Daughters-in-Law (28 page)

She had decided, wrestling with herself as she made the bed or chopped an onion or tied up the toppling stands of Michaelmas daisies in the border, that her entirely justifiable anger would get her nowhere. Anthony was miserably wounded, but yelling at Petra in defense of Anthony would do nothing to influence one or comfort the other. But she could not accept, as much as she had initially felt, when rendered inert by shock, that she could do nothing. She would not shout, or scold, or even reprimand Petra, but she did have to see her and ask her simply why? Why did she not ask for help? Or, if she couldn’t ask outright, because of some version of loyalty to Ralph—only a version, surely, in someone who had found herself another man—why had she not at the very least indicated that the idea of changing their lives was half killing her, at an important and most fundamental level?

Rachel had rehearsed her imaginary encounter with Petra every way she could think of. She had visualized Petra defiant, Petra tearful, Petra stubborn and silent, Petra elusive. She had not permitted herself the satisfactory option of Petra relieved and grateful and remorseful, but that seductive scenario had flickered away, beguilingly, at the back of her mind with a persistence that proved to her how much it was the one she longed for. If she gave way, for a second or two, even, she saw Petra back with her in her own kitchen, the boys peacefully playing
on the floor, companionably cooking together with Anthony only yards away in his studio, working on the beginnings of a new book, in which project Petra, somehow, was going to collaborate. And then Ralph would appear—this happy scene invariably took place on a Friday—tired but satisfied, in his City suit, and take his family home for the weekend to a house somewhere near that Petra had magically become reconciled to. Even as she luxuriated in this vision, Rachel knew it to be hopeless. To work it required too much improbability and even impossibility. But however much she knew she was fantasizing, she also knew that she could not rest until she had seen Petra, and talked to her.

Petra’s mobile phone had been apparently switched off recently. There was no answer-phone message, and sent text messages fell into a black silence. Ralph, readying himself for his departure for London, would not talk about Petra, or reveal her movements or whereabouts. He told his mother that he would be okay if, and only if, he was left to get on with life in his own way. He said he much appreciated his parents’ concern—he said this in a voice wholly devoid of appreciation—but that he could only cope if he was left alone. And he meant
alone
. His mobile number, he said, was only to be used in an emergency. Like the children, or something. It wasn’t to be used just because Rachel needed news, or reassurance. He hadn’t got the energy for that, he had only the energy to do what he had to do for a new job that he didn’t want to make a mess of. Get it, Mum, get it?

“Yes,” Rachel said, helpless at the receiving end. “Yes. I only wanted—”

“Don’t,” Ralph said shortly, “don’t want anything. Then you won’t mind if you don’t get it. Like me. Like I have.”

And he’d rung off. Rachel had gone out into the garden and shouted at old Dick for stringing up the onions in overlarge
bunches, and old Dick had swum up out of the fogs of his blindness and deafness and said that if she spoke to him like that once more he’d be happy to leave her to get on with caring for her vegetable garden all by herself.

She’d said sorry. She’d apologized to old Dick, and she had refrained from worrying Anthony with her call to Ralph, and she had subdued her fury with Petra into a determination merely to seek an explanation. She felt, sitting there on the stony beach watching people crunch and slither their way to the sea, that she, for her, had done pretty well. She had not given way to every impulse and had been penitent about those that had escaped her control. Also, she told herself, she had a right to understand, she was owed an answer. Her and Anthony’s relationship with Petra had not been conventional, had not been merely a matter of the effort and manners required by in-laws. They had taken Petra to their hearts. Petra, in turn, had said on several occasions that she did not know what she would do without them.

Rachel got to her feet and shook the sandwich crumbs off her jacket. She would walk, she decided, up and down the High Street one more time, but she would not knock on Petra’s front door, and she would not go down to the allotment. The time might come to insist upon a meeting, rather than just hope for it, but that time had not yet come. And if she failed to see Petra, she would never need to confess to Anthony that she had gone to Aldeburgh in the hope of encountering her, and there would be a gratifying honesty in that, at least.

She walked briskly down the High Street, crossed it, and walked equally purposefully back up the other pavement. No Petra. No girls with buggies at all, in fact, they all being, presumably, still involved with toddler lunchtime and toddler nap-time. Rachel turned back towards the sea, and the little square where she had left her car, and there was Petra coming towards
her, with no buggy, and no children, and her arms weighed down with shopping.

Petra halted, stock-still. She was wearing a kind of gypsy skirt, familiar to Rachel, and her old denim jacket, and her hair was in a rough pigtail, pulled over one shoulder, and tied at the end with a collection of brightly colored woolen bobbles.

“Hi,” she said to Rachel. Her voice sounded perfectly normal.

Rachel was hurled into a sudden fluster. It would have been natural, instinctive even, to have kissed Petra, but under the current circumstances that wasn’t possible. Nor was smiling, somehow, although Rachel felt her face twist itself into some kind of rictus, like a performing dog. Even her voice, when she managed to say “Hello,” sounded unnatural.

Petra was saying nothing, just standing in front of Rachel with her woven grocery bags. Rachel opened her mouth a few times, and made an involuntary gesture or two, trying to indicate a query about where the buggy was, where the boys were. Petra didn’t help her.

“How . . . are you?” Rachel said at last.

“Fine—”

“And . . . and the boys?”

“Fine,” Petra said.

Rachel got a grip of herself.

“Where are they?” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without the boys—”

“They’re with Steve,” Petra said.

“With . . . with—”

“Yes,” Petra said. She sounded as if what she was saying was so ordinary as to be almost boring. “Steve’s taken them swimming. They love swimming, so he’s taken them.” She let a little pause fall, and then she said, “Because I can’t swim. Remember?”

And then she smiled at Rachel, politely and remotely, and stepped into the road to walk past her with the shopping bags.

That evening, Rachel rang Edward to describe her encounter with Petra, and to ask if he thought she should tell Anthony.

“Why ever not?” Edward said irritably.

“Well, he’s hurt enough already—”

“Exactly.”

“And I don’t want him picturing his grandsons swimming with this man of Petra’s.”

“Well, don’t tell him then.”

“But you said—”

“Mum,” Edward said, “Mum. I don’t feel like this conversation. I don’t want to discuss this. Or think about it. Okay?”

Rachel said sympathetically, “I expect you’re missing Sigrid and Mariella.”

Edward shut his eyes tightly. He thought he wouldn’t reply.

“Are they having a lovely time?” Rachel asked.

Edward didn’t open his eyes. Sigrid had been away for four days and he had rung once. There was no phone signal on the island where her parents’ summer house was.

“Think so,” Edward said.

“Would you like to come up here? The weekend will be grim without them. Come on Friday.”

Edward opened his eyes.

“No, thank you, Mum.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Edward said, “I want to stay here.”

There was a silence. In it, the message signal on Edward’s phone beeped. Then Rachel said crisply, “Fine. I’ll leave you to be disagreeable in peace. Bye, darling.”

The line went dead. Edward scrolled to his message box.

“In Stockholm for 3 nights. Back Sunday. X.”

He dialed Sigrid’s number. There was a wait while the signal sorted itself out between London and Stockholm, and then her voice-mail message, “This is Sigrid’s phone. Please leave me a message and I’ll call you back. Thank you.”

Edward opened his mouth to say, “Call me,” and thought better of it. He threw his phone down on the sofa beside him. She had left, barely kissing him good-bye, declining to account for excluding him from this last-minute holiday, not even offering an explanation for her impulse, withdrawing into a homing Swedishness, which seemed to make her impervious to any consequence of her behavior and certainly to any reaction or emotion of his.

“Will you miss me?” he’d said to Mariella in Sigrid’s hearing, despising himself. Mariella had hugged him as if he were a dear old teddy bear, with no human feelings. “A bit,” she said. And then they’d left, with a case full of shorts and plimsolls, Sigrid wearing a baseball cap and looking about sixteen, and had gone straight to the island in the archipelago where, Mariella said, they were going to have breakfast in their pajamas and go sailing and make campfires on the beach.

“We’re going to sleep together,” Mariella said, “in the big bed. Just me and Mummy.”

Edward had looked up the weather in southeast Sweden online, and it was beautiful, warm and clear and with low wind speeds. He pictured Sigrid and Mariella in his parents-in-law’s house, which was no more than a big cabin, really, white-walled, gray-roofed, furnished with romantic Nordic simplicity, with views on three sides of water and, in the distance, a village of white cottages and a spire on a red-roofed church. He had made love to Sigrid in that cabin, they had cooked fish on flat stones on the beach, she had been thrilled and impressed that he knew how to sail, that he was such a good sailor and handled her father’s boat with ease.

“You look . . . so right here,” she’d said, lying on the beach with her head in his lap.

Well, not right enough, any longer, to be included. Not right enough to accompany her to the island, to see his parents-in-law, with whom he had always got on. Not right enough—oh hell, Edward thought, getting up from the sofa and pacing through to the kitchen, what is going on, what is she playing at, is she going downhill again, what is the
matter
?

He opened the fridge and took out a bottle of beer, slamming it down on the table. Whatever was the matter, whatever Sigrid was up to, he’d just have to bear it. He wouldn’t say anything to anyone, certainly not to his brothers, while Ralph was in such a jam himself, and Luke was dealing with all the consequences of a new marriage and all the crossed wires this unexpected pregnancy had caused. And to crown it all, Ralph was coming to stay for the first few days of his new employment, until his room off Finsbury Square was ready, on the first of the month, and he was going to need supporting, wasn’t he, not informing that his older brother, to whom he looked for strength and sympathy, was in almost as rocky a place as he was, even if more subtly positioned.

Edward flipped the top off the beer bottle and took a deep swallow. Sigrid would be back four nights from now, full of air and sunshine and happy Swedishness, and, despite all his hurt at her treatment of him, he did not want her to walk back in to a long-faced husband as well as an unexpected-guest brother-in-law. He took another mouthful of beer. No more wallowing, he told himself. No more plaguing myself with imaginings. At least . . . at least, she’s coming home.

Sigrid had intended to stay on the island for a week. She had planned on four or five days alone with Mariella, doing all the simple, peaceful, water-orientated things that she had done on
the island when she was Mariella’s age, and then she had asked her parents to come and join them for the weekend, expecting a gratified agreement since her parents loved the island, and had not seen Mariella, their only grandchild, for seven months. But Sigrid’s mother had said that she was so sorry but her father had an important business function in Stockholm on the Saturday night, and so they would be staying in the city.

“Well,
you
come,” Sigrid said.

“No, I can’t,” her mother said. “I’m going with your father. The invitation is for both of us.”

“Rather than see Mariella and me?”

“Sigi,” her mother said calmly, “you have sprung this trip on us. It is last-minute. We had plans in place.”

“But I wanted to see you. For you to see Mariella—”

“Then come to Stockholm.”

“But I wanted to be on the island—”

“I must go,” Sigrid’s mother said. “I leave the decision to you.”

Even with the irritation of her parents not changing their plans, Sigrid anticipated loving being on the island. She longed for the familiar, faintly rough texture of the blue-and-white bed linen in the cottage, and the mornings, nursing a mug of tea, still in her pajamas, and watching the sun come up, and the evenings, on the beach, showing Mariella how to gut a fish as her father had shown her and Bengt, and then spearing it on a twig before grilling it. But Mariella did not much like fish, anyway, and certainly didn’t want to touch the gluey loops of its innards, and at night, instead of sleeping peacefully and thereby allowing Sigrid to rise, rested and refreshed, to watch the sunrise, she kicked and swiveled in her slumber, seizing the duvet and muttering, to such an extent that Sigrid took herself off to her narrow childhood bed in a separate bedroom, where her feet hit the board at the foot of the bed, and some
plumbing pipes cleared their throats at intervals in the wall behind her head, all night long.

The weather was beautiful, but the days on the island were long—long and, frankly, boring. The sailing classes in which Sigrid had hoped to enrol Mariella were finished for the summer, and after a first nostalgic scramble round the rocks, walks were limited. Because Swedish schools returned weeks before English ones, all the families had gone, leaving their houses shuttered and their boats, in some cases, already sheeted for the winter. Mariella knew not to say outright that she was bored, but she did say, now and then, that it was odd to be without a television. It was odd. The whole place felt odd, as if Sigrid’s recollection of her childhood there had been conjured out of fantasy rather than out of fact. On the fourth day, watching Mariella building a little cairn of pebbles with one hand, as if she couldn’t be sufficiently interested to use both, Sigrid suggested that they return to Stockholm. Mariella scrambled to her feet.