Sense & Sensibility Page 3

  The next day, Edward borrowed Fanny’s car and asked Elinor to go to Brighton with him.

  ‘Does she know?’ Elinor said.

  He smiled at her. He had beautiful teeth, she noticed, even if nobody could exactly call him handsome. ‘Does who know what?’

  ‘Does – does Fanny know you are going to Brighton?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Edward said easily, ‘I’ve got a huge list of things to pick up for her: bath taps and theatre tickets and wallpaper samples from—’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Elinor said. ‘I meant, does Fanny know you were going to ask me to go with you?’

  ‘No,’ Edward said. ‘And she needn’t. I have her great bus for the day, I have her shopping list, and nothing else is any of her business.’

  Elinor looked doubtful.

  ‘He’s absolutely right,’ Belle said. ‘She’ll never know and it won’t affect her, knowing or not knowing.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Get in, darling.’

  ‘Yes, get in.’

  ‘Come on,’ Edward said, opening the passenger door and smiling again. ‘Come on. Please. Please. We’ll have fish and chips on the beach. Don’t make me go alone.’

  ‘I should be working …’ Elinor said faintly.

  She glanced at Edward. He bent slightly and, with the hand not holding the door, gave her a small, decisive shove into the passenger seat. Then he closed the door firmly behind her. He was beaming broadly, and went back round to the driver’s side at a run.

  ‘Look at that,’ Marianne said approvingly. ‘Who’s the dog with two tails?’

  ‘Both wagging.’

  The car lurched off at speed, in a spray of gravel.

  ‘He’s a dear,’ Belle said.

  ‘You’d like anyone who liked Ellie.’

  ‘I would. Of course I would. But he’s a dear in his own right.’

  ‘And rich. The Ferrarses are stinking—’

  ‘I don’t’, Belle said, putting her arm round Marianne, ‘give a stuff about that. Any more than you do. If he’s a dear boy and he likes Ellie and she likes him, that is more than good enough for me. And for you too, I bet.’

  Marianne said seriously, watching the car speeding down the faraway sweep of the drive, ‘He wouldn’t be good enough for me.’

  ‘Darling!’

  Marianne leaned into her mother’s embrace.

  ‘Ma, you know he wouldn’t do for me. I’m not looking for a nice guy; I’m looking for the guy. I don’t want someone who thinks I’m clever to play the guitar like I do, I want someone who knows why I play so well, who understands what I’m playing, like I do, who understands me for what I am and values that. Values me.’ She paused and straightened a little. Then she said, ‘Ma, I’d rather have nothing ever than just anything. Much rather.’

  Belle was laughing. ‘Darling, don’t despair. You only left school a year ago, you’re hardly—’

  Marianne stepped sideways so that Belle’s arm slipped from her waist. ‘I mean it,’ she said fiercely. ‘I mean it. I don’t want just a man, Ma. I want a soulmate. And if I can’t have one, I’d rather have nobody. See?’

  Belle was silent. She was looking into the middle distance now, plainly not really seeing anything.

  ‘Ma?’ Marianne said.

  Belle shook her head very slightly. Marianne moved closer again.

  ‘Ma, are you thinking about Daddy?’

  Belle gave a small sigh.

  ‘If you are – and you are, aren’t you? – then you’ll know what I’m talking about,’ Marianne said. ‘If I didn’t get this belief in having, one day, a love of my life from you, who did I get it from?’

  Belle turned very slightly and gave Marianne a misty smile. ‘Touché, darling,’ she said.

  From her bedroom windows – three bays looking south and two facing west – Fanny could see across the immense lawn to the walled vegetable garden, whose glasshouses were so badly in need of repair, never mind the state of the beds themselves, or the unpruned fruit trees and general neglect visible everywhere. And there, in the decayed soft-fruit cage, with its sagging wire and crooked posts, she could see Belle, in one of her arty smock things and jeans, picking raspberries.

  Of course, in a way, Belle was perfectly entitled to pick Norland raspberries. The canes themselves probably dated from Uncle Henry’s time, and in their well-meaning, amateur way, Belle and Henry had tried to look after the garden all the years they had lived at Norland. But the fact was that Norland now belonged to John. And because of John, to Fanny. Which meant that everything about it and pertaining to it was not only Fanny’s responsibility now, but her possession. Staring out of the window at her husband’s (by courtesy, only) stepmother, it came to Fanny quite forcibly that Belle was, without asking, picking Fanny’s raspberries.

  It took her three minutes to cross her bedroom, traverse the landing, descend the stairs, march down the black and white floored hall to the garden door and make her way at speed across the lawn to the kitchen garden. She let the door in the wall to the kitchen garden close behind her with enough of a slam to alert Belle to the fact that she had arrived, and with a purpose.

  Belle looked up, slightly dazedly. She had been thinking about something quite else, mentally arranging the furniture in a cottage she had seen, for rent, near Barcombe Cross, which she had thought might be a distinct possibility even though Elinor insisted that they couldn’t possibly afford it, and she had been picking almost mechanically while she dreamed.

  ‘Good morning,’ Fanny said.

  Belle managed a smile. ‘Good morning, Fanny.’

  Fanny stepped into the fruit cage through a torn gap in the netting. She was wearing patent-leather ballet slippers with gold discs on the toes. She looked round her. ‘This is in an awful state.’

  Belle said mildly, ‘The raspberries don’t seem to mind. Look at this crop!’

  She held her bowl out. Fanny gave a small dismissive sniff. ‘You’ve got a huge amount.’

  ‘We grew them, Fanny.’

  ‘All the same …’

  ‘I’d be happy to pick some for you, Fanny. I offered some to Harry – I thought he might like to pick them with me, but he said he didn’t like raspberries.’

  Fanny said carefully, ‘We are very – selective in the fruit we give Harry.’

  Belle resumed her picking. ‘Bananas,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘Only bananas, we hear. Can that be good for him, not even to eat apples?’

  There was short, highly charged pause. Then Fanny said, ‘Isn’t Elinor helping you?’

  ‘You can see that she isn’t.’

  ‘Because she isn’t here,’ Fanny said.

  Belle said nothing. Fanny threaded her way through the raspberry canes until she was once again in Belle’s sightline.

  ‘Elinor isn’t here,’ Fanny said clearly, ‘because she is in my car, isn’t she, being driven by my brother, on her way to Brighton.’

  ‘And if she is?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to think I hadn’t noticed. I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t know. I wasn’t asked. I saw them. I saw them drive away.’

  Belle said defiantly, ‘Edward invited her!’

  Fanny leaned forward to pick a large, ripe raspberry very precisely out of Belle’s bowl. ‘He may have done. But she had no business accepting.’

  Belle stepped back so that the bowl of raspberries was just out of Fanny’s reach. ‘I beg your pardon!’ she said indignantly.

  Fanny looked at the raspberry in her fingers and then she looked at Belle. ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ she said.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Look,’ Fanny said. ‘Look. My father came from nowhere and ended up somewhere very successful, all through his own efforts. He was ambitious, quite rightly, and he was ambitious for his children, too. He’d be thrilled about Norland. But he wouldn’t be thrilled at all about his eldest son being – being ensnared by his son-in-law’s illegitimate half-sister with not a bean to her name. Any mo
re than my mother would be, if she knew.’ Fanny paused, and then she said, ‘Any more than I am.’

  Belle stared at her. ‘I cannot believe this, Fanny.’

  Fanny waved the hand holding the raspberry. ‘It doesn’t matter what you can or can’t believe, Belle. It doesn’t matter a jot. All that matters is that when Elinor gets back from her jaunt in my car with my brother, you have just two words to say to her. Two words. Hands off. Do you get it, Belle? Hands off Edward.’

  And then she dropped the raspberry on to the earth, and ground it down under her patent-leather toecap.

  Edward held out a crumple of white paper. ‘Have another chip.’

  Elinor was lying on her back on Edward’s battered cotton jacket, which he had spread for her on the shingle. She waved a hand. ‘Couldn’t.’

  ‘Just one.’

  ‘Not even that. They were delicious. The fish was perfect. Thank you for holding back on the vinegar.’

  Edward put another chip in his mouth. ‘I have a thing for vinegar.’

  Elinor snorted faintly.

  ‘I mean,’ Edward said, laughing too, ‘I mean vinegar in vinegar. Not in people.’

  ‘No names then.’

  He lay down beside her, slightly turned towards her. He said comfortably, ‘We know who we mean, don’t we? And you haven’t even met my mother.’

  Elinor stretched both arms up and laced her fingers together against the high blue arc of the sky. ‘Talking of mothers—’

  ‘Did you know,’ Edward said, interrupting, ‘that when you talk, the end of your nose moves up and down very slightly? It’s adorable.’

  Elinor suppressed a smile. She lowered her arms. ‘Talking of mothers,’ she said again.

  ‘Oh, OK then. Mothers. What about them?’

  ‘Mine is so sweet, really—’

  ‘Oh, I know.’

  ‘—but she’s driving me insane. Insane. Almost every day she goes off to look at some house or other. She must be on every agent’s books in East Sussex.’

  Edward put out a tentative finger and touched the end of Elinor’s nose. He said, ‘But that’s good. That’s positive.’

  Elinor tried to ignore his finger. ‘Yes, of course it is, in theory. But she’s looking at stuff we can’t begin to afford. They may technically be cottages but they’ve got five bedrooms and three bathrooms and one even has a swimming pool in a conservatory thing. I ask you.’

  ‘But—’

  Elinor turned her head to look at him, dislodging his finger. ‘Ed, we can’t actually even afford a garden shed. But she won’t listen.’

  ‘They don’t.’

  ‘You mean mothers?’

  ‘Mothers,’ Edward said with emphasis. ‘They do not listen.’

  ‘You mean yours won’t listen to you either?’

  Edward rolled on his back. ‘Nobody listens.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  He said, ‘I applied to Amnesty International and they said I wasn’t qualified for anything they had on offer. Same with Oxfam. And the only reason for having anything to do with the law is that Human Rights Watch might – might – give me a hearing with the right bits of paper in my hand.’

  Elinor waited a moment, and then she said, ‘What are you good at, do you think?’

  Edward picked a pebble out of the shingle beside him and looked at it. Then he said, in quite a different, more confident tone of voice, ‘Organising things. I don’t mean how many cases of champagne will two hundred people drink, like Robert. I mean quite – serious things. I can get things done. Actually.’

  ‘Like today.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Today,’ Elinor said, ‘you drove well, you parked without fuss, you got the bathroom people to find the right taps, you were firm with that useless girl at the box office over Fanny’s tickets, you insisted on the right wallpaper books, you knew just where to get the best fish and chips and exactly where to be on the beach to get out of the wind.’

  ‘Well – yes. Only very small things …’

  ‘But significant. And – and symptomatic.’

  Edward raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. ‘Thank you, Elinor.’

  She grinned at him. ‘My pleasure.’

  He looked suddenly sober. He said, in a more serious voice, ‘I’m going to miss you.’

  ‘Why? Where are you going?’

  He glanced away. Then he raised the arm holding the pebble and threw it towards the wall at the back of the beach. ‘I’m not going, I’m being chucked out.’

  ‘Chucked out? By whom?’

  ‘By Fanny.’

  Elinor sat up slowly. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. Oh.’

  ‘You know why?’

  ‘Yes,’ Edward said, looking straight at her. ‘And so do you.’

  Elinor stared at her raised knees. She said, ‘Where’ll you go?’

  ‘Devon, I should think.’

  ‘Why Devon?’

  ‘I know people there. I was there at the crammer, remember? I can always hang out there. In fact, I can ask, in Devon, if there’s anywhere for you to rent, shall I? It’s bound to be cheaper, in Devon.’

  Elinor said sadly, ‘We can’t go to Devon.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s too far. Margaret’s school, Marianne going up to the Royal College of Music, me finishing my training …’

  ‘OK then,’ Edward said, ‘but I’ll still ask. You never know.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Ellie?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Will you miss me?’

  She didn’t look at him. ‘I don’t know.’

  He moved slightly, so that he was kneeling beside her. ‘Please try to.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Ellie …’

  She said nothing. He leaned forward and put his hand on her knees.

  ‘Ellie, even though I probably taste of grease and vinegar, would it be OK if I did what I’ve wanted to do ever since I first saw you, and kissed you?’

  And now, weeks later, here he was, back at Norland and getting out of the kind of car that Fanny would hate to see on her gravel sweep: an elderly Ford Sierra with a peeling speed stripe painted down its dilapidated side.

  Margaret waved wildly from the kitchen window. ‘Edward! Edward!’

  He looked up and waved back, his face breaking into a smile. Then he ducked back into the car to turn off some deafening music, and came loping across the drive and then the grass to where Margaret was leaning and waving.

  ‘Cool car!’ she shouted.

  ‘Not bad, for two hundred and fifty quid!’

  She put her arms out so that she could loop them round his neck and he could then pull her out of the window on to the grass. He set her on her feet. She said, ‘Has Fanny seen you?’

  ‘No,’ Edward said, ‘I thought she could see the car first.’

  ‘Good thinking, buster.’

  ‘Mags,’ Edward said, ‘where’s everyone?’

  Margaret jerked her head towards the kitchen behind her. ‘In there. Having a major meltdown about moving.’

  ‘Moving! Have you found somewhere?’

  ‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘Only hopeless places we can’t afford.’

  ‘Then …’

  Margaret looked past him at the offending car. ‘Fanny’s throwing us out,’ she said.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Edward said.

  He stepped past Margaret and thrust his head in at the open window.

  ‘Ta-dah!’ he said.

  ‘Oh Edward!’

  ‘Oh Ed!’

  ‘Hi there.’

  He put a leg over the sill and ducked into the room. Belle and Marianne rushed to embrace him. ‘Thank goodness!’ ‘Oh, perfect timing, perfect, we were just despairing …’

  He put his arms round them both and looked at Elinor. ‘Hi, Ellie.’

  She nodded in his direction. ‘Hello, Edward.’

  ‘Don’t I get a hug?’

  Belle and Marianne sprang
backwards. ‘Oh, of course you should!’

  ‘Ellie, oh, Ellie, don’t be so prissy.’

  Edward moved forward and put his arms round Elinor. She stood still in his embrace. ‘Hello, you,’ he whispered.

  She nodded again. ‘Hello.’

  Belle said, ‘This is so lovely, you can’t think, we so needed a distraction. Come on, kettle on, cake tin out.’

  Edward dropped his arms. He turned. ‘Yes please, to cake!’

  Marianne came to put her arm through his. ‘You look horribly well. What have you been up to?’

  He grinned down at her. ‘Loafing about. Sailing a bit.’

  ‘Sailing!’

  ‘I’m a good sailor.’

  Margaret came scrambling through the window. She said, ‘Fanny’s seen your car.’

  ‘She hasn’t!’

  ‘She has. She’s kind of prowling round it. Perhaps she’ll think it belongs to one of the workmen.’

  Edward said to Belle, ‘Will you hide me?’

  ‘No, darling,’ Belle said sadly. ‘We’re in enough trouble as it is. We’re about to be homeless. Can you imagine? It’s the twenty-first century and we aren’t penniless but four educated women like us are about to be—’

  Edward said, abruptly, cutting across her, ‘You needn’t be.’

  ‘What?’

  Even Elinor dropped her apparent lack of interest and looked intently at him. ‘What, Edward?’

  He glanced at Elinor. He said, ‘I – I mentioned I might ask about, while I was in Devon. If anyone knew anywhere for rent. Going cheap. And, well, it happens that – well, someone I know down there is sort of related to someone who’s related to you. So I told them about you. I told them what had happened.’ He looked at Belle. She was staring at him, and so were all three of her daughters. Edward said, ‘I think there might be a house down there for you. It belongs to someone who’s some kind of relation, even. Or at least someone who knows about you.’ He paused and then he said, ‘It’s – it’s a sort of grapevine thing, you know? But I think there really is a house there, if you’d like it?’

  3

  Sir John Middleton liked to describe himself as a dinosaur. In fact, he said, he was a double dinosaur.

  ‘These days,’ he’d say, to anyone who would listen, ‘it’s out of the Ark to inherit a house, never mind a bloody great pile like Barton. And as for being a baronet – I ask you! The definition of antediluvian, or what? There isn’t even a procedure for renouncing your title if you’re a baronet, would you believe? I am stuck with it. Stuck. Sir John M., Bart., to my dying day. Hah!’