Daughters-in-Law

by Joanna Trollope

  Kit put his arms round as much of Anthony’s trunk as he could manage, as if to haul him to his feet. Petra sat back on her heels and watched while Anthony got up unevenly, clumsily tangled with his grandson.

  “There!” Kit said with triumph.

  “Thank you—”

  Petra stood up, unfolding from the floor in a single movement. She said, “We’ll go—”

  Anthony spread his arms and hands in a sudden gesture of helplessness.

  “Did you see Rachel?”

  “I came to see you—”

  “Look,” Anthony said, “look, I can imagine how wretched this has been for you. I know how tricky Ralph can be. I know you don’t want to live in Ipswich or London or wherever, but what . . . whatever possessed you to think another man would be the answer?”

  Kit began to roam round the studio, investigating things. Barney had found a walnut on the floor that he was trying to insert into a hole in the side of one of the armchairs. Petra watched them both for a while and then she said, “He’s not . . . an answer. He’s just getting me through.”

  “But there’s us! There’s always been us! We’ve always been here to help, you only had to ask, you only had to whisper—”

  “I can’t go on saying thank you,” Petra said.

  “We don’t want thanks, we don’t expect thanks—”

  Petra said quietly, “I can’t always do what you want. You . . . forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “That not everybody wants what you want. Some people want much less.”

  “If breaking up something like a marriage is wanting something less—”

  “I didn’t break it. Not at the beginning.”

  Anthony looked at her for the first time since she had arrived.

  “What do you mean?”

  Petra shrugged. She said, “It suited us how we were. It suited us best, at the beginning, with just the cottage and the beach. Then it changed. But I haven’t. I want what I’ve always wanted. I knew it when I first saw the cottage.”

  “But this man—”

  Petra bent to heave Barney into her arms again.

  “You’re all fixated on this man.”

  “Well, of course!”

  Petra looked at him over Barney’s head.

  “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Petra said, “that’s up to you.” She looked about for Kit, dawdling round the table on which Anthony’s drawing materials lay in a confusion that was completely clear to him. “But I wanted to come and tell you that, whatever happens, I know how good you’ve been to me, and I’m grateful.”

  Anthony said hoarsely, “Will you see Rachel?”

  Petra shook her head, holding her free hand out to Kit.

  “Will you come again?”

  “One day,” Petra said.

  “Petra—”

  “Yes?”

  Anthony looked at her standing there in her holey sneakers with Barney in her arms, and Kit jigging at her side. He said awkwardly, “I don’t know why I should thank you for coming, but thank you for coming.”

  “I thought you wouldn’t see me,” Petra said.

  Anthony looked at Kit, and then at Barney. He felt weighed down by unhappiness.

  “So did I,” he said.

  “Long time no see!” Marco, the coffee vendor, said to Sigrid.

  “One week—”

  “One week! Long, long time not to see.”

  “You Italians—”

  “Bella ragazza,” Marco said on cue, smiling, handing Sigrid her coffee and a small white paper bag containing a biscotto.

  She walked down Gower Street holding her coffee. It was a gray day, but the sky was light and high, and there was just a little sharp edge to the air, presaging the end of days when she could walk to work in just a sweater, or a jacket, with bare feet inside her shoes and an abundance of daylight. She had been away only a week, but it had, in its unexpected way, been an intense week, a week that had not turned out in any way as she had planned it, and from which she had returned feeling strangely disorientated, as if she couldn’t remember what it was like to live in either Stockholm or London, as if she had abandoned the familiar—or tried to—for something that wasn’t at all as she had anticipated it would be when she got there.

  Perhaps work would be reassuring. Maybe the lab, and those fragments of wood and cloth and glass that awaited her, would root her again, restore her to the equilibrium that, earlier in the summer, she was sure she had reliably found. Part of her, on the flight home, had felt a twitch of excitement that that equilibrium might be waiting peacefully at home for her with Edward, but when she got home Ralph was there too, gaunt and overanimated, insisting that he wasn’t nervous about his first Monday in a new job, but only eager to begin, and there was no opportunity to do more than be a welcoming sister-in-law, and find him a bath towel. Edward had asked, in a slightly forced way, if they had had a good time and Mariella had said, truffling the fridge in search of homecoming favorites, “You know, Daddy, the island was so, so weird, it was like everyone had just died,” and Edward had laughed with what Sigrid recognized as undisguised relief.

  At her station at the bench in the lab, everything looked as she had left it, but with the unmistakable air of having been occupied by someone else who had been careful to restore everything to Sigrid’s exacting pattern. Everybody said good morning, and asked politely about Sweden, and the head of the laboratory said he was glad to see her back, as a very interesting specimen had just come in from southern Germany that he knew was squarely in her field. Ginger-haired Philip hovered round her for a while, thinking up things to point out or ask, but then he was summoned to run an errand, and was bless-edly absent for two quiet, serious, concentrating hours until he reappeared at Sigrid’s elbow and said that there was someone outside to see her.

  “It’s eleven o’clock,” Sigrid said, “I’m working.”

  “I said that,” Philip said. “I told him you’d be working.”

  “Well, please go and tell him again.”

  “He says he’s your brother-in-law—”

  Sigrid looked up from her screen.

  “Brother-in-law?”

  Philip grinned.

  “Luke?” he said hopefully. “Said his name was Luke?”

  Sigrid made a little sound of annoyance. She got up from her chair.

  “Thank you, Philip?” Philip said.

  She glanced at him.

  “Thank you—”

  “I don’t have to do it, you know,” Philip said.

  “I don’t have to carry messages and run errands. I’ve got a perfectly good degree in computing and technology from Nottingham Trent University, and I don’t need to be treated like someone from the post room.”

  “Was I?”

  “Yes,” Philip said, “always. Even when I give you flowers.”

  Sigrid put her hands in the pockets of her lab coat.

  “Could we have this conversation another time?”

  “As long,” Philip said, “as we have it.”

  Luke was waiting in the uncompromising reception area of the laboratory building. There was a row of beige-tweed upholstered chairs along the wall opposite the reception desk, but Luke was standing up, his hands in his pockets, looking at a bulletin board where notices of academic meetings and lectures had been pinned with meticulous regularity. He turned round as Sigrid came in.

  “Thank you—”

  “Is anything the matter?”

  “No one’s ill,” Luke said, “nothing like that. I just—”

  “What?”

  “Well,” he said, “I didn’t want to come round to your house because I’d quite like this to be private—”

  Sigrid motioned him to sit down.

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “No,” Luke said. “Yes. Well, sort of. It’s . . . about Charlotte—”

  “Charlotte!”

  “She’s fine,” Luke sai
d, “she’s really well. It’s . . . it’s just her—and my mother.”

  He stopped. He and Sigrid regarded each other in silence for some time. Then Sigrid sighed.

  “Oh,” she said. “That.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Marnie did not often go to London these days. In fact, she had hardly been at all since Charlotte’s father died, and had only been inveigled to do so on the two days Charlotte had set aside to find her wedding dress. They’d been strenuous days, Marnie remembered, with a sensationally uncomfortable night in between on the sofa in Charlotte’s flat, despite Charlotte’s flatmate, Nora, kindly finding an extra pillow. The sofa wasn’t long enough, the hot water was inadequate, and Marnie was not of an age or generation to do her hair and makeup as girls did, racing about the flat chattering, their phones tucked into their shoulders and hair grips held between their teeth. Marnie was used to a dressing table with a glass top, a triple mirror and a good light. She had felt, standing in Liberty’s wedding-dress department after the night on the sofa, that she was in every way disadvantaged. She was just the exhausted, disheveled credit-card carrier.

  Today, however, was different. She had prepared herself for today. She had decided the night before what she would wear, and had been delighted to see, when she drew her bedroom curtains back, that the morning weather had obliged her. She had been to the hairdresser in Beaconsfield two days before, there were enough late raspberries for breakfast, and she had rehearsed, both to a mirror and on paper, in her pretty, legible hand, what she was going to say.

  She drove steadily and peacefully to the station. There was plenty of time. Her senior rail card secured her a first-class seat at a very reasonable rate, and she bought a newspaper, and a copy of Country Life, a magazine ideally constituted for advertising her paintings, or the postcards and birthday cards that they were so well suited to. It struck her, waiting for the train, that what she was about to do was something that she would never have dared to do, something that it would probably never have occurred to her to do, had Gregory still been alive. He would, she was sure, have approved of her idea, but he would have wanted it to be his idea; he would have wanted to mastermind it and be applauded for it. Marnie had grown, over the years, very used to applauding Gregory, and skilled at it as well, as it had usually taken a fair amount of time before he was satisfied that he had received all the praise he was due, but it struck her, standing quietly on the station platform with her mind and her person pleasingly ordered, that it was very liberating indeed to feel that every thought and move no longer had to be channeled through, and swallowed up by, another person.

  At Marylebone, Marnie took a Bakerloo Line train to Oxford Circus, where she changed to take the Central Line eastwards to Liverpool Street. Gregory—had he still been there—would have insisted she take a taxi, but one of her new freedoms was only sheltering herself when she felt she really wanted to. Also, the small economy of buying a Zone A Underground ticket along with her rail ticket had been very satisfying. Managing money, Marnie had discovered, was satisfying. It was also, if you kept an eye on it, not difficult, especially for someone in her fortunate position of a largely known income. She remembered the hours and hours Gregory had spent snorting over papers in his study, or telephoning his stockbroker. If it was disloyal not to be able to remember his perpetual state of aggrieved agitation about money without smiling, then so be it. It didn’t diminish her genuine gratitude that all the huffing and puffing had still left her in a very comfortable place indeed.

  At Liverpool Street, Marnie left the train and climbed up to Bishopsgate. The train had been full of refreshingly different people from the kind of people Marnie usually saw, which only contributed to her sense of adventure. People at Liverpool Street station were equally as diverse and interesting, and Marnie had a sudden sense of being extremely conspicuous through conventionality, and was delighted to find that this did not make her feel remotely disconcerted or threatened, but merely mildly exhilarated. A tall Sikh in a turban paused briefly to allow her to get on to the escalator up to the street ahead of him, and smiled when she thanked him, in a way that made her feel she was spreading long-unused wings. How used we become, she thought, to what we have, even if it doesn’t suit us.

  It was a mild, soft, early September day, warmer in London than it had been in Buckinghamshire. Marnie took off her jacket and folded it over her arm, and then, feeling that this was no way to conduct herself in east London, unfolded it and slung it over her shoulders, pausing in front of the plate-glass window of a vast bank to admire the effect. It looked suitably nonchalant. She turned her jacket collar up, and set off northwards towards Shoreditch High Street, and the intriguingly named Arnold Circus, where Charlotte had told her that she and Luke lived, in a flat the size of a shoe box, five floors above the street.

  Jed went down the short flight of stairs from the studio to answer the bell. He found himself face-to-face with a good-looking woman a bit older than his own mother, wearing the kind of clothes his mother wouldn’t have been seen dead in. Jed’s mother wore jeans, and cowboy boots, and still had hair down her back. This lady looked like Jed’s idea of the female half of a Tory Party conference. He wasn’t quite sure what to say to her, so he said nothing, just stood there and gawped.

  “Is Luke here?” Marnie said.

  Jed scratched his head.

  “Um . . . well, he might be. You from some charity?”

  “No,” Marnie said, “I am his mother-in-law, and you are Jed, and you came to his wedding.”

  Jed felt a dark, hot blush surging up his neck.

  “Oh, Jesus—”

  “Don’t worry,” Marnie said kindly, “it’s hard to spot people out of context. And you weren’t expecting me.”

  “No—”

  “And nor was Luke. Is he here?”

  Jed held the door a little wider. He couldn’t quite look at her. He had a dim recollection of a big hat who someone said was Charlotte’s mother, but the hat had had no face that he could recall.

  “Scoot up,” Jed said. “He’s up there. Sorry.”

  Marnie gave him a smile that she hoped was as nice as the one the Sikh had given her. She squeezed past him and began to climb the stairs. Jed went outside, letting the door crash behind him. He leaned on the wall and felt for the packet of gum in his pocket. Charlotte’s fucking mother! What an earth was she doing here?

  “Marnie!” Luke said. He was genuinely absolutely amazed. He got off his stool, and knocked a takeaway coffee cup to the floor.

  “Oh—”

  “No matter,” Luke said, scrambling after it. “Almost finished—”

  “I’ve surprised you.”

  Luke straightened up, holding the coffee cup.

  “Blown me away, Marnie—”

  She said, “I thought that if I rang you, you’d have to tell Charlotte.”

  “Well, I—”

  “And I don’t want you to tell Charlotte, you see. I want this to be a complete surprise.”

  Luke said a little awkwardly, “It’s certainly a complete surprise.”

  Marnie looked round.

  “Can we talk here?”

  Luke said, still awkwardly, “I’m . . . well, I’m working, actually—”

  “I’ll only be ten minutes.”

  “Is . . . is it urgent?”

  Marnie smiled at him.

  “Well, anything to do with Charlotte is important, isn’t it? You and I are in complete agreement about that, aren’t we?”

  “Of course—”

  “We could go up to your flat?”

  “Yes—”

  “I’ve never seen your flat. Charlotte said I couldn’t see it until you’d got some curtains. I don’t mind about the curtains, of course I don’t, but she wanted it to be perfect for me to see, bless her.”

  “It’s not exactly perfect,” Luke said, “but the bed’s made, at least. I’d better warn you though, it’s a bit of a steep climb. Five floors.”

  “Gam
e for that,” Marnie said brightly.

  Luke looked at her. She still played tennis after all.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Well, then?”

  He glanced at his screen. What he was doing wasn’t urgent but it was better uninterrupted, all the same. But now he had been interrupted, and by something and someone about whom he felt more obligation than curiosity. He saved the file.

  “We’ll go up,” Luke said.

  The flat, Marnie thought privately, was charming but impossibly small. While Luke made coffee, Marnie washed her hands in the midget bathroom—no bath, only a shower, and the shower curtain missing half its rings—and noticed, fondly, that the only shelf was crowded with Charlotte’s hair and beauty products. No change there, then, and how nice of Luke not to mind. Gregory had hated to see anything feminine not confined to a dressing table. He’d loved it all there, as much cut-glass powder-puff nonsense as Marnie liked, there, but the bathroom was a purposeful place in his view: he would never have seen it as synonymous with even an atom of self-indulgence.

  Luke had laid out coffee mugs, and a milk jug, and a cafetière on the low table in front of the sofa, and removed several magazines and garments that had been scattered there. Marnie looked at him with approval. Young men of his generation saw nothing dangerous in being domesticated, just as her older sons-in-law were such hands-on fathers, to the point where she had sometimes wanted to urge Sarah and Fiona to remember that those children were their mothers’ responsibility too. She sat down on the sofa and looked about her.

  “Lovely light room.”

  Luke began to pour coffee, still standing.

  “Makes up for the size—”

  “And you two so tall—”

  “It’s a great location.”

  Marnie thought of her walk up to Arnold Circus. It had not been through anything that her own upbringing could have described as a great location—there’d even been a sad little secondhand-clothes market happening on the pavement under a railway bridge—but then, things had changed, like this competent young man who was her son-in-law making her coffee with perfect ease, never mind earning his living in a way which had absolutely nothing to do with the settled old professions of Marnie’s childhood. She accepted a mug of coffee. It smelled wonderful. She smiled at Luke.