Brother and Sister

by Joanna Trollope

  "But this is his home just now—"

  "Just now."

  "Connor—"

  Connor looked steadily at her.

  He said, with decision, "You see him here. For a couple of hours. Then I'll bring the boys in."

  "I can't!" Carole cried, almost shrieking.

  Connor picked up his paper again. His voice was lofty again.

  "You have to, darling," he said.

  And now, here she was, waiting. Here she was alone, abandoned by Connor and Martin and Euan—Martin in a smoldering rage, Euan in a characteristic state of cheerful curiosity. It was to Euan she had said foolishly, gesturing at her clothes, "Do I look all right?"

  He'd glanced at her, grinning. He had all the comfortable confidence in the world, all the happy assurance of personal acceptability that had been entirely left out of Martin. He'd given her a quick kiss.

  "Why'd it matter, Mum?" And then he'd said teasingly, "What were you wearing last time?"

  He'd made her laugh. He could usually make her laugh. She watched the three of them go down the steps to the basement garage as if she would never see them again, as if everything that held her world together was going off to certain death. She waited in the front doorway until the Mercedes came gliding up the ramp and turned towards Ladbroke Grove, and it nearly broke her heart—the heart she had always supposed to be so unsentimental—that none of them thought to turn and wave to her.

  And now she was waiting. She was crossing from the wooden floor of the hall to the carpeted floor of the sitting room, and listening, with idiotic concentration, to the way the sound of her footsteps changed. She was looking out of the sitting-room windows, looking at the white lilac and not seeing it, and then she was turning and walking back again, past Connor's favorite chair, past the sofa, past the television, past the bookcase of all those unread books, and back into the hall and the sharp sound of her heels on the pale-wood veneer. When the doorbell rang, it briefly stopped her breath. She stood on the rug in the middle of the hall and looked at the bland back of the front door and thought, I'm not breathing, I can't breathe.

  The doorbell rang again.

  "One," Carole said. "Two. Three."

  She felt her legs move stiffly as if they had no joints, she saw her hand on the heavy gilt handle of the lock, she saw it turn, and the door swung smoothly inward and there on the step a man was standing, a tall man, older than she remembered and fairer somehow, but still Rory. Rory . . . She swallowed. No, not Rory. Of course not Rory. The man seemed to sway a little, or perhaps she did, and then he leaned in through the doorway and kissed her cheek, rather clumsily, and said, "Hello, Carole."

  "I don't usually drink whiskey," David said. He looked down into his glass, at the silky tea-colored liquid sliding about at the bottom.

  "No," Carole said, "but this isn't a usually occasion."

  She was sitting across the room from him, not far away, but not exactly close either, not where he could look at her properly, examine her. And it was difficult, he found, to look anywhere else, to avoid looking at this person, this woman, this Carole Latimer in her elegant clothes, in her elegant and adult sitting room with its careful lighting, its subdued colors, its absence of child or dog or clutter. They had lived here for just a few years, she'd said, it wasn't where her—other sons had been brought up, it wasn't where family life, in the accepted sense, had ever happened. David had glanced at the carpet.

  "I hope," he said, "my shoes are clean."

  It was the first time she'd looked at him. She'd looked at him quite directly, and he'd seen how remarkable her eyes were, greenish, clear, almost speckled, and his stomach had given an involuntary little lurch.

  "I shouldn't," she said with a warmth she hadn't yet displayed, "care at all if they aren't." And then she said, in a lower tone, "You're not on trial, you know."

  He tilted his whiskey now, slipping the liquid round the glass.

  He said, not looking at her, but at the whiskey, "Did you think about me?"

  She turned to gaze out of the window.

  "No."

  "Never?"

  "I told you," Carole said.

  David tipped the glass so that the whiskey in it crept to the very rim.

  "I can't quite get my head round the fact that nobody knew about me."

  "I went away," Carole said. "I went away quite deliberately. I said I needed to convalesce, so nobody took account of the time."

  "Who's nobody?"

  "My parents."

  A little whiskey splashed on to David's thigh.

  Carole said nothing. She went on gazing out of the window.

  "My father?" David persisted.

  There was another pause and then Carole said, "He didn't know."

  "He didn't know I'd been born?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  Carole's head whipped round.

  She said furiously, "Because he didn't want to."

  "Didn't—"

  "No. Didn't want to. What right have you to ask me questions like this?"

  David put his whiskey glass down with elaborate care.

  "Because," he said, "he is my father and you are my mother and without the two of you, I wouldn't be here."

  Carole bent her head. It was hard to tell if she was angry or distressed or if she was crying.

  "I meant what I said," David said. "I meant what I said on the telephone. All this is on your terms. I don't want to upset anything you've got now, your family. I just want a few answers."

  She nodded. She reached a hand out blindly for her own drink and took a big swallow.

  "Like what?"

  "Do I look like my father?"

  She nodded again, violently.

  "Exactly?"

  Carole looked up slowly.

  "Fairer," she said faintly. "His features. My coloring. Maybe—maybe you're taller."

  David leaned forward a little.

  "Did you love him?"

  "Oh my God!" Carole cried. "What kind of question is that?"

  "So you did—"

  "Yes."

  "So you loved the man you had me by?"

  "I told you," Carole said again. "I told you, didn't I?"

  "But you didn't want me."

  "I never said—"

  "He didn't want me."

  "He didn't want a baby," Carole said. She pushed her hands through her hair. "We were too young. He was just starting. We weren't ready for a baby."

  "But if there wasn't a baby, I mean, if nobody but those nuns in Suffolk and your friend what sername knew there'd been a baby, why didn't you stay with him, why didn't you stay until you were both ready for a baby?"

  "He'd gone," Carole said.

  "Gone—"

  "He went when I knew I was pregnant. He said I had to have an abortion and—I did think about it, I did, but then he went anyway. I think—I think now," Carole said loudly, "that he wanted to go. That my being pregnant was a kind of excuse, the excuse he was actually looking for."

  David shifted in his chair.

  "He sounds a complete shit."

  "No," Carole said.

  "No?"

  She looked up.

  "I didn't have an abortion, because I wanted his baby. Or at least, I did then. I wanted something of him, of his. I thought—" She stopped, and then she said, "I thought he'd change."

  "And he didn't."

  "I don't know. I couldn't find him. I tried, but I couldn't. I've never found him. I don't want to find him."

  "Perhaps he went abroad—"

  "Quite likely."

  "Perhaps he died—"

  An expression of intense pain crossed Carole's face.

  "No—"

  "I only said perhaps," David said. "But would it be easier?"

  "Nothing to do with him has ever been easy. That's not the point."

  David leaned forward more and put his elbows on his knees.

  "What's his name?"

  "It doesn't matter."

  "
It does. It matters to me."

  "I never say it," Carole said almost desperately, "I never say it out loud."

  David said quietly, "It's one of the things I came to ask you. It's one of the things I need to know. It's—it's something I don't have."

  She said, almost in a whisper, "Rory."

  "Rory. Rory what?"

  "Ecclestone."

  David thought. He bent his head and considered for a moment. Then he said, "So I am David Ecclestone?"

  "No," Carole said. "You were born David Hanley. Hanley was my maiden name."

  "But Ecclestone was my father's name."

  "Yes."

  "And David?"

  "Your father's second name."

  "Right. Rory David Ecclestone. R. D. Ecclestone."

  "Yes. But it's not your name. Ecclestone isn't your name. You were registered as David Hanley."

  David said, with the first small show of anger he had displayed all afternoon, "Don't you think that's for me to decide?"

  She was startled.

  "What?"

  "Isn't it for me to decide, now? Haven't I been handed round all these names belonging to other people long enough? Haven't I worn these labels that aren't mine for years and years without complaint? Isn't it about time I was allowed to be who I really am?"

  "Sorry," Carole said. "Sorry—"

  "And suppose, whatever he was like, whatever you say he was like, I'd rather go the accepted route and carry my father's name? Why shouldn't I?"

  Carole stood up abruptly.

  "Don't you take your anger out on me."

  "I'm not angry—"

  "No."

  "But you have been."

  David stood too, slowly.

  "Yes."

  "For having you adopted—"

  "It's hard," David said, sighing, "to get over the fact that you were given away."

  Carole took a few steps closer. She looked up at him. He could see her green eyes and smell scent and whiskey.

  "I had to."

  He said nothing.

  "I'd lost everything."

  "You'd lost him, you mean—"

  "And ever since," Carole said, and he could see a faint glitter of tears, "ever since, all those years, I've had no one to talk to about this. No one."

  "You must have had friends, girlfriends—"

  She shook her head.

  "I hadn't done something very easily—acceptable. I'd fallen for the wrong person, fallen pregnant, betrayed my upbringing. I'd put myself beyond the pale."

  David glanced round the room. He gave a small snort of laughter.

  "Hardly—"

  "It looks all right," Carole said. "It all looks fine, doesn't it?"

  "What?" David said. "Your marriage? Your sons?"

  Carole took a step forward. She was very close to David now. She put up her hands and grasped at the lapels of his jacket.

  "I can't take hostility," Carole said. "I can't. Not in any form."

  He put his own hands up and covered hers. The skin on her hands felt light and smooth and thin.

  "No—"

  "You are so like him! You look so like him!"

  David took hold of Carole's hands and gently detached them.

  He said, "I'll try and think about that. About what you said."

  She took an unsteady step or two backwards.

  "Well," she said, with regained composure. "Have you filled in some blanks?"

  He said uncertainly, "I think so."

  "Another whiskey—"

  "No. No thank you."

  "There's actually some more blanks to fill in."

  "Oh?"

  "My husband," Carole said, "my sons. Your—half brothers."

  "Oh. Yes. Well, one day—"

  "Today," Carole said.

  "Now!"

  "Soon."

  "Coming here—"

  "They live here," Carole said. "They're coming back." She glanced at him. She had retrieved her distance, her self-control. She gave a fleeting smile. "They want to meet you."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sasha told Steve she had once lived in a squat. He rather suspected that she had told a lot of people this, especially men; that it was the kind of achievement she took out and polished publicly every so often, to impress. Steve was impressed. He was, himself, the kind of person for whom radical, even anarchic, behavior was at best pitiful and at worst downright destructive. The very thought, at sixteen or seventeen, of exchanging the dubious advantages of the back bedroom at the Royal Oak for something spectacularly worse would have seemed to him completely lunatic. Even freedom had its proper price, not any old one.

  After the squat, it seemed, Sasha's living arrangements had always remained fluid. There'd been a spell at home helping her mother nurse her dying stepfather; a spell living with a Turk—relationship heavily unspecified—in a decaying wooden house on the Bosphorus; a spell training—unfinished—as a mental-health nurse; a spell looking after a penthouse flat in the Canal Street district of Manchester; a spell in a caravan in a wood in Northumberland with two retired greyhounds and a boy with learning difficulties. Now, in her view, Sasha had washed up somewhere very secure. Now, on a mysterious mixture of grants and subsidies and part-time jobs in shops and bars, Sasha had achieved her own room, with a lockable door, in a house occupied by a divorced mother of three who needed the rent from a lodger. The room was good, Sasha said, biggish with a wide window, and Delia downstairs was so fanatical about her own unquestioned independence that she wasn't about to cramp anyone else's. That's why she was divorced, really, Sasha said: Delia just couldn't compromise, not to the smallest degree.

  Trying to get a picture of the exact nature of Sasha's life, Steve thought, was like trying to sculpture water. He didn't think she lied to him, or invented things, but her priorities were so different from his, and her view of essentials so other, that she presented a picture to him that was, at its clearest, elusive. She was loosely attached to Westerham University—until recently Westerham Technical College—where she was working, equally loosely it seemed, on a thesis. Where this would lead, Sasha couldn't say, and couldn't seem to see that it mattered. When she wasn't in the university's new and impressive computer room, she was working in a small health-food store with vegan principles (not even gelatin permitted), or in a bar called Rouge Noir, or in a second-hand book and music store specializing in early rock, or babysitting Delia's three children. She seemed, at the same time, always to be busy and always to be free if the mood took her. Her list of commitments—which included yoga and a salsa class—appeared to be consistently ongoing and yet never to have a pattern.

  "I don't know," Steve said, "how you don't drive yourself barmy."

  She smiled at him.

  "Practice," she said. "Attitude. Particularly attitude."

  It was the attitude that drew Steve back and back. It was her ease with the looseness of arrangements, her acceptance of the unconventional, her capacity to achieve a somehow approvable distance from human responsibility that made him feel, in a strange and exhilarated way, liberated from all the exhausting burdens and preoccupations of his present life. It had nothing to do with love, he told himself. In no way could his desire to be with Sasha even begin to impinge on the unshakable love he felt for Nathalie and Polly, but being with Sasha was not only exciting and intriguing, but also gave him a holiday from himself, a holiday from Steve Ross who was currently caught in an emotional thicket from which he had no means of extricating himself. When it occurred to him—as it did quite often—that he should not see Sasha again, he felt a small panic rise inside him, as if there was a real threat of a vital conduit being cut off. And when he saw her—the long coat, the boots, the seal-pelt hair—he felt a surge of pure relief.

  When she asked him if he'd like to see her room, in Delia's terraced house looking on to the railway line, he'd said no.

  "Why not?"

  He shrugged. He didn't want to say that he was afraid, afraid of what might happen in S
asha's room, and nor did he want to examine that fear too closely and discover that it contained some more urgent elements as well.

  "Are you afraid?"

  He shrugged again.

  "I've almost never," Sasha said, "had a room to show anyone before. I've never had a place that I felt reflected me. But this is a beginning. I'd like to show it to you."

  Steve put his hands in his pockets.

  "Does Titus—"

  "Of course," Sasha said. "Of course Titus comes. He thinks it's awful." She smiled. "But then, he likes disliking what I like. He likes that a lot."

  "Perverse—"

  "More about control," Sasha said. "Titus is very into control."

  "Really?"

  She glanced at him.

  "Very," she said, and then she leaned towards him a little. "Come and see my room," she said.

  She let him into the house through an Edwardian door painted purple with stained-glass panels. Inside, it was everything Steve deplored, a cluttered cave of fabrics and objects. He knocked immediately against a cascade of wind chimes.

  "Ignore," Sasha said. "Up here."

  She went ahead of him up the staircase, past paintings on mirrors and a birdcage full of dolls and a vase of peacock feathers. He watched her put a key into a door on the landing and then she turned and looked at him.

  "Deep breath," she said.

  The room was almost empty. It was painted red, with a black floor and white blinds at the window. It contained almost nothing except a futon.

  Steve said, "Where's your life?"

  She pointed at the futon.

  "There."

  He swallowed.

  "Everything?"

  "Why not? Don't you work in bed?"

  "No." He looked about him. "Clothes. Books—"

  She pointed at a stack of canvas boxes.

  "There."

  "Do you recognize me? Do you recognize me here?"

  He took a step or two further into the room. He looked at the single Japanese print—a woman, in a kimono, looking over her shoulder—on the red walls, at the futon, at the pair of running shoes on the floor, precisely side by side, and he said, "It figures."

  "Sit down," she said.

  "On that?"

  "Where else do you suggest?"

  "Sasha—"

  "Never stand if you can sit. Never sit if you can lie."