Jane, Actually Page 5

  “I understand perfectly your excitement, Alan. Just a very short while ago, a drop in the proverbial bucket for me, I would never have thought it possible that I might be published again as a … working author. And I understand that the publishing world is very much different from what I knew. I must take you and Melody as my guides, for this time I do not go forth anonymously. My goal is to reclaim my posterity and for that, I will depend upon you.”

  1 Mr Gardiner was the uncle of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. In contrast to Elizabeth’s parents, Mr Gardiner and his wife were sensible people. Their deportment helped convince Fitzwilliam Darcy that Elizabeth’s relations weren’t all foolish.

  Albert Ridings

  Keeping watch for minimum wage

  Albert Ridings watched the girl collect the discarded dresses from the bench of the fitting room. She’d tried on four dresses and apparently had decided that none of them suited her, although he thought the dark green dress went well with her red hair. One of the dresses would clearly be too tight, a size 12 on at least a size 16 figure. But most of the dresses seemed appropriate and flattering.

  She had already redressed in her jeans, sweater and trainers1, collected her purse from the hook provided for same and now stood there, juggling the dresses, her handbag and her coat. After some back and forth, she left with three dresses in her left hand and the green dress underneath her coat in her right hand, her purse slung over her left shoulder. She exited the dressing room stall and returned the three dresses to a rack where they would be later returned to the floor.

  She left the racks displaying early spring fashions in the junior miss department and entered the aisle that led to the sales registers and the exits. She moved to her left, angling toward the exits and away from the registers.

  Albert raced ahead of her and captured the AfterNet field of the terminal hanging from the arm of the loss prevention guard near the exits. Albert was about to log in when he saw the woman suddenly stop as she struggled to put on her coat and noticed the green dress. She turned around and Albert followed her as she returned to the dressing rooms, returned the dress and then departed the store.

  Oh well, she seemed like a nice person, he thought. But it might have been nice to have another shoplifter. It’s been a slow month.

  He’d only identified 10 shoplifters so far with only a few days left in the month, down from his high of 28. Apparently the word had gotten out that it was a difficult department store from which to steal and although he doubted he’d lose his position, he might be transferred to another store. At least I’d have more to do.

  He worked the remainder of his shift without identifying any shoplifters and left, never having spoken a word with anyone living. He had hoped that Phyllis would have been the guard at the door, who during breaks would at least natter on to Albert about her grandchildren, but instead it was the taciturn Ted whom Albert suspected was not overly fond of communicating with the dead.

  He left the shopping mall and hopped a bus that would take him to the assisted living centre and the room he shared with, at last count, 15 other disembodied. It was also the games room for the living residents and he hoped he might find someone with whom to play chess. His previous regular partner, Joe, had died a week before and Albert still felt a sense of abandonment after Joe failed to appear on the AfterNet.

  Probably went back to Massachusetts to plague his poor daughter. Can’t say I blame him, Albert thought ruefully. After all, the only reason for Albert being in Boca Raton was to occasionally look in on his great-great granddaughter. In fact he was to visit that weekend and thought he might surprise his family by buying them a new computer, which coincidentally would improve his ability to surf the web.

  The games room was empty of any living chess partners, and after logging on to the shared AfterNet terminal, he saw that none of the disembodied he might call friends were online. He did see Ronnie’s name listed, and as the oldest dead person, having died in 1918, he felt some responsibility toward Ronnie, the care centre’s newest resident. The 25-year-old man had died in a car crash last fall, but Albert felt he had little in common with the youngster and he thought the feeling mutual.

  So instead Albert checked his inbox and found an email about the upcoming JASNA AGM. He was puzzled by the early announcement; registration didn’t usually begin until late spring. Then he saw the link that explained all. He clicked the link that took him to the JASNA website and read the news.

  Oh my, Jane Austen … THE Jane Austen will be at the AGM! The news came as quite a shock despite its being expected. From the moment he’d read that Jane Austen had been certified by the AfterNet, he’d hoped she would be attending the AGM.

  He could barely contain his joy and immediately searched the chat rooms his Jane frequented but could find her nowhere online. He consoled himself by composing an email and hoped he might get an early reply, but she had been increasingly difficult to contact. He worried briefly, the improbable, incongruous, absurd worry of a man dead a hundred years that a woman he fancied had lost interest in him.

  Stupid old man, she’s probably just busy. She did say she might have a surprise for me the last time we talked. But what might keep a disembodied woman so busy he could not imagine.

  His attention wandered back to the JASNA website and he saw the notice about the special disembodied rate for the AGM. It had been announced at the 2010 conference but this was the first official confirmation that it would be in effect for the 2011 AGM. It was a considerable savings on a full rate, and the web page promised AfterNet access at all the breakout sessions.

  Suddenly Albert decided to take a rash step. He erased what he’d written so far to Jane and decided to make an offer that he hoped would not be considered unseemly. He worked long and hard at the email, rewriting it several times before he felt satisfied and then paused for almost five minutes before sending it to her.

  Afterward he felt drained and yet … he could not help but remember the first time he had asked out Catherine all those years ago and he felt quite silly that he found himself just as excited now as he was then.

  Now he must wait for a reply. He was tempted to open his copy of Mansfield Park and lose himself with the dysfunctional Bertram family, but instead he pinged his roommate Ronnie and inquired as to whether the young man had any knowledge of chess.

  1 Sneakers, athletic footwear

  Something Fresh

  Something new

  Jane looked at what she’d written with some frustration. It was about one in the morning and she was in Melody’s apartment alone, Melody and Tamara having left for the evening to attend a Broadway play and afterward spend time with the director and his particular friend. Melody knew the director from her university days. Jane had always been puzzled that for a person with so many accomplished and famous friends, Melody was so unsuccessful. Then it would occur to her that she had been presuming on her friend and agent for six months by staying in her apartment—Melody’s and Tamara’s apartment she amended.

  Perhaps I need not look too far to find the reason for Melody’s lack of success. She is too charitable to be successful. That thought made her feel guilty because she felt she owed Melody—and herself—more success than just Sanditon. She had been trying to begin something new, something fresh, for weeks and had found little success. Admittedly the endless meetings with Random House and now the avatar agency had interfered with her ability to focus, but the endless nights still provided a great deal of time to write.

  Her latest idea had been to write a story set during the Battle of Britain, during the darkest days of the Second World War when Hitler seemed poised to invade England, if only he could cripple the Royal Air Force.

  It was war that helped ground her the most, to connect her to the living. There had been many long periods of her afterlife when her attention had drifted and she had almost lost the thread of her humanity, but she could not witness the horror of war without empathizing.

  In particu
lar, she had come to identify with a young WAAF1 whom she had encountered one day on the Underground. The young woman, really no more than a girl, was reading Mansfield Park with an attention that seemed impossible to achieve in the crowded car. She stood serenely, one hand holding a strap and the other her book, kept inches away from her nose. After the woman exited the train at Westminster, she kept reading the book, giving her surroundings only the briefest of looks as she made the long way to the surface.

  Jane followed her, happy to see someone enjoying her writing amidst the daily horror of the Blitz. Unfortunately the press of bodies leaving the station caused her to lose sight of the woman. Jane was very disappointed for she saw something of herself in the young woman and wondered if she were alive whether she might also serve her country.

  And so the next day Jane waited at Westminster station and the next and the day after that, hoping to catch sight of her, which she finally did five days later. Jane followed her to the Cabinet War Rooms where she worked as a telephone operator. For months she became a voyeur, daily following the young woman from her shared flat in Camden Town to the war rooms.

  When the young woman—Helen she was—entered the building, she would put her book away and don the glasses she needed to do her work but which she obviously thought unbecoming.

  She was a dedicated reader and over the course of two months, she finished Mansfield Park and then Emma and then Jane Eyre and then Tess of the d’Urbervilles and when she could, Jane read along, mostly at night when Helen would wear her glasses and hold her book with her long arms outstretched, perhaps in compensation for those cramped times on the Underground.

  Helen died the night of the 29th of December, 1940,2 when so many others died. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, on a date with a man she had hoped for months might ask her out.

  Jane had tried to write about Helen, about her hopes and dreams of the man, who also worked in the war rooms and of whom Jane did not approve. But despite her hope that the story would bring Helen back to life, that she might at least offer Helen a measure of happiness, she had not had much success.

  The tone is not right, Jane thought. Perhaps not having heard the actual speech of the time I am unable to reproduce it.

  Which thought made her again long for sound. Of all the senses she had lost, it seemed that sound might be the one she longed for the most—that is until she thought of the aroma of warm bread or the feel of cool linen on a hot night or the tartness of an orange. But for right now, to hear a voice again, to hear people speaking, would be a joy beyond compare.

  She sighed her inaudible sigh. There is no sense in wishing for what I cannot have. I have long since accepted my death; there is no point in cavilling on this minor point.

  Writing Sanditon had been so much easier, but then she’d written it so many years ago and in the language of her own time. Writing it in her mind was the only thing that kept her grip on sanity in the first years after her death. It was a tedious process, of course, and it was that tediousness that provided the anchor. She’d learned to memorize what she’d written and retold the story to herself again and again like an Icelandic saga, each time weeping at her faulty memory. She would be forced to reconstruct that which she’d forgotten but in the process she was honing her words razor sharp. And when, after the arrival of the AfterNet, she was finally able to write it down, she thought it the best she had ever written.

  My guiding principles have always been to write what I know and to write of the here and now. But what for me is the here and now? Is it my life in Hampshire or the years I wandered in India or the time alone in the Rocky Mountains or the trenches of the Great War or my time in the Holy Land?

  And do I really remember that life in Hampshire anymore? I, who am forced to look up the particulars of my own life in wikipedia when I forget the names of my own nieces and nephews.

  That thought of wikipedia made Jane uncomfortable. Now when she wrote she was constantly pausing in her work to Google some fact. She had never before attempted writing something outside her ken, but the resources of the Internet now made that possible. Before she would have never dreamed of writing about the life of a WAAF corporal, but now she had access to museums and libraries that reproduced every aspect of that life and that promised to lend a veneer of verisimilitude to her efforts.

  Perhaps the here and now for me is the here and now of 2011.

  Jane closed the window but did save what she’d written. She had been a novelist long enough to recognize that even her best work required considerable editing and that it was a mistake to consign anything she’d written to nonexistence. After all, when she still put pen to paper and would abandon a story, she still kept it.

  Instead, as she was wont to do when frustrated or bored, she looked at her email. She maintained several accounts, the first being the one created when she first accessed the AfterNet. It was JaneAusten3@theAfterNet.net, she being the fourth person who had claimed her identity, although to be fair JaneAusten2 only chose the email address as a lark, not actually claiming to be the Regency author.

  Her most recent address was JaneAusten@JaneActually.com, Jane Actually being a website that Melody had persuaded her to create once her identity was officially recognized. It consisted of little more than a domain name, a holding page and her email address. She did not care for it but Melody insisted she use it for any official correspondence.

  She preferred her original address through the AfterNet. She would not presume to contact the holder of JaneAusten@theAfterNet.net and ask her (or possibly him) to relinquish the address. She was after all bemused that three people before her and countless others after her thought the mantle of Jane Austen worth claiming.

  She found in her original email account a letter from Albert.

  From: AARidings@theAfterNet.net

  To: JaneAusten3@theAfterNet.net

  Date: Jan. 31, 2011 06:15:09

  Subject: Guess who’s coming to the AGM?

  Dear Jane,

  Have you heard the news? THE Jane Austen is coming to the Fort Worth AGM. I just found out today. I’d been hoping they would invite her, what with the release of Sanditon, but I was still surprised. This certainly puts everything the other way round. Instead of us trying to guess what she was like, we can now just ask her.

  I also found confirmation that JASNA is offering the disembodied a special rate. It’s a nice gesture and makes a welcome contrast from the years before the discovery when I would attend as a lonely ghost, unable to even say “boo!” and reading over the shoulders of the attendees. It’s quite affordable and I hoped that I could persuade you to attend. I know it’s a daft thing to say, but I would enjoy meeting you “in person.”

  You’ve been so coy and secretive of late and I thought that perhaps you were embarrassed that you couldn’t afford the registration fee. Of course I know most of us don’t have money or the means to make any, so I thought I might offer to stand you the fee.

  Or if that makes you uncomfortable, perhaps you could attend unofficially. We could still meet at any public terminals at the hotel. Do say you’ll come.

  Then again, perhaps your recent silence is you giving me the “brush off” and all I’ve done with my offer is make the situation more awkward.

  But the deed is done and my offer stands.

  Albert

  Jane looked at the letter in amazement and she had to admit she felt a flush of excitement. In her day, such a letter would have been an admission of love. Today it would be tantamount to little more than “let’s have coffee.” Well, perhaps more than coffee. Perhaps it would be closer to … she couldn’t actually think what it would be closer to. Two incorporeal entities could do little more than reside in the same space.

  She also felt some guilt over Albert’s remark of “recent silence.” She hadn’t intentionally been avoiding his emails; she had simply been busy, but of course this was nothing compared to the guilt over the fact that she had never mentioned to him that sh
e was THE Jane Austen.

  In fact she had admitted that to almost no one who knew her as JaneAusten3, apart from Melody and the committee that judged her identity. Her reasoning was simple; she hadn’t wanted to be associated with those who claimed to be Napoleon, Jesus Christ or the very famous singer named Elvis from the mid twentieth century. Their claims made them look mentally unstable and she felt sorry for the actual person in question. So although she had claimed the identity of Jane Austen in her username and email address, she never made any claims in her conversations.

  She had found Albert online and they were drawn together by their mutual interest in Hampshire, he claiming birth near Aldershot. Obviously from her username he thought her to be an Austen claimant, but from the first she—disingenuously perhaps—disassociated herself from any such agenda.

  The other reason for avoiding the subject of her identity was her interest in Albert’s life. He told her he died late in the Battle of the Somme during the Great War, which resonated deeply with her for she had been there amid the mud and the death of that horrific battle. Naturally enough he wanted to avoid talk of that time and by mutual agreement their conversation concerned mainly the period after the war.

  He had returned to Hampshire after his death but like Jane eventually decided to travel as a means of forestalling the terror of his afterlife. He was somewhat more adventurous than Jane and told her stories of crossing the Himalayas and of being swept off peaks, his soul floating in the clouds for days before alighting near the Forbidden City of Peking. (She suspected some poetic license there.) He had also trekked the Amazon, hoping to catch sight of Maple White Land, a fictitious land created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle3 and populated with antediluvian monsters.

  After decades travelling, however, he again returned to Hampshire and found that his granddaughter had left for America, the bride of an American soldier. And so he had come to the United States in 1947 so that he might be near family, although he still travelled regularly.