Jane Actually

might also serve her country.
    And so the next day Jane waited at Westminster station and the next and the day after that, hoping to catch sight of her, which she finally did five days later. Jane followed her to the Cabinet War Rooms where she worked as a telephone operator. For months she became a voyeur, daily following the young woman from her shared flat in Camden Town to the war rooms.
    When the young woman—Helen she was—entered the building, she would put her book away and don the glasses she needed to do her work but which she obviously thought unbecoming.
    She was a dedicated reader and over the course of two months, she finished
Mansfield Park
and then
Emma
and then
Jane Eyre
and then
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
and when she could, Jane read along, mostly at night when Helen would wear her glasses and hold her book with her long arms outstretched, perhaps in compensation for those cramped times on the Underground.
    Helen died the night of the 29th of December, 1940, 2 when so many others died. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, on a date with a man she had hoped for months might ask her out.
    Jane had tried to write about Helen, about her hopes and dreams of the man, who also worked in the war rooms and of whom Jane did not approve. But despite her hope that the story would bring Helen back to life, that she might at least offer Helen a measure of happiness, she had not had much success.
    The tone is not right,
Jane thought.
Perhaps not having heard the actual speech of the time I am unable to reproduce it.
    Which thought made her again long for sound. Of all the senses she had lost, it seemed that sound might be the one she longed for the most—that is until she thought of the aroma of warm bread or the feel of cool linen on a hot night or the tartness of an orange. But for right now, to hear a voice again, to hear people speaking, would be a joy beyond compare.
    She sighed her inaudible sigh.
There is no sense in wishing for what I cannot have. I have long since accepted my death; there is no point in cavilling on this minor point.
    Writing
Sanditon
had been so much easier, but then she’d written it so many years ago and in the language of her own time. Writing it in her mind was the only thing that kept her grip on sanity in the first years after her death. It was a tedious process, of course, and it was that tediousness that provided the anchor. She’d learned to memorize what she’d written and retold the story to herself again and again like an Icelandic saga, each time weeping at her faulty memory. She would be forced to reconstruct that which she’d forgotten but in the process she was honing her words razor sharp. And when, after the arrival of the AfterNet, she was finally able to write it down, she thought it the best she had ever written.
    My guiding principles have always been to write what I know and to write of the here and now. But what for me is the here and now? Is it my life in Hampshire or the years I wandered in India or the time alone in the Rocky Mountains or the trenches of the Great War or my time in the Holy Land?
    And do I really remember that life in Hampshire anymore? I, who am forced to look up the particulars of my own life in wikipedia when I forget the names of my own nieces and nephews.
    That thought of wikipedia made Jane uncomfortable. Now when she wrote she was constantly pausing in her work to Google some fact. She had never before attempted writing something outside her ken, but the resources of the Internet now made that possible. Before she would have never dreamed of writing about the life of a WAAF corporal, but now she had access to museums and libraries that reproduced every aspect of that life and that promised to lend a veneer of verisimilitude to her efforts.
    Perhaps the here and now for me is the here and now of 2011.
    Jane closed the window but did save what she’d written. She had been a novelist long enough to recognize that even her best work required considerable editing and that it was a mistake to consign anything she’d written to nonexistence. After all, when she still put pen to paper and would abandon a story, she still kept it.
    Instead, as she was wont to do when frustrated or bored, she looked at her email. She maintained several accounts, the first being the one created when she first accessed the AfterNet. It was [email protected], she being the fourth person who had claimed her identity, although to be