Ralph took a swallow of water.
“She doesn’t have the option to be miserable.”
“Hey, steady on—”
“She hasn’t contributed anything much since the boys were born. The sale of the odd painting, maybe, but nothing significant. If she wants to go on playing with the boys and growing vegetables, then she has to accept some compromises in return for that freedom.”
Edward leaned forward.
“Ralph, she’s never known you in a suit. She’s never known you commuting, with a regular pay slip and long working days. You’ve been a superannuated hippy ever since she’s known you. You can’t blame her for being a bit thrown by the change.”
“It’s exciting—”
“Exciting can also be frightening. Can’t you just battle with a long commute for a few more months until she gets used to this zoot in a suit?”
There was a pause. Then Ralph said, “No. Not really. I want to do this properly. With all my energy.”
“So you want to move into Ipswich—”
“Hell, that’s a compromise!” Ralph said. “I don’t want to live in a suburban street either, but I’m prepared to do it so that I can walk to the fucking station!”
“And if Petra won’t budge?”
Ralph leaned back in his chair. He looked directly at Edward. He said, “That’s why I’m here. I thought maybe you’d have the answer.”
Edward stared down at his plate. He had a sudden mental image of Petra on her wedding day, taking her shoes off and running across the gravel of his parents’ drive in bare feet, as easily as if she were running on a carpet.
“Well,” he said slowly, not looking up, “I suppose you could just not live together for a while. Leave Petra and the boys where they are and rent a room here for the week? Go home at weekends. For now, anyway. Till things settle?”
Now, Edward drank several satisfying mouthfuls of his brandy and soda. A girl came from behind the bar to collect the dirty glasses on his table, standing as close to him, in her miniskirt and knee-high boots, while she stacked the glasses on a tray, as if he had been merely a piece of furniture. At one point, her black-mesh-covered thigh was practically touching his arm, but she took no notice of him whatsoever. Would she, he wondered, have behaved with such supreme indifference if he had been ten years younger? He watched her walk back to the bar. She was a girl so different from Sigrid, so different from Petra, who were in turn so different from each other, that it was hard to believe that they were all of the same gender. The girl from the bar would probably have thought Petra was insane. Pass up the chance to live in a city? Mental.
It might be mental in its way, Edward thought, but Petra was only being true to herself, however inconvenient and weirdly adamant that self was. He was delighted to see Ralph’s enthusiasm for this new job, and relieved to see what looked like a real determination to make something of it. But he felt deeply, deeply uneasy that he had suggested that they lived temporarily apart. He shouldn’t have done it. The moment the words were out of his mouth, and Ralph was eagerly, energetically seizing upon the idea, Edward had felt his heart sinking in that inexorable way hearts are prone to, in the aftermath of the wrong impulse.
“Just an idea,” Edward had said hastily. “Only a notion. Think about it—”
But it was too late. Ralph said he must get his train, but his eyes were bright and, when they stood up from the table, he put his arms round his brother in a way he hadn’t done in years and hugged him hard.
Edward said, trying to temper his enthusiasm, “I’m not trying to split you up, mate,” and Ralph had laughed and said that wasn’t a problem, they both knew what to do with freedom, no worries there, and had gone swinging out onto the pavement and into a taxi, leaving Edward feeling that he had, inadvertently, put something intrinsically pretty fragile even further into jeopardy. He stood there for a moment or two, watching the taillights of Ralph’s taxi diminishing, thinking that he would go straight home and dump himself and his regrets on Sigrid, and then he thought that that was exactly what he should not do, that he should instead work through his remorse on his own, and go home at least on resolved terms with himself.
So here he was, halfway down a brandy and soda, wondering if the person he should actually talk to was not Sigrid, but Petra.
Luke prayed that it would not be his mother who answered the telephone. He was dreading the call in any case, but it was also imperative that he speak to his father alone, and in private, and as his father only used his mobile phone intermittently, and in art-college-term time, Luke’s only choice was to try the home landline at a time when he thought his mother might be out, or in the garden, and his father alone in his studio.
“Hello?” Anthony said.
“Dad—”
“Luke,” Anthony said, his voice full of warmth. “Great to hear you, lad—”
“How are you?”
“Good,” Anthony said heartily. “Good. Drawing some sparrows. The Royal Mail might be doing a series of bird stamps. I love drawing sparrows, so sociable.”
“Lovely—”
“And how are things with you two? I loved your flat.”
“Well—”
“Well, what?”
“That’s why I’ve rung. Things with us. It’s a bit difficult—”
Anthony’s tone altered to deep concern.
“Oh no—”
“I mean,” Luke said hastily, “we aren’t difficult, we’re fine. It’s just that there’s a problem. I’m trying to sort it, for . . . Charlotte, well for us, really. Which is why I’m ringing.”
“Tell me,” Anthony said.
Luke paused. He was alone in the studio, Jed being out looking at a new project. It was just as well he was alone, because he’d been so jangled up all day after Charlotte had told him, when they woke up, that she hadn’t been to work the day before, but instead had been to see her mother, that Jed would have been bound to notice something and Luke would probably have told him a bit, at least, and then wished he hadn’t because Jed, though a really nice guy, thought people who got married needed their heads seeing to. And anyway, he could never have told Jed how horrified he’d been to realize that Charlotte had told him a lie, and that he’d believed her. The horror had deepened because Charlotte didn’t seem to think she’d done anything very awful; she was far more concerned, still, with Rachel’s awfulness, which she seemed to think justified all aberrant conduct on her part. He was now appalled to find that his father’s voice, sympathetic and encouraging, made him feel distinctly unsteady.
“I don’t know how to say it, Dad.”
“Try just starting.”
“It’s . . . well, it’s about the other Sunday.”
“Yes.”
“And what Mum—”
“I know—”
“The thing is, Dad, that Charlotte is still really upset.”
“Poor girl,” Anthony said sympathetically.
“I expect it’s pregnancy and hormones and all that, but she doesn’t seem to be getting over it.”
“Give it time,” Anthony said. “It’s only ten days or so. I know Mum felt terrible afterwards. I’m not saying she didn’t need to feel terrible, but I know she did. They’ve both got to let it just bed down, and become not such a big deal.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work—”
“Oh? Well, I’m not sure there’s another viable option—”
“Dad, I think there is. Charlotte thinks there is. She’s very clear about it.”
There was a tiny pause. Luke wondered if Anthony was still drawing with the hand not holding the phone.
“Which is?”
“Oh God,” Luke said, “I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just say it. Charlotte wants Mum to apologize to her. Could you . . . could you ever ask her to do that? For . . . for Charlotte? For me?”
The pause was much longer this time, then Anthony said less warmly, “No, lad. No, I couldn’t do that.”
“Couldn’t you?” Luke said, aware his voice was shaking.
“No,” Anthony said, “no, she was very much in the wrong, she knows that, I know that, you know that. And she’s paying for it internally, if you know what I mean. But I’m not asking her to make a public apology, I wouldn’t ask her to do that.” He stopped and then he said firmly, “She’s my wife.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Steve Hadley’s cottage at Shingle Street was sunk deeply into the beach. It was brilliantly whitewashed—Steve’s landlord repainted the exterior every spring, after the winter storms—and stood with its narrow gable end facing the sea. From a distance it looked almost as if it was plunging through the shingle towards the shore, but when you got nearer you could see that a concrete gully ran round the house, wide enough for a water butt and a dustbin, and for entry by the only door Steve and his fellow tenant ever used, facing inland, away from the east wind.
Steve shared the house with a man who worked in a fish smokehouse near Woodbridge. They had met online, both seeking short, cheap lets on the coast, and although the landlord of the cottage could have leased it profitably as a holiday rental, he was a man opposed to holidaymakers, a man who preferred to let his few properties to people who worked in Suffolk and were therefore likely to contribute to its economy. So he was pleased to find Steve, and Terry from the smokehouse, who were not only locally employed, but who also would not mind the antiquated hot-water system or primitive kitchen. There were two small bedrooms, a shabby sitting room with a leatherette sofa and chairs, and a television of similar antiquity, and a bathroom where towels never dried and the walls were always sweating.
But there was the beach. Crunching across it, with Barney heavily on her back and Kit slipping and sliding and squealing by her side, Petra wondered how she could ever have borne to be away. The shingle itself—so much of it, so clean and smooth—the flatness, throwing the immense blue dome of the sky into even greater relief, the symmetrical mounds of blue-green sea kale, the creeping skeins of sea pea with its bright-purple flowers, the air, the space, the wind, it was all exhilarating, and at the same time profoundly consoling. I’m home, Petra thought, I’m back. This is the place.
“What d’you think?” she called to Kit. “What d’you think of it?”
He was scrambling through the stones, pink with exertion.
“Windy!” he shouted happily. “Windy!”
“Do you like it?”
He nodded furiously, bending down to seize handfuls of pebbles and throw them, clattering, down again. Petra laughed. Kit glanced at her, and laughed too, hurling pebbles about.
“Careful—”
“Look!” Kit shouted, pointing.
Petra looked. Steve, having seen them approaching, was coming across the shingle to meet them.
“Look!” Kit shouted again to Steve, chucking pebbles. “Look!”
“Hi there,” Steve said to Petra.
She stopped walking.
“Hi—”
Steve indicated Barney.
“Shall I take him?”
“Yes,” Petra said gratefully. “He weighs a ton—”
“I’m throwing!” Kit shouted to Steve. “I’m throwing!”
“I can see you,” Steve said, deftly taking Barney. “I’m watching—”
“I’ll have to watch,” Petra said. “He’s a shocker for water, Kit.”
Barney looked at Steve calmly, without dismay. Steve said to him, “Hello there, big boy. The sea’s not like other water.”
“It’s bigger,” Petra said.
“You have to handle it differently,” Steve said. “I’ll take him down to the sea. I’ll show him the sea. I’ll explain.” He smiled at Kit.
Petra glanced at him. Barney was lolling back in his arms now, like a pasha, and Kit approached to stagger round his knees with handfuls of stones, chattering and chirruping. She said, “You’re a natural, with kids.”
“I like them—”
“Have you—”
“No,” Steve said, “but my brother has. And there’s all the schools who come to the reserve. I like the primary schools a lot. I like it when they still want to please you. They’re a nightmare when they start wanting to impress each other.”
Petra nodded. Steve said, “Shall we go down to the water?”
“Okay—”
Steve looked down at Kit, still chanting and stamping round him in the pebbles.
“Come and meet the North Sea,” Steve said to Kit, and he set off through the shingle, carrying Barney, with Kit tagging along beside him, still clutching his stones.
Petra watched the three of them for a moment, standing where they had left her. The day was bright and clear, so she put up her hand to shade her eyes a little as she followed their uneven progress towards the sea. Barney flung his head back in Steve’s arms, and closed his eyes in rapture against the sun and air, and then Kit, stumbling, put a hand out and grasped at the nearest leg of Steve’s jeans, and Petra saw Steve detach his own hand briefly from supporting Barney, and touch Kit’s head with it, and something inside her, something knotted and strangulated that had been there for weeks now, slipped and smoothed and untied itself. She took an immense involuntary breath of relief, and released it out into the huge blue space above the sea.
Later in his dank kitchen, with its view along the beach to the little terrace of houses where Petra had lived when she was first with Ralph, Steve made toast for the boys, and tea for himself and Petra. He spread the toast with brilliantly red jam of a kind Petra thought Rachel would never have countenanced— “Chemicals and colorings and synthetic pips—a complete travesty of jam”—and cut it into strips without Petra assisting him, or even suggesting it. The boys were entranced.
“White bread,” Kit said reverently.
He picked up strips of toast in each hand. Barney was cramming toast into his mouth with his fist.
“Steady,” Petra said to him, but not as if she meant it. Steve had put a mug of tea down in front of her, and a bag of sugar with a spoon stuck in it, and then he held out more toast and red jam inquiringly towards her and Barney lunged at it, grunting urgently through his packed mouthful, and they all began laughing, even Kit, sitting on plastic garden chairs round a rickety table in Steve’s kitchen. It was then that Steve said to Petra quietly, under the laughing, “Who knows you’re here?” and Petra said, intending only to be factual, “There’s no one to know.”
“You sure?”
“Ralph’s in London for the day. He’s at . . . at an induction meeting, he said. Whatever that is.”
“I wouldn’t want any sneaking,” Steve said.
“No—”
“But I wouldn’t want you not to come. Either.”
Petra looked at her children, gobbling and giggling and sticky. She wanted to say something of what the afternoon had been like, how it had made her feel, how the gritty, abrasive things that had been inside her recently, like little balls of pumice, maybe, had dissolved out there on the stones by the sea. But she couldn’t think how to put it; she couldn’t think how you described a sensation of finding yourself back in place, in a situation which exactly fitted you, and suited you, so she just reached across Kit to remove a fragment of toast glued by its jam to Barney’s thigh and said, for all three of them, “We’ve had a great time. Haven’t we?”
Steve didn’t say anything in response, but he was smiling. He collected up the mugs and the mess on the table, and put it all in the chipped Belfast sink by the window—Petra’s nan had had a sink like that, veined with ancient cracks—and then he produced a flannel and ran it under the tap, and squeezed it out, and attacked the boys’ hands and faces with it, and they loved it, and shrieked, and squirmed to get away and then thrust themselves back at him for more.
He was not, Petra thought, surveying him, good-looking. He wasn’t tall enough, or well formed enough; he was too stocky and his eyes were too small and his ears were too big, but he was pleasing to look at all the same, because he i
nhabited himself so comfortably, he moved so quickly and nimbly, he had an air of flexible practicality. He turned from a deliberately exaggerated swipe of the cloth across Kit’s face and caught Petra’s eye. He smiled again easily. Petra smiled back. Then he threw the cloth towards the sink, and came round the table to where Petra was sitting and, without making any kind of drama out of it, leaned down and kissed her lightly on the mouth.
* * *
Charlotte’s sister, Sarah, said that she would come to London. She made it sound as if she was doing Charlotte a favor, but in truth she loved the chance of a day in London, and she especially liked Marylebone High Street, where Charlotte worked, because it had, she said to her husband, not just a fantastic bookshop, but an amazing charity bookshop too. Her husband, practiced over the years at hearing “books” and understanding “shoes,” nodded and said, have a good day anyway, and offered to collect the girls from school. He had just taken up flying lessons and was anxious to build up credit with Sarah for the hours and the expense that the new enthusiasm was going to require.
Sarah had agreed to meet Charlotte in a French café, with scrubbed tables and an acceptable Continental menu. Sarah had been to the bookshop, and had then bought a necklace and a sweater from the other shops, which she had added to the bookshop bag, which she hoped that Charlotte, who was notorious in her family for not reading anything other than magazines, would notice. But Charlotte, gorgeous in a small white skirt and a black smock top, with bell sleeves and a plunging neckline, was not in the frame of mind to notice anything except that she had an ally in the form of her sister. She came flying into the café and embraced Sarah with a fervor that suggested that they hadn’t seen each other for a year.
“Sarah, I am so pleased to see you, you can’t think what it’s been like, and I am absolutely starving. I’m absolutely starving all the time.”
Sarah, although joining in much of the family adoration of Charlotte in the past, took a more objective view of her younger sister these days. Charlotte, it seemed to her, had a propensity to go on trading on her small-child charms to an unacceptable degree, and it was time Charlotte realized that twenty-six wasn’t, actually, very young anymore, and that marriage wasn’t just a continuation of a pink-glitter wedding day, but a serious undertaking involving adult conduct and compromise. She surveyed Charlotte across the table. Not only was her cleavage much on display, but she was wearing a large jeweled cross on a long chain round her neck, which only drew attention to it.
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