Daughters-in-Law (11 page)

In her allotment, Kit’s dumper truck still lay where he had kicked it, on its side, spilling pebbles. Petra got down on her hands and knees and gathered up the pebbles, and mounded them up neatly because Kit would need them next time he
came, with the intensity peculiar to childhood. Then she dusted out the truck with a dock leaf, and began to pick the strawberries, one by one, carefully, laying them in rows in the truck with their green stalks all facing the same way, as she knew Kit would like her to do. And when she had picked all the ripe ones, she took her penknife out of her pocket and cut a fat bunch of sweet williams, dark red and striped white, and laid them on top of the berries. Then she stood up and looked down at the truck. It was the most satisfactory and healing sight of the day.

C
harlotte was, as usual, home before Luke. Her shifts at the radio station were long, but they were regular, and when they were done they were done, and someone else came in to take over the things Charlotte did, like greeting and shepherding guests, and fetching cups of coffee and glasses of water, and organizing taxis to take the more important guests to wherever they were going next. She liked it that a lot of the guests, especially the regular male ones, either asked for her specifically or made a flattering fuss if it wasn’t her shift, and it was Ailsa instead, who was attractive but small and slight and inclined to a more classic wardrobe than Charlotte’s. Sometimes, of course, the guests went too far and demanded Charlotte in a frankly sexist way, like the well-known actor who’d said loudly that day, “Where’s Miss Well Stacked and Wonderful?” but mostly it was just gratifying to be asked for.

“You
are
well stacked, of course,” the female producer of the afternoon show said, not looking at Charlotte but at the computer printout in her hand. “And it’s a great pity that, as far as he’s concerned, you can’t return the compliment, and point out his pitiful inadequacy.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that—”

“I know,” said the producer, looking up, “you wouldn’t. That’s why we put up with you. If you weren’t so good-natured, we’d be obliged to detest you.”

Now, standing in her own bathroom in the flat, Charlotte opened her shirt and surveyed her bosom. She’d had quite big breasts ever since she was thirteen, but were they now even bigger? And were they, when she unhooked her bra, and pressed the sides tentatively, slightly tender, in the way they sometimes were just before she got her period? That is, when she last had a period. She hadn’t, actually, had a period for almost two months, not since before the wedding, when she had done some calculations to see if she was going to have a period either on her wedding day or—worse almost—on her honeymoon. But, as it happened, she hadn’t had a period for—she paused and ticked off the dates on her fingers—nearly eight weeks. Which she hadn’t made too much of, in her own mind, because her periods had been so irregular since she stopped taking the Pill, as the doctor had warned her they might be. She looked at herself in the mirror with a kind of awe and instinctively laid one hand flat across her stomach.

It was Luke who had said she should stop taking the Pill. She’d swallowed it, almost without thinking, ever since she was in the sixth form at school, and Luke had said to her one evening, very seriously, looking at her across a supper table while they were both eating a Thai green curry, that he thought, now that her future was with him, she should give her body every natural chance and stop putting chemicals into it, however sophisticated and finely judged those chemicals were. He said he was very happy to take contraceptive responsibility, in fact he would like to, so could she please go home and flush the remainder of the month’s supply down the lavatory and give her amazing body the chance to do its own wonderful thing.

Charlotte had been enchanted by this speech. It was thrilling
to have Luke be so mature, and so masterful, and to see her body as something that needed respecting, and taking care of. When she had thrown away the pills—Luke had remembered the effect of contraceptive pills on the potency of the male population via a contaminated water supply—she felt unbelievably womanly and fertile and powerful, and this had been very satisfactory for both of them to the point where Charlotte supposed that, if you were quite simply happy enough, you didn’t really need to sleep. Nor did you need to think too urgently about the precise and efficient use of contraception if your husband had told you, in his alluringly commanding way, to leave it all to him.

So she had. And now she was standing in her bathroom, with her shirt unbuttoned, and her bra loosened, just wondering. That’s all—just wondering. Her breasts might not look
much
bigger, but they certainly didn’t look smaller. And they were tender, just very slightly tender. Charlotte licked her lips. She found she was holding her breath. And then she remembered, with a sudden, joyful rush of relief, that if in fact she
was
pregnant it didn’t actually matter, this time, however much they had planned to give themselves two years of freedom before they even considered a baby. This time, Charlotte thought, there need be no frantic rushing to the chemist for a pregnancy-testing kit, no anxious furtive sessions in a shared bathroom, no three-in-the-morning silent rehearsals of how she was going to tell her mother, should the test be positive. This time if—
if
—she really was pregnant, it would be something to celebrate.

She pulled her bra back into place and fastened the only two buttons on her shirt she considered necessary, tucking it into the top of the skirt, which had caused Ray, the black guy on reception at work whom everyone loved, to say he didn’t know why she didn’t stop pretending and just come to work in her
knickers. Then she went across the sitting room to the kitchen, and the bag she had left on the worktop containing the ingredients—chicken pieces and a pot of hot salsa—for supper. She would put the pieces of chicken to marinate in oil and lemon juice, as her mother did, and wash the salad leaves and measure out the couscous she’d decided on to accompany the chicken, and only when that was done, and the table was laid, would she ring Luke in his studio and ask him—without telling him her simmering suspicions—when he thought he’d be up for supper.

Luke had some new graphics software. It enabled him not just to view things three-dimensionally, but to design in three dimensions too, and the afternoon had been extremely absorbing in consequence. He had a new commission, to design the logo and publicity material for a small chain of spa gyms in Essex and East London, and the software was enabling him to come up, even at this early stage, with some amazing ideas that he was certain the marketing team for the gym would really like. So when his phone rang, and he knew it would be Charlotte, he picked it up and said, “Swing down here, babe, I’ve got something to show you,” even before Rachel had time to say, “Darling?”

“Mum,” Luke said, in quite another tone of voice.

Rachel said, “I don’t think it’s me you want to hear—”

Luke tucked the phone in between his ear and his shoulder.

“I’ve got a new toy I want Charlotte to see.”

“A work toy?”

“Oh
Mum
,” Luke said, laughing. “Of course—”

“I won’t keep you,” Rachel said. “It was just that you hadn’t rung since the weekend, and as we didn’t see you I wondered how things were?”

Luke kept his eyes on his screen and his hands on his mouse and keyboard.

“Great, thank you.”

“Did—did you have a nice weekend?”

“Fab,” Luke said. “Five-star lunch, played tennis—we won—with my new brothers-in-law and Char’s sister Sarah, who has a momentous backhand. Terrific.”

“Oh, good,” Rachel said without enthusiasm.

“It was such a lovely day,” Luke went on blithely, “that we stayed for supper. Char’s mother—I mean Marnie, I keep forgetting to call her that—gave us loads of fruit and veg. We’re eating raspberries twice a day.”

“I have a marvelous crop here,” Rachel said. “You could have picked all you wanted and hardly made a difference.”

“Everyone okay?” Luke said.

“Who exactly do you mean—”

“Well,” Luke said, “you and Dad, Ed and Sigi and Mariella, Ralph and Petra and—oh, what about Ralph and Petra?”

“Ralph has an interview.”

“Wow. Fantastic. Well done him. Who with?”

Rachel said, “Haven’t you spoken to your brothers either?”

Luke shifted his phone a little.

“Nope. Haven’t spoken to anyone. Too busy with work and marriage, Mum. Just too busy.”

“Ralph has an interview Ed got for him. Ed’s been wonderful. And Mariella baked the little boys a basket of cookies and things. We had a wonderful day all together.”

“Good,” Luke said.

“We missed you.”

Luke shut his eyes for a second. He removed the phone from his neck, and put it against his other ear and said, “What a relief about Ralph.”

“It’s only an interview—”

“But it’s a start.”

“Why don’t you ring him? To wish him luck—”

“Mum,” Luke said, “I’ll make my own decisions about who I call—”

“Ralph’s your brother—”

“I know.”

“And he’s in trouble.”

“I know that, too.”

“It would have been supportive if you’d come at the weekend.”

Luke closed his eyes again. He remembered Marnie handing him the basket of raspberries on Sunday night, and giving him a quick kiss, and a pat on the shoulder, and saying how glad she’d been to pass the care of her Charlotte to someone like him. He thought of saying to his mother that he had another family in his life now, as well as his own one, and although his priorities would never change they were priorities and not the only pebbles on the beach. But then he thought, immediately, of how the conversation might develop in consequence, and so he contented himself with saying good-humoredly, “Cut it out, Mum,” and then adding straight afterwards, “We’ll be up in Suffolk soon, I promise. Char’s longing to show you the wedding pictures.”

“Lovely,” Rachel said flatly.

“You can see them all on the website now, if you—”

“I’d rather you showed them to me, darling.”

“I will, Mum. And I’ll ring Ed and I’ll ring Ralph, and now I must go and find Charlotte.”

“Give her my love—”

“Sure will. Love to Dad.”

“Love to you, darling,” Rachel said. “Love to you.”

Luke pressed the end button. The phone rang again at once.

“You were engaged,” Charlotte said reproachfully.

“It was Mum—”

“For
ages
.”

Luke sighed.

“Oh, you know. Rabbiting on about last weekend—”

“What about last weekend?”

“We didn’t go to Suffolk—”

“Of course not,” Charlotte said, “we went home. We had a lovely day at home.”

“We did have a lovely day. Babe, I miss you.”

Charlotte giggled faintly.

“Come on up, then.”

“You come down here.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got something to show you.”

“Will I like it?”

“You will,” Luke said, “be very impressed by it.”

“So will you.”

“I’m impressed already—”

“No,” Charlotte said, laughing. “No. Not about that, whatever it is, but about me. About something I’ve got to tell you.”

“Tell me now—”

“No.”

“Go on—”

“No,” Charlotte said. “It’s the kind of thing you have to tell in person.”

“Then you get your person down here!”

“Okay—”

Luke blew a kiss into the phone.

“Can’t wait to see you,” he said. “
Hurry
.”

Luke was awake. Wide awake. It was two forty in the morning and Charlotte was beautifully, profoundly asleep beside him, her pale head almost on his bare shoulder. What she had told him that evening in his studio had been momentous, even more momentous, in a way, than when she’d agreed to marry
him, because it was such a surprise and such a responsibility and such a change and such a joy. Luke moved a hand and laid it on Charlotte’s nearest thigh. He felt flooded with the most enormous and primitive sense of sheer potency.

He hadn’t really taken much notice when Sigi was pregnant. He’d been on his gap year, in South America, when Ed and Sigi were married, and although there’d been a huge amount of communication about the wedding and offers of airfares, Ed had telephoned Luke, when Luke was by Lake Titicaca, and said look, we’re fine about you not coming back for the wedding, it’s only Mum and Dad fussing really, you stay in Bolivia and we’ll get together after you’re back. So Luke had remained, and made his way down to the Chilean coast and then across to Argentina, where he stayed with a friend from school, whose parents had an estancia near Rosario, and rode out every morning through fields of wild parsley. And when he finally got home a few months later, he discovered that Ralph hadn’t turned up for the wedding, either, and that Ed and Sigi were living in a flat in Canonbury in conditions, it seemed to him, of impressively grown-up settledness, as if they’d been married for years.

Sigrid had got a new job then, in a laboratory attached to a police forensic unit, and she did that job for a few years before announcing, in her steady, undramatic way, that she was pregnant, and by then Luke was deep in life at uni, and this pregnancy was not much more than another cheerful piece of news to be slotted in among all the other buoyant preoccupations in Luke’s mind at the time. Petra, of course, had made more of an impact, because she was not conventional, like Sigrid, and nor had Ralph ever been, and the responsibility for their future, and their baby’s, never seemed to be permitted to be their own, but became a Brinkley family project, which sucked them all in, however often Luke said to Ralph, “You
don’t have to do this, bro. You don’t
have
to get married if you don’t want to. It won’t stop you being a good father, if you aren’t married.”