Brigid Coady - Persuading Austen

She needed to pull out all the stops.

Professional Anne Elliot.

‘Cassie.’ A booming North-London-accented voice reverberated round the upper floor bar, half empty in the early evening. ‘Great to see you again.’ The man it came from was only a bit taller than Cassie. Annie wasn’t sure how that amount of body could produce that volume of voice.

‘And you’re Anne Elliot.’ He shook her hand and looked her up and down. ‘You don’t look much like your sisters.’ Annie concentrated on the slight American twang in Eric’s voice rather than the words.

She counted to three.

‘I’m the changeling,’ she said with a smile.

‘She’s the one who keeps them on the straight and narrow,’ Cassie interrupted with a quick squeeze on Annie’s arm in apology. It acted like a balm on Eric’s thoughtless comparison. ‘And that makes her priceless.’

They all sank into squishy brown suede winged chairs. Music softly piped from speakers round the room.

‘Annie, I’m sorry you couldn’t meet the rest of the cast last night. But it is good we can have this talk here.’ Eric leaned forward, his feet not quite touching the ground. Annie tried not to giggle as he swung his legs, looking like a child playing at being an adult.

‘Les and I are really excited to have you on board. We’ve heard such great things about the Northanger Agency.’

The worried, heavy feeling in Annie’s chest warmed and loosened, even as she could feel herself blush at the compliment.

‘Well I mean, Cassie is also …’

‘No, I know Cassie is just as talented, but I wanted you. This is a tough job balancing the usual accountancy work with what will be my person on the ground, troubleshooting anything that needs it.

‘I’ve been asking around about you, Annie, and I like what I hear. Doesn’t take nonsense, goes the extra mile. In fact from what I can gather you have been doing a producer role on your last few productions.’

Where was the waitress? Annie needed someone to distract him from the love fest.

‘If this goes well, I have some options based in the States that could do with your sort of touch.’ Eric touched his finger to his nose and winked.

‘Thank you,’ Annie breathed, looking over to Cassie incredulously. The silent, judging Cassie of earlier was gone and replaced by a grinning, happy Cass.

‘I’ll be watching you, kid,’ Eric said and then turned to the now-hovering waitress. ‘We’ll take a bottle of champagne – my private collection.’

Was this her life now? And she’d done it all by herself, no matter who Eric didn’t think she looked like.

Would someone pinch her so she could see if she was dreaming?

After the champagne was poured and she clinked glasses with Eric and Cassie, Annie made a promise.

She was telling Dad and Immy about the house rental as soon as possible. If she wanted to show Eric what she could then she needed to put in place some ground rules with her family, and fast. Maybe by the time it got to production they would stick.

Chapter Six

House on rental listing. Tick.

Annie sat at the battered and scratched kitchen table blowing on the M&S lasagne she’d reheated, her work notebook opened to the back page. Her personal to-do list was scrawled there.

She chewed on a mouthful of food, not really tasting it.

As soon as she’d floated home from Shoreditch House, Annie had emailed Shepherd and Kellynch and the next morning got them to put the house up for rent.

That had been a week ago.

She wasn’t sure how they managed to get prospective tenants through the house for viewings without either Immy or Dad noticing. There had been one close call when the couple had been leaving with the estate agent when Dad came back from a meeting.

Annie promised she’d buy a ‘Tablet’ from the next Jehovah’s Witness who came calling as an apology for using their name in vain.

Although God couldn’t have been too upset, the fake Jehovah’s Witnesses had taken the house and the moving date was in three weeks.

Three weeks.

But they didn’t start on location for another two months.

Place to live was the second bullet point. Annie added an ‘s’ to the end of the first word. It felt almost like a bigger act of rebellion than the day she showed Dad her acceptance into university to study History, not even a drama subsid.

So, places to live, pack up the house, all while starting a new job.

Annie screwed up her face. Doable, she thought, and looked at the next bullet point.

It was underlined so heavily the pen strokes had almost torn the paper.

Tell Dad and Immy.

Now this was the real problem.

Currently Annie was going with the Lily Russell School of dealing with difficult situations: do it and ask for forgiveness afterwards. Or run away and hide.

That only worked up to the point the new tenants moved in.

Even Dad would realize that Jehovah’s Witnesses, whilst extremely dedicated to their faith, would draw the line at moving into someone’s house.

But how did she tell them?

She scraped up another piece of the lasagne from her plate. At least she’d done an inventory of the house over the weekend. Admittedly creeping in and out of her dad and Immy’s rooms when they’d been out had been somewhat underhand but needs must.

Now she had to work out what needed to go into storage, what was getting dumped, and what they would take with them. When she presented it as a fait accompli then they couldn’t back out could they?

‘It will be fine,’ she lied around her full mouth of food.

This was the start. The beginning of Annie’s fight back. She did this every day at work and was rewarded for it; she was merely making sure that she got the same from her family.

If she could stand her ground here, stand by her decisions, then maybe she could start clawing back some respect.

She shuddered.

She could do this.

She had to.

Annie moved her notebook out of the way and pulled out the spreadsheet she’d printed out at the office. It ran on for twenty pages, portrait and double-sided.

The house really did have a lot of stuff in it.

They were definitely not taking the full-length portrait of Granddad Elliot with them – that was for sure. It was going into storage. No rental place any of them moved into would be big enough for it and she wasn’t leaving it for the tenants. They had kids.

Annie could feel her shoulders tighten even though the painting in question was a floor above her. She’d been scared of the painting when she’d been a child. Nothing like a painting of your grandfather carrying a skull and looking gloomy to give you the heebie-jeebies and a complex against powdered wigs.

But supposedly Sir Walter Elliot had been the foremost Shakespearean actor of his day and that meant he’d hired some gullible artist to paint his portrait. Full length. In costume. Family legend had it that the artist had never painted again. Dad said it was because he’d reached the pinnacle of his success, more like he’d been scarred for life.

God, Annie wanted to sell it. Whisk it away and everything it represented: the vanity and the ego of the Elliots. Why couldn’t they have fuzzy unposed photos on the walls like normal families?

But she wouldn’t sell it. That wouldn’t get respect from her family; that would be a declaration of war and she wasn’t at that point with them.

A small voice in her head added ‘Yet’.

No. She’d made a promise to Mum. Her job was to keep the family together, although maybe not geographically. And to do that meant keeping them financially solvent or die trying.

Annie put down her fork, picked up a pen, and scribbled an instruction to wrap the painting tightly next to its entry for the packers. She paused and tapped the pen on her lip. Maybe she could somehow get them to mislabel it and perhaps lose it. The warehouse the storage place used in Thurrock was massive. When she’d toured it on Monday all she’d seen were packing cases for what looked like miles. It would be hard to find.