Sense & Sensibility. Joanna TrollopeЧитать онлайн книгу.
John Dashwood said, with surprise rather than pleasure.
He leaned forward and reduced the volume on the television, although he didn’t turn it off altogether. Fanny remained where she was, holding her wine glass. John stood up slowly. ‘Have a drink,’ he said automatically, gesturing vaguely towards the bottle plainly visible on a silver tray on the coffee table in front of them.
‘I’m sure’, Fanny said, ‘that she won’t be staying that long.’
Belle smiled at her. She advanced into the room far enough to give herself authority, but not so far that she couldn’t make a quick escape. ‘Quite right, Fanny. I will be two minutes. We had a visitor this afternoon.’
Fanny continued to regard her wine glass. She said to it, ‘I wondered when you would see fit to mention that to me.’
Belle smiled broadly at John. ‘Would it be an awful nuisance to turn the television off?’
John glanced at Fanny. She made an impatient little gesture of dismissal. He picked up the remote again and aimed it at the screen.
‘Thank you,’ Belle said. She was determined to keep smiling. She folded her hands lightly in front of her. ‘The thing is, that we won’t be troubling you here at Norland much longer. We’ve been offered a house. By a relation of mine.’
John looked truly startled. ‘Good heavens.’
Fanny said smoothly, ‘But not too far from here, I hope?’
‘Actually …’ Belle said, and stopped, savouring the moment.
‘Actually what?’
‘We are going to Devon,’ Belle said with satisfaction.
‘Devon!’
‘Near Exeter. A house on an estate which is, I gather, just a fraction larger than this one. It belongs to my cousin. My cousin Sir John Middleton.’
John said, almost inaudibly, ‘My cousin, I believe. A Dashwood cousin.’
Belle took no notice. She looked directly, smilingly, at Fanny. ‘So we’ll be out of your hair by the end of the month. As soon as we can sort a school for Margaret and all that.’
‘But I was going to help you find a house!’ John said aggrievedly.
‘So sweet of you, but in the end the house came to us.’
‘So lucky,’ Fanny said.
‘Oh, I agree. So lucky.’
‘It’s too bad,’ John exclaimed.
‘What is?’
‘It’s too bad of you to make all these arrangements without consulting me.’
‘But you didn’t want me to consult you,’ Belle said.
Fanny said clearly, ‘Sweetness, you’ve given them all somewhere to live all summer, rent free, and the run of the kitchen gardens, after all.’
John glanced at her. He said with relief, ‘So I have.’
‘There we are,’ Belle said brightly. ‘All settled. You let us stay on in our own home for a while and now we’ve found another one to go to! Perfect. I’ve taken Barton Cottage for a year and, of course, it would be lovely to see you there whenever you are down that way.’
Fanny looked out of the window. ‘I never go to Devon,’ she said.
Belle paused in the doorway. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I thought not. But maybe you’ll break the habit of a lifetime. It’s odd, really, that you never went to see Edward all the time he was in Plymouth, don’t you think?’
Fanny’s head snapped back round. ‘Edward! Why mention Edward?’
Belle was almost out of the door. ‘Oh, Edward,’ she said airily. ‘Dear Edward. So affectionate. He’s going to come to Barton. I made a special point of asking him to come and see us in the cottage. And he said he’d love to.’
And then she reached for the handle and closed the door behind her with a small but triumphant bang.
‘Marianne,’ Elinor said, ‘will you please put that guitar down and come and help us?’
Marianne was in her favourite playing chair by the window in her bedroom, her right foot on a small pile of books – a French dictionary and two volumes of Shakespeare’s history plays came to just the right height – and the guitar resting comfortably across her thigh. She was playing a song of Taylor Swift’s that she had played a good deal since Dad died, even though – or maybe even because – everyone had told her that a player at her level could surely express themselves better with something more serious. It was called ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’, and to Elinor’s mind, it was mawkish.
‘Oh, M, please.’
Marianne played determinedly on to the end of a verse. She said, when she’d finished, ‘I know you hate that song.’
‘I don’t hate it …’
‘It isn’t much of a song. I know that. It isn’t hard to play. But it suits me. It suits how I feel.’
Elinor said, ‘We’re packing books. You can’t imagine how many books there are.’
‘I thought the cottage was furnished?’
‘It is. But not with books and pictures and things. We could get through it so much more quickly if you just came and helped a bit.’
Marianne raised her head to look out of the window. She folded both arms embracingly around her guitar. She said, ‘Can you imagine being away from here?’
Elinor said tiredly, ‘We’ve been through all that.’
‘Look at those trees. Look at them. And the lake. I’ve done all my practice by this window, looking out at that view. I’ve played the guitar in this room for ten years, Ellie, ten years.’ She looked down at the guitar. ‘Dad gave me my guitar in this room.’
‘I remember.’
‘When I got grade five.’
‘Yes.’
‘He did all the research, and everything. I remember him saying it had to have a cedar top and rosewood sides and an ebony fingerboard, a proper, classical, Spanish guitar. He was so excited.’
Elinor came further into the room. She said soothingly, ‘It’s coming with us, M, you’ll have your guitar.’
Marianne said suddenly, ‘Fanny—’ and stopped.
‘Fanny? What about her?’
Marianne looked at her. ‘Yesterday. Fanny asked me what the guitar had cost.’
‘She didn’t! What did you say to her?’
‘I told her,’ Marianne said, ‘I said I couldn’t remember exactly, I thought maybe a bit more than a thousand, and she said who paid for it.’
‘The cheek!’ Elinor exclaimed.
‘Well, I was caught on the hop, wasn’t I, because she then said did Dad pay for it, and I said it was a joint present for getting grade five from Dad and Uncle Henry, and she said, Well, that really means it belongs to Norland, doesn’t it, if Uncle Henry paid for some of it, and not you.’
Elinor sat down abruptly on the end of Marianne’s bed. She said, ‘You couldn’t make Fanny up, could you?’
Marianne laid her cheek on the guitar’s rosewood flank. ‘I put it under my bed last night. I’m not letting it out of