‘He said to me,’ Belle told them, turning her mug slowly in her hands, ‘Norland was so huge and so empty that it reproached him every day. He said he didn’t give tuppence for whether we were married or not. He said marriage was just a silly old convention to keep society tidy. And he told me that he loved seeing people do things he’d never quite had the nerve to do himself.’
Was it nerve, Elinor had thought, trying to comprehend what her mother was saying through the fog of her own shock and sorrow, to live with someone for years and never actually get round to marrying them – or was it carelessness? Was it an adventure not to leave a responsible will that would secure the future of the person you’d had three daughters with – or was it feckless? And was it really romantic to risk being the true beneficiary of a wealthy but deeply conventional old uncle by remaining unmarried – or just plain stupid? Anyway, whatever Dad had done, or not done, would Uncle Henry always have left everything to John in the end, simply because John had had a son and not daughters?
She was still angry with Dad, even now, even though she missed him every hour of every day. No, she wasn’t angry precisely, she was furious. Plain furious. But it had to be a silent fury because Ma couldn’t or wouldn’t hear a word against Dad, any more than she would accept responsibility for never giving a moment’s thought to the possibility of her own future without him. He had been an asthmatic, after all! The blue inhalers were as much a part of the Dashwood family as the members of it were. He was never going to make old bones, and he was living in a place and a manner that was entirely dependent on the charity and whim of an old man who liked his fantasies to be daring but his facts, his realities, to be orthodox.
Of course Belle would not allow for any mistakes having been made, either on her part or on Dad’s. She even insisted for weeks after Dad died, that he and John, his only child and son by that long-ago marriage, had had a death-bed reconciliation in Haywards Heath Hospital, and that they had both wept, and John had promised faithfully that he’d look after his stepmother and the girls.
‘He promised,’ Belle said, over and over, ‘we can stay at Norland for ever. And he’ll keep his word. Of course he will. He’s Daddy’s son, after all.’
And Daddy, Elinor thought, not without a hint of bitterness, is not only safely dead and thus unanswerable, but was perfect. Perfect.
But what had actually happened? Well, what had happened was that they had reckoned without John’s wife, hadn’t they? In the unbearable aftermath of Dad’s death, they had almost forgotten about Fanny. Elinor glanced now across the kitchen to the huge old Welsh dresser, which bore all their everyday mugs and plates, and also holiday postcards from friends and family photographs. There was a framed photograph of Fanny up there, in a girlish white broderie anglaise dress, holding Harry, when he was a baby. Elinor noticed that the photograph had been turned to face the wall, with its back to the room. Despite the distress of the day, Elinor couldn’t help an inward smile. What a brilliant little gesture! Who had done it? Margaret, probably, now sitting at the table with her earphones in and her gaze unfocused. Elinor stretched a foot under the table and gave her sister a little nudge of congratulation.
When John had first brought Fanny to meet them, Elinor had thought that nobody so tiny could represent any kind of force. How wrong she’d been! Fanny had turned out to be a pure concentration of self-interest. She was, apparently, just like her equally tiny mother: hard as nails and entirely devoted to status and money. Especially money. Fanny was mad about money. She’d come to her marriage to John with some money of her own, and she had very clear ideas about how to spend it. She had, in fact, very clear ideas about most things – and a will of iron.
Fanny had wanted a man and a big house with land and lots of money to run it and a child, preferably a boy. And she had got them. All of them. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stand in the way of her keeping them and consolidating them. Nothing.
It was outrageous, really, how soon after Dad’s death that Fanny came bowling up the drive in her top-of-the-range four-by-four Land Cruiser with Harry in his car seat and the Romanian nanny and the kind of household luggage you only bring if you want to make it very, very plain who’s the boss round here now. She brought a bunch of garage forecourt flowers – they even had a sticker on the cellophane wrapping saying 20 per cent more for free – for Belle and then she said would they mind awfully just staying in the kitchen wing for a few hours as she had her London interior designer coming and he charged so much for every hour that she really wanted to be able to concentrate on him.
So they’d taken Harry and the nanny, who had blue varnished nails and a leopard-print miniskirt stretched over her considerable hips, into the kitchen, and tried to give them lunch, but the nanny said she was dieting, and would only have a smoke, instead, and Harry glanced at the food on the plate and then put his thumb in, and closed his eyes in disgust. It was three hours before Fanny, her eyes alight with paint-effect visions, had blown into the kitchen and announced, without any preliminary and as if it would be unquestionably welcome news, that she and John would be moving in in a fortnight.
And they had. So silly, Fanny said firmly, as if no one could possibly disagree with her, so silly to go on paying rent in London when Norland was simply standing waiting for them. She seemed entirely oblivious to the effect that she was having, and to the utter disregard she displayed for what she was doing to the family for whom Norland had been more home than house for all their childhood years. Her ruthless determination to obliterate the past life of the house and to impose her own expensive and impersonal taste upon it instead was breathtaking. Out with the battered painted furniture, the French armoires, the cascading and faded curtains in ancient brocades, and in with polished granite and stainless steel and state-of-the-art wet rooms. Out with objects of sentimental value and worn Persian rugs and speckled mirrors in dimly gilded frames, and in with modern sculptured ‘pieces’ and stripped-back floors and vast flat television screens over every beautiful Georgian fireplace.
It was all happening too, it seemed to Belle and her daughters, with an indecent and brutal haste. Fanny arrived with John and Harry and the nanny, and an army of East European workmen, and took over all the best rooms, all the rooms that had once been Uncle Henry’s, and the house resounded to the din of sawing and hammering and drilling. Luckily, Elinor supposed, it was summer, so all the windows and doors could be opened to let out the inevitable dust and the builders’ smells of raw wood and plaster, but the open windows also meant that nothing audible could be concealed, especially not those things which Elinor grew to suspect Fanny of absolutely intending to be overheard.
They’d heard her, all the last few weeks, talking John out of any generous impulse he might have harboured towards his stepmother and half-sisters. Fanny might be tiny but her voice seemed to carry for miles, even when she was whispering. Usually, they could hear her issuing instructions (‘She never says please,’ Margaret pointed out, ‘does she?’) but if she wanted to get something out of John, she wheedled.
They could hear her, plainly, in their kitchen from the room she had commandeered as a temporary sitting room – drawing room, she called it – working on John. She was probably on his knee a lot of the time, doing her sex-kitten thing, running her little pointed fingers through his hair and somehow indicating that he would have to forgo a lot of bedroom treats if she didn’t get her way.
‘They can’t need that much, Johnnie darling. They really can’t! I mean, I know Mags is still at school – frightfully expensive, her private school, and really such a waste of money when there’s a perfectly adequate state secondary, in Lewes, which is free – but Elinor’s nearly qualified and Marianne jolly well ought to be. And Belle could easily go back to work, teaching art, like she used to.’
‘She hasn’t for yonks,’ John said doubtfully. ‘Not for as long as I can remember. Dad liked her at home …’