‘Two hundred thousand pounds is not nothing, my dear Belle. Two hundred thousand is a considerable sum of money.’

‘For four women! For four women to live on forever! Four women without even a roof over their heads?’

John looked stricken for a moment and then rallied. He indicated the bottle on the table. ‘I brought you some wine.’

Margaret inspected the bottle. She said to no one in particular, ‘I don’t expect we’ll even cook with that.’

‘Shush,’ Elinor said, automatically.

Belle surveyed her stepson. ‘You promised your father.’

John looked back at her. ‘I promised I’d look after you. I will. I’ll help you find a house to rent.’

‘Too kind,’ Marianne said fiercely.

‘The interest on—’

‘Interest rates are hopeless, John.’

‘I’m amazed you know about such things.’

‘And I’m amazed at your blithe breaking of sacred promises.’

Elinor put a hand on her mother’s arm. She said to her brother, ‘Please.’ Then she said, in a lower tone, ‘We’ll find a way.’

John looked relieved. ‘That’s more like it. Good girl.’

Marianne shouted suddenly, ‘You are really wicked, do you hear me? Wicked! What’s the word, what is it, the Shakespeare word? It’s – it’s – yes, John, yes, you are perfidious.’

There was a brief, horrified silence. Belle put a hand out towards Marianne and Elinor was afraid they’d put their arms round each other, as they often did, for solidarity, in extravagant reaction.

She said to John, ‘I think you had better go.’

He nodded thankfully, and took a step back.

‘She’ll be looking for you,’ Margaret said. ‘Has she got a dog whistle she can blow to get you to come running?’

Marianne stopped looking tragic and gave a snort of laughter. So, a second later, did Belle. John glanced at them both and then looked past them at the Welsh dresser where all the plates were displayed, the pretty, scallop-edged plates that Henry and Belle had collected from Provençal holidays over the years, and lovingly brought back, two or three at a time.

John moved towards the door. With his hand on the handle, he turned and briefly indicated the dresser. ‘Fanny adores those plates, you know.’

And now, only a day later, here they were, grouped round the table yet again, exhausted by a further calamity, by rage at Fanny’s malevolence and John’s feebleness, terrified at the prospect of a future in which they did not even know where they were going to lay their heads, let alone how they were going to pay for the privilege of laying them anywhere.

‘I will of course be qualified in a year,’ Elinor said.

Belle gave her a tired smile. ‘Darling, what use will that be? You draw beautifully but how many architects are unemployed right now?’

‘Thank you, Ma.’

Marianne put a hand on Elinor’s. ‘She’s right. You do draw beautifully.’

Elinor tried to smile at her sister. She said, bravely, ‘She’s also right that there are no jobs for architects, especially newly qualified ones.’ She looked at her mother. ‘Could you get a teaching job again?’

Belle flung her hands wide. ‘Darling, it’s been forever!’

‘This is extreme, Ma.’

Marianne said to Margaret, ‘You’ll have to go to state school.’

Margaret’s face froze. ‘I won’t.’

‘You will.’

‘Mags, you may just have to—’

‘I won’t!’ Margaret shouted.

She ripped her earphones out of her ears and stamped to the window, standing there with her back to the room and her shoulders hunched. Then her shoulders abruptly relaxed. ‘Hey!’ she said, in quite a different voice.

Elinor half rose. ‘Hey what?’

Margaret didn’t turn. Instead she leaned out of the window and began to wave furiously. ‘Edward!’ she shouted. ‘Edward!’ And then she turned back long enough to say, unnecessarily, over her shoulder, ‘Edward’s coming!’

2

However detestable Fanny had made herself since she arrived at Norland, all the Dashwoods were agreed that she had one redeeming attribute, which was the possession of her brother Edward.

He had arrived at the Park soon after his sister moved in, and everyone had initially assumed that this tallish, darkish, diffident young man – so unlike his dangerous little dynamo of a sister – had come to admire the place and the situation that had fallen so magnificently into Fanny’s lap. But after only a day or so, it became plain to the Dashwoods that the perpetual, slightly needy presence of Edward in their kitchen was certainly because he liked it there, and felt comfortable, but also because he had nowhere much else to go, and nothing much else to occupy himself with. He was even, it appeared, perfectly prepared to confess to being at a directionless loose end.

‘I’m a bit of a failure, I’m afraid,’ he said quite soon after his arrival. He was sitting on the edge of the kitchen table, his hair flopping in his eyes, pushing runner beans through a slicer, as instructed by Belle.

‘Oh no,’ Belle said at once, and warmly, ‘I’m sure you aren’t. I’m sure you’re just not very good at self-promotion.’

Edward stopped slicing to extract a large, mottled pink bean that had jammed the blades. He said, slightly challengingly, ‘Well, I was thrown out of Eton.’

‘Were you?’ they all said.

Margaret took one earphone out. She said, with real interest, ‘What did you do?’

‘I was lookout for some up-to-no-good people.’

‘What people? Real bad guys?’

‘Other boys.’

Margaret leaned closer. She said, conspiratorially, ‘Druggies?’

Edward grinned at his beans. ‘Sort of.’

‘Did you take any?’

‘Shut up, Mags,’ Elinor said from the far side of the room.

Edward looked up at her for a moment, with a look she would have interpreted as pure gratitude if she thought she’d done anything to be thanked for, and then he said, ‘No, Mags. I didn’t even have the guts to join in. I was lookout for the others, and I messed up that, too, big time, and we were all expelled. Mum has never forgiven me. Not to this day.’

Belle patted his hand. ‘I’m sure she has.’

Edward said, ‘You don’t know my mother.’

‘I think’, said Marianne from the window seat where she was curled up, reading, ‘that it’s brilliant to be expelled. Especially from anywhere as utterly conventional as Eton.’

‘But maybe,’ Elinor said quietly, ‘it isn’t very convenient.’

Edward looked at her intently again. He said, ‘I was sent to a crammer instead. In disgrace. In Plymouth.’

‘My goodness,’ Belle said, ‘that was drastic. Plymouth!’

Margaret put her earphone back in. The conversation had gone back to boring.

Elinor said encouragingly, ‘So you got all your A levels and things?’

‘Sort of,’ Edward said. ‘Not very well. I did a lot of – messing around. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d paid more attention. I’d really apply myself to it now, but it’s too late.’

‘It’s never too late!’ Belle declared.

Edward put the bean slicer down. He said, again to Elinor, as if she would understand him better than anyone, ‘Mum wants me to go and work for an MP.’

‘Does she?’

‘Or do a law degree and read for the Bar. She wants me to do something – something …’

‘Showy,’ Elinor said.

He smiled at her again. ‘Exactly.’

‘When what you want to do,’ Belle said, picking up the slicer again and putting it back gently into his hand, ‘is really …?’

Edward selected another bean. ‘I want to do community work of some kind. I know it sounds a bit wet, but I don’t want houses and cars and money and all the stuff my family seems so keen on. My brother Robert seems to be able to get away with anything just because he isn’t the eldest. My mother – well, it’s weird. Robert’s a kind of upmarket party planner, huge rich parties in London, the sort of thing I hate, and my mother turns a completely blind eye to that hardly being a career of distinction. But when it comes to me, she goes on and on about visibility and money and power. She doesn’t even seem to look at the kind of person I am. I just want to do something quiet and sort of – sort of …’

‘Helpful?’ Elinor said.

Edward got off the table and turned so that he could look at her with pure undiluted appreciation. ‘Yes,’ he said with emphasis.

Later that night, jostling in front of the bathroom mirror with their toothbrushes and dental floss, Marianne said to Elinor, ‘He likes you.’

Elinor spat a mouthful of toothpaste foam into the basin. ‘No, he doesn’t. He just likes being around us all, because Ma’s cosy with him and we don’t pick on him and tell him to smarten up and sharpen up all the time, like Fanny does.’

Marianne took a length of floss out of her mouth. ‘Ellie, he likes us all. But he likes you in particular.’

Elinor didn’t reply. She began to brush her hair vigorously, upside down, to forestall further conversation.

Marianne reangled the floss across her lower jaw. Round it she said indistinctly, ‘D’you like him?’

‘Can’t hear you.’

‘Yes, you can. Do you, Elinor Dashwood, picky spinster of this parish for whom no man so far seems to be remotely good enough, fancy this very appealing basket case called Edward Ferrars?’

Elinor stood upright and pushed the hair off her face. ‘No.’

‘Liar.’

There was a pause.

‘Well, a bit,’ Elinor said.

Marianne leaned forward and peered into the mirror. ‘He’s perfect for you, Ellie. You’re such a missionary, you’d have to have someone to rescue. Ed is ripe for rescue. And he’s the sweetest guy.’

‘I’m not interested. The last thing I want right now is anyone else who needs sorting.’

‘Bollocks,’ Marianne said.

‘It’s not—’

‘He couldn’t take his eyes off you tonight. You only had to say the dullest thing and he was all over you, like a Labrador puppy.’

‘Stop it.’

‘But it’s lovely, Ellie! It’s lovely, in the midst of everything that’s so awful, to have Edward thinking you’re wonderful.’

Elinor began to smooth her hair back into a ponytail, severely. ‘It’s all wrong, M. It’s all wrong at the moment with all this uncertainty and worrying about money, and where we’ll go and everything. It’s all wrong to be thinking about whether I like Edward.’

Marianne turned to her sister, suddenly grinning. ‘Tell you what …’

‘What?’

‘Wouldn’t it just completely piss off Fanny if you and Ed got together?’

The next day, Edward borrowed Fanny’s car and asked Elinor to go to Brighton with him.

‘Does she know?’ Elinor said.

He smiled at her. He had beautiful teeth, she noticed, even if nobody could exactly call him handsome. ‘Does who know what?’

‘Does – does Fanny know you are going to Brighton?’

‘Oh yes,’ Edward said easily, ‘I’ve got a huge list of things to pick up for her: bath taps and theatre tickets and wallpaper samples from—’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Elinor said. ‘I meant, does Fanny know you were going to ask me to go with you?’

‘No,’ Edward said. ‘And she needn’t. I have her great bus for the day, I have her shopping list, and nothing else is any of her business.’

Elinor looked doubtful.

‘He’s absolutely right,’ Belle said. ‘She’ll never know and it won’t affect her, knowing or not knowing.’

‘But—’

‘Get in, darling.’

‘Yes, get in.’

‘Come on,’ Edward said, opening the passenger door and smiling again. ‘Come on. Please. Please. We’ll have fish and chips on the beach. Don’t make me go alone.’

‘I should be working …’ Elinor said faintly.

She glanced at Edward. He bent slightly and, with the hand not holding the door, gave her a small, decisive shove into the passenger seat. Then he closed the door firmly behind her. He was beaming broadly, and went back round to the driver’s side at a run.

‘Look at that,’ Marianne said approvingly. ‘Who’s the dog with two tails?’

‘Both wagging.’

The car lurched off at speed, in a spray of gravel.

‘He’s a dear,’ Belle said.

‘You’d like anyone who liked Ellie.’

‘I would. Of course I would. But he’s a dear in his own right.’

‘And rich. The Ferrarses are stinking—’

‘I don’t’, Belle said, putting her arm round Marianne, ‘give a stuff about that. Any more than you do. If he’s a dear boy and he likes Ellie and she likes him, that is more than good enough for me. And for you too, I bet.’