Daughters-in-Law (34 page)

He closed his laptop and moved to look out of his living room window. It was dusk, and the vast stretches of shingle, dotted with domes of sea kale, shone faintly in the fading light. Steve had never been to Scotland, let alone the West Highlands, but as he stood there gazing at the North Sea darkening beyond the beach, he conjured up in his mind a calendar-picture image of how the place might be, all hills and streams and long white beaches, sprinkled with cowrie shells. It might, just might, be the answer.

Jed was alone in the studio. Luke had gone out to buy a new design component for their shared digital camera, and Jed was idly tinkering with something they had both been working on that day when the key turned in the lock, and Jed said, “You were quick,” to be answered by Charlotte saying, “It’s Charlotte.”

Jed jumped off his stool.

“Hi there, pregnant lady! Wasn’t expecting you!”

“No,” Charlotte said, “I wasn’t expecting me, either. But I wanted to see Luke about something.”

Jed jammed his fists in his pocket.

“He’s gone to get a whatsit.”

Charlotte looked round vaguely, as if Luke might really still be in the room.

“Doesn’t matter. Will he be long?”

“Shouldn’t think so,” Jed said. “Want a coffee?”

“I’m not drinking coffee—”

“Will caffeine stunt its growth?”

“I’m not taking any risks,” Charlotte said. “And Luke—”

“Don’t tell me about Luke,” Jed said. “Impending father-hood has made a right old woman of Luke. Talking of old women—I mean, not
old
but older—I made a complete prat of myself the other day, with yours.”

Charlotte was unwinding a long linen scarf from round her neck.

“My what?”

“Your mother.”

Charlotte stopped unwinding and stared at Jed.

“My mother? Where on earth—”

“She came here,” Jed said airily. “To see Luke. And I . . . I did not,” Jed continued, spacing the words out for emphasis, “I did not recognize her. I was only a guest at your wedding, I was only one of the ushers, wasn’t I, and do I recognize the mother of the bride when she turns up under my very nose? No. No, I do not.”

“Why did she want to see Luke?” Charlotte said.

“Search
moi
. I was too busy feeling a prize idiot to worry. She was very cool about it.”

Charlotte began to wind her scarf again.

“Did they talk?”

“Who?”

“Mummy and Luke.”

“They went up to your flat,” Jed said. “All those stairs. They were gone for most of an hour.” Jed leaned forward a little, head jutting, and peered at Charlotte.

“Didn’t Luke say?”

“Why didn’t you say?” Charlotte said later.

She was slicing tomatoes, in Luke’s huge white bathrobe after a shower.

“You weren’t supposed to know. I forgot to shut that utter plonker Jed’s mouth—”

“Why wasn’t I?”

Luke leaned against the kitchen door frame. He folded his arms and looked at the floor.

“Because I said no.”

Charlotte stopped slicing. She said, “No to what?”

Luke said steadily, still looking at the floor, “To an idea—an offer—your mother made.”

Charlotte put the knife down. She ran her hands under the tap and dried them off on the front of Luke’s bathrobe. Then she came and stood right in front of him, almost touching him.

“What offer?”

Luke raised his head slowly.

“It doesn’t matter now. It’s over. She meant well, but it wouldn’t work. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does!” Charlotte said sharply.

“I don’t want it to turn into a big deal—”

“It’ll only be a big deal,” Charlotte said, “if you won’t
tell
me! I shall go and ring my mother whom I suppose you’ve sworn to silence?”

Luke put out a hand and gripped Charlotte’s nearest wrist.

“Okay, okay. But don’t scream at me—”

“Would I?”

“Yes,” Luke said.

He turned, still holding Charlotte’s wrist, and towed her to the sofa.

“Sit down.”

Charlotte sat. Luke sat down beside her, and dropped her wrist in order to take one of her hands in both his. He said, “You’ll hear me through to the end?”

“Yes.”

“Right to the end, so I can tell you why I said what I said to your mother?”

“Okay,” Charlotte said.

“Look at me, then. Look at me all the time.”

“I’m looking.”

“Your mother,” Luke said, “had hatched a plan. She wanted to surprise you. Her plan was to organize and pay for some nanny, or something, for six weeks after the baby’s born, and to pay, also, the difference in rent between this place and somewhere bigger, because she thinks this place is too small for two people, let alone three, and she thinks we’ll never manage the stairs. And I said—well, I said thank you, of course—but I said no.”

Charlotte opened her mouth. Luke took one hand away in order to hold it up in a silencing gesture.

“One minute, babe. One minute. I said no because I don’t want help. I don’t want to be treated like some half adult who can’t manage now his wife’s pregnant. I also said no because we’ve got to be grown-up about this; it’s our baby, our marriage, we’ve got to do it without bleating for help every time things get a bit demanding. I said no because we can’t be beholden to your mother, and because she’s got to realize that you’re mine now, not hers, and you’ve got to realize that, too, especially with a baby coming. And I said no because—”

“Stop,” Charlotte said.

“You said you wouldn’t—”

“I’ve heard enough.”

“Well, think about what I said, think about what it means if . . . we go on being dependent, letting our parents—”

“I
have
thought,” Charlotte said.

Luke gave a faint groan. He took his hands away from Charlotte’s, and briefly covered his eyes.

“Okay, then,” he said tiredly.

“I have thought,” Charlotte said again. “And even though I expect Mummy was pretty hurt after she’d been so generous, I think you were right.”

“You
what
?”

Charlotte rearranged the tie belt of the bathrobe. Then she smiled at Luke.

“You heard me. I said . . . I think you were right.”

For Ralph, the first two weeks of work had been, quite frankly, surreal. Waking in his strange, impersonal room by six at the latest was novelty enough, but being at his desk an hour later, showered, shaved, dressed, and equipped with a takeaway coffee and a muffin, was almost the stuff of film or fantasy. Seven o’clock was the hour when companies published the announcements that served as the basis for the analyses that Ralph was required to make on behalf of his clients, and if seven o’clock in the past had meant the first reluctant awareness that Kit and Barney were suddenly and completely awake, now it meant a bank pretty well full of its employees, all at their desks, all focused on the first adrenaline rush of the day. The first three days, Ralph had been so knackered by lunchtime that he wondered how any of them made it, full tilt, till early evening, but then an infectious collective acceleration caught him up, and carried him through, as if he’d been riding a giant wave.

The wave then, of course, dropped him with a thud. He had planned all manner of exciting, if vaguely visualized, ways that he might spend the evenings, but the reality was that he was
simultaneously too wired and too tired to focus on anything constructive. He could see why his colleagues drank, and spoke of their drug dealers with such elaborate nonchalance, because it was, quite simply, so difficult to know how to manage oneself once the engine of the day’s roller-coaster ride had been switched off. He had fallen asleep in the cinema and at Sigrid and Edward’s kitchen table, he had drunk too much with work colleagues and with Luke, he had bought tickets for performances he had failed to make, and even a football game at the Emirates Stadium, which he missed because he was still working at the time of the kickoff, and he had subsisted, as well as on coffee and muffins and alcohol, on ready-meals in polystyrene trays banged into the microwave in the flat’s small unhelpful kitchen, which he then ate with a fork, or even a spoon, lying on his bed with both his shoes and the television on.

And then there was Petra. He had told Kit, in Petra’s hearing, that he would telephone every night at six. He would ring even at weekends, when he clearly could not now, on account of Petra’s obstinacy and behavior, come home. He told Kit, inappropriately, that he did not know where he would now be at weekends, but that he would ring from wherever he was each night at six. Some nights, he did indeed ring at six, but most nights, whatever was going on at his desk meant that he rang at half past, almost seven, when Kit was querulous with tiredness, and cried on the phone and said where was he, where was he, and why wasn’t he there in Kit’s house? After these calls, Ralph felt as miserable as he had ever felt about anything, but, because of the extreme and involving oddity of his days, was unable to stoke up quite the pure flame of rage and resentment against Petra that he had felt before he left Aldeburgh. He missed that fury: it had made everything so simple and straightforward, almost clean. It had seemed to him, in the white-hot cauldron of anger, that he would apply himself to
this enticing, but fundamentally uncongenial job with a ferocious energy driven by his central purpose of gaining custody and control of his children, whom he would then bear into some as yet undefined but decent and structured future. He had felt, at times, almost crusading in his zeal, as if he were actually rescuing Kit and Barney from darkness and disorder.

But the reality was not so clear-cut. The reality was that working like this—if, indeed, this was how one had to work, to make visible money—was too disorientating, too detached from the world of simply trying to be alive at the end of the day, and too, even if disconcertingly, beguiling to imagine how one could possibly incorporate into it responsibility for two very small boys, one of whom could barely as yet walk. He told himself that he was no less angry with Petra, merely confused now about his anger. He would, he was sure, get the hang of this new life, and he would, when Kit answered Petra’s phone, as he always did—“Daddy?” he said, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy”—ask to speak to Petra, and he would say to her that she still had a great deal to fear from him, and that his intentions were in no way subdued by the hours or the commitments of the new life.

He told himself fiercely that he had no desire to speak to Petra otherwise. He was thankful to be away from the dreamy muddles of her life, her propensity to stop halfway through cooking a meal to draw a giraffe for Kit (“Can they eat the stars?”), and then not resume cooking because she felt inclined to dawdle down to the allotment, or the beach. He was relieved to be in a world of crisp, conventional clothing, sharp haircuts and prevalent technology. He missed nothing,
nothing
about his life in Aldeburgh except his children, and he was going to prove to everyone—family, colleagues, friends—that he had lost not one iota of the sureness of touch that led to his being implored to stay in that position in Singapore.

* * *

Edward closed the door on Mariella after their good-night conversation. Mariella said she did not want to be read to, and she did not want to read, she just wanted her father to talk to her. Edward was delighted to talk to her, but discovered that what she really wanted was to talk to him. She wanted to tell him about Sweden—lovely, except for those gray curled-up little fish in oily vinegary stuff all the time, yuck—and how she felt about being back at school, and whether she and Indira would still be best,
best
friends, and now that she had had to give up the idea of having a dog, and probably a baby, could she have tap-dancing lessons or go to drama club or maybe have a hamster. Or a rabbit.

Edward sat on the edge of her bed and watched her. While she talked, she played with the ingenious puzzle her Swedish grandfather had made her, so that Edward could regard her uninterruptedly, and think what an extraordinary joy she had been to him since she came home, and how painfully flattering it had been to hear her say that Sweden would have been so much better if he had been there, and how pathetically needy he was of her good opinion. When she said that he could go now, because she needed to think about the hamster/rabbit/tap-dancing priorities, he had bent down to kiss her, and she’d dropped the puzzle and put her arms round his neck and pulled him down until her cheek was against his. She’d held him there silently for a while, and then she said that actually his cheek was a bit prickly, and released him abruptly, and he went out of the room, laughing, closing the door on her, intent once more on her puzzle.

Sigrid was watching the news on television, her feet up on the low table in front of the sofa. She picked up the remote, and turned the volume down. She said, “Did you hear the phone?”

“No,” Edward said.

“It was your mother—”

“Oh God. What’s happened now—”

“Nothing,” Sigrid said.

“That
can’t
be true—”

Sigrid patted the sofa cushion beside her.

“Sit down. I think . . . that’s why she rang. Because nothing’s happened.”

Edward sat.

“So . . . so you felt like talking to her this time?”

“I did,” Sigrid said. “We spoke for ten minutes. I think she is very sad.”

“About Petra?”

“Well, yes. But really because she is now out of touch with everyone. Of the six of us, only one is left in Suffolk, and they are not speaking. She sounded . . . well, she sounded lost.”

Edward glanced at Sigrid.

“You sound almost . . .
sorry
for her.”

“I am,” Sigrid said.

Edward waited a moment, and then he took Sigrid’s hand. He said hesitantly, “May . . . I ask what’s brought this on?”

Sigrid didn’t take her hand away.

“She doesn’t work,” Sigrid said. “She never has, not really. My mother said to me that when both her children left Sweden, her work saved her. She didn’t put it quite that way, but that is what she meant. I have been thinking about what she said ever since I came home.”

Edward said nothing. He interlaced his fingers with Sigrid’s, and squeezed her hand.