Dancing with Mr Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen

Jayne Kirsty Mitchell

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

I mouth the words as I lean forward. Mansfield Park. My nipples shine pink and hard under yellow studio lights.

‘Lower, love.’

Mansfield Park. Mansfield Park, the third published of Jane Austen’s novels. Or was it fourth? Shit.

‘A bit to the left.’

The plastic shutter makes a loud click as it opens and shuts, and the noise rattles obnoxiously around the small studio. I try not to squint against the bright lights behind the fat photographer. The one today is particularly grotesque, with shreds of hair and a screwed-up face. I lie on a sheepskin rug and run through quotations in my head. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. Milton.

The photographer steps out from behind the camera and I am struck afresh by how hideous he is.

‘Brilliant. Lovely. That’s great. In fact,’ he grins broadly, ‘it’s… tit-tastic.’

Oh, fuck off. Fuck off and die, you fat old perv. I smile. Think of the house, and grin and bear it. Bare it. A few years modelling, and I’ll have enough to buy a flat. I’ll live there a few years then get tenants in. The way the market’s going, the rent should cover a mortgage on a house, maybe even a few quid in an ISA. Financial security is very underrated. Plus I’m paying for this university course, for which I can’t even bloody remember the facts. I’d like to say I didn’t finish school because of mitigating circumstances, family situations, but the truth is it was too much like hard work and I couldn’t be arsed. Now I’m paying £200 a month for my education. As Joni Mitchell said, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Or Shakespeare. Nothing can come of nothing. King Lear, Act I. Shakespeare almost made me cry before the last exam. I had a big job on the same day and I sat in the bath the night before, face mask on, mouthing the words. To be, or not to be. That is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune… a blob of strawberry and mango oatmeal scrub fell into the water.

‘Can you put your arms together, love? Push them up a bit?’

I’d like to do well in the Jane Austen part of the course, because my mum’s a big fan. That’s how I got my name, actually.

‘Jane?’ they said when I was starting out.

‘With a Y.’

‘Jayne?’

‘Yes.’

The guy frowned. ‘No, that’s no good for a page three. Plain Jane. No, we need something more exotic. What about Destiny?’

‘No.’

‘Faith?’

‘No. What about Maya?’ I suggested.

Maya, the Indian religious deity who represents the notion that the distinction between the self and the universe is a false one. From last year’s philosophy of religion module, part II. If I was going to be named after a philosophical concept, I’d rather it was a half-decent one.

‘Maya!’ He winked. ‘Sexy!’ What a cock.

Of course Mum wasn’t happy when she found out. She sat sulking in the living room. Peach-pink couch, carpet, curtains that gave everything an odd glow. There was a clashing fake brass fireplace in the middle of the room, on which fake flames swirled. Her ornaments were in a display cabinet on the back wall: a creamy porcelain mass.

‘Calm down, Mum,’ I said.

‘Calm down?’ A pink-fringed slipper hit the floor. ‘Calm down? Do you think this is what I hoped for when I had you? That I looked down at my baby girl and thought, one day she’ll get her breasts out for the Sun?’

‘The Daily Star,’ I corrected.

‘The Daily Star then. Am I supposed to be proud of that? Bloo-dy hell.’

I looked past her frizzy head to the bookcase. All the Austen books sat there in alphabetical order. The spines were cracked and ratty. On the shelf below were the DVDs and videos, and on the wall behind was a poster of the cast of Pride and Prejudice that came free with one of the DVDs. She’d once got an Elizabeth Gaskell book out the library, in a plastic cover with crumbs trapped underneath, but she hadn’t liked it. ‘She’s just not our Jane, Jayne!’ she’d cried.

‘I’m disgusted by you,’ she said.

‘Och, Mum,’ I breathed.

With my first pay cheque, I bought her the complete BBC Jane Austen adaptation box set.

It’s an easy job, by and large. Pouting and posing until my back aches and my skin starts to perspire under the lights and the powdery make-up. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

‘What do you do?’ someone asked me at the uni.

‘English Literature,’ I replied.

‘No.’ He laughed. ‘I mean your day job.’

‘Ah,’ I said. Get my tits out. ‘A nurse,’ I told him. I frequently am. That or in corsets. I hate the corsets. There are cold metal rods inside that press against my skin and make me ache for hours afterwards. What is it with men and bloody corsets?

I’m quite polite, as far as this industry goes. I only do the tabloids and the soft magazines. I wouldn’t do any of the other magazines or any of those late night channels on freeview, the ones where girls wriggle around in cheap plastic costumes and make out like they can’t wait to receive illiterate texts from wankers, when any fool can see they’d rather be at home in front of Eastenders with a digestive biscuit. It’s still not the kind of thing to discuss at a dinner party though. I once went out with a boy who lived in one of the big houses in town, and his parents invited me round for dinner. Mum was beside herself. ‘Take them a bottle of wine,’ she told me. ‘And don’t get a cheap one. You don’t want them thinking you’ve got no class.’

We all sat politely around the dinner table, arms straight. His mum brought out the best glasses, which sparkled against the candles. I was wearing a nice blue dress with a ribbed waist from Karen Millen.

‘And what do you do for a living, Jayne?’ they asked.

‘I work in a photography studio.’

‘Oh, very good. Is it some sort of admin job?’

‘Not really.’

‘More hands on, then?’

‘Kind of.’

But then his dad saw me dressed up as a cowgirl in the Sun, and so that was the end of that.

I do get bored though. I suppose anyone does, in any job. Myself, I am so bored of tits. They’re all over the walls of the studio, big ones, wee ones. Mainly big ones. They’re just tits. There are days when I feel dismayed by the repetitiveness of it all, the stupidity. The stupid costumes, the ridiculous scenarios. Men are so easy to snare. One of the magazines I appear in sells for seven quid in the newsagents. Seven quid! Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps. Much Ado about Nothing, you know. Or was it As You Like It? Fucking hell.

Lunchtime. We film in a block of rented offices, a concrete, square place with a rubbish café. I go to the café, order a baked potato in a plastic box. I’ve brought Pride and Prejudice with me, the copy I use for studying: highlighted fluorescent yellow all over, the spine battered and creased.

‘Hiya.’

I look up and to my irritation see the photographer’s assistant sitting down opposite me at the table. We’ve had a few of his sort, and they’re all the same. Slouchy hats, sculptured facial hair, just out of university, think they’re going to end up in far-flung corners of the world shooting pictures of Aids orphans and politicians and unfortunate victims of unfortunate disasters, but instead end up in the back street of a bad area of Glasgow, shooting breasts.

‘Hello,’ I say darkly.

He taps my book with a long finger. ‘Wouldn’t have thought girls like you would—’

‘What?’

He looks at me.

‘Nothing.’

‘What? A girl like me wouldn’t be reading an actual book? What am I meant to be reading in my lunch hour, bra catalogues?’ A couple of the office workers turn around.

He leaves. I shake the book open. Do you know, I bought a copy of Cosmopolitan a couple of weeks ago and they had one of those stupid foil-covered male nude pull-outs. And all the men they’d asked to be in it were doctors and lawyers and aeronautical engineers. You don’t get that in any of the bloody magazines I appear in.

Sometimes they ask the girls for a comment. They always want some vacuous, dim-witted remark about some topical issue.

‘So what do you think about immigrants, Maya?’ the photographer asked. The eye of the camera clicked loudly, open and shut, open and shut.

‘In the context of immigration or emigration?’

He looked bemused. ‘Both.’

‘Right. Well firstly, I think the media has vastly misrepresented the number of immigrants coming into the country, and I think the reporting has been biased. I recently bought a newspaper and there was an article about the falling birth rate in Britain and how this was going to bring everything to its knees in the future; the NHS, state pensions and so on. But on the other page there was an article about how there were too many immigrants flooding into the country. Now, to me, there’s a contradiction there that smacks of racism. What they’re saying is that there aren’t enough white babies being born. If there’s a demographic argument that birth rates are falling too fast, then why the hell shouldn’t we be welcoming immigrants, especially those with young families? And there’s a possible genetic benefit for the health of the native population as well, particularly in a place like Glasgow where a high proportion of native Glaswegians have an ingrained genetic predisposition towards diseases linked to the immune system, like heart disease. So if the two populations interbred and mingled, this could be genetically beneficial. Although naturally whether this integration did occur would be dependent on social and cultural factors. So, in short, I’m in favour of it. And I think the media has fanned the issue because it sells papers,’ I finished.

He stared at me. My breasts jiggled. ‘Right,’ he said.

He looked disconcerted. A man like me is allowed to be intelligent, a woman is not. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. Northanger Abbey. I experienced a slight thrill at having remembered it all the way through.

Back upstairs, clothes off again. The photographer leers at me, the fat bastard. I reckon I’ve only got a few years left in this. The market’s too competitive now. Magazines, websites, television channels—

‘Only so many punters in this game, only so many wallets,’ the photographer said, in a tone as close as the big ape got to philosophical.

‘There certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them,’ I said.

He looked perplexed.

‘Mansfield Park,’ I told him. ‘Jane Austen.’

The exam tomorrow. A drafty dusty hall, biros on the desk. I’ll do the rest of the modules, finish the course; pay the fees. Buy the flat, have financial security, spend the rest of my life doing what I want to do. I’ll be too old for it soon anyway, the age of some of the girls coming through. A career where a woman is worthless by the age of twenty-five. It’s a disgrace.

I stretch an arm behind me, arch my back.

‘That’s beautiful,’ the photographer says. He sniggers behind snaggled, cracked teeth. ‘It’s tit-riffic.’

Oh. Yuk. Lord, what fools these mortals be!

My inspiration: Despite the fact that many of Jane Austen’s novels are considered love stories, I think there’s a hard, pragmatic edge in how her characters speak about class and money that is often overlooked. W. H. Auden said that it made him ‘uncomfortable’ to see her ‘describe the amorous effects of ‘“brass” / Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety/ The economic basis of society’. Given this, I wanted to create a character who had this same pragmatic edge about money, in a very modern day context.