Brother and Sister (21 page)

"Get down and shake it out then."

"And
stay
down?"

"Polly," Nathalie said, "if you don't eat now, there will be no more food until the morning. Did you hear that? No more food."

Polly's expression declared that the threat was a matter of absolute indifference to her. She bent sideways and pulled the
fork out of one leg of her shorts.

"Will you play with me?"

"No," Nathalie said.

"Why?"

"Because I want to do some thinking."

"Why?"

"Because my mind is full of things that need sorting out."

Polly eyed her.

"You're quite dull."

"I expect so."

Polly flipped the fork in the air so that it clattered across the table.

"I'll be in my bedroom," she said grandly. "Waiting for Daddy."

Nathalie went round the table and picked up Polly's supper plate. She remembered the long-ago days, the before-Polly days,
when the only children she knew were Ellen and Daniel, and how she had thought of them as representative children, because
they were all she knew, just as she had thought of love and motherhood and parenthood within the parameters of familiarity.
Watching Ellen and Daniel eat their wholesome suppers had been as emblematic of an aspect of family life as watching Lynne
and Ralph get into their car together had been emblematic of a certain kind of married habit. It amazed her, looking back,
how much she had accepted, how much she had never thought to examine, or question, or try to see through. It horrified her
to think how cowardly she had been.

Well, there was no opportunity for cowardice now. She had traveled to Northsea, she had spent six or seven hours in her mother's
company, she had slept the night—no, not slept,
passed
—the night in a strange guest house, and had brought back with her a new and fragile cargo of reactions and emotions that
were taking more courage to unpack than she could ever have imagined.

"I don't know what to think," she'd said to David on the telephone. "I mean, I felt lost before, but this is different. I
don't know where my mind is going."

"Yes," he said. "Yes." He'd sounded distant, she thought, almost as if he wasn't listening.

"I don't want to be let down," Nathalie said. "I don't want to find that that phone call was the high moment."

"What phone call?"

"That first one," Nathalie said, "that first one, when she was crying."

"No," he said, "of course not."

Nathalie scraped Polly's supper into the bin. She hadn't rung David since then. She hadn't had the inclination. It was amazing,
disconcerting, but she hadn't really felt that she could, that, if she did, he'd be listening. And even if he was listening,
as he always had, she wasn't quite sure that she could describe what she now felt to him, could make him see the confusion
and awkwardness and affection and guilt and shame and disappointment that had been jostling about together in her mind and
heart since she had stepped down off that train and said to herself, with a cry of silent dismay, "This is my
mother.
"

She put Polly's plate down, and bent over her balled fists on the kitchen counter. Cora had been sweet, very sweet. Nathalie
was absolutely certain that Cora's sweetness of nature was something she would defend to her dying day. Cora was sweet and
affectionate and humble and appealing. But—and why did this have to be the but Nathalie had never considered?—she wasn't what
you would think of, for a mother. She was too uncertain for motherhood, too childlike, too submissive and stubborn all at
once, too simple, too—too
odd.
When she told Nathalie about the party, about the sailor, about the Salvation Army home for unmarried mothers, about the Child
Welfare Officer who took the baby away, Nathalie could see all that. She could see the schoolgirl, see the terror and the
oppression, see the bullying mother, see the despair of knowing one had neither voice nor weight in the matter. But what she
couldn't see was Cora as a mother. All she could see was herself, standing on that platform, sitting at that coffee-shop table,
lying in that inhospitable bed, thinking, It's not her. It can't be.

And, what was worse, what was haunting her, was seeing that Cora could see too, could see what she was thinking.

"Sorry," Nathalie whispered now to her fists. "
Sorry.
"

She raised one up and pushed it into her eye socket. Then the other. If she pushed hard enough, she could obliterate images
with blocks of violent color. There came to her, as there had been beginning to come to her, ever since she had returned,
a desire to tell Steve how she felt, a need to lay all this complicated, contradictory, not entirely proud-making stuff out
in front of the boy from the Royal Oak, the boy who didn't feel he belonged where he'd begun either, and have him tell her
that he understood, that to become something is not necessarily a betrayal of what came before, that love means acceptance
but not, by obligation, emulation. She took her fists away from her eyes. She wanted Steve to give her permission, the permission
he'd had to award himself so painfully, in such a solitary way, unhelped by her, to be the person she felt she truly was,
mother or no mother.

"What time is it?" Polly said from the doorway.

"You tell me."

Polly leaned in the door frame and stared at the clock.

"Half-past eight."

"Seven. Bath time."

Polly transferred her stare to her mother.

"Where's Daddy?"

There were thirty young oaks to be planted, thirty tall, slender, expensive young oaks imported from Holland, with their huge
root balls carefully wrapped in specialist bubbled plastic. David had explained to the owner of this field, which was being
gradually landscaped into a park, that the oaks should ideally be planted while still dormant, but the owner, who was disinclined
to heed advice that conflicted with his wishes, in this case to have an avenue planted before midsummer, had instructed the
planting to go ahead. So David, plus two men and a digger, was making a long double line of huge holes and wondering, not
for the first time, if this kind of work was bringing him the pleasure it once had, or even that he had supposed it would.
You could stay interested in trees, of course, but maybe that was the trouble, maybe you swung, over time, so much on to the
trees' side that you could only see the people who wanted them planted in avenues leading to specially dug lakes as the enemy.

He got down off the digger and went over to where he had slung his jacket on the grass to find a bottle of water. From the
direction of the house across the rough grass, someone was approaching, no doubt the owner who was, David reflected sourly,
the kind of man who would wait until you had dug thirty holes big enough to drop a small car into before saying that he wanted
them another foot apart. David found his water bottle and, affecting not to have noticed the approaching figure, turned his
back towards it to drink, as if thoughtfully contemplating the prospect down towards the lake.

"David," someone said.

He turned, holding the plastic bottle. Martin Latimer stood there, in jeans and a T-shirt and absolutely black dark glasses.

"What are you doing here?"

"They said I'd find you here—"

"Who did?"

"At your office. I went to your office. I said I was a new customer."

David capped the water bottle and threw it down on the ground.

"This isn't a good moment, Martin."

"It won't take long."

"Why didn't you telephone?"

Martin put his hands in his jeans pockets. He was wearing a sort of zipped pouch round his waist like a skiing bumbag.

"This isn't—something ordinary, something you ar­range—"

David looked across at the digger. Andy and Mick were standing by it, waiting.

"Keep going," David shouted. "I'll be ten minutes."

"Five," Martin said.

"Five," David said heavily, "five. Sure it was worth your coming?"

Martin took his hands out of his pockets and pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head.

"Yes."

David began to walk away across the field.

"Did she send you?"

"Who?"

"Carole."

"Oh," Martin said, and then with emphasis, "
Mum.
No, she didn't."

"She's been to meet my wife."

"I know. And it's the last time."

David stopped walking.

"What?"

Martin pushed his glasses back down.

"We don't want you."

David said nothing.

"We don't want anything more to do with you," Martin said. "We don't want any more contact. Not my mother or father or brother
or me."

David glanced at him.

"Who sent you?"

"No one."

"Who knows you've come?"

"None of your business."

"Why," David said, "do you feel so threatened?"

"I don't. I just don't want you around. We don't need you. We don't want you." He took a small step nearer David. "What do
you want, anyway? You've seen her, you've got your pathetic story. What more do you want?"

"If I stay away," David said, "you won't feel any better."

Martin's chin went out.

"I will. I feel better already."

"Already?"

"Yes," Martin said.

"Well, good—"

"My mother had three children," Martin said. "Three sons."

"Yes."

"Two she chose to keep.
Chose
to keep. You weren't one of those two."

David took a quick breath. The impulse—which he was sure his Canadian brothers-in-law would competently have obeyed—to flatten
Martin was almost overwhelming.

"You pathetic little
jerk
—"

"She didn't want you," Martin said. "She didn't want you then and she doesn't want you now."

David began to run clumsily away from him across the grass. When he got to the digger, Andy and Mick were leaning against
it, Mick thoughtfully rolling a cigarette.

"Move," David shouted.

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

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

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

L
ook," 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 would 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."