Daughters-in-Law (10 page)

Kit gave her a quick glance and went on with his pebbles.

“I’m sorry,” Petra said, “but we’ve got to go now. We’ve got to go home—”

Kit got up abruptly. He drew his right foot back and then kicked his truck hard so that the pebbles sprayed out across Petra’s strawberry bed, among the canes that held up her sweet peas.

“NO!” Kit yelled.

Rachel was in their kitchen when they got home. Ralph was there too, in his half beard and usual T-shirt, and he had made Rachel a mug of tea, and was holding one himself with the air of doing something strictly for politeness’ sake only. On the kitchen table, which still bore the remains of the children’s breakfast, was moussaka in a pottery dish and a plastic box of nectarines and a chocolate cake dotted with Smarties.

“Boys!” Rachel said.

She put her tea mug down and darted round the table, kissing Kit and swooping Barney out of his buggy. She held Barney so that he could see the cake.

“Look!” she said. “Look! Look what Granny’s brought you!”

Barney curved himself over her arm and leaned down towards the table.

“Where’s Gramps?” Kit said.

“Painting,” Rachel said. “Where d’you think? Gramps is always painting, isn’t he?”

“That’s kind,” Petra said. “I mean, the food—”

“We aren’t actually short of food,” Ralph said.

“Well,” Rachel said, jiggling Barney, “you won’t be, after this weekend. Mariella’s baking for you. She rang to tell me.
She’s having a bakeathon, and they’re bringing it all up on Sunday.”

“Mariella’s coming?” Kit said.

Ralph moved to take Barney out of his Rachel’s arms.

“Mum, we aren’t refugees, you know—”

Barney flipped himself round so as not to lose sight of the cake.

“No, of course not. But food never comes amiss. Does it, Barney?”

“Who’s coming?” Ralph said. “Are they all coming?”

“Well,” Rachel said with a slightly dangerous emphasis, “Ed and Sigi and Mariella are. But not Luke and Charlotte.”

“Why not?” Ralph said sarcastically. “Why aren’t they all coming, bringing cast-off clothes and blankets and unwanted toys?”

“Don’t be difficult,” Rachel said. “They aren’t coming because Charlotte’s
mother
is having a lunch party—”

“So?”

“Luke,” Rachel said, “is needed
there
.”

Kit stood on tiptoe, holding the edge of the table, and quietly, slowly pushed his forefinger into the chocolate cake until stopped by his knuckle.

“Kit!”

He did nothing, but merely stood there with his finger in the cake. Rachel seized him and pulled him back. Petra gave a little scream, half a sob, and fled from the room. Rachel looked at Ralph over Kit’s head.

“It’s all too much for her—”

“Of course it is,” Ralph said savagely, “if you all behave as if it’s the end of the world.”

Rachel said nothing. With a knowledge of the kitchen that caused Ralph to exclaim under his breath and Barney to regard his father’s furious face, three inches from his own, with grave
alarm, she opened a kitchen drawer, took out a long-bladed knife, and said to Kit, “Let’s cut it properly, shall we? Let’s cut it and then you and Barney can both have some.”

“A
huge
piece,” Kit said.

“Magic word?”

“Huger,” Kit said.

“What about please—”

“Please,” Kit said.

Barney lurched forward in his father’s embrace.

“It’s okay, Barneykins,” Rachel said, “there’ll be cake for you.” Ralph pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down, confining Barney with one arm. Rachel said, “Shouldn’t you go and see if Petra’s okay?”

“No.”

“Ralph—”

“She’s okay. She’s by herself. Being by herself is what she does when she needs to.”

Rachel put two slices of cake onto plates. Barney was purple with desire.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Mum!” Ralph shouted.

Kit jumped. He shot his father a fleeting, terrified look. Rachel lifted him onto another chair and put the cake in front of him.

“Don’t shout,” she said to Ralph.

“Don’t make me shout.”

“There, Barney, there. Just stop him putting the whole thing in at once! No hurry, Kit darling, try to eat slowly. I actually had a purpose in coming.”

Ralph broke off a piece of Barney’s cake and ate it.

“I bet you did.”

“It’s about Petra,” Rachel said.

“Oh yes?”

“When did she last do any drawing?”

Barney pushed his plate slightly to one side out of Ralph’s reach, and hung over it possessively.

“I don’t know,” Ralph said. “Ages ago, months, before Barney maybe—”

“That’s what we thought. We thought that what she needs while everything is so up in the air is the chance to do some drawing. To have a bird day.”

“It’s not up in the air,” Ralph said.

Rachel ignored him. She fetched a cloth from the sink and began to dab at the chocolate smeared on her grandsons’ faces.

“We thought we’d take the boys next week, for a day or so, and then you and Petra can have some time together, or Petra can go off and draw.”

“Okay,” Ralph said. “Great. Fine. You can do it on the Wednesday.”

Barney stretched out, removed the cloth from Rachel’s hand, and dropped it neatly on the floor. Then he put his whole face down into the cake.

“Barney!”

“Wednesday?” Ralph said, pulling Barney back but making no attempt to wipe his face.

“Why Wednesday?”

“Because,” Ralph said, “I have an interview next Wednesday.”

“Darling!” Rachel said. “Fantastic! What amazing news.”

“It’s an interview, Mum. Not a job. An interview.”

Rachel came round the table and put her hands on his shoulders.

“Where is it? Where is this interview?”

Ralph looked across the table at Kit. Kit had picked the Smarties off his piece of cake and was arranging them on the rim of his plate. He glanced up at his father, as if to check that there would be no more shouting.

“London,” Ralph said.

* * *

When Petra had first gone to Rachel and Anthony’s house, as a student in a group of students, it had struck her as being a wonderful place. It looked quite formal outside, with its soft old bricks and defined white windows, but inside it had been only comforting, random and colorful and warm, with crooked floors and sudden steps and beams and odd patches of paneling. She had been bowled over by Anthony’s studio, by Rachel’s kitchen, by the easy authority they both exercised in their particular spheres. But back then, of course, on subsequent visits and until Ralph came home, she had been alone with Rachel and Anthony, the only child, as it were, and she was lapped about with the privilege of being the only young thing in a place that had largely evolved for the nurture and stimulation of a family. Nowadays, however, what with her own family, with Ralph’s brothers and their families, with so many diverse claims upon the house and its chief occupants, going there no longer had the luxury of the past, or the sense of individual significance. Sometimes going there now, being there, she even forgot to speak, she forgot to claim the right to be spoken to, included. Sometimes, too, Ralph said to her on the way home, “Are you sulking?”

It had been like that today. The house had felt as if it was roaring with people. Mariella, a lock of her long hair carefully wound with colored threads, and bead bracelets on her wrists, had dumped a huge baker’s basket on the floor of the sitting room, and proceeded to give a kind of performance of benefaction, producing biscuits and buns and cake out of it to the exclamations and applause of everyone. Except Petra. Petra was very fond of Mariella, and very touched by the fact that this baking bounty had been entirely her idea, and partly her achievement, but, in that rowdily enthusiastic company, she found she simply could not speak because she felt she in
no way belonged to what was going on. It was too
much
. And Ralph looked mutinous.

Lunch was, if anything, even worse. Rachel had cooked superbly, as usual, and lavishly, as usual, and Kit had eaten three roast potatoes, with gravy, and asked for a fourth, and Rachel had been delighted. And, when Luke’s absence had been mentioned, and mentioned again, and analyzed, and discussed, and Charlotte’s mother had been relegated to being the inevitable reason for his not being there, the conversation had turned to Ralph, and the prospective interview, which was apparently at Edward’s bank, by Edward’s connivance, and everyone was extremely pleased with him for engineering it and equally certain that Ralph would acquit himself well because he was, after all, so clever, wasn’t he?

“What if you get the job?” Anthony said.

“What do you mean, what if I get it?”

“Well,” Anthony said, “it’s City-based, isn’t it. You can’t commute from the Suffolk coast to the City every day. Can you?”

“Of course I can.”

“No, you can’t,” Rachel said. “You’ll be exhausted. You’ll never see the children.”

And then Ralph had said calmly, not looking at his parents, not looking at Petra, “We’ll have to relocate then, won’t we?” and then, as an answering hubbub rose around the table, he lifted both his hands in the air and shouted, “No more speculation! No more discussion! Stop!” and Petra had a distinct sensation that, if she just gradually pushed her chair back to the wall, she could melt into it somehow, and vanish, and escape through it into the air and freedom the other side, and nobody—except Kit—would even notice that she was no longer there.

“Are you sulking?” Ralph said on the way home.

“No.”

“What is it then?”

“I’m stunned,” Petra said.

“What by? That I’ve got an interview?”

Petra glanced over her shoulder. Both boys were asleep in their car seats. Barney’s mouth was open.

“No. Of course not.”

“What then?”

“You said,” Petra said, “you said that we might have to leave Suffolk.”

“No,” Ralph said, “I didn’t. I simply said that if I couldn’t manage the commute, we might have to relocate.”

“I can’t do it.”

“I’m not asking you to leave Suffolk. Maybe we just move nearer Ipswich.”

“No.”

“You used to live in Ipswich. You
know
Ipswich.”

“That was before,” Petra said.

“Before what?”

“Before you. And the boys. And being by the sea, and everything.”

Ralph said nothing for a mile or two. Then he said, “Nothing’s happened yet. Why are we crossing bridges we haven’t even got to?”

Petra stared out of the car window.

“There’s always new bridges. I liked it at Shingle Street. I’ve got used to it at Aldeburgh. I don’t want to get used to something else.”

Ralph turned the car into their little street. He said, “You may have to.”

Petra said nothing.

Ralph said again, louder, putting the brake on decisively, “You may have to.”

“No,” Petra said.

* * *

Later, when the boys had been bathed and Barney was in his cot under his dinosaur mobile, Petra said she was going out.

“Where?” Ralph said. He was reading to Kit.

“Just to the allotment—”

Kit began to scramble out from under his duvet.

“I want to come—”

Ralph put restraining arms around him.

“No.”

“Yes, yes, I want to—”

“No,” Petra said. She bent and smoothed Kit’s hair back. “I’m just going quickly. By myself. I’m going to pick the strawberries.”

Kit began to cry.

“I’ll come and kiss you when I’m back. See if you can still be awake when I come back, see if you can stay awake that long.”

“Stay with me,” Ralph said.

“Are you talking to me?”

“No,” Ralph said, “I’m talking to Kit.”

Petra let herself out of the house, and turned towards the footpath. It was a calm, sweet evening, with an apricot light from the sinking sun, and a little sharp breath of air coming up from the sea. Petra went along the road past the school, and then crossed to take the path down towards the allotments, remembering that she had forgotten to bring something to put any ripe strawberries in and wondering if she could balance them in a courgette leaf, or make a pouch out of the hem of her sweatshirt. She’d never owned a sweatshirt before she had children; she’d never considered anything so practical and comfortable and washable. She hadn’t needed to.

A little way down the path, there was a lowish wall with a flat top, the boundary of the garden of a house that Petra fantasized about. Often, on the way home from the allotment, she would put the brake on the buggy and lift Kit onto the
wall, and they would gaze together in silence, and Petra had the sense, as she so often did, that Kit understood something in her because that same element was in him, and thus entirely a matter of course. There was a grassy stretch below the wall, running away to a big, still pond edged in shrubs, some with lime-green-and-purple leaves, and then beyond that the ground rose sharply and dramatically in a little cliff, at the top of which sat the house. It wasn’t a beautiful house, it was simply a big, friendly house, commanding the garden and land in front of it from its wonderful position, surveying the marvelous trees below it, and then the marshes and the reed beds, and beyond that the sea, glimmering away in the distance. The house gave Petra a feeling of something more profound than calm, a sense of fitting in, of homecoming, of being a ship at last in safe harbor. It gave her, in fact, the very opposite feeling that being in Rachel and Anthony’s house today had provided. Just looking at it made her feel better, and it wasn’t even hers. And never would be.

She squinted up at the sky. A few geese were crossing the far horizon, faintly honking, and there were swallows diving in the soft air. She would see, she told herself, what happened after Wednesday, and at least Ralph knew now what she couldn’t do, what she wouldn’t do, and how she wasn’t so stupid that she couldn’t see when support segued into suffocation. She took a few deep breaths, her hands flat on the wall top. She didn’t belong to anyone, not even to Kit and Barney, any more than they belonged to her. She was, however overlaid she had become by the kindness of expectation, the benevolent burden of obligation, still her own person.