Chapter 33
33
Three weeks after meeting with Callum, I was almost done: sitting in my favorite reading room on the third floor of the British Library, working on the conclusion for my dissertation. In two hours, I would go downstairs, put on the blazer hanging in my locker, and interview with the director of HR here. Convince him that what he needed wasn’t someone who fit the part, but someone who had never quite fit the part, anywhere, ever.
My dissertation had come together well, after many long hours. I’d started with an in-depth look at Jane Austen’s novels, and then explored the later novels I’d identified as relevant, alike at least in a spiritual sense: E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread; Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers and, to a lesser extent, The Custom of the Country ; Henry James’s Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. But I still felt something was missing—something to bring it all back together again, unite Austen and these authors and, in some way, myself—so I took a day off I could not afford, and shelled out for a train ticket from Waterloo to Alton.
From there, I walked two miles to the house where Jane Austen had lived, a sort of museum-shrine to her life and work. Tess and I had always talked about going together.
Austen had landed at the house after five years of feeling just as out of place as her heroines: when she was twenty-five, her father had moved the family to Bath, a place she hadn’t warmed to. After his death, Austen and her mother and sister made do with a severely reduced income, forced to live with friends or family (I could relate), until her eldest brother gifted them the cottage I visited.
I had imagined that being there—seeing the clothes, the quilts, the exact wallpaper reproduced, the letters thin and pressed under glass like dried flowers, the tiny twelve-sided table she wrote at (under the window, for light, because of her poor eyesight)—I might feel something like the magic I’d first felt at the British Library. But it was different, less otherworldly. Austen’s work had always been about escape, for me, but now I could approach it academically as well, pull on the strings that connected it to other work, to the parts of her life I’d learned about, even the parts that I related to.
On the train ride home, I wrestled again with the issue of my conclusion. The difficulty was that I couldn’t neatly pull it all together. With their various heroines, these books had no uniform lesson on how to negotiate a world when you were new to it. Some of the young women—Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, Lilia Herriton, Nan St. George—had their high hopes disappointed. A comeuppance for their presumption or their idealism, their feeling that the established wisdom might not apply to them. But others—Fanny Price, Lucy Honeychurch, Catherine Morland—were rewarded in the end. Not with their original aim, which was almost always a disaster, but with the thing that had been right for them all along. Austen seemed happy to critique these heroines, but it was so plain that she admired them, too. Their checkered histories and their hubris—those things appealed to her. As they did to me.
At home that night, on Liv’s couch, I turned this all over and over while sleep reached out its long fingers for me. What had these books taught me about stepping into another life?
Today, finally, I was writing the conclusion I’d decided on: a conclusion that allowed for everything. Every shade of complication, no neat answer for what the authors were trying to show about the world and how to navigate it. It was something I’d learned from Professor Randolph; it was very American, he said, to focus so hard on making a single cohesive argument that you try to squeeze everything into one line. It would be a waste, after all my research and reading, to force one answer on a question that had many. Probably all of us would be both punished and rewarded for our hubris, eventually.
At quarter to three, I packed up and went downstairs to the lockers, where I put on the black blazer Liv had lent me. It took me another three minutes to find the HR director’s office. When I got there, a forty-something man shook my hand and introduced himself as Stephen. He led me back to his desk and sat. In front of him was a list of questions, with space for note-taking. I had to give noteworthy answers, then.
Stephen was warm and chatty, once we got into the standard interview questions. He seemed genuinely interested in my answers and asked good follow-ups.
“I know you mentioned doing dissertation research in the reading rooms upstairs, which is great,” Stephen said, nodding at my cover letter. “But I suspect you know, you’re a little further along than the other applicants. They’re mostly just out of school. It’s more of a starting-out point for them. I do wonder if it might be hard for you, being in a different phase of your life. You’ve taken your time finding your way to us, and they’ve come here directly. Express train, if you will.”
I laughed. “I haven’t taken the express train anywhere, that’s for sure,” I said. “But experience is a good thing, right? I’ve proved I can work hard. I’ve been working since I was fourteen. It’s time for me to work somewhere I’m really passionate about.”
Stephen nodded, evaluating this answer, making his notes. “You’ve read up on the program, I assume? Apprentices often help us spearhead new initiatives and projects. Lately they’ve been digitizing some of our rarer materials for online. We’d love to hear if you have anything in mind?”
I didn’t, of course. Why hadn’t I prepared something? Scrambling, I reached back for what Callum had said, in the cemetery. What could I offer Stephen that the rest of his candidates couldn’t? Something uniquely me?
“I know you don’t have an education track, in the apprenticeship program,” I said, not quite sure where this would lead me. “But as you’ve probably seen on my CV, that’s my background. I’ve found that my difficult experiences as a student—I’ve always felt a little out of place, wherever I studied, a little outclassed—helped me be a better teacher for my students.”
Stephen shifted in his chair, drumming his fingertips on the arms, studying me. “The current tracks reflect our largest needs, of course. But they’re not set in stone. What are you thinking?”
I’d lived my life in books for so long; in London, I’d had to shift that energy to teaching. But all of my students, from the absolute nightmares to my favorite (Pippa), had taught me something about what we need to learn outside our comfort zone. To reach for what might not be readily available to us.
“You mentioned that apprentices have been helping to put more materials online. That’s something that teachers could really use, if they can’t get here. Or for students, who maybe can’t afford to come to London. But it would need to be more than just the materials themselves. It’s not just a matter of scanning documents.”
“What else, then?” Stephen asked, leaning back in his chair as if he had all the time in the world.
I took a deep breath, collecting my thoughts. He already knew I wasn’t his typical candidate. Time to convince him that was good news.
“I didn’t grow up with a lot of money, or a lot of opportunities to travel. University was the first time I really had the chance to branch out, try things, see what I liked. Then, as a student here, having such a different background from my classmates was challenging. Everyone else immediately understood the history behind a piece of writing, the world that author had grown up in, the works their work was in conversation with. It made me feel so excluded, like the material wasn’t meant for me.”
“Yes, I can see how that would be a challenge,” Stephen said, nodding me on.
“You have this amazing collection, and you could have teachers teaching those materials from all over the world, bringing them to students who wouldn’t have any access to them otherwise. You might have students seeking them out, but there should be an infrastructure built around that. Ideally, the materials would be contextualized for people who might be encountering them for the first time. Timelines, supporting materials, historical notes. So anyone can explore them. So no one feels the collection here is not meant for them.”
Stephen smiled. “As it happens, you’re echoing some of the conversations we’ve been having lately, behind the scenes. Things are changing so quickly online, but we want to enter that space thoughtfully. For so long, we’ve catered just to the kind of people who can make it here for a visit.”
I risked a smile. “The kind of people who can afford a ten-pound slice of cake at the library café?”
He laughed and nodded. “Yes, of course. That’s always been our audience. It’s complex, certainly,” he said. “Again, that kind of work isn’t currently part of the apprenticeship program, but maybe…”
“Just to be clear, I’d love to do any work here that helps the library,” I said. “That’s just where I feel like I’d be most useful to you all.”
“Yes, of course, that’s great to hear,” Stephen said, jotting down a note on his sheet. “You’ve given us loads to think about.”
He walked me to the door and we shook hands again. “Should be making decisions in the next few weeks. We’ll ring you.” Stephen held the door open for me as I left the office, but as soon as I was in the hall, he called, “Astrid Cavendish-Fitzroy?”
A statuesque girl of maybe nineteen or twenty pushed off the wall and came toward us. With that name and her crisp pantsuit, I didn’t even need to hear her aristocratic accent. I nodded politely when she passed me, but she was already giving Stephen her winningest smile, her full attention.
Back at the lockers, I folded Liv’s blazer carefully into my bag. I took out the ugly gray polo shirt I wore for bartending and went to the bathroom to change.
In the mirror, pulling my hair back into a ponytail, I looked like the Anna of last fall: tired, overworked, sprinting from one job to another. I could even see, underneath, the Anna who’d first arrived here: washed out into a world that no longer had her mother in it, fleeing with a student loan and a plane ticket. And way, way back through the years, the Anna of my little hometown library: folded up in a sun-bleached armchair, waiting for Mom, reading Sense and Sensibility . A few copies of National Geographic at her feet, ready to take both of them away for a few pages.
I had tried so hard to leave all these Annas behind, to prove that they weren’t really me. That they didn’t have to be part of my future. But they did. And here we all were, together, in the bathroom of the British Library, in the ugly gray shirt, and I was okay. I didn’t mind it. Stephen and his colleagues would have to decide if they did.