Brother and Sister (11 page)

"Yes," she said, "I better had. In fact I should have told you years ago."

"But I thought you had," he said, his voice shaking now with something very close to fright. "I thought you'd told me everything,
about Rory, about the abortion—"

"There wasn't an abortion," Carole said.

Connor stared into the dark room, across Carole, across what had always seemed entirely secure into something he didn't want
to look at, at all. He wanted to say something, to speak in a way that brought things back to the familiar, but he couldn't.
He couldn't utter, he couldn't do anything but wait, wait entirely helplessly, unacceptably, at Carole's mercy. She stirred
a little and gave a tiny sigh.

"There wasn't an abortion," Carole said again. "There was a baby."

CHAPTER NINE

B
etty and Don had run their bed and breakfast for twenty years. They'd started it after Don had his accident in the factory
and was registered disabled, and Betty said that if she was going to have to give up work to look after him, they might as
well think of something they could do together, instead of moping about at home, drawing the dole and wanting to cut each
other's throats.

"I'm not having your bad back turning into the family pet," Betty said. "I'm not having you thinking about it and talking
about it all the time. It's bad enough we've both got to live with it."

Don, who was in considerable pain at the time, having been half crushed by a forklift truck driven by a boy so hungover he
could barely see straight, thought of pointing out that his back was hardly his fault, and decided against it. It was hard
on Betty, after all, hard to leave the retail trade which she loved, hard to have to come home and play nursemaid. He hitched
the elastic corset belt he was now supposed to wear even in bed a notch tighter, and said with only mild sarcasm that he'd
do his best to remember that he was actually as fit as the days he'd played scrum half for Northsea Rugby Club.

It was Cora who'd suggested doing bed and breakfast; Cora, Betty's younger sister, who was eking out a living teaching adult-education
classes in pottery and ceramics. Cora was the artistic one in the family, with an eye for color and no head whatsoever for
figures or practicalities. Betty used to despair, and disapprove of the hand-to-mouth way Cora led her life, with no money
put by for the future, and no insurance, and an inclination to spend what might have fed her for a month on a piece of arty
rubbish that wasn't fit for more than the bric-a-brac stall at a jumble sale. But Cora could come up with ideas, now and then,
ideas of surprising inventiveness, and when she said why not turn Number 9, Woodside (not a tree in sight) into a bed and
breakfast, and call it Balmoral because of Betty's passion for royalty, and Don's fondness for Scotland, they knew she was
onto something.

Over the years, Balmoral had been a respectable little earner. It had given them a modest living and, more importantly, an
occupation. Quite a lot of their guests, mostly businessmen, were regulars and Betty found she could adapt the patience she
had needed for customers in shops to an obligingness about the way guests liked their eggs or their pillows. The lift they
installed on the stairs for Don proved rather a draw, even a source of mild fun and games. The whole enterprise became more
difficult, of course, when Mother needed a home, and looking after, but at least that had been a question of adapting rather
than changing outright. Mother had, too, been infinitely more civil to the guests than she ever managed to be to her own family,
so in her own way she'd become rather an asset, a kind of crochety fixture, whose presence lent a small air of stability,
and therefore of home, to the place. When Mother finally died—it took her six years and three false alarms—Betty found it
strangely hard to do anything commercial about her room which was, you had to face it, the least prepossessing room in the
house, being small and narrow and ground-floor and next to the kitchen. Whatever you did, the smell of frying seeped through
the wall to cling immovably to the curtains and carpet. Mother, of course, had liked it. That was typical of Mother, to like
only the element in her living conditions that nobody else would have put up with. But then, perverse should have been Mother's
middle name.

It was all this really, Mother's being gone, and the room being full of drawbacks and memories, and Betty missing that sense
of family that Mother had provided, despite herself, that made Betty offer the room to Cora. She'd always felt protective
of Cora, not just as a younger sister, but because Mother bullied her so, especially after the baby, and because Cora couldn't
seem to stand up to Mother, couldn't stand up to anyone much. But that was Cora really, sweet-natured and soft and always
inclined to blame herself, even when things weren't really her fault. She'd always been sympathetic, too, able to imagine
herself into someone else's shoes. In fact, if Betty hadn't had Cora there when she'd realized, after four miscarriages, that
this baby thing just wasn't going to happen, she wondered what she would have done. She couldn't believe how good Cora was
to her then, how strong, how understanding. And when you thought about what Cora had been through herself, it made her conduct
all the more extraordinary. Betty had never forgotten that. She might have inherited Mother's sharp tongue, but she wasn't
going to harbor the same hard heart. She would offer Cora Mother's room because, despite her funny clothes, her funny ways,
her uselessness with money and form-filling, Cora was her sister, Cora was
family.

At the back of her mind, too, there was something else, something uneasy. She had a feeling—no, more than that, a nasty little
knowledge—that when Cora had really needed her, over that business with her own baby, Betty hadn't helped. It wasn't that
Betty hadn't sympathized, hadn't felt for her, hadn't tried, in a way, to stand up to Mother on Cora's behalf, but she knew,
in her heart of hearts, that she hadn't done
enough.
It was only later, when she knew she was never going to have a baby of her own, that she even began to see what it had been
like for Cora at sixteen, dominated by other people, shouted at, reprimanded, cajoled, persuaded, threatened, until, at last,
she'd agreed to give the baby away. And Betty hadn't been with her then, hadn't really tried to be with her. Cora had gone
off to Scarborough, and got a job in a hotel as a chambermaid, and Betty hadn't tried to follow her, to see her. Not for three
years. Not until Cora wrote and told her she was doing pottery classes in night school and beginning to feel better.

All this had weighed on Betty down the years. Because of it, she'd never asked Cora to lift a finger to help her with Mother
and never felt a morsel of resentment about it. In fact, she did her best to keep Mother away from Cora and, when Mother began
on one of her tirades about Cora, all based on the assumption that someone who falls pregnant out of wedlock is automatically
pathological, Betty refused to listen. It wasn't possible to shut Mother up, but Betty could, and did, leave the room, sometimes
slamming the door behind her. As time went on, the basis of Mother's grievance became baldly plain, which was that her daughters,
for one reason or another, had failed to make her a grandmother. When Betty shouted she'd had enough of this, Mother would
shout back, "Girls should be good, women should be wives, and wives should be
mothersl
" and Betty would want to hit her in the face.

So Cora came to Balmoral shyly and gratefully, and hung Indian bedspreads on the bacon-scented walls and made a little shrine
in one corner with joss sticks and a tea light and a cross-legged god with his eyes shut. She brought with her, too, items
that Betty found quite hard to bear, bed linen in burnt orange, a Mexican rug in brilliant colors, peculiar lamps she had
made herself out of bits of driftwood or car parts, paintings of nudes.

"Grit your teeth," Don said. "Not a word."

He'd got very thin lately, especially in the face, worn down by years and years of never being quite free of pain.

"The joss sticks—"

"Better than drains," Don said. "Better than kippers. And she's quiet. Most days you'd never know she was there."

She was quiet. She played no music in her bizarrely appointed room and if she turned her television on—you could almost have
covered the screen with your hand, it was so small—she must have had the sound down almost to off. If Betty went in—she always
knocked, family or no family—Cora would be embroidering something in primary-colored wools or doing some of her pen-and-ink
drawings (not to Betty's taste) or reading, curled up on her bed under a striped blanket thing it gave you a headache to look
at. When she went out to work, to teach her evening classes or the supplementary art classes she taught at neighboring schools
for children with learning difficulties, Betty almost never heard her go. Sometimes she'd hear the front-door latch but mostly
she'd just be conscious, with the kind of antennae she supposed mothers had, that Cora wasn't there. She ate with them at
teatime but that was only because Betty told her she had to, that she had to have one proper meal a day, and once a month,
at the kitchen table, Don made her go through her accounts. He'd made her buy an account book, and make lists of incomings
and outgoings, and every month he explained to her, very patiently, that paying more out than you have coming in means debt.
Cora would gladly have turned all her earnings over to him and had him dole it back to her, like pocket money, but he wouldn't
let her do that.

"I won't be here forever," Don said. "I won't be here to do your thinking for you."

"She's like a child," he said to Betty afterwards. "Get her onto money and you'd do better with a quick five-year-old."

"But she's clever," Betty said, thinking of the books in Cora's room, the way she could fashion and invent things, her talent
for explaining how you use your hands to make a pot, stitch a buttonhole.

"Not for figures," Don said. "And you need figures."

In some ways, she supposed, Betty thought of Cora as a child still, as someone who couldn't be expected to shoulder the full
burden of adult life. And maybe something had happened long ago, in that traumatic year when she was sixteen, that had arrested
her, that had made her, at some profound level, either unable or unwilling to develop any further, to venture deeper into
a world of expectation and feeling that might only bring more pain. She'd never had any real relationships, for example, no
boyfriends, not even the kind of undemanding male companions some of Betty's friends had, who went with them to the pub, or
Bingo, or outings to the Dales. It wasn't that Cora seemed anti-man, but more that she didn't seem to see them, let alone
need them. Sometimes Betty would catch one of her guests eyeing Cora, speculating, puzzled but slightly fired up by Cora's
indifference, Cora's faded but still distinctly present prettiness. She'd want to say, "You leave her alone. You'll only upset
her." And they would, if they persisted. Betty didn't want Cora upset, ever again, and as long as she'd got Cora safe, among
her gods and her blankets, in the little room next to the kitchen, she would see to it that it never happened.

Cora sat in the doctor's waiting room. It was a new waiting room, tacked on to the old surgery, decorated with a false, childish
brightness and hung with posters about nutrition and sexually transmitted diseases. Cora didn't look at them. Food didn't
interest her, and sex, having led her down into the darkest pit of her whole life, was something she didn't even think about.
Why should she? After all, nuns presumably didn't either, and it didn't kill them, did it?

She shifted her hands in her lap. Her hands were why she was here, really, her hands and arms and now, if she was honest,
her hips and knees too. Dad had had arthritis, after all, he'd been crippled with it, his poor old hands like a throbbing
bunch of roots. Cora knew about the throbbing. There were some nights when the bones and joints in her hands hurt so much
she'd have given anything just to slip them out of her skin and lay them on the Mexican rug to go on hurting all by themselves,
far away from her. She didn't like to think—couldn't think—what she would do if her hands got too stiff and painful to use.
She looked down at them. They looked perfectly normal still but they belonged to someone in their mid-fifties, and Dad had
begun to be crippled up with arthritis earlier than that. But then Dad had been a miner, and working all those years deep
underground had to be one of the least natural, most body-challenging ways that anyone could spend their life. He'd have agreed
with that. He always saw his arthritis as a punishment for obeying his father in going down the mines instead of working on
the land as he'd wanted to. Dad was very puritanical, very keen on punishment. Cora looked at her hands. Maybe her arthritis
was a punishment too.

She looked at the clock. The doctor was already twenty minutes late in seeing her and there were a lot of people in the waiting
room who'd been there when she arrived. She leaned forward and picked up the nearest magazine, a battered copy of one of those
women's magazines that try and persuade their readers that, despite the emphasis on eyebrow-shaping and sex, their hearts
are actually in important social issues. Cora flicked idly. Girls gazed out, flawless, improbably arranged girls, girls of
a kind never seen on any high street, in any supermarket aisle. Cora sighed. There was a piece on aphrodisiac food, a piece
on seductive lighting, a piece on getaway weekends with the emphasis on romance. Cora thought she would rather stare into
space than glance on. She turned one more page.

"Roughly," said a headline in bold black type, "one woman in twenty-five has had a child adopted."

"Think," the article went on in slightly less emphatic type, "Just think. We have no word for the mother who surrenders her
child for adoption, do we? Is this because she is expected to disappear? It wasn't always like this. The medieval world saw
no stigma in illegitimacy, after all. It was capitalism that made a child a dependent, a liability, because it couldn't support
itself. That's all! So what's gone wrong?"

Cora closed the magazine. Her mouth was dry. She could now see, on its cover, in purple capitals, the words "UNMARRIED MOTHER?—CAN'T
WIN!" She put the magazine down very carefully on the pile she had taken it from and stood up. She couldn't stay, she couldn't
wait. At this precise moment, it didn't seem to matter how much her hands hurt: it didn't seem to matter, actually, if they
simply fell off.

She found a bench in the park with, blessedly, no one slumped moodily on it already. Northsea Park, instituted by civic-minded
Victorians, occupied some high ground above the lower part of the town, thus giving both a view out to the gray sea above
the uneven lines of rain-washed slate roofs and a healthy dose of sea air. The wind from the sea had blown most of the carefully
planted trees back against the slope, making them look as if they were painfully trying to ascend it, and thus also removing
any shelter they might have given to the seats placed thoughtfully in front of them.