by Rosie Thomas
She told the woman caller that Mrs Thorne wasn’t at home. This was her daughter. Yes, Mrs Thorne would be back soon. Yes, she would get her to call this number as soon as she came in. The woman was very insistent that Connie fetched a pen and wrote it down. She made Connie read it back to her, to make sure that she had noted it correctly. Mrs Thorne was to ask for Sister Evans. As soon as she came home, because it was urgent.
Connie replaced the receiver and went back to the piano.
The front door slammed again.
Hilda and Jeanette bundled down the hallway. Hilda’s umbrella rustled into the recess in the hall stand. Connie let her hands fall into her lap, then stood up and followed her mother and sister into the kitchen.
‘There was a telephone call,’ she began.
Hilda was unpicking the knot in the ties of her plastic rain hood.
‘Let me get in the house, Connie.’
‘It’s urgent.’
Hilda’s eyes flicked to her. ‘Well, what is it?’
Connie gave her the number she had written on the cover of the Radio Times. Ignoring Connie, Jeanette filled the kettle and put out two mugs and a jar of Nescafé. Hilda went into the front room to make the call, closing the door behind her.
Jeanette poured boiling water, clinked a spoon, unscrewed the lid of the biscuit jar. She sat down at the table and began to read a magazine. Hilda’s coffee mug stood on the kitchen counter waiting for her to come back.
Connie stared out of the window into the damp passage that separated their house from the next in the terrace. As the minutes passed she slowly became aware of a silence that drew all the oxygen out of the air. Her lungs felt tight with the change in pressure and she could hear the slow surge of blood in her ears. The only movement in Echo Street was Jeanette turning the pages of Woman’s Own.
After what seemed a long time, Connie followed Hilda. At the closed door to the front room she cupped her fist over the doorknob and turned it, listening for the familiar click of the metal tongue. She pushed the door open and looked in.
Hilda was sitting in the armchair next to the telephone table. She was white, dry-eyed, frozen. Her eyes moved, settled on Connie as if she had never seen her before.
‘Mum?’
Hilda’s hands lifted as if to ward her off. Her tongue passed slowly over her lips.
‘Tony’s gone. He’s left us.’
Connie frowned. She knew this wasn’t possible. Tony was at the shop, just like always. ‘Gone where?’
‘Gone,’ Hilda repeated.
The telephone began shrilling again. With a shocking, uncoordinated lunge, Hilda launched herself at it. The white mask of her face suddenly split, broke up into teeth and tongue and twisted lips.
‘Sadie? Sadie, he’s dead.’
She was gripping the receiver with two hands but she was shaking so much that she could hardly hold it in place.
‘Tony’s dead.’
Connie took two steps backwards. She reached behind her with the flat of her hands, pressed herself against the wall and tried to retreat further as fragments and then huge chunks of her world began to rain down around her.
Hilda kept on repeating these two inconceivable words, louder and louder, while her sister on the other end of the line tried to make herself heard.
Suddenly Jeanette was there, in the doorway. Hilda was sobbing and coughing. Connie shrank, knowing instinctively that she couldn’t run to her mother. Jeanette’s head turned from one to the other. She couldn’t hear, even though Hilda’s voice was rising to a shriek.
Jeanette’s fingers came up to her lips.
– Speak, she signed.
Connie stuttered. Her mouth wouldn’t form any words. Isolated in silence and incomprehension, Jeanette turned wild with bewilderment and terror.
– Speak, speak.
She dug fingers like claws into Connie’s arms and shook her until Connie’s head banged against the wall.
‘It’s Dad,’ Connie screamed into her contorted face.
The funeral service was held at the crematorium near Thorne’s on the Parade. Tony’s brother and his wife came from Newport, Sadie’s husband Geoff took the day off from his garage business and drove his wife and daughters in from their detached house in Loughton, Mrs McBride came from Barlaston Road, and some of Tony’s old friends and shop owners and customers from the Parade gathered in the colourless room. Hilda and Jeanette and Connie sat in the front row of chairs and listened to a stranger telling the mourners what a devoted husband and loving father Anthony Thorne had been. Connie gazed at the plain coffin under its purple cloth and tried to believe that her father was lying inside it.
She was cold. She had felt either cold or hot ever since last Saturday when Auntie Sadie and Uncle Geoff had arrived at Echo Street and immediately called the doctor. While he was upstairs with Hilda, their auntie and uncle told Jeanette and Connie that their father had suffered a huge heart attack while he was carrying out the pavement stock. The son of the Pakistani newsagent had called an ambulance and Tony had been taken to the East London Hospital, but he had not survived the journey.
By the end of the stiff little funeral ceremony Connie felt as if she were frozen. Her jaw and neck seemed to be made of some splintery material that was nothing to do with her own flesh and bone, and her eyes were dry as she watched the curtains briefly part and Tony’s coffin slide out of sight.
Jeanette was crying. Silent tears ran down her pale cheeks and Hilda’s arm protectively circled her shoulders, although it might equally have been that Hilda was using Jeanette to support herself.
After the cremation, and the inspection of the flowers laid out in the chilly wind with no grave to make sad sense of them, the mourners were invited back to Echo Street.
Mrs McBride and another neighbour from Barlaston Road had made sandwiches and finger rolls and Uncle Geoff had unloaded two heavy, clinking cardboard cartons from the back of his Jaguar. The front room and the hallway and even the kitchen filled up with sombre people in dark clothes who quickly held out their tumblers to a shopkeeper from the Parade as he circulated on Geoff’s instructions with a bottle of sherry in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other.
Hilda sat in the front room, bright spots of colour showing high on her cheeks, and gravely accepted condolences. The cousins, Jackie and Elaine, were seventeen and fifteen. Jackie was already working as a hairdresser, and her fair hair was done to lie very smooth and flat over the top of her head and then to spring out around her ears in a flurry of sausage-shaped curls. Elaine would soon be leaving school to go to secretarial college, and like her sister she was accorded semi-adult status. The two girls sometimes called their parents by their first names. Geoff had given them a glass of sherry each without any questions asked, and somehow Jeanette had taken one too.
The level of talk rose perceptibly as an hour passed. Connie sat awkwardly on the piano stool, holding a glass of orange squash. The people who nudged up against her ruffled her hair, or patted her shoulders with hands that seemed to grow hotter and heavier.
‘All right, my love?’ someone asked her.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Connie mechanically replied.
After a time Connie noticed that Jeanette and the cousins were missing, and guessed that they had gone upstairs together.
The door to Jeanette’s bedroom stood ajar. Jeanette was sitting on her green satin-covered eiderdown with Elaine holding her hand. Jackie was standing in front of her, combing out her hair with long, gentle strokes. Fine silvery-blonde feathers floated upwards, following the teeth of the comb, and Jeanette’s eyes were closed with the luxury of this tender grooming. Three sticky, empty glasses with nipped-in waists stood on the dressing table.
Connie edged into the room. The cousins glanced over their shoulders at her, then at each other. Nobody spoke.
‘Do my hair as well?’ Connie asked. Her voice sounded loud in her own ears. She hadn’t spoken much in the last few days.
‘Yours?’ Jack
ie said. Connie’s scalp immediately prickled, her dark hair seeming to spiral more tightly and thickly.
‘Yes. Will you?’
Jackie sighed, glancing again at Elaine.
‘I don’t think I can do much with it.’
Suddenly, Connie was angry. From feeling shivery with cold a flash of heat ran through her, making her face burn.
‘You know, you ought to be nice to me as well as Jeanette. My dad’s dead, too.’
Elaine’s face was flushed and her eyes looked strange. Her thumb massaged the back of Jeanette’s hand, moving in slow circles.
‘He wasn’t your dad.’
Connie saw that Jeanette’s eyes were open now. They were wide, and as blue as the sea.
‘What do you mean?’
Jackie shook her head in warning and the comb dropped from her hand.
Elaine’s flushed face turned darker, meaner.
‘You’re adopted, aren’t you?’
Connie looked from one to the other.
She understood in that moment a mystery that had always been there, nagging like an invisible bruise under the eventless skin of her life, and she also knew with perfect certainty that it had been a mystery to her alone.
She bent her head and saw the pale brown of her wrists emerging from the knitted cuffs of her jersey. She felt the dusty twists of her hair, and the narrowness of her shoulders and hips, and then she looked with her dark eyes back at Jeanette, and Jackie and Elaine. They all had pale fine hair, like their mothers’, and they had full breasts and hips and round blue eyes.
Jackie had drawn her lower lip between her teeth and Elaine looked hot and angry. Only Jeanette’s expression was unchanged; she had heard none of those words of Elaine’s that could never be withdrawn or unsaid, but she hadn’t needed to. She looked like an angel in a painting.
Connie turned and left the room.
She went into her bedroom, closed the door behind her and sank to the floor with her back against the wall. She took up the position out of habit, because it was as far as she could get from the cupboard and whatever lurked within it.
There was a roaring in her ears, like surf in a storm.
SIX
They were both older, but Bill was the same. He was the same as he always was, no matter how many years intervened, and just as necessary to her.
He held his arms out.
‘Thank you for coming, Con. I didn’t know whether I should tell you. It’s been worrying me for a long time.’
Connie lifted her head. He kissed her cheek, lightly and quickly, and then they studied each other’s faces. He cupped a shoulder with each hand, then gently released her. She saw that Bill had grown thin. There were lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, the same signs of age that marked her own, but the hollows in his cheeks were made deeper by the shadows of exhaustion. There was now much more grey than dark brown in his thick hair.
Connie said, ‘It’s much better that she told me herself. How is she?’
He shook his head. ‘Physically? As brave and determined as you would imagine. But she’s fighting a battle with herself as much as with the cancer. It’s difficult for her to accept what’s happening. If sheer willpower could change anything, she’d be healthier than you or me.’
‘Where is she?’
‘In the garden. She sits out there a lot of the time, communing with her plants. That seems to soothe her in a way not much else does. How are you, Connie? You look well.’
‘I am. But for this.’
‘Come and see her.’
Bill led the way through the house. Connie glimpsed a copper trough filled with pots of African violets and an expanse of polished parquet flooring divided into squares by the sun. It was very quiet.
‘I’ll leave you to talk to her,’ Bill said.
The French windows stood open. Jeanette was sitting to one side of the big garden in the shade of a copper beech tree, her head nodding. There was a rug over her knees and a newspaper had slipped to the ground at her feet. Connie walked quickly over the grass, but it seemed to take a long time to cover the few yards to her side. Even in the sunshine it felt as if she was wading against a strong current. Their last parting had been hostile. Neither of them had envisaged a reconciliation.
As soon as Connie’s shadow fell on the edge of the newspaper, Jeanette looked up.
– Here you are.
‘Here I am.’
Automatically they used the private, pidgin version of sign language that had been their way of talking to each other ever since they were children. Nowadays Jeanette wore tiny hearing aids, but they were tiring to use because as well as individual voices they amplified all the ambient sounds into a confusing roar. She preferred to rely on lip-reading with everyone except Bill; she could distinguish what Bill said even without looking at him. They had been listening to and talking and interpreting each other for more than twenty-five years.
– That was quick. All the way from Bali.
Connie did her best to smile through her shock at her sister’s appearance. The last time they met she had been plump, pretty, and now she looked like a woman whose flesh had all dissolved and seeped away. Instead of fitting closely her skin clothed her bones in a wrinkled sack. Her blonde hair, once her shining glory, was a cap of colourless tufts that barely concealed her scalp.
‘I came as soon as I got your email. Did I wake you?’
– No.
Connie made to kneel down on the grass beside her sister’s chair, so that it would be easier for her to lip-read, but Jeanette stopped her.
– Could you help me up?
They hardly ever touched each other. But now Connie gently put her hands under Jeanette’s arms and eased her to her feet. She felt as light as a child.
For a moment they stood uncertainly together, their cheeks not quite touching. Connie tightened her arms around her sister’s shoulders. She wanted to find a way to reach beyond words, to leapfrog the impediment that wasn’t lodged merely in Jeanette’s deafness – that being only a kind of clumsy metaphor for a different and more enduring silence – and to hug her so tightly that nothing could come between them ever again.
‘I’m glad to be here,’ she began. She stroked her sister’s thin hair, just once, very lightly.
We have to start somewhere, she thought.
– I wanted to tell you the news myself. I didn’t want you to hear from anyone else that I’m going to die. Not even Bill. But I didn’t expect you to come straight away like this.
‘Did you want me to come?’
Jeanette suddenly smiled. Her teeth looked too big for her mouth, but the lines in her face eased and there was a light in her eyes.
– Yes. You are the only one who remembers everything. That is odd, isn’t it?
‘I know,’ Connie said. ‘I feel the same. All the way in on the train I was thinking about Echo Street. The day we moved in and we fought over the bedrooms. The garden shed and the piano. The nightmares I used to have.’
– So much history.
Connie nodded. She was turning a question over in her mind. Was it their entangled history that made them who they were, the two of them, or were those clashing identities rooted elsewhere, much further off?
‘I’m so happy to see you,’ she said, and it was the truth.
Jeanette’s hand briefly masked her waxy face.
– Looking like this?
‘Looking anyhow.’
– Give me your arm. Let’s walk.
‘Can you manage? Bill said he’d make us some coffee and bring it out here.’
Jeanette’s eyes were also too big. Her gaze settled on Connie, then she looked away.
– Coffee. Like sitting in some waiting room. Drinking coffee. Waiting for your name to be called.
‘Is that how it feels?’
– Sometimes. Not always.
They began to walk, a slow shuffle past the flower border. To Connie, used to the coarse brilliance of Balinese vegetation, the blooms l
ooked ghostly pale with petals as fragile as damp tissue, the embodiment of restrained Englishness.
– Look at my roses.
‘They’re very beautiful.’
But Connie didn’t want small talk starting to blur these first exchanges of their reunion. There was so much to say, right now, in case they should fall into the old evasions or even hostilities.
‘I’d have come long before this, if you had told me that you were ill.’
– Would you?
Jeanette seemed to be examining the words for layers of meaning. Then she sighed, wearied by the effort.
– I kept expecting to get better.
Connie asked, ‘Do you know for sure that you’re not going to?’
– It’s in my spine.
They took a slow step, then another, walking carefully in their new alignment.
If Jeanette had been healthy they would have maintained their distance. Now she was going to die, and the certainty was changing the attitudes of a lifetime.
Connie tried to calculate the combination of defiance and resignation that it must have taken for Jeanette to confess her condition.
Because Jeanette would regard it as a confession. For the whole of her life, it had been Jeanette’s intention and her satisfaction to do as well as everyone else, and then a bit better than that. She had always wanted to be bigger than her deafness, and to make it incidental that she couldn’t hear or speak like other people did.
In that, she had triumphantly succeeded.
So to succumb now to cancer might seem, in some guarded corner of Jeanette’s determined being at least, to be a form of weakness. As would acknowledging it to her sister, with whom she shared everything – and nothing.
Her message to Connie had been a way of asking her to come soon, that was clear. What was it, exactly, that Jeanette wanted?
Connie caught herself. Wait. That wasn’t the right way to pose the question.
What could Connie offer that might help her? All she had was a biting sense of how much had been missed, how much she had failed to do when she could have tried to make friends with her sister again, and how little time they had left to make amends.