“What?”
“Jealous,” Charlotte said.
Luke took his face away a little.
“You are one idiot of an adorable girl.”
Charlotte bent her head. She said, “There’s Sigi, you see, all groomed and professional and clever and detached, and she’s been in your family forever, and then there’s Petra, who everyone treats like a daughter, like a little sister, and it’s a bit much, sometimes, to have to compete with all that, especially when you’ve been competing with sisters all your life and you’re not academic or talented or anything—”
“Shush,” Luke said loudly.
Charlotte didn’t look up. Luke put his hand under her chin and tilted it until her gaze was level with his.
“It’s only what I think that matters,” Luke said. “And you know what I think. And when the family know you better, they’ll think it too, which I suspect they do already because nobody could know you and not think it.”
He leaned forward and kissed her, without hurry, on the mouth. Then he said, “Bugger Ralph and bugger his problems. We’ve got far more important things to concern ourselves with,” and he smiled at her, and, with a single, deft movement, he took her towel away.
The flat Luke had found for them in London was at the very top of a tall and elaborate brick building in Arnold Circus, a stone’s throw, as Charlotte excitedly told Nora, and all her other friends, from Columbia Road flower market, from Brick Lane, from—oh my God—Hoxton. The building, like all those that ringed the Circus like a circle of great ships, had been designed as part of a grand nineteenth-century philanthropic project for public housing, to provide light and air and sanitary living conditions for people who had known nothing previously but teeming slum life. The Circus was impressive, built of red brick banded, here and there, with peach brick, like a kind of architectural Fair Isle jersey, and in the center, on a mound flanked by flights of steps and planted with enormous plane trees, was a folksy little bandstand under a pointed roof where Charlotte had, on her very first visit, seen a pair of thin boys picking at guitars and singing raggedly to an audience of mothers with babies in buggies, and neat old men in kurtas and embroidered caps. It had seemed to her wonderfully vivid and wonderfully exotic. She’d bought take-away falafel and a sun-dried-tomato salad from an engaging little place on Calvert Avenue so that they could have a picnic in the empty, dusty flat that Luke had just signed a lease on, and felt the future unrolling before her like a fairground ride, sparkling with lights.
The flat had two rooms, with a kitchen under the eaves and a bathroom with a huge window from which you could see, giddily, far, far below, the decayed strip of low buildings, which now housed a series of artisan workshops, including Luke and Jed’s studio. You could even, Charlotte discovered, pick out the very skylight of the studio, and she imagined how, in the winter dark, she could look down there and see, with lovely wifely exasperation, that the lights were on in the studio, which meant that Luke was still down there working, when he should have been up in the flat eating the kind of delicious nourishing supper she was going to practice cooking until she was as good a cook as Luke’s mother was. She thought that, what with the number of commissions Luke was now getting from the music industry, as well as the new sidelines he was developing in film, and lighting design for concerts and things, there might be quite a lot of evenings when she would be looking down at that skylight, and seeing the lights still on. She vowed she would not nag. She vowed she would stay as pleased and excited at his growing career as he was, as she was at the moment. She vowed that she would never give him cause to feel that she had to be protected from hard times, like Petra. She had no idea what Ralph’s business was, except that it was some kind of online financial thing, investment advice or something, and she had no inclination to ask further since the whole situation around Ralph and Petra and the little boys and Anthony and Rachel made her feel strangely unsettled, however many times Luke told her that no one mattered to him like she did. She wished she hadn’t told Luke she felt jealous. She wished she’d just navigated the whole topic with the kind of grown-up poise that indicated that she was naturally concerned by Ralph’s news, but not in the least personally ruffled by it. And so, to make amends to herself for an adolescent moment of vulnerability, she said to Luke, when they returned to the flat from Venice, “Do ask Ralph up here, if you want to talk or anything. He can christen the sofa bed.”
And she’d been rewarded by Luke putting his arms round her and saying, his mouth against her ear, “You are a complete doll.”
So here she was, getting wedding-present sheets out of their complicated packaging of cellophane and cardboard, and pulling a new duvet out of its box, in order to have them ready, later that day, to make the sofa up for Ralph to sleep on. It was seven in the morning, the sun was out, Luke was showering in the bathroom, and Charlotte, in a denim miniskirt, tight striped vest, and shrunken military jacket with huge brass buttons, was all ready to leave for her job in a local radio station located on Marylebone High Street. In the fridge sat salad ingredients and pieces of salmon to grill, and she would pick up bread during the day, and cheese and strawberries, and Luke would get wine and beer, and she would light candles later and not tell Ralph that he was their first guest ever. He might also turn out to be rather an appreciative guest. Luke said he’d leapt at the chance of coming to London for the night.
“Actually,” Luke said, “he asked if it was okay by you. A first for Ralph, I should think, wondering if he was being a nuisance.”
Charlotte banged on the bathroom door.
“I’m off, babe!”
There was a pause while taps and Luke’s iPod were turned off, and then he opened the door. He was naked, and wet. He looked her up and down.
“Don’t go to work, angel—”
She giggled.
“I’ve got to. I’m on the eight o’clock shift, which means being there at seven forty-five. You know that.”
“I’ll be thinking about you all day. All day.”
She blew him a kiss.
“Me too. When’s Ralph getting here?”
Luke stepped forward and enfolded her in a wet embrace.
“When he gets here. Miss me. Miss me all day.”
“Promise,” Charlotte said.
Luke’s studio was approached along a broad asphalted path behind the Arnold Circus buildings. It was in a long, low line of what might once have been mews, or garages, brick-built with sizable sections of metal-framed windows, broken where the studios behind them were unoccupied. The ground-floor walls were punctuated by battered black-painted doors that, when you pushed them open, gave on to steep, narrow staircases that led up to small landings illuminated by dirty windows, floor to ceiling. In Luke’s case, one of the two doors on such a landing had been newly painted, in dark-gray matte paint, with a brushed-steel plate fixed slightly to one side of the center eyeline, which read, in black sans serif lower-case lettering, “Graphtech Design Consultants.”
Ralph had only been to Luke’s studio once before, when Luke and Jed were in the process of moving in, and long before Luke met Charlotte. They’d borrowed the money for the initial payment on the lease and down payments on their computers from Jed’s father, who was separated from Jed’s mother and spent most of his time and money restoring classic motorbikes. Luke, who had always been good with his hands, was building drawing boards and installing overhead lighting while Jed sanded the floorboards with a gadget that looked like a giant hair dryer. It had made Ralph think, with some emotion, of how he had intended his Suffolk cottage to be, a private space in which to live and to work without the distraction of obligation to anyone else. It was going to be him, and the white walls, and the uncompromising coastal light, and the sea, and the shingle, and the development of his idea to extend the ease and intimacy of Internet banking into the limitless world of the small investor.
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?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Every 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 bu
ilding 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.
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