The Jane Austen Society(35)

“I can only think of myself, it seems, of late. How to get through today, this hour. How to distract myself. How to forget.”

“Have you thought about going back to teaching? I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t ask—I know it’s still early days.”

She shook her head as she continued to hold the wrapped package in her hands. “No, I haven’t thought about it, not one little bit.” She raised the package up to her right ear and gently shook it. “Dickens? Too light . . . Eliot? No, too thin . . . Hmm . . . what could it be . . . ?”

She came over and sat down next to him on the small settee. He realized that they hadn’t sat like this since the time last summer when they had taken tea together in the courtyard of the Great House. So much had happened since then, in a year when she had already had to endure more than her fair share. He looked forward to 1945 coming to an end for both of them—there was always something to be said for a new year.

She unwrapped the package slowly—she had enjoyed watching him try to act patient while she had teased him—and realized it was the same edition of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as the one of Emma that he had read to her while sitting in the courtyard together.

“My favourite.” She smiled. “Thank you.”

He smiled back. “It wasn’t hard to guess. You must have other editions—but this one you can carry around if you like. Look, Adeline, you need to start getting out again. You need to start walking, long walks, need to get the fresh, brisk air into your lungs and your head, need to just get out. I am always much better for getting out on my rounds. Always much better for talking to, and helping, others. It’s no magic prescription, but it’s a start. Reading is wonderful, but it does keep us in our heads. It’s why I can’t read certain authors when I am in low spirits.”

“But one can always read Austen.”

“And that’s exactly what Austen gives us. A world so a part of our own, yet so separate, that entering it is like some kind of tonic. Even with so many flawed and even silly characters, it all makes sense in the end. It may be the most sense we’ll ever get to make out of our own messed-up world. That’s why she lasts, like Shakespeare. It’s all in there, all of life, all the stuff that counts, and keeps counting, all the way to here, to you.”

He watched as Adeline kept her head bowed slightly as he talked, not looking at him, just gazing down at the small book in her hands.

“It’s amazing, though, how she tricks you with the surface of things,” Adeline finally answered, looking up at him. “When you think about Anne Elliot, for example, and this totally disastrous decision she makes at, what, eighteen? nineteen?—not to marry Wentworth, it has to be partly because her mother has died only a few years earlier. I can’t imagine feeling any different a year or two from now than I do today.”

Dr. Gray didn’t even try to persuade her otherwise this time, but just let her talk, hoping it would help her get out of herself, if only for a moment.

“Austen must have picked her to be fifteen when it happened for a reason,” Adeline continued. “In the book, the ages of everyone when the mother dies are set out fully, right from the start, when we know Austen was no stickler for details like that—but that is her way of cluing us in, that Anne is still in full mourning when she first meets Wentworth, and very vulnerable both to him but also to the ties and pressures of family, still so impressionable. So grief is in there, deep-seated in those books, even when it doesn’t look like it.”

“We all live with grief eventually, every last one of us. Austen knew that. I also think she knew she was dying when she wrote parts of this book, knew that nothing could help her, and so tried not to worry her family when there was nothing to be done.”

“She’s a better woman than me. I’ve got the whole village on edge.”

It was the first joke he had heard Adeline make in months, and again he felt the essence of life break through. Just a crack—but it was there.

“Listen, Adeline, when you are ready, I have a little project for you. Something else that I think might help. Ironically, it has to do with Jane Austen. Adam Berwick suggested it, of all people. Can we entice you out to hear more?”

“Not out, no, but we could meet here.”

The Adeline of old would not have let him pique her interest like this without demanding to know more. But it was a start, nonetheless.

“That’s fine. We understand.” He paused. “Everyone is very worried about you, you are right about that. But I know you. I know what you are made of.”

It was the most honest and personal thing she had ever heard him say, and she was sure her mouth was still open as he turned and left the room.

From the front window seat she watched him leave down the garden path. She let the kitten curl up in her lap, then waited until Dr. Gray was no longer in sight, before turning to his little present and opening it to page one.

“Right, well now, what is it you two wanted to talk to me about?”

Adam gave a little cough and looked as if he was going to bolt.

“Adam . . .” Adeline started, feeling more familiar with him ever since he had come by with the kitten.

The farmer shuffled a bit in his seat by the fireplace in the Grover front parlour. “We’ve been thinking, Dr. Gray and I, about trying to make a place in honour of Jane Austen. In Chawton. Maybe the old steward’s cottage.”