by Lucy Tilney
“You are too kind to me, Lizzy. Don’t you think it would be wonderful if we married best friends?”
“Married! Jane, you need to spend less time with our beloved mama and get out more. Of course, I would like to get married eventually but only the very deepest love will induce me into it, and Mr. Darcy is far from my ideal candidate. What on earth is that racket?
She pushed open the door of the room Kitty and Lydia shared, “Girls, stop shrieking, they’ll hear you in Stevenage.”
Lydia was sitting on the end of her bed in her nightgown clutching a vegetable peeler. “It’s Mischief Night1 but Kitty and I are only engaged in some harmless fortune telling. If you throw an unbroken apple peel over your shoulder at midnight it will form the initial of your future husband, but if we stay up till midnight father will be cross so we thought we’d do it now.”
“Oh, Lydia, when was the last time you thought about anything apart from men?”
“Lizzy, you are becoming as solemn as Aunt Marianne, all universal suffrage and equal pay. Don’t you ever want to tango or wish you could shimmy like your sister Kate,” she said, grabbing Kitty and dancing her around the room.
Elizabeth shook her head and Jane laughed. “Did you actually get an initial in your apple peel, Lydia?”
“It’s an M, I suppose, but I don’t know anyone whose name begins with M.”
“I think it’s quite likely that at fifteen you haven’t met him yet.”
“I’m sixteen next week,” said Lydia defensively, “and I’m taller than any of you so I look the eldest even though I would be utterly ashamed to be single at your age. And, besides, the Meryton fishing pond isn’t going to be restocked dramatically before I am twenty-one. Daddy says he doesn’t want any of us married before we are twenty-one. Have you ever heard such horrid rot?”
“I think it’s prudent,” said Elizabeth.
“How about Albert Mooney?” said Kitty squinting at Lydia’s apple peel.
“First name. Oh, how aggravating this is! What did you get?”
Kitty had scrunched her peel up in her hand, “It could be anything.”
“So not a ‘C’ then? Poor old kittykins. Do try it, Jane! You must have a beau in London, Lizzy, and I wish you would tell us about him… or them.”
“Not me,” replied Elizabeth who wouldn’t have told Lydia about admirer whether she had one or ten.
Lydia pouted. “I refuse to believe London isn’t raining adorable men. How I long to meet someone handsome and glamorous and I know I won’t in Meryton. Meryton is full of freckly farmers, sun-starved clerks, and long-faced lawyers,” she gave Kitty a pointed look that was none too kind, “whereas I long for someone sultry and alluring.”
Kitty rolled her eyes, “I feel sorry for you, Lydia, if you expect to meet a sheik in the public library as no-one in Meryton will ever disguise themselves as a harem girl and have a devastatingly handsome Arabian man fall madly in love with them.2 Why can’t you marry someone nice and normal like everyone else?”
“Apart from you and Mary and Lizzy and Jane?” said Lydia waggling her tongue. “What a good joke it will be when I am married first and how well it will sound… Mrs. Valentino. No, Signora Valentino! I shall tempt him with my dance of the seven veils.”
And seizing her wrapper she began to sashay around the room making eyes at her sisters over the top of it until none of them, even Kitty, could stop laughing.
“And I am grown up,” she asserted flopping on the bed, “I shall be sixteen in a few days. Granny Gardiner was married at seventeen, so that gives me a whole year although I would far rather have a summer wedding.”
“Eighteen months then,” laughed Elizabeth, “but I do wish you would think of something other than boys and not model yourself after your grandmother of all people. Marriage and motherhood are forever you know, don’t you want anything else first?”
Lydia shrugged, “I want to be desperately in love with someone tall, handsome, and terribly rich who will simply adore me. I couldn’t care less about children. I think children are horrid little things. Long live Marie Stopes!”3
Jane gasped but Elizabeth, who was less easily shocked, simply wished them all a good night. Despite her womanly figure and the great age of almost sixteen Lydia’s imagination was entirely populated by swashbuckling heroes with herself cast as Mary Pickford or Clara Bow or her darling Alice Terry. The realities of adult up life in Meryton would be bleak by comparison.
Elizabeth knew her father was downstairs balancing his cheque book against a glass of whisky, but she looked around her mother’s door and blew a kiss.
“I have a terrible headache,” said Phoebe petulantly, “it is what comes of worrying about you five girls all the time.”
When Elizabeth reached her own room she pulled the door fast with a huge sigh.
The next morning she returned from her ramble in what she hoped was time to corner her father at the breakfast table alone. She poured coffee, buttered toast, and her waiting was rewarded by her father, manuscript in hand, darting in for a cup to take to his study.
Gilbert paused when she jumped up which was more than he would have done for his wife. Elizabeth was his favourite daughter; she did not gossip, ask for money, or demand his involvement in domestic disputes so he had time for her, but if he stood too long he would have to hear his two youngest squabbling over imaginary beaux and be assaulted by Lydia’s renewed demands to leave school. He fidgeted with his cup and looked sheepish.
“I’ll be quick,” she said understanding perfectly, “it’s Mary. Uncle Arnold has offered her a clerk’s position and she wants to take it.”
He ran his hand through his greying hair, “Your mother will have kittens. What on earth does she want to be a filing clerkess for Arnold for? She can do my filing if it’ll make her happy.”
“As a legal clerk so that she can be articled as a solicitor,” said Elizabeth as the sniping and snarking of Kitty and Lydia became audible at the top of the stairs. “It would be a marvellous thing for her. If I can be a journalist, why can’t Mary be a lawyer?”
“Because I’m still hearing about you and I want a peaceful life. I want to come home at weekends and write my book in peace.”
“I wish you had broken the heel off your shoe in the first dance,” Lydia’s exasperated voice floated across the hall.
“Well I didn’t dance with anyone you fancy, after all, it’s not as if Albert was going to be there!”
“Oh shut up, I’m sick of you!”
Lydia slithered into her chair and even in her blue pinafore dress and white school blouse she looked more sophisticated than Kitty. She glanced at Elizabeth, “Do you wear trousers a lot?”
Elizabeth ignored her, “Father, please…”
“Father, please, what? What are you getting to do, Lizzy? Can I do it too?”
“It’s ridiculous, Elizabeth, she hasn’t the brains and your mother will make my life a misery.” He refreshed his coffee and headed for the hall.
“What’s going on?” Lydia looked from the door to Elizabeth, “Who hasn’t got brains? You won’t tell me, will you? It’s always the same, no-one tells me anything. I’m just stuck going to school.”
“Stop it, you sound like a broken record.”
“You would too if you were me.”
“At least it’s not boarding school, Lydia, you have weekends and you go to the cinema. Your life is not that dreadful.”
Lydia thumped the jam pot down on the table so violently that her spoon jumped on her plate plopping jam on to the white tablecloth.
“If I went to boarding school I could at least run away like Harriet.”
“And find yourself married to a man nearly twice your age? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“She has her own house and he gives her everything she wants and we have nine bedrooms and I still have to share with Kitty. Besides, she can get a divorce if she gets bored.”
“I don’t know what world you live in, Lydia,” said Eliz
abeth, “but it’s not the same one as the rest of us, of that I’m sure.”
And she dashed out after her father.
1 An old name for Hallowe’en.
2 Approximately the plot of the famous Rudolph Valentino film, ‘The Sheik’, 1921.
3 Author of ‘Married Love’, 1918, an influential but scandalous book advocating, amongst other things, the use of contraceptives and the idea that women should enjoy sex.
AN INVITATION
By the time Jane was ready for their walk into Meryton Elizabeth had extracted her father’s blessing on Mary’s career. The task was harder than it should have been and she was faintly ashamed of her father who was such an ardent advocate of women’s rights in public yet unable to stand up to his own wife in private. To cheer herself up she changed into her French navy suit and a gorgeous little hat trimmed with purple and palest lemon pansies. The good citizens of Meryton, like almost the rest of the world, were not ready for ladies in trousers yet.
When they returned there was a note for Jane on the hall table. She pretended not to notice it had already been opened and resealed.
“It’s an invitation from Caroline Bingley to have dinner at Netherfield on Sunday while Charles and Mr. Darcy are away. She says they will not be at church but I am welcome to arrive any time and spend the afternoon. How kind!”
Phoebe, who had been pondering the problem of Charles being away since the note was delivered, affected surprise, “Away? You must make the most of it all the same. It is always wise to make friends with a man’s family, especially his mother, but as she is in Yorkshire the sisters will do, they will write to her about you. Besides you may be asked to spend the night.”
“I can’t imagine why,” said Jane.
Sunday morning filled in Jane’s lack of imagination. They walked home from church under umbrellas and watched the clouds darken through a comparatively quiet lunch. Kitty and Lydia were in the huff with each other and Phoebe strangely contemplative and not at all inclined to discuss the hole in the chancel roof or even Ethel Long’s hat. Elizabeth was suspicious but grateful for only hearing the sensible conversation passing between her father and older sister she decided not to tempt fate by making enquiries. At two o’clock Jane, in her ivory suit and new ruched silk hat, deemed it time to leave and asked if she could take the car.
Professor Bennet began to nod but his wife reminded him that Tom had spent yesterday cleaning the car for Rex Pennington’s funeral and that she would die if they arrived at a Pennington funeral in a dirty car and it was sure to get absolutely filthy on the road to Netherfield. Jane immediately said she’d ‘phone Louisa and explain that the bad weather was keeping her at home.
Gilbert remarked that had no particular desire to see Rex off to the hereafter having had no liking for him in the here and now but he was drowned out by a cacophony of female opinion. Elizabeth protested that Tom could give the car a quick hose down but in her opinion the road would be fine. Lydia demanded to go along for the ride, Kitty asked petulantly why only Jane was invited, and Mary started puss-puss-pussing for her cat whom Gilbert hadn’t realised was deaf.
“You’ll have to go on Bessie,” said Phoebe, “Your father can saddle her up for you.”
“Oh, Mother, honestly, as I’ve just said, Tom can hose the car off in the morning.”
“I am not attending a funeral in a quickly hosed down car, Miss Lizzy, and if it does rain then Jane will have to spend the night and she may well see Charles in the morning which is the whole point of her going.”
Jane blushed and bit her lip.
“They may simply send her home in one of their cars, mother,” persisted Elizabeth, “and be irritated by the inconvenience of having to get the car out at night and stable Bessie for us.”
“Nonsense,” snapped Phoebe, “Albert will be driving the gentlemen and Mr. Darcy drove himself here so there is no extra chauffeur. Jane will have to stay overnight. Have you nothing better to think about, Lizzy? No young man in London? I thought not.”
So Jane, with a mackintosh on over her suit, mounted Bessie and with a resigned smile at Elizabeth trotted out of the Longbourn paddock. Elizabeth reminded her to take care raising her voice above the gusting breeze and watched her progress until she was driven in by the rain. She was comforted by Jane’s ability as a horsewoman and irritated by her mother’s as a weatherwoman in equal measure. The wind was whipping up into a storm, and the question was no longer would Jane have to spend the night but rather would she even get there without being drenched, but there was nothing to do except guess at how quickly Bessie could move - and hope. She settled on the sofa in the little parlour with a book and tried to blot out the sounds of domestic felicity from the drawing room.
It’s mine… oh who cares, it looks better on me… Mummy, tell Kitty to give me my hat back… Kitty, give your sister the hat… no, Lydia, you cannot go to your room… you always give her my things… why can’t Mary play something fun… Mary, stop that dreadful racket I want to put the wireless on… I saw you making cow’s eyes at Cedric… I was not… oh, yes you were… Kitty loves Cedric! Kitty loves Cedric! Kitty and Cedric sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g… stop it, you two, I can’t hear myself play!… oh, you stop it, Mary, no-one wants your silly concertos here…
Elizabeth got up and shouted down the corridor, “Mary, play ‘Mars’!”1
Another round of bickering followed before they went to change for dinner and even then she could hear Kitty and Lydia arguing over who owned a mauve stole. It was inevitable that Kitty would grow up and shake off the influence of a younger sister and worrying that Lydia persisted in trying to wield it. Elizabeth was quietly and deeply grateful for Jane who had been her first teacher and playmate and was now her dearest, most trusted friend.
Halfway through dinner the expected telephone call came. Jane was feverish and staying overnight. Louisa suggested Elizabeth should call in the morning. Phoebe was triumphant although mystified at Elizabeth being specified and Professor Bennet much less sanguine.
“I hope you will still consider the pursuit of Mr. Bingley quite as worthwhile if your daughter catches influenza and dies.”
“It’s a cold, Gilbert, healthy young women like Jane do not die of trifling colds. She will be as right as rain in the morn… in a few days. Oh, this is such a good outcome, you know how beautiful Jane looks when she is unwell, so ethereal.”
Professor Bennet gave his wife a hard look and left the room muttering about rueing the day dons were allowed to marry.2
“Ethereal is the word you used for Violet Parker when they laid her out after her tuberculosis,” said Mary tartly.
“Like Ruby Gillies in ‘Anne Of The Island’, that was so romantic!”
Mary looked at Elizabeth who rolled her eyes.
“There’s nothing romantic about dying of tuberculosis, Lydia.”
“Oh, it was so sad too, poor Ruby. I shall hate Louisa Montgomery forever for making her die but it was romantic in a way. I'm so young, Anne. I haven't had my life. I've fought so hard to live, and it isn't any use, I have to die.” Lydia flung her hand to her forehead and tried to look dramatic.
“You just liked her because she was always going to parties,” put in Kitty, “Anne was too nice to flirt with all the boys in the village that’s why Gilbert Blythe was mad about her.”
“I bet she kissed Roy Gardner,” retorted Lydia sticking her tongue out, “nee-naw-nee-naw.”
“Oh, get off to school and leave the adults to their day,” snapped Kitty.
Lydia began to protest at the top of her lungs and Elizabeth bolted leaving her half-eaten plate. If Mary wanted to preside over a cat fight for the sake of breakfast she was welcome. Elizabeth would rather be hungry and within twenty minutes she was in the morning room with a bag of Jane’s things. Phoebe objected to the walk, Elizabeth protested she had walked every day when it was a hospital, Phoebe declared that with all the mud she wouldn't be fit to be seen and Elizabeth assured her she would be fi
t to be seen by Jane which was all she wanted.
“However, if a bit of mud will prevent me being in company with the superior friend and sisters I may find some to wallow in on the way there.”
“Sarcasm is unbecoming, young lady. She gets it from all that reading, Gilbert, and if you’re not careful she’ll turn out like your cousin Winifred.”
Professor Bennet looked up from The Meryton Bugle, “Promise me, Lizzy, to always to return your library books on time.”
“Return on time… don’t talk nonsense! Winifred stole sixty books from Hertford Public Library before the Spanish ‘flu got her.”
Elizabeth saw her moment and fled.
She walked briskly down the lane revelling in the scent of damp earth and skiffing through piles of leaves. Then she waved cheerily to the maid hanging out Mr. Bayley’s longjohns in the vicarage garden before jumping a stile and setting out across the first of several fields resembling rice paddies after a fortnight’s rain.
The glebe field ended in a large hazel copse where Elizabeth and the trees had been friends for many years. She took her tammy off and stuffing it in her pocket held her face up to them to be lavished with raindrops then somewhere in Longbourn meadow her skirt trailed in some good Hertfordshire earth and by the time she reached the bridge over the stream that formed the border between Longbourn and Netherfield her boots looked as if she’d borrowed them from a handy farm labourer.
In this state of disarray, she pushed open the oak gate of Netherfield’s kitchen garden and made her way to the side of the house. The great lawns flanking the sweep which had recently looked like the Serengeti had been mowed and would look like the cricket ground at Lord’s by the spring, flower beds had been marked out and there was Fred Tovey, sober for once, merrily digging in manure. He had his muffler tied over his cap, no doubt the place where his right ear had been before Passchendaele was tender in the cold.
And there too, directly in front of her, was Mr. Darcy looking as if he’d like to read her a salutary passage from Fordyce’s Sermons (or whatever it was that Lydia Languish had used to curl her hair)3 but contenting himself with a reproving glower instead.
