“Does he?” Adam said quizzically. “Always seems fine to me. Good chap.”
“Are you sure you won’t come in, for some supper?”
Adam shook his head and started to turn back down the lane with a quick wave goodbye behind him. She noticed he was walking in the opposite direction from the small terrace house he shared with his mother. She wondered where else he could be going at this time of night.
She walked up the garden path in the moonlight, bending down frequently to pick up a stray leaf or twig, her compulsion for gardening having returned just in time for spring. As she felt for the front-door key in her coat pocket, she thought she heard a noise behind her and turned around.
Benjamin Gray was standing there in the moonlight, just a few steps from her front door, his hands in his coat pockets, his head bare.
“God, you startled me again. You have to stop doing that.” She turned to open the door, then realized something. “Did you follow me here?”
He stepped up onto the porch until he was standing over her. “What were you and Adam talking about?”
“Excuse me?”
“On your walk home together—what were the two of you talking about?”
“I’m not discussing this with you . . .” she said in irritation, and went to open the door again, but he firmly turned her back round to face him.
“Fine.” She sighed impatiently. “We were talking about Jane Austen—what did you think we’d be talking about?”
“Are you in love with him?”
“You’re nuts, do you know that?” she exclaimed. “You practically let me get fired, you accuse me of being a drug addict, you do everything you can to push me away all these years. . . .”
“What do you mean, pushed you away all these years?”
“My God,” she muttered, “you even hired my archnemesis from college, a world-class spy . . .”
“Adeline, what on earth do you mean, pushed you away all these years?”
She dropped her head beneath his gaze to look down at her boots.
“I don’t understand. . . .” He sighed, looking up at the full moon and then down at the ground, too, his right hand across his brow.
“You don’t understand? Well, then, I must understand too much.”
“Adeline, please, just listen to me.” He tried to take her hand, but she would have none of it.
“Listen to what? Listen to how lonely you are, when both my own husband and baby have been dead and buried less than a year? What incredible timing for you!” Her voice was rising in anger with every word.
“Adeline, please, just let me in, so we can talk about this.”
“No, stop, you’re ridiculous—this is ridiculous—you have no right, do you hear me?” She turned the key in the lock, but her hands were shaking so hard she had to retry a few times to open it, all the while muttering, “You think you can finally wake up and just go and grab the first woman—the first young woman, I might add—who’s free? Just because you’re looking for someone—for some thing—to get you through the night? How dare you! How dare you presume that about me, of all people!”
She pushed the front door open and held it back against his reach.
“Adeline, I did not presume—I don’t presume—anything. Surely you know that about me by now.”
“Please go,” she begged, tears starting to stream down her face. “Can’t you see how much you’re hurting me?”
She slammed the door in his face, leaving him standing there alone in the darkness, listening to the sound of her sobbing from the inside. He couldn’t have made things worse if he’d tried. He would be lucky if Adeline ever even spoke to him again, when he had come there tonight with completely opposite plans, fuelled by consuming jealousy over Adam Berwick and his little gifts to the ladies.
He waited for a few minutes until he heard her crying finally subside, then he marched down the garden path without looking back at the small house behind him, none of its lights on yet. This left him walking in near darkness except for the moon. He felt as lonely as it was possible at that moment, with no one to guide him but that impersonal terrestrial orb high up in the sky, glowing for everyone and for no one at all. There was no one else watching over him, no one who cared about his well-being. He had been cheated of that years ago, and then the universe in its infinite unfairness had made a one-sided bargain with him: go back for more pain or get nothing in return.
So now here he was, with nothing in return. Except that he had also managed to get hurt all over again in the process, which took some doing by his count.
When he entered his own darkened house, the first thing he saw in the moonlight was the ring of keys to the medicine cabinet dangling just inside his office door. He could make himself feel better, so easily, and no one would ever know. But somehow Adeline would know—or, at least, he would move one step closer to the ridiculous mess she had just accused him of being, and he wasn’t sure he could stand any further sinking in her own eyes or his.
Feeling this bad about himself usually had the opposite effect, usually made him cave in to the pain and the addiction. But after tonight, in a way, he had both nothing left to lose and everything to gain. He wasn’t going to move one iota closer to what he wanted if he gave in now. Because if he submitted yet again, he would be continuing on the path he had set for himself several years ago, and that path had led up a garden and right bang into a locked front door, and it would keep doing so, in different ways, with different people, if he was even lucky enough to get another chance at any of that.
He wasn’t living in his life, because his life was pain. He was living outside his real life instead, and he was using the drugs to help him do that. He had stayed away from the cabinet for several weeks now, ever since his vow to himself in the little church graveyard on Christmas Eve—hiring Liberty Pascal (that “world-class spy,” Adeline had just called her, and he couldn’t help but grin right now at her words, despite his distress) had been a huge help in that regard, as the young woman missed nothing. He had been trying to make himself a better man, and right now the reason for that seemed to be slipping away, but that was the trap, after all. If he could resist the temptation at a time like this, when he had nothing left to hope for, then he could always resist it. It was a large cosmic test, and God knows he had failed so many of those before. But although Adeline might no longer be a reason for him to pass, she had conquered her own temptations in her darkest hour, and he would learn any lesson he could from her. She was still the smartest person he knew, and her rejection of him at this moment spoke to that, as much as it surely pained him to admit.
After all, he clearly had quite some way to go before becoming the type of man that deserved her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Chawton, Hampshire
Midnight, February 2, 1946
As the meeting was wrapping up, Miss Frances offered to give Mimi and Yardley rooms for the night. Mimi was thrilled at the idea of sleeping in a house once full of slumbering Austens—perhaps even Jane herself in the midst of nursing a feverish niece or nephew, despite living just a short distance away.
The three of them walked the length of the village together with Evie, leaving Andrew Forrester heading in the opposite direction towards Alton and Adam escorting Adeline home. The sun was already starting its descent at 4.30 P.M. on a brisk winter’s day, and the shadow of the full moon was waiting patiently above to make its evening appearance. Yardley was peppering Frances with questions about Chawton and its history, and she was gamely answering everything, although she would often refer to Andrew Forrester as the best historian on the village that Yardley would find.
After a late supper in the dining room and drinks by the fire, Evie headed up to her small attic bedroom in the south wing, and Miss Frances to her suite in the opposite corner from Evie’s. On the second floor below was her late father’s bedroom, whose door had remained sealed since his passing and burial two weeks earlier. Frances wondered when she wo
uld finally find the nerve, if ever, to re-enter the room and go through his papers as Andrew had so politely requested.
The guest bedrooms were in the north wing on the second floor, next door to each other on a separate landing reached by what Frances referred to as the Tapestry Gallery staircase. This was because the stairwell was draped in several medieval armorial tapestries from Flanders, which were making Yardley as quietly excited as Mimi had ever seen him. He was convinced their counterparts were hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and he was already planning a long-distance call to one of the senior curators there to discuss the possible value.
Having said good night to Yardley in the long gallery hallway outside, Mimi entered the stunning Tudor bedroom suite she had been offered. After poking around among the different pieces of furniture, some Georgian, some Edwardian, and some practically medieval, she next took a warm bath in the tub that rested on a raised wooden platform in the far corner of the room, soaking and washing her thick mane of hair so that it would dry while she slept. Despite the coldness of the house in general, a fire raged in her fireplace, courtesy of Josephine, electric baseboard heaters were beneath the windows, and a hot-water bottle was wrapped in wool for the foot of her bed. An old white cotton nightgown had been left out for her as well, and with her sunglasses, powder compact, and single red lipstick in her purse, she felt ready to face the outside world in the morning, whether she ended up recognized or not.
Climbing into bed, she immediately pushed her face into the goose-down pillows and tried not to think of Jack. She missed him the most at night, when his body seemed to enclose hers as they lay together, keeping her warm, keeping her bare shoulders covered with kisses, and as she looked about the stately old bedroom, with its canopied bed and wall tapestries, she wondered what he would have thought about all of this. She had telephoned him several times the past few weeks, after he had returned to L.A. following a few days’ stopover in Scotland on business. Their month together in England had functioned as a honeymoon of sorts, even though their wedding date was set for April. When she had cabled to tell him of the Knight estate now being up for grabs by any living male heir, and the society being formed in honour of Jane Austen, he had made a crack about never getting her back stateside again. And on nights such as this, as she stared at the full moon through the row of casement windows made of leaded glass panels and diagonal glazing, wondering who else had once stared at the night sky from this very room, she could understand his underlying concern. Mimi had always been one for moving continuously forward, but now that Hollywood was losing interest in her, or, more specifically, her face, she felt this pull to England, and to the past, and to the lives lived in the books that she had spent her own life devouring.
She got out of bed and walked over to the black plastic phone on the vanity table, a modern instrument fully at odds with the rest of the room. Placing a collect call to Beverly Hills, she dragged the phone as far as it would go over to the windows.
“Hey, what time is it?” Jack’s own voice sounded slightly groggy.
“Midnight—that puts you at what? Four P.M.? Cocktail hour.”
“Actually, I’m just about to head over to the studio to see Monte.”
She laughed. “Say hi to him for me.”
“Actually, Mimi, I’m serious.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, we’re partnering in a new distribution company, trying to offside the risk from your Scheherazade with our upcoming Sense and Sensibility. Monte says the studio will put up fifty per cent in exchange for our covering their exposure to loss with your final film for them.”
“Scheherazade isn’t going to lose any money,” she asserted, although she was becoming increasingly worried. She had learned the hard way that once money was at risk, few in Hollywood cared about anything else.
“Of course, baby, you and I know that—that’s why it’s such a great deal for us.”
“For you. A great deal for you.”
“Tell me about the book club meeting. Such a little ragtag group you’ve got there. Who cried the most?” he teased. “Oh, who am I kidding—it was Yardley. It’s always Yardley, that little fruit.”
“It was great,” Mimi cut in, ignoring him. “I’m starting to think we might really pull this off. You know, there are few places left in England where you could still try and do this—the houses are usually long since demolished and gone, or otherwise unavailable. And that we could be bringing the home of Jane Austen, of all people, back to life—”
“So, Monte and I were talking.”
She heard him clear his throat on the other end of the line. If she didn’t know him better, she would have thought he was nervous.
“So, okay, it’s looking like the budget for Sense is going to approach one mil—but the good news is that we’ve got half of that now from your old studio.”
“As you just told me.” She found her throat becoming dry, and cradling the handset under her left ear, she went and poured a glass of cool water from the pitcher left out for her on the bedside table.
“Yeah, well, look—this was never going to be easy to tell you. But the studio has some requests.”
“Of course. Fifty per cent worth of them, I should think.”
“Look, Mimi, this is still our baby, but the studio wants to go in another direction with Elinor.”
“You mean younger.”
“Not necessarily.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s just . . . the energy, you know? We need a good complement to Angela Cummings as Marianne, and they feel the chem is a bit off with the age difference.”
“Goddammit, Jack, Greer Garson was a year older than me when she played Lizzie with Olivier—Jesus, she was even older than Larry—”
“But Garson had the muscle of MGM behind her and they wanted her in that role.”
“Oh my God, Jack—you’re the one who told me to go free agent and screw the studio!”
“Honey, honey, calm down, would ya? You’re gonna scare Frances Knight out of her frigid bed.”
Mimi took a deep breath. “I can’t believe you’re caving in to Monte on all of this—you don’t even technically need his cash from what I can tell.”
He was silent for once.
“Jack . . .”
“Look, I bought into a company in Scotland—nothing risky—but I used up some of my cash flow, and I need to cut corners a bit right now.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Listen, Mimi, it’s all leverage, you know that. And the more risk I minimize on this, the more risks I can take elsewhere. I won’t allow myself to put too much on the line. You should know that about me by now.”
Something in his tone worried her more than his giving away the role of Elinor at Monte’s request. She felt as if this was the Jack Leonard she should have been getting to know the past year. She had only herself to blame because clearly he had been there all that time. Sometimes it was better to know the defects of one’s partner after all.
“I can’t do this right now,” she said into the handset, as she placed the base of the phone back onto the vanity. “I have to go.”
She hung up and hit the wall with her slender right hand balled into a little fist. She half expected Yardley, sleeping next door, to smack the wall back at her, but there was no responding sound. Everyone else in the house was surely fast asleep by now. It had been a long day.
She went over to the row of windows that looked out onto the expansive front drive and the adjoining woodland and fields of pasture beyond. The outside world, so dark and mysterious, shimmered in a moonlit haze. She was furious at the other world, the one back home, the much more sadly predictable one where Monte could assault her and then end up in bed with Jack all the same, and no one would ever say a word, would ever say anything that might lose them money and—most important of all—power. Because power was everything—you could get nothing done without it. The longer she stayed away fro
m Hollywood, and the less negotiating power she had, the more she wondered if she might not be better off simply torching it all rather than enduring a slow but inevitable decline.
Jane Austen knew about money and power, too, Mimi reminded herself, in the specialness of her surroundings that night. Austen saw what lack of money meant for the women in her life, and this consuming fear was what was telegraphed most loudly in all her books, hidden behind the much more palatable workings of the marriage plot. Austen knew that no amount of charity or largesse from their male relatives could ever grant women real independence. Yet, through her genius—a genius that no amount of money or power could buy because it was all inside her head, completely her own—she had accrued some small degree of autonomy by the end. Enough to work, live, and die on her own terms. It really was a most remarkable achievement, the legacy of those six books, revised and spurred on and cast solely by her own two hands, with no man with inevitably more power or money getting in the way.
Mimi realized that this was not altogether true—that perhaps Austen’s life might have turned out differently, the canon might have been even more expansive, if some of the men in her family and in the world of publishing had made different decisions on her behalf. But all Mimi knew, standing there in the moonlight, a pawn between two moneymen without an original thought between them, was how much more satisfying and safe it was to be a creator of something that doesn’t end with age, but only gets better. She accepted that this was her own Faustian bargain, going to Hollywood and forsaking the stage, where the crow’s-feet and grey hairs weren’t visible past the first few rows of the house. She had gotten rich and famous at an unheard-of clip, spurred on by her beauty and the fantasizing that it generated. And, she suspected, she would lose it all just as fast.
She was about to turn from the window and climb back into bed when she thought she saw someone far off in the distance emerging from the woods. The little shepherd’s hut stood on its wheels in the centre of the lime grove, awash in moonlight, and as she opened one of the windows slightly, she thought she could hear something, the shutting of a latch, the footfall of boots on a creaky wooden stepladder. It was probably just her imagination, which was almost as active as Evie’s. But as Mimi climbed back into bed and dozed off just past midnight, her half-dreaming thoughts were a strange permutation of the eight members of the society into various couplings: Evie and Adam, Adam and Adeline, Dr. Gray and Frances, Frances and Andrew . . .
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