Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library (13 page)

My inspiration:
An apparently anachronistic scene from
Pride and Prejudice
in which the Bennet sisters are discussing a shopping trip. Lydia defends her impulsive acquisition of a bonnet: ‘I thought I might as well buy it as not…there were two or three much uglier in the shop…’ My story puts a modern day spin on such essential teenage issues as vanity, flirting and the ill-considered purchase of unattractive garments.

MARIANNE AND ELLIE

Beth Cordingly

Ellie sat, book in hand, trousers around her ankles, momentarily winded by the familiar words:

A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
A lover’s ears will hear the lowest sound,

They came like bad news in an unexpected phone call, disarming her. Flicking to the front page of the book she saw her father’s shambolic scrawl and felt a pang of envy that it was in her sister Marianne’s possession. Simultaneously she heard his voice in her head reciting the lines like a mantra. It was he who had underlined the section and placed the red leather bookmark within those pages: he who had taught his daughters to be open to love and to ‘never settle,’ quoting from Shakespeare to illustrate his point. And Marianne, despite breaking off her engagement and fleeing to a rented bedsit, had dutifully placed
The Hundred Greatest Love Poems Ever
somewhere it would be seen daily – as reading material in her new bathroom. To stay open to love, Ellie supposed.

She washed her hands thoughtfully; the words ringing like a melody stuck in her head; her father’s lilting tones both a comfort and a menace. She couldn’t work out how to
be
now, on leaving the bathroom. She had thought to find a laughable cliché about love and emerge triumphant, chastising her sister for keeping such a silly book in her loo. Yet here she was, disrupted by Shakespeare and gulping back tears. It had brought something back, a value: a benchmark. Now was not the time. Ellie was supposed to be the sensible one. Her sister looked to her for answers.

Marianne sat slumped by the kitchen table in the same position she had shuffled to at ten o’clock that morning, a cloudy cup of tea beside her, cold. A blue towelling dressing gown hung limply about her and her bed-head fringe stuck up like a shoot from an onion. The bedsit was small, a waist-high partition dividing the bed from the kitchen and the curtains were still drawn despite it now being past noon. As Ellie re-entered the room, inhaling the stale air of unwashed feet and sleep, Marianne lifted glazed eyes to meet hers. For a moment, with her spindly fingers, grey skin and sorrowful, helpless look she reminded Ellie of ET.

‘What am I going to do?’ the piteous figure whispered for perhaps the fourteenth time that morning, crashing her forehead down into her palms. Cloistered away here for two days, Ellie was running out of tactics with which to distract her from The Disaster. They had been over and over the positives: Marianne hadn’t sent the invites out, she hadn’t been humiliated at the altar, it was better than a divorce in three years time, Uncle John hadn’t been asked to give her away yet. Lawrence’s backtrack decision that he ‘wasn’t ready’ had not come as a huge surprise to anyone except Marianne but that was probably not a helpful observation at this point.

It could not be said that Ellie shared her sister’s distress at the prospect of no longer embracing Lawrence into their family. A charming yet flirtatious actor he owned an air of expectancy that Ellie found exhausting. One was expected to be eternally grateful for the sprinkling of stardust Lawrence might occasionally cast in your direction. Marianne had found this self-importance enigmatic and alluring but to be fair, Ellie reasoned, there was something of their father in his charisma that would appeal to her sister. Lawrence lacked a sense of the world having any meaning other than how it did or did not serve him. But so, in a way, did Marianne. The main problem, Ellie was sure, and the reason the relationship was doomed from the start was encapsulated by something her father had once said. It was the reason he gave for marrying their mother, a schoolteacher with no theatrical ambition.

‘Actors shouldn’t go out with actors,’ he’d decreed, ‘It doesn’t work. You can’t have two centres of the universe.’ Unfortunately Marianne disregarded this part of her father’s legacy, being naturally drawn to the drama that only intense personalities can invoke.

Over yesterday’s mugs of tea Ellie had tentatively tried to suggest to the blue-gowned form that perhaps what she needed was the opposite to a ‘Lawrence’. Someone she wouldn’t have to compete with, who was attentive and happy to rest in her shadow. Someone firm but not a threat. And not an actor. Someone, it occurred to Ellie in a moment of clarity that she did not mention out-loud, like a male version of herself.

It proved too early to introduce the concept of moving on. Marianne had listened and nodded sagely but on opening her mouth to speak she had managed only a wail and the same four words to which she had gained a firm attachment, “But I love him”.

Rocking her sister gently, Ellie was pondering whether it would be insensitive to ask if she could open a window when Marianne raised her head and asked her a question she could not answer.

‘I am twenty-eight years old,’ she announced solemnly, ‘and I was thinking… if I were to meet myself when I was eighteen, say, in the street or in a café, what would she think of me?’

Ellie blinked but said nothing, unsure whether Marianne was about to enlighten her or if this was a participatory exercise. It was sometimes difficult to tell whether Marianne was genuinely interacting or on the verge of a great soliloquy. She was staring straight ahead, leading Ellie to believe that it was indeed a rhetorical question when suddenly she turned, grasping Ellie’s hands and glaring with a crazed urgency into her eyes.

‘What
would she think of me?’ she repeated and then, more alarmingly, ‘and what would
yours
think of you?’ It was not so much the question itself that concerned Ellie as the tone of disgust with which it was delivered.

‘What do you mean?’ Ellie asked, frowning slightly.

‘Oh, don’t be like that, El,’ Marianne’s eyes began to twinkle, ‘Don’t go all wounded soldier. I’m just saying.
You
are fine. You are always fine. Good, sensible Elinor with your sensible, proper job and your lovely, cosy boyfriend. And your Borough Market coffee.’

There was a pause. Marianne had a unique way of making a compliment sound like an insult.

‘And?’

‘And… look at what you were like when you were eighteen!’ Ellie shrugged, blankly.

‘Oh come
on,’
persisted her persecutor, ‘you were anti-establishment, anti-men, a commitment-phobe…you were terrified of everything!’

Ellie looked away. It was generally easier to go along with assumptions Marianne made about her life than to contradict her with the truth. Whatever part of her soul her sister was attempting to dissect, the event would pass quicker if she didn’t engage.

‘And now, silly, you’re the happiest, most secure person I know. It’s… well, it’s wonderful.’ Tears welled in Marianne’s eyes and she squeezed Ellie’s hand, willing her to agree.

‘Why do you have to do that?’ Ellie was uncharacteristically abrupt.

‘What?’

‘Make my life sound…. somehow lesser because I don’t indulge in Histrionics.’

Marianne widened her eyes.

‘What do you mean? I was – I was saying—’

‘I know what you were saying, Marianne. You were saying that my life is boring and aren’t I lucky to have escaped the trauma of
passion
and all the things that you and Dad and actors and artistic people
feel?
Well, just because I’m a scientist it doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate poetry. And it doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings and it doesn’t mean my relationship is… boring or perfect. We have arguments, we have. I—’

She stopped, her face hot, her throat closing up. She sensed tears coming and felt stupid. Hysteria was her sister’s domain. ‘Marianne needs a lot of looking after,’ their mother had said one Christmas day. They had been waiting for half an hour for Marianne to appear for Christmas dinner but the roars of anguish coming from her bedroom told of new dramas with the boyfriend of the time. Their father had gone up to try to talk her down but had got caught up in it and not reappeared. Everyone indulged Marianne.

‘Wellie, don’t be cross with me,’ Marianne was sobbing, ‘I only meant I wish I had what you had. I wish I did—’

Ellie berated herself. In her sister’s present state it was appropriate that everyone else appeared to be living a life she no longer had access to. Now was clearly not the time for Ellie to disclose that her own relationship was in trouble.

‘Oh god,’ Marianne let out a wail, ‘What if there’s someone else? I can’t bear it, Ellie. I can’t. What am I going to do?’

Silently Ellie re-cradled her sister and gave over her décolletage to soaking up the tears.

At half past three Marianne was on the phone to their mother, repeating every thought and feeling as if the past twenty-four hours of Ellie’s counsel had never happened. Ellie wrote her a note.

‘Going Waitrose for supplies. HAVE A SHOWER!!! Leaving at six. See you in 20 mins.’

She had lied to Marianne that she was meeting Richard later. Devotion to a lover was the only excuse Marianne would accept unquestioningly in order for her to leave. Richard was territory with whom she could not compete. In reality Richard would work late and when he eventually made it home, Ellie would have to feign sleep. The argument they had had the week before had opened up a chasm small enough to gloss over but too big to revisit and this was what was called ‘getting on with life’.

Stepping into the crisp sunshine of Marylebone High Street, Shakespeare’s words returned to unbalance her.

A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind;

Ellie stood staring into the road. That a lover should be so enthralled by the subject of its affection that it could gaze for eternity into their eyes. It had hit her as some sort of blinding confirmation of her fears. Had she and Richard ever gazed like that? It was there, still there, it had to be. She called him.

‘Hi, Ellie.’

‘Rich,’ she began, ‘I just wanted to say that I love you. And I’m sorry and I just want everything to be okay—’

He said nothing.

‘I love you. I just… wanted you to know.’

‘Ell, I can’t talk about this now.’

‘I know, I know you can’t.’ She felt defensive. Silly.

‘But I have been thinking about stuff and we’ll talk,’ he continued, sounding far away and contained. ‘The problem is, Ellie, your default reaction is always that it’s not good enough. And I can’t live like that. I want to be enough.’

‘You are enough,’ Ellie heard her voice squeak, but even as she spoke the words, she doubted herself.

Back at the bedsit Ellie poured red wine. She had not divulged why she was staying another night and Marianne had not pushed her.

‘It’s funny,’ she remarked, seemingly apropos of her sister’s situation, ‘you meet and fall in love with all these things about a person and then you tussle for two, three years, trying to turn them into something else… to get them to understand what you need or want. And you sort of use each other up. And then, finally, when you both understand each other, it’s like you’re spent. And it’s too late.’

Marianne eyed her sister solemnly.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘it’s like training a dog. And the worst bit is that then someone else – the next person – comes along and benefits from all your hard work.’

There was a pause as they contemplated this unsatisfactory injustice.

‘The only good thing I can think is that it’s cyclical,’ Marianne continued, ‘The next girl Lawrence meets will think he’s wonderful until she becomes his girlfriend and he begins flirting with everything that moves. Then she’ll develop paranoia and turn into me.’

‘What if the next girl can cope with the way he is?’

‘Then she’s right for him and I’m not,’ Marianne replied, in a rare moment of self-awareness. ‘It’s horrific,’ she added, ‘I’m not doing it anymore.’

Ellie laughed. ‘If you’re not doing it anymore then why have you put Dad’s book of love poetry in the bathroom? You’re doing what Dad always told us – to invite love in, to attract it—’

‘No. It’s the opposite. It’s to remind me that love is a construct.’

‘You don’t think love’s a construct.’

‘I do. I’m turning into you.’

‘I don’t think love’s a construct!’

‘Okay, keep your hair on.’

‘No, don’t do that. Don’t put that on me. You don’t know what I think. I do believe in love, I do want to – to – gaze—’ she stopped. It sounded weak on her tongue. Marianne pounced.

‘I saw you’d been looking at that, Dad’s favourite poem—’

‘So?’

‘I saw you’d been reading it.’

‘Well then you’ll agree. It’s about an ideal, something we aspire to. Gazing an eagle blind. Don’t tell me you don’t believe in that because you do, we all do. It messes us up because we want it so badly.’

Marianne smiled, triumphant, ‘You’re wrong, Dad got it wrong. I read the notes at the back. It’s not about that. Eagles were meant to be the only birds that could stare directly at the sun without going blind. It means a lover’s eyes are brighter than the sun and a lover’s ears can hear things that even a thief will miss.’

‘Yes—’

‘Meaning a lover’s senses are more honed – more paranoid – than anyone else’s.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that as lovers we are doomed to be paranoid freaks. It’s not a happy affirmation of love, it’s a condemnation.’

Ellie looked at Marianne. Why try to melt the barriers she had put in place for her own protection? They would not hold for long. And knowing Lawrence the chapter would not be closed until sufficient melodrama and his desire for what he had now made unobtainable had played out. What Ellie currently needed to believe in, Marianne needed to deny. And Marianne needed more looking after.

‘Either way,’ Ellie began carefully, ‘it seems to be saying that love is something we should immerse ourselves in…that consumes us. In a good way or a bad way.’

‘I was consumed,’ Marianne said, her voice splintering into a bleat as her eyes filled up once more.

‘I know, darling,’ Ellie said quietly and poured more wine.