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

We retired to the drawing room. With his bowel temporarily at rest, three-year-old Oscar was sleeping soundly in the nursery while we gathered around the card table to discuss our options.

‘We could have a go with a plunger,’ I suggested in my best primary-school-teacher-rallying-a-class-of-eight-year-olds voice.

‘Have you got a plunger handy?’ Anna asked.

‘Well, no—’

‘Even if you did, we’re hardly dressed for a spot of plumbing, are we?’ Lucy said, blinking back tears, her arms folded beneath her heaving bosom. I scowled at her; frankly, I was getting fed up with her emotional outpourings and quivering flesh.

‘Alright – you decide what to do,’ I told her. ‘Seeing as it’s your child who got us into this mess.’

‘I don’t know what to do!’ Lucy wailed into an embroidered white lace handkerchief that I’d sourced (rather cleverly, I thought) from eBay. I couldn’t deny she was right though; none of us were suitably attired for manual labour, plunger or no plunger. It had taken hours to transform ourselves into Regency belles, doing our best to look the part with our hair curled and pinned up on top of our heads and our cheeks pinched pink. I’d planned a weekend of wafting round in muslin gowns, not shovelling sewage.

‘What would Jane Austen do?’ Rachel wondered aloud.

‘I know exactly what Jane would do,’ Anna said, standing up. ‘She’d get a man in.’

Unfortunately, men weren’t cheap – not in this part of rural England anyway.

‘Sixty-quid call out charge,’ Anna announced ten minutes later, snapping her mobile shut. ‘That’s before he does anything. And he might not get here for an hour.’

‘Great. What do we do in the meantime?’ Lucy asked.

‘It says here that whist was a popular choice for ladies of good breeding,’ Rachel read excitedly from her book. ‘Elizabeth Bennet attends a whist party in Pride and Prejudice, and it’s mentioned in Emma and in Mansfield Park— ’

‘Excellent! Let’s play whist.’ I felt my spirits lift; I’d packed cards, along with some gothic-looking pewter candlesticks. We gathered around the rosewood table and I arranged the candles while Anna opened the cards. This was more like it, I thought with satisfaction. Female bonding, just as Jane would have wanted. Outside, the evening was drawing in; dusk had settled, casting long, low shadows across the oak-panelled room. A perfect time for cards by candlelight. We would eat soon, I decided. Crumpets and dainty little cakes, with tea served in white china cups.

‘Who’s got matches?’ Anna said as she shuffled the cards.

‘Matches?’ I frowned. ‘I thought you’d bring a lighter. You’re the only one who smokes—’

‘I’ve given up.’

‘What?’ Lucy shrieked with laughter. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You smoke more than anyone I know. You can’t give up.’

‘Well I have, so shut it.’ Anna regarded her coolly. ‘The flip side is I’m permanently starving and liable to punch someone at any moment.’

This was enough to silence all of us, even Lucy. In the City bank where she worked, Anna’s temper was legendary. She spent her working day doing complicated things with stocks and derivatives, an area I knew nothing about, except it seemed to involve her screaming down the phone at a succession of ex-public schoolboys who were foolish enough to think they could screw her over. None of them could.

‘So, no matches then.’ Reluctantly, I went to turn the light on. Of course the house had electricity – along with central heating, Wi-Fi access and all the other accoutrements people expected from a historic country house in the twenty-first century. It did rather spoil the mood though, I felt, as the intriguing shadows of the drawing room were exposed in the harsh glare of artificial light.

‘How many cards am I dealing?’ Anna asked as I joined them again.

‘No idea. Rachel? What are the rules?’

‘I don’t know – I’ve never played whist before.’

‘But you’re the one with the guide book,’ I reminded her. ‘You’re always in the library; you said you’d do the research.’

‘I’ve done my best!’ Rachel slammed her book shut. ‘I have had a wedding to organise, you know. I’ve been really busy, sorting out the cars, the flowers, the dress…’

It was true. For months Rachel had been planning her big day, choreographing every moment as precisely as the plot in one of her slushy novels. That was her dream: to be the great romantic heroine, to live out the happy endings she created on paper for real. It wasn’t much to ask – who doesn’t want their wedding day to be special? And here I was, the chief bridesmaid, stressing her out on what should have been a lovely, indulgent weekend. I started to feel bad.

‘Sorry, Rachel.’ I put my gloved hand over hers. ‘You just sit back and relax, we’ll find something fun to do. How else did young Regency ladies amuse themselves?’

Lucy leaned over and picked up the guide book.

‘Um, cross stitch—’ she read aloud.

‘Boring,’ Anna said.

‘Charades—’

‘Not bloody likely.’

‘Pianoforte recitals!’ Lucy’s eyes lit up. ‘Oh, let’s do that – there’s a piano in the room next door and I love that bit in Sense and Sensibility where Marianne and Willoughby play together and he’s watching her in that way – you know, all rakish and sort of brooding and repressed—’

‘Please!’ Anna rolled her eyes.

‘Can anyone play the piano?’ Rachel asked hopefully. I suddenly found all eyes on me.

‘No,’ I said firmly (and truthfully).

‘But you’re a schoolteacher,’ Anna said.

‘And?’

‘All my teachers could play the piano.’ ‘And mine,’ Lucy said. ‘Mine too,’ Rachel added.

‘Well, good for them.’ I shrugged. ‘Because I can’t, sorry.’ Three collective sighs of disappointment echoed around the woodpanelled walls. Which was a bit rich, I thought – three years of teacher training had equipped me with a diverse range of skills: classroom management, extracting pencil rubbers from the ears of small children and the ability to construct lifelike models of dinosaurs to scale from bits of papier mache and Copydex. Mastering a musical instrument seemed to have been squeezed out of the modern Cert Ed curriculum. I explained this to my dear, loyal friends.

They remained unimpressed.

‘All my teachers could play piano,’ Anna reiterated, adding, ‘no wonder kids can’t read anymore and spend the whole time happy-slapping strangers in the street. Typical.’ Before I could defend myself, she stood up. ‘I’m going for a fag,’ she said and swept grandly out of the drawing room. Which left three of us.

‘I’ll go and check on Oscar,’ Lucy said, getting to her feet. ‘If he’s still got a temperature I should really take him home – sorry, Rachel.’ She looked apologetic. ‘It’s not very child-friendly here, is it? With the toilet and hygiene and everything—’

So then there were two.

Rachel started to sniffle. But all was not lost! I resolved then, dear reader, to save the day. I couldn’t provide a rakish piano-playing suitor, an evening of sparkling yet genteel amusements or even a workable flushing loo for my party, but I had at my disposal something far, far superior. The one thing guaranteed to unite a group of females in even the direst of circumstances.

Cake.

I shouldn’t have shouted at Lucy. It wasn’t Oscar’s fault that he’d gatecrashed our hen weekend, or blocked the toilet, or even that he’d managed (despite his upset stomach) to demolish the entire hamper of cupcakes in the half an hour we had faffed about in the drawing room. I know I should have held back – but it was the icing that did it. All those hours I’d spent, hunched over my kitchen table with the latest Nigella, anointing my home-made delicacies with chocolate sprinkles, little silver balls and edible flowers. I’d packed them so carefully too, along with my granny’s best china and filigree napkins, a confection of girly delight that I knew would gain Rachel’s approval and even that of Jane (God rest her soul) Austen herself. To find Oscar standing there, his grubby toddler mouth encrusted with pink icing was just too much.