I COULD NOT REGRET SAVING JANE’S LIFE, YET I HAD A SNEAKING admiration for those Bront?s; their refusal to be saved spoke to some uneasiness of my own about changing the past. I was likewise of two minds about what to do next, feeling I’d had enough of time travel, yet hesitant to quit the institute. Maybe this gloom, so out of character, would lift, and I would again enjoy the hungry curiosity and lust for adventure that had made me upend my life for Jane Austen. Near the end of my furlough, having resolved to sublet my apartment and return to the institute at least for a while, I left early so as to stop off in London on the way, thinking it would be fascinating to walk around a city I had last seen in 1815.
But it was all sleek skyscrapers and overpriced coffee bars, punctuated by the odd museum that made the contrast between past and present even more painful. I got lost a lot and was unable to find any trace of the nineteenth century that was not under glass. Exasperated after three days, I took the train to Chawton.
Austenworld was less elaborate than it had been in my version, though the Great House still combined research center and bed-and-breakfast, where I’d booked a room, disconcerted to find that they knew who I was. I’d shunned publicity for my part in the Jane Austen Project; 1815 was something I didn’t like to talk about. Not because I hadn’t been happy there, but because I had.
“An honor to have you,” the woman checking me in said. “I hope you can take the Backstairs Tour, and tell us if you think our new kitchen restoration looks accurate.”
“I never saw the kitchens here,” I said, but she was not listening.
“Can you imagine, William Finucane was here too, just a few days ago! He told us the wallpaper in the second-best drawing room was all wrong.”
“Sorry I missed him,” I said, relieved at my narrow escape.
But it could not be put off much longer: when I went back to the institute, chances were Liam would be there too. I could only hope he’d have quit, his present life appealing enough to have put him off time travel.
Or maybe he would get rectified; then we’d all be fine.
Or maybe I should.
“What was it like working with him?” the woman was asking.
“Great,” I said, exaggerating my American vowels for her. “Just great.”
TWO DAYS OF WANDERING AROUND CHAWTON, WHICH WAS PRESERVED like a bug in amber, brought a painful gratification similar to picking off a scab or viewing video of Liam. Differently though no less exasperated than I’d been in London, I impulsively decided to go to Leatherhead. But as soon as I got off the train, I was sorry.
The Swan was still in business, the décor more faux-Victorian than faux-Regency. I took a room for the night, hopeful they’d solved their lice problem by now, and set out with the idea of finding the field where the portal site had been. But a parking lot and a highway confused me; halted by a fence that bounded a golf course, I turned back and headed toward town.
Once there, I realized again my mistake. There was nothing for me in Leatherhead, which unlike Chawton was not trading on its heritage, the buildings such a random jumble of eras and styles that I wondered if something terrible had happened here. Had it been damaged in the Blitz? Then I remembered: Now there had been no Blitz, no Hitler. This was just poor urban planning. I’d walked the scruffy length of the main shopping street twice, unable to decide which building had been mine in 1816, if it was even still standing, before I paused at a corner, staring blindly at a menu in the window of a Peruvian-Persian-fusion restaurant, finally struck by the reality I’d been trying to avoid: there was nothing for me anywhere, at least as long as I went on like this.
What was gone was gone. Jane; my mother; my world; the life I’d had in my world; my time with Liam in the nineteenth century; Liam himself. They’d had their day, they were not coming back. My task was to find meaning in a life that did not include them.
I turned and started back toward the Swan, but consoled now by the ugliness of the streetscape, its architectural incoherence a mirror of my own tangled heart. Weren’t we all like that, dragging around scraps of the past that didn’t fit, incompletely overwritten versions of ourselves, always hopeful that someday we’d figure things out and put them right?
But we never do. And what instead?
I am not religious, yet I felt a calm bigger than myself, a sense of the interconnectedness of everything. It will be all right, I thought; somehow it will. As I walked on, looking at the sun and the trees and the random buildings, the few pedestrians, it was as if a veil of the sacred had settled over the tragic ordinariness of daily life.
I found I was on a street with a church, an old one, nothing special, except by Leatherhead’s low aesthetic standards. God is everywhere, I supposed, even for Jewish atheists, so giving way to impulse, I pushed open the heavy wooden door, passed through the silent vestibule and into the stained-glass gloom beyond. I had not been in a church since 1816 and was stunned by its familiar aroma of old wood and mustiness—the smell of Chawton Sundays. It brought everything back, such a train of feelings and images of things and people lost and gone, that tears stung my eyes and I nearly turned and fled. But then I noticed a side door open, a rectangle of green and sunlight. A churchyard seemed better than a street for bursting into tears, so I hurried through the door and out into the air.
Amid weak English sun, an ancient yew tree, old gravestones leaning at odd angles, grass overgrown, I breathed deeper, calm once more. As I began reading names and dates and epitaphs at random, my urge to cry abated. What is gone is gone; our task on earth is to learn how to deal with that. And should I be rectified? Forget Jane, Liam, 1815? For the first time it struck me as a serious possibility, no longer terrifying.
Looking up, I realized I wasn’t alone. At the far end, bent over to study some stones that looked older than the rest, stood a man, dark-haired with a rangy build that reminded me of Liam. For weeks, this had been happening to me. There was no reason he should be in New York, but on crowded subway platforms in Manhattan, in dim sum restaurants in Chinatown, at the opera, I would glimpse an evocative forearm, a familiar walk, a flash of blue eyes, and for a mistaken instant I would see him, embodiment of my failure in forgetting, my guilt for not saying goodbye. A Leatherhead churchyard, why not? It made more sense than a sighting at Rigoletto.
Then I looked again, and realized, as the man turned and drew nearer, that this actually was Liam, headed along the path toward where I stood. Disaster! I shrank behind the yew, which could not help for long; the churchyard was too small and too empty.