"But this was a touchy-feely mood. Steve doesn't have those. Steve goes mental if you leave a pen on your desk out of alignment, but he doesn't do emotional. So it means he doesn't get any practice and therefore when he is upset, he's upset like someone being thrown into a pool for the first time and told to swim. All thrashing and splashing. And obsessed with the alignment of pens."
Two teenage boys on skateboards went screeching past, sniggering at the discrepancy between Sasha and Titus's heights.
Sasha looked after them briefly, and then she said casually, "What was he upset about?"
They paused to cross the street.
"I dunno—"
"You must do," Sasha said. "You can't share a space that size all day and not have some kind of clue."
Titus glanced at her sharply.
"Why do you care? Why are you so interested?"
Sasha set off across the street, towing Titus behind her.
"Why do you think? Because of Nathalie, of course. Because of what I saw of Nathalie."
"Well," Titus said crossly, "you saw all wrong, didn't you?"
Sasha stopped walking. She stood stock still on the pavement and took her hand away.
"No, Titus," she said, in the voice she used for explaining psychological theory to him, "no, I did not read Nathalie wrong."
He smiled.
He said with a little air of triumph, "Then why is she trying to find a search service to look for her natural mother?"
Sasha said nothing. She moved away from Titus to stand in the lit square that fell from a newsagent's window. Titus followed her. He put a hand on her sleeve and stroked it.
"Sorry."
Sasha paused a moment and then she said, "What happened?"
"He just came out with it," Titus said. "When the girls went out at lunchtime, I said what was he being such a pain about, and it all came out."
"Exactly what did he say?"
Titus looked up. Sasha's features were thrown into deep relief by the harsh shadows cast out of the shop window and she looked like some wonderfully dangerous Valkyrie. He swallowed.
He said, "Well, it looks like she didn't tell you the truth or something. She's decided she wants to find her natural mother and she's making her brother look for his mother too."
"Her brother?"
"Her adopted brother. Dave the digger. He does gardens." He peered at Sasha. "Aren't you upset?"
She smiled down at him.
"No," she said. "Why should I be?"
"Well," Titus said, shifting a little, "you got it wrong. She fooled you."
"Or herself," Sasha said. "That's what's so interesting."
"Interesting?"
"It proves the theory," Sasha said, "the theory that all adoptees are interested in where they come from. At bottom, they are. Lack of interest is merely a defense."
"But you believed her!"
"I wonder," Sasha said. "I wonder if I did?"
"Come on—"
"I asked her about work," Sasha said. "I asked her what she did, with all her artistic talents, and she was very evasive. I couldn't get a sense she did anything much, just bits and pieces for friends, odd things, little jobs. And of course, that's classic."
"Classic?"
"The rejection adoptees suffer doesn't just affect their relationships. It spills over into work. They become paralyzed by the fear of being turned down so they won't even try. It looks like laziness, but it isn't. They often want to be better than the best, but they can't make themselves."
Titus took her hand again.
"Bormg," he said, smiling.
"Not boring for Nathalie—"
"Very boring for me—"
"Not," Sasha said, smiling back, "boring for Steve."
"I want a drink," Titus said loudly.
"Do you?"
"I want a drink, with you, and then another, and then possibly another and then a Thai green curry and then—"
Sasha bent and kissed him again. Her tongue lingered a little this time and Titus was appalled to hear himself give a little gasp. Sasha took her mouth away.
"We'll see," she said. "We'll do the drink anyway."
CHAPTER SIX
Daniel lay on his bed. Or rather, he lay across it with his head balanced on one edge and his feet propped up against the wall at the opposite side. The wall had posters on it, exclusively of sportsmen, and Daniel had arranged his trainered feet around them in order not to obscure one of Ian Thorpe's ears or Andrew Flintoff's nose. Daniel wasn't much of a swimmer, but he was passionate about cricket, could recite accurately—if there'd been anyone around who gave a toss about such things—all the names of the major county and world cricket teams, including Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
He moved his feet a little, tapping Thorpe's chin.
"Attapattu," he chanted silently. "Sangakkara. Jayawar-dene—"
He lifted his feet off the wall and brought his knees down onto his chest, pressing hard, pulling his thighs down with his hands so as to blot out all consciousness of the interminableness of this afternoon, the endlessness of these unwanted holiday days in which his mother urged him to devise his own amusements. She was very keen on that, very keen on Daniel and Ellen learning to be proactive, rather than merely reactive, in their leisure time. She explained, in her reasonable way and in order to forestall a torrent of complaint about unfairness, that this requirement did not apply to Petey who was both too young to understand the value of constructive self-diversion and also too young—lucky Petey, as usual—to know what it was to be bored. When Petey was older, Daniel's mother said, he too would need to learn how to interest himself, just as Daniel and Ellen must learn now.
Daniel pulled his knees down even further and parted them so that they could slide past his face and rest beside his ears. It was his mother's theories in this department which meant that he was the only boy he knew—and possibly the only boy in the known universe—who did not have a personal computer in his bedroom. The only computer, apart from his father's business one, was an old family one which lived downstairs in the same room as the only television and suffered from the same rigorous rationing of use. Daniel raised his knees and attempted to fit them into his eye sockets. It seemed to him sometimes that his parents must both have had some kind of amnesia, the kind that prevents you from ever remembering what it was like to be anything other than old and boring.
Of course, his mother had had her childhood in Canada. That, Daniel considered, gave her a monstrously unfair advantage and in consequence no excuse whatever for inflicting such unbelievable quantities of boredom on her own children. His mother had spent absolutely all her childhood time, obviously, as Daniel spent those precious summer weeks in Canada, fishing on the lake and making fires and building cabins and playing tennis with her brothers, those godlike uncles who represented to Daniel all the glories of accomplished male prowess otherwise reserved for England's World Cup cricket squad. Daniel's Canadian uncles could do anything they pleased with a rod or a bat or a gun or a pickup truck and, to be fair, his mother wasn't far behind them. It was just when you took her out of Canada again, and put her back in Westerham, that she seemed to remember all her restrictions again, seemed to lose all the sense of proportion that properly recognized extra cricket coaching to be infinitely more worthwhile to Daniel's development than reading a book or making a model or, heaven help us, cooking. Cooking was beyond Daniel's comprehension, not because it was girly but because it was so entirely pointless to spend hours chopping and mixing and stirring when more satisfying tastes could be instantly conjured out of ready-made packets and plastic pots and foil dishes. When asked once what he would like to eat most in the world he said a cheeseburger and chips in a really good seat at Lord's during a Test Match, and then he paused and added that the burger and chips didn't, actually, matter very much.
He put his feet flat on the wall below the edges of the posters, and pushed until his shoulders were off the bed and he could reach behind him and put his hands
on the floor. Ellen could do handsprings. She could also walk some way on her hands and was exceptionally good, for someone of twelve, at tennis. At this moment Ellen was at the Westerham Tennis Club's junior afternoon practicing her service with a bucket of balls at her feet. She had cycled there, and when it was over, she would cycle back again and come into the kitchen wearing an expression of expectation of approval that would make Daniel want to hit her. Ever since he could remember, Ellen had possessed the capacity to make him feel that being a mere raw boy was most truly a misfortune.
He considered doing a back roll off the bed and decided against it, instead slithering down gracelessly and banging his tailbone on the floor. Then he got to his feet and wandered over to the window. A golfing four was just leaving the green that lay nearest to the bottom of the garden, pulling their trolleys behind them, a sharp spring wind filling out their anoraks in comical little balloons here and there. Daniel had been forbidden to scavenge for lost golf balls and sell them back to the players but he had not, in his heart of hearts, accepted the ban as final. He had chosen, rather, to hear it as something his parents would prefer not to know about rather than something he would be punished for persisting in.
He crossed the room and opened the door extremely quietly. His mother, he knew, had taken Petey to a toddlers' swim group and his father was having an afternoon of catching up with paperwork which meant that, although he was technically babysitting Daniel, he was not actually alert to Daniel's presence, let alone his needs. Daniel tiptoed across the narrow landing and looked down into the hall. The door to his father's office was ajar and Daniel could see his sweatered back and the bright glow of the computer screen beyond. The thing to do, Daniel decided, was to slide seamlessly down the stairs, along the hallway, calling, "Just going into the garden, Dad," in an offhand voice and then escape outside, thereby hardly causing a flicker in David's concentration about anything other than his figures.
Daniel reached the bottom of the stairs with slightly more speed, and therefore noise, than he had intended.
"That you?" David said. He didn't turn.
"Uh-huh," Daniel said.
"What've you been doing?"
Daniel sighed.
"Nothing."
"Like what?"
Daniel sighed again. He edged reluctantly across the hall until he could see into his father's office. The computer screen did not have figures on it: it had a chess game. Daniel could see the black pieces grouped together in the top-left corner and the white pieces scattered over the rest of the board. He edged nearer.
"What are you doing?"
"Playing chess," David said. He moved something. "Very badly. Look. The queen's rook is still where it started. It never pays to play wait-and-see in the middle of the game."
Daniel shifted a little on his feet. Chess made him uncomfortable. His father had wanted to teach him chess for three years now, ever since he was seven, and he didn't want to learn. He wasn't indifferent to learning, he was adamant that he didn't want to, and his father was hurt. Daniel could see that, could see the bruised look of hurt in David's eyes. He didn't want to cause hurt like that, but he couldn't see what else he could do. Something in him simply shrank from chess, shrank from whatever absorption it was that so held his father in thrall, held him, Daniel considered, apart from his family; the regularity of those chess nights, the arrangements with chess friends, the—well, the absence, in Daniel's view, of exactly that team spirit that seemed to him so wonderful. It did not occur to him, standing there uneasily behind his father and staring at the neat little pieces on the screen, to ask why his father was playing chess instead of doing his business paperwork, but it did occur to him to wonder why his father was playing chess at all. He shuffled his feet.
"Why are you?"
"Why am I what?"
"Why are you playing chess?"
There was a pause, then David moved the mouse and the screen abruptly went blank.
He said, still staring at the blank screen, "Because it comforts me."
The next question, Daniel knew, should have been "What's the matter?" but it was a difficult question. Sometimes you wanted it asked very badly and sometimes you hated having it asked, and if you had to do the asking there might be all kinds of stuff that followed that made you feel like you did when you tried to pull just one towel down out of the airing cupboard and the whole lot fell out instead and came out of its folds and turned having a simple shower into an episode. Daniel shuffled again.
He muttered, almost automatically, "Sorry."
David gave an abrupt little laugh. He turned round and looked at Daniel.
"What have you got to be sorry for?"
Daniel shrugged.
"Nothing."
There was a short pause and then David said, "Would you like me to come and bowl for you?"
Daniel nodded vigorously. His father's office seemed to go suddenly from being monotone to being highly colored. David stood up and stretched.
"Might as well—"
Daniel drooped a little.
"Do you mind?"
"No," David said. "No, I don't mind. It'll do me good.
It'll stop me thinking."
It had taken Nathalie over a week to gain enough courage to telephone the adoption search service. It was called Family Find, and the telephone number had been grudgingly given to her by the woman in social services who had wanted Nathalie to use an official agency, something government-run or at least with national standing. She had looked at Nathalie with something close to dislike, Nathalie thought, as if she, Nathalie, was behaving in an ungrateful and unappreciative manner when she ought to have known better. She reminded Nathalie of her first primary-school teacher who had been quite unable to disguise her distaste when Nathalie threw a tantrum about not being chosen as Mary in the Christmas Nativity play, and Lynne was so sweet and consoling to her and, in response to all this sweet consolation, Nathalie had bitten her hard, on the hand, hard enough to draw blood. The implication then had been that Nathalie was biting the hand that fed her, and it was no different now. She looked at the woman from social services and said that she was a special case and needed special treatment.
"In what way?"
"There are two of us," Nathalie said.
"Two of you?"
"My brother and myself."
"With the same mother?"
"Oh no."
"Well, then—"
"It's a double journey," Nathalie said. "We need particular treatment in case we don't feel the same."
"You certainly won't," the woman said. She pulled open a drawer and took out a sheaf of long blue leaflets held together by a rubber band. She said, almost disagreeably, "You could try these people."
Nathalie looked at the blue leaflet. It had a drawing on the front of it, a little silhouetted row of figures, two men and two children and in the middle a woman looking as if she didn't know which way to turn. Above the drawing it said, "Family Find" and underneath it said, "We offer a complete search service for anyone adopted and their natural relations." She turned the leaflet over. There was an e-mail address on the back and a London telephone number.
She said hesitantly, "Do I just ring?"
"Of course," the woman said. "If you want to."
Nathalie put the leaflet away in a kitchen drawer when she got home, not hiding it exactly but placing it nonchalantly among the paper napkins and cardboard plates left over from Polly's last birthday party. She read it, very quickly, before she put it away and discovered that its presence was more complicated than she had thought, more compelling, as if it held the key to all kinds of possibilities which were far from being certainly benign. And it wasn't as if she could give a very coherent reason for this volte-face, this sudden desire to do the very thing she had always resolutely said she wasn't interested in. She'd told Steve and Lynne that it had been started by Polly's ear trouble, but even she knew that that had been only the tiniest, flimsiest of beginnings. After all, it didn't look as
if Polly's ear was anything other than a small natural aberration; it was nothing hereditary and nothing really frightening like damaged eardrums and the consequent need for cochlea implants. She'd even gone to meet Titus's girlfriend feeling quite blithe, feeling that she could airily brush aside all the familiar questions, all the wearily patronizing assumptions that people who weren't adopted made so readily—eagerly almost, Nathalie thought—about those who were. But it was when she was coming away from that meeting that something had hit her, not an anger exactly, nor even the feeling of lostness she had tried to describe to Steve, but more a sensation of shame. She stood on the pavement twenty yards from the coffee place where she and Sasha had met, and felt a great wave of shame surge over her, the kind of burning shame associated with a public humiliation that is unquestionably deserved. How could she have done it, she asked herself, how could she have passed herself off—eloquently, frequently, confidently—as being one kind of person all these years when she was in fact quite another? How could she pretend—well, lie was the word she ought to be using here, wasn't it?—to all these people like Lynne and Ralph and Steve, who loved her and who had believed her? How could she have insisted that not only did she not mind being adopted but that she actually preferred it, when all along she knew that she was treading a separate, fragile, unhappy path which Polly's longed-for arrival had only somehow served to accentuate?
Or was that really how it had been? Had she in fact earnestly believed one thing and did she now, equally earnestly, believe another? Were her feelings all part of her inability to be able to stick at things, to make a career instead of just fiddling about with a string of little jobs that drove Steve mad because he said they were such a waste of her talents? And how, Nathalie thought, staring at the innocent pine front of the drawer that concealed the blue leaflet, was this journey to find her mother supposed to help with any of that? What if her mother was dead?
But—and this is what all her hot, circling thoughts always came back to—she had to do it. She knew she wouldn't settle until she'd done it, she knew she'd be like someone who can't concentrate because they are always waiting for the crucial phone call, the deciding knock at the door. She'd tried to explain this to Lynne, tried to make Lynne see that it wasn't any inadequacy on Lynne's part, as a mother, that was making her want to find the woman who had actually given birth to her. Lynne had stood there, in her garden, where she had taken Nathalie to look at the spring bulbs, and she'd said, over and over, "But I thought you'd got everything you wanted!"
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