Daughters-in-Law (37 page)

Edward plainly had the same thought. He opened the door to them, and then he stationed himself on Ralph’s other side,
almost as if he and Luke were a personal police escort, and they went down the stairs in that formation, Edward leading, Ralph in the middle, Luke bringing up the rear, and halfway down you could hear the little boys’ voices suddenly, and Ralph stopped and said loudly, “What
is
this, what is—” and Edward turned back and took his arm and led him on down until they were there in the kitchen, and only Sigrid was looking their way because everyone else, wired on sugar and wine, was burying Charlotte with cushions from the TV sofa and screaming.

Ralph halted. Luke waited for him to turn round and accuse him of betrayal and kidnap. But he didn’t. He just stood there and stared at his children, at Petra stopping Barney from crawling ecstatically and heedlessly across Charlotte’s face.

Edward gave Ralph a little push.

“Go on,” he said. “Go on. Go on in and join them.”

They put the little boys to bed on improvised mattresses on the floor of Mariella’s bedroom. She was very gratified by this, and lent them several of her plush animals each as a favor, keeping watch from her superior position on the bed until at last, and despite, in Barney’s case, the novelty and excitement of not being caged in a cot, they fell asleep, Barney snoring on his back, his arms flung above his head. When Ralph came in to see if they were okay, she made it plain to him that she was perfectly capable of being in charge.

“Sorry,
ma’am
,” Ralph said to her, smiling.

She nodded. He looked so much better when he smiled. She did her Swedish puzzle twice before she put the light out. She could do it so deftly now that it was time to ask Morfar to make her another. And planning that seemed to Mariella, very oddly, the only thing left to plan in the whole wide world right now.

* * *

Once or twice, during supper, Edward had managed to catch Sigrid’s eye. He had wanted to convey to her his surprise and satisfaction at having, for the first time, both his brothers and both their wives round his and Sigrid’s kitchen table, with all three children safely asleep in the same bedroom, and a weekend ahead. But Sigrid, although she had smiled at him, although she was plainly enjoying herself, enjoying being the provider, the one who could produce extra pillows, and supper, and a bath toy for Barney as if she did such things every day of the week, was not going to allow Edward to point out, or emphasize, what a rarity this evening was. She was behaving as if it was all perfectly normal, as if Petra often came up to London on the bus as a matter of course, as if there had been no estrangement between Ralph and Petra, no complicity between Charlotte and Petra, no break in the step of her and Edward’s married march together. And she is right, Edward thought, she is right not to make a big deal of it, because even if it’s a first it’s only a beginning, and there is a long, long way to go.

For a start, Ralph and Petra were at opposite ends of the table from one another. They had not touched all evening; they had scarcely spoken directly to one another and Ralph had announced quite early in the evening that he was going back to his room at the end of it. Petra hadn’t flinched. She appeared, Edward thought, remarkably composed and able to look at Ralph in a way he couldn’t—yet, anyway—look at her. Charlotte and Luke were flirting across the table, monopolizing the noise and the energy, and Edward observed that Petra was watching them with every sign of ease and pleasure, wearing the expression she’d worn watching her boys with the sofa cushions, almost indulgent. Funny girl, he thought, funny, odd girl, but we shouldn’t underestimate her, me especially, Ralph in particular. Just because someone doesn’t know exactly what you know doesn’t mean that what they
do
know isn’t as
important. Or even more important. She’s got where she’s got all by herself, we shouldn’t forget that, we shouldn’t ever forget how sheltered we’ve been, compared to her. He had a lump in his throat. He picked up his wineglass to take a swallow in order to dislodge it. God, he was getting as sentimental as his father.

His father! He raised his hand to his head and smacked his forehead with his palm. The parents! They should tell them, they ought—no, he ought—to ring Anthony and Rachel and say that everyone was here together, and fine. He hadn’t given them a second thought. That was awful, really awful. He half rose. He’d go and do it now in the study, right now.

“Where are you going, man?” Luke said. He was leaning half across the table, among all the dirty plates and glasses, so that he could hold Charlotte’s hand.

Edward’s face assumed the faintly careworn expression familiar to Sigrid.

“I just remembered. I ought to ring the parents—”

“No,” Sigrid said. “Sit down—”

“Honestly,” Luke said, “honestly. Why spoil a really good evening?”

“But they’ll—”

Luke let go of Charlotte’s hand. He leaned sideways and put the hand on Ralph’s shoulder.

“I’ll do it.”

“What—”

“I’ll ring Mum and Dad,” Luke said.

“But—”

“In the morning,” Luke said. “Not now. We’re celebrating now. I’ll ring them tomorrow and tell them we were all together.” He squeezed Ralph’s shoulder. “Okay, bro?”

“Okay,” Ralph said.

Sigrid was leaning back in her chair.

“There,” she said to Edward, “there. Luke will do it. No need for you to do anything.”

She was smiling at him. He didn’t know when he’d seen her so relaxed. He smiled back, and lowered himself into his chair again. He picked up the nearest wine bottle and held it against the light. Empty. How had that happened? Better get another—

“I’ll get another,” Ralph said, taking the bottle out of his hand.

“They’re in the—”

“I know,” Ralph said. He stood up. “I know.”

Edward looked round the table. He said, “What’s happening?”

Sigrid was laughing now, and so were Petra and Charlotte. Luke folded his arms on the table, and leaned towards Edward.

“All change,” Luke said. He looked about sixteen, Edward thought, but a very welcome sixteen. He gave Edward the thumbs-up sign. “All change.”

T
he light was fading fast. Every year, Anthony was increasingly taken by surprise at how, once summer was over, the evenings drew in so rapidly, and he had to adjust himself to a winter schedule of only being able to rely on natural light, if it was a bright day, for four or five hours. In the past, the winter had been his time of dissection and observation, reconstructing bird skeletons with meticulous reference to diagrams, and wiring them up as if these ghostly creatures were still stepping or pecking or turning in flight. The studio shelves were crammed with skeletons as well as those wired to the roof beams, mostly fractured now, a broken ossuary of past life, past movement. They were ghoulish in their way, particularly the eyeless, beakless skulls, but they were hard to throw away all the same, representing as they did all that learning, all that progress, evidence, if he needed it, that he could represent a bird in two dimensions because he knew exactly how its body worked in three.

Every early autumn, Anthony surveyed his skeleton collection, vowed to do something to at least rationalize it, and did
nothing. Rachel said to him, annually, that it was most unfair on the boys never to attempt to clear out some of the deep litter of the studio, but just to slide round such a monumental task knowing it would inevitably fall to them, once Anthony was dead.

“They can chuck it all,” Anthony said. “All of it. It won’t mean to them what it means to me. And I won’t be there to mind what it means anymore. Will I?”

“But it’ll be such a depressing task for them. Bags and bags of bones. Why subject them to anything so gloomy?”

But they’re not gloomy, Anthony thought now, standing surveying the shelves as the early dusk thickened the light in the studio. Not gloomy at all. They are interesting, every one, and valid. They represented a journey for me, my journey. I never thought I could make a life and a livelihood out of being an artist, nor did my parents. But I did. I have. I’ve kept it all going, and brought up three boys, and educated them, because not only can I see, but I can, with this hand and this brain, translate what I see in such a way that other people can see it too. I can make birds live on paper. And these old bird bones, as Rachel calls them, were part of that process, part of the looking and looking, until you really understand how something works and can then reproduce it in a way, now, that I don’t even have to think about. He raised his right arm involuntarily, his fingers holding an imaginary pencil, and sketched something in the air. There you are, he told himself. There. The power of the unconscious mind. I’ve drawn a lapwing taking off, and I didn’t even have to think what to do before I did it. I
knew
. I knew, because there’s a lapwing up there, somewhere, on those shelves, and I expect its head has fallen off and it’s missing a wing rib or two, but once I knew every bone in its body and that knowledge is now as deep in me as my DNA. The boys won’t mind clearing off these shelves. They’ll get it.
They’ll know that, if their mother’s kitchen was always the engine room of the house, of family life, this place was the lookout. It was in here, Anthony said, almost out loud, where we didn’t just focus on what had to be done—very necessary, admit that—but what
might
be done. And even if she’d rather die than admit it, I think Rachel knows that too, in her heart of hearts, and is afraid of it in her way, because it’s something she can’t control.

Like Ralph. Had they ever been able, really, to control Ralph? If he conformed, as a boy, it was because he wanted to, or it suited him, never because he felt the smallest necessity to be obliging. And because of this innate perversity, Ralph had always exercised a peculiar fascination for his mother. She didn’t—Anthony was sure of this—love him any more than she loved Luke or Edward, but she was, in a way, spellbound by him, always had been, this creature who had always lived on the edge of, or entirely outside, her dominion. So that when he did seem more pliable these last few years, when he had submitted to her brisk, practical organizing of his life—the marriage to Petra, the move to the house in Aldeburgh—there was bound to be a price to pay in the end. And that price had turned out to be the mess of this summer, the upsets in the family, the creeping sense—so evidently painful for Rachel—that they, the parents, were no longer at the hub of things, were not being visited as much, or told as much, or seen as naturally involved in whatever was going on. They were now, Luke had made it plain when he had telephoned yesterday morning, to be informed of everything that was going on, but they weren’t any longer central to the discussion of what should happen next. The three brothers, Luke had implied, in his emphasis on their heady London-weekend togetherness, now had their own priorities, the priorities of their lives, their children, their wives.

“We’re all here,” Luke said cheerfully. “We’re all spending
the day together, all nine of us. Everyone’s fine. You’re not to worry. Everyone’s happy. Barney even walked four steps this morning. He’s a riot.”

It was Anthony who had picked up the phone when Luke rang. He was alone in the kitchen. He stood there, staring out of the window above the sink, while Luke described the evening before and how Ralph had had no idea that he would find Petra and his children at Ed’s house, how Petra has clearly come to her senses and done the sensible thing and just got on a bus, with boys and baggage. If Rachel had been in the room, she would have seized the phone and fired questions, but she was out, buying milk and matches and a crab for supper, if she could find one, and so it was left to Anthony to say, “Good. Good, lad. I’m so pleased, I’m so thankful—” and then to stand there, the phone in his hand after Luke had rung off, and think dazedly, “What
was
all that? What was it?”

When she heard, Rachel wanted to ring, at once, for confirmation. She had her phone in her hand, lifting it to her ear, when Anthony took it from her by force.

“No.”

“But I’ve got to, I’ve got to be sure—”

“Leave them!”

“I can’t, I must know—”

Anthony flung her phone across the kitchen. It hit the far wall and fell behind a chair, clattering against the skirting board.

“Leave them, I tell you.”

He waited for her to scream at him, but she didn’t. She said, as if wrestling with tears, “I need to know if they’re okay—”

Anthony was breathing heavily.

“Never better. Luke sounded like he sounded on his wedding day.”

“But Ralph. Ralph and Petra—”

“Together. No need to suppose anything other.”

“But . . . but
really
together?”

“I don’t know.”

“I
must
know,” Rachel said, starting across the room to retrieve her phone.

Anthony caught her wrist.

“You’ll know when they choose to tell us. Not before.”

“Whose side are you on?” Rachel demanded.

“No one’s,” Anthony said untruthfully.