Brother and Sister Read Online Free Page B

exhausted by emotion, by a sense of having let everyone, including herself, down, "at
     least they have each other."
    Lynne still said that. It irritated Nathalie when she said it because it still seemed to Nathalie that Lynne wanted to be
     reassured about it, even thanked, and even though Nathalie loved Lynne, even though she acknowledged what a support Lynne
     had always been to her, how Lynne had ever been on her side, she still could not get her mind comfortably around the idea
     that Lynne felt she owed her something.
    This problem over Polly's ear was exactly a case in point. Polly was Lynne's granddaughter and Lynne would want, would expect,
     to be included in any anxiety surrounding her, large or small. It would be a mark of the closeness between Nathalie and Lynne—a
     mark of the no difference there was between their relationship and that of a natural mother and daughter—that Nathalie should confide to Lynne all maternal
     preoccupations, everything that had to do with this bond that Nathalie had now achieved so properly, so primitively, with
     Polly.
    But David had silently taught Nathalie otherwise. Watching him as he grew from a child to a boy to an adolescent, she had
     seen that he quietly went round things; he didn't charge through the middle, breaking the china. He made it plain that if
     Nathalie needed to break the china he was prepared both to share the blame and help clear it up, but that she didn't have
     to do things that way to get what she wanted. Over time, cushioned by his undemanding constancy, she began to relinquish some
     of the assertiveness of her power over him, to begin, even, to seek him out to give her the unarticulated satisfaction of
     his presence as hers had always seemed to give him. Leaning against the kitchen wall now, about to dial David's number, she
     suddenly had a memory of herself, crouched on the landing floor outside the locked bathroom door in Ashmore Road. David was
     inside, singing. He was about fifteen and he was obsessed with being a blues singer. He talked about bayous and catfish and
     getting no satisfaction and he was saving up for a slide guitar. Crouched on the gray marl carpet, Nathalie could hear him
     singing "This Train" and she knew he'd be lying in the bath, with everything but his nose and mouth submerged in the water,
     fixin' to die.
    It made her smile, remembering that, remembering him writing songs with titles like "Ain't No Way Out", remembering him before
     he met Marnie and became a businessman, and a father of three. She was still smiling when she picked up the receiver and dialed
     his number.
    "You sound happy," Marnie said.
    "Oh," Nathalie said, "I was just grinning about something when I picked up the phone—"
    "Polly?" Marnie said. In Mamie's steady, practical, comfortable life, most sources of pleasure and humor lay with children.
    "No," Nathalie said. She began to twist her hair up behind her head as she always did when unrelaxed. "No, not actually. It
     was about Dave, remembering something about Dave when we were kids. Is he there?"
    "Well, no," Marnie said.
    "Shall I guess?"
    "Wednesday night, Nat—"
    "Chess club. Of course. I should've known. What is it with men and chess?"
    "Only some men—"
    "My father," Nathalie said, "Dave—"
    "He wants Daniel to play," Marnie said. "But he won't."
    "Why?"
    "He says he's not interested."
    "Perhaps he isn't—"
    "Exactly what I say. At ten, he knows what interests him. Of course, his refusal makes Ellen want to play and David's taught
     her but you can see his heart isn't in it. She's not a boy."
    Nathalie pictured Marnie standing in her hallway, looking at herself in the mirror that hung by the telephone. She'd be looking
     at herself, with the kind of easy acceptance with which she looked at most things, touching her thick, majestic fair plait
     which she wore pulled over one solid shoulder. Sometimes Nathalie imagined how the plait would look when Marnie was older,
     wound into a dense