Writing Jane Austen (27 page)

She shouldn’t have done that, she’d have to work out a way to remove the program. She sat down at her computer.

The Little Helper was wise to that. Of course she could remove the files and trash them, but why would she want to do that? Did
she want to waste time on the computer more than she wanted to write a book? Yes? Was she pretending it was research? Here was advice from her Writer’s Mentor.

It made sense. Routine was the writer’s ally. Butt on seat, fingers on keys was how books got written. No more, no less. Self-discipline, willpower, ambition: those were the qualities that would drive a writer to her goal.

Georgina looked around the room as though a ghostwriter might have materialized in her absence, perched on the shelf above the door, perhaps, or skulking in the corner.

And finally, with the sharp words of the Writer’s Little Helper ringing in her ears, something went ping in her brain. She could do it, and she was going to do it. Self-discipline? Yes. Willpower? Tick. Ambition? Sort of.

A fresh page, the magic words,
Chapter Two,
and she was off.

Routine was to be her friend, and the routine that Georgina adopted was rigorous. Up at seven, shower, fifteen-minute brisk walk along the street and back down the other side. Breakfast, nourishing, with coffee, and a thermos of coffee to take up to her room with her, despite Anna’s protests that coffee in a thermos was:

a) unhealthy

b) not at the right temperature

c) terrible tasting

d) uncivilized

“I don’t want to speak to a soul all day,” Georgina said, as she put in a request for a packed lunch, like Henry’s.

“Eating in your room is definitely not civilized.”

“Too bad.” No, she wasn’t going to sit at her desk all day long and numb her legs. “I shall take regular walks. And in the evening, with all those hours under my belt, and all those words on the page, I shall come down to be sociable and eat a proper meal.”

It was hard, grinding work, but for Georgina at this time, hard was easy. She liked her daily schedule, and when she took the twenty minutes off three times a day, mid-morning, after lunch, and mid-afternoon, she walked with her earphones on and listened to the recordings of the Jane Austen novels that she’d downloaded.

Every five hundred words, she came to the end of whichever paragraph she was writing, and set about revising and editing what she had written, paying careful attention to sentence length, vocabulary, syntax and punctuation, slavishly following the way that Jane Austin had crafted her sentences.

She had access to the complete
Oxford English Dictionary,
and set about methodically checking the etymology of any word about which she had a doubt. When was it first used, was it too modern, too slangy?

With this method, she managed to achieve about two thousand words each day. It was going to be a close-run thing, but for the first time she felt that she was going to turn out a passable manuscript, correctly written in the style of Jane Austen. It might not be literature, but, closely modelled on the six novels, it would do.

She used the novels as templates. From
Emma,
she took a querulous old man, turning him into Susan’s grandfather. From
Pride and Prejudice
she took a sub-plot of a plain woman, no longer young, quite happy to forego any real chance of happiness in a marriage for the sake of having her own establishment. Fanny Price provided a degree of victimhood to Susan, while Mrs. Norris was an excellent prototype of a Lady Carcenet.
Northanger
Abbey
gave Susan a rather silly younger sister, while Willoughby, with a dash of Wickham, made for a good villain.

She added an ill-fated attachment, an elopement, family dissension and a setting that moved between an elegant town house in Bath and a fine country seat, a mixture of Mansfield Park and Lacock Abbey.

Shrubberies abounded, as did some pleasing walks in Dorset, a seaside scene and various carriage rides. Susan took a muddy walk in the style of Elizabeth Bennet, and she had an untrustworthy friend, a mixture of Isabella Thorpe, Lucy Steele, and Maria Crawford.

The hero wasn’t difficult at all. He had to be tall, dark and handsome, proud, rich and possessed of a very fine house and estate.

An unpleasant clergyman, a few servants in the background, a dance, a dinner party and the mixture was complete.

By the third day of this regime, Henry could tell that things were going well for Georgina, and he heaved a sigh of relief before plunging back into his studies, urgent now, as the deadline for a complex piece of coursework loomed. His own emotional life was on hold, since Sophie was proving distinctly elusive. Phone calls went unreturned, text messages ignored and emails went unanswered. This, he told himself, was because Sophie was on location, working hard, and probably out of reach of these kinds of messages. He hoped that she would pick up one or other of his missives, and told his aunt he was sure that Sophie would be coming with him for the weekend.

She replied in her acerbic way that Sophie had better, as otherwise they would sit down thirteen to dinner, which she wouldn’t countenance.

Email from [email protected]

Suggest teddy bear for fourteenth seat if Sophie can’t make it.
Love Henry

Email from [email protected]

I don’t do bears.

Henry and Maud visited another school, which Maud gave a swift thumbs-down. “The music department isn’t up to much, and I don’t think that the headmaster was too keen on my purple hair.”

“I don’t like it either,” said Henry “I hope it washes out.”

“I told you it does. Don’t be so stuffy.”

***

Georgina worked like a fiend for ten days without a break. She worked all through Saturday and Sunday, ignoring all suggestions that she should take some time off, and triumphantly looking at her word count as it reached and passed the twenty thousand figure.

She only needed to keep this up for another fifty days, and with a few days’ grace she would be at the required word length, with a polished manuscript. She knew many writers preferred to do a first draft at speed, and then to take the time to revise it afterwards. They asserted that it was better to write without employing your critical faculty, but Georgina knew that in her case this would make for a disastrous book, which would in no way correspond to what she had been commissioned to write.

She felt a sense of elation and triumph. She’d cracked it. Hard work was the secret, as always. She was going to get
Love and Friendship
written and delivered on time.

Stretching after a long session at the keyboard, she padded down to the kitchen to hunt for a biscuit. Maud was down there, helping Anna make a ginger cake.

“Henry’s favourite,” she said. “Anna reckons he needs feeding up, he’s working so hard at the moment. That’s what happens when you put off work until the last minute,” she added primly as she dipped a finger into the mixture and tasted it. “It needs a bit more ginger, Anna.”

“It does not.” As Anna took the bowl away, the doorbell sounded, a demanding, repeating peal.

“Who on earth is that?” Georgina said.

Maud licked her finger and went over to the window to peer up into the street. “There’s quite a crowd up there. A couple of people with cameras, what’s going on?”

“I’ll go and see,” said Georgina. “They’ll disturb Henry if they go on like that, what the hell do they think they’re doing?”

She went out of the basement door into the little yard, and
bounded up the steps to street level. An astonishing scene met her eyes, as four or five men and women were clustered around the entrance to the house. As Maud had said, three of them were holding large cameras.

“Can I help you?” she said. “And please don’t ring the doorbell like that, it’s very antisocial.”

A flash went off, and she recoiled for a brief second, gathering her wits. “Cut that out. What are you doing here?” Gina had some familiarity with the paparazzi from when the second of her stepmothers had been discovered in flagrante with the host of a popular TV show. These were the English variety, but brothers and sisters under the skin.

“We just want a word with Sophie Fanshawe.”

Sophie? What was going on?

“Sophie Fanshawe isn’t here.”

“This is where she stays in London, isn’t it? This guy Henry Lefroy’s her boyfriend. Is he in?”

“No, he isn’t.”

“Who are you?”

Georgina’s mind was working swiftly. “I’m house-sitting for Mr. Lefroy. And,” she added as Maud came up the steps, eyes round with curiosity and interest, “keeping his sister company.”

Maud had managed to get a good deal of flour on her clothes, and the white patches on her black garments, combined with her purple hair, made-up pallor and dark-rimmed eyes, gave her a very strange appearance.

Nonplussed, the representatives of the press stared at her. She blinked back at them. “If you want Sophie, you’ve come to the wrong place, she isn’t here,” she said in a bored voice. “She’s down in the country with my brother.”

“Where in the country?”

“Like I’m going to give you their address?”

“Are you sure she’s with this Henry guy and not with Chris Denby?”

“What’s your view on the role Sophie’s landed for herself in Hollywood?”

“Will your brother be joining her out there?”

“None of your business,” Georgina said. “Now, go.”

One of the journalists, a woman with bright red hair and sunglasses, looked intently at Georgina. “You sure you’re just house-sitting? You sure Henry isn’t two-timing Sophie?”

Georgina laughed. “What, me instead of Sophie? Please!”

Maud whipped down the basement steps in front of Georgina and vanished through the kitchen. As Georgina sank into a chair, Maud reappeared, saying she’d disconnected the doorbell. “So if any of them come back, they won’t bother us.”

“What if Henry goes out?” said Anna. “Shouldn’t we tell him about these people?”

“Absolutely not,” Georgina said. “He needs to concentrate, not worry about the press and Sophie. I wonder what all that was about?”

“Sophie’s been offered a big part in an American TV series,” Maud said. “I read about it this morning. Google Sophie’s name and you’ll see. Two English actors, her and a guy called Chris Denby. There’s a pic of them together, looking rather cosy, I must say, but that’s actors for you, smooch when on show, not on speaking terms when the publicity lights go off.”

Chris Denby? Wasn’t he the actor in breeches? When Sophie had been in Lacock, instead of Ireland?

“She will have told Henry this news,” Anna said.

“Yeah,” said Maud. “I suppose.”

“And if not, he can catch up with her news at the weekend, when they’re going to stay with your aunt,” Georgina said.

Anna and Maud exchanged glances.

“Whatever,” Maud said.

Georgina awoke on the morning of the eleventh day with a strange numbness in one hand. She must have slept on it. She had a pain in her neck as well, further proof that she had slept awkwardly. She went for a brisk walk, came back to her computer and was surprised to find as she opened it that her fingers were rather painful. Stiff, that was all, the weather had been damp and maybe she had a touch of premature rheumatism. After all, wasn’t that the price you paid for living in England?

As she put her fingers to the keys a stab of pain went from her elbow up to her neck. She waited a few minutes and then tried again. An even worse pain surged through her fingers and travelled via wrist, elbow and shoulder to her neck, where her head felt as though it had been spun round several times in its socket before being replaced at a strange angle.

What the hell was the matter with her?

She began to feel anxious. Twenty minutes of her writing time gone, and she hadn’t produced a single word. She went into the bathroom, opened the white cabinet and fished around for the extra-strong aspirin that she knew were there. Ignoring the instructions on the packet, she dissolved two of them in a glass of water, swallowed them and waited impatiently for them to take effect. Ten minutes later, with half an hour’s good work time wasted, she tentatively tapped at the keyboard. Tender, yes; agonizing, no. It was obviously
a kind of stiffness, and she would work through it, wasn’t that what athletes did?

An hour later, she admitted defeat. Clearly aspirin was not the answer. Glancing at her watch with a worried frown, she bundled herself into a jacket and scarf, ran down the stairs and flew out of the house, without pausing to answer Maud’s startled query as to why she’d left her desk.

Whatever was wrong with her didn’t seem to have reached her back or her legs, so perhaps she didn’t face total paralysis after all. The doctor’s surgery was at the end of their road. Georgina went in and stood impatiently behind a tall blonde woman holding the hand of a child whose face appeared to be covered with spots. That was all she needed, she would get over this stiffness to go down with some kind of London plague.

Finally the woman completed her interminable description of what was wrong with little Finola, as if anybody couldn’t see what was wrong with the child, and Georgina took her place at the counter.

“Two weeks? I have to wait for two weeks to see a doctor?”

“Well, you can walk, can’t you? And your speech isn’t slurred, and from your description of what is wrong with you I have to say I can’t count it as an emergency. I can ring you if we get a cancellation, but I have to tell you there’s a waiting list at the moment of fifty-six people awaiting cancellations, so I don’t rate your chances very highly.”

“That child got to see a doctor right away.”

“Children have priority. Finola comes out in a rash when she eats too many green apples, but it is the rule of the practice that any rash must be investigated. So she has to see the doctor. Meanwhile—”

“Meanwhile I can’t work, I’m in pain and you can’t do anything for me.”

“We only have your word for it that you are in pain.” She looked at Georgina, clearly wondering if this patient might be going to get
violent. She hesitated. “We have Dr. Perry here this morning. He is qualified, but hasn’t finished his general practitioner training, so he can’t do a formal diagnosis or prescribe anything except under the direction of one of our regular doctors. But I’m sure he’ll be able to explain to you why there is nothing wrong with you.”