Writing Jane Austen (12 page)

“Bath is accidental, it’s where Freddie inherited a house—this house—from a great-aunt. Bath’s become frightfully fashionable, of course, all kinds of rich Londoners who want the perfect Georgian house. Freddie says that his mother despaired of how dowdy it was when she grew up here. She hates the place, by the way, when she comes she grumbles about the climate, says she just wants to sleep all the time, and how phoney it all is. Myself, I love it. I adore Georgian.”

Bel disappeared to attend to the dinner. “You stay here, no, I don’t want any help, I like to have the kitchen to myself when I’m cooking. Half an hour, I’ll shout up; pour yourself another glass of wine.”

The door closed behind her. Georgina got up and wandered into the other part of the room, tinkled a few notes on the piano and then scanned the bookshelves. Bel and Freddie clearly shared eclectic tastes, with books ranging from politics to graphic novels to shabby leather-bound volumes.

A red book caught Georgina’s eye, in fact it drew it towards her as though she were hypnotized. She knew what it was, even before she’d squinted at the small, gold-blocked title.
Pride and Prejudice
. She sprang back as though the book might leap off the shelf and bite her.

Get a grip. She had to read the novels. Either that or send the money back—how could she do that, with her rent and overdraft already paid out of it?—and scuttle back to America. She’d made
a start, she was getting facts about the author, as proof of which, here she was in one of Jane Austen’s haunts. Approaching the text through the author’s life, and what a no-no that was to the academic mind. First should come the social background: class, always, in anything to do with England. Gender, that all-important key to everything, the cornerstone of the modern temple of academe.

Just do it. She snatched the book from the shelf as though it were a work of the most vile and debauched pornography and retreated to her armchair. Before her resolve could falter, she took it out of its slipcase—which was flowery, polite, representing all she didn’t like about the whole Jane Austen thing—and opened the book.

She would begin with the introduction.

There was that voice again.
Coward,
it said, quite clearly. Come on, get on with it. Then the half an hour, of which nearly ten minutes had gone, would at least have achieved something to earn her advance: fifteen minutes on the introduction before she used up the final five minutes to visit the bathroom.

The book slipped out of her hand and lay face-down on the floor. That was no way to treat a book that was obviously special. Georgina leaned over, picked it up and before she could think better of it, opened it to a random page.

“
Look here, I have bought this bonnet. I do not think it is very pretty; but I thought I might as well buy it as not. I shall pull it to pieces as soon as I get home, and see if I can make it up any better.”

Her worst fears realized. Just as she suspected, the woman wrote about petty, frivolous things, little domestic details. Interesting if you were into the daily round of upper-class England in the Regency. Which she wasn’t, and never could or would be. She flicked through a few more pages: not even a great stylist, odd punctuation, prosaic, no poetry in this language. Certainly no passion, no intensity; Charlotte Brontë was right in her judgement on Jane Austen’s writing, and her words came into Georgina’s head with sudden clarity:

The Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition.

Bel’s voice floated up from the bottom of the stairs, summoning Georgina to come and eat. At the table, Bel was full of news of common friends, the doings of college contemporaries, gossip, scandal, dismay. “I haven’t really kept in touch,” Georgina confessed.

“I can tell. You’ve shut yourself away in England just as I have, but there is email. Or Facebook, even. Only you’ve always been a private person, I don’t suppose you’ve felt like putting the details of your life out on the net. Have some more cabbage. Sorry to have abandoned you up there, but I’m sure you found something in the pile of magazines to entertain you.”

Bel had always been a mag reader. Georgina could see in her mind’s eye their room at college, stacked with glossy monthlies. Even then, Bel had been more frivolous than Georgina was; she’d read serious journals, not
Vanity Fair
. Although she’d done a paper, using Bel’s stack of magazines, entitled
Self-image of women and the influence of media-engendered constructs,
for her social history course. Comparing modern publications to women’s magazines of the nineteenth century. And concluding that not much had changed. Corset ads in one, Wonderbras in the other. From rouge to blusher; tips, then and now, for how to cook a special meal for you and your husband or partner.

It was also a question of money. In an effort to stretch her budget as far as it would go, Georgina had to cut back severely on books, let alone magazines, of any kind.

Bel understood money. Here she was, asking about Georgina’s father, and they slipped back easily into their old intimacy, when they used to lie on their beds, talking, talking for hours, and discussing the dysfunctionality of their respective families.

“Dad has another expensive divorce coming up,” Georgina said.

“Is he going to flee the country again, leaving alimony and his problems behind?”

Georgina’s father had escaped from the clutches of his fourth wife by fleeing to an offshore haven until she gave up and found herself richer prey.

“It would be funny if he went to the wrong place and met up with my mother. Would he recognize her, do you suppose?”

After Georgina’s mother had decamped with her infant son for a new life in South America, they had heard nothing from her. But news filtered back; she had married a rich Argentine, and Georgina had once seen a photo of her standing beside gleaming white rails, watching a polo match. The rider flashing past on a bay polo pony was, according to the caption, Georgina’s brother.

“You’ve still never been in touch?”

“Neither of them has ever tried to contact me, so why should I make the effort?”

“She is your mother.”

When she was seventeen, Georgina had indulged in a brief sentimental wish to track her mother down, fly to Argentina, land on her doorstep, confront her.

“I’m so glad I didn’t have the money for the plane fare. Only imagine how dreadful if, as is likely, she had simply refused to see me. The rebuff, I already have it. Why seek another rejection?”

“Terrible,” said Bel, all mother now, “to abandon a baby. How could she?”

“She abandoned Dad, really. I was just a tiresome addendum. She didn’t want to have me, in any case, so Dad told me. She was furious when she discovered she was pregnant.”

“She didn’t abort you.”

“More difficult then. But she did do a fair bit of jumping off tables and gin drinking and hot baths.”

“As your father told you.”

“As my father told me.”

Looking back now, she understood he hadn’t wanted her to try to contact her mother, and so he’d stressed all the negative things about her. And they didn’t come much more negative than first trying to miscarry and then dumping a baby. “It’s not a biased version, my dad’s, as it happens. I asked my mother’s onetime best friend, and she said, yes, that was the way it was.”

Bel’s family were differently disordered. Her parents were driven, ambitious, perfectionist, high achievers in every sphere of their life. Their marriage had lasted, because a failed marriage was a failure like any other, and so couldn’t be tolerated. And their daughter had to follow in their footsteps. Top in everything. “Lucky I was clever,” said Bel.

“Do you see much of them now?” Georgina asked, staring into the flickering flames of the log fire.

“They come over once or twice a year. When Freddie’s away. They don’t like Freddie. They can’t forgive me for not finishing college, they don’t like anything about my life or my marriage, and they are convinced I’m bringing up the children shockingly badly.”

“The kids seem fine to me.”

“They are. I just remember how my parents did it, and then I do the opposite. I might write a book about it,
Contrarian Parenting
.”

“All very Philip Larkin.”

“You’ll be into all that if you’re doing work on Jane Austen. She knew a thing or two about family life.”

“Family life? Misty-eyed romance, rather,” Georgina ventured. That at least she knew about Jane Austen; she wouldn’t be called the original chick-lit author for nothing.

“You know better than that. No, I reckon Jane Austen’s own family life wasn’t that great, and the families in her books are so peculiar, aren’t they?”

“Her novels aren’t about families. Didn’t a critic say her books were about nothing except class and money?”

“That’s a trite comment if ever I heard one. How dismissive. Bet it was a man who said it.”

Georgina was anxious to get away from the subject of Jane Austen—how had that woman intruded into the conversation again? “Talking of money, have your parents cut you off without a penny?”

“Luckily, they couldn’t. My money came from trusts and things. That’s how I was able to start my own business.”

“Which is?”

“You won’t trick me that way. Wait until tomorrow, then you can see for yourself.”

Sophie rang,” Maud told Henry when he came in, a bag of shopping in each hand. “She said she tried to get you on your mobile, but you’d switched it off.”

Henry pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I turned it off when we were at that school and I forgot to switch it back on.”

“When you were a banker you had your BlackBerry on and glued to your person. You even took it into the bathroom with you.”

“Making money twenty-four-seven.”

“Or losing it.”

“Those days are over, thank God. Is Sophie going to ring again? I’ve tried her a few times, but I just get her voice mail. Is she still in Ireland? She’s due back in England for the weekend, I’m expecting her on Friday or Saturday.”

“Didn’t sound like she’s taking the weekend off,” said Maud. “She was going on about delays to the schedule, retakes. Excuses, I think, it sounded like lies.”

“Sophie doesn’t tell lies.”

Maud was attending to a reed for her oboe, scraping it with her reed knife. “This needs sharpening; you haven’t been using it for pencils or anything like that, have you?”

Henry was flipping through the paper. “No.” He folded it up and tossed it on to the floor. “Nothing but gloom and lifestyle. Where’s Gina?”

“Didn’t you read her note? She’s run away again. We’re going to have to lock her into her room with her computer, like Cassandra did to her father in
I Capture the Castle
. Otherwise she’s never going to get the book written.”

“Research?”

“That’s a word writers use when they don’t want to get down to it.” She fitted the reed into her oboe and gave an experimental tootle. “That’s better.” With the instrument in her hand, she went to the door. “Anna! Poulenc.”

What a disaster that boarding school had been, Henry mused as he sat back and listened to the music. How extraordinary that Maud was musical, and what a blessing she was. He knew that the aggression of the day would melt away as she and Anna worked their way through the sonata, pausing to refine a passage, arguing about a phrasing. It was one of the reasons he had offered Anna the basement. Her eyes had lit up when she saw the piano. “Are you a musician?” he’d asked.

“An amateur, only, but I prefer to work in a musical household. It is more civilized.”

Maud had refused to take the oboe with her to the school that morning.

“I don’t want them to take me just because they can do with another oboe in the orchestra.”

And in fact Maud had had a wretched day of it, taking an instant dislike to the director of studies, and being downright surly with the headmistress. Who had been a rather trying woman, droning on about sixth-form subjects and how they chose them for each girl.

“Don’t I get to choose?” Maud asked.

“Of course you have a say, but generally, we are best able to judge where a student will excel. Although, I have to be honest”—and here she turned to Henry—“Mr. Lefroy, I must say that Maud’s academic report from St. Adelberta’s isn’t exactly encouraging.”

“Isn’t it? She seems alarmingly bright to me. I’d say she had an original mind.”

“As to that, it is hardly what we look for when we decide whether to offer a place or not.”

“They won’t take me,” Maud said as they drove away.

“Would you like to go there?”

“Not on any account. Sorry, Henry, but I’d bolt in the first week. Look at that smug girl who showed us round, I bet they’re all like that.”

“Well, there are a few more schools to see.”

“Not ones that’ll take me. I hate school. I wish I didn’t have to get an education. I wish I could be with Mum and Dad.”

“Not much education in the Antarctic.”

“Why do they have to be such freaks? Why can’t Dad be a carpenter or something useful like that, and stay at home? Why volcanoes? Why does Mum have to go off with him? I hope global warming does happen, and all the ice and glaciers melt, and then she’ll be out of a job. An unemployed glaciologist sounds good to me. I expect it’s all Darwin’s fault, everything more or less is Darwin’s fault, evolution is why I’m the way I am, uneducable.”

“He didn’t invent evolution.”

“Stop speaking like a scientist. I just hope you and Sophie don’t ever get round to having children, because I can tell you, you’d be a horrible father, always right and reasonable.”

And she’d alternated between silence and angry outbursts all the way back to London.

Well, music was having its usual effect, soothing the savage breast. He’d better go and phone Sophie.

No reply. He left another message on her voice mail and went up to his room to soothe his own troubled soul with an hour or so of work. He opened
Elementary Magnetohydrodynamics, 6th edition.
Maud was quite right, Gina needed to be at her desk, getting down
to it. He wouldn’t get his brain round magnetohydrodynamics if he didn’t put in the hours, and Gina wouldn’t get her book written if she didn’t get down to it. Still, she’d need Bath for the book, background colour.