Sense and Insensibility.

by Jane Downing.

 

The traffic was as unremitting as the winter damp. Ellie missed the turn-off, forcing the technology into a hiccoughing insistence it was recalculating. Eventually their rental filtered off the motorway, where the roads were quickly narrow, countrified, and quiet. As far from the sunburnt country of dusty plains they were visiting from as Ellie could imagine.

‘I can see her coming along here in her donkey cart,’ said Maria.

The lane was clear in both directions, but Ellie nodded because she knew this observation was not to be taken literally. They were of one mind for once, as they ventured further into Jane Austen country.

Her little sister immediately moved on from the author’s mythical donkey cart and stared intently out the window at the hedgerows. She said, dreamily, ‘if I could only catch sight of a hedgehog in the hedgerow.’

Ellie snorted. There was romantic imagination, and there was downright silly. She wasn’t entirely happy Maria had come along on the trip. Every now and then, like now, she wished for a passion she didn’t have to share.

She cast her attention to looking for signs. There ahead was the one she wanted: Jane Austen’s House. They were almost at Jane Austen’s house. They were going to Jane Austen’s house. It didn’t matter where she put the emphasis, the sentences thrilled.

Jane Austen spent the last eight years of her short life in this unpretentious but comfortable cottage,’ Maria read from the guide as Ellie cruised the car park of Chawton’s pub looking for a space.

The words did not tally with the large two-storey, wide frontage house opposite. Cottage? Unpretentious? Unprepossessing maybe: flat red brick, none of the many windows straight or symmetrically placed.

‘Come on,’ Maria called back as she slammed her car door. Ellie made her sister wait as she walked around in the brittle cold looking for a pay station, disbelieving anything was free. Then, two Americans – Ellie could tell with almost certainty by the baseball caps that would surely never have seen a baseball game –  overtook Maria at the iron gate and entered first. Maria posed herself there.

‘Take a photo,’ she demanded.

Ellie held up her iPhone. Maria put on her serious literary look. Her glasses were on the end of her nose and her scarf was lop-sided, one end almost dragging in the dirt.

‘Straighten yourself up,’ Ellie said.

‘You sound like Mum.’

There were only three years between them. Ellie took three shots. She made sure Maria was blinking in all of them.

The photo session did not take long, and the Americans were still clogging the entrance room of the cottage. These other tourists had many questions, any of which Ellie, standing behind them waiting to buy entrance tickets, could have answered easily.

‘She was forty-one when she died,’ said the woman at the cash register. She wore a huge cameo at the neck of her starched shirt and straightened the postcards laid out in front of her as she spoke.

‘Still so young,’ said the Americans in unison.

‘And no, she never married. She died a spinster.’

‘Jeepers,’ said the taller of the pair, the one with the most gleamingly perfect teeth.

‘Oh golly, golly gosh,’ Maria whispered behind her hands in mimicry. She sighed and turned to Ellie. ‘Why are they here if they don’t know already?’

Ellie shushed her, quietly.

‘Well, at least you’ve still got ten more years in you,’ Maria offered.

The word spinster hovered between them. Ellie tried it on for size as she feigned interest in the furnishings of this first room. Jane Austen would have walked through here too; on cold days, she would have felt the sun on her cheek, a warmth magnified by the glass of the window. She too would have closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

‘Did you want a coffee first? After such a drive?’ Maria asked, her tone softening.

‘No, no.’ Today had been planned as the highlight of the trip. Ellie wasn’t going to wait. She stood in her patch of sunshine.

Maria’s hands hovered over the piano in the next room as Ellie carefully stowed her ticket to stick in her journal later. Maria clearly fancied herself as, in Austen’s words, ‘a true proficient.’

‘It’s not actually the piano from Jane Austen’s time,’ Ellie read from the sign on the wall.

Maria’s hands pulled back now the temptation was blown. ‘Poo!’

Ellie wondered how the other Austen sister had felt about the famous Jane. The interpretation panel on the wall said Cassandra Austen was in charge of the housekeeping while Jane wrote. Jane was only responsible for making breakfast. At least, Ellie considered, travelling on a holiday with your sister was not as bad as living with her.

The costume on the dummy in the corner wasn’t real either. It was from the Colin Firth BBC production they’d watched first as little girls on the cusp of puberty, when they’d been as one, falling in love with this faraway world. The bodice on the mannequin was tight, the silk flowed: it promised everyone could go to the ball at Netherfield.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ Maria sighed, her irritation from a few minutes before completely forgotten.

Voices rippled, swelled and crested against them at the door into the next room. The Dining Room was crowded, the words awestruck: it’s the table. Ellie and Maria could not see the famous table within the room – they were left to assess the shape and import of it from the cluster of literary fans hiding it from their view. Jane Austen herself had had only the distractions out the window and the equally famous creaky door that alerted her to anyone coming to intrude on her solitude. She’d never have got any work done in these days of celebrity and voyeurism.

Ellie stared out Jane Austen’s window at Jane Austen’s view. A stream of NATO green Range Rovers went up the road outside, for some reason bringing pheasants and hunting season to mind. Ellie tried to resist seeing England as a theme park, though London had felt like a trip around the Monopoly Board.

The crowd from the bus tour moved away from the writing table and ever onwards at the behest of their guide, and the sisters got within arm’s length of the venerable piece of furniture at last. Ellie was surprised to find it even smaller than described in the books. Big enough for a laptop and a latte, no more. She watched as Maria gave in to temptation this time. Maria placed the cold of her palm against the warmth of the wood and smiled as if she was the only person in the world to ever dream of this.

Ellie, in older sister mode, immediately became the watchman. The clot of tourists were gone, but a figure on the sidewall had seen it all. A man. She hadn’t expected to see so many men on this pilgrimage. She hissed a warning. Maria, emboldened by her communion with ghosts, laughed outright. They wouldn’t be dobbed in – it was just another BBC dummy. His frock coat looked very snug around the shoulders and his trousers showed off well-turned calves.

‘You can have him Ellie, he looks your type,’ Maria told her.

Ellie felt the first rumbles of physical discomfort upstairs in the shared bedroom of the sisters Jane and Cassandra. The small washing closet beside the fireplace was an uncomfortable reminder. On the shelves were three fine examples of blue and white china: a bowl and jug, and a chamber pot. Ellie realised she really should have had a break before rushing into Jane Austen’s house.

‘Did you see a toilet on our way in?’ she asked Maria.

Maria finished taking a photograph of a print of a portrait of the author before answering. She was having trouble with the angle and would have to crop the image. The portrait was described on a label as a Victorianized version of Cassandra’s original. Her sister’s drawing of Jane Austen, on which it was based, had been thought to look a little mean. Like the word portrait Ellie was composing of Maria in her head.

Maria finally lowered her iPhone in a swift and dramatic movement, inappropriate after the time that had lapsed since Ellie asked her question. ‘There was one on the landing on the way up here, but you can’t even think about going to the toilet in Jane Austen’s house,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t want to imagine such things here. Honestly, Ellie.’

Honestly Maria, Ellie responded in her head. She would have voiced her internal fulminations but for the two Americans from earlier who entered the room at this point. Her thoughts tumbled around silently instead: why not, Maria? Why not imagine being on a toilet, we all do it!

She noticed the Americans studiously averting their eyes from the sisters and examining the water closet. She didn’t want to guess what they were imagining.

Maria continued to look anguished in this bedroom where everything was so refined – clean, fresh, in its place. The pictures on the walls, the placement of the chairs, the coin-bouncing tension of the quilt over the mattresses of the matching single beds. All this calm from which Jane Austen’s greatness could flow. Oh, what plotlines and schemes had been birthed in the narrow confines of a single bed.

Ellie had watched her sister home-birthed in a very different bedroom; they had hippy-dippy parents, so little wonder they’d gravitated to the strait-laced era of Jane Austen. She hadn’t breathed at first, baby Maria. Ellie had stood on the edge of the bedroom holding her own breath, aged three, unable to fully understand. The midwife turned so she was out of the sightline of the parents and gave the newborn a slap. On that, Maria had cried and cried and sucked in all the air she needed. And she’d acted like the world was intent on slapping her ever since. Being upset was her way of showing she was still alive.

Maria came close and whispered, ‘You can go across to that pub. They’ll have one. Or there’s probably a toilet out near the bakehouse.’

‘I’m sure if there’s a toilet on the landing, they must expect us to use it,’ Ellie insisted. ‘It’s a natural bodily function after all. Everyone does it, even Jane Austen…’

‘No!’ Maria gasped. ‘Oh Ellie, you are completely insensible to decorum,’ she said, clearly in imitation of something she’d read.

The two Americans took that moment to scuttle from the bedroom. Their departure allowed Ellie the freedom to counter the attack. ‘You’re the one with no sense.’

‘Nonsense!’ Maria took the last word in the exchange, but only because Ellie couldn’t wait any longer.

She headed down to the landing at a rush, Maria close behind. Little symbols of a woman with a parasol and a man in a top hat were a huge relief. It was the fault of all the English Breakfast tea at the breakfast at the English B&B. Having it served in a pot was an invitation and a challenge. Ellie imagined herself making her own breakfast like Jane Austen, and keeping it simple.

Ellie left Maria standing on the landing, guarding the toilet door. The lock shot across, sounding like the cocking of a gun. Ellie heard her sister humming on the other side, obviously intent on masking whatever sounds would be audible. In her head, Maria probably thought she was humming Lady Gaga. Out in the air, her hum sounded like a beehive on a full summer’s day. Drowsy and angry at the same time.

Ellie kept her focus on the bowl of potpourri on the windowsill, beyond which was a series of rooflines and below that a cobbled courtyard. Layers upon layers of view to contemplate. Jane Austen’s donkey carriage was down there somewhere still to be seen, for real.

Maria hummed louder. Ellie suspected strangers were coming up the stairs. So many people came to visit this place, all fans of Austen-world, the buttoned-up prim, proper, prudish, and priggish society of violent and yet violently repressed emotion. The bliss of it. No worrying about slavery and colonialism, industrialisation and the dark satanic mills belching greenhouse gases into the air, the only imperative being to pair up. Alas, the world had changed. And novels weren’t like Austen’s anymore. No-one seemed shy about imagining intimate bedroom stuff, unlike the old days when not even Miss Sensibility herself, Marianne Dashwood, ever got physical on an Austen page. Now everything was permissively permissible. If Jane Austen was writing now – well last night at the B&B, in the novel Ellie was reading, the nether regions were front and centre and active.

But Ellie conceded reluctantly that Marie could actually be right. Some things weren’t mentioned. She couldn’t remember ever reading about a pee-pot in use. Was the toilet the last taboo in fiction?

As the last strains of the flush reverberated against the walls, Ellie determined what she would not be putting on her travel blog that night.

‘It is very clean. Potpourri on the window sill. Lovely,’ she told Maria.

‘Do I need to know that?’ Maria pouted. She ran down the rest of the stairs following a mother with two daughters and a grey-haired couple.

Ellie smiled. She felt good. She loitered on the landing a while to take in more of the Austenish view. Heavy grey clouds bruised the sky over the rooftops of the outbuildings. It was certain to rain. And just as certainly, Maria would want to walk around in it and see everything and do everything. And after that, Ellie mused, there had to be a teashop nearby. Another cup of tea! She laughed at herself, but that was exactly what she felt like. She imagined a teashop with an uneven floor, crooked windows, little tables, delicate teacups and a moment to sit and sip and enjoy the balm of silence.

‘What time do the pubs open in this country?’ asked one of the Americans, suddenly at her elbow. She looked at him properly for the first time. His accent was deep south, but his smile was pure, heart-racing Willoughby.

‘I can’t say I know,’ Ellie answered.

They walked down the stairs awkwardly side by side and turned to face each other on the back step of Jane Austen’s House. The step where Jane Austen would have stood too many times to enumerate. Ellie wondered what she could say next to keep this man from walking away to find his friend. What would a Jane Austen character do? The tasselled end of her scarf accidentally nicked his chest as she flipped it around her neck. He’ll think I’m flirting. She blushed.

‘There you are,’ Maria called before disappearing behind another garden wall.


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