She stopped and looked directly across the table, as if abruptly struck by something. ‘Bill dear …’

He roused himself from whatever thoughts he had been plunged in. He said, affectionately, ‘I’d be glad to see Elinor.’

‘Bill,’ Mrs Jennings said. ‘Bill. Has this Greek got a daughter?’

In the car going home from work and school Margaret wasn’t speaking. She had climbed into the car – which she now required Elinor to park round the corner so that none of her school friends would see her actually having to get into it – and immediately launched into a diatribe about how unfair it was that she had never had a ride in the Aston, as had been promised, and Elinor, strained from a week of worry about Marianne, tension about Lucy Steele and silence from Edward Ferrars, had snapped at her to say nothing more unless she could say something pleasant. So Margaret had goggled at her and shrugged and made her dissing ‘whatever’ hand gestures, and was now slumped beside her sister with her earphones in and a faint, maddening beat emanating from the iPod in her lap.

Elinor drove with fierce concentration. Marianne had not initiated a phone call or a text for days, and whenever Elinor rang her, sounded remote and inert or else worryingly wound up. Elinor had heard the story of the missed phone call a dozen times, as well as an endless litany of reasons why Wills wasn’t in touch, followed by hysterical assertions of certainty that he would be. She knew that Marianne had walked the residential streets off the King’s Road day after day, and although she had never seen the right Aston Martin parked by any kerb, was still insistent that one day she would, and that Wills would be there, with a perfect explanation, and that she, Marianne, would not only be restored to ecstasy, but also justified in her complete faith in his feelings for her being as hers were for him.

‘How’s Mrs J.?’ Elinor said, keenly aware of the consequences of living with Marianne’s intensity.

‘Fine,’ Marianne said carelessly. ‘You know. Jolly and insensitive. Thinks all ills can be cured with chocolate. And parties.’

‘Parties!’

‘I go,’ Marianne said, ‘and I stand there with a glass in my hand. And then I go home again. The inanity of all those people is beyond anything.’

Elinor had said, during the last call, and unhappily, ‘Oh, M, I do hope you are being at least a bit grateful—’ and had immediately regretted it.

‘Grateful?’ Marianne had almost screamed. ‘Grateful! When she only has me here because she’s obsessed with romantic gossip and I’m providing her with an on-going story? Would she even have me in London if both her daughters weren’t already married?’

‘M, I only meant out of politeness—’

‘Politeness,’ Marianne said witheringly. ‘Politeness! It’s all you care about, isn’t it, manners and decorum and – and respectability. You wouldn’t know real feeling, real passion if it hit you on the head with a hammer. You are so completely buttoned up, Ellie, that you can’t even begin to understand someone like me who is open. About everything.’

Then she had ended the call, bang. Elinor texted her, to say sorry. Silence. There had been silence since, too, a silence as uneasy and troubled as the one now reigning between her and Margaret in the car.

Without looking sideways, Margaret suddenly took out her earphones and laid them in her lap. The beat from the iPod grew louder and Elinor was about to say, exasperatedly, ‘Oh, turn that thing off!’ when Margaret said, in quite a different tone to the one she had used earlier, ‘Ellie …’

‘What?’

Margaret glanced out of the window for a moment, and then she looked back at her lap. She said, almost inaudibly, ‘Sorry.’

Elinor shot out her left hand and grasped her sister’s nearest one. ‘Mags. What for?’

Margaret sighed. ‘Just – being a pain.’

‘Well,’ Elinor said warmly, ‘you were promised.’

Margaret gripped Elinor’s hand. ‘I – kind of insisted I was. But he never said. Not really. Not in so many words.’ She sighed again, and then she said, ‘Is he really just a tosser?’

Elinor gave Margaret’s hand a squeeze and let it go. ‘Well, he’s not behaving very well to Marianne.’

‘Is – is she overdoing it a bit?’

Elinor hesitated. ‘Not according to how she sees things, Mags.’

They turned in through the gates to Barton Park’s drive, Elinor’s headlights picking up ghostly tree trunks. Margaret spun the dial on her iPod to silence it. Then she said, ‘Do we have to have boyfriends?’

‘Who?’

‘Us. Us girls.’

Elinor said, half laughing, ‘Of course we don’t have to. But we seem to want to, to need to, don’t we?’

‘But we don’t need to make them our whole world, do we, like Marianne?’

‘Not’, Elinor said carefully, ‘if it doesn’t suit us to.’

She pulled the car up on the gravel in front of the cottage. Belle had all the lights on, as usual, and although it made the house look wonderfully welcoming, Elinor could not help thinking anxiously about the consequent electricity bill. Which she, as usual, would have to deal with.

She turned off the engine. Margaret gathered up her iPod and earphone cables and hauled her school bag from the floor into her arms. She nudged the car door open. She said, ‘Sorry again, Ellie.’

‘Thank you, Mags, but there’s nothing to be sorry for. Really.’

Margaret got out clumsily, trailing cables, and Elinor was about to follow her, when her phone rang. She called after Margaret, ‘I’ll just take this.’

She looked at her screen. Not a number she recognised. She put the phone to her ear. ‘Hello?’ she said cautiously.

‘It’s Bill Brandon.’

She smiled broadly into the darkness beyond her windscreen. ‘Bill!’

‘Am I interrupting?’

‘No, no, not at all. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. Fine. But it’s Marianne—’

‘Oh my God,’ Elinor said, sitting up straighter. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing,’ Bill said. ‘That’s the trouble.’

‘No word still?’

‘No. I saw Mrs J.’

‘I’m coming up to London.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m ringing. How are you getting to London?’

‘Oh, Bill,’ Elinor said, ‘how do you think? National Express bus from Exeter.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Very sure.’

‘I’ll meet you. I’ll meet you at Victoria Station.’

She said, smiling, ‘You don’t have to.’

‘I’d like to.’

‘Bill,’ Elinor said gently, ‘she still thinks the sun rises and sets with him.’

‘I know.’

‘It isn’t a question of merit …’

‘There isn’t’, Bill Brandon said, ‘a man less deserving of your sister on this earth than John Willoughby.’

Elinor was silent. Belle appeared in the lit doorway of Barton Cottage and began to gesticulate to her daughter to come in.

‘Bill,’ Elinor said, ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll see you Friday. I’ll ring you en route. I’ll put your number in my phone, if that’s OK. Thank you.’

She dropped her phone into her bag and climbed out of the car.

‘Who were you talking to?’ Belle called from the doorway. ‘Was it Ed?’

Elinor locked the car doors and then turned towards her mother. ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘It wasn’t.’

Marianne would not wash her hair before going to the wedding. Nor would she even look at the cream silk dress Mrs Jennings produced from Charlotte’s old wardrobe and which, Elinor could see at a glance, was probably the best-cut, best-made garment either of them had ever been offered. Instead, Marianne pulled on – crossly – her old gypsy skirt and piled her hair randomly on top of her head, and added her usual hoop earrings and looked – well, Elinor had to admit it – sulky but wonderful.

‘You could put that girl in a bin liner,’ Mrs Jennings said, ‘and she’d still eclipse every other female in the room. Maddening.’

In the taxi on the way to the church, for the wedding, Marianne sat staring mutely out of the window, her phone gripped, as usual, in one hand. The taxi went via Conduit Street, to collect the Middletons from their flat, and even with Jonno in the cab – resplendent in a gold brocade waistcoat from Favourbrook’s under his black morning coat – Marianne seemed entirely indifferent to the occasion and to the company.

Mary Middleton made an elaborate face at Elinor, nodding in Marianne’s direction. Elinor merely shook her head. Marianne said clearly, without turning from the window, ‘I’m not ill. Or deaf.’

Sir John looked at Elinor. He winked. ‘She’s a party in herself, don’t you think?’

In the church in Chelsea, Marianne did not even bother to look about her. Both Dashwood girls had been squeezed into the same pew as the Middletons and the Palmers – Charlotte in a hat whose immensity almost extinguished her – and Elinor could not help noticing that they were the only two bare-headed women in the congregation. The service was conducted by a camp and sophisticated priest who managed to imbue the whole occasion with irony, and then it was out into the winter dusk and a further taxi ride, back to the Cavalry and Guards Club, where Elinor and Marianne found themselves propelled up an immense staircase, past a spectacular cup awarded, said the attached brass label, for valour in pig-sticking, and into a roaring room full of people clutching glasses of champagne and kissing each other round their hats.

‘Oh Christ,’ Elinor said to Marianne, in dismay.

Tommy Palmer appeared beside them. ‘Shed the old bag, have you?’ he shouted above the din.