Daughters-in-Law (3 page)

“But you liked
our
wedding—”

“It was Swedish.”

“And Ralph’s wedding—”

“That was charming,” Sigrid said. “So simple. In your parents’ garden and Petra taking her shoes off. Where is Petra?”

“Probably chasing her children.”

Sigrid stood up.

“I shall go and find her.”

“What shall I do?”

“Find your parents,” Sigrid said. “See if your daughter has instructed those children properly about the effect of El Niño. Find out where we’re sitting for the meal.”

“Salmon,” Edward said, “and strawberries. Pink food. Wedding food.” He stood up too. “Dad’s down there, by that pond thing. Kit’s paddling.” He paused. “Naked from the waist down.”

Rachel had her eye on Ralph. He looked awful. Well, not ugly, Ralph couldn’t look actually ugly, but gaunt and tired, with shadows round his eyes and his thick dark hair in tufts, as if he’d had a seriously bad haircut. Which he probably had, being, of all her boys, the least vain, the least worldly, the least concerned with appearances. Of course, all crammed together in a so-called family room at the hotel, they hadn’t really slept the night before, any of them, Petra said at breakfast, and then Ralph had taken himself off to walk, just as he used to do when he was a boy, and he’d found some woods and come back looking wild and disorientated after struggling through bushes and undergrowth. Well, Ralph had never been easy to pigeonhole, never been orthodox, that was a great deal of his charm, but it was to be hoped—very much to be hoped—that
he wasn’t leading Petra too much of a dance by being too inaccessible and uncooperative.

When Ralph and Petra told them that they would like to get married, she and Anthony had been overcome with relief as well as happiness. Petra was exactly what Ralph needed, they told each other; Petra would give Ralph the stability and purpose that he seemed to find so hard to achieve while needing it so badly. And now, when Ralph looked as he did today, and left Petra to cope with the children on an occasion that plainly called for two parents, not one, Rachel felt clutches of the old intermingled anxiety and protectiveness that she’d felt since Ralph emerged into the world and arched away from her when she first tried to put him up against her shoulder.

He shouldn’t, Rachel told herself, be in that crowd. Luke’s friends were quite different from his brothers’ friends, heartier, simpler, more conventional. Luke’s stag weekend, a three-day affair in Edinburgh, where he’d been at university, sounded like the kind of thing Rachel could tolerate hearing about only because it involved Luke, her son. Ralph had gone for one night, out of brotherliness, and had then come back to Suffolk and said loyally but briefly that they were all having a good time but that it wasn’t really for him. Petra reported later that a lot of drunken shaving of various bits of them had gone on, and that Luke was lucky to get away with saving his eyebrows. So what was Ralph doing, in the thick of that crowd, and was that a cigarette in his hand? Rachel had been so thankful when he’d given up smoking. Ralph was the only child she’d really worried over when it came to drink and drugs; he was the only one inclined to see the possibility of addiction as a challenge rather than a threat.

Perhaps, Rachel thought, she should go and talk to Petra. She could see Anthony and Kit down by the pond—Anthony was now drying Kit off with his handkerchief before
persuading him back into his pants and shorts—and presumably Petra would have found a quiet spot in which to spoon another meal into Barney. Barney loved meals. His enthusiasm for food made Rachel and Anthony laugh, although Petra said it sometimes amounted to a tyranny. Rachel, who had been a professional cook all her life, made soups and purées for Petra’s freezer, and no doubt it was one of those that Petra was now feeding to Barney somewhere, openmouthed in his buggy like a rapacious little fledgling.

She stood up and smoothed down her skirt, green linen bought in a sale in a dress shop in Aldeburgh, and, as it happened, a good contrast to Charlotte’s mother’s old-rose lace. Such an odd woman, Charlotte’s mother, and anally tidy. Well, at least Charlotte wasn’t that. Even by Rachel’s standards, Charlotte and Luke left their bedroom in Suffolk in an award-winning state of chaos.

As she moved to start her search for Petra, Ralph materialized beside her. He was holding a bottle of lager and he smelled of cigarettes.

“You okay, Ma?”

She looked at him. He was her adored son, but she had Petra to think of now, too.

“I’m fine,” she said. “What about you?”

“What d’you mean, what about me?”

“I mean, are you okay? Is everything okay with you?”

“Of course,” he said. He tilted the beer bottle, as if toasting her. “Of course everything’s okay. Why wouldn’t it be?”

W
hen Anthony was a boy, the building that was now his studio had been a decayed barn, used for storing the lawn mower, and various defunct pieces of semi-agricultural machinery, and nameless old sacks, and coils of baling twine and rusty wire. It had been a dim and dusty place, with barn owls nesting precariously on the beams and colonies of bats and swifts swooping wildly about in the summer dusks. It was known to Anthony’s parents as the Dump, and every year it shed a few more huge slates from its sagging roof, and settled itself more deeply and crookedly into the earth, so that its doors no longer corresponded to their frames, and the small windows at one end had ejected their cobwebby glass into the bed of nettles below.

It was Rachel who had thought of rescuing it, and making it into a studio, Rachel who had come from the Welsh hills and who had such profound misgivings about the flatness of Suffolk and—even more—about moving into the house where her fiancé had grown up.

“God,” she’d said to her sister, “you should see it. I mean,
it’s a lovely house, but they’ve lived there since the dawn of time.
Everything
’s sacred, everything. Anthony thinks it’s all perfect.”

Rachel’s sister, married to a dedicated inner-city teacher and struggling in a council flat with a splintered front door where someone had kicked it in, didn’t much want to hear about huge, if decrepit, Suffolk houses that you were being given—
given
—however much ancestral baggage was inconveniently attached.

“I think you’re bloody lucky, Rach.”

“Well, yes. It’s lucky not to have to
buy
anything. But it isn’t lucky to inherit a moldering old heap you’re expected to
revere
, rather than restore.”

“Balls,” said Rachel’s sister.

“What’s balls?”

“Of course you can restore it. It’s your home, isn’t it? Give Anthony his bit and make it plain that you’ve got as much right to the rest of it as his mother had or his granny or his great-granny or whoever.”

“What d’you mean, his bit?”

Rachel’s sister sighed. She tried not to notice that the aqua-marine on Rachel’s engagement finger was the size of a Fruit Gum.

“Oh, you know. The shed thing. The place where men go and mess about making things that don’t work so that they have to unmake them again. Doesn’t Anthony draw?”

“Actually,” Rachel said proudly, “rather well.”

“There you are then,” her sister said. “Give him somewhere to draw. I wish Frank drew. I wish Frank drew or collected beetles or belonged to a cycling club. I wish Frank did anything,
anything
, rather than think it’s up to him to save every delinquent kid in Hackney.”

“It could be a studio,” Rachel said, some days later, to Anthony.

“What could?”

“The Dump.”

“But it’s always been the Dump.”

“Well,” Rachel said, squinting up at the enormous East Anglian sky, “it isn’t going to be, anymore.”

Anthony looked hurt.

“Mum and Dad liked it like that.”

Rachel went on gazing upwards.

“Mum and Dad are in heaven, Anthony.”

“They didn’t believe in heaven. They didn’t believe in the supernatural. They thought the mind of man was paramount. As I do. They were pragmatists.”

“The Dump,” Rachel said, “is not pragmatic. The Dump is a collapsing waste of space. It would make a wonderful studio. It even has a big north wall, for a window. You could paint in there and draw, and make models of birds the size of airplanes. There’s enough room in there to
build
an airplane, even.”

Anthony sold a piece of his parents’ old and unproductive orchard to the neighbors, for the price of turning the Dump into a studio. He put in windows and skylights, and a wood-burning stove, and laid old bricks on the floor and tongue-and-groove paneling against the walls. He brought in old kitchen tables, and battered armchairs from the tobacco-stained snug where his father used to spend long afternoons working on his complicated cross-referenced systems of racing form, and rugs that had worn down to the canvas after a lifetime on stone-flagged floors. He put up his easels, and lines of shelves, and old saddle brackets on which to hang frames. He added books, and the decoy birds carved out of wood that the fishermen once made on Orford Quay when the weather was too rough to put the boats out. And then, in pride of place, he hung a reproduction of Joseph Crawhall’s
The Pigeon
, a gouache on Holland cloth, painted in 1894 by one of the Glasgow School,
which he had taken Rachel all the way to see, in the Burrell Collection.

“He’s my hero,” Anthony said.

Rachel had gazed at the pigeon, its white plumage flecked with gray, its pale-coral beak and feet, its hard, wild, small eye.

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “Why is it so wonderful?”

“Because,” Anthony said, “because you feel the inner life of the bird.” He took her hand. “In early Chinese culture, bird painting was very important. Not just because birds are so decorative, but because they are wild, inhabitants of the world of air and freedom. The Chinese thought you should observe a bird intently, for ages and ages, and then paint it from memory, making it as vital as possible. They thought that was one of the finest expressions of the human mind, to observe, and then paint like that. Crawhall painted from memory, as he had been taught as a boy. I wasn’t taught like that, but I’ve taught myself. I’d rather there was life and truth in a painting, than romance. I want an emotional charge.”

Rachel had slipped her hand out of his, still looking at the pigeon.

“Yes,” she said respectfully.

The studio, even separated as it was from the main house by a stretch of weedy gravel, became as significant to their lives as Rachel’s kitchen. All three boys had their babyhood daytime sleeps in there, tucked into the huge old coach-built pram that had once been Anthony’s, and then, as time went on, brought their homework in, to sit at one of the cluttered tables, and kick the chair stretchers and complain about fractions and French vocab and Mrs. Fanshawe, who went through every head in the school with a nit comb she doused in Dettol.

It was years, though, until the studio, and what Anthony produced in it, made any money. During those years, Rachel cooked for local people’s parties and held small informal
cooking courses in the kitchen she had made by knocking a warren of little domestic offices into a single space. Her efforts were supplemented by Anthony’s part-time job teaching at a big art college fifteen miles away, a job he kept, out of habit and affection, even after his work began to be exhibited, and widely sold, and he was made a Royal Academician. It was a job that had led to his encountering Petra.

He had noticed her, at first, because she never said anything. She sat at the back of the class, dressed in the whimsical and bohemian rags that most of Anthony’s students affected, and took notes. When he looked over her shoulder as he strolled, talking, up and down the aisles between the students, he saw that she was writing in pencil, with a strong and characterful script, in a notebook so artisan that she could only have made it herself. Her hair was twisted up in a bit of rough blue muslin patterned with gold spots, and her hands—her nails were bitten, he saw—were half shrouded in torn black-lace mittens. She went on writing as he paused beside her, and he could see that she was writing exactly what he was saying.

“I want to say this to all of you as gently as I can, but correctness can become a terrible inhibition. You see, there’s the truth of what we observe, and then there’s the truth of how we
interpret
what we’ve observed. When you’re painting a bird, say, you want to give the sense that you were there, that you are responding to that moment in the life of a living bird. Do you see?”

Petra had underscored “terrible” and “interpret” and “there,” following his vocal emphases. And later, when he had made them loosen up their drawing arms by sweeping charcoal across great sheets of drawing paper, he saw that she was either a natural, or had been very well taught already, and that she was far, far better than anyone else in the class. But she would not look at him, and she did not speak, and Anthony, feeling as
he did when watching the incipient apprehensions of wildlife, did not oblige her to either.

“There’s a girl at college,” he said to Rachel. “Odd girl. I should think she’s nineteen or twenty. Never speaks. But she draws like an angel. It’s years since I’ve had anyone who draws like her.”