Daughters-in-Law (13 page)

“If you ask them in three weeks’ time,” she said, “I’ll have had my twelve-week scan and we can tell them about the baby.”

“I can’t ask them to wait three weeks—”

Charlotte paused a moment and then said, “Why not?”

“It’ll be two
months
since the wedding!”

“Yes,” Charlotte said, and then she paused again.

Luke’s arms loosened around her. He looked past her for a while and then he let his eyes travel back to her face. He attempted a smile.

“Okay,” he said.

I
n his studio, Anthony was drawing with a 4B pencil. He had passed a cottage near Woodbridge a few days earlier, and had seen a dozen bantams pecking about in a patch of worn grass outside it, and had stopped the car and gone to knock at the door and ask if he could watch and sketch the hens for a while. There’d been an elderly couple in the house, looking after a toddler grandson, and they had said, yes, yes, of course, in a harried way, as if they couldn’t actually be distracted from their custodial task to take any interest in other people’s requests or pursuits. So Anthony had climbed over a battered wire fence and crouched down beside the bantams with his sketchbook, and the birds had gone on muttering about around him and stabbing at the earth, as if he was of no more consequence than a tree.

Anthony still taught his art classes. He taught only a day a week now, but he was reluctant to give it up and face the end of the teaching chapter of his life. And it had struck him, often, that domesticated birds were perfect models for new students to use when learning to draw birds, because their outlines were
so solid and their movements were much easier to follow than something that was balanced in such a variety of extraordinary ways, like a godwit. Also, hens were comical and characterful, and allowed one close to them, as Anthony had been then, with two or three bantams coming right up to him, an especially bold one even investigating his shoelaces, seizing them in her beak and then dropping them with little exclamations of exasperation. And now he was back in his studio, working up a series of sketches that he would take into the first class of the new academic year after the summer and hand round among the students, some of them surly with apprehension, as an ice-breaker.

Anyway, hens were soothing. They weren’t romantic and wild and free-spirited like his beloved waders, but they were comforting and familiar, and comfort was what Anthony sought this particular afternoon after a miserable lunchtime conversation with Rachel. It had literally been lunchtime, not lunch, because, although Rachel had made one of her magnificent salads, scattered with seeds and nasturtium flowers, Anthony had not, on account of their altercation, felt like eating it, and the rejection of prepared food had been, of course, the last straw.

The heart of the trouble had been Anthony’s standing up for Charlotte. Rachel had been full of indignation at the idea that a whole weekend in Suffolk was to be rejected in favor of an exhausting, unwanted, and unnecessary drive to London to have lunch, amateurishly cooked, in a poky flat, and then to be required to admire the trendily insalubrious area in which Luke and Charlotte had incomprehensibly elected to live. And Anthony had then said mildly, “I think we should go.”

“What?”

“I think we should accept with enthusiasm and go with a good grace.”

“You are so perverse—”

“No,” Anthony said. He looked at the salad in front of him, decorative and colorful in its pottery bowl, and thought that it suddenly looked impossible to eat. “They want to show the flat off to us, they want us to see the flat—”

“I’ve seen the flat,” Rachel said crossly, interrupting. “I saw it when Luke first found it—”

“Which they have now settled into, as their first married home, and they want to show it off.”

Rachel did not reply. She took a pair of black wooden African salad servers out of a drawer and slammed them down in front of Anthony.

“They want,” Anthony said, “to be seen to be married. They want to be taken seriously now they are married.”

“You mean
she
does—”

“Possibly. More than possibly, as far as you’re concerned.”

“Meaning?” Rachel said dangerously.

“Meaning,” Anthony said, not caring now, “that you don’t think Charlotte has the first idea how lucky she is.”

Rachel took a breath. Then she sat down at the table opposite Anthony, and said, glaring at the salad rather than at him, “You are an old
fool
. Just because she is pretty.”

Anthony had pushed his chair back then and stood up. Rachel said, “And don’t imagine I went to the trouble of making this lunch for
fun
.” Anthony waited a second or two, to see if any helpful riposte came to him, but nothing did, so he had gone out of the kitchen and the house, and across the gravel to his studio, to the solace of a 4B pencil and the prospect of hens. Rachel did not follow him. He had not expected that she would.

What he did expect was that she would still be in the kitchen, feeling awful. She was no good—never had been—at subduing fierce primitive impulses and converting their natural energy into something more measured and constructive. She had been
a tiger mother when the boys were young, not necessarily overprotective but savagely partisan if they came up against the smallest hint of injustice or disloyalty. It had made her, for sure, a trustworthy mother, but, at the same time, a disconcerting prospect for potential friendship among other mothers. She hadn’t cared, she often said to Anthony. She hadn’t wanted friends just for friendship’s sake; she hadn’t been interested in anyone who couldn’t see that her boys came first with her as an instinctively justifiable matter of course. She was amazed, astonished, gratified to have sons, three of them, coming as she did herself from a small family with only one rather older sister. It had been evident from Edward’s birth onwards that Rachel could not help but feel that being the mother of sons conferred upon her a peculiar and visceral consequence. She loved it, and had striven to be, as she saw it, worthy of it, by not insisting on an exaggerated femininity or caprice, by being supremely welcoming to all their friends, by continuing to support them through all the changeableness and experimentation of their adolescence. But girls—the boys’ girls—were another matter. Girls demanded her boys’ loyalty, just as she had expected—and got—Anthony’s. Sigrid and Petra had, for completely different reasons, somehow managed to sidestep any confrontation about who belonged to whom, but Charlotte was not going to be as easy. Anthony sighed and added a small beady eye to the nesting hen he was drawing. Charlotte was used to having her own way with family, and Luke was top of her family list now. Rachel was going to find that the newest of her daughters-in-law was not in the least afraid of standing up to her.

The door to the outside opened. It was a warm day, and usually Anthony would have left it ajar, but the altercation with Rachel had led him, instinctively, to close it.

“I’ve just been talking to Petra,” Rachel said from the doorway.

Anthony didn’t turn.

“Oh?”

“She’ll bring the boys about half nine tomorrow. Barney has to be kept off the bread, apparently. He ate half a loaf yesterday and she said his tummy was as distended as if he was pregnant.”

“Loves his nosebag—”

Rachel came quietly across the brick floor and stood looking at Anthony’s drawings.

“Those are great.”

“Good subject.”

“Yes,” Rachel said. “I wonder why we never kept hens—”

“Because of Mr. Fox?”

“Maybe.”

Anthony drew a hen running, her legs splayed out sideways.

“That’s exactly right,” Rachel said, watching him.

“They can be so funny—”

“I’m just—worried at the moment about Ralph—”

“I know,” Anthony said.

“And you think I’m taking it out on Charlotte—”

“Mmm.”

“She isn’t very bright—”

“You don’t know that.”

Rachel sighed.

“I know she’s got Luke so’s he can’t think straight.”

Anthony drew on.

“Well,” Rachel said. She touched his arm quickly and lightly. “It’s the little boys tomorrow, and Ralph’s interview, and a day off for Petra. Thank God for Petra.”

Anthony shaded in some neck feathers.

“Yes,” he said. “Amen to that.”

Petra didn’t think she had been to Minsmere since before Kit was born. Ralph would always have looked after the boys if she’d wanted to go, and so would her parents-in-law, but
somehow another part of her brain had taken precedence since motherhood, and when she thought about drawing, she visualized it as belonging to that other Petra, the Petra who had worked in the football-club bar and the coffee place, in order to pay for her rent and her strange and inventive food and her drawing classes. She had not been brought up to regard art as vocational, as central to anyone’s existence. Indeed, until she met Anthony, she’d encountered no one who thought art was anything more than a self-indulgent privilege granted to very few. So when art got overlaid in her life by babies and keeping house and adapting to the arbitrary demands of living with Ralph, she had accepted it, just as she had accepted the hand-to-mouth condition of her student days in Ipswich.

But now, suddenly, and because of this interview of Ralph’s, which seemed to her to be as full of things to dread as to hope for, she had a day to herself, a day she was to spend, it had been firmly indicated, sketching. The boys had been dropped off—no frantic screeching from Kit, she was thankful to note—and she was heading north, in the secondhand car Anthony and Rachel had given them to replace Ralph’s unsafe old one, and which Anthony had taught her to drive, as her twenty-first birthday present. She was a good driver, better than Ralph, but it was difficult to concentrate alone in the car, without the chatter from the backseat, without Kit asking how birds did flying or could she stop Barney touching him. She should, she supposed, be exhilarated to be free for a day, but instead she felt only lost, and slightly naked, as if she had come out unprepared and undefended.

Her sketchbooks were in a canvas bag on the passenger seat. Anthony had slipped a couple of pencils into her pocket, and Rachel had produced a picnic, in a cloth bag printed with ecological slogans, and they had waved her off, each holding a small boy, with a vigorous enthusiasm that made her feel
guilty. There was a strong temptation not to go anywhere near Minsmere, but simply to wander off down an unmarked lane and find a gateway big enough to park the car, and then just go and lie in a field somewhere, and stare at the sky and let all the fretting about Ralph and Kit and money and expectations seep out of her mind and into the air, where it would dissolve of its own accord.

But Minsmere had to be done. The boys were being looked after on the unspoken but firm understanding that Petra would be drawing, all day, with an absorption that would energize and revitalize her. She had no option but to take the car down Minsmere’s long wooded entry and leave it in the sloping car park above the Visitor Center, and hire binoculars for two pounds fifty, and set out into the marshes and the sighing reed beds to the East Hide, where she might—just might—find consolation and distraction in watching the avocets picking their fastidious way around the Scrape.

The reserve was busy. It was summer, and the school holidays were in full swing, and there were children scuffing along the sandy paths towards the sea. Petra thought that, if she were them, and used to the restless drama of computer games, a day out in a bird sanctuary, where shouting and racing about were forbidden, and all adults were weirdly distracted and slow-moving, would be very bewildering. Even frustrating. In fact, she thought, pausing by the ingeniously secluded entrance to the East Hide, I’m not sure I can do it today. I’m not sure I can go in there, and find a place on the bench, and sit there in silence with my binoculars and watch and wait and wait and watch until my hand goes to a pencil almost without thinking and I find I’m drawing away, as if I’d never stopped. Maybe I can do it later. Maybe I’d better walk a bit, and get rid of some of this restlessness. Maybe I’ll go down to the sea, too, and sit in the dunes and look at the sky and empty my head a bit.

It was calming, down by the sea. Petra crossed the soft, deeply sandy path that ran parallel to the shore and climbed up the sliding sides of the shallow dunes until the water was visible, shifting and blue-gray under a cloud-streaked sky. There were a few people scattered about, their binoculars trained upwards, and over to one side a young man in an RSPB sweatshirt was rolling up lengths of netting that had evidently been stretched along an area of the beach. Petra sat down to watch him. He moved slowly and steadily, unhurried, bending down to add stakes to a pile, straightening up to pull the netting towards him. It was peaceful to watch him, a stocky, competent figure against a background of sea and sky, his head and shoulders now silhouetted against the shining water, now almost invisible against the sand and the clumps of marram grass. Petra remembered a visit to Minsmere with Anthony in the spring. There’d been purple orchids then, and yellow flags, and she’d seen a little egret, as elegant and exotic as a Japanese print, hunting for frogs among the shallows.