Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  After the reception, exactly on schedule, Jeanette changed into her jade-green going-away coat and came out on Bill’s arm. The wedding car was waiting for them; some of the technicians from Jeanette’s lab had scrawled lipstick messages over the windows and Bill’s friends had tied the usual assortment of junk to the rear bumper.

  The door of the car was held open for her. With Bill’s arm circling her shoulders Jeanette searched the crowd of guests for Connie. Catching sight of her, she held up her bouquet and threw it.

  Connie’s arms stayed stuck at her sides. To catch her sister’s bouquet was her last obligation of the day but she couldn’t make herself dive for the tumble of petals that would promise her a husband, not Bill. Instead there was a pecking of high heels on the gravel and Elaine’s hand shot out. She swung the bouquet upwards, then pressed her flushed face into the flowers.

  A laughing Jeanette blew a kiss to Connie, who returned a small wave. She saw Bill as a dark shape but she would not let herself look directly at him. She gazed at the car instead and kept her smile fixed in a final blizzard of confetti as the newlyweds stepped into the back. She smiled all the time, as the doors slammed and people shouted and the car trailed its cargo of tin cans over the gravel and away.

  There was a party to go to almost every night of the week – the music business took Christmas seriously – but for the first time Connie felt seriously out of key with her new world. The Soho streets seemed full of laughing, drunken people and the pubs overflowed, but however much she drank and danced Connie couldn’t capture the Christmas spirit. From being pleased with her independence she found herself longing to be loved: a proper, intimate love, not the kind that seemed to be all that was on offer for her, involving a lot of drink or dope and a sexual encounter under a pile of coats at a party.

  Everyone else in the world seemed to have a lover, a family, a child.

  The window of Liberty’s that fronted onto Regent Street featured a nativity scene. Mary and the infant Jesus were surrounded by life-sized sheep and a patient donkey.

  Connie wondered where her real mother was this Christmas, and whether she ever thought about her baby.

  One Saturday morning Connie went out to the local library. She looked up Adoption Services and wrote down the information she found there.

  During her lunch hour on the following Monday she walked through the crowds of Christmas shoppers and found her way to the General Records Office at St Catherine’s House. It was a big building with a municipal feel to the interior. Hurrying feet clicked over the stone floors, names and numbers were called out to waiting lines of people. A Christmas tree decorated with blobs of cotton wool and bulbous lanterns blinked in a corner. It was strange to be standing in a queue of coughing people in overcoats, waiting to find out the name of the woman who had given birth to her. Connie wondered if there would be an address. Maybe even a telephone number. How did you begin such a conversation?

  When her turn came, she found herself across a wooden counter from a clerk with a red birthmark spreading across her neck. Almost relieved to have a different point to focus on, Connie concentrated on not staring at the mark while she explained what she wanted. The woman sneezed and whipped a tissue from a box at her elbow. She blew her nose and Connie waited until she was ready to speak. She was imagining a ledger, somewhere close at hand. A finger running down the columns of names and stopping at her own, written under another name.

  Your mother is…

  My natural mother, she practised.

  The clerk said, ‘I am afraid we cannot give you access to your file.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Adopted people born prior to 1975 may only access their records through an intermediary, a counsellor nominated by the Registrar General.’

  Connie frowned, trying to make sense of this. The clerk said that she could make an appointment to talk to the approved social worker, if she wished, but there was a waiting list. In the meantime she could apply to receive a copy of her birth certificate but it would only be a shortened version, revealing no details of her original parentage.

  ‘I see,’ Connie said. There were several people waiting in the queue behind her. ‘I…thank you. I’ll think about it.’ She turned away from the counter, and fled.

  Although it was only two o’clock, the light was already fading. Connie trudged back to the studio.

  In June, she turned eighteen. By the end of the year, Connie was learning the new musical digital technology as rapidly as GreenLeaf took it up. She began mixing and sampling tracks, working up her own compositions after-hours on the eight-track in the studio.

  Jeanette announced that she was pregnant.

  Connie had hardly seen her sister and brother-in-law since their return from honeymoon. They had bought a flat in Stoke Newington and were busy renovating it, and Hilda tended to go over there on Sundays. Jeanette underwent a series of tests, and when the results came back they indicated that the baby was a boy and was highly unlikely to have inherited his mother’s deafness. Once this news was confirmed Jeanette sailed through her pregnancy. Bill sawed skirting boards, sanded floors and put up shelves. Hilda made curtains and covers and knitted piles of blue baby clothes.

  Connie worked harder. She claimed to have too little time to go to Stoke Newington or Echo Street, and this was true. But it was also much easier not to have to see Bill in his decorating clothes, unshaven and happy, with splodges of pale-blue paint in his hair. She also had a boyfriend now, a thin boy called Sam from Newcastle, who was a student at the Royal College of Music.

  ‘Can’t you ever bring your boy home to meet us?’ Hilda asked, on one of the rare Sundays when Connie did see the three of them together. Bill and Jeanette were nestling on their Habitat sofa, and they seemed responsible and dauntingly mature compared with the anarchic Sam and the rest of the post-punks and drummers and students she spent her time with.

  ‘Yeah, one of these days,’ Connie said, knowing that she would not. She liked Sam and he suited her and she was doing everything she could to convince herself that he was what she wanted. And all the time, compared with Bill he was utterly insubstantial.

  Bill didn’t say anything, and he didn’t even look at her. He rubbed one corner of his jaw with his thumb.

  Noah was born. Connie went to see him and Jeanette as soon as they came home from the hospital. She had never had much to do with babies and his helplessness and the crimson miniature limbs with their fine down of hair made her cry so suddenly and unexpectedly that she couldn’t hide it from Bill and Jeanette.

  Jeanette misunderstood.

  – He’s fine. We both are. Do you want to hold him?

  ‘No. I’ve got to go soon.’

  Bill followed her out of the room.

  ‘Seeing him made you think of you, didn’t it? When you were that small?’

  ‘Yes. But so what?’

  He sighed. ‘Connie, you don’t have to try to be so hard-boiled all the time. Look, can’t I help?’

  ‘Maybe. Not right now,’ she said abruptly. It was too difficult to be this close to him and she wished she hadn’t come.

  She went back to St Catherine’s House, and this time she saw a different clerk. She told the woman yes, she did understand that the only way to proceed was by agreeing to talk to a specialist social worker. She made the appointment, and waited for the date to come round.

  It was spring again, but the interview room only had a small high window in a gloss-painted wall and no sunlight reached into it. Connie sat and waited while the counsellor fetched her file. She studied the backs of her hands and the shape of her fingers, wondering if they resembled her mother’s.

  ‘Here we are,’ the woman said. She had introduced herself as Mrs Palmer. Connie stared at the thin buff-coloured folder that Mrs Palmer laid on the desk in front of her and then shielded with her hand. It was odd to think that such an anonymous-looking piece of officialdom contained her personal history.

  ‘I understand,’ Connie
nodded at the end of a lengthy explanation of rights and procedures that she hadn’t listened to. She went to take the folder as Mrs Palmer lifted her hand, but the woman held it away from her.

  ‘I am afraid I’m not allowed to give you direct access to the contents of the file. I can read out the documents to you.’

  Connie felt a pulse hammering in her head but she forced herself to be calm.

  ‘All right.’

  Mrs Palmer put on her spectacles, fumbling for what seemed like five minutes. She took out one slip of paper, then adjusted her glasses again.

  ‘You were found on the night of 17 June 1963.’

  There was a silence. From an anteroom Connie heard the metallic scrape of a filing-cabinet drawer.

  ‘You were taken to the Royal London Hospital, where you were described as being between one and two days old.’

  ‘Found? What does found mean?’

  ‘I’m sorry. There’s not much information here. Do you know what a foundling is, Constance?’

  The word had a Victorian, melodramatic ring to it that was out of place in this utilitarian setting. But she did know what it meant. Somewhere out of sight the cabinet drawer was slammed shut again. Stiffly she nodded her head.

  Mrs Palmer extracted another flimsy sheet of paper. ‘At the Royal London, the medical staff reported that you were healthy on arrival but hungry and dehydrated. You remained at the hospital for two weeks, and were then transferred to St Margaret’s Children’s Home. From there an adoption order was made, let’s see, two months later. Mr and Mrs Anthony Thorne. The Order states that you were a foundling.’

  Connie had imagined a variety of histories for herself, but this one had never occurred to her.

  ‘Found,’ she repeated. ‘Is that all?’

  She could see that there was nothing more in the file.

  ‘That’s usually all there is, in these circumstances.’

  ‘Where was I found?’

  Mrs Palmer consulted the first sheet of paper.

  ‘In the garden of number fourteen, Constance Crescent, London E8. At the hospital you were given the name Constance. That’s quite usual. The hospital staff choose what seems appropriate.’

  The name of a street.

  ‘There must be some more. What do I do next? How can I find out more information?’

  Mrs Palmer looked back at her. Connie could see sympathy in her eyes but she didn’t want that. She kept her gaze level.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. It’s difficult, with cases like this. You have to understand that it is a criminal offence to abandon a baby. So the woman, whoever she is, might have to face charges. Very rarely do they come forward.’

  Connie looked away. What circumstances could have driven a woman to make such a decision? An image of tiny Noah Bunting came to her.

  ‘Constance? Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. It’s a surprise.’

  Mrs Palmer gathered the fragments of Connie’s history and slid them back into their buff folder. She folded her arms protectively across it.

  ‘If there’s anything else I can do?’

  Connie felt for the seat of her chair, gripped it and stood up. She held on to the back of it for a second until she was sure that her legs would hold her. Then she said goodbye to Mrs Palmer, turned and walked back down the corridor, into the open area with the clerks at their counters, and finally out into the thin April sunshine. Everything looked precisely the same as it had done an hour ago.

  She was supposed to go back to GreenLeaf, but she began walking in the opposite direction. She crossed the Strand and continued southwards over Waterloo Bridge. The river water was flowing fast, and debris swirled against the wooden piles and rusty ironwork lining the Embankment.

  Constance Crescent.

  The image of herself, a day old, kept separating and then fusing again with that of Noah Bunting, and her mother was a slip of a figure on the margin of her imagination, refusing to come forward even though Connie stopped on the very centre of the bridge and closed her eyes, trying to bring her into focus. She longed to reach out to that woman and hold her, and be held in return, but her hand opened and closed again on nothing.

  She walked on, a long way, into unfamiliar South London streets. When she was too tired to walk any further she sat down on a bench and then she cried.

  Holding the A–Z open on her lap, Connie told Bill to take the next left turn.

  ‘Then it’s the third on the right,’ she said.

  They were in an area of medium-sized semi-detached villas and smaller terraced houses, no different from many others in London. There were trees in the streets, now coming into full leaf, and front gardens either clogged with wet old furniture or gentrified with clipped hedges screening polished windows. Bill followed Connie’s directions in silence, and then they both craned forwards to read the name plate at the street corner.

  Constance Crescent was a quiet curving street set back from the busier road. All the houses here looked well-tended. There were window boxes on some of the lower sills, brass door-knockers and letterboxes, and several of the white-painted door surrounds had French-blue enamel number plates. Number 14 was one of them.

  Bill stopped the car. A woman came out of the front door of number 12 and bumped a baby’s buggy over the front step and down the path to her gate. She pushed the buggy past the car, glancing at them as she passed.

  Connie got out, and her jerky movements caused her to bang her elbow against the car door. Tingling pain shot up her arm and she rubbed her funnybone as she stood and looked around her. There was a privet hedge, recently clipped, separating the garden from the street. A path tiled in red and black diamonds and triangles led to the dark-blue front door, a pair of black dustbins on the house-side of the hedge had 14 painted in tidy white numerals on the lids. The wroughtmetal gate stood open.

  Bill had got out of the car too and she was conscious of him standing just behind her.

  ‘It’s just a street,’ she said.

  He didn’t ask her what else she had been expecting, although she knew it would have been a fair question. There was nothing here in this patch of urban garden, spruced up with evergreen shrubs, to give her a scrap of information about herself or who had left her here. It had been, she now understood, absurd to believe that it might.

  Almost nineteen years ago her mother had walked along this quiet street, carrying a baby in her arms. Then she had walked away again without her. The thread of this connection was too fragile to take any strain, Connie thought. As soon as she tried to pull on it for more information, or to reel in some comfort, it silently broke away and the end was left floating in an infinity of space.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she muttered.

  Bill put his hand out, didn’t quite touch her arm. To both of them, the inch of space between his fingertips and her wrist was charged with unnatural significance. ‘Wait. We should talk to whoever lives here.’

  He walked up to the blue front door and pressed the bell. Connie listened to the drone of traffic and a police siren in the distance. No one came to the door.

  ‘They must be out at work. We can come back one evening,’ he told her. ‘They may have been living here when you were found, or at least they may know a neighbour who was. Somewhere there is going to be somebody who knows what happened, and all we have to do is ask questions until we find them.’

  Connie nodded, without much expectation. She looked again at the path, the dustbins, the rim of grey earth beneath the hedge. Then she retraced her steps down the path and back to Bill’s car. She felt stiff and rather cold.

  ‘Let’s go and get a coffee,’ Bill said. He drove along the curve of the street and Connie watched the houses slide by.

  An ordinary street, in an ordinary corner of East London. It didn’t provide much of an identity to cling to, she reflected, when she had been hoping to find a solution for herself that didn’t depend on Hilda and Jeanette, or particularly on Bill.

  It was j
ust dawning on her that she was not going to find her mother.

  There was a coffee shop on the corner, empty in the dead time between the end of the lunch hour and the beginning of children coming home from school. Connie sat looking through the window while Bill fetched two coffees from the counter. She stirred sugar crystals into hers and then watched brown liquid drip from her spoon.

  ‘Thanks for coming with me. I don’t think I’d have done even this on my own. But now I know my place of origin, don’t I?’

  ‘Does it help to have seen Constance Crescent?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Con, don’t you think perhaps you should talk to Hilda? She may be able to give you a lead.’

  Connie considered this from all angles.

  ‘I don’t think I can. She’d be offended, wouldn’t she? She’d interpret my wanting to trace my real mother as a criticism of her as an adopted one. Hilda does that, you know. She edits what isn’t about her until it is. I can’t imagine how our talk would go on beyond that, either. It’s not really our family thing, is it? Warm and affirming heart-to-hearts, opening up to each other?’

  Bill said nothing.

  ‘Well, is it?’

  ‘You’re angry, Con.’

  ‘I am not,’ she snapped. ‘I just want to know who I am.’

  His eyes held hers then. ‘Don’t you already know that? Truly? I think I know who you are. You’re what you’ve made yourself, and will make. Regardless of what or who you were born as.’

  She wanted to hurl herself against him, crying, I don’t know. Tell me, help me.

  Bill’s hands lifted, ready to take hers, but then he withdrew them and sheltered them beneath the table, out of danger. They never touched each other, not since the night they had kissed in the rain.

  ‘Does Jeanette know that you’ve come here with me today?’

  She saw his eyes flicker.

  ‘No.’

  It was only a lie by omission, of course. Jeanette didn’t ask him what he did every lunchtime.