by Rosie Thomas
It took a long time for everything to be burned.
The musicians mopped the running sweat from their faces. The wood and metal patterns slowly unwound and separated into falling notes.
The priest’s arms fell stiffly to his sides and the dancers slowed to a shuffle, their heads drooping.
A stillness spread through the cemetery, and flakes of soot drifted through the leaves and settled like black snow.
Jeanette’s eyes followed the smoke up into the sky. The sun would soon be setting.
– Just bones, she said. – Dry bones on the blaze and the spirit set free. I like that.
‘So do I,’ Bill murmured.
Connie’s throat and lips were burning.
She took a bottle of water out of her bag. Jeanette and Bill gulped thirstily, and Connie finished what was left. Water trickled down her chin and when she wiped it with the back of her hand she saw a slimy trail of soot. Jeanette’s face was similarly smirched, but it was smoother than it had been for weeks. Her head rested against the rough bark of the tree and the soot flakes spiralled past her.
Bill rested too. When she stole a glance at him, Connie caught another brief glimpse of the young man of thirty years ago.
The smouldering ashes were finally doused with jars of water, and children raked through them with sticks to collect the coins. The families had been kneeling on the grass to pray, but now they brought urns and scooped up the ashes. Carrying the filled urns between them they began to leave in slow groups, walking through the twilight. Bill and Connie and Jeanette followed them, out of the cemetery and back towards the village. After the tumult of the day, people were quietly gathering in their house compounds to eat and talk. Lights shone across the village street and long shadows flickered whenever someone crossed in front of the lamps. Bats had come out as they always did with the darkness, and now they swooped in complicated skeins between the power lines and the overhanging trees.
Back in the lane, Wayan’s immediate family climbed into a line of waiting cars.
– Where are they going? Jeanette asked, as they stood aside respectfully to let them pass.
Connie said, ‘They are taking the ashes down to the sea. They’ll wade with them into the water, and then the tide will carry them away. The body has been reduced to its five elements, earth, water, fire, air and space, and the spirit has started on its journey. That’s all there is. It’s over.’
The three of them stood still, watching the red tail-lights of the vehicles until they turned out of sight.
‘Wayan and Dayu will be pleased. It was a good cremation.’
Jeanette surprised them with her smile.
– It was. The sea, you said? I’d like to go and see the sea, before we leave.
‘I know a place,’ Connie answered. ‘We can go there. It’s on the way to the airport.’
In two days’ time, Bill and Jeanette would be flying back to London.
Connie made a picnic, and the airport taxi driver took them down a winding road that turned away from the high-rise hotels and cheap shopping malls that blighted most of the coastal strip.
The beach was a thumbnail curve of silver-grey sand overhung by coconut palms, and the midday sea was a sheet of sapphire scalloped with foam where the tiny waves tipped over into the sand. It was Roxana’s picture postcard, almost to a detail.
Connie smiled as she thought of her insistence, ‘But I prefer Suffolk.’
They paddled along the water’s edge. Bill carried Jeanette’s flip-flops for her. Connie picked up bleached shells with salt crystals in their ribbing and Jeanette held out her hand for them, cupping her palm and smelling the ocean trapped in the whorls. But after only a hundred yards she was tired.
Bill spread out a blanket in the shade of the nearest clump of trees and Jeanette lay down, propping her head on one hand. A jet crossed in front of them, on a direct line to the airport.
– Will we really be in England tomorrow? I don’t want to leave this place.
Bill and Connie glanced at each other. They were expert collaborators now in giving Jeanette whatever she wanted.
‘You don’t have to. You could stay here with me,’ Connie said at once.
Jeanette shook her head.
– It’s time to go home. I miss Noah.
She stretched out her arms and sifted warm sand through her fingers. She had given up pretending to eat, but Connie and Bill peeled fruit and drank white wine out of the cool box.
– Remember that day? Jeanette asked. Sand spilled out of her fists and she dug her hands more deeply.
‘The picnic,’ Bill said.
We are too wound up in our damned memories, Connie thought. Jeanette had been brave and capable when the accident happened, and Bill was loving and good, and I was afraid and angry. But that’s not all each of us was, or is. It’s only what we remember. Is it our memories that make us what we are?
She wished it were possible to step out of the past, and the deep parallel grooves the three of them had worn, separately and in their pairs.
Connie and Jeanette, Bill and Jeanette, Bill and Connie.
Within her sister’s changed face she could see again the girl she had once been, just as at the cremation ground she had glimpsed the young man in Bill.
If we were young again, she thought. If we could do everything again, and differently, with more words and less bitterness, what would we say and do today, now we are nearing the end?
Sadness gripped her. They were sitting on the sand together just a few hours before Bill and Jeanette had to get on a plane. Jeanette was going to die before many more weeks passed, and here she was still thinking if and if.
Connie said, ‘It isn’t then that’s important, is it? We can make now matter, this minute, instead of Echo Street and whether it was harder for you to be born deaf or for me to be a foundling.’ Without glancing at Bill she went on, ‘We could forget what Bill and I did. Or we could acknowledge it and say that was a mistake, and not let it matter any more. Could we do that?’
She knelt down in the sand, stretched out and took her sister in her arms.
Jeanette’s eyes widened.
‘I love you,’ Connie said.
She had to strain to catch the blurred syllables of the answer.
– ‘Do you? I haven’t always been lovable.’
‘I love you now. And I always will.’
– ‘I love you too.’ The words almost inaudible now, from Jeanette who usually spoke much too loudly. Her breath was warm on Connie’s cheek.
Bill lay down on the other side of Jeanette. He folded himself against her spine, knees pressed into the crook of her knees. As they would have lain for a lifetime of nights, Connie thought, in their marital bed. They cradled Jeanette between them. Connie felt the ancient scabs of jealousy as if they were peeling off her skin and drifting like the flakes of soot.
‘I’m sorry,’ she breathed.
Jeanette studied her. Connie could see the mesh of wrinkles that netted the loose skin beneath her sister’s eyes, and the beads of sweat caught in the fine hair above her top lip. Light filtered by the palm leaves patterned her skin, and beyond her shoulder it caught the thatch of grey in Bill’s hair. It seemed that each of them was holding their breath, in case a clumsy word or movement from anyone might divide them again.
– I am sorry, too. But we are here now. I am so happy that the three of us are here.
Bill looked up into the clear sky. It was harder to speak than he could have imagined, and he was the one who had long ago railed to Connie about the damage of silence. The two women seemed to slide together, Connie’s warm brown skin enveloping his wife’s brittle bones, Jeanette’s vowels filling Connie’s throat.
He wanted to tell Jeanette that he loved her, and honoured her, but there would be enough time and privacy for that. He wished he could have told Connie out loud that he held her in his heart, then and now and always, but he believed she knew it without his bathetic words.
‘Con
nie is right,’ he said. He could just see the pulse beating beneath his wife’s ear. ‘What matters is now.’
Through the band of colourless, shimmering air between blue sky and sea, another plane roared towards Denpasar. The airport was waiting, already full of people, each of whom was shuttling around the globe like a restless atom, charged with their own concerns, winging towards families or taking flight from them, children and patriarchs, brothers and sisters and parents, healthy and sick, weighted with schedules, laptops, souvenirs, notes for meetings, all the travellers with their guilt and good intentions, each with their dreams and memories.
Jeanette watched the diminishing arrow of the plane.
– I want to go home to Noah, but it’s hard to leave Bali. I’m not ready to die. But I’m ready to consider the prospect.
Bill reached for Connie’s hand, found it, and drew it across Jeanette’s shoulder. They held her more tightly between them and Jeanette smiled at the sky.
– I smashed a table, you know, she said.
‘How did you do that?’ Connie asked.
– Didn’t Bill tell you?
‘No.’
– After I came home from the hospital. After the operation when they couldn’t do what they planned. I saw the glass coffee table we used to have. Smooth and whole. And I couldn’t see why a table should be like that, and not me. I smashed it to pieces. Pounded it with a paperweight.
‘I never liked that table,’ Bill said.
– You were shocked.
‘Yes, that’s true. It was so unlike you.’
– Dying was unlike me.
Not is, Connie noted. She was finding it very hard to keep back her tears.
‘Did smashing it make you feel better?’ she asked.
– No. Not at all. I was shocked at myself. But you know what? Bali has helped me. Your green wave, that was beautiful. The smell in the village of earth, pig-shit, rain, incense. The bodies burning, the party. It was apt. Just life and death. It made me think of Mum and Dad. Us three. Even Noah, some day. Only bones. And then the spirit set free. Maybe. You never know.
Her face split suddenly into a pumpkin-lantern smile.
– You could say, Bali has helped me see the bigger picture.
It was so like Jeanette not to try to speak of spiritual enlightenment or any kind of epiphany. The bigger picture was as big a metaphor as she was likely to use.
‘That’s the best recommendation for the island I’ve ever heard,’ Connie replied.
They lay back with their heads in the sand. A line of giant ants ran from a coconut shell into the coarse grass at the back of the beach, and another plane roared and dipped out of the sky.
Jeanette yawned.
– Have I got long enough for a nap? she asked.
Connie looked at her watch. ‘Maybe half an hour?’
They released her and she curled up on her side, sighing with satisfaction as she pillowed her cheek on her folded hands.
In the wake of the plane the air seemed to expand, the rustle of the waves and the palm leaves exerting an unwelcome pressure in Connie’s ears. Bill shook himself and sat up.
‘I’m going to have a swim,’ he said.
Jeanette seemed already to be dozing.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Connie said.
She was thinking of the unoccupied rattan chair on her veranda, of returning to her own bed and trying to sleep, and the knobs and handles in her kitchen where his fingers had rested.
They walked down to the water’s edge and waded in. Bill stared out to sea.
Abruptly he said, ‘Has Jeanette ever talked to you about afterwards? About what is supposed to happen when she’s gone?’
A breath of wind dragged puckers across the surface of the water.
‘Only at the beginning, that first day when I came down to Surrey. She told me then that she loves you and that you love her, and I agreed that there has never been any doubt of that.’
‘Did you?’
‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Connie heard herself say. ‘And I’ve been able to share the weeks since then with the two of you. I’ve been included in her dying, even though the three of us made it impossible to share life. And I am grateful for it,’ she truthfully concluded.
Like Bill, she kept her eyes fixed on the horizon.
‘Yes,’ Bill agreed. ‘I understand.’
He stripped off his shirt and threw it onto the sand, then dived under the skin of the water. Connie stood and watched him swimming powerfully out to sea as if he would go on and on, over the various bars of paler and deeper blue to the glittering line of the horizon, and never turn back again.
The telephone used to ring in the flat in Belsize Park and she would hear Bill’s low voice.
‘I could see you for an hour, this evening.’
And without a thought even taking shape in her head she would answer ‘Yes’, blinded by a flash of delight at the prospect of a single hour. That was how it was.
From their first evening together after the Docklands party, they both knew that there was no hope of a happy ending. It was even true that to be stalked by the twin threats of imminent discovery and impending pain gave an extra edge to their temporary ecstasy, defining it with the same sharp glitter as the rim of frost on a dead leaf.
Connie told herself that it was enough – more than enough – to revel in the time that Bill could spare away from Jeanette and Noah.
From being an independent woman with money and freedom she willingly became the embodiment of a cliché, the lover of a married man, who sat waiting for him to telephone and who counted the hours until their next snatched meeting.
‘Why?’ Bill asked her.
They were lying in each other’s arms and she pressed her face to his so that their mouths touched.
‘Let me think.’ She played for time, trying to come up with an answer that wouldn’t sound needy or grandiose, when she needed him so much and loved him with an intensity that – in anyone else – she would have called dangerous. Or insane.
Then she laughed, giving up the struggle. ‘Because it’s what I want.’
‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think it’s extraordinary, magical, that it’s so exactly what I want too? How often does it happen that two people stumble on a passion like ours?’
‘Rarely. Eloise and Abelard? Maybe Antony and Cleopatra?’
‘Ha. Don’t cheapen us with pale comparisons, Connie Thorne.’
‘Sorry. Never before, then. Not in the history of the universe.’
He cupped her face in his hands, holding it away from his so he could search her eyes.
‘That is how I feel,’ he said.
Bill could switch from playful to serious in half a sentence, and she knew he did it with her just because he could. She tried never to compare herself with Jeanette where Bill was concerned – but Jeanette couldn’t hear the alteration in his voice from lazy to imperative, or the dip from elation into melancholy, and Connie hugged that advantage to herself with guilty greed. To Bill, the shorthand intimacy of some of their exchanges was as much of a luxury as their long, rambling conversations about music or Italy or food.
Most of the time they spent together, in the fourteen months before the end came, was snatched in brief hours after work when Bill could plausibly have been with clients. They retreated to Connie’s apartment and set about constructing a miniature universe together.
‘I know this isn’t real,’ she said once, sadly. ‘We long for each other so much, and every meeting is like drinking champagne on Concorde. We never see each other on irritable weekday mornings, or when one of us has flu, or when we’ve been spending so much time together that there isn’t anything particular left to say.’
‘It’s real to me. The benchmark of reality isn’t necessarily sharing the breakfast cornflakes.’
‘What would it be like, if we were married?’
As soon as she asked, she wished she had resisted the temptation. But Bill didn’t hesitate.
‘It would be wonderful. I imagine it all the time. To be together like this every day, to see you in the instant before I fall asleep and as soon as I open my eyes. And don’t you think I ask myself every day, how has this happened? How is it that I am married to the wrong sister?’
There was a bitter edge in his voice that was quite unlike him.
‘Bill, I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘Why not? I don’t want there to be even one forbidden topic between you and me.’
Maybe not, Connie thought, but there will be. Not now, but once the inevitable happens.
‘But I can’t leave Jeanette and Noah, you know. I won’t ever do that.’
‘Have I ever asked you to? Even hinted at it?’
‘No, you haven’t,’ he said humbly. ‘What we have now isn’t enough for either of us, but it’s all there can be. Will you forgive me?’
‘No. Because there’s nothing to forgive. We made this choice together. And it’s good.’ Her voice cracked.
‘It’s not good. It’s all wrong, but I love you so, so much.’
A handful of times, when Bill was legitimately away on business, they managed to spend a night together. Connie would travel separately to a hotel in Manchester or York or some other place she had never been to before in her life, check into a hotel, and wait for him to join her. The anonymity of hotel bedrooms, the signs to dangle on doorknobs and the miniature packaging of toiletries and minibar drinks became almost unbearably erotic. The few hours that followed contained the essence of happiness.
And while her affair with Bill continued, for the first time in her life Connie stopped probing at the riddle of her identity. She defined herself simply as a woman in love and all her being was concentrated in the present. It was possible, she discovered, to live almost from one breath to the next.
Just once, they spent three days in Rome.
Bill crammed three days of meetings with an Italian client into a single day. For the rest of the time they walked the streets, drank coffee in tiny bars, and sat in the shadows of baroque churches. They went to Il Trovatore, and came back hand in hand to the home they had made out of a hotel suite.