Brother and Sister

by Joanna Trollope

  "Polly—"

  Her eyes slid sideways.

  "Mmm?"

  "Do as you're asked," David's voice said, close to her ear.

  She wriggled. She pushed her lower lip out and hung her head. It occurred to her that tears might be coming on account of losing, on account of not wishing to displease her Uncle David. She sniffed.

  "Good girl," David said.

  She felt his arm move away some more and then his hands were on her sides, under her arms. Next thing, she was on the floor. She leaned against David and pushed her face into his sleeve.

  "Five minutes, Poll—"

  She tore her face away from David's sleeve and charged out of the room, slamming the door so hard that the wine on the table jumped in the glasses.

  "No flies on Polly," Nathalie said. "She knows there's something going on."

  "She's right."

  "It's just that I can't explain about this extra granny thing yet. Not until I've sorted it myself a bit."

  David moved his wine glass an inch to the left.

  "It isn't an extra granny anyway—"

  "It is!"

  "It isn't, Nat. Not yet. It's about mothers."

  Nathalie said in a whisper, "I know. Really, I know."

  David moved his glass again.

  She said shyly, "I feel kind of thrilled. I didn't think I'd feel like this, I didn't think it would be—exciting—"

  "And frightening."

  He looked at her.

  "Yes."

  She said, "I keep thinking about that saying that you must be careful what you wish for in case you get it."

  He slid one hand across the table towards her.

  "Don't chicken out on me now, Nat."

  She smiled.

  "Wouldn't dream of it."

  He said wonderingly, "She's called Carole. I didn't even know her name."

  "But she knew yours."

  He smiled, an inward, private, pleased smile.

  "She gave me mine."

  Nathalie put her hand on his.

  "Yes," she said, "she did."

  "And there she is, in London, in her posh flat. And—I've got two brothers. Two brothers—"

  "Never any substitute for a sister—"

  He turned his hand over to grasp hers.

  "Never that."

  Nathalie said, "Cora hasn't married. She never did."

  "Are you pleased?"

  She nodded. She was coloring a little.

  "Yes. Yes, I am. And she had her own name for me."

  He gave her hand a squeeze.

  He said, "Samantha."

  "Mum called me Nathalie. After her sister that died."

  "That's nice, though—"

  "Yes. Yes, but it's nice to have mattered enough—"

  "Of course we mattered?."

  She gave him a sharp glance.

  "You didn't used to think like that."

  He smiled again.

  "I didn't know about Carole. Did I?"

  She pulled her hand gently out of his.

  "Don't get carried away."

  "I rather like it—"

  "Dave, the next bit might be much harder."

  "Disappointing?"

  "Maybe—"

  "I don't think so," David said. "It's exhilarating."

  "So far," Nathalie said carefully, "it's been easy. And we haven't had to do any of the work."

  David picked his glass up and held it so that the light shone through the wine.

  "I have a fifty-nine-year-old mother who was a company director!"

  The door burst open. Polly stood there wearing her pajamas and a defiant expression.

  "Heavens, Poll. Is it bedtime?"

  She glowered.

  "What were you talking about?"

  David smiled at her. He moved slightly sideways and patted his knee.

  "Mothers."

  Polly came forward to be lifted on to his lap.

  She said carelessly, "I don't want one."

  "Don't you?"

  Polly glared at Nathalie.

  "Don't laugh."

  "Why not?"

  "It's rude," Polly said. "It's rude to laugh when there's no joke."

  David said, "But you're quite funny."

  She considered this. She looked at her mother again.

  "You're a rude laugher."

  "I'm happy," Nathalie said.

  Polly rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

  "Can't I laugh when I'm happy?" Nathalie said. "Can't we both laugh?"

  "I'm not laughing," Polly said stonily. She pointed to her mouth. "Look."

  "No, darling. Not you. David and me. We're laughing because we're happy." She glanced at him across the table.

  "Aren't we?"

  "Yes," he said.

  Steve had tried to persuade his mother-in-law to stay and have coffee after lunch.

  "No," Lynne had said, gathering up her bags and her scarf. "No, dear. Thank you, but no. I've taken up too much of your time already."

  "You haven't," Steve said patiently. "You haven't. I've liked it. I'm glad you rang."

  She glanced away from him.

  "It took a bit of courage—"

  "To ring your own son-in-law and ask to have lunch with him?"

  "You're so busy—"

  "Not that busy," Steve said. "And certainly not when we're in the same boat."

  She'd put down her bags again then.

  "Are we?"

  "Aren't we," Steve said, "somehow being made to feel that we've failed where we thought we'd succeeded?"

  She gazed at him. He looked back at her face, at the slightly pleading quality in her eyes that must have seemed so appealing to Ralph once, like the eyes of a young deer.

  "I always felt I had to be pitied," Lynne said. "Because I couldn't have children. And I hated that, I hated being pitied. And I don't want to go back there, I don't."

  "Nobody can take away what you've done, what I've done—"

  Lynne dropped her gaze to the table, to the remains of her chicken salad.

  "It wasn't just that I wanted a baby, you know," she said. "It wasn't just going on and on wanting that. It was that I was scared of the future, too—I was scared of my private life just thinning out without children, without grandchildren, thinning out until there wasn't anything there, really, and I was just left with the wanting." She stopped and took a breath and then she said, "It's so terrible, that wanting."

  Steve put his hand over her nearest one for a moment.

  "But you have got children. And grandchildren. You've got all that."

  Lynne began to gather herself up again.

  "Not with all this. Not with all these—discoveries. I feel—" She stopped again.

  "What?"

  "I feel I've gone from being the goodie to being the baddie."

  "Lynne—"

  "Nathalie told me this wasn't my journey."

  Steve said, almost bitterly, "If it's any consolation, she's made it pretty plain it isn't mine either."

  "That's what you mean about being in the same boat—"

  "Yes."

  Lynne stood up finally, struggling to arrange her burdens.

  "Ralph says there's nothing I can do but wait. He always says things like that. Present Ralph with a problem and he says well, the only way to the other side is through. Drives me mad."

  "He isn't the same person as you. He isn't the same person as me. Maybe his emotions don't trouble him so much."

  She gave him a quick smile.

  "No."

  Steve stood too.

  "You take care."

  She reached up to give him a quick little kiss on the cheek.

  "Thank you, dear. Thank you for listening. It—it isn't that Ralph doesn't understand—"

  "No."

  She took a step away.

  "Give my love to Nathalie. And a kiss to Polly."

  "Course."

  He watched her go out of the lunch place, bumping her bags against other tables and
chairs as she went. She was like someone who'd had a sad, fearful secret that had been forgotten for years but which had now somehow surfaced in all its old misery. She'd always been someone Steve saw as vulnerable, someone you'd take care not to be careless with, but today her back view, moving awkwardly away from him, looked defeated, as if some long, brave struggle had finally come to nothing. He sighed. Beyond sympathy, there was nothing he could do for her, nothing he could give her to restore Nathalie to her as her child and hers alone.

  "Don't you go being selfish," his own mother had said to him. "Don't you go behaving like your dad and just riding roughshod. We've all got our feelings about what Nathalie's doing, we're all affected, but I've got my own children, same as you have, and Lynne hasn't, and don't you forget that."

  Steve paused by the cash desk and paid the bill. The girl handing him his change had a bluebird tattooed on her cheekbone and fine blonde hair cut so short that it merely lay on her skull like a dusting of icing sugar. Steve had never really liked short hair on girls, had always loved the luxuriance of, say, Nathalie's hair, but recently he'd begun to see something edgy and attractive in short hair, something almost challenging. It was as if short-haired girls were daring him to think of them as boys. Steve grinned. He put three pound coins in the plastic pot by the till with "Tips thank you!" crudely inked on it with magic marker.

  "So long," Steve said to the bluebird girl, and went out into the street.

  From across the office, Justine could see that Titus was doodling. Instead of being crouched intently in front of his computer, as if coiled to spring right into it, he was slouched against the back of his chair, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other stretched out across his desk making the easy looping movements that people who can really draw make when they're not trying. It looked as if he was scowling, too, not because she could see his face, but because his whole demeanor looked gloomily, angrily slumped from behind, a sort of scowl of the neck and shoulders.

  She glanced around the office. Steve wasn't back from lunch yet, and Meera was sorting invoices with an intensity of concentration that made her look almost spiritual. She got up and smoothed down the hair at the base of her skull, hoping it was lying in funky little straight strands and not curling up babyishly as it had seemed to want to do ever since she cut it. She yanked her jeans down half an inch so that the ring in her bare navel showed, and sauntered over.

  "It's like trying to work with the lights out," she said. "You in that mood."

  Titus was drawing a fanciful elephant with an elongated trunk and ears like wings.

  "Sorry."

  Justine hitched one thigh across a corner of his desk.

  "What's up?"

  Titus heaved an enormous, fed-up sigh.

  "I just feel—that the energy's gone out of things—"

  Justine swung her leg.

  "Happens to everyone."

  "Not to me," Titus said. "I invented energy."

  "Come to think of it," Justine said, "I can't imagine a languid small man."

  "I am not small."

  "Aren't you?"

  "No. I am short but I am not small."

  She grinned.

  "Quite right. Nor you are."

  "I am short," Titus said, "and square. And fed up."

  "With what?"

  "Every bloody thing."

  "Like Sasha, you mean."

  Titus threw his drawing pencil so that it spun in an arc away from him and landed neatly in Steve's waste bin.

  "Why do girls always think it must be love?"

  "Because," Justine said, "it mostly is."

  "What about the atmosphere in this office, then? What about Steve being in a permanent mood so we all have to tiptoe round him in case we step on the fuse and all get blown to perdition?"

  "What's perdition?"

  "Look it up," Titus said.

  Justine leaned forward.

  "You don't have to take it out on me, you know."

  "No," he said.

  "So don't."

  Titus picked up another pencil and began to add angel wings to his elephant.

  "Why does Sasha have to be so fascinated by this Nathalie adoption business? Why does she have to think she's the only person Steve can talk to?"

  "Maybe it's her thesis thing—"

  "Bloody hell," Titus said, "we don't all have to live our thesis, do we? Thesis is work, life is play. Steve gets a little hiccup in his perfect work/play balance and we all suffer. He's such a fucking control freak."

  "You don't have to be controlled—"

  Titus regarded her. He looked at her jeaned thigh on the desk, at the slice of flesh between her jeans and her top where the navel ring glinted, at the zip in her top that ran right up to her chin which somehow looked quite a different shape now that her hair was shorter.

  "Thing is," Titus said, his eyes on Justine's chin, "that I like feeling cheerful. Cheerful is how I'm meant to feel, how I'm programmed, and when I'm not cheerful it totally does my head in."

  Justine let a beat fall, and then she said, "You are such a tosser."

  "That's a boy's word."

  "You're a boy—"

  "You're not. It's a word for boys to use."

  "You're not just a tosser," Justine said, "but a pathetic has-been toff tosser at that."

  He grinned at her.

  "I like a bit of abuse. Cheers me up. Keep going."

  "I can take all kinds of things," Justine said, "but I can't take self-pity."

  Titus pointed his pencil at her, one eye closed.

  "I'm pretty sick of it, too."

  From across the office Meera called out sweetly, "Shouldn't you two be working?"

  Titus swiveled in his chair.

  "Shut it, my little Bombay dream."

  "It's such a shame," Meera said, her eyes never leaving her work, "to see an expensive English education so completely wasted."

  "That's the whole point of it," Titus said, "my sweet and stupid little pakora."

  Justine stood up.

  "I don't know why she puts up with you. I don't know why anyone does."

  "Including you?"

  "Including me."

  Titus swiveled his chair back and leaned forward, gazing up at Justine.

  "You've made me feel one ton better."

  She said nothing. Her hand went to the nape of her neck.

  "Have a drink with me," Titus said. "Or would you rather have a nice bunch of flowers?"

  Justine looked across at Meera. She had put her headphones back on and was typing up dictation. Justine took a step away from Titus and put her chin up. Her voice was as bored as she could make it.

  "Both," she said.

  From the kitchen window, Ellen could see straight down the sloping garden to the hedge with the green gate in it which led to the golf course. Halfway down the garden on the left-hand side was an immense old apple tree, the random relic of an ancient orchard when this part of Westerham had all been fruit farms, in which David had built Ellen a tree house, when she was six, with a rope ladder which could be pulled up after her to prevent Daniel's following her. Beside the rope ladder, to placate Daniel, David had hung two old car tires at different levels, and in the left-hand one of these, hunched into its cramped circle, Marnie was sitting. Her back was to Ellen and she was swinging very slightly, one deck-shoe-clad foot pushing rhythmically against the worn turf underneath.

  She'd been there for ages. Ellen glanced at the kitchen clock. It was after three and Petey had been asleep for nearly an hour now, worn out by his own paroxysmic rage. He was on the kitchen sofa, tossed among the cushions like a rag doll, his pale hair fanned out, his mouth slightly open. Ellen had come back from the tennis club in a bad mood, having failed to elicit an invitation to lunch from anyone there, and found Marnie and Petey in the kitchen and the kitchen floor a mess of squashed broccoli and spaghetti hoops. Petey was screaming and Marnie was crying, not just quiet grown-up crying with a lot of tidy nose-blowing, but real out-of-it
crying, with her head in her hands and her breath coming in heaving gasps. Ellen had put her tennis racket down on the table, stepped carefully through the mess, picked Petey up off the floor and put him, to his amazement, in the sink. Then she had filled a glass of water from the filter jug, handed it to her mother, and turned on Radio One so that Atomic Kitten could drown out the noise.

  Well, that must now have been an hour and a half ago, an hour and a half since Marnie, pausing to give Ellen a brief, wordless hug, had drained her water and walked out of the garden door and down to the swinging car tire. Ellen expected her to sit there for a while, and then to go on down the garden to the gate and out onto the golf course. But she hadn't. She just stayed there, hunched and slightly swinging, her pigtail hanging dejectedly down her back. In the meantime, Ellen had picked Petey, quietly sobbing now, out of the sink, carried him upstairs, changed his nappy—he was devoted to his nappies still—and then brought him back down to the kitchen and laid him, not unkindly but decidedly, on the sofa with his sleepy rag. Throughout this procedure, she had not said one word to him, and he, hiccuping with subsiding sobs, had fixed his huge blue gaze on her as if he knew, in his sinking two-year- old heart, what she was thinking. When he was asleep, Ellen went across the kitchen and took up her station by the window.

  In three days, thank goodness, it would be school again. And it would be safely school all the rest of April and May and June and then it would be Canada. In July and August it was always, thankfully, Canada, always, first a couple of weeks in Winnipeg with Gran and Lai and then the cottage which was complete perfection in every way except the blackfly which you kind of accepted as the price to be paid for everything else. Perhaps when Marnie got to Winnipeg, Ellen thought, she'd be OK again, she'd go back to being the person you could rely on not to go mental, not to give up on Petey and getting supper and making Daniel read something other than Wisden. The thing about Winnipeg too was that Dad wouldn't be coming. Or at least, he would, to the cottage for a couple of weeks or so, but he wouldn't come for the whole time, he never did, because of work. And maybe, because it was obviously something about Dad that was making Marnie behave like someone who needed Prozac—Ellen knew about Prozac because both Zadie and Fizz in her class had mothers who swallowed Prozac, Zadie and Fizz said, like M&M's—it would help Marnie to have a little holiday from him. Perhaps they all needed a holiday from him, from being English, from the unevenness of family life when some members put in so much more, in Ellen's view, than others.