Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  At the screen again Connie clicked through the spam and a couple of emails from London to do with work. There was a message from the leader of the string quartet, thanking her for booking them for the commercial. Connie closed that and her eyes flicked to the sender of the next message. Bunting. Her brain had hardly taken it in before her heart was hammering. She looked away from the screen and then back again, but it wasn’t an illusion. Bunting.

  It was only then that she saw the sender wasn’t BBunting, but JBunting. Jeanette.

  The last time she had seen her sister was four years ago, after Hilda’s funeral.

  They hadn’t spoken since then, nor had they written.

  That was the last time she had seen Bill, too.

  She shouldn’t allow herself to remember their joint history, even to think about him. But what harm did it do to anyone, except perhaps herself?

  A message from her sister now could only mean that something was wrong.

  With Noah? With Bill?

  Her mouth was dry and her hands shook as she opened the message. It took two readings before the news began to sink in.

  There was indeed something very badly wrong.

  Connie read and reread the brief lines.

  Dear Connie,

  I hope this address still finds you because I want you to hear this news from me, not from anyone else.

  I have cancer. I won’t go into detail, but after several months of treatment and having our hopes raised and then lowered again, we were told this week that there isn’t any more to be done. Six months is the estimate.

  I am beginning to work out for myself what this means. What does it mean?

  It’s very hard for Noah. And for Bill. Both of them are full of love and concern for me, and I feel blessed in that.

  There it is. I don’t want anything, except to know that you know.

  Love (I mean this…)

  Jeanette

  Connie lowered her face into her hands. Her forearms pressed against the keyboard and, unseen, the screen split into layers of files. The immediate shock made her shiver. Jeanette had always been there: in her silence, in her brave focus on doing and being what she wanted, her influence most powerful – partly because of its very absence – in all Connie’s past life.

  Behind her eyes, images of her sister receded into their remote childhood.

  The chair she was sitting in became one of the pine set at the kitchen table in Echo Street. The desk became the knotty old table that had come with them from the flat before, the top half of a house in Barlaston Road, where old Mrs McBride lived downstairs.

  Jeanette had planted the idea in Connie that their neighbour was a witch.

  – At night, she rides in the sky. If you look, you can see the broomstick in her back kitchen.

  Now Jeanette was sitting opposite her, eleven years old, full of hope and strength in spite of her deafness.

  Connie lifted her head. She reached for her glass, and drank the wine.

  The computer screen was blinking, asking her if she wanted to close down now.

  It took an effort to reopen the email programme. Connie’s fingers felt uncertain on the keys, like a child’s.

  She started a new message and typed a single line.

  I’ll be there as soon as I can get a flight. Connie.

  The train from the airport ran past the backs of Victorian terraced houses, irregular and broken like crooked teeth in an overcrowded jaw. There were brief glimpses of clothes lines, cluttered yards, interiors veiled in dingy grey, all pressed beneath a swollen grey sky. Connie watched the terraces sliding past, absorbing the steady flicker of snapshot images from other people’s lives. This couldn’t be anywhere but England.

  In an hour, she would be back in her London flat.

  She was glad of this interval between the long flight and whatever would happen next.

  The backs of the houses were identical, all of them clinging to the curves of railway lines and arterial roads and abraded by the dirt and noise that rose off them. Their bricks were dark with soot and the wan trees in patches of garden were weighted with layers of grime.

  Echo Street was a terrace just like one of these, with a railway line carrying local trains into Liverpool Street, running through a shallow cutting beyond a high fence at the end of the garden.

  Connie closed her eyes.

  There was lino down the narrow hallway, dark red with paler bluish-pink swirls in it that looked like skimmed milk stirred into stewed plums. The stairs rose steep as a cliff, each tread usually with a sheet of the Daily Express folded on it because Hilda had just mopped them yet again. Hilda had a fixation with cleanliness. The smell of bleach always sent Connie hurtling back into her childhood.

  In the old flat, Connie and Jeanette had shared a tiny bedroom, the two divan beds separated by a channel only just wide enough for one of them at a time to put their feet to the floor. There was a shelf above each bed. Jeanette’s displayed a neat line of books, whereas Connie’s was silted up with scribbled drawings and broken toys and crushed wax crayons.

  But in Echo Street they were to have their own rooms. Jeanette was delighted with hers. As Tony was downstairs helping the sweating removal men to carry in the piano, she stood in front of her door and held on to the knob to show that her sister wouldn’t be admitted. She signed to Connie, folded hands to the side of her head and then clenched her fist to her chest: my bedroom, mine.

  When Connie looked into the room that was to be hers, she saw a narrow box with a window that faced the brick wall of the next-door back extension. The lino on the floor was the same as in the hallway and the only other feature was a tall cupboard built across one corner. She twisted the handle and saw that the cupboard was empty except for two coat-hangers on a hook. In the dim light the hangers suddenly looked like two pairs of shoulders that had mislaid their heads and bodies, but which might easily clothe themselves on a dark night and come gliding out of the cupboard in search of little girls.

  She ran for the safety of the landing. Jeanette’s door stood open by a crack, allowing a glimpse of a bigger room where the sun cast a reassuring grid of light and shadow on the bare floorboards. Jeanette was sitting with her back against the wall, her knees drawn up and her books and magazines laid out beside her. Her fair hair was drawn in one thick plait over her shoulder and she was thoughtfully chewing the bunched ends.

  It was Connie who started the fight. Overtaken by one of the surges of rage that were her last resort in the unending series of skirmishes against Jeanette, she launched herself through the doorway and fell on her sister. The square box of the bulky hearing-aid battery that Jeanette wore strapped to her chest juddered between them. Magazines slithered and tore under their flying feet.

  ‘It’s not fair. I want the big room. It’s not fair.’

  Connie yelled and pummelled her fists, then tried to haul Jeanette up and out of the room. An earpiece dropped from one ear and the wire tangled between them.

  Jeanette shouted back, but no words were distinguishable.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Connie screamed.

  At the Joseph Barnes School for the Deaf the speech therapist had made little progress with helping Jeanette to talk. When she was upset or angry she gave up the attempt to verbalise and lapsed into shapeless bellowing.

  In any case Connie and Jeanette had their own private hostile vocabulary, a shorthand matter of stabbed fingers and sliced-throat gestures that led to full-blown kicks and blows.

  ‘You sound like a cow mooing,’ Connie screamed. ‘I want this bedroom.’

  Jeanette fought harder. Her face swelled close to Connie’s as she hooked her fingers in Connie’s tangled hair and propelled her backwards until her head smashed against the wall. Connie doubled up like a snake and closed her teeth on Jeanette’s upper arm.

  The noise brought both parents running, their feet like thunder on the stairs.

  Tony caught hold of Connie and hoisted her in the air, her arms pinioned and her feet
kicking against nothing. He put his mouth against her ear and his moustache tickled her skin.

  ‘All right, Con. That’s enough. Calm down. Leave your sister alone now.’

  Connie still wriggled and squawked that it wasn’t fair, but the rage was ebbing away. Its departure left her feeling breathless, and confused, and finally soaked in despair. She slumped against Tony’s shoulder, letting out little whimpers of grief. He stroked her hair off her hot face and rocked her against him.

  Jeanette’s arm showed a ring of red puncture marks. Hilda pinched the corners of her mouth inwards and went for the first-aid box. She wrung out a hank of cotton wool in a bowl of water clouded with Dettol, and made a performance of disinfecting the tiny wound in front of Connie.

  Jeanette’s eyes gleamed with the lustre of martyrdom.

  ‘Let go of her,’ Hilda said to Tony. He released Connie and Hilda took hold of her by the ear and marched her to the other bedroom.

  ‘You stay in here, my girl,’ she said.

  Connie sat down, back against the wall and knees drawn up, instinctively copying Jeanette. She sat there until teatime, staring at the closed cupboard door, willing the ghosts to stay where they were and not come shimmering out through the keyhole.

  That evening, the first in the new house, Hilda was still only speaking when she had to, even after the tea had been cleared and the plates washed and put away in the unfamiliar cupboards that had already been lined with fresh paper. She shook aspirin out of a brown bottle and swallowed the pills with sips of water, in front of both girls.

  ‘Your mum’s got one of her bad heads,’ Tony told them.

  Jeanette gave Connie a look that said See? See what you’ve done?

  ‘Look at the state of this place,’ Hilda sighed. There were cardboard boxes stacked in the kitchen and along the hallway. Connie could see saucepan handles and the blackened underside of the frying pan sticking out of one of them. Everything ordinary looked strange because it was in a different place.

  Tony said, ‘We’ve just moved in. There’s plenty of time. Why don’t you have a rest, love?’ But Hilda went on unpacking, wincing every time she stooped to a box. Jeanette sailed up to her bedroom to arrange her books.

  Connie hated the thought of the darkness in her room. She had only been able to keep the ghosts in their cupboard in daylight by sheer effort of will. She knew that at night she would never be able to control them.

  ‘I won’t sleep in there.’

  Hilda frowned at her. ‘Yes, you will.’ She massaged her temples and lowered her voice. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Constance.’ It wasn’t the first time Connie had heard her say this, and it always made her wonder whether she had swallowed a wriggling worm by mistake.

  ‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ Connie murmured. She turned to her father. ‘Tell me a story first?’

  ‘You’re a big girl,’ Hilda said, but Tony had already taken her hand.

  ‘Come and sit on Dad’s lap, then.’

  Hilda looked at him over Connie’s head. ‘Don’t you think I need any help with all this?’

  ‘Five minutes, love.’

  The three-piece suite was in the front room, but put down any old how. They sat down in the old armchair that was wedged up into the bay window, facing out into the new street.

  ‘Why does Jeanette have the best things always?’

  ‘She doesn’t, pet.’

  ‘I think she does.’

  Tony hesitated. ‘You know your sister’s deaf.’

  Connie didn’t understand rhetorical questions. She wondered how Tony could imagine that she might not have noticed. Joseph Barnes School had been a long way away from their old flat, and so they had moved here to be nearer to it. One way or another, Jeanette’s deafness seemed to steer most of the things that happened to all of them.

  One of Connie’s earliest and clearest memories was of being in the steamy back kitchen of the old flat, standing on a stool at the sink to splash some dolls’ cups in a bowl of soapy water. She had looked out of the window and down into the branches of a stunted tree that grew over the fence in the next garden. There was a moment’s silence, the only sound the faint popping of bubbles in the sink. Then a bird began singing in the branches of the tree. It was a pure, flute-like sequence of notes that utterly entranced her.

  Even as she listened, the knowledge that one day soon she wouldn’t be able to hear this melody fell on her from nowhere. It had the force of a physical blow.

  She jumped from her stool and ran to where Hilda was standing at the stove. She wrapped her arms round her mother’s knees and hid her face in her apron. Even then, she could feel that Hilda didn’t yield to the touch, or offer a comforting pillow of flesh. Her arms bent under pressure and her back formed an angle, but they soon sprang back to their unbent positions.

  ‘I won’t hear the birds,’ Connie howled through her sobs, folds of apron stuffing her mouth.

  ‘What’s the matter? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I won’t hear the birds. Will I? When I’m deaf?’

  Hilda took hold of Connie’s shoulders.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Jeanette’s deaf, not you.’

  ‘Won’t I be, when I’m big?’

  Hilda shook her head. ‘No. You won’t. You’re just an ordinary little girl.’

  This was how Constance learned that deafness wasn’t something that happened automatically to children in her family.

  From about that time, whenever she looked at her sister a feeling that seemed bigger than herself had pumped through Connie. It was her first experience of pity and sympathy, and it was mixed with relief that she wasn’t going to be like her after all, and with guilt for being relieved.

  She didn’t confess what she felt even to Tony – how could she explain what she didn’t properly understand herself?

  It was just that plenty of people, not only Hilda, already made an extra fuss of Jeanette. Mrs Dix in the newsagent’s gave her a pink lipstick that came off the front of a magazine, and when Hilda took them to buy new shoes the shop man brought out half the pairs in the back room for her to try on. It took so long for her to choose that Connie had to have the same style as the old ones she had grown out of, which meant nobody could see they were brand-new. It wasn’t fair, even though Jeanette was deaf and Connie felt sorry for her.

  Tony shifted Connie’s weight on his lap and hugged her tighter. ‘You know your sister’s deaf,’ he repeated. ‘Yes?’

  Connie picked at one of the tiny brown looped threads in the arm of the chair. She tucked her head under Tony’s chin and gave the smallest nod.

  ‘It’s hard for her. She’s going to have difficulties in her life that you never will. We have to make allowances for her. It’s hard for your mum, too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Jeanette inherited her deafness from Mum’s family.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘These things get passed down, from mothers to their babies. Like Martin’s hair, which is the same as his mum’s hair, isn’t it?’

  Martin was a boy Connie knew from her old school – the one she wouldn’t be going to any more because it was too far from Echo Street. Martin and his mother both had hair the colour of the nasturtiums that grew in the front garden in Barlaston Road.

  ‘How do you get babies?’

  ‘Ask your mum about that. Do you want this story or not?’

  ‘Yes. Tell me about when you were little. About the milkman.’

  Tony wasn’t good at making things up, but he often told her about what East London had been like when he was growing up. Connie loved these stories.

  ‘Oh, the milkman. In our street he had a little blue cart with a canvas canopy, and an old grey horse to pull the cart. The horse’s name was Nerys, and in the summer she’d have a bunch of cornflowers tied to her bridle. The coal used to come in sacks on the back of a wagon, and then the coal man carried the sacks on his back and tipped them into the cellars of the houses through a ho
le in the pavement. He had a leather coat with studs on the back of it, so it didn’t wear out so fast from the heavy sacks rubbing on it all day long. Another man used to come up from Gravesend with fresh fish off the trawlers to sell door to door. He’d say, “Lovely fish, Mrs Thorne. Lovely fresh herring.”’

  Tony was good at doing the voices. Connie pressed her ear closer against his shirt-front because she liked the way his voice seemed to come from deep inside his chest. She could hear the steady rhythm of his heart, too. She didn’t know then how finite was the number of those beats.

  Connie opened her eyes. The train crept past Battersea Power Station and made a sighing arrival at Victoria. Announcements washed over her head. She lifted her small bag, dodging the sharp corners and wheels of other people’s luggage, and let the surge of passengers carry her off the train and into the thick of London. Only a taxi ride separated her from home. A version of home.

  It was three months since she had last been in her apartment.

  From the front door she could see that there was dust on all the glass surfaces and dead flies speckling the white floor. The air smelled as if it had been hot too many times; all the moisture it had ever held had been leached out of it. Connie’s lips and the backs of her hands smarted with dehydration from the long flight. She walked down the white corridor to her bathroom and turned on the shower and all the taps. She breathed in the steam, stripped off her creased clothes and stood under the spray until she felt clean again. Then, without giving herself time to think, she wrapped herself in a towel and padded back to the main room.

  When she and Seb had shared this tall white space, they had given parties for musicians and composers and cooked dinners for the loose network of their shared friends, but nowadays she rarely asked anyone to come here. It was quiet enough, she thought, to hear the dust settle.