Brother and Sister (14 page)

He stood back to allow Nathalie to leave the room ahead of him. She went past him slowly, as if she was still deeply absorbed
in something else.

"I can't believe it," she said, pausing in the passage, "I really can't. She was
crying.
" Her voice was awed.

The hairdresser, folding neat little packets of aluminum foil over strands of Carole Latimer's newly tinted hair, told her
she had lost weight. She looked at herself in the mirror, absurd in her frill of tinfoil, and thought that if she had it was
a) only in her face and b) not becoming. She looked in fact, she thought, old and tired and wrung out, which was not surprising
as it was precisely how she felt.

Caspar, who came from Klagenfurt in Austria, and was the middle child of seven and his mother's favorite, said that he was
trying to eat just a little every three hours so that his body never got in a panic that it was never going to be fed again
and started storing fat.

"Is that what it does?" Carole asked, not interested. It wasn't her body panicking that alarmed her, but her mind, the mind
that she had so confidently, stupidly supposed she had learned to manage.

"Almost no carbs," Caspar said, deftly painting and folding. "Lots of protein."

Carole knew her cue.

"The Atkins diet."

"It works for everyone.
Everyone.
They've all tried it." He glanced at Carole in the mirror, his young-old face hardened by a cruelly short haircut. "No fruit,
though. Too many carbs in fruit."

Carole sighed.

"Not for me, then."

"You learn your own metabolism, don't you?"

"I suppose so," Carole said. "
If
you're interested."

Caspar looked faintly shocked. He tucked the last strand of hair into its square of foil and stood back.

"Time for the heat machine!"

Carole closed her eyes.

"Thank you."

"Twenty minutes, darling," Caspar said. He patted her shoulder. "No distractions."

Carole winced. When she had first started coming to this salon almost twenty years ago, time in the chair had been a complete
luxury, time without telephones or questions, time that was somehow sanctioned as her time, even by Connor, the sort of time
women with proper self-respect should be regularly allotted, no questions asked. But now—well, now was so different, and so
frighteningly familiar at the same time, from the two distinct worlds of her past that three hours in the salon being transformed—for
what purpose, beyond habit?— from dark dirty blonde to pale dirty blonde seemed to represent not so much a blessed and restorative
escape as an attempt to hold on to all the flimsy little rituals that gave her the illusion she wasn't drowning. Drowning
women do not, after all, have their hair carefully colored, and grade the towels in their linen cupboards according to size,
and never run out of oranges to squeeze for breakfast juice—do they?

She felt the pleasant semicircle of warmth round the back of her skull from the heat machine.

"Thank you," she said, without opening her eyes.

Caspar's hand rested for a fleeting moment on her shoulder.

"Enjoy, darling."

She nodded, clattering her foils.

"Shall I come and pick you up?" Connor had said as she left the flat. "Why don't you take a taxi there, and then I'll pick
you up?"

"Thank you," she said, "thank you, but no. I never know how long it will be with color, but thank you."

Thank you. It was all she seemed able to say to him now, thank you, and sorry. Sorry for having loved someone else, for having
had sex with someone else, for having had someone else's baby. Sorry for lying about having that baby aborted, for actually
having had that baby, for never telling you that that baby was alive. Thank you for taking me in when Rory dumped me, thank
you for marrying me and making me respectable, for making me a wife and mother. Thank you for giving me a career opportunity,
for encouraging me, for praising me to other people. Sorry I couldn't love you a tenth as well as I loved Rory, thank you
for not probing so I didn't have to tell you how I resented that baby for driving Rory away, sorry for not loving Martin,
thank you for being able to love Martin, sorry for all these recent scenes, thank you for not throwing me out, sorry, thank
you, sorry—oh
God,
Carole thought, pressing her eyelids so tightly shut that she could almost feel her separate lashes, is there one single tiny
corner of my life to hide in where there isn't a price to pay?

Connor had, since that awful night when she had finally told the truth about Rory's baby, been—well,
majestic
was the word that came to mind. He'd been appalled, of course, and stunned and horrified, sitting there in the wing chair
in his cashmere dressing gown holding the letter from this Elaine Price woman which told Carole that her son, David, would,
if she was willing, like to get in touch with her. He sat there, holding the letter by its edge, his eyes full of tears, shaking
his head. It was like watching someone slowly taking in the news of a death, rather than that of a life. She had crouched
on the edge of the sofa, watching him, wondering what he would do, and what she would do when he decided. It felt to her just
as it had felt when Rory told her he didn't want to be saddled with a baby, as if, despite all her efforts to gain control
of her life, to decline any kind of victimhood, some great arbitrary force could always come swinging over the horizon and
knock her flat. But of course, it wasn't an arbitrary force. It was love, the kind of passionate, vulnerable, craving love
that nobody in their right minds would ever seek but that, once you had known it, successfully drained the color out of all
other more manageable loves. She could see Rory as some kind of monster now, she could see his self-absorbed destructiveness,
his terrible carelessness with other people, his almost criminal changeableness; but she could never feel indifferent to him,
or to remembering him. When she remembered him, great lumps of intensity—she didn't care, any longer, to define them—choked
her mind and her breathing. She would never have been able, she knew, to be in the same room with him again. She would never
have dared. She would never, even with all her unhappy knowledge of the sort of man he was, the sort of man he perhaps couldn't
help being, have been able to trust herself.

And with Connor? Well, Connor was trustworthy, in the sense that he didn't eternally let her down, eternally play games with
her feelings, eternally exploit her. But even Connor required her to acknowledge that, because of what had happened to her,
because of what she had
done,
he was in a moral position to call the shots. After what seemed like an eternity of watching him sitting there gazing at Elaine
Price's letter, like some aghast character in a Victorian melodrama, he had risen from his chair and come to sit beside her
on the sofa. She had stared at her knees under the blue wool of her dressing gown, stared and stared at them as if they represented
proof of her existence when everything else was so out of control that existence was hard to discern.

Connor hadn't touched her. He'd laid the letter—respectfully and without obvious anger—on the coffee table in front of the
sofa, and then he'd said gravely, "I shan't reproach you."

There had been, then, a small, appalled silence. Now glaring rather than staring at the knees, Carole fought down waves of
both fury and laughter. Not reproach her! Not reproach her for something that had happened long before they even knew each
other, something that was part of a life that he could not—should not—lay claim to! How dare he . . .

"Did you hear me?"

She'd nodded.

"I think," Connor said, adjusting the tie belt on his dressing gown, "I think I understand why you didn't tell me the truth."

She bit her lip. Whatever the truth was now—whatever the truth ever is—the truth
then
had been that she hadn't told anyone about the baby for the raw and unacceptable reason that she hadn't wanted the baby. She
had wanted his father. With the help of a friend, she had gone away to a strange little nunnery in East Anglia to have the
baby, a place where it was hardly necessary even to have a name; a place where common humanity in humans was unquestioningly
accepted as very, very common. She remembered the duney beach beyond the convent, and the cloudy, ginger-beer North Sea, and
the gulls, and her terror of looking at her baby, in case, in case . . .

She fought with her feeling.

"I did hear," she said to Connor. "I did. Thank you."

He'd brought them brandy then, cognac in old-fashioned balloon glasses, and urged her to drink hers as if it was a medicinal
tonic. He'd become, as the cognac went down, increasingly solicitous, almost possessive, talking to her in the way she recalled
he'd talked to her when they first met, in the deep and thrilled voice of the acknowledged savior of the bruised and fallen
angel.

"Will you see this boy?" he'd said, his hand on hers.

"I don't know."

"I think you should."

"I'm not sure I want to—"

"I think you should."

"I can't think—" Carole said.

"No, no. Of course not. Of course not now. But when you can, I think you should."

And then, of course, there followed what always followed when Connor felt a renewed affirmation of control, a sweet sense
of his true power delivered in great grace. Carole had always liked sex, had enjoyed the physical possession of looks and
health and appetite. But that night, lying on the marital bed, staring up at the ceiling from beneath Connor's energetic and
triumphant shoulder, she had wondered if she would ever be able to see the point of sex again.

The timer on the heat machine gave a small, polite ping and the warmth on Carole's neck began, inhospitably, to subside. She
opened her eyes and, in the mirror, saw Caspar four mirrors away talking animatedly to a girl in leather trousers whose long
copper-colored hair he was meticulously, almost reverently, smoothing. She sighed, bending her head forward, and feeling the
cooling foils rattling against her neck. In the bag by her feet, her mobile telephone began to ring. It occurred to her to
ignore it because it would only be Connor, planning to have the Mercedes purring at the curb outside the salon for her, planning
a surprise glass of champagne at the Ritz or a visit to the gallery in St. James' to look at yet another of the maritime prints
he seemed able to see such charm in. Then it struck her that to ignore Connor would only mean subsequent explanation, subsequent
justification, and apology. She scrabbled in her bag and found the phone.

"Hello?"

A man's voice said, "Is that Carole Latimer?"

She straightened a little in the chair.

"Yes—"

"I don't want to startle you," the man said, "but Elaine said it would be all right to ring. She told me you had said it would
be all right to ring." There was a tiny pause, and then he said, "I'm David."

Carole gripped the phone. She couldn't look at herself, she couldn't look at that grotesque in the mirror, that distorted
face and person. She opened her mouth to stall him, to say some anodyne thing that would give her a moment, seconds even,
and heard herself saying, in a tone she hardly recognized, "What do you want?"

There was silence the other end. Carole swallowed. She couldn't immediately say sorry; she couldn't start all this fatal sorry
business off again, all over again, not now, not with this adult male person, this grown-up—
son,
on the other end of the line.

"I don't want to frighten you," David said. "Elaine said you'd said—"

"Yes," Carole said.

"Do you really think," Elaine Price had said on the telephone in that tone of firm kindness that Carole had always found hard
to resist, "do you really think this son of yours is going to go away? Don't you think he has a right to know where he comes
from?"

"Sorry," Carole said to David.

"It's OK," he said.

"Oh—"

"I've been getting my courage up for ages. I don't know why, but I could suddenly do it. I'm a contract gardener, you see,
and I'm in the middle of planting a hornbeam hedge and I'd been thinking about you. So I rang."

"Yes."

"I've always," David said shyly, "wondered who you were."

The copper-haired girl rose to her feet and offered a cheek for Caspar to kiss. They said goodbye, laughing, and then Caspar
began to walk down the salon towards Carole, brushing his cropped head with the flat of his hand.

"I'm afraid I can't talk now—"

"Can I call again?" David said.

"Perhaps—"

"Look," David said, "this is on your terms. I mean, I know I can't just walk into someone else's life and take what I want
and walk out again."

"No."

"I don't know your circumstances, after all. I don't know what your life is like."

"Lovely," Caspar said, moving the heat machine backwards. "Lovely. Done to a turn."

"Another time," Carole said to David, "another time—" She snapped the phone shut and smiled at Caspar in the mirror.

"You all right, darling?" Caspar said. "You look ever so pale."

CHAPTER TWELVE

M
eera liked her position in Steve Ross's studio. She liked it professionally—being both indispensable and able to keep order
suited her—and she liked her desk in the corner, away from the noise of the street below the front windows, and with a comfortable
view down the length of the room. From where she sat, with a wall behind and to the left of her desk, she had a direct sightline
to the door to the stairs, and another both to Justine and to Titus. Steve's desk was partly obscured by Titus's computer,
but not so much that it prevented Meera from seeing, from the angle of his head, whether Steve was working, or on the telephone,
or thinking, gazing up at those ancient and twisted ceiling beams that seemed to Meera little short of barbaric.

Meera had learned this art of quiet watchfulness at home. She had learned, in the noisy and crowded little house behind her
parents' thriving corner shop, that the way to progress in life was not to join in. The fourth child—and third girl—in a family
of five, she had watched her brother and older sisters clamoring and elbowing their way into positions of advantage, into
the narrow parental focus left over from managing a business that employed relations as well as immediate family, and which
was open for sixteen hours a day. Meera, who favored her maternal grandmother in her composed and slender looks, elected at
an early age to withdraw from this rowdy battleground. She wasn't particularly bookish, but she had an aptitude for organization
and holding her tongue.

"My God," her father said to her when she was twelve, in possibly the only compliment he ever had time to pay her, "you are
the only person in this family who doesn't drive me crazy."

When she was fourteen, she told her parents—it was not an announcement, merely something more than a remark—that she wasn't
going to work in the business. She wanted to work in an office, she said, and to that end she was going to concentrate on
her IT skills. She'd be very happy to help with the accounts but she wasn't going to stack shelves or fight with her sisters
about doing the weekend evening shifts. She expected a row. There wasn't one. She looked at her parents' faces, bruised with
fatigue, and saw something like relief there, something straying reluctantly towards admiration. Her father leaned towards
her. He put a hand out in her direction, forefinger pointing.

"Just no crazy ideas about who you marry, huh?"

"Of course not," Meera said.

Of course not was what she still thought, ten years later. She was independent now, sharing a flat in Westerham with a girlfriend
who was a solicitor, and going home on Saturdays so that her mother could describe, and relive, the dramas of the week to
her. She would marry, of course, and she would marry as her parents expected, but not a shopkeeper. When Meera married, she
would choose a professional, a professional man of her own race and religion who could help her continue with the kind of
life she had chosen. She would like to like him, of course, but she didn't need him to sweep her off her feet and out of her
senses. That kind of love, that kind of knock-you-sideways love, was something Meera found not simply incomprehensible, but
also almost distasteful. How could such loss of self to emotion ever lead to anything but wretchedness and humiliation?

She raised her head and looked down the length of the studio. Steve was out—never good for the firm's productivity, in Meera's
view—and Titus and Justine were, it was perfectly evident, conducting an e-mail flirtation from desks at most eight feet apart.
Titus had his back to Meera, but his back was quite animated enough to convey to Meera what was going on. As for Justine,
she wasn't even pretending to cover what she was doing. Her face was alight, bent towards the screen, the fronds of hair at
her neck curling up as if in response to her delight.

Meera clicked her tongue. It wasn't disapproval she felt so much as a profound exasperation. Even if you set aside the fact
that this was paid work time, it pained her to see that Justine was so obtuse about Titus, that she seemed unable or unwilling
to see that Titus was doing no more than having a bit of fun. Titus wasn't a bad man, after all, but he was the kind of overly
straightforward man, Meera knew from her years of watchfulness, who when thwarted in one area of his male desires and energies
took the easiest route to gratifying them elsewhere. It was plain that that great tall girl—big blondes looked almost androgynous
to Meera—was playing hard to get, and therefore Titus, in frustration, was in his turn playing with something more amenable.
And Justine, for all her vaunted contempt for men like Titus, was being very amenable indeed.

If it was just a game, Meera considered, and the players were equally matched, it wouldn't matter, except for the principle
of not playing at work. But watching Justine over the last few weeks had made Meera feel that this was not a game for Justine,
any more than whatever was preoccupying Steve at the moment was a game for him. Justine was being drawn into this love thing,
this in-love thing, and Titus, while not cruel, could very easily be careless. Perhaps for Justine, from her rather angry
and underprivileged background, Titus's nonchalance and over-privilege represented the attraction of opposites. Perhaps Justine
just liked something that Meera most disliked, which was danger. Perhaps—and Meera had come across many, many girls like this—Justine
just needed that power of being openly fancied.

She stood up. Neither of them took any notice. She picked up her handbag and moved quietly out onto the floor, and across
it until she was standing behind Titus. Justine was staring at her, excited and guilty.

"Not clever," Meera said to Titus.

He didn't turn round. He went very still.

"And don't accuse me of spying," Meera said. "This is an open-plan office."

"I wouldn't dare," Titus muttered.

"And you wouldn't dare behave like this if Steve was here."

Justine ducked her head. Titus turned his head slightly.

"Try not to be priggish, passion flower."

"Shut it," Justine hissed.

Meera turned and walked steadily across the floor and through the door to the stairway. Titus didn't look at Justine.

He said, staring ahead of himself, his jaw tight, "If Steve was here. If Steve was ever bloody here—"

Justine's shoulders drooped.

"Where is he?"

"You don't want to know," Titus said furiously. "And neither do I."

Lynne sat on the edge of the cream leather sofa in the upstairs sitting room of the Royal Oak, holding a teacup and a triangle
of shortbread.

"Only packet, I'm afraid," Evie said. "I don't seem to get round to much baking nowadays."

Lynne took a bite of shortbread and looked hastily down at the carpet for crumbs. The flowers and trellises around her feet
bore the sweeping signs of having been freshly hoovered.

"I shouldn't think I've baked a cake since the children left home—"

"If I baked one," Evie said, "Ray'd only eat it and he's eighteen stone already. Don't you mind about crumbs. I should have
given you a plate."

Lynne put her shortbread in her saucer.

"It's nice enough of you to see me."

Evie regarded her. She'd been much surprised when Lynne telephoned, and even more surprised when Lynne had asked to come round.
It wasn't so much that she and Lynne didn't get on, but more that she was aware that Lynne couldn't quite forget the difference
between living in the Royal Oak and living in a detached house on Ashmore Road. Also—and Evie's antennae were even more sharply
attuned to this distinction than the social one—Lynne had always allowed Evie to know that, as the mother of the mother of
the grandchild, she was unquestionably, in the subtle ranking of these things, the
first
grandmother.

But the sight of Lynne now on the edge of her sofa worrying about crumbs on her carpet—who else, of Evie's rare visitors,
ever had the grace to concern themselves with such details—inspired in Evie nothing but pity. Never mind the past, never mind
the unsubtle jockeying for precedence over Polly, never mind any kind of insecurity-induced silliness, the woman sitting on
Evie's sofa looked both lost and unhappy, and it smote at Evie's heart. She leaned forward.

"Make yourself comfortable, dear."

Lynne looked doubtfully at the sofa.

"Once you get yourself back into it," Evie said, "it's ever so much better."

Gingerly, Lynne inched herself backwards across the leather surface. Evie watched her, with the indulgence she used to watch
Polly with, when Polly attempted her first climbs up the ladder to the slide in the children's playground behind the Royal
Oak.

"There now."

"I expect," Lynne said, allowing herself to half relax against the sofa's unyielding gleaming cushions, "I expect you wonder
why I've come."

"Well," Evie said, "I've a
bit
of an idea—"

"I'm not sure myself, really," Lynne said. "I mean, I knew I needed to talk, I knew I needed to talk to someone who knows
the situation. But I don't really know what I'm after."

"We're all a bit on edge," Evie said. She lifted the lid on the teapot on the tray beside her and peered inside. "Well, when
I say all, I'd have to exclude Ray. Ray's never on edge, not really, not unless it's to do with the business. Ray does good
mood, bad mood, finish. It depends on the day's trade."

Lynne leaned across the sofa and put her cup down on the seat two feet away.

She said suddenly, "Ralph hasn't a clue."

"No."

"He can't see it—"

"No."

"He can't," Lynne said, her voice abruptly loud, "he can't see how I feel having both my children do this, together, at once.
He can't see what it does to me, seeing them so excited. Evie," Lynne said, turning towards her, "I can't remember when I
saw them so happy.
Happy.
"

Evie put the teapot lid back on.

"It's early days—"

"What for?"

"For being happy," Evie said. "They haven't met these mothers yet."

"Mothers," Lynne said. "
Mothers.
How am I supposed to compete with
two mothers?
"

Evie got up. She walked across her hoovered carpet to the leather sofa and removed Lynne's teacup. Then she sat down.

"It's not a competition, dear," Evie said.

Lynne sighed.

"You brought those two up," Evie said. "You took them into your home and you looked after them and schooled them and taught
them how to live in the world. You
mothered
them. No one can take that away from you."

"But I didn't give birth to them. I didn't give birth to
anyone.
"

"That's only the beginning," Evie said. "It counts, but it doesn't count for everything. It's the going on afterwards that
counts, the going on you did for Nathalie and David."

Lynne fished in her pocket for a tissue.

"It isn't the same as belonging. Nothing will make them belong to me like they belong to
them.
"

"Nonsense," Evie said.

"All very well—"

"Don't you start on that," Evie said. "Don't you even
begin.
Take my Verena. Just take Verena. I gave birth to her all right, but if you asked her now if she thought she belonged to me
she'd laugh in your face. We don't belong to nobody in the end. Nobody but ourselves."

Lynne bent her head.

"It just all reminds me—"

"Course it does."

"And I find it hard to see them so excited—"

"Well," Evie said, "try being just irritated about that. You try seeing it as childish. Don't let it upset you."

"No."

"They're not halfway there yet. Not even a quarter of the way."

"No."

"They know their names. They've heard them on the telephone. It's like a Lonely Hearts column, if you ask me."

"One's an art teacher," Lynne said. "The other's a retired company director. In London."

Evie sniffed.

"Could mean anything—"

"It means, in both cases, something utterly different to what they've known. I'm not artistic. I couldn't run a business to
save my life."

"I told you," Evie said, "this isn't a competition." She looked straight at Lynne. "You're their mother, you brought them
up, and that's
that.
"

"But, Polly—"

"Polly lives here. We live here. We've known Polly since she was four hours old."

"Yes."

"I tell you," Evie said, leaning forward, "if there's any funny business with Polly, they'll have Ray to deal with and they
won't like that. Nobody does."

Lynne smiled again, faintly.

"Heavens—"

"You're to stop worrying."

"I know—"

"It'll all pass," Evie said. She put out a hand and patted Lynne's nearest one. "They'll go haring off and fill in all these
blanks they're so obsessed by and then it'll all pass. You'll see."

Lynne looked up. She turned her hand over so that she could grasp Evie's.

"Thank you," she said. "
Thank
you."

Evie smiled at her. She returned the pressure of Lynne's hand. It was good to see her looking better, but it was also time
for a tiny triumph.

"I've got Polly coming Saturday," she said. "That's two Saturdays running. Two on the trot."

Petey sat in his bath, slowly filling an empty shampoo bottle with bathwater and then squirting it dangerously close to the
edge of the bath so that sometimes, thrillingly, the water arced out onto the bathroom floor. There was, after all, no one
there to supervise him for the moment. Daniel had been sent to watch him, and had begun by being quite participatory, kneeling
on the floor beside the bath and aiming the shampoo bottle directly at Petey's tummy button and making him squeal. But then
Petey had found three of Ellen's glitter hairclips lying in the soap dish, and had wanted to put them in his own hair and
Daniel, for some reason neither comprehensible nor acceptable to Petey, had wanted to prevent him. Petey had insisted, Daniel
had objected, Petey had screamed, Daniel had shouted and then stamped out of the bathroom. When he had gone, Petey arranged
the clips in a clumsy clump above his forehead and resumed the water game with the shampoo bottle.