Jane in Love by Rachel Givney

Author:Rachel Givney [Givney, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760144548
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Fred emerged a few minutes later. He wore a blue shirt. ‘I’m off to work,’ he said, in the casual way everyone now seemed to speak. Many times, her brain chased down the meanings of the phrases which littered the new vernacular. ‘Faster than a speeding bullet’ she liked, though it had required a full twenty seconds of cognition, staring into confused space, before she gathered its meaning. ‘Did Sofia go already?’ he asked her.

Jane nodded. She searched his face for any signs of residual awkwardness. Where did things between them now stand? She wasn’t sure. There had been some softening between them after their trip to London, but it did not undo the hostility that had existed during the events before it. Were they friends now? Certainly not. But did he still dislike her? It was hard to tell.

‘She’s left you here alone all day?’ Fred asked her. ‘They don’t need you on set?’

Jane hesitated at the unexpected question and scrambled for an explanation. ‘I am unwell,’ she lied. She coughed and hoped the accompanying noise approximated the severity of a head cold. ‘I am to stay inside. I shall be fine. I have a book to read.’

The excuse seemed to work, for the next thing she knew he was offering to make her a fire. ‘You should keep warm,’ he said. Despite Jane’s protests, he walked outside to the back garden. ‘Stay inside,’ he commanded. Jane watched from the back window as he selected a 2-foot log from a pyramid of wood stacked against the house’s back wall. He rolled his sleeves to the elbow and placed the wood on a stump. He raised an axe over his head, then brought it down with ease. It split the log in half. The muscles in his jaw tensed and relaxed as he raised the axe and carved three more.

A memory struck Jane, from when she was twelve years old. The lid had stuck on a jar of pickled carrots in the kitchen of the Austen’s rectory in Hampshire, and Jane and her mother had quarrelled over how to liberate the vegetables from their briny sarcophagus. Jane favoured a scientific approach, warming the lid whilst cooling the glass beneath, whereas her mother preferred to bash it across the bench. They each tried with their own system, yet the lid remained tight on the jar, as though cemented in place. Martin, the rectory steward, had entered then – summoned no doubt by the dulcet tones of the discussion between Jane and Mama – and gently took the jar from them. A young man in his twenties, Martin held the jar, and with no warming or bashing, turned the lid with his fingers and popped it open like it was nothing. Jane witnessed the muscles flex in his forearms and realised for the first time that men existed, separate from women.

Fred brought the wood inside and knelt at the hearth. He laid the logs well; he placed the kindling at the base, and then built the larger logs around it.

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