Daughters-in-Law (6 page)

“Maybe he’s forgotten we’re still away—”

“Typical.”

“I don’t,” she said, “know them very well. Your brothers, and sisters-in-law. It didn’t occur to me, it didn’t seem to matter—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She transferred her gaze to look at him.

“It kind of does, now. It’s not just a you thing, it’s an us thing. Your brother sends a text like that, and you begin to
look all preoccupied and distant, and I’m your wife now, so I’m in the loop, too.”

Luke put his phone in his trouser pocket. He leaned forward, pinning Charlotte against the rail of the vaporetto, and put his chin into the angle of her neck and shoulder.

“Wife—”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’ll ring him later. When I don’t want to thump him for being so thoughtless.”

“
Is
he thoughtless?”

Luke took his chin away, and stared past Charlotte at the cemetery walls of San Michele as they slid by.

“By normal standards, yes. But Ralph isn’t normal. He’s brilliant and he’s impossible. I missed him like anything when he was away, and it was so peaceful at the same time. You are so bloody gorgeous.”

Later, while Charlotte was showering in the black-marble bathroom, with the window open to the warm, bell-haunted sounds of early-evening Venice, Luke rang Ralph. Charlotte knew he was ringing, so she had the shower turned on full, and she sang as well, for good measure, in order to indicate to Luke that she was in no way going to influence or preempt any reaction Luke might be having in response to whatever it was that Ralph had to say. When she had finished, she wrapped herself in a large white towel, ran her hands through her hair so that it stood up in the soft damp spikes Luke seemed to like so much, and went through to the bedroom. Luke was lying on the bed with his shoes off. His phone was some distance away, on Charlotte’s side of the bed, as if he had just chucked it there.

Charlotte sat down on the edge of the bed beside him. She waited for him to ruffle her hair, or untuck her towel, or slide his hand underneath it. But he lay there frowning, looking ahead at the silvered wooden cabinet that housed the television.

“Is he okay?”

Luke went on staring ahead. He said shortly, “He’s losing his business.”

“
What?
”

“The bank won’t either extend his credit or lend him any more, despite him offering their home as collateral, so he’ll lose the business.”

“Oh my God,” Charlotte said.

Luke took her nearest hand.

“He said he suspected it would be that bad, at our wedding. He said he was sorry he was a bit weird, but he couldn’t help thinking about it.”

“Was he weird?”

Luke sighed.

“He got plastered. He was smoking. Mum and Dad were furious with him.”

“Do—do they know?”

Luke raised Charlotte’s hand to his mouth and looked at her over it.

“No. They don’t. Nobody does, except Ed, and now me. He hasn’t told anyone. He hasn’t told Petra.”

Charlotte felt a clutch of panic. She wanted to say, “You’d tell
me
, wouldn’t you? You’d always tell me everything. Wouldn’t you?” but sensed that if she did she might not get any answer that reassured her. So instead she said, “So, even if he’d offered their house to the bank and they’d, say, accepted, Petra wouldn’t have known anything about it?”

Luke regarded her solemnly.

“Yes.”

“But that’s awful—”

“It’s to protect her.”

“What?”

“Not telling Petra is protecting her. So’s not to worry her.”

Charlotte took her hand out of Luke’s.

“That’s not right—”

“Petra’s got no family,” Luke said. “We’ve all sort of become her family, so there’s this unspoken thing about looking after her. She’s only twenty-four, or something.”

“Two years younger than me.”

“Not a real comparison, angel.”

“But,” Charlotte said, “she’s his
wife
. They’ve got
children
. It’s a thing you do
together
, bad times.”

Luke sighed. He twisted himself round, and lay so that his head was in Charlotte’s lap. Then he reached up to untuck the towel across her breasts. Charlotte put her hand on his.

“Don’t—”

“Why not?”

“The mood’s not right—”

“Bloody Ralph.”

“It’s not Ralph,” Charlotte said, “not really. It’s Petra. It’s this Brinkley thing of treating Petra like a child.”

“Well, she is in a way—”

“Only if you all make her like that. She was managing okay on her own, I gather, before she met Ralph—”

“Just.”

Charlotte looked away. She said, “It’s like Ralph found her under a hedge or something, like an abandoned kitten.”

“She was in Dad’s art class. He said she never spoke but she was brilliant. She is brilliant. At drawing, I mean.”

Charlotte looked down at Luke. She began to stroke his thick hair back from his forehead.

“And then Ralph fell in love with her—”

“Well,” Luke said, gazing upward and thinking how amazing Charlotte looked, from every angle, even when foreshortened from underneath, as she was now, “I suppose he did. I mean, he liked her, he really liked her, but I’m not sure getting married was ever top of Ralph’s to-do list.”

“Did she ask him, then?”

“Oh no,” Luke said. He caught Charlotte’s hand and put it sideways, lightly, between his teeth. Then he took it out again, and said, still holding it, “She got pregnant.”

“Wow,” Charlotte said. “So he felt he had to marry her.”

Luke ran his tongue along the edge of Charlotte’s hand.

“Well, not really. And I don’t think Petra would have expected him to, either. She wasn’t conventional, any more than he was. She’d probably just have shrugged and got on with it, taking the baby to art classes in a basket, that sort of thing. It was Mum and Dad that wanted the wedding. They wanted them married.”

“To be respectable?”

“Not really,” Luke said. He heaved himself upright and ran his hand through Charlotte’s damp hair. “They’re a cool old pair in some ways; they don’t mind about how things look, how conformist things are. It was more that they didn’t want to let Petra go. They’d kind of adopted her. So they couldn’t lose her after all they’d invested, all they’d got used to. At least, that’s what I think.”

Charlotte was very still.

“Are you shocked, angel?” Luke said.

“No—”

He peered into her face, his eyes an inch from hers.

“What is it?”

“It’s a bit silly—”

“What is?”

“How I feel,” Charlotte said. “I mean, I’ve got my own family, who are lovely, and your parents who’ve been really sweet to me, but when you describe how they feel about Petra, I—well, I feel a bit—” She stopped.

“What?”

“Jealous,” Charlotte said.

Luke took his face away a little.

“You are one idiot of an adorable girl.”

Charlotte bent her head. She said, “There’s Sigi, you see, all groomed and professional and clever and detached, and she’s been in your family forever, and then there’s Petra, who everyone treats like a daughter, like a little sister, and it’s a bit much, sometimes, to have to compete with all that, especially when you’ve been competing with sisters all your life and you’re not academic or talented or anything—”

“Shush,” Luke said loudly.

Charlotte didn’t look up. Luke put his hand under her chin and tilted it until her gaze was level with his.

“It’s only what I think that matters,” Luke said. “And you know what I think. And when the family know you better, they’ll think it too, which I suspect they do already because nobody could know you and not think it.”

He leaned forward and kissed her, without hurry, on the mouth. Then he said, “Bugger Ralph and bugger his problems. We’ve got far more important things to concern ourselves with,” and he smiled at her, and, with a single, deft movement, he took her towel away.

The flat Luke had found for them in London was at the very top of a tall and elaborate brick building in Arnold Circus, a stone’s throw, as Charlotte excitedly told Nora, and all her other friends, from Columbia Road flower market, from Brick Lane, from—oh my God—
Hoxton
. The building, like all those that ringed the Circus like a circle of great ships, had been designed as part of a grand nineteenth-century philanthropic project for public housing, to provide light and air and sanitary living conditions for people who had known nothing previously but teeming slum life. The Circus was impressive, built of red brick banded, here and there, with peach brick, like a kind of architectural Fair Isle jersey, and in the center,
on a mound flanked by flights of steps and planted with enormous plane trees, was a folksy little bandstand under a pointed roof where Charlotte had, on her very first visit, seen a pair of thin boys picking at guitars and singing raggedly to an audience of mothers with babies in buggies, and neat old men in kurtas and embroidered caps. It had seemed to her wonderfully vivid and wonderfully exotic. She’d bought take-away falafel and a sun-dried-tomato salad from an engaging little place on Calvert Avenue so that they could have a picnic in the empty, dusty flat that Luke had just signed a lease on, and felt the future unrolling before her like a fairground ride, sparkling with lights.

The flat had two rooms, with a kitchen under the eaves and a bathroom with a huge window from which you could see, giddily, far, far below, the decayed strip of low buildings, which now housed a series of artisan workshops, including Luke and Jed’s studio. You could even, Charlotte discovered, pick out the very skylight of the studio, and she imagined how, in the winter dark, she could look down there and see, with lovely wifely exasperation, that the lights were on in the studio, which meant that Luke was still down there working, when he should have been up in the flat eating the kind of delicious nourishing supper she was going to practice cooking until she was as good a cook as Luke’s mother was. She thought that, what with the number of commissions Luke was now getting from the music industry, as well as the new sidelines he was developing in film, and lighting design for concerts and things, there might be quite a lot of evenings when she would be looking down at that skylight, and seeing the lights still on. She vowed she would not nag. She vowed she would stay as pleased and excited at his growing career as he was, as she was at the moment. She vowed that she would never give him cause to feel that she had to be protected from hard times, like
Petra. She had no idea what Ralph’s business was, except that it was some kind of online financial thing, investment advice or something, and she had no inclination to ask further since the whole situation around Ralph and Petra and the little boys and Anthony and Rachel made her feel strangely unsettled, however many times Luke told her that no one mattered to him like she did. She wished she hadn’t told Luke she felt jealous. She wished she’d just navigated the whole topic with the kind of grown-up poise that indicated that she was naturally concerned by Ralph’s news, but not in the least personally ruffled by it. And so, to make amends to herself for an adolescent moment of vulnerability, she said to Luke, when they returned to the flat from Venice, “Do ask Ralph up here, if you want to talk or anything. He can christen the sofa bed.”

And she’d been rewarded by Luke putting his arms round her and saying, his mouth against her ear, “You are a complete doll.”

So here she was, getting wedding-present sheets out of their complicated packaging of cellophane and cardboard, and pulling a new duvet out of its box, in order to have them ready, later that day, to make the sofa up for Ralph to sleep on. It was seven in the morning, the sun was out, Luke was showering in the bathroom, and Charlotte, in a denim miniskirt, tight striped vest, and shrunken military jacket with huge brass buttons, was all ready to leave for her job in a local radio station located on Marylebone High Street. In the fridge sat salad ingredients and pieces of salmon to grill, and she would pick up bread during the day, and cheese and strawberries, and Luke would get wine and beer, and she would light candles later and not tell Ralph that he was their first guest ever. He might also turn out to be rather an appreciative guest. Luke said he’d leapt at the chance of coming to London for the night.

“Actually,” Luke said, “he asked if it was okay by you. A
first for Ralph, I should think, wondering if he was being a nuisance.”

Charlotte banged on the bathroom door.

“I’m off, babe!”

There was a pause while taps and Luke’s iPod were turned off, and then he opened the door. He was naked, and wet. He looked her up and down.

“Don’t go to work, angel—”

She giggled.

“I’ve got to. I’m on the eight o’clock shift, which means being there at seven forty-five. You know that.”

“I’ll be thinking about you all day. All day.”

She blew him a kiss.

“Me too. When’s Ralph getting here?”

Luke stepped forward and enfolded her in a wet embrace.

“When he gets here. Miss me. Miss me all day.”

“Promise,” Charlotte said.

Luke’s studio was approached along a broad asphalted path behind the Arnold Circus buildings. It was in a long, low line of what might once have been mews, or garages, brick-built with sizable sections of metal-framed windows, broken where the studios behind them were unoccupied. The ground-floor walls were punctuated by battered black-painted doors that, when you pushed them open, gave on to steep, narrow staircases that led up to small landings illuminated by dirty windows, floor to ceiling. In Luke’s case, one of the two doors on such a landing had been newly painted, in dark-gray matte paint, with a brushed-steel plate fixed slightly to one side of the center eyeline, which read, in black sans serif lower-case lettering, “Graphtech Design Consultants.”

Ralph had only been to Luke’s studio once before, when Luke and Jed were in the process of moving in, and long before
Luke met Charlotte. They’d borrowed the money for the initial payment on the lease and down payments on their computers from Jed’s father, who was separated from Jed’s mother and spent most of his time and money restoring classic motorbikes. Luke, who had always been good with his hands, was building drawing boards and installing overhead lighting while Jed sanded the floorboards with a gadget that looked like a giant hair dryer. It had made Ralph think, with some emotion, of how he had intended his Suffolk cottage to be, a private space in which to live and to work without the distraction of obligation to anyone else. It was going to be him, and the white walls, and the uncompromising coastal light, and the sea, and the shingle, and the development of his idea to extend the ease and intimacy of Internet banking into the limitless world of the small investor.