Sara Waters - Dancing with Mr Darcy - Stories Inspired by Jane Austen

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—