Joanna Trollope - Sense & Sensibility

She had texted everyone as she ate her muffin. It was the dullest of muffins, studded here and there with synthetic blueberries tasting of nothing but an indefinable bland sweetness, but nothing Elinor could immediately recollect had ever tasted so wonderful. She ate and drank with her left hand and texted furiously with her right, texts to her mother and Margaret, and Bill, to Mrs Jennings and the Palmers. ‘It’s OK,’ she wrote, ‘OK!!! She’s breathing! She’s breathing!’ She lay back in her chair now, eyes shut, her hands on her own ribs, feeling them rising and falling, rising and falling, letting her mind bob gently like a boat on little waves in the sunshine, over the miracle of her relief, the extravagant immensity of her gratitude, the intense and marvellous sense of being alive, herself, and able to relish that because Marianne was still alive, Marianne was breathing, breathing—

‘Elinor,’ someone said.

She opened her eyes, and looked up.

There was a man standing beside her, a vaguely familiar, dishevelled-looking man in a suede jacket with too long hair. She stared at him.

He sat down beside her. He was holding a showy modern car ignition key, the kind where you press a button—‘It’s Wills,’ Wills said. He tried a smile. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’

‘God,’ Elinor said, instinctively drawing back. ‘God, how dare you—’

He put a hand out. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Charlotte.’

‘Charlotte?’

‘She rang me. At seven o’clock this morning. She said it was an emergency.’ He looked down at the key in his hand. He said, with quiet emphasis, ‘She knows how I feel.’

Elinor edged on to the next chair, away from him. She said, ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘Please, Elinor. I won’t stay long, I promise. But I have to know, I have to know … Is – is she going to be OK?’

Elinor looked out of the window. ‘Yes,’ she said shortly.

He gave a kind of shuddering sigh, a gasp of thankfulness. ‘Thank God. Thank God. I couldn’t have borne it. I couldn’t—’ He stopped. He glanced at Elinor, and then he said, ‘D’you think I’m a shit?’

She continued to look out of the window. She said, ‘Are you drunk or something?’

He sighed. He said, ‘I got in the car at seven ten this morning and drove here like the clappers. I haven’t even had a coffee.’

She turned to glare at him. ‘I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing. I don’t care if you drove from – from Aberdeen. You have no business to be here. Charlotte had no business to ring you.’

He let a moment or two pass before saying, ‘Will – will you give me five minutes, just five minutes?’

‘I don’t see why I should. I can’t think why you should imagine I’d give you a second’s thought, let alone any time.’

He leaned forward. He said, with naked earnestness, ‘I did behave like a shit, Elinor. I did. I’ll never forgive myself. But can I just try and explain, can I just …’ He stopped again. Then he said, almost in a whisper, ‘I want to say sorry.’

Elinor said nothing.

He said, ‘I can’t hope that she’d ever forgive me—’

Elinor said quietly, ‘She already has. That’s another reason why you never deserved her.’

He almost sprang to his feet. ‘She has? She’s forgiven me?’

Elinor looked away again. ‘Long ago.’

He said fervently, ‘She’s amazing. I’ve never known anyone like her. And I never will.’ He said, almost desperately, ‘You must believe me. Your sister is the most wonderful person I have ever known, or ever will.’

Elinor turned her head again and looked at him, stonily. He was still beautiful, but he looked disreputable today, slightly jowly, unshaven, with his hair straggling over his collar and bloodshot eyes. She said coldly, ‘What about the others?’

‘Others?’

‘Little Eliza,’ Elinor said, enunciating with deliberation. ‘And I bet she wasn’t the only one.’

He said with difficulty, ‘No.’

‘Busted by the police, in a pub lavatory.’

‘I didn’t know that, till after it happened.’

‘Which absolves you?’

‘No. No, of course it doesn’t. But it doesn’t make me culpable—’

‘You started it. You gave her drugs, in the beginning.’

He winced. He said, ‘You sound like Aunt Jane.’

‘Good,’ Elinor said, ‘I mean to. And she was pregnant.’

‘Not by me.’

‘Huh!’

He said sadly, ‘Would it satisfy you to know that that’s why Aunt Jane threw me out and changed her will? I always thought Bill Brandon had—’

‘Leave him out of it!’

Wills licked his lips. He said, ‘I was in such debt. Utterly maxed. Every card.’

Elinor said tartly, ‘Well, you aren’t now, are you. You dug for gold, and’ – she glanced pointedly at his wedding ring – ‘you found it.’

‘I was in real trouble. I had to.’

‘Like you had to publicly humiliate my sister? Like you had to send back everything she had given you as if it was the contents of a – of a waste-paper basket?’

He said, in a low voice, ‘That was Ally.’

‘So none of this is your fault really. Your godmother, your wife – your poor wife – they’re all instruments of your great misfortune, are they?’

He raised his head and looked at her. He said, ‘I’ve only been in love, truly in love, once, and that was with M – with your sister.’

Elinor said nothing.

He said pleadingly, ‘Will you tell her that? Will you tell her, when she’s better, that I came and that – that she wasn’t wrong. I did care. I do care. And Ally knows that. Ally knows why I married her.’ He stood up and looked down at Elinor. ‘Will you tell her that?’

‘I might.’

‘Do – do you still think I’m a shit?’

Elinor sighed. ‘I think you’re a car crash. A destructive car crash.’

‘I’ll take that as one degree more approving than a complete shit.’

She shrugged. He bent over her. He said, ‘Can I ask you one more thing?’

‘One more.’

‘Is – is there anyone else in Marianne’s life? Anyone else will be bad enough, but there’s a particular person—’

Elinor stood too. ‘Get out,’ she said.

He said, persisting, ‘You know I’ll never forgive myself, don’t you? You know I’ll be punished all my life—’

Elinor looked at him. She said, ‘If your worst punishment is Marianne never giving you another thought, as long as she lives, then yes, you will,’ and then she turned on her heel, marched down the corridor to the visitors’ room and shut the door of it behind her with a bang.

Belle Dashwood came out of Marianne’s bedroom and closed the door quietly behind her. Elinor was halfway down the stairs. She turned. ‘Is she—?’

Belle put her finger to her lips. ‘Sleeping. Or on the verge of it. D’you know, she nearly has pink cheeks?’

Elinor smiled. They had been back at Barton for a week now, and, after an initially tearful response to being home among everything that was familiar – and painful, for the very reason of being familiar – Marianne had set herself to recover with a purposefulness that astonished all of them. She had even, Elinor discovered, been online, researching a guitar foundation course at the Bristol branch of the Brighton Institute for Modern Music.

‘I could even apply for a scholarship, Ellie. Your family income has to be below forty thousand pounds, and ours easily is.’

Belle came down the stairs towards Elinor. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

‘Nor me.’

‘That drive. That ghastly drive to the hospital – till your text came, of course. And the waiting for Bill, before, and feeling I shouldn’t ring you again, because I’d only howl. Mags was so brave. Every time I looked at her, she smiled even though her poor face was a mask of tragedy. Thank God she isn’t asthmatic. Or you, darling.’

‘Ma?’

‘Yes, darling?’

‘Can we talk?’

‘Of course! But maybe not on the stairs. Shall we even open some wine? Jonno’s sent enough to float a ship. He thinks red wine is an absolute cure-all and I haven’t the heart to tell him that Marianne doesn’t really like it.’

‘But Bill sent some white, didn’t he?’

Belle smiled fondly at the thought. ‘Darling Bill. I’ve never met a man so thoughtful.’

In the kitchen, Margaret had left her school bag on the table. She herself was nowhere to be seen, and was no doubt in her Thomas-made tree house, messaging her friends. Since Marianne’s recovery, her relief had manifested itself in a permanent state of contempt for her family, and every time she was asked not to do something – play her music at anti-social volume, monopolise the bathroom for hours, stare mutely and moodily at whatever was on her plate at mealtimes – was inclined to shout, ‘Ruin my life, why don’t you?’ and stamp out of the room.

‘Ought she to be doing her homework?’ Belle said now.

‘Probably.’

‘Shall we – not make her, just for the moment?’

Elinor subsided into a kitchen chair. ‘Oh, please yes,’ she said tiredly.

Belle opened the fridge and took out a bottle of white wine. She put it on the table and glanced at Elinor.

‘Are you all right, darling?’

‘Yes. I’m fine. I just wanted to tell you that – Wills came to the hospital. Just before you did.’

Belle seemed neither surprised nor especially interested to hear this. She inserted a corkscrew into the neck of the bottle. She said, non-committally, ‘Did he now.’

‘Yes, Ma. He drove down from London because Charlotte alerted him to Marianne’s asthma attack.’

Belle wound the screw in with great concentration. She said, ‘That was very silly of her.’

‘I know. I’ve told her so. But she says he’s still mad about Marianne, and always was, and never stopped being, and she thought he ought to be allowed to say that in such a crisis, and even more that Marianne ought to know it.’

Belle drew the cork out very slowly. She said, almost dismissively, ‘Water under the bridge, darling.’

‘Ma. Should I tell Marianne?’

‘Why bother?’

‘Well,’ Elinor said, pushing the two glasses Belle had put on the table towards her mother, ‘might it not be a bit consoling for M to know that he did mean it, and that she was right to insist that he did?’

Belle began to pour the wine carefully into the glasses.

‘Lovely colour. Look at that! We’re so lucky that Bill knows about wine. D’you know, darling, I don’t think we need bother Marianne about Wills any more. That’s history. He’s history. She’s got far better fish to fry now.’ She stopped pouring and pushed a glass back towards Elinor. ‘I didn’t tell you …’

‘Didn’t tell me what?’

Belle sat down on the opposite side of the table. She took a deep and appreciative swallow of wine. ‘My journey with Bill. We were all in such a state at the beginning, of course we were, and I thought he was just being grim and silent because he was respecting how upset we were, but then your text came, and I suddenly saw that he was fighting back tears, real tears, and I didn’t actually mean to say anything specific but before I could help myself, I said, Oh, Bill dear, are you more than just relieved for the girls and me? And he nodded and couldn’t speak and then he suddenly swerved the car on to the hard shoulder and put his arms on the steering wheel and his head on his arms and honestly, Ellie, he just wept like a baby. And Mags and I patted him a bit, like you do, and then he gave a kind of gasp and said it was hopeless, he was so boring and why would anyone like Marianne ever even think of an old fossil like him, and we said, There, there, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and he said we weren’t to mention it to anyone, ever, and blew his nose, and off we went again. But wouldn’t it be wonderful?’

‘He’s the nicest man.’

‘I know. And very attractive.’

‘You mean well-off.’

‘No, darling. Of course, it’s lovely he’s got money and a house and a business and all that, but it’s beside the point. The point is that when you look at him, you think, Oh, very attractive. A very, very attractive man. What does Marianne think?’

Elinor ran a finger round the rim of her glass. ‘I don’t think she’s thinking about men just now—’

The door to the hall opened.

‘I might be,’ Marianne said.

‘Darling!’

She came into the room in her rosebud and plaid pyjamas, pulled out a chair and sat down. She looked at the wine.