Daughters-in-Law

by Joanna Trollope

  “With him, yes,” Sigrid said. “With your family sometimes. With your mother more than with your father.”

  “Because of—?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Sigi,” Edward said, “that was such a long time ago. And we never told them. Not properly, anyway. You can’t blame them for not knowing something they were never told.”

  The sounds of the arpeggios in the sitting room stopped suddenly.

  “She has done fifteen minutes,” Sigrid said, “as I told her.”

  The kitchen door opened.

  “Finished,” Mariella said triumphantly.

  “Some scales now?”

  “Completely not.”

  “Five minutes—”

  “Oh no, please, oh please no, oh no, no—”

  “Five minutes,” Sigrid said. “I am coming in, to hear you.”

  “Will you stay the whole time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every second till I stop?”

  “Yes,” Sigrid said.

  Mariella looked at her father. “If she comes back in here,” she said sternly, to him, “send her right back to me.”

  Edward took his wine to the glass doors at the back of the kitchen that led out onto a deck above the small paved garden where Mariella had a netball hoop screwed to the wall that backed onto the house behind them. When she was a baby, they had discussed the possibility of moving farther out to a bigger house in a suburb, where there would be a lawn for Mariella to play on, and maybe a tree for a swing, and even bushes, to make camps in. But Edward had soon seen that such a project would never be more than a topic to play with, that Sigrid was, in a way, humoring him, trying to be normal, trying to persuade him—and herself—that she hadn’t spent the first year of Mariella’s life battling with the most profound and frightening of depressions, but had managed instead to take every change easily in her stride, as she would have wished to have done.

  The glass doors stood open to the deck. There were a couple of wooden armchairs on the deck, but Edward stayed in the doorway, leaning one shoulder against the frame, the hand that wasn’t holding his wineglass in his trouser pocket, restlessly sifting his change. He took a swallow. That had been a terrible year. Well, more than a year, really, if you took into account the end of a difficult pregnancy and the slow unhappy settling of Sigrid’s hormones, and her insistence, her absolute insistence, that Rachel and Anthony should not know what was the matter, should not know what a bungled and appallingly prolonged birth Mariella’s had been, ending in an emergency Caesarean operation because the heart monitor showed—had shown for far too long, in Edward’s view—that the baby was becoming acutely distressed.

  “Never again,” Sigrid said.

  She was lying on her side in the hospital bed, turned away from him.

  “No—”

  “I may be a coward, but I cannot do that again, I cannot—” The obstetrician had told Edward that a complicated first birth seldom affected subsequent births. But this, Edward felt, was no moment for pointing this out. Sigrid was weeping. She did not seem to want to try to feed Mariella. She wept and wept and told Edward that she was a bad mother, she knew it, she was bad through and through, a bad mother was the worst kind of badness there was, and there was nothing she could do about it, nothing, and please don’t give her the baby, don’t, because it just made her feel worse, just made her realize how bad, bad, bad she was.

  Sigrid’s mother, the doctor, had arrived from Stockholm. Edward had been thankful, just thankful, to see her. She had been very kind to Edward, and steady, and very firm with the hospital, and she had put Sigrid and Mariella on a plane and taken them both back to Stockholm, where they had stayed for three months. Edward had flown out most weekends to hold his daughter and feed her and change her and to have Sigrid tell him that he must not come near her, and that she was a bad mother.

  “Never again,” she said, over and over.

  And all the time, all during those alarming months, Edward was faced with protecting Sigrid from his parents knowing what was the matter, and with protecting his parents from knowing that they were being excluded from what was the matter.

  “It’s that mother of hers,” Rachel said. “Chilly woman. She was chilly at the wedding, remember?”

  “It’s hard to have a baby in another language, especially a first baby—”

  “She has us,” Rachel said. She looked at Edward. “She has you.”

  “Childbirth is different—”

  Rachel had looked at Anthony.

  “What do you think?”

  “I hope,” Anthony said, “she’ll come home soon. We can look after her here. We’d love to look after her here. We’d love to have the baby.”

  “I expect she’s jealous,” Rachel said. “I expect she resents Sigi marrying an Englishman and having an English family. Not that Sigi seems to want an English family much. She seems to insist on being so Swedish when’s she’s with us—”

  “She is Swedish,” Edward said. He thought gratefully, and with simultaneous regret, of the ordered calm of the flat in Stockholm, of the long windows and the pale floors and furniture, and the quiet, decided way that Sigrid’s mother spoke to her daughter. It was so different from the house he had grown up in, so different from his parents’ random, enthusiastic hospitality to all his friends, so different from the color and chaos and opinionated, loudly expressed conversations. He longed for Sigrid to be home, yet he dreaded her leaving Stockholm. He looked at his mother, ladling a Spanish-inspired stew into pottery bowls, and wished urgently that he could tell her that Sigrid was very ill, and had forbidden anyone in England but him to know.

  “He thinks we don’t know,” Rachel said to Anthony later.

  “Well, we don’t know—”

  “I know,” Rachel said. “We’re forbidden to go to the hospital, Sigrid gets carried off to Stockholm, Edward looks like a ghost and plainly wants to tell us things he’s been forbidden to mention. What on earth could that be, unless Sigrid had an awful time and now has severe baby blues?”

  “Maybe,” Anthony said reluctantly, “there’s something the matter with the baby.”

  Rachel shook her head.

  “Nope. It’s Sigrid. It hasn’t gone as she thought it would, and she doesn’t want us to know.”

  Anthony got up from where he was sitting, and came over to Rachel and planted his hands on her shoulders.

  “Rach—”

  “What?”

  “Rachel, if Sigrid and Edward make it plain that they don’t want us to know, we don’t know it. D’you hear me? We don’t know a thing.”

  Rachel sat very still.

  “We do not know,” Anthony repeated.

  “Okay,” Rachel said reluctantly. And then, “Even if Edward obviously wants us to know?”

  “He doesn’t,” Anthony said.

  “I don’t,” Edward said a week later, when his mother confronted him.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Rachel said. “More women feel like that than don’t, after babies. It’s absolutely normal. It’s hormones. It shouldn’t be called depression.”

  Edward looked away from her. He was consumed by a violent need to protect Sigrid and a dual fury with himself for letting his anxiety show and his mother for not keeping her mouth shut.

  “There’s nothing the matter,” he said. “She just wanted her mother there after Mariella was born, and now she wants to be with her a bit longer. It’s what Dad said, about having your first baby in another language. That’s all.”

  Rachel gave a small smile.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said and Edward, goaded out of self-control by her astuteness and her refusal to restrain it, had yelled, “Mind your own bloody business!”

  It might have been all right, Edward reflected now, drinking his wine and jingling his change, if the matter had been left there, if Rachel had been content with her definite if unacknowledged victory. But she had been unable to restrain herself, unable not to m
ake it plain to Sigrid, after she and the baby were back from Sweden, that Sigrid’s parents were not the only grandparents, and furthermore that Mariella, being the first grandchild on either side, was of particular importance and significance. Then she had gone on to offer help, and support, and babysitting, and Sigrid, adamant with fury, had told Edward that if his mother didn’t leave the house instantly, and possibly forever, she would go straight back to Stockholm, taking Mariella with her. And then, after Rachel had finally gone, Sigrid turned on Edward and accused him of disloyalty, and of telling his mother things he had promised her he would never tell anyone, and of being more attached to his family than he was to his wife and child.

  So he hadn’t confessed. He hadn’t told her, then, that he had been so frightened by her suffering, so desperate not to add to it or be the cause of its ever happening again, that he had, when Mariella was ten weeks old, booked himself a vasectomy with Marie Stopes International and handed over his three hundred pounds with a determined conviction of doing the right thing for the right reasons in the right way.

  The procedure had taken ten minutes.

  “Your sex drive will be unaffected,” a doctor about his own age said to him. “You will produce the same amount of fluid, but devoid of sperm. We will test you in six months.”

  After six months, he had still not told Sigrid. He had, in truth, no need to, because she came to bed in uncompromising pajamas and made it unequivocally plain that she did not want to be touched. He bore it until Mariella was almost one, and until sessions in the shower with himself had reached a pitch of disgusted pointlessness, and then he told her in a rush, blurted it all out, told her his sperm count was nil and that he was going mad.

  She cried. She’d cried so much since Mariella was born that at first Edward thought exhaustedly, distractedly, that this was just more of the same. But she was smiling. Or at least, she was trying to smile, and she said a whole lot of stuff to him in Swedish, and then she said, in English, that he was wonderful, that she so appreciated what he’d done, but at the moment she had all the libido of a floorcloth. He could do what he liked, Sigrid said, laughing, sobbing, but he’d have to put up with her just lying there, a fish on a slab, a fish with a scar across its belly.

  He finished his wine. God, it had taken ages. Years, probably. Years of patience and frustration and knowing that seeking sex elsewhere would provide the brief heady release that comes with, say, losing your temper completely, only to be followed by a long, gray drag of remorse and regret and self-disappointment. He’d tried not to remember the Sigrid he’d met at that wild party at the University of Loughborough, the Sigrid who’d caused him to say, happily amazed, “Is it normal—I mean, is it okay—to have as much sex as this?” He’d tried to concentrate on love, on loving her, on adoring Mariella, on being a man who was not, as someone once said of persistent sexual desire, chained to a lunatic.

  And now, here they all were. Mariella was eight and practicing the cello. Sigrid was the number two in a serious and highly regarded laboratory. He was well paid, professionally well thought of, and their marriage, if not what it had initially promised to be, was something he could not visualize being without. Maybe that was habit. Or maybe it was just . . . marriage. Maybe the seismic shocks of it left a kind of emotional scar tissue, but the body kept on functioning over and around the lumps and bumps with a dedicated optimism peculiar to the human race.

  Edward turned back to the kitchen. Sigrid was by the sink, washing lettuce, and Mariella was leaning up against her from behind, as if to make sure that she couldn’t go anywhere. He felt, abruptly, rather unsteady, and that if he said anything his voice might come out choked, and a bit ragged, so he just stood there, holding his empty wineglass, and thinking that if all you really needed was love, then that was actually a very demanding and complicated recipe for human survival.

  Later, Mariella summoned him to say good night to her. She was going through a phase of nagging for a dog, and had bought a dog whistle with some of her pocket money, which she had attached to a glitter shoelace and hung from one of the knobs of her white-painted Swedish bedhead, and when she was ready for a good-night kiss, she blew it peremptorily.

  She was sitting up in bed in spotted pajamas with her hair brushed into a smooth fair curtain. Her bed was full of her plush animals, and a revolving night-light was casting starry shapes across the walls and ceiling.

  “Daddy,” Mariella said.

  Edward sat down on her bed.

  “Ouch,” she said, moving her feet.

  “Wouldn’t you like to lie down?”

  Mariella slid gingerly down in bed, in order not to disturb the animals.

  “Daddy—”

  “Yes.”

  “This dog—”

  “Darling, we’ve explained. Over and over. It wouldn’t be fair on a dog, with all of us out all day. Dogs hate it, being without company.”

  “Okay then,” Mariella said, clasping her hands together, “we’d better think of something that’ll make you stay at home. Let’s have a baby.”

  “Darling—”

  “Look,” Mariella said, “I know what you have to do. I’ll go for a sleepover at Indira’s and you can just do it, you and Mummy. I really, really want a baby.”

  Edward put a hand on the duvet over her stomach.

  “Darling, it isn’t as simple as that—”

  “You always say that.”

  “Because,” Edward said, “it’s true.”

  “Mummy said she didn’t have any more baby eggs—”

  “That’s about it.”

  “What if I don’t like being an only child?”

  “Then,” Edward said unfairly, looking straight at her, “I would be very sad indeed.”

  Mariella sighed. She lifted her hands and interlaced them in front of her face.

  “Do you have to tell your parents everything?”

  “When you’re a child, it’s quite a good idea to tell them most things. So they can help.”

  “But you don’t really help,” Mariella said. “You just say no, no, this won’t work, that won’t work, you don’t do things that I know would help me.”

  Edward leaned towards her. He put a hand either side of her head, sinking them into the pillow.

  “You are a baggage, Mariella Brinkley.”

  She glimmered up at him.

  “When I’m big—”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have babies and dogs and probably a monkey.”

  “Will I want to come and stay with you?”

  Mariella raised her chin for a kiss.

  “You’ll have to. To babysit everything while I go to work.”

  Edward paused in the downward movement to kiss her.

  “Work? Are you going to work?”

  Mariella closed her eyes briefly, as if he was too tiresome to be borne.

  “Of course I am,” she said.

  In the kitchen, Sigrid was standing with the telephone in her hand.

  Edward said, “Mariella is bent upon a career, and we’re going to look after her monkey while she does it.”

  “I’d be glad to,” Sigrid said. She dropped the telephone back into its charger. “That was Charlotte.”

  “What was—”

  “On the telephone. While you were with Mariella.”

  “Oh?”

  Sigrid said, “She wants us to go to lunch. When your parents are there, the weekend after next.”

  “Goodness. Not what we’re used to—”

  “She sounded very excited.”

  “What, about having us all to lunch?”

  “Well,” Sigrid said, “about something. I don’t know what. It can’t have been about Ralph.”

  “Why Ralph?”

  Sigrid began to clear plates from the table.

  “Ralph was there.”

  “With Charlotte and Luke?”

  “Yes.” She glanced at him. “I think he was a little bit drunk.”

  Edward put his
fists up against his forehead.

  “Give me strength—”

  “Charlotte said they would make him a bed on the sofa. She seemed to think it was funny.”

  “I wish I did—”

  The telephone rang again. Edward moved to pick it up, but Sigrid darted ahead of him, laying a hand on his arm as she passed, to deter him.

  “Yes?” she said into the receiver and then, in a carefully neutral voice, “Oh. Rachel.”

  Edward put his hand out automatically for the telephone. Sigrid smiled at him and turned her back.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” Sigrid said to her mother-in-law. “No, Edward is at a business dinner, and Mariella is in bed . . .”

  There was a brief pause and then Sigrid said, “Edward worked so very hard to get Ralph this interview. It was not easy, in this climate.”

  Edward came up behind Sigrid and slid his arms round her waist. To his relief, after a moment or two, she relaxed against him. He could hear his mother’s brisk tones from the telephone, as if he was listening to her through a wall, or from under bedclothes.

  “I’m not aware,” Sigrid said, “that he has thanked Edward. I’m not aware that he knows the favor he has been done.”

  Edward put his face into the angle of Sigrid’s neck and shoulder.

  “I can’t help you, I’m afraid,” Sigrid said. “I’m sorry Petra is in the dark, too. I’m sure he’ll turn up. Maybe he is celebrating. Yes, yes, of course. I will tell Mariella. She would send kisses too, if she were awake. Yes, thank you. Love to you, love to Anthony.”

  She clicked the phone off.

  “You saved me,” Edward said into her neck.

  “Only a very small save—”

  “Why didn’t you suggest she ring Luke?”

  Sigrid turned round in his arms.

  “Because,” she said, “I didn’t feel like it.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  On the way to London, Rachel said she would drive. Anthony agreed, as she had known he would, so that he could sit silently beside her, half listening to Classic FM, and gazing out of the window at the clouds, and the passing landscape—even the townscape of northeast London—and she could drive and think.

  She needed to think. She had tried to think for days, either alone, or out loud to Anthony, but Anthony had not wanted to participate in her thinking, and had evaded her, either, she supposed, because he didn’t know what to think himself, or because he was not of a mind to sympathize with her and had no inclination to fight about it. Anthony had never liked analysis, anyway. All their lives together, whenever there was a problem involving relationships, Anthony had worn the hunted expression of a dog required to walk on its hind legs, a bemused, slightly oppressed expression, and made for his studio. The most he would ever say, if Rachel pursued him with her need to dissect and ferret out an explanation, was, “Can’t we just see what happens? Can’t we just wait?”