Constance A Novel

TEN

October 1980

Hilda wanted a big wedding for Jeanette – a proper wedding, was the way she described it.

Jeanette gave the impression that she was going to perform like a feature out of Brides magazine, wearing an ivory slub-satin dress and carrying a bouquet of stephanotis and white freesias, just in order to please her mother, with the implication that if left to themselves she and Bill would really have been just as happy to slip off to the registry office in their ordinary clothes and be back at work the same afternoon. But Connie suspected that even though Jeanette was now a lab technician who would frugally walk almost three miles to work in order to put the tube fare into the savings fund she and Bill were building up towards the deposit on a flat, she was actually almost as in love with the full bridal notion as Hilda was.

Connie steered clear of most of the early discussions about arrangements.

She knew that Jeanette and Bill had settled on a date, and that a church and a location for the reception had also been chosen. Beyond that she partly chose to be vague because she didn’t want to think too much about Bill being her sister’s husband anywhere in the near future, and partly it was inevitable anyway because she worked at GreenLeaf Music from the moment the studios opened in the morning until the last person left at night, and then either went out or groped her way home to Perivale to sleep before starting over again. Her only real contact with Hilda and Jeanette was during Sunday lunches at Echo Street, and on some of these occasions Connie was concentrating too hard on staying awake or on facing down her hangover from Saturday night to take in much of what was being said.

She was taken aback, therefore, to realise that over one lunch the bridesmaid’s dress was being discussed with the understanding that she would be the one who was wearing it.

‘Apricot’s a nice warm colour, yes. But with Connie’s complexion, maybe there’s too much orange in it? What about a lovely pale blue?’

Connie chewed and swallowed a mouthful of Hilda’s granite-coloured roast lamb, and then put down her knife and fork. Bill was sitting directly opposite her at the kitchen table with which Hilda had recently replaced the old one that came with them from Barlaston Road. He flicked a glance at her, then ducked his head again. But not before Connie had seen the curl of his smile.

‘I don’t know anything about being a bridesmaid. Jeanette? What’s this? I don’t want to be a bridesmaid. Thank you, and all that.’

Patiently, Jeanette fluffed the blonde wings of her new shorter hairstyle over her ears, in case her hearing aids were protruding.

– Why not?

‘I just don’t. Get Jackie or Elaine.’

Hilda clicked her tongue. ‘Jackie’s due six weeks after the wedding, she can’t possibly do it. And Elaine, what will people think if she’s Jeanette’s bridesmaid and you aren’t?’

‘They’ll probably think how pretty Elaine is, and how lovely she looks in pale-blue satin. I’m just not doing it, all right? Anyway, wouldn’t it have been a nice idea maybe to ask me?’

Bill watched her. He wasn’t smiling now.

‘I’ve tried to talk to you about plans, I don’t know how many times, Connie. Haven’t we, Jeanette? You’re never, ever at that flat of yours, wherever it is. And even when someone else answers the phone they sound half-witted.’

That wasn’t surprising, Connie thought, given what went on. And it was true that she was rarely there. She was making unpredictable new friends, and it was fun to go out after work to drink with them in a noisy throng at the French pub or to fuel up with moussaka at Jimmyz.

‘And I can’t ring you at that place you work.’

‘No, please don’t. I’m not allowed to have personal calls.’

Connie felt fierce about GreenLeaf Music. After more than a year she was still only a glorified cleaner and messenger but she was learning, every day, and she was making herself useful. She was superstitiously afraid that if she relaxed her attention even for a moment, she would miss the one crucial detail that would enable her to impress Brian Luck or Malcolm Avery or one of the others.

‘Well, then. You see what I mean.’

Hilda was going to pursue the subject to the point of combustion, but Jeanette held up her hand.

– We’ll talk about it.

These days, Jeanette was very calm and practical.

After the apple pie and ice cream, Connie went out into the garden. She kicked damp leaves off the path and walked the short distance to the shed. A train rattled through the cutting and as another handful of yellow leaves drifted towards the earth she became aware that Bill had followed her outside. He took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, then stood on the path and looked at the cobwebs spun between the dead twigs of border plants.

‘Can I have one of those?’

He offered her the pack without comment, and struck a match for her. Connie inhaled and watched him through a slice of her hair.

‘What will you have to wear for this wedding?’

‘Lounge suit. Flower of some sort in buttonhole arrangement. Sheepish smile.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because I love Jeanette. Because if that’s all it takes for us to get married, it’s nothing. Even if I have to wear a Tarzan suit I’ll do it.’

Shit, shit, Connie thought. I didn’t want to hear that. The pain it caused her was like a meat skewer stabbing between her ribs straight into the thick muscle of her heart. She had to breathe in hard to stop herself actually wincing.

She managed to say, ‘I suppose you think that if I love Jeanette too, I should dress up in whatever she wants me to wear on her wedding day and be happy for her?’

Bill hesitated. ‘I think you should do what you decide is right, Connie.’

They were standing quite close together. There seemed to Connie to be a light directly behind Bill that gave him a bright outline and trapped tiny rainbow filaments in the nap of his clothing. She could see the fine hairs on his wrists and a pulse in his throat just above the line of his collar.

She wanted to confide in him about how she didn’t love Jeanette, not the way you were supposed to do when you were sisters, because sometimes she hated her and the rest of the time she felt mostly indifferent. She didn’t think he would even be that surprised. Bill had always given her the impression that he noticed and understood what went on at Echo Street. But the very idea of mentioning love, and Jeanette and herself, and including Bill in the equation, was much too dangerous.

She said with her teeth clamped together, ‘I’ll do what’s right, then. I’ll be a bridesmaid if I have to.’ But I’ll be doing it for you, she silently added. Just for you.

To her dismay, and choked delight, Bill put one arm around her and drew her close as she had seen him do with Jeanette.

‘Good,’ he said into her ear.

Connie shivered. She pulled away from him, hard, and threw the glowing end of her cigarette into the next garden. Bill watched its trajectory.

‘You should have put that out. You could start a fire.’

‘It’s soaking wet everywhere.’

‘But the man next door might just have left a crate of firelighters on his lawn.’

‘Yeah,’ Connie said. They both started laughing.

Before she left Echo Street that afternoon she told Jeanette and Hilda that she’d do it.

‘Well, now you’re talking sense, thank goodness. Why would any girl not want to be her sister’s bridesmaid?’ Hilda wondered.

Jeanette squeezed her arm with unusual warmth.

– I’m glad. Thank you. ‘All right. Just promise me that it won’t involve powder blue or baby pink.’

A busy period followed. GreenLeaf were commissioned to compose and record the music for the television serialisation of a Le Carré novel, and Malcolm Avery’s solution required a choir of twenty gospel singers that Connie had to book and then look after for two days. Next she found herself flying to Switzerland at two hours’ notice, to dress up as a Bavarian milkmaid and sing on camera for a chocolate ad. This was the first time she had been abroad. On the plane home one of the other musicians, drunk on duty-free whisky, told her that he loved her. It was fun. Connie was having a good time.

From a swatch of fabrics posted to her by Jeanette she chose a pale gold not-too-shiny satin. She examined the rough sketch that accompanied the material. The dress looked as if it would at least be quite plain, close-fitting, nothing too extreme.

The next thing she heard, she was summoned to a measuring and preliminary fitting. Jeanette’s dress and her own were being made by the sister-in-law of old Mrs Polanski, Connie’s one-time piano teacher. The dressmaker lived somewhere not very accessible, in Bow, and Hilda told Connie that to save time Bill would give her a lift from work. He was going to be in the West End that afternoon, and he could drive her out to Mrs Tesznar’s.

Connie walked down the gritty stairs. There was a session in progress, and a clash of cymbals and then a ponderous drum roll made the walls vibrate. She saw Bill from above, sitting on the battered sofa with musicians dashing past him and a slice of busy street visible through the open door. He was chatting to Sonia who worked on the reception and switchboard.

‘Hi,’ Connie said. He stood up at once.

‘Hi. Are you ready to leave?’

‘Yes, let’s go before anyone finds something else for me to do.’

‘Bye, Bill,’ Sonia called. She gave Connie a wink.

Outside it was smoky and damp, the lights were coming on and it was easy to remember that in only a couple of weeks’ time it would be winter-dark at five o’clock.

‘That’s an interesting place to work,’ Bill remarked. ‘Are you happy there?’

Connie skipped a couple of steps and he grinned down at her.

‘Yes. It’s really pretty cool, sometimes. Elvis Costello came in the other day with a keyboard player who was doing some work. He sat in reception in exactly the same place as you. Where’s your car?’

‘On a meter in Wardour Street. Actually, there’s been a change of plan. Hilda rang, with a message from Jeanette. There’s some drama with her dress, the woman’s cut it too big and there’s more complicated work to do. I’m not certain, but I think that’s the gist. Anyway, apparently they’re going to concentrate on that this evening and start on yours next week. So you and I are surplus to requirements tonight.’

Connie stopped walking and Bill bumped into her. They apologised simultaneously and Connie hesitated.

‘Does that mean you’ve got to go?’

‘Not really. I thought we might have a drink,’ Bill said. ‘You’ll pass for eighteen,’ he added.

Connie skipped again, full of excitement at the legitimate prospect of having Bill all to herself.

‘It’s only a few months off. I’m in pubs all the time.’

‘Are you really? Come on, then. There’s a place off Regent Street that’s quite respectable.’

‘What? What do you mean? I don’t need respectable.’

‘Maybe not. But I do.’

They went to a wine bar, densely furnished with twining plants in wicker baskets. Connie found herself sitting opposite Bill in a ferny alcove scented with damp earth, drinking wine and talking, talking as if a cork had been drawn out of her as well as from the bottle. She told him about Switzerland and the flat in Perivale and some of the friends she had made since leaving Echo Street.

‘You’re very independent, Con.’

‘I am, aren’t I?’

She gulped some more of her wine, feeling that what she was saying was interesting, and that Bill was very easy to talk to. People in work suits passed their alcove, carrying drinks. The volume of noise was rising.

‘Anyway, who else can you depend on but yourself?’

‘Family?’ he answered. ‘Friends?’

Bill talked a lot, too. She found out things about him that she had never known before. He had elderly parents and he had grown up as an only child in a suburb in the Midlands. His mother had suffered for years from agoraphobia, and rarely left the house.

Connie’s eyes widened. With her increasing freedom, she was just discovering the thrill of travel.

‘That’s tragic,’ she breathed. ‘Doesn’t she go anywhere?’

Bill grinned at her dismay. ‘No. And that means my dad doesn’t either. But they’re not unhappy, Con. There are many worse situations.’

He told her about the PR business he was setting up with two partners.

‘You can really make a difference. For instance, we’re doing some work for a charity that raises money to buy special wheelchairs made in Germany, for badly disabled children. We’ve just had a promise from the sports minister that he’ll look into putting some government backing into a nationwide series of wheelchair athletics, and we managed that because one of my partners is related in some way to Mrs T and got himself invited to a reception at Number Ten.’ He was leaning forward in his seat, full of enthusiasm. ‘It’s about connections, but not using those connections in a crass way. Of course, we have to take on some less – um – radiant accounts to underwrite that sort of work. But I love it, you know. You place a little piece in a newspaper for your client, and it’s worth thousands in direct advertising.’

Connie was dazzled. She could feel a hot wire running beneath her cheekbones. They had almost finished the wine, although Bill had drunk more than half.

‘It’s not that I’m fixated on making money,’ he said earnestly. ‘But I want to be able to take care of Jeanette, and our children if we have them. That’s not very modern-sounding, but it’s the truth. I know Jeanette could look after herself, of course she can, she’s the most determined and capable person I’ve ever met, but I want to make it so that she doesn’t have to. I do feel an extra responsibility because she’s deaf. Not that we’ve ever talked about it. She wouldn’t want to admit that her deafness makes any difference and I suppose I’ve joined her in a kind of conspiracy that it doesn’t matter, doesn’t really even exist. I’ve never spoken about this to anyone. Do you mind, Connie?’

‘No.’

Yes. But she didn’t want him to stop confiding in her.

‘It’s so good to talk to you. I can tell you that before I asked Jeanette to marry me, I thought very hard. But the deafness and her determination are so much part of the person she is, I can’t untangle them. I can’t say to myself I love this part of her and if she wasn’t that it would be easier for me. She’s a whole person and that’s the person I’m going to marry, and once I’d worked that out, it was simple. I knew what I had to do. I won’t let her down, you know. You can rely on that. I do love her very much.’

Bill drank the last inch of his wine. When he put his glass down his hands rested on the tabletop and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to Connie to reach out her own to cover them.

‘I know,’ she said. Although she did wonder, So why do you need to say it?

She stared very hard at some drops of wine that had spilled on the varnished wood.

He squeezed her hands and then released them.

‘Well. Time. I’ve got my car, too. I shouldn’t drive before having something to eat.’ He hesitated. ‘I wonder – shall we go somewhere and have dinner? I know you’ve got to get home. But at least it’s not all the way from Bow.’

‘Yes, let’s do that,’ Connie said hastily.

They went to a place a few doors further down the street. There were red tablecloths and oversized pepper grinders, and they ordered food without Connie paying an instant’s attention to what it was going to be. They were both reminded of La Osteria Antica and Uncle Geoff, and Bill did such note-perfect imitations of Uncle Geoff and the waiter’s Italian that Connie coughed into her third glass of wine and Bill had to thump her on the back until she caught her breath. She mopped her eyes with her napkin.

‘You’re not about to choke to death, are you?’ he asked.

She nodded, and laughed some more.

As they ate they went on talking. There seemed to be a lot to say, and there were none of the awkward pauses or sudden speaking over each other or moments of incredulity at what the other person was saying that Connie was used to with other men. It was like a dream to be facing Bill across the red tablecloth, sharing an order of fried potatoes, and at the same time it felt as natural and easy as it had in the wine bar.

This was an evening when nothing could go wrong, whatever she said or did. She was slightly drunk, but it was happiness and not wine that made her feel giddy.

Was this what being a couple was like?

She wondered if Jeanette felt like this every day. Probably she did.

She was telling Bill about finding out that she was adopted.

‘What did you feel?’ he asked.

She thought hard, because she wanted to give him a true answer.

‘It was the day of my dad’s funeral. That was why Elaine and Jackie were there. It was very bad, because it seemed to cut me off more from him. As if I didn’t quite have the same right as Jeanette and Mum to be sad, to miss him so badly, because I wasn’t his and he wasn’t really mine. I felt as if I’d been cut out of another picture, a completely different one, and I couldn’t blend back into the Echo Street family photograph any longer. It made me realise I probably never had done. In a way, after a while, that was a relief because it explained a lot of things that had bothered me and I’d never understood. Then I started wondering who I really was – Hilda didn’t tell me very much – and I made up for the loss of Constance Thorne and my dad by making up all kinds of fantasies for myself. Pretty childish ones. You know. Princesses and great tragedies and stupid stuff like that.’

She took a big swallow of wine. Bill was watching her face, and the sympathetic way he bent towards her made it suddenly seem vital that he shouldn’t feel any sorrier for her.

She added brightly, ‘I don’t do that any more. I’m fine about it. It’s probably quite an ordinary story.’

She almost said that the rest of the episode was the strange part. That she was taken into Echo Street, where Jeanette’s deafness at the centre of the house sent ripples of silence spreading outwards. Like one absence balancing another, nothing that mattered in the Thorne family was ever openly spoken about, not anger or death or disability or the vast mystery of her adoption. Outbursts of any kind were forbidden. Furniture was dusted, exams were passed, and funerals and weddings were done properly. Hilda saw to that, and Connie recognised with a flash of adult understanding that she maintained her rigid ways because she was afraid of the mess of exposure. The only time she had almost collapsed was when Tony died, and with Jeanette’s help she had fought her way back from that.

It was fear that made Hilda afraid. A sudden faint sympathy for her mother buckled and creaked under the skin of Connie’s antipathy.

Connie had opened her mouth to talk about Jeanette and her deafness, and the effect that it had had on both their childhoods. But she closed it again, like a fish. It was the one subject she found she couldn’t talk about to Bill, because, because…I do love her very much.

Another silence. Ironic, that’s what it was.

Connie wanted to laugh again but she suppressed the urge because she could already hear the crazy note it might contain. She was definitely drunk now. The room was blurred at the edges and her head felt as if it might float off her shoulders. Luckily she had had quite a lot of practice lately at dealing with these symptoms. She sat up straighter in her chair, took several deep breaths, and pinched the flesh of her thighs under the tablecloth to the point at which the pain became too much to bear.

Bill said, ‘Have you ever thought about finding your natural mother? It might be easier to know the story than to speculate about it. I think I read somewhere that adopted children can trace their original families now.’

‘I could. Maybe I will.’

He touched her wrist. ‘If you don’t want to do it on your own, and you might not want to involve Hilda or Jeanette, I’ll help you.’

She took these words inside her, wrapping them up with the knowledge that she could come back to them whenever she needed to.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I mean, thank you. I’d like to. It’s just, I haven’t decided anything yet. I’m at GreenLeaf and I go to the pub or a gig afterwards and then I get home and go to sleep and then it’s another day. I’m quite busy.’ A bubble of laughter did escape her now, like a breath of relief. Bill laughed too.

‘I see. I know. That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

She wasn’t waiting, she realised. Now was what counted, a perfectly crystalline moment, in this restaurant with Bill.

Her glass was empty, and so was her plate. Time had telescoped and the dinner was paid for and they were standing up with the table wobbling between them. They walked outside into the fine rain and hesitated, pulling up their coat collars under the shelter of the restaurant awning. Droplets glimmered on the scallops of canvas. Connie knew from past experience that fresh air was likely to affect her in one of two ways. Luckily, tonight her head cleared.

‘I’ll walk you to the tube,’ Bill murmured. They fell into step and without thinking about it Connie slipped her hand into his. Their fingers interlaced. She felt as if she had grown a million new nerve endings. Heat ran up her arm and radiated through her body. They were moving as if they were one person. She could feel his breathing in her chest, his words in her head before he uttered them.

‘Connie…’

They stopped walking. The small side street was deserted. Raindrops slanted into the puddles, splintering the reflected lights. She turned her face up to his and they kissed. The electric shock of it passed through them both and Connie heard his sharp intake of breath. They pressed their bodies closer, fitting shoulder and hip together, arms winding as they kissed more deeply.

‘Connie.’

With the greatest difficulty Bill stepped back and broke the circuit. He lifted his hands to cup her face, and Connie remembered the contrast between cold rain on her skin and the warmth in his fingers.

‘Don’t,’ he whispered. ‘We can’t do this.’

She crowded herself against him imploringly, but all he did was drop his hands to her shoulders and gently hold her at arm’s length.

‘This is not what you want,’ he insisted.

‘It is. It is.’

It was what he wanted too, she knew that whatever he might say to try to convince them both otherwise, and out here in the rain in the street emptied by the downpour – in this deserted world in which they seemed to be the only two living things – nothing and no one else mattered.

‘No. With somebody, yes. But not me. You’re seventeen, Con. Everything has still got to happen to you. And it will, I know that.’ He tried to inject conviction into the words.

Enough has happened already, Connie thought sadly. There were raindrops on her eyelids and lashes. She blinked quickly, and his face blurred. Bill’s thumbs smoothed the corners of her mouth and when he came into focus once more he was smiling down at her. Somehow he had made sure of himself again. He was Jeanette’s fiancé.

‘Come on, or we’ll get soaked. Let’s go for the tube,’ he said. He kissed her forehead, then took her arm and linked it beneath his, drawing her after him. From somewhere beyond herself Connie could see what they looked like. Like a Victorian brother and sister walking to church.

She was cold, and then hot, and then angry. She tramped through the puddles, careless of the icy water filling her shoes.

They turned a corner and a crowded bus churned past them. At the end of the street was the mouth of Oxford Circus tube station. When they reached it the fuggy, familiar smell rose up the steps and they were caught up in the crowd of people hurrying for shelter.

The lights in the ticket hall were very bright. Connie winced and ducked her head, not wanting Bill to see the confusion of her anger, nor that she was close to tears.

‘Have you got a ticket?’ he was asking.

‘I’m not twelve.’

‘I know that, Con. I really do.’

She took a breath and lifted her head. ‘I’m going home now. Thanks for dinner.’

Their eyes met then, and reflected shock and uncertainty and a glimmer of pure madness. Bill blinked.

‘What happened back there was my fault,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry.’

Connie marshalled herself. ‘It was just a kiss,’ she said precisely. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ Then she flicked him a smile. ‘See you,’ she said, and turned to the ticket barrier.

She was in love with Bill Bunting.

She had no option but to be nonchalant now. She would have to be nonchalant and sisterly around him for the rest of eternity; her pride depended on it. As she descended into the depths she searched inside herself for the vestiges of anger. Anger was good; better than despair. Anger was cauterising.

Bill stood and watched her go. Her dark head and thin, square shoulders floated down the Central Line escalator and sank out of his sight. It was as if a part of himself had just been torn away.

He wanted to call her back. He wanted to leap over the barrier and chase after her, but he denied the impulse.

Where could it lead, but into pain?





The wedding was predictable, or slightly worse than Connie might have predicted. Her dress was too tight, and the gold satin turned out to be much shinier than it had appeared in the sample. Jeanette was ravishing – happiness transformed her china prettiness into serious beauty. Uncle Geoff walked her up the aisle, and at the altar she turned to Bill and her smile lit up the church. Bill looked proud and pleased. In his speech at the reception he praised Jeanette’s lovely bridesmaid and thanked Hilda for her generosity in the same sentence.

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 just 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.

Connie thought she might feel a small satisfaction that they had a secret between the two of them, but instead there was a hopeless weight bearing down on her, bending her neck and compressing her spine and making it difficult for her to expand her lungs. Her decision to trace her mother was private to her, and Bill would respect that, even – maybe especially – where Jeanette was concerned. Months ago he had offered to help her, and he was doing no more than keeping his promise.

‘Well. Thank you again,’ she murmured.

Bill shifted sideways on his plastic seat and looked out of the café window. A crack ran diagonally from the bottom corner and it had been sealed with brown parcel-tape.

‘We’ll come back and talk to the people in the house. That’s the next thing to do.’

‘Perhaps.’ With the weight pressing down on her, Connie had lost her enthusiasm for detective work. She changed her tone and asked brightly, ‘How’s Noah?’

Bill smiled. ‘He’s great. He’s sitting up. His favourite game is banging saucepans with a wooden spoon. And how is Sam?’

‘Sam is fine, thank you.’

‘Good,’ Bill said. He began rubbing the skin at the corner of his jaw with the side of his thumb. Connie knew by now that he only did this when he felt unhappy. She was sorry for him, and she was sorry for herself too because he was so near to her and familiar and necessary, and also absolutely desirable and equally forbidden. Love and what she hoped was contrary determination made her sit up and reach for her bag.

‘Come on,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve got to get back to work. They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’