Brother and Sister

by Joanna Trollope

  "Hi," David said, from somewhere windy.

  "Where are you?"

  "At Fernley. About to pull out some tree roots."

  "Can't someone else do that?"

  "I like doing it."

  "Dave," Nathalie said, "I saw her."

  "Yes," he said. His voice was flat.

  "She's cool. I liked her. She made it all sound quite easy."

  "Urn."

  "She'll do it all for us. She'll find our mothers and then she'll write to them. She said—"

  "Yes?"

  "She said nobody regrets doing this."

  "You told me already."

  Nathalie turned herself sideways so that she couldn't see the word on the window.

  "Dave, I thought you were with me, that you were coming with me—"

  "I am."

  "But—"

  "It isn't easy. I can't go back and it's hard going on. I'm just not finding it easy."

  "Nor me."

  "But you're excited."

  "And frightened."

  "Oh yes. Frightened."

  Nathalie said, "Do you want to stay as you are?"

  David said nothing. She could hear a whine which might have been wind or might have been a mechanical saw.

  "If you want to hang on to how you're feeling," Nathalie said, "then fine. Nobody can help you. You stay right there and nurse yourself."

  There was another pause. Nathalie took the phone from her ear and then put it back again.

  "Bye, David," she said.

  His voice came hesitantly.

  "Nat?"

  "Yes?"

  "Help," David said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Connor Latimer went into the sitting room to tell his wife that he was going down to the Hurlingham Club to play tennis, and found that she was fast asleep. He stood looking at her, weighing up how much his tennis would be spoiled by not being certain that Carole knew precisely where he was. He was used to her knowing his movements, after all. They'd had close on thirty years of running a business together and, in the course of those years, had needed to know each other's exact whereabouts with the result that Connor had become dependent upon this knowledge. It made him frankly uneasy to be out of Carole's radar now, because if she didn't know where he was, and how long he would be, how could she be thinking about him, visualizing him, in the way he, well, liked her to?

  He leaned forward a little. Carole was sleeping very trimly, her head balanced on a small brocade cushion wedged into the angle of a wing chair. Her hands were folded in her lap, her ankles were crossed and her mouth was not open. Her hair, a kind of creamy, tawny color which was elegantly reminiscent of the blonde she'd been when they met, was hardly disarranged. Looking at her, Connor wondered if he had actually mentioned his tennis game already, over breakfast, and whether he could remember Carole saying, "Oh good. With Benny?" in reply. But perhaps he hadn't. Perhaps he just thought he had. Carole had, after all, been reading the Financial Times, which she still read, out of habit, and this might have prevented her from completely taking in the information about the tennis game. Connor leaned a little closer and put a hand on Carole's arm.

  She opened her eyes. She smiled.

  "I'm sorry to wake you," Connor said, "but I'm just off to the Hurlingham."

  She still smiled.

  "I know, darling."

  "I'll be back about six. We might have a drink after the game."

  "Lovely."

  He gave her arm a pat.

  "Have a nice sleep—"

  "Mmm," she said. She closed her eyes again.

  "About six," Connor said.

  He straightened up and felt in his pocket for his car keys. He wondered whether, before he left and Carole slid back down into afternoon oblivion, he should also remind her that Martin had said he was coming round later. He opened his mouth.

  "Goodbye, darling," Carole said with surprising distinctness. "Have a lovely game. Love to Benny."

  "Yes," Connor said. He rattled his keys. "Yes."

  He took a step away. Carole's face was now serenely, conclusively shuttered. He thought of asking her whether she would like the French windows open since the sun was now coming out, and decided against it. He took another step away and sighed. Then he gave himself a little shake and left the room with as decisive a tread as he could manage in his tennis shoes.

  His Mercedes was parked in the basement garage below the flat. The garage had been one of the elements that had attracted him to the flat in the first place, the others being that its location in this part of West London was central enough for civilized life, and that the bay windows of its sitting room and main bedroom opened into spectacular communal gardens containing established trees and shrubs, and maintained by a team of nicely mannered gardeners in green overalls.

  "All the pleasure of the countryside," Connor would say to guests, exclaiming at the seclusion and charm of the gardens, only a mile or two from Marble Arch, "and none of the labor or inconvenience."

  Carole had made a delightful place to sit, too, on the patio outside the sitting-room windows, surrounded by Italian pots and urns, and a wisteria trained up a trellis painted a dull shade of bluish-gray which Connor would never have chosen but which, when he saw it, he had to acknowledge was absolutely spot-on. It was always like that, with Carole. She'd make these decisions, these choices, and he'd be full of doubts and hesitations, but then he'd see, in the end, that her instinct, her—her flair, was justified. He always thought that was why they'd been so good in business together, the contrast between his caution and steadiness—well, what else would you expect from a man who'd got top marks in all his accountancy exams?—and her nerve and imagination. Between them, over the years, they'd built the business up into something that had been very well worth selling when Connor had reached sixty and declared himself due a bit of rest, due time to devote himself to his hobbies, to his tennis and his sailing and his print collection. And Carole was due something, too. He was very aware of that, very conscious of what he owed her, his wife, his business partner, the mother of his children. Indeed, he had been careful to pay tribute to her publicly, to make sure that, at the dinner given to celebrate the final sale of the company, his speech had made emphatic reference to Carole's contribution.

  "I would like to make it plain," he had said, standing up at the table in the private room of an expensive Chelsea restaurant amid the handsome detritus of a good dinner, "that none of this—and I mean none of it—would have been possible without Carole. I have no hesitation in saying I owe her everything, and so does this company."

  Carole had cried on the way home. She had sat beside him in the Mercedes on the way home to this new and wonderful garden flat and wept decorously into his white-linen breast-pocket handkerchief. At the time, he had been flooded with gratification, expansively convinced that she had been so moved by his heartfelt acknowledgment of all she had done for him as both a woman and a colleague that she had been unable to express herself in anything other than tears. It was only later, when she had been incomprehensibly reluctant to let him make love to her—and he was longing to make love to her—that a small disquieting doubt began to tiptoe round the edges of his mind. If she wasn't weeping out of gratitude and emotion, what was she weeping for? Surely it couldn't be for the company. Surely, after all those decades of work and sacrifice and anxiety, she couldn't possibly be grieving to see the company go? Not when such freedom beckoned. Surely not.

  Connor put the key into the ignition now, and reversed the Mercedes smoothly up the ramp and into the street. Carole of course didn't drive the Mercedes, she had her own little town car which she said she preferred because you could park it on a playing card. He'd indulged her about that as he'd indulged her about so many things. Damn it, he liked indulging her, he liked her to have what she wanted. And mostly, he thought, turning the car into Ladbroke Grove, she had got what she wanted, he'd seen to that, he'd made sure that he'd compensated her for all the rotten things that had h
appened to her in her early life, all the troubles with men, with insecurity. He'd rescued her, really, he knew he had. He'd rescued her and given her all the things a woman needs to make her happy—a good marriage, a comfortable life, satisfying work (Connor prided himself on that, prided himself on believing that a clever woman needs work) and—children.

  Children. Connor took his sunglasses out of the pocket of the driver's door and, even though the sun was shining only fitfully, put them on. He'd been convinced, certain, that Carole needed children. He wanted them himself, of course, always had, was known for his way with them, with his nieces, with the children of friends, but Carole needed them even more because Carole was a special case. Carole, after all, was, when he met her, a woman with a past, an almost tragic young woman from a disturbingly unsupportive home who'd been disowned by her parents after a feckless boyfriend—whom she'd adored in the way girls persist in adoring attractive shits—had insisted she had an abortion. Carole's parents were Catholic, devoutly Catholic, with views on sex and abortion which even Connor, whose friends teased him about his social orthodoxy, thought came out of the Ark. Carole had had her abortion to try and placate her boyfriend, and then of course both the boyfriend and her parents turned their backs on her, simply refused to have anything more whatever to do with her. So Connor had picked up the pieces. He'd met this gorgeous, bruised-looking blonde at a private view in some gallery in Cork Street, and he'd scooped her up, almost literally, out of all the confusion and hopelessness and near poverty she was stumbling along in.

  He had to admit that after the first glory of love and gallantry was over it wasn't easy. He'd thought he didn't mind about the abortion, about her desperate passion for the boyfriend, but he found it was harder to come to terms with than he expected. He'd really had to struggle with himself, he'd had to speak to himself very severely about behaving in a mature and compassionate manner, and it was in the course of these stern internal lectures that it had occurred to him that a baby might be, if not the answer to their difficulties, at least a significant part of the answer. A baby would give Carole something to love that was her own, that would—wouldn't it?—replace the aborted baby. A baby, his baby, would tie Carole to him more firmly and, at the same time, would help expunge for him the painfully present jealousy he found he still suffered thinking about another man's potent penetration of the woman who was now Connor's wife.

  And so Martin was born. Blond, blue-eyed, charming Martin, the first grandson for Connor's parents, the right and proper obliterator of that previous lost baby. Except—well, Connor thought, blowing the car's horn imperiously at a black boy in a Vauxhall Vectra, that wasn't how it worked out, that wasn't how it happened. In modern terms, Connor supposed, Carole had failed to bond with Martin. She hadn't wanted to feed him, had hardly wanted to hold him. Everyone had told Connor about post-baby blues, but he wasn't prepared for Carole to cry hardest when the monthly nurse left. He shook his head, as if to get a kind of ringing out of his ears. He couldn't think about that time, really, never had been able to. He couldn't think about it because the fact was, the unpleasant, disagreeable, uncomfortable fact, that things hadn't got better. Ever. Martin was now twenty-eight and you couldn't kid yourself for a moment that he and Carole saw eye to eye about anything much. And however much Connor admired Carole, was grateful to Carole, tried to be supportive of Carole, he couldn't help feeling—knowing—that Carole was hard on Martin, hard sometimes to the point of unkindness; hard and critical and unencouraging. And Martin couldn't take it, he wasn't an easygoing laid-back character like his younger brother Euan. Martin was thin-skinned and defensive, and every time he made a mess of something, which was distressingly often, he'd lash out, almost as if he wanted to deflect any criticism before it got within a hundred miles of him.

  The heartbreaking thing was that Martin wanted Carole's approval, longed for it, longed for her to tell him that she was proud of him, that even when he cocked things up she would stand by him. Even now, as Martin approached the supposedly adult age of thirty, Connor would catch him looking at his mother like a spaniel not knowing whether to expect a kick or a chocolate. And Connor would see Carole suppressing something, contriving something in her responses, not aware, seemingly, that everything she did was as transparent as glass. She was easier with Euan, but then Euan was easier as a person, less needy, less chippy.

  Connor sighed. He had a sinking feeling about the reason for Martin's wanting to come round that evening. The way the boy had asked hadn't boded well: too brash, too casual. He sighed again, and swung the Mercedes into the car park of the club. Thirty feet away he noticed, at once, the comfortingly bulky figure of Benny Nolan lifting his tennis bag out of the boot of his BMW. Connor's heart lifted with it. Good old Benny. Good old familiar, cheerful, normal Benny.

  When Carole Latimer woke, the room was dusky. Through the French windows she could see a glimmer of pale evening spring sky behind the black outlines of roofs and chimneys and trees. When she was working, she'd had a view from her office window of roofs and chimneys and trees, looking west. She'd watched thousands of sunsets from that window, thousands and thousands. She sat up a little and took the pillow away from behind her neck and laid it on her knee. No good thinking about those sunsets now. No good thinking about that window or room or office either. No good thinking about lovely, blessed work. No good thinking.

  She leaned forward and put her elbows on the brocade pillow. She must have been asleep for more than two hours, almost three. Awful, really. She'd never done this in the past, never wasted whole afternoons just sleeping them away in this depressing elderly fashion. But then, she'd never felt about sleep as she did now, she'd never sought it, fled to it, as she had the last few weeks and months. She'd never seen it before as a refuge.

  She stood up slowly and stretched, letting the pillow fall to the floor. People said, didn't they, that when you were stressed or unhappy you either stuffed your face or stopped eating altogether. Presumably the same thing could happen with sleep, that you either binged on it or couldn't capture it for a second. She'd never seen herself as a binge person, someone who can't ever quite let themselves off the lead for fear of what boiling cauldron of self-indulgence or self-abuse they might fall into. Apart from those long-ago feelings for Rory—and she'd never known anything in her life which had even begun to approach the madness and intensity and seductiveness of those feelings—she had been able to manage herself, had been able to arrange and dispose of her desires and needs and fears in such a way that they did not stalk her, or haunt her, or wait in dark places to spring out on her. No—her life with Connor, her work with Connor, had been something satisfying and controllable and without menace.

  Until it stopped. Carole bent and picked up the cushion and threw it inaccurately towards the sofa. Of course life with Connor hadn't stopped, but work had. She wouldn't have believed what work meant to her, until it stopped. She'd always thought, had always said, that men identify themselves by what they do, and women by their relationships. But what had happened to her? Work had stopped when Connor was sixty and she was two years younger and she had gone, almost overnight it seemed, from a place of great security and certainty to a howling wilderness where all kinds of events and people she had vowed not to think about again—indeed had largely succeeded in hardly thinking about again—had come swooping down at her like bats out of a cave. That was when the sleeping began, the longing and capacity for oblivion, for the mind to be freed and stilled and soothed. Some days, meticulously making their bed in the mornings in the way she had always done, Carole had to fight herself, almost physically, to prevent herself from just climbing hungrily back in, back into the embrace of the pillows and the fat American comforter and the thick, sweet forgetfulness.

  She hoped that, apart from the sleeping, she'd given Connor, especially, no sign of how she was feeling. She hoped that she'd been as pleasant and placid as he liked her to be, as—as he deserved her to be. That was the trouble really, Carole though
t, this matter of her obligation to Connor, this elusive kind of emotional debt to him that she seemed to have contracted so long ago, almost without knowing it, and which she had wearily come to see would never be quite paid off. Sometimes she'd had moments of resentment about it, flashes of pure, exhilarating, blinding rage about the unfairness of some kinds of emotional liability conditioned so powerfully by social convention, social expectation. Sometimes, she thought she'd be punished forever, for every day that she lived, for something that had been at base and quite simply a powerful, natural, human instinct of the heart.

  She went out of the sitting room and across the hall with its polished pale floor and interesting modern rugs to the kitchen. She would put the kettle on. She didn't, she reflected, much want a cup of tea, but she felt she ought to want it, that it was a respectable thing to want, just as a proper gratitude for her life and comforts was only respectable. She laid a hand on the kettle and lifted it off its base. Respectable. Her hand shook. If only they knew, all those people who recognized and judged Carole Latimer by what they saw and heard. She almost let the kettle drop. If only they knew about the letter which was lying in her stocking drawer, under the lining paper, out of sight, the letter which had been lying there for ten days now and about which she hadn't breathed a syllable to a single soul.

  A key turned in the lock of the front door across the hall. Carole grasped the kettle firmly and took a brisk step or two towards the sink.

  She called out cheerfully, "Hello, darling! Good game?"

  "It's me," Martin said.

  Carole spun round. Martin was coming across the hall wearing jeans and a leather bomber jacket. His hair needed cutting.

  "Hello, darling—"

  "Sorry I'm a bit early."

  "Early?"

  "I told Dad," Martin said. "I told Dad I'd be here around seven."