by Rosie Thomas
– I would love to have seen it.
‘Would you?’ Connie asked. Jeanette had never travelled much, preferring to take villa or hotel holidays with Bill and Noah in Italy or France. A flash of memory came back to her of Bill, in one of their snatched moments during the time long ago when everything hung in the balance between them, calling her his wild roaming girl because she was leaving him to go to Cambodia.
She’d go anywhere, in those days, anywhere in the world that was far enough to try to escape the problem that none of them could solve.
– Wishful thinking now, Jeanette indicated.
There was a small silence that was waiting for the comfort of words to be dropped into it. Bill rubbed the corner of his jaw with his thumb. A reddish patch in the skin showed that the gesture had become habitual.
Connie remembered that her camera was in her bag. She had dropped it in this morning before she left the apartment.
‘I’ve got some pictures here,’ she said.
– Show me?
Bill moved Jeanette’s chair further into the shade so the sun didn’t reflect on the camera’s little screen, and found her glasses for her, and Connie leaned over her shoulder. Their arms briefly touched and Connie’s warm skin looked darker next to Jeanette’s hospital pallor.
‘Press that button, the one with the arrow. There, that’s the view from the veranda of my house.’
Jeanette studied the image. It was an early-morning shot. Mist clung to the lower slopes of the gorge and the row of palms that crowned the ridge looked as if they had been drawn in soft pencil against the silvery sky. Over Jeanette’s bent head Connie pondered the contrast with the froth of roses clothing the back of this house, and the pots of agapanthus just breaking into flower on either side of the French windows.
The next picture was of a village festival. Men with drums and bamboo pipes, and laughing girls carrying towering piles of fruit and pyramids of flowers on their heads processed past a rank of snarling demons carved from tufa and winged dragons with jagged backs like dinosaurs. A line of scarlet and gold penjor flags flashed brilliance against the background mass of leaves.
Jeanette looked at that picture for a long time.
– How beautiful.
The next shot was of the pairs of exquisite Balinese schoolgirls dressed up for the bride commercial, and then there was one of Angela. Connie had caught her on the set with Ed and a couple of the other riggers. There were lights and cables everywhere, and darts of sunshine striking off the metal equipment boxes. Angela was standing upright among the chaos and giving her missionary-among-the-cannibals face straight into the camera lens.
‘It looks like fun,’ Bill said.
‘Well, yes. It was really.’
The last picture was of the gamelan ensemble with their instruments, dressed and made-up for the shoot, with Ketut beaming in the centre.
‘Who are these?’
Connie laughed. She was touched and pleased that Jeanette and Bill liked her photographs. ‘That’s my orchestra. But they’d soon tell you they’re not mine. More like I’m their eccentric Englishwoman. They were on screen here for the commercial, playing a few bars of the music that I wrote for it, but usually it’s me creeping along to play percussion with them and hoping not to make an idiot of myself. It’s a big privilege; generally the seka – that’s the village music club – is only open to men, but I suppose I don’t count because I’m old and regarded as harmlessly mad. Ketut – that’s him in the middle – is a very clever man, and a brilliant musician. He’s a good friend. He only rates me because we were in his brother’s café one afternoon and a local version of the old Boom commercial came on the telly over the bar. I told him I wrote the music and he was almost as impressed as if I’d said “A Hard Day’s Night” was one of mine. Ketut’s a very big Beatles fan.’
Jeanette was looking up at her, clearly trying to place Connie in a setting that was so remote from her English garden. Bill’s expression was harder to read.
Connie shifted slightly.
‘Actually my life’s quieter than it looks from these. I sit and stare at the view quite a lot.’
Jeanette clicked back to the first of the pictures.
– Do you? I think I would, too.
There was a faint flush of colour over her cheekbones.
‘It’s a lovely place,’ Connie agreed.
Bill hopped up and announced that he was going to go in and make some lunch, saying with a laugh he thought he was irritating Jeanette by always being under her feet.
Jeanette reached up and curled her fingers round his wrist.
– You are not, she told him. Never.
As Bill carried the tray back across the lawn to the house the two women settled themselves again.
‘What’s Noah doing?’ Connie asked.
As when Bill had come out into the garden, Jeanette’s face softened and brightened.
– Noah’s fine. He’s a joy.
She told Connie about Noah’s job and his flat and the girlfriend he had just split up with because she had gone travelling, and added that Bill and she thought there might be some new love interest although they hadn’t met her yet.
– He’s grown up now. That’s one good thing.
Connie remembered him as a teenager, protective of Jeanette, with a disconcerting physical resemblance to his father.
– I hope it won’t be too hard for him, Jeanette added.
Her sister’s tenderness for the boy moved Connie, and even without a child of her own she could imagine what anguish it must cause Jeanette to think of leaving him. But it also touched a place in Connie that she tried to keep covered up. Seeing a mother’s love was like placing pressure on an unhealed wound, an old, deep injury that scabbed over and seemed on the point of disappearing, but which broke open when she least expected it and made her wince with the sharpness of the pain.
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.