‘Indeed, no,’ said Wickham with a wry smile. ‘I never listen to a word she says. But I walk around in an old coat, I have nothing to ride, save an old nag, and I drink—when I am not fortunate enough to fall in with a friend—’ he said, raising his glass and draining it ‘—the most damnable wine.’
Willoughby shook his head and sighed. ‘Marriage is the very devil.’
‘Amen,’ said Wickham, pouring himself another glass.
There was a slight stirring in the corner and the gentleman sitting there stood up.
‘And what of you, friend?’ asked Willoughby. ‘What is your tale? Come, pull up a chair and join us.’
‘I am sorry, gentlemen—’ said he, coming into the light.
‘Darcy!’ said Wickham.
Darcy made him a bow. ‘—but I am fortunate enough to love my wife.’
He went upstairs, where he found Elizabeth sitting in front of her dressing table in her nightgown, brushing her hair. As the candlelight fell on her dearly loved features he thought how lucky he had been to meet her, to come to know her, and then to love her—and even luckier that she had loved him in return.
‘What are you thinking?’ she said, looking at him in the mirror.
He walked over to her and took the brush out of her hands, then began to brush her hair, smoothing her hair after each brush stroke with his other hand. Every touch of her hair and her scalp sent powerful surges of emotion through him.
‘I was just thinking how lucky I was to find you, and to win you. If not for you, I would never have known what it was like to love and be loved, and nothing can compare with that feeling.’ His hands stilled and he met her eyes in the looking glass. ‘When I think of how many people are forced to go through their lives with those they dislike or despise, through vanity or avarice or bad luck, I realise how fortunate I have been to find you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth,’ he said softly.
‘And I you,’ she said, putting her hand up to touch his. ‘I always knew that I could never marry unless I met a man I loved and esteemed, a man I could not live without, and I often thought that I would end up an old maid. I pitied Charlotte when she took Mr Collins. I would have pitied her even if he had not been so ridiculous, for she did not love him. But, having met you, I even pity Jane, for although I know she loves Bingley dearly, I am sure she cannot love him half as much as I love you,’ she said with a smile.
‘Do you think our difficulties made us love each other more?’ He rested his hands on her shoulders.
‘Perhaps, yes, I do, for without them we would not have changed. You would have remained proud and resentful and I would have remained blindly prejudiced, caring more about exercising my wit than discovering what lay beneath the coldest, proudest exterior, and finding something wonderful beneath.’
‘You are right, we have both changed. If not for you, I would have been deeply angry with Wickham when I saw him downstairs just now—’
‘You saw Wickham? He is here?’
‘Yes, he is drinking with John Willoughby and they are bemoaning their fates. We met the Willoughbys in London, if you recall.’
‘Yes, I remember. He was a handsome young man, but he seemed very unhappy; he had been paying attention to Marianne Dashwood, if the gossips were to be believed, but then he abandoned her and married an heiress. I recall his wife. She was very cold.’
‘Very cold and very rich.’
Elizabeth shivered. ‘I think I will get into bed,’ she said.
Darcy smiled, and she smiled back at him, and then he lifted her up in his arms and carried her over to the bed.
As he did so, his eyes never left hers, and their deep connection reminded him of all the pleasures that love had brought them and all the pleasures they had to come.
And before he lost all rational thought he knew himself to be the happiest of men.
Jean Buchanan
Jean Buchanan, a Scot brought up in Wales, read English at Oxford, then went into publishing. Marriage, motherhood and writing took over in the 1980s, though she still freelances for Oxford Dictionaries of Quotations—her favourite project so far is Love Quotations (1999). Her husband is a theoretical physicist, their son is grown up and she is currently writing a rom-com. Her writing career started with short stories for Woman’s Weekly and Bella, then a TV script for Jackanory Playhouse (BBC 1). She moved into sitcom with her TV series The Wild House (shortlisted for a British Comedy Award) and Welcome to Orty-Fou, and she has also written for puppets. Her employment CV includes a brush with the civil service, selling gents’ ties in the poshest department store in Wales and organising international conferences. She can make fingermice and gets truculent about the quality of ice cream. Her interests include early music, France, Scottish country dancing and ornithology. Her hobbies are croquet, Scrabble, and planning holidays in the South of France but ending up in Barnstaple.
The World’s a Stage
Never marry an actor.
This is the most vital piece of advice ever given to an actress. At least according to actresses who have been married to actors or, in some cases, to a succession of actors. I heard it on my first and last days at drama school, on most of the days in between. And afterwards.
Actors are regarded as feckless, touchy, always banging on about ‘craft’, liable to upstage you, hopeless at vehicle maintenance and home repairs and frequently skint. As several of my friends have already discovered. And the actors who caused such large amounts of human misery were also—of course—devastatingly goodlooking. A girl has to hang onto her self-possession and also, particularly in the case of handsome actors, her chequebook.
So when I left drama school, proudly clutching my diploma and eye-wateringly convinced that the world was my oyster, I was on my guard about handsome actors. From the moment I started my first paid acting job, small non-speaking parts in a provincial Christmas panto—village girl, maid in castle kitchen, dancing lady at ball—and also ice-cream-seller during the interval—I remembered the advice.
All the more homely actors were married or firmly attached so I concentrated on furthering my career and establishing unromantic professional friendships with the handsome actors. Part of me thought this was an awful waste, even though all around me I could see them breaking other girls’ hearts like glass.
Then I got work in television drama. Girl in bus queue. Waitress in bistro. Girl on hospital trolley. Girl in bed at end of ward. I was a background artiste, the lowest of the low, but it added to my CV and paid a few bills.
Then I was offered voice-over work for television commercials. It was better paid and I got to sit down. Voice-over work isn’t at all glamorous—it takes place mostly in high-tech underground sheds and it’s more tiring than you’d think but it pays bills faster than standing around in the background—or even lying around in the background.
I became the voice of a seal point Siamese wanting its Moggy Brex—superior, drawly, self-indulgent—the voice of a new range of deodorants—mild, soothing, confidential—and I extolled the virtues of a particularly repellent-looking mushroom pie—earthy, rural, dependable.
Although Hollywood wasn’t exactly beating a path to my door I was getting a reasonable amount of work. But on the romance front things could hardly have been less promising…
My friend Kate, who lived round the corner, was in the same boat. She had a highly paid fourteen-hours-a-day job in the City. We met up when we could, which wasn’t that often, given the capacity of our work to send us all over the place—hers involved first-class travel and five-star hotels; mine didn’t.
We met in coffee shops