Writing Jane Austen (26 page)

“If I were Mozart, or if I had one percent of Mozart’s genius, I wouldn’t be in this fix.”

“If you were Mozart, you’d be in a place where Livia Harkness couldn’t get at you, and as for one percent, hooey. I read that nobody ever uses more than ten percent of their potential. Perhaps you should sign up for one of these self-improvement courses. You know, you visualize it, and poof! It’s done.”

“All I can visualize is Livia Harkness in a mood, and Dan Vesey on the phone to his lawyers.”

“Okay, let’s be practical,” Henry said. “Shut up, Maud, Georgina doesn’t need arguments, she needs help.”

Henry didn’t have to go in to college that week, and was contemplating a day’s work in his study. The sun didn’t reach in there at this time of year, and he looked round the untidy room with a sense of dissatisfaction. Normally, he wasn’t much bothered by his surroundings, but today the cluttered desk annoyed him, so he heaved a pile of books off the desk and on to the floor. He looked at the papers spread over what space remained on the surface, considered sorting them out and decided it was a moment to decamp from the battlefield. Like Wellington, he could be masterly in retreat.

The kitchen would be empty: Gina was in her garret, writing, one hoped; Maud was in her room doing God knew what, and Anna was out, he had heard her singing as she went up the basement steps. Using his laptop as a tray, he laid a textbook on it, a pad of paper, two pencils, a ruler, a pen, a calculator and his iPod.

Pleased with his sense of balance, he went down the stairs to the kitchen, missed the bottom step and by means of a juggling motion worthy of a talented Auguste, just saved his laptop from destruction. He reassembled his possessions, laid them out on the kitchen table and plugged in his computer. Since he was down here, he might as well have a beer. He opened the fridge, took out a bottle, helped himself to a few grapes and settled down to work.

For ten minutes. Footsteps, and there was Georgina, even darker circles under her eyes, looking harassed. “Hungry? Thirsty?” he enquired. “Have a beer, how’s it going?”

Georgina sat down on the other side of the table, running her fingers through her hair and giving herself the appearance of something wild in a Greek play. “Going? It isn’t. Or you could say, it’s going nowhere.” She got up and wandered around the kitchen. “Sorry, I’m disturbing you.”

“I hadn’t really started.”

“I envy you, you know that? You work for hours on end, you open a book or your computer and there you are, deep in whatever you need to be deep in, and when you look up, there’s a mass of work done. I used to be like that. I used to put in long sessions like that in the library, thinking nothing of it, and satisfied at the end of the day that I’d achieved something. Same when I wrote
Magdalene
Crib.
I had a schedule, I had my notes, I had all my research done, and I did it. What’s gone wrong?” She opened a drawer in the dresser, investigated the contents and then pulled the drawer right out. She laid it on the table and began to remove its contents one by one. “This drawer’s a mess.”

“It’s meant to be. It’s the odds and ends drawer. No one ever tidies that drawer.”

Georgina wound a piece of string round her fingers and tucked the ends in.

Someone was singing, or rather chanting, a descending scale. Maud was coming down the stairs. “I heard voices,” she said. “Move along a bit, Georgina. What’s all this stuff? Heavens, you aren’t tidying drawers, are you? Isn’t that what writers do when they really are stuck? Do you think you’ve got writer’s block? It can go on for years and years, you know.”

“Thanks. I haven’t got writer’s block. I’ve got writer’s funk. In fact, I’m not a writer. I’m an ex-writer, or possibly an unwriter, and I’ve got unwriter’s frozen fingers and jellied brains syndrome.”

“Did Jane Austen ever suffer from writer’s block?” asked Maud.

“She wouldn’t have called it that, people like Jane Austen didn’t dwell on their psychological state. Look how Mr. Bennet mocks
Mrs. Bennet for her ‘nerves.’ Now she’d tell all about her nerves in a newspaper, and say what Mr. B. was like in bed.” Georgina rubbed her eyes. “I’m becoming obsessed by this woman, I’m starting to think that her moral values might be good ones, how sad is that? A clergyman’s daughter from two centuries back?”

“You’re skirting around the subject of writer’s block,” Maud said, giving Georgina a severe look. “Concentrate. All those years she didn’t write anything, maybe that’s why.”

“Who knows why she didn’t write? I wish she had, I wish with all my heart she’d sat down and finished
Love and Friendship,
and then I wouldn’t have this problem.”

“No, but you’d be on the plane back to America,” Henry said. Was what he wanted to say going to be any use to Georgina, or simply panic her more? “I’ve been doing a bit of research on writer’s block. Seems to have umpteen causes, but the one that fits your case is a stinker. It’s caused by not wanting to write the book you are writing.”

Maud was sucking at her reed. She blew into it, making a fearsome squawk. “That’s stupid. How often does that happen, people writing books they don’t want to write. I mean, who makes them? Like there aren’t enough books out there?”

“Livia Harkness, that’s who,” said Georgina. “She’s got another author who has to turn out soft porn to make ends meet. Under a pseudonym, of course—she’s got a reputation as a serious writer. She hates doing it, even though she’s very good at it, and Livia won’t let her stop, because of all the money it brings in.”

“How do you know about her?” asked Henry. “Does Livia H. gossip about her clients?”

“Hell, no. Gossip? Idle chatter? The chit-chat, the give-and-take of daily conversation? Not Livia. She uses words like every one of them has to earn its living.”

“Is there a Mr. Harkness?”

“Not that I know of, and I begin to doubt that there ever were a Mr. and Mrs. Harkness, her progenitors; I reckon Livia sprang fully formed from some alien’s head.”

“So how did you find out about the soft porn?” Maud sat down and propped her elbows on the kitchen table. “Do tell, fascinating insights into the literary world are much more fun than your writer’s block.”

Georgina picked up a scrum of metal paper clips and began to separate them. “It was at a writer’s conference. Livia Harkness’s clients tend to get in a gaggle and bitch about her, it’s because we’re all terrified of her.”

“You have to stand up to bullies, and then they crumple.”

“Not Livia Harkness. She doesn’t do crumpling, believe me.”

“Then why don’t they go to other agents?” Henry said.

“Because she’s so damn good at what she does, and she gets her authors good deals and fights like a terrier for them when publishers get high-handed and mean with the advances.”

“She hasn’t done much fighting on your behalf, she’s not exactly fending off that Dan person.”

“She got Georgina a fat advance,” Henry pointed out. “Which she’ll have to repay if she doesn’t get a move on and write that book, and honestly, Gina, I don’t think you can.”

Georgina tugged at a clip and bent it so fiercely that it snapped, in the process jabbing her in the finger and drawing blood. “What is it with paper clips, why are they so vicious?” she said, running the wounded digit under the cold tap. She had her back to Henry and Maud, so they couldn’t see her face. “Thanks for that, Henry, it’s so helpful to have it laid out in such clear terms. Basically, I’m screwed, is what you’re saying.”

More footsteps, from outside this time. Anna paused at the door to remove the cigarette from her mouth and stubbed it into the flowerpot full of sand which she kept outside the back door for the purpose. She shook out her umbrella, and backed into the kitchen.

“I go out, I leave the kitchen empty and completely clean and tidy. I come back, only two hours later, and it is like a camp here. Books and papers, the tin of silver polish and a horrid rag, and this drawer open with its contents everywhere. What is all this for?”

“Council of war,” Henry said. “Don’t fuss about the mess, sit down and join in. Gina isn’t writing, or not to any effect, and we’re getting to the bottom of it.”

Anna sat. “The best way to get anything done is to know that you starve if you don’t do it. It concentrates the mind.”

“Gina is an artist, Anna. She has to write a book she doesn’t want to write, it’s out of her area of expertise.”

“Tessitura,” Maud said. “All cracked notes below, and can’t reach the high ones.”

“Gina is a novelist, this is a novel, no one is asking her to write one of Henry’s science textbooks,” Anna said.

“There are novels and novels,” said Henry. “And she’s having to write in someone else’s voice. I suppose there are authors with a gift for pastiche, but it looks like Gina isn’t one of them.”

“Then what is to be done?”

“I just told her I’ve been doing some research about the literary world. I think she needs a ghost.”

Anna let out an exclamation of dismay. “Ghost? You’re crazy! A spirit summoned from other realms? The Catholic church is completely opposed to such practices, they are extremely dangerous. And how would a spirit help?”

“Not a spook, a ghostwriter, Anna. Perfectly harmless.”

“Harmless? This is what happens in a country where everybody is an atheist. Gina cannot risk her immortal soul for the sake of a book! And besides, it’s impractical. How can you summon a ghostwriter? How do you know that the ghost of Jane Austen will speak in her ear? It could be Dostoevsky, and then where would she be,
with a story in Russian about doom and despair? You are not sensible, Henry.”

Georgina laughed as she hadn’t done for a long time. “Oh, if only I could summon up the spirit of Jane Austen! Never mind my immortal soul, I’d do it.”

“There was a woman who said she was getting music from Chopin,” said Maud. “Some of it wasn’t bad, but I thought, why Chopin? Why not Mozart?”

Anna was frowning and pursing her lips. “This is not a subject for jokes and laughter.”

“It’s all right, Anna. It’s nothing to do with spirits and eternal realms. It’s completely down-to-earth, ghostwriters are just writers who write books for people who can’t write them themselves. I’ll show you.”

Georgina ran up the stairs to her room, and came back with some magazines. “Here are some copies of
The Author,
they always have ads for ghosts at the back.”

“Who employs these ghostwriters?”

“People who’ve got a story to tell, but who can’t write. Victims of child abuse, for instance; publishers pay a fortune for those, only it needs a professional writer to put the terrible details into shape so that mums can buy the paperback at the supermarket and drool over the kiddie sex, while exclaiming how dreadful it all is—don’t ask me why. Celebrities who are commissioned to write novels nearly always use ghosts. They get huge advances because they’re famous, only most of them can’t even spell their own names, let alone write a book. Ex–prime ministers, of course there aren’t too many of those, but they’re offered millions for their memoirs or autobiographies. They might be able to turn out a paragraph or two, but they’re mostly too busy making money in other ways to actually put their fingers on the keys.”

Georgina could see that although Anna was relieved on a spiritual level, she was now disturbed on the moral front.

“So I buy a book which has an author’s name on the cover, and that person didn’t write the book?”

“Exactly. And publishers use ghosts when they’ve got a really rotten book by an author they think is promotable—young, sexy, right ethnic origin, only can’t write for toffee. Give their hopeless manuscript to a ghost, and there you are, a bestseller.”

“Don’t worry about it, Anna,” said Maud. “It’s a wicked place, the literary world, there’s no point getting sentimental about it. Come on, Henry, how would a ghost help Georgina?”

“That’s obvious, Maud, he or she would write the book for me.”

“Problem solved. It’ll cost you, I suppose, but you’ve got all that lovely money from Cadell and Davies, haven’t you? Isn’t it worth spending some of that to get the book written?”

For a moment, Georgina was tempted. The relief of handing over her notes to a real writer, a person who sat down at her or his computer every morning and produced the requisite number of words. Could she find a ghost who could write in the style of Jane Austen? In the time? She flipped open another copy of
The Author
and began to read the ghost ads with closer attention.

“What about the non-disclosure clause Livia Harkness got you to sign?” Henry said. “Could you do it without telling her what you were doing?”

The mention of Livia’s name brought Georgina back to earth and reality with a swift bump, and an abandonment of the straw she had been about to clutch.

“Of course I can’t do it. I’m a writer, not an illiterate celeb or a lying politician. Anna’s right, I can’t put my name on something I haven’t written. It would be so dishonest. And I’d have to tell the ghost why I needed it done, and… No, it’s a non-starter. Sorry Henry, nice idea, but it won’t work.”

Why was she sitting here picking at paper clips and unknotting twine, when she should be at her keyboard, clocking up the
paragraphs? “I’d better get back to it,” she said without enthusiasm.

She went up the stairs a good deal more slowly than she’d come down them, no coffee or untidy drawers to distract her. Not that she didn’t have drawers in her room, but every one of them had already been tidied into rigid order. Her books had been rearranged, and her CDs sorted out, with missing tracks added to her iPod. As for her computer files, everything was in its place, old stuff deleted, updates checked.

Short of painting the walls and ceiling, or buying a sewing machine and setting about making cushion covers, there was nothing for Georgina to do in there.

Except sit and write.

Or waste hours on the internet, but even that was now impossible, at least until seven o’clock that evening. She’d found a program on the Procrastination site, called
The Writer’s Little Helper, a Personal Training Program
. It kicked in at 7 a.m., loaded a day’s schedule, and then severed her internet access for the day. Not even turning the computer off and restarting would restore the connection.