Constance (27 page)

‘This would be yours. My bedroom’s at the other end of the flat, and so is my bathroom. The room’s almost self-contained, so I thought it might be good for you.’

Awed, Roxana understood that this amazing apartment must have
two
bathrooms.

She remembered briefly the alcove screened with a plastic curtain where she had washed when she was growing up, soaping her developing breasts and afterwards pulling on her clothes as quickly as she could, not always in time, before Leonid came and caught her. At Dylan’s house the bathroom was a reeking cave that she had avoided as far as possible, and even at Noah’s the basin was speckled with shaved bristles and the towels tended to accumulate in damp drifts against the bath’s side. Here, Roxana allowed herself to imagine that she might have hours to soak and dream, safely alone, with all these mirrors gently fogged with steam. There would certainly be hot water here, endless hot water, she was sure of that.

‘It’s very nice,’ she whispered.

Noah hovered in the doorway. He didn’t look as pleased as Roxana expected. They filed back the way they had come.

‘What do you think?’ Connie asked. She moved into the distance, began opening concealed cupboards to reveal treasures of stacked white china, shining glassware, rows of bottles and jars.

Roxana’s excitement was draining away. Even Noah seemed smaller, somehow scruffier in this setting.

How could she possibly, even momentarily, have expected to be able to live here?

‘I don’t think,’ she sighed. Connie’s head turned, her fingers pinching the edge of a cupboard door. Their eyes met. ‘You see, I don’t think I will have money,
enough
money for rent.’
She remembered the Asian boy with the big shirt and the rental prices he had reeled off.

Connie resumed her search in the cupboard.

‘I don’t really need rent. Not right now, anyway. If you wanted, you could just stay here while you’re getting used to London. Until you’re ready to decide exactly where you’d like to be.’ She spoke tentatively, almost as if Roxana were the one offering to do her the favour. Roxana glanced at Noah, lifted her shoulders interrogatively while Connie’s back was turned. Noah shrugged with a touch of sulkiness, miming
Why not?

‘You are very kind,’ Roxana began.

Connie turned back to face them again. ‘I’d be glad of some company now and again,’ she smiled, as if all this was unremarkable to her. Perhaps it was, Roxana reflected. ‘What do you think?’

Roxana smiled back. ‘So I would like to. Thank you.’

Noah said he could drive her over with her suitcase, if she wanted, but not before the next weekend because their work hours didn’t allow any time off in common.

‘I think for Andy, maybe it will be better if I come by myself before that. I don’t need to bring everything.’

Noah frowned again. Connie went away and came back with a pair of keys on a metal ring. These she dropped casually into Roxana’s pocket, adding, ‘We’re fixed, then. Come when you’re ready. What about a drink now, to celebrate? Or would you like something to eat? I’m just having a look to see what there is.’

The kitchen area somehow didn’t have the appearance of being much used.

Noah said quickly, ‘Thanks, Auntie Con, but we’ll be on our way. Work in the morning and all that.’ He kissed his aunt lightly on the cheek. ‘It’s been really good to see you again. And thank you for coming to see Mum. It’ll make a difference to her.’

‘I’m here. I want to be.’

Connie and Roxana said a quick goodbye, hardly looking at each other. They were already flatmates; it was almost as if they were conspirators, Noah thought. He was silent in the car as he and Roxana headed west.

They were on the elevated section of the route through London when Roxana asked him, ‘Are you angry with something, Noah?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Maybe it was rude, saying we would not like to stay to have something to drink and eat?’

‘That’s your culture. Not necessarily ours. You’re going to be living there, anyway. You’ll have plenty of time with Connie.’ Noah had seen Roxana’s hypnotised expression as she followed Connie round her apartment, and his normal equanimity was shadowed with jealousy. He didn’t want to have to share Roxana with anyone, let alone his aunt. There was too much history here, peering over their shoulders.

He sighed. ‘Sorry. I’m sounding a bit pissed off, aren’t I? I’m really glad you’ve got somewhere decent to stay, you deserve it, and I know you can’t go on staying with me and Andy. It’s just that for years Auntie Con hasn’t been popular in my family and I’m getting my head round thinking differently about her. And I’m also wondering when you and I are ever going to see each other. I mean, you work every night.’

Roxana’s hand slid across the handbrake and rounded itself on his thigh. Her little finger stroked a tiny circle, making him shift on his haunches and wish that they could get home a bit faster.

‘I am here now,’ she reminded him.

‘Mm. So you are. Rox, do you have to work
every
night?’

She turned her face to him. Streetlights and oncoming cars swept light across it and he glimpsed her set expression.

‘Yes. I need money. I need it to make myself into somebody,’ she said.

He couldn’t disagree with her absolute determination. It seemed familiar to him, surprisingly and closely connected to his own being even though he judged himself as slightly lazy, and he loved her for it.

‘But you are already somebody.’

Roxana didn’t answer.

Andy was already at home, occupying his usual end of the sofa, with the television turned up loud. There was an empty pizza box at his feet.

‘Hey, you guys. Had a good day?’ Remembering Jeanette he added quickly, ‘How’s your mum, mate?’

‘She’s about the same, thanks. She was pretty cheerful today, her sister was there. Actually, Roxana’s got a room over at her place. We’ve just been there to take a look at it.’

‘A room at your mum’s?’

‘No. My Auntie Con’s.’

‘It is beautiful,’ Roxana put in.

‘Ah. Oh. Well, cool. That’s really great.’ His gaze slid back to the television. Noah put his hands on Roxana’s hips and steered her briskly across to his bedroom. Once they were inside with the door closed he hooked his knee behind hers and tipped her expertly onto the bed, as he had been wanting to do ever since they had left his parents’ house. They rolled together, giggling and wrestling until Noah found a way to pin her down and kiss her. He caught the hem of her tiny skirt and edged it higher.

‘God, you’re beautiful.’

‘And you, Mr Noah Bunting, are a very kind man.’

‘Right. Is
kind
as far as it goes?’

She pretended to think. ‘You are, um, pushing for a compliment, I think?’

‘
Fishing
. It’s fishing for compliments. Quite an old-fashioned expression. Your English isn’t perfect yet, my Uzbek girl. Although it’s pretty damn good, come to mention it. You never told me how you learned.’

‘I had a teacher called Yakov. He knows a lot of languages. And I worked hard at it.’ He waited for her to expand, but she did not.

In the end he said, ‘Yes, I bet you did. I love you, Rox.’

Her expression lightened, and they were connected again. She touched her mouth to his. ‘Good. I am pleased to hear.’

She never said
I love you
back to him. But there was time, Noah thought. She would in the end.

It was a few days before Roxana stopped feeling like an intruder at Limbeck House, which was the name of the building crowned by Connie’s apartment. She half-expected, as she tapped the security code into the panel at the street door and then rode up in the hushed lift, that some security official would seize her by the shoulder and march her outside again.

But, gradually, she became accustomed to the place. She hung up her few clothes in the cupboard, and stuck her beach postcard right next to the side of the bed. She liked to see the picture when she opened her eyes, although it no longer represented her only idea of Paradise. Where she now found herself came quite close to that.

By the time Roxana got up Connie had usually gone out, and when she came back from The Cosmos her flatmate was always asleep. Roxana didn’t mind at all being alone in the apartment. She unfurled, slowly, like a new leaf.

At first she stayed in her room, watching the clouds and the planes passing her window. She took long, hot baths and stared at herself in the misted mirrors, not quite recognising the scrubbed, leisurely person who looked back at her.

Then she acquainted herself with the other rooms. The daylight in the big living area changed with the hour, and according to the weather. One afternoon there was a storm, and she watched the rain sweeping towards her like fine scratches over the city towers.

She looked in the cupboards in the kitchen and in the huge fridge. There wasn’t much food, and anyway she didn’t think she should help herself to what there was. She left the flat in the middle of the day and went back to the Best Little Internet Café. The owner greeted her warmly, and served her a plate of souvlaki and salad. The fatty meat and chopped salad and the flat bread served with them reminded her of the food at home in Bokhara.

After she had eaten, she checked the email account that the Asian student boy had helped her to set up. There was the latest email from Fatima, responding to Roxana’s news that she now had an English boyfriend as well as a job.

Fatima said she was glad that Roxana was having such a good time.
You struck lucky, all right!

Fatima was working in the travel industry in Tashkent, mostly with the Turkish
biznez
men who came to invest in the new post-Soviet developments. It was okay, she wrote.
You know
.

Roxana rattled off a euphoric description of her new home. When they were little girls, she and Fatima had played with pebbles and pieces of stick in the shade of crumbling walls. It gave Roxana great satisfaction to think what different circumstances they found themselves in now.

The café owner called a friendly goodbye to her as she left, and that made her happy too. She was a regular customer, recognised and valued.

She called in at the grocer’s store on the corner of the street and bought milk, tomatoes, bread and cheese to take home to Limbeck House. She put the food in the fridge,
seeing how lost it looked in the cavernous interior, and wondered what Connie liked to eat and whether she should cook something for her. She didn’t, in the end, but that was because she didn’t really know how to cook anything that would be good enough.

In the early evenings she went out to The Cosmos, and after the cool neutral air of Limbeck House it was like breathing in a toxic compound of smoke, sweat, alcohol and men’s lust. But she was rested now, feeling almost dizzy with the lifting of anxiety, and she was able to work much better. More punters wanted private dances and they paid more money for them, perhaps because her smile was convincing. She earned good money and she didn’t even have to worry about keeping the thickening wad of notes safe. It lay in an envelope, on a shelf within one of the cupboards in her sanctuary.

She came home at three thirty in the morning, her clothes and hair stinking of The Cosmos, and found a note from Connie on the kitchen counter.

I helped myself to milk and bread, etc. Hope you don’t mind. C.

It was beautiful that Connie should be so polite when this place and everything in it was hers.

The solitary hours of the next day flowed past. Roxana ventured beyond the living area to Connie’s end of the flat. She peered into the room where Connie spent most of her time when she was at home. From the doorway, she saw a bank of unfamiliar machinery with dozens of sliding keys, a musical keyboard, computer screens. A pair of headphones was hooked over the back of a swivel chair. There was a separate desk covered with papers, a big diary and a telephone. The inside of the room felt flat, dead of vibration, as if it had been soundproofed. Roxana silently retreated.

The only other door led to Connie’s bedroom.

It was tidy. The white bedcover was smooth and flat and there were no scattered clothes. Roxana knew that this was an intrusion but she couldn’t help herself. She tiptoed across to take a look into the bathroom. There were tiers of white towels, glass shelves with neat rows of cosmetics, a faint drift of Connie’s spicy perfume.

Roxana glided across and opened the nearest cupboard door. Inside, Connie’s clothes were ranged on hangers, like so many ghosts of her. Roxana rippled the tips of her fingers over the fabrics. Suddenly she stepped closer, lifted the sleeve of a dress made of some diaphanous greeny-grey stuff, and buried her face in the fabric as if she could breathe in the essence of the other woman. As if she could make herself into Connie. The perfume was much stronger here.

Nothing happened. She was still a taller, thinner, younger woman, whom none of these clothes would fit.

Embarrassed by herself, even though there was no one to see her, she dropped the sleeve and closed the cupboard door, turned quickly and retreated to her own room. The silence in the flat seemed to roar in her ears. Soon it would be time to go out to The Cosmos again to dance for men.

Connie saw her manager and discussed the current state of the music business, had two lunches in Soho with two producers she had worked with in the past, and called in to see Angela at her production company. They watched the first edits of the bank commercials, and Angela said how pleased she was with them. Connie thought her music was good enough, but no better than that. Ketut and the other musicians looked wonderful for the brief second that the camera lingered on them. She gazed intently at the little wedding temple, the clearing in the jungle greenery and the tropical beach, and the sight of them brought back the thick,
humid warmth of Bali. She particularly missed her veranda and the rolling green wave.

She was also quite aware that wherever she happened to be, it was becoming increasingly unlikely that she would ever feel perfectly at home.