Daughters-in-Law (5 page)

“But what will you do, in Shingle Street, how will you earn a living, away from everything?”

There was a pause. Ralph took a noisy swallow of soup and looked back at his puzzle.

“Leave that to me,” he said, “why don’t you.”

When Petra next came, Ralph was out at his cottage, which he had so far declined to let his parents see.

“Why not?”

“I’m painting it.”

“Are you? Inside or outside?”

“Inside.”

“Oh, lovely. What colors?”

“White,” Ralph said.

“Would you like some help? Would you like curtains and things? Why don’t you make a list of furniture you need—”

“No, Mum,” Ralph said. “No. Thank you.”

Neither Rachel nor Anthony mentioned to Petra that Ralph had come home. Petra made a seafood lasagne with Rachel, and then she went across to the studio and watched Anthony experimenting with a brush drawing using black watercolor. He was drawing vultures, angrily squaring up to each other, wings up, heads jutting. Petra sat beside him, like a pianist’s page turner, and watched his brush intently. Occasionally he said things like, “Sometimes directional lines are useful,” or, “D’you think that’s better because it’s more a diagram than a drawing?” but mostly they sat in silence broken only by the faint hiss and crackle of the wood-burning stove.

When Anthony finally said, “Tea?” Petra said, “Oh, yes,” in a tone that sounded pleased, but also indicated that she could easily have waited, hours if necessary, and then they left the studio and crossed the gravel to the house, and there was Ralph in the kitchen, with white splashes of paint on his hands and clothes. Anthony did not catch Rachel’s eye.

Rachel said, “Petra. This is our middle son. This is Ralph.”

Petra looked slightly past Ralph.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Ralph said. He waited a few seconds. Then he said, “Why are you called Petra?”

“After the ancient city in Jordan,” Anthony said, too heartily.

“No,” Petra said. She gave Ralph a quick glance. “After the dog. The dog on
Blue Peter
.”

“The
dog
—”

“My mother wouldn’t have known about Jordan—”

Anthony opened his mouth again.

“Shut up, Dad,” Ralph said. He smiled at Petra. “Ignore him.”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“She was a famous dog—” persisted Anthony.

“Dad says you draw. You draw birds.”

“A bit.”

“I made a gingerbread,” Rachel said. “Tea and gingerbread.”

“I’m so sorry. I really am. I should have known about the dog—”

“When I was away,” Ralph said to Petra, “in Singapore, the birds were quite different. Utterly different. Very brightly colored. And raucous.”

“Yes.”

“Mugs or cups?” Rachel said.

Ralph pulled a chair out from the table and gestured at the seat.

“Have a chair. Petra.”

She sat down wordlessly.

“Well, mugs, then,” Rachel said. “They hold more tea and it stays hotter.”

Ralph took the chair beside Petra’s. He had, Anthony noticed, paint in his hair as well as on his hands, and a splash above one eyebrow.

“Were you born in Suffolk?” Ralph said to Petra.

“Yes, Ipswich.”

“I missed Suffolk. When I was away. I thought I wanted to get away, but I was so relieved to come back.”

Petra accepted a mug of tea.

“I’ve never been away.”

“D’you want to?”

“What—”

“Go away.”

She looked at him properly for the first time. Rachel risked a lightning glance at Anthony. Surely, surely Petra would be struck by Ralph’s looks, only enhanced by old clothes and whitewash?

“No,” Petra said. “No, I don’t. I think—I think I’d pine.”

“Pine,” Anthony said. “What a good word. Pine. Like a longing dog—”

“Give dogs a rest, Dad.”

“Gingerbread? It’s got dates in it—”

“I’ve bought a cottage,” Ralph said to Petra. He took a mouthful of gingerbread.

She waited.

“It’s right on the sea,” Ralph said, “practically in it. Just down the coast from here.”

“Really?”

“It’s so bleak, it’s thrilling—”

“I—like bleak,” Petra said nonchalantly.

“We haven’t been allowed—” Anthony began.

Quiet, Rachel signaled, cutting more cake,
quiet
.

Ralph put another wedge of gingerbread into his mouth. Round it, he said, “Like to see it?”

She put her mug down.

“Yes.”

“C’mon then,” Ralph said, getting up, still chewing.

“But it’s getting dark!” Anthony said. “You won’t see anything!”

Petra rose too. Ralph put out an arm, as if he was going to encircle her, steer her.

“There’ll be light enough, off the sea,” Petra said.

Ralph smiled down at her.

“I know.”

Petra half turned. She said to Rachel, “Thank you. Thank you for tea.”

Rachel nodded. Then Ralph almost pushed Petra through the kitchen door and out into the stone-flagged passage beyond. Anthony and Rachel heard the outer door slam, and then the sound of Ralph’s car starting up, and the crunch of gravel.

Anthony looked at Rachel. They were both smiling.

“
Well
,” Anthony said.

Rachel held up both hands, her first and second fingers twisted together.

“Fingers crossed!”

L
uke took Charlotte to Venice for their honeymoon. The man who had preceded Luke in Charlotte’s life had worked in the City, on a busy and hugely successful trading floor, and his taste in holidays ran to Thailand and the Maldives, just as his leisure tastes had included cross-dressing and cocaine. His cocaine habit had, in fact, and finally, put Charlotte right off both him and drugs. She regarded herself as perfectly freethinking in all sorts of social areas, but she was very clear about drugs, and when Luke first asked her on a date she said no, with a vehemence that took him aback.

“What d’you mean, no? Why d’you have to say no like that?”

“Because I saw you,” Charlotte said, “I saw you last week, at Julia’s dinner party. I don’t want to have anything to do, again, with anyone who has their dinner off a mirror.”

“It was just a line—”

“People who do coke,” Charlotte said, interrupting, “are boring. Really, really dull. They’re either jittery because they’ve just had a fix, or jittery because they want one. Their noses run
and they think they’re fascinating, but they are so, so boring. Gus was unbelievably boring. I thought I could put up with it for the Club Class flights to Sri Lanka, but I couldn’t. So, until you clean up your pathetic little act, you’ll have to look for dates anywhere but me.”

Luke had been fired right up by this speech. He knew Gus, the City trader, slightly, and he knew that Gus made the kind of money that bore no resemblance to the money that anyone in Luke’s family had ever, or would ever, make, even Ed, even Ralph in Singapore, even Dad in his best years. And Gus was not only wealthy, but personable, and athletic, with a flat in Clerkenwell and a brother in a rock band. But if he couldn’t keep Charlotte, if Charlotte wasn’t prepared to tolerate or join in a habit that was significant in Gus’s life, then Charlotte acquired, in Luke’s eyes, a particular luster that went way beyond her looks and her energy and her undoubted popularity.

He began to make real efforts. He started going to the gym more often and he stopped using cocaine, even when nursing a Coke Zero in a room full of insanely, irresponsibly hyped-up people made him feel he’d landed on another planet. After a while, he even stopped going to parties where he knew what the menu would include, and instead started taking Charlotte’s friend Nora out for coffee and pizzas and other fraternal little meals so that Nora could relay to Charlotte what an impressively changed character he was. He had no idea if this clumsy reformation was working, he only knew that he wanted Charlotte in a way he had never wanted anything in his life before, and whenever he saw her, across a room at a party, he could think of absolutely nothing else whatsoever then, or afterwards. Charlotte, quite simply, filled his head.

And then Gus began to try to win Charlotte back again, and Luke heard unnerving rumors of promises of private planes to
Paris and a chartered yacht in the Caribbean, and he lost his head and hard-won self-discipline and rushed over the river on impulse to the basement that Charlotte shared in Clapham with Nora, and a great many wood lice and silverfish, and found Charlotte on the sofa, in a vest and pajama bottoms, with her shorn fair head unwashed, eating toast and jam and watching
Big Brother
on the television. He stood there, unable to proceed further in any way, and burst into tears, and Charlotte had got up off the sofa and leaned against him, and he had smelled her hair and a faint synthetically sweet whiff of strawberry jam, and had thought he would simply like to die, right then and there, of sheer happiness and relief.

But a year later, and with an engagement ring securely on Charlotte’s finger, there was still to be no question of honeymooning in any place that was remotely reminiscent of a tropical spa. There would be no orchids and no Singapore Slings or infinity pools or flawless room service. Gus, poor guy—it was safe just to pity him now, for most of the time, anyway—might be wealthy and hunky and worldly, but he was a philistine. There was no getting away from that. He knew about consumerism, but he hadn’t the faintest idea about art, or theater, or literature, or any music that wasn’t whatever was playing that week in Mahiki. Luke was going to show Charlotte something different, reopen her eyes to a world she had been kind of brought up to, but had neglected when the buzz of life in London had drowned out all other sounds.

Anthony and Rachel gave Luke some money for the honeymoon. Luke wasn’t earning enough to allow for ten days in Venice in the kind of hotel that was expensive enough to be glamorous. With his parents’ contribution, he could afford a hotel just behind the Accademia, with polished-black-marble bathrooms and electric window blinds and wide pale beds heaped with pillows. They could have breakfast in their room
and glasses of Prosecco on a little roof terrace among the seagulls from the lagoon, and walk out one way to the sunlit Zattere with its air of cultivated seaside, or the other over the Accademia bridge to the
campi
and
calli
that would finally lose them in a labyrinth of bridges and blind alleys and decayed, romantic beauty.

Charlotte was bowled over. She had never been to Venice before. She had never been in an art gallery where pictures on the walls, painted hundreds of years before, showed scenes that she could still walk through, right now, hand in hand with history. She had never eaten tiny soft-shelled crabs out of a paper cone in a fish market, or ridden a water bus, or sat in a hot, dim, late-afternoon church, her bare shoulders swathed in a required paper shawl for decency, and thought about the Virgin Mary as anything more than a sort of sacred cipher that belonged to the Catholic girls at school, and not to anyone else. She had never, either, imagined that she might be married to someone who she not only loved, and fancied so much she sometimes had to lean against something when looking at him, but who knew so much more than she did.

“I don’t, you know,” Luke said. “I just know about different things.”

“But they’re important. I mean, Titian, and Carpaccio, and the Venetian Empire, and things. They’re important.”

“The doges would be so chuffed to hear you say that.”

“Are you patronizing me?”

“Only,” Luke said, “a little bit.”

“I don’t mind,” Charlotte said, “I really don’t. One day I might, but I love it now, it just makes me feel—” She stopped.

“What?”

“That I can do no wrong,” Charlotte said, and laughed. Luke reached across the café table and gripped her wrists.

“You can’t,” he said.

They had a pact that, in order to preserve the extraordinary and magical bubble in which they were briefly living, they would turn on their mobile phones only once a day, in case there was an emergency. There was never an emergency. There were texts hoping they were happy—cheerfully, rudely expressed from most friends—and a few from Luke’s partner in the little graphic-design studio they shared in a shabby building not far from St. Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch, but there was nothing that couldn’t be ignored, or replied to in moments; nothing, certainly, that needed them to speak to anyone except each other, beyond ordering Americanos and glasses of wine, and little cups of green-tea ice cream from a specialist shop off the Campo di San Tomà. It was only on the last day but one, chugging back across the lagoon from a slow and languorous day on Murano, that Luke held his telephone out to Charlotte and said, “What d’you think?”

There was a short text on the screen. It read, “Bro. Things tricky. Need to talk. Ring? R.”

“Ralph?” Charlotte said.

“Mmm.”

“Something that can’t wait till we get home?”

“Sod him,” Luke said. “Why can’t he wait till I
am
home?”

Charlotte squinted at the hazy blue outline of Venice advancing towards them across the glittering water.