Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  It was beautiful that Connie should be so polite when this place and everything in it was hers.

  The solitary hours of the next day flowed past. Roxana ventured beyond the living area to Connie’s end of the flat. She peered into the room where Connie spent most of her time when she was at home. From the doorway, she saw a bank of unfamiliar machinery with dozens of sliding keys, a musical keyboard, computer screens. A pair of headphones was hooked over the back of a swivel chair. There was a separate desk covered with papers, a big diary and a telephone. The inside of the room felt flat, dead of vibration, as if it had been soundproofed. Roxana silently retreated.

  The only other door led to Connie’s bedroom.

  It was tidy. The white bedcover was smooth and flat and there were no scattered clothes. Roxana knew that this was an intrusion but she couldn’t help herself. She tiptoed across to take a look into the bathroom. There were tiers of white towels, glass shelves with neat rows of cosmetics, a faint drift of Connie’s spicy perfume.

  Roxana glided across and opened the nearest cupboard door. Inside, Connie’s clothes were ranged on hangers, like so many ghosts of her. Roxana rippled the tips of her fingers over the fabrics. Suddenly she stepped closer, lifted the sleeve of a dress made of some diaphanous greeny-grey stuff, and buried her face in the fabric as if she could breathe in the essence of the other woman. As if she could make herself into Connie. The perfume was much stronger here.

  Nothing happened. She was still a taller, thinner, younger woman, whom none of these clothes would fit.

  Embarrassed by herself, even though there was no one to see her, she dropped the sleeve and closed the cupboard door, turned quickly and retreated to her own room. The silence in the flat seemed to roar in her ears. Soon it would be time to go out to The Cosmos again to dance for men.

  Connie saw her manager and discussed the current state of the music business, had two lunches in Soho with two producers she had worked with in the past, and called in to see Angela at her production company. They watched the first edits of the bank commercials, and Angela said how pleased she was with them. Connie thought her music was good enough, but no better than that. Ketut and the other musicians looked wonderful for the brief second that the camera lingered on them. She gazed intently at the little wedding temple, the clearing in the jungle greenery and the tropical beach, and the sight of them brought back the thick, humid warmth of Bali. She particularly missed her veranda and the rolling green wave.

  She was also quite aware that wherever she happened to be, it was becoming increasingly unlikely that she would ever feel perfectly at home.

  Angela raised one eyebrow. ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Not much. Are you doing anything this evening? Shall we go and see an early film?’

  Angela’s face clouded. ‘I’d like to, I really would. The thing is, though, Rayner said he might be able to slip away for an hour before he has to be home. We haven’t seen each other for a week. We’ve got a couple of work things to discuss,’ she added, lifting her chin.

  ‘We’ll do the cinema another evening,’ Connie reassured her.

  Bill mentioned to Connie that Jeanette would like to see her. So she drove down to Surrey one morning, against the flow of traffic, arriving well after Bill had left for work. Apart from Jeanette’s cleaner, who hoovered in the distant reaches of the house and laid a tray for coffee, they were on their own.

  It would probably be the longest time they had been alone in each other’s company, Connie reckoned, since she left Echo Street.

  The weather had turned. It was cooler, and there were sharp bursts of rain. Jeanette sat in the room that opened onto the garden, small in her large armchair. She had her mobile that she could use to text for help if it was needed, a small tray with a glass of water and several vials of pills, her book and the newspapers and a radio arranged on the low table next to the arm of her chair. In the afternoons a nurse came in for an hour, and twice a week a beautician visited to wash and set her hair.

  – I am well set up, you see, Jeanette said.

  Connie sat down.

  Do you want to talk?’ she asked. They exchanged a glance of mutual amusement.

  – Yes.

  At once, Connie’s tongue felt thick and awkward. Jeanette gazed out into the garden.

  Connie began almost at random.

  ‘I was remembering the picnic. The day we saw that terrible accident. You and Bill, I remember you especially, were so capable. You were brave, and you knew exactly what to do. You sat in the road and held the biker in your arms. You were talking to him, all the time we waited for the ambulance to come. I was just afraid of what I might see.’

  – You were only a girl.

  Connie protested. ‘I wasn’t. I was grown up, or I thought I was. I don’t think I felt any different in those days from the way I do today, I’ve just seen and lived through more things since.’

  Jeanette nodded.

  – Why were you thinking about that day?

  ‘The picnic was to celebrate you and Bill getting engaged.’

  – Of course.

  Jeanette calmly reached out for her coffee cup, took a sip, replaced it on its saucer and adjusted the teaspoon that lay next to it.

  – We could talk about the old days.

  When she raised her hands her loose sleeves dropped back, exposing her wrists and forearms. A bracelet hung around her right wrist as if it encircled bare bone. Connie felt the dislocation between ordinary life, the present desire for harmony by not causing pain from old injuries, and the steady approach of death.

  Their relationship was changing. It wasn’t too late.

  Connie’s throat tightened.

  – There are times that only you and I remember now. Only the two us, in all the world.

  So Jeanette was thinking back to long ago, before Bill. This was safer ground.

  ‘I know. I’ve been conscious of that too. Remember how Tony used to tell us stories? He didn’t make them up, he always said he didn’t have the right sort of brain for inventing anything. But he was really good at painting a word picture. I used to think I could actually see the old Parade the way it was in the Thirties, just from the way he described it. That little supermarket, Gem Stores, used to be a butcher’s shop with sawdust on the floor, and beef carcasses hanging on hooks. The sawdust would be darkened with spots of blood, directly underneath where the animal’s head had been cut off. Where the café used to be, remember, he said there was a dairy. The milkman delivered to the houses with a horse and cart. What was the horse’s name?’

  A smile lit Jeanette’s face. She didn’t hesitate.

  – Nerys.

  Connie was amazed. ‘Nerys. You’re quite right.’

  This was comfortable, and comforting, for both of them.

  Connie pressed on. ‘Remember the trains, at Echo Street? I could hear them rumbling through the cutting, when I was waiting to go to sleep and when I woke up in the morning.’

  The tip of Jeanette’s fingers touched the rim of her ear then her hand stretched out. The fingertips fluttered, describing the faintest vibration, and the diamond in her engagement ring briefly caught the light.

  – I could feel them.

  The same experience, Connie thought. Differently perceived.

  Talk, she exhorted herself. Before it’s too late. Talk about anything, while it’s still possible. You’ve got the words and Jeanette hasn’t.

  ‘Remember those Sunday lunches, at Auntie Sadie and Uncle Geoff’s?’

  They both laughed. There was no need for either of them to say any more.

  There had been the queasy car journey up to the better part of Loughton, to Geoff and Sadie’s house. ‘Detached,’ Sadie pointed out. Hilda was tense with anxiety and Tony would drum his fingers on the wheel as they waited at traffic lights, whistling through his teeth in an attempt to appear relaxed. When they reached their destination Jackie and Elaine would scoop Jeanette up and take her off to one of their bedrooms to
listen to a record or admire a new pair of shoes. Connie would be left mutely scowling and eavesdropping on the adults’ talk.

  ‘Roast beef. Three different veg, in serving dishes,’ she said anyway.

  – Orangeade. Blue glasses.

  ‘Sherry beforehand for Mum and Sadie, beer for the men.’

  Sadie and Geoff had divorced after Sadie found out that Geoff was having an affair with his receptionist at the garage.

  ‘How are Elaine and Jackie?’

  – The same. Jackie’s oldest is almost a barrister now.

  ‘Really?’

  Connie was thinking that families were more alike than they were different. Children grew up. Grandchildren were born and then became lawyers or IT consultants. The unknown woman who had borne her most probably had grandchildren, a row of them. She’d have framed photographs, similar to the ones of Noah at various ages dotted round this room. Connie hoped that she did, anyway. She wondered if, when the woman looked at her photographs, she imagined another child’s face among them.

  Suddenly she asked, ‘What was it like for you, before I came?’

  Jeanette signed quickly, laughing.

  – Heaven.

  ‘Was it?’

  She shook her head.

  – Mum said I’d have a little sister called Constance. Then you were there. In a cot. Black hair, red face.

  Jeanette screwed up her eyes, opened her mouth and balled her fists in a swift impression of a howling newborn.

  – I wanted you to disappear. But you stayed and stayed.

  ‘That must have been annoying. No wonder older siblings get jealous.’

  There were threads of rain stitched across the glass. Connie could just hear the sounds of Jeanette’s cleaner working in the kitchen. Alarm and claustrophobia made her think of the fresh air outside, away from the faint smell of illness and the pressure of recollection, but she sat still. It was extraordinary, but Jeanette and she had never discussed their childhood like this.

  ‘Can I ask you something? Before Elaine told me, did you understand about adoption?’

  – Yes.

  ‘What did you think?’

  – I was angry.

  ‘Angry?’ Connie wondered, but she suddenly understood something. They were racing ahead, skipping pages of history, just as they skipped words and whole sentences when they communicated in their speech shorthand.

  Jeanette lifted her head and looked Connie full in the face.

  – They didn’t want another like me. So they picked you.

  In her adolescent cruelty, Connie had taunted Hilda with this. Yet it had never occurred to her that Jeanette might have believed exactly the same thing.

  Connie could see and smell the old house. Steep stairs, aerosol polish, gloss paint, the sagging fence at the end of the garden weighted with ivy, the low pitch of the shed and its curled tar-paper roof.

  Within those neat, cramped rooms Hilda had constructed a brittle edifice around Jeanette, trying by ambition for her daughter to compensate for heredity.

  She had drilled into Jeanette the absolute necessity to succeed in spite of being deaf, and – amazingly, brilliantly – Jeanette had met her expectations. She had gone to university, an unheard-of achievement in those days for a child from a deaf school.

  While she did so, Connie had fulfilled her equal and opposite role of being unlike Jeanette in every way. And faithful, loyal Tony had done everything that his wife asked of him – except to stay alive.

  Thinking of these things was like holding together pieces of a broken china dish. The shape was re-created, but the function was gone.

  Connie said awkwardly, ‘You couldn’t have known they didn’t want another you. You were only five.’

  – Not then. But soon.

  ‘How?’

  Jeanette gestured, a small sweep of her hand that nevertheless took in herself, Connie, and the distance between them. Connie knew that the information had come from Jackie and Elaine, the drip-feed of family secrets, exchanged behind closed bedroom doors.

  – We were different, was all Jeanette would concede.

  ‘We were alike in some things. I was angry as well.’

  – I know that. You were terrible. What were you so cross about?

  ‘About not being you, of course.’

  Jeanette stared, and then she started laughing. She laughed so much that she had to wipe the tears from her eyes.

  – I see. Yes. That’s funny.

  Connie nodded. ‘It is. I don’t think I ever saw anyone’s point of view but my own.’ She added, ‘Poor Hilda.’

  – Mum would have been touched to hear you say that.

  ‘Would she?’

  – She was afraid of you.

  ‘Afraid?’

  – You were the unknown. And then you were gone, and then a huge success.

  Connie was going to protest that she had arrived as a baby, two months old and helpless, and in any case Hilda hadn’t been forced to take her in. But she understood that they were talking about Hilda, and from that particular standpoint her own concerns were incidental.

  Jeanette’s head fell back against the chair cushions. Talking and laughing had tired her. Connie realised how weak she was becoming.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  – Yes.

  The door opened and the large shape of the cleaner appeared.

  ‘Mrs Bunting, love, I’m off now. Your lunch is all ready,’ she shouted. ‘Mr B., he said make sure you eat something. There’s a nice piece of quiche, some tomato salad. You’ve got your sister here, she’ll see you’re looked after.’

  ‘I will,’ Connie promised.

  The woman beamed at them and withdrew.

  Connie helped Jeanette to her feet.

  – She shouts, doesn’t she?

  ‘She certainly does.’

  They went into the kitchen. Food was set out and the table was laid. Once they were eating, Connie said, ‘Old Mrs McBride, in Barlaston Road.’

  – Yes?

  She pointed with her fork for emphasis. ‘You told me that she was a witch. I was terrified. Most of my early life was badly affected by extreme fear of our downstairs neighbour.’

  Jeanette’s eyes were round and as innocent as dawn. She chewed and swallowed.

  – Broomstick. Every full moon. Without fail, I promise you.

  Connie left her when the nurse arrived. Jeanette asked Connie if she would come back again the next day.

  When she reached home Roxana had already gone out, but Connie guessed that she had only just missed her. The flat retained the warmth of another presence, nothing more than a breath in the air and a faint indentation in a cushion, but it was enough to make the place feel inhabited. Connie liked the idea of her being there.

  Roxana had taken to leaving food in the fridge, and yesterday there had been a punnet of strawberries placed on a saucer in the centre of the polished counter, with a note saying For you. Today in the same place was a small marguerite bush in a brown plastic pot. A piece of kitchen paper had been folded into a square and placed underneath, so as not to leave a mark on the counter. Connie went in search of a better pot for the plant, humming as she looked through the cupboards.

  Later she sat down and tried to listen to music, but she kept getting up and walking to the window to look down at the roofs and the streets spread below. A young couple who lived at the top of a terraced house in the middle of the nearest street were lighting a barbecue on their roof terrace. Connie stood and watched them fussing with food and plates while the blue smoke curled up behind them. Suddenly she turned and went down the corridor to Roxana’s door. She felt guilty about prying, but she told herself that she was just checking to see that she had everything she needed.

  The bed was made, and there was a Russian–English dictionary and an English language course-book lying on the bedcover. In the bathroom, a roll-on deodorant, a lip-salve and a tube of toothpaste shared a glass shelf.

  As in the main part of the f
lat, Roxana’s presence made an impression, but only a faint one.

  Connie inched open the wardrobe door and saw a brown envelope, two pairs of neatly folded jeans, some tops dangling from wire hangers. On the wardrobe floor were two pairs of shoes, one flat and one high-heeled, both with worn-down heels and creased toes.

  She noticed a postcard stuck to the side of the cupboard next to the bed, and leaned forward to study it. It was a picture of a beach, turquoise water and a rim of white sand, with a fringe of palm trees. Straightening up again, Connie thought how brave the girl was to live in a strange place with so little, so precariously, and with almost nothing to conjure up other places and other times except a picture postcard.

  Connie herself did not like to feel insecure, not physically or financially or emotionally. She had, she supposed, devoted a lot of energy to work that shielded her in the first two cases and to retreating from the demands of the third.

  She went back and turned off the music. She rolled back the section of wall that hid the television screen, and sat down to watch that instead.

  – Would you mind driving me there? Jeanette asked.

  ‘Of course not. Shall we go now?’

  Jeanette had been applying lipstick, holding up a compact mirror towards the light. She rolled her lips to smudge the colour, then ran her fingers through the blunt spikes of her hair. The make-up looked too bright against her skin.

  – Yes.

  Jeanette had said that she wanted to call in at work, to collect some papers and other belongings. They drove the short distance and Connie parked the car next to a red-brick building set in the middle of a botanical garden. The arms of willow trees trailed in the water of a small lake.

  Connie followed Jeanette through a set of double doors and up in a lift, then along a green-painted corridor. Jeanette’s office was a big room lined with desks and big chests of drawers made of dark wood. A handful of people had been working in silence, but they all looked up as Jeanette came in. A woman at the nearest desk was bending over a bound catalogue of drawings, then studying a section of a plant through magnifying lenses attached over her spectacles. She took off this apparatus and leapt from her seat.