Brother and Sister (20 page)

Betty put a hand on Cora's shoulder.

"I knew it," she said, "I knew it.
Kind.
What sort of a daughter is that?"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T
he studio lay bathed in early evening light. Steve hadn't realized this when he bought the building, but the crooked rooflines
outside the west-facing window were so arranged that long shafts of late sunlight could come sliding in, during spring and
summer, straight, it seemed, from the horizon of the world. It gave him the same sensations that contemplating the roof beams
did, the same eerie, wonderful sense of being, quite by chance, part of something timeless, and endless, and, ultimately and
superbly, careless of little human things.

He sat now just outside one of the great dust-furred beams of light, with his stool turned back to the wall. His computer
was still on, the lit screen trivialized by the natural brilliance pouring softly past it, because he had promised himself
he would finish his invoices for the month, so that Meera could insert them into her scrupulously detailed accounts.

"It's not like you to be late," she'd said, standing by his desk with her perfect posture, which enabled her hair to hang
straight down her back in a blue-black sheet. "Not like you at all."

"Sorry," he said, not looking at her.

"Is something the matter?"

He gave a rueful smile at his keyboard.

"You don't miss much—"

"No," she said, "specially things I don't like."

He'd sighed. It was a moment to say something, a moment to spread out the tangle of all that was going on under an objective
and practical eye, and ask for advice in sorting it out. But he let it pass. He sighed again and looked up at her. She was
wearing an expression of surprising sympathy.

"I'll get those invoices to you tomorrow. Promise."

He had done more than half of them. It was only a question of checking, a task he knew his mind was not only suited to, but
rather liked, but all the same it refused to stay focused and slid about like a raw egg on a plate, into the subject of Nathalie,
and then Sasha, and Nathalie's visit to Northsea, and then Sasha, and Polly, and Polly's impending time in hospital, and then
Sasha. Invoices might, in fact, have brought respite and relief, but he couldn't fix upon them, he couldn't stop the sliding,
and the great sloppy burdens of anxiety and love and remorse that so heavily accompanied it.

Sasha had wanted to see him that afternoon. She had wanted to quite insistently, quite demandingly, in a way he might, a few
weeks earlier, have found flattering, especially coming from someone who made such a point of leaving people free, herself
in particular. But she had rung four times on his mobile—her name had come up, almost menacingly, on its tiny screen—and then
tried on his office line until he had to say no with a kind of finality he'd never had to use before.

"What do you mean, no?"

"I mean I have to work. I mean I have some work to finish by six o'clock tonight."

"Then I'll see you at six o'clock."

"I'm going home at six o'clock."

"To put," Sasha said, with a distinct edge, "your child to bed."

"Yes."

"Then have a coffee with me now. Coffee for half an hour. That'll leave you three hours still to do whatever stuff you have
to do."

"No."

"It's this Nathalie thing again, isn't it?"

Steve shut his eyes, holding the phone.

He said, "It was something very big for her—"

"Another behavioral interlude."

"Enough—"

"Another look-at-me-I'm-adopted moment."

"I said enough—"

"You're a fool," Sasha said.

"Maybe."

"The chances you throw away—"

"Maybe that too—"

"I need to see you!"

Steve kept his eyes closed.

"Not today."

There'd been a pause, a highly charged small pause, and then Sasha had said, quite casually, "Bye," and put the phone down.

And since then, he'd sat here, fiddling about on the screen, conscious of Titus and Justine answering their phones, going
out on various errands, of Meera pursuing her steely purpose at the far end, of a desire to telephone Nathalie for no precise
reason he could think of. Nothing just now, he thought, skimming the cursor about mindlessly, was quite on track, nobody seemed
to be cheerful or simple or light of heart. Even Titus, usually so reliably and robustly spirited, appeared to be deriving
nothing from his new affair with Justine, an affair that had given Steve—no use at all pretending otherwise—just the illusory
permission and excuse he needed to see Sasha. Titus looked sullen, Justine looked miserable, Meera looked disapproving, Nathalie
looked, was—oh
hell,
Steve thought, spinning his stool back, how on earth had everything become so unraveled? And how had he so departed from all
the codes of conduct he had followed all his life that he now found himself in the middle of a most despicable maze with not
the first idea of how to make his way back to the beginning?

He looked at his watch. It was ten past six. Meera had left at five-thirty, Justine had followed her ten minutes later, and
Titus had disappeared two hours ago without explanation, and would presumably not now reappear until the morning. He should
have told Steve where he was going, and Steve should have given permission, and ascertained how long he'd be, and made a few
reliably Steve-like comments about the state of his desk. But neither of them had done either. Titus had merely put the telephone
down on some call, called out, "Got to see to something," and gone, followed by Meera's steady and eloquent dark gaze. Justine
hadn't looked up. She'd merely kept on working, head bent, shoulders hunched, every atom of her unhappy body visibly conscious
of his departure.

He glanced at the screen. He'd done three weeks out of four. Perhaps he'd go home now, and see Polly, and let Nathalie say
whatever it was she wanted to say at the moment, and then come back to the office early in the morning, to finish, so that
the disc would be ready and waiting on Meera's desk before she even arrived. As he would like to be, all braced for a return
to the brisk ordinariness of things, to the jokes and the busyness and the tickings-off.

The door to the stairs opened. Titus appeared round it, and stood, holding the edge, almost as if he needed support. He looked
down the length of the room at Steve, and lifted his chin.

"You bastard," he said loudly.

For some reason, Steve stood up. He put his hands in his pockets.

"Where have you been?"

"Where do you fucking think?"

"This is work time, Titus. I pay you for the day's working hours. What you do outside that is your affair, but between nine
and five-thirty—"

"Shut up," Titus said.

He let go of the door and advanced down the studio towards Steve.

"You're a rat," Titus said. "A sanctimonious, two-timing shit of a
rat.
"

Steve licked his lips.

"You've seen Sasha."

"She called me."

"Ah. Of course."

"Don't use that fucking tone!" Titus shouted.

"I wasn't aware—"

"You betray your wife, you nick my girlfriend—"

"I didn't—"

"I knew," Titus said, coming up close and thrusting his face at Steve's, "I knew you were meeting. I knew there was all this
kissy crap in wine bars masquerading as heart-to-hearts about Nathalie. I knew all that. I could just about take all that.
But I didn't know, until two hours ago, that you'd fucked her."

Steve felt his hands clench into fists in his pockets.

"Once."

"Oh!" Titus cried. "Once, is it? One little mistaken, innocent, ooh-what-a-naughty-lapse time? A fuck is a bloody fuck, Steve,
and you bloody well know it."

Steve glanced away. A red tide of something terrible, shameful, was burning up his throat.

"Yes."

"I'd like to put you through that fucking window. I'd like to chop up that pretentious sign out there and ram the pieces up
all your fucking orifices."

"Titus—"

"Don't start explaining. Don't start justifying. Don't give me any of your control-freak
crap.
You
knew
what Sasha meant to me. You
knew
it."

Steve nodded.

"And now," Titus said, "I've gone and buggered up poor old Justine."

"Yes."

"Yes," Titus said in sarcastic imitation. "Yes, yes, sorry, didn't mean to, sorry, Titus, sorry, Sasha, sorry, Justine, sorry,
Nathalie—" He stopped and then he said, "What about Nathalie?"

Steve said in a low voice, "She doesn't know."

"That you've been seeing Sasha? That you've fucked her?"

"No—"

"Will you tell her?"

Steve looked up at the ceiling.

"I don't know."

"You will," Titus said.

"Titus—"

Titus rose up on his toes until his face was almost level with Steve's.

He said, "You'll tell her, you fucking wimp, or I will."

When Ellen woke, she knew it wasn't morning. It wasn't just that the birds were still quiet and that the brief spring night
sky was still dark, but also because there was this feeling, the atmosphere the house always had when life in it got switched
off for a few hours. She rolled over and looked at her clock radio. The squared green numbers said 12:40. She'd been asleep
for an hour and a half. What on earth could make her wake up after only an hour and a half? What was it that had made her
wake up and feel as if it was the morning already?

She sat up in bed and looked at her closed door. There was no line of light under it, so that meant that everyone was in bed,
that the landing light was off, that the only lights in the house would be the little red standby lights on the television,
and the computer monitor. Even Petey slept in the complete dark. When she and Daniel were little, they'd had a lamp like a
dim green mushroom, with plastic rabbits molded round the base, which she'd fallen in love with during a stopover in Montreal
Airport, but Petey had shunned the mushroom and slept like a grown-up—about the only thing about him, Ellen sometimes thought,
that was grown-up—in the dark.

She twisted round and slid out of bed. It occurred to her to do something she'd never done before, something that people in
books did when they had a problem or were in the middle of an adventure, and go down to the kitchen. She might have some cereal,
or make herself some hot chocolate, and then she might go into the family room and turn the computer on and do a bit of research
for her current obsession which was summer tennis camps in Canada. She had already told Zadie and Fizz, untruthfully, about
being enrolled for one of these camps—she'd found a particularly beguiling-sounding one, in British Columbia—and was now playing
with the idea, shortly to become a requirement, of putting the proposition to her parents while they were still in a weakened
state because of this Carole woman.

Ellen tiptoed across the room, and put her hand on the doorknob. She hadn't actually met Carole, but she knew she'd been to
the house, leaving a coffee cup with lipstick on it and a disturbed atmosphere. Marnie hadn't volunteered much about Carole's
visit, and Ellen, now that she knew more than she'd ever wanted to know, hadn't asked. There seemed, in fact, to be a kind
of pact among them all, a silent complicity about not budging, about not making way, in the family, for any new person, for
any change in dynamics. That was fine by Ellen, absolutely fine. She had watched Marnie turning over the cushion in the seat
of the chair where Carole had been sitting, and felt a surge of relief at the gesture.

Out on the landing, she checked in the gloom to see that all the bedroom doors were shut. Daniel's was, her parents' was,
only Petey's was wedged open with a small beanbag hippo, its pink-felt tongue lolling. She took a step or two along the carpet,
and noticed that a light was shining from downstairs, a lamp someone had left on, probably the lamp just inside the kitchen
door. She peered over the banisters. The door to David's office was open, and through it Ellen could see her father's computer
was on, and that her father was sitting in front of it, sideways on, and that on the desk between himself and the computer's
monitor stood his chess set, his old one, the one Grandpa Ralph had given him when he was about eight, and that, because of
the way everything was arranged, the light from the computer screen was throwing the shadows of the chess pieces onto the
wall beside the desk, and making them look much bigger, taller and stranger, and inhuman somehow, like those statues on Easter
Island with monster eyes and mouths. Ellen swallowed. She watched her father's huge shadow hand swoop up a crowned piece and
hold it there, like a prisoner, lit by the hard green glow from the computer. It was rather horrible, watching him, rather
unsettling, as if he was exercising a power which wasn't quite natural, which made him seem to be someone other than her father.
She leaned forward a bit further, gripping the banister, and opened her mouth to call out to him, to bring him back to her,
when she saw him lift his left arm in a sudden sweeping gesture and crash all the chess pieces across the board and off the
desk and onto the floor. And then, while her mouth was still open and her voice stuck dry in her throat, he pushed a button
on the monitor and the light on the screen went out, leaving them all in the sudden dark.

"Where's Daddy?" Polly said.

She had been to tea with her friend Zoe, and was, in consequence, not in the least interested in her supper. It lay in front
of her, on the plate she preferred, bright and appetizing and untouched.

"At work," Nathalie said.

Polly picked her fork up and inserted it down the neck of her T-shirt.

"Why?"

"Because there's a lot to do, I expect."

Polly patted her lumpy front.

"Look."

"I'd rather look at you eating."

Polly sighed.

"We had tea at Zoe's house."

"One day," Nathalie said, "you'll learn what it feels like to carefully make supper for someone who couldn't, in return, care
less."

"My fork's stuck—"

Nathalie put a hand briefly to her face.