Daughters-in-Law Read online

  “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.”

  “But you liked our wedding—”

  “It was Swedish.”

  “And Ralph’s wedding—”

  “That was charming,” Sigrid said. “So simple. In your parents’ garden and Petra taking her shoes off. Where is Petra?”

  “Probably chasing her children.”

  Sigrid stood up.

  “I shall go and find her.”

  “What shall I do?”

  “Find your parents,” Sigrid said. “See if your daughter has instructed those children properly about the effect of El Niño. Find out where we’re sitting for the meal.”

  “Salmon,” Edward said, “and strawberries. Pink food. Wedding food.” He stood up too. “Dad’s down there, by that pond thing. Kit’s paddling.” He paused. “Naked from the waist down.”

  Rachel had her eye on Ralph. He looked awful. Well, not ugly, Ralph couldn’t look actually ugly, but gaunt and tired, with shadows round his eyes and his thick dark hair in tufts, as if he’d had a seriously bad haircut. Which he probably had, being, of all her boys, the least vain, the least worldly, the least concerned with appearances. Of course, all crammed together in a so-called family room at the hotel, they hadn’t really slept the night before, any of them, Petra said at breakfast, and then Ralph had taken himself off to walk, just as he used to do when he was a boy, and he’d found some woods and come back looking wild and disorientated after struggling through bushes and undergrowth. Well, Ralph had never been easy to pigeonhole, never been orthodox, that was a great deal of his charm, but it was to be hoped—very much to be hoped—that he wasn’t leading Petra too much of a dance by being too inaccessible and uncooperative.

  When Ralph and Petra told them that they would like to get married, she and Anthony had been overcome with relief as well as happiness. Petra was exactly what Ralph needed, they told each other; Petra would give Ralph the stability and purpose that he seemed to find so hard to achieve while needing it so badly. And now, when Ralph looked as he did today, and left Petra to cope with the children on
an occasion that plainly called for two parents, not one, Rachel felt clutches of the old intermingled anxiety and protectiveness that she’d felt since Ralph emerged into the world and arched away from her when she first tried to put him up against her shoulder.

  He shouldn’t, Rachel told herself, be in that crowd. Luke’s friends were quite different from his brothers’ friends, heartier, simpler, more conventional. Luke’s stag weekend, a three-day affair in Edinburgh, where he’d been at university, sounded like the kind of thing Rachel could tolerate hearing about only because it involved Luke, her son. Ralph had gone for one night, out of brotherliness, and had then come back to Suffolk and said loyally but briefly that they were all having a good time but that it wasn’t really for him. Petra reported later that a lot of drunken shaving of various bits of them had gone on, and that Luke was lucky to get away with saving his eyebrows. So what was Ralph doing, in the thick of that crowd, and was that a cigarette in his hand? Rachel had been so thankful when he’d given up smoking. Ralph was the only child she’d really worried over when it came to drink and drugs; he was the only one inclined to see the possibility of addiction as a challenge rather than a threat.

  Perhaps, Rachel thought, she should go and talk to Petra. She could see Anthony and Kit down by the pond—Anthony was now drying Kit off with his handkerchief before persuading him back into his pants and shorts—and presumably Petra would have found a quiet spot in which to spoon another meal into Barney. Barney loved meals. His enthusiasm for food made Rachel and Anthony laugh, although Petra said it sometimes amounted to a tyranny. Rachel, who had been a professional cook all her life, made soups and purées for Petra’s freezer, and no doubt it was one of those that Petra was now feeding to Barney somewhere, openmouthed in his buggy like a rapacious little fledgling.

  She stood up and smoothed down her skirt, green linen bought in a sale in a dress shop in Aldeburgh, and, as it happened, a good contrast to Charlotte’s mother’s old-rose lace. Such an odd woman, Charlotte’s mother, and anally tidy. Well, at least Charlotte wasn’t that. Even by Rachel’s standards, Charlotte and Luke left their bedroom in Suffolk in an award-winning state of chaos.

  As she moved to start her search for Petra, Ralph materialized beside her. He was holding a bottle of lager and he smelled of cigarettes.

  “You okay, Ma?”

  She looked at him. He was her adored son, but she had Petra to think of now, too.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “What about you?”

  “What d’you mean, what about me?”

  “I mean, are you okay? Is everything okay with you?”

  “Of course,” he said. He tilted the beer bottle, as if toasting her. “Of course everything’s okay. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Anthony was a boy, the building that was now his studio had been a decayed barn, used for storing the lawn mower, and various defunct pieces of semi-agricultural machinery, and nameless old sacks, and coils of baling twine and rusty wire. It had been a dim and dusty place, with barn owls nesting precariously on the beams and colonies of bats and swifts swooping wildly about in the summer dusks. It was known to Anthony’s parents as the Dump, and every year it shed a few more huge slates from its sagging roof, and settled itself more deeply and crookedly into the earth, so that its doors no longer corresponded to their frames, and the small windows at one end had ejected their cobwebby glass into the bed of nettles below.

  It was Rachel who had thought of rescuing it, and making it into a studio, Rachel who had come from the Welsh hills and who had such profound misgivings about the flatness of Suffolk and—even more—about moving into the house where her fiancé had grown up.

  “God,” she’d said to her sister, “you should see it. I mean, it’s a lovely house, but they’ve lived there since the dawn of time. Everything’s sacred, everything. Anthony thinks it’s all perfect.”

  Rachel’s sister, married to a dedicated inner-city teacher and struggling in a council flat with a splintered front door where someone had kicked it in, didn’t much want to hear about huge, if decrepit, Suffolk houses that you were being given—given—however much ancestral baggage was inconveniently attached.

  “I think you’re bloody lucky, Rach.”

  “Well, yes. It’s lucky not to have to buy anything. But it isn’t lucky to inherit a moldering old heap you’re expected to revere, rather than restore.”

  “Balls,” said Rachel’s sister.

  “What’s balls?”

  “Of course you can restore it. It’s your home, isn’t it? Give Anthony his bit and make it plain that you’ve got as much right to the rest of it as his mother had or his granny or his great-granny or whoever.”

  “What d’you mean, his bit?”

  Rachel’s sister sighed. She tried not to notice that the aqua-marine on Rachel’s engagement finger was the size of a Fruit Gum.

  “Oh, you know. The shed thing. The place where men go and mess about making things that don’t work so that they have to unmake them again. Doesn’t Anthony draw?”

  “Actually,” Rachel said proudly, “rather well.”

  “There you are then,” her sister said. “Give him somewhere to draw. I wish Frank drew. I wish Frank drew or collected beetles or belonged to a cycling club. I wish Frank did anything, anything, rather than think it’s up to him to save every delinquent kid in Hackney.”

  “It could be a studio,” Rachel said, some days later, to Anthony.

  “What could?”

  “The Dump.”

  “But it’s always been the Dump.”

  “Well,” Rachel said, squinting up at the enormous East Anglian sky, “it isn’t going to be, anymore.”

  Anthony looked hurt.

  “Mum and Dad liked it like that.”

  Rachel went on gazing upwards.

  “Mum and Dad are in heaven, Anthony.”

  “They didn’t believe in heaven. They didn’t believe in the supernatural. They thought the mind of man was paramount. As I do. They were pragmatists.”

  “The Dump,” Rachel said, “is not pragmatic. The Dump is a collapsing waste of space. It would make a wonderful studio. It even has a big north wall, for a window. You could paint in there and draw, and make models of birds the size of airplanes. There’s enough room in there to build an airplane, even.”

  Anthony sold a piece of his parents’ old and unproductive orchard to the neighbors, for the price of turning the Dump into a studio. He put in windows and skylights, and a wood-burning stove, and laid old bricks on the floor and tongue-and-groove paneling against the walls. He brought in old kitchen tables, and battered armchairs from the tobacco-stained snug where his father used to spend long afternoons working on his complicated cross-referenced systems of racing form, and rugs that had worn down to the canvas after a lifetime on stone-flagged floors. He put up his easels, and lines of shelves, and old saddle brackets on which to hang frames. He added books, and the decoy birds carved out of wood that the fishermen once made on Orford Quay when the weather was too rough to put the boats out. And then, in pride of place, he hung a reproduction of Joseph Crawhall’s The Pigeon, a gouache on Holland cloth, painted in 1894 by one of the Glasgow School, which he had taken Rachel all the way to see, in the Burrell Collection.

  “He’s my hero,” Anthony said.

  Rachel had gazed at the pigeon, its white plumage flecked with gray, its pale-coral beak and feet, its hard, wild, small eye.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said. “Why is it so wonderful?”

  “Because,” Anthony said, “because you feel the inner life of the bird.” He took her hand. “In early Chinese culture, bird painting was very important. Not just because birds are so decorative, but because they are wild, inhabitants of the world of air and freedom. The Chinese thought you should observe a bird intently, for ages and ages, and then paint it from memory, making it as vital as possible. They thought that was one of the finest expressions of the human mind, to observe, and the
n paint like that. Crawhall painted from memory, as he had been taught as a boy. I wasn’t taught like that, but I’ve taught myself. I’d rather there was life and truth in a painting, than romance. I want an emotional charge.”

  Rachel had slipped her hand out of his, still looking at the pigeon.

  “Yes,” she said respectfully.

  The studio, even separated as it was from the main house by a stretch of weedy gravel, became as significant to their lives as Rachel’s kitchen. All three boys had their babyhood daytime sleeps in there, tucked into the huge old coach-built pram that had once been Anthony’s, and then, as time went on, brought their homework in, to sit at one of the cluttered tables, and kick the chair stretchers and complain about fractions and French vocab and Mrs. Fanshawe, who went through every head in the school with a nit comb she doused in Dettol.

  It was years, though, until the studio, and what Anthony produced in it, made any money. During those years, Rachel cooked for local people’s parties and held small informal cooking courses in the kitchen she had made by knocking a warren of little domestic offices into a single space. Her efforts were supplemented by Anthony’s part-time job teaching at a big art college fifteen miles away, a job he kept, out of habit and affection, even after his work began to be exhibited, and widely sold, and he was made a Royal Academician. It was a job that had led to his encountering Petra.

  He had noticed her, at first, because she never said anything. She sat at the back of the class, dressed in the whimsical and bohemian rags that most of Anthony’s students affected, and took notes. When he looked over her shoulder as he strolled, talking, up and down the aisles between the students, he saw that she was writing in pencil, with a strong and characterful script, in a notebook so artisan that she could only have made it herself. Her hair was twisted up in a bit of rough blue muslin patterned with gold spots, and her hands—her nails were bitten, he saw—were half shrouded in torn black-lace mittens. She went on writing as he paused beside her, and he could see that she was writing exactly what he was saying.