The Making of Us (21 page)

‘Today,’ he began, eventually, ‘I am a bankrupt.’

Lydia’s eyes widened.

‘Today, I have been to the court and been told that I am a bankrupt. That everything I own is no longer mine. That I am no longer allowed to work in this capacity and that all my credit cards are to be shredded. Today I have ceased to exist.’

‘Oh, my God, Bendiks, that’s terrible.’

‘I know, I know.’ He sighed and dragged his hands over his strained face. ‘It is totally terrible. I am destroyed.’

‘Oh, you poor, poor thing. How did this happen?’

Bendiks shrugged and plucked at the cat’s fur disconsolately. ‘Credit cards. Overspending. The usual stuff. I’ve been really, really stupid. A real idiot.’

‘But,’ Lydia began gingerly, ‘isn’t being bankrupted a good thing when you’re in debt? I mean, like a fresh start?’

He shrugged again. ‘Not where I come from,’ he said. ‘I have been reduced to the status of a child. No more credit. No more self-employment. I will have to go back to working in a gym, be an employee again. And I have had to give in my notice on my flat.’

‘Oh, no, why?’

‘Because it was too expensive. It was another stupid decision. I chose a flat I liked rather than a flat I could afford. I have been juggling everything in the air, you know, paying for my whole life on credit so that I could use my wages to pay for this stupid, beautiful flat. And now I will have to live on just my wages. So bye-bye beautiful one-bedroom flat in Willesden. Hello shitty flatshare in Wembley.’

‘You’ve already found someone to share with?’

‘Well, no. But I’ll have to do that. Probably someone from the gym. And I’ve seen their places. They’re shit-holes.’ He shuddered delicately and looked sadly at the floor.

Lydia stared at him desperately. Her heart was breaking for him in a way that she hadn’t thought was possible. Lydia’s heart was a sedate organ generally. It sat silently within her and kept her blood flowing smoothly around her body. It occasionally leaped at the sight of an attractive animal or a beautiful man. It sometimes ached dully with loneliness or longing. And once it had even raced with nervous anticipation, in the run up to a live radio interview when she was a student. But most of the time her heart did nothing, felt nothing, sat in its box under her ribs, tick-tick-ticking away the seconds and the moments and the days. So this sensation, she would call it compassion, was a new one for Lydia to contemplate. Bendiks looked broken, there on her rattan sofa. He looked like the child he’d been reduced to in the bankruptcy hearing. She could not bear to think of him packing away his things into boxes and moving them all to a dank house full of people in some far-flung corner of London. She wanted him to feel good about himself. She wanted him to retain some pride. Because his pride was one of his most attractive features.

‘Stay here,’ she said, the words out of her mouth and hanging in the air before she’d had a chance to wonder what she was doing.

‘What?’

‘I can rent you a room, for the same as you’d pay for the shitty flatshare. You’d have your own bathroom. Run of the house. Come and go as you please. Just while you’re sorting yourself out.’

Bendiks’ face fell into an expression of soft amazement. ‘No,’ he said, one hand clasped to his chest. ‘Are you serious?’

Lydia nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why not? I mean, this house, it’s always been too big just for me.’

‘Yes, but Lydia, your privacy, your space … I would hate to infringe on that.’

‘It’s fine,’ she insisted. ‘I spend most of my time in my office anyway. We’d probably never even see each other.’ She ended her words with a small, sharp laugh. Even as she was speaking she was lining up the potential pitfalls of her rash suggestion. Awkward meetings in the kitchen in the mornings with last night’s fungus still coating her tongue and her hair flat and pillow-stale. Passing each other in corridors in states of incomplete dress. The possibility of strange men, women or both passing through the house and mangled sounds of coupling floating through walls at ungodly hours. And, worse still, the terrible prospect of unsolicited conversation, chatter, words, at unexpected junctures. Lydia was accustomed to a very small amount of speech in her day-to-day existence, and she liked it like that. Conversation was overrated, in her opinion.

Her smile began to wither and wane as these misgivings flooded her thoughts. Would the distinct advantage of being able to see the fragrant Bendiks every day in an informal and intimate environment be quickly outweighed by the disadvantages of sharing her house with a man she barely knew?

He seemed to have noticed Lydia’s frozen smile and was looking at her thoughtfully. ‘You have not thought this through, have you?’

‘No!’ she chimed. ‘I have! It’s fine!’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I love this house, Lydia. You know I do. And I would love to stay here with you. It would solve all my problems. It would be perfect. But I do not, under any circumstances, want you to feel uncomfortable or unhappy. Please, do not be afraid to say so if you’d rather I didn’t come to stay.’

Lydia’s smile softened again. This would be fine. It would have to be fine. Because she could not say no to this beautiful man.

‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘It would be a pleasure. I want you to stay. I really do.’

Bendiks beamed. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I would love to accept. Thank you, Lydia. You have made me very, very happy.’

She could not remember the last time she’d made anyone happy. She went through life touching no one, making no impact. And here it was, like a small, strange miracle. This man had walked into her home ten minutes ago looking grey and lost. Now his face had regained its colour, his whole demeanour was bright and energised. And she had done that. With one, rash, unplanned gesture. And when she looked at him, she felt more than compassion. This, she reminded herself, was a man who understood her. This was a man who had experienced loss. This was a man from a foreign land who had come to London and made a life for himself. This was a man that she felt comfortable with and actually, now she thought about it, this was a person she might quite like to have around as she stumbled towards the most nerve-racking and peculiar experience of her life.

Because there were now two matches showing on the Donor Sibling Registry.

Two.

A man and a woman.

The male match had come up last night.

The female match had still not responded to her request for contact. It had been three weeks since she’d tried, but still there was nothing. Lydia was trying very hard not to take it personally. Why would you sign up to an agency like that if you had no interest in making contact with your siblings? It made no sense. No, she reasoned with herself, this person was on holiday. Yes, that’s what it was. She was away. She was eighteen years old so maybe she was having a gap year. Or studying abroad. She pictured this girl sitting in an internet cafe in Delhi, accessing her e-mails, finding one from the Registry. She imagined her with a female friend, saying, ‘Wow, look at this, I’ve got a sister!’ and then going off to see the Taj Mahal or something.

Or maybe she was ill? Maybe she’d been taken suddenly unwell and was now in a hospital ward somewhere, fearing for her life, unaware of the contact request from the Registry. Maybe her gravely concerned mother couldn’t bear to bring it to her attention in her current state. Or maybe she’d just lost her internet connection. Or maybe she’d gone to the countryside to stay with an elderly aunt. Or maybe she was doing it, right now, filling in the form, giving the agency her permission to share her personal details. Lydia still checked her e-mails obsessively. The preoccupation with waiting to hear from her sister had taken the place of the preoccupation of waiting for a match. Was this what this experience was destined to be? she wondered. Waiting and waiting and waiting?

And just as she’d fully assimilated into her existence this desperate game of waiting and making excuses and inventing more and more unlikely scenarios for the lack of contact, there was another one. A man this time. Twenty-one years old. Now the whole thing would begin all over again. Her nerves were ragged. She could no longer concentrate on anything for longer than about half an hour before it came hurtling back to the surface of her mind. Brother. Sister. Contact. Waiting. She almost wished she’d never signed up in the first place. She hadn’t expected it to be like this. She hadn’t expected it to be such agony.

Juliette walked out on the terrace then, two small cups and saucers balanced on a tray with a selection of biscuits and two glasses of water. Lydia jumped to her feet to take the tray from her. Juliette tutted good-naturedly and said, ‘No, you sit. Sit.’

Lydia felt a small wave of embarrassment for the overly formal and solicitous nature of the delivery of the coffee. It was all so unnecessary. She didn’t need all this five-star frippery. She just wanted someone to keep her house nice for her.

‘Juliette,’ she said, to break the awkwardness, to humanise her, ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever introduced you properly. This is Bendiks. Bendiks is my fitness trainer. Bendiks, this is Juliette. Juliette looks after me.’ She ended this on a nervous laugh.
Looking after her
made her sound like a crazed old maiden aunt with a tendency to walk out of the house in her nightdress.

Juliette smiled suspiciously at Bendiks and barely brushed the solid hand he offered her to shake. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Juliette, circumspectly, before turning on her heel and heading back into the house.

Bendiks laughed. ‘She is very protective,’ he said.

Lydia considered that and thought it was probably about right. Lydia paid Juliette to look after her and her house, and anything not written into that original agreement – cats, visitors – was dismissed off the cuff.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘but she is very, very good at her job. As far as I’m concerned she’s an investment. I pay her to keep my house looking exactly the same as it did when I bought it. If I lived here on my own it would look like a student house share. You know, I’ve lived here for a year and there is not a speck of limescale
anywhere
. And it’s things like that that make a house keep its resale value.’

Bendiks smiled at her. ‘It is OK,’ he said. ‘I’m not English. You don’t need to justify these things to me. Where I come from, anyone who could afford a housekeeper would have a housekeeper. Where I come from, people would think you were mad if you didn’t. You English. You’re very strange about these things. So ashamed of money and success. So ashamed of your trappings. You should celebrate! A beautiful young woman, self-made, set for life. Wow. You should be shouting it from the rooftops! You should be proud of yourself!’

Lydia blinked at him. Had he just said that? she wondered. Had he just said she was beautiful? Lydia had no idea if she was beautiful or not. The mirror told her different things every time she looked in it. Nobody had ever told her she was beautiful. But then nobody had ever told her she wasn’t. It had been left to her to draw her own conclusions, and she had failed to do so. But this compliment from Bendiks, it acted as a small weight in the balance towards believing that maybe she was nice-looking. He had no reason to say that to her. Nothing to gain from it.

And as she sat there on her terrace, the sun warming her face, her cat smiling at her dreamily from Bendiks’ lap, Bendiks himself looking at her with a mixture of pride and affection, and a growing sense within herself that maybe she wasn’t a freak after all, it occurred to Lydia that for the first time in her life, the pieces of her own personal jigsaw were coming together. It was almost as if she were finally starting to make sense of herself. The cat, the trainer, the potential new housemate, the letting go of Dixie, the fact that she did not share her DNA with a man she hated, the siblings she was hoping to meet, even this house, this stupid big house: it all felt like it meant something. The stage was set. The timing was right. Now all Lydia needed was for someone to get in touch with her and say they wanted to meet her.

Sam gazed at Robyn over the top of her bunched up knuckles. Her eyes were serious and sad. By her elbow was a mug of peppermint tea that Robyn already knew she would not drink. There was too much talking to be done.

‘Why are you hurting my son?’ Sam asked, quietly.

Robyn flinched. She had not been expecting those words. She had expected Sam to know exactly why she was hurting her son.
Because he’s my brother, of course!
a small voice inside her head shouted out.

‘Do you not know?’ she asked, picking at a loose thread in the tablecloth, unable to meet Sam’s intense gaze.

‘Know what?’ asked Sam.

‘I thought you knew,’ she muttered.

‘I’ll tell you what I know, young lady, and that is that my son has never felt the way he feels for you about anyone else. He’s a sensitive young man, a beautiful, gentle, wonderful man, and he’s given you his heart in a bag. And he thought – and I thought – that you felt the same way. It’s been clear to me that you’re both crazy about each other … and now you’ve just left him in limbo and I know he’s a grown man and I know it shouldn’t be any of my business and I shouldn’t be here and that I should just butt out but I can’t, because he’s my only boy and I love him so much and I can’t
stand
what you’re doing to him. I can’t
stand
it!’

Her voice caught on the last words and Robyn looked up at her. She was crying.

Robyn looked away again. ‘Look, it’s not as simple as that,’ she began. ‘It’s – I thought you knew. Do you really not know?’

‘Know what?’

‘Jack’s father – was he really a Barnardo’s orphan? Did he really die in a car crash?’

Sam blinked away her tears and glanced at her in horror. ‘What?’ she asked, blankly.

‘Is it all true? The story about Jack’s dad?’

‘Of course it’s true.’

And as she said the words, Robyn knew they were true and she felt everything inside her fall and flood, like a sluice sliding open in a dam. Her legs weakened and her heart slowed and then it picked up again as she felt a huge burst of maniacal laughter forming in her chest. She swallowed it and smiled calmly at Sam. ‘Really?’ she said.