Jane Actually

changed and a family unrecognizable. By the Great War, she no longer followed her family, save for a very distant relation who she thought resembled her brother Henry and whose name he shared. And it was interest in this relative that brought her to the mud and the horror of the Somme and unbeknownst to her at the time, also to be in attendance at the death of the man who would be her friend decades later.
    . . .
    After their chat ended, Albert chuckled at the interest of his friend in the little reports of his family. She had actually corrected him on the age of Thomas and she reminded him that it had been she who recommended the
Thomas the Tank Engine
DVD as his birthday present.
    He also had to laugh at how deftly she’d managed to avoid rejecting his offer to pay her admission to the AGM. He had an uncharitable thought she’d invented the job as an excuse not to accept his charity, but as she did confirm she would be attending—as a paying attendee—he had to assume her employment was genuine.
    And as always after a chat with her he felt the warm glow he remembered after receiving one of the letters from his wife. And as always he felt the tug of guilt that this woman should excite in him feelings he knew were the province of his long dead wife Catherine.
    He tried to push the guilt aside and instead he found additional humour in the patterns of his friend’s conversation. She always began her chats in the modern vernacular but by the end of it would always devolve into the language of Hampshire. She might not actually claim to be Jane Austen, but she certainly was of Hampshire.
    And she had died a long time ago, for she used expressions familiar to him from his youth. As a gentleman, he’d never pried into her age, but he had the unfounded belief that she might have died during the same epidemic that claimed him.
    And then he remembered his own language, how he became far courtlier than was his wont when alive. His romance of Catherine was never as mannered as his conversations with Jane. He had fallen in love with Catherine on the spot and within a week had proposed and within a month had married. His memory of the eloquence of his proposal shamed him, it being along the lines of “Wotcher say we get married?”
    She had deserved better than him, certainly better than being a widow at twenty with two babies.
    Is that my compensation? I gave Catherine my passion and I give Jane what little eloquence I can command.
    The thought struck him hard and brought him out of the AfterNet field and made him aware of his surroundings and the sleeping octogenarian at the card table and the brisk steps of the caregivers in the hallway and the overhead fluorescent lights of the games room, especially the one that presaged its imminent death by its annoying flicker.
    I just equated Jane with Catherine. I just equated a dead woman with …
And then that thought struck him even harder.
They’re both dead and so am I. I’m being a ridiculous old man. Even Mr Cardenas is more alive than me,
he thought, looking at his fellow inmate who’d fallen asleep in the games room.
    Day is dead, and let us sleep.
1
If only I could.
    1 From the poem of the same name by Augusta Davies Webster

Something fresher
It was the best of times?
    “It was hardly the best of times, but Judith had to concede it was hardly the worst. Mostly it just lay there, waiting.” She laughed at her own cleverness or perhaps pretension. Truth was, she was not as enamoured of Dickens as a novelist should be. She tore the paper out of the typewriter, mashed it into a ball and threw it at the wastebasket. It did not go in but bounced off the edge and fell to the floor where it joined its compatriots of similar failed openings.
    Undaunted, she pulled another sheet from the ream of crisp, white blank paper and loaded the typewriter for another attempt. She sat poised, her fingers resting lightly on the keys, a cigarette dangling from lips in what she hoped was a world weary attitude, something befitting a novelist attempting the definitive book that would capture the essence of an entire generation scarred by four years of war.
    “Are you still here?” she suddenly heard. Her flatmate had entered unbeknownst to her and was looking over her shoulder. “Christ, you still haven’t written a thing!”
    Jane looked at what she’d written and closed the window, the mouse pointer poised above “Don’t Save” in answer to the question “Do you want to save