Brother and Sister (6 page)

"I'm sorry," David said.

Marnie looked up. She smiled.

"I don't mean to patronize you—"

He came further into the room and pulled a chair out from the table. He watched Marnie pour boiling water into her enamel
jug.

"And I don't mean to yell at Daniel."

"Don't you think," Marnie said in her nursery-school voice, dipping a long spoon into the coffee and stirring, "that we do
these things we don't mean to do because of something else? Like we're scared or upset?"

"Well, of course," David said irritably. "When was that ever new?"

"Doesn't have to be new to be true. Sure you don't want coffee?"

He leaned back in his chair and sighed.

"Oh, OK. I'll have some."

Marnie unhooked two mugs from a row above the counter.

"I'm going to help you," she said. "I'm going to tell you that my instinct about how you're feeling right now has to do with
Nathalie."

David grunted. Marnie put a strainer over one of the mugs and began to pour.

"She called here the other night. She wanted to talk to you, she said. She wanted to discuss something to do with your mother.
But I kind of felt that wasn't really why she'd called. Fair enough not to want to tell me the real reason, but you can bet
your mother wasn't it."

"No," David said.

Marnie turned and put the coffee mugs on the table. Then she sat down opposite David and pushed a mug towards him.

"So my guess is, she's called you and she's told you whatever it is and it's bugging you."

David said, staring past Marnie and out through the window behind her where he could see Daniel practicing erratic, impatient
swings with a golf club, "I told her I'd tell you—"

"Sure," Marnie said.

"It's not a secret, it's not even particularly private, at least, it won't be for long, it can't be—" He stopped.

Marnie waited. She put her hands around her coffee mug, and waited, her eyes on the tabletop.

"She wants to find her mother."

Mamie's head jerked up.

"Holy
smoke.
"

David said again, dully this time as if resigning himself, "She wants to look for her mother."

Marnie let go of her mug and put her hands down flat on the table.

"What brought this on?"

"I don't know exactly. She gave me some reasons but they sounded pretty flimsy to me. I—I wonder if this has been brewing
a long time, I wonder—" He broke off and shifted his gaze from the window to Marnie. "It makes me wonder a lot of things."

Marnie shook her head.

"She always seemed so sure she didn't need to—"

"I know."

"Maybe," Marnie said, "what she said and what she thought were two different things."

David gave a little shiver.

"Don't," he said quietly.

Marnie leaned forward.

"Does she mean to involve you?"

He nodded.

"How?"

"She wants me to help her tell Mum."

Marnie said, "It will half kill your mother."

"She knows that."

"She
knows
that?"

"She just needs to do this thing very badly. Desperately, even. I pointed out all the people she'll hurt and she said she
knew all that and maybe she was a selfish cow but she couldn't go on pretending any more."

"Pretending?"

"Pretending she didn't mind not being like people who know who their parents are."

Marnie leaned over the tabletop and scratched at something on the surface with a fingernail.

She said, almost impersonally, "It's called rubber-banding."

David looked at her.

"What is?"

"What Nathalie's doing. What's happened to Nathalie." Marnie raised her head. She said with precision, "The return of unresolved
griefs from childhood in adult life is called rubber-banding."

"How on earth do you know?"

"I looked it up."

"Looked it up?"

"On the Internet," Marnie said. "There's a lot about adoption on the Internet."

David said angrily, "What were you doing on the Inter­net?"

"Just looking—"

"You mean sneaking—"

"I don't sneak," Marnie said. "I'd have talked about it as much as you wanted. If you'd ever wanted to talk."

David pushed his chair back.

"Talking doesn't solve everything."

"No. But maybe it
explains
some."

"Like what?"

"Like why Nathalie's decision has thrown you so."

"It's Mum," David said. "And Dad. And Steve and Polly—"

"And yourself?"

He stood up. He nodded.

"David," Marnie said, "could you just look at the positive? Could you just consider your upbringing and your present life
and family situation? Could you just reflect on the fact that whatever the circumstances and tragedies of your early life
I chose to stay in England and marry you and have your children? I
chose
that."

He looked down at her. There was a pause and then he bent towards her and said fiercely, "I was only chosen by you after I
was rejected by
her.
"

Marnie looked back.

"Her?"

"Yes," David said. "
Her.
"

"Not—not Nathalie?"

"No."

Marnie swallowed. "You mean your birth mother."

"Yes," David said with emphasis.

Marnie turned her face away. She put up one hand and held the end of her plait.

"We seem—to be in real deep here—"

David said nothing.

Marnie said, "Nathalie's—kind of ripped the wounds open, hasn't she, even if she didn't mean to—"

"She asked me to go with her."

"Go where?"

"On this journey. To find—to find our mothers."

Marnie let her plait go and sat bolt upright.

"She asked you to find your mother too?"

"Yes."

"Anything else I should know?"

"No!" David shouted. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the ceiling.

"And will you?"

"No!" David shouted again.

Marnie waited a moment and then she said, "Why not?"

"Because I don't
want
to! I don't need to! I don't want to have anything to do with her,
ever.
"

"Look at me," Marnie said.

Slowly David bent his head forward until his gaze rested on Marnie. She was sitting straight-backed with her hands flat on
the table. Her hands were ringless. She had never worn rings, not even a wedding ring. "Why?" she'd said. "Why does a ring
make us any more married?"

"What," he said now.

"Listen—"

"Look," he said, interrupting, "I don't want any half-baked claptrap off the Internet—"

She ignored him.

"Nathalie decides, for reasons we don't know, or maybe understand, that she wants to find her mother. She tells you. She has
never given you any reason previously for wishing to do this, so it's a shock for you. But it's more than that. It's unhinging
something in you, it's digging up something from the past you thought you'd buried, maybe even buried with Nathalie's help.
It seems to me there's only one solution." She stopped and brought her hands together, as if to prevent them from gesturing
and thus making the whole situation more emotional than it already was.

Then she said, "You have to agree."

"I
have
agreed," David said. "I've told her I'll help with Mum."

"No."

She looked steadily at him, and he had a clutch of recollection, a memory of those children in the nursery school who were
going to do what Marnie told them to do because, in the end, she knew what was best for them.

"No," he said again. His voice sounded far away and thin.

"Nathalie's right," Marnie said. "If she's going to look for her mother, you have to look for yours, too—"

"Marnie—"

"You do," she said. "Or you'll never be at peace again. Not now."

CHAPTER FIVE

T
he upstairs sitting room of the Royal Oak had been decorated by Evelyn Ross to provide a distinct contrast to the public
rooms below. The Royal Oak—apart from the improbably green tree on its signboard—had apparently always been painted black
and dark red, with gold lettering, and nothing would shift Ray Ross from the conviction that this was somehow a historic tradition
that it was his duty to uphold. When he had first become the licensee, all those years ago, Evelyn had begged for at least
cream instead of black, or even, inside, some color for the window frames and doors less profoundly redolent of beer than
the chipped tan they had always been, and had been met with complete resistance. The pub would be repainted every ten years,
Ray said, in the livery it had always worn, and if she wanted to display her artistic flair she could do it in the areas well
away from the dignity of his business.

"This isn't a bloody cafe," he'd said. "You can do all your nonsense upstairs, Evie. Do it where the customers can't see."

So she had painted her sitting room lilac with white woodwork and furnished it with a sofa upholstered in cream leather which
had been in a clearance sale at a furnishing store. The store had also provided the nest of brass-legged occasional tables
and the imitation onyx lamps with pleated shades. Ray never sat on the sofa: he said it was impossible to stay on. Instead
he used an easy chair inherited from Evie's father, which she kept covered with a piece of tapestry-woven fabric because all
Ray's clothes smelled of beer and frying.

"You be thankful," he said every so often, "that I'm not a bloody fishmonger."

The sitting room was a small haven for Evie. On the rare occasions when she wasn't required in the kitchen or behind the bar,
she would settle—with difficulty—onto her leather sofa and watch old movies on the television, luxuriously conscious of not
being part of the noise and activity and smells of the pub below. Sometimes, during longueurs in the movies, she thought about
how life would be in two years' time, when Ray retired, and they bought the bungalow in Ferndown they'd always talked about,
and Ray had no official occupation. Quite where she could go then to escape the heavy, demanding seductiveness of his presence,
she couldn't think. Her daughter, Verena, Steve's older sister, who lived on the Isle of Man and only came down to Westerham
once a year, said that she should get a job herself when Ray retired.

"Just a little job, Mum. Just something to get you out a bit. Dad'll drive you crazy, otherwise."

Evie didn't think Ray would like her to have a job, even a little one. He would be affronted by it, insulted. Working for
him in the Royal Oak was one thing—for Ray, after all, a publican like his father, the Royal Oak was almost a vocation—but
slipping out to earn money from another source was quite another. It would be seen as a disloyalty. She could possibly do
some voluntary work in a local hospital, or a library, or an old people's home, but she didn't think a paid job would be possible.
It was all very well for Verena, married to a man of a completely different generation from Ray's, a man who almost
expected
his wife to have a life of her own, just as it was all very well for Evie's daughter-in-law, Nathalie. Steve had always been
so good to Nathalie. Steve saw Nathalie as a person in her own right in a way Evie knew Ray could never do, a way which he
would regard as unmanly. Evie had never said to Steve—or, indeed, to a living soul—"I wish your dad was more like you," but
sometimes, sitting on her leather sofa with her feet up on its matching ottoman, she wanted it so badly she almost cried.

She loved it when Steve brought Polly round. Polly was a source of delight and fascination to both her grandparents at the
Royal Oak—she was the one person in the world Ray Ross would stop whatever he was doing for—and the recipient of endless presents.
Evie knew Steve didn't like the kind of things she bought Polly, but Polly loved them. Polly and her grandmother shared an
excited appetite for the excessively feminine, for glitter and flowers and Hello Kitty handbags. Evie kept the things she
bought for Polly in a velvet-padded chest—it was really a dressing-table stool—behind the cream sofa. Polly called it her
treasure box. She also understood that most of the items in the treasure box belonged at the Royal Oak in a way that could
not be translated to Steve and Nathalie's flat, thus constituting a small conspiracy with her grandmother that Evie relished.
Only over a few items, such as the Barbie bicycle that had been her fourth birthday present, did she fight so remorselessly
to be allowed to take them home that Steve felt it would have been both unkind and excessively priggish not to let her. Some
afternoons, before evening opening time, Evie opened the treasure box and gloated over its tinselly contents, imagining Polly's
face—often profoundly serious when truly affected—when she saw the new additions, the sparkling toenail polish, the stick-on
butterfly tattoos, the jeweled bow hairslides. Although she always loved seeing Steve, it was an acute disappointment to Evie
if he came to the Royal Oak alone. The sight of his bike, chained outside with Polly's little seat on the back, gave Evie
the same fluttering rush of feeling that the sight of Ray Ross's motorbike had once given her, more than forty-five years
before.

Polly's been, she'd tell Verena, on the line to the Isle of Man, and Verena would sigh. Verena had two boys for whom their
grandparents at the Royal Oak constituted no more than a peculiar annual week's holiday, punctuated by plates of chips and
flavored uncomfortably by their mother's tension. "She's a wonderful child," Evie would tell Verena, "wonderful. She has such
an imagination," little suspecting that in the Isle of Man, Verena was rehearsing the phone call to her brother that she'd
make the moment Evie put the receiver down.

"Thanks a million," Verena planned to say to Steve. "Thanks a million for thrusting Polly down Mum's throat, thanks a million
for making sure she never gives Jake and Stuart a thought, thanks for being the perfect son, dancing bloody attendance, showing
me up, cutting me out."

She never actually made the calls. She never rang Steve at all, except at Christmas, and if he thought of her in return, he
gave little sign of it. He told Nathalie that that was how his family were, how they'd always been, that they didn't make
a big deal of one another, didn't need each other really. Nathalie always smiled when he said that, as if she knew, as if
he was demonstrating yet again that natural families couldn't, in the end, hold a candle to chosen families, that real family
life was a matter of free will and love, not of blood. And so it was a surprise to Steve to find himself climbing the back
stairs of the Royal Oak towards his mother's sitting room, impelled by an unease he could neither quite define, nor tolerate
alone.

Evie was on her sofa, her knees covered by a blanket she had crocheted herself out of squares of mauve and purple wool. She
gave a little start when Steve came in, pointing the remote control of the television at him involuntarily, as if it were
some kind of defensive weapon.

"Ooh, I thought it was your father—"

"He's downstairs," Steve said.

Evie struggled to get up from under her blanket.

"No Polly? Where's Polly?"

Steve bent to kiss his mother's cheek. Nathalie had taught him to do that. Before Nathalie, it had never crossed his mind.

"She's at school, Mum. Nathalie's picking her up."

Evie pushed the blanket onto the floor.

"Why didn't you wait till you could bring her? I've got something for her."

Steve paused, and then he said awkwardly, "Today's a bit different, Mum."

Evie looked up sharply. She stopped trying to get up and stayed where she was, on the edge of the sofa.

"What's happened?"

"Nobody's hurt, Mum. Everyone's safe."

"What's happened?"

Steve lowered himself into the easy chair his father used. He sat leaning forward in it, staring at the carpet.

"It's nothing bad, Mum—"

"Then why are you here?" Evie said. "Why are you here without Polly?"

"I wanted to ask you something."

An expression of instant wariness crossed Evie's face. It was an expression very familiar to Steve, an expression he'd known
all down the years when Evie was steeling herself to decide to do something for her children in defiance of her husband.

"Don't worry, Mum," Steve said. "No action. Only an opinion."

"I've never been afraid to act, have I?" Evie said, her voice rising on a tiny note of resentment.

"No. You never have."

"And I wouldn't be now. Especially if it was for Polly."

"This isn't about Polly," Steve said, "it's about Nathalie. About Nathalie and me—"

Evie looked hard at him.

"You never—"

"No," Steve said. He made a wide gesture with both hands, as if utterly dismissing the notion that there could ever be anything
wrong between Nathalie and himself.

"I always said you should get married," Evie said. "It isn't fair on Polly. I've always thought that."

"I know," Steve said. He shut his eyes for a moment. He had no energy for embarking, yet again, on his defense of Nathalie's
strongly expressed desire to live with him, but not to be married to him.

He said firmly, "It's not about that."

Evie bent sideways to pick up the blanket and began to fold it.

"What then?"

Steve said carefully, "You know how Nat's always been about adoption and stuff, you know how she's always said she wasn't
bothered by not knowing her real mother, by not having a natural family?"

Evie patted the folded blanket on her knee, as if it were a cat.

She said placidly, "She's always been good that way."

Steve looked across at her.

"Well, it's all changed."

Evie stopped patting.

"What has?"

"Everything. How she feels, what she wants. Everything. Almost overnight she's gone from saying she's fine about it to saying
she isn't fine at all and she wants to find her mother. Her—natural mother."

Evie shook her head.

"What's brought this on?" She looked across at Steve.

"What've you done?"

He shrugged. He felt the anger he'd always felt when his mother used that tone to him, when she'd cornered him by the door
to the cellar, or coming out of the bathroom, or in his bedroom, and said, "What've you done to upset your father?"

He muttered now, as he always used to, "Nothing."

"Well, if it's nothing," Evie said, "what've you got to be upset about?"

"I'm not upset—"

"Then why are you here? Why haven't you brought Polly?"

Steve looked down again at the carpet between his feet. It was beige, trellised in darker beige with a bunch of stylized pinkish
flowers in every diamond shape. He tried to remember what Nathalie had said, how Nathalie had explained to him that his mother
only used that sharp tone to him because she daren't ever use such a tone to his father.

He said as patiently as he could, his gaze still on the carpet, "Mum, I don't know where I stand."

"Well, you would," Evie said, "if you were her husband." Steve's head jerked up.

He almost shouted, "I am her husband! In everything that matters!"

Evie gave a little jump. She set the folded blanket beside her and got up from the sofa. Then she pulled the ottoman across
the carpet until it was close to Steve's chair and sat down on it.

"Sorry, dear."

"This isn't about doing the respectable thing," Steve said. "This isn't about what the neighbors think."

"No, dear."

Steve looked miserably at his mother.

"It's been a shock, Mum."

Evie put out both hands and took Steve's nearest one between them. Her hands felt familiar, broad and warm and surprisingly
soft after all those years of kitchen work.

He said, "She even told—someone we know—how fine she was about being adopted only ten days ago. When Polly had her ear seen
she said it shook her a bit but only for a moment. She talked to Dave and I thought that'd sorted it. But it hasn't. It's
done the opposite. She's now absolutely set on finding her mother. She just came out with it. Out of the blue. I'd put Polly
to bed, we'd had something to eat, we were just sitting there talking about nothing much and wham, bam, she says it. Tells
me she's made up her mind, says it's the thing that's been missing all along, that nothing I can say will stop her so I might
as well help all I can." He glanced at Evie. "She's getting the details of a search service."

Evie squeezed Steve's hands. He could feel her rings, gold bands set with diamond chips, now worn to mere slivers, pressing
into his own fingers.

She said, "What's upset you then? What's upset you about this?"

He looked down again.

He said gruffly, "That she just tells me. Doesn't ask me, doesn't—consult." He paused, and then he said, "And—and it makes
me feel I'm not enough. Not enough for her."

"Well, dear," Evie said. "You'll never be her mother."

"She's got a mother."

Evie considered. There'd never been any difficulty, as far as she was concerned, in dealing with Lynne. They got on fine,
the two grandmothers, Lynne's superiority in being the first grandmother because of being Nathalie's mother nicely balanced
by Evie's quietly complacent knowledge that she was the grandmother with the blood connection to Polly. This superiority was
not something, she discovered, she cared to have challenged. She took her hands gently away from Steve's and folded them in
her lap. The sudden image of a new competing grandmother, a grandmother with
all
the cards, was both disconcerting and unpleasant.

She looked down at her hands and adjusted her rings.

"Does Lynne know?"

"Not yet."

"It won't be easy. Not for her."

"No, I know. I've told her that."

"And David?"

"She's making him do it too."