Brother and Sister (4 page)

"
What?
"

"There's always an end game. There's always a resolution. If you play chess, you can't get lost."

"Yes," Nathalie said.

"See?"

"Yes," Nathalie said again.

"I don't have to surrender—"

"OK, OK," Nathalie said, "I get it. I've
got
it. But I still don't want to play."

David started a chess club at school and another at horticultural college. When he met Marnie he suggested that he teach her,
but she was sure enough of him then not to need to learn. In any case, chess seemed irrelevant to her; it was deliciously
foreign, a game emerging from the labyrinthine coils of Byzantium, from all the ancient, sophisticated, decayed civilzations
of the past. For David to play it appeared to her eccentric but also cultivated, and somehow gentlemanly. It was only as time
went on, and she saw that he was drawn back to it all the time, as if to an opium pipe, that she began to sense uneasily that
this game represented something more than just a game to David, and that some atavistic workings-out lay beneath the deceptively
civilized black-and-white surface. But then, she told herself, is it completely crazy to be suspicious—jealous even—of a
game?
Suppose he played golf all weekend, or spent all their money on boats or vintage cars or flying round the world in support
of a football team? Chess, she told herself, was no enemy; couldn't be. Chess was like doing the crossword, a challenging
intellectual exercise of great beauty and history. Chess was not arbitrary or demanding or emotional or vulnerable. Chess
was not like Nathalie.

Marnie liked Nathalie. She was sure she did. From their first meeting, Nathalie had shown Marnie only affection and acceptance,
and, even if this affection and acceptance denoted a supreme confidence on Nathalie's part about her own significance in David's
life, it was, Marnie was sure, genuine in itself. Wasn't it? After all, there was everything in David and Nathalie's past
to excuse and explain the bond between them—pure chance, Nathalie had said to her, because they might just as easily have
loathed each other from the start—but the fact that they were
not
blood relations was something you could not, if as intimately involved with them as Marnie was, entirely overlook.

Marnie was one for friends, not particularly girlfriends. She attempted, in her customary, modestly confident way, to make
a friend out of Nathalie, to establish a relationship quite separate from the one either had with David. But Nathalie eluded
her. She was a pleasant sister-in-law, an excellent aunt, she wasn't greedy about time or attention, but she could still stir
something in David, whatever his mood, that transported him, very slightly, out of Mamie's reach. And when he was out of her
reach, she felt herself to be inaudible and invisible in a way that nobody else in her life had ever made her feel. And at
those moments too she felt herself to be living far away from Canada.

Standing now beside the telephone in the hall, with Petey asleep in his cot upstairs—it was really time, she knew, to move
him to a bed—and the prepared vegetables just waiting to be cooked for supper in the kitchen, Marnie thought hard about Nathalie.
Nathalie had not rung to complain to David about Lynne. That was perfectly plain. Nathalie had rung about something quite
different, something she was not prepared to tell Marnie about, something which related to that place where she and David
had first clung together after the shipwreck of their early lives. Marnie looked at herself, at the regularity of her features
and teeth, at the way her striped cotton shirt had been competently ironed. A small but unmistakable anger rose up inside
her, hot and red. You'd think, she said to herself, that I'd done enough, wouldn't you? You'd think that to give a man the
first three blood relations of his life was the most any woman
could
do?

Nathalie drove out of Westerham in the rain. There was something oily and sticky on the windscreen and an exasperating long
smear formed and re-formed with every sweep of the wiper blades. She sat leaning forward in her seat, craning this way and
that to see round the smear and devoting far too much energy to the decision as to whether to stop and get out into the rain
and clean the glass with a sheet of last week's local paper which was lying in the floor-well by the passenger seat, or whether
to stay dry and dangerously maddened. She chose the latter, and drove on, muttering.

David had rung and asked her to meet him at a site he was working on seven miles from Westerham. It was the substantial garden
of an impressive mock-medieval house whose new owners had asked David to design the basic layout of the garden as well as
get it into shape. David was pleased about this. It was the best creative commission he had yet had and he was enjoying it.
He wanted Nathalie to see it in its worst state, at the very raw beginning, before he started to impose pattern and order
on it; he could show it to her while she said to him whatever it was that she wanted to say.

In the drive of the house stood a little Mercedes town car, a big four-wheel drive and two dark-green pickup trucks with "David
Dexter—Gardens" painted on the doors in cream. Nathalie pulled up beside one of them, reached into the back seat to retrieve
the Minnie Mouse umbrella, complete with big black ears, which Lynne had given Polly, and got out into the rain. It had slowed
to a drizzle. Nathalie squinted up at the sky and put up the umbrella. Then she made her way around the house to the gardens
beyond, where David had said she would find him.

The whole area seemed to be nothing but a sea of mud with islands of heaped building materials here and there. A small digger
was chugging purposefully up and down and in one corner, huddled together as if for mutual comfort, stood a sad collection
of spindly trees, their roots bundled up in sacking. In the middle of this discouraging scene, David was standing, holding
a plan sheathed in plastic. Nathalie called out to him.

"Dave!"

He turned and waved. Then he shouted something to the boy on the digger, and came stamping through the mud towards her.

"Very sorry," Nathalie said, gesturing at the muddy desolation, "but I cannot begin to see what will emerge from this—"

David bent to kiss her cheek. Then he straightened and waved his right arm.

"Long terrace there, raised grass terrace all down that side, curved stone steps, lawn, grove, space for swimming pool, formal
garden, brick paths."

"If you say so," Nathalie said.

David glanced at her umbrella.

"Like the ears—"

"It's Polly's," Nathalie said unnecessarily.

"There's a sort of pavilion over there," David said. "A summerhouse thing. We could go there for five minutes. Are you OK?"

He put a hand under Nathalie's bent elbow.

She said, "I don't usually ring you if I'm OK, do I?"

He put his garden plan in his pocket and began to guide her round the edge of the mud.

"I like to think I have a
sense
if you're not OK—"

Nathalie thought briefly how oppressive she would have found such a remark if Steve had made it.

She said, "Well, you did. You wouldn't have rung back if you hadn't. You'd have texted me, saying, 'What's up?' "

"Yes," he said. "What
is
up?"

Nathalie said nothing. She concentrated on putting her feet down carefully to divert herself from thinking of how she was
going to say what she was going to say. She let David lead her up a short flight of crumbling stone steps to a little grass
platform on which sat a greenish wooden building shaped like a pagoda. She looked at it.

"Is this staying?"

"Certainly not. Fake, pretentious and out of keeping."

"But dry—"

"Certainly dry," David agreed, pushing open a half-glazed door.

She stepped inside. The interior was raw and untreated, and contained nothing but a broken plastic chair and a drift of dead
leaves.

"Charming—"

"I'm replacing it with stone. Circular, like a little dovecote."

"Dave," Nathalie said abruptly, "you know how we've always been—"

"How?"

"Not looking back, not saying 'if only . . . ,' not wishing we had what we haven't got—"

He closed the door behind them and stood looking out into the faint rain.

"Yes?"

Nathalie glanced at his back.

"Well, something's happened."

There was a pause, and then he said, "Tell me."

She looked at his back again. He was wearing a waxed jacket over overalls, and the wax had worn thin here and there and she
could see dark patches where the damp had seeped through to the underlying cotton.

"I want you to help me do something," Nathalie said.

He turned round.

He said, smiling, "Nat, you only have to ask—"

"But you won't like this."

"Won't I?"

"No. Because I've sort of broken the rules."

"What rules?"

"The pact we have. About making something of being adopted, about making it a plus not a minus?"

"Yes—"

"Well, I'm going back on that."

He waited. Nathalie realized that she was still holding the Minnie Mouse umbrella over her head even though she was inside.
She lowered it carefully to the floor, crumpling the ears.

"Dave—"

"Yes."

"I want to find my mother."

David gave a small, sharp intake of breath. He put his hands out towards her and then pulled them back abruptly and jammed
them into his jacket pockets.

"You—you
can't.
"

"Why not?"

"You'll upset everything. Everyone. Mum, Steve, Polly, yourself. Me. There's no point."

"I need to," Nathalie said.

He looked at her. His face was full of misery.

"But why? You never—"

She put a hand up to stop him.

"No, I never did before. I never wanted to before. Or at least, I never let myself want to. I told myself that I wasn't going
to be that kind of adopted person, lugging a grievance around and wanting people to make allowances for me. But suddenly—"
She leaned forward and looked earnestly up into his face. "
Suddenly
I do need to. I need to for Polly, but I need to for me. I need to stop being this person of my own creation and find out
what really happened. I need to stop feeling so separate."

He said hopelessly, "You've got me—"

"You're separate too."

"
Please,
Nathalie—"

She shook her head.

"Sorry, I can't not. It started with Polly's ear thing, and then I had this session with Titus's girlfriend and I could hear
myself coming out with all this stuff about being a lottery determined by no one but me except I have more numbers than most,
and I suddenly thought I can't stand this crap anymore, I can't stand hearing myself lying about liking my life story beginning
with me, I can't stand pretending any more, I can't stand not admitting that I have to confront whatever it is, whatever
she
is—and make good somehow."

He said, almost in a whisper, "But it's
been
good. It
is
good."

She moved to grasp the damp folds of his jacket.

"But not anymore, Dave. Something has changed or got unblocked or got released. I used to want to give back to the adoptive
process, d'you remember? When we were having such trouble making Polly, d'you remember me talking about adopting myself because
I'd been so lucky? Well, I don't believe that now. I wonder if I deep down believed it then. I want to be like people who
know where they've come from. I want Polly to know. I want to look the truth in the face even if I don't like it." She shook
his jacket. "I want to find my
mother.
"

"You've got a mother—"

"Shut up."

"You'll break her heart."

"Possibly. And Dad's. And maybe my own. I won't start without telling her."

David shivered.

"I suppose you want me to help you tell her?"

"Yes."

He closed his eyes.

"Let me adjust a bit. Let me think—"

"There's something else."

He opened his eyes again. She was still holding his jacket and her face was very close.

"Go on."

"I want you to do it too."

He stared.

"Me—"

"I want you to look for your mother, too. I want us to do this together."

He stepped back sharply, yanking his jacket out of her hands.

"No," he said. "Sorry."

"Dave, please, don't you see—"

He put his own hands up to his ears.

"No, Nathalie. Not that. I don't want to, I don't need to, I can't even
think
about it."

She stood in silence, watching him. He took his hands away from his ears.

He said, "Sorry, Nat. No. Now and forever,
no.
"

"Dave—"

His face was suddenly completely desolate, as if he'd heard that one of his children was hurt.

"She gave me away!" he shouted. "She bloody
gave me
away!
"

Nathalie moved closer and slid a hand up against his cheek. He put his own hand up to cover it. He was shaking.

"Don't ask me."

"No. Sorry."

"I'll help you," David said, "if that's what you want, if that's what you really want, but don't ask me to join in."

Nathalie said softly, "You aren't really controlling things by just being passive—"

"We're not talking about control."

"Aren't we? Aren't I trying to take it?"

"Don't go on, Nat, don't go on at me—"

"Sorry—"

He took his hand away from covering hers and put his arms round her.

"I'll have to tell Marnie."

"Of course. Don't you tell her most things?"

"Most." He took his arms away. He said in a different voice, looking away from her, "I've never told her about the cutting."

"That was years ago. You were fifteen, sixteen—"

"Nobody but you knows about the cutting. She thinks the scars were some skin allergy."

Nathalie looked up at him. She remembered standing guard outside the bathroom door while David's meticulously organized sessions
with razor blade, tissues, disinfecting cream, plasters were silently, appallingly performed, and how he'd look afterwards,
relieved as if he'd had a holiday from himself.