The Jane Austen Society(62)
“Then let’s get drafting that advertisement, shall we?” Andrew asked the room.
As the rest of the meeting proceeded, Evie Stone remained in the far corner of the drawing room, sitting on a little piano stool that must have belonged to Dr. Gray’s late wife. Evie was indulging her always active imagination as she observed the five trustees before her. For months she had been watching the Knight family’s lawyer not look at Miss Knight whenever he had the chance, and her do the same, and Josephine—as unromantic and tight-lipped as she was—had let something slip once about old Mr. Knight wrecking Miss Frances’s one chance at love with a smart village boy. On the other hand, Mimi and Yardley seemed to be chummy, but in a familiar, brother-sister kind of way.
But years of reading Jane Austen had made Evie alert to characters who, for whatever reason, can’t see things right in front of their noses, and right now she was most intrigued by Adeline Grover and Dr. Benjamin Gray.
Dr. Gray was sitting on the right-hand side of Adeline, and as she took notes, he would occasionally lean over and point out a word or two that she had skipped or got wrong, and Adeline seemed to be vacillating between letting his hand redirect her pen and smacking it away. At one point Evie had got up to serve more tea, and when she offered the cup and saucer to Dr. Gray, he had immediately taken the pad of paper away from Adeline and leaned back so that the teacup could be passed to her instead. He had then tried to assume the note taking himself, only for Adeline to reject the cup of tea and firmly take the pad of paper back from him. Dr. Gray was known in the village for his chivalry, but his solicitousness towards Adeline at this moment was most noteworthy for her total rejection of it.
Some kind of battle was going on between these two, Evie was convinced. At the recent Christmas Eve gathering, Adeline had been in full mourning, pale and withholding, and uncharacteristically but understandably bitter. Dr. Gray had been particularly solicitous towards her then as well, in a way that Evie had recognized as being something beyond mere sympathy for Adeline’s situation—and something beyond Evie’s own ken.
And there was another moment blazed on her flawless memory—from more than two years past—when Dr. Gray had come by the schoolhouse one day, almost sheepishly, to speak to Miss Lewis about her class syllabus. They had been talking about Evie’s own father, and the reading list Miss Lewis had given him for his long convalescence, and Dr. Gray had smiled teasingly at the teacher and said, “I’d like to see such a list sometime, if I may.” Dr. Gray seemed to have always had more than a passing interest in Adeline, her preoccupations, and her pain, as if she were a mystery of some kind that he were trying to get to the bottom of.
Evie Stone, then all of fourteen years old, had picked up on the feeling that everything being said in the little schoolroom was not at all what was wanting to be said. She wasn’t even sure the two grown-ups in front of her knew what that was. There just seemed to be a ton of thwarted energy in the room between Adeline and Dr. Gray, as if they were somehow being held back by outside forces, or maybe even forces of their own making. After all, if Evie recalled correctly, Miss Lewis had just become engaged to her childhood sweetheart, and Dr. Gray was quite a bit older and already the subject of much village gossip. If they were flirting, it was so subtle and indistinct as to appear undetectable even by them. Evie now wondered if that was how people ended up alone and adrift, like Miss Frances and Mr. Forrester. Evie was determined never to become that way in life, for in that direction she saw a quiet but preventable tragedy, if only people could be brave enough to go after what they really wanted.
At times such as this, Evie was grateful to be only sixteen and laser-focused on her secret ambitions. There would be time enough for romance one day, but for now it would only get in the way, however much Tom in the stables might circle her, or the much-older Adam Berwick might act so awkward and shy.
But Evie was indeed very young, and perhaps not quite as intelligent as she liked to think.
Adam Berwick sat in the opposite corner of the drawing room from Evie. But he was not watching her discreetly or amorously. He, too, had spent his young life in a fog of grief and singular focus, fed by his own world of books. His dreams and ambitions for higher education had been ripped out from under him by the unfortunate toll of the First World War on his family. He had gone to work every day merely to survive, saving for himself a few hours every night to disappear into fictional worlds of others’ making. He was hoping to find some answers inside these books, answers for why he didn’t care about some things and cared too much about others. He had always felt different from everyone else around him, different in a way that was so essential to his being that it practically blocked everything else out, it was so huge. It was as if a whole other world were inside him, so big that he couldn’t see it without somehow getting completely out of his own way. But there was no one to help him do that, and try as he might, he couldn’t do it on his own. Not with his innate temperament, the lack of family support, or the particular lessons he had been forced to learn so far in life.
When he first started reading Jane Austen, Adam had immediately identified with Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. He had worried about Darcy, about how he could be in such obvious lust with the heroine Elizabeth Bennet and yet make such bewildering social missteps instead—missteps that Adam himself could relate to, despite not being an educated man of property, wealth, and high rank.
Darcy just couldn’t help himself, that much was clear to Adam—even if it wasn’t clear to Darcy. The character would spend over one hundred pages rationalizing all sorts of behaviour and reactions, grabbing on to straws, projecting onto Bingley the undesirability of marrying into the Bennet family, and rupturing his best friend’s budding romance with the heroine’s sister—all the while not understanding his own reasons for acting like this. To Adam’s mind, Darcy fancied himself an appointed puppet master, pulling others’ strings—the strings of those less able than him in some way, dependent on his intellect and judgment and financial largesse. For the first half of the book at least, Darcy seemed to be using Bingley as a strange sort of proxy for himself—trying to enact through Bingley’s and Jane’s break-up the extinction of his own feelings for Elizabeth.