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

One morning, as I was savouring Elizabeth’s interrogation by Lady Catherine de Bourgh at Rosings, I was faintly aware of the telephone ringing downstairs. I was called. It was my father. My knees began to fail me.

‘Well, my darling, it certainly is the Glorious Twelfth for you! I am so proud of you, so very well done.’

I sat on the bottom step of the stairs and cried; a quantum shift in my own world had just occurred. No tired return to school in September, for the intended third year in the sixth. A curtain had been drawn open, and there was light.

Later that day I stood before Spencer’s ‘Resurrection’, and felt great awe. I decided to treat Maggie to lunch to celebrate. She steered me to a Lyons Corner House. For ‘afters’ we had vanilla ice cream, topped with stem ginger, ginger syrup and double cream. It was gorgeous. As I queued to pay the bill, Maggie declared: ‘You have done awfully well, you know.’ I looked down a little bashfully, and saw my smile reflected in the toes of my new, shiny, black, ‘strappy’, patent leather shoes.

As we hurtled towards Leicester I sat up proudly in the back of Uncle Simeon’s car. We overtook every car on the M1. I reflected on the exhilaration of driving fast and taking risks.

There were already guests arriving at our house. Students had cadged cars, hitched lifts, taken taxis, borrowed vans, and were taking over my home: hairy young men and long-legged girls, squeals of laughter and joy unbounded. I slipped up quietly to my bedroom. One task I had yet to complete. Before the holiday, I had sewn a new silk, Empireline mini dress, in a tiny rose pattern, especially for my brother’s party. Mum had marked the hem up for me. I laid it out on the ironing board and systematically turned it up a further inch and three quarters. I hemmed it carefully, and tried it on. There was a soft tap on the door. It was my brother. He hugged me, and then his look took in the whole me. He focused, a little surprised, on the area above my knees. In his mock-formal voice, he quoted:

‘Loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable….’

I smiled sweetly, and delivered one of Uncle Simeon’s favourite gestures.

My inspiration: Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park inspired this tale of an artless seventeen-year-old girl’s ‘watershed’ week. Her known world is the confined society of the Leicester suburbs. She awaits her A level results, convinced of failure. Her world view is changed by an unexpected, unsought and initially unwanted week in London, staying with unfamiliar relatives. A second-hand copy of Pride and Prejudice, secured for ‘one and thruppence’, sustains her. Her wilful mother and kindly father owe something to the Bennets. However, it is the reckless Uncle Simeon who is the catalyst for her transformation.

I must remember to be back in time for Dr Grant’s dinner. The excitement of the young people for putting on a play is hard to resist, the thrill of it all so contagious; but if I am not there while it is prepared cook will surely end up shouting and snapping at the new scullery maid. Poor Lizzy, only fifteen but clumsy and, as cook claims, always underfoot; not a day seems to pass that there isn’t an explosion of curses and crying from the kitchen that I must rush to calm and soothe.

Today, however, our cast rather seems to have dispersed and I’ve found myself wandering the house aimlessly. Mrs Norris has been curiously absent from the afternoon’s events, for normally she loves to be in the thick of a bustle caused largely by herself, or else haranguing poor Miss Price. While the morning passed in an animated flurry of scene changes, forgotten lines and eager chatter the afternoon has been quiet… so quiet that I begin to feel something creep up on me.

Mr Bertram and his ‘intimate friend’ Mr Yates have been bickering in the newly converted billiards room this past hour about the play. For Bertram everybody spoke too slow, for Yates too quick, they were playing it with too much pathos, nay not enough for Yates and it was only when Mr Rushworth stepped up to ask how he might help that they were silent. Julia has passed by now and again to glower upon the general theatrical proceedings, although always leaving promptly when she catches Yates’s eager eye. Hopefully she has gone to seek out Henry, for I have not seen him since lunch.

I can’t help but smile at my matchmaking plans for Mary and Henry. That first evening Dr Grant and I were invited to dine with all those at the great house (a note urging our presence had been issued by Mrs Norris on behalf of her sister Lady Bertram that brooked no refusal) I had looked around the assembled faces and with an eye that strayed to the eldest Bertram son thought of Mary. Marriage to Dr Grant had not blinded me to Mr Bertram’s good looks, rather the contrast of them sitting to supper across the same table threw his looks into sharper focus. Heir to a great estate and in possession of a kind of laughing good humour, he would well suit Mary’s vivacity and wit. I accepted Mary’s later proposal of a visit with alacrity and who can blame me if my thoughts strayed to matrimony for her? Henry, too, I thought could find his happiness at Mansfield, for Miss Julia Bertram was a fine, good-humoured girl who would suit him, I was sure.

My guesses went slightly awry when Mary began to care for the younger Bertram son, Edmund; his admiration touching and inciting hers. Yet I am not so proud as to resent the collapse of my prediction. She glows with the flush of romance and I look upon it with a joy of my own. As for Henry, he, I’m sure, likes Miss Julia, though when I mention this to Mary she only smirks and looks archly towards the eldest Miss Bertram.

Yes, these love intrigues do make me wonder. What shall become of them all? My own time of intrigue does not offer such a charming show. We met at one of his sermons; my seat in the fourth row, squeezed between my mother and old Mrs Dandridge, whose foggy breath rasped wheezily in the cold November church, was not a conducive setting for romance, nor was his sermon itself made of the stuff to set hearts beating or my own thoughts stirring. But his gentle attentions caused a flutter of pride and satisfaction, my mother was gently approving and my plain self had never experienced or expected to experience a man’s admiration. But I was married to him three months later.

That first night, trembling in my bridal blush, I swear I saw him balk and shudder, daintily picking at my clothes like the morsels of last night’s dinner in the flickering light. Dr Grant took to his marital duties with little zeal and that night I shuddered too and started away from him before growing still.

Yet I was fairly happy. There were pleasures in having a house of my own. All I had to do to keep Dr Grant contented was ply him with a selection of choice dishes, the best of which he would commend with a hearty burp. There was much to occupy me in furnishing the house, visiting the surrounding families, making friends for myself in the village and cultivating my garden. There I can lose myself amongst the flowers that burst and reveal themselves in a flourish of colour – searing their sights upon my dazzled eyes. Mary and Henry’s coming was a welcome distraction however, just as I was beginning to feel something stirring unbidden in me – yes, their arrival was very welcome.

In all my wandering I seem to have reached the upper landing and I hear the soft murmurs of a scene taking place. I creep towards the door, partly cracked open, through which light and voices are spilling. Mary and Edmund are standing rather close together, only two feet between them, facing each other. They are rehearsing a scene from Lovers Vows, their eyes and burning cheeks bent to the pieces of paper in their hands. I know the scene. It is their scene. Edmund spoke his line then: