Dancing With Mr. Darcy Read online

  I told her that we couldn’t sit here in this smell. Who knows how long we would have to wait, even assuming he was in there. We would have to go inside and find him. Then she could judge his work for herself and we could see how he reacted to each of us. Bina got into a tizz and grabbed my hand and said, I can’t go in there. We were both laughing and she pumped my hand and told me: you can’t go in there, because…because…that smell is the smell of dead teenage girl. Mani lures them here and molests them, peels them alive and stitches their skin into canvases. And out of their bones he sculpts the finest, most beautiful miniature animals with his clever hands. Their entrails he just chucks in the bins with the KFC boxes.

  I told her that that was the longest sentence that I’d ever heard her speak. She turned her face away and flashed her cobalt-black hair at me. I reached into it and felt the weight of it. It was thick; each piece of hair, not just the volume of it. I plucked a strand, wound it round my finger and told her that you could use her hair to sew with, it was so strong. Then I buried my face in it. It was just washed and the sweet chemicals were so strong that they obliterated everything else. I whispered to her that Mani is a conceptual artist. He doesn’t do sculpting and painting. That he doesn’t have the balls to do something as wild as that. I grabbed her left hand back and laid it on my palm. It was tiny, like a child’s, but puffy and red like an old hag’s. I told her this and she laughed so hard, she started to snort. So I told her that she snorted like a man. And she pulled her hand back and acted all offended: a man? A man? Not even a pig?

  I thought I might have gone too far, so I put my lips against her stomach and burrowed and blew into it. I asked her to forgive me, told her that she was the most beautiful girl ever, more beautiful than Shilpa Shetty, hair more lovely than Amy Winehouse, eyes prettier than Mani Burdage—We were squealing and laughing so much it took us ten seconds to register the tapping sound on the glass.

  The light had slipped since we had been sitting here and there was a face pressed against the window. We screamed and jumped and held on to each other’s flesh. The figure reeled back like a frightened child. It was Mr Burdage. He waved both hands at us. I dropped Bina, turned my back on her and pressed the window down. I leaned out and filled the space, putting myself between Mani and Bina, so he could see only me.

  I held his eyes and started to talk. I could feel him trying to look past me, but I told him we were looking for the Moustache Bar, that it was near here and that because we couldn’t find it we were about to come in to the studios and ask someone. He gave me his down-turned smile, pretended that he believed the story and said no, he had not heard of that one. What sort of bar was it? Then he said we could try Persuasion, on the High Road. It seemed to be popular with a young crowd. Then he looked at his watch and said. It’s a bit early, though. I asked him if he goes there. And he said, not me, I’m too old for that. Then he backed away from us. When he was at a safe distance, he moved his finger as if he was scribbling lines between us and said: I’m glad you two found each other. I called after him and asked him what the smell was. He looked confused and said, do you mean the canal?

  Bina didn’t say anything on the drive home. I asked her if we should try that bar. She shrugged and said that she had to get home. She was scratching a lot. Her hands, her arms, around her stomach.

  In the end I said, Mani Burdage is all right, but he isn’t worth peeling your skin off for. She covered her mouth in an affected way and then leaving one finger across her lips she looked at me and said: I was never interested in Mr Burdage. I don’t know what interested me here.

  I almost went after her when she left the car. But what could I say to her? Wasn’t it a shame that he came over when he did, because for a moment there I thought we were going to kiss and I ached all over and this was so pure that the words shouldn’t be spoken or embroidered or played with, and now I feel bruised and I want to sit rigid looking into her eyes, not even touching and then fall asleep wrapping myself in her hair and when we wake we are so entangled that we don’t know where Bina ends and Emma begins. And this wouldn’t be a partnership, a convenience. It would be everything.

  My inspiration: In writing ‘Bina’ my starting point was Jane Austen’s Emma, a character whose comic meddling and ambitions set off a chain of events that transform her and allow her to find the love that was there all along. My Emma is the narrator of the story.

  Biographies

  Lane Ashfeldt grew up in Ireland and England, and has lived and worked in several European countries. She is working on a collection of short stories. Her ambition is to live in the past; somewhere sufficiently far back for there to be no mobile phones or speaking buses, but not so far back that chalk gets passed off as food. Information about areas of Europe with permanent network voids gratefully received – contact Lane via her website www.ashfeldt.com.

  Esther Bellamy is 28 and lives and farms in Hampshire. She read history at Oxford and worked at the House of Commons before studying land management at Cirencester Agricultural College. Between chasing beef cattle and avoiding paperwork she is studying for a Masters in Research in English at Southampton University where she is writing her thesis on the concept of failure in the novels of George Eliot. She is working on a novel. She reads omnivorously and a trail of destruction at the back of her house indicates that she may recently have taken up gardening as a hobby.

  Kelly Brendel was born in 1989 in South London. She is currently a student at the University of York studying English Literature.

  Suzy Ceulan Hughes was born in England but has lived in mid-Wales since 1977. She is a writer, translator and book reviewer. This is her first short story to be published.

  Beth Cordingly was born in Brighton and attended Birmingham University where she gained a double first in English and Drama. She is currently doing the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck. She is a founding member of Nomads, a writers’ workshop and of Lou’s Crew, who are working on a comedy series for television. She is an established television and theatre actress.

  Felicity Cowie is a former BBC Panorama journalist and a student on the MA in Creative Writing course at Bath Spa University. She is currently finishing her first novel and wrote ‘One Character In Search Of Her Love Story Role’ whilst developing the central character of Hannah Peel.

  Felicity was longlisted for the Fish International Short Story Prize 2006 and, as a teenager, won the WH Smith Young Writer of the Year Competition. As a journalist, her most interesting guest was Buzz Aldrin.

  Elaine Grotefeld was born in Montreal, Canada and grew up in the UK, where she read English at Jesus College, Cambridge. She wrote two of her dissertations on her favourite writer, Jane Austen (the second to attempt reparation for the first). Since then she’s lived and worked in London, Vancouver, Hong Kong and Singapore – where she ‘headhunted’ technology executives by day and wrote poems, short stories and her novel by night. Happily squeezed between mountains and sea, Elaine is now back in Vancouver – with her Scottish husband, two children, and the occasional rummaging bear. Persuasion’s theme of long-lost love inspired Elaine’s short story ‘Eight Years Later,’ as well as her first and almost-cooked novel, Meeting Joe McManus.

  Jacqui Hazell was born in Hampshire in 1968. She studied textile design at Nottingham and has had a range of humorous greetings cards published. She has also been a runner-up in the Vogue Talent Contest for young writers and worked briefly as a secretary at Buckingham Palace. She is a journalist and magazine editor and is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. Her first novel is entitled, The Flood Video Diaries. She lives in London.

  Elizabeth Hopkinson usually finds her imagination veering towards the fantastic, and is therefore very pleased (and a little surprised) to find herself doing so well with a (nearly) straight story. She lives in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where she finds an endless source of inspiration in the coffee shop in the old Wool Exchange. Her stories have appeared in several genre magazines, webzines
and anthologies, and her themed collection of 12 short stories, My True Love Sent to Me, is available from Virtual Tales. Her website is: www.hiddengrove.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  Mary Howell was born with many advantages, most of which she turned her back on.

  Educated to be a lady at a private convent, she excelled at truancy, managing only to achieve a fistful of star A levels. Her university career and her nursing career both ended abruptly with spells in prison. Both times she was released without stain.

  She has lived all over the world, with as many aliases as lovers, She has been an orthodontist’s assistant, a serial absconder, sawn in half by a magician and a happily married mother of three. She now lives in North Wales.

  Clair Humphries graduated with a BA Hons in English Literature. She has worked in the Official Publications Reading Room of the British Library and is currently employed at a London university, where she provides support for disabled and dyslexic students. She writes humorous contemporary fiction and lives in Kent with her husband, Steve.

  Kirsty Mitchell is 25 and was born in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. She now lives in Glasgow. Her short stories have previously been published in Mslexia magazine, and placed in the Cadenza Short Story Competition, Frome Festival Short Story Competition, and the Bristol Short Story Prize. She is a graduate of Philosophy and History at Glasgow University.

  Victoria Owens worked first in the book trade and later as a legal executive before reading for an English degree. PhD research on John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid followed; she finished her thesis about ten days before her eldest daughter’s birth. She wrote her first novel when her younger daughter started playgroup and her second on Bath Spa University’s MA in Creative Writing, but neither has found a publisher. Victoria runs and swims to keep fit, enjoys choral singing and belongs to the Gaskell Society. She lives near Bristol.

  Penelope Randall was born in Leicester. She grew up in Norfolk and Nottinghamshire and, for three teenage years, in the Bahamas. She read Engineering Science at Oxford University and has worked as a civil servant, editor, typesetter and playgroup assistant. She currently teaches science and maths and wants to start a campaign against education buzzwords. She has always loved writing stories, and recent successes (and near-misses!) encourage her to hope that her three novels may one day find a publisher. She lives in Manchester.

  Nancy Saunders lives in a Hampshire village and works in Library Aquisitions, sending out lovely new books to hungry readers. Writing, fiddle-playing and enjoying the great outdoors are all squeezed in around the job. Nancy is a past member of Alex Keegan’s Bootcamp online writing group – without which her writing would not have won a couple of prizes and appeared in various publications. Elly and Oscar are Nancy’s two true significant others.

  Stephanie Shields was brought up in the Midlands but has spent all of her adult life in the north of England, where she has combined sheep farming with a career in further education. She has written poetry since childhood, but short fiction is a more recent development. Having had some early publication of her poetry in the 1970s, she has continued as a covert writer. She is a member of the Otley Courthouse Writers, based in the market town of Otley, West Yorkshire.

  Elsa A. Solender, a New Yorker, was president of the Jane Austen Society of North America from 1996-2000. Educated at Barnard College and the University of Chicago, she has worked as a journalist, editor, and college teacher in Chicago, Baltimore and New York. She represented an international non-governmental women’s organisation at the United Nations during a six-year residency in Geneva. She has published articles and reviews in a wide variety of American magazines and newspapers, but ‘Second Thoughts’ is her first published story. She has been married for 49 years, has two married sons and seven grandchildren.

  Hilary Spiers lives in Stamford, Lincolnshire, works in adolescent health policy part-time and writes every day, when time and life permit. She has won a number of national writing competitions, been published in several anthologies and had some of her stories broadcast on the radio. Her abiding passion remains playwriting, for stage and radio. Her play Hoovering on the Edge was staged by Shoestring Theatre in September 2009 and she has had work performed at London’s Hampstead Theatre and the Oundle Literature Festival. While collecting rejection letters, she acts in and directs other writers’ plays.

  Stephanie Tillotson joined the BBC in 1989 and worked in television and radio for many years, at length crossing to the independent sector in Wales. For the past ten years she has been writing, directing and performing for the theatre. Originally from Gilwern near Abergavenny, she now lives in Aberystwyth, where she has been teaching in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the university. At present she is editing a book of short stories for Honno called Cut on the Bias, a collection of fictional writing about women’s relationship to clothes and image.

  Andrea Watsmore was born in the London/Essex borders in 1966, has four children and a Fine Art degree from Chelsea School of Art. This has led to a number of opportunities including usherette, engineer, tote operator, teacher, shop girl, bag lady and artist.

  She has always written, whether in paintings or on lonely walls. Now she generally limits it to a spiral-bound notebook and laptop. ‘Bina’ is her first published story.

  The Judges

  Sarah Waters was born in Pembrokeshire. She has won a Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and was twice shortlisted for the Mail On Sunday / John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Fingersmith and The Night Watch were both shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes, and Fingersmith won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and the South Bank Show Award for Literature. Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith have all been adapted for television. Her latest novel The Little Stranger, was published by Virago in 2009. She lives in London.

  Lindsay Ashford is a former BBC journalist and the author of four published crime novels. Her second, Strange Blood, was shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. She has had short stories published and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and has edited two collections of short fiction and prose for Honno: Written In Blood and Strange Days Indeed. She splits her time between a home on the Welsh coast and Chawton House, where she is a PR consultant.

  Mary Hammond started her career writing historical novels for an American book packager in the early 1980s. She is now Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Southampton, specialising in book history, and convenor for Southampton’s MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the print culture of Victorian Britain and has also written on contemporary creative writing.

  Rebecca Smith is the five-times great niece of Jane Austen (descended from Jane’s brother Frances, through his daughter Catherine Ann, who was born at Chawton House). She is a Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Southampton University. Her first novel, The Bluebird Café, was published by Bloomsbury in 2001. Other novels are Happy Birthday and All That (Bloomsbury 2003) and A Bit Of Earth (Bloomsbury 2006).

  Janet Thomas is a freelance editor, living in Aberystwyth. She has edited a wide range of books, including four short-story anthologies for Honno: Catwomen from Hell, The Woman Who Loved Cucumbers, Mirror Mirror and Safe World Gone, which were co-edited with Patricia Duncker. She has published short stories and her children’s picture book Can I Play? (Egmont) won a Practical PreSchool gold award.

  Chawton House Library

  Two hundred years ago Jane Austen made a momentous journey. On a July day in 1809 she set out from Southampton at the invitation of her brother, Edward. He had inherited the Manor of Chawton after being adopted by a wealthy, childless couple and had offered her a new home on his estate. On taking up residence there with her mother and sister, Jane did something she had felt unable to do for a very long time: she took up her pen and began working on a novel.

  Her arrival in the Hampshire village marked the start of what
was to be the most productive period of her literary life. Jane had begun writing many years earlier when her father was the vicar of Steventon. She had produced draft versions of three of her novels – including the manuscript that would eventually become Pride and Prejudice -before she reached the age of 25. But her father’s sudden decision to retire and go to live in Bath greatly upset his daughter. Leaving the house where she had been born and seeing her father’s extensive book collection sold off, along with many other family possessions, plunged her into depression and effectively disabled her as a writer.

  The following decade was spent moving from one rented house to another, first in Bath and later – following her father’s death – in Southampton. During this period the prolific output of fiction she had produced during the 1790s came to a grinding halt. It was only when her brother Edward offered her a permanent home in what had been the Bailiff’s cottage on the Chawton estate that she found the peace and security she needed to flourish as a writer.

  Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Mansfield Park were all published while she lived in the village. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously after her death at the age of just 41.

  So the Great House, as Edward’s Elizabethan mansion was known then, was inextricably linked with Jane Austen’s destiny. Her brother provided an environment in which she could thrive and in those last fruitful years she would often make the short walk from her cottage to the grand building that rose above the parish church of Saint Nicholas.