Northanger Abbey

5

Cat had convinced herself that in spite of Henry Tilney’s failure to appear at the Book Festival grounds, he would surely attend the dramatic adaptation of last year’s bestselling novel about love, zombies and patisserie, Cupcakes to Die For. Had they not touched on the subject of the fluency of women’s writing at Mrs Alexander’s dance class? Was this not the most sought-after ticket of the Fringe? And was not the Botanic Gardens the coolest of venues?

But again, she was disappointed. There was no sign of Henry among the milling audience at the al fresco performance, nor even anyone Cat could momentarily mistake for him. However, that evening there was some slight mitigation of her disappointment for now she had a friend to giggle and gossip with.

Bella had summoned Cat with an enthusiastic wave as soon as she had clapped eyes on her, and Cat had been glad to see her. With Bella, she could indulge her daydreams of Henry to the full. The very idea of discussing him with Susie Allen made the back of her neck turn chill with horror.

But before they could delve into the very depth of their respective affections for James Morland and Henry Tilney, the young women were obliged to watch the play, which, unusually, turned out to be as entertaining as its advance publicity had promised. Even the weather joined in the fun, bathing the audience in warm sunshine throughout. In a momentary lull, Cat looked around in vain for Henry and noticed Mr Allen muttering eagerly into his phone. She wondered whether this was to be his next venture in the West End. If so, it would surely add another zero to his bank balance, and on the advantageous side of the decimal point.

Once the final applause had died away, Bella and Cat escaped on their own to roam the gardens and strengthen those bonds of friendship they had started to weave earlier. ‘So, are you still at school?’ Bella asked.

‘I’ve never been at school.’

Bella’s eyes widened. ‘Wow, how did you get away with that?’

‘We were all home schooled. My mum thought it was better that way.’

‘Amazing. And Jamie got into Oxford. Your mum must be a totally cool teacher.’

Cat shrugged. ‘I suppose. But I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I’m not academic like James.’

‘Oh, something will turn up. You could always get a job as a chalet girl over the winter while you decide.’

‘What about you?’ Cat was eager to turn the talk away from her lack of prospects, a subject that had begun increasingly to dismay her.

‘Camden School for Girls,’ Bella intoned as if she were revealing she’d spent her youth in a penal institution. ‘Ma spent all the money sending our brother Johnny to a classy boarding school so there was nothing left for us girls. I’ve left now, though.’

‘And what are you going to do?’

‘I help out in the business. I’m learning as I go. It can be fun sometimes, but mostly it’s pretty boring and Ma can’t afford to pay me much, so it’s a bit of a dead end. I need to find me a man to pamper me.’

Before Cat could comment on this novel idea, they were overtaken by the weather. Although it had stayed fair for the outdoors performance, they felt a few drops of rain and took refuge inside the humid shelter of the glass and sandstone Palm House.

‘It’s like the tropics in here,’ Cat exclaimed. ‘I read this novel last year, it was, like, a prequel to Jane Eyre, you know? It was kind of the story of the madwoman in the attic?’ In spite of Bella’s blank look, she pressed on. ‘Anyway, it’s really atmospheric, you feel like you’re in the Caribbean yourself. And this—’ She spread her arms wide. ‘This is what it felt like.’

‘I wouldn’t mind being in the Caribbean myself, if I could be with Jamie.’

Cat still couldn’t get used to thinking of her brother as ‘Jamie’. It didn’t fit him at all. ‘I imagine he’d be quite good at knocking coconuts out of trees,’ she conceded.

‘I bet he goes totes brown in the sun, he’s got that kind of skin,’ Bella mused.

‘We all do,’ Cat said. ‘My mum says it’s because we all ran around half-naked like savages when we were small.’ She spun round on the balls of her feet, peering between dripping fronds and sheltering leaves, half-convinced that Henry Tilney must be somewhere nearby. ‘I really thought Henry would be here,’ she said wistfully.

‘If he was a zombie like in the play, he’d be lurking in some graveyard eating the dead,’ Bella said, dropping her voice to spooky depths.

Cat laughed. ‘I think I’d have noticed if he was one of the undead. They’re a bit obvious, Bella. But if he was a vampire ...’ Her voice tailed off.

‘Oh yeah, if this was, like, a Twilight movie, he’d have to hide indoors on a sunny day like this.’ She gave Cat a gentle poke in the arm. ‘That’s it, he’s a vampire. That’s why he’s not around this evening. It’s way too bright for him to be outside.’

Cat giggled. It was a preposterous notion, but nevertheless it was the kind of absurd fantasy that they could have fun with. ‘And of course, yesterday was cloudy so he was able to be out in the daylight, just like in the Twilight books. And he had run all the way across town, he said. And everybody knows vampires can run really far and really fast.’

‘Was he, like, amazingly strong? Could you tell from dancing with him?’

Cat cast her mind back. It was true that Henry had manoeuvred her through the complicated dance moves with little apparent effort. She’d felt safe in his hands in spite of her clumsiness and there was no doubt that he had prevented her from violent collisions with other dancers on more than one occasion. ‘He never let me fall. I know it doesn’t sound much, but when you’re whirling round in an eightsome reel, believe me, it’s a big deal. Have you been to the Highland Ball?’

Bella rolled her eyes. ‘Only, like, every year.’

‘Then you know what it’s like. It must be quite terrifying to have a partner who doesn’t know what he’s doing. I bet people get hurt all the time.’

Bella shrugged. ‘I only dance with men who know what they’re doing. I wish Jamie was here, he’s a dreamy dancer.’

Cat frowned. She’d never seen her brother dance willingly at parties, never mind master the intricacies of Scottish country dancing. She thought Bella’s assertion a wild statement of faith in someone she knew rather less well than she supposed. ‘I guess we’ll never know,’ she said. ‘Since he’s not here.’ She sighed. ‘Do you think Henry’s gone back home? Without saying?’

‘Even if he has gone home, I bet he’ll be back soon as.’ Bella turned and took Cat’s face in her hands, gently moving it this way and that to catch the light. ‘I mean, now he’s seen how pretty you are, he won’t be able to stay away. Didn’t you say he’s a lawyer too? Maybe he knows Jamie. Maybe he can persuade Jamie to take a weekend off and come to Edinburgh? How hard can that be?’

They emerged into the evening air, relieved to be out of the humidity of the palm house. They found Martha Thorpe and Susie Allen sitting on a tartan rug sipping white wine spritzers on a grassy bank. Mr Allen was nowhere to be seen, and the women were engaged in a form of parallel monologue. Martha talked about her children and Susie about her wardrobe. Neither seemed to notice that their twin tracks had no connection; they were content to be in conversation with someone who never tried to wrench the discussion away from their favoured subjects.

Cat and Bella sat on the top of the bank, arms round their knees, leaning companionably into one another, comparing notes about the events they were most looking forward to at the Book Festival and discovering with delicious pleasure that they were of one mind on most of their selected authors.

The only surprise for Cat was that she seemed to have read much more widely than her new friend. But she supposed when you grew as old as Bella, there were more calls on your time and fewer opportunities to spend the evening on a chaise longue with a book. Certainly the Thorpes seemed to watch a great deal more television than the Morlands, whose viewing was, of financial necessity, restricted to those channels that were available free of charge. Their options were further circumscribed by their parents’ conviction that all soaps and most dramas were absurd and therefore not worth the time they demanded. Cat found little hardship in this edict, since there was always something else she would rather be doing.

But that evening in the Botanics, she luxuriated in sharing an intense conversation about the novels she inhabited in her imagination. This was entirely a novelty for Cat, since she was the only member of her family who set any store by fiction. Their views baffled her; fiction seemed to Cat to be the highest form of the writer’s art, depending as it did on the resourceful application of creativity and the necessity of direct communication with the reader.

For historians and writers of narrative non-fiction, all the building blocks of their work were already in place. They had nothing more to do than gather them and construct a pretty edifice. Conversely, the writers of fiction began with nothing other than the contents of their heads and their understanding of the human condition. They must comprehend the deepest and strangest elements of emotion and behaviour and render them accessible to those who lacked their wit and skill.

Poets, it might be argued, also relied on their own emotional and intellectual resources. But Cat had serious doubts about poets. She firmly believed that while some could thrill and excite, too many failed the fundamental test of communicating with their readers. The more obscure their verses, the more praise they appeared to garner. Annie had attempted to convince her that T. S. Eliot was a writer of incomparable ability but Cat had rebelled on the second page of The Waste Land. ‘Honestly, Mum, how can you say someone’s a great writer if you’ve no hope of understanding their work unless you’ve got a stack of reference books next to you? It’s just showing off. If I behaved like that in front of other people, you’d totally tell me off when we got home. So why is it all right for T. S. Eliot to swagger about like a complete know-all and make the rest of us feel stupid?’

Not for the first time, Annie had struggled to find an answer to her eldest daughter’s candour. ‘It’s a challenge,’ she’d finally said. ‘It makes you think. It makes you look beyond your own narrow horizons.’

‘But reading the Twilight novels makes me think,’ Cat replied defiantly. ‘Just because you’re not interested in thinking about the same things doesn’t mean it’s worthless.’

It wasn’t solely her mother who dismissed the power of fiction within the Morland household. Richard naturally read the Bible, though rather less than his parishioners might have hoped. He read a great deal, having the excuse of a weekly sermon to sprinkle with erudition. Most of his reading consisted of philosophy and natural history, with occasional forays into biography. The Internet had also afforded him access to a bewildering array of blogs, which he dipped into like a man sampling an all-you-can-eat buffet. He claimed he approached his reading with a measure of scepticism. Cat was less certain about that; she thought sometimes the blogs more closely resembled the condition of fiction than her father was willing to admit.

Her brother James wasn’t much of a reader. He’d dutifully read the Harry Potter books, but that was the last fiction he’d embraced. In his early teens, he’d discovered the true crime genre. Since then, his reading for pleasure had consisted of exploring the warped lives of serial murderers and spree killers. It was a fascination that puzzled Cat. It couldn’t even be explained as preparation for life at the bar, for James had no intention of pursuing criminal law. He was destined for family law, something of his father’s social conscience having rubbed off on him. And yet, he remained fascinated by the perverted actions of a psychopathic few.

And so Cat was stranded on the shores of fiction alone, save for the occasional forays of her younger sisters, both of whom preferred to fiddle with Facebook or tattle-tale with Twitter than sit down with a book. Cat had briefly cherished hopes of Emma becoming a reader like her when her younger sister had picked up the first volume of the Hunger Games trilogy. But it soon became clear that her interest had only been pricked because she’d seen the film of the book at a friend’s house, and that she had no sincere love for the written word per se.

And that was why Cat revelled so thoroughly in the company of Bella Thorpe, who might not have been the most assiduous reader in the city of Edinburgh, but who at least understood enough of the joys of novels to seek out the presence of their authors, if only to have her copies of their work signed. For once, Cat felt the fiction lovers were in the ascendancy. All they lacked was Henry Tilney who, she was sure, would only have enriched their conversation. But as her parents had been careful to teach her, Cat knew you couldn’t have everything. At least, not all at the same time.