The Confession

by Jessie Burton

  ‘Well, you know,’ said Connie. ‘The childhood illness. Then the accident – the operations. How much she wanted children. The miscarriages. That marriage.’

  Elise shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Only forty-seven when she died,’ said Connie. ‘What a waste to die so young!’

  ‘Not always,’ Elise said. ‘And forty-seven isn’t young.’

  Looking disconcerted, Connie carried on. ‘It’s hard to put my finger on why I feel so sorry for her.’

  ‘I don’t feel sorry for Frida Kahlo,’ said Elise. ‘I don’t think Frida Kahlo wants your pity. She was angry, looking at some of those paintings. She was quite determined to show you what she wanted to show you.’

  Connie laughed. Elise hated it when she did this, like a glass of water dousing a burning candle. She couldn’t help it if she felt strongly about these things. Art wasn’t truth, it was a lie told to tell the truth. That’s what the drawing master said at the RCA where she modelled. And truth held different qualities to a fact. It was a question of angle, where you were standing and what view you needed to see. Art was being always on the hunt for something to which you could cling.

  ‘Frida Kahlo,’ Elise went on, fishing for her Tube ticket in her purse, thinking of herself as the drawing master – ‘she worked on everyone she knew, by the looks of it. She did it to herself. But she used everyone else, too. She put everyone in the soup.’

  *

  The Tube pulled alongside the platform at Whitechapel and they got on, sitting side by side on the District Line to Monument. Connie looked tired. She rested the side of her head against the carriage window. Elise rolled and unrolled the exhibition programme as the carriage swayed them, the lights of the tunnels flashing past. Since meeting Connie, she had felt her heart maturing at speed like a peach in a heated laboratory. It had swelled out, gathered heft, pushing away from the stone that had lived inside her always. Even as Elise got to the door of Connie’s Citroën on the day she moved in, she felt older than she had five minutes previously, and did not realize this could only be a symptom of being so young.

  Connie had said: I want you to flourish. Why did Connie want this for her? Elise wondered, as they hurtled their way back into the city on the Tube. What did Connie ever want from her? I just want to love you, she would say. It is the greatest privilege to love you. Now, why don’t you write that play?

  Elise no longer ached daily for Connie, as she crossed the city to her various jobs. Her face was still as a pond, her cunt a warm coal. But the love she felt was still growing, pressing her down; it was pushing roots into the ground. She knew she hadn’t done much since being with Connie. She was twenty-two years old now and everything was still inside her. Dippy moorhen, that’s what Connie had made her. Ripples in the water; small-headed bird, desire reducing her to black and white. She felt so powerless, and so happy.

  6

  Elise stood on the threshold of Connie’s study, silently watching. She never went in. Connie was so deep in concentration that she did not notice, her head bent slightly over the desk, her arm moving across the notepaper. Ripley lifted his head from the carpet and laid it back down. He rolled over and stared. Connie was a witch with her familiar, writing up her spells, Elise thought. When she was near Connie, she felt just like Ripley, luxuriating in the warmth and safety of Connie’s presence. She wanted to be the one curled up on the carpet at Connie’s feet. Connie had been working longer and longer days, looking occasionally pained at the end of them, distracted at breakfast, lunch and dinner, but also emanating a kind of elation which Elise found exciting to be near.

  ‘Con?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Biscuit?’

  ‘No.’

  Elise continued to hover. Connie’s cleaner, Mary O’Reilly, was downstairs. Elise didn’t like it when Mary was there. The first time she’d met Mary, early on in their relationship, Connie was working upstairs and Elise was reading the paper in the kitchen. Elise had heard the door unlock, and tensed as whoever it was came in – own key! Then footsteps, a woman’s back, woolly hat, placing her rucksack easily on a kitchen chair, walking to the cleaning products under the sink. Only then did Mary turn and see Elise sitting at the table. Mary, in her fifties, slender, a bored and solemn mandarin who understood her cabinet minister’s secrets. ‘Hello,’ Mary had said, clutching her hat by the tips of her fingers. ‘So. You’re the one who’s stopping by.’

  ‘I am,’ said Elise. ‘I’m stopping by.’

  *

  ‘What are you writing?’ Elise said. Connie’s back stiffened. She stopped writing, but didn’t turn round.

  ‘Something.’

  ‘Something?’ said Elise.

  Connie placed her pen down, but still did not turn round. ‘El.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Connie was writing; that was all anybody would ever know. Elise knew she should not ask these questions, that they were juvenile and invasive, but she felt annoyed that day. Los Angeles was less than two weeks away – she’d handed in her notice at the cafe, she’d done her last shift at the National. She told the art school she was going to America for a while, so she wouldn’t be able to pose for life class. She made it sound like she had plans over there, and then she’d sat for the last time in the draughty workshop, listening to the pencil scratches. Elise was closing down everything she’d made here and thought she might like to keep, except for Connie – because they were going to Los Angeles, because there was no way they were going to be apart. And now Connie would not turn round.

  ‘I’ve told you everything I do,’ Elise said, leaning against the door frame, trying to be casual. ‘Everything you ask me, I tell you.’

  Connie swung round on her office chair. She looked exasperated. ‘I’m writing about a green rabbit,’ she said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A green rabbit.’

  ‘OK.’

  Connie’s jaw tightened. ‘Please. Don’t do that.’

  ‘Don’t do what?’

  Connie rubbed her forehead. ‘I’m sorry. I just – let me show you it when it’s finished.’

  ‘OK.’ But Elise still hesitated. ‘What d’you think it’ll be like?’

  ‘The book?’

  So she was writing a book. ‘No. Los Angeles.’

  ‘Oh. A Hockney swimming pool,’ said Connie. ‘Sunshine. Make-believe.’

  ‘And will Sorcha really look after Ripley?’

  Sorcha was a friend of Connie’s from her days as a student at Manchester. Now she was a professor in modern history. But like many of Connie’s friends, Elise had never met her.

  ‘Of course she will.’ Connie scrutinized her. ‘Is something wrong, El? You want to keep on at Seedling? You don’t want to go? What is it?’

  ‘No. Nothing. Don’t worry.’

  Elise went up to their bedroom and lay back and thought about LA. She knew little about it. It seemed a place of dreams, a place where the inheritances of fame were grotesque. Film stars through the century, killing themselves with drugs and alcohol, falling prey to the humiliation of obsolescence or the hubris of too much exposure. It seemed a place where the race was for dollars, where an actress was valued not for her talent but for her receipts. A bad film topples you, Connie had said. I hope to god we don’t make a bad film.

  *

  Despite Mary banging cupboards downstairs, Elise loved Connie’s house for its peace, a peace which she had never known before and was proud she’d managed to find for herself. Connie had lured her in, and Elise longed not to escape, but to stay. This was the first place that had felt like it could be home. She had been free to project her daydreams onto Connie’s overloaded bookshelves and mismatched furniture, like a stage-set in an amateur theatre after the actors had left.

  That night as they were lying in bed, Elise told Connie she was like an almond. It felt as if they’d had an argument earlier, an
d something needed to be righted. Some silliness needed to be introduced. ‘If you were a nut, that’s the nut you’d be,’ Elise said.

  Connie was on her side with her back to Elise, and Elise put her hand on her lover’s neat-shaped skull, inhaling Connie’s hair, as sweet as marzipan. ‘I could grind you up and put you in a cake,’ Elise said. Connie laughed, and Elise watched the flexing of her pointed shoulder blades, feeling desire rise up inside her.

  ‘I don’t feel like an almond,’ said Connie. ‘Aren’t I more of a cashew?’ She rolled to face Elise and tucked her into the arch of her armpit. ‘What nut are you?’

  Elise loved the fact that Connie did not reject these bedtime meanders, as they carried each other in the ebb and flow of words and ideas, as they talked a world into being together, a riverbed of time that was theirs alone. ‘I’m a Brazil,’ she said.

  ‘You creamy Brazil.’ Connie made a hungry rumble noise. ‘My favourite.’

  This is what Connie did. She turned them from being nuts into a reflection of their love, a magician of metaphysics who left Elise enraptured. She placed her hand on Connie’s cheek, moving it down to that collarbone, those pale shoulders flecked with freckles. Connie drew your eye; but once your eye was drawn, you didn’t know what to do next. You didn’t necessarily want to go much nearer, for fear of not being permitted. Connie never seemed aware of how strong she was. She didn’t register how dismissive her voice could be. But now, she was silent, waiting. She would not move until Elise did something more.

  Elise kissed her on the mouth, gently, hearing Connie’s exquisite sigh of pleasure as she did, feeling Connie’s hands reach for her and draw her to her own body, the most natural thing in the world.

  *

  Elise woke early. Connie was a beautiful sleeper, so still and quiet, like a woodland creature come in from the trees to shelter next to Elise’s human heart, unaware that any minute Elise might skin and eat her alive. Connie was a miracle, but Los Angeles was coming, and Elise feared it. She buried this fear, a corrosive thing that had led to many problems before. It was rust in her soul and it was always there.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered, and the words hovered on the air, waiting to be taken up.

  Connie woke, her face a page of surprise. Her limbs underneath the bedsheets sounded like the rustle of leaves. ‘El,’ she said, smiling, burying her face in Elise’s neck. ‘El. I love you too.’

  2017

  7

  I started Wax Heart on the ferry back to Portsmouth, barely exchanging a word with Joe. I hadn’t told him what Dad had told me. I was angry with him for discussing our imaginary babies with Dad. I suppose I felt that stuff – the inner workings of our relationship, of my body – shouldn’t be discussed over a casual coffee in a French bistro. Joe seemed to read my mood and knew to leave me be, mooching around the deck, before plonking himself down on a seat and scrolling the Instagram accounts of food bloggers and chefs.

  Wax Heart had been published in 1979, followed by Green Rabbit in 1983. Wax Heart was slim and elegiac, with hints of a seventies setting yet strangely timeless. It was about a woman called Beatrice Jones, whose husband conducts a long series of affairs, after the discovery of which she ends up alone yet victorious. Green Rabbit was an angry, more rooted and sensual book – but still a variation on the first. It told the tale of a woman in love, although in the case of Green Rabbit, one who does not wish to be alone. I tried to imagine my father reading these books, and found the vision of it disorientating. But if I was going to hunt for secrets about Elise and Constance, then I had to accept that he had his secrets, too. Finally, he’d given me what I’d always wanted – a window on his life with my mother, albeit one that was still half-closed, a room with a compromised view – and I didn’t know if I liked it.

  Nevertheless, I persisted. Now that Dad had – reluctantly, painfully – given me Constance Holden, I was hardly going to hand her back. I particularly loved Green Rabbit, the lives lived and lost inside it, and those allowed to bloom beyond the final paragraph without definitive answers. Back in London I stood on the bus to the coffee shop, swaying side to side reading it. I sat on the loo with it. I waited for the kettle to boil with it, turning for two days into a one-handed woman, whose head and heart had integrated with the heads and hearts of Connie’s characters. Of course I sought my mother in these pages, but how was I to know her if I saw her? She was invisible, but crowding me at the back of my mind nevertheless, like a clutch of funfair balloons, buffeting me out of space and time, their strings about to lift me off my feet.

  Constance Holden didn’t seem to exist in that group of writers whose names you know, even if you haven’t read their books. She wasn’t a Spark or an Angelou or a Lessing or an Atwood. She’d faded – like so many women’s writing lives, eclipsed by other names. And yet Connie’s style was inimitable – though people, I realize, have subsequently tried. Green Rabbit is a book about the solitariness of life, the devastation of love gone wrong. It’s a book about the ever-enduring need to be with others, and the ever-present desire to push them all away. But how much, standing on that bus, did I want it to come out well for Rabbit, a green woman, a woman of hope and jealousy and new beginnings.

  How much did I want for a book to come into my heart and change my life? As I read Connie’s words, it was a terrifying delight to me that according to my father, this woman had known my mother so intimately, and might know exactly what had happened to her. It was painful to me to be aware of this connection, yet not to know what to do with it, except read her fiction. I didn’t want the fiction: I wanted somebody to tell me the truth.

  *

  I asked Zoë, Clean Bean’s resident English undergraduate and bookworm, whether she’d heard of Constance Holden. Zoë’s eyes widened as she pulled down the steam nozzle into a customer’s cappuccino. ‘Oh, man,’ she said. ‘Green Rabbit’s one of my favourite books.’

  ‘I’ve just read it,’ I said.

  ‘I’m just sad she only wrote two,’ said Zoë.

  ‘Do you know why she didn’t write more?’

  Zoë, who was twenty, with her septum pierced and her fine blonde hair dyed blue, took everything very seriously, from novelists to Netflix, and I adored her for it. ‘There are some theories,’ she said. ‘She wrote this really famous essay a year after Green Rabbit came out, and it’s literally included in every feminist theory class I’ve ever taken.’

  ‘Did she say in it that she wasn’t going to write again?’

  ‘Not exactly. But it was the last thing she ever published. It’s called The Locust Plague. I can bring you in my copy if you like?’

  ‘That would be really cool. Thanks, Zoë.’

  ‘No worries.’

  ‘Do you know if she’s still alive?’

  Zoë frowned. ‘I’m pretty sure there’d have been an obituary in the papers for her. I don’t think she’s dead. She was a big deal. She still is, in a culty, weird recluse way.’

  ‘Weird recluse way?’

  ‘Well, why would she stop writing like that at the height of her success? She needed to write more. We needed her! But she stopped. It’s such a shame.’

  Zoë shuddered; she felt things deeply. I felt ashamed, because I, being fourteen years older, had forgotten how.

  *

  Back at our flat, sitting at the kitchen table, I looked Constance up on the Internet. Zoë was right: whether it was the case that Constance Holden wanted to be forgotten, or whether other people chose to forget her – or whether it was nothing so deliberate at all – she wrote those two books, then The Locust Plague, then nothing more. The only photos I could find were grainy headshots from the eighties: black and white, pumped-up messy hair, baggy blouse, prim but lipsticked mouth. She looked young, and I began to think of her like that – though by now she’d be into her seventies. The biography on the back of Dad’s books was wildly out of date, but there was no new information online to supplant it. Where was she now?

  ‘Who’s that?
’ said Joe, looking over my shoulder at the laptop screen.

  ‘Constance Holden,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A writer. I’ve just read her books.’

  ‘She’s a fox,’ he said.

  ‘These are old photos,’ I said. ‘But she might be an old fox.’ I swivelled round to face him. ‘Joey,’ I said. ‘Dad told me something when we were in France. This woman knew my mother.’

  Immediately, Joe looked wary. Any mention of my mother made him look like that; he couldn’t help it. He’d witnessed too many tears, had waded through too many of my black fogs. ‘Right,’ he said.

  ‘And I’m going to find her.’

  ‘Rosie—’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

  ‘Of course I’m not. But I have to try. It’s the first time—’

  ‘No, I understand. OK.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, just don’t get your hopes up, OK?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  We both knew that wasn’t true.

  ‘We’ve got to leave for my parents’ now,’ he said. ‘Are you ready?’

  I sighed and closed the laptop, unwilling to be drawn back to reality. ‘How did last night go?’ I asked. Joe had taken an investor ‘angel’ for drinks to see if he’d be interested in funding our new business idea for the burrito van.

  ‘Good!’ he said brightly.

  ‘And?’

  ‘These things take time,’ I heard as he walked away.

  Inside I was screaming. My mouth, whilst seemingly closed, was fully ajar, a preternatural hurricane bawling out of it. For two years, I’d done the heavy lifting in our team of two. I closed my eyes, crushed by his lack of enthusiasm over the discovery of Constance Holden and her potential connection to my mother. These things took time and they never gave it back.