Daughters-in-Law

by Joanna Trollope

  “Sleep well,” he mouthed down at her silently, and tramped on through the dunes to the path.

  Later Petra bought a cup of tea from the Visitor Center’s café and took it out to one of the picnic tables on the grass. She unwrapped the foil packets Rachel had given her and found egg-mayonnaise sandwiches and cucumber batons and flap-jacks and dried apricots. She spread these out on the table and looked at them. Very delicious. Very thoughtful. The reward for a long morning’s sketching. Except that she hadn’t sketched a thing, she hadn’t even taken one of Anthony’s pencils out of her pocket, she had not done anything except sleep in the warm sand until she was woken by two children stamping past and inadvertently spraying sand in her face. It had been a wonderful sleep. She didn’t think she’d slept like that in years, not since she used to stay with Ralph in his bare cottage at Shingle Street, and slept with the window open to the sounds of the sea, and the wind and the gulls, just like here.

  She yawned. She must have slept for two hours or more, in broad daylight. She felt much lighter and clearer as a result, almost happy. She certainly felt—there were hours of daylight yet—that she could draw, after she’d eaten, she could draw enough to demonstrate to Rachel and Anthony that she had fulfilled the terms of the unspoken bargain, and earned her day off. She took her phone out of her pocket and looked at it. There was no signal. A small feeling of relief stole over her. She couldn’t check on the children, and she couldn’t check on Ralph. She couldn’t, in other words, pick up all the responsibilities concerning other people, which colored her life and sometimes burdened it to an extent that she found very hard to bear. If Ralph was in a mood, for example, she knew it was neither her fault nor her problem, but she could not evade being associated with it somehow, and thus implicated and involved, so that she could feel the energy draining out of her, leaching out into the ground under her feet. But today, sitting in the intermittent sun at a warmed wooden picnic table eating Rachel’s delectable sandwiches, she was having a little holiday from all that, a brief respite in which the mobile-phone company’s signal capacity had kindly conspired.

  She finished the sandwiches and cucumber, and her tea, and wrapped the foil round the remainder. Barney would be pleased later to see the dried apricots, and thrilled to see the flapjacks. Kit would whimper over his supper as he did over most meals, put off by any food that was new, or bright, or natural in shape. But she didn’t need to think about that just yet nor, even, about Ralph’s interview. She didn’t need to think about anything except a few slow, quiet hours in the East Hide with her binoculars to her eyes, and her sketchbook open on the wide shelf below the window where Anthony had first shown her, drawing rapidly and in complete silence, how the beginning of bird drawing lay with the triangle.

  She settled herself at the very end of the bench, to give herself a good view to the left as well as straight ahead. There was an absorbed man with a camera on a tripod, and a few people with notebooks, but apart from them the other visitors slipped in and out of the hide with all the respectful lack of obviousness of people visiting churches and cathedrals. In any case, Petra soon forgot to be aware of anyone coming and going, forgot even to notice the bodies that briefly sat on the bench next to hers. It took her only half an hour of sitting and watching and breathing with increasingly slow, deep breaths before she had a pencil in her hand, and she was drawing.

  She was drawing a redshank, marveling at its brilliant orange legs, when a voice behind her said, “Sorry to interrupt, dear, but it’s five to five.”

  Petra looked up, startled. An elderly man with an enamel avocet pin on his pocketed gilet, and thick glasses, stood beside her, notebook in hand.

  He said, “I’ve been watching you. My wife, too. We come here every week when the weather’s good; we love it. And we’re very impressed.” He indicated Petra’s sketchbook.

  “Oh—”

  “But maybe you’ve forgotten that it closes at five? I said to Beryl, was I being an old fusspot, telling you, and she said better have me tell you than one of the staff, and anyway then I could tell you how good we think your drawings are.”

  Petra looked down at the page. Her male redshank was in flight, showing the white edges to his wings.

  “Thank you—”

  “That’s all right, dear. There’s nothing like birds, is there, nothing. We’ve found them such a comfort since our daughter died.”

  Petra stared at him.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry—”

  “It’s something to do with wings, I expect. Birds and angels. Beryl says it doesn’t do to make too many links like that, but I find it helps.”

  Petra began to gather up her drawing things, shoveling them into her canvas satchel. She couldn’t look at the man.

  “Yes,” she said, “yes. I’m sure it does.” She slung the satchel over one shoulder. “Thank you for telling me. About the time I mean. Thank you.”

  And then she pushed past him, through the door into the reed-lined corridor that led back to the pathway, and fled.

  In the car park, she couldn’t find her car keys. She turned the satchel out, and her waistcoat pockets and the picnic bag, and there were no keys. She jumped up and down experimentally, to see if anything jangled in a pocket she’d forgotten, but there was nothing, not even in the buttoned pouches of her combat trousers. She looked at her watch. It was five fifteen. Rachel and Anthony would be expecting her back about five thirty, and she had no phone signal to tell them she’d be later. She raised a fist and hit the car, pointlessly and impotently, on its roof.

  She must have lost the keys down among the dunes. They must have slipped out while she lay sleeping in the sand, their chinking obscured by the sound of the gulls and the sea. She would have to go back, running past the pond and along the North Wall to the point where the path turned south, parallel to the sea, and find the spot where she had—so carefree then, so untroubled by any preoccupation—lain down and surrendered her gaze to the wide and empty sky.

  She put the canvas bag down beside the car and then, on second thoughts, pushed it underneath, with the picnic bag. The car park was almost empty now, with only the cars belonging to the few paid staff still standing close to the entrance to the Visitor Center. Petra set off at a run, thinking she would ask at the center, to see if anyone had handed in her keys, but the center was shut, its huge glass door closed upon all its goods and services for another day, and no sign of life within, or at the café, where the tables and chairs had been rearranged with a businesslike regard for symmetry.

  Petra ran on, her mind jerked out of the serenity of the afternoon and scrabbling to find a solution to the problem of a locked car and a useless telephone and two little boys needing collecting half an hour away. When she reached the dunes, she found the spot where she had slept, and fell to her knees, raking through the sand with her fingers, hoping and hoping for a glint of metal.

  Then someone called. It was not a shout, but more the sound of someone trying to attract her attention in as discreet a way as possible. She looked up. Away down on the edge of the beach, a quad bike with a trailer was parked, and the trailer was piled with rolls of netting, and the young man Petra had seen earlier was waving at her, gesticulating with his hand.

  Petra scrambled to her feet. She began to run towards him, stumbling in the sand, and he was moving too, and when he was only twenty feet or so away, she could hear that what he was saying was, “I’ve got them, I’ve got them.”

  He held the keys out to her. She was breathless, and beaming. She said, gasping, “Oh thank you, thank you, you can’t imagine, I thought I’d lost them, I can’t phone, I didn’t know what I’d do—”

  He said, “I saw them when I came down on the bike. They were just lying on the sand.” His voice was easy, with a Midlands accent. “I passed them, on the bike. I thought they must be yours. I was going to hand them in, tomorrow.” He smiled at her. “I saw you asleep earlier.”

  Petra nodded. She held the keys hard against her. She
said, “I don’t know how to thank you—”

  “You don’t need to—”

  “You saved my life,” Petra said.

  He shrugged. He said, “Glad to help. Just luck, really.”

  “So lucky—”

  “It looked a good sleep—”

  She nodded.

  “It was wonderful.”

  “It’s the best, sleeping in the open air. By the sea.”

  Petra looked past him, at the water. She said, “I love the sea.”

  “Me too. And seabirds.”

  There was a small silence. Then she said, “What can I do, to say thank you?”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “I’d like to.”

  “Well,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets, “you could make a donation, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” Petra said, “yes. I’ll do that. I’d like to do that. Who shall I say helped me?”

  He looked at his feet.

  “No need for that—”

  “Yes, there is.”

  He shrugged. He glanced at her. She was breathing more evenly now, and her hair had escaped from her scarf thing and had fallen round her face.

  He said, “I’m Steve.”

  She nodded. She said, “I’m Petra.”

  “Unusual name—”

  “I live in Aldeburgh,” she said, “and I’ve got two little boys.” She held the keys up. “Who I’ve got to collect now. Thanks to you.” She took a step or two back, towards the path behind the dunes. She said, “Where d’you live, Steve?”

  He looked up at the sky for a moment. Then he looked briefly at Petra.

  “Shingle Street,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ralph, Edward gathered, had done well in his interview. Which was a relief. In fact, it was an enormous relief since Edward, having arranged the interview, had had severe subsequent apprehensions about the way Ralph might put himself across, and simultaneous pangs of guilt for his disloyalty in fearing that his brother might let him down. Ralph could not, in truth, be relied upon to be orthodox, or even, on occasion, particularly polite. He might turn up unshaven and unironed, in sneakers, and behave as if he was auditioning for an edgy indie band rather than the analysis team of a small, Swiss-owned bank that had managed to keep its sober nose clean during all the upheavals caused by what the French-speakers among Edward’s colleagues called la crise.

  But Ralph had worn a suit, and a tie, and the clarity and speed of his thinking had distracted Aidan Bennett, who was his principal interviewer, from the fact that his hair was over his collar and oddly rough, and his shirt cuffs seemed to have neither buttons nor links. Ralph had also, Aidan indicated to Edward, been extremely candid about his past history, explaining that he had put most of the money he had made in Singapore into his Internet business and had lost it, partly, he said frankly, because of the downturn and his bank’s behavior, but also partly, he thought, because his skills were intellectual and catalytic, rather than managerial. He had admitted that he liked problems, he liked unraveling difficulties and discovering the reasons for their having happened. Problems, mental problems, suited him, he said.

  “I liked him,” Aidan said to Edward.

  Edward nodded, trying to look as if he’d been quietly certain of that all along.

  “He’d fit in well with the Southeast Asia analysis team, especially in relationship to business in the U.S.,” Aidan said. “We could do with that sort of sudoku mind.” He glanced at Edward. “It would be long hours, of course. Not really possible to do daily from the east coast unless you’re a travel junkie.”

  “I don’t expect,” Edward said untruthfully, “that that’ll be a problem—”

  “He’s not at all like you.”

  “No—”

  “In any way.”

  Edward said, faintly nettled, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that he wasn’t what I was expecting.”

  “Is that a compliment? To me, I mean?”

  Aidan surveyed him for a second or two. Then he put a well-cared-for hand briefly on Edward’s shoulder.

  “Not really,” he said.

  Edward found Ralph in the wine bar next to the bank, with two junior members of the analysis team. They were drinking Peroni out of the bottle, and Ralph looked as easy with them as if they’d been working together for years.

  “How’d it go?”

  Ralph tipped his bottle towards his brother.

  “Good. I’m good.”

  “Ade liked him,” one of the juniors said. “He didn’t bother with the charm. That’s Ade all over. Only charming when he’s about to give you the hair-dryer treatment.”

  Edward nodded. He said to Ralph, “Well, I don’t think you should count yourself in just yet—”

  “I don’t, bro.”

  “It may take a few days. There are other people to ask—”

  “I know. Want a drink?”

  “Well,” Edward said, “I was thinking of heading home. Are you coming back for the night? I think Sigi’s expecting you.”

  Ralph put his bottle down.

  “Sorry—”

  “Have you got to get back?”

  “Later,” Ralph said.

  “Come back for supper at least,” Edward said.

  One of the other men signaled to the barman for another round.

  “I think,” Ralph said, “I’ll just stay put for a while. Thank you, though, and all that.”

  Edward hesitated. He wanted to ask Ralph if he didn’t want to tell him, in some detail, about how the interview had gone. He also wanted to say, don’t you want to see your sister-in-law, and your niece, but felt too exposed, especially in front of two men who were both in Aidan Bennett’s team, and also very much junior to him. He looked hard at Ralph.

  “Sure?”

  Ralph smiled at him. He seemed like someone who had come through a considerable crisis and been rewarded by the assurance of an unexpectedly good future.

  “Quite sure. Thanks, bro.”

  Edward took a step back. Were the thanks for the interview, or for the supper invitation—or for neither? Was Ralph, in fact, telling him to leave him alone? A small spurt of fury at his brother’s lack of grace flared inside him.

  “I’ll leave you,” he said, glaring, “to your new friends.”

  “The minute I was out on the pavement,” Edward said to Sigrid an hour later, “I wished I’d pushed him. I wished I’d made him come home with me.”

  Sigrid was laying the table. On weekdays, in term time, Sigrid tried to insist that Edward was home by seven thirty so that Mariella could eat supper with them and they could ask her about her day. Not that she wanted to tell them much. For Mariella, school was still something that you just had to do, every day, like brushing your teeth, or feeding your goldfish, but not something that constituted your real life, which was waiting for you outside school hours. And in the holidays, as it now was, Mariella spent the days with her friend Indira, whose mother also worked full-time, being looked after by a student earning some vacation money, and devising the kind of elaborate and inconsequential games with Indira that did not, definitely, stand up to parental examination over supper. All Mariella wanted to know, every evening, was whether her mother was going—as she occasionally did—to take the day off from work and devote herself to Mariella, all day, from waking up to going to sleep again, and with her mobile phone on silent into the bargain. If one of those rare days was promised, Mariella was all animation over supper, and invented extraordinary adventures and conversations that she had shared with Indira, despite the oppressive presence of Tanya, who only wanted to be back in Leeds with her boyfriend, and not tediously in charge of two conspiratorial little girls who insisted that they were never obliged by their parents to eat meals at a table. But if Sigrid was working the following day, as usual, Mariella simply watched her steadily throughout supper to see if, somehow, she might change her mind.

  Sigrid said, placing the candl
es, which were an integral part of her table laying, “I hadn’t really expected him—”

  “I just rather hoped, you know. After I’d got him the interview. Is that Mariella practicing her cello?”

  “Arpeggios,” Sigrid said briefly.

  “Ralph—”

  “Is rude,” Sigrid said.

  Edward shrugged.

  “Maybe he was just relishing not being around at home for tea, bath, bed. Time off.”

  Sigrid put clean cotton napkins beside their three plates.

  “He had the same upbringing as you. But he is not the same.”

  “Not conventional—”

  “Not connected,” Sigrid said. “A little bit autistic, I would say.”

  Edward opened the fridge door and took out a half-empty wine bottle. He held it up inquiringly.

  “Please,” Sigrid said.

  “If Mum rings,” Edward said, opening a cupboard door in search of glasses, “I’ll simply say that she’ll have to ask him how today went.”

  “Or not answer the phone—”

  Edward turned to look at her.

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that—”

  Sigrid sighed.

  “You’ve done enough. You got him an interview for the right kind of job, and he seems to have done quite well, but he has not thanked you and he has not wanted to talk to you about it; he would rather drink with two strangers.”

  “Are you cross?”