Secrets, lies and even a hint of new love in Downton’s big finale
WITH a clang like a dinner gong rolling downstairs, the penny dropped on Downton Abbey last night. Lord Grantham finally worked out what was going on right under his nose.
Over the four years that he’s been on our TV screens, we’ve discovered that Old Etonian Robert Crawley, the fifth Earl of Grantham and Viscount of Downton, isn’t the greatest advert for the English public school system.
He never was a beacon of intellect, but now in late middle age, his mind resembles a flat expanse of lawn, with the occasional thought ambling across it like a labrador sniffing for rabbits.
For his family, this is a blessing. Lord Grantham, played by the splendid Hugh Bonneville, is surrounded by women, all of whom harbour secrets, and they never need to worry that he might find them out. Occasionally, his wife, mother, daughters, niece or housekeeper will consider a confession – but then they realise the explanations would last for days. And so, it is simpler, and kinder, to say nothing.
The womenfolk of Downton have – more than ever in this fifth series, which reached its finale last night – been running rings round their seigneur. For example, when his daughter Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) told him blithely that she was taking a break with a chum, no suspicion ever entered Lord Grantham’s head that her ‘sketching holiday’ meant a dirty weekend in Liverpool.
Nor did he blink when his wife was flirting with wolfish art historians; his niece was throwing herself at muscular young bankers and his mother was exchanging cryptic innuendos with exiled Russian princes.
MEANWHILE, his drippy younger daughter, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael), has been hanging around a nearby farm for months, fussing over their ‘adopted orphan’. Then she had a funny turn, abducted the little girl and insisted on bringing her up in the Downton nursery.
None of her behaviour struck the Earl as out of the ordinary. Some girls like horses, he mused absentmindedly, and some enjoy dancing, and some kidnap farmers’ children to raise them as their own. But slowly, out of the mental mist, something bothered Lord Grantham. It was the little girl’s face – it reminded him of someone. It was an odd way to finally work out that Edith is an unmarried mother.
But perhaps, as the Earl cannot see the flagrantly obvious when it is waved in front of his face, his only hope of discovering the truth about his family is to decode obscure clues. And that’s what viewers will be doing in the next six weeks as they wait for the Downton Christmas special.
We have one scrap of information based on media gossip on which to pile towers of speculation: Lady Mary will be adorned with a Christmas beau. Matthew Goode, who played the ghastly George Wickham in last year’s Jane Austen sequel, Death Comes To Pember- ley, is rumoured to be her new love interest. Other story-lines leave us guessing. Dame Maggie Smith, as the Dowager Countess, looked both flattered and furious, like a basilisk who’s had her bottom pinched, when her old admirer, Prince Kuragin, invited her to run away with him. ‘I vish to spend my final years vith you, as a friend, as a loffer,’ he growled.
But Downton’s writer, Julian Fellowes, can’t seriously expect us to believe that the grande dame will be tempted. Prince Kuragin, after all, has no money, a wife in Hong Kong, and a greasy topknot that belongs on a drunken grave-digger in a Thomas Hardy novel.
Meanwhile, the police have arrested lady’s maid, Anna, and charged her with murdering the valet who raped her last year. But their only evidence is flimsy as a flapper’s silk stockings. Anna’s husband, Mr Bates, has vowed that ‘she shall not be convicted’ and he is clearly planning to confess to the crime rather than see his wife on trial. But Mr Bates has been trying to get himself shot or hanged in a noble cause since the show began: His existence is one long deathwish. Other characters appear to be on the verge of leaving. Daisy, the stroppy assistant cook, seems to want to run away to London to live in Bloomsbury with Virginia Woolf and write a great novel about class injustice. Although by the end of last night’s 90-minute episode, she was snuggled safely back under cook Mrs Patmore’s wing, she’s bound to fly the coop soon.
The Abbey’s other Leftie, former chauffeur Tom, has announced his intention to emigrate to Boston and sell tractors. Heaven only knows why. At Downton, he’s the estate manager and Lord Grantham’s favourite son-in-law – the only man who ever proposed to a Crawley girl and didn’t promptly die in a car crash, get beaten to death by Nazis or run screaming from the altar. With free meals, open access to the wine cellar and roundthe-clock childcare for his daughter, everything possible has been done to make him comfortable.
Another quitter is Lady Violet’s peevish butler. Dear old Spratt is camper than a Christmas tree in a pink tutu and is threatening to leave. But as Dame Maggie sighs, she doesn’t want to be looking for a new butler at her age.
Spratt’s problem is new maid Denker has been rubbing his pine needles the wrong way. She’s played by the incomparable Sue Johnston (Brookside, The Royle Family), who’s having the time of her life. She’s sharp as a tack and often pickled as an egg, and the battles between her and her mistress promise to be highlights of the next series.
One of Downton’s great strengths is the speed at which its plots move: The scenes constantly shift, from the kitchens to the library to the dining room, rushing off to the station and dashing into the village.
By doing so, it showers us with new story-lines. Let’s just hope the easily muddled Lord Grantham can keep up.