A Walk with Jane Austen (26 page)

More than anything else, this one aspect of my life throws into stark relief the fact that I am not living for myself It is the central tenet of Christianity—your life is not your own; it is not solely about your pleasure but about serving and obeying God. I've never thought that anyone outside the church had any reason to attempt this lifestyle—I mean, there are other reasons, but making people who dont profess Christianity feel guilty about their life choices is not my thing. Not that they aren't good general principles, but the moral strictures of the faith are for those within the faith, not those outside. Sometimes I think, like the apostle Paul said, if we are wrong in the end, we will have been crazy indeed. This is when I doubt my faith the most. Sometimes the desire to be normal—and not be alone—overcomes almost everything else.

My innocent Christian college friend Kari has given up. She was visiting for a couple of weeks and met a guy and just didn't come home. I wouldn't even have known if she hadn't told me. She said he had a talent for caustic sarcasm and didn't like his family much and had a master's degree in Italian literature and that she adored him. For a while she slunk away, dodging shame when she saw me, and then whatever shame was there seemed replaced by loud happiness. She's attempted to hold on to both her strict faith and her adoring boyfriend, and I have to believe she's uncomfortable with the tension. I have to believe there is tension.

I could so easily do the same thing. Actually, I think sometimes that had the opportunity been reversed, she would have been the one counseling me about the soul-bruising effects of sin. But mostly I'm afraid for her, afraid that this particular means of happiness will fail her, maybe spectacularly.

The prospect of possibly not being alone forever—this impossible lonely marathon being nearly over—has me giddy tonight in this slouchy bed.

I just paid ten pence (7? as they're called) for a vile toilet at the Disley train station, but it was worth every
P
My goal is Lyme Park—Colin Firth's Pemberley—but I have one mile to walk, and since today has been a comedy of errors already, I am beginning to fear that it will be as illusory as Godmersham. I have visions of disappearing sidewalks and having to flag a car down in the rain.

I adore that movie, the BBC version of
P&P
,perhaps in a manner that borders on being excessive and slightly irrational. I want to see the approach to the house, which is one of the best moments, when Elizabeth and the Gardiners come through the trees and see it for the first time across the lake.

It's taken me more than three hours to get here, most of the last hour trying to talk myself out of having to pee so badly. I only realized after getting on the bus for Disley that I had to go to the bathroom very bad. I wonder, does anything bad happen if you wait to pee longer than you should? I heard a story once in high school about a girl who waited so long to go that she couldn't go any more at all.

I hurried out of the pub this morning to catch a bus to Bakewell, to catch another bus to Buxton, to get a train to Disley. I had no idea it would be this hard. The bus should have come at 9:43, but it wasn't there by 9:45, then 9:47, then 9:52, and 10:12. Finally at 10:34 a bus arrived to find me first verging on panic and then incredibly relieved. The driver said the first one “musta broke down or something.” On getting to Bakewell and after some difficulty finding the proper stand, I discovered another bus that would take me through Buxton and all the way here. It was a lovely ride, green hills, spectacular views, the
occasional quarry—me wondering how many tiny villages the bus had to stop in and trying to convince myself that I could absolutely survive one hour. This is considered the Peak District, but I don't actually see any real peaks, though everything is bigger and grander here.

Lyme Park is actually right where it is supposed to be, with a wide sidewalk the entire way and a shuttle from the gate to the house. I had a picnic lunch and wandered through the gardens for a little over an hour. There's a long path around the lake, manicured flower gardens, an orangery. Close to the house is a sunken geometric Dutch garden with a detailed pattern of flowers and plants, but you can only look down on it and not actually walk through it. It's all lovely and understated, if not quite so grand as I imagined it to be—just kind of quietly gorgeous.

There used to be a little tour here showing significant spots in the movie, but when I asked about it in the information office, they said, “As it was filmed ten years ago, all ofthat has been taken down.” You don't seem to be able to get to the spot where Darcy dives into the lake. It's back in a meadow beyond the official walking trails. The approach to the house is just as beautiful in real life. It's actually a view of the back of the house; it would be impossible to drive a carriage up that way.

At the risk of betraying the depth of my obsession with the film, I looked for the steps Darcy runs down on his way to meet the Gar-diners and Elizabeth and the spot in the drive behind the house where their conversation was shot.

What exactly is it that makes Darcy so darn attractive? I think there's more going on here than just proud rich man falls in love with poor, spirited girl. For me so much of it is about his character—that he cares about it, for one thing, that he's concerned about being proud. That he not only takes Elizabeth's correction to heart but loves her for it.

I love the quote from Darcy's housekeeper, that he was “the best landlord and the best master.…that ever lived. Not like the wild young men nowadays who think of nothing but themselves.”
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And Emma's dear Mr. Knightley knew what it meant to invest in the social welfare of those beneath him. One of my favorite quotes from Jane is from a letter to her niece, Fanny, who was just at the stage of deciding about suitors. Jane writes, “There are such beings in the World, perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the Creature You & I should think perfection, where Grace & Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are equal to the Heart & Understanding, but such a person may not come in your way.”
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That is just how I feel, and I'm afraid these men may be rarer today than they were then.

We don't value character much anymore. Being a gentleman is a lost art—and I suppose we don't really reward anyone for that. If they make us laugh or dress well or are good in bed, those are the things we've come to prize. But I think most women I know would take Darcy any day (of the Firth or Macfadyen variety), although they probably can't put into words what Darcy has that they're missing.

I find myself wondering about my deep connection to Austen's heroines as well—women who couldn't have professions, who were dependent on marriage or inheritance for their value in life, and who were basically forbidden from expressing their emotions to the men they loved. Yet hundreds of years beyond Austen, whether or not a woman marries and how successful that marriage is is still the defining characteristic of her life.

I used to think that there was a particular brand of Austenian marriage angst that was limited to the evangelical Christian community. Living in the evangelical culture, in which marriage and motherhood
are still the prized roles for women, in which sex is put on hold until after the marriage vows, and in which men are still largely expected to take the lead in relationships, can give one a sense of kinship with Austen's early-nineteenth-century heroines, however different our situations in life.

Relationship discussions with my girlfriends center on trying to navigate a world in which we have little control, the rules are uncertain, and we are at times desperate. There are endless questions:
If I call him before he calls me, will he think Im trying to take the lead and will that ruin everything? If we've been dating for years and he's unsure about marriage, is he a noncommittal loser or just waiting for God's direction? And if he seems to have led me on, is he weak-charactered or simply confused?

I used to think these particular machinations were our own, that somehow the girls out there who were wearing Manolos and having sex and moving in with guys were too sophisticated to care about analyzing e-mails for signs of commitment-phobia. And then I watched
Sex and the City.
And there were Carrie and Miranda and Charlotte and Samantha—the girls who were going to try to have sex like guys, without feeling anything—analyzing conversations to try to figure out if Mr. Bigs “I miss you, babe” was some sort of coded
mea culpa
and hoping (oh God, please) for something more substantial and long term than a brief, albeit incredibly good, one-night stand. Significantly, the producers chose to end the series with all of the characters in long-term relationships.

In many ways, we women live in our own world, a world where we analyze men and try to figure out how to get what we want from them and how to live with what we get from them. It makes me think of Eve's “your desire shall be for your husband”
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curse. As Carrie would say,
“I am someone who is looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love.” Only I am afraid that Mr. Big was no Mr. Darcy, and I wonder how much progress we've really made.

When I get home to the pub after another three hours on various buses, James, Rod and Jo's neighbor, tells me it would have taken only forty-five minutes in a car to get to Lyme Park. I think James comes here every night for a pint because this is his “local,” as they say. I enjoy peering in on their world. Why ever don't we have pubs in America? Or cozy little villages? When I think of England, these are the things I think of. And tea shops. When I think of America, I think of oversized strip malls and chain restaurants. It's all very depressing.

I'm lying on my back on the lawn behind Chatsworth watching the Emperor Fountain (close to where Matthew Macfadyen snogs Keira Knightley in the latest version of
P&P).
The sky is brilliant blue with only the occasional cloud, and after weeks of wrapping up I'm warm again, in my orange T-shirt and jean shorts. I'm probably getting sunburned, and it feels very good. A pair of squabbling ducks are creating a general commotion, and there's a couple just down from me who are so easy with each other, her head on his stomach, now and then sitting up and talking about what they should do for dinner, that for just a minute I wish I had company. But why be unhappy in a garden like this? Especially when there's ice cream.

I was enthralled with the house this morning when I first arrived. You can't see the whole thing at first because you walk up to it from the
side, and from that direction its hidden, so you discover its vastness gradually. But I quickly lost interest and decided I was in no mood to be entertained by an overdone 450-year-old homestead. I found myself turning up my nose at the elaborate paintings on every ceiling, the ornate furniture, the huge heavy silver chandelier celebrating the family's promotion to the dukehood, a room paneled with heavy oak carvings, stone tablets from ancient Egypt, a sculpture room full of delicate marble. The house is bigger and more magnificent than any I've seen, and at the beginning of the trip I could have given it its due, but at this point I've seen far too much to take in anything more. I found myself most interested by the views of the garden from the windows on the second floor.

There was one surprise that enchanted me—a set of china that had belonged to Warren Hastings, head of the East India Company. I generally don't go for those fancy kind of things, but this was lovely, with all kinds of different birds painted in the center of every plate and butterflies scattered around the edge and on the tip of every knife and fork, which are also done in china. Hastings's connection to the Austen family is a bit complicated, and there are debates about exactly the role he played. Jane's aunt Philadelphia, her father's sister, who was also (obviously) orphaned at a young age, found herself at twenty-one without marriage prospects in England and decided to leave for India, where lots of men were making their fortunes in the growing East India Company and where women were relatively scarce. Phila accomplished her objective, marrying Tysoe Saul Hancock, an older surgeon—actually the marriage may even have been arranged before she left England. Hancock seems to have been one of the unluckiest men ever. Nearly every business venture failed, friends deserted him, nothing ever really
worked out, and he found virtually no success in what seems to have been a very hard and hard-working life. One of the couples closest friends happened to be Warren Hastings—the very Warren Hastings who owned the lovely birds-and-butterflies china—who would rise through the ranks to eventually run the East India Company, be governor general of India, and make a fortune doing so.
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