Brother and Sister

by Joanna Trollope

  "Of course," Sasha said. She leaned back into the sofa again and draped her arms out sideways. "It's often so difficult to visualize what we want, isn't it?"

  Steve grinned at her.

  "Did you visualize Titus?"

  Sasha laughed. She threw back her head so that Steve had an uninterrupted view of her neck rising smoothly out of the collar of her jacket.

  Then she said, "You couldn't visualize Titus, could you? I mean, you couldn't exactly invent him."

  "He's a clever boy."

  "Oh yes," she said, "and huge fun. We met doing yoga."

  "Titus does yoga?"

  "Of course not. He'd come with a friend, with the sole purpose of making fun of us all."

  "Tantric Titus—"

  "He only came to one class. Hopeless, of course, but so funny."

  "I'll remember that," Steve said. "It'll come in very useful." He put his hands on his knees. "I'm really sorry, but I ought to get back to the office."

  She smiled at him, without moving.

  "Of course—"

  He stood up.

  "Thanks so much for seeing me. And—and what you said—"

  She was still smiling.

  "My pleasure, Steve. Any time. Thanks for the coffee. I'm going to stay here and finish mine."

  He moved away, his hand raised in a half-wave.

  "Bye, Sasha."

  She waited until he was half a dozen steps away and then she called after him, "See you soon, Steve," and laughed when he went on walking.

  Back in the office, Meera was typing from Steve's dictation tapes with her headphones on, Justine was on the telephone and Titus was pinging pellets of waste paper into his bin with a rubber band.

  Steve said, passing him, "I don't pay you to do that."

  "I'm thinking," Titus said. "I can't think unless I'm doing something else." He slid off his stool and followed Steve across the ancient, polished floorboards. "Have a good time?"

  Steve stopped and turned to stare at him.

  "What's up with you?"

  Titus grinned.

  "She tells me everything."

  "Very unwise."

  "Actually, thanks for asking Nathalie—for setting up this thing. It meant a lot to Sasha."

  "Well, good," Steve said. He hitched himself half on to his stool and leaned forward to move the mouse for his computer. He said, not looking at Titus, "Nice girl."

  "Yes," Titus said. He put his hands in his pockets and yawned. "I could kick myself, though."

  "Why? Is she pregnant?"

  "No," Titus said morosely. "It's just that I really like her."

  "So?"

  "Well, I don't do that," Titus said. "It's the girls who really like me, usually. Remember Vannie?"

  "Oh yes," Steve said.

  Vannie had had the kind of body and sheer physical presence that was impossible to overlook, but all the same when Titus dumped her without ceremony she had sat for days in the downstairs reception area, huddled and sniffing and—dreadful to witness—pleading with him to take her back. Steve glanced sideways at Titus.

  "Why should you worry? I'm sure she likes you too."

  "But does she?"

  "Titus," Steve said, "I have a meeting to plan for and you have the Gower logo to finish."

  "I nearly have."

  "Go away," Steve said. "Tell Justine about your feelings."

  "She's not interested," Titus said. "She thinks I'm an upper-class twerp with an emotional age of seven."

  Steve didn't look at him.

  "Well?"

  "I may be a twerp," Titus said, "but I think being in love is shit. Aren't you supposed to feel on top of the world?"

  Steve said resignedly, "I left her finishing half a pint of latte in Caffe Roma. Go and find her."

  "Blessings," Titus said.

  "And then stay until that logo is finished."

  "It's a deal."

  "I don't actually think you're a twerp," Steve said, "but you are bloody annoying."

  "I know," Titus said happily. He blew Steve a kiss.

  Steve watched him briefly as he slip-skidded across the floor and vanished through the door to the staircase. Justine put the phone down and looked across at Steve.

  "Love," Steve said with ironic emphasis.

  Justine made a face. He glanced up at the wall beside him, at Nathalie laughing, in her blue shirt, at Polly just regarding, from under her hat. He thought of Sasha, lounging on the cafe sofa, telling him all the things he needed to know, all the things he knew he was daft to worry about but needed reassurance over all the same. He smiled at the photographs and felt, simultaneously, a mildly superior pity for Titus's anxiety. He would cycle home, he told himself, past the Union Street flower stall, and buy Nathalie a love token. Iris, if they had any.

  "There was no need," Marnie said quietly, "to speak to him like that."

  She was standing behind David in the little room he used as an office, off the hallway. Since she had been at home, the office had been considerably more orderly, with the introduction—unquestionably an improvement but also mildly admonishing—of box files and a year planner which now hung on the wall above his desk.

  David continued to look at the computer screen.

  "I've told him about golf balls over and over. I've told him he can putt to his heart's content but he can't practice drives in the garden."

  "It wasn't what you said," Marnie said in the same even, reasonable voice, "it was the way you said it."

  "Marnie," David said, "could you possibly concentrate on bringing up just the children, and refrain from including me?"

  There was silence. In it, behind his back, David could sense Marnie wrestling with this remark. When they were first together, she would merely have laughed, or thrown something—very accurately—at him. But over the years, she had become rather less equable about anything that amounted to criticism, anything that implied that there might be faults or flaws in the blatantly, palpably fair-minded way she was trying to deal with family life, with David. Sometimes David summoned up an image in his mind of that athletically built girl in her blue canvas sandals swinging into the nursery school with all the calm assurance of someone who understands the kind of life they have, and knows how to handle it. That image, if he was feeling tired or low for any reason, could sometimes make him feel sharply nostalgic.

  He took a breath now and said, still looking at the screen, "Sorry."

  "That's OK," Marnie said. Then she said, in a softer tone, "What's up?"

  He shrugged.

  "Oh, work—"

  "But it's going well—"

  "Yes."

  Marnie moved from behind him to beside him. She put a hand out towards his computer mouse, almost as if she'd had a thought of turning the machine off, and pulled it back again.

  "Want to talk?"

  David sighed.

  "Come into the kitchen," Marnie said. "I'll make some coffee."

  Marnie always made coffee. In her grandmother's kitchen—her Scandinavian grandmother, who had bequeathed Marnie her smooth, fair coloring—the coffee pot had been the great domestic totem, sitting all day on the back of the stove, strong and bitter and familiar.

  "I don't really want coffee—"

  "But you want to talk."

  "Not want—"

  "David," Marnie said, "when do we ever want to do the things that need to be done?"

  He got slowly to his feet.

  "I'm going to have coffee," Marnie said. "It's not important whether you have any or not. It's only important that you talk."

  She went out of the office and down the hall to the kitchen. David looked out of the office window, at the hornbeam hedge he had planted and which was not thriving, closed his eyes, counted to ten, opened them again and followed her.

  She was standing in the kitchen measuring coffee into a red enamel jug. David stood in the doorway and regarded her. She was wearing clean jeans and a navy-blue polo-necked sweater, and her pigtail was pulled over
one shoulder and fastened at the end with a clip decorated with a row of ladybirds. Ellen had given her mother that clip. Ellen knew it was hopeless to give her mother anything remotely funky: ladybirds, however, were acceptably orderly and unostentatious.

  "I'm sorry," David said.

  Marnie looked up. She smiled.

  "I don't mean to patronize you—"

  He came further into the room and pulled a chair out from the table. He watched Marnie pour boiling water into her enamel jug.

  "And I don't mean to yell at Daniel."

  "Don't you think," Marnie said in her nursery-school voice, dipping a long spoon into the coffee and stirring, "that we do these things we don't mean to do because of something else? Like we're scared or upset?"

  "Well, of course," David said irritably. "When was that ever new?"

  "Doesn't have to be new to be true. Sure you don't want coffee?"

  He leaned back in his chair and sighed.

  "Oh, OK. I'll have some."

  Marnie unhooked two mugs from a row above the counter.

  "I'm going to help you," she said. "I'm going to tell you that my instinct about how you're feeling right now has to do with Nathalie."

  David grunted. Marnie put a strainer over one of the mugs and began to pour.

  "She called here the other night. She wanted to talk to you, she said. She wanted to discuss something to do with your mother. But I kind of felt that wasn't really why she'd called. Fair enough not to want to tell me the real reason, but you can bet your mother wasn't it."

  "No," David said.

  Marnie turned and put the coffee mugs on the table. Then she sat down opposite David and pushed a mug towards him.

  "So my guess is, she's called you and she's told you whatever it is and it's bugging you."

  David said, staring past Marnie and out through the window behind her where he could see Daniel practicing erratic, impatient swings with a golf club, "I told her I'd tell you—"

  "Sure," Marnie said.

  "It's not a secret, it's not even particularly private, at least, it won't be for long, it can't be—" He stopped.

  Marnie waited. She put her hands around her coffee mug, and waited, her eyes on the tabletop.

  "She wants to find her mother."

  Mamie's head jerked up.

  "Holy smoke."

  David said again, dully this time as if resigning himself, "She wants to look for her mother."

  Marnie let go of her mug and put her hands down flat on the table.

  "What brought this on?"

  "I don't know exactly. She gave me some reasons but they sounded pretty flimsy to me. I—I wonder if this has been brewing a long time, I wonder—" He broke off and shifted his gaze from the window to Marnie. "It makes me wonder a lot of things."

  Marnie shook her head.

  "She always seemed so sure she didn't need to—"

  "I know."

  "Maybe," Marnie said, "what she said and what she thought were two different things."

  David gave a little shiver.

  "Don't," he said quietly.

  Marnie leaned forward.

  "Does she mean to involve you?"

  He nodded.

  "How?"

  "She wants me to help her tell Mum."

  Marnie said, "It will half kill your mother."

  "She knows that."

  "She knows that?"

  "She just needs to do this thing very badly. Desperately, even. I pointed out all the people she'll hurt and she said she knew all that and maybe she was a selfish cow but she couldn't go on pretending any more."

  "Pretending?"

  "Pretending she didn't mind not being like people who know who their parents are."

  Marnie leaned over the tabletop and scratched at something on the surface with a fingernail.

  She said, almost impersonally, "It's called rubber-banding."

  David looked at her.

  "What is?"

  "What Nathalie's doing. What's happened to Nathalie." Marnie raised her head. She said with precision, "The return of unresolved griefs from childhood in adult life is called rubber-banding."

  "How on earth do you know?"

  "I looked it up."

  "Looked it up?"

  "On the Internet," Marnie said. "There's a lot about adoption on the Internet."

  David said angrily, "What were you doing on the Internet?"

  "Just looking—"

  "You mean sneaking—"

  "I don't sneak," Marnie said. "I'd have talked about it as much as you wanted. If you'd ever wanted to talk."

  David pushed his chair back.

  "Talking doesn't solve everything."

  "No. But maybe it explains some."

  "Like what?"

  "Like why Nathalie's decision has thrown you so."

  "It's Mum," David said. "And Dad. And Steve and Polly—"

  "And yourself?"

  He stood up. He nodded.

  "David," Marnie said, "could you just look at the positive? Could you just consider your upbringing and your present life and family situation? Could you just reflect on the fact that whatever the circumstances and tragedies of your early life I chose to stay in England and marry you and have your children? I chose that."

  He looked down at her. There was a pause and then he bent towards her and said fiercely, "I was only chosen by you after I was rejected by her."

  Marnie looked back.

  "Her?"

  "Yes," David said. "Her."

  "Not—not Nathalie?"

  "No."

  Marnie swallowed. "You mean your birth mother."

  "Yes," David said with emphasis.

  Marnie turned her face away. She put up one hand and held the end of her plait.

  "We seem—to be in real deep here—"

  David said nothing.

  Marnie said, "Nathalie's—kind of ripped the wounds open, hasn't she, even if she didn't mean to—"

  "She asked me to go with her."

  "Go where?"

  "On this journey. To find—to find our mothers."

  Marnie let her plait go and sat bolt upright.

  "She asked you to find your mother too?"

  "Yes."

  "Anything else I should know?"

  "No!" David shouted. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the ceiling.

  "And will you?"

  "No!" David shouted again.

  Marnie waited a moment and then she said, "Why not?"

  "Because I don't want to! I don't need to! I don't want to have anything to do with her, ever."

  "Look at me," Marnie said.

  Slowly David bent his head forward until his gaze rested on Marnie. She was sitting straight-backed with her hands flat on the table. Her hands were ringless. She had never worn rings, not even a wedding ring. "Why?" she'd said. "Why does a ring make us any more married?"

  "What," he said now.

  "Listen—"

  "Look," he said, interrupting, "I don't want any half-baked claptrap off the Internet—"

  She ignored him.

  "Nathalie decides, for reasons we don't know, or maybe understand, that she wants to find her mother. She tells you. She has never given you any reason previously for wishing to do this, so it's a shock for you. But it's more than that. It's unhinging something in you, it's digging up something from the past you thought you'd buried, maybe even buried with Nathalie's help. It seems to me there's only one solution." She stopped and brought her hands together, as if to prevent them from gesturing and thus making the whole situation more emotional than it already was.

  Then she said, "You have to agree."

  "I have agreed," David said. "I've told her I'll help with Mum."

  "No."

  She looked steadily at him, and he had a clutch of recollection, a memory of those children in the nursery school who were going to do what Marnie told them to do because, in the end, she knew what was best for them.

  "No," he said again. His voi
ce sounded far away and thin.

  "Nathalie's right," Marnie said. "If she's going to look for her mother, you have to look for yours, too—"

  "Marnie—"

  "You do," she said. "Or you'll never be at peace again. Not now."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The upstairs sitting room of the Royal Oak had been decorated by Evelyn Ross to provide a distinct contrast to the public rooms below. The Royal Oak—apart from the improbably green tree on its signboard—had apparently always been painted black and dark red, with gold lettering, and nothing would shift Ray Ross from the conviction that this was somehow a historic tradition that it was his duty to uphold. When he had first become the licensee, all those years ago, Evelyn had begged for at least cream instead of black, or even, inside, some color for the window frames and doors less profoundly redolent of beer than the chipped tan they had always been, and had been met with complete resistance. The pub would be repainted every ten years, Ray said, in the livery it had always worn, and if she wanted to display her artistic flair she could do it in the areas well away from the dignity of his business.

  "This isn't a bloody cafe," he'd said. "You can do all your nonsense upstairs, Evie. Do it where the customers can't see."

  So she had painted her sitting room lilac with white woodwork and furnished it with a sofa upholstered in cream leather which had been in a clearance sale at a furnishing store. The store had also provided the nest of brass-legged occasional tables and the imitation onyx lamps with pleated shades. Ray never sat on the sofa: he said it was impossible to stay on. Instead he used an easy chair inherited from Evie's father, which she kept covered with a piece of tapestry-woven fabric because all Ray's clothes smelled of beer and frying.

  "You be thankful," he said every so often, "that I'm not a bloody fishmonger."

  The sitting room was a small haven for Evie. On the rare occasions when she wasn't required in the kitchen or behind the bar, she would settle—with difficulty—onto her leather sofa and watch old movies on the television, luxuriously conscious of not being part of the noise and activity and smells of the pub below. Sometimes, during longueurs in the movies, she thought about how life would be in two years' time, when Ray retired, and they bought the bungalow in Ferndown they'd always talked about, and Ray had no official occupation. Quite where she could go then to escape the heavy, demanding seductiveness of his presence, she couldn't think. Her daughter, Verena, Steve's older sister, who lived on the Isle of Man and only came down to Westerham once a year, said that she should get a job herself when Ray retired.