Downton Abbey

by Julian Fellowes

ETHEL: I’d say the first course is a thing of the past.

  MRS HUGHES: Then clear and lay the hot plates. Daisy, you fetch the beef and the rest of it. And, Anna, you‘ll have to serve the wine. Mr Lang, you can clear up the mess.

  Lang is dawdling at the back, in a daze. He shakes his head.

  O’BRIEN: I’ll do that.

  MRS HUGHES: There’s no need.

  O’BRIEN: I don’t mind.*

  MRS HUGHES: I thank you. Mr Lang, you’d better go downstairs.

  They go about their tasks. Mrs Hughes is alone in the servery. Alone at the table, Violet has never moved.

  * One of the things – this is personal, and nothing more than that – that drives me absolutely mad is the supposition in hotels and restaurants that it is correct to serve the ladies first at a table, when this is a completely continental practice and not British at all. The server should start with the woman on the right of the host, or if you have two people in waiting, with the hostess and the woman on the right of the host, and then work their way round the table, man, woman, man, woman, man, woman. This makes for a much smoother and more elegant flow.

  † Rosamund has quite a harsh view of the world, although she would simply say that she knows how the world works. She isn’t merciless. Like her mother, her great agenda is to avoid scandal at all costs. And so, if something has happened that is potentially scandalous, she will do everything she can to contain it. But she is a realist. When she says that Mary needs a position and that Carlisle could provide it, she knows that Mary has ‘blotted her copybook’ and cannot hope for the kind of great marriage she might once have aspired to.

  * This is the one generous act O’Brien does, I think, in three series, offering to clean up Mr Lang’s mess, because she is touched by Lang. And, in a way, we know she is doing it for her dead brother. I like to think that this is a Downton theme, that nobody is all bad. But also, this transference was a part of wartime thinking. Women would nurse strangers as a way of helping their brother at the front; they would work in munitions factories to help their absent husbands to victory. Many wrote about it, and very moving these accounts are, too.

  32 EXT. DOWNTON. NIGHT.

  Robert is seeing them all off. Branson is by the car.

  ROBERT: It’s rather a squash. You two go, and Branson can come back for Matthew and Miss Swire.

  LAVINIA: No, we’ll walk. We’d like to.

  Violet and Isobel have climbed in. The door shuts.

  VIOLET: Well, they seem quite happy. I’ll say that much.

  ISOBEL: What did you make of Matthew’s replacement?

  VIOLET: Perhaps he’ll improve on acquaintance.

  33 INT. CORA’S BEDROOM. DOWNTON. NIGHT.

  Cora and Robert are in bed. He is reading.

  ROBERT: Well, Clarkson’s seen him. It’s definitely not a heart attack, but he does need rest.

  CORA: He’s working much too hard. For a start, he’s just got to let the maids serve in the dining room.

  ROBERT: Quite right. There is a war. Even Carson has to make sacrifices.

  CORA: Poor Carson. Don’t make him start working again before he’s ready.

  ROBERT: I won’t make him do anything.

  CORA: Poor Lang! He looked like a rabbit in front of a snake.

  ROBERT: I don’t understand it. He seemed so solid when I met him, even taciturn; now he’s a bundle of nerves.

  CORA: I heard what you said to Matthew about the regiment.

  ROBERT: Everyone else knows what a fool I made of myself. Why shouldn’t he?

  CORA: I don’t think you’re a fool. Isn’t that enough?

  ROBERT: No. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t. I’m afraid it just isn’t.

  He switches off the light.

  END OF ACT TWO

  ACT THREE

  34 INT. LIVERY CUPBOARD. DOWNTON. NIGHT.

  O’Brien sees Lang standing, holding his livery on a coat hanger, but he is quite stationary, staring. At the sound of her voice, he turns a frightened face to her.

  O’BRIEN: Are you all right, Mr Lang? You’re not, are you? I’ve seen shell shock before, you know. I had a brother with it. A favourite brother, as it happens. And I was his favourite, too… They sent him back, and he’s dead now.*

  LANG: They won’t send me back. I’m a goner as far as they’re concerned.

  O’BRIEN: You shouldn’t be working yet.

  LANG: I must work. I don’t know what I’d do, else. I have to work.

  There is a noise and Mrs Hughes appears.

  MRS HUGHES: Mr Lang? I thought you’d gone up.

  O’BRIEN: He wanted to hang up the livery before it got creased.

  MRS HUGHES: Well, we can discuss the dinner another time. I’ll say goodnight.

  O’BRIEN: Goodnight, Mrs Hughes.

  LANG: Goodnight.

  * This was quite an important strand for me, because it allows O’Brien to have some back story, and to hint at the circumstances that made her what she is. Suddenly, you get a slightly different vision of her, as someone who’s survived toughness and neglect. O’Brien, of course, has spotted Lang’s shell shock earlier than anyone else.

  35 INT. CARSON’S BEDROOM. DOWNTON. NIGHT.

  Carson is in bed. There is a knock and Mary appears.

  MARY: May I come in?

  CARSON: That’s very kind of you, m’lady, but do you think you should?

  MARY: Let’s hope my reputation will survive it. And rest easy. Please.

  He’s tried to sit bolt upright. She takes a chair to the bed.

  MARY (CONT’D): I gather it isn’t too serious.

  CARSON: Ah, I’ve been very stupid, m’lady. I let myself get flustered. I regard that as highly unprofessional. It won’t happen again.

  MARY: You mustn’t be too hard on yourself.

  CARSON: I was particularly sorry to spoil things for Sir Richard, knowing he was a guest of yours.

  MARY: Don’t be. I think he found it all quite exciting.

  CARSON: Will we be seeing a lot of him?

  MARY: I don’t know. Maybe.

  CARSON: And Captain Crawley? Is he happy with the changes, so to speak?

  They share a look. Mary knows that Carson loves her.

  CARSON (CONT’D): May I give you one piece of advice, m’lady? Tell him what’s in your heart. If you still love him, let him know. Then, even if he’s killed — and he may be — you won’t be sorry. But if you don’t tell him, you could regret it all your life long.*

  MARY: And what about Miss Swire?

  CARSON: Miss Swire? As if any man in his right mind could prefer Miss Swire to you.

  He looks up as Mrs Hughes comes in with some medicine.

  MRS HUGHES: Oh, I’m so sorry, m’lady. I didn’t know you were in here.

  MARY: I was just going… Carson’s been boosting my confidence.

  She smiles at the butler and leaves the room.

  MRS HUGHES: That’s something I’d never have thought she was short of.

  Carson makes no comment, but takes the glass like a man.

  * This is where Carson gives Mary real advice, and, from him, because she knows he loves her, she takes it. He doesn’t criticise her as he does later – in the fourth series, he is actually quite stern with her, and she has considerably more difficulty accepting his harsh words – but as long as the advice is not critical, which it isn’t here, she will allow him an intimacy that she wouldn’t allow any of the others. I am always sorry that the nature of making a series means that child characters who are members of the running cast are almost impossible to achieve. I mind this because the relationship between a child of a great house and the servants was quite, quite different from that of their parents. They knew the servants in a way their parents did not. All I can do here is hint at that intimacy, through Mary and Carson.

  36 INT. HOSPITAL. DOWNTON VILLAGE. DAY.

  Thomas sits talking to Lieutenant Courtenay, whose eyes are bandaged.

  THOMAS: What about you, sir? What d
id you do before the war started?

  COURTENAY: I was up at Oxford. But I only ever planned to farm. Farm and shoot and hunt and fish, and everything I’ll never do again.

  THOMAS: You don’t know that, sir. We’ve had cases of gas blindness wearing off.

  COURTENAY: Rare cases. And much sooner than this. It doesn’t help me to be lied to, you know. I’m finished, and I’d rather face it than dodge it.

  THOMAS: I’d better go.

  37 EXT. WOODS AROUND DOWNTON. DAY.

  Robert, Cora, Carlisle and Mary are walking in their tweeds. They’ve dropped into two couples. Robert and Cora are ahead.

  ROBERT: Where’s Rosamund?

  CORA: She’s with your Mama. Trying to talk her into the idea of Sir Richard.

  ROBERT: You don’t sound very enthusiastic.

  CORA: Are you?

  With a glance, he moves on. We drop back to the others.

  CARLISLE: Can we stop for a minute?

  MARY: Don’t tell me you’re tired.

  CARLISLE: I’m not tired. I’m hot. This tweed is too thick.

  MARY: It looks more suited to shooting than walking.

  CARLISLE: I had it made for the weekend. I didn’t know there was a difference.

  MARY: It doesn’t matter.

  CARLISLE: That’s like the rich who say that money doesn’t matter. It matters enough when you haven’t got it.

  But he laughs. He doesn’t really feel embarrassed at all.

  MARY: I know you don’t care about our silly rules. You’re always very clear on that score.*

  CARLISLE: You make me sound rude and I hope I’m not that. I have my own rules and I care about them.

  MARY: Such as?

  CARLISLE: I believe that a man who thinks he belongs at the top of the tree should climb it as far as he can.

  MARY: I agree.

  CARLISLE: I’m not a Boer.* I mean to learn how to do things properly and I’m sure you could help me a lot. But I’m not ashamed of being what they call a self-made man. I’m proud of it.

  MARY: Is the point of all this to test me in some way?

  CARLISLE: Maybe. Are you shocked by my bold and modern values?

  MARY: Oh, Sir Richard, you flatter yourself. It takes a good deal more than that to shock me.

  She walks on, and he follows her with admiring eyes.†

  * Carlisle is conscious that he is coming up against a set of rules that he is not cognisant of. But where, I think, he shows strength is in saying that he means to learn how to do things properly. As he says, he is sure Mary could help him, but he is not ashamed of being a self-made man; he is proud of it. In a sense, I feel, at the end of this scene, we like Carlisle more than we did before, because he doesn’t care about getting the tweed wrong. Next time he’ll get it right, and anyway the distinction between a tweed for walking or for shooting is, of course, for him classic toff nonsense. Although, if you think about it, when you’re shooting you stand still for hours, and of course you need to be warmer than when you’re walking, so there is a logic in it.

  * I was sorry about this cut.

  † Mary is not above controlling Carlisle by making him feel she’s doing him a favour, and you see her play notes on that several times. But what he is saying here is, ‘You’re not in control of me. You can help me get the right tweed, but you’re not in control of me.’ We like him for that.

  38 INT. DRAWING ROOM. DOWER HOUSE. DAY.

  Violet is with Rosamund.

  ROSAMUND: But Mama, who do you imagine is out there with more to offer?

  VIOLET: I am not a romantic —

  ROSAMUND: I should hope not.

  VIOLET: But even I will concede that the heart does not exist solely for the purpose of pumping blood.

  ROSAMUND: That is charming, especially from you, but Mary seems to have blotted her copybook in some way…

  If she hopes for Violet to comment, she is disappointed.

  ROSAMUND (CONT’D): So she needs a suitable marriage that will mend her fences.

  VIOLET: But how do we know Carlisle is suitable? I mean, who is he? Who’d ever heard of him before the war?

  ROSAMUND: Sir Richard is powerful and rich, and well on the way to a peerage. Of course, he may not be all that one would wish, but Mary can soon smooth off the rough edges.

  VIOLET: Well, you should know.

  ROSAMUND: What do you mean by that? Marmaduke was a gentleman.

  VIOLET: Marmaduke was the grandson of a manufacturer.

  ROSAMUND: His mother was the daughter of a baronet.

  VIOLET: Maybe. But they were no great threat to the Plantagenets.

  ROSAMUND: The point is, I made up for any social deficiencies and he provided me with a position. It was a good exchange and it worked well.*

  But Violet is staring out of the window, distracted.

  VIOLET: How can Matthew have chosen that little blonde ‘piece’?

  ROSAMUND: You speak so eloquently of the human heart, Mama. You must be aware of its vagaries.

  * I quite like this putting of Rosamund in her place. But one has to remember that marrying for money and overlooking certain unsatisfactory details had been going on since the Conquest, long before the aristocracy went into crisis, and particularly in Britain.

  Years ago, my father was being inducted into the top tier of the Knights of Malta. To get into it, all four of your grandparents had to come from arms-bearing families, and although my father fulfilled this qualification, he observed to the chap running the whole thing that it didn’t seem very much to ask. To his surprise, the answer was that, on the continent, every new knight must have sixteen great-great-grandparents all of whom must have borne arms. When my father asked why that wasn’t the condition in Britain, the reply was that none of the English would qualify. Even the Queen hasn’t got that.

  We have always married money, or power, or land, and if the price was to overlook failings of birth then so be it. This exchange is just a reminder of that. Rosamund, in a sense, is defending Mary’s choice of Carlisle, because she made a similar choice herself, with Marmaduke Painswick. We are told his grandfather amassed his cash as a manufacturer, so the money is new, but not brand new. The son of the manufacturer was then able to marry the daughter of a baronet, and Marmaduke, their son, married the daughter of an earl. The truth is, many toffs nowadays, who are baronets or the fourth Lord Whatever, come from precisely these manufacturing and banking Victorians – family fortunes that were made in the imperial economy. We had an enormous empire to supply, and supplying it generated these vast fortunes. In my opinion, this constant absorbing of new and successful blood is what kept the British aristocracy strong and politically relevant for a century longer than their continental counterparts.

  Rosamund and Marmaduke did not have children. In the original publicity document I think there were two, but we came to the conclusion that she was much more use as a character if the Crawleys were essentially her main family. In that case, the Crawley girls would become her surrogate daughters, and that’s what we have played.

  39 INT. HOSPITAL. DOWNTON VILLAGE. DAY.

  Thomas is opening a letter as he sits by Courtenay’s bed.

  THOMAS: It’s from your father. ‘Dear Edward, Please overcome your stubbornness and allow us to visit. There are decisions we should be facing as a family, not least about your future. Things cannot be as they were and, whatever you may think, Jack has your best interests at heart —’

  COURTENAY: Stop.

  THOMAS: Who’s Jack?

  COURTENAY: My younger brother. He means to replace me. It’s what he’s always wanted.

  THOMAS: Yes. Well…

  COURTENAY: I’m sorry. I mustn’t bore you.

  Thomas starts to walk away. Then he turns and comes back.

  THOMAS: Don’t let them walk all over you. You’ve got to fight your corner.

  COURTENAY: What with?

  THOMAS: Your brain! You’re not a victim. Don’t let them make you into one!

&
nbsp; COURTENAY: You know, when you talk like that I almost believe you.

  THOMAS: You should believe me! All my life they’ve pushed me around just because I’m different —

  COURTENAY: How? Why are you different?

  THOMAS: Never mind. Look. I don’t know if you’re going to see again or not. But I do know you have to fight back.*

  Courtenay reaches for Thomas’s hand and squeezes it.

  * For anyone, going blind would be a very, very difficult test, but if you were a sporting countryman, there would be nothing left at all, and that’s what Courtenay has to deal with. Actually, I’m very interested in the plight of blind men and women. I chair the RNIB Talking Books Appeal, and this story was a way of reminding the audience what blind people have to put up with.

  40 EXT. DOWNTON. DAY.

  Rosamund is walking up the drive. She hears raised voices.

  LAVINIA (V.O.): How dare you threaten me!

  CARLISLE (V.O.): How dare I? Oh, I assure you, I dare a great deal more than that!

  Rosamund, fascinated, approaches and peers through the laurels. Carlisle seems to have Lavinia’s wrist in his grasp.

  LAVINIA: But you can’t! You wouldn’t!

  CARLISLE: I didn’t say I would. I was merely reminding you it was in my power.

  Rosamund walks forward, with a gentle cough.

  CARLISLE (CONT’D): Lady Painswick.

  ROSAMUND: Lady Rosamund.

  CARLISLE: I’m sorry. I’ll get these things sorted out before too long.

  ROSAMUND: It’s not important.

  CARLISLE: Miss Swire and I were just talking about old times.

  ROSAMUND: Happy old times, I hope.

  She stares at Lavinia, who is clearly upset. No one speaks.

  ROSAMUND (CONT’D): Will you forgive me? I want to write some letters before dinner.

  She walks off, leaving the others standing in silence.†

  † Rosamund does not know why these two are arguing, but what she does realise is that, to some extent, they are not being honest, that there is a concealed truth here, which she doesn’t like. Nor is she above putting Carlisle in his place. So when he calls her Lady Painswick, she corrects him – Lady Rosamund is her correct title as the daughter of an earl. Nowadays, of course, no one seems to know the difference between Lord Smith and Lord John Smith. But, then again, why should they?