by Rosie Thomas
Someone tapped Connie on the shoulder. She turned round to see Ketut.
‘Connie, will you play? I think we should not let the people eat without music to help their digestion.’
She beamed at him. ‘Ketut, I didn’t see you in this crowd. You’re asking me to play one of my drum pieces? I think that baby’s doing better than I could.’
‘You have not been practising. We have missed you. You have been in London, I think?’
‘Yes, I have. Jeanette, this is Ketut, my friend and music teacher. Ketut, my sister.’
He bowed. ‘You have heard Connie play Balinese music?’
‘Jeanette is deaf, Ketut.’
Ketut bowed again in calm acknowledgement.
– I would like to see you play, Jeanette indicated. Connie passed this on to Ketut, who lifted his hand.
‘This shall happen. Connie, we have enough friends here to make some music while this ensemble is enjoying the food. Wait one moment, please.’
‘What have you done?’ she sighed to Jeanette.
Ketut darted off through the crowd. He whispered to several people and persuasively patted their arms. A minute later Connie was propelled to the corner where the instruments were set up. An impromptu, giggling group of musicians closed round her. She was relieved to see that she knew most of them from her regular ensemble. Ketut marshalled them into position.
‘Connie, you will play…’
‘Please, Ketut, not the kempli.’
The horizontal gong was the metronome of the group, providing the even beats that underpinned the texture of the music and incorporated the constant changes of tempo.
‘Perhaps not this evening. Maybe tonight you will take the wadon.’
Connie recoiled. This was even harder. The female drum was usually the leader of the ensemble, playing learned patterns that linked to the gong structures but which also had to be built up with considerable personal improvisation.
The other musicians were taking up their mallets and Ketut positioned himself in front of his regular instrument, the large gong. A couple of shy young women with frangipani blossoms in their hair took the paired cymbals. The crowd was still eating and chatting, but they were also waiting to see how the new performers would measure up.
It was too late to back out. Connie swallowed hard.
Ketut bent solemnly in front of his big gong. He took a pinch of rice and laid it on the floor beside the gong stand. The stand was carved in the shape of a giant tortoise, on which according to Balinese mythology the entire world rests. An offering to the spirit of the gong would ensure a harmonious performance.
A second of quiet gathered, broken only by the scrape of frogs and crickets.
Then Ketut struck a single note. The powerful reverberation sailed out over the walls of the compound and slowly faded away into the darkness. He gave Connie the conductor’s bow of introduction; she obediently settled the drum on its brocaded cushion on her lap and lifted her head.
You play with your head high and your heart open, Ketut always told her.
Jeanette was sitting in the chair from which she had watched the prayers. Connie didn’t try to look deeper into the crowd for a glimpse of Bill.
She struck the drum head with the flat of her left hand, and then another beat with the thumb of her right. She had begun with the certainty that she would forget the pattern of this sequence but now, miraculously, the first notes came back to her. Facing her was Bagus, a thin, bespectacled schoolteacher, who had taken the lanang, the male drum. His beats interlocked with hers and the metallophones and the gongs and cymbals fell into place, each pair of instruments tuned slightly apart so that the music breathed in and out, shimmering like rain caught in sunlight. The musicians’ dark heads dipped and their bodies swayed as the pulsing rhythms swelled and diminished.
Some little girls edged forwards and began to dance, tugging their mothers with them. The women extended their arms, the hands flexed and the fingers eloquently raised. The bright threads in their clothes shone as they circled their hips and the children wove between them. A flutter of laughter and appreciation ran through the crowd.
Connie let herself float away into the music. The pattern of drum beats, kap pek kap pek kum pung kum pung, that had started as a rigid imperative suddenly loosened its hold and turned into a platform from which her own pattern launched itself, gathered momentum and soared away. Bagus’s drumming was a sinuous thread, confidently rising and knitting with hers, seeming to know where she was heading before she led him there. Like the best of lovers, Connie would have thought, if she had not been too caught up in the music itself. The bronze and bamboo instruments elaborated the melody, all the time like waves breaking over the sonorous rock of the great gong. As the splash of the cymbals rose to her lead she knew for sure, here and now, what belonging meant.
The music reached a crescendo with a blare of bronze, and then the sequence unravelled again, simplifying itself down to the last drum beats, kap pek kum pung de tut kum pung.
The dancers let their arms fall to their sides. Laughing with exhilaration and the pure pleasure of being part of the music, Connie looked up at last. She saw Bill at the back of the crowd, his eyes fixed on her.
Ketut struck the last thrilling gong note.
The piece had been a short and simple one, but Wayan and Dayu’s guests and even the regular musicians were appreciative. Ketut’s ensemble all smiled at each other, and Connie formally shook hands with Bagus. Her hair was glued to her forehead and her shirt was damp against her back.
‘It was fairly good. You were a little stiff,’ Ketut said judiciously. ‘You should try to be more fluid in the arms, perhaps.’
‘I will try,’ Connie promised.
Jeanette was clapping her hands, and her eyes shone.
– How beautiful and graceful. I wish I could have heard it, but I felt the rhythm in here. She tapped her chest with the flat of her hand.
Bill appeared beside them. Connie pushed her damp hair back from her forehead and grinned at him.
‘That’, he said simply, ‘was the best music I’ve ever heard.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘It was,’ he insisted.
Jeanette nodded in agreement and as she sat between them Connie felt a wave of pride and happiness. Dayu brought a carved wooden dish of fruit and laid it in front of them. The proper gamelan players were taking their seats again.
It was late when the three of them made their way back to Connie’s house.
Bill opened the window onto the veranda and the night’s noises flooded into the room on warm, scented, moist air.
‘Do those frogs ever pipe down?’ he groaned.
Connie shook her head.
Jeanette spread her hands in a gesture of satisfaction, and all three of them laughed.
It was raining.
Fat raindrops slapped on the broad leaves, trickled from the fronds of the roof and drummed on bamboo pipes. The rush of water in stone drainage channels drowned out all the other island noises. For four days it had been thundery, and in the late afternoons swollen masses of cloud had sailed over the gorge and the rice paddies and blotted out the pale-blue cone of Mount Agung. Now the rain had finally come.
Jeanette spent most of the days reclining in the rocker. She studied the book of trees that Connie had brought back from the European bookshop in the village. Connie usually sat with her, while Bill sometimes went out with Wayan and his brothers and cousins to work on the building of the wadah. This was a bamboo cremation tower, with the tortoise and two dragon-snakes at the bottom, representing the universe. Successive tiers rose to a height of thirty feet, to a little pagoda that stood for heaven. It was a big construction job. Bill’s practical contribution was welcomed.
When it was ready the huge structure, with a symbol of the old man’s body in the bale within it, would be carried by his male descendants through the village to the cremation ground.
The hammering and sawing had been audible a
ll day but the rain stopped the work. Connie and Jeanette sat and looked out through a curtain of falling water. The gorge swam with mist, and a miasma of damp rose between the planks beneath their feet.
– Is it often like this?
‘It rains sometimes, yes.’
Jeanette rocked gently.
– It takes a long time. Getting ready for the cremation.
‘Months.’
– I like that. The proper rituals. Everyone doing their part.
‘It’s seen as part of a natural cycle. Grief and the work going on. The body is only a container. The better the ceremony, the more likely that the spirit eventually becomes one of the deified ancestors.’
Jeanette’s head fell back. Connie was used to the way she would suddenly fall asleep, and then wake up and continue talking as if no interval had passed. But instead of drifting into a doze she said,
– I didn’t know it took so long just to die.
‘Does it seem so long?’ Connie kept looking at her sister’s hands.
– Yes. I thought death came quick in the Thorne family.
‘It seemed that way,’ Connie agreed.
She had been away with Seb.
Sébastian Bourret with the Sydney Symphony had been a big event in Hobart, Tasmania. After the series of concerts they had gone up for a few days’ holiday in Cradle Mountain Park. It was cold, but fine clear weather. Seb had been irritable after the rehearsals and performances, and had wanted to get as far away from the music world as he could. On the spur of the moment they rented a motorhome intended for backpackers, and drove out into the park wilderness. For five days Seb fished in the lakes while Connie read, and in the evenings she grilled the fish he caught over an open fire. They went for walks and spoke to no one, and it had been an unusual interlude in their lives. Connie thought that they were happy, so far away from memories and the pull of desire.
On their way back through Hobart, Seb picked up a message that was waiting for him.
He studied it for a moment, then turned to Connie.
‘It’s for you,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m afraid it’s bad news.’
Bill and Jeanette had failed to reach her in London or in Sydney, and as a last resort had tried Seb’s management company.
Connie learned that her adopted mother had died one night, alone at Echo Street, of a cerebral haemorrhage. The funeral was taking place more or less as she stood trying to take in the news on the opposite side of the world.
‘Hilda is dead,’ Connie repeated, disbelieving.
Seb took Connie in his arms to comfort her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.
Connie didn’t cry, but her eyes burned and she felt that there was a tourniquet around her throat, coming close to strangling her. In a voice quite unlike her own she whispered, ‘I never felt that she was my mother, even when I didn’t know that she wasn’t. I don’t think she ever convinced herself that I could be her daughter. It makes it harder to believe that she’s gone, because now it’s too late.’
‘Does her death make you think of your natural mother?’
‘Yes,’ Connie said.
The funeral was over; there was no reason to hurry home to London.
When she did get back, Jeanette was already clearing out the house in Echo Street before selling it.
Jeanette opened the door to her. The smell of the old house flooded into Connie’s face. The past was like a vapour, spiralling into the chambers of her head. Behind Jeanette the stairs that had once seemed to rear like a cliff-face now just looked awkwardly narrow and steep. A fragment of the old red-curdled lino was revealed again where the more recent carpet had been taken up. They stood and looked at each other.
– You’re here.
‘I would have come before now, Jeanette. You know I would. Given the chance.’
– I couldn’t postpone the funeral until you turned up.
‘That was your decision to make, of course.’
Two overalled men edged out of the kitchen doorway, hauling Hilda’s old refrigerator between them. In the confined hallway Connie and Jeanette had to flatten themselves against the wall. Connie remembered the day in 1969 when they moved into the house, when Tony and another set of removals men had carried in their belongings from the old flat and the new rooms had seemed big enough to echo with emptiness. The memories nudged against her, years packed on years, jostling for her attention. She could hear piano music. Für Elise, picked out by small fingers.
To get out of the way of the removers she angled past Jeanette and climbed the stairs.
Her old bedroom was already empty. Noah slept there when he stayed with his grandmother, and a couple of crumpled pages from a boys’ comic lay on the floor. The corner cupboard stood open. Connie rested her fingers on the old-fashioned latch that was swollen with a teardrop of gloss paint, trying to recall exactly why the musty enclosed space had frightened her so badly.
Jeanette had followed her. Now she stood framed in the doorway, her plump body held as taut as a wire. Connie turned.
– Bill’s not here, she indicated, as if Connie might have come up the stairs in search of him.
You are so bloody difficult, Connie thought. Why can’t you let it go, just for today?
Anger inflated like a balloon inside her. It swelled under her ribs and within her head, compressing the memories into shadows that had no depth, only darkness.
She said coldly, ‘Hilda has just died. Can’t we be civil to each other?’
Jeanette seemed to rear up.
– Civil? Was what you did civil?
‘No. It was wrong. We know that. But it’s over. It was over years and years ago.’
That’s all true, Connie thought. But I think of Bill every day. Does that make me guilty, still?
The balloon of anger collapsed again. The sound of heavy furniture being shifted came up the stairs.
She began again. ‘Today is not about what happened between Bill and me. It’s about Hilda, and you and me, the two of us, and what’s left in this house. If you can’t see that, shall we try to do what we’ve come here for? Then I’ll go.’
Jeanette lifted her chin.
– You think you can run away. You always did.
‘Jeanette. For Christ’s sake. Shut up. Shut the fuck up, and stop it. Stop attacking. I’m not your enemy, I never was.’
– You are shouting.
It was true, she was. Connie rubbed her face with her hands.
It became very important to make Jeanette understand what she was trying to say. She took two steps across the room and caught hold of her.
‘I didn’t think Mum would just go and die like this. It’s a shock. I still thought there would be plenty of time for the three of us to work out the…the resentments. They were always there, weren’t they, long, long before Bill? In this house. At Barlaston Road, even. Isn’t that right? That must be what you feel too?’
Jeanette’s flesh was solid under her hands. She was angry too, Connie could feel the heat of it.
– Resentment?
‘Yes. Couldn’t we talk about it?’
– Talk changes nothing.
Jeanette made a twist, away from Connie, then beckoned. Connie followed her into Hilda’s bedroom.
The place where the divan base had rested was outlined in grey furry dust. The dressing table with the triple mirror was gone, and the bedside tables. In the bay window, the curtains with the garland pattern sagged in loops from their tracks. Connie looked at what had once been familiar, and wondered how a person’s absence could be so tangible.
A pyramid of cardboard boxes stood in the middle of the floor. Some of Hilda’s clothes had been packed into them. Connie recognised a checked tweed coat.
– Do you want any of this?
Connie looked again at the boxes of clothes.
‘No. But thank you.’
Hilda hadn’t owned much jewellery, and rarely wore any apart from her wedding ring. On a plain cushion cover on the floor, a few costume br
ooches and a couple of necklaces were laid out. Connie reached down to touch the tweed coat, and then the small heap of faded glitter.
It was cold, and she had the sudden sensation of great distances and a wind blowing across them.
There was nothing, nothing at all to keep her in this house. It was as if she had never belonged or even lived here.
She reached down and picked up a brooch more or less at random. It was a ring of polished stones in a vaguely art nouveau setting.
‘May I take this?’
Jeanette nodded.
– And there is something else. It’s yours, she added.
She pointed out to the landing, where the square trap giving access into the roof space stood open. There had never been anything much up there, apart from a broken stepladder, some paint kettles with cracked residue in the bottom, a pair of deckchairs with the canvas frayed beyond use, and ancient cobwebs thick with soot.
– It was up there.
A smaller cardboard box stood a little apart from the others. It had once contained tins of corned beef. Connie stooped down. She pulled aside the tape that had been used to seal it, grown brittle with age, and opened the flaps. A puff of dust rose. Inside the box, under some folded paper, she found an old brown leatherette shopping bag. It had looped handles, and the plastic material was torn around the rivets to reveal the yellowed padding beneath.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, although she already knew. Her heart was banging like a drum.
– You had better look.
Inside the bag, folded up together, lay a knitted baby’s blanket and a tiny yellow cardigan. As Connie unfolded the cardigan an ordinary cheap brown envelope fell out. Her hands were shaking as she opened the envelope’s flap. Into her uncertain hand an earring fell.
It was a little pendant of marcasites with a rod and a screw fastening for a pierced ear. She gazed at it, her mind racing. This, surely, had been her mother’s earring. The pair to it, she must have kept for herself.