Which is probably a bigger cold part than I want to admit, and pretty off-putting to the world in general, because Ed hasn’t been in touch since we got here. Nothing. Not a text or a call or an email. Nothing. And I am not contacting him. I am absolutely not. In fact, I have deleted his number from my phone and I have defriended him on Facebook, because although I don’t really want to do either, I have to take charge of the things I can take charge of, and removing myself from contact with him is one of those things, however pathetic. I’ve got to protect myself. Or, to be truthful, I have got to be able to tell myself that I’m at least trying to. I may have felt more comfortable with him than I ever have with anyone, but I am not laying myself open to any more pain or disappointment than comes my way any more. If he’s dumped me – and I’m not sure, if I’m honest, that we ever really got to the level you could be dumped from – then he just has, and I’d better get over it. If he’s met someone else, then he has. I’m not going to cry over him – or at least, I’m not going to cry except in strict, strict privacy – and I’m not going to waste time and energy thinking about him. I’m not. I get fed up with the number of times he occurs to me, every day, but I won’t encourage it. I will get on with what there is to get on with, one foot in front of another—‘How much longer?’ Margaret hissed beside her.
Elinor didn’t look at her. She kept her eyes closed.
‘Two more prayers,’ she whispered. ‘One more hymn.’
Margaret leaned closer. ‘I bet when we get back, they’ll have gone off somewhere and I won’t get a ride in his car today either.’ She paused and then muttered vehemently, ‘It’s not fair.’
The Aston was, surprisingly, still outside the cottage when they got back, walking across the park from the church with Belle cajoling Margaret to admire the view, and the weather, and the prospect of a roast chicken for lunch. Margaret was immediately excited to see the car, and began to run towards it, squealing, so that Elinor, impelled by some instinct that she couldn’t immediately identify, began to run too, catching at Margaret’s sleeve.
‘Stop, Mags, stop!’
‘Why? Why should I?’
Elinor dragged her sister to a halt. ‘Don’t, Mags.’
‘But he promised!’
Elinor glanced up at the cottage. It looked exactly as usual except that there was a distinct and unwelcome air, to Elinor’s perception, of something not being quite right. She held on to Margaret’s sleeve.
‘Just wait.’
‘Why? Why?’
‘I don’t know. Just – just let me go in first.’
‘You are so mean!’
Elinor turned as Belle came up. Belle said, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing, maybe …’
Belle looked at the cottage. ‘We should make a noise, so that they—’
‘No,’ Elinor said. She let go of Margaret. ‘No. I’ll just go in first. Quietly.’
‘Darling, what’s all the drama?’
‘It may be nothing,’ Elinor said.
She walked towards the front door, leaving her mother and sister standing by the car. Margaret laid a reverent hand on the bonnet. She said, in surprise, ‘It’s still warm!’
Belle was watching Elinor. ‘So he hasn’t been here long.’
Elinor put her key into the lock and turned it. As the door opened and Elinor went in, Belle saw, quite plainly, Marianne dash sobbing out of the sitting room and rush towards the stairs and then the door swung shut behind Elinor and left Belle and Margaret standing there, beside the car.
‘I can’t explain,’ Wills said.
To his credit, he looked as stricken as Marianne had. He was standing on the hearthrug, on the very spot he had stood after rescuing Marianne from the thunderstorm, but this time he looked almost cowed, Elinor thought, beaten. His hair looked lank and his face was suddenly the face of someone both older and sadder.
From the doorway, Elinor repeated, slightly louder, ‘What’s happened?’
Wills made a limp gesture with one hand, as if whatever it was had been both incomprehensible and also impossible to avoid or repair. ‘Just – something.’
‘What, Wills, what? What did you say to Marianne?’
Elinor heard the front door open again behind her.
‘That – that I’ve got to go back to London.’
‘Why? Why have you, on a Sunday, all of a sudden?’
‘I just have to.’
Elinor sensed Belle and Margaret coming up right behind her. ‘Did you have a row?’ she demanded.
He shrugged.
‘Did you?’
Belle put a tentative hand on Elinor’s arm. ‘Darling …’
Elinor shrugged her off. ‘Did you have a row, Wills? Did you upset your aunt?’
He sighed.
‘I’ll take it as a yes,’ Elinor said. ‘Was it about Marianne? Was it about yesterday?’
He raised his head slowly and looked at them all. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Is that the truth?’
‘Yes!’ he said, almost shouting. ‘It has nothing to do with Marianne!’
Belle pushed past her daughters. She crossed to the fireplace and put a hand on Wills’s sleeve.
‘Stay here, dear Wills, you’d be so welcome.’
He gazed down at her, his eyes full of tragedy. ‘I can’t.’
‘Of course you can! You can have Mags’s room.’
‘I’ve got to go back to London.’
Margaret said, in amazement, ‘Are you being sent?’
He attempted a lopsided grin. ‘Sort of.’
‘But she can’t.’
‘She can.’
‘Because’, Elinor asked pitilessly, ‘she pays the bills?’
He looked immediately uncomfortable. He said, hesitantly, ‘This isn’t about that.’
‘Then what?’
He seemed to pull himself together. He said, ‘I can’t tell you. I can’t tell Marianne. But none of this, none of it, has anything to do with her. She’s—’ He stopped and then he said, ‘I’m really sorry but I’ve got to go.’
Belle was still touching him. She said earnestly, looking up at him, ‘Till when?’
He paused and firmly disengaged himself. And then he said bitterly, to no one in particular, ‘I wish I knew.’
‘Please eat something,’ Belle said pleadingly.
Marianne had her elbows on the table, planted either side of her untouched plate, and her head in her hands. ‘Can’t.’
‘Just a mouthful, darling, just a—’
‘Can I have her roast potatoes?’ Margaret said.
Elinor, who wasn’t hungry either, put a piece of unwanted chicken in her mouth and chewed. Marianne pushed her plate towards Margaret.
‘Can I?’ Margaret said eagerly, spearing potatoes.
Elinor swallowed her chicken. She said quietly to Marianne, ‘What did he actually say to you?’
Marianne shook her head and put her hands over her eyes.
‘M, he must have said something. He must have said why he couldn’t—’
Marianne sprang up suddenly and fled from the room. They heard her feet thudding up the stairs and then the slam of her bedroom door.
‘You told me’, Margaret said through a mouthful of potato, ‘not to ask her anything, so I didn’t, and then you go and do it.’
‘It must be Jane Smith,’ Belle said to Elinor, ignoring Margaret. ‘She must disapprove.’
‘Why should she?’
‘Well, we’ve got no money.’
‘Ma,’ Elinor said angrily, banging her knife and fork down, ‘this isn’t 1810, for God’s sake. Money doesn’t dictate relationships.’
‘It does for some people. Look at Fanny.’
‘He loves her,’ Elinor said, as if her mother hadn’t spoken. ‘He’s as crazy about her as she is about him.’
‘He’ll be back. I know he will. He’ll ring Marianne. He’s probably rung her already.’
‘Then why’, Margaret said, ‘doe
s she keep crying?’
Elinor pushed her chair back. ‘I’m going to talk to her.’
Belle sighed. ‘Be gentle.’
Elinor paused for a second; then she bit back whatever had occurred to her to say and went out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the landing. She tapped on Marianne’s door. ‘M?’
‘Go away.’
Elinor tried the handle. The door was locked. ‘Please let me in.’
‘No.’
‘I want to talk.’
‘Talking won’t help. Nothing will help.’
Elinor waited a moment, her cheek almost against the door, and then she said, ‘Has he rung?’
Silence.
‘Have you rung him?’
Silence.
‘Or texted?’
There was a stifled something from the far side of the door.
‘Oh, Marianne,’ Elinor said, ‘please let me in. Please.’
She could hear a faint shuffling as if Marianne was approaching the door.
‘M?’
From behind the door, Marianne said hoarsely, ‘You can’t help. No one can. Aunt Jane threw him out just like Fanny did Edward. You ought to understand, if anyone can. You ought.’
Elinor waited a moment and then she said, as quietly as she could, ‘M. Is it – over?’
There was a long, long silence and then Marianne hissed through the keyhole, ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say that. Ever.’
‘My dear,’ Abigail Jennings said, ‘has she stopped crying?’
Belle was making coffee. She had not been at all pleased to see her visitor, especially as she had neither Elinor nor Margaret at home to shield her. She nodded towards the huge jug of mop-headed chrysanthemums that Abigail had brought with her.
‘Lovely flowers.’
‘You look, my dear, as if you need a stiff drink rather than flowers. It’s exhausting living with a broken heart. I remember it all too well with my own girls. Mary was a terrific weeper but luckily Charlotte was more like me and always thought there’d be a better bet somewhere else every time it happened. Mind you, I thought she’d do the dumping when it came to Tommy Palmer. But no. He has no manners whatsoever but she seems to find him funny. No accounting for taste, that’s for sure. Except when it comes to Wills – he seems to be to the taste of every living thing with a pulse.’ She looked at Belle with concern. ‘Your poor girl.’
Belle said carefully, ‘It would help if we knew why.’
Abigail raised her plump hands and let them crash on to the table, making the mugs Belle had just put down dance. ‘Money, dear.’
‘No, he—’
‘Sorry, dear, but it’ll be money. He’ll have asked Jane for another handout and she’ll have given him a flea in his ear. That car …’
‘Beautiful.’
‘Tens of thousands it would cost, dear. Tens. Even to lease it. He has champagne tastes, that boy.’
‘But’, Belle said, feeling that even if Abigail wasn’t the right person it was a relief to have someone to talk to, ‘why be so melodramatic, if it was just about money? Why rush off leaving Marianne in pieces like this if—’
‘Pride, dear. Men like that don’t care to be dependent. He’d want Marianne to think he’d earned it.’
‘Hasn’t he?’
Abigail gave a cackle of laughter. ‘He wouldn’t know hard work, dear, if it jumped up and bit him on the bottom!’
Belle began to pour the coffee. ‘They were so adorable together.’
Abigail leaned forward, folding her arms under the cushiony shelf of her bosom. ‘Well, luckily, dear, marriage bells aren’t the only answer for girls these days, are they? And Marianne’s only just out of school, for goodness’ sake.’
Belle said abstractly, ‘I was only eighteen when I met their father.’
‘You were an exception, dear. The modern way is to be like your Elinor, with a career and no time wasted mooning over this F boy. Jonno and I have been killing ourselves over that. The F-word boy, we call him!’ She looked round. ‘Where is Marianne?’
Belle pushed a mug of coffee across the table. ‘She’s gone for a walk. She walks all the time, poor darling, wearing herself out. I make her take her phone and her inhaler but I can’t help her sleep.’
‘And Elinor?’
Belle looked a little startled, as if she’d temporarily forgotten about Elinor. ‘Oh, she’s at work.’
‘Sensible girl. Does she like it?’
‘I think so,’ Belle said uncertainly. ‘I mean, she’s only just started, so it’s a bit early to know.’
Abigail took a swallow of coffee. ‘He’s a naughty boy, Wills, a very naughty boy. And the sooner Marianne gets over her infatuation, the—’
‘It’s not an infatuation!’ Belle said indignantly.
Abigail stared at her. Belle leaned towards her, across the table. ‘Don’t you’, she said, in a different and more emotional tone of voice, ‘believe in love at first sight?’
Abigail went on staring. Then she picked up her coffee mug again. ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said, ‘but no. I do not.’
On the hill above Allenham, where the fateful thunderstorm had begun, Marianne sat on the damp grass, hugging her knees. Below her, the old house lay quietly in hazy autumn sunshine, on its hillside, a plume of bluish smoke rising softly out of one of the marvellous twisted Elizabethan chimneypots, the only other sign of life being the miniature figure of one of Jane Smith’s gardeners raking up leaves. She couldn’t hear him from where she sat, but she could watch him, with avidity. He was raking across the sweep of grass below the window behind which she had had the most wonderful afternoon of her life, in a four-poster bed whose hangings, Wills said, had been embroidered in 1720. She had put a hand out to touch them, reverently, and he had captured her hand in his at once and said that she wasn’t to give a flicker of her attention to anyone or anything but him, or he’d be jealous.
He’d been gorgeously, blissfully jealous of everything that day. She’d wanted to examine every painting and rug, to exclaim over panelling and marquetry and plasterwork, to run her hands over velvet chair seats and polished chests, but he’d stopped her, laughing, pulling her to him, taking her face in his hands, touching her, kissing her, pushing her down into that welter of linen pillows and silky quilts on the great bed until she capitulated completely and let him take her over. Her eyes filled now thinking about it, thinking about him. It had been the ultimate in truth and beauty, to surrender to someone like that when it was someone that you were meant – meant, as she and Wills were – to belong to.
‘Don’t contact me,’ he’d said to her on that Sunday, kneeling on the hearthrug in front of her, clutching her to him, his cheek pressed to her belly. ‘Don’t do anything until I’m in touch again, anything.’
She’d had her hands in his hair. She said shakily, ‘But how am I to know—’
‘Trust me,’ he said. She could hear that his teeth were clenched. ‘Trust me.’
‘Of course.’
He lifted his face. He said, ‘You do, don’t you?’
She nodded vehemently. ‘You’ve got to,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to. You’re the only person in my life who I trust and who trusts me. The only one.’
Even in her shock and misery, she had felt a jolt of happiness then, a little flash of recognition and self-justification. He’d be in touch. He’d be back. He said he would – and he would. He belonged to her; they belonged together. Trust was too small a word for what they had between them.
She got slowly to her feet. The gardener was now piling the leaves into a kind of mesh-sided truck. It wasn’t fair, really, to expect even Ma, let alone Ellie and Mags, to have the first idea of what she was feeling, or of what she and Wills felt for each other. Ma and Dad had had something pretty good going, for sure, but Mags was still a kid and Ellie didn’t have a passionate bone in her body. She, Marianne, must remember that. She must go home and, while needing to remind them all that, with Wills absent, she was only half a person
at all times, she must be forgiving and understanding about Elinor’s limitations.
She began to walk back along the ridge towards the lane and the path down to Barton Cottage. She put a hand into her pocket to pull out her phone – and withdrew it. She would not torment herself by checking it for messages. She had switched it to silent for that very reason. He had said he would be in touch and explain everything, when whatever was the matter was sorted, and he would. She knew it. She knew him and he would do what he had promised. More likely, actually, she thought, scrambling down the bank to the lane where she had first seen his car, he would probably surprise her.
Half skipping down the path to the cottage, Marianne was aware that she felt almost light-hearted. It had been good to look at Allenham, good to remind herself of that magical day, good to reassure herself that exceptional people could not have anything other than equally exceptional relationships. And as she came round the corner of the cottage to the area of gravel Sir John had laid down for parking, she caught a gleam of silver, glossy silvery grey, exactly the colour and finish of Wills’s car, and she began to run, stumbling and gasping, towards it, her arms outstretched and ready.
But it was a Ford Sierra on the gravel. A battered old Ford Sierra with a peeling speed stripe down the side. And Edward Ferrars was getting out of it, looking thin and tired, in the kind of sweatshirt that Wills would never have been seen dead in.
He gave her a half-hearted smile. ‘Hello, M,’ he said.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Margaret demanded.
They were sitting round the kitchen table with macaroni cheese and a bowl of salad that Margaret had positioned so that nobody could see she hadn’t taken any.
Edward put down a forkful of pasta. He said vaguely, ‘Oh, here and there. Plymouth and stuff. The usual.’
Elinor wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t, in fact, looking at anyone. She had arrived home, with Margaret, in the dusk, to find Edward and Marianne playing the guitar together, and Belle bustling in the kitchen – ‘So lovely to have someone to cook for, even if it is only macaroni cheese’ – and nobody had seemed particularly pleased to see her, let alone troubled to ask her how her day at work had been. All right, it had been her fourth day, not her first, but it was still her first week. And Ed – well, Ed might have managed to make some distinction between greeting her and greeting Mags. Mightn’t he?
Sense & Sensibility Page 11
