Daughters-in-Law (29 page)

“Oh,
yes
!”

Sigrid smiled at her.

“Is it so very boring here?”

“Well,” Mariella said, “it would have been better, really, if Daddy had been here too.”

Ralph had laid all his suits for London out on the double bed. He couldn’t think of it, anymore, as “our” bed, even though they still shared it, turned away from each other, and lined up along the edges in case a stray foot or knee should touch by mistake. Ralph had considered moving out, to sleep with Kit, or on the sofa downstairs, but anger kept him in his own bed, just as anger was revving him up to leave for London as soon as he possibly could. Edward, sensing this rage, had agreed that he could occupy their small guest room—it doubled as
Sigrid’s study—in order to get away from Aldeburgh as soon as possible.

“I’m going crazy,” Ralph had said to Edward, “living here. Crazy. And every time I try and talk to her, I get crazier.”

The problem was, really, that Petra was hiding nothing.

“Are you still seeing him?”

“Yes.”

“Are you”—pause—“sleeping with him?”

“No.”

“Are you”—shouting—“going to?”

“Maybe,” Petra said.

“What d’you mean, maybe?”

Petra was at the kitchen table, drawing, her hair hanging, her face mostly hidden.

“I don’t fancy him much,” Petra said to her sketchbook, “but maybe. I dunno.”

Ralph placed his hands flat on the table and lowered his shoulders in order to see her face.

“Look at me!”

Slowly, Petra looked up.

“Why,” Ralph said, trying to control himself, “do you have to see him at
all
?”

Petra waited a moment, and then she said, “I got lonely.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“You couldn’t hear me,” Petra said.

“Why didn’t you tell Mum and Dad?”

Petra bent her head again.

“They’d have wanted to do something. They’d have wanted
me
to do something—”

“But”—shouting again—“you
have
done something!”

“But I chose it,” Petra said to her drawing.

Ralph sat down heavily in a chair opposite Petra. He said, “What d’you feel about me?”

“What I have always done.”

“Which is?”

“I like you,” Petra said. “You’re cool.”

“But—”

“But you’ve changed. You want things I don’t want now. I can’t change, just to suit you.”

Ralph sprawled across the table and laid his head in his arms.

“Oh my God—”

Petra said nothing.

Ralph said wearily, “I haven’t changed, but if we’re going to live and eat, there has to be money, and I’ve been given a chance to earn some. How are you going to look after the boys without money, for God’s sake? And, as you have no job, it has to be me. I cannot believe how . . . how
obtuse
you are.”

Petra said, “I don’t want that sort of money.”

“Christ—”

“I don’t need to live in this kind of place. I don’t need a car. It’s nice to have, but I’d manage. I like things small. I always have.”

Ralph said sarcastically, “Oh, so my parents’ generosity was repulsive to you, was it?”

Petra looked up. She said sharply, “They wanted to do what they’ve done.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m not a complete fool. They’ve been lovely to me, but I’ve suited them.”

“You ungrateful little
cow
.”

Petra stood up, holding her notebook.

“It’s not worth it,” she said.

“What isn’t?”

“It’s not worth people being kind to you. They always want so much back.”

“But not,” Ralph said, “lover boy.”

Petra turned.

“He’s easy.”

“And I’m not—”

“No. You’re not.”

“Then why don’t you bloody go and live with him!”

Petra began to move towards the doorway to the hall.

“I don’t want to. I might, in time, but I don’t want to right now. It’s just that he’s on my side, he doesn’t tell me what to do, he just talks to the kids and digs the spuds and I don’t have to—” She stopped.

“Don’t have to what?”

“
Earn
my existence all the time,” and then she’d gone out, and he could hear her going slowly up the stairs and into their bedroom, and then a couple of thuds as she took off her shoes and dropped them on the floor.

He sat there, for a long time, at the kitchen table. He was not going, he told himself, to go back over everything. He was not going to revert to the Ralph who’d come back from Singapore with all those impractical, dreamy notions of sustaining a solitary life, somehow, in an empty cottage on the North Sea, with only wind and gulls for company. Even if he’d wanted to go back, he couldn’t, in fact, because the money he had brought with him from Singapore had all gone on his failed business, and all he owned now was a small part of the house in which he now sat, which he no longer wanted—if he ever actually had—and nor did Petra. Most of it belonged to the building society, and in his present mood they were welcome to it. They could have the house and the car and the piecemeal furniture and all he would ask them to leave was the clothes he needed to take to London for this job that was going to give him his life back, his sense of self. And only then, when he was back on top, and not crushed underneath, could he begin the
battle to gain custody of his children. Because that’s what he wanted. He was sure of that. He wanted his boys. Petra wasn’t fit to bring up a . . .
goldfish
.

When he had finally gone upstairs that night, Petra was not in their bed. He found her instead in Kit’s bed, and Kit had flung an arm across her in his sleep, and they were lying facing each other, almost nose to nose. Across the room, Barney was snuffling in his cot, stout legs and arms spread-eagled, his thick lashes astonishing on his cheeks.

Ralph stood in the dark bedroom between his sleeping family, and felt something so close to the panic of despair that the only solution he could think of was to force it down with a big hit of anger. It was Petra he was angry with, of course it was, Petra who refused to compromise, refused to understand, refused to be reasonable, refused to
grow up
. It was Petra who had made Kit such a fragile child, it was Petra who had taken all the Brinkleys’ open-handed generosity until, on a whim, it didn’t suit her to see it as generosity anymore, but only as oppression and control and obligation. It was Petra who couldn’t support or admire what he was doing, to look after them all. Hell, she couldn’t even iron a bloody
shirt
properly. It was Petra—

He had to stop himself. He was shaking, and his fists had clenched. He could not go on being so furious, it was exhausting him, diverting his vital energies, obsessing him. He couldn’t understand Petra any more than she claimed not to be able to understand him, so maybe it was better that they were apart, and the sooner the better. He had to subdue the impulse to hurl her physically out of Kit’s bed, and resolved instead to use all that urgent energy towards this new start, that was going to give him, after months of feeling he was fighting under a blanket, focus and purpose and discipline.

He went out of the boys’ bedroom and closed the door
behind him. He made himself stand on the landing and breathe slowly and deeply six times. Edward had said he could come up to London on Saturday, but he thought he would ring in the morning and say he needed to come now,
now
, and if Edward couldn’t have him, for some reason, then he’d find a hotel. Anything. Anything was better than this.

He took down their only big suitcase from the dusty top of the wardrobe. It bore the bashes of many journeys, and the shreds of old baggage-handling labels. He put it on the bed and opened it. There was an old spray bottle of insect repellent inside, and he picked it up and sniffed it, and the smell made him feel suddenly rather tearful. He threw the bottle towards the wastebin beside the chest of drawers, and began to make rapid, methodical piles of shirts and socks and boxer shorts, emptying drawers with speed, to purge himself of all animation that was other than constructive and forward-looking. And then he got into the half of the bed that wasn’t occupied by the suitcase and lay there, panting slightly, and listening to his heart racing away under his rib cage, as if it was just a useful, purposeful muscle, and not the seat, really, of any emotion at all.

S
igrid tucked Mariella up in the bed that had been hers when she was a child. The bed was now in her mother’s study, and used as a daybed, piled with cushions covered in modern graphic designs, but it still had its old wooden headboard with its row of cut-out hearts, and on the wall above it still hung the Carl Larsson prints that Sigrid had loved as a child, depicting idylls of Swedish nineteenth-century country life, complete with apple orchards full of geese and little girls in kerchiefs and pinafores. Otherwise the room was as streamlined and uncluttered as the rest of the apartment. Such papers as were on her mother’s desk were in a black lacquered tray, her pens were in a matching pot, the books and files on her shelves upright and orderly. On the walls hung a small abstract oil painting and framed photographs of her family, including Mariella in a life jacket, on her grandfather’s knee outside the cottage on the island.

Mariella was leaning back against crisp striped pillows, holding a puzzle made of plastic tubes that her engineer grandfather had made for her. The tubes were linked in such a way that
there was only one sequence of separation that could part them, and Sigrid’s father had declined even to give Mariella a clue as to how to achieve it. Sigrid had offered to read to—or with—Mariella, maybe something suitably Baltic like Tove Jansson, but Mariella was absorbed in her puzzle. Morfar always set her challenges, just as Mormor always made her an apple cake, and rising to these challenges was something Mariella liked to do. It was, Sigrid supposed, a form of safe family flirting.

She bent and kissed Mariella.

“Sleep tight. I’ll send Mormor to kiss you too.”

Mariella went on twisting.

“In ten minutes.”

“Why ten minutes?”

“I’ll have done this by then—”

“Will you?”

“Yes,” Mariella said with emphasis.

Sigrid left the study door ajar, and walked down the central corridor of the apartment to the sitting room. It was flooded with soft evening sunlight through the long, floor-length windows, and her mother was sitting by one of those windows, in an armchair upholstered in gray linen, reading the
Aftonbladet
newspaper. She looked up when Sigrid came in and said, “May I go and say good night?”

“In ten minutes. She wants to solve Morfar’s puzzle.”

Sigrid’s mother smiled.

“And he wants her to solve it too.”

Sigrid sat down in the chair opposite her mother’s. She looked out of the window into the soft dazzle of late sunlight. Her mother looked at her. After a minute or two her mother said, “Were you thinking of coming back to Sweden?”

Sigrid gave a little jump.

“Whatever made you say that?”

“I just wondered,” her mother said. “This impulsive trip. Your restlessness. Something . . . unsettled about you.”

Sigrid said abruptly, “I can’t breathe for those Brinkleys—”

“Ah,” her mother said.

“They are like Morfar’s puzzle,” Sigrid said. “Except that there isn’t a way to unlink them.”

Her mother put the newspaper down and took off her reading glasses.

“So you were thinking that you could escape them by coming back to Sweden.”

Sigrid looked away.

“Only sort of—”

“Well,” her mother said kindly, “don’t—”

“But—”

“Listen. Listen to me. You’ve been away too long. It isn’t even the country you grew up in. All the people you grew up with have changed with the country, and although you have changed with England you haven’t moved on here. How could you? You haven’t been here.”

Sigrid made a little gesture.

“I could catch up—”

“And there’s another thing,” her mother said, “a bigger thing. Which I suspect you haven’t thought of.”

“Which is?”

Sigrid’s mother leaned back even more in her chair.

“Me.”

“You!”

“Yes,” her mother said. “Me. Think of my situation.”

Sigrid looked round the room, laughing a little.

“It looks a very comfortable situation indeed—”

“Really?” her mother said. “Really? You think it’s so comfortable to have two children, both of whom have chosen to live in other countries?”

“But you don’t mind—”

“Who says I don’t mind?”

“But—”

“Of course, I am happy you married Edward,” Sigrid’s mother said. “I adore Mariella. I love your brother dearly, but he will never give me a Mariella. I like his partner, I love your Edward, I am pleased and proud of what my children have achieved, but I don’t know their lives. Not as my friends know their children’s lives. How can I? You live in different cultures as well as countries.”

“Goodness,” Sigrid said.

“I have not finished—”

“But—”

“I have had to adjust,” her mother said. “And one of the ways I’ve adjusted to having both my children living in other countries is to throw myself into my work. I work all the time now, as your father does. It suits us. We like it. And when we retire, we will start traveling, and we’ll come often to London and we will see more of you, and more of Mariella. But if—” She paused, and leaned forward, fixing her gaze on Sigrid. “If you come back to Sweden now, I couldn’t just dump all my patients and become a full-time mother and grandmother. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to. It’s too late for that now, and you should realize it.”