Sense & Sensibility

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘It strikes me’, she said, ‘as completely – completely wonderful.’

  ‘Fifteen hundred a month?’ Belle said. She was ladling out portions of chicken casserole.

  Marianne, at the far end of the table, was reading a volume of Pablo Neruda’s love poems. Without looking up, she said, ‘Won’t that work out at below the minimum wage?’

  Elinor took a plate of casserole from her mother and passed it to Margaret. She said, steadily, ‘It’s a job. I have a job.’

  ‘But to work five days a week for—’

  ‘It’ll pay our rent. And some of the bills.’

  ‘What bills?’ Belle said vaguely.

  Margaret looked at her plate. ‘Do I have to eat the carrots?’

  Elinor nodded patiently. ‘Electricity, gas for the cooker – that’s the tank by the washing line – and water rates.’

  ‘But artistically—’

  ‘I am a graphic artist, Ma.’

  Belle sighed. ‘Well, darling, if it’s what you want …’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I’m sure Jonno—’

  ‘Ma, I have a job in my own profession. It’s not well paid but I’ll be learning. He was a nice man. And he thinks the world of Bill Brandon.’

  Marianne, her eyes still on her book, gave a faint snort.

  ‘And,’ Elinor said, ‘I can meet Margaret after school and we can come home together.’

  Margaret was carefully lining her carrots up around the rim of her plate. She said, ‘Suppose I want to see my friends after school and not my sister?’

  Elinor reached across to put a baked potato on her plate. ‘I thought you hated your new school.’

  ‘I do. But I might not hate all the people.’

  ‘I see.’

  Marianne raised her eyes from her book. ‘Good on you, Ellie,’ she said unexpectedly.

  ‘Goodness. Thank you.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Marianne said to Belle. ‘She’s got a job. She’s doing something for us all.’

  Margaret jabbed a knife into her potato. She said to Marianne, ‘Well, I suppose you can’t really, can you?’

  Marianne let a brief pause fall, and then she said nonchalantly, ‘Well, actually, I can. As it happens.’

  Belle stopped ladling. She looked at Marianne, the spoon suspended. ‘What do you mean, darling?’

  Marianne let go of the book and stretched her arms lazily above her head. She said carelessly, ‘I saw Wills today.’

  ‘Oh, we know …’

  ‘You amaze me!’

  ‘What a surprise, darling.’

  ‘And he said—’ Marianne stopped.

  ‘What? What did he say?’

  ‘And he said,’ Marianne repeated, her head thrown back, gazing at her raised hands, ‘he said – that he was going to give me a car.’

  Margaret dropped her knife with a clatter. ‘Wow!’

  ‘A car!’

  ‘M,’ Elinor said earnestly, leaning forward, ‘he can’t. You can’t—’

  Marianne lowered her arms and regarded her sister. ‘Why can’t we?’

  ‘You can’t drive,’ Margaret said.

  ‘I can learn.’

  ‘You can’t accept a car from Wills,’ Elinor said.

  Belle put the spoon down. ‘So romantic,’ she said, ‘but he shouldn’t. Really, he shouldn’t.’

  Margaret picked up her knife again and reached for the butter. ‘What kind of car?’

  ‘An Alfa Romeo Spider,’ Marianne said airily. ‘Series 4. A design classic.’

  Margaret jumped to her feet. ‘I’m going to look it up. I bet it’s worth megabucks.’

  ‘Sit down, darling!’ Belle said sharply. Then she looked at Marianne. ‘It’s very sweet of him …’

  Marianne smiled to herself. She said, ‘Typical, really, the grand gesture but something that we really need, too. It was his twenty-first present from Aunt Jane. So sweet! It’s been on blocks in the garage at Allenham for ages, ever since he got the Aston. He says it’s perfect for me.’

  Belle glanced at Elinor. Then she said to Marianne, ‘Dear one …’

  ‘He’s so wonderful,’ Marianne said.

  ‘Yes, darling. Yes, he is. But before Elinor says it, I have to put a bit of a dampener on things and say we can’t afford it.’

  Marianne’s head jerked up. ‘What’s to afford? He’s giving me a car!’

  ‘We’d have to insure it,’ Elinor said. ‘And tax it and fuel it. And you would need driving lessons.’

  ‘Thomas will teach me!’

  ‘No,’ Belle said, quietly but firmly.

  ‘But we need a car!’

  ‘A sensible, dull car,’ Elinor said. ‘Not a sports car that only fits two people and no luggage.’

  ‘You are just so sad,’ Margaret said crossly.

  Marianne bit her lip. She looked at her mother and her older sister. She said quietly, to Elinor, ‘What would it cost?’

  Elinor reached along the table to take her hand. ‘Don’t know. But maybe a couple of thousand. A year, I mean.’

  Marianne squeezed her sister’s hand briefly and let it go. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can’t have it then, can I?’

  ‘No. Sorry, babe.’

  Marianne sat up straighter. ‘If we can’t afford it …’

  ‘And’, Belle said unwisely, ‘it might be a bit much, you know. As a present, I mean. It’s the kind of thing you get given when – well, when you get engaged, or something.’

  Marianne stood up slowly, ignoring her supper, and picked up her phone, holding it hard against her. She moved towards the door and, as she left the room, she turned long enough to say, almost triumphantly, ‘Well, what would you know, anyway, about that?’

  Margaret could see, from the line of light visible under her door, that Marianne was not yet asleep. She herself had been doing what was strictly forbidden after bedtime, which was going online, with her laptop under the duvet, and looking up all the random things that suggested themselves to her, so seductively beyond the confines of her own circumstances. Tonight, fired up and fed up with her family’s attitude to Wills’s glittering offer – much enhanced, in Margaret’s eyes, by the forceful glamour of his personality – she had found a website which gave valuations for, it said, cars for the connoisseurs.

  She tapped with one fingernail on Marianne’s door. Marianne called, ‘Ellie?’

  Margaret pushed the door open far enough to reveal her face. ‘It’s me.’

  Marianne was sitting up in bed with her phone, her thumbs poised, mid text. She said sternly, ‘Mags, you should be asleep.’

  Margaret eeled into the room and settled on Marianne’s bed. ‘Who are you texting?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Why don’t you ring him?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Does he ring you?’

  ‘He can’t, staying with Aunt Jane.’

  ‘Yes, he can – he can go somewhere.’

  ‘Mags,’ Marianne said loftily, ‘he’s very respectful of Aunt Jane and what he owes her and how he has to give her his company and attention. So it’s better for me to text him while he’s at Allenham.’

  Margaret craned to see the screen on Marianne’s phone. ‘That’s more like an essay than a text.’

  Marianne laid the phone face down on her duvet. ‘Why, exactly, did you come in?’ she said.

  Margaret wriggled a little. ‘That car …’

  ‘What car?’

  ‘The one you can’t have.’

  Marianne tried to look indifferent. ‘What of it?’

  Margaret leaned forward. ‘It’s worth over seven thousand pounds!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I looked it up. It said about seven thousand five hundred if it has good documented history. That’s amazing.’

  Marianne made a series of little pleats in the duvet cover. She said, sadly, ‘I’ve told him I can’t have it.’

  ‘Have you? When?’

  ‘Tonight. I rang him after
supper. He said that it was mine whenever I wanted it and it would just wait at Allenham until I was ready.’

  Margaret said, ‘Was he cross?’

  ‘No. Of course not. Why should he be cross? He’s never cross.’

  Margaret watched her sister’s pleating hand. ‘You’re pretty gone on him, aren’t you?’

  Marianne said nothing. She leaned forward a little more and something swung out of the neck of her pyjamas. They were pyjamas Margaret coveted, patterned in plaid, with rosebuds.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘Round your neck. That shiny thing.’

  Marianne stopped pleating and put a hand to her collar.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Show me,’ Margaret demanded.

  ‘You’re not to tell Ma …’

  ‘I won’t!’

  Marianne held something out between forefinger and thumb. It was a ring, three linked bands of different coloured gold, threaded on a chain.

  ‘It’s a ring,’ Margaret said accusingly.

  ‘I know, muppet.’

  ‘Well,’ Margaret said, pushing her hair behind her ears, ‘a ring looks a bit weddingy, to me.’

  Marianne put the ring against her lips. ‘He’s got one, too.’

  ‘Wills? Wills has got a ring like this?’

  ‘He got them for both of us. His is bigger, of course.’

  Margaret sniffed slightly. ‘You have got it badly, haven’t you?’

  ‘He’s wonderful,’ Marianne said. ‘He’s Mr Wonderful. Don’t tell Ma and Ellie about the ring. I mean it.’

  Margaret sighed. ‘Ellie isn’t speaking to me much, anyway.’

  ‘Isn’t she?’

  ‘Not since I let out about Ed and her.’

  ‘Oh, Mags.’

  ‘Well,’ Margaret said aggrievedly, ‘I was being nagged and nagged, wasn’t I, by Mrs J. and everyone, about boyfriends and stuff, and I can’t exactly diss Mrs J., can I, however much I’d like to, so after a bit I just said I couldn’t talk about it but there was someone and Mrs J. gave one of her gross cackles and said to Ellie, Who, who, and Ellie looked at me like she wished I was dead and I said I couldn’t say but his name began with an F and then Jonno started teasing Ellie and I thought she might hit him and then thank goodness all those dire kids came in and started screaming so I was saved. Sort of. Except Ellie had a go at me afterwards and Ma heard her and said what was going on and Ellie said, Well, someone, meaning me, ate a whole bowl of stupid for breakfast, didn’t they. And she’s still cross.’

  Marianne smiled at her sister. ‘She’s private, Mags.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  Marianne held her ring away from her, on its chain, so that she could admire it. ‘I don’t need to be, Mags. I’m proud of how I feel.’

  Margaret got off the bed. ‘I’d be proud to drive an Alfa Romeo Spider, I would.’

  ‘One day.’

  ‘What?’

  Marianne lay back on her pillows and tucked the ring out of sight into the jacket of her pyjamas. ‘One day, there’ll be all kinds of things. Marvellous things. Happy, glorious things in beautiful places.’

  ‘Like’, Margaret said, ‘no more picnic outings with all the Middletons and those kids.’

  Marianne stared at her. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Margaret made a face. ‘Didn’t they tell you? We’ve all got to go, on Saturday. Jonno wants to have a barbecue, in a wood somewhere, last outing of summer or something, all of us with sausages and stuff. Bill’s taking us; it’s a wood belonging to someone he knows.’ Margaret grinned at her sister. ‘Your lucky day, M. Bill’ll want you to sit next to him.’

  Marianne gave a little groan. Then she touched the ring under her pyjamas. ‘I’ll ask Wills.’

  ‘Yay!’

  Marianne winked at her sister. ‘I’ll ask Wills to come too, and he can drive me.’

  Margaret waited a moment, and then she said, carefully, ‘If I don’t tell anyone about the ring, can I come in the Aston with you two?’

  Across the meagre landing, Belle heard Marianne’s door close and the scamper of Margaret’s feet going back to her own bedroom. If you could call it a bedroom, really. It was more like a large cupboard, just big enough for a bed and a chair, but at least it gave Margaret privacy, the privacy which she had claimed as being as much her right as her sisters’.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I have a bedroom of my own? You’ve all got bedrooms of your own.’

  ‘But we haven’t got tree houses,’ Marianne had pointed out. ‘You have a tree house, and we only have bedrooms. There are three proper – well, sort of proper – bedrooms, and one cupboard. So, as you have a tree house, you should have the cupboard.’ She had paused. ‘Unless, of course, you’d like to share the tree house?’

  There’d been a short silence in which Margaret wrestled with her painful sense of being outmanoeuvred. And then, glaring, she’d given in. But Belle could never hear her door slam on the cupboard without a pang.

  ‘I just wish’, she said in a whisper to the photograph of Henry with which she had futile conversations most nights, ‘that you were here to help me make it better. For little Margaret. For the big ones too. Except that that’s mad thinking. Because if you were here, we wouldn’t be here, in the first place.’

  She had him, as usual, propped against her knees in bed, holding him by his silver frame. He looked very young in the picture, very carefree, in an open-necked shirt against a summer Norland garden. There were secateurs in his trouser pocket, just visible.

  ‘Look,’ she said to him, slightly louder, ‘you really do need to help me. Some sign. Just some little teeny sign that I’m not letting Marianne just be swept away like someone in a canoe over rapids. It’s all happened so fast, this gorgeous boy and the drama of her being caught in a storm without her inhaler, and two seconds later, they seem to be at a point where he’s offering her a car, for heaven’s sake, and she seems to think it was the most natural thing in the world to be offered it as well as to accept it. I know you’ll laugh at me, darling, but she seems to have even less idea of reason or restraint than I did, and although he is heart-stopping to look at, and seems a model of charm, I can’t help but have a twinge of anxiety about the whole thing. It’s happened so suddenly. I mean, we didn’t even know he existed ten minutes ago, and I just have this little nag inside me that she’s riding for a fall, and she’s going to get hurt—’

  There was a sound from the landing. Belle stopped talking, laid Henry down on her duvet, and climbed out of bed. She padded over to the door and opened it cautiously. The landing was dark and ringed by closed doors. Silence reigned. She shut her door again and got back into bed. She looked down at Henry. He smiled up cheerfully at her from his supine position on her duvet. ‘And I’ve got something to confess to you, darling. I did an awful thing, even if most mothers would do the same in my place. Henry, I snooped on her phone. She was washing her hair, and I went into her room and had a look at the texts on her phone – and it was, even by my standards, unbelievable. I couldn’t believe how many. There was actually nothing at all in her sent box except these completely passionate texts to him. I know you’d say I shouldn’t have looked in the first place. You’d say that the Marianne apple didn’t fall far from the Belle tree, wouldn’t you?’ she said to him. ‘You’d say that if anyone ought to have faith in Marianne surrendering to her heart in a flash, like this, it should be me. Wouldn’t you? And you’d be laughing, and teasing me a bit. And I know I’d deserve it. I do. But all the same …’

  She stopped, picked Henry up and put him back on her bedside table. Then she said, to the empty, shadowy room, ‘I expect it’s being a lone parent that’s making me think like this. You’re bound to be more anxious if there’s no one to tell you not to be daft, aren’t you?’ She glanced back at Henry. ‘So I’ll try not to be daft, darling, I really will. The last thing you’d want me to do is to mistrust a lovely, pure, energetic welling up
of true passion. So I won’t. I’ll believe in her just as – as you always did. Didn’t you?’

  Sir John said that they would take two cars to the barbecue, and that Wills could bring Marianne and Margaret in what he called the Nonsense.

  ‘What is the point of a car in which you can’t get a dog and a gun and a brace of nippers? I ask you.’

  ‘The point’, Wills said behind his hand to Marianne, ‘is that I don’t have to take J Middleton or his brood or his gloomy friends anywhere, ever.’

  They were standing on the drive below the great front steps to Barton Park. A portable barbecue and a vast number of cool boxes were being loaded into the back of Jonno and Bill Brandon’s Range Rovers, and various squeals were emerging from the front hall of the house where all the little Middletons were being inserted by their mother and an exhausted-looking Estonian nanny into outdoor clothes and boots. The Dashwood girls, who had been instructed to bring nothing but their looks and their company, were standing by Wills’s car, or, in Marianne’s case, lounging gracefully along the bonnet. Belle, who had complained of a sore throat at breakfast, had been persuaded by Elinor to stay at home.

  ‘Perfect timing, Ma.’

  ‘It is rather, I know. But this sort of outing is far more fun for you girls.’

  ‘Or not.’

  ‘Well, Marianne will love it.’

  Elinor gave her mother a quick kiss. ‘Marianne would love watching paint dry, if Wills was watching it with her.’

  ‘Darling,’ Belle said, ‘can I ask you something? Do you know if Wills has got a job or anything?’

  Elinor grinned. ‘Ma, you old matchmaker!’

  ‘Well, I can’t help noticing, can I?’

  ‘That he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to get back to whatever he does, and that he and Marianne—’

  ‘Yes,’ Belle said.

  She was wearing the misty expression that usually heralded another reference to Dad. To forestall her, Elinor said quickly, ‘I think he’s in property, or something.’

  ‘Property?’

  ‘Yes. I think he’s a sort of search agent. Looks for flats and houses in London, for foreigners. As investments. All very high end.’

  Belle said carefully, ‘It sounds a bit – venal.’