Daughters-in-Law (17 page)

Rachel had tried to talk to Petra. Petra had been, to say the least, detached about the job interview in the first place. She stood in her kitchen, making tea for Rachel with maddening
abstraction, while Barney crawled peaceably about the floor putting unsuitable bits of detritus into his mouth and swallowing them.

“I don’t mind about the money,” Petra said. “I’ve never minded about money. I’m used to not having money.”

Rachel had taken a deep breath and averted her eyes from Barney on the floor.

“That was then,” she said to Petra. “You were a student, and only had yourself to think about. You have children now. You have a house. You have responsibilities. You aren’t free to indulge yourself by saying you don’t care about money.”

Petra didn’t reply. She put Rachel’s tea down in front of her, and then bent to extricate a plastic bottle cap from Barney’s mouth, but without hurry. Her whole posture, her every movement, indicated to Rachel that she was not going to pursue this conversation, any more than she had engaged in the one about possibly having to move nearer a station, to enable Ralph to commute more easily.

“I can’t leave the sea,” Petra said. “Once I could’ve, when I hadn’t lived by it, but I can’t now. The best place I ever lived was Shingle Street. It was the best place for Ralph too. We were really happy at Shingle Street. The sea was almost
in
the sitting room.”

Rachel had felt her whole body clench with tension. She had so much to say, so much to point out about practicality and common sense and responsibility and maturity, and there was no point in uttering a single syllable of it. She had drunk her tea, and gone to find Kit sitting staring and rapt in front of the television, in order to kiss him good-bye, and had then driven home in an advanced state of agitation, to find Anthony determined not to engage with her either.

“We are talking about your
son
!” Rachel had shouted. “Your son and your daughter-in-law who are declining—no,
refusing
—to face the practicalities and consequences of how their life will be!”

Anthony was in his studio, drawing a dead mole he had successfully trapped as it flung up its chain of miniature mountains across the lawn. It lay on a piece of yellowish paper, quite unmarked, its purposeful front paws half curled, as if still in the act of digging.

“It’s their life,” Anthony said, drawing on.

“But they have
children
, they can’t ignore that, and if they don’t move Ralph will never get home at night and then—”

“Stop it,” Anthony said.

“I can’t believe you don’t care—”

Anthony smudged his drawing with a forefinger.

“I care. I care quite as much as you do. But caring confers no right to interfere.”

“How dare—”

“I am not,” Anthony said, “discussing this further. Not now, not tomorrow, and certainly not in the car going up to London when I am trapped beside you.”

So, here they were, in the car together, with the radio on to neutralize the atmosphere, and Rachel at the wheel, driving in a way she knew Anthony would both observe and decline to comment on. She had decided not to speak, being well aware after all these decades of living with herself that fear only made her sound angry, and, if she added the anger caused by her anxiety over Ralph and Petra to the resentment she felt at being forced to have Sunday lunch in Shoreditch rather than at her own large and familiar kitchen table, she knew she couldn’t trust herself to say anything of which she could subsequently be remotely proud. So she drove furiously, and beside her Anthony sat striving to distract himself from her violent silence, and his own inner turmoil at the storms threatening his family life, by examining the cloudscapes and
wondering how Constable, or Turner, or Whistler might have painted them.

Luke had made a table large enough to accommodate seven people for lunch by overlaying their small black dining table with a piece of MDF left over from his office conversion. Charlotte had wanted there to be eleven people, not seven, but Luke had grown tired, after Ralph’s second night on their sofa in a reek of alcohol, of pursuing Ralph and Petra for a sensible answer to their invitation, and had said that they’d just go ahead without them.

“But I want the children,” Charlotte said.

“No, you don’t. Barney will wreck the flat at floor level, and Kit will whine and make a fuss about eating.”

“I don’t mind—”

“I do,” Luke said.

There was a short pause, and then Charlotte said accurately, “You’re worried about your mother coming.”

“I am not—”

“Lukey—”

“I have never,” Luke said, “had my parents to a meal. Not ever. In my whole life.”

“Well—”

“We always went home. We went home to eat. That’s what we did. Always.”

“That’s why it’s worth making an effort—”

“I
am
making an effort!”

Charlotte waited a few seconds, and then she said, “Don’t take it out on me, babe.”

Luke looked at her. He gave a little bleat of exasperation, and flung his hands out.

“It’s not you—”

“Well?”

“It’s—well, it’s just all this stuff recently. Ralph, and us
not going to Suffolk and not telling Mum and Dad about the baby—”

“We’ll tell them today. They’ll know today.”

Luke said sadly, “You told your mother last weekend.”

“I saw her,” Charlotte said. “I wanted to tell her in person, and I saw her.”

“Three weekends running, seeing your mother—”

“Are you counting?”

“No,” said Luke, “but Mum will be.”

Charlotte unfolded a white double sheet, and billowed it out over the table. She said, “Did you get Coke or something, for Mariella?”

“Are you changing the subject?”

Charlotte bent across the table to smooth the sheet out. She was wearing a short gray gauze smock over white-lace shorts. Her legs were absolutely amazing. Luke had a sudden vision of those legs stalking past his father and his elder brother. He said, “Is that what you’re planning to wear?”

Charlotte straightened up. She had smoothed her hair close to her head and added enormous pearl earrings.

“Of course. It’s new.”

Luke sighed unhappily. “It’s gorgeous. You look gorgeous. It’s just—”

Charlotte began to giggle. She came round the table and put her arms round Luke’s neck.

“It’s to distract them all from how disgusting lunch is going to be. D’you think it’ll work?”

“If there are no babies at lunch,” Mariella said, “I will have completely nothing to do.”

“Bring a game,” Sigrid said, “or a book.”

She was standing in her bathroom, putting her makeup on, and Mariella was sitting, fully dressed, in the empty bathtub beside her, on a stool she had brought in for the purpose.

“If we went to Suffolk,” Mariella said, “I’d have heaps to do. I’d always have heaps to do in Suffolk.”

“Well, Aunt Charlotte—”

“She said to call her Charlotte—”

“Charlotte wants us to see her new flat and to cook for us.”

“It’ll be weird,” Mariella said.

“Not necessarily.”

Mariella squinted up at her mother.

“Indira’s mother paints lines on her eyes all the way out like little wings. Little flicky wings.”

“Indira’s mother is very dramatic.”

“She has a million bangles,” Mariella said, “all up her arms. She lets us play with her jewelry; she lets us put on her toe rings and the ankle things and everything, and whoosh about in her saris. She never says, oh what a mess please tidy up don’t jump on my bed careful you don’t get nail varnish on the carpet. She never does.”

“Why don’t you spend more time there then, instead of bothering me.”

Mariella put her head on one side.

“I like bothering you.”

“I noticed,” Sigrid said. She leaned forward towards the mirror, holding her eyelash curlers.

“Why can’t we have a baby?” Mariella said.

Sigrid applied the curlers to one eye, and squeezed. She said, “I’m afraid I’m not very good at it.”

“You are,” Mariella said. “You had me.”

Sigrid opened the curlers for her other eye.

“I did. But not easily. Some women have babies easily and are very good at it. Their bodies are very good at it. We are all designed a bit differently, you see.”

“But,” Mariella said reasonably, “the doctors would help you. The baby doctors. That’s what they’re for.”

“Even so.”

“Which bit of you didn’t work?”

Sigrid put the curlers down and picked up her mascara.

“My head, darling.”

“You don’t have babies in your head.”

“But you have,” Sigrid said, “thoughts and feelings in your head. Especially when you are growing a baby. You are never just a body, you are a head too. After all, you have thoughts all the time, don’t you? And you have to remember that some people have difficult thoughts and feelings, which you might not have yourself, and you have to be sympathetic to them, all the same.”

Mariella stood up, and climbed out of the bathtub. She said quite casually, “Like Granny?”

Sigrid stopped applying mascara. She turned round.

“What?”

Mariella bent to pick up the stool. She said, “Well, Granny had three babies, so she must have thought it was easy.”

“I think she did.”

Mariella put the stool on the bathroom floor. Then she climbed on it, so she was taller than her mother. She looked down at Sigrid, smiling at her own superior position.

“So,” she said, “Granny forgets sometimes to be sympathetic to someone like you. Doesn’t she?”

“Well,” Charlotte said, “we’ve got something to tell you.”

She was slightly flushed. Lunch had been pretty successful, considering, and even though Rachel had hardly commented on it she had eaten everything on her plate and even said, “Oh, chervil!” in a tone of pleased surprise when she saw the garnish on the potato salad. Mariella had been adorable and funny and kept them entertained with improbable stories about her friends, and Anthony had drawn cartoons of them all as
birds—Charlotte was an extremely pretty ostrich with false eyelashes and fishnet stockings—and everybody had exclaimed at the flat and the wedding pictures and Charlotte had caught Luke’s eye and felt him acknowledge that she had been right to insist on hosting lunch, right to demonstrate to his parents that successful family occasions could happen away from the familiar base in Suffolk. So she tapped a stray spoon against her water glass and said in a slight rush, “Well. We’ve got something to tell you—”

Rachel, who was sitting next to Luke, put a hand out to touch his forearm. She said, too fast, “Oh, darling. A work breakthrough—”

Luke was staring at Charlotte. He looked slightly pent-up, as if he was holding something in that it would be a relief to release.

Charlotte, in turn, stared at Rachel.

“No,” she said decidedly.

Rachel turned to regard Charlotte.

“Not—”

“Not what,” Charlotte said dangerously.

“Please—” Anthony said to Rachel across the table.

“Not a baby,” Rachel said recklessly.

“Rachel!” Anthony shouted.

Charlotte stood up. She had lost her temper in an instant.

“Yes,” she yelled. “A
baby
! We’re having a baby! What’s wrong with having a baby?”

Rachel said unflinchingly, “You’ve only been married ten minutes. Couldn’t you have waited?”

The noise erupted. Luke got up, overturning his chair in his haste to get round the table to Charlotte, but Sigrid was there before him, her arms round Charlotte. Edward and Anthony turned on Rachel.

“How
could
you?”

“What are you
thinking
of? Have you lost your
mind
?”

“What business is it of yours—”

“God, you are a liability—”

Mariella was watching. She stayed in her chair across the table from her grandmother, and watched. She saw her mother and her uncle Luke with their arms round Charlotte, and, even though she could only see Charlotte’s hair and Charlotte’s legs, she knew she was crying in there, in all those arms, and she was crying because Granny had said something that she shouldn’t have said, and Granny was now sitting there, staring at her lap, while her father and her grandfather shouted at her in angry whispers. Mariella wondered if Granny would like to say sorry, and then she wondered if her mother was comforting Charlotte because of all the baby-in-your-head stuff, and then she remembered that Charlotte had started all this by saying she and Luke were going to have a baby, and a surge of delight lifted Mariella clean off her chair to stand on it, so that she was taller than anyone else there, just as she had been, in her mother’s bathroom, a few hours before.

She clapped her hands.

“Stop, everyone!” Mariella shouted.

No one took any notice.

“Shut up, shut up!” Mariella shouted. She looked down at her father. He had stopped ranting at Granny, and was sitting with his head in his hands. Mariella took a deep breath, then she yelled, “There’s going to be a
baby
!”

Anthony said he would drive home. He had taken the car keys from Rachel’s bag, and then he held the passenger door open for her, and she had climbed in wordlessly, and buckled her seat belt, and not looked at him as he settled himself into the driving seat and adjusted the mirrors. She asked if he would like to be directed towards the A12, and he said thank you, but
there were perfectly adequate road signs, and then he turned on the radio, quite loud, and they drove in wretched silence, all the way back to Suffolk.

It took two and a half hours. For most of the journey, Rachel lay back against the headrest, with her eyes closed, and her face turned away from Anthony. She could not think how to initiate conversation, and Anthony looked as if such an idea was the last thing he would have welcomed. She had seldom seen him so angry. He wasn’t a man given to anger, least of all with her. In fact, she had grown, over the years, to accept that, as far as Anthony was concerned, she could get away with almost anything, that he not only valued but also depended upon her particular variety of vitality and certainty, her frankly partisan championing of the men in her life, her ability to take action. Her mind roamed over events in their life together where Anthony had sought her for reassurance, for sympathetic companionship, events like Edward’s wedding, or Ralph’s disappearing to Singapore, or Luke’s uncommunicative gap-year wanderings, and she tried to console herself by telling herself that Anthony had needed her then, had relied upon her for her good sense, her candor, her capacity not to be spooked by imaginings. She tried to tell herself that what she had said today was no more than the common sense that everyone else was thinking, and dared not say, and failed. She tried to tell herself that Anthony’s reaction was exaggerated and unjust and colored by his tragic male infatuation with Charlotte’s looks, and failed. She told herself that, whatever she had done, and whatever Anthony’s reaction had been, she would not cry in front of him, and succeeded. And so, through mile after mile of the long road out to East Anglia in the tired sunlight of a summer Sunday afternoon, Rachel sat with her face averted, her eyes closed, and her thoughts teeming behind them like a scuttling plague of vermin.