Daughters-in-Law

by Joanna Trollope

  “To Aldeburgh,” Rachel said.

  Anthony said, staring ahead through the windscreen, “Do you imagine you will get a more sympathetic hearing there?”

  “It’s not that—”

  “No?”

  Rachel said, slightly desperately, “I need to talk to someone. I need to talk. And I can’t talk to you.”

  Anthony opened the driver’s door and got out. He said, “No. You certainly can’t do that.”

  Rachel slid inelegantly across the gear shift and into the driver’s seat. It was still warm from Anthony’s body, and the warmth abruptly made her want to cry, more than any of the thoughts she’d had on the way home. When she had turned the ignition on and inched forward, she realized that the seat was too far back, and the mirrors were at the wrong angles, so she had to stop a yard from where Anthony had halted the car, and adjust everything, with him standing there watching her, his expression inscrutable but not in any way encouraging. She crept forward over the gravel and out of the drive gates to the road, and only when she was out of sight of the house and Anthony’s still and silent figure, did she give way to tears.

  Anthony had grown up with dogs. His father had been a spaniel man, liver-and-white springer spaniels, who were either flat out racing about or flat out fast asleep, and Anthony had assumed that all households, all families, had dogs, the way they had refrigerators and cars and early television sets. But Rachel had, as a child, been bitten, badly, by a dog, an elderly half-blind old Labrador who had believed Rachel to be obstructing her access to her supper, and had never recovered her ease around dogs in consequence. She had tolerated the last of Anthony’s springers, to the point of sitting up with him during the final long wheezing nights of his life, on an old quilt in the kitchen, but had then said she would be grateful for a dog-free spell, which had lengthened because of Edward’s arrival, and then lengthened again when Ralph came, and so on until being without a dog was something even Anthony came to accept. In fact, he hardly thought about dogs now, and it was only on an occasion such as this, walking down to the quay, and along the river parallel to the sea, that it occurred to him that a dog would be comfortably companionable and an uncomplicated distraction from the inside of his own head, and that one could safely say, out loud, to a dog all kinds of things that were clamoring to be expressed and would only make everything considerably worse if uttered to another human.

  The footpath ran along a dike between flat land to the left of the path, and the flat River Orde to the right. It was a walk Anthony had known all his life, starting by the quay with its quiet stretches of sheltered water, and spits of low land, and clusters of small sailing boats, moored and clinking in the soft wind. From the quay, the path ran on past wooden sheds selling fresh fish on weekdays and a neat little tea room with a veranda, and the small white cube of the sailing club—all familiar, all timeless, as timeless as, farther on, the outline, if he looked inland, of the church and the castle among the trees and hedgerows. The boys had all loved the castle when they were younger. Ralph had chosen it for a school project, and had written a careful and measured essay on it, which began, “The castle was built, AT GREAT EXPENSE, by Henry II.” Luke had moved on to Second World War stories, and was keenly envious of the excitement Anthony had known as a boy of the dismantling of beach defenses, the removal of mines, and unexploded bombs. Edward, now so urban, so cosmopolitan, had been the one who was interested in the natural history of the place, the collector of samphire and sea pinks, the identifier of gull types by the color of their legs, the one who would crouch for hours in those flat fields by the dike waiting for brown hares to engage in the remarkable boxing matches of the spring mating rituals.

  Well, Anthony thought now, descending the steep inland side of the dike and turning to look at the white blade of a sail serenely passing on the far side of it, there was nothing to be gained by comparing those days with these. Those days involved three boys under twelve. These days involved three boys almost all over thirty. Little children: little problems; big children: big problems. He felt disgusted by the day, by the drama of it, by the wearisome drives, by Luke and Charlotte’s contraceptive carelessness, by Ralph’s selfish self-involvement, by Rachel’s inability to control her thoughts and her tongue and her conduct. He felt dirtied by it all, soured and sullied, and longed for that mythical dog, racing ahead of him along the wheat-field path in utterly focused pursuit of a scent so compelling that nothing else could be heeded. It would be a comfort in its sheer simplicity. It would remind Anthony that life didn’t consist only of crossed wires and lost tempers and injured feelings.

  From the wheat about a yard away came the sudden sharp drawn-out fall of a bird call. Anthony stopped and stood motionless. There, on a wheat ear, rather than the reed top of its usual choice, sat a reed bunting, smaller than Anthony’s hand, with its boldly striped and speckled body and its coal-black head, garnished with a white collar and a comedy moustache. Anthony waited. The bird had surely seen him. It would have a nest nearby, close to the ground and cup-shaped, with maybe half a dozen eggs in it, which would hatch into brown babies with black-and-white moustaches above their tiny beaks. The bird and the man were quite still together in the summer evening for what seemed like a miraculous number of seconds, and then the bird uttered its curious little cry again and took off without hurry towards the reed beds beyond the dike. Anthony watched it go. He took a breath.

  “Thank you,” Anthony said to the empty air.

  Rachel did not return until after dark. Anthony had poured himself a tumbler of whiskey and water, and had carried it across to his studio, intending to immerse himself there, in his usual way, and found that he couldn’t do it, so he had returned to the kitchen and spread the Sunday newspapers out and tried to read them, and not look at his watch too often, and not to pour a second whiskey.

  Rachel threw the car keys on to the kitchen counter with a clatter. She said, not looking at Anthony, “I am very sorry.”

  He stared at the newspapers. He said, “So am I.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it—”

  “I thought you did—”

  “I did want to,” Rachel said, “but it kind of died out of me. Standing in their kitchen, I was just tired of it, tired of myself, tired—oh, tired of behaving like that. Which was just as well.”

  Anthony looked up. Rachel was standing where she had halted when she came in. She looked exhausted and rumpled, and her hair was sticking up here and there as if she’d slept on it while it was damp.

  “What d’you mean?”

  Rachel turned slowly to look at him. She was smiling reluctantly.

  “Well, they weren’t interested, were they—”

  “What—”

  “I got there just as bath time started. Ralph was doing bath time. So I helped with this and that and then I read to Kit and then I went downstairs, and Petra was drawing at the kitchen table and Ralph was in his office. And I told Petra about the baby and she didn’t look up, she just said, “That was quick.” And I said stupidly, “So were you,” and she didn’t reply, and she just went on drawing, and then Ralph came down and said, thanks for coming, Mum, and I realized I was being—I was sort of being dismissed.”

  Anthony got up slowly from the table.

  “So where have you been?”

  “Down by the sea—”

  “Where—”

  “Parked,” Rachel said, “at Shingle Street. Where Petra said she and Ralph were so happy.”

  Anthony came and stood beside her. He said, “A wrong-footed day—”

  “Sure was—”

  It occurred to him to say, “You have to let it go,” but then he thought that they were both too tired for what would inevitably follow, and maybe Rachel knew that anyway, and didn’t want to face it, or couldn’t face it at the end of such a day. So he stood and half looked at her, and after a while she said, “Did anybody ring?”

  “The boys? No.”

  “I thought Luke migh
t.”

  “No.”

  “Or Edward.”

  “No.”

  “Sigi—”

  “Stop it,” Anthony said. “I’m drinking whiskey. D’you want some?”

  Rachel shook her head. She glanced round the kitchen, at the colors, at the accumulation of objects, the rows of mugs on the wooden pegs, the great pottery fruit bowl, the scarred chopping boards.

  “This all looks pretty dated, doesn’t it—”

  “Rachel, don’t start. It’s too late. We’re too tired—”

  She gave him a quick look, and he caught a sudden glimpse of the girl to whom he’d given the aquamarine ring that had once belonged to his grandmother, the girl who’d known what to do with him, with the Dump, with his parents’ quietly collapsing house.

  “Bed,” Anthony said. He put a hand on her shoulder. “There’s nothing more to be done about today but end it.”

  Rachel moved away so that his hand slipped from her shoulder. She picked up the car keys and threw them into the fruit bowl among the bananas.

  “Okay,” she said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  While Petra was out at her allotment with the boys, Ralph got all his old suits out from the back of the cupboard in their bedroom. He had never moved his suits from his old bedroom in his parents’ house to the cottage at Shingle Street, but when the move to Aldeburgh came Rachel had arrived with all his suits, in an assortment of plastic and canvas covers, and said that, as he was now embarking on family life in earnest, he should house his own property.

  Ralph had been mildly surprised. Rachel had brought his suits, but not his childhood books or his toy fort or the key rack which had been Woodwork Job One at his secondary school. He had accepted the suits, supposing that she was signaling that impending fatherhood required a seriousness of approach, and had stuffed them at the back of the too-small wardrobe that he and Petra shared, haphazardly, and forgotten them, as he had forgotten the childhood possessions that his mother seemed still to wish to keep. In fact, he had forgotten them so thoroughly that he had hired something to wear to Luke’s wedding before Petra said quietly, “But you’ve got a suit. You’ve got several suits.”

  And there they all now were, dark blue and dark gray, squashed on inadequate hangers, bearing the labels of Singapore tailors who had copied so beautifully the two English suits he had arrived with. They did not look good, his poor suits, creased and neglected, with grubby linings and stuff in the trouser pockets and cuff buttons missing. Ralph dropped his jeans to the floor, and picked up the top pair of fine-wool gray chalk-striped trousers. He stepped into them, pulling them up over his elderly boxer shorts and thin market-stall socks. He fastened the waist and zipped the fly. They fitted perfectly, flat across his belly, skimming his thighs, roomy enough to put his hands in his pockets, where he found half a boarding pass for Singapore Airlines and a crumpled fifty-Singapore-dollar bill. He looked at the bill in his hand, remembering. He thought about his flat, in an immense block on Orchard Road, with a vast, shining atrium floored in polished stone and a lift in a glass column that rose silently up among the brilliant-green trees of an indoor jungle. He thought about the dealing room at the bank, where they had all screamed into headphones for ten hours a day. He thought about the beaches at the weekends, where he had sat alone on the sand, watching the sun go down, suddenly, into the Straits of Singapore, thinking that, out there, across the indigo sea, lay the first of the immeasurable islands of Indonesia. He closed his eyes. A sudden yearning for freedom struck him so forcibly that it almost took his breath away.

  He put the fifty dollar bill back in his pocket and opened his eyes. He looked at himself in the narrow mirror he had nailed up behind the bedroom door, and whose bottom edge Kit had decorated with Bob the Builder stickers. He looked quite different in suit trousers, despite a much laundered and stretched dark-green T-shirt, and two days’ worth of stubble. He found the jacket belonging to the suit trousers and put it on too. Even with the T-shirt, and the crumpled condition of the jacket, the suit was impressive. He straightened his shoulders. The suit gave him definition and authority. He breathed in. He wondered if he still had any shirts—and shoes. He had sworn he would never wear a tie again, but there was something ties did for a shirt, a sort of finishing something. Like cuff links. Were people wearing cuff links? Did he still own any?

  In his socks and his suit, Ralph padded down to the kitchen. He filled the kettle. He wasn’t exactly hungry, or thirsty, but he felt a definite stirring of recollection, of remembering something which was—had been—not without excitement, and stimulating, which ought to be celebrated with, at least, coffee. He thought about how carefree it had been in Singapore, how easy it was to exercise his talents but not to be responsible for doing anything more than exploiting what he was naturally good at, and then to be turned loose, in the evenings, at the weekends, and allowed to run free. He wondered now whether he believed that it had sated him, bored him, and how he had been able to turn his back on it all so deliberately. He recalled dropping his tie—he thought it might even have been an Hermès tie, acquired at Changi Airport—into a company wastepaper bin, and marveled at his lunacy. What could he have been thinking of?

  He stared around him at the kitchen. It wasn’t Petra’s kitchen the way his mother’s kitchen was his mother’s kitchen. It was, in a way, their kitchen, or at least the kitchen that he and Petra had allowed to evolve out of a pleasant square room with a sink and a cooker in it. He had painted the walls blue so that Petra could add birds, and clouds, and constellations, and they had arranged the pieces of furniture they had nonchalantly acquired from here and there in a way that was comfortable if not especially aesthetic, and then they just lived there, and the laundry pile acquired its place just as the kettle did, and the cereal boxes and the plastic mugs the boys used. Would he, Ralph wondered, miss it? If they had to leave this kitchen, this house, and move somewhere so that Ralph, in this suit plus shirt and tie and cuff links, could travel on a train every day to a world of glass and steel that held for him, at this precise moment, all the nostalgic glamour of Singapore, would he really care?

  The kitchen door to the outside opened. Kit, in his Spider-Man T-shirt, came in holding an earthy carrot and a stick. He held out the carrot.

  “Look!”

  “I’m looking—”

  “I pulled it,” Kit said.

  “Well done. Will you eat it now?”

  Kit dropped the carrot on the floor.

  “No.”

  “Wow,” Petra said from the doorway. “Look at you—”

  Ralph struck an attitude.

  “What do you think?”

  Petra was holding Barney. She bent to deposit him on the floor. He made straight for Kit’s dropped carrot.

  “Not really my kind of gear,” Petra said. “But cool.”

  “Can you iron it or something?”

  “Okay—”

  “I don’t have any shirts—”

  Petra went back outside and reappeared with a trug of vegetables.

  “Look.”

  “Kit said that to me—”

  “Kit just yanks them. I grew them. Carrots, spinach, radishes, lettuce.”

  Ralph came across the kitchen and peered into the trug.

  “Very impressive.”

  “I like it,” said Petra.

  “The allotment?”

  “Growing things.”

  Ralph went back to the kettle.

  “Maybe we’ll find a house with a garden. A garden big enough to grow stuff in it.”

  “I like the allotment,” Petra said.

  Barney was eating Kit’s earthy carrot. Kit was standing by the table, his stick between his legs, like a hobby horse, wedging pieces of Lego into a toast rack. The table had Petra’s sketchbook on it too, and several newspapers and jars, and a carton of milk and a hammer and some bowls left over from breakfast with cereal dried to their sides. Petra put the trug down on her sketchbook. She said, “This house is
okay.”

  Ralph tipped coffee out of a foil packet into a cafetière. He added boiling water from the kettle and replaced the plunger on the cafetière. Then he pushed it down, slowly and carefully, before he said, “I’ll be earning at least sixty grand. Just for starters. More after a three-month trial.”

  “I can’t think about that much.”

  “Well,” Ralph said, “you should.”

  Petra bent down, took the carrot out of Barney’s grip, wiped off most of the earth on her T-shirt hem, and gave it back to him.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t?” Ralph said.

  Petra rubbed her hands against the front of her T-shirt.

  “The money,” she said.

  Ralph left the coffee and came across the kitchen so that he was standing close to her. He said, “We need the money, hon.”

  “Only a bit—”

  Ralph put out his arms and turned her to face him.

  “Petra. Lesson one. If you don’t have money, you don’t have somewhere to live, you don’t eat, you don’t have clothes. Lesson two, if you don’t have work, you don’t have the money for the above. Okay?”

  Petra didn’t look at him. She nodded.

  He said, “You’re not working—”

  “I could. I did.”

  “Yes. But you’re not working now. You haven’t worked since Kit. I don’t mind. I don’t mind if you don’t work. But one of us has to. I was, and I’m going to again.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I can’t work from this house anymore.”

  Petra said nothing. Ralph bent down to look in her face. He said, “I’ve got to go out to work now. I’ve got to go to London.”

  Petra took a step back, out of his grasp. She said to Kit, “Eggy toast for supper?”

  Kit was focusing on his Lego, breathing heavily. He took no notice.

  Ralph said to Petra, “It’s just going to happen.”

  Petra climbed over Barney to get to the fridge and opened it in search of eggs. She said, without heat, “Why do we go on liking things that hurt us?”