It seems the emails and phone calls from the lawyer were not enough to prepare her. It seems the transatlantic flight was not enough, nor soaking in the hotel tub this morning. Marble tries to do now what she does when she is standing in front of a television camera, when she pays only minimal attention to all the signals around her, the director and crew moving and gesturing from the side and beyond the camera, and thinks only of one thing, thinks only of the person on the other side of the camera, just that one person, with whom she needs to communicate.
She tries to do that now, she tries to focus on these two strangers who have summoned her here and are watching her every move, she tries to mind her manners, tries to smile warmly but not too broadly, she follows them to the dining nook where they have laid a sunny-looking table with toast, jam, eggs, coffee, and an inferior brand of tea, but rather promising-looking scones. She tells herself to focus only on them, but this house is filled with distractions, with the sofa and drapes and coffeepot that her birth mother must have been using until just weeks ago.
Someone could have warned Marble of this new mix of emotions she’s experiencing. Someone could have told her that having breakfast with her brother and sister would feel like being on a blind date, with everyone dressed to impress and making small talk and casting shy glances in one another’s directions. And with Marble wondering why in the world she’s agreed to do this, why she is allowing her sense of who she is to be stripped away. These people, this place, that coffeepot, all tell her that she is not who she thought she was.
She doesn’t have to be here, does she? She could just stand up right now and walk out of this house. She could dodge those noisy crows loitering at the end of the driveway and that silly cactus in the backyard and fly back to her mum and dad. It’s just that Byron and Benny are so tall and thick-boned, just like Marble, and there is something about their bulk that is difficult for her to resist. Plus, all those photographs of Eleanor Bennett, Marble’s own face, staring back at her.
She’ll feel better, perhaps, after she’s had a bit of a rest. Marble is tired from yesterday’s long flight over and annoyed at having to change rooms this morning. The first room they gave her at the hotel late last night was decorated in lilac everything and Marble just had to get out of there. Where in the world, Marble wonders, does one manage to find a lilac lamp?
Marble looks at Byron and Benny. My brother and sister, she thinks. She calls on all her professional skills now, trying to convey curiosity and friendliness and none of this undercurrent of agitation that she is feeling. She talks around the elephant in the room. She talks about her mum and dad, she talks about her late husband and her son’s schooling, she talks about her plans to go back to the UK full time.
One thing Marble doesn’t say is how hard it will be to leave Italy, to leave the everyday memories of her husband behind, even after more than fifteen years. Even after the occasional lover. Even after a man like Coffee Man. She suspects he would fly to England to see her, if it came to that. And it will have to come to that. She knows it’s time to make the move. She’s been feeling this for a while now, ever since she sent her son back to the UK for prep school.
How to begin again? Marble has clothes in the closets, food in the pantry, plants to think of. She has Bobby the dog. The thought of putting poor Bobby in a crate and carting him over to London, the thought of emptying out her husband’s home, is weighing on her. But this is too personal, this isn’t any of Byron and Benny’s business.
Looking at Byron and Benny, now, Marble is aware that she is feeling resentful. She knows these two have nothing to do with Marble being abandoned as a baby, but the fact is, Byron and Benny are the ones who grew up with Eleanor Bennett, while Marble is the one who was left behind. Byron and Benny might not have been born yet but their mother, in effect, chose them over Marble.
Marble knows that she should ask herself, what would a woman have to go through to make the kind of choice that Eleanor Bennett had? It was fifty years ago. A woman like Marble, a person with financial and social resources, cannot presume to judge a woman who came of age in another time, or under different circumstances.
And yet.
Marble will find out more tomorrow how all of this happened. Her birth mother’s lawyer says Eleanor Bennett left a letter and recording for her before she died. Maybe she should have gone to the lawyer’s office first, but the thought of it had made her throat unbearably dry. Ease into it, she’d thought, but now the questions are driving her mad. What will Eleanor Bennett have to say? Will it be enough to cancel out what Marble is thinking?