Writing Jane Austen (19 page)

“She didn’t go to bed until practically dawn, I heard her having a bath in the early hours. So she’ll probably sleep all day.” Maud pushed her brother out of the house and slammed the door behind him, then went into the sitting room and set about the satisfying task of scraping some oboe reeds.

As Maud predicted, Georgina slept all day, not stirring until
twelve hours later, when she woke with a start. She rolled over and looked at her clock. Just after six, early then, too early to get up and have breakfast, although her stomach was rumbling. She got out of bed and went over to the window. The room was stuffy and she wanted to let in some air. How odd, the sky in the west was suffused with a red glow. A fire? The end of the world?

She looked at her watch. Six o’clock? She’d gone to bed around then, so either it was tomorrow and something weird had meanwhile happened out there in the cosmos, or it was still today, and six o’clock in the evening.

A bang on the door, and without waiting for a reply, Maud was in the room. “It’s still Wednesday, in case you’re wondering. Wednesday evening, to be precise. You do look desperate, did you go to sleep with wet hair?”

Georgina peered at herself in the mirror, starting at the dishevelled appearance that looked back at her. “I look as though I’d been on an expedition to some forgotten spot of the world for several months.”

“Like my parents,” said Maud. “Only Mum doesn’t come back looking like that, I’m glad to say. Henry said I wasn’t to disturb you, but I heard you thumping about. Are you feeling disoriented? Henry used to look like that in the days when he was a financial wizard and always flitting off to Hong Kong and New York.”

Georgina ran a comb through her hair and pushed it behind her ears. “I’ll go to the hairdresser tomorrow, tonight I’ll stick with the through-a-bush-backwards look. I assume we don’t have company?”

“No, but that’s not for the want of people trying. You’re awfully in demand. That Yolanda Vesey person said she was coming round to meet with you, and Livia Harkness said she wants you in her office now. That was several hours ago, she seemed a bit pissed off when I told her you were asleep and couldn’t be disturbed. Then a
Mr. Palmer rang, said he’d like to drop round and see you. I didn’t altogether like the sound of him, he might be someone from the Home Office, he was awfully gloomy. I told him you’d gone back to America.”

“Oh my God,” was all Georgina could find to say, as the world and her problems came rushing back to her. And not just the old familiar problems of how to avoid Livia and the Veseys, and how to approach the text, but a larger and quite insuperable problem.

“Did you enjoy the Jane Austens?” Maud asked.

“Enjoy? Of course I enjoyed them, but that word doesn’t begin to describe what reading the books is like. What a mistake! What a terrible mistake!”

Maud looked grave. “Doing it all in one go like that? Bonkers, I’d say. And a bit rushed. You could have spread them out and made them last.”

“I was desolate when I finished. I still am, because there aren’t any more to read.”

“Don’t let that bother you, you just read them again and they get better and better. My English teacher has read
Emma
about twenty times, and she says she still finds something new to admire every time. Is that why you’re looking so dismal?”

No, that was part of the reason, but the real reason was caused by the realization of the impossibility of what she had undertaken. Of course, it was out of the question, it couldn’t be done. The contract had to be torn up, the money returned—somehow. She’d have to go back to America, get a job, pay it off in instalments. At least one thing was perfectly clear and that was she didn’t have to worry about getting a job and not having time to write. Her writing days were over.

“I must send an email to Livia,” she said, heading for her desk.

“You can’t,” said Henry from the door. His expression told Georgina what a fright she looked, although he was far too well-mannered to say so.

“Why not?”

“Connection’s down. Has been for an hour. So forget it, get dressed, come downstairs, rejoin the human race.”

Maud was in the kitchen, inspecting the contents of the fridge. “It’s Anna’s ballroom dancing class tonight, so we have to cater for ourselves. No, we don’t, here’s a fish pie with a note on it. Good for Anna.”

“Leave it where it is,” Henry said. “We can’t celebrate Gina’s initiation into the mysteries of Jane Austen with fish pie, it would be disrespectful to whatever temperamental Greek powers look after writers. Put a bottle of fizz on ice, Maud; I’m going shopping.”

“I like fish pie,” Georgina said as the door slammed behind Henry and they heard his steps fading away down the street.

“Henry doesn’t,” Maud said. “You can tell the world’s changed, it used to be nothing but Krug and the Widow Click, and now it’s all supermarket stuff.”

“None the worse for that,” said Georgina, who wasn’t that keen on champagne, although she agreed it was the right drink for a celebration. The trouble was, she didn’t feel much like celebrating. True, she’d read the novels, but where had that got her? Deeper into the mire. She no longer had a vague feeling she’d bitten off more than she could chew; she knew she was batting way out of her league.

“He’ll buy steak,” Maud said. “Henry likes steak as much as he doesn’t like fish pie.”

“Why does Anna cook food for him that he doesn’t like? Surely she should cook what he wants.”

“She says fish is good for you, and you should eat it at least once and preferably twice a week, haven’t you noticed we always have it on Fridays? Also, the only thing Henry can cook is steak, so if you want another alternative to fish pie it has to be something which either I can cook, which is pasta, or you, which is sausages or
burnt hamburgers, since you’re almost as hopeless in the kitchen as Henry.”

Fifteen minutes later and they heard brisk footsteps in the street, the squeak of the gate, more footsteps coming down the stairs into the area. Henry banged on the kitchen door, and Maud jumped up to let him in.

“Steak.” He laid a squidgy bag on the kitchen table.

Maud investigated the contents. “And oven chips, cool.”

Henry put the oven on and then shooed them upstairs, Maud carrying a tray with three champagne glasses, Georgina holding a bowl of nuts and olives in each hand, and Henry bringing up the rear with the bottle of wine. The glasses weren’t the usual flutes, but the older style of wide-bowled ones with hollow stems, in which the wine sparkled quietly. Georgina loved those glasses, which Henry said had belonged to his grandmother.

Maud dunked her fingers into the glass before she took her first sip, and sprinkled some of the champagne into the air. She repeated the process, sending a little shower across the room and then flicking froth onto the floor.

“What the hell are you doing?” said Henry.

“It’s a libation. To the gods of the upper realms, the middle realms and the lower realms. It seems to me that Georgina is going to need all the help she can get, so a libation has to be good.”

Georgina drank some champagne, the bubbles prickling her nose as they always did. It was why she really didn’t like any kind of fizzy drink, from Coca-Cola to champagne. If a libation would help, she’d gladly sacrifice the entire bottle, but she thought the task that lay ahead of her was too much for even an entire pantheon to fix.

The champagne made Henry and Maud lively, but it simply depressed Georgina. And, when they went downstairs again, the steak—cooked with bravura skill by Henry, who’d been tied into a striped green apron by Maud—was ashes in her mouth.

Anna came back just as they were finishing the ice cream that Maud had served. Anna took in the situation at a single glance, and wagged her finger at Henry. “Fish pie tomorrow, and I shall make some extra fish next week.”

“I don’t really care for fish.”

“You want to do the cooking?”

“Gotcha,” said Maud. “Have some ice cream, you’ll need re-energizing after all that fox-trotting.” Her phone broke into a series of howls, and she took herself off to answer it.

Georgina had been so wrapped up in her own problems, quite apart from being away from London, that she had lost track of Maud’s school situation. She asked Henry how the school hunting was going.

He sighed. “No luck so far. We visited two more, but one didn’t have any places until next year and the other did, but Maud took an immediate dislike to it. I think she objected to the uniform.”

“It’s time she was at school again,” Anna said. “Every week that passes, she is losing a week of education, and these lost weeks can never be made up. There will be principles of mathematics, important language work, historical facts that she will miss.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Henry cheerfully. “I’ve come to the conclusion that you could miss a year of school and would hardly notice it. But yes, you’re right, Maud does need to get back to school. Although she maintains she is perfectly happy, sleeping late, playing her oboe, reading, watching DVDs and eating Anna’s delicious food.”

“She likes being at home,” Georgina said. “I still don’t understand why so many people in England, once they have any money, send their children off to boarding school. Why can’t she just go to a London school? Thousands do.”

Henry passed a hand over his forehead, as though to wipe his frown away. “It’s not my decision. My parents want her in boarding
school because they spend so much time abroad at the moment. It makes sense.”

“Send her to a local school, then, until they’re back. Then it’s up to them to decide what to do with her.”

“I’m her legal guardian while they’re away, and they trust me to do what’s best for her. I agree, she’d like to be at home with me, but our parents don’t want to burden me with having a fourteen-year-old around while I’m trying to study, and besides, she’ll have to be in Cambridge with them when they get back from the icy wastes.” He hesitated. “And Maud would have a rough ride at a lot of schools; individuality isn’t prized much these days. I’m not sure I could deal with a reckless and unhappy fourteen-year-old, to be honest. That’s the age when they go off the rails.”

Georgina, looking at Henry, thought there wasn’t much that he wouldn’t be able to deal with. “I can see it’s tricky, having to do what you think or know your parents would want, while making your own mind up about what would be best for Maud, and needing to sort out what’s practical.”

“Somewhere out there is a school which Maud will like, and which will like Maud.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Georgina said. “If I were you I’d let her stay home for the time being. When do your parents get back?”

“Not until the spring, and she can’t stay off school until then.”

Anna was shocked. “It would be most irresponsible. Henry has undertaken to take care of Maud while their parents are away, and that means he can’t leave such an important matter in the air. Once you have agreed to do something, you can’t go back on your word.”

Maud slouched back into the kitchen. Her eyes flashed round the three of them. “I know what you’ve been talking about while my back was turned,” she said. “Me.”

“There are other subjects in the world,” Henry said. “Like Gina’s book. What’s the schedule now, Gina? What’s the plan of action?”

“Quite simple, really. Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’m going to telephone Livia Harkness and tell her that I can’t do it. I’ll send back what I can of the advance, and tell her that I’ll repay the rest as soon as I can. You’ll have to find yourself a new lodger, Henry. I’m going back to America, to find myself a job in order to earn the money to repay the advance.”

Silence.

Maud spoke first. “Coward.”

Anna was shaking her head. “You feel this way because you are tired, and you have had champagne and then red wine and this clouds your judgement. When you have had another night’s sleep, you will see things quite differently.”

“I shan’t.”

“The best thing for you to do is negotiate more time,” said Henry. “It always was an impossible schedule, and they must be reasonable people, you need to talk it over with them.”

“From the way she sounds on the telephone,” said Maud, “Livia Harkness isn’t at all reasonable.”

Georgina tried to explain that it wasn’t the schedule, they could give her five years to write the book and she still couldn’t do it. “It’s like asking some hack musician who’s written a school musical to compose a Mozart opera. He couldn’t do it. I can’t write a Jane Austen. Period.”

Henry was prowling about the kitchen. “They aren’t asking you to write a Jane Austen, they’re asking you to write a novel in the style of Jane Austen. Lots of people have written music in the style of Mozart.”

“In which case they’ve had years of practice writing music in the style of Mozart. It’s not that I couldn’t copy her writing style,
although that isn’t so easy, I reckon, she’s kind of idiosyncratic with punctuation. It’s simply that she is such a brilliant writer. Just think of those characters—hell, it’s thinking you can climb Mount Everest when you’ve done a bit of scrambling around in the foothills. I can’t do it and that’s that.”

“You signed the contract,” said Anna. “That’s a legal document, like giving your word. You have an obligation to write the book, just as Henry has an obligation to do the best he can for Maud.”

“Can they sue you for millions?” asked Maud.

“Difficult to do if Gina’s back in the States,” said Henry. “It would probably mean you’d never be able to set foot in England again, though, Gina.”

No more England. No more dirty-coloured rain slanting on to wet pavements, no grey, sluggish Thames reflecting a leaden sky, no more surly, incomprehensible Londoners, no more being watched by a dozen cameras every time you step outside your front door, no more paying ridiculous sums for bad coffee, no more wrestling to get on rush-hour underground trains.

And no more May mornings with the intensity of the green countryside dazzling the eyes and spirit, no more loitering on Westminster Bridge watching lights glittering across the surface of the Thames at twilight, no cups of strong tea with the special taste that comes from London water. No more muddy walks in country lanes, no more Oxford dawns where the world seems to be born anew, no more fish-and-chips, warm beer, Cornish pasties. And England had so much that was old: castles and great houses, tiny cottages, mediaeval humped bridges, church spires, ancient walkways; you could spend a lifetime enjoying them, and she’d hardly begun.