Brother and Sister (16 page)

Carole looked down. She looked at her hands in her lap, at her well-shaped nails, at her wedding ring.

She said faintly, "What about the boys?"

"I'll talk to them," Connor said, "I'll explain why David is coming here."

"Martin won't like it—"

Connor said, "Martin doesn't like anything much at the moment."

"But this is his home just now—"

"Just now."

"Connor—"

Connor looked steadily at her.

He said, with decision, "You see him here. For a couple of hours. Then I'll bring the boys in."

"I can't!" Carole cried, almost shrieking.

Connor picked up his paper again. His voice was lofty again.

"You have to, darling," he said.

And now, here she was, waiting. Here she was alone, abandoned by Connor and Martin and Euan—Martin in a smoldering rage, Euan
in a characteristic state of cheerful curiosity. It was to Euan she had said foolishly, gesturing at her clothes, "Do I look
all right?"

He'd glanced at her, grinning. He had all the comfortable confidence in the world, all the happy assurance of personal acceptability
that had been entirely left out of Martin. He'd given her a quick kiss.

"Why'd it matter, Mum?" And then he'd said teasingly, "What were you wearing last time?"

He'd made her laugh. He could usually make her laugh. She watched the three of them go down the steps to the basement garage
as if she would never see them again, as if everything that held her world together was going off to certain death. She waited
in the front doorway until the Mercedes came gliding up the ramp and turned towards Ladbroke Grove, and it nearly broke her
heart—the heart she had always supposed to be so unsentimental—that none of them thought to turn and wave to her.

And now she was waiting. She was crossing from the wooden floor of the hall to the carpeted floor of the sitting room, and
listening, with idiotic concentration, to the way the sound of her footsteps changed. She was looking out of the sitting-room
windows, looking at the white lilac and not seeing it, and then she was turning and walking back again, past Connor's favorite
chair, past the sofa, past the television, past the bookcase of all those unread books, and back into the hall and the sharp
sound of her heels on the pale-wood veneer. When the doorbell rang, it briefly stopped her breath. She stood on the rug in
the middle of the hall and looked at the bland back of the front door and thought, I'm not breathing, I can't breathe.

The doorbell rang again.

"One," Carole said. "Two. Three."

She felt her legs move stiffly as if they had no joints, she saw her hand on the heavy gilt handle of the lock, she saw it
turn, and the door swung smoothly inward and there on the step a man was standing, a tall man, older than she remembered and
fairer somehow, but still Rory. Rory . . . She swallowed. No, not Rory. Of course not Rory. The man seemed to sway a little,
or perhaps she did, and then he leaned in through the doorway and kissed her cheek, rather clumsily, and said, "Hello, Carole."

"I don't usually drink whiskey," David said. He looked down into his glass, at the silky tea-colored liquid sliding about
at the bottom.

"No," Carole said, "but this isn't a usually occasion."

She was sitting across the room from him, not far away, but not exactly close either, not where he could look at her properly,
examine her. And it was difficult, he found, to look anywhere else, to avoid looking at this person, this woman, this Carole
Latimer in her elegant clothes, in her elegant and adult sitting room with its careful lighting, its subdued colors, its absence
of child or dog or clutter. They had lived here for just a few years, she'd said, it wasn't where her—other sons had been
brought up, it wasn't where family life, in the accepted sense, had ever happened. David had glanced at the carpet.

"I hope," he said, "my shoes are clean."

It was the first time she'd looked at him. She'd looked at him quite directly, and he'd seen how remarkable her eyes were,
greenish, clear, almost speckled, and his stomach had given an involuntary little lurch.

"I shouldn't," she said with a warmth she hadn't yet displayed, "care at
all
if they aren't." And then she said, in a lower tone, "You're not on trial, you know."

He tilted his whiskey now, slipping the liquid round the glass.

He said, not looking at her, but at the whiskey, "Did you think about me?"

She turned to gaze out of the window.

"No."

"Never?"

"I told you," Carole said.

David tipped the glass so that the whiskey in it crept to the very rim.

"I can't quite get my head round the fact that nobody knew about me."

"I went away," Carole said. "I went away quite deliberately. I said I needed to convalesce, so nobody took account of the
time."

"Who's nobody?"

"My parents."

A little whiskey splashed on to David's thigh.

Carole said nothing. She went on gazing out of the window.

"My father?" David persisted.

There was another pause and then Carole said, "He didn't know."

"He didn't know I'd been born?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Carole's head whipped round.

She said furiously, "Because he didn't
want
to."

"Didn't—"

"No. Didn't
want
to. What right have you to ask me questions like this?"

David put his whiskey glass down with elaborate care.

"Because," he said, "he is my father and you are my mother and without the two of you, I wouldn't be here."

Carole bent her head. It was hard to tell if she was angry or distressed or if she was crying.

"I meant what I said," David said. "I meant what I said on the telephone. All this is on your terms. I don't want to upset
anything you've got now, your family. I just want a few answers."

She nodded. She reached a hand out blindly for her own drink and took a big swallow.

"Like what?"

"Do I look like my father?"

She nodded again, violently.

"Exactly?"

Carole looked up slowly.

"Fairer," she said faintly. "His features. My coloring. Maybe—maybe you're taller."

David leaned forward a little.

"Did you love him?"

"Oh my God!" Carole cried. "What kind of question is that?"

"So you did—"

"Yes."

"So you loved the man you had me by?"

"I told you," Carole said again. "I told you, didn't I?"

"But you didn't want me."

"I never said—"

"He didn't want me."

"He didn't want a baby," Carole said. She pushed her hands through her hair. "We were too young. He was just starting. We
weren't ready for a baby."

"But if there wasn't a baby, I mean, if nobody but those nuns in Suffolk and your friend what sername knew there'd been a
baby, why didn't you stay with him, why didn't you stay until you
were
both ready for a baby?"

"He'd gone," Carole said.

"Gone—"

"He went when I knew I was pregnant. He said I had to have an abortion and—I did think about it, I did, but then he went anyway.
I think—I think now," Carole said loudly, "that he wanted to go. That my being pregnant was a kind of excuse, the excuse he
was actually looking for."

David shifted in his chair.

"He sounds a complete shit."

"No," Carole said.

"No?"

She looked up.

"I didn't have an abortion, because I wanted his baby. Or at least, I did then. I wanted something of him, of his. I thought—"
She stopped, and then she said, "I thought he'd change."

"And he didn't."

"I don't know. I couldn't find him. I tried, but I couldn't. I've never found him. I don't want to find him."

"Perhaps he went abroad—"

"Quite likely."

"Perhaps he died—"

An expression of intense pain crossed Carole's face.

"No—"

"I only said perhaps," David said. "But would it be easier?"

"Nothing to do with him has ever been easy. That's not the point."

David leaned forward more and put his elbows on his knees.

"What's his name?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It does. It matters to me."

"I never say it," Carole said almost desperately, "I never say it out loud."

David said quietly, "It's one of the things I came to ask you. It's one of the things I need to know. It's—it's something
I don't
have.
"

She said, almost in a whisper, "Rory."

"Rory. Rory what?"

"Ecclestone."

David thought. He bent his head and considered for a moment. Then he said, "So I am David Ecclestone?"

"No," Carole said. "You were born David Hanley. Hanley was my maiden name."

"But Ecclestone was my father's name."

"Yes."

"And David?"

"Your father's second name."

"Right. Rory David Ecclestone. R. D. Ecclestone."

"Yes. But it's not your name. Ecclestone isn't your name. You were registered as David Hanley."

David said, with the first small show of anger he had displayed all afternoon, "Don't you think that's for me to decide?"

She was startled.

"What?"

"Isn't it for
me
to decide, now? Haven't I been handed round all these names belonging to other people long enough? Haven't I worn these labels
that aren't mine for years and years without complaint? Isn't it about
time
I was allowed to be who I really am?"

"Sorry," Carole said. "Sorry—"

"And suppose, whatever he was like, whatever you
say
he was like, I'd rather go the accepted route and carry my father's name? Why shouldn't I?"

Carole stood up abruptly.

"Don't you take your anger out on me."

"I'm not angry—"

"No."

"But you have been."

David stood too, slowly.

"Yes."

"For having you adopted—"

"It's hard," David said, sighing, "to get over the fact that you were given away."

Carole took a few steps closer. She looked up at him. He could see her green eyes and smell scent and whiskey.

"I had to."

He said nothing.

"I'd lost everything."

"You'd lost him, you mean—"

"And ever since," Carole said, and he could see a faint glitter of tears, "ever since, all those years, I've had no one to
talk to about this. No one."

"You must have had friends, girlfriends—"

She shook her head.

"I hadn't done something very easily—acceptable. I'd fallen for the wrong person, fallen pregnant, betrayed my upbringing.
I'd put myself beyond the pale."

David glanced round the room. He gave a small snort of laughter.

"Hardly—"

"It
looks
all right," Carole said. "It all looks fine, doesn't it?"

"What?" David said. "Your marriage? Your sons?"

Carole took a step forward. She was very close to David now. She put up her hands and grasped at the lapels of his jacket.

"I can't take hostility," Carole said. "I can't. Not in any form."

He put his own hands up and covered hers. The skin on her hands felt light and smooth and thin.

"No—"

"You are so like him! You look so like him!"

David took hold of Carole's hands and gently detached them.

He said, "I'll try and think about that. About what you said."

She took an unsteady step or two backwards.

"Well," she said, with regained composure. "Have you filled in some blanks?"

He said uncertainly, "I think so."

"Another whiskey—"

"No. No thank you."

"There's actually some more blanks to fill in."

"Oh?"

"My husband," Carole said, "my sons. Your—half brothers."

"Oh. Yes. Well, one day—"

"Today," Carole said.

"Now!"

"Soon."

"Coming here—"

"They live here," Carole said. "They're coming back." She glanced at him. She had retrieved her distance, her self-control.
She gave a fleeting smile. "They want to meet you."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

S
asha told Steve she had once lived in a squat. He rather suspected that she had told a lot of people this, especially men;
that it was the kind of achievement she took out and polished publicly every so often, to impress. Steve was impressed. He
was, himself, the kind of person for whom radical, even anarchic, behavior was at best pitiful and at worst downright destructive.
The very thought, at sixteen or seventeen, of exchanging the dubious advantages of the back bedroom at the Royal Oak for something
spectacularly worse would have seemed to him completely lunatic. Even freedom had its proper price, not any old one.

After the squat, it seemed, Sasha's living arrangements had always remained fluid. There'd been a spell at home helping her
mother nurse her dying stepfather; a spell living with a Turk—relationship heavily unspecified—in a decaying wooden house
on the Bosphorus; a spell training—unfinished—as a mental-health nurse; a spell looking after a penthouse flat in the Canal
Street district of Manchester; a spell in a caravan in a wood in Northumberland with two retired greyhounds and a boy with
learning difficulties. Now, in her view, Sasha had washed up somewhere very secure. Now, on a mysterious mixture of grants
and subsidies and part-time jobs in shops and bars, Sasha had achieved her own room, with a lockable door, in a house occupied
by a divorced mother of three who needed the rent from a lodger. The room was good, Sasha said, biggish with a wide window,
and Delia downstairs was so fanatical about her own unquestioned independence that she wasn't about to cramp anyone else's.
That's why she was divorced, really, Sasha said: Delia just couldn't compromise, not to the smallest degree.

Trying to get a picture of the exact nature of Sasha's life, Steve thought, was like trying to sculpture water. He didn't
think she lied to him, or invented things, but her priorities were so different from his, and her view of essentials so other,
that she presented a picture to him that was, at its clearest, elusive. She was loosely attached to Westerham University—until
recently Westerham Technical College—where she was working, equally loosely it seemed, on a thesis. Where this would lead,
Sasha couldn't say, and couldn't seem to see that it mattered. When she wasn't in the university's new and impressive computer
room, she was working in a small health-food store with vegan principles (not even gelatin permitted), or in a bar called
Rouge Noir, or in a second-hand book and music store specializing in early rock, or babysitting Delia's three children. She
seemed, at the same time, always to be busy and always to be free if the mood took her. Her list of commitments—which included
yoga and a salsa class—appeared to be consistently ongoing and yet never to have a pattern.

"I don't know," Steve said, "how you don't drive yourself barmy."

She smiled at him.

"Practice," she said. "Attitude. Particularly attitude."

It was the attitude that drew Steve back and back. It was her ease with the looseness of arrangements, her acceptance of the
unconventional, her capacity to achieve a somehow approvable distance from human responsibility that made him feel, in a strange
and exhilarated way, liberated from all the exhausting burdens and preoccupations of his present life. It had nothing to do
with love, he told himself. In no way could his desire to be with Sasha even begin to impinge on the unshakable
love
he felt for Nathalie and Polly, but being with Sasha was not only exciting and intriguing, but also gave him a holiday from
himself, a holiday from Steve Ross who was currently caught in an emotional thicket from which he had no means of extricating
himself. When it occurred to him—as it did quite often—that he should not see Sasha again, he felt a small panic rise inside
him, as if there was a real threat of a vital conduit being cut off. And when he saw her—the long coat, the boots, the seal-pelt
hair—he felt a surge of pure relief.

When she asked him if he'd like to see her room, in Delia's terraced house looking on to the railway line, he'd said no.

"Why not?"

He shrugged. He didn't want to say that he was afraid, afraid of what might happen in Sasha's room, and nor did he want to
examine that fear too closely and discover that it contained some more urgent elements as well.

"Are you afraid?"

He shrugged again.

"I've almost never," Sasha said, "had a room to show anyone before. I've never had a place that I felt reflected me. But this
is a beginning. I'd like to show it to you."

Steve put his hands in his pockets.

"Does Titus—"

"Of course," Sasha said. "Of course Titus comes. He thinks it's awful." She smiled. "But then, he likes disliking what I like.
He likes that a lot."

"Perverse—"

"More about control," Sasha said. "Titus is very into control."

"Really?"

She glanced at him.

"Very," she said, and then she leaned towards him a little. "Come and see my room," she said.

She let him into the house through an Edwardian door painted purple with stained-glass panels. Inside, it was everything Steve
deplored, a cluttered cave of fabrics and objects. He knocked immediately against a cascade of wind chimes.

"Ignore," Sasha said. "Up here."

She went ahead of him up the staircase, past paintings on mirrors and a birdcage full of dolls and a vase of peacock feathers.
He watched her put a key into a door on the landing and then she turned and looked at him.

"Deep breath," she said.

The room was almost empty. It was painted red, with a black floor and white blinds at the window. It contained almost nothing
except a futon.

Steve said, "Where's your life?"

She pointed at the futon.

"There."

He swallowed.

"
Everything?
"

"Why not? Don't you work in bed?"

"No." He looked about him. "Clothes. Books—"

She pointed at a stack of canvas boxes.

"There."

"Do you recognize me? Do you recognize me here?"

He took a step or two further into the room. He looked at the single Japanese print—a woman, in a kimono, looking over her
shoulder—on the red walls, at the futon, at the pair of running shoes on the floor, precisely side by side, and he said, "It
figures."

"Sit down," she said.

"On that?"

"Where else do you suggest?"

"Sasha—"

"Never stand if you can sit. Never sit if you can lie."

"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.