Authors: Joanna Trollope
R
alph, Edward gathered, had done well in his interview. Which was a relief. In fact, it was an enormous relief since Edward, having arranged the interview, had had severe subsequent apprehensions about the way Ralph might put himself across, and simultaneous pangs of guilt for his disloyalty in fearing that his brother might let him down. Ralph could not, in truth, be relied upon to be orthodox, or even, on occasion, particularly polite. He might turn up unshaven and unironed, in sneakers, and behave as if he was auditioning for an edgy indie band rather than the analysis team of a small, Swiss-owned bank that had managed to keep its sober nose clean during all the upheavals caused by what the French-speakers among Edward’s colleagues called
la crise
.
But Ralph had worn a suit, and a tie, and the clarity and speed of his thinking had distracted Aidan Bennett, who was his principal interviewer, from the fact that his hair was over his collar and oddly rough, and his shirt cuffs seemed to have neither buttons nor links. Ralph had also, Aidan indicated to Edward, been extremely candid about his past history,
explaining that he had put most of the money he had made in Singapore into his Internet business and had lost it, partly, he said frankly, because of the downturn and his bank’s behavior, but also partly, he thought, because his skills were intellectual and catalytic, rather than managerial. He had admitted that he liked problems, he liked unraveling difficulties and discovering the reasons for their having happened. Problems, mental problems, suited him, he said.
“I liked him,” Aidan said to Edward.
Edward nodded, trying to look as if he’d been quietly certain of that all along.
“He’d fit in well with the Southeast Asia analysis team, especially in relationship to business in the U.S.,” Aidan said. “We could do with that sort of sudoku mind.” He glanced at Edward. “It would be long hours, of course. Not really possible to do daily from the east coast unless you’re a travel junkie.”
“I don’t expect,” Edward said untruthfully, “that that’ll be a problem—”
“He’s not at all like you.”
“No—”
“In any way.”
Edward said, faintly nettled, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Only that he wasn’t what I was expecting.”
“Is that a compliment? To me, I mean?”
Aidan surveyed him for a second or two. Then he put a well-cared-for hand briefly on Edward’s shoulder.
“Not really,” he said.
Edward found Ralph in the wine bar next to the bank, with two junior members of the analysis team. They were drinking Peroni out of the bottle, and Ralph looked as easy with them as if they’d been working together for years.
“How’d it go?”
Ralph tipped his bottle towards his brother.
“Good. I’m good.”
“Ade liked him,” one of the juniors said. “He didn’t bother with the charm. That’s Ade all over. Only charming when he’s about to give you the hair-dryer treatment.”
Edward nodded. He said to Ralph, “Well, I don’t think you should count yourself in just yet—”
“I don’t, bro.”
“It may take a few days. There are other people to ask—”
“I know. Want a drink?”
“Well,” Edward said, “I was thinking of heading home. Are you coming back for the night? I think Sigi’s expecting you.”
Ralph put his bottle down.
“Sorry—”
“Have you got to get back?”
“Later,” Ralph said.
“Come back for supper at least,” Edward said.
One of the other men signaled to the barman for another round.
“I think,” Ralph said, “I’ll just stay put for a while. Thank you, though, and all that.”
Edward hesitated. He wanted to ask Ralph if he didn’t want to tell him, in some detail, about how the interview had gone. He also wanted to say, don’t you want to see your sister-in-law, and your niece, but felt too exposed, especially in front of two men who were both in Aidan Bennett’s team, and also very much junior to him. He looked hard at Ralph.
“Sure?”
Ralph smiled at him. He seemed like someone who had come through a considerable crisis and been rewarded by the assurance of an unexpectedly good future.
“Quite sure. Thanks, bro.”
Edward took a step back. Were the thanks for the interview, or for the supper invitation—or for neither? Was Ralph, in fact, telling him to leave him alone? A small spurt of fury at his brother’s lack of grace flared inside him.
“I’ll leave you,” he said, glaring, “to your new friends.”
“The minute I was out on the pavement,” Edward said to Sigrid an hour later, “I wished I’d pushed him. I wished I’d made him come home with me.”
Sigrid was laying the table. On weekdays, in term time, Sigrid tried to insist that Edward was home by seven thirty so that Mariella could eat supper with them and they could ask her about her day. Not that she wanted to tell them much. For Mariella, school was still something that you just had to do, every day, like brushing your teeth, or feeding your goldfish, but not something that constituted your real life, which was waiting for you outside school hours. And in the holidays, as it now was, Mariella spent the days with her friend Indira, whose mother also worked full-time, being looked after by a student earning some vacation money, and devising the kind of elaborate and inconsequential games with Indira that did not, definitely, stand up to parental examination over supper. All Mariella wanted to know, every evening, was whether her mother was going—as she occasionally did—to take the day off from work and devote herself to Mariella, all day, from waking up to going to sleep again, and with her mobile phone on silent into the bargain. If one of those rare days was promised, Mariella was all animation over supper, and invented extraordinary adventures and conversations that she had shared with Indira, despite the oppressive presence of Tanya, who only wanted to be back in Leeds with her boyfriend, and not tediously in charge of two conspiratorial little girls who insisted that they
were never obliged by their parents to eat meals at a table. But if Sigrid was working the following day, as usual, Mariella simply watched her steadily throughout supper to see if, somehow, she might change her mind.
Sigrid said, placing the candles, which were an integral part of her table laying, “I hadn’t really expected him—”
“I just rather hoped, you know. After I’d got him the interview. Is that Mariella practicing her cello?”
“Arpeggios,” Sigrid said briefly.
“Ralph—”
“Is rude,” Sigrid said.
Edward shrugged.
“Maybe he was just relishing not being around at home for tea, bath, bed. Time off.”
Sigrid put clean cotton napkins beside their three plates.
“He had the same upbringing as you. But he is not the same.”
“Not conventional—”
“Not connected,” Sigrid said. “A little bit autistic, I would say.”
Edward opened the fridge door and took out a half-empty wine bottle. He held it up inquiringly.
“Please,” Sigrid said.
“If Mum rings,” Edward said, opening a cupboard door in search of glasses, “I’ll simply say that she’ll have to ask him how today went.”
“Or not answer the phone—”
Edward turned to look at her.
“Oh, I couldn’t do that—”
Sigrid sighed.
“You’ve done enough. You got him an interview for the right kind of job, and he seems to have done quite well, but he has not thanked you and he has not wanted to talk to you about it; he would rather drink with two strangers.”
“Are you cross?”
“With him, yes,” Sigrid said. “With your family sometimes. With your mother more than with your father.”
“Because of—?”
“Maybe.”
“Sigi,” Edward said, “that was such a long time ago. And we never told them. Not properly, anyway. You can’t blame them for not knowing something they were never told.”
The sounds of the arpeggios in the sitting room stopped suddenly.
“She has done fifteen minutes,” Sigrid said, “as I told her.”
The kitchen door opened.
“Finished,” Mariella said triumphantly.
“Some scales now?”
“Completely not.”
“Five minutes—”
“Oh no, please, oh please no, oh no,
no
—”
“Five minutes,” Sigrid said. “I am coming in, to hear you.”
“Will you stay the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“Every second till I stop?”
“Yes,” Sigrid said.
Mariella looked at her father. “If she comes back in here,” she said sternly, to him, “send her
right
back to me.”
Edward took his wine to the glass doors at the back of the kitchen that led out onto a deck above the small paved garden where Mariella had a netball hoop screwed to the wall that backed onto the house behind them. When she was a baby, they had discussed the possibility of moving farther out to a bigger house in a suburb, where there would be a lawn for Mariella to play on, and maybe a tree for a swing, and even bushes, to make camps in. But Edward had soon seen that such
a project would never be more than a topic to play with, that Sigrid was, in a way, humoring him, trying to be normal, trying to persuade him—and herself—that she hadn’t spent the first year of Mariella’s life battling with the most profound and frightening of depressions, but had managed instead to take every change easily in her stride, as she would have wished to have done.
The glass doors stood open to the deck. There were a couple of wooden armchairs on the deck, but Edward stayed in the doorway, leaning one shoulder against the frame, the hand that wasn’t holding his wineglass in his trouser pocket, restlessly sifting his change. He took a swallow. That had been a terrible year. Well, more than a year, really, if you took into account the end of a difficult pregnancy and the slow unhappy settling of Sigrid’s hormones, and her insistence, her absolute insistence, that Rachel and Anthony should not know what was the matter, should not know what a bungled and appallingly prolonged birth Mariella’s had been, ending in an emergency Caesarean operation because the heart monitor showed—had shown for far too long, in Edward’s view—that the baby was becoming acutely distressed.
“Never again,” Sigrid said.
She was lying on her side in the hospital bed, turned away from him.
“No—”
“I may be a coward, but I cannot do that again, I
cannot
—” The obstetrician had told Edward that a complicated first birth seldom affected subsequent births. But this, Edward felt, was no moment for pointing this out. Sigrid was weeping. She did not seem to want to try to feed Mariella. She wept and wept and told Edward that she was a bad mother, she knew it, she was bad through and through, a bad mother was the worst kind of badness there was, and there was nothing she could
do about it, nothing, and please don’t give her the baby, don’t, because it just made her feel worse, just made her realize how bad, bad, bad she was.
Sigrid’s mother, the doctor, had arrived from Stockholm. Edward had been thankful, just thankful, to see her. She had been very kind to Edward, and steady, and very firm with the hospital, and she had put Sigrid and Mariella on a plane and taken them both back to Stockholm, where they had stayed for three months. Edward had flown out most weekends to hold his daughter and feed her and change her and to have Sigrid tell him that he must not come near her, and that she was a bad mother.
“Never again,” she said, over and over.
And all the time, all during those alarming months, Edward was faced with protecting Sigrid from his parents knowing what was the matter, and with protecting his parents from knowing that they were being excluded from what was the matter.
“It’s that mother of hers,” Rachel said. “Chilly woman. She was chilly at the wedding, remember?”
“It’s hard to have a baby in another language, especially a first baby—”
“She has us,” Rachel said. She looked at Edward. “She has you.”
“Childbirth is different—”
Rachel had looked at Anthony.
“What do you think?”
“I hope,” Anthony said, “she’ll come home soon. We can look after her here. We’d love to look after her here. We’d love to have the baby.”
“I expect she’s jealous,” Rachel said. “I expect she resents Sigi marrying an Englishman and having an English family. Not that Sigi seems to want an English family much. She seems to insist on being so Swedish when’s she’s with us—”
“She
is
Swedish,” Edward said. He thought gratefully, and with simultaneous regret, of the ordered calm of the flat in Stockholm, of the long windows and the pale floors and furniture, and the quiet, decided way that Sigrid’s mother spoke to her daughter. It was so different from the house he had grown up in, so different from his parents’ random, enthusiastic hospitality to all his friends, so different from the color and chaos and opinionated, loudly expressed conversations. He longed for Sigrid to be home, yet he dreaded her leaving Stockholm. He looked at his mother, ladling a Spanish-inspired stew into pottery bowls, and wished urgently that he could tell her that Sigrid was very ill, and had forbidden anyone in England but him to know.
“He thinks we don’t know,” Rachel said to Anthony later.
“Well, we don’t
know
—”
“
I
know,” Rachel said. “We’re forbidden to go to the hospital, Sigrid gets carried off to Stockholm, Edward looks like a ghost and plainly wants to tell us things he’s been forbidden to mention. What on earth could that be, unless Sigrid had an awful time and now has severe baby blues?”
“Maybe,” Anthony said reluctantly, “there’s something the matter with the baby.”
Rachel shook her head.
“Nope. It’s Sigrid. It hasn’t gone as she thought it would, and she doesn’t want us to know.”
Anthony got up from where he was sitting, and came over to Rachel and planted his hands on her shoulders.
“Rach—”
“What?”
“Rachel, if Sigrid and Edward make it plain that they don’t want us to know, we
don’t
know it. D’you hear me? We don’t know a thing.”
Rachel sat very still.
“We do not know,” Anthony repeated.
“Okay,” Rachel said reluctantly. And then, “Even if Edward obviously wants us to know?”