Writing Jane Austen (16 page)

James Palmer turned to stare at her. “What are you talking about?”

“The harp music.”

“There isn’t any harp music.”

Not only could Georgina hear a harp being played, but she could hear the sound of voices, snatches of conversation, the burst of talk that came from a gathering of people who all knew one another.

“You’ll be hearing voices next.”

“Perhaps they’re filming in here,” she said, as shadowy figures in Regency clothes began to form before her eyes. A woman in a low-cut, velvet gown was talking to a man who was bending forward to listen to her. Why couldn’t James Palmer see and hear what she could? A clergyman—at least Georgina supposed he was a clergyman, given his black suit, his white stock and the breeches and silk stockings he wore—was talking to a child who was laughing up at him, and a young woman in a white muslin dress with a yellow satin sash seemed suddenly conscious of Georgina’s presence and for a long moment looked straight at her with intelligent, sparkling eyes. She seemed familiar, and Georgina remembered the young woman with the heart-shaped face she had seen from the window in London. Then the whole scene faded and the room was empty, silent; no voices, no music, just space and furniture and the rather desolate-looking harp.

“I suppose,” James Palmer went on, “that being an upper servant in a house like this wasn’t the worst of fates. Food on the table and your feet underneath it wasn’t such a bad idea when the table and food were provided by someone else. Maybe it would have been a better fate for Jane Austen to have ended up as a governess, instead of spending her days as a dutiful daughter to a sickly mother. A spinster past the age of getting married, living in the country with her sister and parents, can’t have had much fun. And, of course, when her father died they were left badly off, and dependent on her brothers. She cared about money, of course. What writer doesn’t? You’ll know all about that.”

“If she’d been a governess, she might never have written any of her novels.”

In which case, she, Georgina, wouldn’t now be in this fix.

They walked back to the entrance. Georgina thanked the woman at the desk, who looked her up and down with a sharp eye as if she
might be smuggling out a chair, or possibly the harp, under her jacket, and they went out into the cool air. The rain had subsided into a dismal drizzle.

“Back to the car, I suppose,” said James Palmer glancing at his watch. “Back to Bath, for you. I’m staying near there. Back to a kind of reality. Dine with me tonight?”

He was a glum companion in daytime, God knew what he’d be like with a bottle of wine inside him.

“No?” he said, sounding unsurprised. “Then it’ll be an evening at home with my wife and the squalling brats. Do you have any children?”

“No.”

“So much the better. There are far too many children in this world, each one of them noisier and more unpleasant than the last. Puling, mewling, useless creatures.”

Georgina might have protested that he could hardly feel like that about his own offspring, but on the other hand it was quite possible that he truly did. What kind of a woman was Mrs. Palmer?

As though he had read her mind, James Palmer told her. They were scrunching across wet gravel towards the van, and she quickened her pace.

“I married a woman who, it turned out, had nothing to say for herself that was of any interest to me. As far as I’m concerned, marriage is essentially a conversation that lasts a great many years and so when you have nothing to say to one another, you can hardly call it a successful marriage. That’s one of the things I most dislike about Jane Austen, she draws such enticing portraits of men and women who are destined to make happy marriages. Life isn’t like that.”

Georgina looked at the nanny in disbelief. “Yolanda Vesey telephoned and left a message for me? Yolanda Vesey? Are you sure?”

Daisy looked at her with mild curiosity. “Yolanda Vesey, that’s right. I thought it was a funny name so I got her to spell it, and wrote the message down too.” She handed Georgina a pink Post-it, filled with tiny, untidy handwriting.

Meet Bath tomorow
Waterstons 11 30
clasik litritcha seccion.

Daisy might be good with Thomas—who had set up his customary bawling the moment he caught sight of Georgina, perhaps James Palmer was right about puling and mewling—but her spelling could do with some attention.

How had Yolanda Vesey known where she was? How in God’s name had she got hold of Bel’s phone number?

Daisy was looking at her with concern. “You okay?”

Georgina attempted a smile. “Yes, fine, it’s just I didn’t expect to hear from Yolanda right now.”

She went up to her room, her mind in turmoil. Did Dan Vesey have some GPS system for tracking authors down, day and night?
She opened her laptop for the first time since she’d arrived in Bath. She felt sure there would be email messages from Yolanda and from Dan and from Livia, and she was right. Dan wanted a progress report, and would like to see the chapters as soon as Yolanda had okayed them, so that one of his editors could get to work on the script. Georgina flagged the message as junk. Yolanda was in Bath, assumed that Georgina was getting on with her research and repeated the date and time of the meeting tomorrow.

Like I’m going to be there, Georgina muttered, clicking the keys to empty the trash; she liked the thought of Yolanda flying into the little bin.

Livia’s email was terse and to the point. “Suggest you check your bank account and remind yourself that this advance is to be repaid if the book is not delivered on time. My 15% will not be refunded by me in any circumstances. Get a move on with the Bath stuff, meet with Yolanda as directed, then get back to your computer.”

Without thinking, Gina clicked on an email from Amazon. “Welcome, Georgina,” it said in its matey way. “A suggestion for you, as part of this week’s author promotion:
Persuasion
by Jane Austen.”

Gritting her teeth, Georgina logged into her bank account. She was horrified to see that the hefty sum that she had deposited had already been eaten away. The overdraft had been cleared, that was a large part of it, and then the rent had gone out, and some subscriptions—she’d better cancel those—train fares, phone bill…

Depressed, she logged off and went back to her mail. Junk had crept in, as it always did, and an item caught her eye. “Do you suffer from writer’s block? Procrastination and how to deal with it.” Before she could help herself, she had clicked on the message, wincing at the prospect of viruses, worms, dragons and whatever else rushed into your computer if you let your guard down for a moment. She gave a sigh of relief, it was a genuine email from a writers’ magazine that she had a subscription to.

Organize your time. Set yourself a daily schedule of work. Divide the length of the book by the number of words you can write each day—five hundred to a thousand words is a good number to aim for. Remember to give yourself time off each week—a tired writer is a dull writer.

Hanging above the table was a calendar,
The World of Jane Austen
. This month’s picture was a charming illustration of a woman in a Regency dress descending from a carriage. Perky-looking horses with docked tails looked out at the world with interest, and hovering in the background was an elegant gentleman in boots and the inevitable tight breeches.

Georgina ran her fingers over the days, counting. She’d had twelve weeks to write this book. Of which two weeks had elapsed. One hundred and twenty thousand words to go. It wasn’t impossible, she supposed, if one had a plot, characters, an emotional narrative and a few of the other necessaries for a readable work of fiction. Which she didn’t, and nor did she have the slightest idea of Jane Austen’s style—she’d hardly be able to rattle out the words in an alien voice. Add to that the fact that she didn’t have a storyline, or any characters, or—no, she was wrong. Some characters were introduced in the first chapter which she had read. But it would be up to her, Georgina, to come up with the rest of them. The love interest, for a start. None of the men in that chapter could possibly be cast as a hero.

A sense of helplessness crept over her. She had heard of people writing books at the rate of ten or fifteen thousand words a day, in a frenzy of inspiration, or possibly of desperation.

She’d read somewhere that Sir Walter Scott had written two of the
Waverley
novels within the space of three weeks. And the
Waverley
novels, not that she had ever read any of them, would definitely have been more than mere novellas; readers in those days expected a solid three volumes. How had he done it without getting writer’s cramp?

A few minutes with a search engine, and she discovered how. He had dictated it to a team of secretaries. It seemed almost like cheating, but it was an appealing idea; hadn’t some famous English romance novelist dictated all her novels to a handsome secretary, while lying in a pink dress on a chaise longue with a fluffy dog on her knee?

She abandoned Sir Walter, and the article on procrastination filled the screen once more. To hell with it. She turned the computer off and shut the lid. Sums were rattling through her head. In the end, she had two choices. She could write the book and keep the money, or she could not write the book and go bankrupt. No more London, no more pleasant Henry as landlord, no agent—that last might be rather a relief—and back to America, probably waiting on tables while she tried to relaunch her career as either an academic or a novelist.

She made a list.

One: Read the damn books. Forget about the social history, gender awareness, class and all the rest of it. Estimates of time needed? How long did Yolanda say the books were? Between ninety and one hundred and sixty thousand words each; that was a lot of words to get through. Perhaps she could just read one of them, the shortest one, and copy the plot. The idea was appealing, but Georgina knew that plagiarism was risky.

Say read a book a day. Speed-reading, she was good at that. It would take a week to get through them, with one day off for good behaviour.

That left nine weeks to write the book. And—her stomach gave an uneasy lurch—not only to write the book, but to revise it. She couldn’t see herself doing that in less than a fortnight, and even then it would be an incredibly rushed job. So how did it work out time-wise? She must be precise. Nine weeks, less two for revision, equalled seven. Seven into one hundred and twenty thousand was,
oh my God, about twenty thousand words a week. Three thousand words a day seven days a week for seven weeks. Seven was supposed to be a magical number, but it didn’t seem very magical to Georgina right now.

In the distance a phone rang. Then a voice called up the stairs. It was Bel, who must have come back while Georgina was staring at her computer.

Georgina knew in an instant that the call was for her, and that it was, of course, a call she didn’t want to take. She went quietly out on to the landing and leant over the banister. Bel was coming up the stairs holding the phone in her hand. Georgina gestured wildly at her, waving her finger to and fro to indicate that she didn’t want to take the call.

Bel was quick on the uptake. “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was? Livia Harkness?” She looked up at Georgina again, who shook her head furiously. “She’s been out all day, I’m not sure if she’s back yet.” Bel turned and called down to Daisy, who came out with Thomas on her hip. “Daisy, is Gina back?”

Daisy picked up her cue at once, announcing in a clear, carrying voice, “No, she isn’t.” Thomas twisted round in her arms, caught sight of Gina, screwed his face up in a pitiful look of dismay and began to sob.

Livia’s voice rang out. “What’s going on there? It sounds as though I’m through to the zoo. If Georgina is out, please tell her as soon as she comes in that she is to meet Yolanda Vesey tomorrow. Without fail.”

“Just let me make a note of that,” said Bel, who seemed to be trying not to laugh. “I’ll give her your message as soon as she comes in. Bye.”

Georgina ran down the stairs to join Bel. Daisy retreated, vainly trying to comfort Thomas. Jane came out from the sitting room. “I heard all that,” she announced in priggish tones. “Mom, you lied.”

“Mom is allowed to tell lies on the telephone, as long as she is doing it on behalf of someone else.”

“Who was that cross person?” asked Jane. “I want to be that person when I grow up, being rude down the phone at people.”

Bel wanted to hear all about Livia Harkness. She knew about literary agents, but had to confess that even the most virulent of the New York ones with whom she was acquainted sounded like pussycats in comparison to Livia Harkness. “You have to give it to them, when the Brits really go for it, they outdo everyone. I suppose you have to be at Waterstone’s tomorrow, is there a problem with that?”

Georgina wasn’t inclined to go into her problems with Yolanda Vesey. The mere fact of the woman’s being in Bath filled her with apprehension, and it still didn’t answer the question of how the hell she and Livia and, for all she knew, Dan Vesey, had got hold of Bel’s telephone number.

Bel had the answer to that one. She was apologetic. “It’s my fault, or rather Aubrey’s. Someone rang the shop, asking if by any chance you’d been in; he said they were checking places where someone with a particular interest in Jane Austen would go. Aubrey was keen to help, because the person at the other end said he was ringing from your publishers and Aubrey thought it might be urgent.”

That was all very well, but what had given some minion at
Cadell & Davies the idea that she was in Bath at all, and furthermore that if she were, why she might have gone to Darcy’s? That was, however, the least of her worries at the moment, a minor mystery that might one day be solved. Meanwhile she had to get out of Bath. People who were capable of finding a private phone number were quite possibly capable of turning up on the doorstep and cornering her.

“Unfortunately, I shan’t be in Bath tomorrow. I’ve got a loose crown on a molar”—that was perfectly true, and it had been bothering her for some time—“and now it’s about to come off. My dentist
fits in emergency patients first thing on Tuesday morning. So I’ll catch an early train, and get it fixed.”