Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said again.

  Noah took out his mobile, frowned at it, then tapped out 999.

  FIFTEEN

  Bill stood at his kitchen window and watched the sun rise. The branches of the beech trees formed a dark lattice against the dishwater sky, but then a shaft of light suddenly caught them and they glimmered with rainwater. He was holding a mug of tea; when he looked down it was with surprise because he couldn’t remember how it had got there.

  The tea was stone cold, and his bare feet were cold on the tiled floor.

  He listened, straining his ears. The house was silent, and the silence had a massive quality as if the pressure it exerted on the doors and windows might cause them to fly open.

  Upstairs, Jeanette lay seeming to sleep, in the bed where he had finally left her.

  The gorge was a ripple of leaves, and from her chair on the veranda Connie could hear the crisp, leathery rustle as a quick breeze sprang up.

  In the house the telephone began to ring.

  She put down her book and padded inside to answer it. The floorboards were striped with afternoon sunshine.

  ‘Connie.’ His voice with a break in it.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Jeanette died about three hours ago. I lay there and held her for an hour or so. I didn’t want to come down and leave her all alone, Con, but she’s dead, you know?’

  Connie took in the words.

  ‘Oh, my darling.’

  It wasn’t clear to her whether she meant Bill or her sister.

  ‘Last night she was restless and she couldn’t find any way to lie that didn’t hurt her poor bones. I brought up all the pillows in the house and put them underneath her to make the bed softer. I held her hands, and she smiled at me and signed good night. Then in the middle of the night I knew she was dying.’

  ‘It’s too soon.’

  He raised his head at that. ‘No. She’s been ill for a long time.’

  ‘I wish I had been there.’

  Bill said, ‘I think she would have preferred it this way. It’s as if she left you straight from Bali. She wanted it to come, you know. She probably willed it. That will of hers was still strong, even at the end.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve got to go now, Connie.’

  ‘Is Noah with you?’

  ‘It’s still early. I thought I’d let him finish his night’s sleep.’

  ‘I don’t want you to be on your own.’

  ‘I’ll call him now. Jeanette’s nurse will be here in an hour.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  ‘Connie, she’s gone. She’s dead,’ he repeated, trying to familiarise himself with the words. ‘There is no reason to hurry over here. I don’t think the funeral can be for a week or so.’

  ‘No,’ Connie agreed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ve lost her too. I’m not thinking properly. It’s strange in this house. It’s so quiet. The silence makes me think of her silence.’

  Behind her eyes, Connie felt the first tears gathering.

  After Bill had said goodbye, she went to sit down at her keyboard.

  An unexpected phrase of music was running in her head and she picked out the sequence of notes, then repeated them. There was some of the deep humming of the gongs from the village cremation, overlaid by a shimmer of metal, and she frowned in the effort to harness her imagination to a lyrical line. The fingers of her left hand spanned the keys as she reached with her right for a sheet of manuscript paper and scribbled For Jeanette.

  The music seemed to be caught like floodwater behind a dam. As she struggled to release it Connie lost track of the time. She reached out once to switch on the lamp, but she was surprised when she looked up for the second time to see that it was now pitch dark outside. The night was noisy, as it always was, with dogs barking and the conversation of frogs.

  When the telephone rang beside her she thought it was Bill again.

  ‘I’m here,’ she said.

  ‘Ms Thorne?’ an unfamiliar voice asked.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘This is Lloyds Bank.’

  She listened in bewilderment. A bank official who might have been in Scotland or Cornwall was telling her about some unusual spending patterns relating to her credit cards.

  ‘Hi-fi equipment?’ she repeated. ‘No, I haven’t. No, nor leather goods. What is this about?’

  She listened.

  ‘That can’t be right. These purchases were made in the UK and I have been out here in Bali for more than three weeks.’

  Connie wondered whether this could be to do with Roxana, and then decided that that was impossible.

  ‘Yes, put a stop on the card, please. I will, yes. Yes, thank you.’

  Jeanette and the music were filling her mind. Credit-card fraud was profoundly unimportant and she easily dismissed the thought of it. She returned to the keyboard, but only half an hour later the phone rang again.

  ‘Bill?’

  ‘Connie, this is Roxana. I am calling from London on your telephone, I am very sorry, but my mobile will not…’

  ‘That’s all right, Roxana. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I have bad news to tell you and Noah said for me to call you at once about it. He has gone home now to his father because, you know…’

  ‘Yes,’ Connie interrupted gently. ‘Just tell me what has happened, please.’

  Roxana’s fractured English, breaking up as she tried to explain the news, was eloquent of her distress.

  ‘You know, we are broken into, the things gone, beautiful things belonging to you and all of this because I am stupid and I believe what a man says to me when all my life I am knowing better than to think such words are true. You have been so kind to me and I have paid you like this, Connie, and I don’t ask that you forgive me but you will let me pay back everything over some time, I will do this I promise…’

  Even as she listened, she could not believe that the girl was culpable.

  ‘Roxana, be quiet, stop talking for one minute. The flat has been burgled, is that right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m trying now to find out all what has gone because the police are here making questions and I don’t know…’

  ‘Listen. If the police are there I’ll speak to them in a moment. Just tell me how the burglars got into the flat.’

  ‘It was because of me, and I am so sorry for it.’

  ‘How is that?’

  Roxana said that she had met some men and she had been a fool to trust them, such a big fool, and she had let them into the apartment and this had happened…

  ‘I see,’ Connie sighed. ‘What have they taken?’

  ‘I am afraid to tell you. Your music machines and the computer.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  Connie couldn’t work out yet what the extent of the damage might be. Nor, at this moment, did she care very much.

  ‘And in your bedroom, clothes and such and your little boxes, you know, where jewellery is kept, I think, these are empty now.’

  Among her jewellery there were pieces that Seb had given her, and the circle of polished stones in a vaguely art nouveau setting that she had chosen from Hilda’s small collection.

  From the strangled sound of her voice, Roxana was now in tears.

  As calmly as she could, Connie said, ‘All right. Let me talk to the police now.’

  She discussed with the officer the probability that the thieves had found a spare set of keys in her bureau drawer, and had chosen a convenient time to let themselves in and go through her possessions.

  ‘I understand from your young lady lodger here that she met one of the men through her place of work.’

  ‘Did she? The lap-dancing club?’

  ‘That she didn’t mention. No, in her statement she said it was…’ there was a pause while he seemed to consult his notes ‘…Oyster Films.’

  Connie put her hand to her head and pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. Now Ang
ela would be involved. She felt rather as if she were in a novel with a very convoluted plot that wasn’t holding her attention.

  ‘Officers will be pursuing that line of investigation,’ the policeman droned.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I understand they have taken your computer.’

  He advised her to put a stop on all her cards and to change her PIN numbers and passwords immediately.

  Connie thanked him once more, and asked him to put Roxana on again.

  ‘You see, Connie? It is very bad.’

  ‘It’s not very good, but we’ll deal with it. The first thing you must do is get in an emergency locksmith to change the locks and make the place secure again.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Just do it, Roxana. Ask the police to help you. One thing I do not want you to do is to trouble Noah or Mr Bunting with any of this.’

  ‘You do not have to tell me such a thing,’ Roxana shot back. ‘I also have had my family dead. Do you think I do not know what this feels like?’

  ‘Of course you do. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Please. I will make the locks good.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll be home in a day or so, I don’t know exactly when. You’ll have to be there to let me in.’

  ‘Of course. I dread to see you, Connie, but I will be glad as well.’

  Connie smiled, in spite of everything. ‘Listen. Whatever the burglars have taken, it’s only things. Just stuff. A computer, a few rings and necklaces. No one can break in and steal from us what really matters.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Roxana said bleakly. ‘And I am very sorry indeed that you have lost your sister.’

  Connie booked and paid for a ticket to London. After making sure she had enough cash in dollars to see her home, she made a series of calls to cancel her cards, as the policeman had advised. She found that it was helpful to concentrate on these practical matters. The pressure of grief was steadily gathering inside her skull.

  At length, she decided there was nothing more she could do until she reached London again.

  In Bali it was just coming up to midnight on the day of Jeanette’s death.

  The fragments of music that she had been working on meant almost nothing to her when she glanced at them again. She shuffled the jottings into a pile and put them aside. When she stood up her back and legs ached from having sat so long in the same position.

  In her bedroom, the bed was neatly made under its white cover. She sat down where Jeanette had slept, and gently touched the pillow.

  Beside the bed stood a small wooden cabinet, locally made, with a single drawer. Connie slid the drawer all the way out, unhooked a latch and lifted it out of the way. At the back of the recess was a hidden compartment.

  The only item in the secret place was a small box.

  She opened the box with a practised twist of her fingers, and tipped the marcasite earring with an old-fashioned screw fastening into the palm of her hand. It glinted in the light of her bedside lamp.

  A gecko ran up the white wall behind the bed, briefly startling her.

  The burglars hadn’t got her earring. It was always with her, her talisman.

  She closed her fist on it now. The post dug into the palm of her hand as she clenched her fingers more tightly, and began to cry for Jeanette.

  Connie’s affair with Bill lasted for fourteen months, and in that time they spent a total of perhaps three hundred hours together.

  It was such a brief interval within the drawn-out stretch of the rest of her life that Connie was surprised, once it was all over, by the abject loneliness that descended on her. She responded by parcelling up her days with mechanical attention, immersing herself in mere existence.

  She ached for Bill, even to hear the sound of his voice, but she didn’t see or speak to him.

  There was an instinct for survival buried deep in her.

  She had work to do, and plenty of friends who were loosely connected with work. Six months after everything ended, she won an industry award. A piece appeared in Campaign titled ‘Boom Girl Booming’. More commissions come in, and she wrote the theme music for a hit television serial. Money accumulated in blocks and wedges, but it seemed to hem her in rather than offer greater freedom.

  She began to travel, to India and the Far East and South America, with friends or more often alone. She visited temples and archaeological sites, made notes and searched for inspiration and wrote music, and all the time she felt as if she was drifting without an anchor.

  One day, drinking Thai beer beside the slow brown river in Bangkok and watching the crowds flooding onto an upriver ferry, she realised with a jolt that in this distant place she was searching the faces for any features that bore a resemblance to her own.

  Her companion was a dry Australian woman whom she had met on a plane a few days earlier.

  ‘What’s up?’ the woman asked.

  ‘I don’t think I know what I’m doing here,’ Connie responded with deliberate vagueness.

  The woman raised her eyebrows. ‘What you’re doing here is what you’re doing, having a beer with me and wondering about heading north. What else is there? What do you want to know?’

  ‘All right. I want to know who I am.’

  Connie had told her a little about her history. It was easy to confide in a stranger.

  The Australian woman rolled her lower lip over the upper, removing a tideline of beer.

  ‘Why don’t you try to find out about your real mother, if it’s biting you so hard?’

  Connie smiled at the over-simplification of this. But once she was back in England she extracted her short birth certificate from a file of papers and studied it. The baldness of the two shreds of information she possessed reminded her of how difficult the search would be.

  On or about 17 June 1963. Found in garden at 14 Constance Crescent, London E8.

  Foundling. Such a Victorian word. It seemed to have nothing to do with the 1990s but it was at the heart of her, even as much as Bill was.

  She prickled with renewed desire to trace her real mother and as the days passed the need increased, occupying more and more of her thoughts. It was not just in order to experience that maternal tie, blood to blood, that she would never know with Hilda. If she only knew her mother’s story, however sad it might be, she could then continue her own, like adding chapters to a serial novel. It was having no beginning, Connie thought, that made it hard to develop a coherent narrative.

  She began to read books and memoirs about other foundlings. She felt no less lonely, but to compare her experiences with those of other people provided a kind of comfort.

  Fresh determination galvanised her.

  She made an appointment, and went back to discuss the circumstances of her adoption with a different social worker. Mrs Palmer had retired. She learned that the social-work file that she had not been allowed even to see would have been kept in a safe place until twenty-five years after her birth, but now it had been removed and destroyed.

  ‘It’s a shame, that,’ sighed the young woman who interviewed her. ‘It’s quite a small window, really, for people to apply for the facts. Can’t you ask your adoptive mother about the details?’

  ‘Not really,’ Connie said.

  She refused to be disheartened. She wrote an advertisement giving the date of her birth and the circumstances of her discovery, asking for anyone who might know any more to contact her, and placed it in a series of newspapers and magazines. When the ads appeared in print she sat and gazed at them. She fantasised about how her mother might at that moment be reading the same words, and realising with a flash of joy that this was a message from her lost daughter.

  The only response came from a journalist.

  A famous actor much older than Connie had published a popular memoir revealing that he had been a foundling, and so it briefly became a hot topic.

  Connie agreed to be interviewed by the journalist for a colour supplement article, which appeared alongside a fullpage colour picture of hers
elf looking wistfully out of the window of the Belsize Park flat. The introduction read, ‘Connie Thorne is a successful musician and composer. But there is a hollow at the centre of her life.’

  Although it was a mass-circulation paper, the article produced no response except a sharp note from Jeanette to say that its appearance had really upset Hilda, and did Connie never think about the consequences of her actions?

  After the interview, the journalist asked Connie if she had searched the national newspaper archive for any press coverage following her rescue. It was quite likely that there would have been several local news items about Baby Constance. If it had been a slack news day, the writer pointed out, the story might even have made the national news.

  A few days later at a desk in a utilitarian library reading room in a North London suburb, Connie opened up a bound volume of the Hackney Gazette for June 1963.

  She found herself staring in amazement at a picture of herself as a two-day-old baby.

  She was loosely swaddled in a blanket, and her tiny, crunched-up face looked surprisingly serene.

  ‘Baby Constance is being cared for by nurses at the Royal London Hospital who have named her after the street in East London where she was discovered in the front garden of a house. Two-day-old Constance was tucked inside a shopping bag that had been left under the hedge. Police and medical staff are anxious to trace the baby’s mother, who may be in urgent need of medical treatment.’

  Connie studied the picture for a long time. A hedge and a shopping bag, she thought. They were antecedents of a kind. Better than knowing nothing at all.

  Later, she contacted the records department of the newspaper. They provided her with a photographic print of the baby picture. She framed it, and it stood on a shelf in her flat.

  Hunched over the newspaper volumes in the dry library atmosphere, greedily absorbing the smallest details of her history, Connie first read the name Kathleen Merriwether. The Gazette journalist had even interviewed the girl.

  ‘“My boyfriend Mike thought it was a cat,” Kathleen reported, “but I knew straight away it was a baby…”’