Daughters-in-Law (25 page)

Charlotte had wanted to feel the glow of satisfaction at having been so right and had failed to. When she questioned Luke further about exactly what Petra had
done
, he said he didn’t know details and for God’s sake didn’t
want
to, but that Ralph had been most upset about the fact that Petra was perfectly happy for him to go to London and earn money to keep them all, now that she’d found someone to amuse herself with, who was also prepared to play with the boys.

“That’s what really gets him,” Luke said, standing over her as she lay on the sofa, his thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his jeans. “The kids really like him. Kit talks about him a lot, like Ralph’s supposed to join in all this. It’s gutting him.” He gave an enormous sigh, and then he said, “I’d better ring Ed. Ralph rang Ed two nights ago and told him not to tell me till he’d told me himself. He said he’d meant to do it at once, but he just couldn’t face saying it all over again right then. Poor bloody guy. I know he’s a menace, but he doesn’t deserve this, not on top of his business going belly up and everything, he really doesn’t.”

Then he had bent down, with the grace and ease Charlotte appreciated so much when she wasn’t feeling so grim, and kissed her, and said he wouldn’t be long. He was half an hour in their bedroom. Charlotte didn’t move, on account of not wanting to alert the nausea in any way, but she knew he’d be lying on their bed with his shoes off, his mobile on his chest with the earpiece in, and the television at the foot of their bed on, with the sound turned off. Luke couldn’t be in a room with a television without turning it on. He said it was what came of being a third child, that you liked company but you didn’t always want to be part of the noise and energy of a family, you just wanted to be on the edge of company you could watch but didn’t have to be part of. Television was perfect for that, Luke said. There was even one in the studio, which he had on the minute Jed left the room, just as if, Charlotte thought, he was afraid some dark spirits might sneak in, if there was only solitude and silence to contend with.

At first, she tried to hear what Luke was saying, but he was not quite audible, and the sounds from the street, even if far below, muffled his voice even further. So Charlotte rolled cautiously onto her side, holding a cushion against her, and attempted again to feel the satisfaction of having been justified in her reaction to Petra in the past. It wouldn’t come, any more than even a shred of understanding of Ralph and Petra’s relationship, which seemed to Charlotte as weird and unsatisfactory as an apparently grown-up relationship could be, based as it was on the proximity and support of Ralph’s parents, Petra’s parents-in-law. Even if everything her sister Sarah had said about Rachel had taken the white heat out of Charlotte’s indignation and upset, it had done nothing to endear Rachel to Charlotte. Mothers-in-law are like that, Sarah had said. They just are. They’ll never forgive you for marrying their boys, you’ll just have to accept it. Your mother-in-law is no different.
Charlotte thought about her wedding day, and how she had felt about Rachel that day, how she had been ready to love everybody, almost ecstatically, and she remembered Rachel kissing her, in the vestry of the church while they signed the register, and she remembered that she had had to stoop a bit, because of her height and her heels, and how Rachel’s cheek had been light and dry against her own, and that she hadn’t said anything, she hadn’t said, “I’m so happy for you,” or, “Luke’s a lucky boy,” or anything like that. And then later, Charlotte had seen her with Petra, feeding the little boys, and she’d taken off her green-feather hat thing and she was laughing, really animated. And now? Would she be laughing now? Grimly—and at last with some sense of satisfaction—Charlotte didn’t think so.

When Luke came back to the sitting room, he sat down on the edge of the sofa next to Charlotte.

“You okay, angel?”

“Ish,” Charlotte said.

Luke took one of Charlotte’s hands.

“I’d feel sick
for
you, if I could—”

“I know,” Charlotte said. She looked at him. “How was your phone call?”

Luke said, “Ed feels like I do. We just went round the houses. You know, like you do when there’s not enough to put your finger on.”

“What if Ralph stays in Aldeburgh?”

“Char, he can’t. He’s got to work—”

“But your parents would help, they’re always helping them anyway.”

Luke put Charlotte’s hand between both of his.

“Ed asked me if I’d go with him actually.”

“Go where?”

“To Suffolk,” Luke said. “To tell them.”

Charlotte sat up slowly. She said, “The two of you, driving all the way to Suffolk? Why can’t you tell them on the phone? Why can’t Ralph tell them?”

“He can’t,” Luke said unhappily. “He asked Ed, and Ed asked me. It’s . . . it’s not something you can say on the phone, because, well, because of—”

“Petra?”

“Sort of,” Luke said.

Charlotte swung her legs round and put the cushion in her lap.

She said, “Aren’t you all making a big deal out of this?”

“Well, what if it was one of your sisters? What if Sarah suddenly said she was playing around because she didn’t like Chris’s flying lessons? Wouldn’t you want to tell your mother in person?”

Charlotte gave a tiny shrug.

“Maybe—”

Luke pressed her hand between his.

“I know you’re fed up with Mum. And Dad. I know you feel let down and everything. I know what you think of Petra. But . . . they’re my family. They just are. And the parents are going to be devastated.”

Charlotte was silent for a moment, staring at her hand sandwiched between Luke’s. Then she said lightly, “Oh, they’ll forgive Petra—”

Luke looked across the room. Then he looked back at her intently, and he said, “I’m not so sure,” and suddenly something shifted in Charlotte’s mind and heart, something that wheeled the image of Petra into her mental vision, dressed in the funny little knitted dress she’d worn to the wedding, holding Kit in his Spider-Man T-shirt, both of them whey-faced with fatigue, out of their own context, out of their depth.

Charlotte had returned Luke’s look then. She’d smiled at him.

“I’ll come,” she said.

“What?”

“I’ll come with you,” Charlotte said. “I’ll come to Suffolk with you, at the weekend. With you and Ed. Of course I will.”

He’d given a little exclamation and put his arms round her, holding her hard against him. He said, “You are a star, a complete star, but suppose Ed and I kind of have to do it alone?” and she’d said, into his shoulder, “It’s fine. I’ll be fine. I’d just like to be there, to support you,” and then there’d been a few moments when she’d wondered if he was crying.

He kept thanking her. He’d thanked her so much while they were moseying round each other, getting to bed, that Charlotte had had—laughing—to tell him to stop, because what kind of gratitude would he have left for the really big stuff? And he’d said solemnly, “That
is
big stuff. For me,” and she’d felt a mingled rush of remorse and relief, remorse at how she’d behaved recently, and relief that she was back where she’d been, on the pedestal of She Who Can Do No Wrong, to the extent where she was overtaken suddenly by a flood of inappropriate gratitude towards Ralph and Petra, which was as disconcerting as it was powerful.

Now, lying in the dim glow of a city night, with the nausea gradually subsiding, and Luke’s arm heavy across her groin, Charlotte considered the journey to Suffolk. Luke had said that Sigrid and Mariella wouldn’t be coming, so that left her alone with Edward and Luke. She thought she would offer to do the driving. She liked driving, she was a good driver, and she could tell the boys she’d feel sick if she wasn’t driving and that way, when she’d dropped them off at Anthony and Rachel’s, she’d be free to do as she chose.

“I should paint those,” Anthony said.

He was standing by the kitchen table, which was covered with late-summer vegetables, runner beans and courgettes and
a basket of spinach and a great heap of carrots, trailing their feathery green tops over the edge of the table, like hair. Rachel had been in the garden all afternoon, since it was the day the gardener came, the gardener who had started in that garden as a boy, wheeling barrows and raking leaves for Anthony’s parents, and was now a stubborn old man with poor vision and a bad back. He and Rachel tolerated one another, no more, and an afternoon in Dick’s company was guaranteed, Anthony knew, to test Rachel’s temper.

She was making tea. She cast a glance over her shoulder at the green pile on the table. She said, “Can’t think why I bother.”

Anthony said nothing. His age-old instinct was to say something soothing like, “Oh, but I love spinach,” but experience had taught him that this would not have a mollifying effect, and, in any case, Rachel had sounded more sad than cross. He regarded her back view, switching on the kettle, stretching up to the cupboards for tea bags and mugs. She was as trim in outline as she had been when he first saw her; in fact sometimes, now, catching a glimpse of her digging in the garden, heaving something out of the car, bending to pick a towel off the bathroom floor, he couldn’t believe she was any older, any different from the girl he’d met on a walking holiday in North Wales. She’d had hair almost to her waist then, and a slight Welsh accent. She hadn’t got the accent anymore, and her hair was cut to her jawline, but there was still a great deal of her that was the same—exaggerated maybe here and there, but the same.

She turned round and put two mugs of tea on the table, the swollen tea bags bobbing faintly obscenely on the surface. She said, not looking at Anthony, “Please don’t behave as if I’ll fly off the handle.”

Anthony said reasonably, “Well, you might.”

Rachel opened a drawer to find a teaspoon.

“I’m more likely to cry.”

“You hardly ever cry—”

“Lately,” Rachel said, “I’ve done rather a lot of crying. I don’t like it, but it keeps happening. It happened this afternoon again, pulling those bloody carrots. I don’t think Dick saw. He can’t see anything smaller than a bus these days anyway, and I had my back to him.”

Anthony said cautiously, “Why were you crying?”

“You know—”

“I don’t. I mean, I don’t exactly. Was it . . . Charlotte still? Or the carrots?”

Rachel pressed a tea bag against the side of a mug, and flicked it out.

“The carrots.”

Anthony waited again. Rachel said, “Once I couldn’t grow enough vegetables. Once we had sackloads of the things at the back of the garage, and it was a triumph if the potatoes lasted till after Christmas. We were pretty well self-sufficient, weren’t we, and it
all
got eaten, all of it.”

She stopped and dredged out the second tea bag.

Anthony said, “That was ages ago. Years. You’re thinking of the boys’ school days. As far as Ed’s concerned, that’s about twenty years ago.”

Rachel took a big plastic carton of milk out of the fridge and splashed some into the tea.

“I know.”

“Well, then—”

“It wasn’t really then that I was thinking about, it was now, it was what’s happening now—” She stopped.

Anthony went round the table and put his arms round her. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t resist him, either. She said, into the dark-blue drill of his shirt, “Nobody’s been here, all summer.”

Anthony bent a little.

“What?”

Rachel raised her face slightly and said more distinctly, “The family. No one’s been here, all summer.”

“Yes, they have, we saw the little boys—”

“Weeks ago,” Rachel said. “Not long after the wedding—”

“And the day everyone came to lunch, when Mariella had done all that baking—”

“One Sunday,” Rachel said. She put up one hand, and blotted her eyes with the back of it. “Other summers, they’ve all been in and out, all the time. Last year Mariella stayed for a week, by herself. And the little boys were here all the time, we got the old pram out, you remember, for Barney. And Luke was here, a lot, he went sailing, didn’t he, he brought Jed down and they went sailing, and then he brought Charlotte to introduce her. But not now. Nobody’s been, now. I mean, I expect them to have their own lives, of course I do, I just don’t expect them to stop seeing us, so completely, so suddenly. And Ralph and Petra being in Ipswich won’t make it better. Will it?”

Anthony took one arm away and reached across to rip a piece of kitchen paper from the roll on the wall.

“Here. Blow.”

He looked down on the top of her head as she blew her nose. He said, “It’s been a worrying summer for Ralph. And then the wedding. It’s probably just a one-off, you know.”

Rachel sighed. She pulled herself out of his arms and looked up at him. Then she patted his chest.

“You don’t believe that any more than I do. This is
change
. This is a different dynamic altogether, and I don’t like it.” She blew her nose again. “It frightens me.”

“Why?”

“Because nobody wants me to do something I’m good at anymore.”

“I do—”

She smiled weakly.

“Ant, you aren’t enough people. And you’ve got painting and the college still.”

“Go back to your cookery courses, then—”

She sighed.

“I’m not sure I’ve got the heart—”

Anthony picked up the nearest mug of tea.

“Shall we start by turfing over the veg garden, so that you aren’t oppressed by all this produce with no one to eat it?”

The telephone began to ring. Rachel said, crossing the kitchen to answer it, “I’d rather find a solution that didn’t look as if I was giving in,” and then she picked up the phone and said, “Hello?” into it, as she always did, and then Anthony saw her face lighten into a wide smile and she said, “Luke!” with emphasis.

He walked past her, carrying his tea, saying, “Send him my love,” in a way that made him feel ashamed of his mild cowardice, after his last conversation with Luke, and then crossed the gravel to his studio. It was always a relief to open the door, always a pleasure, a sensation of both security and possibility to be back in that huge, cluttered space under the dusty, ghostly flypast of bird skeletons suspended from the beams. “Never pass up the chance to draw a newly dead bird,” an old naturalist had said to him, and he had obeyed, stripping the carcasses afterwards to see how the feathers grew, how the wings and beaks were attached. They were all there, his birds, wired up and flying, even a wren, whose bones you could have fitted into a matchbox. It had looked so round, that wren, almost solid, like a little feathered walnut, but once it was a skeleton it was as small and fragile as the stamens of a flower.