The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,58
still don’t understand,” she repeated. “Why?”
“Because I love you, silly. Because I know how much it would mean to you—well, at least, Yardley told me, but it didn’t require any imagination, trust me. Why wouldn’t this be a dream come true for an Austen fan like you?”
“But I can’t live there!” she cried as she started to bolt, and he had to pull her back from the road again as they were finally approached by signs of life, a distinguished-looking man in a dark grey coat and hat, carrying a doctor’s bag.
“Shh, Mimi, please, it’s a good thing!” Jack called out, but she had run off. All he could do now was hurriedly nod to the man who had stopped to stare after the retreating female figure, a confused look on his face. Jack knew that look well.
“It can’t be…” Dr. Gray was muttering to himself. He turned to Jack, who simply shrugged nonchalantly. “Sorry, it’s just, your wife—she looks a lot like—”
“Just doing the tourist thing,” Jack said quickly, cutting him off.
“She seemed very upset.”
“Don’t worry yourself about it, just a bit of carsickness. These narrow, winding roads, you know. Anyway, what is it you people say? Cheerio?”
Jack walked quickly after Mimi, who was now kneeling on the grass in a park across from the lane and next to the village cricket pitch.
“I really think I’m going to be sick,” she said as he approached. He put his hand down to help pull her up, and she swatted him again, this time seriously. “Jack, no, stop.”
Now he was starting to get a little mad. “For God’s sake, Mimi, this was supposed to make you happy. Can’t you just be goddamned happy, for once, for me?”
She looked up at him quickly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, my God, you go on and on about Darcy and Pemberley and how Elizabeth fell in love with him after seeing his house—”
“That was irony, you goddamned idiot!”
“—and how romantic it all is, and how hot, and here I am, just trying to make you happy—”
“Or hot.”
“No,” he said firmly, “just happy, believe it or not.”
“By buying me a practical shrine. What the hell am I supposed to do with a shrine? I can’t live there, this can’t be our summer house, that would be insane.” She narrowed her eyes. “Oh, God, you’re not nuts, are you?”
“No, but I’m starting to think you are. Or I am for loving you.” He turned and stormed off.
She stayed kneeling there a few seconds longer, then pulled herself up.
In front of her stood two gigantic oak trees that bordered the eastern edge of the park, the curve of their branches forming a sort of natural proscenium arch. Through this clearing she could see all the golden-apple sunshine, like something out of a poem by Yeats, streaming through the bare branches of the trees and radiating about the rolling hills in the near distance.
It looked like heaven to her. Jack Leonard was trying to buy her a little piece of heaven.
Eventually she returned to the car and found him standing there, leaning back against it, map in hand. She came up and leaned her head against his chest, nuzzling him hard, and at first he didn’t respond. But eventually she could feel him kiss the top of her head and shake her a bit by each shoulder, and she looked up at him and laughed.
He would have loved to stay there against the car, feeling her push up against him like this, but he knew that they needed to get to their meeting with Frances Knight. As they walked down the lane towards the Great House, all the memories for Mimi started to come flooding back.
“You see I got quite lost, and this farmer, this very nice youngish man, showed me the graves of Jane’s mother and sister, and I’d had no idea they were there. Actually, you remember when we met, I’d just made Home & Glory?”
Jack did remember. He had wanted that script—the movie had gone on to be one of the top ten money-makers of 1944.
“I’d thought about that guy, losing both his brothers in the Great War. He looked nowhere near over any of it. Shell-shocked himself, in a way. I thought maybe the movie could help people see how much some families were sacrificing. Help them understand.”
“A one-woman USO.”
“Jack, seriously, short of the draft it was the best I could do.”
“No, I know—I’m still just stinging a bit from before.”