Anthony opened his mouth again.
“Shut up, Dad,” Ralph said. He smiled at Petra. “Ignore him.”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“She was a famous dog—” persisted Anthony.
“Dad says you draw. You draw birds.”
“A bit.”
“I made a gingerbread,” Rachel said. “Tea and gingerbread.”
“I’m so sorry. I really am. I should have known about the dog—”
“When I was away,” Ralph said to Petra, “in Singapore, the birds were quite different. Utterly different. Very brightly colored. And raucous.”
“Yes.”
“Mugs or cups?” Rachel said.
Ralph pulled a chair out from the table and gestured at the seat.
“Have a chair. Petra.”
She sat down wordlessly.
“Well, mugs, then,” Rachel said. “They hold more tea and it stays hotter.”
Ralph took the chair beside Petra’s. He had, Anthony noticed, paint in his hair as well as on his hands, and a splash above one eyebrow.
“Were you born in Suffolk?” Ralph said to Petra.
“Yes, Ipswich.”
“I missed Suffolk. When I was away. I thought I wanted to get away, but I was so relieved to come back.”
Petra accepted a mug of tea.
“I’ve never been away.”
“D’you want to?”
“What—”
“Go away.”
She looked at him properly for the first time. Rachel risked a lightning glance at Anthony. Surely, surely Petra would be struck by Ralph’s looks, only enhanced by old clothes and whitewash?
“No,” Petra said. “No, I don’t. I think—I think I’d pine.”
“Pine,” Anthony said. “What a good word. Pine. Like a longing dog—”
“Give dogs a rest, Dad.”
“Gingerbread? It’s got dates in it—”
“I’ve bought a cottage,” Ralph said to Petra. He took a mouthful of gingerbread.
She waited.
“It’s right on the sea,” Ralph said, “practically in it. Just down the coast from here.”
“Really?”
“It’s so bleak, it’s thrilling—”
“I—like bleak,” Petra said nonchalantly.
“We haven’t been allowed—” Anthony began.
Quiet, Rachel signaled, cutting more cake, quiet.
Ralph put another wedge of gingerbread into his mouth. Round it, he said, “Like to see it?”
She put her mug down.
“Yes.”
“C’mon then,” Ralph said, getting up, still chewing.
“But it’s getting dark!” Anthony said. “You won’t see anything!”
Petra rose too. Ralph put out an arm, as if he was going to encircle her, steer her.
“There’ll be light enough, off the sea,” Petra said.
Ralph smiled down at her.
“I know.”
Petra half turned. She said to Rachel, “Thank you. Thank you for tea.”
Rachel nodded. Then Ralph almost pushed Petra through the kitchen door and out into the stone-flagged passage beyond. Anthony and Rachel heard the outer door slam, and then the sound of Ralph’s car starting up, and the crunch of gravel.
Anthony looked at Rachel. They were both smiling.
“Well,” Anthony said.
Rachel held up both hands, her first and second fingers twisted together.
“Fingers crossed!”
CHAPTER THREE
Luke took Charlotte to Venice for their honeymoon. The man who had preceded Luke in Charlotte’s life had worked in the City, on a busy and hugely successful trading floor, and his taste in holidays ran to Thailand and the Maldives, just as his leisure tastes had included cross-dressing and cocaine. His cocaine habit had, in fact, and finally, put Charlotte right off both him and drugs. She regarded herself as perfectly freethinking in all sorts of social areas, but she was very clear about drugs, and when Luke first asked her on a date she said no, with a vehemence that took him aback.
“What d’you mean, no? Why d’you have to say no like that?”
“Because I saw you,” Charlotte said, “I saw you last week, at Julia’s dinner party. I don’t want to have anything to do, again, with anyone who has their dinner off a mirror.”
“It was just a line—”
“People who do coke,” Charlotte said, interrupting, “are boring. Really, really dull. They’re either jittery because they’ve just had a fix, or jittery because they want one. Their noses run and they think they’re fascinating, but they are so, so boring. Gus was unbelievably boring. I thought I could put up with it for the Club Class flights to Sri Lanka, but I couldn’t. So, until you clean up your pathetic little act, you’ll have to look for dates anywhere but me.”
Luke had been fired right up by this speech. He knew Gus, the City trader, slightly, and he knew that Gus made the kind of money that bore no resemblance to the money that anyone in Luke’s family had ever, or would ever, make, even Ed, even Ralph in Singapore, even Dad in his best years. And Gus was not only wealthy, but personable, and athletic, with a flat in Clerkenwell and a brother in a rock band. But if he couldn’t keep Charlotte, if Charlotte wasn’t prepared to tolerate or join in a habit that was significant in Gus’s life, then Charlotte acquired, in Luke’s eyes, a particular luster that went way beyond her looks and her energy and her undoubted popularity.
He began to make real efforts. He started going to the gym more often and he stopped using cocaine, even when nursing a Coke Zero in a room full of insanely, irresponsibly hyped-up people made him feel he’d landed on another planet. After a while, he even stopped going to parties where he knew what the menu would include, and instead started taking Charlotte’s friend Nora out for coffee and pizzas and other fraternal little meals so that Nora could relay to Charlotte what an impressively changed character he was. He had no idea if this clumsy reformation was working, he only knew that he wanted Charlotte in a way he had never wanted anything in his life before, and whenever he saw her, across a room at a party, he could think of absolutely nothing else whatsoever then, or afterwards. Charlotte, quite simply, filled his head.
And then Gus began to try to win Charlotte back again, and Luke heard unnerving rumors of promises of private planes to Paris and a chartered yacht in the Caribbean, and he lost his head and hard-won self-discipline and rushed over the river on impulse to the basement that Charlotte shared in Clapham with Nora, and a great many wood lice and silverfish, and found Charlotte on the sofa, in a vest and pajama bottoms, with her shorn fair head unwashed, eating toast and jam and watching Big Brother on the television. He stood there, unable to proceed further in any way, and burst into tears, and Charlotte had got up off the sofa and leaned against him, and he had smelled her hair and a faint synthetically sweet whiff of strawberry jam, and had thought he would simply like to die, right then and there, of sheer happiness and relief.
But a year later, and with an engagement ring securely on Charlotte’s finger, there was still to be no question of honeymooning in any place that was remotely reminiscent of a tropical spa. There would be no orchids and no Singapore Slings or infinity pools or flawless room service. Gus, poor guy—it was safe just to pity him now, for most of the time, anyway—might be wealthy and hunky and worldly, but he was a philistine. There was no getting away from that. He knew about consumerism, but he hadn’t the faintest idea about art, or theater, or literature, or any music that wasn’t whatever was playing that week in Mahiki. Luke was going to show Charlotte something different, reopen her eyes to a world she had been kind of brought up to, but had neglected when the buzz of life in London had drowned out all other sounds.
Anthony and Rachel gave Luke some money for the honeymoon. Luke wasn’t earning enough to allow for ten days in Venice in the kind of hotel that was expensive enough to be glamorous. With his parents’ contribution, he could afford a hotel just behind the Accademia, with polish
ed-black-marble bathrooms and electric window blinds and wide pale beds heaped with pillows. They could have breakfast in their room and glasses of Prosecco on a little roof terrace among the seagulls from the lagoon, and walk out one way to the sunlit Zattere with its air of cultivated seaside, or the other over the Accademia bridge to the campi and calli that would finally lose them in a labyrinth of bridges and blind alleys and decayed, romantic beauty.
Charlotte was bowled over. She had never been to Venice before. She had never been in an art gallery where pictures on the walls, painted hundreds of years before, showed scenes that she could still walk through, right now, hand in hand with history. She had never eaten tiny soft-shelled crabs out of a paper cone in a fish market, or ridden a water bus, or sat in a hot, dim, late-afternoon church, her bare shoulders swathed in a required paper shawl for decency, and thought about the Virgin Mary as anything more than a sort of sacred cipher that belonged to the Catholic girls at school, and not to anyone else. She had never, either, imagined that she might be married to someone who she not only loved, and fancied so much she sometimes had to lean against something when looking at him, but who knew so much more than she did.
“I don’t, you know,” Luke said. “I just know about different things.”
“But they’re important. I mean, Titian, and Carpaccio, and the Venetian Empire, and things. They’re important.”
“The doges would be so chuffed to hear you say that.”
“Are you patronizing me?”
“Only,” Luke said, “a little bit.”
“I don’t mind,” Charlotte said, “I really don’t. One day I might, but I love it now, it just makes me feel—” She stopped.
“What?”
“That I can do no wrong,” Charlotte said, and laughed. Luke reached across the café table and gripped her wrists.
“You can’t,” he said.
They had a pact that, in order to preserve the extraordinary and magical bubble in which they were briefly living, they would turn on their mobile phones only once a day, in case there was an emergency. There was never an emergency. There were texts hoping they were happy—cheerfully, rudely expressed from most friends—and a few from Luke’s partner in the little graphic-design studio they shared in a shabby building not far from St. Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch, but there was nothing that couldn’t be ignored, or replied to in moments; nothing, certainly, that needed them to speak to anyone except each other, beyond ordering Americanos and glasses of wine, and little cups of green-tea ice cream from a specialist shop off the Campo di San Tomà. It was only on the last day but one, chugging back across the lagoon from a slow and languorous day on Murano, that Luke held his telephone out to Charlotte and said, “What d’you think?”
There was a short text on the screen. It read, “Bro. Things tricky. Need to talk. Ring? R.”
“Ralph?” Charlotte said.
“Mmm.”
“Something that can’t wait till we get home?”
“Sod him,” Luke said. “Why can’t he wait till I am home?”
Charlotte squinted at the hazy blue outline of Venice advancing towards them across the glittering water.
“Maybe he’s forgotten we’re still away—”
“Typical.”
“I don’t,” she said, “know them very well. Your brothers, and sisters-in-law. It didn’t occur to me, it didn’t seem to matter—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She transferred her gaze to look at him.
“It kind of does, now. It’s not just a you thing, it’s an us thing. Your brother sends a text like that, and you begin to look all preoccupied and distant, and I’m your wife now, so I’m in the loop, too.”
Luke put his phone in his trouser pocket. He leaned forward, pinning Charlotte against the rail of the vaporetto, and put his chin into the angle of her neck and shoulder.
“Wife—”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I’ll ring him later. When I don’t want to thump him for being so thoughtless.”
“Is he thoughtless?”
Luke took his chin away, and stared past Charlotte at the cemetery walls of San Michele as they slid by.
“By normal standards, yes. But Ralph isn’t normal. He’s brilliant and he’s impossible. I missed him like anything when he was away, and it was so peaceful at the same time. You are so bloody gorgeous.”
Later, while Charlotte was showering in the black-marble bathroom, with the window open to the warm, bell-haunted sounds of early-evening Venice, Luke rang Ralph. Charlotte knew he was ringing, so she had the shower turned on full, and she sang as well, for good measure, in order to indicate to Luke that she was in no way going to influence or preempt any reaction Luke might be having in response to whatever it was that Ralph had to say. When she had finished, she wrapped herself in a large white towel, ran her hands through her hair so that it stood up in the soft damp spikes Luke seemed to like so much, and went through to the bedroom. Luke was lying on the bed with his shoes off. His phone was some distance away, on Charlotte’s side of the bed, as if he had just chucked it there.
Charlotte sat down on the edge of the bed beside him. She waited for him to ruffle her hair, or untuck her towel, or slide his hand underneath it. But he lay there frowning, looking ahead at the silvered wooden cabinet that housed the television.
“Is he okay?”
Luke went on staring ahead. He said shortly, “He’s losing his business.”
“What?”
“The bank won’t either extend his credit or lend him any more, despite him offering their home as collateral, so he’ll lose the business.”
“Oh my God,” Charlotte said.
Luke took her nearest hand.
“He said he suspected it would be that bad, at our wedding. He said he was sorry he was a bit weird, but he couldn’t help thinking about it.”
“Was he weird?”
Luke sighed.
“He got plastered. He was smoking. Mum and Dad were furious with him.”
“Do—do they know?”
Luke raised Charlotte’s hand to his mouth and looked at her over it.
“No. They don’t. Nobody does, except Ed, and now me. He hasn’t told anyone. He hasn’t told Petra.”
Charlotte felt a clutch of panic. She wanted to say, “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? You’d always tell me everything. Wouldn’t you?” but sensed that if she did she might not get any answer that reassured her. So instead she said, “So, even if he’d offered their house to the bank and they’d, say, accepted, Petra wouldn’t have known anything about it?”
Luke regarded her solemnly.
“Yes.”
“But that’s awful—”
“It’s to protect her.”
“What?”
“Not telling Petra is protecting her. So’s not to worry her.”
Charlotte took her hand out of Luke’s.
“That’s not right—”
“Petra’s got no family,” Luke said. “We’ve all sort of become her family, so there’s this unspoken thing about looking after her. She’s only twenty-four, or something.”
“Two years younger than me.”
“Not a real comparison, angel.”
“But,” Charlotte said, “she’s his wife. They’ve got children. It’s a thing you do together, bad times.”
Luke sighed. He twisted himself round, and lay so that his head was in Charlotte’s lap. Then he reached up to untuck the towel across her breasts. Charlotte put her hand on his.
“Don’t—”
“Why not?”
“The mood’s not right—”
“Bloody Ralph.”
“It’s not Ralph,” Charlotte said, “not really. It’s Petra. It’s this Brinkley thing of treating Petra like a child.”
“Well, she is in a way—”
“Only if you all make her like that. She was managing okay on her own, I gather, before she met Ralph—”
“Just.”
Charlotte looked away. She said, “It’s like Ralph found her under a hedge or something, like an abandoned kitten.”
“She was in Dad’s art class. He said she never spoke but she was brilliant. She is brilliant. At drawing, I mean.”
Charlotte looked down at Luke. She began to stroke his thick hair back from his forehead.
“And then Ralph fell in love with her—”
“Well,” Luke said, gazing upward and thinking how amazing Charlotte looked, from every angle, even when foreshortened from underneath, as she was now, “I suppose he did. I mean, he liked her, he really liked her, but I’m not sure getting married was ever top of Ralph’s to-do list.”
“Did she ask him, then?”
“Oh no,” Luke said. He caught Charlotte’s hand and put it sideways, lightly, between his teeth. Then he took it out again, and said, still holding it, “She got pregnant.”
“Wow,” Charlotte said. “So he felt he had to marry her.”
Luke ran his tongue along the edge of Charlotte’s hand.
“Well, not really. And I don’t think Petra would have expected him to, either. She wasn’t conventional, any more than he was. She’d probably just have shrugged and got on with it, taking the baby to art classes in a basket, that sort of thing. It was Mum and Dad that wanted the wedding. They wanted them married.”
“To be respectable?”
“Not really,” Luke said. He heaved himself upright and ran his hand through Charlotte’s damp hair. “They’re a cool old pair in some ways; they don’t mind about how things look, how conformist things are. It was more that they didn’t want to let Petra go. They’d kind of adopted her. So they couldn’t lose her after all they’d invested, all they’d got used to. At least, that’s what I think.”
Charlotte was very still.
“Are you shocked, angel?” Luke said.
“No—”
He peered into her face, his eyes an inch from hers.
“What is it?”
“It’s a bit silly—”
“What is?”
“How I feel,” Charlotte said. “I mean, I’ve got my own family, who are lovely, and your parents who’ve been really sweet to me, but when you describe how they feel about Petra, I—well, I feel a bit—” She stopped.
Daughters-in-Law Page 4