Joanna Trollope: Sense & Sensibility

Elinor stretched a hand out to meet his. She said, shakily, ‘So – so you aren’t with Lucy, you aren’t married—’

‘No,’ he said, and his face broke into a wide smile. He made a kind of dive across the car roof so that he could grasp both her hands. ‘No. Thank all the gods. But, Ellie – Ellie, I really would like to be. Please?’

Margaret stood in the landing window of Barton Cottage, looking out into the dark garden. She was supposed to be in bed – she was wearing the T-shirt and American flannel pull-on trousers she slept in – and had done a lot of door-banging and lavatory-flushing and shouting, in order to convince everyone downstairs that she was on her way to bed, but had actually crept out on to the landing again, so that she could look out at her tree house for a bit longer.

It was softly illuminated by several candles in old jam jars, illuminated enough, anyway, for her to see Ed and Elinor up there, huddled together under a blanket. She couldn’t quite see their faces, but sometimes she caught the gleam of Elinor’s hair, or the shine of the wine glasses they had taken up there, and if she leaned out of the window, she could hear the murmur of their voices and occasional little bursts of laughter. They sounded very happy.

Margaret felt rather proud of their happiness. They had been absolutely glowing with it at supper – Ed was like a different man: he said he’d been so sure Elinor would send him away with a flea in his ear that he’d felt extremely sick when he first arrived – and Margaret had found herself wanting somehow to augment all this joy and so she’d said, out of the blue, ‘Why don’t you two go up to my tree house? There’s masses of space now.’

Elinor had beamed at her. ‘Oh, Mags! Could we?’

And Ed had looked as if she’d given him a present or something, and had got up, and come round the table to hug her, and said, ‘You’re a complete star, Mags Dashwood. D’you know that?’

Margaret had felt not only a glow of satisfaction, but also a novel sense of having done something both good and useful. She’d got up from the table then and found a basket, and Belle had put a bottle of wine in it, and glasses, and a new packet of chocolate biscuits, and some apples, and a piece of cheese, and they had all processed out into the dusky garden and helped the two of them climb up the ladder Thomas had made. It was Marianne who put the candles in the jars, and Belle who produced the old rug from the back of the sofa, and then they’d left them there, on the platform in the tree, with each other and their future and the ring Ed had actually had, all along, in his pocket.

It wasn’t a diamond, Margaret was told, it was an aquamarine. Same difference, Margaret thought, except it was sort of blue, not white, but it sparkled, and it made Elinor cry, even if in a way Margaret could see was very different from the kind of crying they usually went in for. Elinor kept looking at it, on her hand, kissing Ed, and then laughing. Ed had talked more at supper than Margaret had ever heard him, describing how he’d kept going back to Lucy’s family when he was a teenager, because they were cosy and welcoming, and didn’t make him feel an utter failure, like his mother and sister did, and he’d thought Lucy was quite pretty, then, because he didn’t know any better – ‘Only a moron would think that,’ Margaret interrupted, and he’d laughed and said, ‘Moron’s the word, Mags!’ – and how he’d got so defeated by his mother insisting on him training to be things he couldn’t bear to be that he’d got himself in a hopeless state, on the very edge of doing something that would cause him the keenest regret all the rest of his life.

Margaret strained her eyes to see them both in her tree. She thought she could make out that Ed had his arm round Elinor, and that their heads were very close together, probably touching. It was so great, it really was. Not just because it was what Ellie had wanted all along, but because Edward would be very susceptible to her, Margaret’s, nagging him to teach her to drive. After all, if he was part of the family, he’d have no escape.

‘Are you cold?’ Edward said.

‘I’m too happy to be cold.’

‘Me too. It’s like paradise here, in Mags’s tree, with you. I can’t believe it, I can’t believe my luck, I can’t believe you said yes.’

‘You knew I’d say yes.’

‘I didn’t, I was terrified.’

‘You had the ring in your pocket.’

‘I wanted you to know I meant it; I wanted to prove to you that you were it. For me. If you’d have me.’

‘I’ll have you,’ Elinor said.

‘That’s what I can’t believe.’

Elinor shifted a little, so that her left shoulder was tucked right under Edward’s arm. ‘What I can’t believe’, she said, ‘is Lucy.’

‘Do we have to talk about her?’

‘Only enough to satisfy my curiosity.’

‘About what?’

‘About’, Elinor said, ‘what she was doing, marrying your brother Robert, who is—’ She stopped.

He kissed her nose. ‘Gay,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘He knew he was gay when he was tiny. I remember him coming down to breakfast once, when he was about seven, in a necklace of Fanny’s and a huge hat with a feather. And my parents didn’t blink. Did not blink. They used to describe him to other people as being very much his own person. That was their phrase. Very much his own person.’

‘So – your mother doesn’t know?’

Edward captured Elinor’s left hand and held it out to see the ring glinting by the light of the nearest candle.

‘I have no idea if she knows. But she won’t acknowledge it if she does. She won’t discuss it. She just says he’s unusual.’

‘So – he can’t talk about it, with her?’

Edward raised her hand to kiss it. ‘You can’t talk to her about anything. Except money. Stocks and shares and house prices.’

‘Poor Robert.’

‘He doesn’t care. He lives his own life and milks her for money when he needs it.’

‘But Lucy,’ Elinor said, ‘Lucy must know he’s gay, she must have known all along.’

‘She won’t care, either,’ Edward said.

‘She must, she can’t not mind that her husband is just using her as a shield—’

Edward said flatly, ‘She’ll be fine with it.’

Elinor turned to look at his shadowed face. ‘But—’

‘Ellie,’ Edward said, ‘don’t judge everyone else by your lovely and right standards. Lucy is only out for Lucy. If there isn’t trouble, she makes it, like snowballing me with texts threatening to tell my mother we were an item, as she put it, so that I had to text her back saying please don’t, please, please don’t. God, Ellie, I was so drunk that night, and of course that played right into her hands. She’s got exactly what she set out to get, even if not with the brother she first thought of. Don’t waste an iota of concern on her. Lucy’s got her hands on a pile of money, and Robert’s got a cover as far as my mother is concerned to do whatever he wants. They’ve done a deal. It suits them both. They’re as selfish as each other. They’ll live their own lives and probably enjoy the joke of being married. And I – lucky, lucky me – have got you.’

‘But—’

‘I want to kiss you, Ellie, I want to just—’

‘One more thing,’ Elinor said.

‘What?’

‘How did you know you were off the hook with Lucy?’

Edward gave a bark of laughter. He said, ‘You’ll never believe it. An email.’

‘An email?’

‘Yes.’ He looked back down at her, and bent so that he could kiss her on the mouth. ‘She wrote me an email,’ he said, his face almost touching Elinor’s, ‘saying that she couldn’t marry me when she was in love, actually, with someone else. Who just happened to be my gay brother. Who, I wonder, did she think she had a vestige of a hope of fooling?’