Daughters-in-Law

by Joanna Trollope

  “Thank you, dear.”

  He sat down on a square upholstered cube opposite her.

  “Now,” he said.

  He looked perfectly friendly, but also slightly in a hurry. Marnie said, “It’s about Charlotte and the baby.”

  Luke took a swallow of coffee.

  “Tell me.”

  Marnie had rehearsed this bit. She sipped her coffee and set it down on the table in front of her. She smiled at Luke again.

  “I have been thinking about this baby of yours—”

  Luke smiled back.

  “Me too.”

  “And it’s lovely that you, especially, are so thrilled about it. So different, I have to say, from my generation where, whatever a man felt about his babies, he wasn’t really encouraged to show it.”

  She paused. Luke waited, still smiling. Marnie said, “I don’t want to worry Charlotte, and we all know that she hasn’t the best financial brain in the world, but . . . will you be all right for money?”

  Luke drank some more coffee. He said, switching his gaze from Marnie to his mug, “A bit strapped. But fine,” and then he added, as an afterthought, “thank you.”

  “Well,” Marnie said, her head slightly on one side, “I have a little plan.”

  Luke didn’t look up.

  “To your advantage.”

  Luke glanced quickly at her.

  “Just to help you over this stage, just for a little while.”

  “It’s very—”

  “No,” Marnie said. She leaned forward. “It’s not kind. It’s what one always wants to do for one’s children, as you’ll discover for yourselves. The thing is, dear Luke, that Charlotte has always been rather sheltered. Her sisters would call it spoiled, but it’s what happens, often, to the baby of the family, especially if that baby is as pretty as Charlotte. And although I know she is in one way thrilled about this baby, I know that part of her is quite nervous, too, scared even, and I thought I could do something to help that, and help you at the same time. I want, you see, to give you a maternity nurse, to help with the baby after the birth, and reassure Charlotte that she is going to be a wonderful mother, as we all know she is going to be, and I think I will engage someone for six weeks, or two months even, to give you both a chance to get back on your feet because a baby’s arrival is a big thing, believe me, a very big thing indeed. But—” She held up a hand to prevent Luke saying what he was plainly agitating to say. “But that’s not all. You can’t possibly fit a nanny in here. You can’t, actually, fit a baby in here, not with all the things babies need, especially these days. So I am going to help you. I am going to help you pay for a bigger flat, and one with a lift, you’ll find you can’t possibly manage all those stairs without a lift, and with a baby, and I shall go on helping you until you are both in a position to help yourselves. I don’t want any thanks, or any argument. It is absolutely my pleasure to do this for you and my Charlotte.”

  She stopped and picked up her coffee and smiled into it, in the sanguine expectation of Luke’s relief and gratitude. There was a silence. The silence was, she supposed, because Luke was slightly stunned at the imagination and scope of this offer, but then the silence went on, and on, and she was forced to look up from her coffee to find Luke scowling into his.

  “Luke?”

  He gave a little jerk, as if he was trying to shake himself into order.

  “What do you say, dear?”

  Luke looked out of the window. Then he looked at the ceiling. Then he looked at a point slightly to one side of Marnie and said with an effort, “I’m afraid . . . not.”

  “Not! What do you mean?”

  Luke managed to drag his gaze on to his mother-in-law.

  “I mean, Marnie, that it’s really kind of you, but we’ll manage.”

  “Luke, you can’t. Charlotte can’t—”

  “She’ll have to learn,” Luke said. “Just like me. We’ll both have to learn. Like our friends have who’ve got babies. Like everyone does.”

  “But there’s no space here—”

  “We’ll cope.”

  “But,” Marnie cried, louder now, “there’s the stairs, all those stairs—”

  “We’re looking at other flats,” Luke said.

  “Then let me help you!”

  “No!” Luke said loudly.

  There was another, sharper silence. Marnie said with dignity, “Did you just shout at me?”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Luke said. “It’s kind of you, but we can’t accept—”

  “Charlotte might accept—”

  “You won’t tell Charlotte,” Luke said firmly. “You won’t go behind my back.” He leaned forward a little. “You won’t.”

  Marnie turned slightly to stare out of the window.

  “I don’t understand your reasons—”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No. It seems to me that you are just being obstinate. Showing male pride. I know all about male pride. I lived with it. I lived with it for almost forty years. You don’t want to accept help for the mother of your child because you want to be the only provider.”

  Luke said, slightly dangerously, “I am so not the same kind of man as Charlotte’s father was.”

  Marnie said nothing, bolt upright on the sofa, staring out of the window. Luke went on, “I don’t want to . . . can’t accept your offer, for all our sakes. Charlotte and I will never grow up unless we learn how. And we can’t be beholden. We have all the right to learn to be independent that you all had. Frankly, Marnie, we can’t be patronized this way.”

  Marnie swallowed. She said tightly, “I can only hope you are thinking of Charlotte.”

  Luke stood up. He had the distinct, and faintly alarming, air of someone bringing an interview to a brisk conclusion. He said, looking down at Marnie, where she sat on the sofa, “It’s precisely because I’m thinking of Charlotte that I’m declining your offer.”

  And then he moved across to the door to the hall, and held it open.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Rachel said.

  She was standing in the kitchen, fresh from the garden, with earthy knees to her jeans and her hair held off her face by a spotted handkerchief that Anthony recognized as his own.

  “I was going to. I always intended to. I was just waiting until I had marshaled my own thoughts about it—”

  Rachel went over to the sink and jammed the kettle roughly under the tap to fill it.

  “So I imagine she didn’t ask to see me.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “What about the boys?” Rachel said, banging the kettle down on its base and switching it on. “How were the boys?”

  “Lovely,” Anthony said. “Sweet. They looked fine.”

  Rachel moved to stand by the sink, gripping its edge, and staring out of the window above it into the garden.

  “Why do you suppose she came?”

  Anthony went to stand beside her.

  “Because,” he said, “she isn’t without gratitude.” He put a hand on Rachel’s. “Don’t focus on her not asking to see you. Don’t take it personally all the time—”

  “But I’m hurt!” Rachel cried.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m . . . I’m really fond of her. I’ve been fond of her for years—”

  “You love her,” Anthony said.

  Rachel nodded furiously. She took her hand out from under Anthony’s and brushed it across her eyes. She said, “And I was so grateful to her. For taking on Ralph. And letting Ralph be Ralph—”

  “Until,” Anthony said, “he was too much Ralph.”

  The kettle clicked itself off.

  “Tea?” Rachel said.

  “Please—”

  “Is she going to live with this man?”

  “I don’t know. She said he was just getting her through. She didn’t sound like someone in love to me, but maybe I just didn’t hear that because I didn’t want to.”

  Rachel got two mugs out of the cupboard above the kettle. She said, more
calmly, “What exactly did Ralph do?”

  Anthony sighed.

  “What he always does. What suited Ralph. Not listening. Not listening, ever.”

  “I don’t listen,” Rachel said. “I should start with myself. I should hear myself sometimes.”

  She dropped tea bags into the mugs. She said, “She really didn’t want to see me—”

  “I think she was afraid to.”

  “In case I barked. I might well have barked. I’ve always barked when I’m frightened.”

  Anthony waited a moment, then he said, “Are you frightened?”

  Rachel poured boiling water into the mugs, and stirred the tea bags round with a spoon. She said lightly, “Yup.”

  “Of . . . what exactly?”

  Rachel flipped the tea bags out into the sink.

  “Of losing my usefulness.”

  “What?”

  Rachel walked briskly past him to the fridge and took out a plastic bottle of milk. She said, splashing milk carelessly into the mugs of tea, “What am I for, now, exactly?”

  “Rachel!”

  “Look,” she said, not looking at him. “Look. I’ve run a house and garden, I’ve brought up three boys. They’ve all married. They’ve produced three children. One to come. And they are doing just what I did, what I wanted to do, which is what I started doing when I came here and married you. Which is to live my own life, start my own family, make my own world. And it’s been my world. And now it isn’t—”

  In his studio that afternoon, Anthony had been listening to a radio interview with the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama had said, in his light, benevolent way, that as far as he could see most of the public trouble in the world was made by men, and most of the domestic trouble was made by women. Anthony visualized the Dalai Lama, in his spectacles and his maroon-and-ochre robes, sitting at their kitchen table and listening to Rachel describing how her life had outrun its purpose, and wondered what version of Buddhist resignation to the vagaries of the human journey he would recommend.

  “Are you listening?” Rachel said.

  “Very much—”

  “This huge house,” Rachel said, “an acre and a half of garden. You and me. At least you’ve still got the studio.”

  Anthony said, “You could run cookery courses again.”

  “I could.”

  “There was that little shop you thought of, the deli shop, at Snape Maltings.”

  “Wrong time. It’s no time to start something up. Anyway—”

  “Anyway?”

  “I haven’t the heart,” Rachel said. “I’m too sad. And too fidgety. I’ve got to get used to being good at something no one needs me to be good at anymore.” She looked at Anthony. She said, “I love being a grandmother.”

  “I know.”

  “I miss . . . I miss all that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Suppose she takes the children to live with this man—”

  “Suppose,” Anthony said, “she doesn’t.” He picked up one of the mugs of tea, and took it to the chair he always sat in, with its blue-checked cushion and view right across the room. He said, “You say you’re frightened. Don’t you suppose Petra is frightened too?”

  Rachel sighed. She put her hands to her head and pushed off the spotted handkerchief.

  “I expect she is—”

  Anthony took a gulp of tea.

  “Well, then,” he said.

  Charlotte was charmed when Sigrid rang to ask if they could have lunch together. Or coffee, Sigrid said, if she was busy. But she’d love it if they could meet. She gave Charlotte the feeling that this was evidence of how sophisticated a relationship between sisters-in-law could be, when the bond caused by marrying brothers served, in the end, as no more than a beginning to something that had a life of its own.

  “Lunch, please,” Charlotte said, “I’m always so hungry at the moment. It’s such a relief not feeling sick anymore. I’m eating breakfast and elevenses and lunch and tea and supper. So lunch would be lovely.”

  Sigrid laughed. She said something about how nice it was to hear someone sounding so healthy about being pregnant, and then she suggested that they meet somewhere halfway between their places of work, and why not the first-floor café of a distinguished architectural institute on Portland Place?

  So here Charlotte was, slightly early for once, studying the menu with considerable interest, and wondering whether to confide to Sigrid that she had been to see Petra, and had offered her support. She thought that, on balance, she probably would tell Sigrid because Sigrid, after all, even though she had never put a foot wrong as a daughter-in-law, had also suffered from not being the favorite, from not quite ever toeing the Brinkley line. Charlotte didn’t know Sigrid very well, and was slightly daunted by what appeared to Charlotte an impressive degree of maturity and togetherness on her part, but then, Sigrid had been the one to suggest lunch, which must mean at least the beginnings of a wish to do a little sisterly bonding. When she saw Sigrid coming up the wide central stairs to the café, she got up, feeling suddenly rather shy, and stood there, waiting to be noticed.

  “You look wonderful,” Sigrid said. “Being pregnant really suits you. I think the word is blooming, isn’t it?”

  “I’m going to be like a whale,” Charlotte said. “I’m eating like one too. Did you?”

  “What—”

  “Did you get huge?”

  Sigrid took off her jacket and hung it over the back of her chair.

  “I was no good at being pregnant.”

  Charlotte waited. Some instinct kept her from bouncing back at once. Sigrid said, picking up the menu, her voice almost detached, “It nearly killed me, having Mariella.”

  “Oh!” Charlotte said, horrified.

  “But we aren’t going to talk about that.”

  “No—”

  “It was nine years ago, and she is wonderful and Edward was a saint.” She looked up at Charlotte and smiled. “And you are going to do it beautifully.”

  “God,” Charlotte said, “I hope so. I mean, we never meant this to happen, and if you don’t you kind of have to get it more right than if you do. Don’t you?”

  Sigrid laughed. She said, “Let’s order you a big plate of food.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Pasta and salad?”

  “Perfect.”

  Sigrid looked up and made a neat little summoning gesture with her menu towards a waitress. Charlotte watched her ordering, with admiration. She looked so in charge of the situation, just as she looked in charge of her appearance, her hair smoothed back into a low ponytail, her white shirt not climbing irrepressibly out of the waistband of her skirt, her lightly tanned hand with its single modern ring holding the menu.

  “There,” Sigrid said, “food for two adults and almost half a baby. Exciting.”

  Charlotte buttered a piece of bread lavishly, and told Sigrid how she now felt about the baby, and how she had felt, and how sick she’d been, and how great Luke had been and how seriously he was taking the whole baby/fatherhood thing, and how there was an empty flat on the first floor of their building which they’d looked at, and really liked, and it was twice the size, with two bedrooms, but obviously miles more expensive and so they were having to do lots of sums to work out whether they really could afford it, because, quite honestly, their present flat was almost too small for the two of them right now, even without a baby.

  Then the pasta and salad arrived, and Charlotte asked Sigrid if she’d had a good time in Sweden, and Sigrid said it was lovely to see her parents, and Charlotte said well, talking of parents, she knew Sigrid would understand why she had done it, but she’d actually, without telling Edward or Luke in advance, gone to see Petra, on the quiet, really, because it must be so awful to be suddenly flung out of the family, like Petra had been, and so Charlotte wanted to offer her some support because oh my God, she needed it, the angel fallen to the ground and all that.

  “And Rachel,” Charlotte said, spearing rocket leaves on the
end of a forkful of tagliatelle, “can be so fierce. I should know.” She gave a little laugh. “I mean, I’m not sure I’m quite over it yet, and it was ages ago.”

  Sigrid took a sip of water.

  “It was very difficult with Rachel,” Sigrid said, “when Mariella was born.”

  Charlotte gazed at her, another forkful suspended. She said eagerly, “Was it?”

  “I had bad depression. So bad. And I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. And Rachel was very angry.”

  Charlotte put her mouthful in. Round it, she said, “She’s good at angry.”

  Sigrid didn’t reply. She sat looking down at her plate, not eating.

  Charlotte said energetically, “None of us will ever be good enough for her precious boys, will we?”

  Sigrid looked up. She said, “I had such a strange conversation with my mother in Stockholm. It made me think.”

  “Oh?” Charlotte said. She would have liked to stay on the topic of Rachel, and stoke it up a bit, but there was something about Sigrid’s attitude that held her back. She said, “About what?” and ate another mouthful.

  “These mothers,” Sigrid said, “these mothers of ours.”

  “Mine’s a doll—”

  “Maybe. But she’s also a person. They are all people. They were our age once. They went through a lot of the things we are going through.”

  Charlotte gave a little snort. She said, “Well, Rachel’s forgotten half of it—”

  Sigrid said slowly, “She’s not a witch, you know.”

  Charlotte stopped eating. She said, “She doesn’t like me, she doesn’t much like you—”

  “Oh, I think she does,” Sigrid said, “and if she hasn’t in the past, she will now. She only is as she is because no one ever opposed her, no one ever challenged her position as the only woman in a circle of men. Petra certainly didn’t. But now she is having to learn something new, and she must learn to hold her tongue, and that comes hard with her.”

  Charlotte put her fork down.

  “Wow—”

  “Think about it,” Sigrid said. “Ralph is very difficult, I don’t think anyone could have brought up Ralph any differently, but even he is a good father. And the others, our husbands, Rachel brought up good men for us. She did that, you know.”