Sense & Sensibility

9

Elinor did not sleep that night. She heard the chime of Barton Church clock strike every remorseless hour, and at five in the morning, she got out of bed, pulled on her father’s old cardigan and some socks and crept down to the kitchen.

It was quiet in there, apart from the low hum of the refrigerator, and even if not especially warm, warmer than anywhere else in the house. She switched on a lamp on the counter, and then the kettle, and found a mug and a box of tea bags, and a small dish of leftover roast potatoes, which oddly seemed to be the very thing to supply comfort and ballast.

It was a Sunday, after all. No one else in the family would be awake for hours. Elinor made her tea and settled with it, and a cold roast potato, at the kitchen table, hooking her socked toes over the stretcher of the chair she sat on, and pulling the sleeves of the cardigan far enough down to act as mittens. They concealed the knuckles on both her hands, but not her fingers, on one of which was the silver band that Ed had given her, at Norland. She had, after the encounter with Lucy the day before, extracted it from among the keys and paper clips on her dressing table and put it on.

Not at first, though. At first, last night, she had been in an agony of humiliation. The moment she could escape to her room, she had lain on her bed, face into the pillow, and agonised that she had been made a complete fool of by Edward, that he was a classic two-timer, and not to be trusted. But once that first rush of indignant misery was over, she could think about him more calmly, and possibly, she told herself, rolling over and staring at the ceiling, more justly. He had been a sixteen-year-old boy after all, expelled from school and sent in disgrace to a college in Plymouth to work for, and sit, his A levels. And there was Lucy, a knowing fourteen-year-old who was very, very sorry for him and who turned, in time, into a determined sixteen-year-old with a sharp awareness of exactly how much money Edward’s father had made. There’d probably been sex – try not to think about that – and then some subsequent promises of loyalty, and a future, which Elinor, having spent several hours now in Lucy’s company, could easily imagine being insisted upon.

She had got off her bed then, and crossed the bedroom to her chest of drawers and the Indian lacquer bowls. Edward, she told herself, hunting for her ring, was not actually a cheat, or a manipulator. He was sweet-natured, affectionate, good-hearted and an unquestioned fan of family life. His own family had rejected him, so he had done the classic adolescent turnaround thing of attaching himself to the next family, or families, who were kind to him – the Steeles, and the Pratts, in Plymouth. Lucy came with that package – and no more. When she thought about how Ed had been when last staying, she could easily account for his gloom by explaining it to herself as being the result of Lucy’s expectations of him, as well as his mother’s. She found her ring and slid it on to the third finger of her right hand – the finger he had chosen when he gave it to her. Edward was, she could now see, as stuck as he possibly could be. Everywhere he turned there was a woman demanding something of him which he could not possibly deliver.

Which makes me, Elinor thought now, holding her tea mug in her sleeved hands, the good guy, really, the one he has actually chosen of his own free will because – well, because he actually likes me. But he can’t do anything about it, because he doesn’t know what to do about Lucy, never mind his mother. And even if I can’t actually admire him for not standing up to either of them, I can believe that he isn’t a hypocrite and that I’m not a gullible dummy. And that’s a vast relief, because when I think about him, my heart just turns right over with the longing to help him, and see him smile again, and be released into being the kind of person he is not just aching to be, but is designed to be.

The kitchen door opened. Belle came in, wearing a blanket round her shoulders like an immense shawl. She was blinking and rumpled. ‘I looked in your room, Ellie, and you weren’t there.’

‘No, Ma. I was down here.’

‘Obviously,’ Belle said. She looked at the dish by Elinor’s elbow. ‘Eating potatoes.’

‘Just the one.’

Belle advanced towards the table and peered at her daughter. ‘Darling, are you all right? Is there anything you’d like to talk about?’

Elinor didn’t move. She gave her mother a wide, untroubled smile. ‘Nothing, Ma. Thank you.’ She put her mug down. ‘I am really fine. Really. Would you like some tea?’

‘I’m such a softie,’ Lucy Steele said, surveying the kitchen table at Barton Park, which was scattered with what appeared to be thousands of tiny fragments of pastel-coloured plastic. ‘I said I’d mend it. Anna-Maria was in floods about it after her dad trod on it, and I told her mother I’d mend it, so …’

She paused. Elinor said nothing. It was a week since the lunch party at Barton Cottage, a week in which Elinor had had far too much time to doubt Edward once more, trust him again, hate Lucy, feel indifferent to Lucy, decide not to ring Edward, write him a text and then delete it, and then begin the whole cycle again in an endless, exhausting circle. So exhausting had it become, in fact, that Elinor had resolved to talk to Lucy once more, in order to try and discover a few more facts so that she could at best put some of her darker fears to rest, and at worst, know what she was actually confronting.

So here she was, in Barton Park’s showpiece kitchen, contemplating the shattered pieces of Anna-Maria Middleton’s Polly Pocket Princess Palace, a toy she never even played with, but which had become, after being accidentally trodden on by her absent-minded and substantial father, the most precious thing that she owned in the whole wide world.

‘I don’t know that you can do anything,’ Mary Middleton had said, gathering up the broken pieces. ‘Poor little sweetheart. She adored it so. I hate to have to tell her it’s beyond repair.’

Lucy had knelt beside her, elaborately and equally concerned. ‘I’m sure it isn’t. I’m sure I can do something. I’m good with fiddly stuff. And Elinor’s here. Elinor will help me.’

‘And Marianne,’ Mary Middleton said, pausing to put a handful of plastic carefully into Lucy’s outstretched palms.

Marianne, who had only been persuaded up to the Park with the assurance that it was for a polite cup of tea and no more, looked mutinous. She said, unhelpfully, ‘I’m going to read.’

‘Read!’ Mary exclaimed. ‘Read? In daylight?’ She got to her feet.

Marianne glanced at the ruined plastic palace. She moved towards the door. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m not wasting my time mending gimcrack rubbish.’

Mary gave a little gasp. She looked at Elinor as if the whole family were at fault. ‘Your sister—’

‘She’s no good with her hands,’ Elinor said hastily. ‘Never has been.’

Mary looked frostily at Marianne’s departing back. ‘Good enough for the guitar, however!’

Elinor said, ‘I’ll help Lucy.’

‘Oh, would you?’

Mary turned back to smile at them. ‘That’s so sweet of you both. And I’ve got people coming for bridge any minute. I really can’t let them down.’

‘Sorry,’ Lucy said now, gazing at the table, ‘but I’m hopeless when it comes to cute kids. I’m a complete pushover.’

Elinor began to pick up bits of plastic of similar colours. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘Don’t you? I’ve been thinking all week – can you believe we’ve been here a week! – that I’d upset you.’

Elinor gave her a steady glance. ‘Upset me? By telling me a secret?’

‘Well,’ Lucy said, twisting her hair up again. ‘That secret. That particular one, you know.’

Elinor picked up two pearlised pale green shards and turned them to fit together. ‘I expect it was a relief.’

‘A relief?’

‘To tell someone. To tell someone else that you are engaged to a guy who can’t move a muscle without asking his mother. Is this worth mending?’

Lucy said carefully, ‘What are you saying?’

‘That the Middletons can afford a hundred Polly Pocket Palace replacements.’

‘No—’

‘Well,’ Elinor said, putting down the green pieces, ‘you must be really mad about each other to have been together all this time, and still not have told his mother or made any real progress, mustn’t you?’

There was a short silence. Lucy extracted a new tube of glue from the plastic bubble of its packaging and unscrewed the cap, with great attention.

Then she said, primly, ‘I can’t ask him to give everything up for me. I can’t. She might disinherit him completely and it wouldn’t be fair to ask him to watch Fanny and Robert get loads while he gets nothing, because of me.’

Elinor found a broken pink turret and examined it. ‘Why does it have to be about family money? Why don’t you earn some, you and him?’

Lucy sighed. ‘You know why. He’s such a sweetie, I adore him, but he’s a bit of a dreamer, isn’t he? I don’t think he knows what he wants to do, more’s the pity.’

Elinor said nothing. She watched Lucy pick up some random shards of plastic and deftly glue them back together into a miniature drawbridge.

Then Lucy said, apparently intent on her mending, ‘I know there’s no one else, at least. Not for Ed. He’s such a one-girl guy and I’d know the minute there was anyone else. I’m the jealous type, at the best of times, so I wouldn’t give anyone else a second chance, I promise you that. The trouble is, you see, he’s so dependent on me, he really is. I can’t let him down by not going along with all this, but I’m really scared of what will happen when his mother finds out.’

‘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. Elinor 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.’

‘Thank you, Mags, but there’s nothing to be sorry for. Really.’

Margaret got out clumsily, trailing cables, and Elinor was about to follow her, when her phone rang. She called after Margaret, ‘I’ll just take this.’

She looked at her screen. Not a number she recognised. She put the phone to her ear. ‘Hello?’ she said cautiously.

‘It’s Bill Brandon.’

She smiled broadly into the darkness beyond her windscreen. ‘Bill!’

‘Am I interrupting?’

‘No, no, not at all. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. Fine. But it’s Marianne—’

‘Oh my God,’ Elinor said, sitting up straighter. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing,’ Bill said. ‘That’s the trouble.’

‘No word still?’

‘No. I saw Mrs J.’

‘I’m coming up to London.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m ringing. How are you getting to London?’

‘Oh, Bill,’ Elinor said, ‘how do you think? National Express bus from Exeter.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Very sure.’

‘I’ll meet you. I’ll meet you at Victoria Station.’

She said, smiling, ‘You don’t have to.’

‘I’d like to.’

‘Bill,’ Elinor said gently, ‘she still thinks the sun rises and sets with him.’

‘I know.’

‘It isn’t a question of merit …’

‘There isn’t’, Bill Brandon said, ‘a man less deserving of your sister on this earth than John Willoughby.’

Elinor was silent. Belle appeared in the lit doorway of Barton Cottage and began to gesticulate to her daughter to come in.

‘Bill,’ Elinor said, ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll see you Friday. I’ll ring you en route. I’ll put your number in my phone, if that’s OK. Thank you.’

She dropped her phone into her bag and climbed out of the car.

‘Who were you talking to?’ Belle called from the doorway. ‘Was it Ed?’

Elinor locked the car doors and then turned towards her mother. ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘It wasn’t.’

Marianne would not wash her hair before going to the wedding. Nor would she even look at the cream silk dress Mrs Jennings produced from Charlotte’s old wardrobe and which, Elinor could see at a glance, was probably the best-cut, best-made garment either of them had ever been offered. Instead, Marianne pulled on – crossly – her old gypsy skirt and piled her hair randomly on top of her head, and added her usual hoop earrings and looked – well, Elinor had to admit it – sulky but wonderful.

‘You could put that girl in a bin liner,’ Mrs Jennings said, ‘and she’d still eclipse every other female in the room. Maddening.’

In the taxi on the way to the church, for the wedding, Marianne sat staring mutely out of the window, her phone gripped, as usual, in one hand. The taxi went via Conduit Street, to collect the Middletons from their flat, and even with Jonno in the cab – resplendent in a gold brocade waistcoat from Favourbrook’s under his black morning coat – Marianne seemed entirely indifferent to the occasion and to the company.

Mary Middleton made an elaborate face at Elinor, nodding in Marianne’s direction. Elinor merely shook her head. Marianne said clearly, without turning from the window, ‘I’m not ill. Or deaf.’

Sir John looked at Elinor. He winked. ‘She’s a party in herself, don’t you think?’

In the church in Chelsea, Marianne did not even bother to look about her. Both Dashwood girls had been squeezed into the same pew as the Middletons and the Palmers – Charlotte in a hat whose immensity almost extinguished her – and Elinor could not help noticing that they were the only two bare-headed women in the congregation. The service was conducted by a camp and sophisticated priest who managed to imbue the whole occasion with irony, and then it was out into the winter dusk and a further taxi ride, back to the Cavalry and Guards Club, where Elinor and Marianne found themselves propelled up an immense staircase, past a spectacular cup awarded, said the attached brass label, for valour in pig-sticking, and into a roaring room full of people clutching glasses of champagne and kissing each other round their hats.

‘Oh Christ,’ Elinor said to Marianne, in dismay.

Tommy Palmer appeared beside them. ‘Shed the old bag, have you?’ he shouted above the din.

They stared at him. ‘Nice to see you!’ he shouted. He waved his champagne glass. ‘Thought you’d got stuck in Devon!’

‘No, we—’

He waved his glass again. ‘Good-oh!’ he shouted and vanished into the crowd.

Marianne looked after him. Then she glanced down into her drink. She said conversationally to Elinor, ‘Shall we get drunk?’

Elinor was looking past her, her gaze following Tommy Palmer’s back into the crowd ahead of them. Just past the point he had now got to, about ten feet away, was someone unmistakeable, someone she had not perceived in church, someone with his arm around the shoulders of a tall and handsome girl, her loudly blonde hair piled on top of her head in an elaborate arrangement. And as she realised who she was looking at, Wills turned his head and looked full at her, and then at Marianne – and turned back, quite deliberately, to talk to the girl within his arm.

Elinor spun round to Marianne, her heart leaping with a sudden prayer that Marianne had not yet seen him. But she was, in that instant, already too late. Marianne, her face instantly illuminated with relief and joy, had thrust her champagne glass into her sister’s hand, and was plunging through the crowd, crying out Wills’s name as if he could not possibly be anything other than enraptured to see her.

But he wasn’t. She reached him in seconds, the crowd falling away around her violent passage in amazement and, in complete disregard of the girl he held against him, flung her arms around his neck and held her shining face up to his, completely and utterly certain of her welcome.

‘Wills,’ she was saying. ‘Oh Wills, at last, at last, I knew we’d find each other again!’

He did not move. His expression, staring down at Marianne, was wooden. The girl beside him tried to disengage herself, but he clamped her closer. Then he bent, very slightly, towards Marianne and hissed at her, ‘Get off me.’

There was a gasp from everyone around them, so loud that it obscured Marianne’s own cries. Elinor saw, to her horror, that Marianne was trying to cling to Wills, that she had manoeuvred her hands further round his neck and that she was trying to say something urgently, her face close to his. A man standing next to them laid a restraining hand on Marianne’s shoulder, and Elinor, thrusting both glasses in her hands at a conveniently passing waiter, found herself pushing forward, battling to get to her sister, before any of the guests attempted physically to defuse the situation themselves.

She took Marianne’s nearest arm and tried to prise it from Wills’s neck. ‘M, M, please …’

‘Thank God,’ Wills said, seeing her, his voice strangled by Marianne’s grip. ‘Someone with some sense. Please, Ellie, get her off me.’

‘Marianne,’ Elinor said loudly in her sister’s ear, ‘let him go. Drop your arms. Let him go.’

‘You should call a doctor,’ the blonde girl said. Her voice was richly, exotically foreign. ‘She needs help. She is a crazy person.’

‘You didn’t answer my calls!’ Marianne shrieked. ‘You didn’t text me! I’ve heard nothing, nothing, for weeks!’

Elinor had by now got her hands on both Marianne’s arms. ‘Let him go now.’

‘Please,’ Wills said, ‘just get her away from me.’

‘And fetch a doctor,’ the blonde girl said again. ‘This is crazy.’

Tommy Palmer was suddenly beside them again, both hands empty. He gave Elinor a quick pat. ‘Let me.’

‘But—’

‘No,’ he said. His voice was quite steady. ‘No. Leave her to me.’

Elinor let her hands slip from Marianne’s shoulders. Tommy Palmer took hold of Marianne’s arms, gently and inexorably pulled them from around Wills’s neck. Then, his own arms still round her, he turned her and guided her steadily through the crowd, out on to the landing by the great staircase, and to a group of empty chairs. Elinor, dazed and horrified, followed them.

‘There,’ Tommy Palmer said. He pushed Marianne down into one of the chairs. She was sobbing and shaking, her hair in a tangle over her face and shoulders. ‘I’ll get you some water.’

‘Get him,’ Marianne wept. ‘Get him to come to me, get him to come and tell me what’s going on …’

Elinor threw Tommy a grateful glance. She sank into the chair next to Marianne’s and took her nearest hand.

‘We can’t do that, M. We can’t make him come.’

‘Why was he like that? Why was he so horrible? Why did he behave as if he didn’t know me?’

‘I don’t know, babe. I don’t know any more than you do.’

Marianne took her hand back and put both over her face, beginning to rock backwards and forwards. Her breath was coming in little gasps. Elinor leaned closer. ‘M, have you got your inhaler?’

Marianne took no notice but went on rocking and sobbing. Elinor put a helpless hand on her back and, raising her eyes above her sister’s heaving shoulders, saw Wills and the blonde girl coming hastily out of the reception room, hand in hand, and then begin to race down the staircase, him tugging her behind him as fast as her towering heels would allow. Elinor bent towards Marianne. She said urgently, ‘He’s gone.’

Marianne’s head flew up. She said hoarsely, ‘What?’

‘He’s gone. Wills has just gone. With—’ She stopped.

Marianne looked wildly at Elinor. ‘Who was she?’

‘M, I don’t know—’

‘But he had his arm round her! Who was she?’

‘Here,’ Tommy Palmer said. He was holding out a tumbler of water. ‘Drink this, and I’ll get you a taxi.’

‘Thank you,’ Elinor said.

Marianne leaped to her feet and rushed towards the staircase. Tommy, in a flash, was beside her and in front of her. He held out his arms to stop her flying down the stairs.

She glared at him. ‘Who’, she screamed again, ‘was she?’

Late that night, after the doctor had gone, and the fear of having to admit Marianne to hospital had abated, Elinor went quietly into Mrs Jennings’s kitchen to make tea. The doctor had given Marianne a thorough check and a sleeping pill, and it was the first moment since the awful events of the afternoon that Elinor had been free to collect her breath and her thoughts.

The episode in the Cavalry Club had only been the beginning. It had been followed by a terrible taxi journey back to Mrs Jennings’s flat with Marianne alternately ranting and gasping, followed by an ill-timed and unintentionally tactless call from Belle asking cheerfully if they had seen Wills at the wedding – ‘Mrs J. was sure he’d be there!’ – and then a full-blown asthma attack which initially looked as if it would end nowhere but in hospital. But Mrs Jennings, entirely practical in an emergency, tracked down her own doctor peacefully choosing a new sofa on a Saturday afternoon, with his wife, in Tottenham Court Road, and had him at Marianne’s side within half an hour. He had closed the spare bedroom door firmly, on both Elinor and Mrs Jennings.

‘P and q are what we need in here, thank you both very much.’

They had fidgeted about in Mrs Jennings’s over-stuffed sitting room.

‘You poor dear,’ Abigail had said to Elinor. ‘It always comes back to you, doesn’t it? The price of having your head screwed on the right way.’

Elinor was standing by the window, swinging the wooden acorn at the end of a blind cord against the glass. She said tensely, ‘As long as she’s OK.’

‘She’ll be fine, dear. Gordon’s so experienced. He’s been in practice for over forty years, I should think. Long enough, anyway, to have seen hundreds of asthma attacks.’ She looked across the room at Elinor. ‘I was so hoping it wasn’t true. I just kept telling myself that the moment he saw her again, he’d remember what he felt for her in Devon. He’d realise that there’s no substitute for true love, however big your bills.’

Elinor turned round. She said sharply, ‘What d’you mean?’

Mrs Jennings spread her hands. She was sitting balanced on the edge of one of her huge sofas, as if she couldn’t quite settle to sitting properly. She said, ‘Wills.’

‘What about Wills?’

‘That girl, dear. The Greek girl.’

Elinor came away from the window. She said loudly, ‘Tall? Blonde?’

‘Dyed blonde,’ Abigail Jennings said. She looked at the carpet. ‘Rich as Croesus. Aglaia Callianos. Aglaia means splendid or beautiful or something, in Greek. Their family comes from Cephalonia. Shipping.’

Elinor shouted, ‘I don’t care where they come from.’

Abigail gave a little jump. ‘Don’t shout, dear. It’s not my fault he’s followed the money.’

‘What?’

‘He brokered a deal about a flat. Her father. That girl’s father. Wills met that girl when he managed to get her father to buy this wildly expensive flat. There’s talk of it costing over a hundred million, would you believe.’

Elinor sat down hard next to Mrs Jennings. She said, ‘You’re telling me that Wills has dumped Marianne for the daughter of a rich Greek he hardly knows?’

Mrs Jennings sighed gustily. ‘Yes, dear.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

Mrs Jennings looked at her. ‘That’s life, dear. That’s men.’

‘Not all men!’

‘Well, men like John Willoughby with fancy tastes.’

‘But he’s going to inherit money from Jane Smith at Allenham.’

‘I don’t think so, dear.’

‘But—’

‘He’s upset her. I don’t know the details, but Mary tells me that she’s very angry, and it takes a lot to make Jane Smith angry, especially when it comes to that boy.’

Elinor said, in a whisper, ‘Poor, poor Marianne.’

‘I know, dear.’

‘I want to kill him.’

‘You won’t be the first, dear.’

‘He just led her on …’

‘Typical, I’m afraid.’

Elinor stood up, abruptly. ‘I’ll have to tell Ma.’

‘Leave it till the morning, dear.’

‘No, I ought—’

‘Leave it, dear,’ Abigail said firmly. ‘Leave it till you’re all calmer. Leave it till tomorrow.’

Elinor closed her eyes briefly. She said, ‘I saw all her texts. I saw all her messages to him. It was heartbreaking; she never doubted him, she never—’ She broke off and gave something like a sob.

Mrs Jennings got up and put an arm round her.

‘I know, dear. It’s all wrong. He’s all wrong. It’s a bad, bad business. That Callianos girl has her car shipped into London for the winters, I’m told. A Porsche, with her own number plates. No change out of twenty grand for that sort of nonsense.’

The door opened. Mrs Jennings’s doctor, in his weekend cords and urban waxed jacket, leaned into the room.

‘All quiet,’ he said, smiling. ‘Good as gold. Fast asleep and breathing like a baby. I’ll be back in the morning to check on her and you’re to ring me any time if you’re worried.’

And now, Elinor thought, filling the kettle as quietly as she could, in Mrs Jennings’s kitchen, I would like to think that sleep is possible for me, too. I would like to think that when I lie down, after this unspeakable day, I won’t be so filled with fury at Wills and despair for Marianne that I just lie there and toss and turn and fret and rage and worry. What will she be like when she wakes up? What can I say to her? How do I tell her that that vile, vile complete shit of a man has thrown her over for money? You couldn’t make it up. You couldn’t. Not in this day and age. I have never wanted just to eliminate anyone before but I do him. And I want him to suffer while I do it. I want him—In her cardigan pocket – her father’s reassuringly familiar old cardigan – her phone began to vibrate. It would be Belle, from Barton, still in ignorance of Wills’s terrible conduct; and needing to be told, as calmly as Elinor could, what had happened, not just today, but to all Marianne’s most passionate hopes and desires for the future. She pulled her phone out and looked at the screen. ‘Bill Brandon’, it said. Elinor felt a sudden rush of pure relief that she couldn’t at all account for. She said, thankfully, into her phone, ‘Oh, Bill …’

‘Are you all right? You sound—’

‘I’m fine, I’m fine. And so is she, so is Marianne, now. I mean, she’s OK. It’s OK.’

‘Elinor,’ Bill said, his voice suddenly alarmed, ‘what’s happened? I was ringing to see how the wedding went, whether—’

‘I can’t tell you over the phone.’

‘Why not, what’s—’

‘It’s all right now,’ Elinor said. ‘It really is. She’s fine. She’s sleeping. But I wonder …’

‘What?’ he said. His voice was sharp with anxiety. ‘What?’

She swallowed. She could feel more tears thickening in her throat. She said, ‘Can – can you come?’

‘What, now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dear girl, I’m down at Delaford. But of course, if it’s really urgent—’

‘No. No, of course not. Not now. Just – just soon, Bill. Please. I’ll be in London for a few days.’

‘I’ll come tomorrow. Are you sure she’s—’

‘Yes,’ Elinor said, tears now sliding down her face. ‘Yes. She’s fine. Thank you. Thank you. See you tomorrow.’

11

‘You wouldn’t believe,’ Charlotte Palmer said, ‘but it’s all over YouTube already! Someone must have been filming, on their phone, at the wedding. Aren’t people just the end?’

She was standing in her mother’s sitting room, as round as a robin, her mobile in her hand.

‘I mean, I wasn’t going to look at it, I really wasn’t, even though absolutely everybody was sending me the link, but then I thought, Well, I can’t defend poor Marianne if I don’t know what I’m defending, can I?’ She glanced at Elinor. ‘Have you seen it?’

‘No,’ Elinor said. ‘And I don’t want to.’

‘It really isn’t too bad,’ Charlotte said. ‘I mean Marianne looks really pretty even if she is crying and you can’t see Wills’s face that well—’

Elinor put her hands over her ears. ‘Please stop.’

Charlotte gave a little shrug. She said, ‘Of course, everyone’s siding with Marianne. I mean, they’re all sick of girls like Aggy Cally just buying up our hottest men like this.’

‘Charlotte dear,’ her mother said, not raising her eyes from her Sunday newspaper, ‘enough, don’t you think? However riveting?’

Charlotte looked intently at her phone, as if deaf to any implied reprimand. She said brightly, ‘Tommy was a bit of a star, wasn’t he? I just adore it when he gets all masterful like that and strides about knowing what to do!’

Elinor said faintly, ‘He was great.’

‘God,’ Charlotte said, stabbing at the keys on her phone, ‘he loved it. He thinks you are just fantastic. He adores brainy girls even if he couldn’t be married to one for a minute. Hey, Mummy?’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Jennings said, still not looking up.

‘Did you say Bill was coming?’

Mrs Jennings raised her head and looked knowingly at Elinor. ‘So I gather.’

Charlotte beamed at Elinor. ‘So adorable. He’s got a sporting chance now Wills is out of the picture.’

‘She’s very frail,’ Elinor said. ‘And broken-hearted. Completely.’

‘Fabby Delaford,’ Charlotte said to her mother. ‘I know it’s full of all Bill’s crazies, but he’s got that separate house that could be so gorgeous if it was done up, and of course the landscape’s divine.’

‘And’, Mrs Jennings said, taking her reading glasses off, ‘he has money and he’s sensible with it. He’s the only ex-soldier I’ve ever known who has a cool head about money.’ She looked directly at Elinor. ‘He’s doing the usual idiot man thing round your sister, of course he is, they all seem to need to, but he’s clearly got a very soft spot for you.’

Elinor felt herself glow unwillingly pink. She said irritably, ‘He’s just nice to me.’

‘Nicer, dear,’ Abigail Jennings said, ‘than that useless Ferrars boy of yours is.’

‘He’s not useless.’

‘No?’

Elinor said, more indignantly than she intended, ‘He may be a bit weak but he isn’t cruel, like Wills. He isn’t selfish and – and venal …’

Charlotte and her mother rolled their eyes at one another. ‘Oooh!’

Elinor said more calmly, ‘And he’s not mine! He’s nobody’s. He’s his own person. Like – like Bill is. And – and I am.’

Charlotte moved sideways and poked Elinor in the ribs. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining, Ellie!’

‘Oh, my dear,’ Mrs Jennings said, laughing, ‘almost platinum, in his case!’

‘Please,’ Elinor said, in sudden, real distress. ‘Please. Marianne’s ill.’

‘But she’ll get better. Of course she will! A bit more sleep, Gordon said, and a quiet life—’

The bell from the street door storeys below rang loudly. Without reference to her mother, Charlotte ran to the intercom on the wall and snatched up the receiver. She said excitedly into it, ‘Bill? Bill! We’re expecting you! Kettle on! Come on up, top floor, welcome mat out!’ She put the handset back in its cradle and turned to face the room again. ‘D’you suppose’, she said, ‘anyone at Delaford showed him the YouTube clip?’

‘I had to get you out of there,’ Bill Brandon said. ‘You looked as if you were about to commit murder.’

Elinor looked across the cold, sunny spaces of Hyde Park. She hunched her shoulders inside Mrs Jennings’s borrowed fur-collared padded jacket. She said, ‘Mrs J. has been so wonderful, really, so supportive and generous. But she has a complete tin ear for anything sensitive. And Charlotte has two.’

Bill said, slightly self-consciously, ‘Marianne looked so lovely, didn’t she, lying there asleep.’

‘I’m so thankful she’s asleep.’

‘Was – was she desperately upset?’

Elinor put her hands in the pockets of her jacket. ‘She woke at three. And cried till five. It’s coming to terms with what he really is that’s going to be so hard. If she could believe him to be basically decent, it would be different, but there is nothing to be said for him, nothing. And she’s got to face the fact that she fell utterly for someone like that.’

Bill let a small silence fall and then he said, ‘It’s the “utterly” quality in her that I can’t resist.’

Elinor darted a quick look at him. ‘I know. It’s always been like that with her. Absolutely all or absolutely nothing. And you risk humiliating yourself if you’re like that.’

Bill paused by a bench at the edge of the path they were following. He said, ‘Will you freeze if we sit down?’

Elinor indicated her jacket. ‘Not in my Mrs Jennings insulation.’

He waited courteously for her to sit first. He had driven from Somerset that morning and he looked as clean and organised as if he had started the day ten minutes ago. Elinor said, ‘You’re so nice to come.’

He sat down beside her and put his elbows on his knees. He said, ‘I wanted to. I had to. The very thought—’

‘Better sooner than later, maybe,’ Elinor said. She looked down at the toes of her boots. ‘I mean, with hindsight you could see this disaster coming, you could see it had hopeless written all over it, but Marianne was so sure, so sure …’

‘Elinor.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve got something to tell you.’ He half turned and looked at her. ‘Not a nice story. But you need to know. You need to know she’s well out of it.’

Elinor stared at him. ‘What?’

Bill looked away from her again, across the cold, bleached winter grass. ‘I don’t know where to start.’

‘At the beginning?’

There was a silence, and then Bill said, ‘His father knew my father. And Jonno’s.’

Elinor let another small pause elapse, and then she said, ‘Is that the beginning?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Sorry. The beginning was – was a girl.’

‘Yes.’

He linked his hands and stared on, into the distance. ‘A sort of cousin. My father had a soft spot for her mother, I suspect, and when her mother died of cancer, very young, Eliza came to live with us.’

‘Us?’ Elinor said.

‘My family. My parents and my brother, and me. She grew up with us. She was fair, not dark, but … but she was so like Marianne. Just – just the same eagerness and passion and energy. Just the same – carelessness about what people thought.’

Elinor waited.

Bill said slowly, ‘We – we all adored her. Me especially. I’m afraid my brother just adored being adored. And he was such a daredevil and she was sort of mesmerised by him. She really liked me, trusted me, maybe loved me, even, but my brother was such an exciting challenge. To do her justice, my mother never thought they should marry, but my father was all for it. Thought it would tame him and that her money would mend Delaford. I was a basket case on their wedding day. Thank God for the army, frankly; it gave me somewhere to go, something to do. I didn’t actually want to be in touch after they were married, but our parents both dying soon after – they were heavy smokers, the pair of them – meant that I couldn’t avoid knowing that the marriage was catastrophic from the get-go, and then, of course, she left him.’

He stopped and looked down at the path between his feet. Elinor said awkwardly, ‘Did – did you …’ And couldn’t finish her sentence.

He sat up straighter and put one arm along the back of the seat behind her.

‘I didn’t go and find her, if that’s what you mean. I should have, and I didn’t. I was so involved in what to do about Delaford, which was now my brother’s, and he was pretty well an alcoholic by then.’

‘Was?’

‘He was killed,’ Bill said, ‘in a car crash. In fog. About four times over the limit. That’s why I’ve got Delaford.’

Elinor glanced at him. It came to her that Bill Brandon, sitting beside her in the cold, bright winter sunshine, looked very much more satisfactory as older-brother material than John Dashwood. She said gently, ‘And then?’

‘And then,’ Bill said, ‘after George’s death, I went to look for Eliza.’

‘And?’

He sighed. ‘It was hideous. I can’t tell you. She’d run through her money, gone from man to man, had a baby by her first dealer—’

‘Dealer?’ Elinor exclaimed in horror.

‘Oh yes,’ Bill said. ‘I found her at last in a crack house, in east Birmingham. The baby – well, she wasn’t a baby any more, she was three – was in care. Eliza was, literally, a wreck.’

Elinor said nothing. She slid one hand out of her pocket and touched Bill’s arm. He gave her a faint smile. He said, ‘I’m afraid that’s not the end. Can you stand any more?’

She nodded.

He gripped her hand for a second with his free one, and let it go. He said, ‘I got her into hospital, before she died. It was days only. Her heart just gave out. Years of chaos, of rackety living. And then I spent the best part of the next three years persuading social services to let me at least educate little Eliza, even if she had to live with a foster family because I was deemed some unfit old pervert for even suggesting bringing her up myself.’ He gave a short, wry bark of laughter. ‘I came out of the Army about then, and set up Delaford. As a kind of memorial to Eliza, if you like. I never thought—’ He broke off.

‘What?’

‘I never thought it would serve for little Eliza, too.’

Elinor gasped. Bill leaned a little towards her. ‘Sorry about this part. Really sorry. But you have to know.’

‘OK,’ she said.

‘Little Eliza knew how and why her mother had died. She had lovely foster parents and we made a real effort that she should be under no illusions about addictions. Christ, Elinor, I even took her to the street where I’d found her mother, and even though the house wasn’t a crack den any more, it wasn’t fit for dogs to live in. And she was fine. Really fine. For years. Even with her mother’s temperament and sense of adventure, she was OK. I know it. And then she fell for someone. She met him at a club, a club in South Kensington. And he gave her her first hit. And, Elinor, you – you know him.’

Elinor felt her mouth dry, suddenly and completely, as if her tongue were being glued to the roof of her mouth. She said, hoarsely, ‘Wills?’

Bill Brandon sighed again. ‘He knew about her, because of our Somerset and Devon connections, because of all the awful stories swirling round my family. I couldn’t truthfully say he set out to corrupt her, but I would guess he thought he might have a bit of fun. Like mother, like daughter. Party girls. Up for anything. The last few years have been a repeat nightmare of what happened to Eliza. One crisis after another.’

He looked directly at Elinor. ‘That’s why I had to dash off, that day at Barton. The police had smashed down a lavatory door in a pub in Camden the night before, because little Eliza was inside, injecting into her feet.’

Elinor gave a small cry and put both hands over her mouth.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Bill said, ‘I really am. The details are so horrible, and for poor little Eliza too. She’d had an abortion, you see, and I think it drove her back on to the hard stuff. I wish you didn’t need to know. But you can see …’

Elinor nodded vehemently, unable to speak.

‘Your sister,’ Bill said, ‘your sweet, impulsive, wholehearted sister – I couldn’t bear to see another girl sacrificed just because she wasn’t worldly wise. I didn’t want to rain on anyone’s parade but I just could not stand to see that bastard making your sister believe he was worth a minute of her time. I thought, when I first saw them at Barton together, that he might be redeemable, with someone like her, but then all the Eliza business blew up, and I heard about the Callianos girl and I thought, No, sorry, same dangerous old Wills, and that you should know.’ He paused and then he said, in a lower voice, ‘I’ve been such a failure in looking out for either of them. Haven’t I?’

Elinor took her hands away from her mouth and regarded him. She looked grave, but no longer horrified. He tried to smile at her. He said, ‘So you see why I’m such a … such a sad old stick.’

She shook her head, and then she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You are so not,’ she said. ‘You are a lovely, principled man.’

‘You can look if you like,’ Marianne said. She was lying on her side in bed, in her plaid and rosebud pyjamas, facing away from her sister. At the end of the bed, balanced against the footboard, was a stiff green department-store carrier bag. ‘It’s got everything I ever gave him in it,’ she said. ‘CDs and books and stuff. And a photo in a frame. And his ring.’

Elinor picked up the carrier bag and peered inside. The contents were in a jumble. ‘Oh, M.’

‘The ring is inside a plastic bag,’ Marianne said, not turning. ‘Just an old plastic ziplock thing, the kind you put sandwiches in. Just – dumped in there.’

Elinor put the bag down again. She said, ‘Was there a note?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ Marianne said. ‘It was delivered on a bike. There was a boy on a bike who needed a signature from Mrs J. The bag didn’t even have a handwritten name and address on it. It was a typed label.’

Elinor sat down on the side of the bed. She put her hand on Marianne’s hip. ‘Where’s your ring?’

Marianne fumbled inside her pyjama jacket. Here.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to take it off? Especially now you know what Bill Brandon told me, and this bag has come?’

Slowly Marianne turned on to her back and sat up. There were violet smudges under her eyes, but she was breathing normally, and her skin, though pale, was no longer grey-white with lack of oxygen. She put her hands up into her hair, behind her neck. ‘I can’t undo it.’

Elinor bent forward, arms outstretched. ‘M, did you take in what I told you about Wills, and Bill’s ward?’

‘Yes,’ Marianne said. ‘I’ll be glad to get this off.’

Elinor found the ring bolt on the chain and released it. She held it up. ‘In the bag?’

‘In the bin,’ Marianne said. ‘With everything else. Put it all in the bin.’

Elinor dropped the ring and the chain into the carrier bag, and then put the bag on the floor. She said, ‘Have you told Ma?’

Marianne looked away. ‘She was on the phone almost all the time you were out. She says I shouldn’t go home. She thinks that if I’m at home I’ll only start remembering, that I’ll be reminded all the time—’ She broke off and said, in a whisper, ‘Ellie, how could he?’

‘How could he behave to you as he has?’

Marianne shook her head slowly. ‘How could he do what he’s done – to everyone? How could he?’

‘M, I don’t know.’

Marianne slid down in the bed again. ‘Ellie, you’ve been so great. But I can’t talk about it. I can’t. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I can’t think or speak just now, I can’t.’

‘No, no …’

‘Are you staying?’

‘I’ve got to go back to work.’

‘Will you come back next weekend?’

‘Marianne, you can’t just stay in bed, in Mrs J.’s spare room.’

Marianne turned away once more. ‘I may have to. What’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

‘That noise.’

‘Oh, somebody coming to see Mrs J., or something. M, Bill was so lovely, telling me, so straight.’

‘He is straight,’ Marianne said. ‘He’s not the one who gives men a bad name.’

The noise from down the corridor beyond the closed bedroom door was growing louder. Marianne said, ‘You’d better go.’

‘Will you be OK?’

‘Yes. Yes. Just get that bag out of the room, would you? And could you ring Ma again for me? Poor Ma. You’d think it had all happened to her.’

Elinor bent and kissed her sister’s cheek. Marianne’s hand came up and held Elinor’s hair, compelling her to stay close.

‘Thank you,’ Marianne whispered. ‘Thank you.’

‘Surprise!’ Mrs Jennings cried as Elinor came into the room. She made an extravagant and theatrical gesture, flapping the scarf she was wearing round her shoulders for emphasis.

Lucy and Nancy Steele were side by side on the sofa, holding cups of tea. Nancy, impeded by being on a very low sofa while wearing very high heels, made no attempt to get up, but Lucy sprang to her feet and rushed at Elinor as if they were bosom friends whom fate had recently cruelly prevented from seeing one another. Carefully holding her teacup away from her body with her left hand, Lucy put her right arm entirely round Elinor and pressed her cheek to the side of Elinor’s head.

‘Ellie.’

‘Hello.’

‘God, I’m so thankful to see you. I thought you’d never make it to London, what with work and everything, I thought it was useless, hoping I’d see you!’

Elinor extricated herself. ‘I’m – just here for the weekend.’

‘And these girls’, Mrs Jennings said, ‘came up to London in some style, isn’t that right?’

‘Totes amaze,’ Nancy Steele said, tossing her hair. ‘Couldn’t believe it! He just said, Look, two seats in the plane going begging! Hilar!’

Mrs Jennings nodded, knowingly. ‘So useful to have a top-flight plastic surgeon in hot pursuit—’

‘Oh, not pursuit,’ Nancy said, tossing her hair again. ‘I mean, the plane makes all my girlfriends well jeal, but not the paunch, please!’ She threw her head back and gave a little scream.

‘Sorry,’ Lucy said sotto voce to Elinor. She looked round. ‘Where’s Marianne?’

‘Not well, I’m afraid.’

Lucy made a face of intense sympathy. She put her teacup down.

‘Oh, the poor love. It’s so utterly ghastly, being trolled online like that.’

Elinor moved a few steps away. Lucy said, ‘I mean, she’s so well out of it and he’s just so blatant, isn’t he? God, it’s been such a day, hasn’t it? First all that horrible, tacky rubbish about your sister on YouTube, and then all the stuff about Robert Ferrars—’

‘She doesn’t know, dear,’ Mrs Jennings said, rustling across the room with her Sunday paper in her hands. ‘She’s been so caught up with poor Marianne that she won’t have seen this.’ She thrust a double-page spread under Elinor’s nose. ‘Look at this, dear. The original party boy. He couldn’t be less like his gloomy brother if he tried!’

‘And of course,’ Lucy said, moving to stand very close to Elinor once more, ‘that’s all over the social media too. But in a good way. Or at least that’s what Robert will think!’

Elinor gazed at the newspaper held out to her. Under the headline King Robert – Britain’s Party Royalty was an enormous picture of a good-looking, slightly feminine young man in a tight-fitting grey shirt and trousers, with a fur coat slung over his shoulders, a large silver cross on a chain round his neck, and his arms around two identical girls in cocktail dresses.

‘Read on!’ Mrs Jennings commanded.

Elinor said weakly, ‘I’m not sure I need to …’

‘One hundred parties in the last year!’ Mrs Jennings said. ‘Incredible. That’s one party every three nights that wouldn’t have happened without him!’

‘Too silly,’ Lucy said, looking straight at Elinor. ‘Brainless. My poor Ed must be cringing.’

‘Amaze,’ Nancy said from the sofa. ‘Amazeballs.’

Elinor took a step back. ‘Well, I suppose it’s good to be good at something.’

‘Only if it’s worthwhile,’ Lucy said. ‘Or genuine. Like poor Marianne.’

‘She’s much better …’

‘Can we see her?’

‘Well, I think she’s still fairly—’

‘Of course,’ Lucy said earnestly. ‘Oh, of course. I was just going to sit on her bed and have a bit of a girly chat but if you think …’

‘I do,’ Elinor said. ‘And’ – glancing at her watch – ‘I’ve got to get the bus, a bus back to Exeter.’

From the sofa, Nancy Steele erupted into giggles.

‘A bus!’

‘Good news, dear,’ Mrs Jennings said, folding up her paper. ‘Your brother rang, asking how Marianne was. Of course, your sister-in-law had seen everything on this YouTube thing, everything. Never mind her little brother in the papers! How do you have a private life these days, I ask you! But your brother John said he and Fanny happened to be in London for something or other, and he wanted to do something to help, so I said he could come and take you to the bus tonight and have a chat.’ She beamed at Elinor. ‘Wasn’t that sweet?’

‘My goodness,’ John Dashwood said, the moment he had Elinor in the car, ‘you have made a useful friend there!’

Elinor, busy with her seat belt, affected not to understand.

‘Abigail Jennings,’ John said. ‘She clearly has a lot of time for you and Marianne, and that’s quite a flat, isn’t it! Penthouse in Portman Square? Not much change out of five or six, I’d say. And charming, I thought her, really charming.’

‘She’s very generous,’ Elinor said primly.

‘Well,’ John said, turning the car towards Park Lane, ‘for girls in your situation, it never hurts to have someone like her on your side. A sort of patroness, I suppose. What luck, Ellie. You really did fall on your feet, didn’t you, going down to Devon. Lovely cottage, by all accounts, and the Middletons sound delightful. And so supportive of you all. Fanny would really appreciate an introduction to Mary Middleton, you know, both of them with young kids and huge houses to do up and keep up. Could you do something about that?’

‘Well, I—’

‘The thing is, Ellie, we could do with a tip or two. It’s wonderful at Norland, of course it is, but I can’t describe to you what it’s costing me.’ He beat the steering wheel lightly with one hand. ‘I’m telling you, it’s just insatiable. I had to buy old Gibson out – remember him? East Kingham Farm? – and of course he knew I needed the land because it always was Norland’s, in the past, so he had me over an absolute barrel. And what with rewiring and replumbing the whole house, never mind this amazing new reed bed sewage system that Fanny was quite right to insist on – the Prince of Wales has one at Highgrove, you know, state-of-the-art eco everything – it’s been non-stop cheque-writing, I don’t mind telling you.’

Elinor cleared her throat. She said, ‘How is Harry?’

‘Oh, on top form. Absolutely jet-propelled. We took him to the zoo and then he had a day with Granny. Well, we all had a day with Granny because he’s a bit of a handful on his own, and if you hadn’t been going back tonight – what is this job thing you’ve got in Exeter, anyway? – I’d have asked you to give Fanny a bit of a break from Harry because she is simply exhausted, being such a completely hands-on, conscientious mum.’

‘I’d love to see him.’

‘Talking of seeing people,’ John said, swerving round Hyde Park Corner, ‘I hear you are very definitely seeing someone!’

Elinor tensed. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘Not what I hear!’ John said triumphantly. ‘I hear that not only have you and Marianne – I do wish she hadn’t made an ass of herself over that Willoughby boy – managed to get your knees very well under Abigail Jennings’s table but that you’ve hooked an extremely satisfactory fish. Big estate in Somerset, never been married, solid business going, good age—’

‘No, John,’ Elinor said firmly.

‘Now, I know your modesty …’

To Elinor’s relief, they were now approaching Buckingham Palace Road. John looked fretfully ahead. ‘Do you have to travel by bus?’

‘Yes,’ Elinor said, ‘I do.’

He slowed the car to a gradual standstill under some plane trees. Then he switched off the engine and turned to look sternly and directly straight at her. He said, almost threateningly, ‘Elinor.’

‘Yes?’

‘I want to say something very seriously to you. You may have got very lucky in Devon with all your new connections, but do not be an idiot. If this Brandon fellow comes good, take him. Because it’s no good hoping for Fanny’s brother. None at all. Ever. Do you hear me? Just please use the good sense you at least were born with and put Ed right out of your mind. He is not for you, or the likes of you, most definitely. OK?’

12

Belle Dashwood had resolved, as one of many New Year resolutions, that while she had the cottage to herself during the day, she would not turn on the central heating, but would instead light the fire – logs generously supplied by Sir John, and replenished by Thomas – in the sitting room, and add extra sweaters. It was not only, as she pointed out to Elinor, a material contribution to their situation, but was also, she felt, an almost spiritual acknowledgement of Marianne’s suffering and Elinor’s quiet stoicism. It seemed to her that it was somehow fitting to be cold, and that she was acknowledging a need for mild sacrifice that the whole family appeared to feel, even Margaret, who was currently astonishingly biddable and amenable and had, that morning, actually thanked her mother for breakfast, and put her cereal bowl in the sink without being reminded at least four times.

Kneeling in front of the fireplace – and noticing in what immaculate order Thomas laid the logs for her; well, for Marianne, really, even in her absence – Belle made an effort not to remember Wills standing on that very spot, so magnificent, so gallant, in his damp clothes, towelling his hair. How excited they’d all been, how trusting, how full of hope and expectation, and now all of it was over, dashed to the ground, trampled on. Wills had, quite simply, broken Marianne’s heart, not just by throwing her over – and so brutally! In public! – but also by turning out to be such a worthless person. Belle turned the word over in her mouth. Worthless. Without worth. No worth of any kind, beyond his beauty, and that turned out to be part of the wickedness of him, because it was a deception, wasn’t it, to look so good and to be so bad?

And he was bad. Elinor had told her something of his badness when she got back from London, about the Greek girl and the money, and she had hinted that there was more, which she might divulge later, but Belle wasn’t sure she wanted to hear any more. She had, as she told Elinor, heard quite enough to convince her that Wills’s beauty was, as she’d always hinted – hadn’t she? – only skin deep. Elinor had looked at her with the kind of affectionate scepticism she’d sometimes caught on Henry’s face, a sort of fond tolerance, which had made her most indignant and extra determined to assert her mistrust of Wills from the very beginning. She was equally assertive in her conviction that Marianne must stay away from everything that might remind her of happier and more hopeful times.

‘I’m glad you think that, Ma,’ Elinor had said that morning before she went to work, ‘because I don’t think I could persuade Marianne to move just now, whatever I did. It’s probably shock, the effect of shock. There’s so much for her to come to terms with.’

‘Exactly,’ Belle said. ‘Just what I said to her. Poor darling. But she wouldn’t be warned.’

She twisted newspaper pages into spirals, now, and laid them in the fireplace; then she added kindling, which Thomas had left arranged as carefully as breadsticks in a wicker basket. Marianne was impulsive to the point of wilfulness, entirely certain that what had captured her imagination needed no other justification for providing the obvious, indeed the only, course of action. It was wonderful and terrible to see the consequences of Marianne’s predilection for allowing emotion to prevail over everything, and it was also alarmingly familiar. Belle leaned forward to place a few small, split logs on to her wigwam of paper and wood. Marianne was just as she had been, and, if she was truthful with herself, was still very capable of being. She sat back on her heels and dusted her hands off against one another. But admitting that, she assured herself stoutly, did not in any way diminish the fact that she had been suspicious of Wills from the start. Who wouldn’t be, faced with such utter male glory? It wasn’t natural, it really wasn’t, for a man to be as good-looking as that.

The landline telephone began to ring from the kitchen. Belle scrambled to her feet and hurried to answer it.

‘It’s Mary,’ Mary Middleton said in her unengaged way.

‘Oh, Mary.’

‘Awful day.’

‘Well, I suppose—’

‘I hate this time of year in the country. Thank goodness the boys are all at day school now, and Anna-Maria’s doing three days at nursery. It means Baby and I can keep scooting up to London. A lifesaver.’

Belle leaned against the kitchen table. Outside the window, the rain fell noisily into the small paved yard in which the rotary clothesline was planted, and dripping. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘I thought I’d better ring you,’ Mary said. ‘To let you know that I’ve met your sister-in-law, in London.’

‘Fanny!’

‘Yes,’ Mary said. ‘Her Harry and my William are about the same age. And of course, she’s got Norland.’

Belle straightened a little. She said crisply, ‘Indeed she has.’

‘It sounds lovely.’

‘It is.’

‘Well,’ Mary said, in the tone of one who had been instructed to pass on information which they, personally, saw no need to share, ‘we’ve all been asked to dinner at Fanny’s, next weekend. Jonno thought you should know, for some reason. Perhaps because the girls have been asked too.’

‘The girls?’

‘Elinor,’ Mary said, ‘and Marianne. And Lucy and Nancy. We’ll be swamped with girls. At least Bill’s coming too. It’s so great he can be relied on not to mind being the universal man.’

Belle closed her eyes. She took a deep breath. She said, ‘I’m not sure Marianne will be well enough.’

‘Oh?’ Mary said. ‘Won’t she? Isn’t the best remedy for a broken heart to accept every invitation going?’

‘It’s not her heart, Mary, it’s her asthma.’

‘I don’t think the Dashwoods have any dogs in London. It’s a house somewhere near Harley Street.’

‘I know perfectly well where my stepson and his wife live in London, Mary, thank you. And dogs are not, this time, the problem.’

‘Oh, I thought—’

‘Mary,’ Belle demanded, ‘have you any idea of the complete waste of space that John Willoughby has turned out to be?’

There was short a silence on the other end of the line, and then Mary said, ‘Jonno says he’ll never speak to him again, and he never says that about anyone.’

‘Good. And you?’

Mary said, with more energy, ‘He never took any notice of the children when he was here. He paid more attention to the dogs than my children, for heaven’s sake.’

‘There you are then.’

‘Will you tell Elinor?’

‘Tell her what?’

‘Will you tell Elinor’, Mary said, ‘that John and Fanny expect her for dinner, in London, on Saturday? But you’d better not tell her that Edward won’t be there.’

‘Mary—’

‘Lucy told me that he won’t. I don’t know why she should know where he is, but she seems to. He can’t stand his mother, or something.’

‘His mother!’ Belle exclaimed.

‘It’s weird, when her house is the only home he’s got, according to everyone. But I expect it’s to do with her wanting to marry him off to some heiress or other, so he won’t be pounced on by a gold-digger. She sounds quite something, Mrs Ferrars.’

‘But why’, Belle said, bewildered by Mary’s stream of consciousness, ‘does it matter where Ed’s mother is?’

‘Oh,’ Mary said, ‘Fanny said her mother would be there at dinner. Won’t that be interesting? The dragon who guards the cave to the Ferrarses’ millions. Mrs F., and Fanny’s other brother. The one who was in the paper. Belle, I’ve got to dash. Baby wake-up time and we do not like it if the first thing we see when we open our eyes isn’t Mumma.’

‘Of course,’ Belle said faintly.

‘And you’ll tell Ellie? Smart casual, Saturday night.’

‘Yes,’ Belle said. ‘Yes. Goodbye.’

She put the handset back into its cradle with elaborate care in order not to slam it. No Edward, but instead, Edward’s mother, Fanny, John, those gruesome Steele girls, smart casual … Poor Elinor. Poor, poor Marianne. Why was the world so intent on pretending that nothing had happened?

The phone rang again. She snatched it up. Before she could utter a word, Mary said, ‘Completely forgot to say that Wills is getting married, or something.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t know the details, just heard that he’s gone to Athens. Must fly, really, really loud baby noises from on high now!’

And she was gone.

From her sitting room, Abigail Jennings could hear the sounds of Marianne’s guitar. It was, she had said to Charlotte on the telephone that morning – Charlotte’s baby was late now, by five days, and therefore constant encouraging telephoning was required, on both sides – such a relief to hear. Even the dirgeful, gloomy things she seemed to want to play were better than all that sighing or silence. Thank goodness, she’d said to Charlotte, for Bill Brandon’s besottedness. He’d said he’d bring the guitar up to London on his next trip from Delaford, and she was sure he’d made a special journey to collect it, but who cared, really, as long as Marianne had the thing in her hands and could play some of her misery out, at least.

‘I never cease to be thankful, dear,’ Abigail said to her younger daughter, ‘that you never went in for having your heart broken.’

Charlotte gave a squeal of laughter. ‘No fear!’

‘These Dashwood girls, Char, such sweeties, but really hopeless. So emotional. I suppose you only have to look at their mother, don’t you?’

‘Now, now, Mummy.’

‘Well,’ Abigail said, ‘she was all over Wills like a rash. And now the Ferrars boy, for Elinor …’

‘Don’t think so, Mummy.’

‘Char dear, he went to stay; there’s all that mystery about him just coming and going—’

Charlotte’s voice dropped to confidential. She said quietly but emphatically, ‘He’ll do as he’s told.’

‘What?’

‘Mummy, there’s squillions in that family. Just loadsa money. His father made an absolute pile, you know that, and Mrs F. will be very picky about the girls those boys end up with. They won’t be allowed to choose, Mummy, or if they do, there’ll be awful consequences. Ellie can moon about after Ed till she’s blue in the face but he’s got to marry where he’s told, which is Tassy Morton.’

‘Tassy?’

‘Of course!’ Charlotte exclaimed. ‘It makes absolute sense. Property prince marries scaffolding heiress, it’s perfect! And she’s really sweet. She’ll do anything Daddy tells her, so if he says marry Ed Ferrars, she’ll do it. I don’t suppose she’s ever had an opinion of her own in her life!’

‘My dear,’ Abigail said with satisfaction, ‘you do know everything, don’t you?’

‘Chip off the old block!’ Charlotte said gaily.

‘Just think …’ Abigail said musingly. ‘Just think how very, very fascinating this supper party of Fanny Dashwood’s is going to be …’

‘Is it on Saturday?’

‘It is, dear.’

‘If this baby hasn’t come by Saturday,’ Charlotte said, ‘I shall just come with you and have it right in front of everyone. Do you think I’m going to be pregnant for ever?’

‘He’s not here,’ Lucy hissed to Elinor as they got out of the taxi on Saturday night, ‘because of me.’

Elinor, focusing on managing the descent from a taxi in unaccustomed high heels, said nothing.

Lucy put a hand under Elinor’s elbow to steady her. She said, close to Elinor’s ear, ‘I mean, it would completely give the game away. You know Ed. He simply can’t hide his feelings. One look at me and it would be completely evident to everyone.’

Elinor removed her elbow. She said, straightening up and trying not to sound cross, ‘Would it matter?’

‘Oh, Ellie,’ Lucy said reproachfully, ‘you know we’ve got to play the long game!’ She looked up at the façade of the house they were outside. ‘I thought it was all doctors and stuff in Harley Street.’

‘Ooh,’ Nancy squealed from her other side, ‘totes inappropes to talk about doctors in front of moi!’

Lucy went on staring at the house. She said, dismissively, ‘It’s all you talk about, Nance.’

‘You can be such a cow, Luce.’

‘Better than boring.’

‘Boring, is it, to have a boyf with a plane, rather than one with a wrecked Sierra?’

‘Something has to compensate for a beer belly and no hair.’

‘You make me vom—’

‘Stop it,’ Elinor said. ‘Stop it. This house belongs to the family. Well, to John now. He rents out all of it except their flat.’

Lucy took her arm again.

‘Nice little earner. For your brother, I mean.’

Elinor made no reply. She glanced down the street, to the second taxi, from which Bill Brandon and Sir John Middleton, watched by Marianne and Mary Middleton, were endeavouring to extract Mrs Jennings. Lucy pressed the arm she held to retrieve Elinor’s attention. She whispered, ‘Help me, Ellie.’

‘What d’you mean?’

Lucy pushed her face so close to Elinor’s that their skin was almost touching.

‘I feel so sick. I can’t tell you. I’m about to meet Ed’s mum and he isn’t here to support me and our whole future depends upon what she thinks of me. Honestly, if you weren’t here, I couldn’t face it, I simply couldn’t. I know you’ve got to look after your sister a bit, but please don’t leave me, please.’ Her fingers dug into Elinor’s arm. ‘After all, Ellie, you’re the only sensible person here who knows.’

‘Hello,’ Mrs Ferrars said, not looking at Elinor, ‘I don’t know which of you girls is which. I told Fanny there’d be too many of you, and I’d never remember. So don’t expect me to.’

‘I won’t,’ Marianne said loudly from beside her sister.

Mrs Ferrars did not appear to hear her. She was a small scowling woman in an expensive dark dress with gnarled little hands knobbly with diamonds.

‘We are Fanny’s sisters-in-law,’ Elinor said helpfully.

Mrs Ferrars sniffed.

Elinor shot out a hand and gripped Marianne’s nearest one warningly. She said, ‘We were brought up at Norland. We know Harry.’

Mrs Ferrars looked past them both. ‘Harry is my grandson.’

‘Yes, we know that.’

Mrs Ferrars’s eyes, as small and dark as currants, shifted their focus to anything but the Dashwood girls in front of her. She said, as if making an announcement, ‘Harry will inherit Norland.’

‘Yes, we know that too.’

‘And we don’t care,’ Marianne said. ‘If that’s what you mean.’

Mrs Ferrars stiffened slightly. ‘Where’s Fanny?’ she demanded.

‘Here, Mother,’ Fanny said, materialising beside her. She flashed a perfunctory smile at Elinor and Marianne. ‘Lovely you could come.’ She took her mother’s nearest arm with a hand, Elinor couldn’t help noticing, that it was identical to Mrs Ferrars’s, only younger. ‘Mother, I’m sure Ellie and Marianne will forgive us, but I want you to meet some adorable new friends of ours. The sweetest girls. Harry adores them.’

‘Girls?’ Mrs Ferrars said with a little grimace.

Fanny gave another mirthless smile in Elinor and Marianne’s direction.

‘Yes, girls, Mother. Divine girls. Mary and I are just mad about them and you know how you love young people!’

Mrs Ferrars regarded her daughter. She sniffed again. ‘Do I?’ she said.

Fanny gave a playful little laugh. ‘Oh, these ones you will!’ She threw a fleeting glance towards her sisters-in-law. ‘Supper soon,’ she said, as if food was plainly all that they had come for. ‘A buffet, as we’re so many, but all Ottolenghi. Don’t you just adore their cooking?’

‘That’, Marianne said, hardly lowering her voice, ‘was absolutely awful. The longest, dullest supper of my life. And the food – well, it’s pure exhibitionism to serve food like that, for just standing about with plates and forks. And can you believe that a roomful of supposedly educated people could be just so banal and boring?’

‘Sh,’ Elinor said automatically.

‘Cars and right-wing politics from the men. Nothing worth the breath it was uttered with from the women.’

Elinor bent towards her sister. ‘M, someone will hear you.’

Marianne raised her chin a little. ‘I don’t care if they do. Why are we here? Why did we get ourselves mixed up in—’

‘John and Fanny’, Elinor said firmly, ‘are family. We had to come.’

‘And why is Fanny all over those Steele girls? Look at her and her mother and your friend Lucy.’

‘She’s not my friend.’

Marianne gave her sister a quick, mischievous smile. She said, ‘She thinks she is.’

Elinor said sadly, ‘That’s the sort of thing Mags would say.’

‘Don’t. Don’t. I miss Mags, I miss—’

The door opened suddenly and revealed Harry on the threshold in his pyjamas, wearing an expression of ferocious defiance.

‘Oh!’ Mary Middleton cried at once. ‘Spider-Man! Look, Spider-Man! My William just adores his Spider-Man PJs!’

Fanny, not to be outdone in the maternal rapture stakes, rushed forward and knelt by Harry. ‘Now, poppet—’

Harry shouted, ‘I don’t like being in bed!’

Fanny tried to put soothing arms around her son. He wrestled himself free immediately.

‘Don’t! Don’t!’

‘Now, Harrykins, Mummy’s big boy …’

Mary Middleton said, to no one in particular, ‘Such a big boy! But not quite as tall as William.’

Fanny twisted round. She was wearing a tight, small smile. ‘Oh, I think you’ll find he’s taller.’

Harry caught sight of his aunts. He shouted, ‘Ellie! Ellie, Ellie, Ellie …’

She came forward, smiling, and knelt on the floor beside him.

‘Hello, Harry.’

He said, ‘I don’t want to be in this bed. I want my proper bed.’

‘Perhaps I could come and read to you?’

‘I think you’ll find’, Mary said to Fanny, ‘that William is in the top percentile of height for his age and that Harry—’

‘—is a much bigger boy!’ Fanny said brightly to her son.

Mary was in no hurry. She indicated Elinor, kneeling beside Harry. She said calmly, ‘She’ll know. Elinor knows both boys. She sees William at least every week.’

Fanny turned to fix her hard, demanding gaze on Elinor. ‘Well?’

There was a pause. Elinor took Harry’s hand and, for once, he didn’t snatch it back. They looked at one another. From the edge of the group, Lucy Steele, whose opinion had not been sought, said loudly that she thought both boys were enormous and that she’d have thought them years older than they actually were, if she hadn’t known their ages. No one took any notice, not even Mrs Ferrars, who had now come to stand on Harry’s other side, as if to defend him from all slights.

‘Well?’ Fanny said again to Elinor, remorselessly.

Elinor squeezed Harry’s hand. ‘You are my nephew,’ she said to him, ‘and I love you, and I think that by next year you will be as tall as William, and by the time you are both grown up, you will probably be the taller because your daddy is taller than his daddy. So you just have to eat all the good stuff, and not the rubbish, and wait.’

Harry nodded. He did not seem unduly upset by the verdict.

‘Thank you,’ Fanny said sarcastically to Elinor.

‘It’s a pity’, Mrs Ferrars said, ‘that she can’t show loyalty even to her own family, don’t you think?’

‘You asked me’, Elinor said, ‘for my opinion, and I gave it.’

She got stiffly to her feet. Looking up at her, Harry said, unexpectedly, ‘I don’t mind. I’m gooder at football, anyway.’

‘Thank you.’

He said, still holding her hand, ‘Will you come and do drawing for me?’

Fanny gave a little snort. ‘Drawing?’ she said, witheringly.

Mrs Ferrars gave Elinor a hostile stare. ‘You draw?’ she said accusingly.

‘Yes,’ Elinor said. ‘Sort of. I – I’m doing architecture.’

Mrs Ferrars and her daughter exchanged glances. ‘Oh, architecture.’

‘So,’ Fanny said to her mother, ‘nothing artistic. Terribly neat and clean. She’s very good at neat and clean.’

Mrs Ferrars gave a tiny, chilly smile. ‘Not like Tassy Morton, then?’

‘Oh, no, Mother, nothing like. Those divine flower paintings—’

‘And the dragonfly—’

‘Oh, the dragonfly! And those darling autumn berries, bryony or something.’

‘I regard Tassy’, Mrs Ferrars said, ‘as a true artist, with a real gift.’

From the other side of the room, Marianne called, ‘So has Elinor.’

There was sudden silence. Everyone turned and looked at her.

‘What?’ Fanny said dangerously.

‘I don’t know who this Tassy person is,’ Marianne said, ‘and I don’t care. Nor do I care for the utter inhibition of botanical watercolours, actually. But Ellie draws like a dream. She can draw anything. Harry’s right to ask her to draw for him. You’d be amazed at what she can draw.’

Elinor, gripping Harry’s hand, stared at the floor. How had the evening come to this?

‘Who is that?’ Mrs Ferrars enquired of Fanny.

‘Mother, you met her earlier. She’s John’s half-sister, one of the three.’

‘Oh,’ Mrs Ferrars said contemptuously, ‘them.’ She gave another deliberate sniff. ‘No money and plainly no common sense either.’

There was a distinct exclamation of anger, and Marianne plunged forward and flung her arms round her startled sister.

‘Don’t listen to them, Ellie. Don’t pay any attention. They’re just small-minded, money-obsessed—’

‘Sh,’ Elinor said desperately, struggling to stay upright and, at the same time, to put her free hand over Marianne’s mouth. ‘It’s OK, I’m OK.’

‘Is she crying?’ Harry said.

Marianne nodded vehemently, taking both hands away from grasping Elinor and covering her face with them.

Elinor said, slightly desperately, ‘Yes, I think she is.’

‘Why don’t you’, Fanny said crisply, ‘take Harry back to bed and see if you can’t calm Marianne down at the same time? What a ghastly scene, totally unnecessary, John always said she was hysterical.’

Elinor put her free hand out to take Marianne’s.

‘Come on, M.’

Bill Brandon was suddenly beside them. He looked at Marianne with an expression that betrayed everything he felt.

‘Can – can I help you? Can I—?’

Elinor smiled weakly at him. ‘I’ll just try to get her quiet with Harry.’

‘I’m not crying,’ Harry said.

‘No, nor you are.’

‘Will you tell me if there’s anything …’

Elinor turned, holding Harry still in one hand and Marianne in the other. As she turned, she caught a glimpse, across the room, of Sir John and Lucy Steele talking animatedly together, their eyes fixed on the group in the doorway. She said to Bill Brandon, ‘Well, you could murder a few people for me, if you like,’ and then, as she saw him struggling to take in what she had said through his own distress, added with as much lightness as she could muster, ‘only joking.’

‘Sorry, dear,’ Mrs Jennings said, peering into the bathroom, ‘but Lucy’s here.’

Elinor stopped wiping her face. She stared at Mrs Jennings’s reflection in the bathroom mirror over the edge of her washcloth.

‘What?’

‘Lucy’s here, dear. No, I didn’t ask her. I didn’t. She’s just turned up, all bright and breezy, without so much as a phone call, saying she just has to see you. How’s Marianne?’

‘Asleep. She slept quite well, considering.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Poor girl, so emotional.’

Elinor dropped the washcloth. ‘She was defending me.’

‘I know, dear. It was adorable. Even if it ruined the evening. Now, what am I to do about Lucy?’

Elinor sighed. She pulled her hair off her face into a rough ponytail and secured it with a clip. ‘I suppose I’ll see her.’

Mrs Jennings gestured towards Elinor’s pyjama bottoms and grey T-shirt. ‘Like that?’

‘Well, Mrs J., I’m not dressing up for Lucy.’

Mrs Jennings gave a conspiratorial smile. ‘No, dear, I quite see that. I’ll get you both some coffee.’

Elinor turned round to face her. ‘You’re lovely, but I don’t want to encourage her to stay, exactly.’

‘Like that, is it?’

‘Mrs J., I’ve got to get back to Devon and I—’

Mrs Jennings held up a hand. ‘You can’t go anywhere in pyjamas with no breakfast inside you. You’re as pale as a ghost. Talking of pale, did you see Bill’s face last night when Marianne—’

‘Yes,’ Elinor said shortly.

‘Right,’ Mrs Jennings said. ‘Right. I’m not one to butt in where I’m not wanted. Charlotte’s always telling me to mind my own business. Fine one to talk, she is. Well, Elinor dear, your current business is sitting on my sofa in full make-up and ridiculous shoes. So run along and deal with it, would you?’

‘Ellie!’ Lucy cried, leaping up from the sofa.

She was wearing skinny jeans and stilettos, and her hair had been tonged into long, soft curls which hung well below her shoulders.

She caught Elinor by her upper arms. ‘Wasn’t that amazing?’

‘Amazing?’

‘Last night! Wasn’t it fabby? She was so lovely to me. Gosh, Ellie, are you OK? You look, you look …’

‘Awful?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t – I didn’t want – Were you up all night with your sister?’

Elinor detached herself. ‘Marianne was fine, thank you.’

‘I just thought—’ Lucy began.

Elinor glared at her. ‘She’s fine,’ she said. ‘She’s asleep.’

Lucy took a long, elaborate breath and said, with deliberate politeness, ‘I’m so glad.’

‘Yes. Well.’

‘Ellie?’

‘What?’

‘Wasn’t she just lovely to me last night?’

Elinor was in no mood to be helpful.

‘Who?’ she said.

Lucy sat down on Mrs Jennings’s sofa again with a little bounce. ‘Ed’s mum, of course.’

‘Edward’s mother?’

Lucy bent her head so that her hair swung forward becomingly. ‘She was so sweet. She made such a fuss of me and Nance. So did your sister-in-law. I just loved your sister-in-law. Did you see her shoes?’

Elinor lowered herself into an armchair opposite the sofa. She leaned forward. ‘Lucy …’

‘Yes?’

‘Lucy,’ Elinor said, ‘they weren’t sweet to you for anything particular. I mean, I don’t know why you’re so happy, because they don’t know about you and Ed, do they, so they weren’t pleased for that reason.’

Lucy tossed her hair back. ‘I knew you’d say that!’

Elinor said resignedly, ‘Well, it’s obvious.’

Lucy leaned forward. ‘Ellie. Listen. I can’t expect you not to be a bit jealous of everything looking so rosy for me, but they liked me. They really did. I won’t let you rain on my parade; I know they liked me. And I adored them. Why didn’t you say how amazing your sister-in-law was?’

Elinor said nothing. Lucy peered at her. ‘Ellie, have you got a hangover?’

‘No,’ Elinor said between gritted teeth.

Lucy slipped off the sofa and knelt beside her. She tried to take Elinor’s hand. ‘You’re a fantastic friend, Ellie. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve a brand-new, lovely best friend like you. Next to Ed, you mean the world to me, you really do, even though we’ve only known each other a few months.’

‘Please get up.’

Lucy put up a hand, as if to try and stroke Elinor’s forehead.

‘Don’t,’ Elinor said. ‘Don’t.’

Lucy sighed. She got to her feet, with difficulty, in her heels. ‘Poor you,’ she said. ‘You carry so much, and all alone. It must be awful seeing someone like me with all this lovely future rolling ahead of them, and new friends like Fanny. I hope you’ll tell Fanny that I thought she was awesome.’

Elinor stared at the rug under her bare feet in silence.

‘I know she liked me,’ Lucy repeated, still standing over Elinor. ‘You couldn’t mistake it. Nor Ed’s mother. I was expecting her to be really frosty with me because I know she’s got a killer reputation—’ She broke off. ‘Was that the doorbell?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Who could it be?’

Elinor roused herself slightly. She said, ‘I have no idea. Some friend of Mrs J.’s. Bill, maybe.’

‘Oh, of course,’ Lucy said with emphasis, ‘Bill coming to ask after Marianne.’

The sitting-room door opened, revealing Mrs Jennings holding a tray of mugs and behind her, slightly dishevelled and looking as short of sleep as Elinor felt, was Edward Ferrars.

‘There!’ Mrs Jennings said loudly. ‘One dressed girl, one undressed girl, one young man, and three mugs of coffee!’

She advanced into the room and put the tray down on the low glass table by the television. Neither girl said a word. Edward stood frozen in the doorway, his gaze directed at the ceiling.

Mrs Jennings straightened up. She looked round at them. ‘What on earth’s the matter? Don’t you three know each other?’

Elinor swallowed. She said, ‘Yes, of course, it’s just that I was not expecting – We weren’t—’ She stopped and glanced at Lucy. Lucy was staring out of the window, holding the absurd pose of a fashion model, her lips slightly parted. Elinor looked, cornered as she was, at Edward.

‘Hello, Ed.’

He croaked something in reply, hardly intelligible. Mrs Jennings marched back towards the door.

‘I don’t know what’s going on. With a daughter like Charlotte, tongue-tied isn’t a problem I ever have to face, thank goodness. I’ll be in my bedroom, telephoning, if you want me. Or,’ she added to Elinor, ‘you need an interpreter?’

Elinor said faintly, ‘Thank you for the coffee.’

Mrs Jennings pushed Edward a little further into the room and then bustled out, closing the door resoundingly behind her.

Elinor picked up a mug of coffee and held it out to Lucy. ‘Coffee?’

Lucy gave a little smirk, but didn’t speak. She accepted the coffee and resumed her seat on the sofa, staring into her mug. Elinor looked at Edward. ‘Coffee, Ed?’

‘Thanks,’ he said, not moving.

She held a mug out, offering him the handle so that their fingers need not touch. Lucy lifted her head and regarded them both and, although her pose didn’t alter, her eyes were watchful.

‘How are you?’ Elinor said to him, into the silence.

He took the mug and held it in both hands. ‘Fine. Thanks.’

Elinor waited. The awkwardness in the room was as thick as smoke and she was suddenly conscious of being barefoot in pyjamas with unbrushed hair. She was also seized with a flash of irritation at Edward’s inability to help with any conversation and Lucy’s deliberate refusal. She said, too loudly, ‘Well, before you trouble to ask, Mum is fine, Mags is fine, Marianne is doing OK, and I am about to go back to Devon. When I’ve dressed, that is.’

Edward took a swallow of coffee. He seemed unable to look at either girl. He then said, hesitantly, ‘I’m – I’m so glad if Marianne’s OK.’

‘She’s down,’ Elinor said, ‘but not out. Definitely not out.’

He gave a ghost of a smile. ‘Brilliant.’

Elinor looked at Lucy. Lucy seemed perfectly composed now, but in no hurry to help with the conversation. Elinor said to her, ‘You OK?’

Lucy nodded, smiling. ‘Perfectly, thank you.’

‘Well,’ Elinor said, putting her mug down, ‘you two haven’t seen each other for ages. I’ll – I’ll just go and see if Marianne has woken up.’

‘Please …’ Edward said.

‘Please what?’

He sidled behind an armchair. Lucy watched him, still smiling.

‘Please see if she’s awake,’ Edward said. ‘I’d – I’d love to see her.’

Elinor moved towards the door. Lucy didn’t take her eyes from Edward’s face. ‘Me too,’ she said.

‘Ed’s here?’ Marianne cried, starting up in bed. ‘Here? In Mrs J.’s flat?’

‘Yes. He wants to see you.’

Marianne began to rummage about, hanging over the edge of her bed, for her slippers.

‘How fantastic. God, how cheering. A human being after weeks of monsters. Can you see the other one?’

‘You don’t need slippers,’ Elinor said. ‘And – and Lucy’s here.’

Marianne flipped upright and pushed her hair off her face.

‘Lucy?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is she doing here?’

‘I – I don’t know. She just came.’

Marianne climbed off the bed and stood up. She said, grinning, ‘You mean thing, Ellie, leaving him to have to talk to her.’

‘Well, I thought that as they know each other a bit—’

‘Nobody should have to talk to anyone from the Steele family unless at gunpoint. I’m going straight along.’

‘Aren’t you going to brush your hair?’

Marianne looked at her. ‘You haven’t brushed yours.’

‘Mrs J. pounced before I could.’

‘And you’, said Marianne, ‘pounced before I could. Poor Ed.’

She wrenched the bedroom door open and went racing along the corridor towards the sitting room, with Elinor stumbling in her wake.

‘Ed!’ she cried, flinging her arms round his neck. ‘Oh, Ed, I am so pleased to see you!’

Edward, who had hardly moved from his position behind the armchair, returned her embrace as enthusiastically as he could whilst encumbered with a coffee mug. ‘Hi, M, oh, hi, hi.’

‘We’ve been longing to see you! Ellie especially, of course, but me too, to see someone normal, someone from home.’

He held her away from him a little. ‘You’re terribly thin, M.’

‘Oh,’ she said, tossing her hair, ‘that doesn’t matter. I’m fine, I really am. But Ellie’s great. Don’t you think she looks great? As long as Ellie’s OK!’

Elinor caught Lucy’s instant change of expression to one of unmistakable fury. She tried to say something conciliatory, and failed.

Edward said to Marianne, ‘Are you OK here? In London?’

She shook her head. She said quietly, ‘You know what happened?’

‘Yes,’ he said sadly, ‘I heard.’

‘And then’, Marianne said, brightening at the recollection of how dreadful the previous evening had been, ‘we had this family gathering thing, organised – sorry about this, Ed – by your sister, which was beyond awful. Why didn’t you come? It would have made it bearable.’

He shifted slightly. He said, mumbling, ‘I – couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I’d kind of promised someone—’

‘And Edward’, Lucy said, suddenly and sharply, ‘isn’t like the kind of guys you know, Marianne. Edward keeps his word. Don’t you, Ed?’

Marianne stared at her. She said in surprise, ‘I know he does. I know if he says he’ll do something, he will. I know that. What are you on about?’

Elinor turned away, clenching her fists. It was one thing not to like or trust Lucy Steele especially; it was quite another to be on the point of hitting her.

Edward put his mug down on a side table. He said to Marianne, with real affection, ‘I’m so sorry, M, but I’ve got to run.’

She laughed at him. ‘But you’ve only just come!’

‘Just – just wanted to see how you were.’

‘I’m fine. I will be fine. And she’ – gesturing towards Elinor – ‘is the most fantastic sister and person. As you know.’ She leaned forward until her mouth was against his ear. ‘Lucy’ll be gone in a minute, I’m sure she will,’ she whispered. ‘Stay and talk to us.’

He shook his head, even though he was smiling at her. ‘Sorry, M. Got to go.’

He glanced up, his gaze sliding rapidly over Lucy and Elinor. ‘Sorry,’ he said again.

Elinor didn’t speak. Anger at Lucy and disappointment in Edward formed a lump in her throat she didn’t seem able to swallow past. She looked steadfastly ahead, aware of Edward leaving the room, having some brief encounter with Mrs Jennings in the hall and then hearing the slam of the front door behind him. From what seemed like far away, Lucy’s voice said, primly, ‘I ought to be going too.’

Elinor jerked into full consciousness. Marianne had walked past Lucy and flung herself on the sofa, where she was examining her fingernails with fierce concentration.

‘Oh,’ Elinor said.

Lucy moved towards the door. She put her mug down on the side table, close to Edward’s. ‘Busy day,’ she said, and gave a little laugh, ‘and after a really late night!’ She looked at Elinor. ‘You are’, she said with theatrical emphasis, ‘such a trustworthy person. And I do so value that!’

When the front door had slammed for the second time, Marianne uncoiled herself from the sofa. ‘OK, Ellie. Why was she here?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Why was she here, Ellie? Her and Ed?’

Elinor looked out of the window. She said, ‘They’ve known each other for yonks.’

‘And?’

‘No and.’

Marianne marched to the door.

‘OK, Ellie, don’t tell me. But don’t expect me to play games with you either. You hardly give him the time of day, and then she’s here, whatever that means.’

Elinor started to speak but Marianne held up a hand to silence her.

‘Don’t fob me off, Ellie. Something’s going on that’s not good for you, and if you won’t tell me, then you won’t. But don’t expect me, either, Elinor Dashwood, not to smell a rat.’

And then she strode out of the room and left Elinor staring out of the window at the sky.

13

Sir John thumped a heavy bottle down on Belle Dashwood’s kitchen table. Belle, who had not been expecting him and was not prepared for visitors, looked at the bottle in amazement.

‘Champagne!’

He beamed at her. ‘Champagne, indeed! To celebrate.’

‘But’, Belle said, ‘it’s just a Tuesday …’

Sir John put his hands flat on the table, either side of the bottle, and leaned towards her.

‘We’re going to drink to Charlotte. She’s had the baby. Tommy Palmer’s got a son and heir!’

Belle smiled broadly back. ‘I’m so glad.’

‘A whopper,’ Sir John said happily, ‘over nine pounds. Bigger than any of ours. Mary’s gone flying up to London and I imagine the monster-in-law is already barking orders in the hospital. Isn’t it great?’

‘Wonderful! Wonderful. I’d get the girls but they’re not back yet, from Exeter. Margaret had some after-school club.’

‘Then’, Sir John said, grasping the bottle, ‘we’ll have to swig the lot, you and me. Get the glasses!’

‘I haven’t lit a fire yet.’

‘I’ll do that. Come on, come on, Belle, if we’ve got to make a party on our own, then we’ll do it. Abi said to me on the phone that Tommy was all over the place while Char was in labour, and then the moment the baby’s here, he reverts to type and is making out that he can’t tell one end from another and that the poor little blighter looks like Churchill. Abi said he was as exasperating as ever and the baby looks exactly like him, poor little sod.’

He began to march round the kitchen, opening cupboards. ‘Glasses? Glasses?’

‘Here,’ Belle said. ‘But not proper flutes.’

Sir John made an exclamation of false annoyance. ‘No flutes? No flutes?’ He nudged her jovially. ‘Between you and me, Belle, I’d be happy to drink it out of jam jars.’

‘I can’t,’ Elinor said.

She was sitting up in bed, the sleeves of her father’s cardigan pulled down over her knuckles, drinking a mug of tea. On the end of the bed her mother sat, still dressed and still slightly flushed from a quantity of champagne drunk at astonishing speed. She had tried to make Sir John stay for supper, but he had declared that he was off to Portugal in the morning, to visit his factory, and that he needed to sort himself out for an early start. He had roared off into the dark in his Range Rover, and left Belle slightly dazed and with a mild attack of hiccups, to await Elinor and Margaret’s return from Exeter.

She sighed, now, regarding Elinor.

‘Darling, I know it’s exhausting, all this toing and froing to London. But John – and Fanny, I suppose – have asked you to this concert, and Marianne won’t go without you. And you could go and see Charlotte’s baby. Couldn’t you?’

Elinor drooped over her tea mug. ‘I’ve been every weekend, for ages.’

‘I know you have.’

‘And that bus journey is so long. And grim on Sunday nights.’

‘Darling Ellie. Could you just go one more time? Because I think it’s time Marianne came home.’

Elinor’s head jerked up. ‘You what?’

‘Well,’ Belle said carefully, ‘she’s got to face life again, sometime, hasn’t she? You may think I didn’t notice anything but I am aware that we’ve been here more than six months, and she has just drifted about and not really focused on what she’s going to do.’

Elinor said shortly, ‘I’ve tried.’

‘Oh, darling, I’m sure you have …’

Elinor put her mug down on the pile of books beside her bed. She said, ‘So you think getting her back here will focus her? On anything?’

‘It would be a start,’ Belle said. ‘She can’t go on taking Abi’s hospitality—’

‘Mrs J. loves it. She’s using Marianne as a substitute daughter.’

‘All the same …’

Elinor rubbed her eyes. She yawned. ‘So you want me to drag up to London again for some concert—’

‘I think’, Belle said, interrupting, ‘that John wants to – well, make amends. For Fanny, I mean. He wouldn’t say so, in so many words, but I think he feels that they weren’t very supportive over Marianne, and he’d probably like to offer you a bed in Harley Street. At least, that’s what he was implying on the phone.’

‘I would hate to stay in Harley Street.’

‘Ellie darling, John is family.’

‘And I’, Elinor said, sliding down under her duvet, ‘am exhausted.’

Belle leaned forward. She patted the duvet roughly in the region of Elinor’s stomach. ‘One more weekend, darling. Be nice to John and persuade Marianne to come home. You can see your friend Lucy—’

‘I detest Lucy,’ Elinor said.

‘Oh, I thought—’

Elinor twisted over on to her side, facing the wall. ‘That’s what everyone does,’ she said. ‘They think what suits them. And one of the things that suits you is to have me make things nice with John and Fanny, and persuade Marianne that she’s got to stop making an opera out of a broken heart and think seriously about the future.’

There was silence. Belle stood up. Elinor waited for her to cross the room to the door, but she didn’t. Instead she said, in a voice that was not entirely steady, ‘I do appreciate you, darling.’

Elinor stared at the wall. Was it worth saying that she was no longer going to do anything for anyone since it seemed to her that the more generous she was, the more she herself seemed to get punished? Or was she going to be sensible, reliable, patient Elinor who never put her own feelings first because – let’s face it – she didn’t have any worth considering in the first place, did she?

She rolled back and peered at her mother. Belle was standing with her hands clasped together, almost in an attitude of supplication. ‘One more London weekend,’ Elinor said severely. ‘And that’s it.’

The concert was in a grandly converted church in Chelsea. The audience, Elinor guessed – uniformly well fed and well dressed – could be divided into those who really liked music and those who liked to be thought to like music. Fanny, she was sure, was in the latter category, and spent a good deal of her time swivelling in her seat to see whom she knew and might make a beeline for in the interval. Only Marianne sat quietly studying her programme, pausing just long enough to say to Elinor, ‘Rachmaninov Two. I don’t care how often I hear it. Bliss.’

Fanny gave a little screech.

‘Oh my God, there’s Robert! What on earth is he doing here? Classical music is so not his thing!’ She leaped up and began brandishing her programme. ‘Robbie! Robbie! Over here!’

A slender young man in a suit of exaggerated cut, halfway down the aisle from their seats, began to gaze about distractedly.

‘Robbie!’ Fanny shouted. ‘Here! Up here!’

The young man, Elinor saw, was the one she had seen in the double-page spread in Mrs Jennings’s Sunday newspaper. He came swooping up the aisle and gave his sister a theatrical kiss. ‘Lovely to see you, big, big sis!’

‘And this is Elinor,’ Fanny said without enthusiasm. ‘You know. Johnnie’s half-sister. Or rather, one of them.’

‘Ooh,’ Robert Ferrars said, rolling his eyes at Elinor, ‘so we’re nearly related!’

‘Well, sort of.’

‘And you’, Robert said with emphasis, ‘know our bad black sheep brother, Ed, don’t you?’

‘A little,’ Fanny said crisply.

‘Well,’ Robert said, shooting his shirt cuffs, ‘I always say – don’t I, Fan – that if Mother and Father had done the sensible thing with Ed, and sent him to Westminster, like me, we’d have had none of this nonsense. Would we, Fan? It was being sent in disgrace to that crammer in Portsmouth—’

‘Plymouth,’ Fanny said.

‘Well, that’s what did for him, wherever it was. He just ran wild. And he hasn’t stopped since, has he? Such a naughty boy.’

John Dashwood, noticing his brother-in-law for the first time, got to his feet and moved into the aisle to greet him. Marianne glanced up from her programme, took in someone – yet again – of no interest to her, and returned to her reading.

‘Hello, old boy,’ John Dashwood said heartily. ‘Didn’t expect to see you here.’

Robert Ferrars winked at Elinor. ‘Not really my thing, I have to admit. Why sit in silence, listening, when you could be talking, I say!’ He looked at his sister. ‘Remember Sissy Elliot? Or, Lady Elliot, darling, as she now is since he got booted into the coronet department. Such a hoot! Well, I was supposed to be there tonight, helping her with a party. Robbie, she said, there’s no way we can get two hundred people into a room the size of a small fridge, and I said to her, Darling, easy peasy, leave it to me, sofas out on the balcony, under plastic, open the double doors to the dining room and hey presto, party space with somewhere even for the smokers to sit, outside. She was thrilled. But so cross I wouldn’t be there, after all.’

Elinor was equally fascinated and repelled by him. She said, almost without meaning to speak, ‘Why aren’t you?’

He touched her hand.

‘Entre nous, Elinor my nearly sister-in-law, I had a better invitation. The Elliots are life peers, ducky, and I’ – he glanced down the aisle – ‘was asked here by a duchess. Who wants me – yes, me – to organise her daughter’s wedding.’

‘Oh,’ Elinor said blankly.

‘You are so naughty,’ Fanny said with real affection.

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. Then he laid two fingers against Elinor’s. ‘Kisses next time, sweetie pie.’ He looked past her, at Marianne. ‘Is that the famous—’

‘Shh,’ Fanny said, mock scolding, ‘you are awful. So awful.’

He grinned at her. ‘And I’m gone,’ he said and darted back to his seat.

‘Such a sweetheart,’ Fanny said to Elinor. ‘We adore him. He’s welcome any time, isn’t he, Johnnie?’

John Dashwood looked at Elinor. He said in a rush, as if he were greatly daring something, ‘As you are, of course, Elinor. Any time.’

‘Thank you,’ Elinor said awkwardly.

Fanny cleared her throat. She said to her husband, in measured tones, ‘We talked about that, sweetness.’

‘I know we did,’ John Dashwood said. ‘But I didn’t want Elinor to think—’

Fanny turned to look at Elinor. ‘I don’t suppose Elinor thought anything. Did you, Ellie? Why should Elinor mind if I offer a bed to the Steele girls while they’re in London?’

‘Oh, I don’t. I didn’t know, I—’

‘After all,’ Fanny said smoothly, ‘my family rather owes Lucy’s uncle for coping with Ed during those difficult years, don’t we? I’ve never had a chance to say thank you for all they did, before, have I?’

‘No,’ John Dashwood said uncertainly, ‘I suppose you haven’t.’

‘And I’, Elinor said, hardly caring if she sounded rude, ‘don’t mind, either way. It’s lovely, anyway, staying with Mrs J.’

There was a small pause, in which Fanny regarded Elinor, and Elinor looked at the carpet. Then Fanny said, without any warmth, ‘Come another time,’ and, after a further pause, ‘Harry just loves having Lucy around.’ She looked at her husband. ‘Doesn’t he?’

John Dashwood gulped a breath. He did not catch Elinor’s eye. ‘Look!’ he said with relief. ‘Look. The lights are going down!’