Writing Jane Austen (15 page)

“Sophie Fanshawe. She won’t have a big role, just a minor part.”

“She is not playing Elizabeth,” said Igor, breaking into their
conversation. “I have enquired. She plays Lydia Bennet, and she is going to be raped by the man in breeches, who is neither Mr. Darcy nor Mr. Wickham but an extraneous character, a wicked and lustful local landowner invented by the scriptwriter.”

It was like listening to people talking about a soap, the interested, gossipy conversation about people one had never heard of, and who, of course, didn’t exist.

“He’s very into all the characters,” Gina remarked to James Palmer, as by common consent they moved away from the filming.

“All the Janeites are, they’re obsessive.”

Susie was rounding her group up, not an easy task when the Americans were busy taking pictures, and Dot and Rodney, their portable DVD player shut now, were enthralled by the filming. “We shall have coffee at the Red Lion,” Susie announced. “And meanwhile, I’ll find out how this affects our tour.”

“Don’t bother,” said Dot, shifting a piece of gum from one side of face to the other before popping a bubble as a kind of punctuation mark. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? We only came because it’s where they filmed the BBC version of
Pride and Pred
. Action’s better than just trailing round a place where there’s nothing going on.”

Mrs. Igor gave an expressive shrug of her shoulders and said that she, personally, was longing for a cup of coffee, and had no interest whatsoever in seeing the filming. “At least,” she said, falling into step beside Georgina as the group made its way to the inn, “there are some things here that have nothing to do with Jane Austen. I’m going to spend all my time in the Fox Talbot museum. Photographs, inventions, and, with any luck, not a Regency ruffle in sight. What a relief. Igor can scamper round all the Austeny features on his own, I really have had Jane Austen up to here.” She made a gesture as of one cutting her throat.

James Palmer’s eyes lit up. “I can see you’re a woman of sense.”

Georgina, seizing the chance to escape from James Palmer, went
to the bar, ordered coffee and then crossed to the other side of the room where French windows led out on to a courtyard. It was deserted; there was a chill in the air, and scudding clouds brought a promise of autumn gales, but she did up a button on her jacket and sat down at one of the rustic wooden tables.

A girl brought her coffee and set it down on the table, observing that the film people would be there in a minute, so she wouldn’t find it that quiet, and as she spoke, a little crowd of costumed customers came into the courtyard.

“Extras,” said the girl with a swift appraising glance. “They keep separate from the real actors, and the crew sit over there. The directors and that lot go back to the caravans when they want a break.”

Clearly filming was still going on, but of a scene that didn’t need the huddle of locals in their Regency outfits. They were a motley lot: a stocky, red-faced man with whiskers, clad in gaiters and a tight coat; beside him a thin man wore a voluminous smock and carried a shepherd’s hook. He looked around to find a place to prop it, and a sheepdog, clinging to his legs, flopped down under the table.

“Sheep don’t like it,” he said as he sat down. “Up and down that street, they’re getting bored. And the dog’s mystified, can’t think what I’m up to. Still, it’s good money.”

“You’re lucky,” said a middle-aged woman with greying curls tucked under a white cap. “These corsets are killing me. I hate it when directors get fussy about what you’ve got on under the costume.”

“Authenticity,” said a short, plump woman, dressed as a maidservant. “We don’t know how lucky we are to be living in the twenty-first century when we can wear what we like. I couldn’t be doing with all these long skirts and caps and bonnets and funny underwear. I don’t know how our forebears put up with it, I really don’t.”

A fair-haired young man was massaging his calf. “These boots don’t fit very well, and that damn horse has a horrible action, apart from being narrow-backed. It’s like trying to ride a rocking-horse.”

The girl from the inn emerged bearing a trayful of drinks. Most of the men were drinking beer, as was the matronly woman, while the shepherd gulped down a Coca-Cola. “None of that in those times, neither,” he observed. “Ale and wine and gin was all you got.”

“And lemonade if you lived in a posh house,” said the maidservant. “And tea and chocolate and coffee, too, but not if you were one of the lower orders.”

“When are they shooting the children?” asked the burly man of no one in particular.

“Wish they would,” said the fair young man.

“Now, now, that kind of talk will get you arrested.”

“Bet their teacher agrees with me.”

“They’re filming the scene in the schoolroom this afternoon,” said the girl from the inn, who was hovering, openly listening to their conversation. “I know that, because the kids are changing in the rooms upstairs.”

“I don’t remember a scene in a schoolroom in
Pride and Prejudice,
” said the matronly woman.

“That’s because you’ve read the book, which is more than the director’s done,” said the burly man. “It was in the
Express
yesterday, a piece all about how he’s never read a word of Jane Austen. Proud of it.”

“If this were France and he bragged he hadn’t read Balzac or Flaubert, he’d be laughed out of the business,” said the fair young man.

“What, have you read Jane Austen?”

“I have, as it happens. I did
Emma
for A-level and read the others as well. Good stuff,” he added with a touch of defiance. “I know it’s Eng Lit, but it isn’t too bad, actually. Makes me laugh.”

Georgina wondered whether to go and find Sophie, but decided against it. Sophie probably wouldn’t thank her when she was filming, and she’d surely be turning up at Henry’s house someday soon, now that she was back from Ireland. In which case, Georgina’d see her then. At least she might, if she herself was back in London, which was an open question. At the moment London spelt threat. London was where Dan Vesey, Livia Harkness, and, worst of all, Yolanda Vesey could find her.

Fastening her jacket more tightly against the rising wind, she went out through the side door. She looked up and down the street, but none of the minibus party, nor James Palmer, were to be seen. Good. She would go and have a prowl around the abbey and shop. The leaflet she had picked up in the inn told her something of its history—the usual story: the abbey founded by worthy mediaeval Christian woman; nuns; scandals and finally dissolution and purchase by a wealthy client of Henry VIII.

However usual the story, the abbey was strikingly beautiful. More recent inhabitants than the original nuns had had a rush of Gothic to the head, which would account for the pointy windows and arched doorways, which could certainly be no older than the eighteenth century. She decided to take a walk around the grounds and look at the outside of the house before venturing inside, and was about to set off when a figure materialized at her elbow.

“Been inside yet?” said James Palmer in a melancholy voice.

What was this man doing in Lacock? Didn’t he have a job, a home to go to? He had a family, or at least a wife, judging by the gold band on his ring finger; perhaps he was one of those people who’d lost his job but didn’t tell anyone and set off every morning in a pretence of going to work.

“I thought I’d take a stroll in the grounds first,” she said.

“Very sensible. That Russian’s inside now, talk, talk, talk. And the grotesques with a portable DVD player are having an argument with one of those women who are employed in old houses with the express purpose of telling visitors what not to do. I was once accosted by a particularly virulent specimen who told me to stop looking out of the window. I suppose she thought I was using up the daylight,” he added.

There was one thing James Palmer might be able to help with. “Do you know what a ha-ha is?” Georgina asked.

“Of course I do, there’s no mystery about a ha-ha. You find them all over the place. A ha-ha is a kind of shallow ditch, an indentation in the ground so that the changed levels prevents animals from straying from one area to another.”

“Not many of them in London then.”

“When I said all over the place, naturally I meant all over this kind of place. Country houses, large estates. People liked to have an unobstructed view of the countryside, but also considered things like a herd of shorthorn cattle or deer ornamental. Only, you wouldn’t want to come out of the house on to the terrace only to find yourself face-to-face with a large cow. With horns.”

They had walked round the side of the house, and were buffeted by a sudden gust of wind which brought with it a swirl of rain. James Palmer said in a matter-of-fact voice, “If you take a couple of steps further forward you’ll fall over the edge of a rather steep ha-ha, as it happens.”

Georgina stepped back hastily before advancing to look over the edge of where the ground fell away beneath her feet. “Not much fun if you wandered out here in the dark.”

“Back in the good old days, I don’t think people did venture out much except in the moonlight. No doubt we’ll all go back to that, soon enough, when electricity runs out. Then instead of indulging in great bouts of nostalgia by coming to places like this, we’ll find out for ourselves just what life was like when there were no cars, houses were lit by candlelight, and your heating was a coal fire, if you were lucky. And we won’t have the benefit of coal fires, since coal will undoubtedly be banned by the powers that be who’ll be more than happy to have us all back in the Stone Age and under their control, with a permit necessary to travel more than five miles from your low-status hovel.”

“Are you interested in energy?”

“Not in the least. My main interest at present is the Dissolution. I’m putting together material for a documentary and a book. That’s why I’m in Lacock.”

Dissolution? Of what? “Oh, you’re talking about the dissolution of the monasteries, under Henry VIII.”

“Dreadful man, Henry VIII. Vulgarity and vanity combined in a monstrous frame.”

It was coming on to rain quite hard, and Georgina felt this was a good time to see the inside of the house and perhaps escape from James Palmer’s glum utterances.

By the time they reached the steps up to the main entrance, the rain was pelting down. “That’ll put a stop to their filming,” said James Palmer. He watched while Georgina bought a ticket from the woman sitting at the table by the entrance. She wore round glasses and a severe expression. “You can’t go into the cloisters today,” she said. “They’re filming there. Jane Austen. We get a lot of film companies using the abbey. The BBC, costume dramas, Harry Potter.”

“It must be good for business,” said Georgina.

The woman sniffed. “This is a family home, not a business.” Her mouth snapped shut and Georgina, dismissed, set off to make the accustomed circuit. Minus the cloisters, of course.

James Palmer padded along beside her. “You don’t seem to be enjoying your day very much,” she said, as he cast a disillusioned eye over an immense portrait of a man in armour astride an improbable horse.

How different this was from the nineteenth century in which Georgina spent her academic and authorial days. What a seat of privilege this place was, and had been for the best part of nine centuries. She bet the nuns had done themselves well, and the family who had lived there since the sixteenth century had led lives far removed from the hardship, poverty, illness and despair of most of the population of the country. A life of ease and bliss made possible only by grinding the faces of the poor.

And this must be exactly the kind of house that the characters in Jane Austen’s novels inhabited. Where a rich family lived, with a bevy of servants to wait on them and be at their beck and call, tenants to oppress, the poor to despise.

She could hardly imagine what life in a house like this would have been like in its heyday. How would it have felt to be a child here, with these corridors and stairways to race up and down, with a pony of your own in the stable, with nurses and governesses and tutors to look after you?

Rather pleasant,
her inner voice remarked.
In fact, delightful
. And probably equally delightful when you grew up. She thought of the frocks she had seen in the costume museum, tiresomely long and complicated and restrictive to a jeans-and-T-shirt generation. But would women who had no idea of anything different have found them uncomfortable and unpleasant to wear? Would a young woman from the early nineteenth century have been appalled at the prospect of dieting
and squeezing herself into a pair of skin-tight trousers in which she could hardly move, let alone sit down comfortably?

They had come to a drawing room which was furnished very much as it must have been in the early eighteen hundreds. A harp stood in one corner and a label informed her that it had belonged to a governess, who had stayed so long that she had herself almost become a member of the family.

“Ghastly job,” remarked James Palmer. “Female drudgery, the only profession open to a gentlewoman of slender means. Jane Austen’s governesses escaped, of course. Think of Jane Fairfax, although I don’t know how she could bring herself to marry Frank Churchill, and Mrs. Weston, with that garrulous and gossipy husband. Still, certainly better than Mr. Woodhouse.”

What on earth was he talking about? Georgina knew the answer to that, more wretched characters from Jane Austen’s novels. “Now you’re doing it, talking about characters as though they existed. And being a governess was the only profession open to women of a certain class,” she corrected him. “Women from other strata of society had different opportunities. Many women ran their own businesses, and even carried on trades.”

“And of course there was always the oldest profession of all. That was open to any young woman; plenty of middle-class girls came upon the town.”

“I didn’t realize there were any audio-visuals on this tour,” said Georgina as the sweeping chords of a harp piece reached her ears.