Sara Waters - Dancing with Mr Darcy - Stories Inspired by Jane Austen

Catherine squeezed his arm. ‘Thank you for bringing me here, Chris,’ she said. ‘It’s the best birthday present you could have ever given me.’

‘You’re only fifty once, Mom.’

‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘I don’t think much of it so far – apart from this trip, of course. I have much higher hopes for sixty and seventy.’

He smiled but his eyes stung. They both knew she’d be lucky to reach fifty-one.

Time to confess. He turned to face her, placed his hands on her shoulders, felt her bones through her shirt.

‘Mom,’ he said. ‘There’s something I need to tell you before we go in. I should have told you before but didn’t know how. Can we stroll round the garden a bit first?’

She tilted her head back to study his face. ‘I thought there was something,’ she said. ‘Lead on.’

Five minutes later, they stood together at the white front door, a little giddy from the scent of mint and roses – and their conversation.

‘We’re still early,’ Catherine said. ‘She won’t be here for a while.’ She sounded preoccupied – no wonder – it had been a lot for her to take in. And for Chris to explain – to compress eight years of intense and private longing into the five minutes it took to tell all. He’d tried to make his mother understand that the Jane Austen pilgrimage to England (they’d been to Bath first), and the visit to Oxford, Catherine’s hometown, was all about her, about him and her sharing the adventure. The other idea had come later.

Chris bent to get through the doorway and led Catherine into a small entrance room, where they were greeted by a smiling lady about his mother’s age. A collection of Jane Austen postcards, pens and notebooks lay on a few wooden tables and shelves but the commercialisation of Jane was nothing by American standards – much to Chris’s relief.

‘Thank you,’ said Chris, admiring the gleaming wooden floor, the light through the window, the painted white shutters. ‘We’re delighted to be here.’

‘Oh’ said the lady, eyes bright with interest. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Well,’ Chris began. ‘I’m from Vancouver, Canada – but my mom here, Catherine, came from England originally.’

‘Many years ago,’ Catherine added. ‘I went to Canada to visit a friend and never came back.’

Her lovely voice, still distinctively English after 30 years in Canada, had developed a raspy edge of late and Chris noticed she spoke less and less.

‘I tried to beat the Canadian accent out of my son but to no avail,’ she said. ‘Peer pressure and all that – young people nowadays – what more can I say?’

Chris grinned. This was more like the old Catherine. ‘Sorry to be such a disappointment to you, Mom.’

‘If you’ve come all this way just to bring your mum to Chawton,’ the lady said, ‘you can’t be all bad.’

Catherine winked at her. ‘Oh – I’m not the only reason we’re here.’

Chris winced. This was getting a little too much like the old Catherine. ‘Shall we go look around?’ he said. ‘While we have time?’

The house felt smaller inside than out, but there was much to marvel at. A little wooden table, placed by a window in the parlour, was the highlight. A sign on it read Do Not Touch. But Catherine would never get another chance and so Chris held her hand and, while nobody was looking, brushed both their fingertips across an inch of the actual surface Jane Austen must have touched herself. His hand tingled violently but perhaps it was nerves.

Next they inspected a display of family letters painstakingly written with quill and ink. When was the last time he’d actually written anything? Email had all but wiped out the personal letter. Even his undeniably romantic plea had been typed. Typed!

Catherine lingered over the letters, and Chris left her to it. Such a gift to see her wrapt withal. He wandered through or peeked into the small rooms alone, bending under the low door frames, inhaling the comforting smell of wood and ancient wallpaper. The floorboards creaked and squeezing himself down the narrow staircase he felt huge, like a bear, over-sized and clumsy amongst all these dainty artefacts and impossibly tiny period clothes.

He checked his watch. It was time. It felt like he’d just been whacked with a baseball bat in the back of the knees.

So many unknowns: would she have seen his notice in those Jane Austen online newsletters? And if she had, would she come? And if she came – would she still be free? He hadn’t thought further than that.

Back downstairs, he heard his mother back in the front entry room.

‘The thing is,’ she was saying, ‘my son has a deep, dark secret.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes – he loves Jane Austen! He was always a great reader. I think he read his first when he was about fourteen. We were on some camping trip in the rain and he’d read everything including the camping stove instruction manual – excuse me, it’s just a cough – anyway, he got so desperate he picked up my copy of Persuasion. He was so embarrassed to be found reading it, poor boy.’

Persuasion. Where his story had started.

Chris, aged seventeen, usually ran straight past the glass-fronted Starbucks on his way to the trail path through the woods, but that morning in late August, something – or rather someone – made him stop and stare inside.

A person – no longer a girl but hardly old enough to be called a woman – sat curled in the big armchair in the corner, wearing a simple white summer dress – and reading Persuasion. She even looked like the writer – petite, intelligent, impish. Prettier, though – but didn’t everyone say that the one surviving likeness of Jane Austen didn’t do her justice? Maybe this was how she’d really looked.

His heart rate spiked and he’d hardly started his run. Chris is rather timid, they said in his school reports, like it was a sin. He stared inside, wanted so much to go in, to go up and talk to her, maybe ask her about the book. He’d read it too, hadn’t he? And loved it. She wouldn’t find that odd. Surely.

But he didn’t. He was too scared. He took one last look and pounded along the sidewalk towards the woods.

By the time he started back at school the following month he must have wandered into Starbucks about twenty times in the hope of seeing the girl again. He carried Persuasion in his backpack and was all set with his master plan to sit himself near her and ‘coincidentally’ produce the same book as hers. But she never showed – he’d blown his chance.

‘We’d like you all to welcome our new English teacher,’ the principal announced at the first assembly in September. ‘Miss Anderson.’

And there she was – the girl from the coffee shop. She looked 19, but she had to be 23 – minimum. And she was his English teacher.

Obviously, he told himself to forget it.

But never had he looked forward to a class so much – and never had he wanted more for time to slow down during it. Miss Jean Anderson was sweet and clever and funny and spoke with a soft English accent. Like Jane Austen – whom she adored. She wore summer dresses at first, and then in fall exchanged them for long wool skirts and lace-up boots, and a purple velvet cloak that was totally impractical in the Vancouver rain but he loved to see her in it. He feared others would mock her for her eccentricity but nobody did. She was English, after all, only been in Canada since college, so that seemed to explain it. Everybody loved her.

As did he. But differently from the rest. She was six years his senior and his teacher, and to make any kind of approach to her seemed to him to be not just preposterous and out of the question, but to be a gross imposition on her sweetness, her sunny innocence.