Wimsey-fic

[nineveh_uk]

I went to see Pygmalion at the Oxford Playhourse last night, starring Tim Pigott-Smith as a magnificently appalling Henry Higgins. If you have the opportunity to see this Theatre Royal Bath production (now touring to Oxford, Guildford, Darlington and Bath), take it. It's perfectly pitched and acted, and though Higgins ends up a little lost and tragic ( if perhaps only temporarily), one cannot feel too sorry that Eliza ends up with Freddy instead, "as soon as [she's] able to support him". Its abundently clear that Higgins would be absolutely terrible in bed.

More AU Peter and Harriet, being a sequel to Rural Pursuits post-cowpat.

Open Air

The balmy pleasure of a summer’s day was somewhat spoiled when one was enjoying it not in the light frock one had put on that morning, but wrapped in an oily Burberry retrieved from the Daimler and handed over by Peter before he had absented himself behind the hedge. The frock, which was at least not new, hung forlornly on the hawthorn as the manure smeared over a large portion of the back baked dry for brushing off. Peter, who had already offered to go and drown himself, appeared to be having grave difficulty seeing the funny side of things. Given that he was not the one wrapped in an elderly coat that smelled faintly of dogs and better days, Harriet was not inclined to sympathy on that score. There should not be long to wait; the sun was blisteringly hot and Harriet rather regretted the necessity of the coat. It was not as if Peter had not seen her in considerably less on the beach at Wilvercombe, but though he had not turned a hair at the students of Shrewsbury who had once again had to be asked by the Dean not to disport themselves on the lawns in drawers and brassieres, she did not quite feel capable of pulling off the same trick herself. Besides, Peter had been wrong about the thistles, too, and to draw notice to the irreparable state of her stockings seemed an unkindness in itself.

A diffident cough sounded from the other side of the hedge.

‘Oh, Peter, I’m sorry. I was miles away. Come back in here and let’s have a cigarette or something.’

He sidled apologetically through the gate.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to end it all in the pond? I’m afraid it too bears evidence of cows in the locality, but it looks deep enough.’

‘Quite sure; Shrewsbury has need of you. Besides, you’ve the car keys in your pocket.’

‘So I have. Let’s sit down – I think it’s all right here.’

Harriet lowered herself carefully, and tucked the coat neatly under her knees.

‘I don’t think,’ she said, ‘that if this were a novel, this would be considered an appropriate development.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Wimsey said, with a tinge of bitterness. ‘You’ve forgotten the scene in which the hapless oaf insults the girl and demonstrates his fitness solely for the role of comic relief. I’m only surprised you haven’t demanded the car and taken off.’

‘Oh, Peter, for goodness sake stop being so maudlin! The dress doesn’t matter a bit, and you know that I know perfectly well that if you had been exerting yourself to get my clothes off you might have done it a long time ago and under vastly more convenient circumstances.’ She shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. ‘I mean, you said it yourself.’

‘So I did.’ He picked up the cigarette case, turned it over, and shoved it back in his pocket. ‘I am two fools, I know, for loving and for saying so, but one might at least endeavour not to make oneself obnoxious, and even watering places cannot excuse everything.’

‘It’s all right. I knew you wouldn’t.’

‘Did you? I shall try to take it as a compliment.’ He looked at her queerly. ‘Unless – you wouldn’t have preferred it?’

‘No, Peter, I shouldn’t prefer it. But it was very decent of you not to.’

‘I don’t know that I’d put it down to decency. More selfishness and a determination to get all that I wanted.’

She caught a glimpse of a relentlessness she had never wholly appreciated. ‘Most people settle for half.’

‘Most people are fools. Look at young Gerald. He’ll end in a pickle if he isn’t careful.’ He climbed to his feet and held out a hand. ‘Come on. I can admire you in that appalling garment for only so long. We’d better get back to Oxford - the sky’s beginning to get a bit dubious. We’re in for some rain tonight if I’m not mistaken.’

‘I believe you’re right.’

They drove along the lanes in silence under a lurid sky. It was only when they were passing through a small town that Peter suddenly drew up, outside a leather-and-harness shop.

‘I may never make you mine,’ he said, ‘but I’m damned if I’m letting the poltergeist have you. I won’t be five minutes – you needn’t come in.’

Comments

[grondfic.livejournal.com]

This is lovely. You've caught the tone; and the agonised ongoing debate between them, completely authentically.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Of course I owe it all to the Ouija board...

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm half-inclined to believe you. I think it's uncanny the way you capture both the voice and the - oh, for want of a better word I shall say ethos - of the original. If you don't have a Ouija board for taking dictation from the dead, you must at least have a cryptophone. Please give my love to Dorothy next time she calls and tell her I think her current stuff is really good.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

At the risk of being seen as an ignorant fool, what is "AU"?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Not ignorant fool - it takes me _ages_ to work out what internet acronyms/slang mean. Asking is much more sensible.

AU = alternative universe. In this case, one in which Harriet sits in a cowpat and events go on from that, rather than the canon no cowpat in which she sits smoking a slightly suggestive cigarette and thinking about how she could make the previous scene into something a bit racy for her latest novel. AU may be oft-scorned when it's an excuse to dump a canon element the ficcer doesn't like (e.g. "I think Ron's really boring, so I'm saying that he went to Durmstrang instead of Hogwarts"), but it can be interesting as a jumping off point for exploring plausible might-have-happened (e.g. "what if Harry met Ernie Macmillan's family at King's Cross instead") - an excellent example being tree_and_leaf's brilliant but depressing bit of Sayers fic Tell Beauty How She Blasteth (http://tree-and-leaf.livejournal.com/45386.html#cutid1).

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Poor old Peter. Dignity hits rock bottom.

I particularly enjoyed the threats to end it all in the duckpond - Peter being Peter, he probably would seriously consider doing so if asked, so deep is his mortification...

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Oh, not rock-bottom, surely. Half-way down at most… Though yes, if asked to I'm sure a penitent Peter would at least get himself rather soggy in the pond.

[marginaliana]

Oh, I adore this. I particularly like the way you capture their shared wavelength here - both of them seem to speak elliptically in these awkward half-sentences, but they make sense to each other. I also really admire your talent for including the sort of sensual detail that I love, but without it overtaking what's happening and the things that are the focus of the story. Very nice.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Thank you! They got a bit sticky at one point (I think the lines between "convenient circumstances" and "most people are fools" went through about 5 versions veering off all over the place before I got the right one) but they are very nice to write.

[bronze-ribbons.livejournal.com]

Very nice, especially the foreshadowing to Peter's sulking in BH.

A wee nitpick: "compliment", I think? Unless I'm failing to clue into a pun...

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Thanks - he doesn't always take thwarting well, does he?

Oh damn! You're right. Well, it was late at night.

[aerama.livejournal.com]

Tim Pigott-Smith! Last time I saw him was in "Masque of Mandragora" which was, well, on TV. And Doctor Who. And quite awhile ago. But lo, the mere mention of the name!

But wait, Eliza ends up with Freddy? I should pay more attention to originals versus "My Fair Lady." Or at least the version with Wendy Hiller which I think did not end in Higgins's favor either, but I tend to not like Wendy Hiller so much.
(Though with the other, Jeremy Brett as Freddy was scrumptious, despite being a hapless buffoon. And Rex Harrison is a god, plain & simple.)

I am sadly lacking in non-AU Peter and Harriet as it is, but I was drawn into your tale regardless, and loved it. I've been in sore need of something _good_ and witty and entrancing to read and this filled the bill right enough. Yay!

P.S. It also took me ages to figure out what "AU" meant. Embarrassingly enough, I kept thinking it meant "gold" and was used by fandom to mean something akin to "That's a really good story." Ah, chemistry.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

But wait, Eliza ends up with Freddy?

According to an ancient bit of cinema lore that I am dredging up from the depths of my memory, Leslie Howard told Shaw that Higgins was in love with Eliza and Shaw (who was still alive at the time and so didn't have to be contacted by ouija board, unlike DLS when she advises nineveh_uk on her bits of wimseyfic) insisted he absolutely wasn't (and I go back on forth on the question of which of them was right, and which of them had the better grasp of what makes a good story). But although at the end of Pygmalion Eliza announces that she will marry Freddy as soon as she can support him, this causes Higgins to burst into peals of laughter, and thus endeth the play. So I think we can safely say that Eliza/Freddy wasn't Shaw's One True Pairing either.

[aerama.livejournal.com]

I love Memory!Cinema Lore, especially in this case where Eliza/Freddy does not = True Happiness.
Though now I unaccountably feel mean for saying that about Freddy. It's not his fault he's fit for nothing but admiration of Eliza. /charitable.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I have loved Tim Pigott-Smith ever since squirming with I-can't-bear-to-watch embarrassment at his performance of Ronald Merrick romancing Daphne in The Jewel in the Crown.

Yep, Eliza ends up with Freddy. I love MFL, so it's wierd to watch Pygmalion and recognise so many lines, and have them veer off in unexpected directions.
azdak is right about the story behind the Higgins/Eliza/Freddy business. The play (especially in its earliest version before the additions for the film, like the ball), is pretty polemical, and its clear than Eliza might _consider_ marrying Higgins, but that the end result of any ssensible woman's consideration could only be that there's no way on earth she's going to marry a man like that! Higgins is another matter, and though I can see him being played as completely indifferent to Eliza, in fact TPS played him as rather taken, but completely undeveloped in the personal emotion/sex department, with a rather pitiful lack of ability to know what he wanted to do about her - he had some rather affecting attempts at holding his hands vaguely in her direction and then having to put them away, and was bereft at the end without ever quite knowing why. Freddy wins because he is nice and acceptable and wants Eliza, and Eliza is a bit stuck in her new position and really has to bestow herself somewhere.

There is actually a short story epilogue to the play that goes into what happens to everyone afterwards that's well worth reading.

(Glad you liked P&H, who are certainly golden, whether AU or not!)

[aerama.livejournal.com]

It is true, I remember being slightly appalled that Eliza would come back to Higgins in MFL - and that he dared to stretch out and say "Where the devil are my slippers?" and all she did was gaze touchingly at him as if a small piece of her heart did not just wither and die at this example of her future with him.
Agh!

I still want that library they had. The balcony! The ladder! The sink-in-me leather chairs (no doubt smelling of manly cigar smoke, but oh well)!

I should find that play for real, though, with that epilogue you mentioned. That and The Beggar's Opera already. Gawd.

P&H FTW!

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I thought the best bit of the play was Higgins saying that if what she wanted was for Higgins to treat her with respect and kindness, what the hell was she doing fetching his slippers for him? Abasement definitely not in this case engendering love.

But I should love a library, with big non-leather chairs (they're too cold), and a moving ladder, and a rug, and a cat.

[lazy-neutrino.livejournal.com]

Lovely again. I like the small glimpse we get - and Harriet recognises - of his long-term strategy. Most people do indeed settle for half. But we'd never have had Busman's, Gaudy or arguably Carcase if Sayers had taken that route, and life would be dull indeed!

I know Gaudy Night so well that there are parts of Oxford that have no life for me independent of it. I read it over and over as an impressionable teenager who was just a little in love with Peter. When I walk through through the centre it's not my memories I have but theirs. !

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I should hate to have missed any of the Harriet books, but at the same time, I can't help feeling that one about an absolutely disastrous marriage and painful divorce could have been interesting!

I wish I had read Gaudy Night as a teenager. A crush on Peter would have been _such_ a better choice than the one on Marc Remillard, evil genius hero of Julian May's "The Saga of the Exiles".

[missfoxie.livejournal.com]

I'm 19 years old and have a crush on Peter. Which is wonderful, but does give you extremely high expectations. ;) Overall, these books are leaving quite the distinct impression on me.

More AU Peter and Harriet, post-cowpat. - I do like that summary. Almost as much as I like the actual piece. Delightful.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

As a summary it has a certain simple charm ;-)