by Rosie Thomas
Malcolm shouted, ‘Bollocks, mate.’ The cat-food client looked furious and Angela covered her eyes with one hand.
After the awards had all been presented the table-hopping part of the evening began. Among the well-dressed executives the composers looked like skinny angular children at a party for plump old relatives. Connie excused herself and went to the cloakroom. Angela came in a minute later and tossed her Lulu Guinness bag down beside the basin. They peered into their reflections in the mirror as Angela applied red lipstick.
‘Bad luck about the award,’ Connie commiserated.
Angela raised one eyebrow. ‘Worse luck for Malcolm. He needs it. But next year, darling, it’ll be yours for your Bali bank music. Trust me.’
‘I do, I do,’ Connie smiled. ‘Ange? How are things with…?’ Women were coming in and out behind them so she didn’t say Rayner Ingram’s name out loud.
‘All right. Well. You know. Quite difficult, actually.’
Angela looked unhappy, but determined to conceal it.
Connie couldn’t think of anything she could say that might improve matters. She murmured something anodyne, and they went back out into the party together.
At the end of the evening Connie returned to their table. Waiters had carried away all the debris except for the wine cooler, which now contained only a couple of detached wine labels and a scum of melting ice. A couple of agency account men were attempting to haul Malcolm Avery to his feet.
Malcolm rather thought he would like one more drink, and resisted their efforts to hustle him. He gripped the table edge and rotated his head as if he were blind in one eye. Then he stood up, hauling on the cloth for support. The cooler slid towards him.
‘Check this,’ he suddenly roared. He moved fast, considering how drunk he was. He grabbed the wine cooler by its two little handles and tipped the contents over his head. Waves of icy water gushed over his shoulders and poured down his clothes. He gasped and shook himself like a walrus emerging from the sea. Constance gasped too, because quite a lot of the water had splashed over her.
‘There you are. Sober as a judge now. Sober as Constance,’ Malcolm shouted. He took off his shoes and tried to empty water out of them.
Connie told this story, complete with mime.
Jeanette and Bill and Noah all laughed, and after a second Roxana joined in too. She watched Connie admiringly as she pretended to wring water out of her hair, then glanced quickly round the table. This family laughed a lot, eagerly seizing every opportunity.
Bill sat back in his chair, grinning broadly.
‘What did you do?’
‘I personally saw him into a taxi and gave the driver forty quid to take him to West Hampstead.’
‘Bravo, Auntie Con,’ Noah applauded.
Connie didn’t tell them what one of the account men had murmured to her.
‘Poor sod, his wife’s just left him.’
Roxana said, ‘I thought it was only in Uzbekistan, like this.’ She tipped her left fist towards her mouth, thumb and little finger raised.
‘Ah, no. I am afraid you will encounter mass drunkenness in the UK. Even here in Surrey,’ Noah said gravely, as he poured more wine for everyone. They all laughed again.
Bill had made a summer pudding. They all admired the crimson, slightly sunken dome before he stuck a spoon into it and rivers of juice escaped. Noah and Roxana ate most of it between them, then they cleared the table and went into the house together, claiming that they were going to do the washing-up.
Jeanette immediately raised her eyebrows at Bill and Connie.
Bill pretended to consider. ‘I like her…skirt.’
Jeanette pointed at him and sliced her finger across her throat. She turned to Connie.
‘She’s impressive,’ Connie said.
– She liked you, Jeanette indicated.
They faced each other, and the faintest shadow of ancient rivalry seemed to dim the afternoon sun.
Connie leaned forward and touched her sister’s hand.
‘I expect she just wants to get into advertising.’
Jeanette met her eye, and then smiled.
– She’d be mad, from the sound of it. Plant taxonomy would be far better.
There was relief in their laughter. Connie wondered, Might it have been as simple as that all along, to defuse the hostility? Why do you have to die for us to find out?
Noah and Roxana did most of the washing-up. Then they wandered through the house and Noah led her into his old bedroom. Roxana rested her elbows in the deep window embrasure and peered down into the garden. Jeanette and Connie were lying on a rug in the shade of the big tree, seemingly asleep. Bill sat in a deckchair beside them, reading a newspaper.
‘Your mother and your auntie are not very like each other.’
Noah leaned behind her and kissed the back of her neck.
‘They’re not but they are, if you see what I mean. They’re not real sisters, Auntie Connie was adopted. I haven’t seen her for years. Not since my grandmother’s funeral, come to think of it. Mum and Auntie Connie really didn’t get on.’
‘Why is that?’ Roxana asked. Noah was thoughtfully sliding his hand over her hip.
‘Well. My dad and Connie. They had a sort of relationship, long ago. An affair, I think you’d call it that. Yeah. I was only a kid and I didn’t know much, but my mum was wild. She’s always loved my dad extravagantly. My dad went very quiet and dignified about it, even though you could tell he was massively confused and in pain. He hated hurting my mother, he’s always protected her by encouraging her. That’s partly why she’s been a successful scientist, he saw his job as enabling her, not further disabling. Connie was the loser in the end. She just sort of evaporated. Went to live abroad, and we never saw her. Dad kind of made a point of being exemplary after that, making up for it all. I mean, I don’t think it was a penance because I know he loves Mum. There are different kinds of love, that’s stating the obvious. But once the blood-letting was over there was a silence around it all. Taboo subject, you know, don’t mention. Elephant in the corner. And then it’s too late to mention anyway, because it’s got hidden behind the rest of the furniture. It takes the prospect of someone dying to get anyone to expose the old carcass again.’
He looked over Roxana’s shoulder at the tranquil scene in the garden. Then he buried his face in the nape of her neck.
‘English middle-class silence. Profound deafness has got nothing on the silence of comfortable family dysfunction.’
Roxana was quietly working out where an elephant fitted into this plush house, and why its presence seemed to matter so much.
Noah added hotly, his lips against her skin, ‘I want my family, the family I will have, to talk to each other all the time. No silences.’
Roxana tilted her head and wriggled round to face him.
‘Of course. You can have the family you want. You can make it that way.’
He gazed at her. Her belief was so strong, and yet she was the one who was a stranger to this house and alone in England. She didn’t seem particularly shocked about his father and Connie, although his father’s betrayal and his mother’s distress was the single biggest trauma Noah had had to deal with in his life, up until the present one.
Roxana had lost her mother and father and her only brother and left her whole world behind. He didn’t know what she had suffered at the hands of her stepfather after her mother died, although he could guess.
He held her face between his hands and smoothed her broad Asian cheekbones with his thumbs. Compared with Lauren and her predecessors, who had had to deal at the very worst with an overbearing mother, or a father who ran off with his secretary, Roxana’s experience was unfathomable.
‘I love you,’ he blurted out.
Roxana laughed. ‘Is that the truth, or are you saying what men say?’ Her mouth was the loveliest shape he had ever seen.
‘It’s the truth,’ Noah said humbly. ‘Do you love me?’
She turned serious. �
�Yes. Maybe. That is a difficult question. I want to give a proper answer.’
‘Then let’s leave it at yes, for the time being,’ Noah advised. ‘Here. Lie on my bed for a minute with me. See, up there, the cracks in the ceiling look like a map. When I was a kid I made up a whole imaginary country to go with it. I called it Outlandia.’
Connie opened her eyes. The leaves overhead created an abstract pattern shot through with darts of light. The remains of sleep, the scent of grass and the sun-warmed wool rug made a complex net of memory that held her captive. With an effort of will she turned her head and saw Jeanette asleep on her back a foot away. Her mouth was slightly open and a tiny snore repeatedly caught in the back of her throat, and this was part of Connie’s memory too.
Bill’s shadow fell over her.
He was holding out a mug of tea to her. She pushed herself to a sitting position and took it from him.
A picnic. That was it. The day and the place and the time swam out of her subconscious and delivered themselves to her, complete. Connie shook herself.
‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘Maybe an hour.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why? You looked very comfortable, both of you.’
‘Where are Noah and Roxana?’
Bill rubbed with his thumb at the raw patch near his mouth. ‘Upstairs. No, here they are.’
They spilled out of the door leading to the kitchen. They were scuffling, trying to trip one another and grabbing at each other’s arms for support.
‘They’re very young,’ Bill said quietly.
Jeanette stirred. She coughed and sighed, and he went to her and helped her to sit up.
‘That was a good nap,’ he said, holding her against him, and she nodded, still dazed with sleep.
Noah and Roxana chased across the grass and came to a panting standstill in front of them. Roxana tugged at the hem of her skirt again and composed her face, and Connie involuntarily smiled. This girl was endearing, as well as formidable.
‘Dad? Mum? We might have to head back quite soon. I’m going to take Rox to North Ealing to look at the room.’
Connie sat more upright. There were midges coming out as the sun sank, and she had to put her mug aside to slap at her exposed ankles. An idea had taken shape.
‘Roxana? This might not suit you, but I’ve got a spare room. It’s a big flat, and I’m not there all that often. You’d be welcome to stay. It’s not all that far from where you work.’
Roxana’s self-possession finally deserted her. She looked from Noah to his parents, then back at Connie. Jeanette was fully awake now, following the conversation intently.
‘With you? In your place?’ Roxana stammered. Her face flushed with surprising colour.
‘Yes. It might not be what you want at all, but until you get your bearings and decide what you really need?’
‘Connie?’ Bill murmured.
Roxana nodded very quickly. ‘Thank you. Yes, please. If you think it would not be a trouble. Thank you.’
Connie wondered, too late, if Jeanette might interpret the offer as an attempt to infiltrate Jeanette’s family, and Jeanette did seem to struggle with herself before she responded. But then she nodded.
– That’s kind of you, Connie. What a good idea.
Directly to Roxana, Connie added, ‘Maybe you and Noah could come back via my place this evening. You could take a look at the room.’ She felt suddenly absurdly pleased with the thought of company, of Roxana’s company, in her bare white apartment.
‘Noah, can we do this?’ asked Roxana.
In his easy-going way, Noah said, ‘Yeah. Sure we can. Thanks, Auntie Con.’
EIGHT
June 1979
They drove out of London on a Sunday morning, the four of them in Bill’s old car, Hilda taking the place of honour in the front passenger seat and Jeanette and Connie corralled in the back. Jeanette kept angling her left hand towards the light in order to admire the sparkle of her diamond engagement ring. Connie turned away from this spectacle and pressed her forehead to the window glass as the suburbs finally gave way to countryside. She was a few days short of her sixteenth birthday.
The picnic had been Hilda’s idea.
‘We should have a family day out together. Jeanette, what do you say? To welcome Bill to this family? Tony and I – that’s Jeanette’s dad, Bill, of course – we had a picnic to celebrate our engagement. We went in Geoff’s car. He was doing nicely for himself even in those days, you know. There was Sadie and Geoff and Tony and me, and we drove all the way up to Constable country. That’s on the river Stour, in Suffolk.’
‘I expect Bill knows where Constable country is,’ Connie interrupted.
Hilda ignored her. Bill’s interested expression didn’t change but Connie caught a glimmer of – what? Complicity? – behind his eyes. She stored up that one look as if they had shared an hour’s private conversation.
‘My Tony’s family originally came from up in Suffolk, Bill. Farm workers, they were, generations of them. It was his father who moved down to Essex, to work for a butcher. My family were quite different, proper East Enders, bombed out in the war. My granddad worked on the docks.’
Connie listened even though she had heard all this before from Tony, many times, and Hilda’s retelling made her miss him. She was interested in the old stories, though, because everyone had their stories. Somewhere, in a place that she hadn’t yet discovered, her own story was waiting for her. Maybe her real mother was waiting, too. Some day she would find out exactly what painful circumstance had forced this unknown woman to give her up, and then she would be able to dress herself in her own history.
She thought often about this process, imagining it as if the details of her bloodline were glamorous garments that she could pull on, transforming herself like Cinderella from Connie Thorne into…well, not a princess, that was just a kid’s idea, one she used to play with once she had worked out what her cousin Elaine’s words on the day of Tony’s funeral really meant. She had long ago discarded that babyish fantasy. Today she was thinking that perhaps her mother was an opera singer. Or maybe she was French, something like Edith Piaf, or possibly Simone de Beauvoir.
She would find out.
In the meantime, she pushed her hands into her pockets and sat expressionlessly as Hilda chattered on to Bill.
‘It was a perfect day, I remember. Warm; sunny. Sadie and I made a lovely picnic. Cold chicken, and that was when it was a real luxury, not like these days. Meat rationing only ended in 1954, you know, and this was just a year later. We lay on the riverbank and it was as beautiful as any picture.’
‘It sounds it,’ Bill said.
‘We stopped at a country pub on the way home. We sat out in the garden, in the twilight, drinking cider. There were bats flying between the trees and Sadie got quite hysterical, moaning that one of them was going to get tangled in her hair. Tony and Geoff laughed at her, the mean things. I’ll always remember that day. He was a wonderful man, my Tony.’
– Yes, Mum, he was, Jeanette gently agreed.
‘I’m sorry I never met him,’ Bill said.
Connie was pondering the fact that once people were dead, you didn’t speak ill of them. It was as though they turned into a different person, just through having died. While he was still alive Hilda had always been going on at Tony. She would go on until he couldn’t put up with it any longer, and then there would be an argument. Usually it was about money, and how Sadie and Geoff lived in a detached house with a front garden and garage parking for two cars, or else it was about Jeanette and how the Joseph Barnes School for the Deaf wasn’t giving her the right opportunities, not with her abilities, until Tony gave in and agreed to the expensive private speech-therapy lessons.
And the lessons had made a big difference.
‘She’s doing well, our Jeanette,’ Tony had conceded. ‘You were quite right, love, to send her for extra help. I’m sorry, I should have seen it for myself.’
&nb
sp; Tony never believed in letting the sun set on an argument, whereas that was one of Hilda’s specialities. Hilda could bear a grudge as though she had invented the process.
After Tony died, though, their marriage could only be viewed as perfect, its shining face never having been rippled by discord. Tony was a hero. Hilda would not hear a murmur to the contrary. Connie knew that this tribute, too late, ought to have pleased her, but instead the distortion made her feel angry.
Money was short. The piano lessons that Connie loved so much had to stop, but Hilda managed to go on paying for the speech therapy. She couldn’t afford to keep the shop going once the creditors were paid off. They would have had to put a manager in and there wasn’t enough turnover for a man’s wage as well as an income for the family. Corner hardware shops couldn’t compete with the DIY stores that were opening up along the North Circular. The shop was sold as a going concern, quickly and not very well.
Hilda took a part-time job in a school, preparing and serving dinners, and Jeanette became her lieutenant in the house. She did more of the cooking and cleaning, and delegated a proportion of the rest to mutinous Connie.
Uncle Geoff helped out financially. He never missed an opportunity to remind them, in a low, almost prayerful voice, of how generous he was being. Hilda was usually thin-lipped and long-suffering, sometimes seeming actually to vibrate with the effort of bearing all her burdens. Occasionally her veneer of control shattered into fits of hysterical weeping. Jeanette would fill a hot-water bottle and give her headache tablets. When an attack became more serious than Jeanette thought she could deal with, she would indicate to Connie that it was time to call in Auntie Sadie. Connie would telephone, Uncle Geoff would drive Auntie Sadie over in his red Triumph Stag, and Auntie Sadie would sit with Hilda in her bedroom until the weeping subsided. Eventually Hilda would emerge, white in the face and swollen-eyed, and make no reference to the outburst.