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

her Petra. What do you do if you have absolutely no money, not even enough to buy a tiny little piece of cheese that would be too small even for a mouse to live on?”
    “They aren’t like that,” Edward said. “They have plenty of money for cheese and cornflakes.”
    Mariella spread her hands. She had a tiny blue daisy transfer on her smallest left fingernail, which she had daringly left on for a school day.
    “So they’re okay?”
    “Exactly.”
    “You go jabbering on,” Mariella said, “all weekend, and then you say there’s nothing to worry about.”
    Edward turned the car expertly away from the curbside and into the traffic along the street.
    “It isn’t quite as black-and-white as that. Uncle Ralph needs to find different work to do.”
    “For when the money runs out?”
    “Well, yes, kind of—”
    “He could be a doctor,” Mariella said, “or a weatherman. Or he could be in the post office, selling stamps. Mummy says there are never enough people in the post office, and the queues are terrible.”
    Edward slowed the car at the first traffic lights.
    “It takes six years to train to be a doctor.”
    “Wow,” Mariella said admiringly.
    “And you need a science degree to be a weather man, and selling stamps might not produce quite enough money to look after them all.”
    “Petra could work,” Mariella said. “Like Mummy does.Mummy says it’s good for women to work. She says look at Bella’s mother spending her whole life having her toenails painted.”
    “I don’t think she said that—”
    Mariella tossed her head and felt her school-day plait thumping against her neck.
    “Well, she
looked
as if she was going to say it.”
    “Maybe she just thought it.”
    Mariella stared out of the car window in silence.
    “Or, maybe,” Edward said, “
you
thought it, looking at Bella’s mother, and then you just found you’d said it.”
    Mariella inspected her daisy transfer.
    She said, “D’you think we should spend next weekend making food and putting it all in a basket and driving to Suffolk to give it to Ralph and Petra?”
    “That’s a very nice idea.”
    “Shall we ask Mummy?”
    “Let’s.”
    Mariella glanced at her father.
    “If you and Mummy run out of money, Daddy, you’re to tell me. Okay? At once.”
    “Really? Why? Suppose we want to protect you?”
    Mariella snorted.
    “If I don’t
know
, then I can’t do anything about it, can I?” She kicked at the rubber mat that protected the carpet in the floor well under her feet. “That’s not protection.”
    “Oh?”
    “No,” Mariella said firmly. “That’s just daft.”
    Edward rang Sigrid at lunchtime. He told her about his conversation with Mariella and said he hoped she was having a good day untroubled by human provocation, and that he was going to talk to his managing director about Ralph because eventhough the bank wasn’t much in a hiring mood, there were still some opportunities in the analysis team. Sigrid told him about Philip.
    “And he’d brought me flowers.”
    “What?
Flowers?
”
    “Cornflowers. Really rather pretty.”
    “Fuck Philip—”
    “I was so cross,” Sigrid said. “I was so cross that he tried to disarm me with flowers. I’ve put them in a mug in the little place where I eat lunch sometimes. I hope he gets the message.”
    “As long as you don’t like them—”
    “Oh, I like
them
,” Sigrid said, “I just don’t like being given them.”
    Edward said, “I’m really sorry about the weekend—”
    “That’s okay.”
    “Mariella wants us to bake cookies and stuff for Ralph and co.”
    “At least she’s practical,” Sigrid said.
    “I’m trying to be, too. Just one thing—”
    “What?”
    “I quite understand,” Edward said, “why you said a lot of what you said, last night, and you were right about most of it. But—”
    “But what—”
    “It’s much easier,” Edward said, “to be detached and grownup about your family, if said family is safely in another country.