Joanna Trollope - Sense & Sensibility

‘Why?’ Edward demanded.

‘Because she wants nothing so much as for her children to be happy. Because she has been badly wounded by her sons’ conduct just recently.’

Edward ran his hand through his hair. He said incredulously, ‘Are you saying I should write to my mother and say sorry for Robert?’

‘Well, it would be very much to your advantage—’

‘No.’

‘Edward—’

‘No. Absolutely not. Never. I wish I hadn’t had all that nonsense with Lucy, but I am so certain, so certain about Elinor that I don’t give one single stuff about what any of you think. I’m not sorry. I’m not humble. I might talk to Mother about all this, one day, if she’ll ever listen, but I absolutely refuse to write a letter that I don’t mean and for something I haven’t done. Right?’

John said stiffly, ‘You are making a big mistake.’

‘Not as big as my mother’s!’ Edward shouted.

There was silence. Then John said, with elaborate dignity, ‘I shall go and convey this to your sister.’

‘You do that,’ Edward said rudely. ‘How does it feel to be pussy-whipped by two women in your life?’

There was shocked silence at the other end of the line. An orange car was creeping along the valley floor, and Edward felt his heart lift in his chest, like a bird.

‘Bye,’ he said, into the phone, carelessly, ‘bye,’ and tossed it on to the dented cushions of the sofa.

Marianne was sitting on the ridge above the valley where Allenham lay. She was sitting upright, her hands round her knees, and a yard away, Bill Brandon lay on his elbow in the grass and watched her. Her hair was loose down her back and, every so often, a breath of breeze lifted a strand or two and he watched them float and then settle again.

She was not, he observed, looking tense or strained. She was gazing down at the old house, at its eccentric Tudor chimneys and neat hedge-partitioned gardens, and her expression was one of dreamy half-interest, rather than one of any intensity. It was strangely comfortable, being up there with her, in silence, and he found he was in no hurry to break it, or to know what she was thinking as she looked down, not just on a place she knew, but a place she had hoped to know so much better.

It had, after all, been astonishing to him that she should ask him to walk with her at all. Of course, Belle didn’t want her going anywhere alone for the moment, and he had been conveniently lounging about in the garden, ostensibly waiting for Edward, when Marianne had come right up to him, and looked straight at him, and said she needed to go and have a look at Allenham, and would he go with her?

They’d climbed up, companionably enough, through the woods, across the lane and he’d made her, without fuss, stop to catch her breath before they set out across the ridge itself. He’d offered to carry the sweater she’d taken off, and she’d said, ‘No,’ and he’d calmly said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ and taken it, and she’d turned to him, laughing, and let him. And now here they were, on the rough, tussocky grass high above Allenham, in easy silence, a yard apart. Only a yard, Bill thought, but it’s a distance. And I’ve made it, because I am desperate not to push her. And, actually, it’s more than enough, it’s wonderful to lie here and watch her able to look down at that house without it distressing her. She’s not indifferent – that would be too much to hope for – but she’s not yearning, either.

As if she’d read his thoughts. Marianne turned and smiled at him.

She said, ‘It’s OK.’

‘Is it?’

She nodded.

He said, ‘Was it a test? To come back here?’

She nodded again. ‘Sort of.’

‘And you passed?’

She turned to look at him properly. Then she dropped her gaze to the turf. She said softly, ‘First love …’

He let a beat fall, then he said, ‘Tell me about it.’

She gave him a quick smile. ‘I don’t suppose there’ll ever be anything quite like it.’

‘No,’ he said hesitantly, ‘but that doesn’t mean it’s the best. Only that it’s unique in its own way.’

‘Because it’s the first—’

‘And one doesn’t know enough not to surrender oneself completely.’

She said, not in a melancholy way, ‘I liked that quality.’

‘Me too.’

She glanced at him. ‘Did you?’

He plucked a buttercup and twirled it. He said ruefully, ‘I wanted to drown in what I was feeling.’

‘Really?’

‘I didn’t want to know what she was like. In fact, I wanted not to know. I just wanted what I believed, and to feel.’

‘Wow,’ Marianne said respectfully.

He smiled at her. ‘And you?’

‘Just like you,’ she said.

‘So perhaps,’ he said gently, ‘we didn’t get it so wrong. We didn’t deliberately choose the wrong people, because almost anyone would have done, to feed the passion.’ He looked across at her and winked. ‘At least we chose beautiful people.’

She edged a bit closer to him across the turf. She said, ‘Elinor told me that Wills said I didn’t mistake him. He did mean it. He does.’

Bill looked at her. He said steadily, ‘Eliza knew she’d have been a different person with a better life with me.’

Marianne said, ‘Could you have lived with her?’

‘I’d have tried.’

‘Me too. And it would have half killed me.’

‘Yes. Sacrifice is only exciting at the beginning.’

She reached forward and took the buttercup out of his hand. She said, ‘I think I’m only beginning.’

‘In what way?’

‘To learn that there is more to a good life than … I can’t say it.’

‘A good life,’ he said, stating it.

‘Yes. You live a good life.’

He looked at her seriously. He said, ‘It could be.’

She looked away. She said, ‘I know.’

He got to his feet and held a hand down to her.

‘Up you get. Time to go home.’

‘Bill—’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No more. Not now.’

She leaned forward and threaded the buttercup into the top buttonhole of his shirt. Then she reached up and kissed him, quickly and lightly.

‘I’ve been so happy with you today,’ she said.

Mrs Ferrars’s flat in Mayfair had not been touched, decoratively speaking, for thirty years. Climbing up the building’s common staircase, Edward was transported back to his eight-year-old self, trudging up those same stairs on the same green trellis-patterned carpet between walls dotted with the same dim little flower prints in gilt frames, and feeling an apprehension and a reluctance that time had done nothing to diminish. When he pressed the brass doorbell outside the flat, he couldn’t help sighing. He had spent a great deal of his childhood sighing, one way or another. But the last few weeks had introduced him to a completely new kind of sighing, that resulting from an excess of incredulous happiness, which was the kind, he thought, listening to his mother’s heels tapping their way along the parquet floor inside the flat, he must arm himself with now.

‘Edward,’ his mother said without inflection, opening the door. She held up her powdery cheek for a kiss.

He bent obediently. He was aware that she had instantly observed and judged his clothes, and found them to fall short of the standard set by her formal day dress and expensive jewellery.

‘Hello, Mother.’

‘I imagine you’ve had lunch?’

‘Well, I—’

‘I’ll make coffee, then. Or you could make yourself useful, and make it for us?’

He said truthfully, ‘It’s never right for you when I make it.’

She surveyed him again, without, somehow, looking at him in the face. It struck him for the first time how alike she and Fanny were. In a few years’ time, they would be indistinguishable: tiny, immaculate, forceful and hard.

In her drawing room, with its elaborate curtains and draped tables bearing rafts of china boxes and silver frames, Mrs Ferrars wasted no time.

‘I have had a terrible time recently,’ she informed Edward. ‘As the mother of a family, I have suffered acutely. I feel, I don’t mind telling you, as if I have had no sons at all.’

Edward cleared his throat. He was holding the small bone-china mug she had handed him, a puddle of lukewarm coffee at the bottom.

‘Mother,’ he said, ‘I am here. I have come to see you.’

‘And what do you mean by that?’

He made an effort, remembering what Elinor had urged him to do. ‘I mean’, he said, ‘that whatever either of us has done, or not done, I am your son and I don’t want to be estranged from you.’

Mrs Ferrars considered this. She was perched on the edge of one of her upright sofas, her patent-clad feet neatly together. She didn’t look across at him. She said, ‘I hear you aren’t going to marry that girl.’

‘Not Lucy—’

‘Well, what was all that about then?’

‘It was a mistake, Mother. I’m just amazingly lucky that it wasn’t a worse one.’

She raised her chin. She said disapprovingly, ‘A fortune-hunter.’

Edward ignored her. He had no wish to discuss Lucy, or to go anywhere near the topic of his brother. He said, instead, ‘But you should know something, Mother. You should know that I am getting married.’

Mrs Ferrars turned to scowl at him. ‘Sensibly, I do hope.’

‘I’ve never done anything more sensible in my life.’

‘The Mortons are nice people,’ Mrs Ferrars said. ‘Scaffolding has proved—’

‘I’m not marrying a Morton,’ Edward said, ‘I hardly know them. I have no interest in them. I am marrying Elinor Dashwood. I have asked her, and she has said yes. I absolutely cannot believe that she said yes.’

There was a prolonged silence. Mrs Ferrars looked into the middle distance and Edward looked at his feet. Then she said, ‘Even you, with your over-developed sentimental side, must see the sheer folly of doing that. Tassy Morton is worth seven figures now, and will be worth many times that in the future. The Dashwood girl hasn’t a penny.’

Edward raised his eyes and looked steadily at his mother. He said, ‘I love her.’

Mrs Ferrars made an impatient gesture and clicked her tongue. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I am not being ridiculous,’ Edward said. ‘I have never been less ridiculous. Elinor is the most wonderful person I have ever come across, and it will be your loss if you don’t try and get to know her. I wouldn’t be here, if it wasn’t for her. She told me that I must make things up with you because, to be honest with you, Mother, three days ago I didn’t care if I never saw you again.’

Mrs Ferrars gave a little jump. She fished about in her sleeve and brought out a small lawn handkerchief, which she pressed to the skin under her eyes. She said unsteadily, ‘You must see the force of what I say. About the discrepancy in their wealth.’

‘I do,’ Edward said. ‘Of course I do. But the thing is, I don’t care. I only care about living with the best person I’ve ever met, for the rest of my life. I’ll be earning at Delaford. Elinor will earn more when she’s qualified. We get a flat thrown in. It’s perfect.’

Mrs Ferrars sniffed. She appeared, if no warmer, at least not to be rallying for further attack. After another pause, she said, ‘You know what I gave Fanny …’

‘When she married John?’

‘Yes. Well, of course you will have the same.’

‘Wow,’ Edward said, with genuine appreciation.

‘But no more.’

‘I don’t want more, I didn’t even expect—’

‘There’s no one on the planet who doesn’t always want more.’

‘Not me, Mother.’

Mrs Ferrars plainly decided to let this idiocy pass. She said, ‘I never wanted to fall out with my boys.’

‘No, Mother.’

‘I never want to stand in the way of your – happiness.’

‘Good, Mother.’

‘You can’t, of course, go back to where you once were in my estimation, but I am relieved to feel I have at least one of my boys back again.’

Edward said nothing. He put the little mug down among the nearest scattering of china boxes and leaned forward. ‘Come to Delaford, Mother.’

She looked mildly startled. ‘What?’

‘This weekend. Everyone’s coming this weekend, to see our flat. Come too. Come and meet Bill.’

Mrs Ferrars shifted slightly and blew her nose. She said cautiously, ‘Everyone?’

‘Elinor’s family. The Middletons. Mrs J. John and Fanny and Harry.’ He paused and then he said, ‘Ellie’s going to ring Lucy. Lucy and Robert might be there. We’re going to have a sort of picnic. In the grounds if it’s fine; in our flat if it’s not.’