Daughters-in-Law (7 page)

But, of course, it hadn’t turned out like that. He had been in the cottage a few months, four or five maybe, with Petra undemandingly there, now and then, drawing gulls on the beach and doing remarkable things with tins of baked beans and sharing his bed with the same absence of claim, or right, that she brought to most things, when she said, quite baldly, that she’d missed two periods, and she thought she was probably pregnant. He had been stunned, then rather overwhelmed and almost tearful, and then asked her, clumsily, what she would like him to do about it.

She’d stared at him.

“Nothing.”

“I mean, d’you want to live here? D’you want to come and live here with me?”

“I might.”

He’d held her. He thought that if this was love, he liked it. He imagined a baby in his bare sitting room, Petra holding a baby, him holding a baby and showing it the sea, out of the
window. But then, impelled by something he could not explain or really remember, they had gone to tell Anthony and Rachel, to
tell
them, not to ask them anything, and from then on everything changed, everything was not only different from how he’d imagined it, but hardly his and Petra’s anymore, either.

The cottage had gone. It went almost at once. It was replaced by a little terraced place in Aldeburgh, with a small garden but no view of the sea. Ralph had a good room to work in, but it looked out over sheds and other people’s gardens, and a random parking space, not shingle and sea and sky. Rachel made sure it was comfortable for him and pointed out how much better the Internet connection was than it had been at the cottage, and then there was a wedding—which he’d liked, he’d liked a lot—and there they were, living in a little house, in a little town, and the baby turned out to be Kit, two months after they were married. None of it, Ralph thought, standing outside Luke’s studio on a summer evening in Shoreditch, was remotely,
remotely
, what had been in his head or his imagining when he had last stood there. And that had been no more than four years ago.

Not only had the studio changed, but Luke and Jed had, too. The studio looked very together, very monochrome and modern with sophisticated track lighting and computer screens set at angles, like drawing boards. Luke and Jed were wearing a similar nonchalant kind of nonuniform: black T-shirts, combat trousers, carefully designed trainers, and Luke had a wedding ring now, a flat band of white gold that made his left hand look weirdly grown-up. He gave Ralph a rough hug, and Jed high-fived him and said he’d got to go, good to see him, take care, man, and had hooked a black leather jacket over one shoulder and loped out of the studio and down the stairs, whistling. And then Luke said, “You don’t look too hot, bro.”

Ralph perched on one of the black stools by the computers.

“How’s Charlotte?”

“Great.”

“And Venezia?”

“Amazing.”

Ralph took a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and held them out to Luke.

“Smoke?”

“No thanks,” Luke said, “not anymore. No drugs but alcohol. And not in here.”

“Come
on
—”

“You can smoke outside. Not in here.”

Ralph shrugged. He dropped the pack back in his pocket.

“Tell me,” Luke said.

“What, now? At once?”

“I don’t want you boring Charlotte later. I don’t want Charlotte thinking my brothers are tedious and problematic.”

“Okay then,” Ralph said. He stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and stared at the ceiling and the skylight.

“Bad, bad, bad?” Luke said.

“Yup.”

Luke said nothing. He glanced at his watch. Charlotte would be home in ten minutes.

“I’ve had my small-business account closed,” Ralph said.

“Ouch—”

“Sometimes I have to wait up to six months for commission on something I do. Sometimes even longer. That means I need a good overdraft facility, it’s important. No, it’s crucial. And four months ago, the bank just raised the interest rate. Bang. Just like that. Five percent to 9.9 percent, take it or leave it. And—” He stopped. He looked at Luke.

“What?”

“There was my personal overdraft rate. It was bad enough, anyway. It was 9.9. And they upped it, no arguing, to
19.9
percent even though I’d never exceeded the limit. And when I objected, they said I’d only get a better rate when there was more money going in. So I pointed out that more money was hardly likely to go in if I was being caned for my necessary, and
agreed
, business account, and they said tough. I have no assets they seem interested in, so it’s the end of the story. Except that my investors, the friends from Singapore who helped me set this up, aren’t happy. You can imagine the e-mails I’m getting.”

Luke said softly, “It’s scandalous.”

“Too right.”

Luke sighed. He scratched the back of his neck. It wouldn’t help Ralph if he said how sorry he was. Ralph never liked people being sorry for him.

“Have you told Mum and Dad?”

“Not yet.”

“Petra?”

“Nope. Just Ed. And you. Like I said on the phone. I wouldn’t have done that, if I didn’t need you to know before Mum and Dad do.”

Luke jammed his fists into his trouser pockets. He felt terrible about Ralph, but he wanted to be up in the flat before Charlotte got home. He said, scuffing at the black floorboards with the rubber toe cap of his boot, “What are you going to do?”

E
very weekday morning, Sigrid bought coffee from an Italian who ran a tiny stall, not much more than a cupboard, opening out onto the pavement not far from the laboratory where she worked. The Italian, a voluble man from Naples whose English had hardly improved in thirty years of speaking it, preferred blondes, and every so often he insisted on either giving Sigrid her coffee for nothing, or adding a café-style biscotto as a present, dotted with almonds and chips of bitter chocolate. Sigrid liked all this. It was one of the bonuses—the many bonuses—of living in London. In Stockholm, where she had grown up, true blondes, like her, were two a penny.

Sigrid’s laboratory, independently funded but loosely affiliated with London University, was tucked into the basement of a building in Bloomsbury, behind the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In the mornings, during school terms, and when it wasn’t her turn to drive a carload of small girls to their junior school in Highgate, Sigrid tidied the house, then walked the length of Upper Street to the Highbury and Islington Tube Station, and caught a Victoria Line train to Warren Street.
Then, via Marco and his coffee stall, she walked down Gower Street, to work.

Sigrid’s father was an engineer, and her mother a doctor; Sigrid had one brother, who had become an avant-garde composer and wrote scores for cult movies, largely made in Berlin, where he now lived. Sigrid herself had taken a master’s degree in computational science at the University of Uppsala, followed, through English student friends she made there, by research at the faculty of engineering at the University of Loughborough, which was where she had met Edward, who’d gone there to celebrate an old school friend’s birthday. What a weekend that had been! Even twelve, nearly thirteen years later Sigrid couldn’t recall that weekend without smiling.

And now here she was, thirty-eight years old, Edward’s wife, Mariella’s mother, and in command of her own particle accelerator, which could analyze materials without destroying them and was thus invaluable to museums and art collectors alike. Her triumph, the year before, had been to examine a sixteenth-century pen-and-ink drawing for a private collector, and establish that both the ink and the paper had come from the same time period, and geographical location, as Leonardo da Vinci himself. The collector had been beside himself with excited gratitude. He had wanted to give Sigrid and her family a skiing holiday in his chalet in Gstaad. But Sigrid had declined graciously. In her lab coat, with her hair tied back and her spectacles on, she was not the blonde in knee-high boots whom Marco wanted to give free coffee to. And as far as her professional life was concerned, it was the lab-coat Sigrid who prevailed.

Walking into the building off Gower Street, holding her coffee and her briefcase, Sigrid thought gratefully of the prospect of her lab coat. The head of the laboratory was away at a conference in Helsinki, and whenever he was away the assumption was that Sigrid was in charge, an assumption that nobody in
the laboratory seemed to question except for a clever, ginger-haired boy called Philip who craved Sigrid’s attention and believed that challenging her authority was a successful way of getting it. Yet this Monday morning, even the prospect of batting Philip’s tediousness away was attractive; better anyhow than spending the weekend listening to Edward on the telephone to his parents, or his brothers, or his parents again, in an endless cycle of anxiety and suggestion and countersuggestion and exasperation, that had finally driven her to take Mariella, and her three best friends for that week, to eat immense pastel-colored cupcakes at an American bakery that seemed to be the current nirvana for the whole of Mariella’s class.

“So bad for you,” Sigrid said, watching them eat. “All that fat and sugar. Empty calories, every mouthful.”

Mariella’s friend Bella had held out an alarming deep-red cake, iced in buttercream. Her mouth was frosted with it.

“Red velvet,” she said. “Taste it. You’ll see. Worth getting fat and spotty for.”

In the evening, after Mariella was in bed—accompanied as she was every evening by her iPod and seventeen stuffed animals, all of whom would be offended, Mariella said, if they were anywhere but on her bed at night—Sigrid laid out their customary Sunday-night supper of Matjes herring, black bread, and pickled-cucumber salad, and then took a glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc to the small room off the kitchen where a big plasma television screen had been fitted into a wall of bookcases. Edward followed her. Sigrid sat down on the sofa opposite the screen and aimed the remote control at it. Edward leaned forward and took the remote out of her hand.

“Please don’t,” Sigrid said.

Edward sat down close to her.

“I need to talk to you.”

“You’ve been talking all weekend—”

“Yes,” Edward said, “but not to you. I’ve been talking, as you well know, to my fucking maddening family, and I need to talk to someone with some sense.”

Sigrid sighed. She put her wineglass down on the nearest pile of magazines and turned to face him.

“Okay.”

“
Please
don’t say it like that.”

“Well,” Sigrid said, “I know your family. And I know how you all operate. So I can’t feel very hopeful, now, can I?”

Edward reached across Sigrid for her wineglass and took a swallow from it.

He said, “I cannot believe the fuss they are making—”

“Can’t you?”

“No,” Edward said. “I mean, Ralph has lost his company, which is very sad, but not really surprising when you look at the high-handed way he’s behaved to his bank all along, and they’re all reacting as if one of the children had been run over. I kept saying to Mum it’s only a
job
, Mum, and she said, oh, he’ll never find another one in this climate and what about the mortgage, they can’t afford that and Dad and I can’t help them at the moment and Petra is distraught—”

“Is she?” Sigrid said.

“Is she what?”

“Is Petra distraught?”

“Well,” Ed said, shrugging, “when I spoke to her, she sounded as if she was doing the usual Petra thing of being all vague and unconcerned till everything had blown over and someone else had thought of a solution.”

“Well then.”

Edward put his hand out again for Sigrid’s glass. She moved it deftly out of his reach.

“Get your own.”

Edward sighed.

“It isn’t Petra. I mean, in a way it is because she’s such a professional eternal child, but it’s also Mum and Dad panicking and Ralph at his most unhelpful because he feels he’s handled it all so badly, and he has.”

Sigrid took a sip of her wine and offered the glass to Ed. He looked at her gratefully. He said, “I could cheerfully strangle the lot of them.”

“Have you spoken to Luke?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He’s still on honeymoon. In his head, anyway. He says it’s rotten for Ralph and scandalous of the bank, but Ralph’s got to deal with it.”

“He has,” Sigrid said.

Ed took another deep swallow of Sigrid’s wine.

“I’m the eldest, Sigi. I feel I have to prop up the parents and help the brothers.”

“Only up to a point. You can’t choose their lives, you can’t live their lives for them, you can’t stop your parents having the priorities they have.”

“You mean Petra.”

“Only partly,” Sigrid said.

Edward put the wineglass down and took Sigrid’s nearest hand.

“The geography doesn’t help. All of them living so close and being so involved with each other. I said something so stupid to Mum—”

“What?”

“I said,” Ed said unhappily, “I said, because she said she was really wound up about it all and wasn’t sleeping and stuff, I said just leave it to me and I’ll think of something and ring you tomorrow, and you know how pseudo-tough she is and never cries and all that, and she did cry, well, nearly, and she
said, oh thank you, darling, thank you, in a way she never does normally, and now I’m in a hole because I’m exhausted by it all and can’t think how on earth I’m going to come up with anything constructive by tomorrow.”