Brother and Sister (18 page)

Nathalie reached for a roll of paper towels and pushed it across the table.

"Why d'you want to meet Carole?"

Marnie blew her nose.

"She's David's mother—"

"Or do you want to fight
her
for David, too? Are you going to tell her where to get off? Are you going to tell her that no one has rights like a wife does?"

Mamie's head came up.

"You haven't been tested! You don't know what it's like!"

Nathalie said nothing. She put a hand on Petey's head.

"You wait," Marnie said. "You just
wait.
"

If her room was completely dark, Polly understood, the glow stars on the ceiling would shine better. However, if she insisted
that her teddy bear night light was still on, and her bedroom door was left open enough to be wedged by her slipper, this
not only represented a triumph over Nathalie's wishes, but also the opportunity to hear whatever else was going on in the
flat. Mostly whatever was going on was quite boring, but sometimes, and quite a lot lately, there was an edge to the atmosphere.
It wasn't anything Polly could actually have described, like Daddy shouting or Mummy crying, but more a feeling of tension
or energy in the air that made her feel that she had better stay awake in case she missed out on something. The feeling also
made her restless, and a bit uncertain, so that it was extremely necessary to put Nathalie to the test, over and over, by
doing things which, while not exactly naughty, were not precisely good either. Polly was not particularly happy teetering
on this borderline, but while things were as they were it seemed the only possible place to be.

She lay, and looked up at her glowstars. They seemed dim and furry, and she could hardly see the points of the moon, the points
that made it look like a
c,
which was the letter for cat and candle and car crash. Polly said "car crash" to herself, several times, savoring it. She
turned her head to one side and stretched her eyes wide to see better. If she really stretched them, she could make out her
doll's house and all her Barbies piled in a plastic laundry basket and her Noah's Ark in its box. When she got home from school
that day, her Noah's Ark animals had been all over the floor because Petey had been playing with them.

"You shouldn't have let him," she'd said to Nathalie.

"Oh? And why not?"

"He might have broked something."

"I was there, Polly. I was watching."

"Not all the time," Polly said. "You weren't watching
all
the time.
"

She had gathered up the animals with elaborate care, and laid them reverently in their box.

"Very commendable," said Nathalie, in a voice that made Polly suspicious.

She looked at her supper. It was one of her favorites except that the carrots were in rounds, not sticks.

"Not hungry!"

"Fine," Nathalie said.

"Don't like penny carrots."

"No," Nathalie said, "nor you do. I've got something to tell you."

"What?"

"I can't tell you till you're sitting in your chair."

Polly sighed. Slowly she hitched herself into her chair and absently picked up a cube of ham.

"I'm going away for a couple of days."

Polly let the ham fall out of her hand.

"Just two days," Nathalie said.

"Why?"

"Eat your ham."

Polly bent down to her plate and seized the ham in her teeth.

"Polly!"

Polly smirked.

"How disgusting."

"Dogs do it," Polly said.

"And are you a dog?"

"Yes."

"Well, be a good Fido and eat another mouthful and I'll tell you."

Polly picked up her fork and speared a piece of carrot.

Nathalie said, "I'm going away to see a friend."

"Why?"

"Because I haven't seen her for years and years."

"Since I was born?"

"Long before that."

Polly chewed her carrot.

"Are you going on an airplane?"

"No," Nathalie said, "on a train."

"Am I coming?"

"No. You're staying here with Daddy. Daddy and the grannies will look after you."

Polly threw her fork across the table.

"No!"

"It's only two days. Two days and one night."

Polly thrust her lower lip out.

"Like," Nathalie said, "you having a sleepover with Hattie."

"Why are you going on a train?"

"Because it's a long way."

Polly screwed up her eyes.

"As long as—Australia?"

Nathalie retrieved Polly's fork and handed it back to her.

"Not quite."

Polly flicked her fork about.

"What's her name?"

"Who?"

"What's your friend's name?"

Nathalie looked away. Polly watched her. The mood had suddenly gone from one thing to quite another thing. Polly gave her
plate a shove and morsels of food scattered across the table.

"Cora," Nathalie said.

Going back to the flat had become, Carole decided, something almost to be dreaded. It wasn't the place itself, the place that
had once been such a pleasure to decide about, to choose things for, but more a question of what she might find there. Once
she had known it would only be Connor. Connor whom she knew, and knew how to manage, Connor back from a game of something
or an auction room, or a meeting with somebody's respectful son seeking advice on the basic principles of setting up a small
business. Now it was certainly still Connor, but a more unpredictable and vigilant Connor, a Connor on the lookout for any
tiny telltale sign in her that she had been anywhere or contacted anyone that he should know about.

And if Connor was out, then there was always Martin. Work kept Martin occupied until the early evening, but he never now seemed
to do anything after that but come home. He said he had no money, and he didn't want to see his friends because he couldn't
face them. Carole had tried to say that one of the essential elements in friendship was that it was there when you really
needed it, in bad times, but Martin had looked at her as if she didn't know what she was talking about. On the whole, she
preferred that look to his other one, the slightly suspicious version of Connor's new alertness, which suggested strongly
to Carole that she was being tested, in every detail, for any change she might display in demeanor or attitude since producing
David and introducing him to the family.

It was exhausting, having their eyes upon her in this way. Even if she felt, to some degree, that Connor's behavior was justified,
Martin's only maddened and sometimes alarmed her. She felt that he had already judged her, and come to his own conclusion,
and was merely watching her to obtain evidence of the verdict he had pronounced already. He had, it seemed, decided that David,
on account of his looks and his provenance, and the fact that he had been her private secret for all these years, had risen
effortlessly to the head of the list in her affections. He was her eldest son, her firstborn. He was successful enough to
run his own business. He had produced two sons of his own. He must be what every mother hopes and longs for, and Martin was
going to keep his eye on his mother for as long as it took to prove himself right.

"Have it out with him," Euan said. "Get it out in the open.
Tell
him."

Carole twisted her wedding ring.

"He takes everything I say the wrong way—"

"Oh," Euan said, "that's just Mart. Perfectly balanced, chip on each shoulder. Tell him David's just an add-on."

Carole looked at him.

"Would you come too? Would you help me?"

Euan hesitated. He wanted to help, he wanted his mother and brother to find some solution to their age-old difficulties, but
the fact was, he was a bit tied up just now. He'd spent so much time with his family recently, what with the David business,
that Chloe, who was as demanding as gorgeous girls so often turned out to be, was beginning to kick up a bit of a fuss, check
up on him, want treats and compensation. David's arrival had been pretty shaking, for God's sake, but the thought of Chloe
being dissatisfied enough to get restless was very much more so. He scratched his head.

"Sorry, Ma. Bit difficult at the moment, I've had so much time off—"

"Of course."

"Anyway," Euan said, "you ought to do it alone. Mart wouldn't like me holding your hand. Who invented sibling rivalry?"

Carole laughed.

"You're right. Of course you are. It's just—"

"I know, Ma. It always is."

Now standing in the hall outside Martin's bedroom door and surveying with exasperation the growing heap of bags and boxes
he had begun to pile up outside it, she felt an enormous weariness. There always seemed to be a mountain to climb, just now,
and the scaling of one peak only led to another, and another. That was why, she supposed, people kept secrets. The moment
they stopped, and confessed, was the moment their own control over whatever it was vanished and everyone else joined in, clamoring
and criticizing and claiming their slice of the action. She took a step forward and raised her hand to knock on Martin's door.

The door opened. Martin stood there, wearing tracksuit bottoms, a Manchester United T-shirt and bare feet.

Carole said, almost diffidently, "I was just coming to see you."

"Oh."

"Were you on your way out?"

"Only to the kitchen. To get some juice."

Carole said, "Then perhaps I could talk to you. While you drink it."

Martin moved past her and headed across the hall.

"What about?"

Carole followed him.

"David."

Martin was by the fridge, his back to her.

"Thought so."

"Darling," Carole said, "nothing has changed, nothing in the way I feel about you or Euan or Dad."

Martin opened the fridge and took a carton of juice out of the door.

"Good-looking bloke."

"What's that got to do with it?"

"Isn't it gratifying," Martin said, tipping the carton up so that he could drink from it, "to have such a handsome son?"

"I have two already."

Martin snorted.

"Don't give me that."

Carole came closer.

"I didn't think about him. Not for months on end—"

"But you thought about his father."

Carole hesitated.

"Sometimes."

"And he looks like his father."

Carole looked straight at Martin.

"Darling, all that is over.
You
are my family, Dad is my husband, this is now and the future; that was the long, long ago past."

Martin slammed the carton back in the fridge.

"But it happened."

"Yes," Carole said, "I can't undo that. I can't. I've said sorry till I can't say it anymore. What am I supposed to do now,
what more
can
I do?"

Martin swung the fridge door shut. He stood facing it a while and then he turned round.

"Get rid of him," he said.

"Get rid—"

"No," Martin said. "No, on second thought, I'll get rid of him. I'll tell him he's not wanted." He eyed his mother. "Is he?"

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A
man a bit further down the railway carriage had been looking at Nathalie all the way from Birmingham New Street Station.
He wasn't staring exactly, and he didn't look sinister or threatening, but he was obviously, frankly, interested. He had a
heavy-looking, thick book, but he spent more time gazing at Nathalie than he did at its pages.

It was as if, Nathalie thought, he was trying to work something out about her. It was as if he had first noticed her because
she attracted him, and then he'd noticed something else, something more elusive and beguiling than mere looks, and was held
in thrall to it. She'd tried, once and unwisely, giving him a brief glance and smile, but he hadn't

responded or changed his steady, open gaze. He was plainly concerned with something much less commonplace than flirting.

Nathalie looked steadfastly out of the window. She too, had a book, but she couldn't even contemplate concentrating long enough
to get through a single sentence. She wasn't, if she was honest, particularly surprised that the man should be looking at
her: in fact, she was more surprised that everyone in the carriage wasn't

looking, that there could possibly be a person sitting within yards of her who couldn't see the difference, the difference
between all of them in the accepted certainty of their lives and her, on the brink of this extra ordinary change in hers,
this change that was going to bring solution and resolution and—and
discovery.
And yet it wasn't a change, in reality. The change had been all the years leading up to this moment, all the years when she
didn't know who her mother was, didn't know that her mother cared so much. She kept replaying that first telephone conversation
in her mind, with Cora crying, Cora asking so—so anxiously, if Nathalie was angry, if Nathalie could ever forgive her. When
she went back through those minutes on the telephone together, Nathalie felt a surge of something so pure and strong and pleasing
that she supposed it must be joy.

Elaine Price had offered to come to Northsea with her.

She'd said she often did that, often came to the first meeting just to get it started, just to help those first few moments
when it was so dauntingly difficult to start on the business of repair and reconciliation. She said it was her practice to
pull out as soon as she could, but that as these meetings were often an anticlimax, neither side daring to reveal their true
feelings, it was usually a help to have someone there to help that daring along.

"If you hold back on emotion," Elaine said, "you'll hold back on progress."

Nathalie had been very sure that holding back on emotion would not be a problem. The problem, she thought, would be that there
would be too much emotion, too little holding back. She wasn't sure she wanted Elaine there while she cried, and Cora cried,
as she was certain they would; not because she didn't like and trust Elaine, but because this moment was going to be so supremely
private that it should have no witnesses. There shouldn't, Nathalie told herself, be anyone present at a kind of rebirth;
it wasn't

right or natural. Two adults who were going, in their separate ways, to remedy the great loss in each of their lives should
be able to perform this precious and extraordinary ritual in an appropriate seclusion.

"Thank you," she said to Elaine, "thank you, really. But I have to go alone. I want to go alone."

She hoped Elaine had understood. She hoped that Elaine meant what she said when she had explained that she was no more than
a midwife to a form of rebirth, that when it had happened she would step quietly back and attend to other clients, those clients
who were always, always coming along. Nathalie hoped—though not to much effect, if she was candid—that in her exhilaration
at what lay ahead of her she hadn't forgotten, somehow, to include Elaine in all she was thinking and feeling.

She glanced away from the window. The man with the book was, slightly disappointingly, now reading it.

He seemed to be reading it—so male this—with exactly the attention he had given to her face only minutes, probably, earlier.
She pulled back her cuff to look at her watch and felt a sharp clutch of panic in her stomach.

In thirty-seven minutes the train would pull into Northsea Station, where Cora would be waiting on the platform wearing, she
said, something red, or orange, and carrying flowers.

"Cornflowers, if I can find them," she said. "I love cornflowers. I've never seen them growing in corn, but I'd love to. Cornflowers
and poppies in a field of corn."

Nathalie closed her eyes. For the last few weeks, there'd

been an image of herself that kept coming into her mind, as clear and precise as an old snapshot. She was six perhaps, or
seven, wearing the kind of dress Lynne liked her to wear, a puff-sleeved, full-skirted dress with a smocked bodice and a sash
tie. It was pink, or blue, something pale, and her hair was tied up on top of her head with a ribbon with long ends falling
down to her shoulders. She had white socks on, and bar shoes, and she was standing in the back garden at Ashmore Road by a
lilac bush, with her hands demurely clasped in front of her, as they had to be at the beginning of her dancing classes. She
couldn't remember where this tidy and formal child had been going, but she knew where she was going to go now. It was a scene
she had played over and over in her mind of the child with the hair ribbon and bar shoes stepping down off the train and holding
her arms up to a woman in a red dress holding a bunch of cornflowers. In some moods, she could bring a lump to her throat,
just picturing it.

She opened her eyes. Better not to think about that now, better not to hope and plan too much, better to look out of the window
and see that, astonishingly, the gray-blue North Sea was only a hundred yards from the railway line, glimmering under a cloud-blurred
sky. They must be close, very close. In fact, people were beginning to stir in the seats around her, struggling into jackets,
stuffing newspapers into bags, adopting the wary, shuttered expressions necessary for abandoning the brief and blessed release
of a journey for the pressures of daily life again.

"Northsea," the conductor's voice said over the speaker.

"Northsea next stop."

Nathalie stood up unsteadily. Oh, the terror of great moments, the terror of facing them coupled with the accompanying terror
of having them somehow taken away.

She reached up to the rack for her bag, the bag containing her night things and a picture Polly had drawn—insistently, deliberately—of
a large dog beside a small house and three tiny people with "For Cora" written at the top with the r's

backwards.

The train was sliding past houses now, gray-walled houses with gray slate roofs, and then a warehouse and a garage and a football
stadium with craning lights rearing up above the stands. Then more houses, and a park, and railway lines running together
and apart in a seemingly liquid sequence that made you dizzy to look at. And then the train slowing, nothing to stop it, gliding
under the dirty glass canopy of Northsea Station, gliding along beside the platforms, beside the piles of mailbags, the luggage
trolleys, the scattered passengers, the dog on a lead, the newsstand, the signs saying "Taxis" and "Toilets." And then, stop.

Nathalie grasped her bag. She stepped forward. In the aisle between the seats, the man with the book was standing looking
at her.

"Good luck," he said.

She nodded. He made way for her to precede him and she went clumsily past, holding her bag up in front of her, down the carriage,
out of the door down the steps, and onto the platform.

There was someone there, someone waiting, someone in an orangey-red garment, a loose, coatlike thing. She was holding flowers,
but they weren't cornflowers, they were something ordinary, something like carnations, whitish-green. And this person wasn't
mother-sized, this person was small. Tiny. You couldn't, Nathalie thought wildly, hug up to this person. You'd have to hug
down.

"Hello, dear," Cora said.

It had taken determined courage to telephone Carole.

Marnie had performed all kinds of steadying rituals beforehand—folding the laundry, re-plaiting her hair, checking that Petey
hadn't kicked his rug off during his nap—and had then made herself walk into the hall with resolute steps and dial the number
David had given her. He hadn't

wanted to give it to her, of course, protesting that, as it didn't look as if there was much future in any of this anyhow,
there was no point in Marnie joining in the dance.

But Marnie had insisted, holding out her hand as if he was a chastised child who had to surrender something he had stolen.

"If it concerns you, it concerns me. We agreed that, from now on. Remember?"

Carole had not sounded welcoming. David had told her that Marnie would be calling her, but she still managed to sound as if
she had been caught out unfairly, and didn't like it. Marnie tried to remember all David had said about Carole's inability
to deal with confrontation, which in turn would require great patience on the part of the confronter.

"I don't want anything from you," Marnie said. "I'm not after anything at all. But I'm his wife, so I'm involved." She stopped
abruptly. She'd been about to say, "I can't be left out of this," but that was exactly the kind of thing she was schooling
herself
not
to say. So she said instead, "This touches all of us."

There was a pause, and then Carole said reluctantly, "I suppose so."

She'd wanted Marnie to go to London. She'd suggested they meet for lunch somewhere, maybe in the restaurant of a gallery,
a place, she implied, that was both acceptable and anonymous for women in such a highly charged situation to meet. But Marnie
was ready for her. Marnie was having no truck with emotional airbrushing, not after having seen Nathalie, with the gloves
off.

"You should see his home," Marnie said. "You should see his life, where his family is."

"OK," Carole said surprisingly. She sounded, irritatingly, slightly amused and not in any way taken aback.

"OK. I'll come to Westerham."

And now, here she was, in Mamie's sitting room, in one of Mamie's blue upholstered chairs, accepting a cup of Mamie's coffee
and refusing one of Mamie's specially baked pecan squares. She was looking round her in a way Marnie couldn't fathom, neither
avidly curious, nor indifferent, taking in the clean walls and polished floor and the books and pictures and the model child
on the hearthrug with his fingers in his mouth and an ecologically sound wooden train set strewn around him. Marnie watched
her, watched her gaze travel over the flowers in the stone vase, the photographs, the sofa with its unmistakable signs of
having been jumped on more than sat on, and wondered what, if anything, she had forgotten.

Carole took a sip of coffee.

"Lovely."

"I come from a long line of coffee makers—"

"I meant the room. The coffee too, of course."

Marnie waited for Carole to say something to Petey.

Petey was, after all, being perfect, upright on his bottom with his blue stare fixed upon the visitor, his little boot-clad
feet so charmingly thrust out among the decorative clutter of his train. But, apart from a brief greeting, Carole had appeared
oblivious to Petey. So oblivious, in fact, that Marnie was beginning to wonder if she was avoiding looking at him because
she couldn't bear to, because the sight of a small blond boy was too painful, brought too sharp a recollection.

Petey took his fingers out of his mouth and picked up the wooden train. He held it out, towards Carole.

"Thomas," Petey said.

Carole gave him a quick glance.

"He means Thomas the Tank Engine—"

"Lovely," Carole said again. "Lovely train."

Petey dropped the train, leaving his arm stiffly still in the air.

"
Not
Thomas," he said.

"No."

"Thomas
blue,
" Petey said scornfully. He put his fingers back in.

"He's two," Marnie said.

Carole looked at her coffee.

"I'm rather out of practice at guessing ages." She took another sip. "I haven't had a two-year-old for over twenty-five years."

Marnie put her cup down on the floor by her chair. She disliked drinking coffee out of cups. Cups were for tea, English-style.
Coffee should come in mugs, in pints and half-pints. But somehow, seeing Carole's hair and suede shoes, her conviction about
the Canadian way of coffee had faltered and given up. Just as her resolve had given up about not changing out of her jeans,
about not washing the kitchen floor. She had determined to do neither and then the recollection of what David had said about
Carole's

clothes, Carole's flat, had weakened her.

"I expect David told you," Marnie said, "that Petey is the youngest of our children. Ellen is twelve and Daniel is ten."

She indicated a photograph on a bookshelf four feet away from Carole. "That's them, in Canada last summer."

Carole turned her head towards the photograph. She made no movement to lean to pick it up.

"Lovely."

"We spend each summer in Canada," Marnie said, "staying with my folks. It's a wonderful life for children."

"I'm sure," Carole said. She turned her head back again.

"I've never been."

Petey got slowly and carefully to his feet. Then he trotted across to Carole and stood by her knee, looking intently at her.

"Hello," Carole said.

Petey said nothing. Marnie looked at his solid small back in its striped T-shirt, at his smooth pale head, at his endearingly
stoutly shod feet, and marveled that anyone could refrain from touching him.

"When my Martin was two," Carole said to Petey, "he liked tractors. Do you like tractors?"

Petey took a step back.

"Thomas," he said loudly.

"Of course—"

"Thomas!" Petey shouted.

"Don't shout, sweetheart," Marnie said.

Petey turned and went back to the hearthrug. He bent and picked up his train and then trotted purposefully out of the room
with it.