Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  The statement and the first payment demand, Connie estimated, would drop through her letterbox in the next two or three weeks. And this was probably only the beginning. There would be statements and demands for purchases made on whichever other major store cards the thieves had also taken out, probably using her existing credit cards as collateral and her driving licence and utility bills as proof of identity. Somewhere out there, Connie thought, was a woman who was not Constance Thorne but who looked like her or was made up to look enough like her (Wig? Coloured contact lenses? How far did they bother to go?) to convince busy bank-counter staff and shop assistants that she actually was herself, or at least as she appeared in the tiny photograph on her driving licence.

  ‘You okay?’ Jez wanted to know.

  ‘Yeah. Fine.’ She meant it. This, at least, was a set of circumstances she could deal with.

  She picked up her mobile again. A moment later she was speaking to a credit reference officer about the startling debts that were being run up in her name.

  ‘I am afraid we see a lot of this. You are a victim of what we call…’ the woman solemnly paused ‘…identity theft.’

  Connie concluded the call, and then stared at the long list of authorities to be contacted and steps that would have to be taken to restore the credit ratings and various degrees of purchasing power that seemed to constitute her identity, as far as the outside world was concerned.

  The more she thought about it, the more absurd and perfectly ironic the situation seemed. She sat back in her chair and began to laugh.

  Jez flicked her a nervous glance, then hunched attentively over the laptop once more. Clearly, he was keen to get shot of the madwoman as soon as possible.

  Connie went across to Angela’s office, intending to share with her the comedy of Mr Antonelli and his associates making off so successfully with an identity that she had spent most of her adult life trying to define.

  Can I replace it with a nice, plain, utilitarian one? she was going to ask. No problems, no missing history, no racial or social ambiguities? Will my insurance cover that?

  But through the glass panel in the door she could see that Angie was still on the phone. Her shoulder was turned away, and she was shading her eyes with her free hand. Connie backed away.

  In a windowless cubicle behind the reception area Roxana was also on the phone, speaking Russian very quickly in a wheedling tone of voice.

  Connie looked around her. These were the offices of a busy film production company. A motorbike courier in leathers and a Darth Vader helmet was collecting a package from reception and two ad-agency account executives were sitting over a set of A3 storyboards while they waited for a meeting. She had no place here. She picked up her coat and bag, told Jez that she would be back in half an hour, and went down the street to a coffee shop.

  Sitting on a tall stool, she gazed out through the faintly fogged plate-glass window into the street. Crowds passed by, but today their faces leapt out as if they were known to her. She saw how each individual had a different gait, a different path, and the ability to follow it without colliding with anyone else; each one had a set of unique motives that was propelling them past this window at just this hour. The variety of humanity within a few yards of inner-city pavement on an ordinary mid-morning suddenly took her breath away. She was warmed by the sight, and her feeling of separation melted like ice in the sun.

  Connie realised how much she would have liked to talk to Bill about this, and about many other things – all the random coincidences and dislocations that made up a life. It took a great effort of will not to reach for her mobile, but she didn’t do it. She wouldn’t discuss the repercussions of the burglary with him, nor would they laugh about the definitions of identity.

  Bill had the broad dimensions of grief to map, and then learn to inhabit.

  As she did herself.

  The split-second impulse to tell Jeanette about the theft flickered and then snuffed itself out when she recalled – with the same stab of pain that came a hundred times a day – that she couldn’t tell Jeanette anything.

  Roxana finished her work. It was the end of the day, at last.

  Angela had given her some notes but then had hurriedly left for home more than an hour ago, without speaking to anyone. Connie had picked up the laptop computer that Jez had prepared for her and had gone again before it was even lunchtime. For Roxana in her cubicle it had been a very long day. Film pre-production work seemed mostly to consist of trying to persuade local suppliers to offer more of their services for less money, and this was not a system that the Russians were very amenable to.

  As she was putting on her coat, Noah called her.

  ‘Where are you?’ he wanted to know. When he was at the house in Surrey he was always asking her this, as if he felt trapped there, and feared that she might slip away from him.

  ‘I am still at work,’ she said. ‘How is your father today?’

  ‘He’s quiet. Just – very quiet. Are you going back to the apartment?’

  ‘Yes, in a bit,’ Roxana admitted.

  She didn’t want to go back there yet, because she felt she didn’t deserve the privilege. When Noah was with his father, she had taken to staying out on her own until it was late enough for her to slip into Limbeck House and go straight to bed. London was losing the warmth it had briefly acquired and once again beginning to gape around her, a chilly place full of strangers’ faces and eyes that never met hers – unless they were men’s eyes, with the usual speculation in them.

  ‘Call me, then, when you get there?’

  She didn’t want to hear the insistent note in Noah’s voice. It told her that his mother’s death and her mistake with Mr Antonelli had changed matters between them, and they were not as innocent or as easy as they had been.

  ‘If…’ she began, and then thought that whatever she said it was unlikely to satisfy either of them. ‘All right,’ she said.

  Some evenings, Roxana went to the cinema. It was expensive, though, in the West End. She didn’t like sitting alone in pubs or bars, not because that in itself was particularly lonely, but because she was obliged to defend herself. So she went back to the Best Little Internet Café on the Planet. When he saw her, the owner called out that he thought she had deserted them.

  ‘No,’ Roxana smiled. ‘I have been working very hard, that’s all.’

  ‘Good. Work is very good. What will you eat? Souvlaki salad?’

  Roxana ate her solitary dinner, saving for later the possibility that there might be an email from Fatima. Afterwards she took her cup of thick sweet coffee back with her to the internet section, even though there was a notice saying that drinks were forbidden near the keyboards. The café man winked at her.

  Roxana logged on, and went automatically to the Uzbek language portal. Up came the picture of the blue domes against the desert-blue sky.

  Until this moment Roxana would have denied that she ever felt a moment’s homesickness, but now she felt an unwieldy longing to be in this place again.

  The news that scrolled underneath the picture was the usual bland propaganda put out by the government. Everything that she had left behind was no doubt still the same – corruption, intimidation, religious hostility. But her gaze kept returning to the picture of Chor Minor. The sights and smells and memories of home rose up, thicker and heavier and more real to her than the damp London street outside the café.

  Roxana sat forward in her chair. Abruptly she clicked at the keyboard and the picture of Bokhara disappeared. She opened her email inbox, and saw that there was a message from Fatima.

  It was very short, without any of the usual stories about her biznez men. It said simply that she had been talking to people, friends from home, and she had heard from them that Yakov wanted to speak to Roxana. It was very urgent, and if it was possible she should telephone him right away.

  Fatima gave her a number to ring, but Roxana already knew it. She stood up, pushing back her chair so hard that it almost tipped ove
r.

  ‘You want another coffee?’ the owner called to her.

  She left the terminal and the usual row of hunched Asian students.

  ‘Not tonight,’ she said.

  ‘See you tomorrow, maybe,’ echoed after her as she went out into the rain.

  There was another shop a few yards away. Peeling signs read Cheap Calls/China/Russia/Asia. It was late, too late really to be making this call, but Roxana could not possibly wait until the morning. Yakov didn’t sleep much anyway.

  He answered within a few seconds, so she knew he had been awake.

  She could see him clearly, a shapeless dome of flesh topped with a bald bean of a head, a man grown so fat that he rarely left his shuttered apartment. Her mother’s old friend, the one-time scholar.

  ‘My daughter. I have some news to tell you,’ Yakov gasped.

  ‘Roxana?’

  Connie had been sitting in the semi-darkness, watching the lights beneath her and the planes on their winking descent.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Noah called. He’s been trying your mobile. Can you…Roxana? What’s happened?’

  Roxana let her bag and her coat fall to the floor.

  ‘My brother.’ She had held herself together all the way home but now her face was beginning to work out of control.

  ‘My brother. He did not die in Andijan. He is in prison, but he is not dead.’

  It was the same golden-lit bar that had so impressed Roxana when Cesare Antonelli took her there. Connie and Angela strolled in, choosing one of the leather-circled booths as if the place belonged to them. They scanned the drinks menu and told each other that tonight was definitely the night to have the cachaça and absinthe mint cocktail, and when the drinks came they clinked glasses with each other. They told Roxana to remember that friends were what mattered.

  ‘They are all that matters,’ Angela said. Deliberately she made a face like someone trying to be tragic in a TV comedy show.

  Angela smoked constantly and kept taking off her tinted glasses and then putting them on again, but she and Connie both laughed a lot as well, and teased each other and Roxana, and even after all that had happened they made her feel as if she was one of them, one of the confident women who were at home in places like this.

  When the second round of cocktails arrived Connie became serious. She raised her glass again.

  ‘Here’s to you, Roxana. I’m so happy for you and your brother, and I hope you’ll be able to see him soon. I hope he’ll be out of prison before too long, and I know you’ve got to go back right away to do whatever you can to help him. But I’m really going to miss you.’ She took a big gulp of her drink. ‘Good luck. Bon voyage,’ she added.

  ‘You’ll miss me, even though I let those men into your home?’

  ‘Those men took the things that don’t matter and I’ve still got everything that does.’

  Roxana’s eyes went to the thread that held the pouch, just visible in the V of Connie’s top.

  ‘Nobody can steal who you are. I’m glad to have found that out,’ Connie said. ‘I owe the discovery to you, in a way, don’t I?’

  Connie had even said that she would pay for Roxana’s flight home, but Roxana had money saved and wouldn’t let her. There had been a joke about how Connie didn’t have money or cards anyway.

  ‘Good luck, Roxana,’ Angie added. ‘Now, are we going to have another of these?’

  They went on to dinner in a restaurant. In the taxi on the way there, Roxana looked out of the window at the shiny shop windows and the neon signs in Piccadilly Circus, the strings of blue twinkling lights strung in the bare branches of trees along the river, and all the big, imposing old buildings. She wasn’t seeing them as a stranger any longer, but still, London was slipping away, receding from her, already turning from what was real into what was only recollected, or imagined, a trick of the light, like a mirage in the desert. Her moment of longing for Bokhara now felt like a premonition.

  It was not the same restaurant as the one Cesare Antonelli took her to, but it looked quite similar. Angela knew the man at the desk inside the door, and he said good evening and led them to a table in the corner with a view of all the other tables. Roxana noticed that none of the other diners glanced at her this time, and she didn’t feel the need to watch them either, or to compare her clothes with theirs. Instead of having to say and be what sounded right for the two men, she could speak as a friend to her two friends.

  The day after tomorrow she would be in Tashkent.

  To have Niki given back to her, even Niki imprisoned on such serious charges without trial and without a release date, was the best thing that could and would ever happen.

  Caught on the cusp between two worlds, this night made her glow with a rare happiness.

  They were all a bit drunk by now.

  They were still talking and laughing when, without any warning, Angela’s eyes filled up with tears. She gave a sob and then tried to cover it up, and Connie gently grasped her wrist.

  ‘Bugger it,’ Angela sniffed. ‘Sorry.’

  Roxana knew that Angela had just split up with her boyfriend. She guessed it was the man who had been with her in Suffolk, after the night of the storm, although she couldn’t be sure.

  Angela said, ‘I am going to give you some advice, Roxy. Don’t ever get involved with a married man. Conmen, nightclub owners, even ad men if you must. But never ever, take it from me, lose your heart or give your life to a man with a wife and children.’

  Roxana felt awkward, because of Connie and Mr Bunting. It came to her that even Angela did not know about this piece of Connie’s life, and when she met Connie’s dark eyes she saw that this was the case.

  ‘I will remember,’ she said carefully.

  Connie squeezed Angela’s hand. ‘Have some coffee.’

  Roxana tried to pay for the dinner, but they wouldn’t let her. Angela took one of about a dozen cards out of her wallet.

  ‘It’s on expenses. Pre-production meeting, St Petersburg shoot.’ The tears had dried up and she was smiling again.

  Connie and Roxana saw her into a taxi, and then took another back to Limbeck House.

  Roxana’s bag was packed, ready to go, and her room was bare except for the postcard.

  Connie went into her bedroom and came out with something draped over her arm.

  ‘Would you like to have this, as a goodbye present? The burglars didn’t take it. Probably too last season for them. I know it won’t be that much use in the desert heat, but as a souvenir?’

  It was the Chloé suede jacket that Roxana had once borrowed without Connie’s permission. She took it now and eased her arms into the sleeves. She couldn’t help stroking the soft lapels, and then giving a dancer’s pirouette.

  ‘Yes, I would love so much to have this,’ she said.

  She saw the direction of Connie’s glance, and laughed, because she had already thought of it. She eased the postcard off the wall, and gave it to her.

  Connie held out her arms and they hugged each other. It was a motherly and sisterly embrace, and it acknowledged that they were more equal than either of them had thought.

  ‘Maybe some day you will come to visit me and Niki in Uzbekistan,’ Roxana said.

  Noah took her to the airport.

  He didn’t want her to go, but there was no hope of her staying. Her brother had been delivered back from the dead, and there wasn’t a single card in the pack that he could play to trump that. He was happy for her, and bereft for himself.

  ‘Are you sure you will be able to get on the flight? And back into Uzbekistan, on an expired holiday visa?’

  She reassured him. The confidence and determination that had temporarily seeped away were back again.

  ‘At Tashkent I will have to pay some fine, for an expired visa, I think. Your people, the British, will be happy to see the back of me.’

  ‘I have never so not wanted to see anyone’s back.’

  He grasped the lapels of her denim jacket as if he coul
d physically prevent her from leaving. Noah had always hated goodbyes.

  She was so beautiful. He stared down into her eyes, then outlined her mouth with the tip of his finger, like some romantic loser in a date movie. He acknowledged to himself that that was quite close to what he was. He was losing her to Uzbekistan and history.

  ‘Roxana, you have to promise that you’ll call me, and email. I want to know about Niki. I want to know you’re safe and well.’

  ‘Yes.’ She pressed her warm mouth to his. ‘Noah?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Thank you for all the times we have had. You have been kinder to me than anyone else in my whole life. You and Connie.’

  If only we could leave Auntie Con out of this, Noah thought in despair.

  They were at the Departures line.

  ‘Tell your father I send him my best wishes,’ Roxana said.

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘It’s time for me to go,’ she whispered.

  ‘Roxana, wait. What about us?’

  For a second, he was going to ask her to marry him. That would solve everything.

  Gravely, she shook her head. ‘I am from Uzbekistan,’ she said.

  ‘Fuck that. I love you. I…’

  ‘Shhh.’ She placed her finger on his lips. ‘Don’t say any more.’

  They kissed each other, and then very firmly she put her hands on his arms and turned him to face away from the line. She gave him a gentle but definite push.

  ‘Are you coming back?’ Noah insisted.

  ‘Maybe one day I will come back,’ Roxana grinned. Then she shrugged, a fatalistic, comical gesture that was more eloquent than any words. ‘But…I never was an English girl, was I? I don’t think I ever will be.’

  She stepped back and blew him a kiss. Then she walked towards the departure gate and out of his sight.

  SEVENTEEN

  Connie had been travelling for almost a year.

  She had been working, writing music, and watching the constant flow of the crowds in a series of cities from Berlin to New York and Mumbai. She hadn’t been alone all the time: in New York she went to a Beethoven concert given by Sung Mae Lin, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Sébastian Bourret. The three of them had dinner afterwards, and she was even on the point of accepting their invitation to spend a weekend with them and their twin girls at their Long Island home. Seb confided that he had always believed they would be good friends, given time. But then Connie had a call to do some urgent rescue work on the musical score for a Bollywood/Pinewood joint film production, and she had flown out to Mumbai instead. There had followed a month of intense collaboration with people she didn’t know well, which had been stimulating but also very hard work. Afterwards she felt tired and full of a kind of shapeless desperation, so she thought a holiday might be a good idea. She went to China and travelled overland to Kashgar, a remote trading city in the far west that she had always wanted to visit.