Daughters-in-Law (26 page)

Anthony stood in front of his easel, drinking his tea. On it was propped the beginnings of a drawing of a crane, a
European crane, startled into sudden takeoff with its big gray wings and long legs awkwardly splayed, its head just turned enough to show the red patch on the back of it. He’d been lucky to see it, because they were so rare in England, preferring Scandinavia and central Europe and liking great stretches of marsh and bog in which to make their precarious nests. He thought that, beyond the central crane, he might add some more, in flight, wings spread, to suggest the dance for which they were so famous. He put down his tea and picked up his pencil. Crane, he said to himself, Latin name,
Grus grus
. Like the sound they make.

The door to the drive opened.

“Guess what!” Rachel said from the doorway.

“What?”

“Luke and Ed are coming on Sunday. For lunch. Together. Isn’t that lovely?”

C
harlotte had never been to Aldeburgh before. When Luke asked her how she would spend the time while he and Edward were with their parents, she’d said airily that she thought she’d just go and be by the sea.

“Probably sleep,” she said. “Eat an ice cream. Time off everything.” She’d leaned sideways to kiss him. “Don’t fret, babe. I’ll be fine.”

Luke was reluctant to get out of the car.

“This feels really weird, you driving us up here and not coming in. Leave your phone on. All the time. I’ll text you when we’re through.”

Edward, climbing out of the backseat of the car, squeezed her shoulder.

“You’re a heroine, Charlotte.”

Then they had trooped away together, towards their parents’ house, and Charlotte had thought how young they both looked suddenly, unformed, more boys than men, and she had put the car in gear and set the TomTom on the dashboard for Aldeburgh, and driven off without looking in the rear mirror to see if Luke was still watching.

The road led her north-westward, through woodland, before she turned right towards Snape, and Aldeburgh. She had been to Suffolk several times before, of course, but driving through it alone, with her own purpose, and no requirement to admire it for Luke’s sake, made the journey extremely interesting to her. It was so different than the Buckinghamshire of her upbringing that it felt almost like being abroad, somewhere designated as foreign, and in consequence slightly exotic. Aldeburgh itself, with its main street still full of summer visitors, and the sea only yards away behind the houses and the shrieking gulls, was like nowhere familiar to her, and this was pleasurably exciting.

She left the car in a back street outside a shuttered house that looked as if its residents were not there to object, and walked down to the sea. It was a cool, fair day, and the beach was dotted with families, and plastic windbreaks, and the immense blue-gray sea was heaving and sucking at the pebbles with a relentless rhythm that might, Charlotte thought, drive you nuts if you weren’t a sea person. She wondered if she was hungry and decided that she was too strung up by what she was about to do to be hungry, so she turned inland to the High Street, where she thought she would stop someone who looked local—holidaymakers from London were amazingly easy to spot—and ask them how she could find Ralph and Petra’s house.

Ralph, holding the front door open wide enough to see out but not wide enough to admit her, looked as if he could hardly remember who she was.

“Oops,” Charlotte said, “did I wake you?”

Ralph passed his hand over his chin, as if to check the time by whether he had shaved or not. He was wearing cutoffs and a sagging T-shirt. Charlotte, in a short summer dress and wedge-heeled espadrilles, thought he looked terrible.

“No,” Ralph said. “No. I . . . it’s just, I wasn’t expecting you—”

“I didn’t say I was coming,” Charlotte said, “so you couldn’t.” She smiled at him. “I dropped Ed and Luke off at your parents’. Then I thought I’d come.”

Ralph didn’t open the door any wider. He looked past Charlotte rather than at her.

“I’m afraid this . . . this isn’t a very good time—”

“I know,” Charlotte said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Ralph sighed. He said, “I don’t want to be rude to you, but I can’t talk to you, really. I don’t know you . . . well enough—”

“No,” Charlotte said. She found that the sight of him gave her confidence, his beaten appearance made him no longer the slightly disconcerting, unpredictable brother-in-law who came to doss down on her sofa every so often, but hardly spoke to her, only to Luke.

Ralph said with evident frustration, but not specifically, apparently, to Charlotte, “For God’s sake, what did I
do
?”

Charlotte shifted a little on her wedge heels. She thought of taking her sunglasses off and decided not to. She said, as nonchalantly as she could, “Actually, I came to see Petra.”

Ralph said wearily, “They aren’t here.”

Charlotte felt a little clutch of excited panic. Where were they, then? Were they with
him
?

“Oh—”

“They’re at the allotment,” Ralph said. “You’ll find them there.”

He plainly, Charlotte thought, couldn’t say Petra’s name. She said, “Can you show me?”

Ralph lifted an arm. He pointed vaguely to the right. He said, “Down there, and then right past the school, then left to the footpath.”

“Has Petra got her phone?”

Ralph looked at her with sudden focus. He said crisply, “I have no idea.”

“Sorry,” Charlotte said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about all of it,” and before the words were fully out of her mouth, Ralph said emphatically, “Me too,” and slammed the door shut in her face.

Petra and Kit were kneeling on the ground together, examining something in the earth. They had their backs to the gate. Opposite them, strapped into his buggy, with a carrot in either fist, was Barney. He gave an energetic wriggle when he saw Charlotte and gestured vigorously with his carrots.

“Gah!” Barney said loudly.

Petra lifted her head.

“What, Barn—”

“Gah,” Barney said again. He looked over his mother’s head at Charlotte, standing by the gate, her hand on the latch. Petra turned.

“Oh!” Petra said, scrambling to her feet.

Charlotte opened the gate.

“Surprise!” she said. She bent forward slightly, as if to kiss Petra. Petra stepped back.

“I didn’t expect—” Petra said.

“I know. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I thought if you knew, you wouldn’t see me.”

Kit got up from where he had been kneeling, holding a snail.

“It’s gone in again,” he said to Charlotte. “It came out, then it went in again.”

“Yes—”

“It doesn’t like noise,” Kit said sternly.

Charlotte crouched down beside him.

“I’ll try to be quiet.”

Kit nodded. Petra moved to stand beside Barney’s buggy.
She said in a neutral voice, “I know where Ralph’s brothers are today. They told him.”

Charlotte glanced up from Kit’s snail.

“How’d you know that?”

“Rachel rang,” Petra said in the same neutral tone. She stooped and released Barney, heaving him into her arms. From behind him she said, “She asked us to go over. Because the others were coming. But we couldn’t go.” She paused and then she added, “So I knew you’d be there.”

Charlotte stood up slowly.

“I didn’t go in. They don’t know I came. I just drove the boys down, and left them there. At the gate.” She stopped, and then she said with much less assurance, “They were . . . going to tell them—”

“Yes,” Petra said, “that’s why we couldn’t go.”

“Look!” Kit shouted excitedly. “Look! He’s done his horns out!”

Charlotte looked down. The snail withdrew sharply.

Kit said, “Don’t look at him!”

Petra sat down on the strip of turf between the vegetable beds, holding Barney on her lap. She said into Barney’s hair, “What d’you think will happen?” Charlotte sat down too, the other side of a bed of big, fierce marrow leaves. She tucked her legs to one side and leaned on one hand, looking down at the grass and ripping up single blades with the other.

She said cautiously, “What
is
happening?”

“What?” Petra said.

“With . . . with you. With you and this man—”

“He’s great,” Petra said. “He’s easy. He just lets things be. He’s called Steve.”

“Have—” Charlotte said, and stopped.

“Have what?”

“Have you slept with him.”

Petra brushed something off the top of Barney’s head.

“Not yet.”

Charlotte’s head snapped up.

“But you’re
planning
to?”

Petra shrugged.

“It might happen—”

“But you’re
married
!”

Petra looked entirely unoffended. She said, glancing at Charlotte over the marrow leaves, “He said he had to be free.”

“Who did?”

There was a beat, and then Petra said, her voice suddenly catching, “Ralph did.”

Charlotte got up and went round the marrow bed, Kit following. She knelt on the grass by Petra and, to her delight and surprise, Kit lowered himself onto her knees, still holding his snail. Charlotte said with feeling, “Oh, Petra—”

Petra said, her voice shaking, “He said he had to be free, for all of us. So I let him! I couldn’t stop him anyway, so I let him. And I thought that if he was free, then I was free too. Not from the boys, not ever, but from him, kind of, if that’s what he wanted. Because . . . because, whatever I think of him, whatever I want from him, he . . . well, he doesn’t really want me to
be
anything, he just doesn’t want me to stop him. So I haven’t.”

Charlotte said nothing. She put her arms round Kit and held him, and he leaned back against her, peering into the snail shell, warm and solid and unspeakably reassuring.

“And there’s the sea,” Petra said. “I know everyone thinks I’m a flake about the sea, but it matters. It matters to me, and it matters that Ralph gets it, and he used to get it, and now he doesn’t. Now he wants to be like he was before he met me. He got all his suits out again. Nobody gets what I’m doing, nobody thinks I have any right to live like I need to. They never have. I thought Ralph did, sometimes, but he doesn’t. Not even
Ralph. He wants me to be like he wants me to be. Like everyone does.”

“Not me,” Charlotte said.

Petra sighed. She said, “You don’t really know them yet.”

“I know enough—”

“Not to stand up to them—”

Charlotte rested her chin on the top of Kit’s head. Her gaze went past Petra to rest on Petra’s shed, which was open, revealing all the tools inside, ranged on hooks like a tidy kitchen.

She said, “That’s why I’ve come.” She held Kit a little tighter. He was really relaxed against her now, almost sleepily, and although her knees hurt from being bent under his weight, she would not have dreamt of moving. “I don’t know what’ll happen today,” Charlotte said. “I don’t know how they’ll react, but all I can say is that so far the boys are sticking together. Brother stuff. So—so I don’t know how they’ll, well, put it. I don’t know how they’ll tell the story—”

“It won’t be good,” Petra said.

“No. I don’t expect it will.” Charlotte paused, and considered bringing Rachel, and her own abiding grievance, into the equation, and then, buoyed up by the sense of maturity she was experiencing in this whole escapade, told herself not to. Instead, she said, “I just came to say that not everybody doesn’t get it. I do. I mean, I might not understand about the sea, and I don’t know Steve, but I’m kind of here, if you need me.”

Petra said into Barney’s hair again, “I’m not in love with him. Or anything.”

“Steve?”

“No.”

“Then why—”

“Because he helps me,” Petra said. “He knows what I know. About the sea and stuff. He likes what I like. He likes the kids.” She glanced at Kit. “He’s asleep.”

Charlotte looked down.

“What a compliment—”

“He likes women,” Petra said.

“Does . . . does he like his grandmother?”

There was a tiny, significant pause, and then Petra said, “Yes. He does,” and then she said almost inaudibly, “She’s not going to like me, though. Not now.”

Charlotte smiled at her. She said, “She doesn’t like me, either,” and Petra looked up at her, straight at her, and smiled back.

Anthony said, for the fiftieth time, “I cannot believe it.”

Rachel was lying back in one of the sagging old armchairs in the studio, with her eyes closed. They had been in the studio for hours now, ever since the boys had gone, driving away with Charlotte at the wheel—Charlotte, who they hadn’t even known had come to Aldeburgh, and who didn’t get out of the car to greet them, but just sat there, smiling, with the window rolled down, the car engine still humming.

“Come in,” Rachel had said, stooping to speak to her. “Come in, at least, and have some tea, before you go back.”

Charlotte hadn’t even taken her sunglasses off. She gave Rachel her wide, white smile and said thanks, but they really had to get back, work tomorrow and all that, and Ed and Luke had got in beside her docilely, as if somehow suddenly obedient to her rather than to their parents, and Charlotte had put the car in gear, and driven off, waving and smiling, and they had watched it go, desolate and disorientated, and then turned, as if by unspoken mutual consent, and retreated to the studio.