Joanna Trollope - Sense & Sensibility

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!’

‘We’re going out for coffee,’ Elinor said firmly to Marianne the next morning, ‘and you are going to listen to me. I mean listen. Not just gaze at me while you think about something quite different.’

Marianne was in front of the bathroom mirror, fixing her earrings. Her eyes met Elinor’s in the mirror, wide with innocence. ‘OK. But I don’t want to be lectured.’

‘You mean you don’t want to hear any point of view but your own.’

‘No, I mean I don’t want to be talked down to, and told – what’s that noise?’

‘Mrs J. on the phone. As usual.’

Marianne was suddenly very still. She said, ‘She’s screaming.’

‘She’s always loud.’

‘No, but—’

The voice down the passage to the sitting room stopped abruptly and there was the sound of heavy feet, almost running, towards them, instead. Seconds later, Abigail Jennings appeared in the bathroom doorway, her mobile phone clutched to her tremendous bosom.

‘Girls,’ she said. She sounded as if she could hardly catch her breath. ‘Girls—’

They stepped forward, towards her. Elinor put out an arm as if to support her. ‘Goodness, Mrs J., are you OK? Are you—’

Abigail pressed her phone into the folds of the cashmere scarf draped around her neck. ‘My dears …’

‘What? What – it is something awful?’

Mrs Jennings looked at the ceiling as if for divine sustenance. ‘Not exactly awful …’

Elinor and Marianne now both put steadying hands on their hostess and guided her solicitously across the bathroom to sit on the closed lid of the lavatory. She said, gasping slightly, ‘I just rang Charlotte …’

‘Yes! Yes?’

‘Because, you know, she was in such a state about the baby crying, and I said, Well, it’ll be colic, it’s so common and you need this divine Donovan man, the osteopath, to do a little cranial massage on the baby, and you’ll be amazed at the effect. It’s astonishing how many people simply do not understand how the plates of the brain get squashed on that grim journey down the birth canal, and then that compresses the nerve endings at the base of the skull, and hey presto, colic, poor little—’

‘Is that’, Marianne said, interrupting, from her kneeling position on the bathroom floor beside Mrs Jennings, ‘why you were screaming? Because of the baby and—’

Mrs Jennings gazed at her, round-eyed. ‘Oh no. No, dear. That was why I rang Charlotte. To tell her—’

‘Then why—?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why were you screaming?’

Mrs Jennings took a huge breath, lifted her plump hands and let them fall dramatically into her lap, still holding her telephone.

‘My dear, you will not believe what Charlotte told me. Such dramas. It’s like something out of a novel.’

Elinor knelt too. She said, ‘Please tell us!’

Mrs Jennings bent forward, as if to impart something confidential. ‘There’s been the most ghastly row. In Harley Street. Just this morning. Apparently Nancy Steele thought that everyone there was getting on so famously that it would be perfectly acceptable to tell your brother and sister-in-law that Lucy and the Ferrars boy – your sister-in-law’s brother, dear, the F-word boy, God help us – have been engaged for more than a year, and never told a soul because Mrs Ferrars senior has such fixed ideas about who her boys should marry, being so terrified, as she is, of fortune-hunters. Your sister-in-law went completely ballistic, Charlotte said, and rushed to wake Lucy up and tell her she was sick of cheap little gold-diggers sniffing round her family, and next thing we know, Lucy and Nancy are out on the pavement and round they go to Charlotte’s, straightaway, and Tommy found his kitchen was absolutely full of crying women and a screaming baby and Charlotte says he just went straight off to the office, even though it’s Sunday.’

Marianne was ashen. She sat back on her heels, her hand over her mouth. From behind it, muffled, she said, ‘Not Ed. Not—’

Mrs Jennings patted her. ‘Come on, now, dear. It’s lovely he’s stood by Lucy, isn’t it? I think to defy those money-obsessed Ferrarses takes some doing, I really do. I rather applaud him; I can’t bear people who think money is all that matters.’

Marianne’s gaze swung round to Elinor. She whispered, dropping her hand, ‘Did you know?’

Elinor nodded mutely. ‘When?’ Marianne said.

‘Weeks ago. Months.’

‘And you didn’t tell me?’

Elinor said, looking at the floor, ‘I didn’t tell anyone.’