Brother and Sister (8 page)

But—and this is what all her hot, circling thoughts always came back to—she had to do it. She knew she wouldn't settle until
she'd done it, she knew she'd be like someone who can't concentrate because they are always waiting for the crucial phone
call, the deciding knock at the door. She'd tried to explain this to Lynne, tried to make Lynne see that it wasn't any inadequacy
on Lynne's part, as a mother, that was making her want to find the woman who had actually given birth to her. Lynne had stood
there, in her garden, where she had taken Nathalie to look at the spring bulbs, and she'd said, over and over, "But I thought
you'd got everything you wanted!"

"So did I," Nathalie said.

Lynne bent down to set a leaning narcissus upright.

"You always said—"

"I know, Mum. I always did."

"It's hard not to take it personally," Lynne said, propping the bent flower against a straighter one.

"Mum—"

"I always had this feeling," Lynne said, kneeling now, on the damp grass, "that I'd somehow rescued you and David. Even when
I was battling with my own disappointments, I used to tell myself that I'd done some good in the world at least, that I'd
helped two children to have a chance they mightn't otherwise have had. I know you shouldn't think like that, but it's hard
not to when people keep telling you that you've done a good thing."

"You
did
do a good thing," Nathalie said.

"I used to say to myself, 'I want a baby, I want a baby.' Dad said I shouldn't say that. Dad said I should say instead that
I wanted to bring up a child." Lynne looked up at Nathalie. "If you find your mother, can't you see what that makes me?"

Nathalie shook her head.

Lynne said miserably, "I go from being the rescuer to the woman who took another woman's child."

Nathalie crouched down beside her.

"You won't change, Mum."

"No, I won't change. Not as a person. But what I'm seen as will change. What about Polly? What kind of granny do I become
when Polly has this new granny?"

"It mightn't happen—"

"What mightn't?"

"I mightn't find her. I mightn't like her."

"Then why are you taking such a chance?"

"Oh, Mum," Nathalie said, leaning forward and holding Lynne's arms hard. "Because I have to
know.
Even if I don't like it, I have to know.
You
know, don't you? You know who your mother was?"

Lynne pulled herself free and stood up.

"At least David—" She stopped.

"At least David what?"

"Doesn't want to join in all this."

Nathalie stood too.

"Mum, he does."

"No, he doesn't want to. You are forcing him."

"I couldn't
force
him, Mum. I couldn't if I tried. He's scared, like me, but he's going to."

Lynne took a step away and began to fiddle with a flowering currant bush.

"Daniel was here yesterday. He helped Dad in the workshop. He's good with his hands."

"Mum," Nathalie said, "
nothing
is going to change between you and your children or you and your grand­children."

"You don't know that," Lynne said.

Nathalie put her hands over her face.

"Please trust me!"

Lynne said nothing.

Nathalie took her hands away and said furiously, "Look, I didn't
have
to tell you or Steve or anyone. I could have just telephoned this search-service person in secret and gone to meet my mother—if
indeed she's still alive—and none of you would have been any the wiser. But I didn't. I
didn't,
did I? I've told you all everything, right from the beginning, and if that doesn't show love and trust and all the things
you imply I'm failing in, I don't know what does!"

Lynne put a hand out and adjusted a spray of leaves on a philadelphus. The moment she took her hand away, the philadelphus
adjusted itself back to its original position.

"I don't want to go back to the past," Lynne said.

Nathalie said nothing. Lynne laid hold of the philadel­phus again.

"It's not that I don't understand what you want to do. I'd never try and stop you. You know I wouldn't. But it's just such
a risk, it just opens up so much that I thought was healed over, all those things I thought I'd come to terms with."

Nathalie closed her eyes. She and Lynne had had a long and anguishing conversation about infertility when she had discovered
that she was, at last, pregnant with Polly, and she had, at this moment, less than no desire to have it again.

She opened her eyes and said, in as neutral a voice as possible, "Will you tell Dad?"

Lynne let the philadelphus spring back.

"Oh no."

"What do you mean—that you won't or that he shouldn't be told?"

"Of course he should be told," Lynne said. "You should tell him yourself."

"I thought you'd like to—"

Lynne spun round. She was someone who could be relied upon never to lose her temper, but she had lost it now. Her face was
quite diminished by the concentration of her fury.

"Nathalie," she said, "Nathalie. I don't like
any
of this."

Titus, Steve noticed, had left his computer on. His screen-saver, which no doubt he had designed himself, was a series of
serenely flying pigs, some of them wearing spectacles. Steve stood and watched their stately floating progress across the
screen for some minutes and then he leaned forward and turned the computer off. On the desk around the keyboard lay a nonchalant
scattering of little objects—paper clips, rubber bands, a dice, a crumpled bus ticket, a liquorice toffee in a black-and-white-striped
wrapper—that caused Steve simultaneous irritation at its presence and envy that its presence was of neither annoyance nor
significance to Titus. He bent over the desk and scooped all the mess to the edge with the side of his hand. Titus's bin,
he noticed, was almost full and apparently with items of rubbish that had absolutely nothing to do with work. Steve took a
breath. There was a fine line between being punctilious and being paranoid, and peering analytically at the contents of someone
else's waste bin was definitely a symptom of the latter.

"Fussing," Nathalie used to say to him, "isn't sexy." She'd said it affectionately, laughing, in the days when she could get
away with saying anything. That wouldn't happen now, no good pretending otherwise. In the first place, she wouldn't be laughing
and in the second she wouldn't get away with it. Steve gave Titus's waste bin an inaccurate, childish kick and went across
the studio to his own desk.

"I just hope," he said aloud and angrily to Nathalie's smiling face on the wall, "that you know what you're doing."

"Steve," someone said.

He spun round. Sasha was standing holding the door that led to the staircase. She was half hidden by it, like some cool modern
version of a fan dancer, so that he could see only one eye and one ear and a long slice of dark clothing.

"What are you doing here?"

"I was looking for Titus—"

"How did you get in?"

Sasha emerged from behind the door. She was wearing a kind of naval overcoat, strongly made with emphatic shoulders and buttons.

"The door wasn't locked, only latched. The street door."

"That was Titus," Steve said. He looked at her. She had her red-laced boots on again. He said, "I've no idea where he is."

"It doesn't matter."

Steve said nothing.

"I'm glad to see, you," Sasha said. "Actually."

Steve shrugged.

He said, almost nastily, "I wonder why."

Sasha moved towards his desk, unbuttoning her coat.

"Sorry?"

"Well," Steve said, "having made such a superb diagnosis of Nathalie's state of mind, I imagine you've come to justify yourself."

"Oh no," Sasha said easily.

"So you feel not one twinge of conscience in being one hundred percent wide of the mark and persuading me to think likewise?"

"Of course not," Sasha said. "I'm not a bloody
doctor.
" Steve grunted.

"I just find it all riveting," Sasha said.

"What, getting things wrong?"

Sasha leaned against the side of Steve's desk. Underneath the coat she was wearing a tight red T-shirt and black trousers
tucked into her red-laced boots.

"The thing is," Sasha said, "that now she's come clean Nathalie falls completely into the pattern. The almost universal pattern.
And all those years of denial, as if she knew, all along, what she really felt and couldn't face it."

Steve moved a little until he was quite close to her, close enough to see her eyelashes and the tiny sharp angles of her nose
stud.

He said, "Am I going to have to spell it out?"

"What?"

"That I am angry with you. That I am really
very
angry indeed."

She smiled at him.

"No, you're not."

"Excuse me—"

"Steve," Sasha said, "you're angry, for sure. You're angry and frightened and puzzled. Who wouldn't be, in your situation?
But you aren't angry with
me.
"

"Don't you be so sure."

She smiled again.

"Well," she said, "I don't accept it. I don't accept your anger. You'll have to find somewhere else to dump it."

"But you made me
believe
—"

"I didn't do anything," Sasha said. "I merely told you what Nathalie told me. Which was, as it's turned out, what she wanted
to believe and you wanted to hear. In fact, you should be thanking me."

"How—"

"You should be thanking me," Sasha said, "for being the catalyst, for being the force for change, for truth, at last."

Steve turned away and put his hands in his pockets.

He said, staring off down the studio, "This is all a bit much for me."

Sasha said nothing. She hitched herself onto the edge of Steve's desk and swung her foot.

Then she said, in quite a different voice, "I know."

Steve blinked. He could feel, to his distress, that tears were bunching up in the back of his throat.

He said unsteadily, "It's—" and then he stopped.

Sasha watched him, swinging her foot.

"It isn't," she said, in the same soft tone, "as if she'd found another man."

"It's worse."

"Worse?"

"It's another territory," Steve said. "Feelings that were there long before I knew her. Feelings I've no part in—"

"But not a
threat.
"

Steve sighed.

"There's David."

"David?"

"It's all tied up with David, too. It's all part of this fucking club we can't join."

"But they have different mothers—"

"And the same situation."

"Steve," Sasha said, "I've never met him, but are you jealous of David?"

Steve gave a little bark of near laughter.

"Oh yes."

"Why?"

"He knows things I'll never know. He shares things I can't share."

Sasha said curiously, "What's he like?"

Steve gave another little bark.

"Big, blond and beautiful."

"Well," Sasha said, "you are big and beautiful."

"I'm losing my hair."

"All the better."

Steve turned round.

"What are you after?"

She looked at him calmly. She had a red bead on a leather bootlace sitting precisely in the hollow of her throat above the
neckline of her T-shirt.

"Making you feel better."

"Why bother?"

"Because this is an unusual and very emotional situation and you are a nice guy."

Steve said awkwardly, "I thought you were looking for Titus."

"I was."

"Well, then—"

"He isn't here. He said he'd be here until six and it's long after."

"He likes you," Steve said.

"And I like him."

"No, I mean more than that. I mean that he's really keen."

"I'm just a challenge," Sasha said. She glanced sideways at him. "We all like challenges."

"I don't much like mine—"

"You could learn to."

He said nothing.

"I could teach you," Sasha said in a cool voice.

"Do you seriously expect me to have any faith in your powers of discernment?"

She regarded him. The light from one of the ceiling spotlights fell directly on the smooth pelt of her hair and made it shine
like something unearthly, like a nimbus.

"Yes," she said.

Steve snorted.

Sasha said, bending a little towards him, "You're angry because you were wrong. We hate having our safe patterns disturbed,
we hate disillusion."

"And who," Steve said with heavy sarcasm, "are you quoting now?"

"Steinbeck."

"
Steinbeck?
"

"Yes."

Steve moved away from his desk and began to pace. Sasha stayed where she was, and watched him. She watched him until he had
circled Justine's desk and come slowly back to her.

He said, "D'you know something?"

"Tell me," Sasha said.

"She always said being adopted was no big deal, but now I come to think of it, she was always coming back to it.

Always."

"Yes."

"When I think about it, I don't think a week went by—"

"No."

"I'm so
obtuse
—"

"No."

He glanced at her.

"No?"

"You're not in thrall."

"To what?"

"To what is known as early attachment figures. Like a rejecting parent."

"I think," Steve said, "that I've had enough of this kind of talk—"

"Pity," Sasha said. "I like it."

"Can you do any other kind?"

"Try me."

He smiled. He straightened his shoulders and put his hand out for his jacket, hanging on a steel peg in the wall.

"Over a drink," Steve said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

M
arnie was running Petey's bath with the kind of attention to ritual that is comforting when other areas of life seem to be
slipping out of control. His towel—a square towel, hooded at one corner, left over from his babyhood—lay ready on the bathroom
chair and his pajamas were hanging on the heated towel rail. Petey himself was not in the bathroom however, but was instead
in his bedroom where he was lying on the floor having one of the intense and almost soundless rages that had overtaken him
since just before his second birthday.

In theory, Marnie, of course, knew about these rages. She had written sheaves of notes, during her years of conscientious
nursery-teacher training, about the small child's need to have some powers transferred to himself from his omnipotent parents,
and how this need often manifested itself in tantrums. But somehow, the reality of Petey's rages was something she couldn't
seem to handle with anything like the calm assurance she had felt and displayed when Ellen and Daniel were at the same stage.
She remembered, clearly, both the energy and the consistency she had been able to bring to discipline and to distraction then,
the confidence she had felt in shepherding these two little creatures from babyhood into the first stages of independence.
Both children had shown, she knew, a highly developed sense of recognition and responsibility for other people by Petey's
age. She remembered Daniel's acute concern when a carelessly flung toy had caught her a sharp blow not far from her eye. The
resulting bruise had distressed him for days. But Petey was not like Daniel. He had been an obliging and easy baby but it
was as if, as his second birthday approached, he had decided that he had been altogether too amenable for too long and must
make up for lost time. That evening, for example, having been whining round her while she painstakingly made his supper, he
had seized his plastic dish when she set it before him, plunged both hands into the contents and then spattered them far and
wide, gazing at her blankly and fixedly while he did so. Then, when reprimanded, he had fallen instantly into one of his near
silent, heaving, paroxysms of rage. Forty minutes later, he was still in it, jerking on his back on the rug by his cot, his
silky pale hair fanning out like the tentacles of a sea anenome, his face in a rictus of utter temper.

Marnie knelt by the bath and swished her hand in the water. She thought that, if Petey hadn't stopped in five minutes' time,
she would call Ellen to come and help her. Ellen was good with Petey's rages because they in no way alarmed her. She made
it very plain to Petey that his tantrums bored her, that mostly she couldn't even see that he was having one because they
were indeed so very, very boring. She would go into Petey's room, looking as if she were thinking of something else, and step
over him as if he were no more than part of the carpet, and begin to play, very casually, with something he prized, or, even
better, something he was only permitted to play with very occasionally. It was often only a matter of seconds before Petey
had shed his rage as if it were no more encumbering than a cloak and would be clamoring to do whatever Ellen appeared to be
so engrossed in. She could, Marnie knew, have summoned Ellen as soon as Petey's baked potato and peas and grated cheese began
to be hurled around the kitchen, but she hadn't. And she hadn't—she shut her eyes and swished her hand harder in the water—because
she didn't want Ellen taking charge, she didn't, at the moment, want any more evidence, however small, that the domestic control
and competence and satisfaction that had always, up to now, been so—so
sweetly
hers was in any way diminished. What with David's new preoccupations—however much she had urged them, however much she had
known she was doing the right, loving, wifely thing in urging them—and his consequent increased withdrawal from the family,
from her, Marnie didn't think that she could, just now, stand any more relegation, not just from the center of things, but
from the supreme maternal role she had chosen—yes,
chosen
—when Petey was born.

Ellen appeared in the doorway. She was wearing the pink shorts in which she had played tennis earlier that day, and an uneasy
little top which outlined the diffident small buds of her breasts and exposed her pale young midriff.

"Petey's having a thing."

"I know."

"D'you want me to sort him?"

Marnie put her hands on the side of the bath and pushed herself to her feet.

"I think we'll just leave him."

"Why?"

"He threw his supper all over the place."

"Maybe he's hungry."

"Then he can stay hungry."

"And screaming?"

"Ellen," Marnie said. "This is the third child I've raised." Ellen tweaked her top.

"You can't be right about everything, always. Nobody is."

"Some things I do know about."

"What I hate about this family," Ellen said, "is that everyone thinks they know everything about something. Dad knows all
about chess. Daniel knows all about cricket. You know all about children. When I have children I'm going to make sure I know
a little about a lot of things—I'm not going to be Mrs. Supreme Opinion about
anything.
No wonder Petey has his things."

Marnie bent and refolded Petey's towel.

"You'll find experience dictates your knowledge. And validates it."

"Then I'll have to have a lot of experience, won't I?"

"Ellen," Marnie said, "I don't have enough energy for this kind of conversation right now."

"Well, why won't you let me see to Petey?"

Marnie turned away. She bent to re-smooth Petey's pajamas and her plait swung forward, the heavy, solid, flaxen plait that
had been swinging over her shoulder for more than twenty years. Twenty years—she caught her breath suddenly, seized by the
image of herself twenty years ago, before coming to England, before the nursery school, before David, before two-year-old
Petey, lying on his bedroom floor in a fury that was quite beyond either his or her control. She straightened up slowly.

"Go get him," she said tiredly to Ellen.

She heard Ellen's feet pounding along the landing and then her voice, light, indifferent, in the doorway to Petey's room.

"Hello," Ellen said, "you tedious child."

Marnie looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. White T-shirt, dark cotton overshirt, clean skin, good teeth. Perhaps it
was time to cut her hair. Perhaps it was time to jettison the T-shirt and the overshirt and let Ellen take her shopping. Perhaps
it was time, in the midst of all these dark passageways opening up around her, to reassess how she felt in all these wonderings
about identity, how it was for her, a girl from Winnipeg, who had hitched her hopeful wagon to a foreign star and found that—please,
God, not forever—it had lost its pulling power.

She went out of the bathroom and down the landing. She stopped outside Petey's bedroom and looked in. In the middle of the
room, and regarding herself as best she could in Petey's baby looking glass, ringed with blue rabbits, Ellen was dancing a
fair imitation of Kylie Minogue. And from the floor by his cot, upright on his bottom with his thumb in his mouth and his
legs neatly crossed at the ankle, Petey was peacefully watching her.

Justine almost never stayed in the office for lunch. It wasn't only that she needed to get out and walk but also that she
needed to show Steve that she could assert her independence and go out, and also be reliably depended upon to come back in
an hour, give or take five minutes or so. Going out also saved her from having to acknowledge that Meera never left her desk
at lunchtime, but sat there eating, very unobtrusively, a neat packed lunch from a pristine plastic box. This was, Justine
thought, what Steve would have liked them all to do, as long as, like Meera, they left no detritus, no crumbs or smears or
smells. Justine imagined sometimes the kind of lunch Titus might bring—hideous leftovers full of garlic and chili, lumps of
overpowering cheese, mangoes, oranges—and thought of how Steve would react, the distaste, the disapproval of the distaste,
the struggle between the two, and Titus oblivious in the midst of it all, licking his fingers and hurling fruit peels towards
his bin.

Justine had slightly hoped that, seeing as they were under pressure to finish work for the Greig Gallery that week, and she
had volunteered to forgo her lunch hour, Titus might offer to forgo his too. She had a brief fantasy about him asking her
what kind of sandwich she would like, and then him going off to get it and coming back with something quite different, and
very messy, like prawns in Marie Rose sauce filling, and them having to eat the sandwiches together in a kind of giggling,
furtive conspiracy. Being clever and state-educated, and only the second person in her family to go on to further education,
Justine naturally despised someone like Titus. His confidence, his thick dark hair, his voice, his apparent supreme indifference
to the defects of his class and height were all in their way powerful reasons for finding him anathema, and no more than yet
another example of the stupid upper-class has-beens who her father said had made such a laughingstock of the Conservative
Party. Justine had been brought up with a very clear idea of which social groups were beneath contempt, and Titus fell fair
and square into the middle of most of them. When she talked to her sister about work, she referred to Titus as "Sloane Brain,"
and her sister, who was currently going out with a professional activist—Justine was not quite sure for which cause—said she
didn't know how Justine could stand working with a tosser like that.

Sometimes—often, even—Justine didn't know how, either. It was indisputable that Titus was good at what he did, especially
at layout where he excelled, and that when he wasn't in the office an indefinable electric charge went out of the atmosphere,
like a spotlight being extinguished. But setting all that aside, so much about Titus was unbearable, especially his indifference
to other people's opinions. No, Justine thought, it's his indifference to other
people,
the way he breezes round the office not noticing if anyone needs anything or wants anything. Or has a new haircut.

Justine wasn't sure about her haircut. She'd had her hair long all her life, well past her shoulders, sometimes carelessly
skewering it up on top of her head with a pencil. And then she'd cut it. She'd cut it all off, really short, and was unable
to decide whether it was radically becoming or unbecoming because whichever it was it was certainly radical. She'd waited
for everyone to notice and at last Meera had said, "Very pretty" (her own hair was black with a blue gloss and hung to her
waist), and Steve had said, "Brave!" and Titus had said nothing. And you could be forgiven, couldn't you, for thinking Titus
liked short hair if his current girlfriend was anything to go by, you could at least expect a wink and a thumbs-up, couldn't
you?

Justine finished her solitary sandwich—cheese and coleslaw, not a wise choice—and looked again at her lettering for the Greig
Gallery. A modern take on rococo was what they'd asked for. Whatever that meant. Behind her, Meera snapped shut the lid of
her plastic lunch box and went briskly past on her way to the lavatory downstairs from which she would emerge smelling of
toothpaste and Issey perfume. Justine sighed. Perhaps it was time to look for another job, to look for a place where you didn't
have to work with people from the unacceptable Land of Posh. The street door slammed. Titus's voice could be heard downstairs
performing a parody of an operatic tenor singing the theme from
Titanic.
Justine bent intently towards her computer screen and fingered the wisps of hair in the nape of her neck.

"It isn't necessary to meet," the woman from Family Find had said. "We can do it all over the telephone if you'd rather. It's
entirely up to you."

Nathalie had been sitting on the floor, squashed into a corner the far side of the bed, like a child in trouble, with the
telephone pressed to her ear.

"I don't know—"

The woman had waited. She was called Elaine, she said, Elaine Price. She had sounded patient and practical, in the way you
hope hospital nurses will be.

"I'm sorry," Nathalie said, "I don't seem able to decide very well, I don't seem able to think—"

"Could you," Elaine said, "come to London?"

Nathalie paused.

"Yes," she said doubtfully.

"And your brother?"

"Maybe—"

There was another pause. Nathalie had pulled her knees up hard against her chest and put her forehead down against them.

"Nathalie," Elaine said, "I think you had better come and see me. Or I'll come and see you."

"No," Nathalie said.

"Then you come—"

"Yes."

"And we'll take your brother from there."

And now here she was, in the coffee shop of a supermarket in West London, waiting for Elaine Price. She was early. She'd caught
a train well before the train she'd needed to catch and had let one cappuccino get cold and depressing already. Ordering another
seemed not just futile but artificial, as if she was pretending there was something, anything, ordinary about sitting waiting
for a complete stranger next to a plate-glass window overlooking the West Cromwell Road. Why fake any more normality, anyway?
Why delude yourself that there is anything remotely, conceivably
normal,
as David had angrily said the night before, about any sane woman giving her own baby away? Why kid yourself that having to
go and
find
the woman who gave birth to you and then gave you away is the kind of thing that normal people ever have to contemplate in
a million years?

Nathalie pushed the coffee cup away. The foam on the surface had subsided into a thin sludge. Nathalie tipped the pot of paper
tubes of sugar out onto the table and began to arrange them in categories.

"Nobody regrets making this journey," Elaine had said. She'd said it just before the call ended, just after she'd said that
every child has a right to know where they come from, a right to try and make sense of themselves. "I can promise you that."