Constance (18 page)

The sudden exposure of it made her push back her chair and drop to her knees.

She had to move to ease the hurt so she knelt down and gathered her sister into her arms, stroking her sparse hair and rocking her as if she were a baby. This time Jeanette didn’t resist. Her head lay against Connie’s shoulder in just the way Connie’s used to do against Tony’s when she was a little girl. This connection was made more precious by its fragility, its limited life, then as now.

Hot, uncalculated words broke out of Connie like fresh blood from beneath the broken scab.

‘Jeanette. Jeanette, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I haven’t been here with you. So much in our childhood was wrong. It was nobody’s fault, not even Hilda’s. I ran away from home and from you. I was full of my own concerns, and I haven’t been the sister you wanted or deserved.

‘What I did with Bill was bad. But I didn’t plan to fall in love with my own sister’s husband, you know. None of it was intended. Once you were married I should just have kept running, off over the horizon, before anything else happened. Bill was in the wrong too, but he’s a good man. He loves you. He’s not the first or the last husband to make a mistake and to regret it ever afterwards.

‘I know you don’t trust me, why should you? But I’m trying to say I’ll do whatever I can now. If you let me. If you and Bill let me. If I knew Noah better, I’d promise you that he’ll never need a woman’s support while I’m here to give it.’

Over the years Connie had taught herself not to cry, but tears came now. They burned her eyes and the green garden blurred into splinters of silver.

She didn’t even know how much of what she said was intelligible to Jeanette. Most probably it was nothing more than a vibration in the locked bones and channels of her bent head, but she held her and rocked her and slowly Jeanette lifted her arm. She put her hand on Connie’s head and lightly stroked her hair, just once.

‘It’s not too late,’ Connie said. ‘It’s not. It can’t be.’

Jeanette made no response.

Silently they held on to each other.

Noah fell asleep with the lights and the television on, and the next thing he heard was a key in the lock. The front door of the flat opened and softly closed. He sat up and rubbed his face, then looked at his watch. It was ten past four in the morning.

‘Hi, Roxana?’ he called out.

The hall light clicked on and she appeared in the doorway. There were black marks like thumbprints where her thick eye make-up had smudged. She stood with her plastic handbag clutched across her chest, warily gazing at him. She looked dazed with exhaustion.

Noah stumbled to his feet. Roxana immediately took a step backwards.

He held his hands up. ‘It’s all right,’ he mumbled. ‘I just wanted to make sure you got back safely. It’s very late.’

She shrugged. ‘It is a club for men to enjoy themselves.’

Noah felt uncomfortable on behalf of his sex. ‘Did you have a bad night?’

Roxana’s mouth creased. Even when she looked plain, as she did now with her blotched make-up and late-night skin, her mouth made her beautiful.

‘I earn money,’ she said.

She burrowed her hand into the bag and brought out her wallet. ‘If you like I can pay you some money for rent.
Here.’ She held out a note, but he wouldn’t even look at it.

‘Roxana, for God’s sake, put your money away. Look, I don’t know what’s been happening to you and I don’t know what you’re afraid might happen next. But you’re welcome to stay and I don’t need any rent from you and I told you this morning, yesterday morning, whenever the fuck it was, you’re safe here. I’m not going to touch you if that’s what you’re concerned about.’

She slid him a glance under her blackened eyelids. Noah thought, I shouldn’t have promised that. Now I’m going to have to keep my word. With the flat of his hand he massaged the corner of his mouth towards his nose and sniffed hard.

‘Would you like a cup of tea or something?’

Roxana raised her thin shoulders. ‘I would like just to sleep,’ she said.

‘Go ahead.’ He indicated the door of his bedroom.

She gave him an awkward nod. ‘Good night. Thank you, Noah. You are a kind person.’ She slid away and the door closed behind her.

She must have pulled off her clothes and dived immediately into sleep because he didn’t hear any sounds of her moving about from then until he left for work.

Every evening of the following week Noah came home straight from work instead of going to the gym or stopping off at the pub, in the hope of overlapping with Roxana before she left for The Cosmos. If he was lucky he would find her still wandering between the bathroom and his bedroom with her hair wrapped in one of his towels, her muscled legs beaded with drops of water from the shower.

‘Hi, Noah. Did you have a nice day? What work did you do?’

He took a beer out of the fridge or made himself a mug
of tea, and while Roxana perched on the sofa to paint her toenails with deft strokes of silver glitter he told her about providing technical support to editors who could spend days honing a manuscript, somehow manage to lose all their work with a couple of keystrokes, and want him to recover it for them.

‘It sounds highly responsible business. You have a good career.’

‘Oh, I don’t know that it’s a career. I haven’t made a policy decision on that yet. It’s just a job.’

Roxana laughed. ‘But you are lucky, aren’t you?’

He was puzzled for a moment until he realised that it would be a luxury, where Roxana came from, to be able to choose between a job or a career and to postpone one while indulging in the other.

When her hair and toenails were dry she would retreat into his bedroom and put on her street clothes.

‘I have to go,’ she would sigh. ‘Mr Shane tells all the girls, even the Brazilian one that he likes, that if we are late we need not come back another time.’

‘Don’t you get a night off?’

Roxana teasingly smiled at him. ‘Why do I need this? What will I do with a night off and not earning any money?’

‘You could come out with me. You could tell me about Uzbekistan, talk about your life.’

‘And why do you want to know about Uzbekistan, when you do not even know where it is?’

‘I
do
know. You told me quite precisely.’

Their hour’s overlap was already ending. Roxana took some small lacy items out of the tumble-dryer and placed them in a Tesco carrier-bag, together with an apple and a filled roll in a supermarket wrapper to eat during her break. He found it touching to think of her eating this humdrum meal in between dances, biting tidily into the doughy bread
so as not to get blobs of mayonnaise on her chin or on her – whatever it was she wore, in order to take it off.

‘What time do you think you will be back?’ he asked, and then realised that he sounded like her husband. Or her brother.

She shrugged. ‘When the club closes. I will see you tomorrow, Noah, when you come back from work.’

Noah’s mobile rang and he dragged it out of his pocket. ‘Yeah, hi mate. Ner, I didn’t see it. Hang on a sec, will you?’ Roxana was on her way out of the door. He gave her a wave and made an unthinking kiss in the air, as he would have done to Lauren. To his surprise Roxana laughed and copied the gesture and then she was gone.

‘What’s that, mate? I
am
listening. Who? Ner, it’s a girl who’s staying here while And’s in Barcelona. No, I’m not. Nowhere near. I wish, in fact.’

He decided to wait for Saturday. On Saturday, he calculated, they should be able to spend the day together, and in the evening when Roxana went off to work he would go home again to see his parents.

On Saturday, Roxana didn’t stir until two o’clock in the afternoon.

He made a pot of coffee, thinking the smell might tempt her, and when that one went cold he made a fresh one. At last he heard the small creaks of furniture and soft footsteps as she got up and padded round his bedroom. He didn’t like the image of himself as an eavesdropper so he went to strip the covers off Andy’s bed and made as much noise as he could putting the sheets in the washing machine. When he slammed the door and turned round she was standing in the kitchen. Her face was scrubbed and she looked younger, and miserable. Her greeny-blonde hair stood on end, like a child’s.

‘Hi. What’s up?’

‘Nothing.’ She pressed the waxen wings of a carton of juice that he had left on the draining board and poured herself a glass. They stood in awkward silence as she drank it down and he knew that she wanted to be left alone. He supposed that he could go out for a while but then he thought, It’s my flat. So he sat down at the kitchen table instead and busied himself with the
Guardian
. Roxana went and took a shower and when she came back again she had on the pale jeans that she was wearing the first time he saw her and a grey T-shirt with the word
free
printed on the front. Her damp hair was combed flat.

‘You slept for a long time,’ he said.

‘I like to sleep. It is easy. Easier than to be awake.’

‘Is it? I suppose so. Listen, d’you want to come out for a walk? We could go down to the river and have a drink at a pub.’

Her first instinct was to refuse. Then she glanced at the slice of blue sky visible through the mansard window.

‘All right.’

They walked down the road to the Broadway and crossed under the flyover. It was a bright, windy day with the leaves of the trees all tossed up to reveal their pale undersides. Roxana walked quickly, and he could see her brightening up with the fresh air and the sight of people busy with their Saturday afternoon pleasures. At Hammersmith Bridge they descended the steps to the riverside and headed west among the couples with buggies and the joggers and children on trikes.

Roxana turned to him and smiled. Her eyes were dancing.

‘I like your Thames,’ she said. He noted with a touch of regret that she pronounced it correctly now. ‘I like all of London. In the daytime.’

Her English was improving and he wondered if he was only imagining that her heavy accent was fading slightly. Roxana was clever, there was no doubt.

‘Only in the daytime?’

‘Phhh. At night you see less of this…’ she waved at the benign scene ‘…and more of this.’ She grabbed her own throat, lasciviously crossed her eyes and drooped her tongue from one corner of her mouth in such a comic evocation of sicko psycho drooling that Noah burst out laughing. Roxana laughed with him.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Night bus, half the people. Believe me.’

‘Harmless munters.’

‘What is that?’

‘This.’ He grabbed his own throat and copied her face and Roxana gave a little scream and skipped out of his reach.

‘What’s it like where you come from?’ he asked.

‘I come from a very old city called Bokhara.’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘Very good. It has a small centre, the old city, where there are magnificent bazaars and
madrassahs
. You will have seen pictures, perhaps. And it has also a very big outside, very dusty, with railway lines and cement works and ugly blocks of apartments for the Soviet workers.’

‘What part do you live in?’

‘I live in London,’ Roxana said coldly.

‘Okay. Right. By the way, you know Andy, my flatmate, is coming back from holiday this evening?’

‘Yes. I remember this. I will have to move out. I will find a room, better than the last place. I was thinking this when I got up, and I was going to do it today, but now I am here walking with you.’

‘Much better. It’s fine, anyway. I’ll be at my folks’ tonight and I’ll just leave a note for And, tell him who you are and not to leap up in the night assuming you’re a burglar. After tonight I’ll be on the sofa until you get sorted.’

She stopped walking and laid her hand on his arm.

‘Thank you. I like staying with you, Noah. You have a good heart.’

They had walked a distance from the bridge and there were no people in the immediate vicinity. Roxana’s face was close to his, close enough for him to be able to smell the scent of her skin and hair, and the promise of her mouth was suddenly too much for him. He came in closer and kissed her. He didn’t intend anything heavy. It was supposed to be an appreciative sort of kiss, casually suggesting that there might be more to come if that happened to be acceptable.

Roxana’s reaction was startling. She whipped away from him as if he had seriously assaulted her and her arms came protectively across her chest. She glared at him.

‘Whoa. It’s all right,’ he murmured.

‘It is not,’ she snapped.

‘Roxana, don’t overreact. It was just a peck.’

‘Perhaps you believe that because I am just a lap dancer, I am for anyone? Perhaps now you will offer me some money? Or perhaps you think you let me stay in your flat and I am free?’

He gazed at her in dismay. ‘I don’t think any of those things. I think you’re pretty, and I like you. I’ve got no reason to believe you dislike me, in fact you just told me I’ve got a good heart. We’ve known each other a couple of weeks, I gave you a very quick kiss. It’s what men and women do. At least, they do in London.’

That touched a chord, as he had known it would. Roxana hoisted her shoulders towards her ears and with a long breath let them fall again.

‘I see.’

‘Here. Let’s sit down for a bit.’ There was a pub with wooden trestle tables and benches set out parallel to the river.
They sat down facing each other at one end of a table, both of them reminded of their first encounter further downriver, with the robot man and the borrowed bicycle.

‘I am thinking you are the same,’ Roxana muttered.

‘The same as what?’

Her fingers drew a circle in the air.

‘My stepfather. My teacher. Dylan at my other house. Mr Shane at my work.’

Noah was aware that there was a big tangle here that he and Roxana might have to unravel together if they were to go any further. He picked at the nearest thread.

‘Mr Shane?’

‘He is the man who owns The Cosmos. He likes one of the Brazilian girls, Natalie she calls herself. But last night he came when I was in my break and tried to make some games with me.’