Read Brother and Sister Online
Authors: Joanna Trollope
Brother and Sister
Brother & Sister
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Choir
A Village Affair
A Passionate Man
The Rector's Wife
The Men and the Girls
A Spanish Lover
The Best of Friends
Next of Kin
Other People's Children
Marrying the Mistress
Girl From the South
Brother
& Sister
JOANNA TROLLOPE
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2004 by Joanna Trollope
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London.
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable
products made from wood grown in well-managed forests.
The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental
regulations of the country of origin.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Trollope, Joanna.
Brother and sister / Joanna Trollope.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59691-925-9
1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Birthmothers—Fiction.
3. Adoptees—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6070.R57B76 2004
823'.914—dc22
2003062649
First published in the United States by Bloomsbury in 2004
This paperback edition published in 2005
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the United States of America by
Quebecor World Fairfield
Contents
F
rom where he sat, Steve could see right down the length of the studio. He could see across the width, too, from one stripped
brick wall to the other, and then right up high, right up into the roof space where the seventeenth-century beams—still suggestive,
somehow, of the sinuous lines of the branches and trunks they had once been—formed their crooked and purposeful patterns.
He'd designed the lighting so that even in the evenings, even on the darkest days, the eye would be drawn upward, as it was
in cathedrals and domes. It was comforting to look upwards, comforting and encouraging. He'd spent hours over the last eight
years since the studio was finished looking upwards at those wandering beams and thinking about the trees they had once been,
about the sky that was still there above them, through the roof. He liked the measurelessness of those thoughts, just as he
liked this nameless, neutral time at the end of each working day, when everyone else had gone home leaving him alone to let
his mind slip quietly down through all the jarring preoccupations of the previous hours and lie peacefully at the bottom of
some still pool of not quite thinking.
It was a running joke in the office that Steve had to be the last to leave. It was the same with the navy-blue name board
above the ground-floor window: "Steven Ross and Associates," it read, "Designers."
"And who might those associates be?" Titus said. Titus had worked for Steve for three years. He was twenty-seven, short and
square and vigorous, with the elaborate courtesy of manner that sometimes results from an old-fashioned English upbringing.
"Because it doesn't
appear
to be me."
"It's a name," Steve said, pretending to read some papers. "It's just a name. To register the company."
"Not
my
name," Justine said. She was straight out of art college and rolled her own cigarettes. She winked at Titus.
"Might be one day," Steve said. "If I think you're worth it."
She liked that. She didn't want straight flirting, but she wanted a challenge from Steve, she wanted him to see that even
though she still bit her nails she had drive and focus. When she came for an interview, he'd looked through her portfolio
in complete silence and then he'd said, "Good." It was her seventh job interview and nobody had done anything before but sigh
and say they hadn't actually got a vacancy after all. She lived for months on that "Good."
Steve stretched himself slowly, luxuriously upright on his stool—Swedish, economically designed—and contemplated his small
and satisfying empire. He looked at the original elm floorboards—enormously wide: whatever size could the trees have been?—and
the angular outlines of Titus's desk and Justine's desk, and the serene, almost clinical area where Meera did the accounts
and administration with heart-lifting orderliness. Steve tried very hard not to indulge himself over order, not to nag about
neatness. He endeavored to remember that the precision which seemed to be such a balm to his soul should be properly and appropriately
applied to work but should not—emphasize that not—spill over into the rest of life.
It was Nathalie who had alerted him to this. Years ago, before he even found this collapsing urban cottage with all its demanding
potential as a workplace, he'd tried to persuade her to move in with him.
She'd looked at him doubtfully.
"Thing is," she'd said, "you're a bit—well, a bit careful."
He'd been wounded.
"You mean fussy," he'd said, "you mean anal."
She sighed. She ran her forefingers under her eyes as if she thought she'd smudged her mascara.
"Well—"
"I don't just take trouble with things," Steve said insistently, "I take trouble with people. I pay attention to
people
"
Nathalie closed her eyes. Steve leaned towards her.
He said unwisely, "Of all the people I've ever met, you need me to do that. You need me to pay attention to you."
Nathalie's eyes snapped open.
"That," she said sharply, "doesn't sound like careful to me. That sounds like
control
"
He'd been chastened. He could remember the feeling still, the hot air of righteous self-justification rushing out of him in
a deflating instant. He'd recalled his mother saying, over and over during his childhood and growing up, about some small
choice that was absolutely, reasonably, hers to make, "I don't think your dad would like it."
"Sorry," Steve had said to Nathalie. He was full of a thick shame. "Sorry."
There was a photograph of Nathalie in the studio, trapped inside a rectangular Perspex block and fixed to the wall close to
Steve's desk. She was wearing a denim shirt and she was holding her long dark hair up with both hands on top of her head in
a loose pile, and she was laughing. Beside her was another Perspex block containing a photograph of Polly. Polly was five.
She had Steven's soft curly hair and Nathalie's sooty-edged eyes. In the photograph, she was looking straight ahead from under
the brim of a flowered sun hat, serious and determined. She had just started school, registered as Polly Ross-Dexter because
Nathalie wouldn't give up her surname, and Steve couldn't have the school thinking that he wasn't Polly's father. There'd
been a struggle about which name should go first, and Nathalie had only relented in the end on grounds of euphony. This was
not a victory, Steve reflected, that had given him any pleasure at all.
He let his gaze travel upwards, from the evidence of Meera's organizational skills to the haphazardness of those of the seventeenth-century
roof builders. He'd often tried to work out the stresses among the beams up there, the reasons for their positionings, whether
these had been from deliberate calculations or from something altogether more ad hoc, more let's try this, let's try that.
It hadn't been a very grand cottage after all, perhaps the house of one of the Huguenot weavers who had fled to England after
persecution in France and adapted their competence with silk to an equal competence with the wool that had made Westerham
prosperous in the days before the spa waters were discovered and the town became gentrified. When Steve came upon the cottage—he
was twenty-seven and humming with notions—it was slumped, decaying, between its more elegant early-nineteenth-century neighbors,
and was being used as an indoor reclamation yard, piled with old doors and chimneypieces and floorboards. Its restoration
had required a loan from the bank that he was still painfully paying off. When he took it out, he'd wanted to say to Nathalie,
"That's hardly being careful, is it?" but he hadn't quite dared to, he hadn't wanted her to have the chance—which she might
well have taken—to say, "And exactly who is this great carelessness
for?
"
Of course it was for him. He could bluster about the benefits it would bring for them both, for any children they might have,
but he would always have known otherwise, deep in his heart of hearts. He was the one, after all, who lived in the skin of
the boy who'd grown up in a back bedroom of the Royal Oak pub out on the Oxford Road, whose father had been so angry at his
desire to go to art college that they hadn't spoken for over two years. His mother had crept about between them appeasingly,
bringing food parcels to the bedsit the college had helped him find, and always getting back to the pub before opening time.
He'd thought he wanted to be a photographer—that's what he'd set his heart on doing. He'd had fantasies about going back to
the Royal Oak and slapping down on the bar, under his father's nose, a national magazine, or a Sunday-newspaper supplement
with a double-page spread of beautiful black-and-white shots taken by none other than Steve Ross. But something had interfered
with that plan, something had occurred during that first foundation year when everyone else was faffing about making installations
out of mirror tiles and painting murals with twig brooms. He'd spent one single morning in the design studio and had known
that somehow he'd come home. He'd loved it, completely, immediately; he'd seen the point of the simultaneous precision and
creativity, he'd grasped the extraordinary psychological effect of tiny adjustments, in placing or proportion. It was clean,
pure, clever, and it was for him. He'd promised himself, cycling to college on the morning of his nineteenth birthday, that
he wanted to be—was going to be—a designer with his own studio. He was going to show himself. He was going to show his father.
He got off his stool now, and picked up his waste bin. It was his last task of every day, and yet another source of amusement
to Titus and Justine, this rounding up of waste bins in order to tip the contents into the shredder, "Steve's shredder."
"Can't Kim do it?" Titus said, leaning comfortably against Steve's desk.
Kim came in at nine, three evenings a week, to clean.
"No," Steve said.
"Confidentiality?"
"Mmm," Steve said.
"Or," Titus said, folding his arms, "as Kim is probably as interested in the contents of our bins as she would be in a print-out
of the Hang Seng index, could it be that she isn't really to be trusted with the
shredder?
"
"Go away," Steve said.
He tipped the contents of his bin into the machine. It would reliably be only paper. So would Meera's. Titus and Justine's
bins however hid banana skins and gum wrappers and old Band-Aids. Occasionally, Titus would also leave the tiny packet from
a condom, to see if Steve noticed. Titus's sex life seemed, by all accounts, to be a cheerful affair, mostly conducted with
girls considerably taller than he was. Sometimes Steve wondered if Justine would have liked to join them.
He put the bin back under his desk and straightened up. The photograph of Polly was directly in front of him, her don't-you-fool-me
eyes on an exact level with his own. She seemed quite happy at school, not troubled by anything; in fact, perhaps not troubled
enough since her form teacher, Nathalie reported, had gently said that Polly appeared to have some difficulty concentrating
and that they should have her hearing checked. Steve touched one ear involuntarily. Nothing wrong with his hearing, never
had been.
Downstairs, in the reception area, the street door banged loudly.
"Only me!" Titus shouted.
Steve moved towards the staircase that led down from the studio.
"Forgotten something?"
"I've got someone with me!" Titus called.
Feet crossed the reception area and started up the stairs.
A woman's voice said, "This is so
cool
"
"Steve will love that," Titus said. "Won't you, Steve? You'll love it that Sasha thinks this place is cool."
Titus emerged into the studio, pink-cheeked from the cold outside. He wore a vast scarf, muffled up round his neck and ears
like a student.
"Sorry to come back," Titus said, grinning. "I know you like us to go when we've gone."
A woman appeared from the staircase behind Titus. She was inevitably much taller than he was, and older, possibly in her mid-thirties,
with thick pale hair cropped close to her skull. She held her hand out to Steve.
"I'm Sasha."
"Hello," Steve said.
Titus put his hands in his pockets.
"We're on a bit of a mission," he said. "We had an impulse—"
"I did," Sasha said, smiling at Steve. "It was my impulse."
"Can you spare us five minutes?" Titus said.
Steve said, "I was on my way home, to read to Polly."
"Polly?"
"My daughter," Steve said. He indicated the photograph briefly. "She's five."
Sasha peered.
"Adorable. Five. So it's all Barbie and Angelina Ballerina." Steve smiled at her.
"Anything pink."
"I love pink," Titus said stoutly. He unwound his scarf and dropped it over the angled edge of Justine's desk. "Explain to
him, Sash."
She hesitated.
"It's a bit cheeky—"
"Titus
is
cheeky," Steve said.
"Except that it isn't Titus, it's me."
"Well, then—"
"I'm doing a project," Sasha said. "I'm doing a course, a counseling course, and I'm doing a thesis on identity, personal
identity, where we come from, how we define ourselves. That sort of thing."
Steve thought briefly of the Royal Oak. He looked at Sasha's hands. They were long and supple and she had a plain silver band
on each thumb.
"The thing is—" Sasha went on and stopped. She looked at Titus.
"Your project," he said airily.
"Titus told me about your wife."
"Partner," Steve said.
Sasha looked briefly at Polly's photograph.
"Sorry—"
"What about Nathalie?"
"That she's adopted," Sasha said.
Steve looked at Titus.
"
Did
I tell you that?"
"Yup."
"I wonder why," Steve said. "I don't usually. I don't think about it."
"Don't you?" Sasha said.
He looked at her. She was very attractive in a bony, bold way, with that pale seal-pelt hair. He smiled kindly.
"No," he said pleasantly, "I don't need to.
She
doesn't need to. It isn't an issue."
"But—"
"Sorry," Steve said, "but Nathalie isn't traumatized. She's always said she's glad she was adopted, that she's had the choice
of being who she wanted to be."
"I've never felt like that," Titus said. He put his hands in his pockets. "I know exactly where I come from and almost
none
of it is what I'd have chosen."
Sasha leaned forward.
"I really didn't mean to invade anything—"
"You haven't."
"It's so fascinating, though," Sasha said, "that she doesn't mind."
"She used to tease me," Steve said, "about what she called my battles with my biofolks. She never had those. Battles, I mean."
Sasha looked at Polly's picture again.
"We shouldn't keep you."
"No."
"But—but do you think she'd talk to me?"
"What?" Steve said. "Nathalie talk to you about adoption?"
Sasha gestured with her big, flexible hands. The rings made her thumbs look oddly truncated.
