Writing Jane Austen (32 page)

“That’s Willoughby, and that long-necked woman beside him is Caroline, Caroline Grey, they’re getting married soon, too. He’s marrying her for her money, she’s a lawyer who does something called intellectual property, makes about a million a year. He’s terribly expensive and doesn’t earn much himself. He went around for ages with Marianne, and she’s still awfully cut up about him.”

Georgina closed her eyes, wondering if she had had too much wine with her supper. She must be mishearing what this girl was saying. This whole Jane Austen thing was becoming a fixation and unbalancing her mind.

Lally was still talking. “That’s Sir Thomas over there, Sir Thomas Bertram. He’s quite ancient and a bit stately, but rather a sweetie really. His wife is the most indolent woman I’ve ever met, I’m terribly surprised he managed to get her here tonight.”

This was too much. Making an excuse, Georgina left Lally to her own devices and walked over to the other side of the room. There after a few minutes, she was joined by Henry, breathless after his attempts at the quadrille.

“You know, this dancing has got something. Foxy says they’re going to do a waltz next, do you think you could grit your teeth and dance with me?”

Georgina knew it would be painful, but on the other hand she wanted to waltz with Henry. “I’ve been having the strangest conversation with that girl sitting over there,” she told him as he led her on to the floor. “She was telling me about people here, and I had the strangest fancy that they all were characters out of Jane Austen’s novels. I think I need to see a shrink.”

“What girl? I didn’t see anyone with you.”

Georgina gave up. She shut her eyes for a moment, opened them, and then with Henry’s strong arm around her waist, and his count of one, two, three sounding in her ears, began to waltz.

It was at that moment she was struck by three revelations, which reached her consciousness almost simultaneously.

Here, at the ball, for the first time, she appreciated how the world of Jane Austen’s novels had intruded into her everyday life in such a mysterious way, nudging her into an acceptance of the vitality and existence the characters of a master storyteller could take on. Plot is incidental, characters live, she muttered to herself as Henry, holding her with kind care, swung her round.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

What about those people who’d drifted in and out of her sight, apparently from the nineteenth century? They weren’t characters from Jane Austen, nor were they characters from her version of
Love and Friendship
. Whoever they were, they weren’t Susan or Lady Carcenet or anyone from their circle. Whoever they were, they had a message for her, and it was time she paid attention to what it might be.

Thirdly, and this disturbed her more than all the rest, she realized she was falling in love with Henry.

It was some while since Georgina had felt so depressed on a Monday morning. In general, Monday mornings held no threat for her, she was usually happy that a new week was beginning and inclined to look forward to what the following days would bring.

Not this Monday. This Monday she woke up with a feeling of oppression. Outside her window, the weather had reverted to that state of grey sky and drizzle where she couldn’t tell where the clouds ended and the rain began. She had a nagging headache. A hangover? No, this was a headache of foreboding, a headache brought on not by what was past, but what was to come, and by the shadow that lurked at the back of her mind, the shadow of her impending departure from Henry’s house and Henry’s life.

As soon as the book was finished, she’d have to move. It would be too painful being here, seeing Henry every day, and, worst of all, seeing him and Sophie together, when Sophie deigned finally to appear. For a moment she hated Sophie—how could she treat Henry in so cavalier a fashion? But she didn’t really hate Sophie, she was simply jealous of her. And jealousy, Georgina was very well aware, was about the most destructive emotion going, and one she wanted nothing to do with.

Work was the answer, work would be her immediate refuge. If it didn’t bring her heartsease, it could provide a distraction, and
some solace. An occupied mind shut out emotion, she’d learned that as a girl.

She swallowed a couple of painkillers and turned on her computer. An email from Yolanda Vesey. She had sent twenty thousand words to her before going off for the weekend. Yolanda Vesey was evidently an eager beaver, a woman who worked on weekends. Georgina heaved a sigh of relief as she read the email. Yolanda Vesey was surprisingly complimentary. Her first analysis showed that sentence length, grammatical constructions, word length, and vocabulary choice were well within the parameters that she had set out. She would await the next twenty thousand words by the end of the week.

Georgina gingerly tapped a key or two with her right hand, and wished she hadn’t. When she applied her left-hand fingers to the key she had an ominous tingling sensation again.

It was Maud who came up with a plan. “Even if the school takes me, and Aunt Pamela thinks they will, I shan’t be starting until after half term. Henry is going to take me down later in the week to look at it, but apart from that I’ve got plenty of time. Why don’t you dictate the book into a tape recorder, and then I’ll key it into the computer for you? It can’t be too difficult, typists used to do it all the time.”

Clutching at straws, Georgina said to herself, but she didn’t have much else to cling to.

“Print out what you’ve done so far, so I know where the story is going, and then you get dictating, and I’ll get typing. Henry’s got a little mike that plugs into his iPod, you can borrow that.”

Every fibre of Georgina’s being told her that this wasn’t going to work. She wrote with her hands, not with her voice. There were people, she knew, who wrote books by dictation, as she had discovered when she read about Walter Scott and his secretaries.

Maud was more sanguine. As she carried the pages off, she said
airily that it was simply a matter of trusting yourself. She had a good book about how the left brain and right brain meshed, or didn’t mesh, maybe Georgina would like to look at it while she was waiting for Maud to finish reading the manuscript. “You should be able to dictate much more quickly than you type,” Maud pointed out helpfully. “So this way you might actually get the book finished in time.”

Georgina plugged the microphone into the iPod, shut her eyes and tried to think of something to say. Her mind was a blank. Okay, she’d read something into it, just to get the hang of it. A minute later she was reading the headlines from the news off the screen. It didn’t seem so very difficult, and when she played it back it sounded quite good. So she could begin. “Chapter Eight,” she said, and then pressed the pause button. She couldn’t think of anything to say, maybe she needed to get the imaginative side of her mind running. Maybe if she played a game for a while, nothing too hard on the hand, it would do the trick.

A bang on the door, and Georgina looked up, realizing that half the morning had gone. Maud, a wild look in her eyes, was standing at the door clutching the manuscript.

Georgina started guiltily. “Are you waiting to begin? I haven’t got very far yet, it’s going to take some getting used to.”

“Just as well,” said Maud.

“Have you read it? Yolanda Vesey has and she says it’s absolutely right for Jane Austen’s style.”

“I don’t know about style, I mean I recognize words and phrases here and how Jane Austen might have used them, but really, what I’ve got to say, is—well, not to wrap up the truth, it’s unreadable.”

Georgina’s first reaction was one of fury. She snatched the script out of Maud’s hands. “Maud, really, I knew it was a mistake, one should never give a draft to other people to read. It’s impossible for anyone else to understand what a writer’s trying to do.”

“Come off it, Georgina. That’s not a draft, I never saw anything
so polished. The trouble is, it isn’t Jane Austen, because what it is, is dull. Jane Austen is never dull. I had to force myself to read past the first twenty pages or so, I could tell to a sentence, even if I didn’t know, where Jane Austen left off and you started.”

“That’s a sweeping condemnation.”

“Well, there’s no point you going on writing another hundred thousand words that nobody will ever want to read. It’s no more Jane Austen than the Highway Code. It’s all there, the names and characters and situations and all that, but all the people in it are as dead as dodos. Lifeless. Unquick. It’s like Henry said, your heart isn’t in it.”

With those words, and darting a quick look at Georgina’s drained face, Maud whisked herself out of the room, for once not shutting the door with a bang.

Life hadn’t been a bundle of joy recently, but that Monday would go down in Georgina’s memory as the worst day in a long time. At least before, she had the feeling that once she got started, she could probably do it. Now she knew that she couldn’t. She’d given it her best try, and, she had to admit Maud was perfectly right, it was terrible. Leaden hardly began to describe it.

Georgina took some faint satisfaction in slowly ripping the manuscript into tiny pieces and throwing the fragments into her wastepaper basket, and a kind of catharsis in dumping the document and its backup copies into the trash and emptying it. Of course it still existed out in cyberspace, since Yolanda had a copy; she just prayed that she didn’t show it to her brother. Or perhaps Dan Vesey neither knew nor cared that it was so dreary.

Livia would.

Maud, with rare tact, took herself off for the afternoon. Anna was out, and Georgina had the house to herself. She prowled about unhappily, turned the television on and off, thought of getting lost in a computer game again, decided against it, made herself cups of
coffee which she didn’t drink and a sandwich that she didn’t eat. She turned the radio on. It was a book programme, and they were discussing adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels for television and film. She contemplated hurling the radio into the yard, but didn’t have the energy nor the use of her right arm to make it an effective gesture.

Finally, she could stand being in the house no longer. She put on a shabby old jacket, which she had been meaning to throw away, but which suited her mood, rammed her beret on her head and, eyes down and shoulders hunched, went out to go for a long walk in the rain.

Henry was staying late at college for an evening lecture. Anna and Maud were so sympathetic that Georgina wanted to scream at them. The fish pie tasted like cotton wool with bits in it, and soon after eating Georgina went up to her room, had a bath and went to bed.

Music woke her out of her sleep, startling her. Bemused by the sound, she sat up; was she dreaming? Then the bedroom door swung open, to reveal Maud standing there with her oboe, playing “Happy Birthday to You.” It was Georgina’s twenty-eighth birthday, and she had forgotten all about it.

Not so the others. Anna had knitted her an exquisite jumper in dark green and scarlet, in a mixture of mohair and scraps of silk; it was a work of art, and Georgina loved it. Maud had bought her a brooch. “It’s only costume jewellery, but when I saw it I thought you’d really like it.” Georgina, knowing that Maud had very little money, was touched; she just hoped that Maud hadn’t spent too much on it, but Anna reassured her. “She spent hours looking for it, going round all the charity shops until she found just what she wanted. I don’t think it cost a lot, but I told her that it was a gift that you would appreciate very much.”

Henry had gone out early, Anna said. He was going to be back in good time, and there was to be a special meal to celebrate her birthday. Charlie was coming up from the country, she added, saying his name with a warmth that made Maud and Georgina exchange knowing looks.

Henry’s present was downstairs on the kitchen table. Attached to it was a large label,
open now
. Georgina unwrapped the parcel, and felt a stab of disappointment as she took out a set of headphones with a microphone attached, and an item of computer software.
dictate,
it said on the box in large letters. Henry had written on a Post-it in his clear handwriting, “I think this is what you need.”

Maud pulled a face. “Henry wouldn’t say what he’d got you, but I can’t say it looks very exciting. What is it? A game?”

Georgina was reading the leaflet that accompanied it. “No, it’s a voice recognition program. You talk into it, and it comes up on your computer as text. Or that’s the theory; I’ve heard that these programs don’t ever work. Well, it’s kind of him to think of it,” she said unenthusiastically.

“Open the card,” said Maud.

It was a big card, in a thick envelope. She took it out and opened it and a mellifluous voice filled the kitchen:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,

That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain….

Startled, Georgina shut the card, then slowly opened it again for a second or two before closing it and putting it back in the envelope.

“It’s kind of a reverse howler, sweet words instead of shrieks and nags. I love those talking cards,” said Maud. “That’s by Sir Philip Sidney, he wrote some good lyrics.” Humming to herself, she clomped out of the room. Georgina sat down at the table, across from Anna, who was looking at some papers with a worried expression.

“Homework?” said Georgina. “Need any help?”

Anna pursed her lips. “No, not homework. This is a form that Stefan has to fill in, for the university. It is to do with what happens to him next year, when he has finished his doctorate. His English is good, but he finds official language difficult, and so he asked me to read the form and the documentation through for him. Only I don’t understand it at all.”

“May I see?” Georgina said.

Anna passed the folder over, and Georgina began to read. She looked up at Anna. “Has he gone to the Administration Office about this?”