Writing Jane Austen (8 page)

“I’m American.”

“The same thing. I can lend you my copies.”

“You’ve read them?”

“Of course. I’m an educated person.”

“I don’t think you’ve got much choice, Gina,” Henry said. “Perhaps it’s fate’s way of kicking you in the backside, life’s like that. Making you do something you think you don’t want to do.”

“Think? I know I don’t want to do it.”

The phone rang, and Maud’s voice floated down from the hall.

“It’s for you. That Livia person again. Shall I say you’re out?”

Georgina went upstairs, making a face at Maud and mouthing, “She’ll hear you.”

“Much I care,” said Maud, and went back to the school prospectus she’d been reading while perched on the bottom step of the stairs.

“Dinner. Tonight. At the Phoebus.”

“Livia, I’m not going—”

“Dan’s hosting. Eight o’clock. Be there. And smarten yourself up, will you? He doesn’t want to feel he’s dining some hick author up from the country.”

Georgina wandered around the house like a lost soul. Stay in England, or go back to America? To stay in England, she’d need money. Work illegally, cash in hand? Doing what? Wait on tables, bar work? That might pay for a bedsit somewhere a long way out from the centre; it wouldn’t pay her rent here, nor would it pay off her overdraft. Try for another academic post? Even if she were successful, it wouldn’t be for this academic year.

She was a professional writer. Did one published novel make you a professional writer? Yes, it did. So if she could produce something acceptable for Dan Vesey and Livia, it would buy her time. Time to finish Jane Silversmith’s story and get back on track with the kind of fiction she really wanted to write: thoughtful, challenging, socially aware historical fiction. Other writers turned out porn or chick lit or young adult books to earn money in order to be able to take the time to write good stuff; why not her?

Only, was trying to emulate the writing of a woman considered by some to be England’s greatest novelist quite the same as churning out porn or teen angst?

It was all a matter of perspective. She had to pick up where JA left off and come up with some kind of pastiche. Could she do it? Four hundred and fifty pages of romantic sensibility and middle-class matchmaking, that was all it was. Anybody could do that, surely.

She felt a sudden surge of confidence. Yes, she could do it. It was a matter of self-discipline, of completing an allotted task in a specific way. She’d never flinched at hard work, and now three months’ hard work would solve all her problems. Well, most of them.

It was after lunch when she finally took the contract out of its envelope, and, under the stern gaze of Henry, Maud and Anna, signed the three copies.

“Without reading it, I note,” said Henry, adding his signature as witness. “Is that wise?”

“Like I’m going to argue about a contract approved by Livia.”

“Let me see.” Henry turned to the first page and began to read it through paragraph by paragraph. He whistled when he came to the payments clause. “No trouble paying your rent for a while then.”

He read on. “The delivery date’s tight.”

“Yes, as I said, and I’ll have to give the money back if I don’t make it. ‘Time is of the essence’ is what it says.”

“Get writing,” Maud said. “Or, no, not yet. Get reading. Start with
Northanger Abbey
and
Sense and Sensibility
. Then
Pride and Prejudice
, what a treat,
Mansfield Park
,
Emma
and
Persuasion
. Won’t take you long, you’ll get swept up into them and time will whiz by.”

“Begin with
Pride and Prejudice
,” advised Henry. “It’s the quickest way to find out what you’ve been missing.”

Dressed too early for going out, and knowing that despite her best efforts, her clothes wouldn’t stand up to Livia’s scrutiny, Georgina sat for a long time at the window of the sitting room, looking out at the street. The street Robert Browning must have walked down on his way to visit Elizabeth in Wimpole Street. A street that would have been there even in Jane Austen’s day.

Carriages, not cars, going past. Horse dung in the streets, crossing boys at the corner. Street criers. Chimneys belching smoke,
no Clean Air Act in those days. Henry said that this hadn’t been the smartest part of town; it was genteel, beyond the fringes of the magic rectangle of Piccadilly and the parks where the rich and the noble lived.

Jane Austen’s London? Had Jane Austen ever been to London? Was she a Londoner? Surely not, surely a country girl. Although she must have lived in Bath, people were always talking about Jane Austen’s Bath.

Not that she’d ever been to Bath, although she had promised herself a trip. She had a friend from college who’d married an
Englishman and now lived in Bath. Bel had issued an open invitation, which she’d never taken up. Her trips were to places like Liverpool and Manchester and Salford, not enclaves of the middle classes, like Bath.

She heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves and looked down to see a figure on horseback, a man in a blue coat. Trotting past. She knew people rode in the park, but she’d never seen a horseman in this street before.

Across the way a young woman with a wilful, heart-shaped face came out of the house, closing the green door behind her and tripping down the steps. What extraordinary clothes she was wearing. Off to a party in that long, high-waisted, low-cut dress, but a hat festooned with feathers! Maybe it was fancy dress.

The light was fading from the sky, the streetlamps were late coming on. A figure came round the corner, a small man in a long coat, He had a light on the end of a pole, and she watched, fascinated and bewildered, as he walked along the pavement, pausing at each lamp to light it with a gentle plopping sound, leaving a soft glow behind to illumine the street. He went round the corner and was gone.

Georgina shut her eyes and shook her head. When she opened her eyes again, the street was brightly lit, a man on a scooter was revving at the corner, and a girl was hanging out of the window of her tiny town car, manoeuvring into a space just about large enough for a wheelie bin.

Dan Vesey was a smooth man, smooth from his shining, mostly bald head to his sleek tailoring to his vowels.

No one was quite sure where Dan Vesey came from. He was an American who had burst on to the publishing scene in London five years before, taking charge of the ailing list at Cadell & Davies, a publishing house with a history that went back to the eighteenth century. He had staged a management buyout, which meant, as far as Georgina knew, that he owned the whole company. There were other directors, but they were never in evidence. Dan ran a sphincter-tight ship, as he put it, and he had the reputation in the trade of having a nose for bestsellers.

His sister, Yolanda, was petite, with the same cold and brilliant blue eyes as her brother. And she was even sleeker than Dan was, from her elegant bob through her immaculate little black suit to her patent high heels. Gina, wearing a defiant red jacket, bought at an Oxfam store the previous year, felt the hick Livia had cautioned her not to be.

The restaurant was the kind Gina most disliked. Not that she often got to eat in such a place—the prices on the menu made
her wince. And the food was strange and came in tiny, exquisitely crafted portions and she wasn’t certain exactly what she was putting in her mouth. Whatever happened to the food that had made the English great? Agincourt would have been a wipe-out for all those
yeomen archers if they’d been raised on food like this. Chocolate pudding, now there was something the English knew how to make, a comfort dish if ever there was one. Would they have chocolate pudding on the menu here? She doubted it.

She came to with a start, to find six eyes fixed on her.

“Well?” said Livia, breaking the silence.

“Well what? Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“We’re discussing the narrative line,” Yolanda said in clipped tones, sounding as though she were talking to a not very bright ten-year-old. “We’d like a structural plan from you. Soon.”

“By next week,” Dan said. “You’ve had time to read through what I gave you. Time to learn it off by heart. So let’s have that plan Monday. First thing.”

“You mean a plot.”

Yolanda winced. “Please! That’s not a word we use.”

“I do. And by Monday? That just isn’t possible.”

“Georgina,” said Livia warningly.

“I don’t work that way. If you want a book inside three months, then you’d better just leave me to get on with it.”

“Now that isn’t possible,” said Dan, his voice turning gravelly. Georgina had always had a suspicion that his eyes weren’t really that colour—surely no human being could possess such a startlingly blue pair of orbs. Yet there was Yolanda with exactly the same blue gaze, so unless they had matching contact lenses, it was a true Vesey colour.

Livia’s eyes weren’t blue. They were almost black, to match her clothes: sharp, hooded and distinctly unfriendly.

“This has to be a cooperative effort,” she said. “You’re going to need our help, especially Yolanda’s.”

“It’s a question of matching the parameters,” Yolanda said. “The structural balance and interplay of Austen’s texts. And we have also to consider the nexality.”

Nexality?

“People call her Jane Austen in England,” said Georgina. “And if you mean novel, say so. Nineteenth-century authors didn’t write texts, they wrote novels.” What was she saying? Of course it was The Text, The Text was holy, no one spoke or wrote these days of novels or poems or essays, to do so was to be branded instantly and hopelessly pre-post-modern. Unforgivable.

“As an historian, I wouldn’t expect you to be up to scratch on current literary theory, but you can’t approach this with a head full of exploded clutter.”

“Literary theory isn’t going to get a book finished, in three months or ever. What I do is called writing. And I do it the way I can. Which isn’t having a committee meeting about it.”

Yolanda wasn’t listening. “Structural notes Monday, and then we need to work to a schedule. Austen’s novels are from eighty-five to one hundred sixty-five thousand words. One hundred twenty thousand is the specified extent for this book. Livia assures me that you’re a fast worker. I will expect a chapter every two days. Then I can run it through the computer, to adjust it so that it tallies with regard to sentence length, punctuational idiosyncrasies and so on.”

Georgina felt a violent blow to her shin, and there was Livia eyeballing her as a python might look at a goat. “Liaise with me on the schedule, Yolanda,” Livia said, and then with a swift ease she began to talk about the cover design.

Because of the glassy nature of the restaurant, sounds bounced across tables and walls and gleaming floor. The voices of other diners rose in an effort to make themselves heard; Gina wanted to cover her ears with her hands.

“Palette of colours,” Livia was saying.

“American tastes…”

“A leading designer…”

“PR.”

A chapter every two days? Was Yolanda out of her mind? She had no plot, no idea how the wretched woman wrote, it would take weeks to get a grip, to turn out even a single chapter.

Dear God, what had she taken on?

“You’re drunk,” said Henry amiably, as she staggered through the door.

“Wish I were,” said Georgina. “My heel came off, and I think I’ve dislocated my hip trying to hobble and hop along.”

He looked down at her feet, and his mouth twitched.

“Quite the ragamuffin. Did you end up walking in your stockings?”

“Tights,” said Georgina. “And yes, I did, and I’ve got a blister on my heel, and I expect trench foot as well, I do not want to think about what I’ve been walking through.”

“I’ll turn my back, you strip off those tights, and then go and wash your feet. There’s antiseptic in the bathroom, green tube, smells vile. If you’re not drunk, would you like a glass of wine? A whisky—oh no, you hate whisky, a cognac?”

The sitting room was a haven of soft greens and cream. Her feet clean, if sore, Georgina padded across the parquet floor and sank into a sofa.

“I suppose it didn’t occur to you to take a taxi?” Henry asked as he handed her a glass generously filled with what Georgina suspected was his special cognac.

“None to be had. Yolanda dropped me off”

“Yolanda?”

“Yolanda Vesey. Dan Vesey’s sister. A terrifying academic. She was driving back to Oxford, so she gave me a lift part of the way. I thought I could catch a bus, and then I decided to walk, and then I came to grief on one of those grids people have over their basements. Can I sue, do you think?”

“For a blister or two? A ruined shoe? Did the shoe cost a fortune?”

“Ten quid in a sale.” Georgina leaned back and shut her eyes.

“Not very civil of the Vesey woman not to drop you at your front door.”

“She was in a hurry.” In fact, Georgina had discouraged her, eager to get away from the relentless flow of knowledge, knowing that at any moment Yolanda would pause, ask a penetrating question or two and discover how complete was Georgina’s ignorance of everything about Jane Austen.

When Georgina woke the next morning, it was to a silent house. A thin sun was easing through the curtains; what time was it? Nine o’clock. The morning after the night before. Not a night made hideous by excess of any kind, but a night of sleepless terrors, of tossing and turning and worrying, of Veseys and Livia floating through half dreams, until in the early hours, she had fallen asleep, to be chased through the tunnels of Steventon station by a plump, pink-faced woman in a high-waisted frock and a poke bonnet, brandishing a quill pen and shouting,
Fraud, fraud
.

Georgina blinked at the memory. Her eyes fell on the book on her bedside table, the book she had tried to read the night before, the biography of Jane Austen. The prose was so dry it gave her a sore throat. The portrait of the demure woman on the cover was the woman of her dreams, the one name-calling. How ridiculous; Steventon station, if it existed, would be a halt in the middle of nowhere. Tunnels? A rickety bridge over the tracks, more likely.