Daughters-in-Law (27 page)

Anthony was standing by the easel. His drawing of cranes was still on it, unfinished, and out of habit he had picked up a piece of charcoal and smudged at the paper with it, but he couldn’t focus, he couldn’t recognize his own capacity. He just
stood there holding the charcoal, and saying that he couldn’t believe it, he simply couldn’t. Petra of all people.
Petra
.

Rachel had been quite silent. She had flopped into the nearest armchair and stayed there, head back, eyes either closed or directed at the ceiling. She had given the boys lobster at lunch-time, specially bought lobster, which she knew they both loved, and had made garlic mayonnaise, and that pudding of crushed meringues and strawberries that had always been Luke’s favorite. But nobody had eaten anything much. They’d said, “Great, Mum, thanks,” sounding as they did when they were adolescents, and then they’d exchanged glances as if about to confess to a cricket ball through the greenhouse roof, and then Edward had cleared his throat and said, well, actually, there was a reason for their coming, and it wasn’t, unfortunately, a very happy reason, and then he started, and Rachel could see, almost from his first words, that Anthony wasn’t grasping it, that Anthony couldn’t take in what he was being told, that Edward might as well have been talking to him in Mandarin. And then he did understand, suddenly, and he went gray and put down his spoon, and Rachel had felt such fury on his behalf, such protective rage at his betrayed trust, that she had almost leaped out of her chair.

She was calmer now. She was calmer, and exhausted as, she knew, you can only be when you have been literally flooded with anger. And she had been. She had said a great many things about Petra that came straight out of her volcano of outrage, outrage that Ralph’s efforts to support his family should be rewarded in such a way, outrage at Petra’s conduct, outrage that Anthony’s faith in her, real love for her, should be repaid so carelessly.

“She’s wicked,” Anthony said, bewildered and distressed, red in the face now, his table napkin crumpled into the lobster. “
Wicked
.”

But Rachel knew Petra wasn’t wicked. She had, in that first panic of knowing, said terrible things about Petra, but she knew she wasn’t wicked. She knew, if she thought about it, if she forced herself right through her violent primitive maternal loyalty to Ralph to the other side, that Petra had come up against something in her marriage that was like hurling oneself against a steel door. It wasn’t that Petra had encountered something in her life and in her husband that she could not deal with that got to Rachel; oh no, so much of Ralph, and living with Ralph, was so profoundly intractable. What got to Rachel, what Rachel could neither understand nor forgive, was that, in her trouble, Petra had not come to her and Anthony for help, but had, instead, chosen an alternative solution that was, frankly, disastrous for everybody.

Edward and Luke had described this new man of Petra’s as minimally as they could, indicating their distaste for the whole business. Rachel liked their loyalty, liked the sense that no man could be an understandable replacement for their own brother. But she was equally unnerved by how mild this Steve person sounded, how peacefully attractive his work and his interests, how much—this was the worst—the boys seemed to enjoy being with him. Edward had reported that Ralph was as bemused as he was hurt.

“He says Steve’s got nothing, really. Rented shared cottage, clapped-out Toyota. But he doesn’t mind and Petra doesn’t mind. It’s all birds and sea and throwing stones on the beach with them. That seems to be all. That seems to be enough.”

“Has she been to bed with him?” Anthony demanded.

Luke made a sick noise. Edward said woodenly, “I wouldn’t know.”

“It won’t last,” Anthony said. “Flash in the pan. Defiance. I’ll go and talk to her—”

“No!” Rachel said loudly and suddenly.

They’d all looked at her.

Anthony said, “But we always talk to her—”

“Not now,” Rachel said. “
Not
now.”

They’d gazed at her, astonished. She could see that they were all thinking, what’s got into Mum, Mum’s always rushing in to sort things out, Mum always thinks she’s got the answer. Well, this time she didn’t have an answer, except to say that they would do nothing, Anthony especially. They would do nothing, Rachel thought, lying in the armchair watching the curious moving patterns behind her closed lids, because, for the first time in decades, Rachel did not know what to do. All that energetic bustling about to try and fix a house in Ipswich for Ralph and Petra now seemed ludicrous, a kind of mad displacement activity for some profound anxiety that she did not care to give a name to. Well, now she knew what that anxiety had been, an anxiety about Ralph’s work difficulties causing his strange, opaque, elusive relationship with Petra to dissolve still further, to an extent that no amount of dictatorial external management could shore it up. Petra was Petra. Always had been, slipping in and out of manageableness like a fish in a wet grasp. But really, Rachel thought now, wearily trawling through her jumbled thoughts, I believed I was through to her, I believed that, since Kit was born, we’d got to a steadier place, somewhere where we all knew where we were, where we could rely upon one another. And if she thinks she can get away with treating Anthony like this, after all he’s done for her, all his patience and help and affection, well, then she’s got another think coming, and a gigantic think at that.

She opened her eyes and looked at Anthony standing by his easel, staring, unseeing, at the cranes. He seemed much older than he had seemed even that morning, his shoulders slightly stooped, his whole demeanor just giving off sadness like a dark vapor.

“Ant?” Rachel said.

He turned slightly, and gave her a halfhearted smile.

“I wondered if you were asleep—”

“No such luck.”

She sat up a little straighter, and ran her hand through her hair.

“Tea?” she said.

Anthony ignored her. He said, “What do we do? What do we do, for Ralph?”

Rachel struggled to sit upright.

“We’ll ring him. Later. When we’ve both got our heads a bit more together.”

“Yes,” Anthony said. “Yes. Poor bloody boy.” He raised his arm and added something to a crane’s wing. Then he said with some force, “You’re right. I’m not ringing
her
. I’m not ringing her, Rachel, ever again.”

Luke and Charlotte dropped Edward off at home. He invited them in, but then discovered, from a note on the kitchen table, that Sigrid and Mariella had gone to Indira’s house, and would not be back until later, and after he’d made a faint attempt at offering them something to drink, Luke said, well, actually, maybe they ought to get home, and they’d got back into the car, leaving Edward in the late-Sunday-afternoon aimlessness of his own house.

He poured himself a glass of water from the jug in the fridge and took it out onto the deck outside the kitchen. Their little patio garden, always tidied to Sigrid’s exacting standards, looked tired and spent. The hornbeams that Sigrid had planted against the back wall—imported, she told Edward, from Italy—were beginning to drop a discolored leaf or two, and such flowers as were left in the wooden planters Sigrid had had specially commissioned looked as if it was simply too much trouble, now, to stay vibrant.

Edward sat down on the edge of a long planter’s chair that they had bought with the romantic but unrealistic image in mind of one or other of them in it, with the Sunday papers, or a book from the silently reproachful pile in Edward’s study. Sigrid had acquired cushions for it, striped in gray and cream, but those were also in Edward’s study and he was sitting on the hard slats of teak, or iroko, or whatever it was made of, and somehow unable to make himself more comfortable.

There had been nothing left, really, to say in the car. Charlotte had been to the sea, she said, and she’d obviously liked it because she seemed quite animated, and chattered away about the beach in Aldeburgh, and when Luke asked her if she’d been to see Ralph she’d given a short laugh, and said, “
Not
a good idea!”

“So you went?” Luke said.

“I did. I rang the bell, and he answered, but he didn’t ask me in.”

“How was he?”

Charlotte had lowered her voice a little.

“He looked awful—”

“Poor sod. What did he say?”

“Nothing,” Charlotte said.

“What d’you mean?”

“He said it wasn’t a good time. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted me to go away.”

Edward had seen Luke put his hand across the gear shift to touch Charlotte’s thigh.

“You were a doll to try,” Luke said.

Charlotte shrugged.

Edward said, “Did you see Petra and the kids?”

Charlotte’s sunglasses turned slightly upwards to meet Edward’s eyes in the driving mirror. She said, “They weren’t there.”

“Oh God,” Edward said. “Don’t say—”

“Don’t think about it,” Luke said. “We’ve all had enough today. More than enough. And you,” he said, looking fondly at Charlotte, “have done all the driving.”

She’d smiled. She said breezily, “I’d rather drive than throw up,” and Edward had had a sudden stab of something like envy at the simplicity of Luke’s situation, at his shiny new marriage to this pretty, good-natured, pregnant girl, such a breath of fresh air after an exhausting day of Brinkley dramas.

He turned the water glass in his hands, studying the distorted view of his feet visible through the bottom. He felt that he had done the right thing that day, and doing it had been strangely unsatisfactory, because no solution had emerged, no resolution, only the oddly frustrating sensation that all these tall, clever people were somehow being held to ransom by a slight and enigmatic girl who seemed to have no comprehension of the meaning of obligation or even responsibility. He had had a notion, that night after supper with Ralph in London, that he would go and see Petra, talk to her, explain to her why Ralph was doing what he was doing, and suggest that her support would make the whole process so much easier for everyone, including her. If he had obeyed that impulse, if he had gone all the way to Suffolk to try and reason with Petra, would it actually have made any difference? Would she actually have paid him the slightest bit of attention, or was she always, in her quiet, apparently neutral way, determined to behave in a manner that suited her, and her alone? He shook his head. It was right to feel that his brother was being wronged, that his parents were being treated with extraordinary ingratitude, he was sure it was. But something unsettled him all the same, something that always unsettled him about going back to Suffolk, where the unalteredness of his parents’ lives was, weirdly, more of an uneasy disquiet than a consolation.

He was relieved to hear the front door slam. Mariella came skittering down the basement steps, calling out for him.

“Here!” he shouted. “I’m out here!”

She came flying through the kitchen and crashed into him, flinging her arms round him and holding up her face. Her eyebrows were traced with tiny studs of blue glitter.

“I’m an avatar,” Mariella said.

Edward bent to reciprocate her embrace.

“So you are. Where’s Mummy?”

“Getting stuff out of the car—”

“Did you have a nice time with Indira?”

Mariella pulled free and began to hop round the kitchen table.

“We played airports. For when I go to Sweden.”

“Oh,” Edward said, not comprehending. “Ready for next time?”

“Yes,” Mariella said, still hopping. “Mummy got tickets on the computer before we went to Indira’s. She said we’d get the last of the Swedish summer. Before I go back to school.”

“I see,” Edward said. He felt abruptly slightly sick. The front door on the floor above them opened and closed, and Sigrid’s footsteps went across the hall over their heads.

Edward looked at Mariella.

“Am . . . am I coming? Did Mummy get three tickets?”

Mariella had her back to him. She hopped twice more and stopped, balancing unsteadily on one leg.

“Oh no,” she said. “Mummy said you couldn’t. She said you’d have to stay here, and look after your brothers.”

T
here were plenty of reasons why Rachel should find herself in Aldeburgh. There was the bookshop, after all, and the delicatessen, and the need to buy a birthday present for her sister, which always proved so difficult as her sister inferred so much from every present, and was offended by every inference she drew. So it was not at all extraordinary that Rachel should be there, walking slowly and watchfully along the High Street, with her gaze sharpening every time she saw a young woman with a buggy and a small child, or even just a young woman, with disheveled hair and clothes that could never, in a million years, have been dictated by the sartorial requirements of middle-class convention.

She walked and shopped for over an hour. She bought a monograph by Kenneth Clark about the Alde River from the bookshop, and a variety of different olives from the deli, and a striped cotton dressing gown, cut like a kimono, for her sister (would she take offense at the label in the neck being marked “large,” meaning large for someone Japanese, but not large at all for a European?) plus a pair of kippers and a loaf of
sourdough bread, and stowed them all in the boot of the car. Then she went back to the High Street, and bought a sandwich and a bottle of water, and had a restless small picnic, sitting on the pebbly beach on her spread-out fleece jacket, watching the few late-summer families who were left, and willing one of the small boys she could see to turn out to be Kit: Kit, who would come running up to her, shouting her name with enthusiasm, and thus breaking the ice in whatever conversation she was then going to have with Petra.