Sense & Sensibility

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Perhaps,’ Elinor said, thinking that this was what Margaret would say, ‘she’ll die?’

  Lucy gave a little gasp, and then a giggle. ‘Not much hope of that. She’s only in her sixties.’

  Elinor held her turret closer, as if examining it.

  Lucy said, ‘I don’t even know your sister-in-law.’

  ‘And I don’t know Robert.’

  Lucy smiled. She said, ‘He is a complete idiot. I mean, loads of fun, but so shallow, all parties and tweeting. A million miles from Ed.’

  Elinor said calmly, ‘Why don’t you just break off the engagement?’

  Lucy put down the glue tube. She said, almost dangerously, ‘Are you telling me to?’

  ‘No,’ Elinor said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you to do anything you didn’t want to do anyway. You wouldn’t take any notice.’

  ‘Then why’, Lucy said, ‘mention it?’

  ‘You asked for advice. Unbiased advice. Last weekend.’

  ‘Unbiased?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, so you are,’ Lucy said. ‘You don’t care one way or the other, of course you don’t. Why should you?’

  Elinor shrugged. ‘Exactly.’

  Lucy leaned forward. The ring on its chain swung out of the neck of her top, and she touched it lightly.

  Elinor glanced at her own ringless hands. What instinct – what instinct on earth – had made her take it off again that morning and put it back in the lacquer bowl of paper clips? Lucy was smiling down at her own ring.

  ‘I’ll win Mrs Ferrars round,’ she said. ‘You’ll see. When I go up to London.’

  ‘Are you going to London?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lucy said. She let a beat fall and then she said, with a tiny but unmistakable note of triumph, ‘To see Edward.’

  ‘Are you awake?’ Marianne whispered.

  Elinor opened her eyes into the darkness of her bedroom, and shut them again. ‘No.’

  ‘Please, Ellie.’

  Elinor moved slightly across her bed, towards the wall. She felt Marianne slip in beside her, and pull the duvet across.

  ‘Ow! Horrible cold feet.’

  ‘Ellie?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Will you come to London with me?’

  Elinor turned over on to her back. ‘London! What are you talking about?’

  ‘Today,’ Marianne said, ‘at the Park. While you were in the kitchen with Lucy. Mrs J. cornered me and said would we like to go and stay with her in London because she thought it was very boring for us stuck out here with nothing to do and no shopping.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘What’s daft about it?’

  ‘Well,’ Elinor said, ‘for starters, you can’t stand Mrs J.’

  ‘I can.’

  Elinor glanced sideways. Marianne’s profile was clear, even in the dim room, outlined against the glow from Elinor’s bedside radio. ‘M, you tell everyone that she’s ghastly. Tactless and noisy and uncultured.’

  ‘Well,’ Marianne said calmly, ‘maybe I’ve been a bit mean. She’s got a flat in Portman Square.’

  Elinor waited a moment and then she said, ‘Have you told Ma?’

  ‘She’s all for it.’

  ‘She’s all for you going up to London in the hopes of bumping into Wills?’

  Marianne shifted a bit. ‘Not so crudely.’

  ‘But accurately,’ Elinor said. ‘Mrs J. and a flat off Oxford Street suddenly stop being vulgar and unbearable and become intensely desirable because Portman Square isn’t a million miles from the King’s Road?’

  Marianne said, as if she’d thought about this with immense care, ‘It would be much easier for him, if I took the initiative. He trusts me, like I trust him, and sometimes a really strong man like him is just longing for a helping hand.’

  ‘Which you, with your vast experience of men, would know all about?’

  Marianne turned on her side to face Elinor. She said, much more urgently, ‘Ellie, I’ve got to. I am going mad here; it’s like a kind of prison, a prison of boredom and nothingness. I’ve got to know what’s happening to him.’

  Elinor said, ‘Have you looked on Facebook?’

  ‘He hasn’t been on it. He hasn’t been on it since he left here. He hasn’t even changed his status from “single”.’

  Elinor sighed. ‘M, it’s such a risk.’

  ‘I don’t mind risks. I like risks; at least risks are taking action.’

  ‘And Ma—’

  ‘She’s all for it,’ Marianne said again. ‘She says I need to get away, I need something to do, to occupy my mind.’

  Elinor turned to face her sister. She said, soberly, ‘What would occupy your mind would be thinking about your future. Are you going to study music further, are you going to teach music, are you going to uni—’

  ‘Ellie, I can’t.’

  ‘Of course you can!’

  Marianne began to cry. ‘Don’t bully me, please don’t bully me.’

  ‘I’m not bullying, I’m just trying to make you see that your future happiness depends upon what you do for yourself and not on what some guy you hardly know—’

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘It’s true.’

  Marianne sniffed and rolled away from her sister again. ‘It might be true for you,’ she said, ‘but it isn’t true for me.’

  Elinor sighed again. ‘OK.’

  ‘Ellie. Come with me.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘M, I can’t come to London! I’ve got a job!’

  Marianne turned to stretch her arms up into the dimness and interlace her fingers. She said, ‘Come at weekends, then.’

  ‘But Ma—’

  ‘Ma won’t mind. She’d rather we were together.’

  ‘I – might. Why are you talking about weekends, anyway? How long are you planning on going for?’

  ‘As long as it takes.’

  ‘As long as what takes?’

  ‘As long’, Marianne said, and her voice was full of hope, ‘as it takes to find Wills. And talk to him.’ She turned her head sideways and smiled. ‘So I know where I am, with him and our future. And then I’ll think about all the dull stuff you want me to think about.’ She lowered her arms and put the back of one hand against Elinor’s cheek. ‘Promise,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

  10

  ‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Jennings said, ‘you’ve got time for a cup of coffee.’

  Bill Brandon looked at his watch. ‘Well, I—’

  Mrs Jennings took his arm. ‘We don’t see you for weeks, dear, weeks, and then I just run into you like this, coming out of the Underground …’ She paused and looked at him. ‘Bond Street Underground, Central Line. Where have you been?’

  Bill Brandon sighed, as if courtesy compelled him to give information he would have preferred to keep private. ‘Mile End,’ he said.

  ‘Mile End? What on earth were you doing at Mile End?’

  ‘Visiting the hospital,’ Bill Brandon said patiently. ‘The specialist addiction unit.’

  ‘Ah!’ Mrs Jennings cried, as if a penny had dropped. ‘Ah! For your Delaford people!’

  Bill Brandon gave a non-committal smile. He tried to extract his arm. He said, ‘And now I’ve got to get back.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To Delaford.’

  ‘But not before’, Mrs Jennings said firmly, ‘you’ve had a cup of coffee with me.’ She leaned closer. ‘I have a lot to tell you.’

  He glanced down at her, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Oh?’ he said.

  She smiled and nodded. ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, ‘I have. Guess who I’ve got staying with me?’

  ‘I can’t—’

  She let his arm go at last, and then she said, in a tone that implied she knew she’d finally caught his full attention, ‘Marianne!’ she said.

  Settled in Dolly’s café in Selfridges, Mrs Jennings was very disappointed by Bill
Brandon’s choice of only a cup of black coffee.

  ‘Have some carrot cake, dear,’ she said. ‘It isn’t called heavenly for nothing. Or the walnut and coffee. Come on, Bill, you’re too thin and too thin isn’t good on a man, trust me.’

  He closed his eyes, briefly. ‘Just coffee, thank you.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Just coffee.’

  ‘Jonno would get you to eat cake.’

  ‘Jonno isn’t here.’

  ‘Bill,’ Mrs Jennings said, suddenly picking up a spoon to stir her large chocolate-dusted cappuccino, ‘you’re quite right. Let’s get down to business. I have Marianne Dashwood moping in my spare bedroom and she’s quite a worry to me.’

  Bill said quietly, not looking at her, ‘I heard she was in London.’

  ‘From whom? Oh, Jonno, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why’, Abigail Jennings demanded, putting her spoon down decisively, ‘haven’t you been to see us? You know you’re always welcome, you know.’

  ‘I’ve been a bit tied up.’

  ‘With what?’

  Bill Brandon glanced up at her. He smiled tiredly. ‘None of your business, Abigail.’

  ‘Delaford?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Or this mystery daughter of yours?’

  Bill picked up his coffee cup. ‘She doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Now then—’

  ‘Abigail,’ Bill Brandon said, ‘can we get back to Marianne?’

  ‘Aha! I knew you’d take my bait!’

  ‘Well, I have,’ he said patiently. ‘And I want to know how she is.’

  ‘Pathetic,’ Mrs Jennings said, ‘unhappy. Just – oh, Bill dear, you know, moody and miserable. I thought I’d take her shopping, to cheer her up, and so we headed for Bond Street – show me a girl on this planet, Bill, who isn’t cheered up by Bond Street – and at first I thought she had actually perked up a little and then I realised – I think we were in Fenwick’s – that she wasn’t looking at the bags and the jewellery like any normal girl, she was just examining all the people, as if Wills might suddenly materialise out of a cosmetic counter. It was so sad, and absolutely exasperating at the same time. She found a missed call from him on her mobile the other day, and was wild to ring him back, and when she did, was told that the number had been cancelled. So he can’t have rung her, it can’t have been him, perhaps he isn’t even in London—’

  ‘He’s in London,’ Bill said shortly.

  Mrs Jennings put down the cup she had just picked up, with a small bang. ‘My dear! You don’t tell me!’

  Bill said slowly, ‘John Willoughby is in London. He’s in London because he has just done a deal. For him, a big deal.’

  Mrs Jennings leaned forward. Her gaze was intensely focused. ‘Bill—’

  ‘There’s no reason not to tell you,’ Bill said. ‘It’s been in the press.’

  ‘Not in my paper!’

  Bill gave her a small grin. ‘No, Abigail. Not in your paper. Property deals only interest your paper when they’re shady. And this, as far as one can tell, isn’t shady, just substantial. John Willoughby has brokered the sale of a very expensive flat in one of those new towers in Knightsbridge to a wealthy Greek getting some of his euro millions out of Athens.’

  Abigail Jennings threw herself back in her chair. ‘I am flabbergasted. I didn’t think that boy knew how to put one business foot in front of another. What was the commission?’

  Bill laughed. ‘Dear Abigail, I have no idea.’

  ‘Well, then – who is the Greek? Is he in shipping?’

  Bill shrugged. ‘He’s a Greek, Mrs J., a Goulandris or a Chandris or a Niarchos: all the same to me. I know nothing about him except that he has bought a high-end flat through John Willoughby, which has kept the latter very firmly in London.’

  Mrs Jennings looked suddenly sober. She said, ‘But nowhere near Marianne.’

  ‘Thank the Lord.’

  ‘Bill dear, that’s not how she sees it. He’s a rogue.’

  ‘I think’, Bill Brandon said quietly, ‘that he’s worse than that.’

  ‘And Marianne, poor dear, has got all the looks a girl could want, but no money.’

  Bill Brandon said nothing. He finished his coffee and pushed the cup away. Then he said, ‘How’s her sister? How’s Elinor?’

  ‘Oh, my dear. So sensible. Really making something of that job you found her. I gather they’re so pleased with her and of course, unlike the rest of her family, she has a proper work ethic. In fact, dear, she’s coming up this weekend to see her sister. Frankly, I’m thankful. It’s quite a strain trying to cheer Marianne up on my own. I’m sending them both to a wedding – Charlotte’s old friend Suzy Martineau, remember? It should be fun. All the old crowd. I made Charlotte get them invited and as Jonno and Mary are coming up from Barton for it – Suzy was at school with my girls – there’ll be plenty of people to look after them.’

  She stopped and looked directly across the table, as if abruptly struck by something. ‘Bill dear …’

  He roused himself from whatever thoughts he had been plunged in. He said, affectionately, ‘I’d be glad to see Elinor.’

  ‘Bill,’ Mrs Jennings said. ‘Bill. Has this Greek got a daughter?’

  In the car going home from work and school Margaret wasn’t speaking. She had climbed into the car – which she now required Elinor to park round the corner so that none of her school friends would see her actually having to get into it – and immediately launched into a diatribe about how unfair it was that she had never had a ride in the Aston, as had been promised, and Elinor, strained from a week of worry about Marianne, tension about Lucy Steele and silence from Edward Ferrars, had snapped at her to say nothing more unless she could say something pleasant. So Margaret had goggled at her and shrugged and made her dissing ‘whatever’ hand gestures, and was now slumped beside her sister with her earphones in and a faint, maddening beat emanating from the iPod in her lap.

  Elinor drove with fierce concentration. Marianne had not initiated a phone call or a text for days, and whenever Elinor rang her, sounded remote and inert or else worryingly wound up. Elinor had heard the story of the missed phone call a dozen times, as well as an endless litany of reasons why Wills wasn’t in touch, followed by hysterical assertions of certainty that he would be. She knew that Marianne had walked the residential streets off the King’s Road day after day, and although she had never seen the right Aston Martin parked by any kerb, was still insistent that one day she would, and that Wills would be there, with a perfect explanation, and that she, Marianne, would not only be restored to ecstasy, but also justified in her complete faith in his feelings for her being as hers were for him.

  ‘How’s Mrs J.?’ Elinor said, keenly aware of the consequences of living with Marianne’s intensity.

  ‘Fine,’ Marianne said carelessly. ‘You know. Jolly and insensitive. Thinks all ills can be cured with chocolate. And parties.’

  ‘Parties!’

  ‘I go,’ Marianne said, ‘and I stand there with a glass in my hand. And then I go home again. The inanity of all those people is beyond anything.’

  Elinor had said, during the last call, and unhappily, ‘Oh, M, I do hope you are being at least a bit grateful—’ and had immediately regretted it.

  ‘Grateful?’ Marianne had almost screamed. ‘Grateful! When she only has me here because she’s obsessed with romantic gossip and I’m providing her with an on-going story? Would she even have me in London if both her daughters weren’t already married?’

  ‘M, I only meant out of politeness—’

  ‘Politeness,’ Marianne said witheringly. ‘Politeness! It’s all you care about, isn’t it, manners and decorum and – and respectability. You wouldn’t know real feeling, real passion if it hit you on the head with a hammer. You are so completely buttoned up, Ellie, that you can’t even begin to understand someone like me who is open. About everything.’

  Then she had ended the call, bang. El
inor texted her, to say sorry. Silence. There had been silence since, too, a silence as uneasy and troubled as the one now reigning between her and Margaret in the car.

  Without looking sideways, Margaret suddenly took out her earphones and laid them in her lap. The beat from the iPod grew louder and Elinor was about to say, exasperatedly, ‘Oh, turn that thing off!’ when Margaret said, in quite a different tone to the one she had used earlier, ‘Ellie …’

  ‘What?’

  Margaret glanced out of the window for a moment, and then she looked back at her lap. She said, almost inaudibly, ‘Sorry.’

  Elinor shot out her left hand and grasped her sister’s nearest one. ‘Mags. What for?’

  Margaret sighed. ‘Just – being a pain.’

  ‘Well,’ Elinor said warmly, ‘you were promised.’

  Margaret gripped Elinor’s hand. ‘I – kind of insisted I was. But he never said. Not really. Not in so many words.’ She sighed again, and then she said, ‘Is he really just a tosser?’

  Elinor gave Margaret’s hand a squeeze and let it go. ‘Well, he’s not behaving very well to Marianne.’

  ‘Is – is she overdoing it a bit?’

  Elinor hesitated. ‘Not according to how she sees things, Mags.’

  They turned in through the gates to Barton Park’s drive, Elinor’s headlights picking up ghostly tree trunks. Margaret spun the dial on her iPod to silence it. Then she said, ‘Do we have to have boyfriends?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Us. Us girls.’

  Elinor said, half laughing, ‘Of course we don’t have to. But we seem to want to, to need to, don’t we?’

  ‘But we don’t need to make them our whole world, do we, like Marianne?’

  ‘Not’, Elinor said carefully, ‘if it doesn’t suit us to.’

  She pulled the car up on the gravel in front of the cottage. Belle had all the lights on, as usual, and although it made the house look wonderfully welcoming, Elinor could not help thinking anxiously about the consequent electricity bill. Which she, as usual, would have to deal with.

  She turned off the engine. Margaret gathered up her iPod and earphone cables and hauled her school bag from the floor into her arms. She nudged the car door open. She said, ‘Sorry again, Ellie.’