Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library (14 page)

My inspiration:
In
Sense and Sensibility
there is a moment where Elinor nurses Marianne’s broken heart whilst concealing that she suffers one too. I wanted to explore a modern-day version of
Sense and Sensibility
where two sisters of opposing temperaments discuss the nature of love. As with Austen’s characters they are eloquent and well read but these present day heroines have professions, are older and live independently. I have aimed to maintain a middle class sensibility and lifestyle. I realise the authorial voice I use can be quite telling but was hoping to emulate Austen in this style.

THE JANE AUSTEN HEN WEEKEND

Clair Humphries

It began with a blocked loo.

‘How?’ I asked, staring as the sinister-looking stream of water oozed out from under the bathroom door.

‘How do you think?’ Anna glared at Lucy. ‘Someone’s toilet-bothering brat stuffed too much paper down there, didn’t they?’

‘That’s not fair!’ Lucy clutched a gloved hand dramatically to her ample chest. Her Empireline frock was doing its best to withstand her womanly curves, but I could see why Keira Knightley proved such a popular choice for costume drama casting directors. Anything above a C cup was perilous and clearly put the stitching under intolerable strain.

‘It bloody is fair. You and Oscar have been locked in there for an hour.’

‘He’s not well, I told you. He can’t help that—’

‘Why bring him then? Couldn’t your mum look after him or something?’

‘Oh, I can tell you don’t have kids! What am I supposed to do – he’s been up all night with the runs, crying his eyes out. I can’t just abandon him for the weekend!’

‘Um, could you try not to swear please, Anna?’ Rachel interrupted, looking up from her well-thumbed guide book. ‘Genteel ladies of the Regency period wouldn’t use that kind of language. And ‘toilet-bothering’ doesn’t really make sense. One’s ‘toilet’ usually referred to getting dressed, or powdering your nose, that sort of thing—’

We all looked at Rachel; now wasn’t the best time for a lecture on early nineteenth century linguistics. Water was spreading rapidly across the flag stoned floor, accompanied by a distinctly whiffy odour. Wisely, Anna chose to ignore her and pressed on.

‘Dragging your child down here with the squits is hardly fair on us either, is it? Now the loo’s out of action and we’ve probably all been infected with whatever vile bug he’s carrying.’

‘What was I supposed to do? Stay at home while you all have a lovely time as usual? Well, I’m sick of it!’ Lucy’s lip began to wobble. ‘I haven’t been anywhere for ages – mums never get the chance to dress up and play. I just wanted some fun for a change.’

‘Fun?’ Anna waved her fan accusingly in my direction. ‘Remind me, will you – how exactly is this meant to be fun? I’m freezing in this stupid dress, there’s no pub for miles around and my favourite shoes are about to be written off by raw sewage!’

She had a point. The toilet overflow was gathering momentum and, squealing like the girls that we were, we hurried back down the corridor, escaping the pool of evil-smelling goo. Not the ideal beginning to a Jane Austen-themed hen weekend, I had to admit. And, yes, maybe I should take some of the blame – it was my idea. I’d booked the venue, hired the costumes and (with the help of my year three class) cobbled together the props, determined everything would be perfect for my best friend Rachel: romantic novelist and bride-to-be, who was marrying her own real life Mr Darcy next Saturday. The premise was simple enough. Four friends, two days and one country house. So far, so civilised. What, dear reader, could go wrong?

We retired to the drawing room. With his bowel temporarily at rest, three-year-old Oscar was sleeping soundly in the nursery while we gathered around the card table to discuss our options.

‘We could have a go with a plunger,’ I suggested in my best primary-school-teacher-rallying-a-class-of-eight-year-olds voice.

‘Have you got a plunger handy?’ Anna asked.

‘Well, no—’

‘Even if you did, we’re hardly dressed for a spot of plumbing, are we?’ Lucy said, blinking back tears, her arms folded beneath her heaving bosom. I scowled at her; frankly, I was getting fed up with her emotional outpourings and quivering flesh.

‘Alright – you decide what to do,’ I told her. ‘Seeing as it’s your child who got us into this mess.’

‘I don’t know what to do!’ Lucy wailed into an embroidered white lace handkerchief that I’d sourced (rather cleverly, I thought) from eBay. I couldn’t deny she was right though; none of us were suitably attired for manual labour, plunger or no plunger. It had taken hours to transform ourselves into Regency belles, doing our best to look the part with our hair curled and pinned up on top of our heads and our cheeks pinched pink. I’d planned a weekend of wafting round in muslin gowns, not shovelling sewage.

‘What would Jane Austen do?’ Rachel wondered aloud.

‘I know exactly what Jane would do,’ Anna said, standing up. ‘She’d get a man in.’

Unfortunately, men weren’t cheap – not in this part of rural England anyway.

‘Sixty-quid call out charge,’ Anna announced ten minutes later, snapping her mobile shut. ‘That’s before he does anything. And he might not get here for an hour.’

‘Great. What do we do in the meantime?’ Lucy asked.

‘It says here that whist was a popular choice for ladies of good breeding,’ Rachel read excitedly from her book. ‘Elizabeth Bennet attends a whist party in
Pride and Prejudice,
and it’s mentioned in
Emma
and in
Mansfield Park—
’

‘Excellent! Let’s play whist.’ I felt my spirits lift; I’d packed cards, along with some gothic-looking pewter candlesticks. We gathered around the rosewood table and I arranged the candles while Anna opened the cards. This was more like it, I thought with satisfaction. Female bonding, just as Jane would have wanted. Outside, the evening was drawing in; dusk had settled, casting long, low shadows across the oak-panelled room. A perfect time for cards by candlelight. We would eat soon, I decided. Crumpets and dainty little cakes, with tea served in white china cups.

‘Who’s got matches?’ Anna said as she shuffled the cards.

‘Matches?’ I frowned. ‘I thought you’d bring a lighter. You’re the only one who smokes—’

‘I’ve given up.’

‘What?’ Lucy shrieked with laughter. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You smoke more than anyone I know. You can’t give up.’

‘Well I have, so shut it.’ Anna regarded her coolly. ‘The flip side is I’m permanently starving and liable to punch someone at any moment.’

This was enough to silence all of us, even Lucy. In the City bank where she worked, Anna’s temper was legendary. She spent her working day doing complicated things with stocks and derivatives, an area I knew nothing about, except it seemed to involve her screaming down the phone at a succession of ex-public schoolboys who were foolish enough to think they could screw her over. None of them could.

‘So, no matches then.’ Reluctantly, I went to turn the light on. Of course the house had electricity – along with central heating, Wi-Fi access and all the other accoutrements people expected from a historic country house in the twenty-first century. It did rather spoil the mood though, I felt, as the intriguing shadows of the drawing room were exposed in the harsh glare of artificial light.

‘How many cards am I dealing?’ Anna asked as I joined them again.

‘No idea. Rachel? What are the rules?’

‘I don’t know – I’ve never played whist before.’

‘But you’re the one with the guide book,’ I reminded her. ‘You’re always in the library; you said you’d do the research.’

‘I’ve done my best!’ Rachel slammed her book shut. ‘I have had a wedding to organise, you know. I’ve been really busy, sorting out the cars, the flowers, the dress…’

It was true. For months Rachel had been planning her big day, choreographing every moment as precisely as the plot in one of her slushy novels. That was her dream: to be the great romantic heroine, to live out the happy endings she created on paper for real. It wasn’t much to ask – who doesn’t want their wedding day to be special? And here I was, the chief bridesmaid, stressing her out on what should have been a lovely, indulgent weekend. I started to feel bad.

‘Sorry, Rachel.’ I put my gloved hand over hers. ‘You just sit back and relax, we’ll find something fun to do. How else did young Regency ladies amuse themselves?’

Lucy leaned over and picked up the guide book.

‘Um, cross stitch—’ she read aloud.

‘Boring,’ Anna said.

‘Charades—’

‘Not bloody likely.’

‘Pianoforte recitals!’ Lucy’s eyes lit up. ‘Oh, let’s do that – there’s a piano in the room next door and I love that bit in
Sense and Sensibility
where Marianne and Willoughby play together and he’s watching her in that way – you know, all rakish and sort of brooding and repressed—’

‘Please!’ Anna rolled her eyes.

‘Can anyone play the piano?’ Rachel asked hopefully. I suddenly found all eyes on me.

‘No,’ I said firmly (and truthfully).

‘But you’re a schoolteacher,’ Anna said.

‘And?’

‘All my teachers could play the piano.’ ‘And mine,’ Lucy said. ‘Mine too,’ Rachel added.

‘Well, good for them.’ I shrugged. ‘Because I can’t, sorry.’ Three collective sighs of disappointment echoed around the woodpanelled walls. Which was a bit rich, I thought – three years of teacher training had equipped me with a diverse range of skills: classroom management, extracting pencil rubbers from the ears of small children and the ability to construct lifelike models of dinosaurs to scale from bits of papier mache and Copydex. Mastering a musical instrument seemed to have been squeezed out of the modern Cert Ed curriculum. I explained this to my dear, loyal friends.

They remained unimpressed.

‘All my teachers could play piano,’ Anna reiterated, adding, ‘no wonder kids can’t read anymore and spend the whole time happy-slapping strangers in the street. Typical.’ Before I could defend myself, she stood up. ‘I’m going for a fag,’ she said and swept grandly out of the drawing room. Which left three of us.

‘I’ll go and check on Oscar,’ Lucy said, getting to her feet. ‘If he’s still got a temperature I should really take him home – sorry, Rachel.’ She looked apologetic. ‘It’s not very child-friendly here, is it? With the toilet and hygiene and everything—’

So then there were two.

Rachel started to sniffle. But all was not lost! I resolved then, dear reader, to save the day. I couldn’t provide a rakish piano-playing suitor, an evening of sparkling yet genteel amusements or even a workable flushing loo for my party, but I had at my disposal something far, far superior. The one thing guaranteed to unite a group of females in even the direst of circumstances.

Cake.

I shouldn’t have shouted at Lucy. It wasn’t Oscar’s fault that he’d gatecrashed our hen weekend, or blocked the toilet, or even that he’d managed (despite his upset stomach) to demolish the entire hamper of cupcakes in the half an hour we had faffed about in the drawing room. I know I should have held back – but it was the icing that did it. All those hours I’d spent, hunched over my kitchen table with the latest Nigella, anointing my home-made delicacies with chocolate sprinkles, little silver balls and edible flowers. I’d packed them so carefully too, along with my granny’s best china and filigree napkins, a confection of girly delight that I knew would gain Rachel’s approval and even that of Jane (God rest her soul) Austen herself. To find Oscar standing there, his grubby toddler mouth encrusted with pink icing was just too much.

‘There’s no need to be rude,’ Lucy sobbed, smoothing his hair.

‘Why shouldn’t he be allowed a bit of cake?’

‘A
bit
of cake? How much is left exactly, Rachel?’

Rachel peered into the depths of my ravaged wicker picnic hamper.

‘None,’ she replied. ‘Apart from a few crumbs and some hundreds and thousands—’

‘None!’ I nearly exploded.

‘He’s not well!’ Lucy yelled at me, as if that made it all better.

‘We won’t be having cake then,’ Rachel said sadly and flipped the lid of the hamper shut.

‘There’s still crumpets,’ I said. ‘And I can make some tea—’ but I knew that was it. The Jane Austen hen weekend ended here; I’d failed her. I was a rubbish chief bridesmaid, a rubbish event organiser and a thoroughly rubbish best friend.

Oscar emitted a loud burp.

‘Mummy,’ he said in that whiny toddler voice that reminded me why I’d chosen to teach eight-year-olds and not a nursery or foundation class. ‘I think I do a sick now.’

My beautiful hamper. There was no time to explain politely (not that I was feeling especially polite at that point) to Lucy how priceless it was. Or why, as she thrust it beneath her retching child’s chin, it might have been an idea to remove my granny’s cherished Royal Doulton and napkins from it first. I could only watch, and whimper.

‘Guess what?’ Anna burst into the kitchen with a big grin on her face, trailing cigarette ash in her wake.

‘What?’ I asked weakly.

‘The plumber’s here and he’s proper fit. Quick, come and look!’

We didn’t need telling twice.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all young ladies, when confronted by a single man in possession of a six-pack draped in a crisp, white, wet shirt, will inevitably swoon. The fact that the plumber’s shirt was drenched in half a gallon of raw sewage could have taken the shine off it, but I was willing to overlook that, seeing as he was so handsome. And proper fit.

‘Hi,’ I said, watching as he wrestled with the waste pipe. ‘Shouldn’t you be wearing a boiler suit or something?’

‘I was at my brother’s wedding,’ he said, looking up at me with deep brown eyes. ‘But I came as soon as I could.’

‘Thank you so much.’ Our eyes remained locked. Despite this, I still managed to take in all the necessary details: the moody, furrowed brow beneath tousled dark hair, the fixed, firm jaw and the arm muscles that tensed impressively as he did something manly and complicated with a monkey wrench. I could have stood there in that bathroom all evening, oblivious to the sodden floor and heinous smell, if it meant spending more time with this Colin Firth-alike. Until Anna coughed and broke the reverie, reminding me that we had an audience. She stood in the doorway, smirking, along with Lucy, Rachel and Oscar who had thankfully stopped retching but nevertheless was still seriously cramping my style.

‘Er, did you want a cup of tea?’ I asked our hero, attempting to sound in control.

‘No, I’m fine. But I could do with changing this shirt—’ and the three of us ladies watched open-mouthed as he loosened the buttons.