By Jane Downing.
It all started with an invitation which came in the form of a letter, handwritten on thick Basildon Bond notepaper and delivered to the society’s pigeonhole. No legitimate postal carrier would have handled the envelope, decorated as it was with the sketched portrait of a famous author in the corner in lieu of a stamp.
The letter started by floundering on the rocks of assumption: Dear Brothers of the Wargaming Society.
Angelique bristled on the other side of the table as the secretary of the Wargaming Society read the salutation aloud, but she took it on her chin, because, fair enough, she was the only female-gender identifying member of the society in the basement room that evening.
The young men of the wargaming society lent half an ear as the secretary, elected unopposed at the beginning of the university semester under protest – from himself – continued with a quick synopsis of the rest of the invitation. There was little time for correspondence in or out with games awaiting.
‘They want us to meet up for activities,’ Harry announced after his quick scan of the letter.
Voices rose up at various levels of interest.
‘Who do?’
‘What are these things you call activities?’
‘Flames of War?’
‘World of Warcraft?’
‘Diplomacy?’
They were a tight group, but any influx of newbies was welcome, in small doses at least.
Harry hesitated. It wasn’t the elaborate cursive and curlicued letterhead tripping his understanding of the provenance of the invitation, simply pure and unadulterated amazement.
‘They are – wait for it my confederates – asking us to consider some sort of alliance on a periodic schedule, with…’
‘Not the Pokémon crowd?’
‘Bloody Magic: The Gathering groundhogs.’
Harry asserted his elected position of power and said loudly, ‘Settle petals.’ He paused for further effect. ‘With the Jane Austen Society.’
The revelation was met with silence. Then laughter. Then, unexpectedly, consideration.
Though not sure what it all meant, the wargamers had a Napoleonic campaign planned for the coming weekend and thanks to the state’s high school curriculum, they also had a serviceable knowledge of the author’s oeuvre, itself of the Napoleonic era. The periods of the societies’ obsessions would briefly coincide. An alignment of the stars.
Before putting it to the vote, two post-grads in the group decided to share the advantage of their age and wisdom. ‘We don’t want another Beauty and the Geek fiasco.’ Their younger brethren shared only questioning glances and thought it best not to ask. The moment passed.
While the terrain was rearranged on the tabletops and the battalions lined up for maximum strategic fuckery in the night’s wargame, Benni and Ralph designed some matchingly flamboyant letterhead as that of their sister society, and composed a reply in their best multisyllabic, high-falutin, dressed-to-impress prose.
In the first instance. And so on and so forth.
Jem stayed out of it. He threw the ten-sided die and fiddled with his retractable tape measure. And found that for the rest of the evening, he was quite off his game.
________
Come the weekend, the looks on the young women’s faces were a picture. Less Renoir, more Munch.
‘Do you reckon they had us mixed up with the Creative Anachronism guys?’ Jem whispered. His voice carried through the shocked silence.
If the Jane Austen Society had mistaken them for the students who dressed up in handmade chainmail armour, crusader helmets and heraldic shields with 1:1 swords, lances and ornamental daggers, politeness dictated that the members suck it up and enter the room with as much grace as they could muster. This wasn’t altogether easy as the nine mainly literature and history students had to sidle past five trestle tables set up in the middle of the basement room. Only the president managed a wide smile, a skill for which she’d won the hearts and minds at the most recent AGM.
The president of the wargaming society stepped into the same squashed space at the far end of the tabletop miniature trestles and made to shake Aashi’s outstretched hand. His mother’s voice said something withering in his skull so he fell forward and let his lips touched said hand in what could, and would in the retelling, be called a kiss.
‘Welcome,’ Brad enunciated. He’d elected to play France in the day’s tournament. He repressed his inner Napoleon. ‘It is a pleasure to welcome you to a day of wargaming activities.’
Nine sets of feminine eyes, framed in dark mascara, widened upon the emphasis of the word activities. They looked around for someone to blame for this misunderstanding.
Luckily there were more sensible Elinors and Elizabeths than flighty Mariannes and Lydias in the current membership. Their headquarters were a mere five minutes away on campus, yet a world away, was an understatement. But when in Rome…
Skye ripped off her straw bonnet to let loose a surfeit of ringlets. ‘So how does this work?’ She asked the soft boy closest to her.
It would be a misdirection to say everything turned out beautifully from that point. For one, Aashi got some very lucky rolls of the dice and almost had the French, under Brad’s command, routed, which, while historically accurate was not the outcome the veteran wargamers anticipated.
Nevertheless, the women of the Jane Austen Society carried on through six gruelling hours of tabletop wargaming because they had an agenda. Every girl must go to the ball. And that ball was coming, as surely as some fantasy writer’s winter. The national Jane Austen conference was descending on the city in two months, and it would culminate in said dance on the Saturday night. A partner and a mastery of the dance steps were imperative. They had no regiment of miniature toy soldiers to reify. They needed the next best thing: actual men.
So, any boredom was thus subsumed beneath politeness. Any glitches could find a solution in the etiquette books of the period. And who knew? The actual dimensions of the battlefield of Waterloo were astonishing to the newcomers; the château on the hill was merely a farmhouse, the posh word an interesting new fact. There was a lot more to Waterloo than a Eurovision song.
Jem’s coming week was haunted by a recurring image. He’d be measuring the length of a marsupial mouse in the lab, or crunching data on the mainframe, or popping suds in the kitchen sink, or locking his bike to the racks near the granite sculpture of who-knew-what, and he’d blink and see her. Skye. Fingering his fusiliers.
________
The return match the following week was on Jane Austen territory.
The university was generous in granting rooms for qualifying hobbyists. The wargamers were however a little miffed, collectively, to find the Jane Austen lot had, to coin a not-quite-appropriate phrase, better digs. It might have been a matter of perspective – without the trestles necessary for any tabletop activity, the room they entered the following Friday evening appeared enormous. Their deep male voices called out across a vast expanse of carpet. Female voices called back welcomes and beckoned them forward as if into a trap.
As at the previous encounter, the women were dressed in frocks befitting their chosen era. Cotton dresses with tiny puffed sleeves under plain pinnies tied behind in bows. They already had their bonnets off. Jem noticed the seamstress and frock designers’ attention to detail. Just as Skye had noticed the authenticity of the paint jobs on the battalions of French, Prussians and British metal soldiers. Accuracy is always something to be admired.
Amidst the general mingling that followed, they exchanged nods, Jem and Skye, tongue-tied without the focus of a specific activity. Jem belatedly realised how carefully the initial invitation had been written. They indeed needed activities. Luckily, Audrey and Anupama had linked a laptop to a generously sized screen and harpsichord music soon boomed out, mitigating all need for small talk.
Relief was felt amongst the strategist wargamers when they now realised the obvious. The girls needed partners, but they were not looking for boyfriends. They were there to dance.
They were at a university. They were there to learn. So, first, in the manner of a planned tutorial, they watched the experts on the screen. BBC actors and extras romanced in candlelight, a hand on the back, dainty fingers resting on a broad palm in close-up.
‘We’ll not be learning anything as anachronistic as Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot,’ Aashi assured the mini crowd who’d been shifting from foot to foot, though not in time to the music. ‘In truth, the dances of the time were more lively so we’ll start with a simple English Country Dance.’
This was hardly reassuring to the men in the room whose experiences on the dance floor were confined to high school graduations, cousins’ 18th parties and grandparents’ 50th anniversaries, and even then, the mix of fear and alcohol had to be seriously out of whack to transform nascent dancers from wallflowers to floor-jivers.
That evening, peer pressure had its way. In two long lines facing each other, ‘gentlemen’ to the right, ‘ladies’ to the left, the societies faced off.
‘Two steps forward,’ directed Audrey, ‘right arm out, touch hands, twirl around, two steps out.’ The music kicked in. Pianoforte, not harpsichord, as it turned out. Angelique and Rosie took turns being the man on either side of the line and danced up a storm, the most angelic and rosy-cheeked of the couples, though not by much. There was far more hopping, skipping, jumping and clapping of hands than expected.
The young men thought, these women opposite are so unlike the females in the dark corners of the internet, it makes you think the ones on the screen are actors. Or AI.
And the young women thought, these men opposite are so unlike the males in the dark corners of the internet, it makes you think the ones on the screen are a different species. Or bots.
Yu Yan took over the calls so Audrey could have a spin on the dancefloor. She intoned the directions: ‘second figure, neutral couple stand by, top to bottom, meet in the middle.’
Trips, slips and fumbles ensued. And laughter. They had not expected laughter, neither in the offering or in the taking up of the invitation. At times the hoots and giggles crashed against the bow of Yu Yan’s instructions but never drowned the vital bits.
After an hour of vigorous country dancing, the sweat was visible under the arms of the Gorgoroth, K-Pop and ‘Don’t Ask About My Thesis’ t-shirts of the wargaming members. Jem could see no such half-moons on the cotton frocks. Did women not sweat? Skye’s face however, glowed. No-one regretted a break being called and a dash was made to the familiar looking trestle on the sidewall, this one supporting a terrain of non-alcoholic punch (juice in a bowl) and gelatinous pork pies.
Jem watched Skye swipe right the flecks of pastry from her pinny’s bib. He could see some sort of campaign afoot. The prize uncertain.
Then a cotillion swept Jem and Skye up into the herd again. Another dance to perfect the required EFG of the ball: Elegant taste, Fine form, Graceful carriage. Another dance that gave the young men permission to touch a girl in an era of fraught uncertainty. Because of shit men doing shit things to young women down the ages. Often on university campuses.
________
The night of the Ball fell. A crisp autumn night, a time of the year when the trees arrayed themselves in gold. The Jane Austen conference spilled out from the campus into the town, which could not boast too much history, but had for hire a hall with a high ceiling, hundred-year-old paintwork and antiquated plumbing.
Everything before this point was merely preface material. For the gentlemen, this included scouring op-shops and the wardrobes of fathers for white trousers. Also searched for: suit jackets that could be cinched at the waist; details to fine-tune as braid and sashes, chevrons and medals. It included much fussing with beards and moustaches and greasy hair-care products in front of mirrors, and some truly heroic shaving which would not grow back for months.
But none of this was anything to the preparatory staging for their new friends whose dresses had to swish and sway on every movement, the skirts falling from under the bust, an area emphasised by pretty bands of ribbon to contrast with the white and lemon and jonquil and dusk-grey fabrics of the gowns. These were not ball gowns to be found at Target or Myers. Minds had been challenged to setting cap sleeves into gathered bodices. Sewing machines had rattled. Hand stitching had been resorted to. And at the last, hair was piled high on the head and secured with sparkly diadems for the night.
The night! It came. It opened at Chapter One.
Harry and Benni and Ralph and Amir loitered under the portal of the hall-for-hire until the others arrived. Jem was late, having battled anxiety to get there, and Angelique was unrecognisably gorgeous in a riot of ringlets and a silky polyester blend. So much so, the fellow wargamers walked past her until she called out, ‘hey guys.’
The buzz in the ballroom indicated a hive of activity (Amir loved dropping puns). The lovely solace of activity. Two lines had already formed as a live orchestra tuned their instruments from cat-gut squawks to melody. Huge lines – longways for as many as will – of excited faces and curious faces. The high ceilings absorbed the cacophony and sent back merriment and camaraderie, an anticipation of the next step, two forward, spin, two back, dip and sashay.
This was a far cry from the battlefields of Europe which the brave men would be off to imminently, had the modern participants really been transported back in time. Ah, simpler times: when men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were yet to hitchhike out of an author’s imagination.
This memory of Douglas Adam’s humour sustained Jem through the double-doors at the entrance. He moved at a crawl along the walls, knocking knees with early wallflowers. He knew he’d spot Skye instantly in any crowd, even camouflaged in finery.
And there she was: amidst a coterie of local society members, her gown a silvery bell that stopped short of her ankles to better show off her prowess on the dance floor. The gathered bodice revealed creamy skin which rose and fell, indicating she was a living, breathing being. With lungs. And a beating heart.
He stilled his babbling mind and read the body language of whispers as he approached. His rehearsed question became morse code as it left his lips.
‘You. Kindly. If. Dance.’
Skye laughed, a white gloved hand raised to hide her teeth and her Colgate mintiness. She said then, loudly, perfectly, to her companions: ‘He is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young men who are slighted by other women.’
Jem stumbled back into Harry and Amir who’d followed in his wake and heard it all. The orchestra skipped into a quicker beat as he beat his own retreat, cannons exploding in his ears.
Skye only caught up with him outside under the stars.
‘It was a quote,’ she called. The smokers and vapers turned, looked, turned back to their own tribe under a ghost gum. ‘From the first ball,’ she explained as she got closer. ‘When Darcy and Elizabeth met and hadn’t worked out they loved each other yet.’
‘I know… We’ve all seen the movie…’
‘I was just showing off to my friends. Being a dick.’
Eye contact was a terrifying business, when seconds pass as hours and the window to the soul gapes and rattles in the wind.
They were beyond the realm of both societies, in a place popularly known as the real world. A place where the rules were not written in an etiquette book, nor predicted on the roll of a dice. Jem didn’t know whether he should tell Skye how ardently her loved and admired her now, or wait for the safe distance of an internet connection. Or whether he should pray for rain and in the downpour, do the cliché crush to his braided chest, making his lips hesitantly meet hers.
Or whether he should retreat to a field of war he understood.
And yet, it was like she was reading his mind in that moment. She spoke. ‘I don’t know what the new rules of engagement are now either.’
The snorting and shifting of horses harnessed to waiting carriages was, in their world, the roar of fuel-injected engines from a distance.
‘Maybe we need to form a committee to write a new rule book,’ Skye said. ‘That’s a joke,’ she added, in case he missed her sense of humour again.
But over the top of her explanation, he was building on the joke. ‘We could elect a president and a secretary for the committee. Someone would have to be the vice-’ And he was finally smiling.
Inside and out, the dance went on.
