Daughters-in-Law (4 page)

Rachel was grinding pine nuts for a pesto.

“What’s her name?”

“Petra something.”

“Petra?”

“That’s what it says on my class list. I’ve never heard her say it. I’ve never heard her say anything. She’s completely mute.”

“How peaceful.”

“And intriguing. I’m intrigued by her.”

Rachel began to drip olive oil into the green sludge of basil leaves and pine nuts.

“Ask her here. I miss all the boys’ friends coming round. I used to love that, when the kitchen was full of them and they were all always so starving.”

“I can’t ask her anything,” Anthony said, “until she speaks.”

Rachel put a finger into the sauce to taste it.

“Perhaps she’ll do for Ralph. He doesn’t speak much, either.”

“He wouldn’t accept any choice of ours—”

“Probably not. Is she pretty?”

Anthony thought.

“Yes—”

“You sound doubtful.”

“Well, she’s not Sigrid kind of pretty. She’s not—not
organized
-looking—”

“Okay,” Rachel said, spooning the pesto into a pottery dish they had brought back from a bird-watching holiday in Sicily. “When she speaks and you like how she sounds, ask her here anyway. I could do with more young.”

“I know.”

“D’you remember that poem? ‘How Can That Be My Baby’?”

“Pam Ayres.”

“Yes. Well, that’s me. ‘What happened to his wellies with the little froggy eyes.’”

A month later, Petra spoke. Anthony had been talking to the class about the importance of never having an eraser—“Keep going, as fast as the bird moves. Soft pencils, 4B to 6B, pencil sharpener vital but no eraser. Never”—and Petra had looked up and said in a voice presumably hoarse from lack of use, “Is the angle of the bird’s body more important than its outline?”

The whole class had turned to look at her.

“We thought you was mental,” a boy two seats away said to her, not unkindly.

Petra went on looking at Anthony for an answer.

“Yes,” Anthony said.

Petra glanced at the boy two seats away. Then she looked back at Anthony.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, and went back to her drawing.

Two weeks later, Anthony said to the class, “I wonder if you would all like to come and see my studio?”

It was evident that they all would, and had no idea how to say so.

“Good,” Anthony said. He smiled. “All of you?” They nodded. He looked at Petra. “Even you?”

“Yes,” she said, and then, “Please.”

They came on the local bus, as exotic-looking as a troupe of Shakespearean traveling players. Petra was wearing small, studious-looking steel-framed spectacles, and her hair hung down her back, almost to her waist, over a paisley shawl and purple Turkish trousers gathered at the ankle.

“I’m not going to ask your names,” Rachel said, “because I won’t remember any of them. But I’m Rachel and he’s Anthony, and those are scones I’ve just made, and that’s a chocolate cake. Obviously.”

The food released them. They ate with the focused concentration of babies, and then they began to talk. Anthony let them into the studio, and they all gasped and began to chatter and point things out to one another, and Rachel said to Petra, “Do you go bird-watching?”

Petra took her spectacles off. Her eyes were greenish, with a definite dark rim to the iris.

“Not really—”

“Well, you should,” Rachel said. “Anthony thinks very highly of your drawing, but you need to observe, like he does.”

Petra nodded.

“What about your family? Does anyone in your family draw?”

Petra cleared her throat.

“I don’t really have a family—”

“Oh,” Rachel said. She waited a moment, and then she said, “Meaning?”

“It all kind of fell apart,” Petra said.

“Fell apart?”

“My mother died and my father went, ages ago. And now my grandmother’s gone to Canada.”

“Why did she do that?”

“Because most of her grandchildren are there. I suppose.”

“Leaving you all alone?” Rachel demanded.

“It’s okay,” Petra said. “We weren’t close. I’ve got somewhere to live.”

Rachel looked at her intently.

“What are you doing in Anthony’s art class?”

“It’s what I want,” Petra said. “I work in a football-club bar weekends, and a coffee place weekdays except my college day.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty,” Petra said. She put her spectacles back on. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I’m used to fending for myself.”

Later that evening, Rachel said to Anthony, “I think we should help her.”

“In what way?”

“I’ll teach her to cook. You take her bird-watching, to Minsmere.”

“Rach—”

“She’s a brave child,” Rachel said. “She reminds me of me at that age, somehow, all stubborn and independent without quite knowing how to do it. And she’s got no one.”

“Rach, I can’t go round rescuing students. You know I can’t. Especially girls. You’re regarded as an old perv if you even look at a girl student while you’re talking to her.”

Rachel sighed.

“I’ll ask her. I liked her. She’s not ordinary.”

“Certainly not—”

“And then, after a bit, you can take her bird-watching.” Petra, it turned out, could cook. She’d never made bread, or a white sauce, but she knew what to do with chillies and lemongrass and fish sauce. She had several ingenious ways of turning a budget tin of baked beans into something interesting and surprising. And she was a quick learner. She watched, with the concentrated silence Anthony had noticed in his classes, while Rachel demonstrated various knife skills, and then she did it herself, with considerable competence. Rachel liked having her in the kitchen. In fact, she would have liked her to be in the kitchen far more often, but Petra was working, always working.

“You have to,” she said simply. “On the minimum wage. You have to.”

“What is the minimum wage?” Anthony said to Rachel.

“Under six quid an hour—”

“Poor child—”

“I know. But she’d rather do it herself. She’d rather be independent.”

“Who’s this Petra person?” Edward said to his father on the telephone.

“What?”

“Someone called Petra. Mum keeps talking about her. Is she a new cleaner? Wonderful to have a cleaner called Petra.”

“Actually,” Anthony said, “she’s one of my students. A seriously good draftsman. With not a bean and no family. Mum has rather taken to her.”

“And you?”

“I don’t want to be thought weird—”

“Dad!”

“But I think she’s great. She’s a bit peculiar and very talented and she’s only twenty and she’s great.”

“Are you grooming her for Ralph, by any chance?”

“They haven’t met—”

“Don’t dodge the question.”

“It has crossed our minds,” Anthony said, “that they might have something in common. Yes.”

“So you’re sort of keeping her on ice?”

“I’m taking her bird-watching,” Anthony said slightly stiffly.

“Ah,” Edward said affectionately, from his office in London with its view of another office. “Minsmere. The East Hide at Minsmere. The Garden of Eden.”

“Exactly,” Anthony said, and smiled into the telephone. “Exactly.”

He had driven Petra, on one of the rare weekend days she allowed herself off, down the long wooded entry to the nature reserve. She was, as usual, silent, looking about her at the spreading oak trees, the pairs and groups of quiet, earnest bird
people, the view out across the marshes to the white dome of Sizewell, like some exotic temple on the skyline.

Anthony had hired her a pair of binoculars, and taken her out among the whispering reed beds, past wooden seats dedicated to the memories of ardent bird-watchers—“He loved all living things”—to the East Hide to see, he said, because it was summer, the avocets in their precise black-and-white plumage, stalking about on their long gray legs with their shiny, upturned black bills questing for worms and insects.

“Avocets,” Anthony said, “and, over time, sandpipers and spotted redshanks and black-tailed godwits. All we have to do is wait, and watch. Watch and watch.”

It was the first visit of many. They spent, over the subsequent months, hours in the East Hide overlooking the shallow lagoon of the Scrape, with binoculars, and sketchbooks balanced on the wide ledge below the low window that, except when it was very cold, was opened to let in the sounds of the reeds sighing, and the gulls, and the not far-off sea. Sometimes, Anthony left Petra there alone, and took himself off to the bittern hide, to wait for a rare glimpse of the big striped birds stealing through the reed beds and uttering their peculiar booming call. And when he came back to find her, she would never have moved, and the pages of her sketchbook would be filled with the rapid, energetic drawings that gave him such satisfaction to see.

“I wonder,” Rachel said, “if it would have felt like this, if we’d had a daughter?”

“No.”

“Why d’you say no?”

“Because it wouldn’t have felt so friendly. There’d have been baggage. There always is.”

“So—”

“So,” Anthony said, “we mustn’t rock the boat.”

Then Ralph came home. Ralph had been traveling. Ralph
had been sent, by the American bank that had, to his parents’ surprise, hired him, to Singapore. He had not fitted in to Singapore. He sent e-mails describing his weekend escapes, to islands, to the hills, to stretches of coast not groomed as playgrounds for Westerners who liked their adventures sanitized. He said he would stick it for three years, until he had made enough money to come home and buy a cottage in Suffolk and start up some business of his own, that didn’t mean wearing a tie and being a habitué of airports. He gave no hint of what was going on in his personal life, and slid past all Rachel’s questions with the ease of practice.

“He’ll come back,” Rachel said, “married. Or not married. But with a Malay girl or an Indonesian girl. And a baby. There’s bound to be a baby. And she’ll hate Suffolk and be miserable and cold and then she’ll want to leave him and go home.”

“Probably.”

“Don’t you care?”

“Desperately,” Anthony said, “but what can we do? What have we ever been able to do, about Ralph?”

Rachel looked at him quickly, and then looked away, but not before he had seen tears spring to her eyes. Rachel had never been tearful, had never resorted to weeping when upset or frustrated—except where Ralph was concerned. Ever since his babyhood, ever since his complex and elusive childhood, Ralph had presented Rachel with a conundrum she could neither solve nor relinquish, an Achilles’ heel that she could bear only if she kept him close to her, supervising, involved, worrying. Sometimes Anthony had tried to say that it was perhaps not a good idea to indulge Ralph in his persistent oddness, but Rachel, instantly protective of her own acute vulnerability, as well as of Ralph himself, would fly to his defense.

He was so clever, she’d say, so talented, so unusual, it was
really unimaginative, as well as depressingly orthodox and limited, to expect Ralph to conform to mere convention. Anthony seldom argued. Not only did he see how deeply Rachel felt her defensiveness, but he also, to some degree, shared it. When Ralph announced, without preliminaries, that he was off to Singapore, Anthony’s guilty relief was tempered by a very real anxiety. Would Ralph ever come back? Or would he, like a character out of a Somerset Maugham short story, go native, and end up in some decayed ex-colonial outpost, soaked in arak and reading ancient Greek philosophy in the original by the light of a kerosene lamp? Or would he, as Rachel had suggested, come home, as ever unannounced, with a girl and a baby, whom he would proceed to dump, without explanation or apology, on his parents?

But then Ralph did come home, alone. He had resigned from the bank. They had begged him to stay, but, despite the fact that many of his colleagues were being sacked, and he was regarded with a fierce envy for being considered worth keeping, he persisted in his resignation. He told the manager of his department that, although he could go on doing what he was doing perfectly competently, he imagined, his heart wasn’t in it and he wanted to feel engaged. His manager asked, with some force, if the money he was being offered wasn’t pretty engaging, and Ralph said that how he felt wasn’t much affected by money, and he’d made enough for now, and he needed to get out of all this tropical tidiness and do his own thing.

“I don’t get it,” his manager said. “I simply don’t get people like you.”

“No,” Ralph said, “you wouldn’t,” and then he took his tie off and dropped it in a corporate waste bin with the bank’s logo embossed in silver on the side.

He looked, Rachel thought, very well. The bank had required that he have regular and conventional haircuts,
and the weekends of hiking and snorkeling had honed him and tanned him. His eyes were clear, and his teeth, courtesy of some skillful Singaporean cosmetic dentistry that he had agreed to, because the bank had paid for it, were a marked improvement on the slightly ramshackle mouthful of his adolescence. He settled back into his old bedroom with complete nonchalance, bundling his business suits on to dry cleaners’ wire hangers at the back of his wardrobe, and emerging, as he had done all his life, at random times of the day and night in search of cornflakes or coffee or the sports section of the newspaper.

“Do you have any kind of plan?” Anthony said.

Ralph was hunched over a sudoku, nursing a mug of soup. He glanced up briefly but didn’t speak.

“Well,” Anthony said, “I don’t want to play the heavy father. Or even the especially conventional one. But you are not far off thirty, and have had a thriving, if brief, career, and sitting about in your mother’s kitchen in a sweater you have had since school doesn’t appear to me to be a very satisfactory way to live.”

Ralph regarded his father.

“I’ve bought a cottage.”

“What!”

“I’ve bought a cottage.”

“When—”

“The other day.”

“Ralph—”

“It was easy,” Ralph said. “I heard about it, I saw it, I liked it, I bought it.”

“Where is it—”

“Shingle Street.”

“Oh, Ralph—”

“It’s cool. It’s in a little terrace. Right on the shingle.”