Daughters-in-Law Read Online Free

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