Writing Jane Austen (23 page)

A coach drew up, and another gaggle of girls, wearing grey skirts and navy blazers, poured out of a set of swing doors, each of them carrying a large musical instrument case. These were loaded into the luggage compartment of the coach, the girls clambered aboard and the coach drove off.

Silence descended once more. Georgina scrabbled under the rubber mat for her pen, but once she’d retrieved it, she found it impossible to concentrate on her plot. She let her mind drift, idly watching a squirrel run down from the tree and scamper over the tarmac and into the grass.

She got out of the car, wanting to stretch her legs, and went
across to the other side of the little car park. The handsome building before her must be the main school building, and the modern parts she could see between the trees were later extensions. Once this had been a private house, with a fine Palladian façade and a roundel of grass in front of it. Just the kind of house where Jane Austen’s family and friends might have lived and visited—at least, those who were wealthy enough to own a country estate. She sat down on a nearby tree stump and looked at the house, a golden colour in the autumn sunlight. She had to admit that there was something supremely pleasing about the classical proportions, the sash windows, the pediment and columns that marked the entrance. Somehow, this ordered elegance didn’t go with those healthy cheerful girls in their sports clothes and their uniforms, with their trumpets and trombones and exercise machines.

Someone was coming out of the door behind the pillars. Maybe it was Henry and Maud. Could they have finished so quickly?

It wasn’t. It was a man in strange clothes: breeches and a long, caped cloak. Faintly at first, then louder, came the sound of hooves, and she watched with disbelief as a carriage swept past her, two blinkered black horses moving in fine style. A man in a coat and a tall hat was perched in the driver’s seat, holding a long whip. The carriage drew up in front of the house, a man in livery appeared and darted forward to let down the carriage steps as a woman in a striking hat adorned with feathers came out of the house and stepped into the coach. She was joined by the man in the cloak and as the carriage came back down the drive and swept past her, she could see the man and woman engaged in an animated conversation. As the carriage drew level with the tree stump, the man turned his head, smiled and lifted his gloved hand as though to acknowledge Georgina’s presence.

The hooves faded into the distance. Bemused, Georgina rubbed her eyes and shook her head as though to brush the vision away.
Then she saw a figure at a second-floor window of the house, and a minute later a rope made of sheets knotted together was lowered over the sill. Two seconds later, a bundle was thrown out of the window, followed by a girl in a straw bonnet who launched herself on to the sheets. As her feet touched the ground, Georgina heard hooves again, and a solitary horseman rode up to the house. He leapt off his horse and clasped the escapee in a passionate embrace, before heaving her up on to the horse and swinging back into the saddle behind her.

Horse, man and woman cantered towards her, and dissolved into nothingness before they reached her.

What was going on? Was she becoming subject to hallucinations? No, she must have drifted off into a doze while sitting on the tree stump, and fallen into one of those waking dreams which can seem more real than the world around you.

Or she could simply be losing her wits. Perhaps what she needed was to take herself off smartly to a psychiatrist, and, there was a thought, if she were actually deranged, she couldn’t possibly be expected to finish the book, could she?

Some people think all writers of fiction are crazy,
said the clear, cold voice inside her head.
What’s imagination but a form of derangement?

“What’s up, you look as though you’d seen a ghost,” Henry said, when he returned to the car half an hour later, preceded by a cross-looking Maud.

Reluctant to talk about it, but needing to tell someone, she described what she’d seen. “It’s not the first time, either,” she added.

“You aren’t deranged,” said Henry calmly, as he drove through the school gates and on to the road. “You’re just seeing things because your head is full of Jane Austen, and the book you’ve got to write is stressing you out.”

Maud sat silently in the back. “I take it this wasn’t the one?” Georgina asked, turning round to look at Maud.

“No way,” said Maud. “And they won’t want me. The person who interviewed me kept going on about team spirit. I don’t do team spirit.”

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” said Henry cheerfully. “It’s a fiendishly expensive school.”

“I’m going to eat a huge lunch,” announced Maud, “and forget what a failure I am. That woman had all my marks from St. Adelberta’s, would you believe it? She asked me why my Latin results were so poor, and when I told her it was because I had an appalling teacher, she got quite cross. It’s never the teacher’s fault, you see, it has to be me. Oh, how I wish I lived in a different age, when I didn’t have to go to school at all. I wish I could have a governess like Jane Eyre, all demure and grey.”

“It would be very lonely,” Georgina said. “Only think what it would be like to live in a place like that house in those days, just you and your family and the servants. No internet, no DVDs, no mobile phone. I don’t think you’d like it a bit,” Georgina said.

“I suppose not, once you’ve had those things you’d miss them. Still, if I’d lived two centuries ago I still think it would have been rather nice not to go to school and to have a governess. And go riding, and be expected to play the piano and sing.”

“Only if you were rich and well-born.”

“I take that as a given,” said Maud. “And the trouble with that life was having to marry young and die in childbirth. I can’t say I fancy that very much. How many schools left on our list, Henry?”

“Only one.”

Georgina wasn’t sure what she had been expecting of Jane Austen’s house at Chawton, but she felt a strange sense of disappointment as she went round it.

“Tacky,” observed Maud as they went in through the front door, and she saw the mouse mats and key rings showing Colin Firth in his
TV role as Mr. Darcy. And then, to the woman who was dispensing tickets, “Where’s the creaking door?”

The woman gave her a pitying look. “Ah, well, of course the creak hasn’t lasted this long. And we aren’t even sure which door it was. If you read the notices, it will tell you what you want to know.”

Unabashed, Maud led the way out of the room into a tiny passage.

“What creaking door?” said Georgina.

Now it was Maud’s turn to give a withering look. “One forgets how little you know about Jane Austen, which is unfortunate in the circumstances. Jane Austen used to write in the drawing room of this house, and the creaking door warned her when anyone was coming in, so that she could hide the pages of her manuscript under her embroidery, to keep people from seeing what she was writing. And,” she continued as they went into the drawing room, “that’s the table she wrote on.”

The tiny table was the only thing in the house that stirred any emotion in Georgina. She stared down at it, a small round table set on a single shaft with three curved legs at its base. She couldn’t have fitted her notebook on there, nor her laptop. And Jane Austen had sat here, listening to the creaking door, and had written one hundred and sixty thousand words of
Mansfield Park
and
Emma
.

She felt a sense of sadness as she looked at the polished wooden surface. How could Jane Austen have written in a public room? Couldn’t she have had a room of her own?

It was a question that was answered when they went upstairs. The best room had belonged to Mrs. Austen, and across the passage from it was a small room, looking out the back into a small yard, which had been Jane and her sister Cassandra’s room. But there were other rooms, why couldn’t Jane have had a room of her own?

“She liked sharing with her sister,” said Maud matter-of-factly. “It was the only company she had of her own age. They would have talked up here, where their mother couldn’t hear them.”

“That’s fine for teenagers, but fancy sharing a room with your sister when you were forty. It’s all very small and domestic, isn’t it?”

The garden was probably charming in spring and summer, but it had an autumn melancholy to it. The sun which had shone so brilliantly while they were at the school had disappeared behind great clouds billowing high into the sky, and Georgina was glad to get back to the car.

“Useful for you?” said Henry. “You’re very quiet.”

“I liked the little table,” Georgina said. “I shall never forget that, it wrung my heart.”

Perhaps it was the anguish from Jane Austen’s house that made the visit to Winchester Cathedral so poignant. It was dusk when they went through the West Door and the chilly hush settled about them.

“Jane Austen is buried in the south aisle,” Maud said in a whisper. She’d made Henry stop at a florist, and carried a single red rose in her hand. Halfway down the aisle, she said, “Here it is,” and plopped down on her knees, before brushing the gravestone with a gentle hand and then laying the rose on it.

Georgina saw the tears brimming in Maud’s eyes, and she felt a tell-tale prickle in her own. Henry came to her rescue.

“Let’s stay for Evensong, shall we?”

They sat in the stall behind the choir of grown men and little boys wearing long red gowns with white collars and surplices. Henry leant over to whisper in Georgina’s ear. “It’s the same service Jane Austen would have heard, from
The Book of Common Prayer
. It’s one of the few bits of the Anglican service they haven’t rewritten in the style of a directive from the Inland Revenue.”

As the choir sang the Nunc dimittis, Georgina thought of that quiet grave in the south aisle.
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.

If Jane Austen could write a hundred-and-sixty-thousand-word novel on that tiny polished table, in the midst of family life, with a quill pen dipped into an inkstand, then she, Georgina Jackson, could turn out a hundred and twenty thousand words, in her own room, with the power of Apple and Microsoft at her elbow.

A hundred and twenty thousand words of what? Jane Austen wrote masterpieces. Had she gone on with
Love and Friendship,
it would have been another masterpiece. Jane Austen was a genius, Georgina Jackson wasn’t. Why hadn’t Jane Austen finished the book she’d started? What distracted her? Unhappiness at being in Bath, as received opinion had it? Or a busy social life there and in Southampton that made sitting down at a little table and scribbling away in her idle moments less attractive than friends and talk and theatre and gossip?

Perhaps her mother came down to breakfast every morning and said, “How’s the new book going, Jane?” until her daughter was so full of rage she couldn’t pen a word.

It didn’t matter. This was idle speculation, and any speculation that was going to be done needed to be done on the page, here, with these characters.

Georgina had taken a dislike to Lady Carcenet. She was sly, manipulative, aware of a fading beauty, jealous of Susan’s moral strength and youth and looks, all of which would be a reproach to a woman such as Lady C.

What if… ?

What if she went down to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee? That would wake up her brain, send some action round her grey cells. But first she would check out the American news. She was out of touch, time was she’d look at the
New York Times
every day; it was weeks since she’d done that. An article on baseball? That would be interesting.

She pulled herself up short. Baseball? When had she ever had any interest in baseball? This was procrastination, pure and simple. What was that site that had popped up in her mailbox, Procrastination 101? She might dip into that, it was bound to have a few useful tips.

Take your procrastination seriously. Here’s today’s task: sharpen some pencils. You don’t have any pencils? Shame on you, that means you aren’t taking advantage of the procrastinatory possibilities of Sudoku and other puzzles. Get your coat, and go to the stationer’s. Find a proper shop, the supermarket won’t do. Once at the stationer’s, you can while away a good chunk of your morning’s work time by stocking up on paper, notebooks, pens—all essentials for the active writer. Deliberate on your choice of pencils—HB, 2B, eraser on the end, red, yellow, blue? You’ll need at least a dozen. Don’t rush it. And don’t forget to buy a sharpener.

Once back at your desk, they’ll all need sharpening, and, with luck and perseverance, this can become part of your daily writing routine.

Henry knew the minute he came into the sitting room that Georgina hadn’t written a word. It was the way she sat listening to Maud’s scales that was the giveaway. It wasn’t the capitulation
of exhaustion, of a person worn out by a day’s hard time at the keyboard. It was the defiant posture of one who intended to start tomorrow.

First thing.

Without fail.

He’d watched with dismay as Georgina hacked her way through endless versions of Chapter One of
The Sorrows of Jane Silversmith,
persuading herself, day after day, that she’d cracked it, that tomorrow she would be on to Chapter Two and then she’d be on her way through the rest of the book.

Was
Love and Friendship
going to be another series of Chapter Ones? Disastrous, if so. Why didn’t writers write? He had no idea. He was one of nature’s Get-on-with-its. If something had to be done, do it. Yet he could appreciate that he had never had to stare at a blank page on the computer screen waiting for inspiration to strike and words to flow, one after another, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter until, finally, miraculously, there was a pile of pages spilling out of the printer—a book.

And Georgina wasn’t writing non-fiction. He was sure she’d have no problem researching, organizing and writing twenty or thirty coherent chapters on Victorian workhouses, or indeed Victorian workhorses or Victorian housework. Fiction was tougher. Facts and info in the end got you nowhere with a good story, although Georgina had buried herself in research for her previous books. Now she was on her own, and having to juggle characters convincingly; action ditto and purposeful; dialogue ditto and, in an attempt at the Jane Austenesque, also pithy and witty. His head reeled at the thought of it.