Brother and Sister

by Joanna Trollope

  Marnie bent and refolded Petey's towel.

  "You'll find experience dictates your knowledge. And validates it."

  "Then I'll have to have a lot of experience, won't I?"

  "Ellen," Marnie said, "I don't have enough energy for this kind of conversation right now."

  "Well, why won't you let me see to Petey?"

  Marnie turned away. She bent to re-smooth Petey's pajamas and her plait swung forward, the heavy, solid, flaxen plait that had been swinging over her shoulder for more than twenty years. Twenty years—she caught her breath suddenly, seized by the image of herself twenty years ago, before coming to England, before the nursery school, before David, before two-year-old Petey, lying on his bedroom floor in a fury that was quite beyond either his or her control. She straightened up slowly.

  "Go get him," she said tiredly to Ellen.

  She heard Ellen's feet pounding along the landing and then her voice, light, indifferent, in the doorway to Petey's room.

  "Hello," Ellen said, "you tedious child."

  Marnie looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. White T-shirt, dark cotton overshirt, clean skin, good teeth. Perhaps it was time to cut her hair. Perhaps it was time to jettison the T-shirt and the overshirt and let Ellen take her shopping. Perhaps it was time, in the midst of all these dark passageways opening up around her, to reassess how she felt in all these wonderings about identity, how it was for her, a girl from Winnipeg, who had hitched her hopeful wagon to a foreign star and found that—please, God, not forever—it had lost its pulling power.

  She went out of the bathroom and down the landing. She stopped outside Petey's bedroom and looked in. In the middle of the room, and regarding herself as best she could in Petey's baby looking glass, ringed with blue rabbits, Ellen was dancing a fair imitation of Kylie Minogue. And from the floor by his cot, upright on his bottom with his thumb in his mouth and his legs neatly crossed at the ankle, Petey was peacefully watching her.

  Justine almost never stayed in the office for lunch. It wasn't only that she needed to get out and walk but also that she needed to show Steve that she could assert her independence and go out, and also be reliably depended upon to come back in an hour, give or take five minutes or so. Going out also saved her from having to acknowledge that Meera never left her desk at lunchtime, but sat there eating, very unobtrusively, a neat packed lunch from a pristine plastic box. This was, Justine thought, what Steve would have liked them all to do, as long as, like Meera, they left no detritus, no crumbs or smears or smells. Justine imagined sometimes the kind of lunch Titus might bring—hideous leftovers full of garlic and chili, lumps of overpowering cheese, mangoes, oranges—and thought of how Steve would react, the distaste, the disapproval of the distaste, the struggle between the two, and Titus oblivious in the midst of it all, licking his fingers and hurling fruit peels towards his bin.

  Justine had slightly hoped that, seeing as they were under pressure to finish work for the Greig Gallery that week, and she had volunteered to forgo her lunch hour, Titus might offer to forgo his too. She had a brief fantasy about him asking her what kind of sandwich she would like, and then him going off to get it and coming back with something quite different, and very messy, like prawns in Marie Rose sauce filling, and them having to eat the sandwiches together in a kind of giggling, furtive conspiracy. Being clever and state-educated, and only the second person in her family to go on to further education, Justine naturally despised someone like Titus. His confidence, his thick dark hair, his voice, his apparent supreme indifference to the defects of his class and height were all in their way powerful reasons for finding him anathema, and no more than yet another example of the stupid upper-class has-beens who her father said had made such a laughingstock of the Conservative Party. Justine had been brought up with a very clear idea of which social groups were beneath contempt, and Titus fell fair and square into the middle of most of them. When she talked to her sister about work, she referred to Titus as "Sloane Brain," and her sister, who was currently going out with a professional activist—Justine was not quite sure for which cause—said she didn't know how Justine could stand working with a tosser like that.

  Sometimes—often, even—Justine didn't know how, either. It was indisputable that Titus was good at what he did, especially at layout where he excelled, and that when he wasn't in the office an indefinable electric charge went out of the atmosphere, like a spotlight being extinguished. But setting all that aside, so much about Titus was unbearable, especially his indifference to other people's opinions. No, Justine thought, it's his indifference to other people, the way he breezes round the office not noticing if anyone needs anything or wants anything. Or has a new haircut.

  Justine wasn't sure about her haircut. She'd had her hair long all her life, well past her shoulders, sometimes carelessly skewering it up on top of her head with a pencil. And then she'd cut it. She'd cut it all off, really short, and was unable to decide whether it was radically becoming or unbecoming because whichever it was it was certainly radical. She'd waited for everyone to notice and at last Meera had said, "Very pretty" (her own hair was black with a blue gloss and hung to her waist), and Steve had said, "Brave!" and Titus had said nothing. And you could be forgiven, couldn't you, for thinking Titus liked short hair if his current girlfriend was anything to go by, you could at least expect a wink and a thumbs-up, couldn't you?

  Justine finished her solitary sandwich—cheese and coleslaw, not a wise choice—and looked again at her lettering for the Greig Gallery. A modern take on rococo was what they'd asked for. Whatever that meant. Behind her, Meera snapped shut the lid of her plastic lunch box and went briskly past on her way to the lavatory downstairs from which she would emerge smelling of toothpaste and Issey perfume. Justine sighed. Perhaps it was time to look for another job, to look for a place where you didn't have to work with people from the unacceptable Land of Posh. The street door slammed. Titus's voice could be heard downstairs performing a parody of an operatic tenor singing the theme from Titanic. Justine bent intently towards her computer screen and fingered the wisps of hair in the nape of her neck.

  "It isn't necessary to meet," the woman from Family Find had said. "We can do it all over the telephone if you'd rather. It's entirely up to you."

  Nathalie had been sitting on the floor, squashed into a corner the far side of the bed, like a child in trouble, with the telephone pressed to her ear.

  "I don't know—"

  The woman had waited. She was called Elaine, she said, Elaine Price. She had sounded patient and practical, in the way you hope hospital nurses will be.

  "I'm sorry," Nathalie said, "I don't seem able to decide very well, I don't seem able to think—"

  "Could you," Elaine said, "come to London?"

  Nathalie paused.

  "Yes," she said doubtfully.

  "And your brother?"

  "Maybe—"

  There was another pause. Nathalie had pulled her knees up hard against her chest and put her forehead down against them.

  "Nathalie," Elaine said, "I think you had better come and see me. Or I'll come and see you."

  "No," Nathalie said.

  "Then you come—"

  "Yes."

  "And we'll take your brother from there."

  And now here she was, in the coffee shop of a supermarket in West London, waiting for Elaine Price. She was early. She'd caught a train well before the train she'd needed to catch and had let one cappuccino get cold and depressing already. Ordering another seemed not just futile but artificial, as if she was pretending there was something, anything, ordinary about sitting waiting for a complete stranger next to a plate-glass window overlooking the West Cromwell Road. Why fake any more normality, anyway? Why delude yourself that there is anything remotely, conceivably normal, as David had angrily said the night before, about any sane woman giving her own baby away? Why kid yourself that having to go and find the woman who gave birth to you and then gave you away is the kind of thing that norm
al people ever have to contemplate in a million years?

  Nathalie pushed the coffee cup away. The foam on the surface had subsided into a thin sludge. Nathalie tipped the pot of paper tubes of sugar out onto the table and began to arrange them in categories.

  "Nobody regrets making this journey," Elaine had said. She'd said it just before the call ended, just after she'd said that every child has a right to know where they come from, a right to try and make sense of themselves. "I can promise you that."

  "Really?"

  "It'll stop you defining yourself by loss. It'll help you move on."

  Nathalie shifted the sugars. Was that what it was? Was that what had dogged her all these years, made her insist that, if she was indeed an outsider, then she was an outsider by choice? She began to balance the blue paper tubes of white sugar carefully against one another, as if she was building a miniature bonfire.

  A woman paused beside her, and waited. She was younger than Nathalie had expected, with long pale hair and a denim jacket.

  "Hello," the woman said.

  Nathalie tried, clumsily, to get up.

  "I'm Elaine," the woman said. She put a large patchwork suede bag down on the chair next to Nathalie's. "Don't get up." She smiled and glanced at the cold cappuccino. "I'll get us some more of those."

  "No, I'll—"

  Elaine put a hand briefly on Nathalie's shoulder. She had a ring on her wedding finger with a big turquoise in it.

  "You stay there."

  Nathalie watched her walk over to the self-service counter. Besides the denim jacket she wore cutoff trousers and trainers without socks and her bare ankles were brown. Nathalie wasn't, now, quite sure what she had been expecting sartorially, but a suit possibly, certainly a skirt, and a briefcase rather than a kind of bag she'd taken herself on long-ago weekends to the music festival at Glastonbury. She also hadn't been expecting long hair. Elaine Price, Nathalie had decided, would be like the woman from social services, with a wash-and-wear haircut that was no trouble—or signal—to anyone. She let out a breath. The denim jacket and bare ankles and unofficial hair were all a surprise and a comfort.

  "There," Elaine said.

  She put two big coffee cups down on the table and transferred Nathalie's discarded one to an empty table nearby. Then she moved her bag from the chair next to Nathalie's and sat down in it herself.

  "Dark hair," she said to Nathalie, "white top. Leather jacket. Just like you said."

  Nathalie looked round the coffee shop.

  "Plenty of those in here—"

  "But not waiting for me. You had waiting written all over you."

  Nathalie said shyly, "I've been here ages—"

  "Most people do that. The other habit is to be late, really late. Sometimes that's how I sort out who wants to do this search and who needs to."

  Nathalie drew a spoon through the foam on her coffee and made a soft furrow.

  "Does it matter?"

  "Well," Elaine said, "it's better to want to, if you can. Otherwise there's a likelihood of wanting to punish your mother."

  Nathalie stared at her coffee.

  "I can't imagine that," she said. "I can't even see she's real."

  Elaine picked up her coffee cup and held it balanced between the tips of her fingers.

  "Let's start at the beginning."

  Nathalie nodded.

  "Don't you want to know about me?"

  "I hadn't really thought—"

  "Well, why are you here and not with an official agency?"

  "Because—because you aren't official—"

  "But I'm trained."

  "Yes."

  Elaine put her coffee cup down again. She pushed her hair behind her shoulders.

  "Go on."

  "My brother wanted to know about your training. My brother David."

  "It was intensive," Elaine said. "I did it at the Post Adoption Center. There were modules on searching, on infertility, on genetic sexual attraction. I do a retraining course every year."

  "I'll tell him."

  "Nathalie," Elaine said. "Relax."

  Nathalie took a spoonful of coffee foam.

  "I've upset so many people, wanting to do this. I can't tell you. Everyone seems to feel let down, as if I'm doing something unnecessary, something deliberately destructive. My partner, my sister-in-law, my mother—"

  "Your mother?"

  "Yes. My mother."

  "I'm afraid," Elaine said, "that your adoptive mother has to stay out of this. This isn't her journey."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  "You mean—"

  "I mean," Elaine said, looking straight at Nathalie, "that you are entitled to do this. People who are adopted are damaged by adoption and are looking for healing. You are entitled to look for healing."

  "Thank you," Nathalie whispered.

  "Don't thank me. I'm not a benefactor, I'm a service. You're going to pay me to find your mother. To find your brother's mother."

  "Yes—"

  "It won't take long."

  "No—"

  "You said you had your birth certificate. That's a start. It will probably take less than three weeks. It'll cost between two and three hundred pounds per person. I'll need a deposit of a hundred and fifty from each of you."

  "Of course."

  "And I'll need to know why you want to do this now."

  "Now?"

  "Yes, now."

  "It's hard to describe—"

  "With a lot of people, it's something quite specific that's the trigger, like having your own child."

  "Polly's five."

  "Does she look like you?"

  "More like her father."

  "Nathalie," Elaine said, "I have some responsibility too, for your birth mother. I have to know something about your thinking."

  Nathalie looked up.

  "I want to know," she said, "I want to know where I come from. I want to know if I'm like her or not. I want to know about my father. I want to stop—not knowing. I don't know exactly what set me off, but I'd suddenly had enough of pretending, and now that I've started, I can hardly stand not knowing anymore. Even—" She paused, and then she said, "Even if I don't like what I discover."

  "You might not. She might not. She might refuse you."

  "I don't want a meeting—"

  "You don't now. Wait and see. You might feel like exchanging letters and photographs."

  "Photographs—"

  "Don't forget, in theory you have a position on two family trees."

  Nathalie said slowly, "If you find my mother—"

  "When, more likely."

  "What will you do?"

  "Tell you. Immediately."

  "And then?"

  "Write to her."

  "Write a letter—"

  "She'll read it, from me. If it was from social services, she'd throw it away. Especially if she's married. If she's got other children."

  Nathalie's head came up.

  "Other children!"

  "Oh yes."

  "I didn't think—"

  "There mayn't be any. Up to forty percent of women who give up a baby for adoption don't conceive again."

  Nathalie picked up her coffee cup and took a swallow. It tasted warm and silky and synthetic.

  "My dad taught me a word once. I think it's Spanish. It's—I'm not sure if I'm saying it right—it's duende. It means kind of a spirit of the earth, something roused in the very cells of the blood."

  "Sounds a good kind of dad."

  Nathalie nodded.

  "He is. He's the only one not making a fuss over all this."

  "Not threatened, then."

  Nathalie said angrily, "Nobody's threatened."

  "You hang on to that. That, and these instincts you're obeying."

  "Yes."

  "I think," Elaine said, "that our instincts play a big part in all this. I think that instinctively we know whether we were wanted or not."

  "Do I know?"

  "I think you do."<
br />
  "And David—"

  "Yes?"

  "Maybe," Nathalie said, "he isn't so certain. Maybe that's what he's frightened of." She glanced at Elaine. "What are you going to do now?"

  "I'm going looking for your mother's birth certificate. I'll get on the Internet."

  Nathalie swallowed.

  "She was called Cora. Cora Wilson."

  "I know. You told me on the phone."

  "And—and what do I do?"

  Elaine smiled. She picked up her suede bag and plumped it on to her lap.

  "You wait to hear from me," she said.

  In Paddington Station, Nathalie bought a cup of tea and a bar of chocolate and an apple. Eating the chocolate, she found herself automatically justifying herself silently to Polly, who declined to understand that if chocolate was a food and therefore nourishing—as opposed to sweets which were purely chemical concoctions and therefore harmful—she couldn't eat it whenever she felt like it, and especially as a substitute for meals she didn't care for, like breakfast. After the chocolate, the apple tasted metallic and empty, and had a hard, wet texture that hurt her teeth. She drank half the tea from its plastic cup and dumped the rest in a litter bin. There were times, she thought, when you simply should not eat or drink, times when you were so agitated and consumed by something happening in your mind or spirit that basic functions like digestion were best ignored. If you didn't, they only declined to function properly anyway, and added to the turmoil. She threw the chocolate wrapper and the half-eaten apple into the bin after the tea, and went in search of her train.

  It was waiting at one of the more obscure platforms, a short train of small carriages with uncompromisingly upright seats. There was almost nobody on board yet except a boy eating a filled baguette out of a long paper bag and a couple of women with bulging plastic carriers crammed defensively behind their legs. Nathalie went down the carriage to the far end and chose a seat in a corner by a window. The window was dappled with dirty dried raindrops, and in the grime outside somebody had written the word "fuck", backwards, with a finger, so that it was legible from inside. Nathalie sat down and took out her mobile phone.