The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,5
be bringing him his tea. But he needed some air, needed to clear his brain and find some respite from all the cares that piled up before him every day. He was the general practitioner for the village of Chawton, but also its confidant, father figure, and resident ghost—someone who knew more about the future, and the past, than anyone else.
He left his rose-covered thatched cottage through the green front door that was always open to patients and led straight out onto the street. Like all the former worker cottages, the house was so close to the main road that it practically half heaved itself onto it. His nurse, Harriet Peckham, tried to keep the front bay window’s lace curtains drawn as much as possible during patient visits, but the small beady eyes of the town had proven themselves even smaller still by a willingness to peer through the eyelet pattern and thin crack where the panels tried to meet.
He started down the lane and saw the Alton taxi pulling up at the junction where Winchester Road split in two, and where the old pond had only recently been drained. Three ducks could still on occasion be spotted meandering about the roads, searching for their lost paradise. But right now Dr. Gray was watching three middle-aged women instead, as they stepped out of the cab amidst a flurry of hats and handbags, landing right in front of the old Jane Austen cottage.
Despite the war now stretching across the Atlantic, women of a certain age still saw fit to travel to Chawton to see where Austen had lived. Dr. Gray had always marvelled at their female spirit in coming to pay homage to the great writer. Something had been freed in them by the war; some essential fear that the world had tried to drum into them had collapsed in the face of an even greater enemy. He wondered if the future, just as the cinema foretold, belonged to these women. Chattering, gathering, travelling women, full of vigour and mission, going after what they wanted, big or small. Just like Bette Davis in Jezebel or Greer Garson in his favourite movie, Random Harvest.
Dr. Gray permitted himself one night a week to indulge a passion he had shared with his late wife: a bus trip into the neighbouring town of Alton to see the newest movie release. The rest of his free time he spent trying to distract himself from thinking about Jennie. But now, when the movie-house lights dimmed, and the couples slouched against each other even farther still, he allowed himself to picture his beloved wife and their own nights out at the cinema together. She had always wanted to see the “weepies,” those woman-centred films starring such actresses as Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, and he would sometimes put up a little fuss, a little push for a Western or a gangster film—but he always ended up enjoying her choices as much as she did. Sometimes they would even skip the bus after and walk the half hour home in the moonlight instead, talking over the film they had just seen. He couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say.
He had always loved her most for her mind—and he was smart enough to know that she was much smarter than him. She had been one of the few women at his college and had spent equal time in the library and in the lab. Her sharp mathematical mind could have been a real asset to the war effort, but this was one of many things about her that he would never know. She had died four years earlier from a simple fall down the stairs leading to their bedroom, hitting her head in the absolute worst way, on the one jutting part of the lowest stair that he had always meant to fix. The internal bleeding was swift and acute, and he had been completely unable to save her.
A doctor who can’t save his own wife achieves an unfortunate degree of notoriety to add to the grief and self-recrimination. No one was ever going to be harder on him than himself, but his professional pride often caused him to wonder if the other villagers might not blame him, too.
As he passed the trio of women chatting excitedly in front of the little white gate to the Austen cottage, he tipped his hat at them. He was not one of the villagers who considered them a nuisance to be