Daughters-in-Law by Joanna Trollope

okay by you. Afirst for Ralph, I should think, wondering if he was being a nuisance.”
    Charlotte banged on the bathroom door.
    “I’m off, babe!”
    There was a pause while taps and Luke’s iPod were turned off, and then he opened the door. He was naked, and wet. He looked her up and down.
    “Don’t go to work, angel—”
    She giggled.
    “I’ve got to. I’m on the eight o’clock shift, which means being there at seven forty-five. You know that.”
    “I’ll be thinking about you all day. All day.”
    She blew him a kiss.
    “Me too. When’s Ralph getting here?”
    Luke stepped forward and enfolded her in a wet embrace.
    “When he gets here. Miss me. Miss me all day.”
    “Promise,” Charlotte said.
    Luke’s studio was approached along a broad asphalted path behind the Arnold Circus buildings. It was in a long, low line of what might once have been mews, or garages, brick-built with sizable sections of metal-framed windows, broken where the studios behind them were unoccupied. The ground-floor walls were punctuated by battered black-painted doors that, when you pushed them open, gave on to steep, narrow staircases that led up to small landings illuminated by dirty windows, floor to ceiling. In Luke’s case, one of the two doors on such a landing had been newly painted, in dark-gray matte paint, with a brushed-steel plate fixed slightly to one side of the center eyeline, which read, in black sans serif lower-case lettering, “Graphtech Design Consultants.”
    Ralph had only been to Luke’s studio once before, when Luke and Jed were in the process of moving in, and long beforeLuke met Charlotte. They’d borrowed the money for the initial payment on the lease and down payments on their computers from Jed’s father, who was separated from Jed’s mother and spent most of his time and money restoring classic motorbikes. Luke, who had always been good with his hands, was building drawing boards and installing overhead lighting while Jed sanded the floorboards with a gadget that looked like a giant hair dryer. It had made Ralph think, with some emotion, of how he had intended his Suffolk cottage to be, a private space in which to live and to work without the distraction of obligation to anyone else. It was going to be him, and the white walls, and the uncompromising coastal light, and the sea, and the shingle, and the development of his idea to extend the ease and intimacy of Internet banking into the limitless world of the small investor.
    But, of course, it hadn’t turned out like that. He had been in the cottage a few months, four or five maybe, with Petra undemandingly there, now and then, drawing gulls on the beach and doing remarkable things with tins of baked beans and sharing his bed with the same absence of claim, or right, that she brought to most things, when she said, quite baldly, that she’d missed two periods, and she thought she was probably pregnant. He had been stunned, then rather overwhelmed and almost tearful, and then asked her, clumsily, what she would like him to do about it.
    She’d stared at him.
    “Nothing.”
    “I mean, d’you want to live here? D’you want to come and live here with me?”
    “I might.”
    He’d held her. He thought that if this was love, he liked it. He imagined a baby in his bare sitting room, Petra holding a baby, him holding a baby and showing it the sea, out of thewindow. But then, impelled by something he could not explain or really remember, they had gone to tell Anthony and Rachel, to
tell
them, not to ask them anything, and from then on everything changed, everything was not only different from how he’d imagined it, but hardly his and Petra’s anymore, either.
    The cottage had gone. It went almost at once. It was replaced by a little terraced place in Aldeburgh, with a small garden but no view of the sea. Ralph had a good room to work in, but it looked out over sheds and other people’s gardens, and a random parking space, not shingle and sea and