Daughters-in-Law

by Joanna Trollope

  Rachel ignored him. She fetched a cloth from the sink and began to dab at the chocolate smeared on her grandsons’ faces.

  “We thought we’d take the boys next week, for a day or so, and then you and Petra can have some time together, or Petra can go off and draw.”

  “Okay,” Ralph said. “Great. Fine. You can do it on the Wednesday.”

  Barney stretched out, removed the cloth from Rachel’s hand, and dropped it neatly on the floor. Then he put his whole face down into the cake.

  “Barney!”

  “Wednesday?” Ralph said, pulling Barney back but making no attempt to wipe his face.

  “Why Wednesday?”

  “Because,” Ralph said, “I have an interview next Wednesday.”

  “Darling!” Rachel said. “Fantastic! What amazing news.”

  “It’s an interview, Mum. Not a job. An interview.”

  Rachel came round the table and put her hands on his shoulders.

  “Where is it? Where is this interview?”

  Ralph looked across the table at Kit. Kit had picked the Smarties off his piece of cake and was arranging them on the rim of his plate. He glanced up at his father, as if to check that there would be no more shouting.

  “London,” Ralph said.

  * * *

  When Petra had first gone to Rachel and Anthony’s house, as a student in a group of students, it had struck her as being a wonderful place. It looked quite formal outside, with its soft old bricks and defined white windows, but inside it had been only comforting, random and colorful and warm, with crooked floors and sudden steps and beams and odd patches of paneling. She had been bowled over by Anthony’s studio, by Rachel’s kitchen, by the easy authority they both exercised in their particular spheres. But back then, of course, on subsequent visits and until Ralph came home, she had been alone with Rachel and Anthony, the only child, as it were, and she was lapped about with the privilege of being the only young thing in a place that had largely evolved for the nurture and stimulation of a family. Nowadays, however, what with her own family, with Ralph’s brothers and their families, with so many diverse claims upon the house and its chief occupants, going there no longer had the luxury of the past, or the sense of individual significance. Sometimes going there now, being there, she even forgot to speak, she forgot to claim the right to be spoken to, included. Sometimes, too, Ralph said to her on the way home, “Are you sulking?”

  It had been like that today. The house had felt as if it was roaring with people. Mariella, a lock of her long hair carefully wound with colored threads, and bead bracelets on her wrists, had dumped a huge baker’s basket on the floor of the sitting room, and proceeded to give a kind of performance of benefaction, producing biscuits and buns and cake out of it to the exclamations and applause of everyone. Except Petra. Petra was very fond of Mariella, and very touched by the fact that this baking bounty had been entirely her idea, and partly her achievement, but, in that rowdily enthusiastic company, she found she simply could not speak because she felt she in no way belonged to what was going on. It was too much. And Ralph looked mutinous.

  Lunch was, if anything, even worse. Rachel had cooked superbly, as usual, and lavishly, as usual, and Kit had eaten three roast potatoes, with gravy, and asked for a fourth, and Rachel had been delighted. And, when Luke’s absence had been mentioned, and mentioned again, and analyzed, and discussed, and Charlotte’s mother had been relegated to being the inevitable reason for his not being there, the conversation had turned to Ralph, and the prospective interview, which was apparently at Edward’s bank, by Edward’s connivance, and everyone was extremely pleased with him for engineering it and equally certain that Ralph would acquit himself well because he was, after all, so clever, wasn’t he?

  “What if you get the job?” Anthony said.

  “What do you mean, what if I get it?”

  “Well,” Anthony said, “it’s City-based, isn’t it. You can’t commute from the Suffolk coast to the City every day. Can you?”

  “Of course I can.”

  “No, you can’t,” Rachel said. “You’ll be exhausted. You’ll never see the children.”

  And then Ralph had said calmly, not looking at his parents, not looking at Petra, “We’ll have to relocate then, won’t we?” and then, as an answering hubbub rose around the table, he lifted both his hands in the air and shouted, “No more speculation! No more discussion! Stop!” and Petra had a distinct sensation that, if she just gradually pushed her chair back to the wall, she could melt into it somehow, and vanish, and escape through it into the air and freedom the other side, and nobody—except Kit—would even notice that she was no longer there.

  “Are you sulking?” Ralph said on the way home.

  “No.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I’m stunned,” Petra said.

  “What by? That I’ve got an interview?”

  Petra glanced over her shoulder. Both boys were asleep in their car seats. Barney’s mouth was open.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “What then?”

  “You said,” Petra said, “you said that we might have to leave Suffolk.”

  “No,” Ralph said, “I didn’t. I simply said that if I couldn’t manage the commute, we might have to relocate.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “I’m not asking you to leave Suffolk. Maybe we just move nearer Ipswich.”

  “No.”

  “You used to live in Ipswich. You know Ipswich.”

  “That was before,” Petra said.

  “Before what?”

  “Before you. And the boys. And being by the sea, and everything.”

  Ralph said nothing for a mile or two. Then he said, “Nothing’s happened yet. Why are we crossing bridges we haven’t even got to?”

  Petra stared out of the car window.

  “There’s always new bridges. I liked it at Shingle Street. I’ve got used to it at Aldeburgh. I don’t want to get used to something else.”

  Ralph turned the car into their little street. He said, “You may have to.”

  Petra said nothing.

  Ralph said again, louder, putting the brake on decisively, “You may have to.”

  “No,” Petra said.

  * * *

  Later, when the boys had been bathed and Barney was in his cot under his dinosaur mobile, Petra said she was going out.

  “Where?” Ralph said. He was reading to Kit.

  “Just to the allotment—”

  Kit began to scramble out from under his duvet.

  “I want to come—”

  Ralph put restraining arms around him.

  “No.”

  “Yes, yes, I want to—”

  “No,” Petra said. She bent and smoothed Kit’s hair back. “I’m just going quickly. By myself. I’m going to pick the strawberries.”

  Kit began to cry.

  “I’ll come and kiss you when I’m back. See if you can still be awake when I come back, see if you can stay awake that long.”

  “Stay with me,” Ralph said.

  “Are you talking to me?”

  “No,” Ralph said, “I’m talking to Kit.”

  Petra let herself out of the house, and turned towards the footpath. It was a calm, sweet evening, with an apricot light from the sinking sun, and a little sharp breath of air coming up from the sea. Petra went along the road past the school, and then crossed to take the path down towards the allotments, remembering that she had forgotten to bring something to put any ripe strawberries in and wondering if she could balance them in a courgette leaf, or make a pouch out of the hem of her sweatshirt. She’d never owned a sweatshirt before she had children; she’d never considered anything so practical and comfortable and washable. She hadn’t needed to.

  A little way down the path, there was a lowish wall with a flat top, the boundary of the garden of a house that Petra fantasized about. Often, on the way home from the allotment, she would put the brake on the buggy and
lift Kit onto the wall, and they would gaze together in silence, and Petra had the sense, as she so often did, that Kit understood something in her because that same element was in him, and thus entirely a matter of course. There was a grassy stretch below the wall, running away to a big, still pond edged in shrubs, some with lime-green-and-purple leaves, and then beyond that the ground rose sharply and dramatically in a little cliff, at the top of which sat the house. It wasn’t a beautiful house, it was simply a big, friendly house, commanding the garden and land in front of it from its wonderful position, surveying the marvelous trees below it, and then the marshes and the reed beds, and beyond that the sea, glimmering away in the distance. The house gave Petra a feeling of something more profound than calm, a sense of fitting in, of homecoming, of being a ship at last in safe harbor. It gave her, in fact, the very opposite feeling that being in Rachel and Anthony’s house today had provided. Just looking at it made her feel better, and it wasn’t even hers. And never would be.

  She squinted up at the sky. A few geese were crossing the far horizon, faintly honking, and there were swallows diving in the soft air. She would see, she told herself, what happened after Wednesday, and at least Ralph knew now what she couldn’t do, what she wouldn’t do, and how she wasn’t so stupid that she couldn’t see when support segued into suffocation. She took a few deep breaths, her hands flat on the wall top. She didn’t belong to anyone, not even to Kit and Barney, any more than they belonged to her. She was, however overlaid she had become by the kindness of expectation, the benevolent burden of obligation, still her own person.

  In her allotment, Kit’s dumper truck still lay where he had kicked it, on its side, spilling pebbles. Petra got down on her hands and knees and gathered up the pebbles, and mounded them up neatly because Kit would need them next time he came, with the intensity peculiar to childhood. Then she dusted out the truck with a dock leaf, and began to pick the strawberries, one by one, carefully, laying them in rows in the truck with their green stalks all facing the same way, as she knew Kit would like her to do. And when she had picked all the ripe ones, she took her penknife out of her pocket and cut a fat bunch of sweet williams, dark red and striped white, and laid them on top of the berries. Then she stood up and looked down at the truck. It was the most satisfactory and healing sight of the day.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Charlotte was, as usual, home before Luke. Her shifts at the radio station were long, but they were regular, and when they were done they were done, and someone else came in to take over the things Charlotte did, like greeting and shepherding guests, and fetching cups of coffee and glasses of water, and organizing taxis to take the more important guests to wherever they were going next. She liked it that a lot of the guests, especially the regular male ones, either asked for her specifically or made a flattering fuss if it wasn’t her shift, and it was Ailsa instead, who was attractive but small and slight and inclined to a more classic wardrobe than Charlotte’s. Sometimes, of course, the guests went too far and demanded Charlotte in a frankly sexist way, like the well-known actor who’d said loudly that day, “Where’s Miss Well Stacked and Wonderful?” but mostly it was just gratifying to be asked for.

  “You are well stacked, of course,” the female producer of the afternoon show said, not looking at Charlotte but at the computer printout in her hand. “And it’s a great pity that, as far as he’s concerned, you can’t return the compliment, and point out his pitiful inadequacy.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that—”

  “I know,” said the producer, looking up, “you wouldn’t. That’s why we put up with you. If you weren’t so good-natured, we’d be obliged to detest you.”

  Now, standing in her own bathroom in the flat, Charlotte opened her shirt and surveyed her bosom. She’d had quite big breasts ever since she was thirteen, but were they now even bigger? And were they, when she unhooked her bra, and pressed the sides tentatively, slightly tender, in the way they sometimes were just before she got her period? That is, when she last had a period. She hadn’t, actually, had a period for almost two months, not since before the wedding, when she had done some calculations to see if she was going to have a period either on her wedding day or—worse almost—on her honeymoon. But, as it happened, she hadn’t had a period for—she paused and ticked off the dates on her fingers—nearly eight weeks. Which she hadn’t made too much of, in her own mind, because her periods had been so irregular since she stopped taking the Pill, as the doctor had warned her they might be. She looked at herself in the mirror with a kind of awe and instinctively laid one hand flat across her stomach.

  It was Luke who had said she should stop taking the Pill. She’d swallowed it, almost without thinking, ever since she was in the sixth form at school, and Luke had said to her one evening, very seriously, looking at her across a supper table while they were both eating a Thai green curry, that he thought, now that her future was with him, she should give her body every natural chance and stop putting chemicals into it, however sophisticated and finely judged those chemicals were. He said he was very happy to take contraceptive responsibility, in fact he would like to, so could she please go home and flush the remainder of the month’s supply down the lavatory and give her amazing body the chance to do its own wonderful thing.

  Charlotte had been enchanted by this speech. It was thrilling to have Luke be so mature, and so masterful, and to see her body as something that needed respecting, and taking care of. When she had thrown away the pills—Luke had remembered the effect of contraceptive pills on the potency of the male population via a contaminated water supply—she felt unbelievably womanly and fertile and powerful, and this had been very satisfactory for both of them to the point where Charlotte supposed that, if you were quite simply happy enough, you didn’t really need to sleep. Nor did you need to think too urgently about the precise and efficient use of contraception if your husband had told you, in his alluringly commanding way, to leave it all to him.

  So she had. And now she was standing in her bathroom, with her shirt unbuttoned, and her bra loosened, just wondering. That’s all—just wondering. Her breasts might not look much bigger, but they certainly didn’t look smaller. And they were tender, just very slightly tender. Charlotte licked her lips. She found she was holding her breath. And then she remembered, with a sudden, joyful rush of relief, that if in fact she was pregnant it didn’t actually matter, this time, however much they had planned to give themselves two years of freedom before they even considered a baby. This time, Charlotte thought, there need be no frantic rushing to the chemist for a pregnancy-testing kit, no anxious furtive sessions in a shared bathroom, no three-in-the-morning silent rehearsals of how she was going to tell her mother, should the test be positive. This time if—if—she really was pregnant, it would be something to celebrate.

  She pulled her bra back into place and fastened the only two buttons on her shirt she considered necessary, tucking it into the top of the skirt, which had caused Ray, the black guy on reception at work whom everyone loved, to say he didn’t know why she didn’t stop pretending and just come to work in her knickers. Then she went across the sitting room to the kitchen, and the bag she had left on the worktop containing the ingredients—chicken pieces and a pot of hot salsa—for supper. She would put the pieces of chicken to marinate in oil and lemon juice, as her mother did, and wash the salad leaves and measure out the couscous she’d decided on to accompany the chicken, and only when that was done, and the table was laid, would she ring Luke in his studio and ask him—without telling him her simmering suspicions—when he thought he’d be up for supper.

  Luke had some new graphics software. It enabled him not just to view things three-dimensionally, but to design in three dimensions too, and the afternoon had been extremely absorbing in consequence. He had a new commission, to design the logo and publicity material for a small chain of spa gyms in Essex and East London, and the software was enabling him to come up, even at this early stage, with some amazing ideas that he
was certain the marketing team for the gym would really like. So when his phone rang, and he knew it would be Charlotte, he picked it up and said, “Swing down here, babe, I’ve got something to show you,” even before Rachel had time to say, “Darling?”

  “Mum,” Luke said, in quite another tone of voice.

  Rachel said, “I don’t think it’s me you want to hear—”

  Luke tucked the phone in between his ear and his shoulder.

  “I’ve got a new toy I want Charlotte to see.”

  “A work toy?”

  “Oh Mum,” Luke said, laughing. “Of course—”

  “I won’t keep you,” Rachel said. “It was just that you hadn’t rung since the weekend, and as we didn’t see you I wondered how things were?”

  Luke kept his eyes on his screen and his hands on his mouse and keyboard.

  “Great, thank you.”

  “Did—did you have a nice weekend?”

  “Fab,” Luke said. “Five-star lunch, played tennis—we won—with my new brothers-in-law and Char’s sister Sarah, who has a momentous backhand. Terrific.”

  “Oh, good,” Rachel said without enthusiasm.

  “It was such a lovely day,” Luke went on blithely, “that we stayed for supper. Char’s mother—I mean Marnie, I keep forgetting to call her that—gave us loads of fruit and veg. We’re eating raspberries twice a day.”

  “I have a marvelous crop here,” Rachel said. “You could have picked all you wanted and hardly made a difference.”

  “Everyone okay?” Luke said.

  “Who exactly do you mean—”

  “Well,” Luke said, “you and Dad, Ed and Sigi and Mariella, Ralph and Petra and—oh, what about Ralph and Petra?”

  “Ralph has an interview.”

  “Wow. Fantastic. Well done him. Who with?”

  Rachel said, “Haven’t you spoken to your brothers either?”

  Luke shifted his phone a little.

  “Nope. Haven’t spoken to anyone. Too busy with work and marriage, Mum. Just too busy.”

  “Ralph has an interview Ed got for him. Ed’s been wonderful. And Mariella baked the little boys a basket of cookies and things. We had a wonderful day all together.”