Daughters-in-Law (23 page)

Steve didn’t say anything in response, but he was smiling. He collected up the mugs and the mess on the table, and put it all in the chipped Belfast sink by the window—Petra’s nan had had a sink like that, veined with ancient cracks—and then he produced a flannel and ran it under the tap, and squeezed it out, and attacked the boys’ hands and faces with it, and they loved it, and shrieked, and squirmed to get away and then thrust themselves back at him for more.

He was not, Petra thought, surveying him, good-looking. He wasn’t tall enough, or well formed enough; he was too stocky and his eyes were too small and his ears were too big, but he was pleasing to look at all the same, because he inhabited himself so comfortably, he moved so quickly and nimbly, he had an air of flexible practicality. He turned from a deliberately exaggerated swipe of the cloth across Kit’s face and caught Petra’s eye. He smiled again easily. Petra smiled back. Then he threw the cloth towards the sink, and came round the table to where Petra was sitting and, without making any kind of drama out of it, leaned down and kissed her lightly on the mouth.

* * *

Charlotte’s sister, Sarah, said that she would come to London. She made it sound as if she was doing Charlotte a favor, but in truth she loved the chance of a day in London, and she especially liked Marylebone High Street, where Charlotte worked, because it had, she said to her husband, not just a fantastic bookshop, but an amazing charity bookshop too. Her husband, practiced over the years at hearing “books” and understanding “shoes,” nodded and said, have a good day anyway, and offered to collect the girls from school. He had just taken up flying lessons and was anxious to build up credit with Sarah for the hours and the expense that the new enthusiasm was going to require.

Sarah had agreed to meet Charlotte in a French café, with scrubbed tables and an acceptable Continental menu. Sarah had been to the bookshop, and had then bought a necklace and a sweater from the other shops, which she had added to the bookshop bag, which she hoped that Charlotte, who was notorious in her family for not reading anything other than magazines, would notice. But Charlotte, gorgeous in a small white skirt and a black smock top, with bell sleeves and a plunging neckline, was not in the frame of mind to notice anything except that she had an ally in the form of her sister. She came flying into the café and embraced Sarah with a fervor that suggested that they hadn’t seen each other for a year.

“Sarah, I am so pleased to see you, you can’t think what it’s been like, and I am absolutely starving. I’m absolutely starving
all
the time.”

Sarah, although joining in much of the family adoration of Charlotte in the past, took a more objective view of her younger sister these days. Charlotte, it seemed to her, had a propensity to go on trading on her small-child charms to an unacceptable degree, and it was time Charlotte realized that twenty-six wasn’t, actually, very young anymore, and that marriage wasn’t just a continuation of a pink-glitter wedding
day, but a serious undertaking involving adult conduct and compromise. She surveyed Charlotte across the table. Not only was her cleavage much on display, but she was wearing a large jeweled cross on a long chain round her neck, which only drew attention to it.

“You might thank me,” Sarah said, “for coming to London all of a sudden, to suit you.”

Charlotte looked up from the menu. Her eyes were huge.

“I do thank you—”

“I may only work part-time,” Sarah said, “but it isn’t always easy to get away, all the same.”

Charlotte took one hand away from the menu and put it on Sarah’s.

“Please don’t tick me off—”

“I’m not ticking you off, I’m just saying—”

“I know I’ve been a bit one-track-minded,” Charlotte said, “but it really got to me, it really did. And when people can’t be supportive, I just kind of crack up. That’s why I rang you. I rang you because of Luke. After . . . after, well, after he called me a nut-nut diva.”

Sarah stared at her.

“He
didn’t
—”

Charlotte paused. She took her hand off Sarah’s and looked down at the table.

“Well—”

“Charlotte,” Sarah said warningly.

“He didn’t . . . disagree—”

“He didn’t disagree with what?”

Charlotte put her hands on either side of her face, and stared hard at the table.

“Well, I was really upset, really crying after Luke told me that his father refused to ask his mother to apologize, and I lost my cool a bit, and I said to Luke that they were all ganging up
on me—which is what it feels like, Sarah—and treating me as if I was a nut-nut diva, and he didn’t contradict me. I mean, he said they weren’t ganging up, that he wasn’t ganging up, but he didn’t say I wasn’t a diva, he wouldn’t. He just went down to his studio, and when I went to the loo in the night and looked to see if the studio light was still on, it was, and it was two in the morning.”

“Char,” Sarah said.

Charlotte looked up slowly.

“What—”

“You are—”

“I’m what—”

“You are being a diva.”

Charlotte cried, “But you weren’t there; you don’t know what she said, how she sounded—”

Sarah leaned forward.

“Look, Char. I don’t know the woman, but she’s a mother-in-law. Nobody will ever be good enough for her boy. She’s really tactless, but she was just doing what people like her do. Remember our wedding? Chris’s mother wouldn’t even come, because it wasn’t in a church, and she insisted I’d bullied him out of a church wedding. I’d have been fine in a church; it was Chris who wouldn’t have it. He said he’d had enough of church in his childhood and he didn’t believe in God anyway. But he wouldn’t stand up to her, he let me do that. So I was the witch. It’s what happens. It’s what it’s like for lots of daughters-in-law.”

Charlotte regarded her solemnly. She fiddled with her cross. She said, “Mummy said she’d like to kill her.”

“That’s what she would say. That’s Mummy all over. That’s how I feel if anyone’s unkind to the girls.”

Charlotte said sadly, “What are you saying?”

“Just that you’re making too big a deal of it.”

“But—”

“But what?”

Charlotte leaned to meet her sister and said in a loud whisper, “I didn’t mean to get pregnant.”

Sarah waited a second, and then she said, “I know.”

Charlotte’s eyes filled with tears.

“Don’t cry,” Sarah said. “It’s not perfect. But it’s got some pluses. Two babies before you’re thirty, family done and dusted, get on with your life.”

Charlotte said, leaning back a little, “I don’t think Luke feels the same way about me—”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Charlotte said, looking back down at the table, “I sort of could do no wrong in his eyes. I mean, I held him off till he sorted the coke thing and he had to wait till I was finished with Gus, and everything. And now I haven’t got that . . . power anymore. He looks at me as if I’d disappointed him, as if he’d opened a Christmas present and found something that wasn’t what he’d been hoping for.”

Tempting though it was to say “Nonsense” in a brisk voice, Sarah found herself softened. She said, “He loves you, you know. Really loves you. This baby’s probably a bit of a bomb-shell for him too.”

“He hasn’t got to have it—”

Sarah looked at her sister. She said, “I was just beginning to feel sorry for you. Don’t spoil it.”

Charlotte smiled weakly. She said, “I’m a right mess, aren’t I?” She picked up a paper napkin and blotted her eyes. “I’m supposed to be a grown-up married lady, and I’m a mess.”

“Don’t bleat.”

“I’m not—”

“Charlotte,” Sarah said, “we’re all thrilled you married Luke, we think he’s lovely and the wedding was wonderful. But marriage isn’t just more of the same. And most of all, marriage
doesn’t happen in
public
. It’s not a sort of performance where you can ask the audience for help when you feel things aren’t going your way. You’ve got to sort it, together. You have no idea about my relationship with Chris, have you? It’s never entered your head. Well, it’s not a picnic, but we manage. And you’ll have to manage. You’ve got a nice guy and a nice place to live and you’re not on the breadline. Deal with it.”

Charlotte sighed.

“Okay,” she said.

“And now,” Sarah said, picking up the menu again, “let’s order lunch.”

Ralph had found a room to rent. Someone who was about to be a colleague had a flat off Finsbury Square that he wanted to himself at weekends when his girlfriend came over from Dublin, but which had a small second bedroom that he was happy to let out during the week. He said that, if Ralph just had showers, and only used the microwave, he thought fifty quid in cash, for four nights a week, would be fine, utility bills and council tax thrown in, no paperwork, no questions asked, how about it? Ralph looked at the room, decorated and furnished to be as impersonal and modern as a hotel, and thought it all looked more than acceptable. He lay down on the bed and looked up at the ceiling, with its tiny brilliant recessed lights, and felt a little thrill of excitement at the prospect of liberty. He had no intention of misusing it, he reassured Edward on the telephone, no stupid bad-lad behavior just because he was off the lead, but there’d be films, and reading, and working late, and a gym membership, and going to see his brothers, and all that good stuff, wouldn’t there? Edward, at the other end of the line, had not sounded convinced or reassured.

On the train back to Suffolk, Ralph thought about the room off Finsbury Square. Fifty quid a week was an amazing
bargain, especially for a power shower and a ten-minute walk to work. He thought about Kit and Barney, and how odd it would be without them, and how wonderful it would be to see them at weekends, and how he would make up for his week-night absences by getting them up, so that Petra could have a lie-in, and taking them out to do things that he never seemed to do at the moment, because every day was just an ordinary day, and one day was really indistinguishable from another. He marveled at how his energy and optimism had returned and how, instead of floundering through life like a half-dead zombie, he was now alert and eager for what lay ahead. At Ipswich station, he bought packets of chocolate buttons for the boys and looked for flowers to buy Petra. There were none. Never mind, he told himself, she grows flowers anyway, I’ll stop on the way home and buy a nice bottle of wine. We’ll have wine tonight and I’ll cook for her. In fact, I’ll cook at weekends from now on; we’ll have a whole new regime and outlook, and the money to pay for it. It’ll be like starting again.

Petra was in the bathroom when he got back, kneeling by the bath in order to soap Kit, who was sitting in four inches of water playing with a wind-up plastic frog. Barney, swaddled in an endearing hooded towel with ears, was sitting beside Petra on the bath mat absorbed in a cloth book whose pages squeaked when he pressed certain places. Ralph heard their voices as he came up the stairs, and he could tell they were happy from the sound of them, and, when he came in, and they all looked up and saw him, and the boys squealed, he felt an elating rush of certainty that life was going to stop being a trudge across a plateau, and transform itself instead into a gallop across a plain towards a mountain range of sheer promise.

He bent, holding his tie back with one hand, to kiss Petra and Kit, and then he picked Barney up from the floor and sat down with him on his knee on the closed lid of the lavatory.

“Good day?” Petra said.

“Very. And you?”

“We went to the sea!” Kit said, scrambling to the end of the bath to be near to his father. He spread his arms. “It was this big! And full of stones!”

Ralph laughed. He said to Barney, “What about you, fat Buddha?”

Barney offered him his book. Ralph accepted it and began to press the pages obediently.

“Lots to tell you,” he said to Petra.

“Great. When the boys are in bed—”

“Read to me!” Kit commanded. He dropped the frog and began to scramble out of the bath. “Read to me, Daddy, read to me, read to me—”

“Of course I will—”

“My digger book—”

“Could we have a change, maybe, from the digger book?”

Petra wound Kit into a towel.

“Give Daddy a break. Give him a break from the digger book, hey?”

“Nah!”

“No!” said Barney delightedly. He gazed up at his father. “Nah!”

Ralph looked down at him. He looked completely winning, beaming up at his father, displaying his tiny perfect teeth from under his pointed toweling hood. Ralph felt a rush of love for him, for all of them, for his whole little family, gathered safely round him in their shabby bathroom. He dropped a kiss on Barney’s head.

“Of course I’ll read the digger book,” he said.

Later, in the kitchen, he unwrapped the wine from its cocoon of brown paper.

“Wow,” Petra said. “What are we celebrating?”

“Lots of things,” Ralph said. “And I’m cooking.”

“I’ve done it—”

“Done it?”

“Almost. Just a risotto.”

“I love risotto,” Ralph said. “I love your risotto. Of course, I’d have cooked, but really, I like your cooking.”

Petra put two wineglasses on the table.

“So the meeting was okay?”

“It was more than okay. I met all the analysis team, all good, all seemed fine, and one of them offered me a room. Fifty quid a week! Ten minutes from the office. Perfect.”

Petra stopped moving. She was tipping mushrooms onto a board from a paper bag, and she stopped, the bag in her hand with most of the mushrooms still in it.

“A room?”

Ralph looked up from inserting the screw of the corkscrew into the top of the wine bottle.

“Yes, babe. A room. Like we agreed.”

“Did we?”

Ralph began to turn the corkscrew.

“You know. You said I’d better have my freedom—”

“Yes.”

“Well, you meant it, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Petra said.

“So I’m taking a room on the edge of the City during the week and I’ll be back at weekends, and you can stay here with the boys, like you wanted.”

He pulled the cork out and straightened up, smiling at her.