‘Who is that?’ asked Hannah.
‘That is dearest Lizzy and Mr Darcy. They are no doubt attempting their scene where Mr Darcy refers to her as “tolerable” which they both find most amusing.’
‘Mr Darcy!’ exclaimed Hannah.
‘You have already made the acquaintance of Mr Darcy?’ asked Miss Bennet very politely.
‘Oh no,’ said Hannah, ‘but a lot of my friends have worked with him. He’s a very popular hero just now, after the Andrew Davies adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1995 and the subsequent Bridget Jones novels. Oh, Miss Bennet, what’s wrong?’
Miss Bennet had started to frown.
‘It is nothing, Miss Peel, only that my poor Mr Bingley suffers a little for Mr Darcy’s popularity. CAST does not have so much work for Mr Bingley.’
‘But Mr Darcy is every woman’s ideal man, Jane. Aren’t you secretly disappointed that you don’t end up with him?’
Miss Bennet shook her head firmly.
‘Mr Bingley singles me out from the start of our acquaintance and, as soon as he is sensible of my returned feelings, he proposes marriage to me. But I am not sure that Mr Darcy is always so good a man until Lizzy speaks to him of his improper pride.’
Hannah considered this and said, ‘Maybe that’s why Mr Darcy is always getting shadowed? Because he gets his act together after Lizzy gives him what for? Gives women authors and readers some belief that they can turn their men about, doesn’t it? But Bingley’s already an all-round decent bloke from the start.’
Miss Bennet laughed and asked, ‘What do you need to learn from me, Miss Peel?’
‘Well, like you I’m very attractive and good but, at the moment, stuff sort of just happens to me. My bloke loves me from the start. He proposes and we get married. I get scouted as a model but, I dunno, I don’t like it much. I feel just like a coat hanger. I want to have a baby but I’m not sure I get the chance in the novel to tell my husband about what I really want from him.’
Miss Bennet nodded quickly, ‘Yes, if Charlotte Lucas had spoken to me, as she does to Lizzy, of the need for me to make my feelings for Mr Bingley plainer, then I do not believe it would have been so easy for others to convince him of my indifference. And we would have wed within the first quarter of the novel—’
‘Miss Bennett, would you mind if I take notes?’ asked Hannah who now sat poised over a notebook with pen.
‘Shall I speak slowly for you, Miss Peel?’
‘It’s okay. My bloke, Bill, is a super-duper journalist and he’s been teaching me shorthand when our author’s been asleep. So I should be able to keep up. I’ve already got up to 100 words a minute.’
Miss Bennet continued, ‘It is Mr Darcy who returns Bingley to me after conveying my true feelings for him. And Mr Darcy has them from dear Lizzy. So my happiness rises and falls with Mr Darcy’s perceptions of my character. That is rather hard. But I am very blessed at the end of the novel, securing not just my own happiness but also that of my dear family. For you know that until Lizzy and I marry so happily, there is an entail which hangs over us all? My father’s death would have left Mama and my sisters in difficult circumstances if we had married otherwise. Does your marriage please your family?’
‘Yes. Like your mum with Bingley, my mum is quick to invite my bloke into our house. He’s only 15 and a runaway when we all meet so he lives with me and my parents. He’s not like Bingley because when he turns up he’s dirt poor, but he’s got brains and earning potential. My parents don’t care much about the cash. But we’re a close family. They like having Bill grow up under the same roof as me. They believe it’ll be a safe way for me to fall in love.’
Miss Bennet sighed and said, ‘Your parents are perhaps more sensible than my dear father to family responsibilities. I am afraid he learns a very hard lesson when Lydia elopes with Wickham after he fails to heed or check her nature. She is but 15 when she meets Wickham and lacking the prudence brought about by living within loving constraints.’
Suddenly, Miss Bennet smiled, ‘Miss Peel, is your man to come and shadow Mr Bingley?’
Hannah shook her head, ‘I’m afraid not, Jane. My fella turns out to be rather messed up.’
Miss Bennet said, ‘And so that is why you are to go to Thornfield Hall? To shadow Miss Eyre and her poor Mr Rochester?’
When Hannah arrived at Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre was away from home. Mrs Fairfax invited her into a small, snug room.
‘That’s Grace Poole,’ said Mrs Fairfax gesturing towards a woman sitting at a round table by the fireplace, rapidly shuffling a pack of cards.
‘Do you play, Miss—?’
‘Peel,’ said Hannah, ‘I’m Hannah Peel, here to shadow Jane Eyre.’
‘And this is Bertha.’
A tall, sad woman turned from the fire, which she stirred with a poker. She extended a nail-bitten hand to Hannah and said, ‘Welcome to Thornfield. How long are you to stay with us here?’3
An alarm sounded.
‘Goodness, that startled me!’ exclaimed Bertha Antoinette, ‘Come on, Miss Peel. It’s another fire alarm.’
The characters exited the house and waited in the drive for the siren to stop. Adele, Sophie and Leah were already outside. Grace Poole smoked a cigarette and Adele skipped around them all, breathlessly singing ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’.
‘Is it a real fire?’ asked Hannah.
‘I doubt it, Miss Peel,’ said Mrs Fairfax, ‘it is most likely a test. Mr Rochester thought it best to put in a system so that none of us gets hurt.’4
At that moment—5
At that moment, a slight figure, gripped by a stocky, pugnacious man, could be seen approaching the house from the direction of the chapel.
‘Good God! Miss Eyre’s back from the doomed wedding already with Edward. I must return to the third storey,’ exclaimed Bertha Antoinette. She started to rip at her clothes and pulled her black hair into disarray as she ran back into the house. The fire alarm stopped. Grace Poole hastily stamped out her cigarette and followed her.
Mrs Fairfax said to Hannah, ‘In eight minutes, Miss Eyre will withdraw to her own room. You may be able to speak with her briefly until Mr Rochester arrives. He will sit outside her door before he makes his inappropriate offer of sinful living.’
Hannah knocked on Miss Eyre’s door.
‘Ed?’ exclaimed a voice in surprise.
Hannah entered, ‘No, it’s me, Hannah Peel. I’ve come on a CAST placement. I know it’s not a great time but—’
‘Come in, Miss Peel. I thought it strange that Ed should be knocking at the door. I usually stumble over him sitting in a chair across my threshold, some time in the afternoon.’
‘Have I disturbed you getting undressed?’ asked Hannah, who saw a square, blond veil on the bed.
‘I need to take off my gown mechanically and put on my stuff dress from yesterday. But I have all morning to do that. Miss Peel, are you certain that you are to shadow me?’
‘Yes,’ said Hannah.
‘But you are very beautiful. Even more magnificent than Miss Ingram. And I am small and plain.’
‘What! Are you kidding me? Your look is so right now. Slight, boyish figure, elfin. You might even be a size zero. And your skin is clear, hair in great condition and a versatile style. As for height, Kate Moss is five seven. Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole are way shorter than that.’
‘Miss Peel! How can this be true?’ asked Miss Eyre, moving to a very small mirror to study her face, ‘And I’m so much used to being plain,’ she said, wonderingly.
‘Jane, you are hot right now.’
‘Hot?’ repeated Miss Eyre.
‘Still—’ said Hannah.
‘What?’
‘Well, it is all a bit of a waste of time, isn’t it? Looks come and go, don’t they? But it’s your actions which count, isn’t it, Jane? Miss Eyre?’
Miss Eyre continued to consider her small face in the mirror. ‘Miss Eyre?’
‘When you said “hot” just a mo
ment ago, Miss Peel, I wonder if you were teasing me as I am so very plain, am I not?’
Hannah sat down in a chair and said, ‘Look, Miss Eyre, you must know you’ve got something going on, otherwise how do you explain all of your marriage proposals, right, left and centre.’
‘There are not so many. Two.’
‘Right, one from Rochester who’s minted and chased by women, and another from St John who’s attractive and ambitious. Between them you’re holding the whole deck. You ain’t doing badly.’
‘Yes, but sometimes I do wonder if it is my littleness which attracts them. After all, it is not so very hard to destroy something small when you are finished using it. I have no family in the world to protect me, for most of the novel anyway, and I wonder if, knowing that and in desperate want of a mate, Mr Rochester proposed this impossible wedding to me. When he asks me to travel abroad with him, unmarried, that cannot be with any true mindfulness of my long-term welfare. And St John plainly does not love me but presses me to travel to India with him where it is almost certain that we shall perish in the difficult climate. He asks me to give him my life. I wonder if life might be more ordered if I were to train myself out of my strongest feelings. But then, I suppose I do not really wish for a passionless life.’
Miss Eyre sighed and lowered herself onto the bed.
‘Are you ever tempted to marry St John, Miss Eyre? I ask you because when my husband Bill suffers and pushes me away, my friend Flash asks me to start a relationship with him. I don’t know what to do. Bill is very hard work, like Mr Rochester. But I love him. I want to have a baby and Flash offers me that. But I don’t love Flash. It feels morally wrong to have a child with someone you don’t love.’
‘I do not wish to marry St John, Miss Peel, because he does not love me. God did not give me my life to throw away on any fruitless mission. Nor you. Nor any character. Regardless of what Mr Pirandello may write on the subject.’
Hannah, emboldened by Miss Eyre’s passion and disgusted with the objectification of Miss Bennet returned to the CAST HQ in a resolute mood. She showed her card at the barriers to pass.6
She filed her report back to her author and hoped that the equipment wasn’t playing up and that her author could hear her distinct voice.
My inspiration: In the early stages of writing my novel, I felt uncertain about my central female character, Hannah Peel. I wondered if I might get to know her better by having her interact with other literary heroines. I have studied Pride and Prejudice five times (from GCSE to an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa). My admiration for this novel influences the way I draw characters. My own novel is quite dark and it was a joy to write this ‘essay’ for a complete change. It worked, too. It gave me Hannah’s voice.
SECOND FRUITS
Stephanie Tillotson
Rosamunde Shaw neatly folded together the pink pages of the Financial Times and, finding little consolation there, asked herself, ‘Now, I wonder how all this will end?’
Her gaze slid cleanly down from the thickening autumn clouds above her to the glass and black wall of the building opposite, down to the wet London pavements thirty-two storeys below. In the offices around her own, the flames of fluorescent light were catching, running along the ledges and leaping from atom to atom in the recycled, dry oxygen of the city air. Now that the bank had failed she wondered if they would see people jumping from these windows, as they had done in Wall Street after 1929. What determination had resolved that leap into oblivion, was it simply the fear of something yet worse to come?
Guto had told her, on the first day they met, about a play he’d seen, the tale of a Welsh queen who, in middle age, had taken a young lover with passionate, unquenchable fervour. When the King had discovered her betrayal, he had ordered that the lover be hanged outside the Queen’s chamber window, where she could heed the hammering and the intensity of the execution drums.
‘That’s a horrible story. Why did you tell me that?’ Rosamunde had demanded.
‘They didn’t hang him,’ replied Guto earnestly, his mouth almost touching her face so that she could hear him above the sound of the waves and the wailing of the boat’s engine. ‘With the noose around his neck, the Queen’s lover jumped from the scaffold to his death. Don’t you think that is wonderful, Rosa? What courage! What defiance!’
She hadn’t understood but she had enjoyed the feel of his breath on her face. She thought it might just be despair that had caused the lover to jump but she hadn’t understood Guto then, after all she was only sixteen. It was August and her newly received exam results had been even better than predicted. For once her father had seemed pleased, pleased enough to allow her to join a small party of girls from school, boarding the day ferry from Penarth pier to Ilfracombe bay and back again. What he didn’t know was that Amelia Edwards had invited her brother and some of his friends to come along and that Amelia’s brother had brought several bottles of wine with him. Guto was one of the brother’s friends and, an hour or so into the trip, when the cliffs around Cardiff and Barry were little more than a charcoal smudge on the horizon, he had brought over a cup of red wine. Rosamunde did not drink it, though she had sipped it once. At Ilfracombe they had eaten light-brown scones with sweet strawberry jam and sticky cream. Later, as they stood on the beach, he had tried to kiss her. She had decided that she liked this, though she was nervous of what else he might try to do. Amelia said a boy had pushed his hand down the front of her knickers and put his finger inside her but Guto had never once done that to Rosa. Now she wondered what it would have felt like if he had.
She turned from the window back to the television in the corner above the filing cabinet. There had been a time when she only switched on the set to check the market prices. Tonight she was watching the early evening news. She could see a young man on the screen, someone with whom it seemed she had worked. He was crossing the crowded concourse in front of the building, a cardboard box in his hands. The dark jacket of his suit stirred as he walked, his rounded shoulders taking the weight of the box. A voice stumbled on, a voice unable to hide its excitement at the latest catastrophic news from the bank. Thirty-two storeys above the now empty concourse, Rosamunde watched the young man leaving the building, walking towards the Underground.
Her father had not approved of Guto. Because of the way his Welsh name is pronounced (the ‘u’ sounding like an ‘i’ to her father’s ears), he was always referred to as ‘the little git’. But then Guto’s father had not been pleased by his son’s growing attachment to a girl who only spoke English. Guto’s parents had both been teachers of Welsh and had brought up their children to be proud of their otherness. Guto’s dad now worked for the Examining Board and Guto’s mum was the headteacher at the comprehensive school he attended, where he was taught through a mysterious language Rosa had only ever heard on the television. He told her stories from books she had not known existed and learned of a history that seemed to have almost nothing to do with Shakespeare or English kings and queens. And all this in a building only twenty minutes walk away from her own school, where she was expected to devote herself to the development of her natural talents for Mathematics, Latin and Lacrosse.
‘Why did your Dad send you to that snobby girls’ school?’ Guto had asked.
‘It was when Mrs Shaw ran back home to her mammy,’ she had replied.
‘You see,’ he had laughed, ‘It’s just not normal!’
‘Aberystwyth University,’ her father had sneered in exasperation. ‘What the hell does he want to go there for?’
‘To study Welsh Literature.’
‘And what will he be able to do with that? He’ll be fit for nothing but teaching if he’s not careful and teachers earn a pittance. That boy of yours has no ambition.’ In her father’s eyes not to have any ambition was the worst failing possible. He had never spoken of courage or defiance with admiration, not to her anyway, yet how much he had displayed as the cancer threatened to overwhelm his failing flesh. It had been no more unnatural than th
e tide going out but Rosa’s father had clawed and hammered against it every minute of every day, steadfastly refusing to die in peace. The hospice had rung her late one Monday afternoon somewhere in the middle of this surprising month. ‘Come now,’ the doctor had advised and an hour later she was running down the platform at Paddington Station, cursing her short legs and her expanding waistline, leaping for the door just as the whistle blew on the train to Cardiff Central. All night long she sat by her father’s bed watching his chest expand and contract. She had remembered the prayers her mother’s religion had taught her, even though her father had nothing but contempt for ‘frail subservience and ignorance’.
‘Not in my house,’ he had shouted, ‘you will not teach my children the ways of fawning and toadying.’
‘Your father is a bad man, Rosamunde.’ Her mother had stood her ground and, when he had forgotten to collect her from the hospital after the birth of Rosamunde’s little brother, had taken the next taxi to the airport and gone home to her own mother in Tipperary. Thereafter Rosa’s father only referred to his wife as ‘Mrs Shaw’, who continued to stand her ground and would not entertain the idea of divorce until Rosamunde was forwarded to her mother in Ireland. In response, her father had taken Rosa out of the convent primary and made her sit the entrance exam to an exclusive girls’ school in Cardiff. She had passed easily, so her father’s next move was to buy a two-bedroomed luxury flat on the cliffs above the sea in posh Penarth. Suddenly their neighbours were judges, barristers and wealthy businessmen and her friends at school were the daughters of judges, barristers and wealthy businessmen. There had never been any further talk of divorce.
‘Do you think he knows that I am here?’ Rosamunde had asked the nurse.
‘He can probably hear you. Why don’t you talk to him?’
‘I’m still here, Daddy,’ she had told him time and time again through that night, her hand around his. ‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,’ she murmured as his chest contracted. This time the breath did not shudder out, his body remained silent and still. ‘Has he gone?’ she asked. The nurse took a step towards the bed as his body rippled and reached out for life once again.