Joanna Trollope - Sense & Sensibility

Elinor came further into the room. She said soothingly, ‘It’s coming with us, M, you’ll have your guitar.’

Marianne said suddenly, ‘Fanny—’ and stopped.

‘Fanny? What about her?’

Marianne looked at her. ‘Yesterday. Fanny asked me what the guitar had cost.’

‘She didn’t! What did you say to her?’

‘I told her,’ Marianne said, ‘I said I couldn’t remember exactly, I thought maybe a bit more than a thousand, and she said who paid for it.’

‘The cheek!’ Elinor exclaimed.

‘Well, I was caught on the hop, wasn’t I, because she then said did Dad pay for it, and I said it was a joint present for getting grade five from Dad and Uncle Henry, and she said, Well, that really means it belongs to Norland, doesn’t it, if Uncle Henry paid for some of it, and not you.’

Elinor sat down abruptly on the end of Marianne’s bed. She said, ‘You couldn’t make Fanny up, could you?’

Marianne laid her cheek on the guitar’s rosewood flank. ‘I put it under my bed last night. I’m not letting it out of my sight.’

‘And you still want to stay here? Even if it meant living with Fanny?’

Marianne lifted her head and then stood up, adjusting the guitar so that she was holding it by the neck. She said, ‘It’s the place, Ellie. It’s the trees and the light and the way it makes me feel. I just can’t imagine anywhere else feeling like home. I’m terrified that nowhere else ever will be home. Even with Fanny, I just – just belong, at Norland.’

Elinor sighed. Marianne had not only inherited their father’s asthma, but also his propensity for depression. It was something they all had learned to accept, and to live with: the mood swings and the proclivity for inertia and despair. Elinor thought about what lay ahead, about the enormity of this move to such a completely unknown environment and society and wondered, slightly desperately, if she could manage to accommodate a bout of Marianne’s depression as well as their mother’s volatility and Margaret’s appalled reaction at having to leave behind every single person she had ever known or been at school with in her whole, whole life.

‘Please,’ Elinor said again. ‘Please don’t give up before we’ve even got there.’

‘I’ll try,’ Marianne said in a small voice.

‘I can’t manage all of you hating this idea—’

‘Ma doesn’t. It was Ma who bounced us all into this.’

‘Ma’s on a high at the moment because she got one across Fanny. It won’t last.’

Marianne looked at her sister. ‘I’ll try,’ she said again, ‘I really will.’

‘There’ll be other trees—’

‘Don’t.’

‘And valleys. And jolly Sir John.’

Marianne gave a tiny shudder. ‘Suppose they’re the only people we know?’

‘They won’t be.’

‘Maybe’, Marianne said, ‘Edward will come.’

Elinor said nothing. She got off the bed and made purposefully for the door.

‘Ellie?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you heard from Edward?’

There was a tiny pause.

‘He hasn’t rung,’ Elinor said.

‘Have you seen him on Facebook?’

In the doorway, Elinor turned. ‘I haven’t looked,’ she said.

Marianne bent to lay her guitar down on her bed, like a child. ‘He likes you, Ellie.’

There was another little pause. ‘I – know he does.’

‘I mean,’ Marianne said, ‘he really likes you. Seriously.’

‘But he’s caught—’

‘It’s pathetic, these days, to be still under your mother’s thumb. Like he is.’

Elinor said quite fiercely, ‘She neglected him. And spoiled the others. She isn’t at all fair.’

Marianne came and stood close to her sister. ‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘Standing up for Edward. Good sign.’

Elinor looked at her sister with sudden directness. ‘I can’t think about that.’

‘Can’t you?’

‘No,’ Elinor said. ‘Today I am thinking about packing up books so I don’t have to think about giving up my degree.’

Marianne looked stricken. ‘Oh, Ellie, I didn’t think …’

‘No. Nobody does. I know I’d only got a year to go, but I had to ring my year co-ordinator and tell him I wouldn’t be back this term.’ She broke off, and then she said, ‘We were going to concentrate on surveying this term. And model-making. I was, he said, possibly the best at technical drawing in my year. He said – oh God, it doesn’t matter what he said.’

Marianne put her arms round her sister. ‘Oh, Ellie .’

‘It’s OK.’

‘It isn’t, it isn’t, it’s so unfair.’

‘Maybe’, Elinor said, standing still in Marianne’s embrace, ‘I can pick it up again later.’

‘In Exeter? Could you join a course in Exeter?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have you told Ma?

Elinor sighed. ‘Sort of. I don’t want to burden her.’

‘Please think about telling her properly. Please think about finishing your course in Exeter.’

Elinor sighed. She gave Marianne a quick hug, and detached herself. ‘I’ll try. In due course, I’ll try. Right now … Right now I can’t think about anything except getting us all settled in Devon without losing our minds or our money.’ She paused and then she said, ‘ Please come and help with these books?’

Sir John sent the handyman from Barton Park to Norland, with Sir John’s own Range Rover, to drive the Dashwoods down to Devon. He also organised a removal company from Exeter to come and collect their books and pictures, and their china and glass, and Belle had the exquisite satisfaction of seeing the Provençal plates disappearing into paper-filled boxes, and in then labelling those boxes with a bold black marker pen so that Fanny, monitoring the whole packing-up procedure, could not fail to observe the china’s departure.

John Dashwood was very uneasy around the whole process. When he returned each day from the notional job of running the Ferrarses’ commercial property empire – he was regarded as an inevitable and unwelcome nuisance by the man who actually did the work – he hovered in Belle’s sitting room or kitchen, mournfully reciting the expenses that made Norland such an exhausting drain upon his wallet and energies, and pointing out how lucky Belle was to be exchanging life at Norland for one of such carefree simplicity and frugality in Devon. Only once did Belle grow so exasperated by his perpetual litany of complaints that she was driven to point out quite sharply that the promise of generosity made in that room at Haywards Heath Hospital had never actually been adhered to. John Dashwood had been deeply wounded by her accusation that he had been other than both honourable and generous, and said so. ‘It’s too bad of you, Belle. It really is. You and the girls have had absolutely the run of the house and garden since Henry died, the complete run. It’s been really inconvenient for Fanny, having you here and having to put all her decorating plans on hold, but of course she’s been angelic about that. As she has about everything. I sometimes wonder, Belle, if Henry didn’t spoil you, I really do. You don’t seem to have the first idea about recognising or acknowledging generosity. I’m really quite shocked. I just hope poor old John Middleton knows what he’s in for, trying to help someone who appears not to have the first idea of even how to say thank you.’ He’d peered at her, cradling his whisky and soda. ‘Just a “thank you, John” would be nice. Don’t you think? It’s all I’m asking, after everything you’ve been given. Just a thank you, Belle.’

It was a relief, in the end, to see Sir John’s car. Belle climbed in beside young Thomas, the handyman, who had put on his new jeans in honour of this important commission from his employer, and the girls got into the back seat behind her, Margaret clutching her iPod, her childhood Nintendo DS and her pocketbook laptop, as if they represented her only frail remaining link to civilised or social life as she knew it. Behind the girls Thomas stacked their suitcases and, on top of that, Marianne’s guitar case, which she had held in her arms all the time she was saying goodbye to John and Fanny. Fanny had been holding Harry’s hand, as if he were a trump card that she needed to flourish at the final moment of victory. In the hand not gripped by his mother, Harry was clutching a giant American-style cookie which seemed to absorb too much of his attention for there to be any to spare for his cousins’ departure. Elinor had knelt in front of him, and smiled. ‘Bye, bye, Harry.’