Daughters-in-Law by Joanna Trollope Read Free Book Online Page A

abandoned kitten.”
    “She was in Dad’s art class. He said she never spoke but she was brilliant. She is brilliant. At drawing, I mean.”
    Charlotte looked down at Luke. She began to stroke his thick hair back from his forehead.
    “And then Ralph fell in love with her—”
    “Well,” Luke said, gazing upward and thinking how amazing Charlotte looked, from every angle, even when foreshortened from underneath, as she was now, “I suppose he did. I mean, he liked her, he really liked her, but I’m not sure getting married was ever top of Ralph’s to-do list.”
    “Did she ask him, then?”
    “Oh no,” Luke said. He caught Charlotte’s hand and put it sideways, lightly, between his teeth. Then he took it out again, and said, still holding it, “She got pregnant.”
    “Wow,” Charlotte said. “So he felt he had to marry her.”
    Luke ran his tongue along the edge of Charlotte’s hand.
    “Well, not really. And I don’t think Petra would have expected him to, either. She wasn’t conventional, any more than he was. She’d probably just have shrugged and got on with it, taking the baby to art classes in a basket, that sort of thing. It was Mum and Dad that wanted the wedding. They wanted them married.”
    “To be respectable?”
    “Not really,” Luke said. He heaved himself upright and ran his hand through Charlotte’s damp hair. “They’re a cool old pair in some ways; they don’t mind about how things look, how conformist things are. It was more that they didn’t want to let Petra go. They’d kind of adopted her. So they couldn’t lose her after all they’d invested, all they’d got used to. At least, that’s what I think.”
    Charlotte was very still.
    “Are you shocked, angel?” Luke said.
    “No—”
    He peered into her face, his eyes an inch from hers.
    “What is it?”
    “It’s a bit silly—”
    “What is?”
    “How I feel,” Charlotte said. “I mean, I’ve got my own family, who are lovely, and your parents who’ve been really sweet to me, but when you describe how they feel about Petra, I—well, I feel a bit—” She stopped.
    “What?”
    “Jealous,” Charlotte said.
    Luke took his face away a little.
    “You are one idiot of an adorable girl.”
    Charlotte bent her head. She said, “There’s Sigi, you see, all groomed and professional and clever and detached, and she’s been in your family forever, and then there’s Petra, who everyone treats like a daughter, like a little sister, and it’s a bit much, sometimes, to have to compete with all that, especially when you’ve been competing with sisters all your life and you’re not academic or talented or anything—”
    “Shush,” Luke said loudly.
    Charlotte didn’t look up. Luke put his hand under her chin and tilted it until her gaze was level with his.
    “It’s only what I think that matters,” Luke said. “And you know what I think. And when the family know you better, they’ll think it too, which I suspect they do already because nobody could know you and not think it.”
    He leaned forward and kissed her, without hurry, on the mouth. Then he said, “Bugger Ralph and bugger his problems. We’ve got far more important things to concern ourselves with,” and he smiled at her, and, with a single, deft movement, he took her towel away.
    The flat Luke had found for them in London was at the very top of a tall and elaborate brick building in Arnold Circus, a stone’s throw, as Charlotte excitedly told Nora, and all her other friends, from Columbia Road flower market, from Brick Lane, from—oh my God—
Hoxton
. The building, like all those that ringed the Circus like a circle of great ships, had been designed as part of a grand nineteenth-century philanthropic project for public housing, to provide light and air and sanitary living conditions for people who had known nothing previously but teeming slum life. The Circus was impressive, built of red brick banded, here and there, with peach brick, like a