The Jane Austen Society

by Natalie Jenner

  Now, in the spring of 1945, with America fully in the war, and his steel and weapons contracts worth millions, and his studio putting out a film a week, Jack Leonard stood towering down over Mimi Harrison as she lay on a lounge chair in her purple one-piece swimsuit.

  Mimi opened one eye against the sun, now partially obscured by Jack standing there, and said simply, “You’re blocking my sun.”

  “Your sun?” he asked with one eyebrow raised.

  She sat up a bit, peering at him from underneath her sunglasses, then placed them back down on her still slightly freckled nose. “Well, I have it on loan from our host today.”

  “Loans. I can give out those. Jack”—he held out his hand to her—“Jack Leonard.”

  No glimpse of recognition passed over her face, and he could feel the back of his neck start to tighten in irritation.

  “Mimi Harrison,” she replied, shaking his hand. He noticed that she had a strong, assured grip for a woman. He also noticed her hands were bare of any jewellery and slightly calloused.

  She looked down at her hand still resting in his and added, “I ride.”

  “And you act.”

  “When I’m not riding.”

  “Or reading.” He casually picked up the book on the unoccupied lounge chair next to her and flipped it over to see the cover.

  “Northanger Abbey,” he read aloud, then looked at her inquiringly.

  It was a test, in a way—at least in L.A. They so rarely knew the books, the studio men—they were numbers guys. The actors—they were the outdoorsy types, always in motion, always too bored to have sat still in school. She had lost count of the number of two-seat airplane, motorcycle, and sailboat rides she had been taken on over the years; the golf courses, the canyon hikes, the one-room fishing cabins.

  “Jane Austen,” she said with a nonchalant shrug. “You’re not familiar with her?”

  He put the book back down and sat on the edge of the lounge chair facing her. “For a role?”

  “I wish. No, just relaxation.”

  “Relaxing’s overrated.”

  He was the most confident man she had ever met. She knew he must know who she was, although she genuinely had no idea about him.

  “What rates with you then?” she asked, reaching for a glass of iced tea from the tray now being held out to her by one of the household staff.

  “Winning.”

  “At all costs?”

  “Nothing costs more—or is worth more—than winning. Look at the war.”

  She sighed, and the sudden look of boredom on her face made the irritation start creeping down his spine and right back up to his temples. “Why do you men have to make everything about the war?”

  “Why not? We’re all in this together.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, are you shipping out soon?”

  Now it was a full-on migraine. Jack stood back up. “Look, I’m not going anywhere. Not my style. I don’t think it’s yours, either. I think—well, anyway, it was nice to meet you.” He paused, and something almost yearning appeared in his hazel eyes. “I always hoped we’d meet.”

  It was the first sign of anything approaching vulnerability she had seen in him. She could tell he was supremely used to getting everything he wanted. She could tell he wanted her. The distance between his confident bravura and his interest in her was something only she could bridge. As Elizabeth Bennet would say, it was most gratifying.

  She looked at him in his perfectly pressed white shirt and beige khakis that were the exact same shade as his close-cropped sandy-brown hair, and she saw the glint of the Cartier watch around his tanned left wrist, and the slightly faded spot at the base of his ring finger. There would be plenty more to find out about him, of that much she was sure.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Chawton, Hampshire

  August 1945

  Dr. Gray had finished up his rounds for the day and decided to take a walk to clear his head. He headed down the main Winchester road past the Austen cottage, then walked briskly along old Gosport Road until he reached the long gravel drive that led to the Knight estate and the adjoining parish church of St. Nicholas.

  A little farther down the lane he could see the Berwick hay wagon, now emptied of its bales of straw and done for the day, sitting next to the kissing gate. But this afternoon he was not looking to stretch his legs with a long walk through the summer fields to Upper and Lower Farringdon.

  Instead he walked up the drive to the church. It was only a little past three, and he knew that Reverend Powell would be out on his daily rounds, visiting various ailing villagers either right before or right after him. Their two jobs were probably much more alike than either would want to admit. But where the reverend was being asked to change reality through prayer, Dr. Gray was being asked to prescribe hope in the face of reality. Two sides of the same fateful coin. Which side the coin would flip on—which corner of the stairs, which X-ray film, would rear its ugly head—was the darkness that it was his job to somehow manage and disperse, even as he himself so often wanted to surrender to it.

  He had always loved the small stone church of St. Nicholas, set back from the road on its little walled incline. To him the church was the perfect size: small enough to always feel intimate, but just big enough to always seem full. Although he was never sure how much visitors were aware of it, the connection to the Austen family was at its most poignant here. The church was on the estate of Chawton Park which Edward, Jane’s older brother, had inherited from the wealthy childless couple who had adopted him, to avoid dying without an heir. The estate also included the little steward’s cottage where the Gosport and Winchester roads intersected, and where Jane Austen had finally found a home for her writing after years of dependency on several other male relatives. Here in this church, nearly a century and a half later, the Knights still held sway. The Knight family heraldry stained the panes of glass, the altar stood above the family crypt, and the pews were made from oak that had been felled on the Knight estate.

  As Dr. Gray entered, he removed his hat and, after crossing himself, looked up to see Adeline Grover alone in the front pew, her long straight brown hair brushing against her full pink cheeks as she kept her head lowered in prayer. She was wearing a simple floral-patterned housedress that had been let out at the waist, with a white girlish collar and cuffs on its short sleeves.

  Her husband, Samuel Grover, had ended up perishing last March in a dive-bombing attack off the coast of Croatia, unknowingly leaving her just one month pregnant. The baby was now all that she had, her husband’s body lying below one simple plain white cross on the rocky island of Vis. Dr. Gray had been surprised at the young woman’s composure throughout the ordeal. With all her brashness, he would have thought Adeline would become quite bitter, quite fast, if life dealt her an unfair hand. But instead she radiated a strange positivity, almost a desperate determination that somehow everything would turn out alright. He would have chalked it all up to her youth, but he knew from patients such as Adam Berwick that being young when tragedy strikes can make it even harder to endure.

  From across the aisle he had watched her stand in church every Sunday for the past six months, both hands on her expanding belly, listening peacefully to the words of Reverend Powell. Perhaps expecting a child could do that—he would never know himself. But he wondered if the pregnancy was keeping her from fully experiencing her grief. He was the last person on earth to judge anyone for that; he sometimes wondered what good grief did at all.

  Adeline looked up at the sound of his heavy step on the old stone floor but did not turn around. He watched silently as she crossed herself, then stood to move up the centre aisle towards him.

  He remembered her and Samuel’s wedding day here last February, during the young officer’s final leave. Adeline had been radiant—but then again, she always looked bright-eyed and game for anything. Yet as wonderful and spirited as Adeline was, she had ended up too interesting and progressive a teacher for their slumbering Hampshire village. Sh
e had quit halfway through the last spring term, on the heels of her wedding, and dedicated herself to setting up house for Samuel once he permanently returned from the war. Even now, in the late-summer heat, with only a trimester left in her pregnancy, Dr. Gray would occasionally wander by the little Grover house to find Adeline knee-deep in the dirt of her garden patch, pulling up the courgettes and wax beans and beets to be pickled and preserved for the winter ahead.

  He smiled at her approach, hoping she would not pass by without stopping to talk.

  “Adeline, how are you feeling?”

  “Better than last week. Which is unusual, I understand, as all the old women keep telling me it only gets worse.”

  “Best not to listen to them,” Dr. Gray advised with a laugh. “They have their line, and they will stick to it. They can be counted on for at least that.”

  She made as if to keep on her way, and he fell in step next to her.

  “Am I keeping you?” she asked.

  “Not at all—I worried I’d done the same to you.”

  She shook her head quickly. “No, I was finished. Said all I needed to. And then some.”

  “I’m sure He was listening. You are hard to ignore.”

  “Dr. Gray!” she exclaimed in mock offense.

  He was one of the few people in Chawton who did not recoil whenever they ran into her, as if suddenly flinching from the memory of her loss—which of course only made her feel even worse, the opposite of what the other villagers surely intended. She had also always loved Dr. Gray’s dry sense of humour, and the way he acted so admonishing, even when she suspected that he might be a much softer person inside. During the few times Samuel had been on leave, they would often go see a movie in Alton—always her pick—and she was sometimes surprised to catch a glimpse of Dr. Gray watching a Mimi Harrison “weepie” all alone in the back, half-hidden by the whirls of cigarette smoke, surrounded by couples at what were highly wrought romantic movies designed to make the audience cry.

  Maybe the movie-going was some kind of weird catharsis for him. Certainly she marvelled at how he stood it all, the terrible random diagnoses he carried around inside him, knowing that sharing any of it was only going to make someone’s pain even worse—knowing that just a few words from him could destroy a life. Even as colleagues fighting over her teaching methods at the school, she had always looked up to Dr. Gray as one of the kinder souls in the village, quick with a comforting and attentive smile. Since his wife’s tragic death, she wondered if he had found anyone else to confide in. She knew his nurse, Harriet Peckham, was up to something about him, for all the gossip she liked to spread in town about his comings and goings.

  They emerged together into the sunshine. Two female tourists could be seen loitering in the lane, gazing up the gravel path and past the church in its tree-sheltered hollow, to the large Elizabethan house standing on rising ground behind.

  “They’re back,” Adeline said. “That didn’t take long. I guess only a world war could keep them away.”

  “Do you ever stop and think how lucky we are, the way we get to live here every day, like Jane Austen did? I know I do. I sometimes think it was one of the reasons I moved back.”

  Adeline turned to look at him with interest. “Actually, yes, I do. I always have. It made this place magical for me when I was young. That someone could spin such stories from this: this walk, this lane, this little church. Those gorgeous sunlit fields, that kissing gate, all of it. So very English. They come to see it because it exists. Here, at least, it exists. Here at least it is real.”

  He nodded in agreement. “I should tell you I am reading Emma again. Every time I find a new clue, something I missed before. It’s like she’s still writing these stories, still giving them life.”

  Adeline always loved discussing books with Dr. Gray. When she had been essentially fired from the local village school—although she had quit before the town could have its way with her, shrewdly using her wedding as a way out—there had been increasing concern over her class discussions. Certain subjects and authors continued to be deemed inappropriate; Adeline on the other hand did not think it was for a village to decide which of the classics counted. That job, presumably, had already been done, by people much more learned and wise than any of them. Of everyone in the village, only with Dr. Gray could she speak with total freedom about the books she loved.

  “I don’t know about Emma, Dr. Gray. I mean, I am all for high spirits myself, as you so often point out, but I sometimes fail to see where the selfishness ends and the spirits begin.”

  “Emma is not selfish, per se. She is self-interested, in a way that most people can’t afford to be.”

  Adeline was not so sure of this. She would never want the amount of attention that Emma gladly soaked up. Even though Adeline was now an object of anxious concern among the villagers, she could never endure it for long without wanting to rotate the intense beam of attention elsewhere. She wondered what it said about Emma that she was always so content to keep the beam shining directly on herself.

  The two women tourists were still standing at the bottom of the drive, and Dr. Gray for all his manners was not quite in the mood for an encounter. He looked back up at the Great House, then over at Adeline, noticing for the first time the faint shadows of fatigue beneath her eyes.

  “Shall we stop and see into the back kitchens and get you some tea?”

  Adeline nodded quickly. “Yes, let’s do.”

  The Knights had long been known throughout the area for their generous hospitality. The back kitchens were kept open for those in the know, and even the occasional tourist who was brazen enough to walk all the way up to the front door and knock was never turned away. The kitchen at the back of the house was entered from a beautiful open courtyard, surrounded by four high walls of red brick, green ivy, and stained glass containing more Knight heraldry. There they could sit with their tea and a sugar bun hot from the ovens and, for a little while longer, capture the peace and calm of the church nearby.

  Josephine, the cook, was an arthritic, hunched-over old woman who had been with the family for as long as anyone could remember. Always eager to see visitors, she motioned Dr. Gray and Adeline into the kitchen the minute their boots hit the threshold. Soon they were back outside on a bench in the courtyard with their arms full, balancing plates of hot buns on their knees as their hands cradled warming mugs of milky black tea.

  “So what little secrets are you gleaning from Emma this time around?” Adeline asked, curious to hear his reply, wondering if she could possibly be one step ahead of him for once.

  “Ah, yes, it was this tiny set of words, thrown into the middle of a rumination by Mr. Knightley on Emma’s lack of discipline. Remember in Pride and Prejudice when Darcy is listening enrapt to Elizabeth playing the piano, and she is mocking his lack of ease with strangers, saying he should practice more—saying she should herself practice the piano more to be better?”

  Adeline loved that scene. “Yes, of course! And he so gallantly replies—because he is wooing her—except she has no idea he is wooing her, and neither even does he—that she has employed her time much better than with practice, because ‘no one admitted to the privilege of hearing you could think anything wanting.’ I used to muddle over that phrasing when I was younger—was he saying she is only exactly as good as her limited amount of practicing can achieve? ‘Wanting’ in the sense of something missing, like in an equation, or a puzzle? But eventually I realized he means that she is so smart not to practice very often because no one hearing her would be anything but pleased, and so she is efficiently mastering her time. Darcy is so in over his head at this point.”

  “Now, I know Pride and Prejudice is your favourite”—Dr. Gray smiled indulgently—“but back to Emma. So last night I am reading this scene, where Mr. Knightley is thinking the opposite of Darcy—he’s thinking that Emma never reaches her potential, never even thinks about how best to spend her time. And he mentions this list she once composed of great bo
oks to read, remember?”

  “Yes, and she never finishes any of them! She has the attention span of an eight-year-old boy—and I should know, seeing as I used to teach them. Always distracted by something new. That’s one reason I disagree with you on her heroine status—she’s all about pleasing herself, never about improving.”

  Dr. Gray shook his head. “Yet she gets there all the same. She is, after all, only twenty-one when the book begins.”

  “That’s not so young. I am only a few years older than that and look at what I’ve endured.”

  “Very true, Adeline,” he answered thoughtfully, then paused for so long that she ended up egging him on.

  “Anyway, and the little clue is . . . the little secret . . . ?”

  “Well, right in the middle of this rumination, Mr. Knightley mentions Emma’s hand-made list of books, and then almost as an afterthought he very briefly adds that he once held on to a copy of her list for a period of time. And I was brought up short by that. Because this is well before even the most astute reader can see that Knightley is in love with Emma. Perhaps Austen thought her readers were even less intelligent than I fear. I know I myself never picked up on that so many times. . . .”

  “Oh, I am sure she did!” Adeline was laughing with delight, so happy to disappear into this conversation about unreal people with very real flaws. “I know I never noticed that line before either. My goodness, no—wait—it’s like Harriet and her little collection of ‘most precious treasures’ from Mr. Elton—the bandage he gave her, the pencil she stole, all the stuff that ends up in the fire at the end! Mr. Knightley has acted just like Harriet, holding on to something so trivial to everyone else, and so subconsciously important to him—and yet Jane Austen takes such pains in the book to put Mr. Knightley above everyone else and Harriet so far below them, at least intellectually.”