Brother and Sister (22 page)

Marnie took a small step back, freeing her arms. She raised them and rested them on David's shoulders.

"I think your mother would have liked to love you now," she said. "But it's too late. She's trapped."

"And so is Martin."

"Martin?"

"He came. He came and found me at work. He came to tell me that none of them wanted another thing to do with me."

"Oh David—"

"He told me that she'd had a choice of three sons, and had only chosen two—"

"How dare he—"

"Because he's unhappy. He's not sure of her. He wanted me to think he'd come as a family deputation, but I think he just came
because he couldn't stand not to."

"Poor, sad guy."

"Yes."

Marnie looked up at him. She moved one hand so that she could touch his neck with her forefinger.

"David—"

"Yes?"

"Nathalie—"

"She's had a hard time," David said. "I get the feeling she got even harder answers than I did, less straightfor­ward."

"That's not what I meant."

"No."

"I meant—" She stopped and took her hands off David's shoulders. Then she put them flat on his chest and regarded them sternly,
as if something important was written on the backs of them. She said, "Why have you said all this stuff to me and not to her?"

"Because you are the right person."

"Even if I almost never have been before?"

"That was part of the problem," David said, "the being stuck in the past problem. She was stuck there with me."

Marnie said hesitantly, "Is—is something rather amazing happening?"

"I don't know. I don't know about the amazing, I mean. I hope so. But I do know about the happening."

The door to the garden swung open. Daniel, fresh from school, stood there carrying his bookbag and wearing his cycling helmet.
He looked at his parents.

"What's going on?"

They said nothing. He dropped his bag on the step, and came further into the kitchen. He looked at all the cake tins on the
floor.

He said, "Is it someone's birthday?"

Fifty yards ahead of them, Polly was pedaling furiously on her Barbie bicycle. She had refused to let Steve detach the stabilizers,
just as she had refused, during her swimming lessons, to remove her armbands. Steve could see her clearly, curls flying, riding
with purpose straight down the center of the main asphalt path in Westerham Park. Boys on boards and blades and mini-scooters
were swooping respectfully round her in a way, Steve thought, that could only, when she was older and more vulnerable, end
in tears or triumph.

It was easier, he was finding, to focus on Polly than on Nathalie. Nathalie, who had never been very demonstrative, was holding
his arm, actually closely linked to him, leaning on him, her head occasionally turning towards him, so that her hair brushed
his shoulder. She had taken his arm as soon as they entered the park, and she was talking to him as she had been talking the
last few days, earnestly and confidingly, as if he, instead of being the man she happened to live with who also happened to
lack the required degree of emotional intelligence, had been transformed into a soulmate, into the kind of person who would,
uniquely, understand the complexity and conflict of emotion that she was currently going through.

It was, Steve thought, feeling the pressure of her arm through the cotton of his shirtsleeve, agony. He felt terrible, awful,
base. He could hear her talking on about Cora, about motherhood, about the long painful journey to reconciliation with self,
however disappointing, and could sense, in the way she was talking, that not only did she want him to understand her and comfort
her, but also that she knew he would, because he could, because he had suffered a similar disillusionment, a similar feeling
of not being perfectly matched to his actual beginnings. She was talking in a way, in fact, that he would have sold his soul
for, up to a week or so ago, a way that he had longed for her to talk to him, a way he had jealously feared, all the years
they had been together, that she had reserved exclusively for David. And now here it was, pouring out of her, sweet and confiding,
and he had put himself in a place where he was, quite simply, too grubby to receive it. He looked ahead at Polly on her pink
bicycle and longed, with a childish anguish, to change places with her.

"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

D
o 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 fill 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.