Daughters-in-Law (8 page)

Sigrid let a silence fall, but she didn’t take her hand away. Instead, she let her gaze travel along the lines of family photographs in their glass-and-chrome frames, which sat on the front edges of some of the bookshelves, her parents on their boat, her parents dressed up for some formal occasion at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, her brother in a leather coat and dark glasses on a Berlin street, Mariella in a tutu, on a bicycle, in a playpen, on a beach, Anthony and Rachel on Ed and Sigrid’s wedding day, his brothers and their wives on theirs, Ralph and Petra’s little boys posed on a hearthrug with some colored wooden bricks. Then she looked back at Edward.

“I can think of one thing. One thing you could do.”

He sighed again. He said, despondently, “What?”

“Well, Ralph is clever, isn’t he? He was successful in Singapore—”

“Yes—”

“They wanted him to stay.”

“Yes—”

Sigrid moved to the edge of the sofa, preparatory to getting up and returning to the kitchen for supper.

“Well,” she said, “why don’t
you
offer him a job?”

It was only much later, Sigrid thought now, pulling off her boots and sliding her feet into the ergonomic molded clogs in which she worked, that Ed had confessed that he thought Ralph—even if work could be found for him—would be very difficult to work with. So difficult, in fact, that he, Edward, wasn’t at all sure he could do it. It was at that point that Sigrid had lost her temper. She said a great deal about Edward’s
attitude to his family, and contrasted it with her attitude to her family, and then she said that she, too, would find working with her own brother difficult, but if she decided to do it she would just
do it
, for family reasons, and not go complaining on, as all the Brinkleys did, and all the time, about everything,
everything
was a drama with them, and then she had gone into the bathroom and locked the door and, staring at herself in the mirror while she brushed her teeth, told herself that tomorrow she would be in her laboratory, with interesting, impersonal work to do and, even if there was irritating Philip, there would be no Brinkleys, and no circular conversations, and nobody asking for advice in order to ignore it.

And here she was now, clogs on, hair tied back, ready. In a sealed box, wrapped in acid-free paper, on the bench by her accelerator and microscopes, lay a fragment of medieval textile, sent from a significant church in Florence, about which Sigrid had all the interested skepticism of the cradle atheist. She opened the door to the lab, almost humming in anticipation of a day ahead free of all the clinging tendrils of family preoccupations, and saw at her bench, actually sitting on her particular stool and peering into one of her microscopes, ginger-haired Philip.

Mariella liked her rare journeys to school with her father. She liked her father being tall—taller than most of the other fathers—and she liked his black car with its blond interior, and she liked being able to talk to him when she had his individual attention. His attention, at the weekend, had been all over the place, which meant that her mother had been distracted too, although she would have denied it, which rather diminished the eventual victory about the American bakery and the cup-cakes. They had gone, certainly, but Sigrid hadn’t been wholehearted. Like most only children, Mariella was aware of every nuance in parental mood.

“Daddy,” she said, buckling herself into the front seat of the car beside her father, “are Ralph and Petra going to have absolutely no money at all, not even enough money for cornflakes?”

“
Uncle
Ralph,” Edward said automatically. “
Aunt
Petra.”

“Petra said to call her Petra. What do you do if you have absolutely no money, not even enough to buy a tiny little piece of cheese that would be too small even for a mouse to live on?”

“They aren’t like that,” Edward said. “They have plenty of money for cheese and cornflakes.”

Mariella spread her hands. She had a tiny blue daisy transfer on her smallest left fingernail, which she had daringly left on for a school day.

“So they’re okay?”

“Exactly.”

“You go jabbering on,” Mariella said, “all weekend, and then you say there’s nothing to worry about.”

Edward turned the car expertly away from the curbside and into the traffic along the street.

“It isn’t quite as black-and-white as that. Uncle Ralph needs to find different work to do.”

“For when the money runs out?”

“Well, yes, kind of—”

“He could be a doctor,” Mariella said, “or a weatherman. Or he could be in the post office, selling stamps. Mummy says there are never enough people in the post office, and the queues are terrible.”

Edward slowed the car at the first traffic lights.

“It takes six years to train to be a doctor.”

“Wow,” Mariella said admiringly.

“And you need a science degree to be a weather man, and selling stamps might not produce quite enough money to look after them all.”

“Petra could work,” Mariella said. “Like Mummy does.
Mummy says it’s good for women to work. She says look at Bella’s mother spending her whole life having her toenails painted.”

“I don’t think she said that—”

Mariella tossed her head and felt her school-day plait thumping against her neck.

“Well, she
looked
as if she was going to say it.”

“Maybe she just thought it.”

Mariella stared out of the car window in silence.

“Or, maybe,” Edward said, “
you
thought it, looking at Bella’s mother, and then you just found you’d said it.”

Mariella inspected her daisy transfer.

She said, “D’you think we should spend next weekend making food and putting it all in a basket and driving to Suffolk to give it to Ralph and Petra?”

“That’s a very nice idea.”

“Shall we ask Mummy?”

“Let’s.”

Mariella glanced at her father.

“If you and Mummy run out of money, Daddy, you’re to tell me. Okay? At once.”

“Really? Why? Suppose we want to protect you?”

Mariella snorted.

“If I don’t
know
, then I can’t do anything about it, can I?” She kicked at the rubber mat that protected the carpet in the floor well under her feet. “That’s not protection.”

“Oh?”

“No,” Mariella said firmly. “That’s just daft.”

Edward rang Sigrid at lunchtime. He told her about his conversation with Mariella and said he hoped she was having a good day untroubled by human provocation, and that he was going to talk to his managing director about Ralph because even
though the bank wasn’t much in a hiring mood, there were still some opportunities in the analysis team. Sigrid told him about Philip.

“And he’d brought me flowers.”

“What?
Flowers?
”

“Cornflowers. Really rather pretty.”

“Fuck Philip—”

“I was so cross,” Sigrid said. “I was so cross that he tried to disarm me with flowers. I’ve put them in a mug in the little place where I eat lunch sometimes. I hope he gets the message.”

“As long as you don’t like them—”

“Oh, I like
them
,” Sigrid said, “I just don’t like being given them.”

Edward said, “I’m really sorry about the weekend—”

“That’s okay.”

“Mariella wants us to bake cookies and stuff for Ralph and co.”

“At least she’s practical,” Sigrid said.

“I’m trying to be, too. Just one thing—”

“What?”

“I quite understand,” Edward said, “why you said a lot of what you said, last night, and you were right about most of it. But—”

“But what—”

“It’s much easier,” Edward said, “to be detached and grownup about your family, if said family is safely in another country. That’s all.”

“Is that a judgment?”

“No,” he said, “it’s an observation.”

“Then you said it in the wrong tone of voice.”

“Sigi—”

“I would like,” Sigrid said, “to see more of my family than I
do. I would
like
the chance to get as exasperated with them as you do with yours.”

There was a brief pause and then Edward said shortly, “See you later,” and put the phone down.

Sigrid’s colleagues—three girls, a quiet and competent middle-aged man, and Philip—were either eating various forms of lunch in the cubbyhole adorned with the mug of cornflowers, or out. Sigrid wrote a note to deter any further interference during her absence—“Please do not touch under any circumstances”—and weighted it under a stapler on her bench, and then went out of the lab to retrieve her boots and have half an hour in a café to settle her thoughts and her temper. As she passed the cubbyhole, Philip looked up from the tub of pasta salad he was eating with a plastic fork, but did not speak. She dared to hope she had quelled even him into silence.

Walking briskly, she crossed Tottenham Court Road and made for Charlotte Street, and the lounge of a hotel where she could be sure of coffee and a sandwich and the brief peace of anonymity granted by a public space. The hotel was unaggressively hip, with most life in it being concentrated in its brasserie, so Sigrid found an armchair in a corner, ordered a smoked-salmon sandwich, put on her spectacles, and opened a book to deter interruption—there was a breed of men who seemed to believe that any blonde alone in a bar or hotel lounge had been left there like a parcel, expressly to be collected—and applied herself to straightening her thoughts.

It was not, she told herself firmly, that she did not like Edward’s family. She had always liked them, from that first visit to Suffolk when Ed wanted to show her off to his parents as the prize he had secured, and now she was used to them. She had grown up in a first-floor flat in a good part of Stockholm, furnished with pared-down modern furniture interspersed with elegant gray-painted Gustavian pieces inherited from
her father’s mother, and the color and sprawl of Anthony and Rachel’s house on the flat Suffolk coast had been a great surprise to her. But she was accustomed to it now, as she was to Rachel’s robust cooking, and Anthony’s energetic emotions, and the expectation that anyone who came in from the outside would acknowledge, as a matter of course, that they would be subsumed into the Brinkley way of thinking, the Brinkley way of doing things, because the Brinkley way was—well, the best way.

Her sandwich arrived, on a square white-china plate, garnished with frondlike pea shoots. She regarded it. Smoked fish. Her parents probably ate smoked fish at some point every day. If they—she and Edward and Mariella—lived in Stockholm, would there be a quiet but determined pressure on them to eat smoked fish, too, on a daily basis? Would her parents, unshowily preoccupied with their own lives and professions as they were, be insistent that Sigrid and her family lived their lives by the same rules and expectations as they did themselves? Was Edward right? Had she somehow idealized her parents because they were tidily in Sweden, and not messily right here? She bit into the sandwich. Was she being unfair?

She leaned back in her chair, chewing, and closed her eyes. I have been here in England, she told herself, for fourteen years. I have been in London for twelve years. I like it here, I like London, I like England, I don’t want to go back to Stockholm. But—she took a little breath, as if to give herself the energy to pursue the thought right through to the end—although I am not an outsider to Edward, to Mariella, to most people I meet and work with, I am still a foreigner to my parents-in-law. To them I am Our Swedish Daughter-in-Law. I may be made welcome and made at home and invited to help Rachel in the kitchen, but I am always a little bit the stranger, the one who captured their son before he could meet an English girl,
and married him in a place that wasn’t their place, and in a way that wasn’t their way. And nothing can ever change that, because I was born in Sweden, and however good my English is—and it is good—I speak with a slight singsong, as Swedes do, and so every time I open my mouth I remind them.

And then there is Petra. I don’t mind Petra. I am quite fond of Petra, in fact. She is not, perhaps, a natural fit for me as a person, but she makes no difficulties, she is not jealous or possessive or unpleasant; in fact, she is sweet in her odd way, and Mariella loves her and loves to help with the little boys. But she is treated differently from me. Nothing is said, but it is in the
attitude
. Petra is English, Petra is an artist, Petra has no family to support her or look after her, Petra is something they can own, and shape, and make think like they do. And what they don’t remember, Sigrid thought suddenly, angrily, is that every time they pull Petra a little closer they make a little more distance between them and me, and, because I don’t have my family in this country, I feel that distance, and when I feel it I am sometimes cold to Edward, to punish them through him, and then I am sorry, and angry with myself, and with them, and end up crying in hotel lobbies and not eating my expensive sandwich.

She opened her eyes, sniffing, and sat upright, pulling a pack of tissues out of her bag. She blew her nose decisively. This was ridiculous. She was a grown woman, a scientist, a wife and mother. Her English parents-in-law were not unkind to her. She had a lovely house and enough money and a husband and daughter who thought the world of her. Her job was to support Edward through family crises, especially when he felt, as the eldest son, that everyone was turning to him in the hope of a solution, and he could not think what that solution could be. It was not her job to isolate him, and refuse to help him, or listen to him, and then shriek at him when he touched a raw nerve in
her, which he never did out of malice, but only because he was a man and therefore sometimes clumsy.

She picked up her sandwich. There was something else now, too, to add to the mix. There was Charlotte. Gorgeous Charlotte, the baby of her family and plainly babied by them, especially by her mother who had, since the death of Charlotte’s father, devoted herself to her maternal and grandmaternal roles. How would Rachel and Anthony turn out to be with Charlotte? Would Luke stand up to them, in her defense, if she wanted him to? How was Luke going to manage, balancing the expectations of the Brinkleys? And how would Charlotte relate to Petra, and to the place Petra had at the heart of the Brinkley family? Sigrid swallowed her mouthful. Somehow, the thought of Charlotte made her feel better, less excluded, more able to look at the situation as something that could be perfectly well managed. She blew her nose again, and smoothed her hair back, and looked up to ask someone to bring her some coffee.