Daughters-in-Law Read Online Free Page A

paint it from memory, making it as vital as possible. They thought that was one of the finest expressions of the human mind, to observe, and then paint like that. Crawhall painted from memory, as he had been taught as a boy. I wasn’t taught like that, but I’ve taught myself. I’d rather there was life and truth in a painting, than romance. I want an emotional charge.”
    Rachel had slipped her hand out of his, still looking at the pigeon.
    “Yes,” she said respectfully.
    The studio, even separated as it was from the main house by a stretch of weedy gravel, became as significant to their lives as Rachel’s kitchen. All three boys had their babyhood daytime sleeps in there, tucked into the huge old coach-built pram that had once been Anthony’s, and then, as time went on, brought their homework in, to sit at one of the cluttered tables, and kick the chair stretchers and complain about fractions and French vocab and Mrs. Fanshawe, who went through every head in the school with a nit comb she doused in Dettol.
    It was years, though, until the studio, and what Anthony produced in it, made any money. During those years, Rachel cooked for local people’s parties and held small informalcooking courses in the kitchen she had made by knocking a warren of little domestic offices into a single space. Her efforts were supplemented by Anthony’s part-time job teaching at a big art college fifteen miles away, a job he kept, out of habit and affection, even after his work began to be exhibited, and widely sold, and he was made a Royal Academician. It was a job that had led to his encountering Petra.
    He had noticed her, at first, because she never said anything. She sat at the back of the class, dressed in the whimsical and bohemian rags that most of Anthony’s students affected, and took notes. When he looked over her shoulder as he strolled, talking, up and down the aisles between the students, he saw that she was writing in pencil, with a strong and characterful script, in a notebook so artisan that she could only have made it herself. Her hair was twisted up in a bit of rough blue muslin patterned with gold spots, and her hands—her nails were bitten, he saw—were half shrouded in torn black-lace mittens. She went on writing as he paused beside her, and he could see that she was writing exactly what he was saying.
    “I want to say this to all of you as gently as I can, but correctness can become a terrible inhibition. You see, there’s the truth of what we observe, and then there’s the truth of how we
interpret
what we’ve observed. When you’re painting a bird, say, you want to give the sense that you were there, that you are responding to that moment in the life of a living bird. Do you see?”
    Petra had underscored “terrible” and “interpret” and “there,” following his vocal emphases. And later, when he had made them loosen up their drawing arms by sweeping charcoal across great sheets of drawing paper, he saw that she was either a natural, or had been very well taught already, and that she was far, far better than anyone else in the class. But she would not look at him, and she did not speak, and Anthony, feeling ashe did when watching the incipient apprehensions of wildlife, did not oblige her to either.
    “There’s a girl at college,” he said to Rachel. “Odd girl. I should think she’s nineteen or twenty. Never speaks. But she draws like an angel. It’s years since I’ve had anyone who draws like her.”
    Rachel was grinding pine nuts for a pesto.
    “What’s her name?”
    “Petra something.”
    “Petra?”
    “That’s what it says on my class list. I’ve never heard her say it. I’ve never heard her say anything. She’s completely mute.”
    “How peaceful.”
    “And intriguing. I’m intrigued by her.”
    Rachel began to drip olive oil into the green sludge of basil leaves and pine nuts.
    “Ask her here. I miss all the boys’ friends coming round. I used to love that, when the