Persuading Austen

by Brigid Coady

  ‘Les, you have three external shots for Rosings Park marked in for the production. Three. In total. Can’t you cut the East Tower out? Shoot round it? Photoshop it?’ Annie batted the iPad out of her face. ‘What you aren’t doing is changing locations. It’s too late,’ Annie said.

  Les was a bloody liability; she wouldn’t mind but they’d discussed it for days. She had the email trail as well. Including the one where he said he was happy and signed it off.

  ‘Annie,’ Les started, his hairy mole jiggling.

  ‘No, Les. Enough. We’ve a budget that was signed off and agreed by you and the rest of the production team. We aren’t changing locations unless you can come up with a better excuse than crenellations. And even then I’m not going to agree.’ Annie didn’t raise her voice, but made sure a strand of steel was in it.

  She glanced at the iPad.

  ‘Les, this is a castle in Scotland. Rosings Park is supposed to be in Kent.’ She frowned at him.

  What was he playing at?

  Les shuffled his feet and then glared at her through his lowered brows.

  ‘Fine,’ he said and turned to leave.

  She put a hand on his arm, trying to soften the blow.

  ‘Les, the original location will be fine. Go and have a chat with Gus, see what he can do to shoot round it. He’ll come up with something amazing.’ Annie was banking on Gus, the cinematographer, using his well-known negotiation skills to get Les back onside. Gus would be good cop, while she would play bad cop.

  ‘Whatever,’ Les said. ‘Oh and, Annie, can you talk with Austen here about the arrangements for assistants. He doesn’t have one at the moment and I said you could help out.’ Les waved Austen over and Annie wondered if this was payback for telling Les off.

  Annie watched as Austen walked towards them. So much for avoiding him.

  It was funny, Annie thought, that you could tell when someone was trying too hard to cover the horror of having to talk to a person they didn’t care for. Even if that someone was the best actor in the world; or did it help that at one point in the past she had known Austen better than she’d known herself?

  She propped herself back against the wall to stop herself from falling over. All the steel she’d had in her when talking with Les left her abruptly, turning her into an overcooked piece of spaghetti.

  She clenched her hands behind her back to stop them shaking.

  Austen reached her and there was a stretched silence. Annie stared at the dip in Austen’s neck; she could see it peeking above the neckline of his grey T-shirt.

  I’ve licked there, she thought. It was easier for her to think something like that than look him in the face and see contempt. Or hate. Or nothing.

  Nothing would be worse.

  Seeing that you weren’t registering at all on their radar, that they didn’t care.

  She couldn’t help herself; she looked up at Austen.

  She was wrong. Pity. Pity trumped nothing.

  Pity was like a vine that reached up from your belly, wrapped itself round your throat, and whispered all those awful thoughts you had about yourself at three o’clock in the morning.

  ‘So …’ She realized that Les had been talking again and she’d missed it.

  ‘Sorry – what?’ She looked away from Austen and back to Les. The mole waved to her. She quickly averted her eye and focused on the My Little Pony pin that Les always wore on his jacket. Each to their own, she thought.

  ‘Assistants?’ Les said raising his eyebrows. He pursed his mouth in frustration. ‘I can’t believe I have to put up with this,’ he said as he turned and walked away.

  ‘Okay, people, let’s take five,’ he called back into the room.

  Crap. She needed to pull it together. This was her job.

  Also, bugger.

  This, she realized, was the first time she and Austen been alone in eight years.

  ‘So …’ He drawled the word out and it went up at the end. Questioning her.

  Annie looked up. Austen’s face no longer held pity, merely a question and a hint of impatience.

  He hated wasting time.

  How had she forgotten that about him? Or had she? It was as if Austen was a foreign language that she was rusty in from lack of use but she could suddenly remember half-forgotten vocabulary and grammar. All this knowledge popping up in her mind from some dusty corner where it had lain undisturbed.

  He’d explained his time issues to her once.

  ‘It has everything to do with respect,’ he’d said, fairly vibrating with annoyance. ‘As an actor I’m supposed to be on stage at the correct time and if I’m late for an audition or on set I’m not going to be employed again. Being late shows you have no respect for your fellow actors.’

  Annie remembered her skin crawling with embarrassment when he’d told her this.

  That had been the day Dad had left the whole company waiting for an hour before a rehearsal.

  It might have been at the start of their relationship but it had sown the seeds of its end, although she hadn’t known it at the time.

  Annie had tucked her natural defence of her dad behind her heart. Silenced the automatic words of deflection.

  Torn her heart in two.

  She had agreed with Austen but couldn’t say it.

  If she could add up all the hours she’d waited on Dad, Immy, or Marie she would gain back years she was sure.

  But that was her place wasn’t it?

  Waiting.

  ‘Annie?’

  His voice bit through her memories, ripping them apart.

  ‘Yes, assistants …’ Annie fumbled with her phone, her hand too sweaty to get it to swipe properly the first time.

  Austen didn’t tap his foot. He didn’t need to; his body was as much an instrument of expression as his voice. She could feel what he was thinking from the minute changes in his posture and his muscles; it vibrated off his body.

  ‘Right. Yes. I’ve got the approved list here. There is a fixed budget and there is a list of people you can choose from or you can appoint your own and I can ensure that there is an allowance for you.’

  Annie’s voice faltered … Why was Austen dealing with this? This was usually one for the actor’s management team.

  ‘Can you email it to me?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said as if emailing Austen for the first time in eight years was nothing important. As if she hadn’t stared at his email address and phone number on the contact sheet and realized he had never changed them. And once again she had his contact details in her phone, years after she’d deleted them to stop temptation.

  He hesitated and took a breath. Annie braced herself, her grip on her phone tight, turning her knuckles white, waiting …

  And then Austen let out his breath sharply, turned on his heel, and went back into the rehearsal room leaving a vacuum in his wake. Annie felt her heart being sucked towards him again. And as she walked back into the hallway to make more calls she wasn’t sure she still had it with her. Or whether she ever had.

  Chapter Nine

  Annie took the pillow from under her head and stuck it over her face. She breathed in through the feathers and cotton, her face getting hot and humid and not particularly comfortable, but it was better than having to face the day, the week, or even the next few months in front of her.

  At least she was facing it in her own flat. Okay, so Immy had called in a huff last night wanting to know why Annie hadn’t been round to cook them dinner. When Annie explained there were frozen M&S meals in the freezer and an M&S shop around the corner, Immy put the phone down on her.

  Annie had only struggled with herself for about twenty minutes not to go around and cook. She was getting better at this.

  Why did this production have to be the one to be her dream job? She would’ve been happy with a small independent film with grateful and hungry actors fairly vibrating with ambition. But no, she got this one, which included her family, her ex, and a director who had a reputation in the industry for ov
errunning on his budget.

  Eric Cowell had forgotten to mention that fact. Annie was there to make sure he didn’t blow all the money before they had got through the whole shoot.

  But she could handle work.

  What had her trying to suffocate herself was this weekend. She had definitely done something seriously wrong in a previous life because she had somehow been finagled into spending the weekend on the coast. There was nothing wrong with going to Lyme Regis for the weekend. It had Jane Austen overtones, so when Charlie had suggested a weekend away, Annie hadn’t known how to say no.

  By the time she realized the guest list had grown to include Austen, the Musgroves, and Austen’s friends Harry, Lewis, and John, it was too late to back out.

  Why Marie and Charlie had thought it was a nice thank you to Annie for everything she had been doing, she didn’t know.

  Annie would’ve been happy to look after the kids and let them all go without her. But this weekend the kids were staying with Charlie’s parents.

  Crap. She needed to work out how to say no.

  It wasn’t so hard was it?

  No.

  One syllable. Two letters.

  And a whole heap of guilt that travelled with it.

  ‘So why exactly are we going to Lyme Regis?’ Louisa had asked while they had been discussing it the previous Sunday over another of the Musgrove lunches that Austen was now a fixture at.

  Annie could’ve told her.

  ‘It is a way to get us in an Austen state of mind,’ Austen had said and even though Annie had been staring at her roast chicken and poking at it with a fork when he’d said it, she knew he’d winked. It was the sort of corny joke that he revelled in.

  She could’ve said that Lyme Regis or as it was known then, Lyme, was not in Pride and Prejudice but in Persuasion, but no one asked her and if she remembered telling Austen that Persuasion was one of her favourite books she wasn’t going to pretend it was anything but a coincidence.

  ‘It’s from Persuasion.’ Austen’s knee was bouncing, his whole body fairly vibrating with excitement, and the table trembled. Annie itched to put her hand on his knee to calm him down.

  ‘Persuasion? What’s that?’ Louisa asked.

  Annie’s head came up sharply and she watched as Austen schooled his face to cover his shock.

  She could’ve told him that Louisa wasn’t into literature. She was a doer not a reader. Louisa didn’t believe in sitting down and reading if she could be out and doing.

  And Austen, for all his new solid body, was a bookworm. He’d immersed himself in stories and words. Weighing them and rolling them in his mouth, enjoying their sounds and meanings, excitedly reading passages of his favourite books to Annie as they lay, legs tangled on the sofa.

  She wondered if Louisa would change for Austen? In some ways Louisa was as malleable as Annie underneath her strong personality, her mind still young and unformed, whilst Annie was just a pushover.

  Okay, the pillow-suffocating wasn’t going to get her out of the weekend. Annie threw it across the room and rolled out of bed.

  Four hours later she was outside Marie and Charlie’s house watching as Austen, Louisa, Henrietta, and Robbie disappeared off in the sporty car that Austen had hired. She could only be thankful that it was a grey April day so the top wasn’t down. She couldn’t handle seeing that Hollywood exit.

  Annie preferred taking the train down, honestly. She could work whilst she was on it, do things.

  Like ignore Marie and Charlie bickering. Annie blessed the day sound-cancelling headphones were invented.

  Taking a taxi from Axminster, Annie leaned her head against the glass and tried to tune out Marie’s voice.

  ‘I hope Austen told them I’m gluten intolerant,’ she said for the fifth time since getting in the cab.

  There was no escape like there was in London, Annie thought. Maybe she could invent some sort of work-related emergency. Get Cassie to call her so she could make a break for it. But they’d all know it was a lie – the problems of going away with work colleagues as well as family.

  The taxi took them up to the hotel that looked over the Lyme Regis harbour, the famous Cobb stretching out into the sea. There was a green lawn laid out in front of the Victorian house.

  It was not the small bed and breakfast that Annie had expected. She blanched when she thought of the damage the weekend stay would be doing to Austen’s bank account. He had insisted that he was footing the bill for them all.

  Her insides cringed. Somehow she was going to pay him back. She couldn’t be beholden to him, even if it meant she would be struggling to pay her rent. Maybe he’d take it in instalments?

  Annie let Marie and Charlie go in before her.

  ‘Great, you got here.’ Austen got up from the armchair he was sitting in. The lobby was scattered with pale blue and cream chesterfield chairs and sofas. Henrietta and Louisa bounced out of their own chairs and fell on them all with squeals and cheek kisses as if they hadn’t seen each other five hours ago in London. Robbie looked on with a grumpy face.

  ‘This is great. You’re here and Harry, Lewis, and John have texted to say they’ve checked in too.’ Austen rubbed his hands together. ‘They have been off exploring and I’m going down to meet them at a pub; do you all want to come too? We can go on for dinner there.’

  Louisa clapped her hands; Henrietta gave a little dance. Annie wanted to go home.

  ‘Yeah,’ Charlie said and rubbed his hands and then clapped Austen on the shoulder.

  Marie preened.

  Annie still wanted to go home.

  ‘Annie, you’re making us late,’ Marie shouted twenty minutes later as Annie made her way down the stairs from dropping her bag in her room.

  She could feel her face heating up.

  It wasn’t her fault that her room was up in the far corner of the second floor and was a hike to get to.

  Austen lifted one eyebrow as if waiting for Annie to say something back, some words to defend herself.

  Why did she always look at him as soon as she walked into the room?

  But she didn’t say a word, halted on the stairs looking down at them, her hand clutching the bannister. Austen’s eyebrow fell and then his face smoothed over, only showing polite interest.

  ‘We’re not in any hurry,’ he said to Marie. ‘This weekend is about taking things easy and going with the flow.’

  Marie’s lips tightened. Annie rushed down the rest of the steps to join them.

  ‘Come on,’ Austen said and beckoned them out the door.

  They all went to follow him out of the hotel, like a train of ducklings.

  Annie trailed at the back. She knew Austen had wanted her to fight back, to say something. He’d always wanted her to do that. Didn’t he realize she was still a marshmallow? Didn’t he remember?

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Austen had said eight years ago when they’d got back to his Stratford digs after a Sunday lunch with the cast and her family, ‘is why you let them speak to you like that.’

  Annie shut her eyes; maybe if she couldn’t see him, he wouldn’t be able to see her. Or maybe she could imagine she was somewhere else and not having this conversation.

  ‘Come on, Annie-matronic. Look at me.’

  She opened her eyes and he was crouching down slightly so he could look her straight in the eyes. No escape. She looked down at his chin; it was a very nice chin.

  ‘Anne-arbour.’ His hands came down onto her shoulders.

  Why did he have to ask the one question she couldn’t answer?

  ‘They’re my family, Aus,’ she said stating the facts.

  ‘That doesn’t mean they can treat you like a slave.’ He shook her gently when he said it.

  And she knew what he was saying. As if she hadn’t thought those things herself. As if she was blind.

  Not blind. Paralysed. Held hostage.

  ‘Don’t, Aus. Please?’

  She slipped her hands up onto his and then up his arms before
clutching his biceps and pulling him closer. With a huff he let his arms wrap round her and he hugged her.

  ‘Well, they won’t be able to do that when we’re in LA. They’ll have to find someone else. We’ll be in AustenWorld,’ he said into her neck.

  She smiled into his battered T-shirt. LA. The dream. She loved that they had this world they’d created. AustenWorld™. She always added the TM in her head. It was what they talked about and dreamed of in bed when the heating in his digs was on the blink and they were huddled together for warmth.

  ‘A house in the hills,’ she said stroking his back.

  ‘A private jet,’ he added as his breath tickled her. ‘And you’ll be there counting the people in and out when we have the theme park.’

  He nibbled on her ear and she couldn’t breathe. His fingertips started to skirt under the hem of her T-shirt, raising goosebumps. Before she knew it, her T-shirt was pulled up over her head.

  ‘Need you, Annie-magus,’ he said seriously, as he stripped his own shirt off. She stared with wonder at his chest, at the hair dusting the slight contours on his chest. At the small tuft of hair that she twirled when they were cuddled on the sofa. It was a boy/man’s body still and it was all hers.

  She leant forward and kissed him between his pecs, her hand going up to tweak his nipple.

  He flinched back and tried to grasp her round the waist.

  ‘This is the only theme park I’m interested in,’ she said. ‘And I don’t like other people on my rides.’

  Austen’s bark of laughter made her feel lighter. She’d distracted him from talking about her family or even of AustenWorld™ and as they giggled and sighed and took each other on a rollercoaster ride of an afternoon, she knew that she had to enjoy it while she could.

  Annie’s body heated up with the memories. She could feel the ghost of Austen’s hands even after eight years.

  Bugger, she thought as she dragged her feet towards the pub where they were meeting Austen’s friends. She needed something to distract herself from running down the street and leaping on Austen to try and re-create the images in her head.

  All this thinking about the past was dangerous; the box she’d put all her memories in was beginning to open too easily.