Page 3 of The Austen Affair

I return to the safety and warmth of my trailer to wait out the impending storm.

For about ten minutes, I distract myself by swiping idly through Bumble.

I immediately swipe left on anybody who seems like they’re on the production crew, and study the faces of some of the locals, wondering if any one-night entanglements would relieve my stress or just add to it.

I opt to match with no one, in the end. I can’t be trusted with love. Never could.

Like Marianne Dashwood, I’ve always been more sensibility than sense.

I throw myself fully into whatever relationship I’m in, and sometimes that intensity scares people.

Ryan, the last guy I seriously dated, bailed on me when Mom was just starting chemo.

We’d been dating two months when I told him I was in love with him.

Came on too strong, I guess, because the next time I saw him, it was because he was featured on Page Six, escorting a supermodel to his movie premiere.

Since then, I’ve been on a strict diet of no-strings-attached stress relief only.

And somehow I still end up getting hurt.

It probably doesn’t help that I’m a sucker for a pretty face—something Hollywood’s full of—and maybe not the best judge of character. I always seem to pick the cheaters, ghosters, and commitmentphobes. Just one more way I can’t seem to get my life together.

I toss my phone onto the couch in frustration, realizing that getting all mush-brained about some random guy right now would only distract me from the one person I do desperately need to create some chemistry with: Hugh Balfour.

Hugh doesn’t appear to be on any of the dating apps I’ve downloaded.

He probably has some perfect, old-money girlfriend back home in London.

And that means he’s probably faithful, too.

So while Hugh may be a narcissist, he seems to comport himself about 66.

6 percent more respectably than most of my exes.

I sigh, leaning my head against the plastic window of my trailer, trying to shake myself out of this funk.

We’ve come out to jolly (and rainy) old England, specifically Hampshire, the same county where Jane Austen actually lived and died, to shoot the majority of our scenes.

You’d think Hugh would loosen up a little back on his native soil, but nuh-uh.

The stick is still firmly lodged up his surprisingly shapely ass.

There’s a lot of upside to our tour of Hampshire.

I’m told we’ll be visiting Winchester Cathedral, where Jane is actually entombed, for the wedding scene.

And for the establishing shots of the titular Northanger Abbey, we visited this massive local hotel that used to be some rich-ass, snobby family’s actual home.

It was incredible. All gray stone and turrets and multistory windows that must have been a real flex back in the day.

I’ve never imagined that any place could be so intimidatingly huge, short of, like, the Vatican.

The hotel manager gave the principal cast a tour as a courtesy, and she said that the house had over sixty bedrooms, with the grounds clocking in at nearly a thousand acres.

Hugh, for his part, very obviously wasn’t listening to the manager as we strolled through the place.

His eyes were completely glazed over. The only time I saw a sign of life from him was when he gave this delicate snort after I asked the manager if this was the same place where they shot Downton Abbey.

So sue me. Fancy, old houses all look the same.

I suppose that Hugh, growing up in this country and with, I take it, multigenerational wealth, thinks I’m laughably ignorant.

And I guess I am. I grew up in significantly humbler circumstances than he did, given that both his parents are critically acclaimed British actors and my mom was a dental hygienist. It’s nepotism, really.

Can he be so much more talented than I am, the daughter of a working-class single mom, when we both ended up in exactly the same place, starring in exactly the same movie?

Nevertheless, I sit in my trailer, my chin resting in my hands as I stare dolefully out the window, watching the rain pound down on the verdant English countryside.

The metallic pinging of the rain hitting the roof is almost trance-inducing.

It certainly makes a girl slip deeply into her most melancholic thoughts.

Hugh was right about one thing: my trailer is not in the best condition.

Much like my trailer on set at Chuck Brown, this one is gradually accumulating the same everyday debris I leave in my wake everywhere I go.

I haven’t spent too much time in here yet, but the trailer is already messy enough that it’s starting to remind me of home.

I don’t like to admit it, but sometimes I find myself less likely to wash lipstick off a used glass in small part because it reminds me of the old days, when Mom was around.

After an hour or so of heavy rain, the sky lightens and the rain slows down to a persistent drizzle. At about this point, staring dully out my window, I realize that if I squint, I can see straight through the window opposite mine, into the inside of Hugh’s trailer.

And what do I see? If you’ll forgive me drawing from the English dialect: bloody nothing. Hugh is indeed sitting like a statue—a windup tin soldier whose gears have run down—on the sofa in his trailer, so straight and motionless I suspect he’s trying to avoid wrinkling his costume.

A splash of guilt poisons my stomach. I generally lounge around my trailer in costume, heedless of potential wrinkles or snack crumbs. But I push that guilt aside—we can’t all be rigid automatons like Hugh Balfour.

I refocus on the tiny square of Hugh’s private space I can see from this angle.

I see his script resting in his lap as he studies it, knees rising up over his coffee table like the legs of a praying mantis.

Said table is meticulously arranged, every object on it straightened to a right angle: a mug of tea (positioned on a coaster), an old-ass book as thick as a hotel Bible, and his cell phone, lying face up as if he’s expecting a call.

Who is he waiting on? His agent, with the script for his next great role in hand, something with gravitas and cultural capital?

That posh, surreally gorgeous girlfriend he almost certainly has?

Or—a stab of jealousy—his brilliantly talented actress mother, who’s been booking steadily in this business for decades, and whose most recent high-profile role was that of an enigmatic matriarch on a Game of Thrones prequel.

I can’t stand this. I push myself out of my chair and lurch to the door of my trailer. For the thousandth millionth time, I wish I could call Mom right now. Vent about my unreasonable costar, about Twitter haters and my professional screwups, about how hard every day is without her.

Now, I don’t really have anyone to call.

It’s not like I’ve always been totally friendless.

I used to be quite cordial with my castmates on Chuck Brown —but I’m certainly not reaching out to them today.

Then there were a few actresses I came up alongside in LA.

But there was always that silent obstacle to closeness: the knowledge we were often going up against each other for the same parts.

And the other fact… that the role of my lifelong best friend had been filled on the day I was born.

I didn’t need to be inseparable with those women.

I didn’t need to cultivate rituals, inside jokes, the natural ease of confiding deepest secrets without judgment. Not when I had Mom.

I’m knocked out of my funk when I hear a harried production assistant rap on Hugh’s trailer door outside, telling him to report back to the beauty department to restyle his wet hair before we resume filming.

My breath catches in my chest: the almost painful lightning strike of inspiration.

Hugh refuses to be in the beauty trailer with me due to his Method-acting process. It’s reached the point of pathologically deranged from my point of view now—what harm will come to him (or his precious acting craft) just because we sat in the same trailer?

And my character, Catherine Morland, is an incorrigible snoop. The kind of girl who creeps around a gothic manor that doesn’t belong to her, poking through wardrobes and looking for family secrets. Could Hugh blame me if I invoked Catherine’s spirit? He’s the one who wanted to go Method.

I dash from my trailer, slipping around the back of Hugh’s so he doesn’t see me rushing into the beauty trailer ahead of him.

Once inside, I slip silently into the coat closet.

Luckily, Lea, the hairstylist who works on getting Hugh’s curls to a state of onscreen perfection, has her back to me as I enter.

Her Beats headphones are on—I happen to know Lea spends most of her free time listening to true-crime podcasts.

I settle myself between a thick wool coat and a still-slick rain jacket, leaving the closet door open just a crack. And I wait for Hugh.

He arrives promptly. One would expect nothing less from a man whose mind is as dull and as regular as a train schedule.

He sits down in the beauty chair (his back directly in front of the closet door— score ), and Lea pulls out a wide-toothed comb to rearrange his dark curls back to perfection.

Lea slips her headphones down around her neck, and I can hear the faint, tinny voice of her podcast’s narrator.

“After her disappearance on April twenty-ninth, the only thing found of Casey Wilkerson were her panties.…”

Lea glances out a window I can’t see from this angle and says, “Looks like it’s clearing up. Maybe Dominic will get this scene taped today, after all.”

“Can’t get it over with soon enough,” Hugh grunts.

“Okay, Mr. Grumpy,” Lea says, voice light.