Daughters-in-Law (2 page)

The morning after the wedding Sigrid had appeared, packet-fresh in white and gray, with her smooth hair in a ponytail, and taken Ed away in a boat, not to return. Anthony and Rachel were left marooned among Sigrid’s family and friends under a cloudless sky and entirely surrounded by water. They’d held hands, Anthony recalled, on the flight home, and Rachel had said, looking away from him out of the airplane window, “Some situations are just too foreign to react to, aren’t they?”

And a bit later when Anthony said, “Do you think they are actually married?” she’d stared right at him and said, “I have no idea.”

Well, that was over eleven years ago now, almost twelve. And there, on the carpet below the chancel steps, sat Mariella, Edward and Sigrid’s eight-year-old daughter. She was sitting very still, and upright, her ballet-slippered feet tucked under her pink skirts, her hair held off her face by an Alice band of rosebuds. Anthony tried to catch her eye. His only granddaughter. His grave, self-possessed granddaughter. Who spoke English and Swedish and played the cello. By the merest movement of her head, Mariella indicated that she was aware of him, but she wouldn’t look his way. Her job that day, her mother had said, was to set a good example to the other
little bridesmaids, all Charlotte’s nieces, and Mariella’s life was largely dedicated to securing her mother’s good opinion. She knew she had her grandfather’s, whatever she did, as a matter of course.

“Concentrate,” Rachel, beside him, hissed suddenly.

He snapped to attention.

“Sorry—”

“I’m delighted to announce,” the priest said, removing his stole that he’d wrapped around Luke and Charlotte’s linked, newly ringed hands, “that Luke and Charlotte are now husband and wife!”

Luke leaned to kiss his wife on the cheek, and she put her arms around his neck, and then he flung his own arms around her and kissed her with fervor, and the church erupted into applause. Mariella got to her feet and shook out her skirts, glancing at her mother for the next cue.

“In pairs,” Anthony saw Sigrid mouth to the little girls. “Two by two.”

Charlotte was laughing. Luke was laughing. Some of Luke’s friends, farther down the church, were whooping.

Anthony took Rachel’s hand.

“Another daughter-in-law—”

“I know.”

“Who we don’t really know—”

“Not yet.”

“Well,” Anthony said, “if she’s only half as good as Petra—”

Rachel took her hand away.

“If.”

The reception was held in a marquee in the garden of Charlotte’s childhood home. It was a dry day, but overcast, and the marquee was filled with a queer greenish light that made everyone look ill. The lawn on which it was erected sloped slightly,
so that standing up, complicated by doing it on rucked coconut matting, was almost impossible, especially for Charlotte’s friends who were, without exception, shod in statement shoes with towering heels. Through an opening at the lower end of the marquee, the immediate bridal party could be seen picturesquely on the edge of a large pond, being ordered about by a photographer.

Oh God, water, Petra thought. Barney, who was still not walking, was safely strapped into his pushchair with the distraction of a miniature box of raisins, but Kit, at three, was mobile and had been irresistibly drawn to water all his life. Neither child, in the unfamiliarity of a hotel room the previous night, had slept more than fitfully, so neither Petra nor Ralph had slept either, and Ralph had finally got up at five in the morning and gone for such a long walk—well over two hours—that Petra had begun to suspect he had gone forever. And now, uncharacteristically, he had joined a roaring group of Luke’s friends, and he was drinking champagne, and smoking, despite the fact that he had given up cigarettes when Petra was pregnant with Kit and, as far as she knew, hadn’t smoked since then.

Kit was whining. He was exhausted and hungry and intractable. Keeping up a low uneven grizzle, he wound himself round and round in Petra’s skirt, shoving against her thighs, disheveled and beyond being reasoned with. He had started the day in the white linen shirt and dark-blue trousers that Charlotte had requested, even though she considered him too young to be a page, but both had become so filthy and crumpled in church that he was back in the Spider-Man T-shirt he insisted on wearing whenever it wasn’t actually in the washing machine. Petra herself, in the clothes that had looked to her both original and becoming hanging on the front of her wardrobe in their small bedroom at home, felt as out of sorts and
out of place as Kit plainly did. Charlotte’s friends, mostly in their twenties, were dressed for the mythical world of cocktails. She looked down at Kit. Intensely aggravating though he was being, he was to be pitied. He was her sweet, sensitive, imaginative little boy, and he had been plucked out of the familiarity that he relied upon, on an entirely and exclusively adult whim, and dumped down in an artificial and alien environment where the bed was not his own and the sausages were seasoned fiercely with pepper. She put a hand on his head. He felt hot and damp and unhappy.

“Petra,” Anthony said.

Petra turned with relief.

“Oh, Ant—”

Anthony gave her shoulder a brief pat and then squatted down beside Kit.

“Poor old boy.”

Kit adored his grandfather, but he couldn’t give up his misery all of a sudden. He thrust his lower lip out.

Anthony said, “Might you manage a strawberry?”

Kit shook his head and plunged his face between Petra’s legs.

“Or a meringue?”

Kit went still. Then he took his face out of Petra’s skirt. He looked at Anthony.

“D’you know what they are?”

“No,” Kit said.

“Crunchy things made of sugar. Delicious. Really, really, really bad for your teeth.”

Kit pushed his face out of sight again. Anthony stood up.

“Shall I take him away and force-feed him something?”

Petra looked at her father-in-law, comfortably in his own father’s morning suit, shabbily splendid.

“You’re too clean.”

“I don’t mind a bit of sticky. Have you got a drink?”

“No. And I’m worried about the water.”

“What water?”

Petra indicated with the hand that wasn’t trying to restrain Kit.

“Down there. He hasn’t noticed it yet, thank goodness.”

“Where’s Ralph?”

“Somewhere,” Petra said.

Anthony regarded her.

“It’s not much fun for you, all this. It is—”

“Well,” Petra said, “weddings aren’t meant for people of three, or for people with people of three to look after.”

“Yours was.”

She glanced down at Kit. He was still now, breathing hotly into her skin through the fabric of her skirt.

“Ours was lovely.”

“It was.”

“Perfect day, walking back from the church to your garden, all the roses out, everybody’s dogs and children—”

Anthony smiled at her. Then he said casually to Kit, “Crisps?”

Kit stopped breathing.

“Maybe,” Anthony said, “even Coca-Cola?”

Kit said something muffled.

“What?”

“With a straw!” Kit shouted into Petra’s skirt.

“If you like.”

“Thank you,” Petra said. “Really, thank you.”

“I am sitting next to Charlotte’s mother at whatever meal this is. She’s a noted plantswoman and amateur botanical artist, so we are put together at all occasions. I shall fortify myself by feeding Kit the wrong things first. Better eat the wrong things than nothing. If you don’t come with me, Kit, I shall choose your straw color for you and I might choose yellow.”

“No!” Kit shouted.

He flung himself, scarlet and tousled, away from his mother.

“Sam, Sam,” Anthony said to him in a mock Yorkshire accent, “pick up tha’ musket.”

Kit grinned.

“You’re a lifeline,” Petra said.

Anthony winked at her.

“You know what
you
are.”

She watched them walk away together, unsteadily over the coconut matting, hand in hand, Anthony gesturing about something, Kit as scruffy as a bundle of dirty washing in that sleek company. She looked down at the pushchair. Barney had finished the raisins and torn the box open so that he could lick traces of residual sweetness from the inside. He had faint brown smudges across his fat cheeks and on the end of his nose.

“Where,” Petra said to him, “would we be without your granny and gramps?”

It was amazing, Charlotte thought giddily, to be so violently happy. It was better than waterskiing, or dancing, or driving too fast, or even the moment just before someone you were dying to kiss you actually kissed you. It was amazing to feel so beautiful, and so wanted, and so full of hope, and so pleased to see everyone and so awed and triumphant to have someone like Luke as your husband. Husband! What a word. What an astonishing, grown-up, glamorous word. My husband Luke Brinkley. Hello, this is Mrs. Brinkley speaking, Mrs. Luke Brinkley. I’m so sorry, but I’ll have to let you know after I’ve spoken to my husband, my husband Luke Brinkley, mine. Mine. She looked down at her hand. Her wedding ring was brilliant with newness. The diamonds in her engagement ring were dazzling. The diamonds had come from an old brooch
belonging to Luke’s grandmother, and they had designed the ring together. Luke had actually done most of the designing because he was the artistic one, coming as he did from an artistic family. Charlotte’s mother was an artist too, of course, but of a very controlled kind. The table where she worked at her meticulous drawings of catkins and berries was completely orderly. It wasn’t like Anthony’s studio. Not at all.

Charlotte loved Anthony’s studio. She thought, in time, that she might rather come to love Anthony himself—oh, and Rachel, of course—but at the moment, with her own father dead only two years, it seemed a bit disloyal to think of loving anyone else in the father category. But Anthony’s studio, in that amazing, messy, colorful house, was a perfectly safe thing to love, with all its painting paraphernalia, and sketches and pictures pinned up all anyhow everywhere, and the photographs of birds and models of birds and sculptures of birds and skeletons of birds on every surface and hanging from the beams of the ceiling in a kind of birdy flypast. She’d been there once—it was only her second or third visit to Suffolk—when Anthony and Rachel were looking after their little grandson, Kit, the one who was so shy and difficult to engage with, and Anthony had taken down the skeleton of a godwit’s wing from a dusty shelf and drawn out the frail fan of bones so that Kit could see how beautifully it worked. Kit had been quite absorbed. So had Charlotte. When she mentioned, at work, that she had met someone called Anthony Brinkley, a boy looked up from the next desk in the newsroom and said, “
The
Anthony Brinkley? The bird painter? My dad’s mad on birds, he’s got all his books,” and Charlotte had felt at once excited and respectful that she had been shown the godwit’s wing by Anthony Brinkley. And now here he was, her father-in-law. And Rachel was her mother-in-law. How amazing to have parents-in-law, and brothers- and sisters-in-law, and to be going to live with
Luke, not in her cramped basement flat in Clapham but in the flat Luke had found two minutes from Shoreditch High Street. How cool was that? How cool was it to be married, well before she was thirty, to someone like Luke and to be so happy with everyone and everything that she just wanted the day to go on forever?

She looked at her champagne glass. It was full again. People kept giving her full ones; it was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous, but wonderful too. Everything was wonderful. She caught Luke’s eye across the heads of a group of people, and he blew her a lingering kiss.

“Quite soon,” Charlotte thought, “quite soon, I’ll be back in bed with him.”

“Don’t sit there,” Edward said to Sigrid, “disapproving of English weddings.”

“I’m not disapproving—”

“Well,” Edward said, “you look like someone enduring something that you know you could do much better.”

“I don’t think,” Sigrid said, “that we’re being made to feel very welcome. Do you? This is all about the bride’s family. If we were in Sweden, the groom’s family are made to feel part of the wedding. Remember ours.”

“Oh, I do—”

“Your parents were made to feel really welcome. My parents made a real fuss of them. So did their friends.”

“You mean Monica Engstrom making a pass at my father—”

“He didn’t mind! It’s flattering to have a good-looking woman come on to you.”

Edward looked round.

“Do you think that’s what this wedding lacks? Randy women—”

“It would certainly loosen things up.”

Edward nodded towards the group of Luke’s friends, which had grown larger and noisier, and seemed now to be equipped with pint glasses of beer as well as champagne chasers.

“
They
look quite loose.”

“Boorish,” Sigrid said.

“Where’s Mariella?”

“Organizing the little girls. She had them in an imaginary schoolroom just now having a lesson on the weather. She has just done weather at school, you see.”

Edward was still looking at Luke’s friends.

“Luke is only six years younger than me, but that lot feels like a different generation.”

“They are single, mostly. Not married, anyway.”

Edward took a swallow of his champagne. It was warm now, and faintly sour. He said, casually, “Do you like being married?”

“Mostly,” Sigrid said again.

“Your candor. Your famous candor. I remember saying in my wedding speech that you were one of the most honest people I had ever met.”

“And?”

“You still are.”

“And?” Sigrid repeated.

“And now I sometimes wish you would temper it slightly even while I know I wouldn’t believe you if you did.”

“I think,” Sigrid said, “that our new sister-in-law looks quite stunning, but that she is very young for her age. How old is she? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven?”

“About that. She’s certainly a looker. D’you know, Ralph’s in that gang over there. What’s he doing? He hates all that heavy lad stuff.”

“Weddings make people behave very strangely.”

“You mean,” Edward said, “English weddings.”

“I didn’t say so.”