Romantic Association - Loves Me, Loves Me Not

‘Very cold and very rich.’

Elizabeth shivered. ‘I think I will get into bed,’ she said.

Darcy smiled, and she smiled back at him, and then he lifted her up in his arms and carried her over to the bed.

As he did so, his eyes never left hers, and their deep connection reminded him of all the pleasures that love had brought them and all the pleasures they had to come.

And before he lost all rational thought he knew himself to be the happiest of men.

Jean Buchanan, a Scot brought up in Wales, read English at Oxford, then went into publishing. Marriage, motherhood and writing took over in the 1980s, though she still freelances for Oxford Dictionaries of Quotations—her favourite project so far is Love Quotations (1999). Her husband is a theoretical physicist, their son is grown up and she is currently writing a rom-com. Her writing career started with short stories for Woman’s Weekly and Bella, then a TV script for Jackanory Playhouse (BBC 1). She moved into sitcom with her TV series The Wild House (shortlisted for a British Comedy Award) and Welcome to Orty-Fou, and she has also written for puppets. Her employment CV includes a brush with the civil service, selling gents’ ties in the poshest department store in Wales and organising international conferences. She can make fingermice and gets truculent about the quality of ice cream. Her interests include early music, France, Scottish country dancing and ornithology. Her hobbies are croquet, Scrabble, and planning holidays in the South of France but ending up in Barnstaple.

Never marry an actor.

This is the most vital piece of advice ever given to an actress. At least according to actresses who have been married to actors or, in some cases, to a succession of actors. I heard it on my first and last days at drama school, on most of the days in between. And afterwards.

Actors are regarded as feckless, touchy, always banging on about ‘craft’, liable to upstage you, hopeless at vehicle maintenance and home repairs and frequently skint. As several of my friends have already discovered. And the actors who caused such large amounts of human misery were also—of course—devastatingly goodlooking. A girl has to hang onto her self-possession and also, particularly in the case of handsome actors, her chequebook.

So when I left drama school, proudly clutching my diploma and eye-wateringly convinced that the world was my oyster, I was on my guard about handsome actors. From the moment I started my first paid acting job, small non-speaking parts in a provincial Christmas panto—village girl, maid in castle kitchen, dancing lady at ball—and also ice-cream-seller during the interval—I remembered the advice.

All the more homely actors were married or firmly attached so I concentrated on furthering my career and establishing unromantic professional friendships with the handsome actors. Part of me thought this was an awful waste, even though all around me I could see them breaking other girls’ hearts like glass.

Then I got work in television drama. Girl in bus queue. Waitress in bistro. Girl on hospital trolley. Girl in bed at end of ward. I was a background artiste, the lowest of the low, but it added to my CV and paid a few bills.

Then I was offered voice-over work for television commercials. It was better paid and I got to sit down. Voice-over work isn’t at all glamorous—it takes place mostly in high-tech underground sheds and it’s more tiring than you’d think but it pays bills faster than standing around in the background—or even lying around in the background.

I became the voice of a seal point Siamese wanting its Moggy Brex—superior, drawly, self-indulgent—the voice of a new range of deodorants—mild, soothing, confidential—and I extolled the virtues of a particularly repellent-looking mushroom pie—earthy, rural, dependable.

Although Hollywood wasn’t exactly beating a path to my door I was getting a reasonable amount of work. But on the romance front things could hardly have been less promising…

My friend Kate, who lived round the corner, was in the same boat. She had a highly paid fourteen-hours-a-day job in the City. We met up when we could, which wasn’t that often, given the capacity of our work to send us all over the place—hers involved first-class travel and five-star hotels; mine didn’t.

We met in coffee shops or in Kate’s palatial flat or in my teeny studio flat and over lattes or wine we sympathised about the lack of eligible men in our lives. These conversations usually ended with one of us saying that it was pathetic. On this occasion, it was Kate’s turn. ‘Let’s face it,’ she said, refilling my glass. ‘It’s pathetic, isn’t it?’

And then, suddenly, everything changed for Kate. I had just got the occasional hurried text message when out of the blue came the announcement of her engagement. Hope for us all, I thought, on the why-not principle. A few days later I got an invitation to the engagement party. Fancy Dress, it said firmly in the corner.

Well, I knew about fancy dress. I visited the nearest theatrical costumier’s, about ten minutes’ walk away from my flat, and put down a deposit to hire a lovely floor-sweeping vaguely mediaeval number in crimson velvet that reminded me of Sleeping Beauty. Just right. I arranged to collect it the afternoon before the party.

I chose an engagement present, a salad bowl glazed green and white. I packed it up with plenty of padding, wrapped the box in bright pink paper and tied a big silver bow around it. Perfect.

On the day of the engagement party I did an emergency voice-over in the morning and by three o’clock was back in my flat, finishing lunch and thinking about strolling down to the theatrical costumier’s to collect my costume. After that I should have time to slip into a bubble bath. But then my phone rang. It was someone at the costumier’s to say that they’d just discovered a mistake with the booking. I couldn’t have my lovely crimson Sleeping Beauty dress as it was still out on hire. They could offer another dress of comparable quality but it belonged to a different period and I’d have to go and collect it from their other branch, which was miles and miles away.

The sky faded by three shades of blue. The sparrows on my bird-feeder sounded grumpy.

I wallowed briefly in a ten-minute bath, threw on some clothes, grabbed my bag and picked up the pink parcel containing the engagement present. Time was tight, so I’d have to go straight to the party once I’d collected my costume. I trekked across several postal districts and an hour later I reached the other branch of the theatrical costumiers, when they were on the point of closing.

They let me have a discount for inconvenience, which I accepted with as much grace as I could muster. I paid up and the elderly assistant was just putting the costume into a box when she suddenly said, ‘You’ll have someone to help you get into this, dear, won’t you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m going to change when I get there.’

The assistant sighed heavily and opened the box again. ‘You’ll never manage it by yourself,’ she said. ‘Too complicated. Come into the fitting room.’

You’d think I’d have realised, with my training. The dress and the corset underneath it laced up at the back—in the era my costume belonged to they had maids, lots of them. And then there was the wig.

‘You don’t look bad in that,’ the assistant said grudgingly, once she’d shoehorned me into the dress. The corset underneath helped, of course, and the dress material, heavy blue silk, was really pretty. There were even large concealed pockets where I could stow essential items—keys, money, mobile phone, lipstick and a mini A to Z.