I've often wondered just what Charles Bingley did with himself in the period between disappearing from Netherfield Park in a cloud of stagecoach dust, and then stepping blithely out into the room of an Inn at Lambton like some Variety-show illusionist. The missing eight months in fact.
In general, it doesn't take much imagination to decide what a single, healthy and wealthy young man in his early twenties might well do in such circumstances in London, particularly in a period that took in Christmas and New Year, but if the Bingley we think we know were true to type, just how much of his time did he spend thinking of Jane Bennet? With Georgiana on the scene and given the fact that their party only mixed with people of fashion and no one in status less than the Duke of Fullers Earth would be invited, it's hardly likely that tavern crawling and ladies of the night were on the social agenda. Balls, assemblies and supper parties no doubt were prime pastimes, maybe a small amount of gambling at Bridge etc, but even considering that, spending large amounts of time listening to his sisters chattering like demented canaries to the clicking of beads and bangles, and trying to keep an interested expression whilst airs on pianoforte, with Mr Hurst's snores providing the percussion filled the room, must have been a tad tedious? He did love to dance, we already know, but I imagine Caroline would see that not too much annoyed Mr Darcy, and that lively discussions on Lady Fotheringay's niece's elegant design for a firescreen, or Esmeralda Flushington's latest watercolour of an African parrot were displayed and admired.
Seriously, eight months is a considerable time and, Darcy was presumably missing for some periods of it no doubt, on business and the visit to Rosings etc which might not have helped . Bingley must have suffered some periods of boredom in between firing paper balls of crumpled sonnets into the fireplace, surely? At the end of it, he bounced cheerfully back into the plot with all the impeccable timing of a stately grandfather clock striking the hour. What really did fill his hours of reflection?
