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

deep-red cake, iced in buttercream. Her mouth was frosted with it.
    “Red velvet,” she said. “Taste it. You’ll see. Worth getting fat and spotty for.”
    In the evening, after Mariella was in bed—accompanied as she was every evening by her iPod and seventeen stuffed animals, all of whom would be offended, Mariella said, if they were anywhere but on her bed at night—Sigrid laid out their customary Sunday-night supper of Matjes herring, black bread, and pickled-cucumber salad, and then took a glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc to the small room off the kitchen where a big plasma television screen had been fitted into a wall of bookcases. Edward followed her. Sigrid sat down on the sofa opposite the screen and aimed the remote control at it. Edward leaned forward and took the remote out of her hand.
    “Please don’t,” Sigrid said.
    Edward sat down close to her.
    “I need to talk to you.”
    “You’ve been talking all weekend—”
    “Yes,” Edward said, “but not to you. I’ve been talking, as you well know, to my fucking maddening family, and I need to talk to someone with some sense.”
    Sigrid sighed. She put her wineglass down on the nearest pile of magazines and turned to face him.
    “Okay.”
    “
Please
don’t say it like that.”
    “Well,” Sigrid said, “I know your family. And I know how you all operate. So I can’t feel very hopeful, now, can I?”
    Edward reached across Sigrid for her wineglass and took a swallow from it.
    He said, “I cannot believe the fuss they are making—”
    “Can’t you?”
    “No,” Edward said. “I mean, Ralph has lost his company, which is very sad, but not really surprising when you look at the high-handed way he’s behaved to his bank all along, and they’re all reacting as if one of the children had been run over. I kept saying to Mum it’s only a
job
, Mum, and she said, oh, he’ll never find another one in this climate and what about the mortgage, they can’t afford that and Dad and I can’t help them at the moment and Petra is distraught—”
    “Is she?” Sigrid said.
    “Is she what?”
    “Is Petra distraught?”
    “Well,” Ed said, shrugging, “when I spoke to her, she sounded as if she was doing the usual Petra thing of being all vague and unconcerned till everything had blown over and someone else had thought of a solution.”
    “Well then.”
    Edward put his hand out again for Sigrid’s glass. She moved it deftly out of his reach.
    “Get your own.”
    Edward sighed.
    “It isn’t Petra. I mean, in a way it is because she’s such a professional eternal child, but it’s also Mum and Dad panicking and Ralph at his most unhelpful because he feels he’s handled it all so badly, and he has.”
    Sigrid took a sip of her wine and offered the glass to Ed. He looked at her gratefully. He said, “I could cheerfully strangle the lot of them.”
    “Have you spoken to Luke?”
    “Yes.”
    “And?”
    “He’s still on honeymoon. In his head, anyway. He says it’s rotten for Ralph and scandalous of the bank, but Ralph’s got to deal with it.”
    “He has,” Sigrid said.
    Ed took another deep swallow of Sigrid’s wine.
    “I’m the eldest, Sigi. I feel I have to prop up the parents and help the brothers.”
    “Only up to a point. You can’t choose their lives, you can’t live their lives for them, you can’t stop your parents having the priorities they have.”
    “You mean Petra.”
    “Only partly,” Sigrid said.
    Edward put the wineglass down and took Sigrid’s nearest hand.
    “The geography doesn’t help. All of them living so close and being so involved with each other. I said something so stupid to Mum—”
    “What?”
    “I said,” Ed said unhappily, “I said, because she said she was really wound up about it all and wasn’t sleeping and stuff, I said just leave it to me and I’ll think of something and ring you tomorrow, and you know how pseudo-tough she is and never cries and all that, and she did cry, well,