Daughters-in-Law (24 page)

“So we can work this thing out, and you can have what you wanted, can’t you?”

Petra tipped out the rest of the mushrooms. She picked up a knife. Ralph said, “Are you with me?”

She said, not looking up, “I . . . suppose so. I’m . . . just a bit surprised about the room—”

“Why?”

“So quick—”

“Babe, I start work in two weeks.”

“Yes—”

“What did you think would happen? How did you think we’d work it?”

“I didn’t,” Petra said truthfully. “I just thought I’d wait till you decided something, and then I’d see what to do.”

“Well, I have decided. I’ve got a room.”

Petra looked at him. She smiled.

“Good,” she said.

“And you can go on with your life here. Doing what you like doing. Like going to the sea, like you did today. Wasn’t the beach crowded?”

“We didn’t go there—”

Ralph began to pour the wine.

“Where’d you go then?”

“Shingle Street,” Petra said, slicing mushrooms.

“Shingle Street? How did you get there?”

“Taxi—”

Ralph stopped pouring.

“A
taxi
? Both ways?”

“No,” Petra said calmly. “My friend brought us home.”

“What friend?”

“He works at the bird reserve.”

“
He?
”

Petra looked at him.

“Yes.”

Ralph said, “How do you have a friend, a man friend, from the bird reserve?”

Petra put her knife down.

“He found my car keys when I lost them the day I went drawing there, when you had your interview, when your parents had the boys.”

“And now he’s a friend.”

Petra said, “He lives at Shingle Street. It was amazing to be back there. Amazing. The boys loved it.”

There was a silence. Ralph looked at the wine in the glasses, then he looked at Petra. He said, “You took the boys—”

“Of course. What else would I do?”

“Is—is that why you’re so happy? Is that why the atmosphere here’s so good tonight? It’s not that you’ve come round to my point of view, my point about the future, is it, it’s because you’ve had an afternoon—”

“It was the beach,” Petra said.

“An afternoon,” Ralph said, rushing on, taking no notice, “with some guy who you let be with my children and God knows what else you let happen, it’s that, isn’t it, it’s that—”

He stopped suddenly. He tried to gauge, looking at Petra, what she was thinking. She was standing on the other side of the table, one hand lightly on the pile of sliced mushrooms, the other lying on her knife, quite still and alarmingly composed. She was looking back at him, and although her gaze was veiled she didn’t look as she usually looked when things got difficult and she was trying to evade being involved in a resolution. She looked more as if she’d decided something and then pulled back into herself, decision made.

“Petra?”

“Yes.”

“Petra, are you happy, not because of me but because you’ve had a good afternoon with this guy?”

She gave him a faint smile and picked up her paring knife again.

“Yes,” she said.

S
igrid put down the telephone. She had called her mother in Stockholm, at a time she knew her mother would be at home after her surgery, and before her father returned and, in a way Sigrid was sure was unintentional, exercised a quiet but definite background restraint upon her mother’s responses to what Sigrid was saying. Sigrid had meant—had wanted—to tell her mother about all the Brinkley family upsets, and had gone so far, on her journey back from the laboratory, as to plan how she would describe the lunch party, and Rachel’s manner, and Charlotte’s reaction and subsequent behavior: but when it came to it, she discovered that the flavor had quite leached out of it all, to the extent that she felt, oddly, that she ought to protect the Brinkleys in a way, she ought not to expose their inadequacies, even—or maybe, especially—to her mother. So they had an affectionate and anodyne call instead, so anodyne that Sigrid could sense her mother was only just managing to refrain from asking her if anything was the matter.

Sigrid picked up the mug of green tea she had made to accompany the phone call and looked at it. It was cold now,
with a rim of brown sediment at the bottom, and looked as appetizing as a mug of pond water. She went over to the sink and poured it away, and then refilled the kettle. Coffee was the answer. Coffee, in her upbringing, had always been the answer. Green tea was no substitute. Just as, Mariella frequently pointed out, water was no substitute for juice. Or a smoothie. Mariella had been promised some vanilla smoothie—her favorite—when she could not only spell out loud all the words on her summer-holiday spelling list ending in “ough,” but could write them down too. She had been shut in her room for hours, so she had probably abandoned spelling for playing, and her bedroom floor would be covered with the families of tiny anthropomorphized toy woodland animals whom she would be putting to bed, in nests of paper tissues, in all her shoes. Sigrid was not going to interrupt her. Absorbed playing with miniature mice and badgers had to feed the inner life more richly, surely, than learning why “cough” and “rough” and “bough” all looked the same but didn’t sound it. English! What a language.

Edward’s key scraped in the front-door lock, followed by a bang as he swung it shut behind him. He came rapidly down the stairs to the kitchen, as was his wont, and kissed her—rather absently, she thought—and went straight to the fridge.

“A bit desperate, aren’t you?” Sigrid said.

“Water,” Edward said shortly. He took out the filter jug Sigrid kept in the door of the fridge and poured out a large glass, which he then drank, straight off. Sigrid watched him.

“Is something the matter?”

Edward went on drinking.

“Please,” Sigrid said. “No dramas. Have you had a bad day?”

Edward put the glass down and refilled it.

“Yes.”

“Would you like to tell me about it?”

Edward nodded, drinking again.

“Is it your family?”

Edward stopped swallowing long enough to say, “Why should it be them?”

“It usually is.”

“Whereas—”

“No,” Sigrid said, interrupting. “No, not in comparison to mine, if you must know. I have just had a very inadequate talk to my mother.”

“Inadequate?”

“I talked to her in a completely pointless way. As if I didn’t really know her—”

“Why?” Edward said.

Sigrid let a small silence fall and then she said evasively, “I don’t know. Maybe I was tired.”

Edward sat down heavily on a kitchen chair, with his third glass of water.

“I
am
tired.”

Sigrid waited. Edward said, “I am especially tired of Ralph. At least, poor bugger, I’m not tired of
him
, but I’m pretty tired of the complications he seems to attract.”

Sigrid took a chair across the table from Edward. She said cautiously, “What now? Is he reneging on the job?”

“Oh no,” Edward said. “Nothing like that. Heavens, he starts in a week.”

“Well, then?”

Edward sighed. He said, looking at the tabletop rather than at Sigrid, “It’s Petra.”

“Petra!”

“He rang today. He sounded in quite a state. He said he’d been sitting on something for about a week, and he had to tell someone. It seems that Petra has . . . well, I don’t know how
far it’s gone, I mean, I don’t know if they’re sleeping together or anything, but Petra’s got another man.”

Sigrid gasped. She held on to the table edge and leaned forward.

“
Petra?
”

“Yes,” Edward said. He got up. “I’m going to get something stronger. You want a drink?”

“Sit down,” Sigrid said. “Sit down. We’ll get a drink later. Sit down and tell me. Who
is
this man?”

Edward leaned against the table. He said dully, “He works at the nature reserve.”

“He—”

“Outside. He’s a kind of—maintenance man, I suppose. I couldn’t really tell. He looks after the infrastructure, fences and steps and handrails, that sort of thing. Petra met him there.”

“But she hasn’t been there lately—”

“Once,” Edward said.

“Once!”

“She lost her car keys. He found them. It was the day Ralph came up for the interview.”

Sigrid put her head in her hands.

“Oh my God—”

“He’s got a place at Shingle Street,” Edward said. “Where they used to live. Petra takes the kids there, they love it, they—well, Kit anyway—want to tell Ralph about it, they want to take him there.”

“Don’t—”

“Ralph said that she doesn’t seem to get what she’s doing. She just doesn’t. They agreed he could live in London in the week, so that she and the boys didn’t have to leave Aldeburgh, and she seems to think that gives him a freedom that she’s entitled to, too, so she’s got this bloke.”

Sigrid said, “I think I’d like that drink.
Petra
. I can’t believe it—”

Edward turned towards the fridge.

“Ralph said he can’t talk to her. He simply can’t. She won’t discuss it. She just looks at him, and smiles, and says she’s okay now, so she’s fine with him doing this job in London. She doesn’t seem to understand that working in London to support your family doesn’t exactly equate to unbounded freedom for Ralph. And it
certainly
doesn’t give her permission to embark on an affair with someone else.”

“
Has
she?”

Edward opened the fridge and took out a wine bottle.

“I don’t know. Ralph doesn’t know. She just says it’s the sea, it’s the sea, which is plainly utter rubbish. How can it be the
sea
, for God’s sake? There’s sea all over the place in Aldeburgh!”

Sigrid got up to fetch two glasses. She said, “It’s always been . . . a bit funny, that relationship—”

“All relationships look funny from the outside.”

“Goodness, Ed, that’s very philosophical, for you—”

Edward put the wine down on the table, and picked it up again.

“I told him to tell the parents. He said he couldn’t face it. He asked if I would.”

“Will you?”

Edward began to pour.

“When I know more. When I know what I’m telling them, maybe.” He pushed a glass towards Sigrid. “Stupid bloody girl.”

Sigrid said nothing. Edward sat down again. He took a swallow of wine. He said, suddenly angry, “I know Ralph is a pain, I know he isn’t the easiest person to live with, but he’s doing this for his family and, however stupid and pigheaded he is, he isn’t a player, he doesn’t play around with other women, he doesn’t drink or gamble, he’s just Ralph, like he always was.
And Petra isn’t exactly a picnic, is she, drifting about, refusing to grow up, all daffy and artistic. Honestly.
Honestly
.” He raised his voice and said again in almost a shout, “Stupid bloody woman!”

“Who is?” Mariella said from the doorway.

Charlotte lay in bed on her back. Luke was asleep beside her, his right arm across her thighs, where she had moved it, from being across her belly. She had been assured by everyone—her mother, sisters, friends—that if she felt sick (not everyone does, promise, Char, I mean, I nearly died from nausea but lots of people don’t even feel a
thing
) it would be in the morning, early, and would be enormously helped if Luke brought her tea in bed, and a plain biscuit or something, before she even put a toe out. But the mornings were fine. Really fine. It was the evenings that Charlotte dreaded. In the evenings, she was beginning to find that not only could she not face food, she couldn’t even face the
thought
of food, let alone the smell, and she daren’t even think about coffee or brown bread, for example, without having to race for the bathroom. Luke had been so sweet. He’d had something to eat, the last week or so, in the studio before he came upstairs, and he’d brushed his teeth, too. She’d really appreciated that, and she really appreciated that he wanted to sleep with his arms round her. It was just that she couldn’t bear the weight of his finger, let alone his arm, across her belly, but if she merely lifted it away he put it back again, at once, in his sleep, as if it was absolutely vital for him to be connected. So she had, the last few nights, just pushed his arm down her body a little, and that seemed to content him, while she lay waiting for either sleep or sickness to gain the upper hand.

Of course, tonight there was another reason to stay awake, a reason beyond that of simply wondering whether she was going to throw up, or just feel that she might. Luke had come
up from the studio, touchingly redolent of toothpaste over pizza, and said that Ralph had rung him to tell him that Petra was seeing someone else. Luke didn’t seem very clear about any of it, not who the guy was, or whether Petra was going off with him, or whether Ralph was going to do anything about it, but it was more that he, Luke, was in a stumbling sort of rage on his brother’s behalf who, he said to Charlotte, was, he knew, not the easiest bastard to be married to, but hell, he was doing his best with a new job and all that and anyway, Petra hadn’t exactly pulled her weight the last few years, and he now saw why she, Charlotte, had always had a bit of a down on Petra, and he should have taken her opinion on Petra more seriously, he really should, because she’d been proved spot-on right now, hadn’t she?