Dancing with Mr. Darcy Part 4

A dozen seagulls had joined the polka-dot sheep, skimming low, strutting their stuff on the green baize, searching for food. Perhaps there was a storm out at sea. Wasn't that what they said? That seagulls inland meant bad weather at sea?

Her parents had inhabited polarised worlds. All air and water, she thought. Not a sc.r.a.p of solid ground between them. Even their languages were not translatable from one to the other. It was a simple question of semantics. Neither of them had any vocabulary for taking responsibility. So, she'd had to find her own piece of solid ground, her own shoes to walk away in.

'I'll put new shoes on the front,' he said. 'The hind ones can go back on this time.'

The small furnace roared in the back of the van. The red-hot shoes would hiss with seeming fury when they were plunged in water. A cloud of steam would rise and disperse. This much she knew.

She and her parents had stopped speaking. It was for the best. Her new language had words with meanings that simply could not exist in theirs, like love and solid and rock. She had her own cliches now. The man she loved was as solid as a rock. He had once wondered, out loud, who would look after her if something happened to him. "Who would look after you if something happened to me?" he had said. She had supposed she would look after herself.

Again, he drew the pony's leg between his thighs and placed the shoe. He held the nails between his lips, taking each one as he needed it. They had flat, rectangular heads, and the shaft tapered to a fine point.

'Do you know the story,' she said, 'of the Black Bull of Norroway?'

He hammered a nail into place and glanced up at her, sideways, with two nails still held softly between his lips. He paused before answering her, pinching the nails between the thumb and index finger of his left hand and holding them away from his mouth so he could speak.

'I don't know that I do,' he said. 'But if you tell me what it's about, perhaps I'll recognise it, all the same.'

'It's about a young woman who, by her own small error, finds herself abandoned in the Valley of Gla.s.s. The floor and walls of the valley are all made of gla.s.s, and the more she tries to scramble up the sides, the more she slides back. In the end, she can do nothing but crawl on her hands and knees around the edge of the valley, looking for a way out.

'Just as she is about to give up, to curl up and wait for death to come to her, she finds a blacksmith's forge tucked deep into the side of the valley. The blacksmith he can be young and handsome or old and gnarled, whichever you wish listens to her story and takes pity on her. He promises to make her a pair of iron shoes to help her climb out of the valley, but first she must work for him for seven years without complaining.

'And so the young woman she can be any age you please, really pumps the bellows and holds the tongs and pa.s.ses the blacksmith his tools for seven long years without once complaining, though it is hard and heavy work, and the heat from the furnace scalds her skin red and raw.

'Finally, at the end of the seven years, the blacksmith thanks her for her work and makes her a pair of iron shoes whose soles are set with spikes. But he knows no way of fastening them other than to nail them to her feet, which is what he does.

'Of course, the young woman is in agony, and every step she takes sends pain s.h.i.+vering through her body. But, as we already know, she is a stalwart soul and she clambers up the smooth side of the Valley of Gla.s.s until she reaches its rim and is free. The End.'

'You mean that after all that she doesn't even get to marry a prince?'

'Well, of course she does, but it's a long story and I've told you the interesting bit.'

'I see,' he said. 'But I'd like to hear the ending, nonetheless.'

He drew the pony's leg forwards and upwards, placing its foot on the metal tripod. He clenched the tips of the nails and rasped them smooth and safe. Like a manicurist, he filed the edges of the hoof tight to the shoe, sending slivers of horn falling to the ground.

'There,' he said. 'All done.'

She slipped the head collar from the pony's head and they sat on the top bar of the gate to watch as the pony went back out into the field. It moved slowly at first, as though getting the feel of its new shoes. Then it dipped and tossed its head like a ballerina, she thought before arching its neck and trotting away towards the herd, its steps slow and elevated and its tail raised like a fine plume behind it.

He turned to her and smiled. 'So,' he said, 'she marries the prince in the end. But how did she come to be in the Valley of Gla.s.s? What was her own small error? And who is the Black Bull of Norroway?'

She stared at him. 'So many questions,' she said. 'And I am not Scheherazade.'

He jumped down from the gate. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I just-'

She watched him as he wiped his hands against his leather chaps and gathered his tools, ready for the next pony. He was a very kind young man, she thought. Perhaps there was something about him that reminded her. Perhaps that was why she had started to tell him the story. She had lied about the prince. And the beginning of the story had never been told.

In the beginning, she had felt as though she had been saved from herself, though she had not understood quite what she meant by that, at the time. He had been tall and strong and big of bone and heart. She had felt safe. She had imagined she might be looked after for the first time. For the first time, she had imagined she might be looked after. But he had gone away and he had not come back, though she had waited and waited and waited.

'The girl and the bull,' she said, 'are travelling together. At first, she is uncertain of him and has no idea of their destination. But he carries her gently and safely, and she finds that she can lean against his great, black shoulders without fear.

'They have been travelling some time together in this way, in quiet companions.h.i.+p, when they come to a dark valley overhung with brooding cliffs. This is the Valley of Gla.s.s and the Black Bull of Norroway must fight its guardian if they are to pa.s.s through safely.

'"Sit on this rock," the bull tells her. "If the sky turns blue and the sun begins to s.h.i.+ne, you'll know the battle is won. But should everything turn red, you'll know I've lost. Above all, don't move. If you so much as wriggle your toes, I'll never be able to find you again."

'So the girl sits on the rock and waits. And when the sky turns blue and the sun begins to s.h.i.+ne, bathing the valley around her in blue-gold light, she smiles. She watches as the bull comes ambling back towards her, his broad shoulders flecked with blood. But he cannot see her. She calls to him, but he does not hear. And he never sees or speaks to her again, although she sees and speaks to him all the time.'

There was a long silence between them. The ponies had settled to grazing beneath the line of oak trees that ran across the centre of the field. A chaffinch hopped around the edges of the manure pile, seeking delicacies. Traffic hummed on the main road through the village.

'So her one small error wasn't an error at all,' he said.

'No,' she said. 'She didn't do anything wrong. But she broke the spell that joined their worlds. The door was still there, but it had been closed on her. And even if she had been able to open it, perhaps she would have found nothing on the other side.'

'Nothing?' he said.

'Oh, you know,' she said. 'Some doors are better left closed, and all that. You never know what you might find behind them. And nothing is always a possibility. A blank, impenetrable wall, perhaps. Sometimes it's better to leave the door closed than to contemplate what is, or might have been, behind it. The door might be very beautiful in itself. An ancient oak door, say, with a single extraordinary hinge. The hinge, of course, is not a hinge, any more than the door is a door. But it is also very beautiful. It is a hinge forged of horseshoes. You can see the curving shapes, the nail holes; the groove that provides the grip. The ends of the shoes are hammered into simple flowers, like daisies. The door goes nowhere. It does not open. The hinge serves no purpose. It is pure ornament. It is all a comforting deception.'

'Like the prince?' he said.

'Ah,' she said, 'the prince. I suppose I must tell you that the girl has rather cannily held on to three magic fruits, each of which she has been instructed to cut when she meets the first great need of her life. I never fail to wonder why she doesn't cut at least one of them to avoid those seven years of mourning in the Valley of Gla.s.s, or at the very least to avoid the agony of that hideous shoeing of iron. But she's right, you know, because in the end she needs all three of those magic fruits to conquer the demons who would see her finally vanquished and to secure her love.'

'Hmm,' he said.

'Well, precisely,' she said. 'I did say I'd told you the interesting bit. Shall we get this last pony's feet trimmed? At least this one doesn't wear shoes.'

She held the lead rope, standing first on one side of the pony's head, and then on the other, and then back again, depending on which foot he was working on. It was a dance, ch.o.r.eographed over time, and the three of them knew the pattern of the steps and their pacing. They did not falter.

I should like to acknowledge Kenneth McLeish's superb version of 'The Black Bull of Norroway' in Tales of Wonder and Magic by Berlie Doherty (ed).

My inspiration: In February 2009 I was one of the lucky few to get through the snow to Chawton House to attend a writing workshop. There I found my horseshoe motif in the single hinge on the ancient oak door set against a wall in the Long Gallery. Jane Austen's life and work provided my central theme: sometimes through our own choice or error, sometimes because of external events and circ.u.mstances, doors close on relations.h.i.+ps. In life, they might never again open, even if we wish them to; in fiction we might hope for redemption in a prince or a Mr Darcy.

MISS AUSTEN VICTORIOUS.

Esther Bellamy.

'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,' Mrs Bennet announced.

Mr Bennet, wedged between the wings of a Sheraton armchair, lowered his newspaper, which bore the headlines '72 killed in V2 rocket attack', and inquired cautiously over the top of it, 'Is that his design in settling here?'

Mrs Bennet nodded vigorous encouragement in his direction, before throwing back her head and hands in order to signal exasperation.

'You take delight in vexing me; you have no compa.s.sion on my nerves.'

Mr Bennet gave a sort of bleat and peered frantically at Miss Bates, who was squeezed uncomfortably behind the curtain on a camp stool, but whilst trying to find her place in the script she had dropped her spectacles and, whilst groping for them frantically, she was unaware of the emanations of distress from the armchair, or indeed of anything else.

Mrs Bennet, almost equally unaware, blundered on. 'Ah you do not know what I suffer-' She stopped abruptly as it finally occurred to her that she had not given Mr Bennet the chance to make her suffer. He had not refused to wait upon Mr Bingley and, mouth half open from anxiety, showed not the faintest signs of doing so. Mrs Bennet leapt in to the breach and extemporised furiously.' 'Since you have already said that you will not visit Mr Bingley what use is it if twenty such men visit the neighbourhood?'

Inspiration came to Mr Bennet and he a.s.sured Mrs Bennet with the glee of a man who sees the end of a scene in sight, 'depend upon it, my dear, when there are twenty I shall visit them all.'

They stared at each other in delight at their mutual cleverness. Lady Baverstoke, realising that the scene was over, clapped.

Mrs Bennet turned to her husband also clapping, 'Oh well done, Gerald! Well done! You see, I told you you would remember the lines on the night.'

Mr Bennet muttered something about its only being the dress rehearsal.

Polly, relentlessly modern in trousers, despite Lady Baverstoke's protests, trudged onto the set and began moving the furniture back for the ball at Netherfield. Mr Bingley, aged not quite seventeen, trailed after her, transfixed by the uniform trousers. She completely ignored him. Mr Bennet was chivvied out of his armchair and it was pushed to the side.

'Are the girls ready?' Mrs Bennet asked Polly. She did not bother to lower her voice being rather keen to emphasise her role as actor and director to Lady Baverstoke.

'You've got them all except a Mary,' replied Polly.

'Oh really! She absolutely promised me to be here on time tonight.'

'Well she's not going to be here at all. One of the chaps she does fire-watch duty with is ill, so Muriel said she'd stand in tonight. She asked me to tell you but I didn't get a chance before. She said she was sure you would understand.'

That was not quite true.

'Really it's too bad, the dress rehearsal, I do think Muriel could have made the effort.'

Polly attempted to be conciliatory.

'Well Mary doesn't say much does she? She just has to look disapproving most of the time.'

'But the piano! Muriel's the only one who can play the piano.'

'I could play the piano if you like, Emma,' interjected Lady Baverstoke, 'I know the music and,' coyly, 'I certainly know the piano.'

Mrs Bennet looked put out but while she felt that it was very much her play and her cast she could hardly deny that it was Lady Baverstoke's double drawing room and Lady Baverstoke's piano. It had also been Lady Baverstoke's idea to put on a play 'for the war effort.'

Lady Baverstoke's house, and double drawing room in particular, had had a very quiet war and, despite a front of magnificent indifference, she was not deaf to acid comments from the WVS and others of that ilk. Baverstoke Park was housing the contents of an important portrait gallery, rather than evacuees, for the duration. On the whole Lady Baverstoke considered the portraits a wonderful addition to the house; in the drawing room an eighteenth-century lady in yellow now went beautifully with the watered-silk curtains. By this ruse, acres of carpet, yards of curtains and ma.s.ses of furniture remained jealously protected from hoi poloi by her ladys.h.i.+p. She spoke vaguely of 'preserving standards' and shook her head with regretful decision when asked if she had any material to donate for the making of clothes for bombed-out families.

Lady Baverstoke had spent England's Finest Hour stockpiling sufficient sugar and sherry to last a thousand years. By The End of the Beginning she was the dedicated enemy of the ARP, the WVS and the Captain of the local Home Guard, to that list she could now add GIs. However, it seemed that the Americans were shortly to be foisted on the deserving French and Lady Baverstoke, sugar and sherry supplies still holding out, felt quite able to do a little fundraising in aid of the victory that must surely be at hand. Putting on a play had struck her as a means of putting her drawing room to a use that was both patriotic and elegant. Surprisingly she had found a ferocious ally in the vicar's wife, Mrs Emma Houghton. No one could have accused Mrs Houghton of having a quiet war. She had billeted evacuees, rolled bandages, knitted balaclavas and had sent exhausted survivors of Dunkirk on their way armed with strong tea and tart jam sandwiches. And she sat on committees.

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 circ.u.mstances. 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 fort.i.tude, 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 sn.i.g.g.e.red 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 Hamps.h.i.+res 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 s.h.i.+lling 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 pa.s.sing 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- They pulled Mrs Bennet out first, protesting furiously that they should have taken her nephew before her. Gradually the rest of the cast was disinterred, scratched and bruised but, with the exception of Mr Darcy's broken arm, essentially undamaged. The chief fireman came over as the survivors were being solicitously wrapped in blankets. Someone had managed the English conjuring trick of hot sweet tea for emergencies.