Writing Jane Austen (18 page)

Henry appeared. “Has a fire broken out?” he enquired pleasantly. “Hello, Gina, welcome home. So what’s up, why the squeals, Maud? Government fallen? Aliens landed from Mars?”

“Better,” said Maud, “better and more astonishing than any of those things. Gina’s reading Jane Austen.”

“About time too. In which case, Maud, why not leave her alone. When did you get back, Gina?”

Georgina, still more in Hertfordshire in the time of George III than in modern-day London, gave him an owlish look. “This morning,” she said vaguely, “I had to go to the dentist.”

“Then you won’t have had anything to eat. Maud, go and rustle up some food for Gina.”

Georgina shook her head. “No, it’s okay, thank you. I’d rather just get on with this.”

“A sandwich then, up here.” He gave Georgina another glance and took himself off. She settled herself back in the chair and in
two seconds was deeply involved once more with the goings-on of the Bennet family. She hardly noticed Maud’s entry as she ostentatiously tiptoed in bearing a tray with sandwiches and coffee.

Georgina was a fast reader when she needed to be, but, deep in the narrative as she was, she couldn’t help reading slowly enough to absorb the delights of the story. By dinnertime she was at Pemberley. Henry brought her food up on another tray, and she ate her meal with one hand, while she turned over the pages with the other. He had thoughtfully provided a large glass of red wine and she sipped it as the story wound to its deeply satisfying conclusion.

Georgina closed the book and sat back stunned. That was the kind of experience she had had on very few occasions in her life. It was up there with the first time she had seen the
Marriage of Figaro,
and
Casablanca,
and a magical performance of
Much Ado About Nothing
that left her floating on air for days afterwards.

Of course there had been other moments when she had been overwhelmed by great art. There was
Hamlet,
which always left her in tears,
Anna Karenina,
and she had spent one summer deep in Dostoevsky, lost in that extraordinary Russian world of despair and heightened humanity. The only despair she felt after reading Jane Austen was the awful realization of what she had let herself in for, but pushing that thought to the back of her head, she got up and set off to find another book by Jane Austen.

Henry was ahead of her. She met him on the landing as he came up the stairs with a pile of books. “I know you’ve been reading
Pride and Prejudice,
because Maud snooped. Why don’t you read the others in more or less chronological order and plunge into
Northanger Abbey
? Short and delightful. Meanwhile, come downstairs and have another glass of wine, you look as though you need it.”

Georgina shook her head. “No, I want to go on reading.” She almost snatched the books from him, disappeared back into her room and closed the door firmly. She opened the book on top of the pile.

Northanger Abbey,
a novel in three volumes by Jane Austen. She turned to the first page.

When Henry went to bed at midnight, her light was still on. He knocked on her door, and hearing no reply tentatively put his head round it. Georgina looked up at him, dazed and distant. “It’s midnight,” he said. “Hadn’t you better put aside Miss Austen for the night and get some sleep?”

“Can’t stop,” said Georgina, not looking up from the page. He shook his head and retreated, closing the door softy behind him, then jumped to find Maud standing at his elbow.

“She’ll go on till she’s finished the next one,” said Maud. “I’d better make a thermos of coffee if she’s going to be up all night.”

“I’m sure she has far too much sense to do that,” said Henry.

“And before you tell me it’s time I should be in bed, I shall say save your breath. Since I have nothing to get up for in particular in the morning, it doesn’t really matter what time I go to bed.” With which defiant words she descended to the kitchen, where Anna was just finishing putting things away. She told Anna what Gina was up to, and Anna shook her head. “It’s bad for the brain to go on too long like that. Gina will feel terrible in the morning. No, don’t make coffee for her. If she has coffee, she will certainly stay awake, otherwise she will fall asleep over the book.”

Anna was mistaken. Georgina read on and on, delighted to find that she could picture so many of the places in Bath, and sure that
Northanger Abbey
would have been very like Lacock. It was a charming book, not on a par with
Pride and Prejudice,
she had to admit, but still an enthralling read. It was a much shorter book, and she finished it in the early hours of the morning. Time to go to bed? No, not with
Sense and Sensibility
sitting there invitingly. She went silently down into the kitchen and made herself some strong coffee which she carried back upstairs. Half an hour later, she was off with the Dashwoods to their new life in Devonshire.

By this time she was becoming rather tired, but a brief quarter of an hour’s nap restored her and she ate her way through the substantial breakfast brought up by an anxious Anna without lifting her eyes from the pages. Maud came in at eleven o’clock, bearing several cans of Red Bull and some capsules.

“If you’re planning to get into the Guinness book of records by reading all the Jane Austen novels in one go, then why don’t you take some guarana? Everyone uses it at school during exams, it’s amazing at keeping tiredness at bay.”

“Thanks, but I don’t need it. I’m not tired,” said Georgina simply.

Early afternoon took Georgina into the bathroom for a shower, before she sank back into her chair with yet another novel, off on a journey to Northamptonshire and the strange closed-in world of Mansfield Park.

“Henry says you’ll be ill if you go on like this,” Maud told her when she brought her up some supper, “but I expect you’ll flake out in a little while. Mrs. Norris is the most horrible woman ever, don’t you agree? But I do like Mary Crawford, I think she’s cool.”

Georgina was too involved in the story to form any judgements on the characters. She was there among them, they were far more real to her than Maud or Henry or Anna, and if she had gone to the window and looked out she would have seen the elegant landscape around Mansfield Park, and not a London street with cars passing and the rain beating down on to the pavement.

Another cat-nap, one of Maud’s Red Bulls, and with a swift jump of the imagination she left behind the dull but happy couple, Edmund and Fanny, and was whisked away to Emma Woodhouse’s Surrey. Another long book, but as far as Georgina was concerned, the longer the better.

In the basement, a kitchen conference was in progress.

She’s into Emma now,” said Maud. “That’s a long one, about as long as
Mansfield Park,
I should say. She certainly won’t finish it before any sensible bedtime, and so I suppose she’ll be reading all night again.”

Anna shook her head disapprovingly. “To do without sleep is not good for you. One night, anyone can do that, but to sit in a room and only get up to go to the bathroom, and eat all her meals on a tray? It isn’t sensible or practical, and it is not good for her. Her health will suffer.”

“It’s not as bad as that,” Maud said. “She doesn’t smell, she’s taken a shower.”

“Thank you for your helpful comments, Maud,” Henry said. “Surely tiredness will simply get the better of her, and she’ll keel over and sleep for twelve hours or so.”

“Not until she’s finished all six novels if you ask me,” said Maud. “Have you got a friendly doctor in your pocket? There are some wonder pills which are supposed to make you highly alert mentally. A few of the sixth-formers used them last year when they were doing A-levels. Better than guarana even, but you can only get them on prescription, ten quid a pop, something like that, but of course Gina is rich now, so she could afford it.”

“I can’t think that she can understand what she’s reading,” observed Anna. “She must be very desperate indeed to read the
books like this all in a row. I believe the deadline for her book bothers her a lot.”

“Deadline, nothing,” Henry said. “She’s enthralled. Lost in a few good books. They say you enter a higher state of consciousness when it’s like that, and in Gina’s case it clearly is. Not so damaging as drugs, you will admit.”

A delicious aroma came from a pot that was bubbling on the stove. Maud asked what it was, and Anna, with some pride, said that she was boiling a chicken. “Chicken broth is extremely nourishing for invalids and for convalescents and also to people who have been using their brain a great deal.”

“And, one trusts, for people who are determined to read some three quarters of a million words in one go.” Henry was prowling about the kitchen now, looking unhappy. “I do wish Gina didn’t go to such extremes. She faffed about doing nothing, except escaping from those dreadful people who hounded her day and night, and now, instead of tackling the whole thing calmly, she does this. She’ll be fit for nothing by the time she gets to the end of
Persuasion,
which isn’t much help since she needs to be in peak form if she’s to get her book written on time.”

He went over to look at the calendar on the wall, and began to do some calculations. He wasn’t at all sure how many words an author could possibly write in a day, but whichever way you looked at it, Gina needed to get her head down at the computer, and soon.

Maud got up from the table. “Henry, if you give me some money, I’ll go out and buy Gina the most luscious ice cream I can find. There’s that Italian shop, with about forty varieties. That’s what I’d need to eat if I were reading all those books in one go, and I don’t see why Gina should be any different.”

Neither Henry nor Anna felt ice cream was what Gina needed right now, but Maud got her way and returned in about twenty minutes bearing a large carton of ice cream. “Three flavours,” she
announced. “Fruits of the forest, dark chocolate, and cinnamon. All my favourites.” She was all set to scoop the ice cream into a bowl, but Anna stopped her.

“I’m always telling you that food must look as good as it tastes,” and in her skilful hands, the ice cream did look particularly delicious.

“I think I bought too much for Gina to eat all on her own,” Maud said, reaching for a spoon. “I might try a little myself.”

Henry and Anna exchanged glances, and Henry said he’d take the ice cream up.

By this time Georgina was looking distinctly wild. She had been running her fingers through her hair so it now stood on end, and that, together with the dark rings under her eyes, Henry informed her, did make her look rather like someone auditioning for a vampire movie.

“Vampires?” said Georgina. “Is that ice cream? How clever of you, Henry, that’s exactly what I feel like.”

He could see that her attention was wandering back to her book, and the advice he had been going to give her, to put the bloody book down and go to bed, died on his lips. Instead, he asked, “Which one are you on now?”

“Still
Emma
. I adore Mrs. Elton, what a wonderfully dreadful creature she is.”

That was all Henry was going to get out of her, and he knew it.

It was at six o’clock the next morning that Georgina read the final words of
Persuasion
and closed the book. She sat very still, the book still on her knee, gazing out through the undrawn curtains to the scene beyond, illuminated by a street-lamp. In the distance she could hear the wail of a siren, and then from closer at hand the squall of tomcats fighting. It was as though the world had stood still, or as though the world out there was not one in which she belonged. With a clarity that came from extreme tiredness she had a sudden overwhelming glimpse of timelessness; two hundred
years ago and the present stood side by side, each one as real as
the other.

She felt a wetness on her cheeks, and dabbing with a finger she found the tears trickling down her face. She knew why she was crying. It wasn’t weariness, although she didn’t think she’d ever felt so exhausted in her life, no, it was an irredeemable sadness that Jane Austen had written only six books, and that she had read them all. She felt a surge of anger that Jane Austen had died so young. Look at all the authors who turned books out over decades; how unfair that Jane Austen had managed just six. Mozart had died younger than Jane Austen, of course, but he had started young and had left the world hugely enriched by his prodigious output. Imagine if Mozart had written nothing but six operas or six symphonies.

The clarity faded, and the numbing sense of tiredness swept over her. Staggering a little, she went to the bathroom, ran a bath, splashed some lavender into it and sank into the hot water. Two minutes later she was fast asleep, but she woke up quickly when the water reached her nose. She slid down into it to soak her hair, before washing it and herself and climbing out to wrap herself in a fluffy towelling robe. She padded back to her bedroom, shut the door, climbed into bed, still in her bathrobe, and without switching out the light, fell deeply asleep.

There’s no need to shush me,” Maud said indignantly. “You could assemble a band outside Gina’s door, like Wagner did, and she wouldn’t stir. I wonder if she’s dreaming, I wonder if all those characters and all those events in all those places are rattling through her mind, and she’ll wake up in the nineteenth century, mad, and have to be carried off to a zonky crystal therapist to bring her back into her proper time.”

Henry knew he was going to be late for his lecture. “Don’t be fanciful. Where the hell did I put that book?”

“If it’s that ridiculously fat one full of unintelligible formulae, I used it to prop the sitting-room door open. Anna oiled the hinges and now the door won’t stay open when you want it to.”

With another curse Henry retrieved
Chromospheric Supergranule Cells
, stuffed the lunch box that Anna had left on the hall table into his computer bag, slung it over his shoulder and opened the front door. “I’ll have to leave my phone on silent, but text me if Gina wakes up, and let me know how she is.”