"So did I," Nathalie said.
Lynne bent down to set a leaning narcissus upright.
"You always said—"
"I know, Mum. I always did."
"It's hard not to take it personally," Lynne said, propping the bent flower against a straighter one.
"Mum—"
"I always had this feeling," Lynne said, kneeling now, on the damp grass, "that I'd somehow rescued you and David. Even when I was battling with my own disappointments, I used to tell myself that I'd done some good in the world at least, that I'd helped two children to have a chance they mightn't otherwise have had. I know you shouldn't think like that, but it's hard not to when people keep telling you that you've done a good thing."
"You did do a good thing," Nathalie said.
"I used to say to myself, 'I want a baby, I want a baby.' Dad said I shouldn't say that. Dad said I should say instead that I wanted to bring up a child." Lynne looked up at Nathalie. "If you find your mother, can't you see what that makes me?"
Nathalie shook her head.
Lynne said miserably, "I go from being the rescuer to the woman who took another woman's child."
Nathalie crouched down beside her.
"You won't change, Mum."
"No, I won't change. Not as a person. But what I'm seen as will change. What about Polly? What kind of granny do I become when Polly has this new granny?"
"It mightn't happen—"
"What mightn't?"
"I mightn't find her. I mightn't like her."
"Then why are you taking such a chance?"
"Oh, Mum," Nathalie said, leaning forward and holding Lynne's arms hard. "Because I have to know. Even if I don't like it, I have to know. You know, don't you? You know who your mother was?"
Lynne pulled herself free and stood up.
"At least David—" She stopped.
"At least David what?"
"Doesn't want to join in all this."
Nathalie stood too.
"Mum, he does."
"No, he doesn't want to. You are forcing him."
"I couldn't force him, Mum. I couldn't if I tried. He's scared, like me, but he's going to."
Lynne took a step away and began to fiddle with a flowering currant bush.
"Daniel was here yesterday. He helped Dad in the workshop. He's good with his hands."
"Mum," Nathalie said, "nothing is going to change between you and your children or you and your grandchildren."
"You don't know that," Lynne said.
Nathalie put her hands over her face.
"Please trust me!"
Lynne said nothing.
Nathalie took her hands away and said furiously, "Look, I didn't have to tell you or Steve or anyone. I could have just telephoned this search-service person in secret and gone to meet my mother—if indeed she's still alive—and none of you would have been any the wiser. But I didn't. I didn't, did I? I've told you all everything, right from the beginning, and if that doesn't show love and trust and all the things you imply I'm failing in, I don't know what does!"
Lynne put a hand out and adjusted a spray of leaves on a philadelphus. The moment she took her hand away, the philadelphus adjusted itself back to its original position.
"I don't want to go back to the past," Lynne said.
Nathalie said nothing. Lynne laid hold of the philadelphus again.
"It's not that I don't understand what you want to do. I'd never try and stop you. You know I wouldn't. But it's just such a risk, it just opens up so much that I thought was healed over, all those things I thought I'd come to terms with."
Nathalie closed her eyes. She and Lynne had had a long and anguishing conversation about infertility when she had discovered that she was, at last, pregnant with Polly, and she had, at this moment, less than no desire to have it again.
She opened her eyes and said, in as neutral a voice as possible, "Will you tell Dad?"
Lynne let the philadelphus spring back.
"Oh no."
"What do you mean—that you won't or that he shouldn't be told?"
"Of course he should be told," Lynne said. "You should tell him yourself."
"I thought you'd like to—"
Lynne spun round. She was someone who could be relied upon never to lose her temper, but she had lost it now. Her face was quite diminished by the concentration of her fury.
"Nathalie," she said, "Nathalie. I don't like any of this."
Titus, Steve noticed, had left his computer on. His screen-saver, which no doubt he had designed himself, was a series of serenely flying pigs, some of them wearing spectacles. Steve stood and watched their stately floating progress across the screen for some minutes and then he leaned forward and turned the computer off. On the desk around the keyboard lay a nonchalant scattering of little objects—paper clips, rubber bands, a dice, a crumpled bus ticket, a liquorice toffee in a black-and-white-striped wrapper—that caused Steve simultaneous irritation at its presence and envy that its presence was of neither annoyance nor significance to Titus. He bent over the desk and scooped all the mess to the edge with the side of his hand. Titus's bin, he noticed, was almost full and apparently with items of rubbish that had absolutely nothing to do with work. Steve took a breath. There was a fine line between being punctilious and being paranoid, and peering analytically at the contents of someone else's waste bin was definitely a symptom of the latter.
"Fussing," Nathalie used to say to him, "isn't sexy." She'd said it affectionately, laughing, in the days when she could get away with saying anything. That wouldn't happen now, no good pretending otherwise. In the first place, she wouldn't be laughing and in the second she wouldn't get away with it. Steve gave Titus's waste bin an inaccurate, childish kick and went across the studio to his own desk.
"I just hope," he said aloud and angrily to Nathalie's smiling face on the wall, "that you know what you're doing."
"Steve," someone said.
He spun round. Sasha was standing holding the door that led to the staircase. She was half hidden by it, like some cool modern version of a fan dancer, so that he could see only one eye and one ear and a long slice of dark clothing.
"What are you doing here?"
"I was looking for Titus—"
"How did you get in?"
Sasha emerged from behind the door. She was wearing a kind of naval overcoat, strongly made with emphatic shoulders and buttons.
"The door wasn't locked, only latched. The street door."
"That was Titus," Steve said. He looked at her. She had her red-laced boots on again. He said, "I've no idea where he is."
"It doesn't matter."
Steve said nothing.
"I'm glad to see, you," Sasha said. "Actually."
Steve shrugged.
He said, almost nastily, "I wonder why."
Sasha moved towards his desk, unbuttoning her coat.
"Sorry?"
"Well," Steve said, "having made such a superb diagnosis of Nathalie's state of mind, I imagine you've come to justify yourself."
"Oh no," Sasha said easily.
"So you feel not one twinge of conscience in being one hundred percent wide of the mark and persuading me to think likewise?"
"Of course not," Sasha said. "I'm not a bloody doctor." Steve grunted.
"I just find it all riveting," Sasha said.
"What, getting things wrong?"
Sasha leaned against the side of Steve's desk. Underneath the coat she was wearing a tight red T-shirt and black trousers tucked into her red-laced boots.
"The thing is," Sasha said, "that now she's come clean Nathalie falls completely into the pattern. The almost universal pattern. And all those years of denial, as if she knew, all along, what she really felt and couldn't face it."
Steve moved a little until he was quite close to her, close enough to see her eyelashes and the tiny sharp angles of her nose stud.
He said, "Am I going to have to spell it out?"
"What?"
; "That I am angry with you. That I am really very angry indeed."
She smiled at him.
"No, you're not."
"Excuse me—"
"Steve," Sasha said, "you're angry, for sure. You're angry and frightened and puzzled. Who wouldn't be, in your situation? But you aren't angry with me."
"Don't you be so sure."
She smiled again.
"Well," she said, "I don't accept it. I don't accept your anger. You'll have to find somewhere else to dump it."
"But you made me believe—"
"I didn't do anything," Sasha said. "I merely told you what Nathalie told me. Which was, as it's turned out, what she wanted to believe and you wanted to hear. In fact, you should be thanking me."
"How—"
"You should be thanking me," Sasha said, "for being the catalyst, for being the force for change, for truth, at last."
Steve turned away and put his hands in his pockets.
He said, staring off down the studio, "This is all a bit much for me."
Sasha said nothing. She hitched herself onto the edge of Steve's desk and swung her foot.
Then she said, in quite a different voice, "I know."
Steve blinked. He could feel, to his distress, that tears were bunching up in the back of his throat.
He said unsteadily, "It's—" and then he stopped.
Sasha watched him, swinging her foot.
"It isn't," she said, in the same soft tone, "as if she'd found another man."
"It's worse."
"Worse?"
"It's another territory," Steve said. "Feelings that were there long before I knew her. Feelings I've no part in—"
"But not a threat."
Steve sighed.
"There's David."
"David?"
"It's all tied up with David, too. It's all part of this fucking club we can't join."
"But they have different mothers—"
"And the same situation."
"Steve," Sasha said, "I've never met him, but are you jealous of David?"
Steve gave a little bark of near laughter.
"Oh yes."
"Why?"
"He knows things I'll never know. He shares things I can't share."
Sasha said curiously, "What's he like?"
Steve gave another little bark.
"Big, blond and beautiful."
"Well," Sasha said, "you are big and beautiful."
"I'm losing my hair."
"All the better."
Steve turned round.
"What are you after?"
She looked at him calmly. She had a red bead on a leather bootlace sitting precisely in the hollow of her throat above the neckline of her T-shirt.
"Making you feel better."
"Why bother?"
"Because this is an unusual and very emotional situation and you are a nice guy."
Steve said awkwardly, "I thought you were looking for Titus."
"I was."
"Well, then—"
"He isn't here. He said he'd be here until six and it's long after."
"He likes you," Steve said.
"And I like him."
"No, I mean more than that. I mean that he's really keen."
"I'm just a challenge," Sasha said. She glanced sideways at him. "We all like challenges."
"I don't much like mine—"
"You could learn to."
He said nothing.
"I could teach you," Sasha said in a cool voice.
"Do you seriously expect me to have any faith in your powers of discernment?"
She regarded him. The light from one of the ceiling spotlights fell directly on the smooth pelt of her hair and made it shine like something unearthly, like a nimbus.
"Yes," she said.
Steve snorted.
Sasha said, bending a little towards him, "You're angry because you were wrong. We hate having our safe patterns disturbed, we hate disillusion."
"And who," Steve said with heavy sarcasm, "are you quoting now?"
"Steinbeck."
"Steinbeck?"
"Yes."
Steve moved away from his desk and began to pace. Sasha stayed where she was, and watched him. She watched him until he had circled Justine's desk and come slowly back to her.
He said, "D'you know something?"
"Tell me," Sasha said.
"She always said being adopted was no big deal, but now I come to think of it, she was always coming back to it.
Always."
"Yes."
"When I think about it, I don't think a week went by—"
"No."
"I'm so obtuse—"
"No."
He glanced at her.
"No?"
"You're not in thrall."
"To what?"
"To what is known as early attachment figures. Like a rejecting parent."
"I think," Steve said, "that I've had enough of this kind of talk—"
"Pity," Sasha said. "I like it."
"Can you do any other kind?"
"Try me."
He smiled. He straightened his shoulders and put his hand out for his jacket, hanging on a steel peg in the wall.
"Over a drink," Steve said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Marnie was running Petey's bath with the kind of attention to ritual that is comforting when other areas of life seem to be slipping out of control. His towel—a square towel, hooded at one corner, left over from his babyhood—lay ready on the bathroom chair and his pajamas were hanging on the heated towel rail. Petey himself was not in the bathroom however, but was instead in his bedroom where he was lying on the floor having one of the intense and almost soundless rages that had overtaken him since just before his second birthday.
In theory, Marnie, of course, knew about these rages. She had written sheaves of notes, during her years of conscientious nursery-teacher training, about the small child's need to have some powers transferred to himself from his omnipotent parents, and how this need often manifested itself in tantrums. But somehow, the reality of Petey's rages was something she couldn't seem to handle with anything like the calm assurance she had felt and displayed when Ellen and Daniel were at the same stage. She remembered, clearly, both the energy and the consistency she had been able to bring to discipline and to distraction then, the confidence she had felt in shepherding these two little creatures from babyhood into the first stages of independence. Both children had shown, she knew, a highly developed sense of recognition and responsibility for other people by Petey's age. She remembered Daniel's acute concern when a carelessly flung toy had caught her a sharp blow not far from her eye. The resulting bruise had distressed him for days. But Petey was not like Daniel. He had been an obliging and easy baby but it was as if, as his second birthday approached, he had decided that he had been altogether too amenable for too long and must make up for lost time. That evening, for example, having been whining round her while she painstakingly made his supper, he had seized his plastic dish when she set it before him, plunged both hands into the contents and then spattered them far and wide, gazing at her blankly and fixedly while he did so. Then, when reprimanded, he had fallen instantly into one of his near silent, heaving, paroxysms of rage. Forty minutes later, he was still in it, jerking on his back on the rug by his cot, his silky pale hair fanning out like the tentacles of a sea anenome, his face in a rictus of utter temper.
Marnie knelt by the bath and swished her hand in the water. She thought that, if Petey hadn't stopped in five minutes' time, she would call Ellen to come and help her. Ellen was good with Petey's rages because they in no way alarmed her. She made it very plain to Petey that his tantrums bored her, that mostly she couldn't even see that he was having one because they were indeed so very, very boring. She would go into Petey's room, looking as if she were thinking of something else, and step over him as if he were no more than part of the carpet, and begin to play, very casually, with something he prized, or, even better, some
thing he was only permitted to play with very occasionally. It was often only a matter of seconds before Petey had shed his rage as if it were no more encumbering than a cloak and would be clamoring to do whatever Ellen appeared to be so engrossed in. She could, Marnie knew, have summoned Ellen as soon as Petey's baked potato and peas and grated cheese began to be hurled around the kitchen, but she hadn't. And she hadn't—she shut her eyes and swished her hand harder in the water—because she didn't want Ellen taking charge, she didn't, at the moment, want any more evidence, however small, that the domestic control and competence and satisfaction that had always, up to now, been so—so sweetly hers was in any way diminished. What with David's new preoccupations—however much she had urged them, however much she had known she was doing the right, loving, wifely thing in urging them—and his consequent increased withdrawal from the family, from her, Marnie didn't think that she could, just now, stand any more relegation, not just from the center of things, but from the supreme maternal role she had chosen—yes, chosen—when Petey was born.
Ellen appeared in the doorway. She was wearing the pink shorts in which she had played tennis earlier that day, and an uneasy little top which outlined the diffident small buds of her breasts and exposed her pale young midriff.
"Petey's having a thing."
"I know."
"D'you want me to sort him?"
Marnie put her hands on the side of the bath and pushed herself to her feet.
"I think we'll just leave him."
"Why?"
"He threw his supper all over the place."
"Maybe he's hungry."
"Then he can stay hungry."
"And screaming?"
"Ellen," Marnie said. "This is the third child I've raised." Ellen tweaked her top.
"You can't be right about everything, always. Nobody is."
"Some things I do know about."
"What I hate about this family," Ellen said, "is that everyone thinks they know everything about something. Dad knows all about chess. Daniel knows all about cricket. You know all about children. When I have children I'm going to make sure I know a little about a lot of things—I'm not going to be Mrs. Supreme Opinion about anything. No wonder Petey has his things."
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