Brother and Sister

by Joanna Trollope

  "Move," David shouted.

  They looked up at him, slow, astonished and normal.

  "Move!" David yelled again. "Move! Get back to fucking workl"

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Look," Meera said, "it's not worth crying over."

  Justine put her chin up and sniffed.

  "I'm not crying."

  "No man's worth humiliating yourself over."

  "But I've done it," Justine said, "I've already done it. Haven't I? I am humiliated."

  Meera began to order things on her desk, picking up paper clips, parking her computer mouse tidily on its mat.

  "You don't have to show it," Meera said.

  "You mean you wouldn't—"

  "We're not all made the same," Meera said. She flicked her hair behind her shoulders. "Maybe I'll never feel as much as you do. Maybe I'm just not made for it."

  Justine leaned across Meera's desk to twitch a tissue out of her box.

  "I didn't want to. I didn't like myself. I didn't like him, even—"

  "No."

  "You think I'm pathetic—"

  "Only if you let it get to you. Only if you let it affect your decisions, what's right for you."

  Justine blew her nose.

  "What should I do now?"

  "You don't take my advice," Meera said. "You never have. Why should I waste any more on you?"

  "Sorry—"

  "I think everyone in this office has gone mental recently. Mental. In fact I'm wondering whether to stay."

  Justine's eyes opened wide.

  "Not stay!"

  The door to the staircase opened, revealing Titus.

  Meera glanced at him and said, a little more loudly, "I'm thinking about it."

  "About what?" Titus said, advancing.

  "Never you mind," Meera said, "I was talking to Justine." She picked up her handbag.

  Titus looked at Justine.

  He said, "I don't suppose she'll talk to me."

  Justine said nothing.

  "You look awful," Meera said. "You both do."

  "No change there then," Titus said, still looking at Justine.

  Meera put out a hand and lightly touched Justine's arm.

  "Will you be OK?"

  Justine nodded.

  "Sure?"

  "I'm too beaten up," Titus said, "to be a trouble to anybody."

  "Do you want to come with me?" Meera said to Justine.

  Justine looked up. She glanced at Titus.

  Then she said, "In a minute."

  "OK then," Meera said. "If you're sure. Bye, then."

  They watched her go, and the staircase door shut decisively behind her.

  "I keep," Titus said, "feeling that there's no further shit to feel like, and then I feel like more."

  "Yes."

  Titus turned and sat down heavily in Meera's desk chair.

  He said, "She's gone."

  "Who has?"

  "Sasha," Titus said. "She's just gone."

  "What do you mean, gone—"

  "I went round to Delia's," Titus said, "and Delia said she went on Tuesday. Tuesday night. After I'd seen her."

  Justine leaned on Meera's desk.

  "Rubbish. People don't do that, except in soap operas, they don't just go, they can't, they have to arrange stuff—"

  "She's gone," Titus said. "Her room is empty except for that Japanese girl picture. She's paid Delia, and she's gone."

  "Well, find her—"

  Titus tipped his head back and closed his eyes.

  "She doesn't want me."

  "She might, when she's calmed down a bit—"

  "No."

  Justine straightened up.

  She said, too quickly, "Now you know how it feels."

  There was a pause. Titus raised his head and slowly opened his eyes.

  "Sorry."

  She shrugged. He sat a bit further upright.

  He said, "I suppose—" and stopped.

  "Well, don't," Justine said.

  "Maybe, in time, if there isn't Sasha—"

  "No."

  "Babe—"

  "I'm leaving too," Justine said.

  "What?"

  "I've decided," Justine said. She put her hand up to the wisps of hair on her neck, and twisted some. "I'm going."

  "Does Steve know?"

  "Not yet."

  Titus stood up.

  "Where'll you go?"

  "I don't know yet—"

  "Babe, don't go till you've got another job, don't go just because of me—"

  She looked away.

  "It's got nothing to do with you."

  "That," Titus said, "really depresses me."

  "Don't make me laugh," Justine said desperately. "Don't make me like you."

  He reached forward and put a hand on her arm.

  "Stay—"

  She jerked her arm away.

  "Don't."

  "Sorry. It's just that I'm so bloody miserable."

  She looked at him hard. Her eyes were full of tears.

  "Yes," she said furiously. "Yes."

  When Marnie was small, and her parents weren't getting on too well, her father used to clear out the basement. It never looked much different when he'd finished, except all the lumber would be piled in a different corner, and the boys' pool table would be cleared of boxes, and the little thick glass window, through which you could see the pilot light for the furnace, would have been polished. After he'd been crashing about down there for a few hours, her father would come upstairs to take a shower, and then he'd put a gun in the back of his pickup and roar off to the cottage and Mamie's mother would glance up from whatever work she was doing—she was always doing work then—and ask someone to bring her some coffee. It was only years later, long after Mamie's parents had divorced, and her mother had married Lai, who was a philosophy professor and more than her intellectual make weight, and Marnie had had a row with her mother about her choice of career and her decision to go to England, that she found herself, almost without meaning to be, down in the basement hurling broken lampshades and splitting boxes of out-of-date academic magazines into a pile to be put out for the trash.

  It had occurred to her then to call her father. He'd gone to live near Halifax, to lead the kind of practical outdoor life that suited him, with a woman called Sandie who believed in self-sufficiency. Once he'd gone to Halifax, it didn't seem to cross his mind to come west again, even to see his children, but if he was called, he sounded both delighted and interested, and Marnie would picture him in a checked shirt and overalls, standing in his rural kitchen, smiling with real affection into the telephone. She pictured him saying, "You do what you have to do, hon," so vividly that she did indeed call him, and he answered on an early mobile telephone—he'd always been interested in technology—from his pickup, and said, "Now, hon, if it's what's in your heart to do, and England is the place to do it, you go do it in England."

  Now, nearly twenty years later, sitting on the kitchen floor with, as a basement-clearing substitute, the contents of the tin and pan cupboard strewn around her, her father came into her mind again. He'd had a hip operation but was back at home now, being nursed by Sandie, and so it would be perfectly possible to call to ask how he was, and then just gradually let the call slide into telling him that she seemed to have lost her way, and that all the clarity of purpose and intention that had guided her for almost forty years had become blurred in the last few months, and that she had never felt so foreign in this land which had been her home now for almost half her life.

  She couldn't quite imagine what her father would say. Anything too philosophical, or metaphysical, unsettled him and made him tense and anxious, as life with her mother had done. But she knew he not only had her real welfare at heart, but was also not temperamentally inclined to judge. Were she to ring her mother—so mellowed now, so relaxed by living with Lai who saw no merit in a life that was exclusively a life of the mind—her mother might be sympathetic, might be ready with advice, but there woul
d always be, at the back of everything she said, the unspoken admonishment that as Marnie had chosen, deliberately, this bed of an English life, and marriage to an Englishman, she now had to lie on it.

  Marnie sighed. She picked up a muffin tin and shook the dried corpses of two daddy-long-legs out of it. From the family room came the strains of the theme tune from Thomas the Tank Engine, which meant that Petey had eluded his nap—and she had been so certain he would sleep, after his swim group—and his room, and had come downstairs to watch a video. It was incredible to Marnie that he had no fear of being caught, and reprimanded. His purpose was always so focused, and so steely, that it plainly overrode, obliterated, all that he knew—he knew—about the consequences of forbidden actions. You could talk all the child psychology you liked, comfort yourself with the knowledge that this two-year-old behavior was unlikely to translate into similar twenty-year-old behavior, but nothing helped the exhausting and sometimes frightening business of dealing with Petey, day in, day out, now.

  Wearily, Marnie put the muffin tin down and got to her feet. At the same moment, the front door opened, and then slammed, followed by the sound of Petey's feet running into the hall.

  "Hi there," David said to him. "How're you doing?"

  He appeared in the kitchen doorway holding Petey in his arms. He looked at the floor.

  "Going to make a cake?"

  Marnie looked at the clutter round her feet.

  "I was thinking of calling my father."

  David set Petey on the floor.

  "I don't get the connection—"

  "No," Marnie said, "you wouldn't. It isn't a connection to anyone but me." She glanced up. "You're home early."

  "Yes."

  "Something wrong?"

  David ruffled Petey's hair.

  "I just had enough."

  "Yes," Marnie said. "It's a hard feeling."

  Petey leaned against his father's leg.

  "Bic?"

  "No, he may not," Marnie said. "He didn't stay in bed."

  "I climbed," Petey said truthfully.

  "And now," Marnie said, making a move towards the door, "I am going to unplug that television."

  David leaned to try and catch her arm.

  "Could he watch it?"

  "No."

  "Ten minutes?" David said. "I want to say something."

  "Oh please—"

  "No," David said, "not another thunderbolt."

  Marnie swallowed. She looked down at Petey. He looked back, calm and unconcerned.

  "Till the end of this video."

  They watched him trot out of the room, back to the television.

  "The others were never this—this willfully disobedient. They wanted to please me. They wanted to get it right."

  "Maybe," David said, "you were different."

  "Let's not make something else my fault, huh?"

  "I didn't mean—"

  Marnie kicked a cake tin.

  "What do we do with the possible theory, then, that I was a more able mother when I worked than I am when I don't?"

  David picked his way towards her among the pans and put his arms round her. She stiffened.

  He said, "I came home to talk to you."

  She closed her eyes. It was almost unbearable that he should think he could claim her full attention, from whatever else was preoccupying her, simply by putting his arms round her. It was even more unbearable because it was true.

  He held her a little tighter.

  "I want to say some things," he said against the side of her head, "that I can't say to anyone else."

  She held her breath. If she didn't, she knew she would say, "Nathalie?" in a tone of voice whose neutrality she couldn't guarantee.

  "Not even Nathalie," David said. "Not now."

  Marnie let her breath go.

  She said, "Do you want me to make some coffee? Do you want to sit somewhere more comfortable?"

  "No."

  She relaxed a little. She felt him adjust his hold on her, moving his arms until they were behind her shoulders.

  He said, "Marnie, I am so tired of all this going back."

  She didn't move. She opened her eyes and looked into the buff brushed cotton of his rolled-up workshirt sleeve. Then she looked down his arm a little to that fine tracery of scars, like the veins on a leaf, scars she'd always known about and never, for some reason, mentioned. She brought her hand up and laid a finger on his skin.

  "Not back to this," she said.

  He took a tiny breath.

  "Never to that."

  She took her finger away.

  He said, "You knew."

  "Yes."

  She felt him sigh.

  She added, "It doesn't matter, my knowing."

  He said, "It's a relief. Like—like not having to keep going back to the past is a relief. It's—it's being freed from something because—well, I haven't just been doing it the last few months, you see. It might look like that to you, but I now know I've done it always, I've always been conscious of the gaps and the questions, I've always had this where-do-I-come-from stuff at the back of my mind. Now that I know some answers, I realize how much I needed to know them. I mayn't like some of them much, but I know them."

  "OK," Marnie whispered.

  He took his cheek away from her hair.

  He said, "I never realized, you see, that just going on living wasn't going to take me away from my past. I thought it would, I thought it had to, that time would just sort of cover it over, after a while. But it didn't. It didn't just take me somewhere else, it just kept taking me back to my childhood, back to all those things I didn't know. And that place, that childhood place, was the one place I didn't want to be."

  He bent his head a little lower.

  He said softly, "Do you get me?"

  She nodded. He moved a hand behind her to hold her pigtail.

  He said, "I have no regrets about finding Carole. I feel kind of sorry for her. I don't even seem to mind that she couldn't really love me because I wasn't the one she wanted. Maybe I ought to mind, but I don't."

  Marnie raised her head a little.

  She said clearly, "Lynne loved you."

  "Yes," David said, and then, after a pause, without any anxiety or questioning in his voice, "And you do."

  She nodded again, pulling her plait free of his grasp.

  He said, "Maybe, if your mother can't love you, you're never very certain of your own lovableness. Maybe you don't quite know how to do love, even if you'd like to."

  Marnie took a small step back, freeing her arms. She raised them and rested them on David's shoulders.

  "I think your mother would have liked to love you now," she said. "But it's too late. She's trapped."

  "And so is Martin."

  "Martin?"

  "He came. He came and found me at work. He came to tell me that none of them wanted another thing to do with me."

  "Oh David—"

  "He told me that she'd had a choice of three sons, and had only chosen two—"

  "How dare he—"

  "Because he's unhappy. He's not sure of her. He wanted me to think he'd come as a family deputation, but I think he just came because he couldn't stand not to."

  "Poor, sad guy."

  "Yes."

  Marnie looked up at him. She moved one hand so that she could touch his neck with her forefinger.

  "David—"

  "Yes?"

  "Nathalie—"

  "She's had a hard time," David said. "I get the feeling she got even harder answers than I did, less straightforward."

  "That's not what I meant."

  "No."

  "I meant—" She stopped and took her hands off David's shoulders. Then she put them flat on his chest and regarded them sternly, as if something important was written on the backs of them. She said, "Why have you said all this stuff to me and not to her?"

  "Because you are the right person."

  "Even if I almost never have been before?"

  "
That was part of the problem," David said, "the being stuck in the past problem. She was stuck there with me."

  Marnie said hesitantly, "Is—is something rather amazing happening?"

  "I don't know. I don't know about the amazing, I mean. I hope so. But I do know about the happening."

  The door to the garden swung open. Daniel, fresh from school, stood there carrying his bookbag and wearing his cycling helmet. He looked at his parents.

  "What's going on?"

  They said nothing. He dropped his bag on the step, and came further into the kitchen. He looked at all the cake tins on the floor.

  He said, "Is it someone's birthday?"

  Fifty yards ahead of them, Polly was pedaling furiously on her Barbie bicycle. She had refused to let Steve detach the stabilizers, just as she had refused, during her swimming lessons, to remove her armbands. Steve could see her clearly, curls flying, riding with purpose straight down the center of the main asphalt path in Westerham Park. Boys on boards and blades and mini-scooters were swooping respectfully round her in a way, Steve thought, that could only, when she was older and more vulnerable, end in tears or triumph.

  It was easier, he was finding, to focus on Polly than on Nathalie. Nathalie, who had never been very demonstrative, was holding his arm, actually closely linked to him, leaning on him, her head occasionally turning towards him, so that her hair brushed his shoulder. She had taken his arm as soon as they entered the park, and she was talking to him as she had been talking the last few days, earnestly and confidingly, as if he, instead of being the man she happened to live with who also happened to lack the required degree of emotional intelligence, had been transformed into a soulmate, into the kind of person who would, uniquely, understand the complexity and conflict of emotion that she was currently going through.

  It was, Steve thought, feeling the pressure of her arm through the cotton of his shirtsleeve, agony. He felt terrible, awful, base. He could hear her talking on about Cora, about motherhood, about the long painful journey to reconciliation with self, however disappointing, and could sense, in the way she was talking, that not only did she want him to understand her and comfort her, but also that she knew he would, because he could, because he had suffered a similar disillusionment, a similar feeling of not being perfectly matched to his actual beginnings. She was talking in a way, in fact, that he would have sold his soul for, up to a week or so ago, a way that he had longed for her to talk to him, a way he had jealously feared, all the years they had been together, that she had reserved exclusively for David. And now here it was, pouring out of her, sweet and confiding, and he had put himself in a place where he was, quite simply, too grubby to receive it. He looked ahead at Polly on her pink bicycle and longed, with a childish anguish, to change places with her.