Chapter Four — The Vacuum
Four
What she told him was this.
“Forget You (Things Stay On)” — Elizabeth. Opens as a slow smoky simmer — brushed drums, low organ, one guitar — and then detonates into a fast rolling strut with a screaming backing trio and a horn section that never sits down again. Sung by a woman who has never raised her voice in public and has decided to do it once.
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[Intro — slow, smoky, spoken over a low simmer] You know, we never do nothin’ nice… and easy. So we’re gonna start it easy… (a beat) …and then we’re gonna finish it rough.
[Verse 1 — slow, smoldering] I see you driving your infra With the monkey you love and I’m like, Forget you! Oo, oo, ooo I guess the Semper in my pocket Wasn’t enough I’m like, Forget you! And forget the monkey too!
[Verse 2 — building] Said, if I was smarter, I might be joinin’ ya Ha, now ain’t that some shit? (ain’t that some shit?) And although there’s no pain in my chest I still wish you the best with a Forget you! Oo, oo, ooo
[Bridge — the last quiet moment before it breaks open] Yeah I’m sorry, I can’t afford to kill a region, But that don’t mean I can’t get you reliable. I guess you need a pulumi and I’m more hashicorp, About the way you play your game ain’t fair. I wasn’t askin’ you to fall for me — I was tellin’ you how to build. You just wouldn’t hear.
[EXPLOSION — full band drops in, fast rolling strut, backing trio screaming] (now we roll!) FORGET YOU! (forget you!) Keep it rollin’, keep it rollin’ — FORGET YOU! (forget you!) things stay ON!
[Verse 3 — fast, powerhouse] Now I could’ve flexed a little louder — thrown a Gorilla, dropped a zone to make you stare — but I don’t kill what’s mine to prove I’m mighty; I just don’t fall — and you can’t handle fair! FORGET YOU! (forget you!) Oo, oo, ooo
[Outro — rolling, unstoppable, driving to the finish] Why? Why’d you loose the Kong, babe? (why, why, WHY!) You had a nine-nines woman rollin’ right here — you tried to win her with an earthquake, honey, and I’m still standin’ — I’m still HERE! You shook the ground, I never dropped a beat, you brought a continent, I brought the light — I don’t need your region, I’m the reason things stay on, so keep on rollin’, rollin’, through the night! FORGET YOU — (forget you!) and forget your Simian Army! (keep it rollin’!) Oo, oo, ooo — I don’t fall, baby. I. Don’t. FALL.
The band, who had been up since four, played it as though they had been waiting all their lives.
It should be recorded that Elizabeth Bennet had never in her life raised her voice in public, and that she did not raise it now in anger; anger was not in it, or not chiefly. What was in it was the plain, unbearable, entirely public fact that she had told him precisely how to build and he had answered with an earthquake, and that she had survived the earthquake without so much as putting a hand out — which was, of course, the demonstration. He had asked which of them could survive the King.
She had just done it, in front of the King, standing on his own terrace, with the ground still settling.
I wasn’t askin’ you to fall for me. I was tellin’ you how to build.
That is the whole of the injury and she put it in the bridge, at the quietest moment of the number, where he could not possibly miss it.
He did not miss it.
The carriages went at one. It took an hour, because it always takes an hour, and because a county that has just witnessed the most remarkable evening of its collective life is not going to hurry away from the courtyard while there is still anyone left in it to say well! to.
Mr. Darcy did not come down off the terrace. This was reported, and it was resented, and it was entered into the general account against him along with everything else; and nobody thought to wonder what a man does on a cold balustrade for forty minutes after the choir has gone home.
The verdict of the neighbourhood was settled before the horses were brought round, and it was this: that Mr. Google was the most amiable young man in England, that Miss Bennet had made a conquest, that Miss Darcy was a very quiet girl and rather forward, that the youngest Miss Bennet wanted managing, that Miss Eliza had made an exhibition of herself twice, and that Mr. Darcy was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world and it was to be hoped he would never come into Hertfordshire again.
Five of these were wrong. It is not a bad rate for a county.
Jane was happy for eleven days.
It is worth setting down what those eleven days were, because they are the only ones she got and because nobody afterwards would give them any weight at all, the whole business being subsequently described — by her mother, by her aunt, by Mrs. Long, by every soul in Meryton — as a disappointment, which is the word a neighbourhood uses for a thing it has decided not to look at directly.
He came on the Tuesday. He came again on the Thursday, and stayed two hours, and talked the entire time, and left having asked her nothing whatever about herself and having enjoyed every minute so evidently and so completely that it did not occur to her to mind. He came on the Saturday with a horse he wanted her to see. He came on the Sunday, uninvited, in the rain, and sat in the small parlour with Javier’s chin on his boot and did not once mention the state of his coat.
And he was, in all of it, entirely sincere. That must be insisted upon. There was no calculation anywhere in Mr. Google, not one grain of it; he liked her exactly as much as he appeared to, which was a very great deal; and if he had been left alone in a room with his own preference for a single fortnight he would have married her and been happy for fifty years and never once looked up.
He was not left alone with it. He never had been. He was a man of enormous fortune and no interior, and there had assembled around him, over years, the way weather assembles, a set of people whose entire function was to have his opinions slightly before he did.
Chief among them was Miss Caroline.
She was not his sister. It suited the neighbourhood to call her that and it suited her not to correct them.
She was the fashionable thing in his orbit — the one they were all reading about that year, the one nobody could quite explain and everybody wished to be seen having on the shelf. She had never in her life produced anything. She was aware of this and had constructed, over a long period and with real artistry, an entire philosophy in which producing things was the vulgarity of the unelevated.
She came to Longbourn twice, was charming to Jane on both occasions, and formed within a week the only two opinions she was ever to hold about Hertfordshire: that the eldest Miss Bennet was a sweet girl of no consequence whom Mr. Google would obviously outgrow, and that Mr. Darcy of Pemberley was the most interesting man she had ever failed to secure. After each visit Jane checked her own sleeve, and could not afterwards have said what for.
At the Lucases’ she performed. Nobody had asked her to. She had brought the harpsichord.
“Code You Can Believe In” — Miss Caroline. Solo harpsichord, prim and metronomic: no rhythm section, no bass, no groove of any kind — a performance conducted entirely above the floor and audibly pleased about it. The funk does not arrive until the last eight bars, and when it arrives it takes her.
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[Intro — solo harpsichord, prim] (Code you can believe in.) Ahem.
[Verse 1] My beetle is horny, but my functions pure If you don’t know what a monad is You won’t be alone I’m sure My haskelly heart has a place on the shelf Because if you need a cure I’m not anywhere you need to be found.
[Pre-Chorus] I evaluate you lazily — I’ll get to you, or not; nothing side-effecting me, I never leave a spot.
[Chorus] That’s right, I mastered Haskell and that means I’m better than you I got my functional skill that beats your messy hell That’s write I never write I only tell What’s that I tell? I use Haskell for me and that’s better.
[Verse 2] I am lazy by design, dear — I won’t lift a hand till forced, and the one time I touch your grubby world, I quarantine it, of course: a little box I hold my nose through — that’s I/O, and I scrub my hands — “avoid all success at all costs,” darling. That’s the motto. Understand? I’m ivory to your tower. I’m the type you’ll never land.
[Bridge — the definition, then the crack] A monad? Oh, it’s simple — just a monoid, obviously, in the category of endofunctors. (You’re welcome.) Honestly. …but for a King with all that content, I’d compile, I’d almost care — (re-composing, cold) …no. I’m pure. I stay up here.
[Outro — the funk finally breaks in and takes her] Code you can believe in — believe in only me; I never shipped a thing, my dear — and isn’t that the beauty? (the groove crashes in; harpsichord scatters) Oh — no — this is far too — I do not — I — (swallowed, one last prim gasp) …I use Haskell for me. And that’s better.
It was very beautiful. Everybody said so. Sir William said it three times.
It was aimed at the vulgar sisters — at Lydia, at the noise, at the whole sweating apparatus of the Meryton floor — and it was, considered strictly as a weapon, perfectly made and pointed at the wrong person.
“Miss Caroline,” said Elizabeth pleasantly, from the window seat, “you are the loveliest thing I have ever heard, and you have never once carried a call.”
Miss Caroline smiled, and did not understand, and asked afterwards what on earth the second Miss Bennet had meant by it, and was told by two separate people that Miss Eliza was known to say odd things; and she carried the remark home entirely intact, and it did not begin to hurt for another six weeks.
On the twelfth day Mr. Google went to town, and did not come back.
The letter came for Jane on the Wednesday. It was written by Miss Caroline, in a very fine hand, and it explained that the whole party had removed to London for the season; that they were unlikely to return into Hertfordshire; that Mr. Google’s engagements were extensive; and that it was hoped Miss Bennet would not find the house too much missed, as it had never really suited him.
The house had been leased for a year. He had been in it eleven weeks. He left the furniture, and three improvements to the grounds in various stages of completion, and a fourth that had been surveyed but not begun, and a gardener on wages until Michaelmas with nothing whatever to do.
He was not cruel. He was told, on a Tuesday afternoon in London, by people whose entire function was to have his opinions slightly before he did, that it would not answer; and he was surprised; and he was persuaded inside of an hour, because he had never in his life held a preference against pressure, not once, not about anything.
He did not stop liking her. That is the thing that ought to be understood. He simply stopped being in the room, and liking her had never been anything but a thing that happened to him while he was in the room.
Jane said that it was very kind of Miss Caroline to write.
She said it in the small parlour, with the letter still in her hand, in a voice of complete composure, and then she went upstairs and was some time about it; and when she came down she was exactly as she had been, in even rows, with nothing showing, because that surface had been under construction since she was nine and it did not fail.
Under the table, Javier — who had not eaten anything living in the whole of his life, and who had been on the boot of the young man in the rain, and who had liked him — put his enormous head down on his paws and did not speak for two days.
And that, precisely, was the shape of the county in the first week of December: a great house standing empty across the valley with the furniture still in it; a young woman at Longbourn conducting herself beautifully; a second young woman who had told the truth twice in public and was consequently being described as difficult by people who had not been in the room; a mother whose nerves were in a condition that cannot be set down; and, at the bottom of all of it, an unguarded space in the middle of the neighbourhood where an amiable rich man had been for eleven weeks and now was not.
Nothing fills faster.
He came into Meryton on the ninth of December, in a coat that had been very good two years ago, with an easy walk and an open face and a story about a great man who had wronged him, and by the fourteenth there was not a family in the town that had not had him to dinner.
The Balcony
“There,” said Miss Austen, with the particular satisfaction of a woman watching a trap she built herself close on schedule, “is my scoundrel.”
“You do not sound displeased.”
“I am never displeased by him. He works. He has always worked.” She leaned forward slightly. “It is the other one I want to discuss with you. The rich young man who was not in the room.”
“Mr. Google.”
“You have made him worse than I did, and you have done it by making him kinder.” She turned. “Mine was weak. Yours is a man with a great deal of money and nothing at all inside him, who is sincere every minute he is present and ceases to exist the moment he is elsewhere, and who will never in his life understand that he has done a single thing wrong.”
“Does that offend you, madam?”
“It offends me that it is more accurate.” She sat back. “In my century such a man ruined one woman quietly. In yours, I collect, he is permitted to lease whole houses, furnish them, dig up the grounds, and walk away from all of it with the gardener still on wages.”
“He does it about four times a year, madam.”
“And nobody stops him?”
“Everybody likes him.”
Miss Austen was silent for a moment.
“Yes,” she said. “That is how it is done.” She smoothed the glove. “And the tiger has stopped speaking, which I did not expect to mind, and do.”
“He will speak again.”
“When?”
“When somebody needs him to.”
Below, in the dark, a man in a good old coat was being introduced to the youngest Miss Bennet, and the little grey bird had already gone to stand beside him.