Daughters-in-Law

by Joanna Trollope

  “You might thank me,” Sarah said, “for coming to London all of a sudden, to suit you.”

  Charlotte looked up from the menu. Her eyes were huge.

  “I do thank you—”

  “I may only work part-time,” Sarah said, “but it isn’t always easy to get away, all the same.”

  Charlotte took one hand away from the menu and put it on Sarah’s.

  “Please don’t tick me off—”

  “I’m not ticking you off, I’m just saying—”

  “I know I’ve been a bit one-track-minded,” Charlotte said, “but it really got to me, it really did. And when people can’t be supportive, I just kind of crack up. That’s why I rang you. I rang you because of Luke. After . . . after, well, after he called me a nut-nut diva.”

  Sarah stared at her.

  “He didn’t—”

  Charlotte paused. She took her hand off Sarah’s and looked down at the table.

  “Well—”

  “Charlotte,” Sarah said warningly.

  “He didn’t . . . disagree—”

  “He didn’t disagree with what?”

  Charlotte put her hands on either side of her face, and stared hard at the table.

  “Well, I was really upset, really crying after Luke told me that his father refused to ask his mother to apologize, and I lost my cool a bit, and I said to Luke that they were all ganging up on me—which is what it feels like, Sarah—and treating me as if I was a nut-nut diva, and he didn’t contradict me. I mean, he said they weren’t ganging up, that he wasn’t ganging up, but he didn’t say I wasn’t a diva, he wouldn’t. He just went down to his studio, and when I went to the loo in the night and looked to see if the studio light was still on, it was, and it was two in the morning.”

  “Char,” Sarah said.

  Charlotte looked up slowly.

  “What—”

  “You are—”

  “I’m what—”

  “You are being a diva.”

  Charlotte cried, “But you weren’t there; you don’t know what she said, how she sounded—”

  Sarah leaned forward.

  “Look, Char. I don’t know the woman, but she’s a mother-in-law. Nobody will ever be good enough for her boy. She’s really tactless, but she was just doing what people like her do. Remember our wedding? Chris’s mother wouldn’t even come, because it wasn’t in a church, and she insisted I’d bullied him out of a church wedding. I’d have been fine in a church; it was Chris who wouldn’t have it. He said he’d had enough of church in his childhood and he didn’t believe in God anyway. But he wouldn’t stand up to her, he let me do that. So I was the witch. It’s what happens. It’s what it’s like for lots of daughters-in-law.”

  Charlotte regarded her solemnly. She fiddled with her cross. She said, “Mummy said she’d like to kill her.”

  “That’s what she would say. That’s Mummy all over. That’s how I feel if anyone’s unkind to the girls.”

  Charlotte said sadly, “What are you saying?”

  “Just that you’re making too big a deal of it.”

  “But—”

  “But what?”

  Charlotte leaned to meet her sister and said in a loud whisper, “I didn’t mean to get pregnant.”

  Sarah waited a second, and then she said, “I know.”

  Charlotte’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Don’t cry,” Sarah said. “It’s not perfect. But it’s got some pluses. Two babies before you’re thirty, family done and dusted, get on with your life.”

  Charlotte said, leaning back a little, “I don’t think Luke feels the same way about me—”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Charlotte said, looking back down at the table, “I sort of could do no wrong in his eyes. I mean, I held him off till he sorted the coke thing and he had to wait till I was finished with Gus, and everything. And now I haven’t got that . . . power anymore. He looks at me as if I’d disappointed him, as if he’d opened a Christmas present and found something that wasn’t what he’d been hoping for.”

  Tempting though it was to say “Nonsense” in a brisk voice, Sarah found herself softened. She said, “He loves you, you know. Really loves you. This baby’s probably a bit of a bomb-shell for him too.”

  “He hasn’t got to have it—”

  Sarah looked at her sister. She said, “I was just beginning to feel sorry for you. Don’t spoil it.”

  Charlotte smiled weakly. She said, “I’m a right mess, aren’t I?” She picked up a paper napkin and blotted her eyes. “I’m supposed to be a grown-up married lady, and I’m a mess.”

  “Don’t bleat.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Charlotte,” Sarah said, “we’re all thrilled you married Luke, we think he’s lovely and the wedding was wonderful. But marriage isn’t just more of the same. And most of all, marriage doesn’t happen in public. It’s not a sort of performance where you can ask the audience for help when you feel things aren’t going your way. You’ve got to sort it, together. You have no idea about my relationship with Chris, have you? It’s never entered your head. Well, it’s not a picnic, but we manage. And you’ll have to manage. You’ve got a nice guy and a nice place to live and you’re not on the breadline. Deal with it.”

  Charlotte sighed.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “And now,” Sarah said, picking up the menu again, “let’s order lunch.”

  Ralph had found a room to rent. Someone who was about to be a colleague had a flat off Finsbury Square that he wanted to himself at weekends when his girlfriend came over from Dublin, but which had a small second bedroom that he was happy to let out during the week. He said that, if Ralph just had showers, and only used the microwave, he thought fifty quid in cash, for four nights a week, would be fine, utility bills and council tax thrown in, no paperwork, no questions asked, how about it? Ralph looked at the room, decorated and furnished to be as impersonal and modern as a hotel, and thought it all looked more than acceptable. He lay down on the bed and looked up at the ceiling, with its tiny brilliant recessed lights, and felt a little thrill of excitement at the prospect of liberty. He had no intention of misusing it, he reassured Edward on the telephone, no stupid bad-lad behavior just because he was off the lead, but there’d be films, and reading, and working late, and a gym membership, and going to see his brothers, and all that good stuff, wouldn’t there? Edward, at the other end of the line, had not sounded convinced or reassured.

  On the train back to Suffolk, Ralph thought about the room off Finsbury Square. Fifty quid a week was an amazing bargain, especially for a power shower and a ten-minute walk to work. He thought about Kit and Barney, and how odd it would be without them, and how wonderful it would be to see them at weekends, and how he would make up for his week-night absences by getting them up, so that Petra could have a lie-in, and taking them out to do things that he never seemed to do at the moment, because every day was just an ordinary day, and one day was really indistinguishable from another. He marveled at how his energy and optimism had returned and how, instead of floundering through life like a half-dead zombie, he was now alert and eager for what lay ahead. At Ipswich station, he bought packets of chocolate buttons for the boys and looked for flowers to buy Petra. There were none. Never mind, he told himself, she grows flowers anyway, I’ll stop on the way home and buy a nice bottle of wine. We’ll have wine tonight and I’ll cook for her. In fact, I’ll cook at weekends from now on; we’ll have a whole new regime and outlook, and the money to pay for it. It’ll be like starting again.

  Petra was in the bathroom when he got back, kneeling by the bath in order to soap Kit, who was sitting in four inches of water playing with a wind-up plastic frog. Barney, swaddled in an endearing hooded towel with ears, was sitting beside Petra on the bath mat absorbed in a cloth book whose pages squeaked when he pressed certain places. Ralph heard their voices as he came up the stairs, and he could tell they were happy from the sound of them, and,
when he came in, and they all looked up and saw him, and the boys squealed, he felt an elating rush of certainty that life was going to stop being a trudge across a plateau, and transform itself instead into a gallop across a plain towards a mountain range of sheer promise.

  He bent, holding his tie back with one hand, to kiss Petra and Kit, and then he picked Barney up from the floor and sat down with him on his knee on the closed lid of the lavatory.

  “Good day?” Petra said.

  “Very. And you?”

  “We went to the sea!” Kit said, scrambling to the end of the bath to be near to his father. He spread his arms. “It was this big! And full of stones!”

  Ralph laughed. He said to Barney, “What about you, fat Buddha?”

  Barney offered him his book. Ralph accepted it and began to press the pages obediently.

  “Lots to tell you,” he said to Petra.

  “Great. When the boys are in bed—”

  “Read to me!” Kit commanded. He dropped the frog and began to scramble out of the bath. “Read to me, Daddy, read to me, read to me—”

  “Of course I will—”

  “My digger book—”

  “Could we have a change, maybe, from the digger book?”

  Petra wound Kit into a towel.

  “Give Daddy a break. Give him a break from the digger book, hey?”

  “Nah!”

  “No!” said Barney delightedly. He gazed up at his father. “Nah!”

  Ralph looked down at him. He looked completely winning, beaming up at his father, displaying his tiny perfect teeth from under his pointed toweling hood. Ralph felt a rush of love for him, for all of them, for his whole little family, gathered safely round him in their shabby bathroom. He dropped a kiss on Barney’s head.

  “Of course I’ll read the digger book,” he said.

  Later, in the kitchen, he unwrapped the wine from its cocoon of brown paper.

  “Wow,” Petra said. “What are we celebrating?”

  “Lots of things,” Ralph said. “And I’m cooking.”

  “I’ve done it—”

  “Done it?”

  “Almost. Just a risotto.”

  “I love risotto,” Ralph said. “I love your risotto. Of course, I’d have cooked, but really, I like your cooking.”

  Petra put two wineglasses on the table.

  “So the meeting was okay?”

  “It was more than okay. I met all the analysis team, all good, all seemed fine, and one of them offered me a room. Fifty quid a week! Ten minutes from the office. Perfect.”

  Petra stopped moving. She was tipping mushrooms onto a board from a paper bag, and she stopped, the bag in her hand with most of the mushrooms still in it.

  “A room?”

  Ralph looked up from inserting the screw of the corkscrew into the top of the wine bottle.

  “Yes, babe. A room. Like we agreed.”

  “Did we?”

  Ralph began to turn the corkscrew.

  “You know. You said I’d better have my freedom—”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you meant it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Petra said.

  “So I’m taking a room on the edge of the City during the week and I’ll be back at weekends, and you can stay here with the boys, like you wanted.”

  He pulled the cork out and straightened up, smiling at her.

  “So we can work this thing out, and you can have what you wanted, can’t you?”

  Petra tipped out the rest of the mushrooms. She picked up a knife. Ralph said, “Are you with me?”

  She said, not looking up, “I . . . suppose so. I’m . . . just a bit surprised about the room—”

  “Why?”

  “So quick—”

  “Babe, I start work in two weeks.”

  “Yes—”

  “What did you think would happen? How did you think we’d work it?”

  “I didn’t,” Petra said truthfully. “I just thought I’d wait till you decided something, and then I’d see what to do.”

  “Well, I have decided. I’ve got a room.”

  Petra looked at him. She smiled.

  “Good,” she said.

  “And you can go on with your life here. Doing what you like doing. Like going to the sea, like you did today. Wasn’t the beach crowded?”

  “We didn’t go there—”

  Ralph began to pour the wine.

  “Where’d you go then?”

  “Shingle Street,” Petra said, slicing mushrooms.

  “Shingle Street? How did you get there?”

  “Taxi—”

  Ralph stopped pouring.

  “A taxi? Both ways?”

  “No,” Petra said calmly. “My friend brought us home.”

  “What friend?”

  “He works at the bird reserve.”

  “He?”

  Petra looked at him.

  “Yes.”

  Ralph said, “How do you have a friend, a man friend, from the bird reserve?”

  Petra put her knife down.

  “He found my car keys when I lost them the day I went drawing there, when you had your interview, when your parents had the boys.”

  “And now he’s a friend.”

  Petra said, “He lives at Shingle Street. It was amazing to be back there. Amazing. The boys loved it.”

  There was a silence. Ralph looked at the wine in the glasses, then he looked at Petra. He said, “You took the boys—”

  “Of course. What else would I do?”

  “Is—is that why you’re so happy? Is that why the atmosphere here’s so good tonight? It’s not that you’ve come round to my point of view, my point about the future, is it, it’s because you’ve had an afternoon—”

  “It was the beach,” Petra said.

  “An afternoon,” Ralph said, rushing on, taking no notice, “with some guy who you let be with my children and God knows what else you let happen, it’s that, isn’t it, it’s that—”

  He stopped suddenly. He tried to gauge, looking at Petra, what she was thinking. She was standing on the other side of the table, one hand lightly on the pile of sliced mushrooms, the other lying on her knife, quite still and alarmingly composed. She was looking back at him, and although her gaze was veiled she didn’t look as she usually looked when things got difficult and she was trying to evade being involved in a resolution. She looked more as if she’d decided something and then pulled back into herself, decision made.

  “Petra?”

  “Yes.”

  “Petra, are you happy, not because of me but because you’ve had a good afternoon with this guy?”

  She gave him a faint smile and picked up her paring knife again.

  “Yes,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sigrid put down the telephone. She had called her mother in Stockholm, at a time she knew her mother would be at home after her surgery, and before her father returned and, in a way Sigrid was sure was unintentional, exercised a quiet but definite background restraint upon her mother’s responses to what Sigrid was saying. Sigrid had meant—had wanted—to tell her mother about all the Brinkley family upsets, and had gone so far, on her journey back from the laboratory, as to plan how she would describe the lunch party, and Rachel’s manner, and Charlotte’s reaction and subsequent behavior: but when it came to it, she discovered that the flavor had quite leached out of it all, to the extent that she felt, oddly, that she ought to protect the Brinkleys in a way, she ought not to expose their inadequacies, even—or maybe, especially—to her mother. So they had an affectionate and anodyne call instead, so anodyne that Sigrid could sense her mother was only just managing to refrain from asking her if anything was the matter.

  Sigrid picked up the mug of green tea she had made to accompany the phone call and looked at it. It was cold now, with a rim of brown sediment at the bottom, and looked as appetizing as a mug of pond water. She went over to the sink and poured it away, and then refilled the kettle.
Coffee was the answer. Coffee, in her upbringing, had always been the answer. Green tea was no substitute. Just as, Mariella frequently pointed out, water was no substitute for juice. Or a smoothie. Mariella had been promised some vanilla smoothie—her favorite—when she could not only spell out loud all the words on her summer-holiday spelling list ending in “ough,” but could write them down too. She had been shut in her room for hours, so she had probably abandoned spelling for playing, and her bedroom floor would be covered with the families of tiny anthropomorphized toy woodland animals whom she would be putting to bed, in nests of paper tissues, in all her shoes. Sigrid was not going to interrupt her. Absorbed playing with miniature mice and badgers had to feed the inner life more richly, surely, than learning why “cough” and “rough” and “bough” all looked the same but didn’t sound it. English! What a language.

  Edward’s key scraped in the front-door lock, followed by a bang as he swung it shut behind him. He came rapidly down the stairs to the kitchen, as was his wont, and kissed her—rather absently, she thought—and went straight to the fridge.

  “A bit desperate, aren’t you?” Sigrid said.

  “Water,” Edward said shortly. He took out the filter jug Sigrid kept in the door of the fridge and poured out a large glass, which he then drank, straight off. Sigrid watched him.

  “Is something the matter?”

  Edward went on drinking.

  “Please,” Sigrid said. “No dramas. Have you had a bad day?”

  Edward put the glass down and refilled it.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to tell me about it?”

  Edward nodded, drinking again.

  “Is it your family?”

  Edward stopped swallowing long enough to say, “Why should it be them?”