EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT FROM JOANNA TROLLOPE’S NEW NOVEL, BROTHER & SISTER, selected as the Great Read in the February issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly and published by Bloomsbury.
Natalie had been four when David came to join her. She’d been expecting a baby, not a silent, toddling boy with a big head and big soft hands that eh wanted to lay on everything that was hers. There seemed to be, implicit in the way everyone treated David, an extra sympathy and sorrow, so that his speechlessness was allowable, even admirable, and so was the fact that he was ruthlessly determined one second and completely withdrawn the next.
‘Don’t be cross with him, Nathalie,’ Lynne and Ralph would say. ‘He’s only little. He can’t help it.’
Privately, Nathalie thought that they could have helped it by not bringing David home in the first place. Life had been fine, without David, there had been no need for David. Adding David to the house on Ashmore Road seemed a peculiarly unnecessary, arbitrary thing to do. A baby would have been fine, a baby in a cot or a pram; a baby would not have wanted to challenge or take over the life that Nathalie and Ralph and Lynne had built up together. Nathalie sense, even at four, that she could have accommodated herself to a baby.
She shut her bedroom door against David. She put her toys in places where David, even though he was learning to climb, couldn’t reach. She ate without looking at him and, when he misbehaved at meals, as he often did, hurling his plate to the floor and letting food fall out of his mouth and spill down his front, she fixed her attention on something quite different and stared at it until her eyes watered. When David made Lynne cry with frustration, Nathalie would scream too, to show Lynne that she had good reason for crying. She fought Ralph when he tried to dress her for nursery school and, when he remonstrated, she looked blank and went speechless, like David.
She knew she hated him. She also knew that to say she hated him was not just not allowed, but utterly forbidden. Nobody had ever spelled this out to her, but something in the almost reverential pity that surrounded David made her realise that there were some areas of human conduct that were so fenced about with outrage that penetrating them brought a personal penalty you might have to pay for the rest of your life. She had a sense that if she went down the path of saying she hated David, she could never go back. She could say she hated his big head and his dribbling and his dirty nappies and his persistence, but she couldn’t say she hated him. It wasn’t that she wanted to – she’d have liked him to stay blob-like for ever – but that he wanted to respond to her. When she came near him, his eyes lit up and his hands went out. She hated his hands. They were always sticky.
It took him years to win her over. Lynne told friends that it broke her heart to see David struggling for Nathalie’s attention, never mind her approval. Of course she couldn’t expect a little girl to appreciate the double deprivation of David’s parenting – first the loss through adoption of his birth mother, then the second one of his first adopted parents in a coach crash on holiday in France – but it was as if Nathalie had hardened her heart to David without even thinking, without even looking at him in the first place.
‘And he loves her,’ Lynne would say, her eyes filling at the thought of David’s infant unrequited emotion. ‘You can see it in his little face. He loves her.’
Even then, Nathalie was suspicious of the love word. Lynne used it a lot. Lynne said that she loved Nathalie and so did Ralph, and they loved her especially because they had chosen her to be their little girl. If you are chosen, Lynne said, that makes you special. But Nathalie was as suspicious of being special s she was of the love-word. It seemed to her, sitting on Lynne’s knee in her pyjamas (pale-yellow, printed with rabbits), that when Lynne talked about love and specialness she wanted something back. She wanted Nathalie to gather up all this stuff, and a bit extra, and to give it back to Lynne, like a present, a present which would somehow, obscurely, make Lynne feel better. And Lynne needed to feel better, always. Something in her thin, kind, anxious face made you realise that she carried some sort of ache around, all the time, and she thought that you, in your yellow pyjamas, could assuage that ache and comfort her.
But Nathalie couldn’t do it. She liked Lynne. She liked Ralph. She liked her life in the house on Ashmore Road and her bedroom, and most of the food that she was offered, and going to school. But she couldn’t go further than that. She couldn’t fling herself at Ralph and Lynne and want to lose herself in them, partly because she didn’t feel the necessary urgency and partly because she couldn’t give Lynne what she seemed to want in case Lynne wanted more and more and more until Nathalie was entirely sucked up into her, like carpet fluff going up the vacuum-cleaner tube.
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