Daughters-in-Law

by Joanna Trollope

  Charlotte pushed her plate away. She looked down at the table, and the crumbs and smears she had left on it.

  “We can’t gang up on her,” Sigrid said. “It’s lonely for her now. My mother said she had coped with her own loneliness by working. She’s a doctor. Rachel isn’t a doctor, she’s never worked properly, she is a homemaker, and now . . . well, I don’t know what she is. I expect she is terrified she will lose her grandchildren.”

  “But—”

  “I think that’s why she’s angry,” Sigrid said. “She is a very tactless person, and now she is angry too. But I don’t think she doesn’t like us. And I don’t think she would want her sons back, even if we offered them to her. I think she has new ways to learn, and she is angry with herself for that too.” She smiled at Charlotte. “Think now. If Rachel was a bad woman, wouldn’t Luke be bad too?”

  Charlotte said, “What, exactly, are you telling me?”

  “Oh,” Sigrid said, “I wouldn’t tell you anything. I would only describe how I see it now.”

  “But you were so lovely to me that day in our flat, about the baby—”

  “Of course,” Sigrid said, “it was an unprovoked attack. Rachel was in the wrong, everybody saw that. I expect she saw that, too, even if she could never say so. But after this Petra thing, we have all moved round in the dance a little, we are all in a slightly different place. So is Rachel.”

  Charlotte picked up her fork again, and pulled her plate back towards her. She opened her mouth to protest the continuing validity of her own grievance, and found she hadn’t got the heart for it. She wound a final mouthful of tagliatelle round her fork, and then she paused and looked at Sigrid.

  “Okay,” Charlotte said with a reasonableness that quite surprised her. “Okay. Point taken.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Steve Hadley was not a man given to restlessness. All his life he had gone steadily from activity to activity, every waking hour, moving without hurry from one practical task to another, to a point where he was almost unable to think unless his hands were busy with something. His mother, he knew, would say it was inherited. His father was unable to think, or hold a significant conversation unless physically occupied with something else. Steve remembered his father’s halting attempts to tell him the facts of life being conducted with both of them lying under the old jacked-up Alvis his father was restoring, until Steve plucked up the courage to admit, passing his father a spanner, that he knew about it already.

  He did not say that he had tried it, too, at thirteen, with a fifteen-year-old from year eleven who was, depending upon your point of view, either very generous or a bit of a slapper. And even if he hadn’t actually done it, he’d had a frustrating glimpse of how hugely exciting and satisfactory it was going to be when he did, and three years later, he had succeeded, and in his own view had never looked back. He’d had innumerable brief relationships, and one steady one (she’d ended it, when she went away to college, in Scotland) and in all cases he had known, in his unshowy, steadfast, unremarkable way, that he gave sexual satisfaction. It was in his nature. Sex was a good thing to do in his view, so why not learn to do it properly? He was no god to look at, for heaven’s sake, but that didn’t stop him from being an attractive proposition as a lover. He had, consciously, made sure of that.

  Except that, at the moment, his unquestioned competence seemed to be of no use to him. Petra plainly liked him, liked his company, had done nothing to discourage him, but was not so much refusing to sleep with him as seeming to be oblivious to the idea in the first place. In Steve’s view, sex was a natural progression after you got to know someone a bit and were confident, after a kiss or two, that they fancied you back, but Petra, although apparently happy to be kissed, and to be touched significantly here and there as they passed each other or sat next to each other in Steve’s car, seemed somehow to evaporate when Steve’s movements began to shift the situation into another gear. He supposed that he should simply ask her outright about it, but that kind of conversation didn’t come easily to him, and he kept waiting for a moment when it would be entirely natural to say, in so many words, what the hell do you think you’re playing at?

  He had asked himself, moving steadily round the endless tasks of repair and renewal at the nature reserve, why he went on with Petra anyway. She wasn’t the first mother he’d had a relationship with, and she wasn’t the best-looking, or the liveliest, or the most enticing hard-to-get girl he’d ever pursued, but she had something that chimed with something in him, this profound appreciation of the sea and shore and bird life that amounted, he was surprised to find himself thinking sometimes, almost to a shared religion. She was unusual too, and he revered her artistic talent to a point way beyond mere admiration; her ability, with less than half a dozen pencil lines, to make him feel he was looking not at a drawing but a living bird, roused in him a degree of respect that bordered on awe. And he liked her kids. He liked little kids anyway, but these two were especially great, particularly the older one with his imagination and his fears. Steve had few fears, and it intrigued him that someone of only three had the capacity somewhere in his brain to have so many. All in all, there was, definitely, something in Petra that made him disinclined to give up and turn his attention instead to one of the girls who worked in the reserve’s café, and who had made it more than plain that he could have pretty much anything he wanted.

  He was blithely confident, too, about Petra’s marital situation. There was this husband in the background, but Steve had never seen Petra other than alone, and she almost never mentioned her husband, only saying, once, that he had gone to London, in a way that suggested that he had gone for good, and not just for a few days, or a while even. Steve had picked up the distinct impression, too, that Petra and her boys’ father came from very different backgrounds, and although that was in no way a handicap, it did mean that neither could rely as a given on shared assumptions. Petra was a kind of orphan, it appeared, with no immediate family left alive in England, and that family never cohesive or supportive when it was around anyway. Petra had learned to fend for herself when she was still at school, and this situation aroused in Steve a protectiveness that was all the stronger for being unfamiliar to him. To be abandoned by both your family and then your husband, but not to seem to resent either seemed to Steve evidence of a remarkable nature. It was just how to get such a remarkable nature to focus on him as someone who might be an all-round answer, that was Steve’s current preoccupation.

  And then an opportunity arose at work. In the internal e-mail bulletins that went round the organization, any job vacancies going were advertised. It was how Steve had found his present job. He scanned these bulletins regularly, rather in the way that someone who is perfectly content with their own home cannot help, all the same, glancing through property columns. A vacancy caught Steve’s eye, a vacancy on an island off the northwest coast of Scotland, an island famous in the bird world for its corncrakes. The job required several practical skills as well as knowledge of bird conservation, and the terms included a tied cottage at the southern end of the island. There was only a small community on the island itself but on the sister island, merely a short, tidal causeway away, there was a school. Steve was not someone given to romantic fantasies of any kind, but this possibility seemed, all of a sudden, to offer a potential solution to the intriguing and thwarting problem of what to do about Petra.

  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 i
dly 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 weeken
ds, 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.