Brother and Sister (9 page)

"Really?"

"It'll stop you defining yourself by loss. It'll help you move on."

Nathalie shifted the sugars. Was that what it was? Was that what had dogged her all these years, made her insist that, if
she was indeed an outsider, then she was an outsider by choice? She began to balance the blue paper tubes of white sugar carefully
against one another, as if she was building a miniature bonfire.

A woman paused beside her, and waited. She was younger than Nathalie had expected, with long pale hair and a denim jacket.

"Hello," the woman said.

Nathalie tried, clumsily, to get up.

"I'm Elaine," the woman said. She put a large patchwork suede bag down on the chair next to Nathalie's. "Don't get up." She
smiled and glanced at the cold cappuccino. "I'll get us some more of those."

"No, I'll—"

Elaine put a hand briefly on Nathalie's shoulder. She had a ring on her wedding finger with a big turquoise in it.

"You stay there."

Nathalie watched her walk over to the self-service counter. Besides the denim jacket she wore cutoff trousers and trainers
without socks and her bare ankles were brown. Nathalie wasn't, now, quite sure what she had been expecting sartorially, but
a suit possibly, certainly a skirt, and a briefcase rather than a kind of bag she'd taken herself on long-ago weekends to
the music festival at Glastonbury. She also hadn't been expecting long hair. Elaine Price, Nathalie had decided, would be
like the woman from social services, with a wash-and-wear haircut that was no trouble—or signal—to anyone. She let out a breath.
The denim jacket and bare ankles and unofficial hair were all a surprise and a comfort.

"There," Elaine said.

She put two big coffee cups down on the table and transferred Nathalie's discarded one to an empty table nearby. Then she
moved her bag from the chair next to Nathalie's and sat down in it herself.

"Dark hair," she said to Nathalie, "white top. Leather jacket. Just like you said."

Nathalie looked round the coffee shop.

"Plenty of those in here—"

"But not waiting for me. You had waiting written all over you."

Nathalie said shyly, "I've been here ages—"

"Most people do that. The other habit is to be late, really late. Sometimes that's how I sort out who wants to do this search
and who needs to."

Nathalie drew a spoon through the foam on her coffee and made a soft furrow.

"Does it matter?"

"Well," Elaine said, "it's better to
want
to, if you can. Otherwise there's a likelihood of wanting to punish your mother."

Nathalie stared at her coffee.

"I can't imagine that," she said. "I can't even see she's real."

Elaine picked up her coffee cup and held it balanced between the tips of her fingers.

"Let's start at the beginning."

Nathalie nodded.

"Don't you want to know about me?"

"I hadn't really thought—"

"Well, why are you here and not with an official agency?"

"Because—because you aren't official—"

"But I'm trained."

"Yes."

Elaine put her coffee cup down again. She pushed her hair behind her shoulders.

"Go on."

"My brother wanted to know about your training. My brother David."

"It was intensive," Elaine said. "I did it at the Post Adoption Center. There were modules on searching, on infertility, on
genetic sexual attraction. I do a retraining course every year."

"I'll tell him."

"Nathalie," Elaine said. "Relax."

Nathalie took a spoonful of coffee foam.

"I've upset so many people, wanting to do this. I can't tell you. Everyone seems to feel let down, as if I'm doing something
unnecessary, something deliberately destructive. My partner, my sister-in-law, my mother—"

"Your mother?"

"Yes. My mother."

"I'm afraid," Elaine said, "that your adoptive mother has to stay out of this. This isn't her journey."

"Really?"

"Really."

"You mean—"

"I mean," Elaine said, looking straight at Nathalie, "that you are entitled to do this. People who are adopted are damaged
by adoption and are looking for healing. You are entitled to look for healing."

"Thank you," Nathalie whispered.

"Don't thank me. I'm not a benefactor, I'm a service. You're going to pay me to find your mother. To find your brother's mother."

"Yes—"

"It won't take long."

"No—"

"You said you had your birth certificate. That's a start. It will probably take less than three weeks. It'll cost between
two and three hundred pounds per person. I'll need a deposit of a hundred and fifty from each of you."

"Of course."

"And I'll need to know why you want to do this now."

"Now?"

"Yes, now."

"It's hard to describe—"

"With a lot of people, it's something quite specific that's the trigger, like having your own child."

"Polly's five."

"Does she look like you?"

"More like her father."

"Nathalie," Elaine said, "I have some responsibility too, for your birth mother. I have to know something about your thinking."

Nathalie looked up.

"I want to
know,
" she said, "I want to know where I come from. I want to know if I'm like her or not. I want to know about my father. I want
to stop—
not
knowing. I don't know exactly what set me off, but I'd suddenly had enough of pretending, and now that I've started, I can
hardly stand not knowing anymore. Even—" She paused, and then she said, "Even if I don't like what I discover."

"You might not. She might not. She might refuse you."

"I don't want a
meeting
—"

"You don't now. Wait and see. You might feel like exchanging letters and photographs."

"Photographs—"

"Don't forget, in theory you have a position on two family trees."

Nathalie said slowly, "If you find my mother—"

"When, more likely."

"What will you do?"

"Tell you. Immediately."

"And then?"

"Write to her."

"Write a letter—"

"She'll read it, from me. If it was from social services, she'd throw it away. Especially if she's married. If she's got other
children."

Nathalie's head came up.

"Other children!"

"Oh yes."

"I didn't think—"

"There mayn't be any. Up to forty percent of women who give up a baby for adoption don't conceive again."

Nathalie picked up her coffee cup and took a swallow. It tasted warm and silky and synthetic.

"My dad taught me a word once. I think it's Spanish. It's—I'm not sure if I'm saying it right—it's
duende.
It means kind of a spirit of the earth, something roused in the very cells of the blood."

"Sounds a good kind of dad."

Nathalie nodded.

"He is. He's the only one not making a fuss over all this."

"Not threatened, then."

Nathalie said angrily, "
Nobody's
threatened."

"You hang on to that. That, and these instincts you're obeying."

"Yes."

"I think," Elaine said, "that our instincts play a big part in all this. I think that instinctively we know whether we were
wanted or not."

"Do I know?"

"I think you do."

"And David—"

"Yes?"

"Maybe," Nathalie said, "he isn't so certain. Maybe that's what he's frightened of." She glanced at Elaine. "What are you
going to do now?"

"I'm going looking for your mother's birth certificate. I'll get on the Internet."

Nathalie swallowed.

"She was called Cora. Cora Wilson."

"I know. You told me on the phone."

"And—and what do I do?"

Elaine smiled. She picked up her suede bag and plumped it on to her lap.

"You wait to hear from me," she said.

In Paddington Station, Nathalie bought a cup of tea and a bar of chocolate and an apple. Eating the chocolate, she found herself
automatically justifying herself silently to Polly, who declined to understand that if chocolate was a food and therefore
nourishing—as opposed to sweets which were purely chemical concoctions and therefore harmful—she couldn't eat it whenever
she felt like it, and especially as a substitute for meals she didn't care for, like breakfast. After the chocolate, the apple
tasted metallic and empty, and had a hard, wet texture that hurt her teeth. She drank half the tea from its plastic cup and
dumped the rest in a litter bin. There were times, she thought, when you simply should not eat or drink, times when you were
so agitated and consumed by something happening in your mind or spirit that basic functions like digestion were best ignored.
If you didn't, they only declined to function properly anyway, and added to the turmoil. She threw the chocolate wrapper and
the half-eaten apple into the bin after the tea, and went in search of her train.

It was waiting at one of the more obscure platforms, a short train of small carriages with uncompromisingly upright seats.
There was almost nobody on board yet except a boy eating a filled baguette out of a long paper bag and a couple of women with
bulging plastic carriers crammed defensively behind their legs. Nathalie went down the carriage to the far end and chose a
seat in a corner by a window. The window was dappled with dirty dried raindrops, and in the grime outside somebody had written
the word "fuck", backwards, with a finger, so that it was legible from inside. Nathalie sat down and took out her mobile phone.

"Hi," David said, from somewhere windy.

"Where are you?"

"At Fernley. About to pull out some tree roots."

"Can't someone else do that?"

"I like doing it."

"Dave," Nathalie said, "I saw her."

"Yes," he said. His voice was flat.

"She's cool. I liked her. She made it all sound quite easy."

"Urn."

"She'll do it all for us. She'll find our mothers and then she'll write to them. She said—"

"Yes?"

"She said nobody regrets doing this."

"You told me already."

Nathalie turned herself sideways so that she couldn't see the word on the window.

"Dave, I thought you were with me, that you were coming with me—"

"I am."

"But—"

"It isn't easy. I can't go back and it's hard going on. I'm just not finding it
easy.
"

"Nor me."

"But you're excited."

"And frightened."

"Oh yes. Frightened."

Nathalie said, "Do you want to stay as you are?"

David said nothing. She could hear a whine which might have been wind or might have been a mechanical saw.

"If you want to hang on to how you're feeling," Nathalie said, "then fine. Nobody can help you. You stay right there and nurse
yourself."

There was another pause. Nathalie took the phone from her ear and then put it back again.

"Bye, David," she said.

His voice came hesitantly.

"Nat?"

"Yes?"

"Help," David said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

C
onnor Latimer went into the sitting room to tell his wife that he was going down to the Hurlingham Club to play tennis, and
found that she was fast asleep. He stood looking at her, weighing up how much his tennis would be spoiled by not being certain
that Carole knew precisely where he was. He was used to her knowing his movements, after all. They'd had close on thirty years
of running a business together and, in the course of those years, had needed to know each other's exact whereabouts with the
result that Connor had become dependent upon this knowledge. It made him frankly uneasy to be out of Carole's radar now, because
if she didn't know where he was, and how long he would be, how could she be thinking about him, visualizing him, in the way
he, well,
liked
her to?

He leaned forward a little. Carole was sleeping very trimly, her head balanced on a small brocade cushion wedged into the
angle of a wing chair. Her hands were folded in her lap, her ankles were crossed and her mouth was not open. Her hair, a kind
of creamy, tawny color which was elegantly reminiscent of the blonde she'd been when they met, was hardly disarranged. Looking
at her, Connor wondered if he had actually mentioned his tennis game already, over breakfast, and whether he could remember
Carole saying, "Oh good. With Benny?" in reply. But perhaps he hadn't. Perhaps he just thought he had. Carole had, after all,
been reading the
Financial Times,
which she still read, out of habit, and this might have prevented her from completely taking in the information about the
tennis game. Connor leaned a little closer and put a hand on Carole's arm.

She opened her eyes. She smiled.

"I'm sorry to wake you," Connor said, "but I'm just off to the Hurlingham."

She still smiled.

"I know, darling."

"I'll be back about six. We might have a drink after the game."

"Lovely."

He gave her arm a pat.

"Have a nice sleep—"

"Mmm," she said. She closed her eyes again.

"About six," Connor said.

He straightened up and felt in his pocket for his car keys. He wondered whether, before he left and Carole slid back down
into afternoon oblivion, he should also remind her that Martin had said he was coming round later. He opened his mouth.

"Goodbye, darling," Carole said with surprising distinctness. "Have a lovely game. Love to Benny."

"Yes," Connor said. He rattled his keys. "Yes."

He took a step away. Carole's face was now serenely, conclusively shuttered. He thought of asking her whether she would like
the French windows open since the sun was now coming out, and decided against it. He took another step away and sighed. Then
he gave himself a little shake and left the room with as decisive a tread as he could manage in his tennis shoes.

His Mercedes was parked in the basement garage below the flat. The garage had been one of the elements that had attracted
him to the flat in the first place, the others being that its location in this part of West London was central enough for
civilized life, and that the bay windows of its sitting room and main bedroom opened into spectacular communal gardens containing
established trees and shrubs, and maintained by a team of nicely mannered gardeners in green overalls.

"All the pleasure of the countryside," Connor would say to guests, exclaiming at the seclusion and charm of the gardens, only
a mile or two from Marble Arch, "and none of the labor or inconvenience."

Carole had made a delightful place to sit, too, on the patio outside the sitting-room windows, surrounded by Italian pots
and urns, and a wisteria trained up a trellis painted a dull shade of bluish-gray which Connor would never have chosen but
which, when he saw it, he had to acknowledge was absolutely spot-on. It was always like that, with Carole. She'd make these
decisions, these choices, and he'd be full of doubts and hesitations, but then he'd see, in the end, that her instinct, her—her
flair, was justified. He always thought that was why they'd been so good in business together, the contrast between his caution
and steadiness—well, what else would you expect from a man who'd got top marks in all his accountancy exams?—and her nerve
and imagination. Between them, over the years, they'd built the business up into something that had been
very
well worth selling when Connor had reached sixty and declared himself due a bit of rest, due time to devote himself to his
hobbies, to his tennis and his sailing and his print collection. And Carole was due something, too. He was very aware of that,
very conscious of what he owed her, his wife, his business partner, the mother of his children. Indeed, he had been careful
to pay tribute to her publicly, to make sure that, at the dinner given to celebrate the final sale of the company, his speech
had made emphatic reference to Carole's contribution.

"I would like to make it plain," he had said, standing up at the table in the private room of an expensive Chelsea restaurant
amid the handsome detritus of a good dinner, "that none of this—and I mean
none
of it—would have been possible without Carole. I have no hesitation in saying I owe her everything, and so does this company."

Carole had cried on the way home. She had sat beside him in the Mercedes on the way home to this new and wonderful garden
flat and wept decorously into his white-linen breast-pocket handkerchief. At the time, he had been flooded with gratification,
expansively convinced that she had been so moved by his heartfelt acknowledgment of all she had done for him as both a woman
and a colleague that she had been unable to express herself in anything other than tears. It was only later, when she had
been incomprehensibly reluctant to let him make love to her—and he was longing to make love to her—that a small disquieting
doubt began to tiptoe round the edges of his mind. If she wasn't weeping out of gratitude and emotion, what was she weeping
for? Surely it couldn't be for the company. Surely, after all those decades of work and sacrifice and anxiety, she couldn't
possibly be grieving to see the company go? Not when such freedom beckoned.
Surely
not.

Connor put the key into the ignition now, and reversed the Mercedes smoothly up the ramp and into the street. Carole of course
didn't drive the Mercedes, she had her own little town car which she said she preferred because you could park it on a playing
card. He'd indulged her about that as he'd indulged her about so many things. Damn it, he
liked
indulging her, he
liked
her to have what she wanted. And mostly, he thought, turning the car into Ladbroke Grove, she had got what she wanted, he'd
seen to that, he'd made sure that he'd compensated her for all the rotten things that had happened to her in her early life,
all the troubles with men, with insecurity. He'd rescued her, really, he knew he had. He'd rescued her and given her all the
things a woman needs to make her happy—a good marriage, a comfortable life, satisfying work (Connor prided himself on that,
prided himself on believing that a clever woman needs work) and—children.

Children. Connor took his sunglasses out of the pocket of the driver's door and, even though the sun was shining only fitfully,
put them on. He'd been convinced, certain, that Carole needed children. He wanted them himself, of course, always had, was
known for his way with them, with his nieces, with the children of friends, but Carole needed them even more because Carole
was a special case. Carole, after all, was, when he met her, a woman with a past, an almost tragic young woman from a disturbingly
unsupportive home who'd been disowned by her parents after a feckless boyfriend—whom she'd adored in the way girls persist
in adoring attractive shits—had insisted she had an abortion. Carole's parents were Catholic, devoutly Catholic, with views
on sex and abortion which even Connor, whose friends teased him about his social orthodoxy, thought came out of the Ark. Carole
had had her abortion to try and placate her boyfriend, and then of course both the boyfriend and her parents turned their
backs on her, simply refused to have anything more whatever to do with her. So Connor had picked up the pieces. He'd met this
gorgeous, bruised-looking blonde at a private view in some gallery in Cork Street, and he'd scooped her up, almost literally,
out of all the confusion and hopelessness and near poverty she was stumbling along in.

He had to admit that after the first glory of love and gallantry was over it wasn't easy. He'd thought he didn't mind about
the abortion, about her desperate passion for the boyfriend, but he found it was harder to come to terms with than he expected.
He'd really had to struggle with himself, he'd had to speak to himself very severely about behaving in a mature and compassionate
manner, and it was in the course of these stern internal lectures that it had occurred to him that a baby might be, if not
the answer to their difficulties, at least a significant part of the answer. A baby would give Carole something to love that
was her own, that would—wouldn't it?—replace the aborted baby. A baby,
his
baby, would tie Carole to him more firmly and, at the same time, would help expunge for him the painfully present jealousy
he found he still suffered thinking about another man's potent penetration of the woman who was now Connor's wife.

And so Martin was born. Blond, blue-eyed, charming Martin, the first grandson for Connor's parents, the right and proper obliterator
of that previous lost baby. Except—well, Connor thought, blowing the car's horn imperiously at a black boy in a Vauxhall Vectra,
that wasn't how it worked out, that wasn't how it happened. In modern terms, Connor supposed, Carole had failed to bond with
Martin. She hadn't wanted to feed him, had hardly wanted to hold him. Everyone had told Connor about post-baby blues, but
he wasn't prepared for Carole to cry hardest when the monthly nurse left. He shook his head, as if to get a kind of ringing
out of his ears. He couldn't think about that time, really, never had been able to. He couldn't think about it because the
fact was, the unpleasant, disagreeable, uncomfortable fact, that things hadn't got better. Ever. Martin was now twenty-eight
and you couldn't kid yourself for a moment that he and Carole saw eye to eye about anything much. And however much Connor
admired Carole, was grateful to Carole, tried to be supportive of Carole, he couldn't help feeling—
knowing
—that Carole was hard on Martin, hard sometimes to the point of unkindness; hard and critical and unencouraging. And Martin
couldn't take it, he wasn't an easygoing laid-back character like his younger brother Euan. Martin was thin-skinned and defensive,
and every time he made a mess of something, which was distressingly often, he'd lash out, almost as if he wanted to deflect
any criticism before it got within a hundred miles of him.

The heartbreaking thing was that Martin wanted Carole's approval, longed for it, longed for her to tell him that she was proud
of him, that even when he cocked things up she would stand by him. Even now, as Martin approached the supposedly adult age
of thirty, Connor would catch him looking at his mother like a spaniel not knowing whether to expect a kick or a chocolate.
And Connor would see Carole suppressing something, contriving something in her responses, not aware, seemingly, that everything
she did was as transparent as glass. She was easier with Euan, but then Euan was easier as a person, less needy, less chippy.

Connor sighed. He had a sinking feeling about the reason for Martin's wanting to come round that evening. The way the boy
had asked hadn't boded well: too brash, too casual. He sighed again, and swung the Mercedes into the car park of the club.
Thirty feet away he noticed, at once, the comfortingly bulky figure of Benny Nolan lifting his tennis bag out of the boot
of his BMW. Connor's heart lifted with it. Good old Benny. Good old familiar, cheerful,
normal
Benny.

When Carole Latimer woke, the room was dusky. Through the French windows she could see a glimmer of pale evening spring sky
behind the black outlines of roofs and chimneys and trees. When she was working, she'd had a view from her office window of
roofs and chimneys and trees, looking west. She'd watched thousands of sunsets from that window, thousands and thousands.
She sat up a little and took the pillow away from behind her neck and laid it on her knee. No good thinking about those sunsets
now. No good thinking about that window or room or office either. No good thinking about lovely, blessed work. No good
thinking.

She leaned forward and put her elbows on the brocade pillow. She must have been asleep for more than two hours, almost three.
Awful, really. She'd never done this in the past, never wasted whole afternoons just sleeping them away in this depressing
elderly fashion. But then, she'd never felt about sleep as she did now, she'd never sought it, fled to it, as she had the
last few weeks and months. She'd never seen it before as a refuge.

She stood up slowly and stretched, letting the pillow fall to the floor. People said, didn't they, that when you were stressed
or unhappy you either stuffed your face or stopped eating altogether. Presumably the same thing could happen with sleep, that
you either binged on it or couldn't capture it for a second. She'd never seen herself as a binge person, someone who can't
ever quite let themselves off the lead for fear of what boiling cauldron of self-indulgence or self-abuse they might fall
into. Apart from those long-ago feelings for Rory—and she'd never known anything in her life which had even begun to approach
the madness and intensity and seductiveness of those feelings—she had been able to manage herself, had been able to arrange
and dispose of her desires and needs and fears in such a way that they did not stalk her, or haunt her, or wait in dark places
to spring out on her. No—her life with Connor, her work with Connor, had been something satisfying and controllable and without
menace.

Until it stopped. Carole bent and picked up the cushion and threw it inaccurately towards the sofa. Of course life with Connor
hadn't stopped, but work had. She wouldn't have believed what work meant to her, until it stopped. She'd always thought, had
always said, that men identify themselves by what they do, and women by their relationships. But what had happened to her?
Work had stopped when Connor was sixty and she was two years younger and she had gone, almost overnight it seemed, from a
place of great security and certainty to a howling wilderness where all kinds of events and people she had vowed not to think
about again—indeed had largely succeeded in hardly thinking about again—had come swooping down at her like bats out of a cave.
That was when the sleeping began, the longing and capacity for oblivion, for the mind to be freed and stilled and soothed.
Some days, meticulously making their bed in the mornings in the way she had always done, Carole had to fight herself, almost
physically, to prevent herself from just climbing hungrily back in, back into the embrace of the pillows and the fat American
comforter and the thick, sweet forgetfulness.