Brother and Sister

by Joanna Trollope

"I can't lie on a futon in the middle of the afternoon—" Sasha went past him and knelt to unlace her boots. Inside them, her feet were clad in black socks with scarlet toes. Then she turned herself and slid gracefully on to the futon and lay looking at him.

  "I'm not up for this," Steve said.

  "For what?"

  "I'm not lying on your bed with you."

  "We can talk very well here," Sasha said. "This is an admirable place to talk."

  "I shouldn't be here."

  Sasha sighed.

  "Possibly," she said, "you are unaware of what is due in relationships. How the balance works."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I listen to you," Sasha said. "I am happy to listen to you, I am interested. I listen to you while you tell me about your problems, your difficulties, the things you can't understand about Nathalie wanting to find her mother. I listen to you and I tell you that you are coping very well, that Nathalie is asking a lot of you while telling you very little, that I admire you for your tolerance and, sometimes, stoicism." She paused and shifted her body a fraction, as if she were making room on the futon beside her, as if she were creating an inviting space. "But possibly," Sasha said, "it hasn't occurred to you that we have been driving down a one-way street. Your street." She paused again and then she gave him a smile, a direct, clear, open smile. "My turn now."

  In his bedroom—furnished by his mother for guests who almost never came—Martin sat in front of his laptop. Or rather, he sat squashed at an angle because the only surface in the room suitable for a laptop was a small chest of drawers. Carole had put a lamp on the chest of drawers, and added an extra chair to the room, and cleared out all the drawers and hanging space to accommodate some of Martin's possessions, but she hadn't, he felt, tried to make the room his, she hadn't given any indication that this comfortable, light room was in any way anything more than briefly on loan to him. And the fact that he had angrily, aggressively, filled it with things, piled the second bed with his clothes, stacked boxes, and bags of sports equipment, on all the available surfaces and floor space only, it seemed, served to underline her unspoken assumption that he would soon, somehow, be gone again. He'd made the room a shambles, and she was quite serene about it because, as her serenity indicated calmly, the situation was only temporary. Very temporary.

  He stared at the screen of his laptop. He'd called work that morning, pleading a migraine—he'd been susceptible to them ever since adolescence—and his boss, who appeared immune to any kind of headache, said that that was too bad but that Martin had better finish up those figures at home because he needed them for a five o'clock meeting. It was now ten past three and Martin had been sitting at the chest of drawers since noon, one knee pressed against a drawer handle, and his mind roaring in his skull like a swarm of bees.

  From beyond the closed bedroom door, he'd heard his parents' movements. He'd heard his father go out, and then his mother unloading the dishwasher in the kitchen, and the telephone ringing a couple of times, and then the front door closing again with a kind of studied quietness, as if the person going out was anxious that their departure should be unremarked. That had been about eleven-thirty. Before that time, Carole had been nowhere near Martin's bedroom door. She had not asked him if he would like coffee, she had not told him she was going out, she had made no mention of what he might find in the fridge to make himself lunch. She had simply tidied the kitchen, spoken briefly to two people he didn't know about, and gone. He typed three words with angry inaccuracy, and swore.

  There'd been nothing, either, on his mobile all morning, not even a text message. His brother Euan had taken to texting him recently, sending him idiotic facts and filthy jokes. He was grateful for these, but simultaneously resentful too, resentful that he needed them, resentful that his need was so evident, resentful that Euan, who was technically in exactly the same position as he was, appeared to be coping with it with extraordinary ease. They'd had a session about it, of course, a session with Dad, and then another, and then a session together in some awful pub in Chelsea after they'd met David where Martin had drunk several vodka chasers after his beer, and had ended up on the sofa in Euan's flat, much to the distaste of Euan's girlfriend, Chloe, who had seemed unable to grasp that Martin's plight was worse than her sofa's. He remembered Euan saying things like, "We've got to accept it, Mart, we can't put the clock back," and, "Seemed a nice guy. Didn't you think? A nice guy," and himself raging back, incoherent and muddled, raging about everything he could think of, everything relevant and irrelevant, but mostly, raging about Carole.

  "I'm not the first-born," he said, his fingers white around his shot glass. "I'm not, am I? I never have been. She let me think I was, and I wasn't. It explains everything, it explains how she's always been to me—"

  "Crap," Euan said. He was yawning. "Bollocks. Bullshit." He glanced at his watch. He'd told Chloe they'd be an hour and they'd been three. "Nothing changes except we have David to factor in."

  Euan had talked to Carole, too. He'd asked Martin to join in, but something in Martin wouldn't let him, wouldn't allow himself the possibility of being reconciled, even comforted. They'd gone into the sitting room, leaving the door ajar for him to join them, and he'd found himself flinging out of the front door instead, slamming it so that they could be in no doubt as to his feelings, his outrage. He'd just wandered that evening, miles and miles, amazed and insulted that the people in the streets could be so callously going home or into bars and cinemas, just like usual. When he finally got back, Euan had gone and Carole was in the kitchen with his father, making an omelette. She'd looked up at him and he could see she'd been crying again. She balanced the spatula on the edge of the omelette pan and came towards him.

  "Sorry," she'd said. "Oh Martin, sorry, sorry—"

  She'd tried to touch him then, tried to put her arms round him, to put her drained, red-eyed face against his, against his offended, injured one. But he hadn't let her, he couldn't. He stood there, his arms by his sides, his chin raised so that she couldn't reach his cheek.

  "Martin," his father had said. "Come on, come on—"

  He shook his head. He'd stepped backwards then, and turned and headed off across the hall to his bedroom, pursued by the smell of burning butter. How was he to know that the sweet thrill of triumph wouldn't last more than a minute or two?

  She hadn't tried again. Or at least—Martin tried to push Euan's remonstrations out of his mind—she hadn't tried in any way acceptable to Martin. She'd done quiet domestic things, ironing, cooking, asking the watchful Romanian maid to clean Martin's bedroom and the guest bathroom, but she hadn't come near him again, she hadn't tried to touch him. She had been, in fact, rather weird with him, not angry, not punishing, but behaving more as if she was afraid of him, and her fear had made her withdraw. There'd been moments, even, when he'd almost expected her to slip apologetically out of a room when he entered it, like an Edwardian housemaid. He wasn't at all sure what he wanted from her—utter abasement sometimes seemed alluringly to fit the bill—but he knew it wasn't this, he knew he didn't want this kind of control, this kind of power which seemed, so subtly, so horribly familiarly, to put him in the wrong.

  He hit the shut-down keys on his laptop and stood up. There was a sharp pain in his knee and his shoulders ached from sitting crookedly. He caught sight of himself in the framed mirror hanging above the chest of drawers. He looked tired, out of sorts, old. His hair was beginning to recede. He touched his forehead gingerly, apprehensively. His hair had begun to recede when he was twenty-two; he remembered noticing it in a changing room after a game of squash, suddenly being aware of the peak of hair on his forehead and the shadowy triangles either side where the hair was thinning. David's wasn't receding. David was taller than he was and broader than he was and his hair had a thick permanence about it that had been one of the first things Martin had noticed, one of the first things to go on the list of rivalries. Martin turned away from the mirror and crashed out of his room and across the hall to the k
itchen.

  It was as tidy as the kitchens of his childhood had always been, as tidy as the kitchens of women whose primary preoccupation is not culinary so often seem to be. On the table a place had been laid, a knife and a water glass, and next to the fruit bowl, a sandwich on a plate under a skin of cling film. Martin picked the sandwich up and peered at it sideways through the film. It appeared to be cheese and tomato, the sandwich filling he had always chosen in childhood, the sandwich filling you could only get now, on account of its simplicity, in old-fashioned places.

  Martin peeled the film off the sandwich and sniffed it. Then he crossed the kitchen, trod on the pedal of the chrome Italian waste bin, and tipped the contents of the plate inside.

  "Tell me," Nathalie said. "Tell me!"

  She was holding the door open for him, gripping it almost, and her eyes were shining. He bent and kissed her.

  "What was it like? What was she like? What happened?"

  "Everything," David said. "Nothing."

  "What do you mean—"

  "I'm so tired," David said. "I feel absolutely sandbagged. I haven't done anything, physically, and I'm worn out."

  Nathalie took his arm and propelled him into the kitchen. There was a basket of mixed polyanthus on the table, as brilliantly colored as a Mexican mural. David gestured towards them.

  "Nice—"

  "Never mind them," Nathalie said, pushing him towards a chair. "Never mind. Tell me. Tell me what happened. What did she look like?"

  David stared ahead.

  "She looked great."

  "What kind of great?"

  "Quite tall, blondish. Sort of expensive-looking—"

  "Did she cry? Did she hug you?"

  "No—"

  "Dave—"

  "She's in quite a mess," David said. "She's got this husband. And boys. Two sons."

  "Did you meet them?"

  "Yes."

  "And? David, and?"

  David shut his eyes.

  "Nat, I got what I went for. I got that and more. Rather a lot more."

  Nathalie was hovering over him. She had her hands clasped in front of her, almost as if she was praying.

  "Like what?"

  He opened his eyes and looked up at her.

  "I know who my father was. I know where I was born. I know why she gave me away—or at least, I know why she says she gave me away. I know that nobody knew about me, not even this Connor guy she married. I know that seeing me threw her back somewhere she never thought she'd have to go again."

  Nathalie loosened her hands. She put one on David's shoulder.

  "You OK?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did you—did you like her?"

  "If you mean," David said, "did she feel like my mother, the answer is no."

  Nathalie felt for a chair, still looking at David, and sat down.

  "Was she kind to you?"

  "Not really."

  "You mean hostile?"

  David's eyes widened.

  "She used that word."

  "Hostile?"

  "Yes. She said she couldn't take hostility. She couldn't take it from anyone. It was the one thing, she said, that she couldn't take."

  "Did you tell her you were angry with her?"

  "I said I had been. But I wasn't when I was with her. I wasn't angry then."

  Nathalie leaned forward.

  "How did you feel? I can't imagine it, I can't imagine how I'm going to feel—"

  David frowned.

  "I was kind of—fascinated. And fearful. I wanted to know the answers but of course having them means I have to deal with them. When you just imagine, you don't have to face anything, in the end."

  Nathalie swallowed.

  "No."

  "My father was called Rory David Ecclestone. He buggered off. Before I was born. She said I looked like him."

  Nathalie attempted a small smile.

  "Lucky her—"

  "I don't think so."

  "And her husband? Connor?"

  "Oh," David said, "you know. I work for hundreds of them. Well-set-up guy in his sixties, perfectly pleasant, prosperous. Probably reads the Telegraph. Collects maritime prints. When he shook my hand, he looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Welcome, my boy.'"

  "Nice of him—"

  "I don't know. Or establishing something, making sure I knew—" He stopped.

  "Knew what?"

  "Where I stood," David said. "Where I'd be, in relation to his sons. I felt he was making sure I knew he was doing the right thing." He leaned forward and touched a polyanthus petal. "She changed when he came in."

  "Did she?"

  "A kind of frankness went. She hadn't been very generous to me before he came, but at least I felt she wasn't pretending. But when he came in, a kind of mask went on. She was more polite to me, but I didn't feel she was being so honest. I felt she knew her family were watching her."

  "I can't imagine it—"

  "The younger son was fine. He's going to be like his father, minus the pomposity. He just behaved like this was bloody awkward, but it was bloody awkward for everyone so let's just make it as pleasant as we can. The older one looked like he wanted to kill me. He hardly said a word. He wouldn't sit down, he just stood there by the door, glaring."

  "For God's sake," Nathalie cried, "what are you taking that's his?"

  "Nothing. And maybe I could have asked him the same question. I don't want anything of his, I don't even want his mother—"

  "David!"

  He turned to look at her.

  "I don't."

  "You can't say that. You can't know that after one meeting—"

  "I can."

  Nathalie was silent. She gazed at him with huge, troubled eyes.

  "Remember what Elaine said?" David said.

  "What—"

  "Something she said to you. Something you told me. That—that we all know, deep down, if we're wanted."

  "Didn't Carole love your father?"

  "Oh yes," David said. "That's the trouble. It was my father she did love."

  Nathalie gave a little shiver.

  "Oh."

  "If she hadn't been pregnant, she might have kept him."

  "But you look like him—"

  "That just confuses things. It confused her. Perhaps I'm a kind of travesty of him, to her." He put a hand out and laid it on top of Nathalie's. "I'm OK, Nat. Really. I'm exhausted, but I'm OK." He took his hand away and got slowly to his feet. "Better get home."

  "Haven't you told Marnie?"

  "Not yet."

  "Dave—"

  He bent and kissed her forehead.

  "Now, would I? First?"

  Nathalie had her eyes tight shut.

  "David, go home, go."

  "I'm going," he said. "Now I've seen you, I'm going." He took a step towards the door, and then he stopped. "Marnie wanted to meet her. Before I went to London, she reminded me that she wanted to meet her. What am I going to do about that?"

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Titus's kitchen looked, he told himself with a kind of swagger, hideous. It usually looked pretty awful; it was not uncommon, after all, he thought, tiptoeing gingerly across it, to stick to the floor, but this aftermath of cooking on top of its usual carefree squalor was award-winning. There were even violently colored smears—turmeric? chili? blood?—down the fronts of the cupboards and the sink was so full it was impossible to wedge the kettle in, to fill it. It was a prime case, in fact, for that television program where a couple of presenters swoop down for the weekend, and whip all your crap away, and sell it to some sad other-people's- crap-hunters at a car-boot sale.

  Gingerly, he moved the stack of crockery and pans in the sink to one side and inserted the kettle under the cold tap. The kettle was interestingly full of flakes of limescale, floating about like chunks of coral in a tropical sea. Sasha had once bought a sachet of descaler to deal with the kettle, but as she declined, on principle, to take on the burden of Titus's living conditions, and as Ti
tus himself didn't give a monkey's about the state of his kettle, the sachet lay where she had left it, now obscured by a moldering bag of bagels.

  Plugging the kettle in, Titus remembered Sasha commenting on the extreme contrast between the meticulous fastidiousness of Titus's approach to his work and the boastful slovenliness of his attitude to his domestic arrangements. She'd said it as she said all these things, as an observation rather than as a criticism, and with a lack of personal engagement which indicated that she wasn't going to lift a finger to change things. She was wonderfully unfeminine in that way, miraculously unmaternal, and to Titus, consequently extremely attractive. It was therefore, he thought, looking at the mess in the sink, a bit odd that not only had he noticed when Justine had made no move to clear up after their drunken cooking session the night before, but also it had irritated him. He'd almost, he thought he remembered, asked her if she wasn't going to wash up. Or, at least, he'd noted the enquiry somewhere in his mind, in amongst all the other possibly more pervading thoughts about sex. He sighed. Sex. Amazing how much you wanted it when you wanted it. And conversely, even if this feeling only lasted an hour or two—how much, if standing in a revolting kitchen with a headache and the distinct possibility of being late for work, you didn't want it when you didn't.

  Titus picked two mugs out of the chaos on the counter and rinsed them cursorily under the cold tap. His mother had always been scornful about hygiene, claiming that germs only invaded those who were afraid of them and that anyway too much sanitary preoccupation was bourgeois. He fished about in a cupboard and found a handful of teabags squashed into the top of an open box of rice. "Rice with Lime Leaves and Ginger," it said on the label. Titus looked at it for a moment. It must have come from Sasha's health-food shop. He dropped the teabags into the mugs and reached for the kettle. He hadn't seen Sasha in almost three weeks and when he left her messages she just sent little laconic texts back saying "Busy" and "Back soon." Part of him burned to know what was going on and part of him shrank from the knowledge. When you knew, after all, you had to deal, and Titus didn't want to deal. He just wanted to be back in a place where he was carrying two mugs of tea—milkless, as the milk had settled into a rank lump in its plastic bottle—back to a bed which contained Sasha, rather than Justine.