by Rosie Thomas
A busy period followed. GreenLeaf were commissioned to compose and record the music for the television serialisation of a Le Carré novel, and Malcolm Avery’s solution required a choir of twenty gospel singers that Connie had to book and then look after for two days. Next she found herself flying to Switzerland at two hours’ notice, to dress up as a Bavarian milkmaid and sing on camera for a chocolate ad. This was the first time she had been abroad. On the plane home one of the other musicians, drunk on duty-free whisky, told her that he loved her. It was fun. Connie was having a good time.
From a swatch of fabrics posted to her by Jeanette she chose a pale gold not-too-shiny satin. She examined the rough sketch that accompanied the material. The dress looked as if it would at least be quite plain, close-fitting, nothing too extreme.
The next thing she heard, she was summoned to a measuring and preliminary fitting. Jeanette’s dress and her own were being made by the sister-in-law of old Mrs Polanski, Connie’s one-time piano teacher. The dressmaker lived somewhere not very accessible, in Bow, and Hilda told Connie that to save time Bill would give her a lift from work. He was going to be in the West End that afternoon, and he could drive her out to Mrs Tesznar’s.
Connie walked down the gritty stairs. There was a session in progress, and a clash of cymbals and then a ponderous drum roll made the walls vibrate. She saw Bill from above, sitting on the battered sofa with musicians dashing past him and a slice of busy street visible through the open door. He was chatting to Sonia who worked on the reception and switchboard.
‘Hi,’ Connie said. He stood up at once.
‘Hi. Are you ready to leave?’
‘Yes, let’s go before anyone finds something else for me to do.’
‘Bye, Bill,’ Sonia called. She gave Connie a wink.
Outside it was smoky and damp, the lights were coming on and it was easy to remember that in only a couple of weeks’ time it would be winter-dark at five o’clock.
‘That’s an interesting place to work,’ Bill remarked. ‘Are you happy there?’
Connie skipped a couple of steps and he grinned down at her.
‘Yes. It’s really pretty cool, sometimes. Elvis Costello came in the other day with a keyboard player who was doing some work. He sat in reception in exactly the same place as you. Where’s your car?’
‘On a meter in Wardour Street. Actually, there’s been a change of plan. Hilda rang, with a message from Jeanette. There’s some drama with her dress, the woman’s cut it too big and there’s more complicated work to do. I’m not certain, but I think that’s the gist. Anyway, apparently they’re going to concentrate on that this evening and start on yours next week. So you and I are surplus to requirements tonight.’
Connie stopped walking and Bill bumped into her. They apologised simultaneously and Connie hesitated.
‘Does that mean you’ve got to go?’
‘Not really. I thought we might have a drink,’ Bill said. ‘You’ll pass for eighteen,’ he added.
Connie skipped again, full of excitement at the legitimate prospect of having Bill all to herself.
‘It’s only a few months off. I’m in pubs all the time.’
‘Are you really? Come on, then. There’s a place off Regent Street that’s quite respectable.’
‘What? What do you mean? I don’t need respectable.’
‘Maybe not. But I do.’
They went to a wine bar, densely furnished with twining plants in wicker baskets. Connie found herself sitting opposite Bill in a ferny alcove scented with damp earth, drinking wine and talking, talking as if a cork had been drawn out of her as well as from the bottle. She told him about Switzerland and the flat in Perivale and some of the friends she had made since leaving Echo Street.
‘You’re very independent, Con.’
‘I am, aren’t I?’
She gulped some more of her wine, feeling that what she was saying was interesting, and that Bill was very easy to talk to. People in work suits passed their alcove, carrying drinks. The volume of noise was rising.
‘Anyway, who else can you depend on but yourself?’
‘Family?’ he answered. ‘Friends?’
Bill talked a lot, too. She found out things about him that she had never known before. He had elderly parents and he had grown up as an only child in a suburb in the Midlands. His mother had suffered for years from agoraphobia, and rarely left the house.
Connie’s eyes widened. With her increasing freedom, she was just discovering the thrill of travel.
‘That’s tragic,’ she breathed. ‘Doesn’t she go anywhere?’
Bill grinned at her dismay. ‘No. And that means my dad doesn’t either. But they’re not unhappy, Con. There are many worse situations.’
He told her about the PR business he was setting up with two partners.
‘You can really make a difference. For instance, we’re doing some work for a charity that raises money to buy special wheelchairs made in Germany, for badly disabled children. We’ve just had a promise from the sports minister that he’ll look into putting some government backing into a nationwide series of wheelchair athletics, and we managed that because one of my partners is related in some way to Mrs T and got himself invited to a reception at Number Ten.’ He was leaning forward in his seat, full of enthusiasm. ‘It’s about connections, but not using those connections in a crass way. Of course, we have to take on some less – um – radiant accounts to underwrite that sort of work. But I love it, you know. You place a little piece in a newspaper for your client, and it’s worth thousands in direct advertising.’
Connie was dazzled. She could feel a hot wire running beneath her cheekbones. They had almost finished the wine, although Bill had drunk more than half.
‘It’s not that I’m fixated on making money,’ he said earnestly. ‘But I want to be able to take care of Jeanette, and our children if we have them. That’s not very modern-sounding, but it’s the truth. I know Jeanette could look after herself, of course she can, she’s the most determined and capable person I’ve ever met, but I want to make it so that she doesn’t have to. I do feel an extra responsibility because she’s deaf. Not that we’ve ever talked about it. She wouldn’t want to admit that her deafness makes any difference and I suppose I’ve joined her in a kind of conspiracy that it doesn’t matter, doesn’t really even exist. I’ve never spoken about this to anyone. Do you mind, Connie?’
‘No.’
Yes. But she didn’t want him to stop confiding in her.
‘It’s so good to talk to you. I can tell you that before I asked Jeanette to marry me, I thought very hard. But the deafness and her determination are so much part of the person she is, I can’t untangle them. I can’t say to myself I love this part of her and if she wasn’t that it would be easier for me. She’s a whole person and that’s the person I’m going to marry, and once I’d worked that out, it was simple. I knew what I had to do. I won’t let her down, you know. You can rely on that. I do love her very much.’
Bill drank the last inch of his wine. When he put his glass down his hands rested on the tabletop and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to Connie to reach out her own to cover them.
‘I know,’ she said. Although she did wonder, So why do you need to say it?
She stared very hard at some drops of wine that had spilled on the varnished wood.
He squeezed her hands and then released them.
‘Well. Time. I’ve got my car, too. I shouldn’t drive before having something to eat.’ He hesitated. ‘I wonder – shall we go somewhere and have dinner? I know you’ve got to get home. But at least it’s not all the way from Bow.’
‘Yes, let’s do that,’ Connie said hastily.
They went to a place a few doors further down the street. There were red tablecloths and oversized pepper grinders, and they ordered food without Connie paying an instant’s attention to what it was going to be. They were both reminded of La Osteria Antica and Uncle Geoff, and Bill did such note
-perfect imitations of Uncle Geoff and the waiter’s Italian that Connie coughed into her third glass of wine and Bill had to thump her on the back until she caught her breath. She mopped her eyes with her napkin.
‘You’re not about to choke to death, are you?’ he asked.
She nodded, and laughed some more.
As they ate they went on talking. There seemed to be a lot to say, and there were none of the awkward pauses or sudden speaking over each other or moments of incredulity at what the other person was saying that Connie was used to with other men. It was like a dream to be facing Bill across the red tablecloth, sharing an order of fried potatoes, and at the same time it felt as natural and easy as it had in the wine bar.
This was an evening when nothing could go wrong, whatever she said or did. She was slightly drunk, but it was happiness and not wine that made her feel giddy.
Was this what being a couple was like?
She wondered if Jeanette felt like this every day. Probably she did.
She was telling Bill about finding out that she was adopted.
‘What did you feel?’ he asked.
She thought hard, because she wanted to give him a true answer.
‘It was the day of my dad’s funeral. That was why Elaine and Jackie were there. It was very bad, because it seemed to cut me off more from him. As if I didn’t quite have the same right as Jeanette and Mum to be sad, to miss him so badly, because I wasn’t his and he wasn’t really mine. I felt as if I’d been cut out of another picture, a completely different one, and I couldn’t blend back into the Echo Street family photograph any longer. It made me realise I probably never had done. In a way, after a while, that was a relief because it explained a lot of things that had bothered me and I’d never understood. Then I started wondering who I really was – Hilda didn’t tell me very much – and I made up for the loss of Constance Thorne and my dad by making up all kinds of fantasies for myself. Pretty childish ones. You know. Princesses and great tragedies and stupid stuff like that.’
She took a big swallow of wine. Bill was watching her face, and the sympathetic way he bent towards her made it suddenly seem vital that he shouldn’t feel any sorrier for her.
She added brightly, ‘I don’t do that any more. I’m fine about it. It’s probably quite an ordinary story.’
She almost said that the rest of the episode was the strange part. That she was taken into Echo Street, where Jeanette’s deafness at the centre of the house sent ripples of silence spreading outwards. Like one absence balancing another, nothing that mattered in the Thorne family was ever openly spoken about, not anger or death or disability or the vast mystery of her adoption. Outbursts of any kind were forbidden. Furniture was dusted, exams were passed, and funerals and weddings were done properly. Hilda saw to that, and Connie recognised with a flash of adult understanding that she maintained her rigid ways because she was afraid of the mess of exposure. The only time she had almost collapsed was when Tony died, and with Jeanette’s help she had fought her way back from that.
It was fear that made Hilda afraid. A sudden faint sympathy for her mother buckled and creaked under the skin of Connie’s antipathy.
Connie had opened her mouth to talk about Jeanette and her deafness, and the effect that it had had on both their childhoods. But she closed it again, like a fish. It was the one subject she found she couldn’t talk about to Bill, because, because…I do love her very much.
Another silence. Ironic, that’s what it was.
Connie wanted to laugh again but she suppressed the urge because she could already hear the crazy note it might contain. She was definitely drunk now. The room was blurred at the edges and her head felt as if it might float off her shoulders. Luckily she had had quite a lot of practice lately at dealing with these symptoms. She sat up straighter in her chair, took several deep breaths, and pinched the flesh of her thighs under the tablecloth to the point at which the pain became too much to bear.
Bill said, ‘Have you ever thought about finding your natural mother? It might be easier to know the story than to speculate about it. I think I read somewhere that adopted children can trace their original families now.’
‘I could. Maybe I will.’
He touched her wrist. ‘If you don’t want to do it on your own, and you might not want to involve Hilda or Jeanette, I’ll help you.’
She took these words inside her, wrapping them up with the knowledge that she could come back to them whenever she needed to.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I mean, thank you. I’d like to. It’s just, I haven’t decided anything yet. I’m at GreenLeaf and I go to the pub or a gig afterwards and then I get home and go to sleep and then it’s another day. I’m quite busy.’ A bubble of laughter did escape her now, like a breath of relief. Bill laughed too.
‘I see. I know. That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed.
She wasn’t waiting, she realised. Now was what counted, a perfectly crystalline moment, in this restaurant with Bill.
Her glass was empty, and so was her plate. Time had telescoped and the dinner was paid for and they were standing up with the table wobbling between them. They walked outside into the fine rain and hesitated, pulling up their coat collars under the shelter of the restaurant awning. Droplets glimmered on the scallops of canvas. Connie knew from past experience that fresh air was likely to affect her in one of two ways. Luckily, tonight her head cleared.
‘I’ll walk you to the tube,’ Bill murmured. They fell into step and without thinking about it Connie slipped her hand into his. Their fingers interlaced. She felt as if she had grown a million new nerve endings. Heat ran up her arm and radiated through her body. They were moving as if they were one person. She could feel his breathing in her chest, his words in her head before he uttered them.
‘Connie…’
They stopped walking. The small side street was deserted. Raindrops slanted into the puddles, splintering the reflected lights. She turned her face up to his and they kissed. The electric shock of it passed through them both and Connie heard his sharp intake of breath. They pressed their bodies closer, fitting shoulder and hip together, arms winding as they kissed more deeply.
‘Connie.’
With the greatest difficulty Bill stepped back and broke the circuit. He lifted his hands to cup her face, and Connie remembered the contrast between cold rain on her skin and the warmth in his fingers.
‘Don’t,’ he whispered. ‘We can’t do this.’
She crowded herself against him imploringly, but all he did was drop his hands to her shoulders and gently hold her at arm’s length.
‘This is not what you want,’ he insisted.
‘It is. It is.’
It was what he wanted too, she knew that whatever he might say to try to convince them both otherwise, and out here in the rain in the street emptied by the downpour – in this deserted world in which they seemed to be the only two living things – nothing and no one else mattered.
‘No. With somebody, yes. But not me. You’re seventeen, Con. Everything has still got to happen to you. And it will, I know that.’ He tried to inject conviction into the words.
Enough has happened already, Connie thought sadly. There were raindrops on her eyelids and lashes. She blinked quickly, and his face blurred. Bill’s thumbs smoothed the corners of her mouth and when he came into focus once more he was smiling down at her. Somehow he had made sure of himself again. He was Jeanette’s fiancé.
‘Come on, or we’ll get soaked. Let’s go for the tube,’ he said. He kissed her forehead, then took her arm and linked it beneath his, drawing her after him. From somewhere beyond herself Connie could see what they looked like. Like a Victorian brother and sister walking to church.
She was cold, and then hot, and then angry. She tramped through the puddles, careless of the icy water filling her shoes.
They turned a corner and a crowded bus churned past them. At the end of the street was the mouth of Oxford Circus
tube station. When they reached it the fuggy, familiar smell rose up the steps and they were caught up in the crowd of people hurrying for shelter.
The lights in the ticket hall were very bright. Connie winced and ducked her head, not wanting Bill to see the confusion of her anger, nor that she was close to tears.
‘Have you got a ticket?’ he was asking.
‘I’m not twelve.’
‘I know that, Con. I really do.’
She took a breath and lifted her head. ‘I’m going home now. Thanks for dinner.’
Their eyes met then, and reflected shock and uncertainty and a glimmer of pure madness. Bill blinked.
‘What happened back there was my fault,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry.’
Connie marshalled herself. ‘It was just a kiss,’ she said precisely. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ Then she flicked him a smile. ‘See you,’ she said, and turned to the ticket barrier.
She was in love with Bill Bunting.
She had no option but to be nonchalant now. She would have to be nonchalant and sisterly around him for the rest of eternity; her pride depended on it. As she descended into the depths she searched inside herself for the vestiges of anger. Anger was good; better than despair. Anger was cauterising.
Bill stood and watched her go. Her dark head and thin, square shoulders floated down the Central Line escalator and sank out of his sight. It was as if a part of himself had just been torn away.
He wanted to call her back. He wanted to leap over the barrier and chase after her, but he denied the impulse.
Where could it lead, but into pain?
The wedding was predictable, or slightly worse than Connie might have predicted. Her dress was too tight, and the gold satin turned out to be much shinier than it had appeared in the sample. Jeanette was ravishing – happiness transformed her china prettiness into serious beauty. Uncle Geoff walked her up the aisle, and at the altar she turned to Bill and her smile lit up the church. Bill looked proud and pleased. In his speech at the reception he praised Jeanette’s lovely bridesmaid and thanked Hilda for her generosity in the same sentence.