Daughters-in-Law (16 page)

“He doesn’t,” Anthony said.

“I don’t,” Edward said a week later, when his mother confronted him.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Rachel said. “More women feel like that than don’t, after babies. It’s absolutely normal. It’s hormones. It shouldn’t be called depression.”

Edward looked away from her. He was consumed by a violent need to protect Sigrid and a dual fury with himself for letting his anxiety show and his mother for not keeping her mouth shut.

“There’s nothing the matter,” he said. “She just wanted her mother there after Mariella was born, and now she wants to be with her a bit longer. It’s what Dad said, about having your first baby in another language. That’s all.”

Rachel gave a small smile.

“I don’t believe you,” she said and Edward, goaded out of self-control by her astuteness and her refusal to restrain it, had yelled, “Mind your own bloody business!”

It might have been all right, Edward reflected now, drinking his wine and jingling his change, if the matter had been left there, if Rachel had been content with her definite if unacknowledged victory. But she had been unable to restrain herself, unable not to make it plain to Sigrid, after she and the baby were back from Sweden, that Sigrid’s parents were not the only grandparents, and furthermore that Mariella, being the first grandchild on either side, was of particular importance and significance. Then she had gone on to offer help, and support, and babysitting, and Sigrid, adamant with fury, had told Edward that if his mother didn’t leave the house instantly, and possibly forever, she would go straight back to Stockholm,
taking Mariella with her. And then, after Rachel had finally gone, Sigrid turned on Edward and accused him of disloyalty, and of telling his mother things he had promised her he would never tell anyone, and of being more attached to his family than he was to his wife and child.

So he hadn’t confessed. He hadn’t told her, then, that he had been so frightened by her suffering, so desperate not to add to it or be the cause of its ever happening again, that he had, when Mariella was ten weeks old, booked himself a vasectomy with Marie Stopes International and handed over his three hundred pounds with a determined conviction of doing the right thing for the right reasons in the right way.

The procedure had taken ten minutes.

“Your sex drive will be unaffected,” a doctor about his own age said to him. “You will produce the same amount of fluid, but devoid of sperm. We will test you in six months.”

After six months, he had still not told Sigrid. He had, in truth, no need to, because she came to bed in uncompromising pajamas and made it unequivocally plain that she did not want to be touched. He bore it until Mariella was almost one, and until sessions in the shower with himself had reached a pitch of disgusted pointlessness, and then he told her in a rush, blurted it all out, told her his sperm count was nil and that he was going mad.

She cried. She’d cried so much since Mariella was born that at first Edward thought exhaustedly, distractedly, that this was just more of the same. But she was smiling. Or at least, she was trying to smile, and she said a whole lot of stuff to him in Swedish, and then she said, in English, that he was wonderful, that she so appreciated what he’d done, but at the moment she had all the libido of a floorcloth. He could do what he liked, Sigrid said, laughing, sobbing, but he’d have to put up with her just lying there, a fish on a slab, a fish with a scar across its belly.

He finished his wine. God, it had taken ages. Years,
probably. Years of patience and frustration and knowing that seeking sex elsewhere would provide the brief heady release that comes with, say, losing your temper completely, only to be followed by a long, gray drag of remorse and regret and self-disappointment. He’d tried not to remember the Sigrid he’d met at that wild party at the University of Loughborough, the Sigrid who’d caused him to say, happily amazed, “Is it normal—I mean, is it okay—to have as much sex as this?” He’d tried to concentrate on love, on loving her, on adoring Mariella, on being a man who was not, as someone once said of persistent sexual desire, chained to a lunatic.

And now, here they all were. Mariella was eight and practicing the cello. Sigrid was the number two in a serious and highly regarded laboratory. He was well paid, professionally well thought of, and their marriage, if not what it had initially promised to be, was something he could not visualize being without. Maybe that was habit. Or maybe it was just . . . marriage. Maybe the seismic shocks of it left a kind of emotional scar tissue, but the body kept on functioning over and around the lumps and bumps with a dedicated optimism peculiar to the human race.

Edward turned back to the kitchen. Sigrid was by the sink, washing lettuce, and Mariella was leaning up against her from behind, as if to make sure that she couldn’t go anywhere. He felt, abruptly, rather unsteady, and that if he said anything his voice might come out choked, and a bit ragged, so he just stood there, holding his empty wineglass, and thinking that if all you really needed was love, then that was actually a very demanding and complicated recipe for human survival.

Later, Mariella summoned him to say good night to her. She was going through a phase of nagging for a dog, and had bought a dog whistle with some of her pocket money, which
she had attached to a glitter shoelace and hung from one of the knobs of her white-painted Swedish bedhead, and when she was ready for a good-night kiss, she blew it peremptorily.

She was sitting up in bed in spotted pajamas with her hair brushed into a smooth fair curtain. Her bed was full of her plush animals, and a revolving night-light was casting starry shapes across the walls and ceiling.

“Daddy,” Mariella said.

Edward sat down on her bed.

“Ouch,” she said, moving her feet.

“Wouldn’t you like to lie down?”

Mariella slid gingerly down in bed, in order not to disturb the animals.

“Daddy—”

“Yes.”

“This dog—”

“Darling, we’ve explained. Over and over. It wouldn’t be fair on a dog, with all of us out all day. Dogs hate it, being without company.”

“Okay then,” Mariella said, clasping her hands together, “we’d better think of something that’ll make you stay at home. Let’s have a baby.”

“Darling—”

“Look,” Mariella said, “I know what you have to do. I’ll go for a sleepover at Indira’s and you can just do it, you and Mummy. I really,
really
want a baby.”

Edward put a hand on the duvet over her stomach.

“Darling, it isn’t as simple as that—”

“You always say that.”

“Because,” Edward said, “it’s true.”

“Mummy said she didn’t have any more baby eggs—”

“That’s about it.”

“What if I don’t like being an only child?”

“Then,” Edward said unfairly, looking straight at her, “I would be very sad indeed.”

Mariella sighed. She lifted her hands and interlaced them in front of her face.

“Do you
have
to tell your parents everything?”

“When you’re a child, it’s quite a good idea to tell them most things. So they can help.”

“But you don’t really help,” Mariella said. “You just say no, no, this won’t work, that won’t work, you don’t do things that I know would help
me
.”

Edward leaned towards her. He put a hand either side of her head, sinking them into the pillow.

“You are a baggage, Mariella Brinkley.”

She glimmered up at him.

“When I’m big—”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have babies and dogs and probably a monkey.”

“Will I want to come and stay with you?”

Mariella raised her chin for a kiss.

“You’ll have to. To babysit everything while I go to work.”

Edward paused in the downward movement to kiss her.

“
Work?
Are you going to
work
?”

Mariella closed her eyes briefly, as if he was too tiresome to be borne.

“Of course I am,” she said.

In the kitchen, Sigrid was standing with the telephone in her hand.

Edward said, “Mariella is bent upon a career, and we’re going to look after her monkey while she does it.”

“I’d be glad to,” Sigrid said. She dropped the telephone back into its charger. “That was Charlotte.”

“What was—”

“On the telephone. While you were with Mariella.”

“Oh?”

Sigrid said, “She wants us to go to lunch. When your parents are there, the weekend after next.”

“Goodness. Not what we’re used to—”

“She sounded very excited.”

“What, about having us all to lunch?”

“Well,” Sigrid said, “about something. I don’t know what. It can’t have been about Ralph.”

“Why Ralph?”

Sigrid began to clear plates from the table.

“Ralph was there.”

“With Charlotte and Luke?”

“Yes.” She glanced at him. “I think he was a little bit drunk.”

Edward put his fists up against his forehead.

“Give me strength—”

“Charlotte said they would make him a bed on the sofa. She seemed to think it was funny.”

“I wish I did—”

The telephone rang again. Edward moved to pick it up, but Sigrid darted ahead of him, laying a hand on his arm as she passed, to deter him.

“Yes?” she said into the receiver and then, in a carefully neutral voice, “Oh. Rachel.”

Edward put his hand out automatically for the telephone. Sigrid smiled at him and turned her back.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” Sigrid said to her mother-in-law. “No, Edward is at a business dinner, and Mariella is in bed . . .”

There was a brief pause and then Sigrid said, “Edward worked so very hard to get Ralph this interview. It was not easy, in this climate.”

Edward came up behind Sigrid and slid his arms round her waist. To his relief, after a moment or two, she relaxed against him. He could hear his mother’s brisk tones from the telephone, as if he was listening to her through a wall, or from under bedclothes.

“I’m not aware,” Sigrid said, “that he has thanked Edward. I’m not aware that he knows the favor he has been done.”

Edward put his face into the angle of Sigrid’s neck and shoulder.

“I can’t help you, I’m afraid,” Sigrid said. “I’m sorry Petra is in the dark, too. I’m sure he’ll turn up. Maybe he is celebrating. Yes, yes, of course. I will tell Mariella. She would send kisses too, if she were awake. Yes, thank you. Love to you, love to Anthony.”

She clicked the phone off.

“You saved me,” Edward said into her neck.

“Only a very small save—”

“Why didn’t you suggest she ring Luke?”

Sigrid turned round in his arms.

“Because,” she said, “I didn’t feel like it.”

O
n the way to London, Rachel said she would drive. Anthony agreed, as she had known he would, so that he could sit silently beside her, half listening to Classic FM, and gazing out of the window at the clouds, and the passing landscape—even the townscape of northeast London—and she could drive and think.

She needed to think. She had tried to think for days, either alone, or out loud to Anthony, but Anthony had not wanted to participate in her thinking, and had evaded her, either, she supposed, because he didn’t know what to think himself, or because he was not of a mind to sympathize with her and had no inclination to fight about it. Anthony had never liked analysis, anyway. All their lives together, whenever there was a problem involving relationships, Anthony had worn the hunted expression of a dog required to walk on its hind legs, a bemused, slightly oppressed expression, and made for his studio. The most he would ever say, if Rachel pursued him with her need to dissect and ferret out an explanation, was, “Can’t we just see what happens? Can’t we just wait?”

Rachel knew she was bad at waiting. All her life, ever since the first self-awareness of childhood, she knew that the flip side of her marvelous energy was her impatience. Problems had the effect of firing her up like a rocket, impelling her to chase about in her mind, mentally darting hither and thither, to seek a solution that invariably involved her own zealous participation. Rachel’s mind and body thrived upon activity, upon practical and immediate answers to even intractable-seeming dilemmas, and, when she was thwarted of the opportunity to offer instant resolution, she found herself utterly devastated by her own helplessness. It was then, even after almost forty years of disappointed experience, that she turned to Anthony, and he, as usual, made it abundantly plain that he couldn’t help her.

It was always worse when the trouble was Ralph. Edward’s comparative orthodoxy and Luke’s relative youth and optimism made them both less of an anxiety to Rachel than Ralph. But Ralph was designed to cause anxiety, and was also designed to be completely oblivious to his capacity for being a constant small nagging worry to her, like an emotional tooth-ache, bearable much of the time but with a propensity to flare up without notice and cause agony. He had caused a bout of agony when the bank foreclosed on his borrowing, and, although the agony had abated at the prospect of a job interview, it had flared up again when Ralph had gone missing after being offered the job, and nobody had thought to tell Rachel that he was sleeping off a drinking binge on Luke’s sofa, and that he had no idea whatsoever how he was going to manage a working life that expected a minimum of twelve-hour days in an office that was almost three hours’ traveling time from his wife and children.