Jane Actually

send it up hot.

Today, of course, it would seem strange to serve a hot, creamy soup to young people flushed from dancing.

A sneak peek

Jane and Mary’s first book reading
    J ane looked nervously to the book-lined corridor as Mr Pembroke continued his lengthy story about the drunken author he once had to extricate from a jail in the southern American state of Georgia. A long life spent in publishing had given him a vast fund of stories and he was entertaining Jane, Melody and Mary with those stories while they waited for more people to arrive at the Strand for the book signing.
    But Jane could not keep her mind on the story. She kept hoping to see another attendee to supplement the seven people who’d arrived so far. All seven were seated alone, spread out over the two sections, five rows and 49 chairs, one chair in the last row gone missing. She’d had time to count.
    It all looked so horribly empty to Jane and she wondered if there were some way to better distribute the six women and one man, but decided short of a miracle of the loaves and fishes variety that there was little to be done.
    “I finally found a judge to set bail but by then it was too late. But it didn’t matter; he used the story as his own
Reading Gaol
1 opportunity and created a particularly pornographic ballad that I cannot possibly repeat. He would recite it at any literary party after his fourth or fifth martini. He never could hold his liquor. Which reminds me of …”
    Jane decided she could take the opportunity while he related yet another publishing story to see if there were people in the store who might look as if they had come to the book signing but had gotten lost.
    She was philosophic about the turnout, of course, and had said that ten people or a hundred made no difference to her, but seven! She left Mary’s side and navigated the maze to the middle of the store, which was doing good business on a Saturday morning. Coffee sipping customers were in line at the registers and the table of bargain advance reading copies was mobbed.
    It was quite a scene and Jane thought briefly of the circulating libraries of her day, where she often met with people to gossip, buy postcards and had attended several book readings. She tried to imagine herself at Marshall’s on Milsom Street in Bath, a venti cappuccino in hand, listening to Ann Radcliffe read from
The Mysteries of Udolpho
2 while following along on her e-reader.
    Unfortunately her recce failed to make her aware of any individuals obviously there for her appearance and she retreated back to the reading area.
    She reacquired the AfterNet field of Mary’s terminal and realized her avatar was speaking for her to the store manager, who had just rejoined them.
    “Please don’t concern yourself, Mr Britten. A low turnout might be a blessing for I am already nervous,” Mary said to the worried young store employee. Jane looked at the transcript of their conversation and saw that he had apologized for the low turnout.
    “Where have you been?” Mary asked of Jane. “I’ve been tap dancing while you were gone.”
    Jane wasn’t familiar with the expression but guessed its meaning.
    “Sorry, I just looked in the hallway. And also through the store to see …”
    But Jane’s reply was cut short by Mr Britten holding up one hand while talking into the phone he held up to his ear.
    “Oh, wait a minute,” he said to Mary and Melody. “It looks like we have some people waiting outside on the sidewalk. I think someone put up the overflow sign. Let me take care of this.” He and Mr Pembroke hurriedly left to investigate, leaving Jane, Mary and Melody able to converse.
    “I told you there was nothing to worry about,” Melody said, but the relief in her voice made clear that she’d been worried as well. Melody had advocated this book signing a week ahead of the official start of the book tour as a “shakedown cruise” and it was put together with almost no publicity or advertising. Instead they decided to see how much of a turnout could be achieved just by word of mouth.
    “Well, as Mary said, a low turnout might be preferable,” Jane said. Mary spoke these words for Jane, feeling odd to be referring to herself in the third person.
    “Are you nervous, Jane?” Melody asked.
    “Not as nervous as Mary must be, is that not so?”
    Mary said these last words uncertain how to answer. Finally she said, “I thought we agreed I shouldn’t break out of character, Jane. And if you’re