Joanna Trollope - Sense & Sensibility

Elinor regarded them both. She took a step back and put her almost untouched glass of wine down on the nearest surface. ‘I think I’ll just slip out,’ she said. ‘Quietly. Have a good evening.’ She managed a smile. ‘See you soon.’

At the end of Saturday lunch at Barton Cottage, throughout which Marianne had sat without speaking, gazing aloofly past the assembled company out of the window, Lucy Steele followed Elinor out to the kitchen. She said eagerly, ‘I’ll help you make coffee.’

Elinor put the pile of pudding plates she was carrying down, with difficulty, on the cluttered table. ‘It’s OK.’

‘Let me help, do. Look at all this washing up!’

‘I’m used to it.’

Lucy, taking no notice, began to run hot water into the sink. She said confidingly, ‘I’m really sorry about Nance. All the endless, endless man talk. I’m afraid she’s a bit one-track-minded and this guy in Exeter, Brian Rose, she was going on about, well, he’s, um … well, she’s my sister but it’s a bit much really. Kind of embarrassing. Are there any gloves?’

‘Gloves?’

‘Washing-up gloves. Rubber gloves. You know.’

Elinor shook her head, ‘Sorry. We just have neglected hands.’

Lucy put her own hands behind her head, and twisted her hair into an artless knot. ‘No matter. Anyway, poor old Nance. I’m afraid it’s all boys and bags with her.’

‘Bags?’

‘Handbags,’ Lucy said. She located a bottle of washing-up liquid and squirted some liberally into the sink. Then, appearing to concentrate very hard on swishing the soap into a foam, she said, almost carelessly, ‘Have you ever met Mrs F.?’

Elinor stopped scraping scraps off plates into the bin. ‘Who?’

‘Mrs Ferrars. Ed’s mum.’

‘No,’ Elinor said shortly. ‘The scary mother. No, I’m glad to say.’

There was a short pause and then Lucy said, turning from the sink, ‘That’s a real pity. I wish you had. I – I so wanted you to advise me.’

Elinor put the scraped plate down on the nearest worktop. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t get …’

Lucy looked down at her wet hands. She appeared to be deciding something. Then she looked up again, earnestly, at Elinor. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘Of course, but should you—’

Lucy held up one hand. She said solemnly, ‘I knew I could trust you. The minute you walked into the room at Barton Park, I just knew you were honour bright.’

‘Well,’ Elinor said, picking up the next plate, ‘thank you, but I can’t see how I can advise you about anything, nor where Ed’s mum fits in.’

‘Oh, not now,’ Lucy said, ‘She doesn’t matter now. But she might, you see. Soon. Quite soon.’

She smiled to herself, shyly, as if she were relishing some secret. Elinor put the plate down and came round the table.

‘Are – are you going out with Ed’s brother or something? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? You’re going out with Robert and he hasn’t told his mother?’

Lucy looked straight at Elinor. Her eyes were wide and guileless. She smiled again. ‘Oh,’ she said softly, ‘not Robert. He’s a complete muppet. I’m talking about Ed.’ She let a fraction of a second pass and then she said, ‘My Ed.’

Elinor didn’t move. She remained where she was, standing by the table. Everything seemed to have stopped, even her breathing. As she stood there, she was conscious, through the intensity of her own shock, that Lucy was watching her carefully. She made a supreme effort. ‘Wow …’

‘I know,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s so great, but it’s so awful, having to keep it a secret. Are you OK?’

Elinor nodded. She could feel her body starting up again, tentatively, as if it was wondering whether it would work again.

‘Ed wanted me to tell you,’ Lucy said. ‘He thinks the world of you and your family. You’re like a sister to him.’

‘Ed wanted you to tell me …’

‘Well, I know he would want me to tell you. You know how hopeless he is at expressing himself – it drives me mad sometimes! But the thing is …’ She stopped, significantly.

Elinor, concentrating on both breathing and giving nothing away, waited.

‘Actually,’ Lucy said, ‘he is my Ed.’ She looked away, as if privately communing with someone who wasn’t there. ‘I think you could actually say we were engaged, in a way. Enough for me to have this, anyway.’

She reached into the neck of her shirt and pulled out a chain, holding it bunched in her hand to indicate that it was private and personal.

‘Wow,’ Elinor said again, her voice sounding to herself as if it came from miles away, ‘I didn’t – know you even knew each other, let alone …’

‘Oh yes,’ Lucy said, moving to stand very close to her. ‘Oh yes. My uncle Peter runs a crammers, in Plymouth. Ed was sent there. Didn’t he tell you? And Nancy and I grew up in Plymouth. We were always round at Uncle Peter’s. Peter Pratt. He was like a dad to Ed.’

Elinor recovered herself a little. ‘Ed never said anything to me about—’

‘No, he wouldn’t. He’s so shy. And there’s his old witch of a mother so it had to be secret from everyone. But we saw each other again at a party the other day – mutual friends down here – and I just knew. The minute I saw him again, I knew. It was like we’d never been apart. Poor lamb, he was so drunk that night! Completely out of it. I expect it was the relief of seeing me, don’t you? But honestly, Elinor, thank goodness I was there to look after him, he was in such a state.’ She paused and gave Elinor a wide smile. ‘And the next day, I took him shopping.’ She held the chain out to Elinor. There was a ring on it, a flat silver band, with a small green stone set into it.

‘We got these,’ Lucy said, ‘both of us. He didn’t really want one but that’s just a boy thing, isn’t it, about having anything that might be thought girly, so I made him have one too. And now he texts me, like, all the time. Shall I show you how many? I can’t show you what they say, of course, but you’d understand that, wouldn’t you? I’ve told him that when I’m twenty-one – any minute, so exciting! – we’ll tell everyone, and between you and me, Ellie – can I call you Ellie? – I’ll be sick with relief. I hate secrets, just hate them, and anyway it stresses me out, not saying, and worrying that Nancy might, because she’s so hopeless and blabs everything to everyone, and she’s the only person who knows. Oh God, it’s been such a strain!’

Elinor regarded her. She said, as levelly as she could, ‘Why is it still a secret? Why don’t you just marry?’

Lucy sighed. She picked up the nearest tea towel and held it to her face, as if to wipe her eyes with it. ‘Ed says he can’t. He can’t commit till he knows what he’s going to do. He says he can’t expect me to live in a hole-and-corner way on nothing.’

‘Aren’t you earning?’

Lucy raised her chin. ‘I’m a therapist.’

‘Oh.’

‘Reflexology.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t make enough money to support both of us. It’s heartbreaking.’

Elinor straightened her shoulders a little. ‘I’m sure it is.’

‘I just thought’, Lucy said, her voice becoming little girlish, ‘that if you knew Ed’s mother, you could help me think of a way to get round her. Because we’re so stressed about it all. Didn’t you think Ed was stressed when he came to stay with you? He’d come straight from me, and we’d had such an awful time saying goodbye. Awful. We’ve got to take some action. We’ve got to. Don’t you think?’

The kitchen door opened. Margaret stood there, holding the dish in which Belle had made an enormous apple crumble.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ Elinor said.

Lucy smiled at her and swooped forward to relieve her of the crumble dish. ‘Your lovely sister’, she said, ‘is helping me to untangle a bit of a knot in my life. That’s all.’

Margaret stared at her and let the dish go. She shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ she said.

Elinor did not sleep that night. She heard the chime of Barton Church clock strike every remorseless hour, and at five in the morning, she got out of bed, pulled on her father’s old cardigan and some socks and crept down to the kitchen.

It was quiet in there, apart from the low hum of the refrigerator, and even if not especially warm, warmer than anywhere else in the house. She switched on a lamp on the counter, and then the kettle, and found a mug and a box of tea bags, and a small dish of leftover roast potatoes, which oddly seemed to be the very thing to supply comfort and ballast.

It was a Sunday, after all. No one else in the family would be awake for hours. Elinor made her tea and settled with it, and a cold roast potato, at the kitchen table, hooking her socked toes over the stretcher of the chair she sat on, and pulling the sleeves of the cardigan far enough down to act as mittens. They concealed the knuckles on both her hands, but not her fingers, on one of which was the silver band that Ed had given her, at Norland. She had, after the encounter with Lucy the day before, extracted it from among the keys and paper clips on her dressing table and put it on.

Not at first, though. At first, last night, she had been in an agony of humiliation. The moment she could escape to her room, she had lain on her bed, face into the pillow, and agonised that she had been made a complete fool of by Edward, that he was a classic two-timer, and not to be trusted. But once that first rush of indignant misery was over, she could think about him more calmly, and possibly, she told herself, rolling over and staring at the ceiling, more justly. He had been a sixteen-year-old boy after all, expelled from school and sent in disgrace to a college in Plymouth to work for, and sit, his A levels. And there was Lucy, a knowing fourteen-year-old who was very, very sorry for him and who turned, in time, into a determined sixteen-year-old with a sharp awareness of exactly how much money Edward’s father had made. There’d probably been sex – try not to think about that – and then some subsequent promises of loyalty, and a future, which Elinor, having spent several hours now in Lucy’s company, could easily imagine being insisted upon.