Writing Jane Austen (13 page)

Let epsilon be greater than zero.

Maybe he’d give his cousin Charles a ring in the morning, invite himself down at the weekend, take out a horse for a few hours. Thank God for horses and mathematics, there were too many women in his life, each of them more exhausting than the next.

No, I’m not going to tell you about my shop, you can see for yourself in about ten minutes.”

Bel drove a small white van, which surprised Georgina. “How do you get the children in here? Stuff them in the back? Is that legal?”

“We have another car, all fitted out with childish paraphernalia. This is for the shop. And tax deductible, having no windows at the back.”

“Do cars pay window tax? Wasn’t that houses back in the bad old days?”

“It was, but even the tax man these days can’t argue about whether a van is a commercial vehicle. Or they can, they do try, but they have to back off in the face of incontrovertible evidence. Do you know that it was the powder tax that killed powdering? Pitt thought he was on to a good wheeze in 1795 when his government imposed that tax, but of course people just left off powdering their hair. Except for footmen, and that didn’t bring in enough cash to make it worth collecting.”

“I didn’t know that. Out of my period,” Georgina added, as though to justify herself. “And I’m not really into footmen and powdered hair. Different stratum of society.”

“Not if you’re interested in Jane Austen’s life and times. The gentry were definitely of the powdering classes. Here we are. No, this isn’t the shop, this is a friendly garage where I leave the van. From here we walk.”

“Couldn’t we have walked in any case? Aren’t we only a short distance from Bartlett Street?”

“Yes, but I’ll need the van later.”

The weather had changed overnight, and a clear, calm day had dawned, with brilliant blue skies and a tang in the air, presaging winter.

“There,” said Bel with pride as she stopped in front of a black front door to yet another Georgian house. The ground floor was slightly raised, and had two handsome sash windows. Above them, in flowing script, was inscribed the word
Darcy’s
.

“My fourth child,” Bel said. She was opening the door beside the shop. “Come in. Step back a couple of centuries, welcome to the past.”

The first thing that struck Georgina was how lovely all the objects around her were. The ornate gilt mirror. The two chairs with sweeping curved lines and embroidered seat-pads. Candlesticks with classical proportions. A chandelier that sparkled and captured rainbows, sending them twinkling on to the ceiling.

At any moment, she expected the panelled door in the corner of the room to open, and a girl in the white muslin dress to come dancing in, looking for a book she had just laid down, or sitting at the escritoire to pen a note on the cream writing paper that was waiting for her.

“Well?” said Bel, who had a handful of letters in her hand and was riffling through them. “Do you like it?”

“I’m in awe. Is this really a shop?” And she had to ask, although she knew the answer, “Why
Darcy’s
?”

“You need to ask? Because we sell anything and everything that has to do with Jane Austen and her times. I wanted to open a shop, and I worked through several ideas, but this one was perfect for Bath. Georgian town, full of Regency fans, and who epitomizes the Regency more than Jane Austen?”

“Why didn’t you tell me yesterday, when we were talking about Jane Austen?”

“I wanted you to see it for yourself; after all, how could words do it justice?”

“Is everything for sale?”

“Everything. Which is a challenge because when, for instance, that chair goes, as it will, tomorrow, I have to find a replacement that looks just right. With some of the bigger pieces of furniture, a sale means a complete rearrangement, but then I earn more from selling a table or a sofa than I do from selling a book or a trinket.”

As she spoke, the door in the corner opened, and a willowy redheaded man came in. He was in his early thirties, Georgina judged, although with an ageless faun-like quality to him that made it hard to be sure.

He swooped down on Georgina, and before Bel could introduce her, had seized her hand, and bowing over it in the most affected but, she had to admit, graceful way, declared himself ravished to meet her, a famous author; he was thrilled when Bel said she knew Georgina Jackson and she was coming to visit. How wonderful to be a writer, of all the arts, writing was the one closest to his heart, so much more difficult than any other, that blank page every morning, “I can’t even begin to imagine how you do it. I’ve searched high and low for your book, when Bel said you were visiting, but not a copy to be had, must have sold every copy, clever you, and no more on order, so they tell me. But I’ve found one on the web, and they’ve promised to rush it to me, a perfect copy, so they say, absolutely clean, pristine, unread, even, so I pray that it will arrive while you’re in Bath, and then I shall ask you to do me the great honour of signing it for me.”

Overwhelmed, Georgina nodded, to be rewarded by a radiant and rather sweet smile.

“Meet Aubrey, my shop manager,” said Bel.

“Heaps of post to deal with, Bel,” he said, becoming suddenly business-like. “Orders falling around my ears. I’ll be in the other room if you need me.”

“We don’t open for half an hour,” Bel said to Georgina. “So let’s have coffee, and you can look around. There’s another section through the door.”

“More wonderland?”

“Not the same. Go see for yourself.”

In the other room, Aubrey sprang up from his labours. His desk was tucked away behind a screen decorated with dramatic Eastern dragons. “Silk, almost a museum piece, clever Bel to pick it up. There was rather a vogue for chinoiserie in the early eighteen hundreds, but of course you’re bound to know all about that.”

This part of the shop was more modern in its goods, although the theme was the same. Paperback and hardback editions of all Jane Austen’s novels, plus a great many books about her. “Sequels over there; of course, you’d despise those, being the kind of writer you are, but people do like them. Well, only six novels from Miss Austen herself, and people do hunger for more. Although some of them are, I regret to say, definitely second-rate and even in some cases downright lewd. Readers want to imagine having sex with Mr. Darcy, or one of his screen incarnations. Very coarse.” His mouth shaped into a moue of distaste. “One can’t control the imagination, needless to say, but I do wish they wouldn’t feel the need to put it down in words. However, they sell tremendously, even this kind of thing.”

He held up a fat volume with a lascivious cover of a woman with her breasts falling out of her low-cut dress, melting into the embrace of a dark, stern-looking man with a ruffled shirt torn open to reveal a manly chest. It was
Mr. Darcy’s Desire
again.

“Written in the style of Jane Austen, supposedly,” said Aubrey. “Which means lots of quaint and long words hideously misused.”

“Have you read it?”

“I make a point of reading everything we stock. So that I can advise customers. But it is rather an effort sometimes.”

“Only one copy,” said Georgina, taking the book from him and flipping it open. “Goodness, look at all those printings.”

“Now, I would know you were an author if you had just walked in here off the street,” cried Aubrey. “Only writers go first to the copyright page, no one else ever looks at it. I do the stock for the books, under Bel’s eagle eye, of course. We sell a tremendous amount by mail order, so you see, and it’s our boast that we have every title relating to Miss Austen available.”

“Here?” said Georgina, looking round as though rows of bookshelves might emerge from the walls.

“No, no, all done through interconnectivity. We take the order, and then send it on to the company we work with. Music, now we have some charming collections of music of the period. Are you fond of dance? Minuets and waltzes, you see, and even instructions on how to dance the quadrille. How they must have enjoyed themselves. Now, you just browse, I can smell coffee, Bel always makes it, she likes it exactly so. Excuse me.”

The phone was ringing, and he picked it up and was soon in deep conversation about sizes.

Sizes?

“Dress sizes,” Bel explained. She handed Georgina a cup of coffee; no mugs here, but a delicate china cup and saucer. “We have a seamstress who makes up period costumes to order. We put out pattern dresses on the website, and they send their measurements, and voilà. Or we can supply paper patterns for people to make up their own costumes.”

Candles, soap, face lotions, jewellery, satin shoes, everything from mittens to shoe roses, soup recipes to guided tours. “If it has anything to do with Jane Austen, or we can stretch it to have a connection, then we can provide it.”

“Not the poverty in which most of her fellow countrymen lived,
though,” said Georgina, suddenly and unreasonably annoyed by the elegance around her.

“Most?”

“Nostalgia, dreams for a past that never existed. Isn’t that what all this is about? Aren’t you selling a dream?”

“We are,” said Bel equably. “So was Jane Austen with her vision of marriage between two equals—how often does that ever happen? Isn’t that what all fiction is? Some good dreams, some nightmares. You write nightmares, I sell happy dreams. Whereas, Jane Austen herself was the ultimate realist.”

There was a tinkle of a bell, and Aubrey darted for the door. “I’ll take it, Bel,” he said, and in a moment they heard his well-modulated voice extolling the virtues of a cushion, handworked, exquisite, unique.

“Do you sit and stitch those yourself, while you’re not raising a family and running this?” said Georgina, sounding cross, and disliking herself for it.

“I do embroider, as it happens. I find it soothing. But that’s only for myself. Those cushions are done by a pair of sisters in their seventies, who are extraordinarily expert. It supplements their pension, so we’re all happy.”

Aubrey popped his head round the door. “She’s taken an Elinor, and wants to order two more.”

“An Elinor?” asked Georgina.

“We give everything a name out of Jane Austen, or of the period.”

“Like IKEA.”

“Yes, but no trolls.”

More customers came in, and Bel went away to serve them. Georgina wandered among the books, steadfastly avoiding the many editions of Jane Austen’s novels, which ranged from cheap paperbacks to leather-bound matching sets.

“Of course, you’ll have your own well-thumbed copies,” said
Aubrey, coming up silently behind her and making her jump. “For all the passionate Janeites, I recommend this one-volume edition. Large, hardly suitable to take on a train or plane, but exactly right for the drawing room. And you see it has these divine illustrations, by Hugh Thomson. It is a perpetual mystery to me why modern publishers don’t illustrate novels. Aren’t they charming?”

Georgina looked reluctantly at the line drawings of women in high-waisted gowns, carrying parasols, men in top hats and cutaway riding coats, spirited horses with docked tails, interiors with feather-headed women gossiping around card tables. Here a tall aloof man standing in front of a fireplace with his shining boot on a fender, there a girl on horseback, her full skirts sweeping down the side of the horse, a whip in her hand. A carriage bowled up to a fine house, another was departing, trunks strapped on the back, and a man in a frogged dressing gown sat in a wing chair in a library, a pair of spectacles on his nose, a book open on his knee.

“I love that street scene,” said Aubrey, pointing to a particularly lively drawing. “Highbury, I can see it so clearly, at any moment Miss Bates is going to come along, or Jane Fairfax will hurry past, on her way to the post office. All life is there, don’t you agree that he captures the essence of the novels quite perfectly?”

“Yes,” said Georgina, feeling it would be churlish to ask where were the portrayals of the workhouse, of slums, of country hovels, of shoeless children, of gin-drenched babies. And irrelevant. Blinkered Jane Austen had lived her comfortable life in the big house, no doubt doing her duty among the poor, but never dignifying them by including them in her stories. Realist, indeed.

“I can see from your face you don’t approve,” said Aubrey, shutting the book with a definite thud. “Do you see them differently?”

“It was a very closed world.”

“Oh, and that’s what makes it so delightful, such a joy to open the book, and there you are, in another world.”

“Escapism.”

“Do you think so? I find Miss Austen so bracing, so devastatingly truthful, but I don’t think it’s escapism at all. How disappointing, you almost sound as though you are not an admirer. Heresy to say that here.”

He looked sulky for a moment, and Georgina reassured him. “Why? Why not be honest about what you think?”

“Oh, how wise! And I’m not alone in what I think, given her reputation as a realist. And she is one, she is,” he said, smiling again. “Lordie, another customer, aren’t we busy today?” He moved forward to attend to a stout woman in a loden coat, wanting a really nice edition of
Pride and Prejudice
for her goddaughter’s birthday.

Georgina picked up a leaflet. “Jane Austen tours,” it proclaimed in swirling colours. “Small, select groups, each accompanied by an expert guide. We take you to the places associated with Jane Austen, from Lyme Regis to Chawton, from Bath to Lacock, from Portsmouth to Kent. Local tours Mondays and Thursdays, or by special arrangement.”

Aubrey was back, having deftly wrapped the chosen volume in pretty rose-patterned paper. “Do you want to book for one of those? They’re very popular, and I can recommend it, if you’ve never been on one. A very select firm, everything done in comfort and with taste.”

“I don’t really like bus tours. I went on one yesterday, I think it was this same company.” Georgina had put the leaflet down, but now she picked it up again.

“Our Lacock tour takes you to this perfectly preserved village owned by the National Trust, which gives you a unique opportunity to discover what life in a village in the early nineteenth century, in the time of Jane Austen, would be like. It has been the location for filming several of the Jane Austen adaptations. Lunch is provided at the Red Lion, and then we offer a guided tour of the village. After
that, you’re free for two hours. We suggest and recommend a visit to Lacock Abbey, a stately home which has been home to the Talbot family since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540. This house is an outstanding work of architecture, and is also notable for being the home of Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers of photography; most visitors will find the museum of photography situated next to the Abbey well worth a visit.”