Brother and Sister by Joanna Trollope Read Free Book Online Page A

the ancient, sophisticated, decayed civilzations
     of the past. For David to play it appeared to her eccentric but also cultivated, and somehow gentlemanly. It was only as time
     went on, and she saw that he was drawn back to it all the time, as if to an opium pipe, that she began to sense uneasily that
     this game represented something more than just a game to David, and that some atavistic workings-out lay beneath the deceptively
     civilized black-and-white surface. But then, she told herself, is it completely crazy to be suspicious—jealous even—of a game? Suppose he played golf all weekend, or spent all their money on boats or vintage cars or flying round the world in support
     of a football team? Chess, she told herself, was no enemy; couldn't be. Chess was like doing the crossword, a challenging
     intellectual exercise of great beauty and history. Chess was not arbitrary or demanding or emotional or vulnerable. Chess
     was not like Nathalie.
    Marnie liked Nathalie. She was sure she did. From their first meeting, Nathalie had shown Marnie only affection and acceptance,
     and, even if this affection and acceptance denoted a supreme confidence on Nathalie's part about her own significance in David's
     life, it was, Marnie was sure, genuine in itself. Wasn't it? After all, there was everything in David and Nathalie's past
     to excuse and explain the bond between them—pure chance, Nathalie had said to her, because they might just as easily have
     loathed each other from the start—but the fact that they were not blood relations was something you could not, if as intimately involved with them as Marnie was, entirely overlook.
    Marnie was one for friends, not particularly girlfriends. She attempted, in her customary, modestly confident way, to make
     a friend out of Nathalie, to establish a relationship quite separate from the one either had with David. But Nathalie eluded
     her. She was a pleasant sister-in-law, an excellent aunt, she wasn't greedy about time or attention, but she could still stir
     something in David, whatever his mood, that transported him, very slightly, out of Mamie's reach. And when he was out of her
     reach, she felt herself to be inaudible and invisible in a way that nobody else in her life had ever made her feel. And at
     those moments too she felt herself to be living far away from Canada.
    Standing now beside the telephone in the hall, with Petey asleep in his cot upstairs—it was really time, she knew, to move
     him to a bed—and the prepared vegetables just waiting to be cooked for supper in the kitchen, Marnie thought hard about Nathalie.
     Nathalie had not rung to complain to David about Lynne. That was perfectly plain. Nathalie had rung about something quite
     different, something she was not prepared to tell Marnie about, something which related to that place where she and David
     had first clung together after the shipwreck of their early lives. Marnie looked at herself, at the regularity of her features
     and teeth, at the way her striped cotton shirt had been competently ironed. A small but unmistakable anger rose up inside
     her, hot and red. You'd think, she said to herself, that I'd done enough, wouldn't you? You'd think that to give a man the
     first three blood relations of his life was the most any woman could do?
    Nathalie drove out of Westerham in the rain. There was something oily and sticky on the windscreen and an exasperating long
     smear formed and re-formed with every sweep of the wiper blades. She sat leaning forward in her seat, craning this way and
     that to see round the smear and devoting far too much energy to the decision as to whether to stop and get out into the rain
     and clean the glass with a sheet of last week's local paper which was lying in the floor-well by the passenger seat, or whether
     to stay dry and dangerously maddened. She chose the latter, and drove on, muttering.
    David had rung and asked her to meet him at a site he was working on seven miles