Joanna Trollope - Sense & Sensibility

Elinor recovered herself a little. ‘Ed never said anything to me about—’

‘No, he wouldn’t. He’s so shy. And there’s his old witch of a mother so it had to be secret from everyone. But we saw each other again at a party the other day – mutual friends down here – and I just knew. The minute I saw him again, I knew. It was like we’d never been apart. Poor lamb, he was so drunk that night! Completely out of it. I expect it was the relief of seeing me, don’t you? But honestly, Elinor, thank goodness I was there to look after him, he was in such a state.’ She paused and gave Elinor a wide smile. ‘And the next day, I took him shopping.’ She held the chain out to Elinor. There was a ring on it, a flat silver band, with a small green stone set into it.

‘We got these,’ Lucy said, ‘both of us. He didn’t really want one but that’s just a boy thing, isn’t it, about having anything that might be thought girly, so I made him have one too. And now he texts me, like, all the time. Shall I show you how many? I can’t show you what they say, of course, but you’d understand that, wouldn’t you? I’ve told him that when I’m twenty-one – any minute, so exciting! – we’ll tell everyone, and between you and me, Ellie – can I call you Ellie? – I’ll be sick with relief. I hate secrets, just hate them, and anyway it stresses me out, not saying, and worrying that Nancy might, because she’s so hopeless and blabs everything to everyone, and she’s the only person who knows. Oh God, it’s been such a strain!’

Elinor regarded her. She said, as levelly as she could, ‘Why is it still a secret? Why don’t you just marry?’

Lucy sighed. She picked up the nearest tea towel and held it to her face, as if to wipe her eyes with it. ‘Ed says he can’t. He can’t commit till he knows what he’s going to do. He says he can’t expect me to live in a hole-and-corner way on nothing.’

‘Aren’t you earning?’

Lucy raised her chin. ‘I’m a therapist.’

‘Oh.’

‘Reflexology.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t make enough money to support both of us. It’s heartbreaking.’

Elinor straightened her shoulders a little. ‘I’m sure it is.’

‘I just thought’, Lucy said, her voice becoming little girlish, ‘that if you knew Ed’s mother, you could help me think of a way to get round her. Because we’re so stressed about it all. Didn’t you think Ed was stressed when he came to stay with you? He’d come straight from me, and we’d had such an awful time saying goodbye. Awful. We’ve got to take some action. We’ve got to. Don’t you think?’

The kitchen door opened. Margaret stood there, holding the dish in which Belle had made an enormous apple crumble.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ Elinor said.

Lucy smiled at her and swooped forward to relieve her of the crumble dish. ‘Your lovely sister’, she said, ‘is helping me to untangle a bit of a knot in my life. That’s all.’

Margaret stared at her and let the dish go. She shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ she said.

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.’