Brother & Sister - Couverture rigide

Trollope, Joanna

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1582344000 ISBN 13 : 9781582344003

Editeur : Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA, 2004

Synopsis

Book by Trollope Joanna

A propos du livre

Extrait

Chapter One
 
From 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, ergonomically 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 endeavoured 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 neighbours, 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, and 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 pyschological effect of tiny adjustments, in placing or proportion. It was clean, pure, clever, and it was for him. He’d promised him self, 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,’...

Quatrième de couverture

'Deliciously readable' The Times

Nathalie and David have been good and dutiful children to their parents and now, grown-up with their own families, they are still close good friends. Brother and sister.

Except that they aren't - brother and sister, that is. They were both adopted when their loving parents found that they couldn't have children of their own. And until now it's never mattered.

But when Nathalie discovers a deep need to trace her birth parents, she insists that David makes the same journey. She also discovers that sometimes the answers - to who we are and where we come from - can be more difficult than the questions...

'There is nothing Joanna Trollope does better than explore the minefield of family life...skilful and highly readable' Sunday Telegraph

'No one is better at observing and reporting changes in relationships and family dynamics than Joanna Trollope' Daily Express

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA
• Date d'édition: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1582344000
• ISBN 13: 9781582344003
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 320