Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library (8 page)

The cast gaped. Even Lady Baverstoke was silenced. Then Mr Darcy smiled at Mrs Bennet. ‘Maybe a sling will improve my performance.’

Mrs Bennet turned on him a face like the rising sun.

‘Oh, Ken, how noble of you!’ The smile vanished under a tide of relief. ‘Thank goodness I didn’t have time to bring those chairs over from the church hall.’

My inspiration:
A Jane Austen novel seems the antithesis of violent chaos, although these novels were written between the Terror and Waterloo. They appear to be concerned with a thin veneer of civilised behaviour among an exclusive minority yet they have survived and flourished among readerships very different from the ones for which they were written. Jane Austen has always been associated with the country house but has proved herself well able to survive and flourish in much tougher circumstances.

CLEVERCLOGS

Hilary Spiers

Yesterday I read 27,373 words. Not counting rereading the cereal packet. It would have been more but Dad took my torch away last night so I had to kneel on my bed to try to read by the light of the street lamp outside, with my head poking through the curtains. That was hard work, because I had to keep listening out for Mum’s footsteps on the stairs. She’s really sneaky, taking her shoes off at the bottom and creeping up to catch me out. ‘You’ll go blind reading in the dark,’ she says. Which is stupid because all you are doing when you’re reading is using your eyes, just the same as if you were looking where you are going or shopping in the supermarket or enjoying the view. Anyway, I wouldn’t have had to read the cereal packet if Dad hadn’t said at breakfast, ‘It’s rude to read at the table,’ and taken my book away. He’s always doing that.

The book I’m reading at the moment (or was until Dad took it away from me) is
Sense and Sensibility
by Jane Austen. Granny lent it to me. Dad flicked through it and said to Mum, ‘Should she be reading this?’ like it was one of those fat books Mum reads on holiday that I’m not allowed to borrow. Mum shrugged and said, ‘It’s a classic,’ so Dad just put it on the counter until I’d finished my muesli. I hate muesli; when I stay over at Gina’s, she has those little packets with all the different cereals in them. Mum says they’re bad for your teeth, but what I had for breakfast had 22g of sugar per 100g, so I don’t think that’s very healthy either.

I worked out the number of words I’d read by using a formula. My formula is one page equals 350 words. You times the number of pages by 350 to get the total, and then add all the other words you’ve read during the day. You can count adverts and things like menus, but not road signs or shop names that you pass every day, because they’re not new. I read 60 pages of
Sense and Sensibility
today, so that makes 21,000 words already. Then I added all the words in lessons (in books and on the board) and the hymns in assembly. Plus the torn bit of newspaper someone had left on the seat by the bus stop. And it came to 27,373.

I overheard Uncle Terry say to Mum once, ‘She’s a right little bookworm’, like it was something not quite right. I looked it up. The dictionary said
Bookworm: An organism, sometimes a literal worm, which harms books by feeding on their binding or leaves. Also a term for a person devoted to books.
I think he meant the ‘also’ bit. I like the word devoted. It makes me think of
Little Women.
I’ve read that too.

I
yearn
to get back to Elinor and Marianne. Yearn is my word of the day. It means to long or ache or hanker for. I don’t like hanker much because it sounds too close to handkerchief which is not serious enough. Granny gave me a very old dictionary, which looks like someone has picked at the cover with their nails. I think it might be covered in leather because it smells a bit funny and the pages are blobby with little brown marks. I looked up yearn in that and it said:
To have a strong, often melancholy desire.
And I thought that suited
Sense and Sensibility
because that is how I feel about it. It makes me scrunch my toes up and hold my breath. I’ve just read the bit where Marianne falls ill because of the horrible Willoughby, which was so terrible I could hardly bear it (even though I think Marianne is a bit of an idiot sometimes) and I wanted it to go on forever at the same time. This is why it is such a good book, because it’s almost making you read it whether you want to or not.

Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night, all the characters of all of the books I’ve read swim round my head in a mad dance. My head feels like it might burst with words sometimes and then I think that I’ve years and years of reading still to come and where do all the words go? Mrs Finch said in class that everything we ever see or do or read leaves a memory in our brains, but I’ve seen a picture of a brain and it’s so
small.
And if we can’t store all the words and stories, then how do we know we aren’t just reading the same things over and over without knowing it? That’s why I keep all the books I’ve read in my bedroom so I can prove to myself I know what they are about. Some of my friends test me sometimes, especially Harriet. She says, ‘Okay, cleverclogs, tell me what happens in the book,’ so I do. I tell her about all the characters and what happens to them and the sorts of things they say and how it makes me feel. I did that with
The Lord of the Rings,
but she said, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that on DVD so I don’t have to read it,’ and even though I told her that the books were miles better and that the films left loads of stuff out, she didn’t care. At first, Mrs Finch didn’t believe I’d read all three books – it’s called a trilogy – because she’d never met anyone as young as me who had. She didn’t read them until she was at university. I told her I hope they have loads of books at university because I don’t want to go there if it’s full of things like
The Lord of the Rings
that I’ve already read. Although I wouldn’t mind reading something like
Pride and Prejudice
again (but not straightaway), because there’s so much going on and you can learn a lot about life in olden times. Plus Mrs Bennet is really funny.

Once I’d learnt what a bookworm was, the word kept coming up all over the place. It was in the paper yesterday morning in an article about Jacqueline Wilson and I saw it on the back of a book I picked up in the local bookshop on the way home from school. I didn’t buy the book, I never do, unless it’s my birthday or something, but I love being in there, surrounded by the smell of books. Sometimes I think words just hang around in the background waiting to be noticed and then when they are they get sort of brighter so they stand out. I don’t like the ‘worm’ bit, but if that’s what the word is, then I suppose I’m stuck with it. I wonder if there are jobs for people to invent new words or better ones, because sometimes you come across something and there isn’t a word for it. Or perhaps there is, but I haven’t read it yet. I mean, why isn’t there a word for those days in September when the dew twinkles on the spiders’ webs in the privet hedge and the air feels like it’s decided just that morning that summer is over? Or the sensation you get when the melted cheese in cheese on toast sticks to the roof of your mouth? I asked Granny that once and she just said, ‘Goodness me, Laura, you do have some odd ideas, don’t you? Sticky?’ and then she gave me a big hug and said ‘Bless’ to Mum over my head. Sticky’s not right: that doesn’t describe the way you can push the cheese around with your tongue like playdough and how the butter makes it all slippery.

Mrs Finch has been having ‘one-to-ones’ with each of us at the moment. One-to-ones are conversations just between her and one pupil, in private. It’s part of the preparation for us moving up to secondary school next year. I like Mrs Finch a lot; she reminds me of my Auntie Ruth. She’s quite large, like Auntie, and very jolly, with a big laugh that makes her face and boobies bounce up and down. But she can be very strict if she thinks we aren’t behaving properly. Everyone knows to keep quiet when Mrs Finch gets one of her moods on. But in the one-to-ones, she is really kind and
empathetic.
That means standing in our shoes and imagining the way we might be feeling. She said, ‘Are you nervous about going to Haydon Hill? I know I would be if I were you.’ But I’m not, not at all. I’m looking forward to doing new subjects and wearing the Haydon Hill uniform. And anyway, most of my friends are going too, so I don’t expect it will be that different there. Mrs Finch said a funny thing when we finished our chat, ‘At least you’ll never be at a loss for words, Laura,’ and gave a little laugh, so I laughed too to be polite and went to collect my coat and bag because it was home time by then.

I was going to call in at the library on my way home, because I knew I would finish
Sense and Sensibility
at the weekend and I was worried I wouldn’t have anything to read on Sunday. I want to read all Jane Austen’s books and I haven’t read
Persuasion
yet, but Granny didn’t have a copy of that. ‘Still enjoying Miss Austen, then, my pet, are you?’ she said last weekend when I rushed back to
Sense and Sensibility
after Sunday lunch and when I said yes, she smiled and whispered, ‘I think that’s her best book. Takes you to another place, doesn’t she?’ I knew what she meant. She’s taken me to loads of places already – Norland Park, London, Bath, Pemberley, Mansfield Park – so I was looking forward to my next adventure.

But when I came out of school, Mum was waiting at the gate, looking like someone had wiped all the colour off her face. She was peering all around as if she’d lost something, then she saw me and she gave a little cry and broke through the sea of bodies and grabbed me by the wrist. Her hands were icy cold, even though the day was warm. Her mouth was all wobbly and her voice sounded odd, like her tongue was swollen. ‘Mum?’ I said and my heart jumped in my chest, knocking all the breath out of me.

‘It’s Granny,’ said Mum. ‘She’s in hospital.’ And then we were in the car and Mum was driving in lurches through the traffic and when I looked at her, tears were dripping off her chin on to the front of her shirt. She tried to give me a smile as we pulled into the hospital car park, but it came out all wrong and then she was fumbling in her purse for change to buy a ticket. We ran up the side of the building hand in hand and into the entrance, which was glass and full of light like a cathedral. People were standing and sitting around as if they were waiting for someone to tell them what to do and then Mum was pushing me into a lift and stabbing the button for the fifth floor.

Granny looked very small in the bed. There was something funny about her face. Half of it looked like Granny and half like someone else’s face had been stuck on to it, and not very carefully at that. Mum took Granny’s hand, which was lying all knotted up on the sheet and stroked it. ‘Go on,’ she said, nodding her head towards Granny’s other hand, ‘hold her hand so she’ll know you’re here.’ It felt like tissue paper, all feathery and fragile, like it might tear if you rubbed too hard. ‘Dad’s on his way,’ said Mum. ‘And Auntie Ruth.’

I looked at Granny, at the tiny flicker of her eyelids, at the tears leaking out of the eye on the funny side, and I thought of all the things I wanted to tell her about. I wanted to tell her how happy I’d felt when Elinor realises Edward Ferrars really loves her. I thought about the way she always says, ‘Goodness me, the speed that child reads!’ as if she is a bit embarrassed and a bit proud at the same time. I thought about the day she stopped looking things up in the dictionary for me and pulled the spotty book down from the top of the bookcase and said, ‘There you go. That should keep you out of mischief for a while.’ I remembered the musty smell when I opened it for the first time and how tiny the words had been and how it was the first time I’d seen the word ‘ecstasy’ written down and how I told Granny it was my favourite word and she’d smiled.

A nurse came in and murmured something in Mum’s ear. Mum got up and whispered to me as if afraid she might wake Granny, ‘Dad’s on the phone. I won’t be long. Talk to Granny while I’m gone.’ I must have looked startled, because she leant towards me and said, ‘I know she looks like she’s asleep, but hearing’s the last thing to go.’ To go? To go where? And where had the first things gone? What were they? Mum hesitated in the doorway then rushed back to give me a really hard hug. ‘Don’t be frightened, sweetheart. It’s just that at the moment Granny’s in another place.’

The sun streamed in through the window, bathing Granny in a white light that almost hurt you to look at it. I sat forward on the hard plastic chair and opened my mouth to say something. I could feel my head buzzing with words, alive with them, but none of them would come out. I thought to myself, I must have thousands, millions of words in my brain, why can’t I find any of them? I thought about what Mrs Finch had said and how it wasn’t true. I had lost my words. And then I remembered my bag at my feet. I reached down and my hand closed around the book. I knew all about being in another place. I opened Granny’s favourite book at my bookmark and, in my best reading-aloud-in-class voice, but quietly so only she could hear, I began to read.

My inspiration:
Our son is about to become a father. We were discussing the perfect ‘starter library’ for our grandchild and reminiscing about how and when we were introduced to certain books. I recalled first reading Jane Austen (and realising on rereading her years later how much I had missed!) and insisted she be included in our collection.