Margaret picked up her knife again and reached for the butter. ‘What kind of car?’

‘An Alfa Romeo Spider,’ Marianne said airily. ‘Series 4. A design classic.’

Margaret jumped to her feet. ‘I’m going to look it up. I bet it’s worth megabucks.’

‘Sit down, darling!’ Belle said sharply. Then she looked at Marianne. ‘It’s very sweet of him …’

Marianne smiled to herself. She said, ‘Typical, really, the grand gesture but something that we really need, too. It was his twenty-first present from Aunt Jane. So sweet! It’s been on blocks in the garage at Allenham for ages, ever since he got the Aston. He says it’s perfect for me.’

Belle glanced at Elinor. Then she said to Marianne, ‘Dear one …’

‘He’s so wonderful,’ Marianne said.

‘Yes, darling. Yes, he is. But before Elinor says it, I have to put a bit of a dampener on things and say we can’t afford it.’

Marianne’s head jerked up. ‘What’s to afford? He’s giving me a car!’

‘We’d have to insure it,’ Elinor said. ‘And tax it and fuel it. And you would need driving lessons.’

‘Thomas will teach me!’

‘No,’ Belle said, quietly but firmly.

‘But we need a car!’

‘A sensible, dull car,’ Elinor said. ‘Not a sports car that only fits two people and no luggage.’

‘You are just so sad,’ Margaret said crossly.

Marianne bit her lip. She looked at her mother and her older sister. She said quietly, to Elinor, ‘What would it cost?’

Elinor reached along the table to take her hand. ‘Don’t know. But maybe a couple of thousand. A year, I mean.’

Marianne squeezed her sister’s hand briefly and let it go. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can’t have it then, can I?’

‘No. Sorry, babe.’

Marianne sat up straighter. ‘If we can’t afford it …’

‘And’, Belle said unwisely, ‘it might be a bit much, you know. As a present, I mean. It’s the kind of thing you get given when – well, when you get engaged, or something.’

Marianne stood up slowly, ignoring her supper, and picked up her phone, holding it hard against her. She moved towards the door and, as she left the room, she turned long enough to say, almost triumphantly, ‘Well, what would you know, anyway, about that?’

Margaret could see, from the line of light visible under her door, that Marianne was not yet asleep. She herself had been doing what was strictly forbidden after bedtime, which was going online, with her laptop under the duvet, and looking up all the random things that suggested themselves to her, so seductively beyond the confines of her own circumstances. Tonight, fired up and fed up with her family’s attitude to Wills’s glittering offer – much enhanced, in Margaret’s eyes, by the forceful glamour of his personality – she had found a website which gave valuations for, it said, cars for the connoisseurs.

She tapped with one fingernail on Marianne’s door. Marianne called, ‘Ellie?’

Margaret pushed the door open far enough to reveal her face. ‘It’s me.’

Marianne was sitting up in bed with her phone, her thumbs poised, mid text. She said sternly, ‘Mags, you should be asleep.’

Margaret eeled into the room and settled on Marianne’s bed. ‘Who are you texting?’

‘Guess.’

‘Why don’t you ring him?’

‘I do.’

‘Does he ring you?’

‘He can’t, staying with Aunt Jane.’

‘Yes, he can – he can go somewhere.’

‘Mags,’ Marianne said loftily, ‘he’s very respectful of Aunt Jane and what he owes her and how he has to give her his company and attention. So it’s better for me to text him while he’s at Allenham.’

Margaret craned to see the screen on Marianne’s phone. ‘That’s more like an essay than a text.’

Marianne laid the phone face down on her duvet. ‘Why, exactly, did you come in?’ she said.

Margaret wriggled a little. ‘That car …’

‘What car?’

‘The one you can’t have.’

Marianne tried to look indifferent. ‘What of it?’

Margaret leaned forward. ‘It’s worth over seven thousand pounds!’

‘How do you know?’

‘I looked it up. It said about seven thousand five hundred if it has good documented history. That’s amazing.’

Marianne made a series of little pleats in the duvet cover. She said, sadly, ‘I’ve told him I can’t have it.’

‘Have you? When?’

‘Tonight. I rang him after supper. He said that it was mine whenever I wanted it and it would just wait at Allenham until I was ready.’

Margaret said, ‘Was he cross?’

‘No. Of course not. Why should he be cross? He’s never cross.’

Margaret watched her sister’s pleating hand. ‘You’re pretty gone on him, aren’t you?’

Marianne said nothing. She leaned forward a little more and something swung out of the neck of her pyjamas. They were pyjamas Margaret coveted, patterned in plaid, with rosebuds.

‘What’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

‘Round your neck. That shiny thing.’

Marianne stopped pleating and put a hand to her collar.

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Show me,’ Margaret demanded.

‘You’re not to tell Ma …’

‘I won’t!’

Marianne held something out between forefinger and thumb. It was a ring, three linked bands of different coloured gold, threaded on a chain.

‘It’s a ring,’ Margaret said accusingly.

‘I know, muppet.’

‘Well,’ Margaret said, pushing her hair behind her ears, ‘a ring looks a bit weddingy, to me.’

Marianne put the ring against her lips. ‘He’s got one, too.’

‘Wills? Wills has got a ring like this?’

‘He got them for both of us. His is bigger, of course.’

Margaret sniffed slightly. ‘You have got it badly, haven’t you?’

‘He’s wonderful,’ Marianne said. ‘He’s Mr Wonderful. Don’t tell Ma and Ellie about the ring. I mean it.’

Margaret sighed. ‘Ellie isn’t speaking to me much, anyway.’

‘Isn’t she?’

‘Not since I let out about Ed and her.’

‘Oh, Mags.’

‘Well,’ Margaret said aggrievedly, ‘I was being nagged and nagged, wasn’t I, by Mrs J. and everyone, about boyfriends and stuff, and I can’t exactly diss Mrs J., can I, however much I’d like to, so after a bit I just said I couldn’t talk about it but there was someone and Mrs J. gave one of her gross cackles and said to Ellie, Who, who, and Ellie looked at me like she wished I was dead and I said I couldn’t say but his name began with an F and then Jonno started teasing Ellie and I thought she might hit him and then thank goodness all those dire kids came in and started screaming so I was saved. Sort of. Except Ellie had a go at me afterwards and Ma heard her and said what was going on and Ellie said, Well, someone, meaning me, ate a whole bowl of stupid for breakfast, didn’t they. And she’s still cross.’

Marianne smiled at her sister. ‘She’s private, Mags.’

‘Aren’t you?’

Marianne held her ring away from her, on its chain, so that she could admire it. ‘I don’t need to be, Mags. I’m proud of how I feel.’

Margaret got off the bed. ‘I’d be proud to drive an Alfa Romeo Spider, I would.’

‘One day.’

‘What?’

Marianne lay back on her pillows and tucked the ring out of sight into the jacket of her pyjamas. ‘One day, there’ll be all kinds of things. Marvellous things. Happy, glorious things in beautiful places.’

‘Like’, Margaret said, ‘no more picnic outings with all the Middletons and those kids.’

Marianne stared at her. ‘What are you talking about?’

Margaret made a face. ‘Didn’t they tell you? We’ve all got to go, on Saturday. Jonno wants to have a barbecue, in a wood somewhere, last outing of summer or something, all of us with sausages and stuff. Bill’s taking us; it’s a wood belonging to someone he knows.’ Margaret grinned at her sister. ‘Your lucky day, M. Bill’ll want you to sit next to him.’

Marianne gave a little groan. Then she touched the ring under her pyjamas. ‘I’ll ask Wills.’

‘Yay!’

Marianne winked at her sister. ‘I’ll ask Wills to come too, and he can drive me.’

Margaret waited a moment, and then she said, carefully, ‘If I don’t tell anyone about the ring, can I come in the Aston with you two?’

Across the meagre landing, Belle heard Marianne’s door close and the scamper of Margaret’s feet going back to her own bedroom. If you could call it a bedroom, really. It was more like a large cupboard, just big enough for a bed and a chair, but at least it gave Margaret privacy, the privacy which she had claimed as being as much her right as her sisters’.

‘Why shouldn’t I have a bedroom of my own? You’ve all got bedrooms of your own.’

‘But we haven’t got tree houses,’ Marianne had pointed out. ‘You have a tree house, and we only have bedrooms. There are three proper – well, sort of proper – bedrooms, and one cupboard. So, as you have a tree house, you should have the cupboard.’ She had paused. ‘Unless, of course, you’d like to share the tree house?’

There’d been a short silence in which Margaret wrestled with her painful sense of being outmanoeuvred. And then, glaring, she’d given in. But Belle could never hear her door slam on the cupboard without a pang.

‘I just wish’, she said in a whisper to the photograph of Henry with which she had futile conversations most nights, ‘that you were here to help me make it better. For little Margaret. For the big ones too. Except that that’s mad thinking. Because if you were here, we wouldn’t be here, in the first place.’

She had him, as usual, propped against her knees in bed, holding him by his silver frame. He looked very young in the picture, very carefree, in an open-necked shirt against a summer Norland garden. There were secateurs in his trouser pocket, just visible.