Brother and Sister

by Joanna Trollope

  "How does Titus know I'm adopted?"

  "I must have told him—"

  "How many other people have you told?"

  "Nobody. No one. I can't actually remember telling Titus, but he said I did—"

  "Does it matter" Nathalie said, "my being adopted? Does it make any difference?"

  Steve began to break the mince up with a wooden spatula.

  "Not to me, Nat. And I thought not to you."

  She said emphatically, "Certainly not to me."

  "Then that's what does make you different. Apparently. Not feeling set apart. That's why Sasha would like to talk to you."

  Nathalie turned back to the table and picked up her glass of wine.

  "Well, she can."

  Steve turned round.

  "She can?"

  "Yes. Why not?"

  "I thought—well, I thought after what you said just now about feeling lost, about being so thrown in case you don't know everything Polly might have inherited, that—well, that you wouldn't want to talk to anyone. I felt I had to ask because I told Titus I would but I didn't think you'd say yes."

  Nathalie said quietly, "Well, I have."

  "Did you talk to Dave?"

  "No. It was a chess night. I forgot."

  "But—"

  "It doesn't matter now," Nathalie said. "Sorry about earlier. Anything to do with Polly—"

  "Tell me about it."

  "I know. I'm sorry."

  "So I can tell Titus that this Sasha woman could at least ring you?"

  "Of course," Nathalie said.

  She picked her hair up and began to twist it behind her head.

  "I don't mind telling her how I feel."

  Steve watched her, spatula in hand. Behind him, the onions and meat spat and sizzled.

  "Which—is?"

  "That being adopted," Nathalie said, "allows you to choose to be the person you want to be. I can shuffle the cards of my past at will." She smiled at him. "You can't do that. Nor can she."

  CHAPTER THREE

  When David Dexter was eighteen, he told his parents, Lynne and Ralph, that he wasn't going to take up the university place he had won to read business studies. He was going instead, he said, in the flat voice he had learned to use if telling them something that might cause a stronger reaction than was comfortable for him to deal with, to agricultural college in the West Midlands to study horticulture. He intended, probably, to be a landscape gardener or something of the sort. He wasn't sure. He just knew he didn't want to go to Leicester, and study business.

  Ralph thought of all those weekends spent cajoling David to help him in the garden.

  "But you don't even like gardens, David."

  "Perhaps," Lynne said quickly, anxious as ever that none of the children's apparent enthusiasms, however hard to understand, should go without encouragement, "he just doesn't like this garden."

  David said, "I just want to learn about something living. That's all."

  Ralph, who had run his own small engineering company until it was bought up by a rival, rattled the change in his trouser pockets.

  "I think you'll find there's something pretty living about the business world—"

  "Directly living," David said. "Cyclical. Organic. Something I can touch."

  They let him go. They had to, just as, Ralph had pointed out, his own father—whom he had detested—had had to recognize that Ralph was not going to follow him into accountancy. Ralph's father had expressed his resentment by leaving the bulk of his meager estate to Ralph's sister, which decision, Ralph suspected, had no doubt given him considerable vengeful satisfaction. So David went off to horticultural college with everyone's hearty outward blessing, and gained an adequate degree and then proceeded to set up a small lawn-mowing and hedge-trimming business which had now blossomed into a busy garden-maintenance company with three vehicles bearing his name on the cab doors, and a staff of ten.

  It was, in his very early days, cutting the long, sour privet hedges in front of a row of substantial Victorian detached houses, one of which had a nursery school in its basement, that he had met Marnie. He'd heard her voice—American, he thought—organizing her little chattering charges in a way he found immediately attractive. She'd sounded friendly and interested and affectionate, but also as if she knew what those children should be doing, and she also knew that very soon they would all be doing it, without argument. David had played a kind of game with himself, wielding his electric hedge-cutter out of sight of the owner of that appealing voice, imagining what she would look like. She was possibly in her mid or late twenties: she was quite tall, and slight, with perhaps Nathalie's coloring, pale skin and darkish hair and those clear, strongly colored eyes which give their owners such a particular intensity of gaze.

  When he finally trimmed his noisy way round the hedge and into view of the back windows of the nursery school, he found, to his intrigued excitement, that he had only been right about one thing. Marnie was tall, almost as tall as he was, taller if she wore anything other than the peculiar blue canvas sandals she was wearing then. But she was young, not more than twenty-two or -three, and solid with the big supple grace of a girl brought up on sport. And she was fair, very fair, Scandinavian fair, with her hair pulled smoothly back from her face and hanging right down her back in a thick, even pigtail. There was no ribbon on the end of the pigtail, only a plain rubber band of the serviceable kind used to bundle up mail.

  Three days later, having covertly watched her as she came and went from the school—on foot, carrying a backpack rather than a handbag—David lay in wait for her. He was in his work clothes, his hands and forearms smeared with green from the hedges, having not given any thought as to the impression he might make on account of being so wholly taken up in his mind by the impression that Marnie had made on him.

  "I looked up," Marnie said later to Nathalie, "and there was this fabulous man."

  He asked her if she would have a drink with him. He told her that it was her voice that had caught his attention, and her manner with the children. He said he'd never asked an American out before.

  "Canadian," Marnie said. "Winnipeg. Listen to my r's."

  They drank cider on a peeling bench outside a pub on the edge of the canal. Marnie said she had done preschool teacher training in Canada and had come to England because she needed to get out of Winnipeg and had felt that Toronto wasn't far enough. She had almost immediately landed a nursery-teaching job in West London, where she had so impressed one of the mothers there—"She's been so good to me, but really, she wants to run my life for me, and live it too"—that she had been helped, within two years, to set up her own school in her benefactor's home town. She was twenty-four.

  "Me too," David said. "Do you play tennis?"

  "Sure," she said.

  She played golf as well, and swam and skied, and was taking climbing lessons on the purpose-built wall at the local sports center. She appeared to possess none of the mysterious complexities and maneuverings of the girls David had been involved with before; he didn't feel, as he so often had, that he abruptly had to leave the straightforward highway and plunge off into the shadowy labyrinths either side, in pursuit of a girl who'd suddenly gone elusive and baffling on him. Yet even he was baffled now. Here he was, irresistibly drawn towards this uncommon girl, almost exotic in her seemingly serene otherness to all the English girls he'd known—and she wasn't remotely like Nathalie. David had always supposed, hoped even, that when he found the girl he would like to share his life with she would be so like Nathalie that he would feel no sense of added loss. It was, after all, the loss he had always dreaded, the loss he had wrestled with painfully when Nathalie met Steve Ross at art school and began to turn away from David, in the ineluctable way of a sunflower turning its face towards the sun. He'd always imagined, after that, that his consolation would come in the form of finding a girl just like Nathalie. But Marnie wasn't like any woman David had ever met, even up to the point of, within eight months of meeting, directing her
warm brown gaze straight at him and suggesting that they get married.

  He was astonished, astonished and relieved.

  He leaned across the Cheddar ploughman's lunch they were sharing in a pub outside Westerham and said firmly, "Of course."

  Marnie smiled.

  "When it's right, go for it."

  It was all so easy. He could hardly believe it. Lynne and Ralph were delighted, and Nathalie was too taken aback by Mamie's complete absence of challenge to her on any grounds to do anything other than echo them. Marnie took him to Winnipeg and introduced him to her kind, straightforward academic parents and a handful of approachable, easygoing brothers, and David had an eerie sensation that all this had somehow been guided by an unseen hand, and that the path that had been so treacherous and stony in his early life was now being superbly smoothed for him as a kind of almost unearthly compensation. He looked round his new Canadian family and considered his English one and it suddenly seemed to him that all kinds of disturbing inner battles had not so much been won as simply melted away without a blow being struck. He told Marnie he loved her in a voice that even she, almost dazed by him as she then was, could hear was heavy with gratitude. It was deeply, wonderfully thrilling.

  They were married in England (Mamie's decision), honeymooned by hiking (Mamie's decision) through the Pyrenees from France to Spain, and returned to set up house in a cramped flat ten minutes' walk from Mamie's nursery school. Ellen was born—and named for her Canadian grandmother—eighteen months after they were married, and Daniel two years after that. The gardening business expanded, as did the nursery school to new premises with enough space for fifty children, and they moved to a detached house with a long garden—long enough to hit a cricket or tennis ball—running down to the edge of Westerham golf course. On weekends, Daniel collected lost golf balls from the bushes along the fairways and behind the greens, and sold them back to the members for five or ten pence depending upon what he thought he could get away with. From the lawn of the long garden, Ellen watched this minute commercial enterprise with scorn: her own aim was to be famous, but whether as an actress or as a tennis player she had not yet decided.

  After nearly fourteen years of marriage, Marnie became pregnant once again. The result—Petey—turned her instincts all homeward, and she gave up the nursery school to gratifying laments from all the parents, in order to devote herself to motherhood and domestic life. After all, she said to David, she'd never had the full-time chance for either, and she was going to take it now, while Petey was still small.

  "Of course," David said. He had said, "Of course," a great deal in the fifteen years they had been together and most of the time he had meant it. But this change in Mamie's life was weirdly disconcerting and his "Of course" didn't have quite its usual ring of conviction.

  He wondered, staring at the input invoices for Value Added Tax on his computer—he still preferred to do these quarterly returns himself—what it was that alarmed him about the prospect of Mamie's not working. It wasn't really the money, because in the first place he was doing well enough to keep them all comfortably if not luxuriously, and in the second, the nursery school had never been run for a profit. It was more, he thought, scrolling pointlessly up and down, how their life would be when all Mamie's quiet, formidable energies were focused in just one area instead of two.

  You couldn't, exactly, call Marnie bossy. She didn't domineer or nag or insist for no good reason. But she had a very clear, certain view of how human beings should conduct themselves, both as individuals and even more importantly in relation to one another. Marnie saw people in terms of community; she talked in terms of groups and teams and families. This had worked wonderfully at the nursery school where such principles were both practical and healthy. But when it came to family life, it didn't seem to work out so naturally. Marnie made it very plain to David, as the children came along, that he was no longer a priority to himself, nor even to her, but rather a leading team member in this new group, and the new group took precedence over everything. Everything. Family, it became clear, was Mamie's religion.

  Part of David loved this, adored it, believed that it was helping to restore, deep down, the great torn gashes left by having his own blood family ripped away. He would look at his children asleep and feel an intensity of possession that was to do with something far more visceral than even paternal love. But for all this savage sense of physical belonging, part of him still strayed away by itself, part of him that was still engaged upon the lifelong struggle—he supposed every human to be similarly engaged—of discovering exactly who he was and how to live with that person. This struggle, which seemed to preoccupy the less conscious parts of his mind for most of the time, was in no way eased by his unquestioned love for either Marnie or his children. Only two things eased it, two things that he knew Marnie felt were, if not actually disloyal to the family, at least not contributory to its welfare. She would never prevent him from doing either, but she silently conveyed to him the fact that she considered the time and energy he devoted to these other pursuits was time and energy the family both deserved and could well have profited from. These two pursuits were playing chess, and seeing his sister Nathalie.

  Ralph had taught David to play chess when he was seven, and even at seven, David had sensed a kind of rivalry at stake which excited him. Ralph was a good, steady player, a member of a local club, and he had said to Lynne that he wanted to teach David various skills and games that they might share, perhaps, when talking was simply too difficult. Lynne thought it was a wonderful idea. Her eyes shone. They shone with a gratitude to Ralph, which she was always thankful to feel, because it diminished her abiding sense of being let down by Ralph in the matter of babies.

  Ralph had a soapstone chessboard that Lynne had given him, and a set of heavily carved wooden pieces which had belonged to his grandfather. He set David down one side of the board on a stool.

  "Now," he said. "Before I tell you what's what I want to tell you two things. One is that, because all the moves in chess are up to you, you soon find out your own limitations. The second thing is—you could beat me."

  David's head came up. His eyes were bright.

  "Beat you?"

  "The only aim in chess is to checkmate the king. You could capture all the other pieces on the board and still lose. But if you checkmate the king, you win. So a boy can win over a man."

  It was evident quite quickly that David was going to be good, very good even, better than Ralph had bargained for. By the time he was twelve, Ralph, saying bravado things like, "Well, I always said the game was greater than the players," ceased to play with him. David noticed this, but took no account of it, so obsessed was he by then with this mesmerizing activity, where thought seemed to replace action, where he could move without really exposing himself, where he felt both his emotional and intellectual defenses were safe.

  "Why do you play?" Nathalie said, declining to let him teach her. "Why do you keep on and on playing?"

  He was tearing an envelope into smaller and smaller squares.

  "Because I can control it."

  "No, you can't. You don't always win. When you lose, you've lost control."

  "But I can play again," David said. "There's always another game. Every time I lose, I look forward to winning the next one. It keeps me hoping." He balled his fist up round the envelope pieces. "And I can't get lost."

  "What?"

  "There's always an end game. There's always a resolution. If you play chess, you can't get lost."

  "Yes," Nathalie said.

  "See?"

  "Yes," Nathalie said again.

  "I don't have to surrender—"

  "OK, OK," Nathalie said, "I get it. I've got it. But I still don't want to play."

  David started a chess club at school and another at horticultural college. When he met Marnie he suggested that he teach her, but she was sure enough of him then not to need to learn. In any case, chess seemed irrelevant to her; it was deliciously foreign, a g
ame emerging from the labyrinthine coils of Byzantium, from all the ancient, sophisticated, decayed civilzations of the past. For David to play it appeared to her eccentric but also cultivated, and somehow gentlemanly. It was only as time went on, and she saw that he was drawn back to it all the time, as if to an opium pipe, that she began to sense uneasily that this game represented something more than just a game to David, and that some atavistic workings-out lay beneath the deceptively civilized black-and-white surface. But then, she told herself, is it completely crazy to be suspicious—jealous even—of a game? Suppose he played golf all weekend, or spent all their money on boats or vintage cars or flying round the world in support of a football team? Chess, she told herself, was no enemy; couldn't be. Chess was like doing the crossword, a challenging intellectual exercise of great beauty and history. Chess was not arbitrary or demanding or emotional or vulnerable. Chess was not like Nathalie.

  Marnie liked Nathalie. She was sure she did. From their first meeting, Nathalie had shown Marnie only affection and acceptance, and, even if this affection and acceptance denoted a supreme confidence on Nathalie's part about her own significance in David's life, it was, Marnie was sure, genuine in itself. Wasn't it? After all, there was everything in David and Nathalie's past to excuse and explain the bond between them—pure chance, Nathalie had said to her, because they might just as easily have loathed each other from the start—but the fact that they were not blood relations was something you could not, if as intimately involved with them as Marnie was, entirely overlook.

  Marnie was one for friends, not particularly girlfriends. She attempted, in her customary, modestly confident way, to make a friend out of Nathalie, to establish a relationship quite separate from the one either had with David. But Nathalie eluded her. She was a pleasant sister-in-law, an excellent aunt, she wasn't greedy about time or attention, but she could still stir something in David, whatever his mood, that transported him, very slightly, out of Mamie's reach. And when he was out of her reach, she felt herself to be inaudible and invisible in a way that nobody else in her life had ever made her feel. And at those moments too she felt herself to be living far away from Canada.