Brother and Sister

by Joanna Trollope

  He glanced at the screen. He'd done three weeks out of four. Perhaps he'd go home now, and see Polly, and let Nathalie say whatever it was she wanted to say at the moment, and then come back to the office early in the morning, to finish, so that the disc would be ready and waiting on Meera's desk before she even arrived. As he would like to be, all braced for a return to the brisk ordinariness of things, to the jokes and the busyness and the tickings-off.

  The door to the stairs opened. Titus appeared round it, and stood, holding the edge, almost as if he needed support. He looked down the length of the room at Steve, and lifted his chin.

  "You bastard," he said loudly.

  For some reason, Steve stood up. He put his hands in his pockets.

  "Where have you been?"

  "Where do you fucking think?"

  "This is work time, Titus. I pay you for the day's working hours. What you do outside that is your affair, but between nine and five-thirty—"

  "Shut up," Titus said.

  He let go of the door and advanced down the studio towards Steve.

  "You're a rat," Titus said. "A sanctimonious, two-timing shit of a rat."

  Steve licked his lips.

  "You've seen Sasha."

  "She called me."

  "Ah. Of course."

  "Don't use that fucking tone!" Titus shouted.

  "I wasn't aware—"

  "You betray your wife, you nick my girlfriend—"

  "I didn't—"

  "I knew," Titus said, coming up close and thrusting his face at Steve's, "I knew you were meeting. I knew there was all this kissy crap in wine bars masquerading as heart-to-hearts about Nathalie. I knew all that. I could just about take all that. But I didn't know, until two hours ago, that you'd fucked her."

  Steve felt his hands clench into fists in his pockets.

  "Once."

  "Oh!" Titus cried. "Once, is it? One little mistaken, innocent, ooh-what-a-naughty-lapse time? A fuck is a bloody fuck, Steve, and you bloody well know it."

  Steve glanced away. A red tide of something terrible, shameful, was burning up his throat.

  "Yes."

  "I'd like to put you through that fucking window. I'd like to chop up that pretentious sign out there and ram the pieces up all your fucking orifices."

  "Titus—"

  "Don't start explaining. Don't start justifying. Don't give me any of your control-freak crap. You knew what Sasha meant to me. You knew it."

  Steve nodded.

  "And now," Titus said, "I've gone and buggered up poor old Justine."

  "Yes."

  "Yes," Titus said in sarcastic imitation. "Yes, yes, sorry, didn't mean to, sorry, Titus, sorry, Sasha, sorry, Justine, sorry, Nathalie—" He stopped and then he said, "What about Nathalie?"

  Steve said in a low voice, "She doesn't know."

  "That you've been seeing Sasha? That you've fucked her?"

  "No—"

  "Will you tell her?"

  Steve looked up at the ceiling.

  "I don't know."

  "You will," Titus said.

  "Titus—"

  Titus rose up on his toes until his face was almost level with Steve's.

  He said, "You'll tell her, you fucking wimp, or I will."

  When Ellen woke, she knew it wasn't morning. It wasn't just that the birds were still quiet and that the brief spring night sky was still dark, but also because there was this feeling, the atmosphere the house always had when life in it got switched off for a few hours. She rolled over and looked at her clock radio. The squared green numbers said 12:40. She'd been asleep for an hour and a half. What on earth could make her wake up after only an hour and a half? What was it that had made her wake up and feel as if it was the morning already?

  She sat up in bed and looked at her closed door. There was no line of light under it, so that meant that everyone was in bed, that the landing light was off, that the only lights in the house would be the little red standby lights on the television, and the computer monitor. Even Petey slept in the complete dark. When she and Daniel were little, they'd had a lamp like a dim green mushroom, with plastic rabbits molded round the base, which she'd fallen in love with during a stopover in Montreal Airport, but Petey had shunned the mushroom and slept like a grown-up—about the only thing about him, Ellen sometimes thought, that was grown-up—in the dark.

  She twisted round and slid out of bed. It occurred to her to do something she'd never done before, something that people in books did when they had a problem or were in the middle of an adventure, and go down to the kitchen. She might have some cereal, or make herself some hot chocolate, and then she might go into the family room and turn the computer on and do a bit of research for her current obsession which was summer tennis camps in Canada. She had already told Zadie and Fizz, untruthfully, about being enrolled for one of these camps—she'd found a particularly beguiling-sounding one, in British Columbia—and was now playing with the idea, shortly to become a requirement, of putting the proposition to her parents while they were still in a weakened state because of this Carole woman.

  Ellen tiptoed across the room, and put her hand on the doorknob. She hadn't actually met Carole, but she knew she'd been to the house, leaving a coffee cup with lipstick on it and a disturbed atmosphere. Marnie hadn't volunteered much about Carole's visit, and Ellen, now that she knew more than she'd ever wanted to know, hadn't asked. There seemed, in fact, to be a kind of pact among them all, a silent complicity about not budging, about not making way, in the family, for any new person, for any change in dynamics. That was fine by Ellen, absolutely fine. She had watched Marnie turning over the cushion in the seat of the chair where Carole had been sitting, and felt a surge of relief at the gesture.

  Out on the landing, she checked in the gloom to see that all the bedroom doors were shut. Daniel's was, her parents' was, only Petey's was wedged open with a small beanbag hippo, its pink-felt tongue lolling. She took a step or two along the carpet, and noticed that a light was shining from downstairs, a lamp someone had left on, probably the lamp just inside the kitchen door. She peered over the banisters. The door to David's office was open, and through it Ellen could see her father's computer was on, and that her father was sitting in front of it, sideways on, and that on the desk between himself and the computer's monitor stood his chess set, his old one, the one Grandpa Ralph had given him when he was about eight, and that, because of the way everything was arranged, the light from the computer screen was throwing the shadows of the chess pieces onto the wall beside the desk, and making them look much bigger, taller and stranger, and inhuman somehow, like those statues on Easter Island with monster eyes and mouths. Ellen swallowed. She watched her father's huge shadow hand swoop up a crowned piece and hold it there, like a prisoner, lit by the hard green glow from the computer. It was rather horrible, watching him, rather unsettling, as if he was exercising a power which wasn't quite natural, which made him seem to be someone other than her father. She leaned forward a bit further, gripping the banister, and opened her mouth to call out to him, to bring him back to her, when she saw him lift his left arm in a sudden sweeping gesture and crash all the chess pieces across the board and off the desk and onto the floor. And then, while her mouth was still open and her voice stuck dry in her throat, he pushed a button on the monitor and the light on the screen went out, leaving them all in the sudden dark.

  "Where's Daddy?" Polly said.

  She had been to tea with her friend Zoe, and was, in consequence, not in the least interested in her supper. It lay in front of her, on the plate she preferred, bright and appetizing and untouched.

  "At work," Nathalie said.

  Polly picked her fork up and inserted it down the neck of her T-shirt.

  "Why?"

  "Because there's a lot to do, I expect."

  Polly patted her lumpy front.

  "Look."

  "I'd rather look at you eating."

  Polly sighed.

  "We had tea at Zoe's house." />
  "One day," Nathalie said, "you'll learn what it feels like to carefully make supper for someone who couldn't, in return, care less."

  "My fork's stuck—"

  Nathalie put a hand briefly to her face.

  "Get down and shake it out then."

  "And stay down?"

  "Polly," Nathalie said, "if you don't eat now, there will be no more food until the morning. Did you hear that? No more food."

  Polly's expression declared that the threat was a matter of absolute indifference to her. She bent sideways and pulled the fork out of one leg of her shorts.

  "Will you play with me?"

  "No," Nathalie said.

  "Why?"

  "Because I want to do some thinking."

  "Why?"

  "Because my mind is full of things that need sorting out."

  Polly eyed her.

  "You're quite dull."

  "I expect so."

  Polly flipped the fork in the air so that it clattered across the table.

  "I'll be in my bedroom," she said grandly. "Waiting for Daddy."

  Nathalie went round the table and picked up Polly's supper plate. She remembered the long-ago days, the before-Polly days, when the only children she knew were Ellen and Daniel, and how she had thought of them as representative children, because they were all she knew, just as she had thought of love and motherhood and parenthood within the parameters of familiarity. Watching Ellen and Daniel eat their wholesome suppers had been as emblematic of an aspect of family life as watching Lynne and Ralph get into their car together had been emblematic of a certain kind of married habit. It amazed her, looking back, how much she had accepted, how much she had never thought to examine, or question, or try to see through. It horrified her to think how cowardly she had been.

  Well, there was no opportunity for cowardice now. She had traveled to Northsea, she had spent six or seven hours in her mother's company, she had slept the night—no, not slept, passed—the night in a strange guest house, and had brought back with her a new and fragile cargo of reactions and emotions that were taking more courage to unpack than she could ever have imagined.

  "I don't know what to think," she'd said to David on the telephone. "I mean, I felt lost before, but this is different. I don't know where my mind is going."

  "Yes," he said. "Yes." He'd sounded distant, she thought, almost as if he wasn't listening.

  "I don't want to be let down," Nathalie said. "I don't want to find that that phone call was the high moment."

  "What phone call?"

  "That first one," Nathalie said, "that first one, when she was crying."

  "No," he said, "of course not."

  Nathalie scraped Polly's supper into the bin. She hadn't rung David since then. She hadn't had the inclination. It was amazing, disconcerting, but she hadn't really felt that she could, that, if she did, he'd be listening. And even if he was listening, as he always had, she wasn't quite sure that she could describe what she now felt to him, could make him see the confusion and awkwardness and affection and guilt and shame and disappointment that had been jostling about together in her mind and heart since she had stepped down off that train and said to herself, with a cry of silent dismay, "This is my mother."

  She put Polly's plate down, and bent over her balled fists on the kitchen counter. Cora had been sweet, very sweet. Nathalie was absolutely certain that Cora's sweetness of nature was something she would defend to her dying day. Cora was sweet and affectionate and humble and appealing. But—and why did this have to be the but Nathalie had never considered?—she wasn't what you would think of, for a mother. She was too uncertain for motherhood, too childlike, too submissive and stubborn all at once, too simple, too—too odd. When she told Nathalie about the party, about the sailor, about the Salvation Army home for unmarried mothers, about the Child Welfare Officer who took the baby away, Nathalie could see all that. She could see the schoolgirl, see the terror and the oppression, see the bullying mother, see the despair of knowing one had neither voice nor weight in the matter. But what she couldn't see was Cora as a mother. All she could see was herself, standing on that platform, sitting at that coffee-shop table, lying in that inhospitable bed, thinking, It's not her. It can't be.

  And, what was worse, what was haunting her, was seeing that Cora could see too, could see what she was thinking.

  "Sorry," Nathalie whispered now to her fists. "Sorry."

  She raised one up and pushed it into her eye socket. Then the other. If she pushed hard enough, she could obliterate images with blocks of violent color. There came to her, as there had been beginning to come to her, ever since she had returned, a desire to tell Steve how she felt, a need to lay all this complicated, contradictory, not entirely proud-making stuff out in front of the boy from the Royal Oak, the boy who didn't feel he belonged where he'd begun either, and have him tell her that he understood, that to become something is not necessarily a betrayal of what came before, that love means acceptance but not, by obligation, emulation. She took her fists away from her eyes. She wanted Steve to give her permission, the permission he'd had to award himself so painfully, in such a solitary way, unhelped by her, to be the person she felt she truly was, mother or no mother.

  "What time is it?" Polly said from the doorway.

  "You tell me."

  Polly leaned in the door frame and stared at the clock.

  "Half-past eight."

  "Seven. Bath time."

  Polly transferred her stare to her mother.

  "Where's Daddy?"

  There were thirty young oaks to be planted, thirty tall, slender, expensive young oaks imported from Holland, with their huge root balls carefully wrapped in specialist bubbled plastic. David had explained to the owner of this field, which was being gradually landscaped into a park, that the oaks should ideally be planted while still dormant, but the owner, who was disinclined to heed advice that conflicted with his wishes, in this case to have an avenue planted before midsummer, had instructed the planting to go ahead. So David, plus two men and a digger, was making a long double line of huge holes and wondering, not for the first time, if this kind of work was bringing him the pleasure it once had, or even that he had supposed it would. You could stay interested in trees, of course, but maybe that was the trouble, maybe you swung, over time, so much on to the trees' side that you could only see the people who wanted them planted in avenues leading to specially dug lakes as the enemy.

  He got down off the digger and went over to where he had slung his jacket on the grass to find a bottle of water. From the direction of the house across the rough grass, someone was approaching, no doubt the owner who was, David reflected sourly, the kind of man who would wait until you had dug thirty holes big enough to drop a small car into before saying that he wanted them another foot apart. David found his water bottle and, affecting not to have noticed the approaching figure, turned his back towards it to drink, as if thoughtfully contemplating the prospect down towards the lake.

  "David," someone said.

  He turned, holding the plastic bottle. Martin Latimer stood there, in jeans and a T-shirt and absolutely black dark glasses.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "They said I'd find you here—"

  "Who did?"

  "At your office. I went to your office. I said I was a new customer."

  David capped the water bottle and threw it down on the ground.

  "This isn't a good moment, Martin."

  "It won't take long."

  "Why didn't you telephone?"

  Martin put his hands in his jeans pockets. He was wearing a sort of zipped pouch round his waist like a skiing bumbag.

  "This isn't—something ordinary, something you arrange—"

  David looked across at the digger. Andy and Mick were standing by it, waiting.

  "Keep going," David shouted. "I'll be ten minutes."

  "Five," Martin said.

  "Five," David said heavily, "five. Sure it was worth your comin
g?"

  Martin took his hands out of his pockets and pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head.

  "Yes."

  David began to walk away across the field.

  "Did she send you?"

  "Who?"

  "Carole."

  "Oh," Martin said, and then with emphasis, "Mum. No, she didn't."

  "She's been to meet my wife."

  "I know. And it's the last time."

  David stopped walking.

  "What?"

  Martin pushed his glasses back down.

  "We don't want you."

  David said nothing.

  "We don't want anything more to do with you," Martin said. "We don't want any more contact. Not my mother or father or brother or me."

  David glanced at him.

  "Who sent you?"

  "No one."

  "Who knows you've come?"

  "None of your business."

  "Why," David said, "do you feel so threatened?"

  "I don't. I just don't want you around. We don't need you. We don't want you." He took a small step nearer David. "What do you want, anyway? You've seen her, you've got your pathetic story. What more do you want?"

  "If I stay away," David said, "you won't feel any better."

  Martin's chin went out.

  "I will. I feel better already."

  "Already?"

  "Yes," Martin said.

  "Well, good—"

  "My mother had three children," Martin said. "Three sons."

  "Yes."

  "Two she chose to keep. Chose to keep. You weren't one of those two."

  David took a quick breath. The impulse—which he was sure his Canadian brothers-in-law would competently have obeyed—to flatten Martin was almost overwhelming.

  "You pathetic little jerk—"

  "She didn't want you," Martin said. "She didn't want you then and she doesn't want you now."

  David began to run clumsily away from him across the grass. When he got to the digger, Andy and Mick were leaning against it, Mick thoughtfully rolling a cigarette.