Constance (17 page)

Connie swallowed.

‘Hi, I’m Bill. You must be Connie,’ he said.

What had Jeanette told him about her?

‘I am Constance,’ she replied stiffly. Her ears had turned red. She was conscious of the drips of something sticky and
dark down the front of her jumper and her hair being a mess of dusty black spirals with plastic slides stuck in it, just like a kid.

He held his hand out. Hilda was asking him if he wanted a drink, a coffee maybe, or he could have a beer if he wanted one. Jeanette was leaning on him to indicate that they had to go.

In spite of herself, Connie shook his hand.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked. ‘It must be really good.’ He did smile now, his mouth curling.

‘
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. It’s my set book in English.’

‘Yes. That’s a good book.’

Connie would have liked to ask him why he enjoyed it, because she didn’t particularly. It would have been interesting to talk to him, and a fully-fledged fantasy popped into her head in which she and Bill Bunting were sitting at an outdoor table in some exotic but unspecified place, drinking wine and discussing literature and music.

But in reality he was holding her sister’s hand and telling Hilda that they couldn’t stop, although he’d like to, because he was taking Jeanette for something to eat before they went to hear a new band at a place under a pub in Camden Town.

Jeanette was
deaf
. Why was he taking
her
to a gig?

Jeanette claimed that she didn’t have to hear the music, she could feel the beat in her bones, which was the kind of pretentious thing she was always suggesting, but Connie knew that the evening would be wasted on her.

‘Go on then, both of you,’ Hilda said. ‘Have a lovely time.’

Jeanette was almost bouncing with happiness, springing up and down in her little suede boots with the turnover tops. Connie thought that she was looking really pretty and sexy tonight, prettier and sexier than she had ever seen her look before.

‘Bye, Constance,’ Bill said. She knew that he was gently teasing her for having insisted on her full name, and she couldn’t bear to be teased. It took enough concentration to keep the blocks of her life piled up in the right precarious order, without someone dodging in and out and threatening to topple them by laughing and making her feel ridiculous. Especially not this Bill Bunting.

Connie wouldn’t look at him. She picked up her book again and stared at the grey paragraphs until he and Jeanette departed for their date. Hilda accompanied them to the front door, waved them off and then came back and picked up her cloth.

She resumed her rubbing and sighing.

Now that they were alone Connie was certain that Hilda wouldn’t talk to her, the way Davy’s mother and normal people talked, for example; she would just go on with the chores in a way that rejected any offer of help and never stopped implying that it was desperately needed. Hilda could make you feel superfluous and guilty all at the same time, even with her back turned. Being trapped in this house with Hilda and her martyred silences was what Connie disliked most, and it was happening more and more frequently these days as Jeanette’s life blossomed. She still lived at home, but reading Biological Sciences at Queen Mary’s College meant that she spent little time at Echo Street.

Connie sat and pretended to read for just long enough to make her motionless presence thoroughly irritating.

If Hilda suddenly boiled over and started shouting, at least that would be something happening. They would both have the release of an argument.

‘What do you want for your tea?’ Hilda asked at last, when there was no surface left in the kitchen that could conceivably benefit from further polishing, wiping, sweeping or disinfecting.

This evening, apparently, there wouldn’t even be the equivocal satisfaction of a proper row.

Connie shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘You can’t eat nothing.’

‘Really? Can’t I? What makes you think that?’

‘I don’t want any of your silly sarcasm, my girl.’

Connie gathered up her books and files.

‘I might go out.’

‘You’ve got the money for that, have you?’

In fact Connie did; she had a Saturday job in a record shop up in Hackney although that was more for the chance to gloat over the new and second-hand vinyl than for the cash it brought in. She shrugged again and this goaded Hilda enough to make her demand, ‘Why can’t you be more like your sister?’

Connie let three seconds tick by, deliciously.

‘You know why. You should have had another one just like her, if that was what you wanted.’

Hilda’s face went tight and dark. Connie strolled out of the kitchen and it was only as she was going up the stairs that Hilda was able to call after her in a loud, harsh voice, ‘You’ve got the devil in you, Connie Thorne. I don’t know what you’re doing in this house.’

Connie went into her bedroom and closed the door.

Anyway, she thought, I won’t
be
in this house for much longer.

It took a very long time to grow up, but with every week and month that passed she knew with greater certainty that it would happen in the end. In a year, or not much more than a year, she would be able to leave school.

She was going to move out and leave Echo Street far behind her, and she was going to find her real mother and father. Once she had found them she could become the person she was born to be, instead of having to be Constance Thorne.

Connie wondered whether Jeanette remembered that evening. She knew Bill did, because they had once talked about it.

‘You looked like an angry foal,’ he laughed.

‘A
foal
?’

‘Yeah. With a sort of matted forelock hanging down over your nose and the whites of your eyes showing.’

‘Oh, great. And I suppose thick knees and spindly legs, finished off with two pairs of unmanicured hooves.’

‘I couldn’t see your legs, you were sitting down.’

‘I thought you were gorgeous.’

‘I was pretty full of it in those days. I imagined that going out with someone who looked like Jeanette and who was deaf as well would make me look deeply cool and kind of committed and interesting.’

‘Yes?’

Bill had laughed again. ‘She outwitted me, though. Instead of being my accessory she made me hers.’

‘You fell in love with her.’

Bill nodded.

Jeanette tasted two or three sips of her coffee then replaced her cup on the tray. The saucer rattled. Bill passed her a glass of water instead and she took a brown bottle of pills out of her cardigan pocket and swallowed two capsules, then gave the glass back to Bill. They did all this without a word or a glance, and Connie saw how practised they were at being just the two of them.

Jeanette leaned back in her chair.

– What about you?
she asked.

Connie said, ‘I’ve been at home, in Bali. Last week I was working on the music for a big commercial shoot.’

The bank clients and Rayner Ingram and Angela seemed already to have fallen into some distant other world. She was startled to think how recent the week’s miniature dramas
had really been, and how very little they mattered now that she was here.

When Jeanette was settled Bill sat down and crossed his legs. He was wearing deck shoes without socks, and Connie remembered that this was a sort of uniform for Englishmen at home on summer days. She was sufficiently unused to England to start noticing such things again.

‘That sounds glamorous,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘It does, doesn’t it? I had two groups of musicians to look after and I enjoyed that, and some of my neighbours were involved as well. It felt a bit strange, though, seeing London in Bali. I wasn’t quite sure which environment was which. Life in the village isn’t usually so busy.’

Jeanette followed all this. Conversations when each person took a turn didn’t trouble her, only when everyone was speaking at once.

– But you said at home. Is Bali your home?

‘Did I say that?’

– Yes.

Connie thought about it, and Bill looked at her over his coffee cup. ‘I’ve been living there for a while now, so I suppose I do think of it as home.’ This wasn’t the time or the place to expand on anyone’s definition of home.

–
What is it like?
Jeanette leaned forward.

Connie’s face shone. ‘Beautiful. Hot. Different. Exotic. And that doesn’t do it justice.’

– I would love to have seen it.

‘Would you?’ Connie asked. Jeanette had never travelled much, preferring to take villa or hotel holidays with Bill and Noah in Italy or France. A flash of memory came back to her of Bill, in one of their snatched moments during the time long ago when everything hung in the balance between them, calling her his wild roaming girl because she was leaving him to go to Cambodia.

She’d go anywhere, in those days, anywhere in the world that was far enough to try to escape the problem that none of them could solve.

–
Wishful thinking now
, Jeanette indicated.

There was a small silence that was waiting for the comfort of words to be dropped into it. Bill rubbed the corner of his jaw with his thumb. A reddish patch in the skin showed that the gesture had become habitual.

Connie remembered that her camera was in her bag. She had dropped it in this morning before she left the apartment.

‘I’ve got some pictures here,’ she said.

– Show me?

Bill moved Jeanette’s chair further into the shade so the sun didn’t reflect on the camera’s little screen, and found her glasses for her, and Connie leaned over her shoulder. Their arms briefly touched and Connie’s warm skin looked darker next to Jeanette’s hospital pallor.

‘Press that button, the one with the arrow. There, that’s the view from the veranda of my house.’

Jeanette studied the image. It was an early-morning shot. Mist clung to the lower slopes of the gorge and the row of palms that crowned the ridge looked as if they had been drawn in soft pencil against the silvery sky. Over Jeanette’s bent head Connie pondered the contrast with the froth of roses clothing the back of this house, and the pots of agapanthus just breaking into flower on either side of the French windows.

The next picture was of a village festival. Men with drums and bamboo pipes, and laughing girls carrying towering piles of fruit and pyramids of flowers on their heads processed past a rank of snarling demons carved from tufa and winged dragons with jagged backs like dinosaurs. A line of scarlet and gold
penjor
flags flashed brilliance against the background mass of leaves.

Jeanette looked at that picture for a long time.

– How beautiful.

The next shot was of the pairs of exquisite Balinese schoolgirls dressed up for the bride commercial, and then there was one of Angela. Connie had caught her on the set with Ed and a couple of the other riggers. There were lights and cables everywhere, and darts of sunshine striking off the metal equipment boxes. Angela was standing upright among the chaos and giving her missionary-among-the-cannibals face straight into the camera lens.

‘It looks like fun,’ Bill said.

‘Well, yes. It was really.’

The last picture was of the
gamelan
ensemble with their instruments, dressed and made-up for the shoot, with Ketut beaming in the centre.

‘Who are these?’

Connie laughed. She was touched and pleased that Jeanette and Bill liked her photographs. ‘That’s my orchestra. But they’d soon tell you they’re not mine. More like I’m their eccentric Englishwoman. They were on screen here for the commercial, playing a few bars of the music that I wrote for it, but usually it’s me creeping along to play percussion with them and hoping not to make an idiot of myself. It’s a big privilege; generally the
seka
– that’s the village music club – is only open to men, but I suppose I don’t count because I’m old and regarded as harmlessly mad. Ketut – that’s him in the middle – is a very clever man, and a brilliant musician. He’s a good friend. He only rates me because we were in his brother’s café one afternoon and a local version of the old Boom commercial came on the telly over the bar. I told him I wrote the music and he was almost as impressed as if I’d said “A Hard Day’s Night” was one of mine. Ketut’s a very big Beatles fan.’

Jeanette was looking up at her, clearly trying to
place Connie in a setting that was so remote from her English garden. Bill’s expression was harder to read.

Connie shifted slightly.

‘Actually my life’s quieter than it looks from these. I sit and stare at the view quite a lot.’

Jeanette clicked back to the first of the pictures.

– Do you? I think I would, too.

There was a faint flush of colour over her cheekbones.

‘It’s a lovely place,’ Connie agreed.

Bill hopped up and announced that he was going to go in and make some lunch, saying with a laugh he thought he was irritating Jeanette by always being under her feet.

Jeanette reached up and curled her fingers round his wrist.

–
You are not
, she told him.
Never
.

As Bill carried the tray back across the lawn to the house the two women settled themselves again.

‘What’s Noah doing?’ Connie asked.

As when Bill had come out into the garden, Jeanette’s face softened and brightened.

– Noah’s fine. He’s a joy.

She told Connie about Noah’s job and his flat and the girlfriend he had just split up with because she had gone travelling, and added that Bill and she thought there might be some new love interest although they hadn’t met her yet.

– He’s grown up now. That’s one good thing.

Connie remembered him as a teenager, protective of Jeanette, with a disconcerting physical resemblance to his father.

–
I hope it won’t be too hard for him
, Jeanette added.

Her sister’s tenderness for the boy moved Connie, and even without a child of her own she could imagine what anguish it must cause Jeanette to think of leaving him. But it also touched a place in Connie that she tried to keep covered up. Seeing a mother’s love was like placing pressure
on an unhealed wound, an old, deep injury that scabbed over and seemed on the point of disappearing, but which broke open when she least expected it and made her wince with the sharpness of the pain.