Daughters-in-Law (9 page)

There was a man standing in front of her. He was about her age, in a dark suit, and he was holding a glass of wine and a bottle of water. He had a black-leather satchel slung over one shoulder, and with the hand holding the wine he made a little gesture towards the armchair beside Sigrid’s.

“Mind if I join you?” he said.

She gave him a minimal smile.

“No, thank you,” Sigrid said, “I am just about to make a call to my mother in Sweden. And then to my sister-in-law. If that answers your question?”

Mariella was sitting on the stairs. She had been about to go into the kitchen, on the pretext of wanting someone to hear her spelling list, but in reality to nail her mother for a while before she was sent to have a bath, but had been deterred by
discovering both her parents in there already, with their arms around each other.

When Mariella was younger—much younger—she had hated finding her parents embracing without her, and had always fought her way in between them so that she became the focus rather than they to each other. But now, although she was relieved to see them behaving in a way that meant they probably weren’t going to get divorced, thank goodness, she found she wished they’d just get it over with, and be like normal, because it was a bit embarrassing, really, and made her feel weird. So she had retreated to the stairs with the cat’s cradle someone at school had shown her how to do, made out of a length of purple wool, and she was singing to herself to cover any potentially disconcerting sounds that might emanate from the kitchen, like kissing, when the telephone on the hall table rang.

“I’ll go!” Mariella shouted.

She scrambled off her step and down to the hall to seize the telephone. She was supposed to say, “The Brinkleys’ house,” when she answered the phone, but she always said, “Hello?” on a rising note instead, because that’s what her parents did.

“Mariella?”

“Yes—”

“Mariella, it’s Charlotte.”

Mariella thought.

“Charlotte! Your new aunt, Charlotte.”

“Oh!” Mariella said, beaming. “Oh,
hi
.”

“You were such a cute bridesmaid,” Charlotte said. “You looked so great. Everyone said so. I really liked having you as my bridesmaid. What will you do with your dress?”

“Mummy says she has no idea,” Mariella said truthfully. “You can’t exactly go Rollerblading in pink silk, can you?”

“Did she say that?”

“Oh yes,” Mariella said.

“Oh.”

Mariella took the phone back to her seat on the stairs. She said confidingly, “Everyone’s really worried now about Ralph and Petra.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said uncertainly.

“Daddy says they’ve got enough money for little things, like cereal, but not the big stuff. We’re going to make a huge load of food and take it to them at the weekend. Are you coming?”

“No,” Charlotte said.

“Why not?”

“We’re going to see my mother,” Charlotte said. “You remember my mother?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she’s doing a big lunch for me and Luke and my big sister Fiona and her husband and my other big sister Sarah and her husband, and all the little girls you were bridesmaid with.”

Mariella settled herself more comfortably.

“So it’s going to be a party?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “My family is big on parties. We have parties whenever we can. When you come to our next party, you can wear your bridesmaid’s dress, can’t you?”

“Okay,” Mariella said.

“Is Mummy there?”

“Well,” Mariella said, “she is, but she’s doing something with Daddy.”

Charlotte began to giggle.

“They’ll be finished soon,” Mariella said. “They’re only in the kitchen.”

Charlotte was laughing.

“Don’t interrupt them—”

“No,
thank
you,” Mariella said.

“Could you give Mummy a message?”

“Okay.”

“Could you tell her that we’d love to meet up, as she suggested, sometime. Love to. But at the moment, we just haven’t a minute, we’re flat out, hardly even time to brush our teeth—”

She sounded, Mariella thought, a bit overexcited, as if she wasn’t breathing properly.

“I’ll tell her.”

“Thank you,” Charlotte said, “thank you. Give them my love. No, give them
our
love. Byeee!”

Mariella clicked the phone off and sat looking at it for a while. Then she lifted her head and called out to the kitchen, “Mum! Charlotte’s too busy to see you at the moment, but she’ll see you sometime!” and then she untangled the cat’s cradle from her fingers and went slowly up the stairs to her bedroom, singing a cheeky song they’d made up at school, about some of the teachers, that was supposed to be a complete and utter secret.

W
hen Ralph was in a mood, Petra had learned, it was better not to be in the house. She thought of his moods like fog, or dark smoke, drifting silently under the closed doors of his office and seeping into all the corners of the house, so that every room was invaded, and affected, and even Barney, who was the epitome of straightforward good cheer, looked at her with anxious eyes and an unsteady lower lip. On such occasions, she had discovered, the best thing was to bundle Barney up into his buggy and collect all the paraphernalia necessary to nourish and change both little boys, and just leave quietly, no notes, no door banging, just a swift, undramatic, unremarkable exit.

In the winter, she usually turned towards the High Street—past all the cottages with their seaside names, Shrimper’s Cottage, Mermaid Cottage, Gull Cottage—because Kit loved the shop windows. She hardly ever bought anything, largely because she had never been in the habit of shopping, but she liked grazing along the windows at Kit’s pace, past the ceramic curlew in the little gallery window, which was priced
at a fantastical—to Petra—two hundred pounds, and the dentist with a plaque of a buxom mermaid coyly brandishing a toothbrush while reclining carelessly on a row of teeth fixed to the wall, and the pharmacy, which sold buckets and spades in summer, to the amber shop, where Kit yearned for the tiny seals and elephants carved out of amber the color of barley sugar. And then, for Barney’s especial delight, they would trail slowly down the other side of the High Street, and stop, for ages, outside the sweet shop, which had huge, foil-wrapped sweets in the window, through which you could see pretty jars on white shelves and more sweets than you could dream of. Barney never made a sound outside the sweet shop. He simply craned forward in his buggy, his arms and fat little hands held out towards the window in rapture, like someone prostrating himself before an altar.

But in summer, as it now was, their walks went the other way. They would turn out of their scrap of front garden—Kit pointing out, every time, that it was so sad that they didn’t have a name, only a number, 31, on their house—and go past the primary school, where they would always stop for Kit to admire the bas-relief of a ship at sea on the gable end, and the fence made of giant colored pencils that divided the playground, and then they would proceed, very slowly, on account of all the things that needed to be examined on the way, down the King’s Field footpath to Petra’s allotment.

Kit approved of the allotment. He liked the way other people in the allotments flew patriotic flags, and he liked Petra’s little shed, where she kept her tools, and the elder and lilac bushes that hung over it, and the special wicket gate you went through, from the path. He kept some toys—a plastic digger, a dumper truck, a tractor—in the shed, and he would get these out with a workmanlike air while Petra settled Barney, and found a hoe and straightened bean canes. He was, Petra often
reflected and sometimes pointed out to Ralph—even if it was hard to tell how much it registered with him—very contented when he was in her allotment, and seemed to be free of most of the cares and apprehensions that stalked his waking hours.

“Perhaps,” she said to Ralph, “he likes being in a sheltered space. He likes knowing where the edges are.”

Ralph gave a little bark of laughter.

“Then he’s not like me—”

But nobody, Petra reflected, peering under the stiff, abrasive leaves for new courgettes, was much like Ralph. That was what she had liked about him, apart from his looks, when she first met him; she’d liked his difference, the way he came from quite a posh background, but you’d never know it from the way he talked, or dressed, or thought. He’d been a banker once, after all, in a suit and tie, and even, he told her, with manicured nails because his Singapore office required you to have that done because your hands were on show at meetings, and bitten nails and ragged cuticles gave an impression of insufficient professionalism.

Well, everything about Ralph was a bit ragged now. He needed a haircut, he shaved in a haphazard way that made him look worse than if he hadn’t shaved at all, and he wore the same T-shirt every day unless Petra actually picked it up off the floor and put it in the washing machine. Petra didn’t mind Ralph looking untidy—heavens, untidy was a natural and proper state to her way of thinking—but grubby and neglected was another matter. And even if Ralph had been the kind of person you could tell off, or try to change, it wasn’t in Petra’s nature to do either, even if it occurred to her, now and then, that Ralph was the least susceptible-to-change human being that she had ever met in all her life.

Rachel had often tried to talk to her about this aspect of living with Ralph. She was sympathetic to Petra, Petra knew that,
and anxious to help and even to ameliorate some of the exigencies imposed by sharing your life with someone who could take imperviousness to extraordinary levels. But Petra, who had never experienced the smallest element of emotional possessiveness until she had children, was aware that she owed at least the courtesy of gratitude to Rachel, but saw no need to oblige Rachel by minding the way Ralph was, more than she did. She didn’t want to interfere with the way Ralph lived or made money for them to live on. She didn’t want to change him any more than she wanted him to change her.

Except—well, now she
had
changed. Having Kit and Barney had changed her. Things that would never have crossed her mind as worrying were now troubling her, mundane things like security and fatigue, and the sharing of anxious, fragile burdens like Kit’s propensity for unhappiness. She didn’t know if she felt like this because of hormones and motherhood, or because Rachel and Anthony’s concern for her had infected her and made her believe things were the matter that would never have entered her head to matter if left to themselves. She just knew, with a heavy heart, as she laid a shiny little row of courgettes on the grass strip that edged her allotment, that Ralph’s current money and employment worries and his family’s urgent and vocal concern were getting to her in a way that nothing had ever got to her before, and were knotting her stomach, and her mind, and making her look at her children as if her urgent and only duty towards them was to shield them from harm.

And Ralph would not talk to her. He was the same as he always was with the children, affectionate and even interested in his intermittent way, but he would not discuss any of his business troubles with her. Petra, who had never even had a bank account before she met the Brinkleys, knew that the bank had refused Ralph something he could not operate without, which was presumably a loan, but she did not know why this
refusal spelled disaster, or what degree of disaster it meant. When she thought about having, perhaps, to leave their house, she only felt fear that Kit and Barney would lose the familiarity of their shared bedroom, but when she had tried to voice this alarm to Ralph, he had simply said, hardly looking at her, “You can always go to Mum’s, can’t you? Take the boys to live with Mum and Dad.”

She straightened up and looked across the allotment. It was a bright day with a nursery-rhyme sky of small, solid white clouds decorating an expanse of satisfactory blue. Kit, squatting beside his truck, was filling it with pebbles, which he was piling in carefully, one by one. Barney, under the dappled shade of the lilac bush, was asleep, his hands clasped comfortably on his belly like a caricature alderman. It was lovely, peaceful and contented and safe. Petra looked down at her sneakers, stained where Barney had dropped a buttered cracker upside down. It was perfect, yet she could see only how frail it was, how temporary, how susceptible to being destroyed by the prospect of going home to Ralph’s silent fury with himself for having let them all down. She wondered, with a sudden wild pang of nostalgia, where the peace of mind she used to have when there was only a fiver in her pocket, and a drawing class in prospect, had gone.

She crossed the allotment and crouched down by Kit.

“What are those for?”

Kit didn’t look at her.

“To make a wall.”

“What kind of wall?”

Kit went on piling.

“So the bad guys don’t get in.”

“What bad guys? What do you know about bad guys?”

Kit shrugged.

“There aren’t any bad guys,” Petra said. She leaned forward.
“There aren’t any. And if there were, I’d look after you. I wouldn’t let them come.”