Daughters-in-Law (30 page)

Sigrid said defiantly, “I’m not sick again—”

“I never said you were. I don’t think you are.”

“Then why are you talking to me like this? Why are you angry?”

“I’m not angry,” her mother said, “but as a mother yourself, I expected that you might have a little more imagination.”

Sigrid looked at her lap.

“And,” her mother added, “for your mother-in-law too. Didn’t she bring up the man you married?”

Sigrid put her hands to her face.

“No crying,” her mother said more gently. “We are both too old for that. A bit of frankness between women shouldn’t make you cry.”

“I’m not crying—”

“Oh?”

“I’m just . . . adjusting. Myself.”

Sigrid’s mother stood up. She bent forward and gave her daughter’s shoulder a squeeze.

“I’m going to say good night to Mariella. Why don’t you get us a glass of wine. Friday night, after all.”

“Mamma—”

“Yes?”

“I’m not trying to . . . run away—”

Her mother paused, passing her chair. She said, “It never works, Sigi. You just take it all with you, anyway. You can change your situation, but it will be the same one if you don’t change yourself. I say this to my patients, over and over. I should have it painted on my surgery wall.”

Charlotte’s evening sickness was improving. As it diminished, her stomach swelled slightly, but definitely, and her bosom was magnificent. She told her boss at work, who was dramatically unsurprised, that she was pregnant, and was informed that she would have four months’ paid maternity leave, plus two further months on half pay, but that her job would not be kept open for her after that automatically. This all sounded fine to Charlotte. It occupied the same realm of improbability as having a baby in the first place seemed to do, and Charlotte thought blithely that it would all somehow just happen, and events would carry her along as if she were a paper boat on a stream, and she would adapt to each new happening as she had adapted, in the past, to school, and work, and London, and men, and then marriage. The early feelings of anxiety, almost fear, that she had felt at being pregnant, finding herself in a tunnel from which only she could exit, had been considerably subdued by seeing how thrilled Luke was about the baby, to the point, she discovered, of buying several pregnancy and
baby books, which he read earnestly at night before they went to sleep.

“He’d be having this baby for you if he could,” Jed said to Charlotte one day. “It’s mental. Just make sure you hand the real Luke back when you’re done with the pregnant one.”

Jed had brought Charlotte a mug with a stick drawing of a beaming pregnant woman on it, and “Happy Mum” written below the picture. It was very strange indeed to consider herself as a potential mother, to be the kind of person upon whom a much smaller person would shortly depend, a person for whom her responsibility was, her own mother had told her, a lifelong companion from your baby’s first breath. Well, Charlotte thought, a sense of responsibility probably arrived along with the baby, just as a different kind of love had appeared when she began to take Luke seriously. A kind of love which, Charlotte suspected, Petra still felt for Ralph and which Charlotte, because of her feelings for Luke, had a great deal of sympathy for.

Since the visit to Petra’s allotment, Charlotte had kept in touch with her by text. Petra didn’t do Facebook, or Twitter, or even answer her mobile, but she responded sometimes to texts, writing cryptic little messages, often mysterious in meaning, but always signed off with a kiss. Charlotte had half a dozen of these little communications in her phone’s memory, and they gave her both the glow and the mild kick of being in some kind of conspiracy. She wasn’t quite sure what the conspiracy was for, or when she would tell Luke about it, but it gave her a frisson of secret power all the same, as if she was stealing a march on Luke’s family without their knowing it. It wasn’t a big disloyalty, she told herself, it wasn’t really undermining anything serious, and anyway, didn’t Petra have the right to a point of view just as much as any of the Brinkleys?

And so when Luke said, one evening, after Edward had rung
to say that Ralph was due to stay with him, and he sounded pretty down, so could Luke please find time to meet him for a beer in the next day or two, “Ralph’s in London. He’s actually done it. Maybe that’ll bring Petra to her senses,” Charlotte said quite forcefully, “Why doesn’t anyone in your family consider Petra’s point of view?”

They had been clearing up after supper, jostling round each other in the tiny kitchen. Luke had a tumbler in each hand, and a tea towel over one shoulder. He stopped on his way to the shelf where they kept their glasses and said, “What?”

Charlotte was tipping the remains of a chicken korma into a plastic box. She said again, with emphasis, “Why don’t any of you think of what it’s like for Petra? Why does she get all the blame?”

“She doesn’t,” Luke said.

“She does. You all go on and on about her ingratitude and not having a grip on real life and wanting everything her own way—”

“Well, she does,” Luke said. He put the glasses on their shelf and whipped the tea towel off his shoulder.

“You don’t know—”

“What don’t I know?”

“What she feels. How she’s been treated—”

“Treated?”

“Yes.”

“By whom?”

“By you,” Charlotte said, snapping the box shut. “By all of you.”

Luke picked up a handful of cutlery to dry it. He said, frowning down at the forks in his hand, “Are we that mean?”

“She didn’t say anyone was mean. She just said Ralph didn’t understand.”

Luke looked up.

“
Said?
When?”

Charlotte stood up straight so that she could look directly at Luke.

“When I went to see her.”

Luke dumped the forks back on the draining board.

“Oh, Char—”

“I saw her while you were at your parents’. When you went with Edward. I drove to Aldeburgh and I went to their house, but Ralph didn’t want to let me in, so I went to find Petra on her allotment.”

Luke said sadly, “What good did you think that would do?”

“She deserves a hearing!”

“Are you sure,” Luke said, “that you’re not just getting even with my mother, somehow?”

“No,” Charlotte said too quickly. “She needs someone to be on her side. Don’t you think?” She paused, and then she said, “Anyway, we didn’t even mention your mother’s name.”

Luke sighed. He said, “I don’t expect you needed to.” He glanced at Charlotte. “I don’t want a row about this.”

“Nor me.”

“What did you . . . exactly say to her?”

“I said,” Charlotte said, feeling a sudden and disconcerting diminution in her own certainty, “that even if I didn’t share everything that’s important to her, I understood the importance, and I was, well, I was there for her.”

“Shagging the bloke?”

“She isn’t shagging him. Why does it always have to be about sex? Why can’t she be with someone who isn’t always telling her to do things she doesn’t want to do?”

“Like what?”

“Like,” Charlotte said, gaining confidence again, “like saying he had to be free to go to London, but she wasn’t free to see anyone else—”

“He’s in London,” Luke said, “to earn money to keep her, and the kids.”

“That’s not how she sees it. It isn’t what she wants. She just wants to be left, living by the sea, but not by the standards of . . . of—” She stopped.

“My parents,” Luke said.

Charlotte nodded. Luke put the tea towel down in a damp lump beside the forks. He looked out of the window above the sink, his hands in his pockets. Charlotte waited, watching him, uncertain of how she would defend herself, now that she had been found out. Luke didn’t turn.

“It always comes back to that,” Luke said. “Doesn’t it? It always comes back to the fact that you’ve decided to hate my mother.”

Anthony was sorting canvases. He’d been drawing—a sandwich tern in flight, trying to differentiate clearly all the flight-feather groups in its spread wings—but he wasn’t concentrating properly, so he left his easel and the bunch of pencils he kept in an old stoneware mustard jar, and climbed a stepladder to haul down, from their unsteady stacks on the rafters, the piles of old boards and canvases, to see which of them might be used again, and which could be taken into the college to be used for his students. It was less than a week until the beginning of term, and Anthony felt a pitiful need for the small structure it gave to his life, the reassurance of familiarity of yet another class of foundation-year students, who were all in love with Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, and could see no point or merit in learning to draw a scene from their grandma’s bird table. Anthony thought even of their scorn and reluctance with pleased anticipation.

He had brought down two piles, blown the worst of the dust off them, and sorted through the endless drawings and
paintings, years and years of owls and ducks, of storks and swans and geese, of a golden eagle landing on a rock (that had been a good holiday, in the Western Highlands), of gulls and lapwings, and of a dipper swimming as happily as a penguin. He’d paused over a painting of a group of kittiwakes plunging and splashing together in a lake, and thought that it was actually good enough, arresting enough, to do something with rather than leave to molder on the rafters, and he was standing with the painting in one hand and some sketches of herons drawn on thick rough handmade paper in the other when there was a sudden flurry of gravel outside the studio, as if someone was running unsteadily, and the door was flung open, and Kit appeared, panting.

“Gramps!”

Anthony let both pictures fall to the floor. He knelt and held his arms out.

“Kit!”

Kit ran to him. He was laughing. He put his arms round Anthony’s neck, and held on, chattering in his ear. Then the gravel crunched again and Petra appeared carrying Barney. She walked through the door, and then halted just inside, looking at Anthony. She didn’t speak.

Anthony detached Kit’s arms, and got to his feet. Kit clung to his trouser legs, still chirruping. Barney observed his grandfather and leaned forward in Petra’s arms, grunting.

Anthony said, “What are you doing here?”

Petra shifted Barney slightly in her arms. She was wearing jeans, and a loose smock made of green Indian gauze, embroidered with mirrors. Her bare feet were thrust into sneakers, whose toe caps were worn into holes.

“I wanted to see you,” Petra said.

She bent and deposited Barney on the floor. He began to crawl rapidly towards his grandfather.

“Careful,” Anthony said, “there might be drawing pins—”

“I’ll look!” Kit shouted. “I’ll look! I’ll look!”

Anthony dropped to his knees again.

“I was sorting old drawings. They might have fallen out, where a drawing was pinned to a board—”

Petra came a few steps closer.

“We’ll all look—”

She dropped to the floor too.

“I’m not sure,” Anthony said, “that I have anything to say to you.”

Petra found a drawing pin and reached up to put it on the edge of the nearest table.

“Okay—”

“Okay!”

“I didn’t think you would,” Petra said.

“Then why have you come?”

Petra reached forward to take some nameless small object out of Barney’s hand.

“You’ve been good to me. Always. I wanted you to know that.”

“Found one!” Kit said excitedly.

Anthony turned away so that she wasn’t in his line of vision.

“I do know it. That’s why . . . what you are doing is so hard to understand—”

“I’m not doing anything to you—”

“Ralph is my son. He’s hurt. I’m hurt.”

Petra sat back on her heels.

“I get that.”

“So maybe you will also get that I don’t want to see you.”

Kit went up to Anthony and offered two drawing pins.

“Thank you,” Anthony said. He felt violently disconcerted. He put his hand up to his eyes.

“You crying?” Kit said, peering.

“No—”

“Shall I blow your nose?”

“Kit, old boy, just give Gramps a minute, would you, just let me—”

Kit put his arms round as much of Anthony’s trunk as he could manage, as if to haul him to his feet. Petra sat back on her heels and watched while Anthony got up unevenly, clumsily tangled with his grandson.

“There!” Kit said with triumph.

“Thank you—”

Petra stood up, unfolding from the floor in a single movement. She said, “We’ll go—”

Anthony spread his arms and hands in a sudden gesture of helplessness.

“Did you see Rachel?”

“I came to see you—”

“Look,” Anthony said, “look, I can imagine how wretched this has been for you. I know how tricky Ralph can be. I know you don’t want to live in Ipswich or London or wherever, but what . . . whatever
possessed
you to think another man would be the answer?”

Kit began to roam round the studio, investigating things. Barney had found a walnut on the floor that he was trying to insert into a hole in the side of one of the armchairs. Petra watched them both for a while and then she said, “He’s not . . . an answer. He’s just getting me through.”

“But there’s
us
! There’s always been us! We’ve always been here to help, you only had to ask, you only had to whisper—”

“I can’t go on saying thank you,” Petra said.

“We don’t want thanks, we don’t expect thanks—”

Petra said quietly, “I can’t always do what you want. You . . . forget.”

“Forget what?”

“That not everybody wants what you want. Some people want much
less
.”

“If breaking up something like a marriage is wanting something less—”

“I didn’t break it. Not at the beginning.”

Anthony looked at her for the first time since she had arrived.

“What do you mean?”

Petra shrugged. She said, “It suited us how we were. It suited us best, at the beginning, with just the cottage and the beach. Then it changed. But I haven’t. I want what I’ve always wanted. I knew it when I first saw the cottage.”

“But this
man
—”

Petra bent to heave Barney into her arms again.