Elinor put a hand on her mother’s arm. She said to her brother, ‘Please.’ Then she said, in a lower tone, ‘We’ll find a way.’
John looked relieved. ‘That’s more like it. Good girl.’
Marianne shouted suddenly, ‘You are really wicked, do you hear me? Wicked! What’s the word, what is it, the Shakespeare word? It’s – it’s – yes, John, yes, you are perfidious.’
There was a brief, horrified silence. Belle put a hand out towards Marianne and Elinor was afraid they’d put their arms round each other, as they often did, for solidarity, in extravagant reaction.
She said to John, ‘I think you had better go.’
He nodded thankfully, and took a step back.
‘She’ll be looking for you,’ Margaret said. ‘Has she got a dog whistle she can blow to get you to come running?’
Marianne stopped looking tragic and gave a snort of laughter. So, a second later, did Belle. John glanced at them both and then looked past them at the Welsh dresser where all the plates were displayed, the pretty, scallop-edged plates that Henry and Belle had collected from Provençal holidays over the years, and lovingly brought back, two or three at a time.
John moved towards the door. With his hand on the handle, he turned and briefly indicated the dresser. ‘Fanny adores those plates, you know.’
And now, only a day later, here they were, grouped round the table yet again, exhausted by a further calamity, by rage at Fanny’s malevolence and John’s feebleness, terrified at the prospect of a future in which they did not even know where they were going to lay their heads, let alone how they were going to pay for the privilege of laying them anywhere.
‘I will of course be qualified in a year,’ Elinor said.
Belle gave her a tired smile. ‘Darling, what use will that be? You draw beautifully but how many architects are unemployed right now?’
‘Thank you, Ma.’
Marianne put a hand on Elinor’s. ‘She’s right. You do draw beautifully.’
Elinor tried to smile at her sister. She said, bravely, ‘She’s also right that there are no jobs for architects, especially newly qualified ones.’ She looked at her mother. ‘Could you get a teaching job again?’
Belle flung her hands wide. ‘Darling, it’s been forever!’
‘This is extreme, Ma.’
Marianne said to Margaret, ‘You’ll have to go to state school.’
Margaret’s face froze. ‘I won’t.’
‘You will.’
‘Mags, you may just have to—’
‘I won’t!’ Margaret shouted.
She ripped her earphones out of her ears and stamped to the window, standing there with her back to the room and her shoulders hunched. Then her shoulders abruptly relaxed. ‘Hey!’ she said, in quite a different voice.
Elinor half rose. ‘Hey what?’
Margaret didn’t turn. Instead she leaned out of the window and began to wave furiously. ‘Edward!’ she shouted. ‘Edward!’ And then she turned back long enough to say, unnecessarily, over her shoulder, ‘Edward’s coming!’
However detestable Fanny had made herself since she arrived at Norland, all the Dashwoods were agreed that she had one redeeming attribute, which was the possession of her brother Edward.
He had arrived at the Park soon after his sister moved in, and everyone had initially assumed that this tallish, darkish, diffident young man – so unlike his dangerous little dynamo of a sister – had come to admire the place and the situation that had fallen so magnificently into Fanny’s lap. But after only a day or so, it became plain to the Dashwoods that the perpetual, slightly needy presence of Edward in their kitchen was certainly because he liked it there, and felt comfortable, but also because he had nowhere much else to go, and nothing much else to occupy himself with. He was even, it appeared, perfectly prepared to confess to being at a directionless loose end.
‘I’m a bit of a failure, I’m afraid,’ he said quite soon after his arrival. He was sitting on the edge of the kitchen table, his hair flopping in his eyes, pushing runner beans through a slicer, as instructed by Belle.
‘Oh no,’ Belle said at once, and warmly, ‘I’m sure you aren’t. I’m sure you’re just not very good at self-promotion.’
Edward stopped slicing to extract a large, mottled pink bean that had jammed the blades. He said, slightly challengingly, ‘Well, I was thrown out of Eton.’
‘Were you?’ they all said.
Margaret took one earphone out. She said, with real interest, ‘What did you do?’
‘I was lookout for some up-to-no-good people.’
‘What people? Real bad guys?’
‘Other boys.’
Margaret leaned closer. She said, conspiratorially, ‘Druggies?’
Edward grinned at his beans. ‘Sort of.’
‘Did you take any?’
‘Shut up, Mags,’ Elinor said from the far side of the room.
Edward looked up at her for a moment, with a look she would have interpreted as pure gratitude if she thought she’d done anything to be thanked for, and then he said, ‘No, Mags. I didn’t even have the guts to join in. I was lookout for the others, and I messed up that, too, big time, and we were all expelled. Mum has never forgiven me. Not to this day.’
Belle patted his hand. ‘I’m sure she has.’
Edward said, ‘You don’t know my mother.’
‘I think’, said Marianne from the window seat where she was curled up, reading, ‘that it’s brilliant to be expelled. Especially from anywhere as utterly conventional as Eton.’
‘But maybe,’ Elinor said quietly, ‘it isn’t very convenient.’
Edward looked at her intently again. He said, ‘I was sent to a crammer instead. In disgrace. In Plymouth.’
‘My goodness,’ Belle said, ‘that was drastic. Plymouth!’
Margaret put her earphone back in. The conversation had gone back to boring.
Elinor said encouragingly, ‘So you got all your A levels and things?’
‘Sort of,’ Edward said. ‘Not very well. I did a lot of –
