Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library (7 page)

MISS AUSTEN VICTORIOUS

Esther Bellamy

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,’ Mrs Bennet announced.

Mr Bennet, wedged between the wings of a Sheraton armchair, lowered his newspaper, which bore the headlines ‘72 killed in V2 rocket attack’, and inquired cautiously over the top of it, ‘Is that his design in settling here?’

Mrs Bennet nodded vigorous encouragement in his direction, before throwing back her head and hands in order to signal exasperation.

‘You take delight in vexing me; you have no compassion on my nerves.’

Mr Bennet gave a sort of bleat and peered frantically at Miss Bates, who was squeezed uncomfortably behind the curtain on a camp stool, but whilst trying to find her place in the script she had dropped her spectacles and, whilst groping for them frantically, she was unaware of the emanations of distress from the armchair, or indeed of anything else.

Mrs Bennet, almost equally unaware, blundered on. ‘Ah you do not know what I suffer—’ She stopped abruptly as it finally occurred to her that she had not given Mr Bennet the chance to make her suffer. He had not refused to wait upon Mr Bingley and, mouth half open from anxiety, showed not the faintest signs of doing so. Mrs Bennet leapt in to the breach and extemporised furiously.’ ‘Since you have already said that you will not visit Mr Bingley what use is it if twenty such men visit the neighbourhood?’

Inspiration came to Mr Bennet and he assured Mrs Bennet with the glee of a man who sees the end of a scene in sight, ‘depend upon it, my dear, when there are twenty I shall visit them all.’

They stared at each other in delight at their mutual cleverness. Lady Baverstoke, realising that the scene was over, clapped.

Mrs Bennet turned to her husband also clapping, ‘Oh well done, Gerald! Well done! You see, I told you you would remember the lines on the night.’

Mr Bennet muttered something about its only being the dress rehearsal.

Polly, relentlessly modern in trousers, despite Lady Baverstoke’s protests, trudged onto the set and began moving the furniture back for the ball at Netherfield. Mr Bingley, aged not quite seventeen, trailed after her, transfixed by the uniform trousers. She completely ignored him. Mr Bennet was chivvied out of his armchair and it was pushed to the side.

‘Are the girls ready?’ Mrs Bennet asked Polly. She did not bother to lower her voice being rather keen to emphasise her role as actor and director to Lady Baverstoke.

‘You’ve got them all except a Mary,’ replied Polly.

‘Oh really! She absolutely
promised
me to be here on time tonight.’

‘Well she’s not going to be here at all. One of the chaps she does fire-watch duty with is ill, so Muriel said she’d stand in tonight. She asked me to tell you but I didn’t get a chance before. She said she was sure you would understand.’

That was not quite true.

‘Really it’s too bad, the dress rehearsal, I do think Muriel could have made the effort.’

Polly attempted to be conciliatory.

‘Well Mary doesn’t say much does she? She just has to look disapproving most of the time.’

‘But the piano! Muriel’s the only one who can play the piano.’

‘I could play the piano if you like, Emma,’ interjected Lady Baverstoke, ‘I know the music and,’ coyly, ‘I certainly know the piano.’

Mrs Bennet looked put out but while she felt that it was very much her play and her cast she could hardly deny that it was Lady Baverstoke’s double drawing room and Lady Baverstoke’s piano. It had also been Lady Baverstoke’s idea to put on a play ‘for the war effort.’

Lady Baverstoke’s house, and double drawing room in particular, had had a very quiet war and, despite a front of magnificent indifference, she was not deaf to acid comments from the WVS and others of that ilk. Baverstoke Park was housing the contents of an important portrait gallery, rather than evacuees, for the duration. On the whole Lady Baverstoke considered the portraits a wonderful addition to the house; in the drawing room an eighteenth-century lady in yellow now went beautifully with the watered-silk curtains. By this ruse, acres of carpet, yards of curtains and masses of furniture remained jealously protected from hoi poloi by her ladyship. She spoke vaguely of ‘preserving standards’ and shook her head with regretful decision when asked if she had any material to donate for the making of clothes for bombed-out families.

Lady Baverstoke had spent England’s Finest Hour stockpiling sufficient sugar and sherry to last a thousand years. By The End of the Beginning she was the dedicated enemy of the ARP, the WVS and the Captain of the local Home Guard, to that list she could now add GIs. However, it seemed that the Americans were shortly to be foisted on the deserving French and Lady Baverstoke, sugar and sherry supplies still holding out, felt quite able to do a little fundraising in aid of the victory that must surely be at hand. Putting on a play had struck her as a means of putting her drawing room to a use that was both patriotic and elegant. Surprisingly she had found a ferocious ally in the vicar’s wife, Mrs Emma Houghton. No one could have accused Mrs Houghton of having a quiet war. She had billeted evacuees, rolled bandages, knitted balaclavas and had sent exhausted survivors of Dunkirk on their way armed with strong tea and tart jam sandwiches. And she sat on committees.

That Lady Baverstoke had never sat on a committee with Mrs Houghton before was proof of her powerful, if latent, political instinct. Furthermore, realising that it is much easier to steer a committee from below than to order it from above, she had helped elect Mrs Houghton to be president of the newly formed Amateur Dramatics Committee.

Something very English, the committee felt, would be desirable in the circumstances. Someone promptly suggested Shakespeare. Someone else, perhaps not without a touch of malice, suggested
Henry V
and the possibility of involving local evacuees. Lady Baverstoke was not the only person with visions of these willing little extras re-enacting the battle of Agincourt through her drawing room. Some kind soul pointed out that the imminent film, with its rather superior resources made a play rather unnecessary just now. No one could remember just who it had been who suggested Jane Austen but everyone, without quite explaining how, felt that she struck the right note; highbrow but not too difficult to understand, obviously. Very English, of course, and perfect for acting in a large drawing room.

Getting enough men for the play had been a problem; nothing but Christian fortitude, patriotic duty and fear of his wife would have made the Reverend Gerald Houghton take to the stage as Mr Bennet. He could now be observed getting in to character for the Netherfield ball scene by showing the greatest possible reluctance. His wife’s glance swept proprietarily over the cast as the Bennet girls trooped in.

‘Lizzy!’ admonished Mrs Bennet, ‘wipe that lipstick off. It’s far too bright anyway, not right for the period at all.’

‘Mrs Houghton’s quite right, dear,’ urged Lady Baverstoke.

‘But we’ll look such frights,’ protested Lizzy. ‘We’re all wearing modern evening dresses and you can’t then say that everything else has to be Regency, it doesn’t make sense.’ She rolled her eyes and gave her mouth a desultory wipe. ‘There, will that do?’

‘For now,’ agreed Mrs Bennet. Now line up for the dance; chaps on one side…oh dear, oh dear we do need more
men.’

‘There’ll be two more on the night,’ pointed out Polly, ‘me and Rosalind—’

‘Rosalind and I, dear,’ interposed Lady Baverstoke.

‘Rosalind and I in our hunting kit. The others will just have to dance with each other.’

‘Polly will you dance now?’

‘All right, come on, Alice.’ Alice bounced forward but Mrs Bennet swooped.

‘No, no, Alice must dance with Mr Bingley. It says so in the book. He dances first with Charlotte Lucas. Come along Henry.’ (Mr Bingley was her nephew.) He shuffled forward. Charlotte and Mr Bingley, being sixteen and seventeen respectively, turned scarlet. They were hustled to the front of the stage, touching each other only when and where strictly necessary.

‘Now is everyone ready?’ A figure drifted to the edge of the stage with an expression of nervous inquiry. ‘No, Mr Darcy, off stage, we don’t need you yet, not until your grand entrance.’ The figure vanished with alacrity.

‘Now,’ to Lady Baverstoke, ‘could we have a waltz please? We begin the dancing and Mr Darcy comes in.’

Lady Baverstoke smiled and obliged, with the ‘Blue Danube’. To Mrs Bennet’s irritation she was very good but in her role as director she had more pressing concerns. After a few bars she began to glare towards the wings. The second time she waltzed past she risked a gesticulation and Mr Darcy, accompanied by Miss Bingley, moved to the centre of the stage with the high-shouldered, stork-legged gait of a man who fears that his breeches are going to fall down. He had been outvoted by the females of the cast who were quite determined that Mr Darcy should wear breeches. (Mr Bingley was luckier; simply appearing in his Eton tails which had been deemed quite suitable.) Lady Baverstoke had donated her late husband’s court dress but the late Lord Baverstoke had been cheerfully corpulent and the current Mr Darcy was not. Despite belt and braces, he was in miseries.

The casting of Ken Thornton as Mr Darcy had been a worry to Lady Baverstoke, of course he was terribly good-looking and he sounded alright, more or less, but her nephew Reggie had sniggered dreadfully when she told him.

‘Good Lord, you mean you’re casting a Brylcreem boy as the quintessential English hero?’

‘Well, my dear, what else can I do? You wouldn’t care to play the part I suppose?’

‘No fear. I’ll probably be in France by then anyway. And I think I’d rather be there,’ he added with a laugh.

Whether Ken Thornton would rather have repeated a botched parachute landing somewhere over Beachy Head, which left him with three broken ribs and a few weeks leave, was a moot point. Certainly nothing but his being grotesquely in love with Emily Lowe, who was playing Lydia Bennet, would have induced him to spend the last of that leave cooped up in Lady Baverstoke’s drawing room. Lydia had kissed him twice behind the scenes and promised to write to him. (She had also promised to write to one Coldstream guardsman, a Lieutenant in the Royal Hampshires and a Free French pilot. Her handwriting was not very clear.)

The dancers stopped and everyone stared at Ken. He really did look rather good in court dress. Mrs Bennet bore down on him and curtseyed. Mr Darcy bowed stiffly.

‘There’s nothing like dancing, sir, one of the refinements of polished society,’ she opined.

‘Every savage can dance,’ Mr Darcy snapped.

He had actually forgotten the rest of the line and was trying to act but it sounded like truculent rudeness and not only Mrs Bennet but also Emma Houghton took it as such. She considered Ken Thornton’s manner ‘distinctly offhand’. She was annoyed by Polly’s presence and Muriel’s absence. She sensed that her cast did not really consider this play, her play, important, although her potent combination of cajolery and bullying had already sold out both performances. (Her cast had nearly rebelled about that second performance.) Nearly one hundred people at a shilling apiece, would be squeezed in to the drawing room to suffer the particular martyrdom offered by the church hall’s folding chairs. Two performances would raise nearly ten pounds, which, Mrs Bennet considered, was quite a lot of spitfire for one village. She was tired, having spent all afternoon rehearsing, all morning volunteering at the nearest hospital and a fair portion of the night before sewing up the back of Jane Bennet’s evening dress, which its occupant had managed to split from stem to stern at a party. Mrs Bennet felt that it was very unfair. At the end of the scene she sat back in the armchair, and eyed the other cast members with intent. They drew together instinctively.

‘I don’t know what is wrong with you children,’ she began peevishly. ‘All you do is complain—’

But Mrs Bennet was suddenly silent. The cast froze in a tableau around her chair. Lady Baverstoke, still at the piano stool, put her hand to her mouth as if to silence the tiny ‘oh!’ that escaped it. Slowly every face turned upward.

In another time and place, it is possible to think of a sound like a giant hornet’s thrum, or perhaps the metallic burble of a motorbike passing down the lane. However, none of the people in that room had the luxury of metaphor or distance: instant terror bought instant recognition.

The engine of the V2 rocket chugged on, on, on.

Silence.

One or two people put their hands over their heads, but mostly they stared at the ceiling, the beautiful Angelica Kauffmann ceiling that, for a petrified moment, turned into a fabulous mosaic, before the cracks turned to raining plaster, the delicate carvings to relentless missiles. As everything that was solid and heavy in the world began falling—

They pulled Mrs Bennet out first, protesting furiously that they should have taken her nephew before her. Gradually the rest of the cast was disinterred, scratched and bruised but, with the exception of Mr Darcy’s broken arm, essentially undamaged. The chief fireman came over as the survivors were being solicitously wrapped in blankets. Someone had managed the English conjuring trick of hot sweet tea for emergencies.

The officer surveyed them. ‘You were lucky.’

Lady Baverstoke turned from surveying a house that had not a window left in it with wobbling lip and welling eye. She said, ‘lucky?’

‘If that had hit the house you’d all have been killed. As it was—‘He indicated the crater that had once been a croquet lawn. ‘You’d probably have been all right if it hadn’t been for that rotten old ceiling.’ It was too much for Lady Baverstoke who broke down again. The cast tried to comfort her but the fact remained that her drawing room was ruined and the rest of her house not much better. She was quite inconsolable and perhaps it was a little tactless of Mrs Bennet to declare, after a few more minutes, ‘well, we’ll simply have to move the play to the church hall.’