Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  Their mutual difficulties might have brought Jeanette and Connie closer, forging a bond in adversity. But what happened in fact was that Jeanette’s increased confidence, and the responsibilities that she was shouldering, lifted her forward onto a different plane. She simply stepped ahead of Connie. From being Connie’s near-equal and constant adversary it seemed that in a matter of weeks she became an adult, moving beyond childish fistfights, out of Connie’s realm altogether. From a chaotic sea of grief, the messy aftermath of Tony’s business affairs and Hilda’s shaky control of herself and their lives in Echo Street, the deaf and nearly speechless daughter sailed like a swan.

  It was Connie who didn’t deal well with her loss.

  After Hilda had given her a brief and featureless account of her adoption – We didn’t know who your mother was. We adopted you through a council home in North London. It was done properly, formally, through a court order. We wanted Jeanette to have a little sister – this new, immense piece of information wasn’t manipulated at all. It was just left there, knocking up against all the other new truths; that Tony was dead and the shop was bankrupt and Hilda, who had once seemed made of iron, was threatening to dissolve.

  Tony had been Connie’s champion and now he was gone. She would have liked to run away from home, and dreamed of doing it, but she didn’t have enough life or daring in her. Instead she took refuge in her music. She played the piano as much as she could and she listened almost obsessively to pop on the radio. She made up her own charts, and squirrelled away tunes and trends. She loved Roxy Music and hated Abba. Connie knew that she was waiting for her life to start.

  Hilda had forgotten the whereabouts of the first picnic spot.

  Bill obligingly turned the car off the main road and they followed country lanes through villages on the Suffolk border until it became clear that they were pursuing a dream rather than a memory. The objective became to find any secluded place that offered a riverbank, shady trees, an unspoiled view, and no cows because Hilda was afraid of them. The discussion was happy and animated at first, but quite soon became impatient.

  Bill made the decision for them. He swung the car into a field-gate opening and turned off the ignition with a decisive click.

  ‘This will be a good place,’ he announced firmly.

  Beyond the gate there was a rough field, with no livestock visible, and a line of trees indicating the course of the river.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Hilda demurred.

  Jeanette swung out of her seat and opened up the boot. She began lifting out baskets and a rug and the insulated picnic box that had been bought for the occasion. Connie saw her framed in the rear window, and was struck again by how happy Jeanette was. The word that came into Connie’s head was joy. Joy shone out of her sister’s face like a searchlight. Bill got out and went round to join her. He quickly kissed the back of her neck and then they began passing camping chairs to each other, laughing and enjoying the job.

  Connie unfolded herself. Her limbs were stiff, she had hardly moved all through the journey. She stood beside the open car door, yawning and rubbing her upper arms.

  ‘Here, Con,’ Bill said. He passed her a heavy basket and she took it from him, and she bowed her head submissively as he draped the rug around her shoulders. ‘Can you manage that?’

  ‘Yeah. Course.’

  They marched in a line down the edge of the rough field, skirting patches of nettles. The river lay at the bottom of a small incline. There were a few trees, mostly stunted alders, but the view was of a field of young corn opposite and a copse on the higher ground beyond. There was a small crescent of dirt at the near margin of the river, deeply pocked with dried-out animal prints, but the grass at either side looked quite inviting, although it was thistly. Jeanette was beaming her approval.

  ‘Are you sure there are no cows in this field?’ Hilda wondered, peering back up the rise.

  Bill and Jeanette were already trampling down the thistles. Bill kicked aside a dried cowpat and took the rug from Connie’s shoulders. He spread it on the grass and set up four low chairs with seats and backs made from faded green canvas.

  ‘If any cows come, Hilda, I’ll defend you,’ he laughed. Jeanette unwound the ties of her espadrilles and balanced over the hoof-marks in dried mud to the water. She paddled in, found a couple of stones and weighted the six-pack of beer that she had brought for Bill. But the current was deceptively strong and as soon as she turned away the pack toppled and was dragged downstream. She waved her arms and plunged after it, and Bill vaulted in off the bank shouting ‘Catastrophe!’ He rescued the beer and Jeanette, and brought them both back to dry land. Jeanette happily squeezed river water out of the hem of her floppy skirt.

  Bill rummaged in the bag that he had brought with him and produced a bottle of white wine.

  ‘Hilda, this is for you,’ he said.

  Hilda flushed with pleasure and told him that he really shouldn’t have.

  The picnic was a success, only slightly marred by the large orange flies that hummed from the cowpats to the Tupperware. Bill and Jeanette waved them away as they talked about the future, touching on Jeanette’s plans to find a job as a laboratory assistant, her imminent exam results, Bill’s job that he had now been doing for a year, a possible date for the wedding. Bill and Jeanette had agreed that they should wait for at least a year, maybe two, until they had saved some money. Bill asked Connie what she was going to do next year at school, as if he expected that she would have plans and intentions like everyone else. She couldn’t think of what to say, as the idea of another year at school seemed real only in its utter implausibility.

  ‘I dunno,’ she shrugged, and hitched her black sleeves over her knuckles. Connie had made no concession in her clothes to the occasion or the weather, and was layered in shapeless dark garments as usual. Next to Jeanette in her floaty skirt and white pin-tucked top she felt hot and grubby, and the wrong shape.

  ‘With all your opportunities, I’d have thought you’d be full of ideas, Connie,’ Hilda reprimanded her.

  Jeanette smoothed back a ripple of blonde hair, momentarily exposing the heavy hearing aid she wore. She was so comfortable with Bill now that she didn’t try to conceal it from him.

  – Mum, she’s all right. Don’t go on at her.

  It was Jeanette’s defence of her that was almost the hardest to bear. Connie frowned hard and chewed her lip.

  When the food had all been eaten and the bottle of white wine was empty, Jeanette lay on the rug with her arms outstretched. Hilda sat in her canvas chair and looked through Woman’s Own. Bill and Connie carried the plates and cutlery down to the water to rinse them before packing them away. Connie passed each piece to Bill and he swilled it clean, then handed it back. They worked comfortably together, and with the cool water swirling round her ankles Connie felt better. She caught his eye, and grinned at him.

  ‘There,’ Bill said as the last plate was done. He looked into her eyes. ‘You okay?’ he asked, and she was sure that he was concerned for her.

  ‘Yes,’ Connie said.

  Hilda was reading, and after two glasses of wine Jeanette had drifted off to sleep. Bill wandered away down the bank of the river. Connie would have liked to go with him, but she was too shy to follow. Instead she lay on the rug beside Jeanette, taking care to leave as much space as she could between them.

  In the afternoon’s humid silence she fell asleep too.

  When she woke up, disorientated and with her temples throbbing with heat and wine, she turned her head and saw Jeanette asleep a foot away. Her sister’s mouth hung open and a tiny snore clicked in the back of her throat. Bill was sitting in the nearest chair, and it was as if he had been watching over both of them.

  Not long afterwards a few heavy drops of rain fell. Jeanette yawned, stretched, and sat up. A smile lit her face as soon as she saw Bill.

  ‘It’s going to pour down,’ Hilda said. The light was purplish, as sore as a bruise, and there was not a breath of air. They packed up
the remains of the picnic, folded the chairs, and trudged back along the field edge to the gate and the car.

  They drove back towards London, but the thunderstorm never managed to break. After forty minutes Hilda leaned towards Bill and murmured something.

  ‘Sure, of course we can,’ he said at once. ‘I’ll look for somewhere.’

  A mile or so further on he stopped just past another field gate, waited for a car to pass, then reversed into the gateway. There was a high hawthorn hedge separating the field from the road.

  ‘Will this do?’ Bill asked. ‘Behind the hedge?’

  Hilda peered out. ‘I should think so. Won’t be long.’

  Jeanette went with her. The next thing Connie registered was Hilda’s alarmed voice calling out that she couldn’t go here, there were cows in the field.

  A car was approaching, travelling fast. Connie saw a second blurred image, swinging across the path of the oncoming car. There was a long, jarring screech of brakes and an explosion of metal, a deafening whump that discharged itself in breaking glass and Connie’s scream. The blurred thing had been a motorbike and rider, and now it split into two parts and she saw the bike skidding sideways in one direction and the dark shape of the rider bumping and rolling down the crown of the road. The noise seemed to last for a long time, and then it stopped abruptly, apart from tinkling glass and the creak of buckled metal. The car was in the ditch, rear-end up. The motorbike lay on its side, handlebars askew like broken limbs, one wheel still revolving. The rider was a motionless hump.

  Jeanette and Hilda ran out of the field.

  Bill was already out of the car, and Jeanette followed him into the road.

  Hilda began moaning, ‘Oh God.’

  Connie knew that she must do something, but every fibre in her body told her not to move, not to go and see what lay there in the road. Jeanette had already dropped to her knees beside the prone biker.

  From the crashed car Bill shouted, ‘Connie, run to those houses and call an ambulance.’

  In the distance, back down the road with the broken white line seeming to point straight to it, was the brick and flint end-wall of a cottage. Connie started running, over broken glass and the black skid marks and then along the verge. Her footsteps pounded in her ears and gravel crunched under her feet.

  She reached a pair of cottages and an old man came to the door.

  ‘An accident? What kind of accident?’ He had a pendulous lower lip, and a huge stomach with shirt buttons straining across it.

  Connie gabbled out the account again and pointed back down the road.

  ‘Telephone?’ the old man repeated after her, as if she was using a foreign language. She made him understand at last.

  After he had called the ambulance the old man struggled to get his arms into the sleeves of a stained fawn-coloured jacket. Connie noticed the incongruity of a pink rosebud secured through a buttonhole in the lapel. He followed her back up the road.

  Jeanette was sitting with the biker’s helmeted head in her lap. The black sheen of the helmet was scraped and dented. Her head was bent and blonde hair waved around her cheeks. Her lips moved as she seemed to talk to the injured man.

  There was a second man sitting at the roadside, propped up against a tree trunk. There was blood down one side of his shockingly white face.

  Bill walked across the road with the picnic rug in his arms. He went round to the passenger side of the crashed car, shook out the rug and covered up the person who was still sitting in the passenger seat. Connie began moving towards him but Bill held up his hand.

  ‘Don’t come over here,’ he said quietly. Then he pointed to Hilda, indicating that Connie should go to her instead. Hilda was leaning against the bonnet of Bill’s car, the heel of one hand pressed into her mouth.

  ‘The ambulance is coming,’ Connie heard herself say. Two more cars had arrived. People began to pass across Connie’s line of vision, but all she could really see was Jeanette in the broken glass and tyre marks, cradling the injured biker. She couldn’t see much of the biker’s face, just enough to note that his skin was a terrible grey colour. His eyes seemed to be open and he looked straight up into Jeanette’s face. She was smiling and silently talking, words of encouragement and reassurance that only the two of them could understand.

  Hilda was shivering and weeping.

  ‘Mum, why don’t you sit in the car?’

  A police or ambulance siren sounded in the distance.

  The old man from the cottage mopped his face with a red handkerchief.

  Five minutes later the emergency services were doing their work. Bill and Jeanette watched the ambulance crew tending to the biker. Bill’s hand rested on her shoulder, but her attention was still entirely fixed on the injured man. His eyes closed as they all bent over him.

  The police wanted to take their names and addresses, and brief witness statements. Jeanette would not be distracted until the biker had been put on a stretcher and lifted into the ambulance.

  Connie gave a brief account of what she had seen. The biker had fatally turned in front of the oncoming car.

  ‘Are you certain of that?’ a policeman asked.

  She nodded her head. She had been certain, but now the images were melting behind the biker’s grey face, Jeanette’s bowed head, the rosebud in the old man’s buttonhole. She was trying not to see a knot of uniforms over by the crashed car, lifting out the passenger’s body still blanketed in tartan, laying it at the roadside. The driver was trying to walk, but his legs would not carry him. The ambulance men supported him on either side.

  A policeman tried to speak to Jeanette. She shook her head and Bill said tersely, ‘She’s deaf.’

  ‘I see, sir.’

  It seemed that they were at the roadside for a long time, but at last the police indicated that they could go. The front of Jeanette’s white pin-tucked top was covered in blood. A policeman beckoned them out of the field entry, pointing to the line they were to take so as not to drive over any evidence.

  Bill drove with exaggerated care. Raindrops starred the windscreen. Within seconds, rain was sheeting down. The windscreen wipers whined, struggling with torrents of water. Words similarly began to flood out of Hilda as if a tap had been turned on.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like that, not as bad as that,’ she kept repeating. ‘Not even in the Blitz. It was so sudden, one minute just the birds singing and then bang.’

  Jeanette couldn’t have known what she was saying, but she leaned forward and stroked her mother’s neck and shoulder. Bill didn’t take his eyes off the road. Hilda’s hands shook.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Just like that, it happened so fast. I couldn’t believe my own eyes.’

  The torrential rain slowed the traffic and it took a long time to get back to Echo Street.

  They trudged into the house, carrying the bags and chairs. Jeanette stood in the kitchen, seeming to notice her bloodstained clothes for the first time. She stared down at her blouse.

  – I need to change.

  ‘Come upstairs, love. You should have a hot bath,’ Hilda insisted. Now that they were back in the house she was regaining her equilibrium.

  When Hilda and Jeanette had both gone Bill carried out the folding chairs and put them away in the shed in the garden. Connie wondered what she could do, and then remembered that at times like this people made tea. She filled the kettle and clicked the switch, and while she was waiting for it to boil she tipped some of the picnic litter into the kitchen bin. Bill came back, shaking off the rain.

  He said, ‘Tea, that’s a good idea’, so warmly that she felt useful. Carefully she poured a cup and passed it to him.

  He drank some and looked at her. ‘You look very pale.’

  Images of the accident flickered in her head.

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone dead before.’

  ‘Neither have I,’ he told her.

  ‘Was the…was the bike man going to die as well?’

  ‘I don’t k
now.’

  ‘Jeanette comforted him.’

  ‘Yes, she did. She was amazing.’

  Connie hunched her shoulders. Everything to do with the day was raw, bulging and swollen, and she felt as if the slightest pressure would puncture a membrane and out would come spilling all kinds of things that she feared and tried to keep hidden because they were bad and secret and known only to her. Her jealousy of Jeanette was only one of them.

  ‘Connie…?’ Bill murmured. Then he put down his tea and gathered her in his arms. He pulled her closer until her cheek and the corner of her mouth creased up against the collar of his shirt, which was warm and slightly damp and smelled of him. He combed his fingers through her hair and rocked her against him, settling her head in the crook of his shoulder. He rubbed her shoulders and her back.

  ‘You’re shocked. I’m not surprised. Listen. Terrible things happen, Connie. They happen every day, and there’s no reason, and all you can do is try to help out and then be grateful that it wasn’t you or anyone you love in that car or riding the motorbike. You have to just go on doing what you do, and try to do it as well as you can, and be happy doing it. That’s all life is.’

  To her surprise, Connie’s body was loosening and relaxing.

  She whispered, ‘Yes. I know.’

  Her shoulders dropped as she felt her weight supported in Bill’s arms. They stood locked together, gently swaying. Then a different feeling spread through her, like a tide of warm honey, thick and slow. Connie had long ago left innocence behind, but none of the boys she had known, dirty-minded and fumbling and of a different species as they were, had ever made her feel like this.

  She wanted nothing more than to turn her mouth to discover Bill’s bare neck beneath the shirt collar. Then she wanted to lick her sister’s fiancé’s skin, and measure out her hips and the length of her legs against his. Somewhere close at hand, tantalisingly close, mysterious and yet obvious, there was a connection that would answer all the questions that teemed around her.

  For a second, a brief interval of delight as brilliant as a flash of lightning, she was certain that Bill felt the same and wanted exactly what she did.