Writing Jane Austen (25 page)

“And I don’t want to hear about wild boar, in Poland or anywhere else,” said Maud. “I know it’ll get gory.”

Upstairs, brother and sister looked at each other conspiratorially.

“He’s smitten!” said Maud. “I never would have believed it, when you think of those fluffy dimbos he goes for.”

“They never last.”

“She’s taller than him.”

“He’ll have to look up to her, that’s all.”

“He’ll have to marry her if he sleeps with her,” said Maud. “She has strong views on sex.”

“He’s only known her for five minutes, give them a chance. Even as we speak, they may have come to blows over a recipe for boar’s head.”

A dishevelled Georgina looked down from the upstairs landing. “What’s going on? Why are you whispering on the stairs?”

“Don’t get paranoid,” said Maud, advancing up the next flight. “It’s nothing to do with you. Charlie’s here, Charles Grandison, you met him, our cousin. He’s getting on like anything with Anna. A romance,” she added hopefully. “Like in a book.”

“Don’t mention the word
romance,
or
book
if it comes to that. Maud, will you tell Anna not to bother with cooking for me, I don’t feel like eating anything and I want to work.”

“Okay,” said Henry, before Maud could protest. And then, as Georgina’s door shut behind her, he hissed at Maud, “Shut up, we’ll
haul her down when it’s ready, and force-feed her if necessary. There’s no point in arguing about it now.”

“She isn’t working. She’s simply staring at a screen, or at sheets of paper covered in scribbles.”

“That’s the creative process.”

Maud gave him a telling look. He retreated to the study, but instead of returning to solar physics, he went back to the sites he’d bookmarked about writers and writer’s block. He read through several articles, clicked on links to other sites and then, finally, shut the lid of his computer. He leant back in his chair and stretched his long legs out under the desk. Then he flicked through the Page-A-Day desk diary—a “Far Side” one that Maud had given him. He counted the days, did a quick calculation in his head, frowned, sighed and turned to page 775 of
Quantum Chromodynamics
.

Good wine, some excellent food and agreeable company cheered Georgina up, although she had started the meal in a sullen mood, angry with Maud for forcing her downstairs to the table. She would have made more of a fuss if Charles weren’t there, but she didn’t want to be rude in front of Henry’s cousin, and guest.

Charles was passing on an invitation from his mother to spend the weekend at her country house.

“Invitation?” said Henry. “Does that mean I can say no?”

“Not if you value your skin. Rather a royal command, this one. Foxy’s having a twenty-first, and she wants us all to go.”

“God, is Foxy only twenty-one? The sophistication of today’s young women is terrifying.”

“Well, old man, you’ll never hear the end of it if you don’t come. Bring Sophie, you know Mum likes her.”

“Oh God, I suppose I must say yes. I’ll ring Sophie and see what her filming schedule is like, and whether she can get away for the weekend.”

“I noticed that I’m not included in any invitation,” said Maud.

“Good God,” said Henry. “I forgot to say, Charlie, Maud isn’t here, okay?”

“If you say so. Where is she?”

“At school. St. Adelberta’s.”

Charles looked knowing. “Did they expel you, or did you run away?”

“Bit of both,” said Maud.

“Risky, running away. I tried it once or twice, but I never got as far as the station before they hauled me back. Lack of planning,” added Charles. “Should be quite easy if you time it right and have a good plan. Never did it myself, wouldn’t have been welcomed back into the bosom of my family if I had, I can tell you. Why did you run away? I thought schools these days were all sweetness and light, people queuing up for places and crying when they have to go home at the end of term.”

“Was your school like that?” Georgina asked.

Charles was taken aback. “Good Lord, no. Ghastly place, made a man of me. I’m not terribly clever, and I can’t say I excelled at any sports, so they didn’t think much of me. Not like Henry, he did okay at his school, he was bright, brilliant at maths and all that. Won prizes, even. Didn’t bother me, really, I didn’t want to go to university or anything like that. When I left school, I went to agricultural college. I never wanted to do anything but farming.”

“The thing is,” said Henry, bringing the conversation back to the matter in hand, “that I haven’t told your mother about Maud.”

“Which is wise,” said Charles. “She’d probably drive straight here, scoop up Maud and take her back to St. Adelberta’s.”

“That would be a waste of time and effort,” said Maud. “They wouldn’t have me back.”

Georgina looked thoughtfully at Maud.

Henry hated to see Georgina with those dark rings under her
eyes, and he wished he could come up with a solution to her problems. He did have an idea or two, but he suspected that if he were to make any suggestion at this point, Georgina would simply turn on him. Or pack up her bags and go, since he had an idea that she was longing to make some dramatic gesture.

Ever since Maud had arrived unexpectedly from her school, Henry, Anna and Georgina had wondered what had induced her to run away—why then, as opposed to any other time. Henry had ventured a question or two, but Maud had given him her best blank look and said that it was a private matter.

Which was one of the reasons why it was proving so difficult to find her a new school. Without knowing what had been so terrible about St. Adelberta’s, it was hard to make a sensible choice of a new one.

Now Georgina, tired and uncaring, came out with a straight question. “Maud, why did you run away?”

For a moment, Henry thought Maud was going to storm away from the table, reverting to the tantrums which had characterized her childhood. Instead, she rubbed at the side of her nose in a thoughtful way, and said, “This and that. Things like the bells.”

“What bells?” Charles demanded. “Do you mean those damned things they ring at the end of every session? I must say they used to get on my nerves, although in the end you simply didn’t hear them any more.”

“All schools have those,” said Maud with disdain. “I mean real bells, clanging ones in the church tower.”

Henry looked at her in astonishment. “Do you mean to tell me that the ringing of church bells annoyed you so much that you felt you had to run away? I don’t believe it.”

“Not the ringing in the sense that you mean. Not the gentle peal of bells sounding across an idyllic English landscape. What I mean is actually pulling the bells. Standing there at the end of the rope
and hauling it up and down, up and down. Bell ringing. Like Quasimodo. Compulsory for all music scholars at St. Adelberta’s. It’s called service to the community.”

Charles was puzzled. “Come on, Maud. You’re a musician, you should like bells.”

She gave a withering glance. “Bells aren’t music.”

Georgina, filled with strange insight, went on, “The bell ringing was just representative, wasn’t it? What you didn’t like was all the direction. Do this, do that, be here, be there. And I don’t suppose they gave you much choice, and I don’t suppose they bothered whether you wanted to do it or not. Rebel,” she added, in an undertone. “A rebellious little girl most likely grows up to be a rebellious woman.”

“That’s what schools are all about,” said Charles. “I can’t be doing with these places where everybody has an opinion, and everybody’s feelings and thoughts have to be taken into consideration.”

Anna turned round from the stove, holding the dish of lamb in padded gloves. She shut the oven door with her knee. “Good teachers take account of all this and do not make unreasonable demands of their pupils,” she said, placing the food on the table.

“Georgina’s quite right,” Maud said. “The bell ringing was the final straw, just another of the really stupid rules and obligations that they were always going on about. That’s why they said I had a bad attitude, because when something was really pointless and stupid I said so. They don’t like that. And the other girls in my class said I shouldn’t argue with the teachers all the time.”

“School certainly taught me to keep my mouth shut,” said Charles cheerfully. “Best lesson I ever learned at school.” He paused, thinking. “Probably the only lesson I learned at school. No point making a fuss about what you can’t change. No point in giving your opinions about anything, you’re bound to offend someone.”

***

Long after midnight, an exhausted Georgina climbed into bed. She lay there, looking at the ceiling, until Maud came noisily out of the bathroom and, after a perfunctory knock, put her head round the door.

“Why are you lying there with the light on?”

“Just thinking,” Georgina said. “Who’s Foxy?”

“Oh, a wild cousin of Charlie’s, on his mother’s side. No relation of ours. She fancies Henry. Goodnight.”

Georgina turned over and switched out the light, but sleep eluded her. Desperate, she turned the light back on and reached for a book.
The Letters of Jane Austen.
She hadn’t read any of them yet, she’d been too busy trying to find inspiration in the novels.

Anna came upstairs at seven the next morning, as requested by Georgina, and found her on her back, fast asleep, with the copy of Jane Austen’s letters lying open on her chest, her hand hanging down at the side of the bed. On the floor by the bed was a notepad and a pen which must have fallen from her hand. Anna put down the coffee on the bedside table, and lifted the book off Georgina, who didn’t stir. She picked up the notepad and pen and put the book on the desk. Scrawled on it were the words
Maud is more like Jane Austen than I am.

Anna looked across at the sleeping figure. She called Georgina’s name, quite softly, then rather more loudly. She gave her shoulder a shake. Georgina stirred, flung herself over and went back to sleep. Anna left the coffee where it was and went back downstairs.

Georgina woke at midday, emerging wild-eyed from a vivid dream in which she had, yet again, been pursued into dark realms of unfamiliar landscapes by Jane Austen, or at least by the woman in the portrait that adorned the cover of her edition of Jane Austen’s letters. Sharp-eyed, plump-cheeked, this dream being had nothing of sweetness and light about her. This was a woman straight out of ancient Greece, cousin to the Furies, on nodding terms with Athene, a woman, moreover, who clearly dined merrily with Aristophanes.

How the unconscious mind distorted reality. She must get a grip.
Jane Austen was the daughter of an English country vicar, a beloved daughter, sister, aunt, the author of some of the most life-enhancing novels ever written, stories with invariably happy endings.

And an author who penned some of the wittiest and sharpest lines ever written.

“That’s the real problem,” she told Henry, when he came in looking shocked after a lecture on P-mode helioseismology.

“What is?” Henry stretched out in his favourite armchair in the sitting room and took a gulp of the reviving mug of tea that Anna thoughtfully provided.

Georgina had given up on her computer and desk, and had been out most of the day walking the plot. Or rather, brooding on the enigma that was Jane Austen.

“The problem is that Jane Austen is a comic writer,” she said. “She wrote comedies. She can make you laugh out loud, and she created some of the most preposterous and outrageous comic figures ever. Think of Mr. Collins.”

Maud, who was sitting on the piano stool, chimed in, “Or Mrs. Norris, who is so horrible, but she’s funny at the same time. And, talking of Jane Austen, which is a subject that dominates the conversation around here, at least when it’s not about wild boar, why did you write that I’m more like Jane Austen than you are?”

“Have you been snooping?”

“Nope. Anna told me. You’d written it in letters an inch high, nothing secret about it.”

“I don’t remember writing that—yes, I do. It was those letters. Gossip, family news, a dress length, and then bang, one of her devastating remarks. It reminded me of you, direct, clear-minded, cutting through all the niceties and getting to the heart of the matter. Telling it like it is.”

Henry agreed. “A mind clear of cant, Samuel Johnson would have said. That’s what an eighteenth-century upbringing in the hands of a scholarly father did for her.”

“Is that complimentary, what you just said about me?” Maud asked. “It doesn’t sound like a life skill that I need. I tell you what, Jane Austen wasn’t at all PC.”

“Lucky her, living in a time when she didn’t have to be.”

His tea drunk, and the memory of p-modes and convection cells receding, Henry’s mind was sharpened. “Maud mentioned plagiarism yesterday. It’s an idea. Take stuff from her novels and letters and tweak them, different context, different characters. It would give an authentic flavour to your book, wouldn’t it?”

“Yolanda Vesey would sniff out my thefts in a second.”

“So what? Isn’t it in her interest as much as yours and everyone else’s for you to get the book written? You’ve got an impossible deadline, you have to cut corners somewhere. At least, if you have scruples about pinching words, can’t you make up a plot which is an amalgam of her novels? Especially of
Mansfield Park
and
Emma,
because those were the next two she wrote, you could justify that, surely.”

“Don’t think I haven’t tried.” Georgina prowled up and down as she spoke. “It’s no good, it doesn’t gel, it doesn’t come out as a coherent story at all. And one thing I am sure of, there’s no way I can wing it through this. I’ve got to have a detailed outline, everything in place. Only every time I start, it falls apart. I’ve had a go at just picking up from the last words of her opening pages of
Love and Friendship
and plunging in.”

She was silent, and Maud, looking at her expectantly, said, “Go on, what happens?”

“Rubbish happens. It’s no good, there are writers who are quick, and writers who are—”

“Dead,” Maud put in. “In a literary if not a literal sense. Lots of writers and composers, too, turn out good stuff in no time at all. Look at Mozart.”