Daughters-in-Law (33 page)

Sigrid laughed. She said something about how nice it was to hear someone sounding so healthy about being pregnant, and then she suggested that they meet somewhere halfway between their places of work, and why not the first-floor café of a distinguished architectural institute on Portland Place?

So here Charlotte was, slightly early for once, studying the menu with considerable interest, and wondering whether to confide to Sigrid that she had been to see Petra, and had offered her support. She thought that, on balance, she probably would tell Sigrid because Sigrid, after all, even though she had never put a foot wrong as a daughter-in-law, had also suffered from not being the favorite, from not quite ever toeing the Brinkley line. Charlotte didn’t know Sigrid very well, and was slightly daunted by what appeared to Charlotte an impressive degree of maturity and togetherness on her part, but then, Sigrid had been the one to suggest lunch, which must mean at least the beginnings of a wish to do a little sisterly bonding. When she saw Sigrid coming up the wide central stairs to the café, she got up, feeling suddenly rather shy, and stood there, waiting to be noticed.

“You look wonderful,” Sigrid said. “Being pregnant really suits you. I think the word is blooming, isn’t it?”

“I’m going to be like a whale,” Charlotte said. “I’m eating like one too. Did you?”

“What—”

“Did you get huge?”

Sigrid took off her jacket and hung it over the back of her chair.

“I was no good at being pregnant.”

Charlotte waited. Some instinct kept her from bouncing back at once. Sigrid said, picking up the menu, her voice almost detached, “It nearly killed me, having Mariella.”

“Oh!” Charlotte said, horrified.

“But we aren’t going to talk about that.”

“No—”

“It was nine years ago, and she is wonderful and Edward was a saint.” She looked up at Charlotte and smiled. “And you are going to do it beautifully.”

“God,” Charlotte said, “I hope so. I mean, we never meant this to happen, and if you don’t you kind of have to get it more right than if you do. Don’t you?”

Sigrid laughed. She said, “Let’s order you a big plate of food.”

“Yes,
please
.”

“Pasta and salad?”

“Perfect.”

Sigrid looked up and made a neat little summoning gesture with her menu towards a waitress. Charlotte watched her ordering, with admiration. She looked so in charge of the situation, just as she looked in charge of her appearance, her hair smoothed back into a low ponytail, her white shirt not climbing irrepressibly out of the waistband of her skirt, her lightly tanned hand with its single modern ring holding the menu.

“There,” Sigrid said, “food for two adults and almost half a baby. Exciting.”

Charlotte buttered a piece of bread lavishly, and told Sigrid how she now felt about the baby, and how she
had
felt, and how sick she’d been, and how great Luke had been and how
seriously he was taking the whole baby/fatherhood thing, and how there was an empty flat on the first floor of their building which they’d looked at, and really liked, and it was twice the size, with two bedrooms, but obviously miles more expensive and so they were having to do lots of sums to work out whether they really could afford it, because, quite honestly, their present flat was almost too small for the two of them right now, even without a baby.

Then the pasta and salad arrived, and Charlotte asked Sigrid if she’d had a good time in Sweden, and Sigrid said it was lovely to see her parents, and Charlotte said well, talking of parents, she knew Sigrid would understand why she had done it, but she’d actually, without telling Edward or Luke in advance, gone to see Petra, on the quiet, really, because it must be so awful to be suddenly flung out of the family, like Petra had been, and so Charlotte wanted to offer her some support because oh my God, she needed it, the angel fallen to the ground and all that.

“And Rachel,” Charlotte said, spearing rocket leaves on the end of a forkful of tagliatelle, “can be so fierce. I should know.” She gave a little laugh. “I mean, I’m not sure I’m quite over it yet, and it was ages ago.”

Sigrid took a sip of water.

“It was very difficult with Rachel,” Sigrid said, “when Mariella was born.”

Charlotte gazed at her, another forkful suspended. She said eagerly, “Was it?”

“I had bad depression. So bad. And I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. And Rachel was very angry.”

Charlotte put her mouthful in. Round it, she said, “She’s good at angry.”

Sigrid didn’t reply. She sat looking down at her plate, not eating.

Charlotte said energetically, “None of us will ever be good enough for her precious boys, will we?”

Sigrid looked up. She said, “I had such a strange conversation with my mother in Stockholm. It made me think.”

“Oh?” Charlotte said. She would have liked to stay on the topic of Rachel, and stoke it up a bit, but there was something about Sigrid’s attitude that held her back. She said, “About what?” and ate another mouthful.

“These mothers,” Sigrid said, “these mothers of ours.”

“Mine’s a doll—”

“Maybe. But she’s also a person. They are all people. They were our age once. They went through a lot of the things we are going through.”

Charlotte gave a little snort. She said, “Well, Rachel’s forgotten half of it—”

Sigrid said slowly, “She’s not a witch, you know.”

Charlotte stopped eating. She said, “She doesn’t like me, she doesn’t much like you—”

“Oh, I think she does,” Sigrid said, “and if she hasn’t in the past, she will now. She only is as she is because no one ever opposed her, no one ever challenged her position as the only woman in a circle of men. Petra certainly didn’t. But now she is having to learn something new, and she must learn to hold her tongue, and that comes hard with her.”

Charlotte put her fork down.

“Wow—”

“Think about it,” Sigrid said. “Ralph is very difficult, I don’t think anyone could have brought up Ralph any differently, but even he is a good father. And the others, our husbands, Rachel brought up good men for us. She did that, you know.”

Charlotte pushed her plate away. She looked down at the table, and the crumbs and smears she had left on it.

“We can’t gang up on her,” Sigrid said. “It’s lonely for her
now. My mother said she had coped with her own loneliness by working. She’s a doctor. Rachel isn’t a doctor, she’s never worked properly, she is a homemaker, and now . . . well, I don’t know what she is. I expect she is terrified she will lose her grandchildren.”

“But—”

“I think that’s why she’s angry,” Sigrid said. “She is a very tactless person, and now she is angry too. But I don’t think she doesn’t like us. And I don’t think she would want her sons back, even if we offered them to her. I think she has new ways to learn, and she is angry with herself for that too.” She smiled at Charlotte. “Think now. If Rachel was a bad woman, wouldn’t Luke be bad too?”

Charlotte said, “What, exactly, are you telling me?”

“Oh,” Sigrid said, “I wouldn’t tell you anything. I would only describe how I see it now.”

“But you were so lovely to me that day in our flat, about the baby—”

“Of course,” Sigrid said, “it was an unprovoked attack. Rachel was in the wrong, everybody saw that. I expect she saw that, too, even if she could never say so. But after this Petra thing, we have all moved round in the dance a little, we are all in a slightly different place. So is Rachel.”

Charlotte picked up her fork again, and pulled her plate back towards her. She opened her mouth to protest the continuing validity of her own grievance, and found she hadn’t got the heart for it. She wound a final mouthful of tagliatelle round her fork, and then she paused and looked at Sigrid.

“Okay,” Charlotte said with a reasonableness that quite surprised her. “Okay. Point taken.”

S
teve Hadley was not a man given to restlessness. All his life he had gone steadily from activity to activity, every waking hour, moving without hurry from one practical task to another, to a point where he was almost unable to think unless his hands were busy with something. His mother, he knew, would say it was inherited. His father was unable to think, or hold a significant conversation unless physically occupied with something else. Steve remembered his father’s halting attempts to tell him the facts of life being conducted with both of them lying under the old jacked-up Alvis his father was restoring, until Steve plucked up the courage to admit, passing his father a spanner, that he knew about it already.

He did not say that he had tried it, too, at thirteen, with a fifteen-year-old from year eleven who was, depending upon your point of view, either very generous or a bit of a slapper. And even if he hadn’t actually done it, he’d had a frustrating glimpse of how hugely exciting and satisfactory it was going to be when he did, and three years later, he had succeeded, and in his own view had never looked back. He’d had innumerable
brief relationships, and one steady one (she’d ended it, when she went away to college, in Scotland) and in all cases he had known, in his unshowy, steadfast, unremarkable way, that he gave sexual satisfaction. It was in his nature. Sex was a good thing to do in his view, so why not learn to do it properly? He was no god to look at, for heaven’s sake, but that didn’t stop him from being an attractive proposition as a lover. He had, consciously, made sure of that.

Except that, at the moment, his unquestioned competence seemed to be of no use to him. Petra plainly liked him, liked his company, had done nothing to discourage him, but was not so much refusing to sleep with him as seeming to be oblivious to the idea in the first place. In Steve’s view, sex was a natural progression after you got to know someone a bit and were confident, after a kiss or two, that they fancied you back, but Petra, although apparently happy to be kissed, and to be touched significantly here and there as they passed each other or sat next to each other in Steve’s car, seemed somehow to evaporate when Steve’s movements began to shift the situation into another gear. He supposed that he should simply ask her outright about it, but that kind of conversation didn’t come easily to him, and he kept waiting for a moment when it would be entirely natural to say, in so many words, what the hell do you think you’re playing at?

He had asked himself, moving steadily round the endless tasks of repair and renewal at the nature reserve, why he went on with Petra anyway. She wasn’t the first mother he’d had a relationship with, and she wasn’t the best-looking, or the liveliest, or the most enticing hard-to-get girl he’d ever pursued, but she had something that chimed with something in him, this profound appreciation of the sea and shore and bird life that amounted, he was surprised to find himself thinking sometimes, almost to a shared religion. She was unusual too,
and he revered her artistic talent to a point way beyond mere admiration; her ability, with less than half a dozen pencil lines, to make him feel he was looking not at a drawing but a living bird, roused in him a degree of respect that bordered on awe. And he liked her kids. He liked little kids anyway, but these two were especially great, particularly the older one with his imagination and his fears. Steve had few fears, and it intrigued him that someone of only three had the capacity somewhere in his brain to have so many. All in all, there was, definitely, something in Petra that made him disinclined to give up and turn his attention instead to one of the girls who worked in the reserve’s café, and who had made it more than plain that he could have pretty much anything he wanted.

He was blithely confident, too, about Petra’s marital situation. There was this husband in the background, but Steve had never seen Petra other than alone, and she almost never mentioned her husband, only saying, once, that he had gone to London, in a way that suggested that he had gone for good, and not just for a few days, or a while even. Steve had picked up the distinct impression, too, that Petra and her boys’ father came from very different backgrounds, and although that was in no way a handicap, it did mean that neither could rely as a given on shared assumptions. Petra was a kind of orphan, it appeared, with no immediate family left alive in England, and that family never cohesive or supportive when it was around anyway. Petra had learned to fend for herself when she was still at school, and this situation aroused in Steve a protectiveness that was all the stronger for being unfamiliar to him. To be abandoned by both your family and then your husband, but not to seem to resent either seemed to Steve evidence of a remarkable nature. It was just how to get such a remarkable nature to focus on him as someone who might be an all-round answer, that was Steve’s current preoccupation.

And then an opportunity arose at work. In the internal e-mail bulletins that went round the organization, any job vacancies going were advertised. It was how Steve had found his present job. He scanned these bulletins regularly, rather in the way that someone who is perfectly content with their own home cannot help, all the same, glancing through property columns. A vacancy caught Steve’s eye, a vacancy on an island off the northwest coast of Scotland, an island famous in the bird world for its corncrakes. The job required several practical skills as well as knowledge of bird conservation, and the terms included a tied cottage at the southern end of the island. There was only a small community on the island itself but on the sister island, merely a short, tidal causeway away, there was a school. Steve was not someone given to romantic fantasies of any kind, but this possibility seemed, all of a sudden, to offer a potential solution to the intriguing and thwarting problem of what to do about Petra.