Sense & Sensibility

by Joanna Trollope

‘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 inexorab
ly 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—’