Daughters-in-Law (20 page)

“Do. Thanks,” Ralph replied laconically, and clicked “Send.” Having been so hard, and painful and frustrating, life suddenly seemed to be smoothing out, rolling away in front of him in a manner it hadn’t done for ages. He didn’t actually want to live in a semidetached house in a featureless street near Ipswich station, but that prospect, at the moment, seemed merely dimmed by the brightness of all the other things on offer that were suddenly, wonderfully, making him feel that he was being released into an immense space of brilliant blue air, where he could soar and spin and dive. He thought that, with lungfuls of that liberty and energy and chances for achievement inside him, he could well endure reducing himself to weekends in a mildly unsympathetic place. Anyway, there was a hundred-foot garden. In Aldeburgh, they had no more than a scruffy little yard, backing onto a pebble-dashed garage wall. A hundred feet of garden was enough to kick a ball, hit a ball, have more vegetable space than there was in the allotment.

He put Rachel’s e-mail printout down in front of Petra.

“What d’you think?”

Petra peered at it.

“It’s okay—”

“It’s seven minutes’ walk from the station.”

Petra nodded. She stopped looking at the house particulars and picked up her trug. There were new potatoes in it, whitish yellow and the size of walnuts.

“There’s a hundred-foot garden,” Ralph said. “For a football goal. And veg. South-facing.”

Petra tipped the potatoes into the sink.

“Nice,” she said.

“Want a beer?”

“No thanks.”

“It’s not especially attractive, I know, but the location’s perfect. Schools, station, everything.”

Petra ran water into the sink. She said, “Have you said good night to the kids?”

“Yes,” Ralph said.

Petra turned round.

“You haven’t—”

“Okay,” Ralph said, “but I will.”

“Stop looking at that stuff—”

“I was just thinking—”

“Don’t,” Petra said. “Go and see Kit. He’s in bed. He’ll be waiting.”

Ralph stood up. He was wearing, Petra noticed, a T-shirt she had never seen before. It was bright white, with a little discreet dark logo on the left breast. And he’d shaved. Petra hadn’t seen him this clean-shaven in months.

“Hon, just think about this—”

Petra turned back to the sink. She said, “We had a good end to the day. At the allotment. It was a relief, after what happened.”

Ralph wasn’t listening. He was standing by the table, in his white corporate T-shirt, lost in some place other than the one he was actually in.

“Kit pulled my hair,” Petra said, rumbling the potatoes round the sink to rinse off the earth, “really hard. I mean, it really hurt, he pulled it so hard. I don’t know if he meant to, maybe he just wanted to see how you get hair out of a head, or something, but I screamed, and I must have frightened him because he rushed across the room and pulled Barney’s hair, and then Barney screamed. So I picked Barney up and cuddled him, and I ignored Kit, and then Barney got furious and I could see he was furious with me for not punishing Kit, just ignoring him. What do you think I should have done?”

“Um?” Ralph said absently.

“I mean,” Petra said, “you could see Barney wanted justice, you could see he really wanted it, he wanted me to—to
stab
Kit, or something.”

There was a silence. Then Ralph said, from far away, “You could hardly do
that
, could you?”

Petra pulled the plug out of the sink.

“I went on cuddling Barney and then Kit started whining. He whined all the time, for hours, until we went to the allotment. Then he was okay.”

“Oh, good,” Ralph said.

Petra picked up a tea towel draped across the back of a chair. She said, looking at the e-mail printout on the table, “It’s no good.”

“What isn’t?”

“I’m not living there.”

Ralph gave her a wide smile.

“It’s pretty ordinary, I know. I’m sure we can find something else—”

“I’m not living in Ipswich,” Petra said.

Ralph said patiently, “I need to be near a station.”

Petra dried her hands. Then she draped the tea towel back over the chair.

“I can’t,” she said.

Ralph looked right at her.

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t,” Petra repeated. “I can’t leave it. I can’t leave the sea.”

C
harlotte’s mother was at her painting table, with a dahlia. Dahlias had fallen so far out of fashion, it seemed, that they were now on trend, bang on trend. At least, that’s what Charlotte had told her when she brought a bunch of them the day before, a gaudy strident bunch of them, orange and purple and scarlet and yellow. Charlotte had bought them, she said, in the flower market near their flat, which was apparently a famous Sunday flower market where you could also buy the world’s best bread, and coffee, and cupcakes, and Charlotte said she couldn’t get enough cupcakes just now, and Luke had bought her a whole box, and then a hat from the next-door shop because he said a hat would still fit her, however huge she got. And then Charlotte had burst into tears all over her mother and told her what Luke’s mother had said to her, and how she hadn’t been able to sleep the night after, and she still didn’t know whether to be more hurt than angry.

Marnie had, after giving the dahlias a long drink, laid a single yellow one on a piece of white paper in order to examine the extraordinarily precise structure of its petals. It was as if it
had been made of origami, so symmetrical and deeply three-dimensional was it. It would be a challenge to draw it, but a pleasurable challenge. When she had had a long and careful look, she would put the dahlia into the special small bronze clamp that Charlotte’s father had designed and had made for her, and begin on the lengthy and exact process of drawing the flower before she painted it. She had been painting flowers since before Charlotte’s sisters were born. She had started because Charlotte’s father, although generous to a fault, had preferred to support her entirely, but had also acknowledged that she must, of course, have a life of her own outside the house and garden. Marnie, pregnant with Fiona, who was now thirty-five, had enrolled in a course that taught botanical drawing. She had been the best in her class. Charlotte’s father had been so very proud of her. He had also, Marnie was aware even if she did not say so, felt justified; if she had been working, she would not have had the chance to be the best botanical artist in her area. Would she?

Charlotte’s father was called Gregory, and he had been ten years older than Marnie, and a partner in a local firm of solicitors that he had joined as soon as he qualified. He was eager to have children but disappointed not to produce sons. He was extremely kind to Marnie after each of his three daughters’ births, and gave her carefully chosen special pieces of jewelry to commemorate the occasions—garnets, for Charlotte, which were possibly Marnie’s least favorite stone—but she knew he was disappointed. He never said so outright, but he was the kind of man whose conduct and vocal inflections carried far more meaning than his words, and Marnie knew that he was longing for another Gregory to take his place, as he had taken his father’s, and his father had taken his own father’s: four generations of Gregory Webster-Smiths with deep and affectionate links to the beech-covered hills of Buckinghamshire.

Even during his long last illness, during which Marnie had nursed him tirelessly, he repeated frequently that he was dying a happy man, in the tones of a defiantly dissatisfied one. He even said, once, after a day in which the pain had been hard to manage and they were both worn out by it, that he knew that it was not her fault that all their children had been girls. But he managed to say it in a way that induced only guilt and regret in Marnie, and she had wept helplessly into the chicken consommé she was heating up for him in the hope that he would accept even a spoonful of it.

She had wept a great deal too after he died. She had been married for almost forty years, and he was leaving her with a pleasant house and enough money, which she had done nothing to earn, even if she had contributed immeasurably in less quantifiable ways. She was used to him, used to being a wife, and she wasn’t at all sure how she would—even could—make the transition to being a widow. Apart from anything else, she was bone-tired after three long years of steady nursing, and seemed to have lost herself in the process of sublimating herself to Gregory’s personality in illness. For well over a year after his death, she moved about the house mindlessly, forgetting what she had gone upstairs for, carrying a ball of string pointlessly from room to room, gazing out of the window down the lawn to the pond without taking anything in. And then Charlotte, her lovely, adorable Charlotte, who had been such an anxiety to her father because he believed her looks could only spell trouble, came home one weekend, lit up like a Christmas tree, and said, almost before she was in the door, that she had met someone. Seriously.

Her announcement had the effect of waking Marnie from her post-Gregory trance. It galvanized her. Both Charlotte’s older sisters, Fiona and Sarah, rang each other constantly to say what a relief, isn’t it amazing, can you believe, have you
ever
seen Mummy like this? Everybody adored Luke of course, so good-looking, so tall, so besotted with Charlotte, so sweet to Fiona and Sarah’s children, so polite to Marnie, such a good tennis player, so interesting to have Anthony Brinkley as a father. Marnie’s house ceased, almost overnight, to be a place resonant with Gregory’s powerful ailing presence and the girls’ long-gone childhoods and became the energetic headquarters for a wedding. Charlotte wanted everything—frock, marquee, cake, flowers, speeches, champagne—that Marnie could have wished, that she had had herself, that Fiona and Sarah had had, although in modified form, since Fiona’s husband had been on brief leave from the navy, and Sarah’s husband had refused to be married in anything but specifically secular circumstances. The registry office in Beaconsfield had done the ceremony beautifully, of course, with great dignity, but Sarah wore a short dress and her husband was in a lounge suit and there was a distinct absence of—well, magic was the word, really. But Charlotte wanted magic. She wanted magic by the sparkling bucketload, and she had looked to her mother, as trustingly as she had looked to her for praise or comfort when she was small, to give it to her.

And she had. She knew she had. Marnie could still look back on Charlotte’s wedding day with complete satisfaction, just as she could look back on the months that preceded it with the pleased certainty that the house had come alive again, that the children and their children were constantly there, that the tradition of Webster-Smith hospitality—Gregory had been famous as a host—was as vigorous and welcoming as ever. It had been a wonderful summer. The spare beds hardly seemed to have had time to cool between occupants. The fridge was full of beers, and there was a liter bottle of vodka in the freezer. Guiltily, Marnie sometimes wondered if she had ever been so happy.

But now this. Now Charlotte—who it transpired had already been pregnant even before her wedding day—was sobbing in Marnie’s arms about how unkind Rachel had been to her. Marnie didn’t know Rachel very well—there had been only a couple of elaborately orchestrated meetings before the big day—but she had struck Marnie as the kind of person she would expect Luke’s mother to be. In Marnie’s experience, mothers of sons were, broadly speaking, either excessively feminine or forthright and capable. Rachel had seemed to fall into the latter category, and although Marnie had never seen her house she knew Charlotte was impressed by its bohemian ease and color and the way life revolved around cooking and painting. Charlotte was awed by Anthony’s studio. Marnie had never ever considered a studio. Gregory had bought her a pretty rosewood table—reproduction, but beautifully made—that fitted into the deep bay window of the sitting room. He said that, while he was watching racing, or golf, or cricket on the television, in the afternoon, as he liked to do, she could paint at her table, across the room from him, and that way they could be together.

Rachel, Charlotte said angrily, had asked her if they couldn’t wait to start a family.

“She didn’t say it in a nice voice,” Charlotte said. “She said it as if she was furious. As if she was . . .
disgusted
with us. She thinks we’re careless. She sounded as if we’d kind of insulted her, let her down.”

“I expect,” Marnie said carefully, “that it wasn’t what she’d planned for you—”

They were together on the big sofa in the sitting room, Charlotte half lying against her mother. The sofa was in a different place from where it had been in Gregory’s day, and so was the television and the chair he used to sit in to watch it, which now had a new cover in a bold russet check, which
Fiona had chosen for her, advised by a friend who had a small soft-furnishings business.

“She had no business to make plans for us!” Charlotte cried. She blew her nose and pressed her face against her mother’s arm. “It’s not her life! It’s ours! And . . . she sounded so horrible. Her voice was horrible.”