Brother and Sister

by Joanna Trollope

  "Do you know something," Nathalie said. "Do you know something really unexpected? It's—it's how humbling this has all been, how it's made me feel I made myself a tragedy queen I'd no right to be. I mean, I sort of saw myself—awful to admit it—as the center of the world, I saw a kind of glamour in my situation, a kind of pathos. And now I know Cora's story, I feel terrible about that, I feel that what she's been through in terms of loneliness and being just, well, forgotten is ten times worse than anything that's happened to me. And then I feel worse because I can't see her as my mother. I can see her as a sweet person who got caught up in something she didn't intend in a million years, and has been paying for it ever since, and I feel desperately sorry for her. But I can't feel that sort of blood link I expected to feel, that I feel for Polly—"

  "Look at Polly," Steve said, interrupting.

  Nathalie looked. Then she looked at Steve.

  "Aren't you listening?"

  "Yes—"

  "Aren't you interested? I thought, I really thought you were interested—"

  "I am. I am."

  "I expect I'm repeating myself. I mean, you do that, don't

  you, while you work stuff out—"

  "Nathalie—"

  "What?"

  Steve stopped walking. He looked at the sky.

  He said, "It isn't that."

  "Well, what?"

  "I'm deeply interested in what you're saying. I'm really concerned, I love having you talk to me like this, I've longed for you to talk to me like this—" He stopped.

  Nathalie slid her arm out of his and took his hand.

  "What's the matter?"

  Steve could feel tears coming.

  He said with difficulty, "I can't let you. I can't let you talk like this. I can't let you be so—so—trusting—"

  "Why not? What's the matter?"

  Steve pulled his hand out of hers and turned his back on her. His head was bent.

  He said, as inaudibly as possible, "I've had an affair."

  "What?"

  He raised his head a little.

  He said again, not turning, "I've had an affair."

  There was a silence, an apparently interminable and complicated silence. And then Nathalie walked round him until she could see his face.

  "An affair?"

  "Yes."

  He couldn't look at her. He could see her face, so close to his, and he stared just past it, just past her ear and a dark cloud of her hair.

  "Why?" Nathalie said in a kind of whispered shriek.

  He shook his head.

  "I was lonely."

  "Lonely?"

  "I didn't think I was of any account to you. I didn't think I was enough for you—"

  "An affair," Nathalie said, with horror.

  "I'm so sorry, so sorry—"

  "Who was she?"

  "You know."

  "No, I don't. Who—oh my God," Nathalie said. "Not her, not Titus's girlfriend, not that pseudo—"

  "Yes," Steve said.

  Nathalie took a step back and put her hands to her face.

  "Why now—"

  "It was because of now. And it's over."

  Nathalie said nothing.

  "It's over," Steve said. "I slept with her once, and it's over. I ended it and she's gone."

  Nathalie took her hands away. She looked straight at him.

  "It's over?"

  "Yes. I promise. And it was never to do with love, never, ever to do with love—"

  "Over—"

  "Yes."

  "For you," Nathalie said. Her eyes were huge. "For you, maybe. But can't you see, for me, it's only just beginning?" And then she turned away from him and began to run down the path towards Polly and her bicycle.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Do you need a Scotch or something?" David said.

  Steve shook his head.

  "It doesn't seem to make any difference. But thank you."

  "A pint, then."

  "Yes—"

  "I'll get it," David said. "You stay there. I'll get it."

  Steve watched him walk away across the pub and then, as big men so often seem so peacefully able to do, through the crowd at the bar to a place directly opposite the bartender. He thought, shamefacedly, that even if he'd had the collectedness of wit to offer to get the drinks first he might not have made it to the bar, might, quite simply, not have been able to walk across that floor with David watching him, David knowing what he had done, David knowing and then doing something he had almost never done in all the years they had known each other—telephoning and suggesting a drink.

  "A drink—" Steve had said, as if David had suggested a trip to the moon. "With—with you?"

  "Why not?"

  Steve had shifted his mobile against his ear. Nathalie had been round to see David and Marnie the night before, had been gone hours and had then returned and made it plain that, for the third night, she preferred Steve to sleep on the sofa in the sitting room.

  "Because—"

  "What?"

  "Nathalie saw you last night—"

  "This isn't about Nathalie. Or, only peripherally about Nathalie. It is, in fact, something I would rather tell you than tell Nathalie. I would rather you told Nathalie."

  "OK," Steve said uncertainly.

  "Good," David had said. "Good. The Seven Tuns at lunchtime."

  And now here he was, on a padded bench covered in exactly the kind of harsh velour fabric favored by his father for the Royal Oak, being bought a pint by David.

  "There," David said, setting it down.

  "Thanks—"

  David sat down on a chair opposite Steve, and hitched it closer.

  "Look," David said, "let's get this over with. Last night, when Nathalie came. We're very sorry, but we're not getting involved. It's for you guys to sort out."

  "I thought," Steve said, "that you'd want to call me all the names I've been calling myself."

  "Nope."

  "Didn't she—"

  "She didn't call you names, either. She's shocked, but she isn't calling you names."

  Steve gave his glass a nudge.

  He said, "I'm shocked—"

  "I bet."

  "And ashamed."

  David said nothing. He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees.

  "And now," Steve said, "as of this morning, it looks as if my entire workforce is walking out."

  David glanced up sharply.

  "What's the matter with them? Titus you'd understand—"

  "Justine because of Titus, and Meera because she says I am not concentrating on the business and I mind most about her because she's right."

  "She looks to me the kind of girl who is usually right."

  "She's brilliant. She'll be impossible to replace. But do I want to replace her? Do I want to replace any of them?

  Do I—"

  "Look," David said, "I don't want to seem unsympathetic, but that's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about."

  "My business?"

  "Mine," David said.

  Steve picked up his beer and put it down again.

  "You're not in trouble, surely—"

  "It's doing fine," David said. "It's not growing like it was, but it's OK. I like it, but I don't love it, not anymore. I'm going to sell it."

  Steve looked startled.

  "Sell it!"

  "Yes," David said, "because we're going to Canada."

  "You always go to Canada—"

  "I mean go to Canada for good."

  Steve leaned back and let out a breath.

  "Wow."

  "All this family stuff," David said, "the way it's turned out, this finding my mother, and then a brother who wants to murder me, and realizing my name isn't my name, and putting Marnie through it all, well, it's sort of made me feel I've got to start again somewhere. I've got the answers now, I've got the knowledge, I can start with those, I can live somewhere where people only know me with those."

  Steve said, "Will you change your name
?"

  "I might."

  "To your father's name?"

  David shrugged. "Maybe. Or it may be too late—"

  "Will you try and find your father?"

  "Maybe that, too."

  "I think—I see what you're doing."

  "No conjecture anymore," David said, "no wondering. No walking down a street having fantasies that this mythical mother might have walked down it before. She didn't. She's Carole Latimer, and she never came to Westerham."

  "But why Canada?"

  "Think about it," David said. "Think about living in Winnipeg and just being accepted, quite easily, as the person I actually am, without having to lug all the adoption baggage round with me. My parents have names. I have a name. I have wonderful adoptive parents but they live in England so that dynamic can actually, thankfully, stay in England. It gets simple, at last, it gets straightforward at last, it gets honest."

  "Yes."

  "And Marnie gets to go home."

  "Yes."

  "And perhaps I will find, in a way, that I've gone home too."

  Steve looked at him.

  "And if it doesn't work?"

  "What do you mean, not work?"

  "What if you don't like it," Steve said. "What if you aren't happy?"

  David looked back.

  He said, "Have you been listening?"

  "I think so—"

  "What have I just said about the way my life has been? How can Canada be anything other than better than that?"

  Steve glanced down.

  "I bet the kids are thrilled."

  "They don't know yet."

  "And—and you want me to tell Nathalie."

  "Yes."

  "Why don't you tell her yourself?"

  "Why do you think?"

  "Because you don't want to be the one to upset her further—"

  "No," David said. He picked up his beer glass again. "Because I can't be there for her anymore. And you can."

  Steve said nothing. Then he glanced away across the room, towards the comfortable crowd by the bar.

  "Suppose I can't," he said. "Suppose I've blown it."

  David drank his beer, then held the glass and looked down into it.

  "Then you'll have to think again. Just like I have."

  In ten minutes or so, Betty would knock on Cora's door, and say tea was ready. Often, in the past, when she hadn't got classes to teach, Cora would go into the kitchen and try to help with slicing onions and peeling carrots, even though she never did it quite the way Betty would have liked. She'd be given an apron and a board and a knife just as if, she thought, she was a good child, and then be set a task at the table with Betty watching, alert to the inevitable disappointment of Cora's performance. But lately, since Nathalie's visit, Cora hadn't felt like too much time in the kitchen, too much time alone with Betty who was as congenitally incapable as their mother had been of keeping the smallest thing that was on her mind to herself. And as none of the opinions that Betty currently—and strongly—held coincided with Cora's, it was better, really, to stay out of the way unless Don was in the room to neutralize things, to say, "You leave her now, Betty, you just let her alone."

  Well, she was alone. But, contrary to Betty's insistence that she was desperate in her loneliness, she was not, in her own view, any more alone than she'd ever been. She suspected that some people were just like that, alone all their lives, with this odd sense of not quite belonging, not quite fitting in. It wasn't particularly painful, once you got used to it; it was just a state of being that people who needed close communication with other people would never understand. In fact, Cora sometimes wondered if, had the opportunity for close communication with someone ever come up, had she ever surrendered to any of the offers made by Betty's paying guests, she would have liked it at all. At least with herself, she knew who she was, she was in a place of familiarity and control. How must it feel, then, to embark on unknown human terrain, to take chances and make bargains and compromises? How must it feel to give up—be required to give up—the ultimate freedom of self?

  Anyway, if she was truthful, she hadn't expected any change in the alone department when she met Nathalie. She might have made her little shrine, and pored fascinatedly over those photographs, but she had never deluded herself that she'd be embarking on some fabled episode of happy families. Meeting Nathalie had been about something quite different, about the unspeakable relief and comfort to be derived from realizing that she was forgiven, that Nathalie wasn't angry or resentful of the past, that Nathalie had managed to salvage something out of a life which had started so wretchedly. It was so difficult to make her see that she'd never had any idea of playing mother and daughter, of trying to retrieve what was lost and gone forever.

  The trouble was—and Betty, ever lynx-eyed, had pounced upon this—that the meeting hadn't been easy. It hadn't been exactly difficult, but it had been undeniably awkward. It was inevitable, when she thought about it, that there'd be a tension between their blood bond and their differing ways of life, but it wasn't until she saw Nathalie, and heard her voice, and watched the way she sat and drank her coffee, that she realized that courtesies were going to have to substitute for candors. Nathalie hadn't put a foot wrong, but she hadn't relaxed either. When the door of the guest house where Cora had booked her a room closed behind her that evening, Cora knew that Nathalie was relieved to be alone, and so was she. She might be hurt, in the way you can't help being if you feel you've made a bit of a fool of yourself, but she was also free to go back to her room where she lived not just with the inside of her own head, but also with baby Samantha. And that, she knew, was where the pain lay, the pain that had to be faced and dealt with. It didn't really lie with Nathalie and her southern ways, or only obliquely; it lay with the realization that baby Samantha, idealized, lost and precious, was, in hard, cold reality, no more. She supposed that this was how you felt if you lost your faith. If, indeed, you'd ever had one.

  Betty's fist crashed on the bedroom door.

  "Tea's ready!"

  Cora stayed where she was, sitting on her bed.

  Betty turned the door handle and looked in.

  "I don't like to see you brooding."

  "I'm not brooding," Cora said. "I'm thinking."

  Betty came further into the room.

  "Same thing—"

  "I'm not resentful," Cora said. "I'm not wishing what happened hadn't happened. I'm just thinking about it."

  Betty stood in front of her.

  "What'll you do now?"

  Cora gave a little shrug.

  "Nothing."

  "Has she rung you?"

  "Once," Cora said, "to tell me that she's safely back and Polly's having her ear done on the twenty-seventh."

  Betty gave a little snort.

  "That all?"

  Cora glared at her.

  "What d'you expect her to talk to me about? The weather? The television?"

  "You know exactly what I mean."

  "I'm not expecting anything," Cora said. "I got what I wanted and I'm not looking for anything more."

  "Good."

  "Why good—"

  "Because," Betty said, holding out a hand as a signal for Cora to get up, "you can now start accepting that it's over."

  Cora looked with distaste at Betty's hand.

  "Over—"

  "Yes," Betty said. Her voice had a ring of finality to it. "Yes. Chapter closed. At last."

  Lynne stood by her kitchen sink, waiting for the tap to run really cold. Looking through the window above the sink, she could see Nathalie just where she had left her when she'd said she'd come in and get them both a drink, sitting on the bench by the lilac bush, staring in front of her.

  "I don't need a drink," Nathalie had said.

  Lynne put a hand on her arm.

  "You do, dear. You've been crying."

  Nathalie had turned a wan smile on her.

  "You always say that. You always did, when we'd been crying. D'you suppose a drink will f
ill up our tear ducts?"

  Lynne had put elderflower cordial and ice cubes in two tumblers. It was a silly gesture, she knew, making a drink, but her instincts always drove her to the consolingly practical and, in any case, she'd needed a moment in the kitchen to collect herself, to steady her mind in the face of Nathalie's wild, tearful claim, made only minutes before, that the two most important men in her life had betrayed her, Steve by sleeping with this Sasha girl, and David by going to Canada for good.

  "How could he?" Nathalie had wailed. "How could he do it? And how could David leave me?"

  It had occurred to Lynne to point out that she was as much affected by David's departure as Nathalie was, but with an enormous effort of will, she had restrained herself.

  "I can't believe it," Nathalie said. "I can't believe they could both do this to me. And in this conspiracy. David telling Steve to tell me—"

  Lynne picked up the tumblers one by one, and held them under the tap. There was so much, it seemed, to feel at the moment, so many conflicting things that it was hard to know what was uppermost. Her own shock and dismay at David's news and Steve's infidelity had, after all, come hard on the heels of an exquisite relief at the outcome of David and Nathalie meeting their mothers. It was—as it so often was, she reflected—yet more evidence of life only allowing you to have something you longed for if it took away something equally important simultaneously, as compensation. She put the tumblers on a tray and looked at a packet of salted almonds. If she put those on the tray too, Nathalie would tell her that eating was no cure for emotional torment. Her hand hovered a moment, and then left the nuts where they were.

  She carried the tray out into the garden and set it down on the table that Ralph had made years ago, when eating outside had graduated from what you did on the beach to something you might stylishly do any fine day of the year.

  "He hardly knew her," Nathalie said, turning her head away to look down the length of the garden. "I mean, what does that say? What kind of man goes to bed with someone he hardly knows?"