Petra halted, stock-still. She was wearing a kind of gypsy skirt, familiar to Rachel, and her old denim jacket, and her hair was in a rough pigtail, pulled over one shoulder, and tied at the end with a collection of brightly colored woolen bobbles.
“Hi,” she said to Rachel. Her voice sounded perfectly normal.
Rachel was hurled into a sudden fluster. It would have been natural, instinctive even, to have kissed Petra, but under the current circumstances that wasn’t possible. Nor was smiling, somehow, although Rachel felt her face twist itself into some kind of rictus, like a performing dog. Even her voice, when she managed to say “Hello,” sounded unnatural.
Petra was saying nothing, just standing in front of Rachel with her woven grocery bags. Rachel opened her mouth a few times, and made an involuntary gesture or two, trying to indicate a query about where the buggy was, where the boys were. Petra didn’t help her.
“How . . . are you?” Rachel said at last.
“Fine—”
“And . . . and the boys?”
“Fine,” Petra said.
Rachel got a grip of herself.
“Where are they?” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without the boys—”
“They’re with Steve,” Petra said.
“With . . . with—”
“Yes,” Petra said. She sounded as if what she was saying was so ordinary as to be almost boring. “Steve’s taken them swimming. They love swimming, so he’s taken them.” She let a little pause fall, and then she said, “Because I can’t swim. Remember?”
And then she smiled at Rachel, politely and remotely, and stepped into the road to walk past her with the shopping bags.
That evening, Rachel rang Edward to describe her encounter with Petra, and to ask if he thought she should tell Anthony.
“Why ever not?” Edward said irritably.
“Well, he’s hurt enough already—”
“Exactly.”
“And I don’t want him picturing his grandsons swimming with this man of Petra’s.”
“Well, don’t tell him then.”
“But you said—”
“Mum,” Edward said, “Mum. I don’t feel like this conversation. I don’t want to discuss this. Or think about it. Okay?”
Rachel said sympathetically, “I expect you’re missing Sigrid and Mariella.”
Edward shut his eyes tightly. He thought he wouldn’t reply.
“Are they having a lovely time?” Rachel asked.
Edward didn’t open his eyes. Sigrid had been away for four days and he had rung once. There was no phone signal on the island where her parents’ summer house was.
“Think so,” Edward said.
“Would you like to come up here? The weekend will be grim without them. Come on Friday.”
Edward opened his eyes.
“No, thank you, Mum.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Edward said, “I want to stay here.”
There was a silence. In it, the message signal on Edward’s phone beeped. Then Rachel said crisply, “Fine. I’ll leave you to be disagreeable in peace. Bye, darling.”
The line went dead. Edward scrolled to his message box.
“In Stockholm for 3 nights. Back Sunday. X.”
He dialed Sigrid’s number. There was a wait while the signal sorted itself out between London and Stockholm, and then her voice-mail message, “This is Sigrid’s phone. Please leave me a message and I’ll call you back. Thank you.”
Edward opened his mouth to say, “Call me,” and thought better of it. He threw his phone down on the sofa beside him. She had left, barely kissing him good-bye, declining to account for excluding him from this last-minute holiday, not even offering an explanation for her impulse, withdrawing into a homing Swedishness, which seemed to make her impervious to any consequence of her behavior and certainly to any reaction or emotion of his.
“Will you miss me?” he’d said to Mariella in Sigrid’s hearing, despising himself. Mariella had hugged him as if he were a dear old teddy bear, with no human feelings. “A bit,” she said. And then they’d left, with a case full of shorts and plimsolls, Sigrid wearing a baseball cap and looking about sixteen, and had gone straight to the island in the archipelago where, Mariella said, they were going to have breakfast in their pajamas and go sailing and make campfires on the beach.
“We’re going to sleep together,” Mariella said, “in the big bed. Just me and Mummy.”
Edward had looked up the weather in southeast Sweden online, and it was beautiful, warm and clear and with low wind speeds. He pictured Sigrid and Mariella in his parents-in-law’s house, which was no more than a big cabin, really, white-walled, gray-roofed, furnished with romantic Nordic simplicity, with views on three sides of water and, in the distance, a village of white cottages and a spire on a red-roofed church. He had made love to Sigrid in that cabin, they had cooked fish on flat stones on the beach, she had been thrilled and impressed that he knew how to sail, that he was such a good sailor and handled her father’s boat with ease.
“You look . . . so right here,” she’d said, lying on the beach with her head in his lap.
Well, not right enough, any longer, to be included. Not right enough to accompany her to the island, to see his parents-in-law, with whom he had always got on. Not right enough—oh hell, Edward thought, getting up from the sofa and pacing through to the kitchen, what is going on, what is she playing at, is she going downhill again, what is the matter?
He opened the fridge and took out a bottle of beer, slamming it down on the table. Whatever was the matter, whatever Sigrid was up to, he’d just have to bear it. He wouldn’t say anything to anyone, certainly not to his brothers, while Ralph was in such a jam himself, and Luke was dealing with all the consequences of a new marriage and all the crossed wires this unexpected pregnancy had caused. And to crown it all, Ralph was coming to stay for the first few days of his new employment, until his room off Finsbury Square was ready, on the first of the month, and he was going to need supporting, wasn’t he, not informing that his older brother, to whom he looked for strength and sympathy, was in almost as rocky a place as he was, even if more subtly positioned.
Edward flipped the top off the beer bottle and took a deep swallow. Sigrid would be back four nights from now, full of air and sunshine and happy Swedishness, and, despite all his hurt at her treatment of him, he did not want her to walk back in to a long-faced husband as well as an unexpected-guest brother-in-law. He took another mouthful of beer. No more wallowing, he told himself. No more plaguing myself with imaginings. At least . . . at least, she’s coming home.
Sigrid had intended to stay on the island for a week. She had planned on four or five days alone with Mariella, doing all the simple, peaceful, water-orientated things that she had done on the island when she was Mariella’s age, and then she had asked her parents to come and join them for the weekend, expecting a gratified agreement since her parents loved the island, and had not seen Mariella, their only grandchild, for seven months. But Sigrid’s mother had said that she was so sorry but her father had an important business function in Stockholm on the Saturday night, and so they would be staying in the city.
“Well, you come,” Sigrid said.
“No, I can’t,” her mother said. “I’m going with your father. The invitation is for both of us.”
“Rather than see Mariella and me?”
“Sigi,” her mother said calmly, “you have sprung this trip on us. It is last-minute. We had plans in place.”
“But I wanted to see you. For you to see Mariella—”
“Then come to Stockholm.”
“But I wanted to be on the island—”
“I must go,” Sigrid’s mother said. “I leave the decision to you.”
Even with the irritation of her parents not changing their plans, Sigrid anticipated loving being on the island. She longed for the familiar, faintly rough texture of the blue-and-white bed linen in the cottage
, and the mornings, nursing a mug of tea, still in her pajamas, and watching the sun come up, and the evenings, on the beach, showing Mariella how to gut a fish as her father had shown her and Bengt, and then spearing it on a twig before grilling it. But Mariella did not much like fish, anyway, and certainly didn’t want to touch the gluey loops of its innards, and at night, instead of sleeping peacefully and thereby allowing Sigrid to rise, rested and refreshed, to watch the sunrise, she kicked and swiveled in her slumber, seizing the duvet and muttering, to such an extent that Sigrid took herself off to her narrow childhood bed in a separate bedroom, where her feet hit the board at the foot of the bed, and some plumbing pipes cleared their throats at intervals in the wall behind her head, all night long.
The weather was beautiful, but the days on the island were long—long and, frankly, boring. The sailing classes in which Sigrid had hoped to enrol Mariella were finished for the summer, and after a first nostalgic scramble round the rocks, walks were limited. Because Swedish schools returned weeks before English ones, all the families had gone, leaving their houses shuttered and their boats, in some cases, already sheeted for the winter. Mariella knew not to say outright that she was bored, but she did say, now and then, that it was odd to be without a television. It was odd. The whole place felt odd, as if Sigrid’s recollection of her childhood there had been conjured out of fantasy rather than out of fact. On the fourth day, watching Mariella building a little cairn of pebbles with one hand, as if she couldn’t be sufficiently interested to use both, Sigrid suggested that they return to Stockholm. Mariella scrambled to her feet.
“Oh, yes!”
Sigrid smiled at her.
“Is it so very boring here?”
“Well,” Mariella said, “it would have been better, really, if Daddy had been here too.”
Ralph had laid all his suits for London out on the double bed. He couldn’t think of it, anymore, as “our” bed, even though they still shared it, turned away from each other, and lined up along the edges in case a stray foot or knee should touch by mistake. Ralph had considered moving out, to sleep with Kit, or on the sofa downstairs, but anger kept him in his own bed, just as anger was revving him up to leave for London as soon as he possibly could. Edward, sensing this rage, had agreed that he could occupy their small guest room—it doubled as Sigrid’s study—in order to get away from Aldeburgh as soon as possible.
“I’m going crazy,” Ralph had said to Edward, “living here. Crazy. And every time I try and talk to her, I get crazier.”
The problem was, really, that Petra was hiding nothing.
“Are you still seeing him?”
“Yes.”
“Are you”—pause—“sleeping with him?”
“No.”
“Are you”—shouting—“going to?”
“Maybe,” Petra said.
“What d’you mean, maybe?”
Petra was at the kitchen table, drawing, her hair hanging, her face mostly hidden.
“I don’t fancy him much,” Petra said to her sketchbook, “but maybe. I dunno.”
Ralph placed his hands flat on the table and lowered his shoulders in order to see her face.
“Look at me!”
Slowly, Petra looked up.
“Why,” Ralph said, trying to control himself, “do you have to see him at all?”
Petra waited a moment, and then she said, “I got lonely.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“You couldn’t hear me,” Petra said.
“Why didn’t you tell Mum and Dad?”
Petra bent her head again.
“They’d have wanted to do something. They’d have wanted me to do something—”
“But”—shouting again—“you have done something!”
“But I chose it,” Petra said to her drawing.
Ralph sat down heavily in a chair opposite Petra. He said, “What d’you feel about me?”
“What I have always done.”
“Which is?”
“I like you,” Petra said. “You’re cool.”
“But—”
“But you’ve changed. You want things I don’t want now. I can’t change, just to suit you.”
Ralph sprawled across the table and laid his head in his arms.
“Oh my God—”
Petra said nothing.
Ralph said wearily, “I haven’t changed, but if we’re going to live and eat, there has to be money, and I’ve been given a chance to earn some. How are you going to look after the boys without money, for God’s sake? And, as you have no job, it has to be me. I cannot believe how . . . how obtuse you are.”
Petra said, “I don’t want that sort of money.”
“Christ—”
“I don’t need to live in this kind of place. I don’t need a car. It’s nice to have, but I’d manage. I like things small. I always have.”
Ralph said sarcastically, “Oh, so my parents’ generosity was repulsive to you, was it?”
Petra looked up. She said sharply, “They wanted to do what they’ve done.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m not a complete fool. They’ve been lovely to me, but I’ve suited them.”
“You ungrateful little cow.”
Petra stood up, holding her notebook.
“It’s not worth it,” she said.
“What isn’t?”
“It’s not worth people being kind to you. They always want so much back.”
“But not,” Ralph said, “lover boy.”
Petra turned.
“He’s easy.”
“And I’m not—”
“No. You’re not.”
“Then why don’t you bloody go and live with him!”
Petra began to move towards the doorway to the hall.
“I don’t want to. I might, in time, but I don’t want to right now. It’s just that he’s on my side, he doesn’t tell me what to do, he just talks to the kids and digs the spuds and I don’t have to—” She stopped.
“Don’t have to what?”
“Earn my existence all the time,” and then she’d gone out, and he could hear her going slowly up the stairs and into their bedroom, and then a couple of thuds as she took off her shoes and dropped them on the floor.
He sat there, for a long time, at the kitchen table. He was not going, he told himself, to go back over everything. He was not going to revert to the Ralph who’d come back from Singapore with all those impractical, dreamy notions of sustaining a solitary life, somehow, in an empty cottage on the North Sea, with only wind and gulls for company. Even if he’d wanted to go back, he couldn’t, in fact, because the money he had brought with him from Singapore had all gone on his failed business, and all he owned now was a small part of the house in which he now sat, which he no longer wanted—if he ever actually had—and nor did Petra. Most of it belonged to the building society, and in his present mood they were welcome to it. They could have the house and the car and the piecemeal furniture and all he would ask them to leave was the clothes he needed to take to London for this job that was going to give him his life back, his sense of self. And only then, when he was back on top, and not crushed underneath, could he begin the battle to gain custody of his children. Because that’s what he wanted. He was sure of that. He wanted his boys. Petra wasn’t fit to bring up a . . . goldfish.
When he had finally gone upstairs that night, Petra was not in their bed. He found her instead in Kit’s bed, and Kit had flung an arm across her in his sleep, and they were lying facing each other, almost nose to nose. Across the room, Barney was snuffling in his cot, stout legs and arms spread-eagled, his thick lashes astonishing on his cheeks.
Ralph stood in the dark bedroom between his sleeping family, and felt something so close to the panic of despair that the only solution he could think of was to force it down with a big hit of anger. It was Petra he was angry with, of course it was, Petra who refused to compromise, refused to understand, refused to be reasonable, refus
ed to grow up. It was Petra who had made Kit such a fragile child, it was Petra who had taken all the Brinkleys’ open-handed generosity until, on a whim, it didn’t suit her to see it as generosity anymore, but only as oppression and control and obligation. It was Petra who couldn’t support or admire what he was doing, to look after them all. Hell, she couldn’t even iron a bloody shirt properly. It was Petra—
He had to stop himself. He was shaking, and his fists had clenched. He could not go on being so furious, it was exhausting him, diverting his vital energies, obsessing him. He couldn’t understand Petra any more than she claimed not to be able to understand him, so maybe it was better that they were apart, and the sooner the better. He had to subdue the impulse to hurl her physically out of Kit’s bed, and resolved instead to use all that urgent energy towards this new start, that was going to give him, after months of feeling he was fighting under a blanket, focus and purpose and discipline.
He went out of the boys’ bedroom and closed the door behind him. He made himself stand on the landing and breathe slowly and deeply six times. Edward had said he could come up to London on Saturday, but he thought he would ring in the morning and say he needed to come now, now, and if Edward couldn’t have him, for some reason, then he’d find a hotel. Anything. Anything was better than this.
He took down their only big suitcase from the dusty top of the wardrobe. It bore the bashes of many journeys, and the shreds of old baggage-handling labels. He put it on the bed and opened it. There was an old spray bottle of insect repellent inside, and he picked it up and sniffed it, and the smell made him feel suddenly rather tearful. He threw the bottle towards the wastebin beside the chest of drawers, and began to make rapid, methodical piles of shirts and socks and boxer shorts, emptying drawers with speed, to purge himself of all animation that was other than constructive and forward-looking. And then he got into the half of the bed that wasn’t occupied by the suitcase and lay there, panting slightly, and listening to his heart racing away under his rib cage, as if it was just a useful, purposeful muscle, and not the seat, really, of any emotion at all.
Daughters-in-Law Page 22
