Writing Jane Austen (29 page)

Georgina raised her arm in its sling, and extended her left hand, which her hostess ignored. “How did you hurt your arm, did you have a fall?” She didn’t wait for a reply, but said sharply, “Wickham, come here at once.”

As she spoke Georgina heard a snarl, and looked down to find a small dog at her feet, his teeth buried in the calf of her new patent leather boot.

Henry bent down to pull the dog away, taking care, Georgina noticed, to keep his hands away from the action end of the little creature. Bulbous eyes looked furiously up at her. “Pam’s pug. Meet Wickham,” Henry said.

Georgina didn’t know whether to be glad that she was wearing leather boots, thus saving her leg from a vicious wound, or sorry, because she suspected that when she looked at the boot, she would find tooth marks imprinted on the glossy leather.

“He likes you,” said Lady Pamela. “He only goes for people he likes, take it as a compliment.”

It was a compliment Georgina felt she could do without, and she kept a wary distance from the still-growling pug as she and Henry followed his aunt into the house.

Georgina, amazed, at once forgot all about the pug and her boot. The hall, the one that Henry had said was the original great hall of the manor, rose to a height of about twenty feet. A gallery ran around three of the walls at first floor level, and a carved oak staircase led up to it. The floor had broad polished floorboards, more oak, with some beautiful Oriental rugs on them. On the wall opposite was a large stone fireplace set beneath a wide arch and in front of it were a bulgy sofa in faded red velvet and a couple of armchairs. On the walls of the gallery, Georgina made out a line
of pictures, large, gloomy canvases in massive gilt frames: ships on stormy seas, lines of soldiers and guns puffing out little balls of white smoke, portraits of men in uniform, scarlet with swords, blue with cocked hats and telescopes.

Georgina realized she was gaping and gawping as she drew her gaze away from the hall and paintings to find that Lady Pamela was speaking to her. Before she could apologize and ask her to repeat what she’d said, her hostess was halfway to the stairs, talking to Henry.

“You’re in the Tulip Room as usual. I’ve put Georgina in the Rose Room. She doesn’t seem terribly bright, I must say, I thought you said she held a university position and had written a book. It is extraordinary how people get on these days. But of course she’s American.”

As though that explained it all. Georgina wished she were a pug, and could sink her teeth into a well-turned ankle or two.

Lady Pamela led the way along a landing and into a wide corridor, lined with prints of bucolic scenes. She turned her head to address Henry, keeping step with Georgina a few paces behind. “Who is this girl Charles is bringing for the weekend? He was very unforthcoming when I asked him about her. I told him to invite Hermione, but he says he and Hermione aren’t on speaking terms any more.”

“Hermione’s become a vegetarian.”

“How tiresome of her. Well, I hope this girl’s presentable, whoever she is. Charles should stop dating so many different girls and settle down. You too, Henry. It’s high time you were married.” She paused in front of a cream door with a tiny rose painted on the central panel, opened it, and gestured for Georgina to go in, expressing the hope that the room would be to her liking.

In the Rose Room, with the door firmly shut, Georgina sank down on the bed. It had a wooden frame, a kind of miniature
four-poster, and the mattress was plump and well-sprung with a chintz cover in a rose and cream pattern. The drapes matched the cover, the carpet was rose pink, and Georgina knew without looking that the adjoining bathroom would have fluffy pink towels.

She slid off the bed and began to unpack her bag, a tricky task to accomplish single-handed. She carefully eased her right arm out of its sling, and tentatively reached into the bag for the sponge bag. A stab of pain ran through her fingers, savaged her elbow and continued to her shoulder and neck. She put her arm back in the sling, and by using her left hand and teeth, managed to put her things away.

“Take the weekend off entirely, get away from the keyboard and rest your wrists,” Henry had advised. She’d had an acute sense of guilt when she closed her bedroom door, her computer shut on her desk, and she felt an obscure relief at the stab of pain in her hand and shoulder, which seemed to justify her decision to leave her laptop behind in London.

Now what? She hadn’t paid much attention on the way up here, and she had a suspicion that she was going to have trouble finding her way down stairs to the right room. And what was the right room? Didn’t people in English houses have tea around this time? Although Pamela Grandison’s slim figure was not indicative of a person who had anything more than a cup of Earl Grey, possibly with a daring slice of lemon in it.

She was saved by Henry, who knocked on the door and then came in to enquire how she had managed with her unpacking. “Thoughtless of me, it must be difficult to do with only one hand. Still, I see you’ve managed. Do you want tea? I don’t; Pam’s dinners are excellent, and better attempted on an empty stomach. Let’s go and play billiards until it’s time to change for dinner.”

“I feel when it’s time to change I’m going to be escorted up to my room by a maid in a mob cap bearing an oil lamp, or possibly
a branch of candles, to have my stays fastened and my hair put up. And I can’t play billiards with one arm, even if I knew how to play it at all, which I don’t.”

“Can you play pool? Yes? Then you won’t have any trouble with billiards, it’s just a bit more stately. You can use a rest, and we’ll both play one-handed. The only rule is, don’t rip the baize. The billiard room is at the front, so we can keep an eye out for Charlie.”

Georgina looked around the panelled billiard room with interest. Henry switched on the main light, which hung over the billiard table, a symphony of mahogany and green baize supported on eight stout legs, which stood in the centre of the room. “I know I don’t want to think about Jane Austen, but this must have been the kind of room where they put on
Lover’s Vows
in
Mansfield Park
, I’m sure they set up the theatre in Sir Thomas Bertram’s billiard room. How ever did they get the table out? It’s massive.”

Henry was chalking a cue for Georgina. “Three balls, two white, one red, and I’ll tell you how to play as we go along.”

Georgina found the dark room, silent except for the soft thunk of cue against ball and the louder clunks as the billiard balls collided, very peaceful. Henry was an extraordinarily calm man. Not placid, not lacking in energy, just with a calm nature. Maybe that was what spending your time pondering the sun did for you. Not that the sun was calm; Henry had shown her photos of solar storms and flares, unnervingly active. Henry had nice hands. She didn’t like stubby fingers, but Henry’s hand, set on the green baize with the cue aligned between thumb and forefinger, was just right. His voice suited the room, too, neither too deep nor too sharp, but resonant and definite.

Concentrate, how could she have missed that? Her ball whizzed to the other side of the table and plopped into the netted pocket. Henry went round to get it out, and paused at the sound of a car approaching.

“That’s Charlie.” He went to the window and drew back the heavy red velvet curtain. “Yes, here he is.”

Georgina joined him at the window just as the car drew up. Charlie got out and went round to the other side to let out his passenger.

“Good heavens,” said Henry. “That’s possibly not the wisest thing Charlie’s done.”

Georgina couldn’t believe her eyes. Standing in the circle of light cast by the lamp above the front door was Anna, looking absurdly fair and pretty in a voluminous fur jacket she’d been delighted to find in a thrift shop.

“Wait here while I park the car,” Charlie called out to her.

“Come on,” Henry said to Georgina, letting the curtain drop. “We can finish our game another time.”

They arrived in the hall to find Lady Pamela already at the front door, looking Anna up and down.

“Who are you?”

“I am Anna Bednarska.”

“What are you doing here? You’re Polish, of course, one of the catering team, don’t you know to go round to the back, to the kitchen? And you’re late, all the others have been here for hours.”

Charles emerged out of the darkness. “What’s going on?”

“Charles, I expected you earlier. You haven’t come alone, have you? You know I won’t sit down thirteen to dinner.”

“What are you talking about? Of course I’m not alone, you can see I’m not, with Anna standing here in front of you.”

“This person? She’s a Pole, with the caterers. I’ve told her to go round to the kitchen.”

“You’ve put your foot in it,” said Charles crossly. “Honestly, Mum, you really have mislaid your manners. This is Anna, who’s
a guest. My guest, your guest. Kitchen, indeed! Anna, welcome to Motley Manor. Hi, Henry, Georgina.” He gave his mother a vexed look. “Do you mind if we come in? It’s cold out here.”

Drinks were served in the hall, and Georgina, looking down at the gathering from the gallery, was intimidated. She hated meeting a large number of strangers, and a familiar feeling of shyness, helplessness and irritation at herself for not having grown out of it came over her, despite the fact she was wearing her morale-boosting dress, a velvet Jean Muir she’d found in a charity shop. She didn’t want to go down those stairs and join the group of loud, confident people, standing with drinks in their hands, all of whom seemed to know one another. Although there was Anna, who certainly didn’t know anyone except Charlie, smiling and chatting with a thin-lipped woman in an expensive-looking green dress.

“Come on,” said Henry. “Down we go.” He followed her down the stairs, and then guided her across to meet his uncle, a fresh-faced, tall man who seemed to have a much milder temperament than his wife, and then, in rapid succession, Georgina was introduced to a jolly man who turned out to be a senior judge—Henry whispered in her ear that in the bad old days he would most certainly have been a hanging judge, despite his amiable appearance—and a woman with several chins who bred Shetland ponies.

All of them asked Georgina how she had injured her arm, and all of them had remedies to suggest. Some made a kind of sense, such as that far too many people wrote and published books these days, so one the less was all to the good; others were less practical, one coming up with a gruesome account of how a niece had crushed various ligaments and had been cured by alternating compresses of ice and extreme heat.

Georgina was beginning to feel that possibly these were not her kind of people. Most of them seemed to know each other very well,
and they were exchanging gossip and news about other people that Georgina didn’t know, and by the sound of it wouldn’t want to know. Her only consolation was that Henry was looking distinctly bored.

“Is this why Sophie wriggled out of the invitation?” she asked Henry, sotto voce, nodding at the other guests.

“Actually, Sophie gets on very well with my aunt and her friends. The one thing all these people have in common, in case you haven’t noticed, is horses. My aunt breeds horses, didn’t I tell you? Sophie loves horses, and rides whenever she can.”

“You too?”

“I do ride, and I like horses. That’s how Sophie and I first met, when I was riding in Richmond Park, and she’d come off her horse. But I’m not fanatical.”

Pamela Grandison shimmered towards them and addressed Henry. “Talk to Christian, he wants to know how you’re getting on. Charm him, he’s going to buy one of my Arabs.” Without waiting for a reply, she flashed a smile and headed off to another cluster of guests.

“Arabs?” asked Georgina.

“Horses. Arabian horses.”

“Big eyes and little ears with sweeping manes and tails, that zip along at high speed?”

“Those are the ones. Pam breeds them.”

“What does your uncle do? Is he a horse-breeder as well?”

“No, he’s a banker. That’s how I got into banking.”

“Has he been made redundant?”

Henry shook his head. “He doesn’t do dangerous banking. He works for the family bank, not my family, I hasten to add, Pam’s family. It’s a private bank, been going since the year dot, all very staid and unadventurous, luckily for Rupert. I think he’d be hard put to explain what a credit derivative swap is. Although so would
I, that’s a lesson I learned the hard way, never invest in anything a bright ten-year-old couldn’t understand.”

Christian turned out to be a formidably tall man with a bald head and bristly eyebrows. He boomed at Henry, and said he was wasting his time with solar physics, he’d be back in a bank where he belonged as soon as this present little spot of trouble was behind them. He enquired what Georgina did, and discovering that she was a writer, announced with triumph that he hadn’t read a book for twenty years.

“A publisher’s delight,” Henry murmured in Georgina’s ear.

“He is,” said Georgina. “Publishers always want to sell their books to people who don’t read. They reckon it’s an untapped market, one with the greatest potential for growth.”

Georgina was drinking champagne, and the bubbles were making her want to sneeze. She put her glass down and pressed at her nose, while her eyes watered. At that moment a vision in a flame-coloured dress moulded on to an exquisite figure slid out from the other guests and wrapped herself around Henry.

“Hello, Foxy,” Henry said, rescuing his glass and disentangling himself.

Georgina could see why she was nicknamed Foxy. Her flaming red hair was the giveaway.

“No, Sophie, I was so delighted when Charlie told me that she couldn’t come.” She turned big green eyes on Georgina. “You must be Georgina, Henry’s lodger. Charlie told me that Henry was bringing his resident author. Anyone is better than Sophie,” she added, giving Henry a languishing look. “I’ve adored Henry ever since I had a crush on him at the age of thirteen, and he never casts a single glance in my direction. I’m so pleased that you’re hardly seeing anything of Sophie these days.”

“Behave, Foxy,” said Henry, for once looking rather put out. “Sophie is away filming, she’s very sorry to have to miss your birthday party, but work comes first.”