Following Austen

40: Incense and willow

I went to church Sunday morning without showering, in my t-shirt and jeans and hiking boots, thinking it would be just the four of us like last night.  Of course it wasn’t—there was a full congregation in their Sunday clothes, looking at me I felt a bit askance.  I determined not to think about it, that this would be one more instance of grace given me on this trip, if reluctantly given on their part.

The church filled with the musky sweetness of incense, thick fragrance pouring out of the Abbot’s swinging censer, overwhelming the small space.  I thought I might throw up, and decided instead to try to drink it in like the grace I desperately needed.  Dom Andrew spoke on patience and trust.  During prayers, the Abbot repeated, “Lord hear us” and we all replied, “Lord, graciously hear us.”  It was just what I needed to pray.

I had woken up sick again.  Actually, I woke to a noise in the middle of the night—someone going down the hall to the bathroom.  I was jarred by the realization that there was no lock on my door and turned on my light for a minute although I knew that would push me into waking.  Everything was more awful and terrible and wonderful then, all of my certainty and uncertainty about Jack.  For hours after turning the light off, with my eyes closed, trying to sleep, I dreamed and feared—afraid and full of wonder at what my heart already knew, that my life could change so much and so suddenly.

Overwhelmed with emotions and exhaustion, I ended up in Juliet’s room after breakfast in tears, feeling ill and anxious and overcome.  She was wonderful.  She prayed with me, and walked me through the garden behind the Abbey, to a bench by a lily pond, under a willow.

Jane said that being here on retreat can bring to mind things one doesn’t usually think about.  She was mourning her brother, and Juliet mourning a brother who committed suicide years ago.  Somehow, in all the quiet, it was the grace of God that overwhelmed me, like my challenge here was to be able to accept good things from his hand.  And yet I struggled with what it means to trust God—the God who gives both beautiful and terrible things.

I began to regain my appetite over roast beef, potatoes and Yorkshire pudding at lunch, and then the best lemon meringue pie I’ve ever had.  Sunday became a lost day, a day to recover.  I had planned to go to Steventon, but I knew I needed rest.  I prayed God would heal my body and comfort my heart.

That afternoon I went back to the bench under the willow to journal.  The truth was, I concluded, I couldn’t count on Jack.  What I knew for sure was that he’s not sure he wants to get married—someday, perhaps, but now?—and that he just started sort of dating a girl from North Carolina, and that officially we were just hanging out.

It felt like so much more than that.  And I’m convinced he felt the same things.  He never said as much—like Willoughby, it was never spoken but everywhere (or perhaps often) implied.  The way he looked at me, watching me walk down the stairs or just paying attention to what I said.  He made sure I was next to him.  When we didn’t have time to talk about everything he would tell me that he wanted to hear more about what I thought, later.  He carried my backpack, and walked on the outside of the sidewalk wherever we went, in that protective southern way.

There was that communion, those myriad unspoken signs that exist between two people, that claim you as each other’s.  If he was talking to someone else when I walked in the room I immediately had his attention.  Or when I pulled on my white hoodie between classes, he reached over and rescued one of the ties that had gotten stuck inside—taking care of me, putting me right.  When I said goodbye to Paul, he watched while trying not to seem to be watching, to see just how close we were, like he imagined there to be competition.

People who didn’t already think we were engaged assumed we were dating or that we would be soon.  Everyone believed it—believed in us.  Other guys noticed and kept their distance.  (Perhaps my active imagination generated this impression, but that was how it seemed.)

So why did he send me off with this kind of uncertainty?  I could only assume it was because he was uncertain himself, and that I couldn’t entirely trust it, no matter what I felt.

39: The green sun

I was thrilled to be on my own when I left Oxford—me and my sixty pounds of luggage and my rail pass.

Four trains—first to Reading, then Ash and Aldershot and Alton—took me from commercial Oxford into the green sun of the English countryside.  Hills, wheat fields, copses of trees, vines overgrowing the tracks.  My mind was full of goodness, of a tremendous confidence I couldn’t articulate—of Jack’s regard, of my respect for him and his worthiness of it.  I was sure I loved him, though I wouldn’t use that word.  I’d never felt so sure of anything in my life.  I wasn’t so silly as to begin to speculate about exactly what it would mean, though I wondered what form it would take, how long it would take to meander through casual dinners to beach trips with friends and holidays with family, to its perhaps inevitable conclusion.

Perhaps part of the joy of being alone was having this great goodness to consider, this thing that no one around me knew.

My train was late into Reading.  I missed my connection, got a chicken sandwich, figured out how to read the train schedules.  There are at least ten platforms here, full of people, with small little cafes and newsstands and hanging flowering baskets.  When the trains come in, there are just a few minutes for everyone to get off and on, and if you are waiting on the wrong platform you’ll never make it.  I kept checking and doublechecking to make sure I had it right.

In Aldershot, I had almost an hour to wait, missing the train earlier having messed up this connection as well.  There was just a single platform—or two, I guess, one on each side of the tracks—and a couple simple benches in the sun.  The teenage girl who shared my bench was smoking and talking on her mobile and fixing her makeup.  A shady-looking guy just down the platform helped me with my bags when the train finally came.

As the trip stretched out over three hours, my elation and certainty waned, my exhaustion began to take over.

38: Emma

The other guests—Jane, Trish, and Juliet—invited me to join them for a cup of tea, but what I wanted more than anything else was to be alone in the comforting silence.

I ran a bath in the long narrow tub that reminded me somehow of a casket. I didn’t care. I was overwhelmed with the sense of peace.

Back in my room I tried to read Emma, but my own life felt tied to it in some way. The connections were too close, the story bringing me back to the one subject that had been disrupting all my thoughts. I read two pages, turning things with Jack over and around in my mind again. I looked out the window at the dark shadows of trees and wondered at being so close to Austen, in the middle of the countryside she knew and loved.

At 10:30 I turned out the light and fell into the easiest sleep I’d had in weeks.

37: Abbey silence

My welcome to Hampshire was soft and quiet—the dusky air, the green trees overarching the stone buildings of Alton Abbey.

My cab pulled into the parking lot at exactly the wrong time, around ten to eight. (“Right, Jane Austen. So you’re American, yeah? Always the Americans—and the Japanese, too—tourists, coming to see Jane Austen stuff. Don’t understand it myself, ” William, the driver, said in a thick-ish and to my untrained ears, working-class accent.) The brothers were in the chapel praying, or meeting. Dom Nicholas, the guestmaster, heard my car and came to meet me, slightly bent, feet moving fast beneath his ankle-length black robes.

“Mrs. Smith,” he called me. I guessed that he might be somewhere between sixty and seventy, maybe closer to the higher end, with whitening hair and softening skin. He is about six feet tall, on the thin side, and carried my terribly heavy bag up the stairs before treating me to a half-whispered tour with his Irish lilt.

My room spoke of solace—terribly clean, a worn parquet floor, two twin beds with duvets, a large window overlooking the wide lawn and rose garden. The monks’ quarters were down the hall, behind a closed door. Should I need anything at night, he said, after they had closed themselves up, all I needed to do was knock on their door.

The Abbey itself is big and meandering. It must feel small to the six or eight men who live there—the Abbot has been there forty years, I think—but it took me a while to get my bearings. The hall and wide stairway outside my room have windows looking out on a central stone courtyard, with benches and water plants and a fountain. There is a huge great room, with five or six couches, bookshelves with games, big chairs, and old-fashioned bay windows looking out onto the garden. Next door is the dining room, where our meals would be taken in silence. Around the corner and down a hall is the entrance to the church, which forms one side of the seemingly square structure.

I was very afraid that I would inevitably do something to offend the monks. Their goal is to welcome all as they would welcome Christ, and I knew I was welcomed here—yet they live by a strict code, with which I was largely unfamiliar (aside from my reading Kathleen Norris).  They must often experience a tension between their Benedictine way and their ignorant guests.

Dom Nicholas showed me the bathroom down the hall, still in an earnest whisper, charging me to remember to leave the rubber shower mat out to dry on the edge of the tub, rather than on the heater where it would melt. He graciously brought me three small towels since my own was dirty, and asked several times to make sure I had soap.

I joined them in the church for evening prayer at 8:30. There were three English women also staying here, on retreat, so the four of us sat in the first row. Dom Nicholas told me where I would find the prayer book, the order of worship, on the table against the wall on the right hand side. But I didn’t see it, so the Abbot himself came down in the silence before the service started to get it for me, opening it to the right page.

The prayers were comforting, Psalms read responsively, the left side leading with the three brothers who were sitting there. We women followed Dom Nicholas and Andrew, and a visiting nun here at the Abbey on holiday, who sat on the right of the raised platform, facing the brothers at the other end. The readings were almost chanted, in a strong monotone that seemed to heighten their English accents. There were a few melodies, led by Father Luke with no accompaniment. We sang a simple hymn as the day closed and the sky darkened, and then the monks filed out, raising the hoods of their robes.

I felt as though I had entered the silence.

Walking with Jane

Walking the fields around Steventon alone was one of the best and craziest things I did on this trip.  I'm working on pulling a few travel articles out of the book project (with the help of Amanda Castleman, the instructor in an online travel writing class I'm taking).  Here's the first--thought you might enjoy seeing it.  This material will make it into the book, in slightly different format.

Jane Austen was nothing if not a great walker—much like Lizzie Bennet in her perennially best-selling Pride & Prejudice.  I’m afraid I have less claim to the title.  Following Austen, I found myself alone and nearly lost in the middle of a Hampshire wheat field on a sunny day in mid-July.

My friend Jane dropped me off at St. Nicholas church in Steventon at 11:00, leaving me four hours of solitude in the middle of Austen country.  I wanted to go inside the church, find the site of the rectory, and walk through the fields to her friend Anne Lefroy’s house.  But for ten minutes, I just sat on a bench in the churchyard, contemplating my good fortune.  Bugs and birds were active, but everything else was wonderfully quiet.

Austen spent the first 25 years of her life in this little village.  Houses, thatched cottages—some of which were here in Jane’s day—and a town meeting hall line the main street.  Fields and farms fill the surrounding hills.

The community still speaks directly to the quiet country life Austen captured in her books.  The land—largely free of development—must look at least something like it did when she was growing up.  Here she threw rousing family theatricals in the barn with her brothers.  She rolled down the hill at the back of the rectory, like Catherine in Northanger Abbey.  She picked up the books her father used to teach the boys at the school run out of the family home.  And, of course, she started writing.

Jane’s father was rector at St. Nicholas, a simple Norman structure from the 1200’s, still occasionally in use today.  We found it by following signs, turning left on the one significant cross-street in town.  The yew tree where they used to hide the church key still stands guard, towering over an assembly of mostly kept-up graves.  Jane’s brother James and his two wives are buried here, along with some of the Digweed family who lived in the manor house when Jane was a girl.

I was unable to get into the church despite pushing and turning the heavy door handles, so I set off through the fields.  I had a mobile phone, a power bar and a guidebook with detailed directions.  “Walk over the field towards the copse,” it said.  What is a copse?  I thought.  I knew then that I could be in trouble.

I’ve done a good bit of backpacking in the States, but I have never been the one responsible for reading the map.  Little good that would have done me either, as these trusty instructions left out distances altogether.

“Cross the railway,” it said, neglecting to mention the 50 yards of weeds and brambles.  “Keep the pines close on your right”—this in a veritable forest.  I discovered that in England the pathmarkers are relatively small (sometimes no more than a 3”x3” sign on a fence post) and if there are bigger signs, they are made of wood, making them incredibly difficult to see.

Stiles—for clambering over fences—are often a few pieces of board stuck at funny angles with just enough support to enable a foothold.  Paths run through private property, occasionally through fields of livestock.  Lazy cows followed me with their glassy eyes.  At one point, a pony with a red leather fringe tied around his head (to keep the flies off?) tramped after me along his fence.  The whole time he was goofily eyeing my banana.

After two hours of fumbling to find the right stiles and pine trees, an incredibly-pleased-with-myself me walked up a quiet road to the Lefroy home.  Ashe House is a simple Georgian structure, brick with a classical row of windows along the front and a fanlight above the door.  Anne Lefroy was one of Jane’s closest friends, like a mentor to her.  It’s here that Jane met Anne’s nephew Tom, her first love.  They danced and Jane flirted.  Tom was quickly called back to Ireland by his family to marry someone of appropriately large fortune, leaving poor Jane behind.

Just down the lane is Ashe church.  It was rebuilt in 1877, but the yard holds the Lefroy graves.  I couldn’t tell which of the moss-covered structures belonged to Anne, who was killed in a riding accident on Jane’s 29th birthday.  Jane wrote a poem in her memory, speaking of her “solid Worth” and “captivating Grace.”  Persuasion’s Lady Russell may have been based partly on Anne Lefroy, but after reading the poem, it’s clear this fictional character could never have rivaled the “genuine warmth of heart without pretence” of Jane’s dear friend.

I set off again, this time for the village of Deane, where the Harwoods threw dances in the manor house.  Jane’s father and brother James were both rector here at one point.  The guide says, “Walk ahead over a large field aiming for the left-hand corner of a strip of woodland.”  Had the guidebook author been present I could have strangled her.  Aim left??  Aim left through a large field?, I thought.  But when I crossed a stile under the trees, I found a field full of high summer wheat, with a green walkingpath cut through the middle, aiming for the left corner.

I walked into the field and stopped in the sun.  I don’t think these are the paths Jane walked, of course.  But I imagine this may be how she felt walking them—gloriously alone, surrounded by the heat and health of nature, independent for a few precious moments, with friends waiting at the other end.  I’m glad I ventured out.  I’m glad I didn’t have a tour guide.  And somehow, I feel closer to Jane.

And now back to the matter at hand...

It's been quiet here over the last week. Last week I was so focused on getting the first section of the book edited for the proposal that I put everything else on hold, and this week I was playing catch-up (rather unsuccessfully).

But as you know, this book is not really about Jack.  It's about Jane.  And me.

Things went up on the blog in first-draft form, and rather segregated. First stuff about Jane, then about me, then the Jack story. In the book, they'll be much more closely tied together.

I've got the first section edited to include in the proposal (roughly 17,000 words!) and I'm hoping to be able to put it up here as a short little e-book for anyone who would like to read it. And for anyone who's just stumbled upon the blog and would like to read something that's actually formatted for reading rather than having to page backward through months' worth of blog entries.

People have emailed me from time to time to say 'I can't wait to find out what happens with you and Jack!' I have to say, I'm sorry, but... prepare to wait.

Because where we are in the story, I'm headed off for the Hampshire countryside, for the monastery. (I think of all the places I went on the trip, I miss this most. If I could go anywhere right now, I would go to Alton Abbey. I would like to pray with the monks, and sit in the rose garden.)

If that seems difficult, you can imagine how I felt on the trip--headed off for three weeks with a terrible mixture of certainty and uncertainty. But this is the drama of ordinary life.

So, next week, hoping to start posting again, continuing the journey in Hampshire.

Thanks for reading!

36: Leaving

When it came time to actually say goodbye, I left Jack and Simon on a little overgrown road outside of Oxford, in front of the place they would both be staying that night before heading off the next day.  Simon kissed me warmly on the cheek and gave me a close hug, talking about how wonderful the week was, and how we would definitely have to get together when we got home, and how I must meet his fiancee.  And then he made himself scarce—getting his luggage out of the cab, I think—and I turned and saw Jack leaning over to kiss me on the cheek.

His bending down to meet me was so rare for this week of falling into something like love, it startled me, in the best way.  We had barely touched all week.  I remember him putting his hand on my back once on Saturday, making sure I made it across the street, and our legs touching briefly by accident as we sat listening to Baroque music in the corner of candlelit Exeter College chapel.  But that’s it.

So for a moment I felt lost in him, in this simple closeness.  I threw my arms around him and buried my face in his neck and kissed him just there, wherever my lips happened to be, awkwardly and spontaneously.  My heart was so full.  My tongue was stulted as usual.  I couldn’t say even half of what I’d said to Simon in genuine friendship.  Jack didn’t do much better.  He told me we’d get together when I got home, and as I walked away, called out something about not working too hard.

There is one particular scene in Pride and Prejudice that may be my favorite.  I sometimes have to go back and watch it again, even though nothing really happens.  Elizabeth is at the piano, helping Georgiana, and Darcy—Colin Firth—just gazes at her for a moment, with complete adoration.  That’s it.  One moment—the best possible look on his face.  I never thought to be looked at that way.  I mean, this is the movies after all, and a Jane Austen movie at that.  How many guys just sit back and give girls adoring glances like they are wholly entranced—in a way that’s more than just wanting to get her into bed?

But when I left Jack he had the best look in his eyes--like he couldn’t smile enough, so it was coming out everywhere else.  But it was more than happiness.  For those few moments I was adored.  It was so strong as to feel tangible, and sent me off with the confidence of something I didn’t dare put into words.

35: Saturday

When you deal with regular insomnia and fatigue you reach a point at which your sleeping and waking self are very much alike—the main differences being that when you are “sleeping” your eyes are closed and when you are “awake” you are ever so slightly more coherent.  Such was my state of being on Saturday morning.  On these horrible days, I have trouble eating anything and a flight of stairs can seem insurmountable.  I find myself in a kind of stupor where time seems to act out of character—I may be doing nothing but daydreaming, or looking at a book without actually comprehending words, or shutting my eyes to pretend to rest, and hours pass in the space of what should be fifteen minutes.

Jack’s small words that morning were incredibly attentive and kind.  He wished me good morning—such a small thing—more than once with so much energy and attention, with such a kind look, if you saw it I think you would forgive me for feeling it to be significant.  There is a way couples talk to each other, and Jack had started talking to me, looking at me, that particular way.  To be so far at the end of myself and to be met with this warmth of affection made me feel warm and loved.

But I knew (and felt rather spitefully) the insecurity of all the looks and all the good-mornings-es.  There was still the girl in Georgia.  We were still officially just hanging out, whatever the hell that meant.  I knew there was nothing solid to back up all of these small goodnesses and so I did not always reply in kind.  I’m afraid at times I gave him little meannesses in return.  I was generally guarded, attempting to be stalwart Eleanor and not betray the depth of my feelings.  At one point, he looked at me with warmth, and all I could say in my exhausted stupor was how bad my allergies were.  We sat drinking tea at a patisserie on our way downtown to meet Simon for lunch, and I told him he and my roommate would probably have a lot in common, in a teasing way that could have implied that I’d like to set them up.  I was almost daring him to say something, to tell me with words what his actions and looks had been saying all week.  He was not entirely functional that day either, but he didn’t slip.  He said nothing substantial, nothing to give me false hope.

When we were alone close to St. Mary’s, he looked at me and said, “Well, it’s been great hanging out with you this week.”  And I thought, so that’s it.  And then said, with far less warmth than I felt, and with a chilled heart, “Yeah, it’s been great.”

34: St. Aldates

There is a woman who walks St. Aldates and the Folly Bridge at night. Tonight was the second time I saw her.  She mumbles and shuffles, rather well dressed for someone who may be crazy, in a matching long skirt and blouse.  She works her hands together and looks at the ground and sort of hunches along.  I wanted to know what she was talking about, and if anyone ever listens to her.  I wonder, does she have children, and do they know this is how she spends her evenings—does she have friends?

Our loud group passed her on the way to the Head of the River pub, after our farewell banquet in Wadham College’s four-hundred-year-old dining hall.  I was in my favorite red Ann Taylor dress.  It’s sleeveless and cut in to bare all of my shoulders, and falls to mid-calf, grazing my minimal curves.   I got to see that instant look of the best kind of surprise on Jack’s face when I walked out on the lawn in it.

As we walked—together in the crowd, as always—to dinner, he said, “We should get pictures together,” so there we are in my album, looking couplish, standing on the manicured lawn of the Wadham quad.

I laughed that night like I hadn’t laughed in ages—healing laughter.  Stacey got a Long Island Iced Tea and they doubled the alcohol for her.  The rest of us didn’t need much motivation; our hearts were limber.

I spent an hour that afternoon back at the spot by the river, laying in the sun, off to the side a bit because there was a group of college girls right where I wanted to be.  I drifted in and out of sleep, afraid that I could actually sleep soundly there in the middle of the afternoon, and not wake up until the evening sky was grey and I had missed everything.  When you live like this—awake and exhausted almost all the time, you can never tell when sleep will come.  You sort of have to obey it whenever it wants to make an appearance, but here I was denying it again.  I would pay for it later, as the unending laughter had me fighting off dry heaves, which were making regular appearances every morning now.

In England they shut down all of the pubs at 11:00 p.m. for some reason, as the result some horrible law.  When they kicked us out we split up into smaller groups and wandered slowly back up through town, passing Christ Church again, curtains blowing by an open pane, past lines of people on Cornmarket waiting for the midnight release of the new Harry Potter book, up St. Giles, always the quiet heaviness of the Oxford college buildings playing the counterpoint to our lightness.  I walked next to Jack, close and connected somehow in spite of the fact that we didn’t touch—him with his arms crossed, me occasionally letting my hand hang free by my side.  We didn’t stop laughing—nor I trying to conceal the occasional dry heaves—until we got back to Wycliffe, and then with the sad realization that this was the end of our party.

Tomorrow we would go our separate ways. Simon would go back home to a job he wanted to leave, Paul to a busy practice, Jesse to Wales to check out a graduate program, Stacey to work with Muslim youth in northern England, Jack to Jordan for research for his masters degree, me to a quiet Benedictine monastery in Hampshire, near Jane’s home.  I had no idea what to expect, but I longed for the peace of the monks.

33: Punting

Thursday afternoon I went punting with a huge group from Wycliffe.  Jesse gave up his excellent spot in a boat so that five of us girls could go together.  We hung out in the gorgeous sun eating strawberries (or straw-bries if you’re going to say it the British way) and cream, each of us taking turns to try to not tip the boat over, and managing to go further than anyone else.  It was all lovely.

Stacey wanted to know how long Jack and I had been dating, and kept going on about our obvious connection, and how great that God would bring us together like this.  I tried to change the subject, to give her a quick, “We just met, actually, and we’re just hanging out.”  But she was resolute.  So I endured (and not entirely without enjoying them) a series of wouldn’t-it-be-wonderfuls and speculations on her part about what exactly God was doing and how everything would work out amazingly.

We ran back and took showers and rushed to a little Italian place to meet the gang for dinner.  Jack saved me a seat.  And that seemed to be the end of our trying to avoid each other.