Writing Jane Austen (7 page)

The telephone was ringing. Automatically she ran over to pick it up, then remembered that whoever was calling, it wouldn’t be for her. The answer phone clicked on, and the words quacked out at her. “This is a message for Dr. Jackson, Dr. Georgina Jackson.”

The accent was slightly American, and strangely familiar.

“This is Yolanda Vesey. Dan’s sister. He told me to get in touch with you.”

Of course, Livia had mentioned Dan’s sister, an academic who had verified the manuscript and—how could she have forgotten?—who was from Oxford.

“Let’s meet tomorrow. Nine a.m., Balliol, my room.”

Aghast, Georgina stared at the squawking phone and then picked up. “How did you get my number?”

“Is that Dr. Jackson? Livia Harkness gave me this number. She has a list of numbers for you, and since you’re in Oxford, I assumed this would be the right one to call. Nine tomorrow.”

She rang off.

So much for escaping from the Harkness-Vesey duumvirate. Fiendish Livia, handing over all her contact numbers for God knew how far back. Wasn’t that illegal, data protection, all that?

As if niceties like privacy laws meant anything to Livia.

It was half past ten. Too late to leave now. There would be a late train, but she didn’t relish venturing out into the foul wetness of the night. First thing in the morning, she’d be out of here.

Where to?

Back to London. Back to her own life. From there, she would contact Livia, and Dan Vesey, and lay it on the line. No dice. She wasn’t playing. She wasn’t on for this, the sooner she made that completely clear, the sooner they could dig up some other literary sucker, one of doubtless dozens of writers who would jump at this chance. This evening’s encounter with those students had been the narrowest escape ever, and the mere thought of meeting Dr. Yolanda Vesey filled her with terror. No. She was out of here, and out of the whole lunatic scheme.

She woke at five, after a fretful night, and flung her things into her bag. Dragging it behind her, she thumped her way down the stairs—it looked like the ancient elevator needed serious work, as it was still out of action—and out into the chilly damp darkness of pre-dawn Oxford.

The station, a fifteen-minute walk away, was a haven of light, with early commuters gulping their lattes, and station staff punctiliously announcing the delays to trains in all directions.

Recklessly, she broke her no-bought-coffee vow and bought a cappuccino and a newspaper, before going through to the platform, where a disconsolate crowd of people waited in a triumph of hope over experience for the London train.

In the manner of Oxford trains, the 7:05 arrived well before the 6:38, and she felt herself lucky to find a seat. She was in the quiet carriage, but the woman next to her was muttering into her phone, giving instructions about meetings, appointments, deadlines—who on earth was at the other end at this time of the morning? Did she have a twenty-four-hour secretary, some hapless slave who worked and slept beneath her desk? It would save on rent, she supposed.

Outside Reading, the train slowed to a crawl, and then stopped. After fifteen minutes, it started again.

“Signalling failure,” predicted a man on the other side of the aisle. He shut his laptop and reached up for his coat. “I’d guess brakes, judging by the smell,” the man next to him said, also getting up and retrieving his belongings.

The train juddered into Reading. “Due to engine failure, this train will not,” boomed the announcer and a guard in a counterpoint of bad news, “be proceeding Londonwards. Passengers should disembark and board the next Paddington train, due from Swansea in twenty-five minutes.”

Since the Swansea train was already packed by the time it drew into Reading, there was no room aboard for another trainful of passengers. Georgina took the slow train ten minutes later, and watched the unlovely suburbs drift past in a haze of rain.

Why did she want to stay in England? What was it about this grey country that so appealed to her? Why not finish her work and go back to an American university, where she would have more money, more prospects, more sunshine?

Because the history she was interested in had happened here, and buried deep beneath her analytical mind was a tumbled heap of Englishness in its glory, of kings and queens, of Runnymede and Shakespeare’s London, of hansom cabs and Sherlock Holmes and Watson rattling off into the fog with cries of “The game’s afoot,” of civil wars bestrewing the green land with blood, of spinning
jennies and spotted pigs and Churchill and his country standing small and alone against the might of Nazi Germany.

It was a mystery to her how this benighted land had produced so many great men and women, and ruled a quarter of the world and spread its language and law and democracy across the planet.

The train stopped at Twyford. A lanky youth in a baseball cap got in and sat opposite her. Arms folded, his jeaned legs stretched out aggressively so that her own legs were cramped into a corner.

She glared at him, and he shifted his long limbs a little. He sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, ostentatiously, she was sure, and dug a hand into the pocket of his disreputable jacket.

Not a knife. Please, God, not a knife.

He pulled out a paperback, settled his shoulders and opened the book.

Georgina squinted at the cover.

Sense and Sensibility
. A bosomy girl in a period frock. And, in twinkling, whirling letters,
Jane Austen
.

Paddington at last, a sea of umbrellas. There were severe delays on the Circle and District lines, a voice intoned. Passengers were advised to find alternative routes.

Georgina preferred buses, in any case. She liked to look about her, watch people, glance into shop windows. However, the scene today from any bus would be a static one, as the delays on the underground combined with the continuing autumnal downpour had brought London traffic to a standstill.

She bought the cheapest of the umbrellas on sale at a nearby stall, and walked. Her umbrella blew itself inside out as she reached Baker Street, and she was a bedraggled sight by the time she reached the house. Looking down into the basement area, she could see into the brightly lit kitchen. Henry was sitting at the table and Anna was cracking eggs into a bowl. It was a domestic scene, two people at ease with themselves and the world.

Who was the outsider in this household? Anna? Maud? Or her? She shook herself out of impending self-pity, and ran down the steps to knock at the window.

Henry raised a quizzical eyebrow as he opened the door for her “Back so soon? You look as though the hounds of hell are after you. I suppose Livia and that very persistent Vesey woman tracked you down. Where were you? Anna and Maud thought Oxford.”

“Yes,” said Gina, sinking into a chair at the table. Anna had
darted upstairs, and she now returned to place a cup of coffee and a little pile of letters in front of Gina.

“The minute you go away, the postman is at the door with letters for you.”

“Junk mail, I bet,” Gina said. She sifted through the envelopes, pausing as she came to one from the United States. She looked at
it, hope springing into her heart. It was from the Norris Foundation, the providers of her fellowship. She had applied for an extension, for funds for another year, had provided a fat folio of her work so far, papers published, lectures given, plans for the next, more exciting stage of her research.

The letter was short and to the point. Not only were they not extending her fellowship, they were cutting it short by six months. She must be aware of the seminal new work on pauperism and migration in England 1834–1841 by Dr. Peter Chapman, to be published by OUP in England and by Princeton in the United States. A work which in the opinion of the academic committee rendered her own research project superfluous.

They would be happy to consider at some future date an application for a new area of research, and forms would be available online for the next funding round, for research projects beginning in eighteenth months’ time. However, they would point out that it was rare for the foundation to grant two such fellowships to any post-doctoral student.

“Bad news?” said Henry, watching her face, which looked puzzled rather than shocked.

“It is, rather,” said Georgina. “It’s about my research funding.”

Funding. Henry didn’t say anything, but Georgina knew as he did that her rent was late again. “I will pay it, really soon,” she burst out.

“Pay what?”

“The rent. My father will help out.”

There was another letter, this one from America.

Hi Honey

Just to let you know that I’m going to be under pressure finance-wise for a while, so it’s good to know you have your Fellowship money to keep you going until your next book is finished. Jennifer has filed for divorce, and the lawyers say it’s going to cost me. And my investments are in the same terrible shape as everyone else’s…

Despite the large house in an expensive part of London—what part of London wasn’t expensive?—Georgina knew that Henry couldn’t do without the rent for her room. The house had belonged to his parents, and he had bought it from them with the help of a large mortgage when they’d moved to Cambridge. Which was fine in his investment banking days, a time of large salaries and handsome bonuses. All that had vanished in the downturn. The bonuses, often paid in the shape of stock in the bank, had become worthless as the bank gradually sank into the mire of the strange financial dealings it had indulged in over the last few years.

The mortgage remained, and Gina knew that Henry desperately wanted to hold on to the house in which he had grown up.

Couldn’t his parents help out? she’d asked him. But no; his parents’ work was fascinating and important, but hardly lucrative. “It’s a struggle for them to pay Maud’s school fees, and then one assumes she’ll go on to university.”

The coffee tasted bitter, the scrambled eggs which Anna always cooked for Henry were a yellow unappetizing mess, the toast was dry and brittle.

“Is Maud still asleep?” she asked, striving for normality while her mind raced with figures, trying to square the unsquareable circle
of remaining in England without a work permit or any prospect of another position.

She wouldn’t let herself think about the hours, weeks, months wasted on her research. She was prepared to bet that large chunks of Peter Chapman’s published book had been lifted from material she had shared with him. At one time, Chapman’s work had been going in quite a different direction from hers, but he presumably knew a good and easy find when he saw it.

She could complain, begin the whole procedure of trying to prove that a fellow academic had plagiarized her work, but the fact was that the older, more distinguished academic, with OUP and Princeton behind him, would hold all the cards. It could end up with a reverse accusation, that she had been the one riding on Dr. Peter Chapman’s coattails—she’d known that to happen.

Rather to her surprise, she found she didn’t really care. The titles of those articles on Jane Austen darted into her head. When had scholars become academics? When had a genuine thirst for knowledge become a relentless and jargon-ridden pursuit of publication?

Before her time, and how much of a scholar was she really?

“You have another letter,” said Anna helpfully. “From the bank, I know very well what letters from the bank look like.”

With one of those flashes of intuition that letters from the bank induced in anyone with half a wit, Georgina knew it wasn’t good news even before she’d taken the letter out of its envelope. Her overdraft was at its limit. Its old limit. The bank was reviewing all its customers’ accounts, and in the present climate and given the way her account was conducted and her present income, they were cutting her limit and would be grateful if she would immediately remit funds to bring the level down to the new limit.

“Half what it was!” Georgina said. “They can’t do this. We had an agreement.”

“Calling in your overdraft, are they?” Henry said. “It’s happening a lot.”

Georgina was working on the sums. It was another fortnight before the next tranche of money came in from the foundation—and would that arrive? She snatched at the letter from America and ran her eye down the page until she came to the stark words “With immediate effect.”

There was a lot of immediacy about at the moment. That sounded like no more money, period.

“Do you think the bank would give me a loan?”

“To pay off the overdraft? No.”

“You have no money?” said Anna, keenly interested. “This is like my friend Adam. No money in the bank, no overdraft, and when he tried to use his card in the machine, it swallowed it up. No more cash, and his credit card was cancelled at the same time.”

“Cancelled? Why?”

“The card was with the same bank, and so they cancelled everything.”

Georgina’s credit card was with her bank. “I’ve got my American one, that’s got some credit on it.” Enough to keep her in peanuts for a week or two. Not enough to cover the overdraft, not enough to pay the rent. “What did Adam do?”

“He absconded,” said Anna. “Went back to Poland. Good riddance.”

“What did he do?” said Henry

“He worked as a plumber.”

“Plumbers earn good money.”

“Not anymore, and, besides, he was a very bad plumber. He was an aeronautical engineer, a very good one. But there was more money in being a plumber in London than in being an aeronautical engineer in Poland. So he came here for a new life. Now he’s gone back again.”

“I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do, head back home,” said Georgina.

“Write that book,” said Anna. “Maud says they want to pay you a lot of money.”

“You don’t understand, Anna. It’s not so easy to write a book. Particularly that one. It’s a book I simply can’t write.”

“Can’t! Never mind can’t. It’s surprising what you can do when the alternative is having no bank account, no nice attic room here, no anything and having to go back to where you don’t want to be.”

“How do you know about the book?”

“Maud and I discussed it. Eat some breakfast, ring your agent, this Livia, she is rightly named after the empress Livia, I believe, who was a poisoner of everyone around her, and sign the contract. It’s an important document, send it round by courier, Henry will lend you the money if you’re short, won’t you, Henry? Then read the novels. I was very shocked when Maud said you had not read them. Every educated person in England should have read them.”