hours, to Devon.
It was only in the last five miles or so, as the countryside grew increasingly beautiful and spectacular, that they began to rouse themselves from the aftermath of shock and exclaim at what they were passing.
‘Oh, look.’
‘This is amazing!’
‘Gosh, Thomas, is Barton going to be this good?’
It was. They left the road and turned in between stone gateposts crowned with urns that heralded a series of drives curving away around a smooth hillside crowned with trees. There were freshly painted signs planted alongside the drives, indicating the directions to the main house, to the offices, to visitors’ parking and, with a right-angled arrow, to Barton Cottage. And there, after a further few minutes, it was, as raw and new looking as it had been on Sir John’s laptop, but set on a pleasing slope, with woods climbing up behind it, and the forked valleys falling away dramatically in front. They had gasped when they saw it, as much for its astonishing situation as for its uncompromising banality of design.
Thomas had looked at it with satisfaction.
‘We never thought he’d get planning permission,’ he said. ‘We all bet he wouldn’t. But he managed to prove there’d been a shepherd’s cottage up there once, so there’d been a residence. If he wants something, he doesn’t give up. That’s Sir John.’
Sir John had left wine and a note of welcome in the kitchen, and a basket of logs by the sitting-room fireplace. Someone had also put milk and bread and eggs in the fridge, and a bowl of apples on the new yellow-wood kitchen table, and Margaret reported, after inspecting the bathroom, that there was also a full roll of toilet paper and a new shower curtain, printed with goldfish. Elinor could not think why, confronted both with the kindness of almost strangers, and a practical little house in a magnificent place, she should feel like doing nothing so much as taking herself off somewhere private and quiet, to cry. But she did – and there was no immediate opportunity, what with Marianne needing to be assisted into the house, and Belle and Margaret exclaiming at the advantages (Margaret) and disadvantages (Belle) of their new home, to indulge herself. The luxury of being alone and able to look at and begin to arrange her thoughts would have, as it so often did, to wait.
And now, here was her chance, by herself in the kitchen, with unpacked boxes of saucepans and plates. It was comical, really, the way she’d ended up with unpacking all the practical stuff, while the others, ably and eagerly assisted by Thomas, decided where the pictures should hang and which window gave on to the right prospect to be conducive to guitar practice. Margaret had found a tree outside where she could get five whole signal bars on her mobile phone, if she climbed up into the lowest branches, and Thomas had immediately said that he would make her a tree house, just as he had agreed with Belle that the cottage could be easily improved by extending the main sitting room into a conservatory on the southern side. He had said he would bring brochures. Elinor had said quietly, ‘What about me?’
Belle went on looking at the space where the conservatory might stand. ‘What about you, darling?’
‘Well,’ Elinor said, ‘most architects get their first break designing extensions for family houses. Even Richard Rogers—’
Belle gave her a quick glance. ‘But you’re not qualified, darling.’
‘I nearly am. I’m qualified enough.’
Belle smiled, but not at Elinor. ‘I don’t think so, darling. I’d be happier with professionals who do thousands of conservatories a year.’
Elinor closed her eyes and counted slowly to ten. Then she opened them and said, in as level a voice as she could manage, ‘There’s another thing.’
Belle was gazing at the view again. ‘Oh?’
‘Yes,’ Elinor said, more firmly. ‘Yes. What about the money?’
She put two frying pans down on the kitchen table, now, beside three mugs and a handful of wooden spoons, which had been wrapped, in the universal manner of removal men, as solicitously in new white paper as if they had been Meissen shepherdesses. Money was haunting her. Money to buy and run a car – how else was Margaret to get to her new school in Exeter? Money to pay the rent, money for electricity and water, money to pay for food and clothes and even tiny amounts of fun, when all they had in the world was, when invested, going to produce under seven hundred pounds a month, or less than two hundred pounds a week. Which was, she calculated, banging Belle’s battered old stockpot down beside the frying pans, not quite thirty pounds a day. For four women with laughable earning power, one of whom is still at school, one is unused to work, and one is both physically unfit and as yet unqualified to work. Which leaves me! Me, Elinor Dashwood, who has been living in the cloud cuckoo land of Norland and idiotic, impractical dreams of architecture. She straightened up and looked round the kitchen. The prospect – bright new units overlaid with a chaos of unarranged shabby old possessions – was sobering. It was also, if she didn’t keep the tightest of grip on herself, frightening. She was not equipped for this. None of them were. They had fled to Devon on an impulse, reacting against the grief and rejection they had been through, surrendering to the first hand held out to them without considering the true extent or consequences of that surrender.
Elinor closed her eyes. She mustn’t panic. She mustn’t. There would be a way to make this work; there had to be. Perhaps she could appeal to Sir John, perhaps he had already guessed, perhaps he … Her eye was caught by a movement outside the kitchen window. It was Thomas carrying planks of wood towards Margaret’s communications tree. Already! They had been in the cottage one night and a tree house was under way. Elinor seized a saucepan lid out of the open box in front of her and flung it wildly in frustration across the kitchen. Who was going to pay for a tree house, please?
‘Wonderful,’ Sir John said. He was standing holding open the immense front door to Barton Park and beaming at them all. ‘Come in, come in. I wanted you for supper last night, you know, but Mary wouldn’t let me. Said you’d be exhausted. Probably right. Usually is.’ He plunged forward, bent on heartily kissing all of them. ‘She’s upstairs now with the rug rats. Bedtime. Complete mayhem, every night, goes on for hours. And then they trickle down all evening under one transparent pretext or another. Nil discipline. Nil. Bless them. Fantastic children.’
Belle said, emerging from his embrace, ‘Don’t you get involved?’
‘With bedtime? No fear. I do Tintin on Saturdays with the boys. I’m a wholly unreconstructed male, I’m happy to say. Now then.’ He swung round, closing the door and gesturing lavishly with his free hand. ‘What do you think of my old gaff?’
The girls gazed about them in silence. The hall was huge, larger than Norland, with niches for statues and an elaborate plaster frieze of gilded swags. It was as grandly chilly and unlike Norland in spirit or appearance as it possibly could have been. It resembled some kind of museum, a public space dedicated to the formal past. Elinor saw Marianne give an involuntary little shiver.
‘Frightful, isn’t it?’ Sir John said jovially. ‘Tarted up for a visit from Queen Victoria, all this marble nonsense. It’s an idiotic house. Dining room seats thirty-six. Thirty-six!’
Margaret stopped swivelling her head in amazement. She said, ‘Well, why do you live here, then?’
Sir John gave a gust of laughter. ‘It’s in my bones. Inheritance and all that. Can’t live with it or without it.’
Marianne said tightly, ‘We know about all that.’
‘Course
