Constance A Novel

ELEVEN

‘The weather forecast’s not that great,’ Connie said. She put her foot down and overtook a horsebox with wisps of straw rustically blowing out of the tailgate. ‘I was hoping it would be sunny.’

Roxana laughed delightedly. She laced her arms beneath her long thighs and hugged herself.

‘I am not worried about sunny,’ she said. ‘Today I am going to see the sea.’

In Uzbekistan the sun blazed relentlessly out of an invariable, dust-whitened sky, or else it was harsh winter. But the weather in England was for ever changing from sun to rain and back again, with an endless sequence of halfway states in between those two. Sometimes there was even rain and sun at the same time, and the wind could chase away heavy grey clouds and leave a sparkling sky in the space of a single hour.

‘We’ll be there quite soon,’ Connie told her. They were driving towards the east coast, for the first part of the way following the same route that she had taken with Hilda and Jeanette and Bill on the day of the long-ago engagement picnic.

Connie made the simple plan and Roxana told Mr Shane that she would not be working for one night. He frowned and said that he preferred to employ dancers who wanted to dance, not take half the week off.

‘Just this once,’ she coaxed. ‘A friend of mine has invited me to make a trip to the sea. This will be my first time.’

At last, grudgingly, he agreed that she could go.

Connie caught some of Roxana’s excitement. They accelerated out of London as if they were heading for somewhere much more exotic than the Suffolk coast.

‘What did Noah say about this outing, by the way?’ Connie asked.

Noah hadn’t been very pleased.

‘What is it with you about Auntie Con, Roxy? If you’re actually going to take time off work wouldn’t you rather come for a lovely weekend at the seaside with me?’

He coiled his arm round her waist and tried to pull her closer to him, but Roxana held herself just a little apart. Noah could sometimes be more affectionate than she really wanted him to be. Occasionally she could feel her resistance to his demands breaking out all over her skin in tiny tremors of impatience. Of course, she told him, she would have liked to go to visit the beach with him. But Connie had invited her, and it was very kind of her, and so they were going.

‘Is it still so far?’ Roxana asked now, peering through the windscreen as if she could make the waves materialise out of the fields ahead. ‘I thought England was only a small country, but it seems very big.’

Now it was Connie’s turn to laugh. It was like having a child in the car on Christmas Eve.

They turned eastwards, off the main road, and drove across a flat landscape hummocked with gorse. As they approached the coast the sky hollowed out and the light turned hazy.

Connie had given some thought to where would be the best place for them to make the first sighting. She knew this part of the coast because Sébastian had conducted a series of concerts at the Aldeburgh music festival a few miles away. While he was rehearsing she had driven for hours, exploring the salty inland creeks and the shingle spits that poked out into the changeable sea. She had taken long, solitary beach walks and sheltered with her book in hollows in the sand dunes. Thinking back to this time, as she headed down narrowing roads, it occurred to her that she had been lonely. She was glad of Roxana’s company now. Her anticipation of reaching the sea suddenly sharpened to match her passenger’s.

At last the lane swung into a sharp bend and petered out. There was a cluster of wood and tar huts around a patch of broken tarmac dusted with sand, and beyond them an undulating line of dunes.

‘Is this it?’ Roxana asked.

Connie opened the car door. A gust of salty air swept in.

‘Yes. Can’t you smell it?’

Roxana sprang out. The beach café was closed and theirs was the only car in sight. Seagulls shifted on the ridge of the nearest hut, a rusted tin ice-cream sign swung and creaked in a rising wind and the undertone was the constant dull murmur of breaking waves. Connie pointed to a rough path through the marram grass, up the slope of the dune. Roxana’s eyes were wide with expectation now.

They started out at a walk but Roxana’s pace quickened as the path led upwards and for the last few feet they were sprinting, sinking into the loose sand with the grass and sea thistle clawing at their ankles. Neck and neck, panting, they reached the crest of the dune.

The fierce onshore wind snatched their breath away. Roxana would have exclaimed, but all that came out of her lungs was a gasp.

A curve of coastline expanded like a scribble of silver wire, from a low headland to the north away southwards to the dull glimmer of a tiny, toy-sized town etched against the sky and water in the far distance. The two extremities were joined by the broken combs of surf, rolling out of the mass of sea and pounding on the vast sweep of shingle. Towards the still horizon, patches of water shone an unearthly pale gold where sun broke through the towering clouds. Seagulls looped and screamed over the waves.

Roxana galloped down the steep face of the dune, straight to the gentler slope of shingle beach. She staggered as the surface changed, managed to right herself, and ran the few steps onwards to the sea. The tide was at its highest point and the waves smashed in front of her at hip height. A yard from the water she spun round and waved her arms to Connie in a wide, exuberant arc. Her mouth was a slash of glee. She kicked off her clumpy sandals and even as Connie was racing towards her, the wind snatching her shouted warning and hurling it away, Roxana dashed straight into the surf.

For an instant she was a flat shape, a cartoon of limbs cut out against a lacework of receding water. Then with the sea sucking at her calves she stumbled on the lip of a shelf, where the beach dropped invisibly away. The next wave smashed against her and knocked her off her feet, her laughter turning into a shriek of alarm. As Connie reached the waves, Roxana was thrown forwards in a tumble of surf and then dragged away in the undertow.

Connie gasped with the shock of the cold water as a wave slapped her thighs. For two seconds that stretched into an age she lost sight of Roxana under the surf. Then she spotted her, arms and legs flailing.

She had never seen the sea.

Of course she couldn’t swim.

Roxana went under again.

Connie threw herself into the waves and kicked off to the point where she had seen her disappear. The water was icy and the beach shelved very steeply. Another wave caught her and she paddled hard to crest it, then glimpsed Roxana in the next trough. She swam as fast as she could towards her and as the undertow caught her they were thrown together. Roxana flung her arms around her neck, yelling words Connie couldn’t understand as she was dragged down. With a massive effort Connie broke free from Roxana’s grasp and caught her under the arms. Another wave smashed over their heads.

There was a swirl of green water and then darkness as they tumbled over. Connie had no air in her lungs. She clenched her teeth, willing herself to hold on against the bursting pain in her chest and the urge to breathe.

Then the water rolled backwards again and somehow she was the right way up and still holding on to Roxana. Their heads broke the surface. Connie gulped in a lungful of air and kicked towards the pewter gleam of the shingle. Roxana churned in the water beside her, heavy as a barrel, but Connie’s efforts and the next wave together flung them over the lip of the shelf and their arms and legs and cheeks were suddenly scraping the sharp pebbles. Connie clawed herself to her knees and hoisted Roxana beside her. Struggling before the next wave hit them she staggered to her feet and dragged her burden into the lacy curl of foam and detritus at the high-water mark. She tottered another couple of steps, grasping both Roxana’s wrists, and then they collapsed beyond the reach of the sea.

Roxana lay in a heap on the shingle. She coughed and opened her eyes. Her eyelashes were glued into spikes with salt and mucus and her face was a mask of superficial scratches and grey-black dribbles of ruined mascara.

Connie knelt beside her.

‘You’re all right,’ she kept repeating. ‘It’s all right. You weren’t going to drown.’

Roxana began to shiver. Within seconds her teeth were chattering.

Connie made her sit up.

‘In a minute,’ she said with her mouth close to the girl’s ear, ‘we’re going to stand up and walk slowly back to the car. Then when we’re out of this wind we can get dry and warm again.’

The thunder of the waves was getting louder, and the wind was rising. Connie helped Roxana to her feet. Slowly, holding on to each other and coughing to clear the salt from their lungs, they plodded like wounded creatures to the slope of the dune and began the ascent. Connie was shivering too.

At the summit, Roxana shook herself like a dog. Drops of water spun out of her hair and her clothes. She looked backwards at the pounding waves.

‘My God,’ she gasped.

As soon as they descended it was quieter, and almost warm. They trudged through the sand and Connie had a moment of panic before she discovered that the car keys were still wedged in her sodden back pocket.

‘It’s all over now,’ she told Roxana.

It was less than ten minutes since they had left the car park.

It was only when they had stripped off the outer layers of wet clothes and were in the warmth of the car that Roxana spoke. She sat in the passenger seat, staring towards the dunes as if what lay beyond might still reach out for her. Her lips were blue.

She started to gabble. ‘I am so sorry, Connie, to be stupid and make you jump into the sea for me. Don’t be angry with me.’

‘I didn’t expect you to run straight in, or I’d have warned you, but of course I’m not angry. You’re safe, that’s all that matters. Are you warmer now?’

‘You saved my life.’

Connie said, ‘No. No, nothing nearly as heroic as that. They were big waves and the sea took you by surprise, that’s all.’

‘You saved my life,’ Roxana kept repeating.

Connie started up the car and drove to the nearest village. There was nowhere to buy dry clothes and Roxana looked in urgent need of a hot drink.

‘Let’s go in here,’ Connie said. There was a teashop open in the main street. She gave Roxana an old jumper she unearthed from the car’s boot, and wrapped herself toga-style in a picnic rug. The teenaged waitress stared at their costumes and at the fresh grazes on Roxana’s face, but fortunately they were the only customers.

Connie put a cup of hot tea into Roxana’s hands.

‘We weren’t going to drown, you know. It was just the shock and cold, and losing your balance. You’d never seen the sea before, you didn’t know what to expect,’ she comforted her.

‘But I think in England many, many people must die by drowning.’

‘Some do,’ she conceded. ‘But not us.’

Roxana put down her teacup. She stared at Connie. ‘I didn’t want to die. When I was under the water and it was filling my mouth and eyes, I was thinking no, no, it’s not time for me, I am in England now and I have met Connie, and Noah, and soon all the dreams I had in Uzbekistan will come true, and now I’m going to die and everything is wasted.’

Connie said gently, ‘That’s a good response, isn’t it? To know that life is precious and you can’t bear to lose it?’

Finally Roxana nodded. ‘I am still alive. I will try harder to be who I want.’ Her gaze was fixed on Connie’s face as if she could draw the essence out of her.

Connie was thinking that when the time came, she didn’t want to die without knowing what she wanted to live for. A sense of isolation descended on her. What was she doing, sitting here with Roxana, in a place she was familiar with only because of Seb’s absence?

Suddenly she longed for Bill. She wanted to hear his voice, to close her eyes and touch her forehead to his, submerging herself in the comfort of him.

No. No, you can’t wish for that. Not now, not ever.

To Connie’s dismay, Roxana’s eyes had flooded with tears. The girl bent her head to hide it, but it was too late.

The waitress, idling beside her display of scones, was pretending not to eavesdrop.

‘What’s wrong, Roxana? What is it?’ Connie implored.

But Roxana would not be drawn. She screwed up the paper napkin that had been placed underneath her mug and scrubbed at her face with it, then winced as she rediscovered the grazes.

‘If you’ve finished your tea, let’s go,’ Connie said quietly. ‘We won’t find anywhere to buy clothes this late in the afternoon. I think we should stay up here tonight. You can have a hot bath, and we’ll dry out our things and go home in the morning.’

They drove along the coast towards the town that had been visible in the far distance. The weather was deteriorating and the sea was an angry expanse of white horses.

Connie called ahead and booked two rooms in a pub she had once been to with Seb, across the road from the sea front. She saw Roxana into her room and told her to take a hot bath, then went to her own and tried to read until it was time for dinner. The print kept dancing in front of her eyes.

When she descended again she found Roxana waiting for her in the bar with an unopened bottle of wine and two glasses on a tray. Apart from the scratches on her face she looked her normal self again. She leapt up as soon as she saw Connie, her mouth wide in a smile.

‘I want to say thank you for saving my life.’

The barman opened the wine for them and Connie raised her glass to Roxana.

‘I hauled you out of the water, no more than that. But here’s to life. Here’s to us.’ Whoever we both are…

‘To life and us,’ Roxana echoed in triumph. She was exuberant with relief and pleasure in being alive, and her elation rubbed off on Connie. The wine quickly disappeared, and Connie ordered a second bottle.

They ate dinner in the restaurant off the bar, which was decorated with nets and fishing floats.

Roxana kept shaking her head in wonderment. ‘That sea, my God. It was not blue and smooth as glass, and there was no white sand like there is in my picture. I could not see one single palm tree, only grey stones. And such cold. Like Siberia, I should think. I thought my breath would never come again.’

‘Your picture’s of Thailand. The sea can sometimes be blue in England in September – but not all that often, come to think of it. There are no palm trees here. Well, maybe there are in Bournemouth or Torquay, I’m not sure. I should have told you more beforehand, and most of all I should have warned you that the North Sea wasn’t going to look anything, nothing at all, like Koh Samui. I was so concerned with not spoiling the impact that I didn’t think hard enough. I’m sorry you were disappointed.’

Roxana’s eyes opened wider.

‘Disappointed? I was not, not one bit. That sea, it was like a wild monster. It was alive, roaring, coming to swallow us up. I have never seen a sight like the waves coming, and to be caught by it like that, snatched up in its jaws and shaken, I could not ever have imagined such a thing. I have lived only in Uzbekistan, you know. The desert is a different animal. It lies coiled up like a snake, heavy, and only a very few times does it move. It is dangerous always, but not like your sea. I will never forget today, if I live for ever.’

‘No,’ Connie smiled. ‘I don’t think you will forget.’

It was only the very young and determined, she was thinking, who could conceive of living for ever.

Jeanette had been intending to return to work at the centre for taxonomic studies today. Connie found herself wondering how she had managed it.

‘You are the heroine,’ Roxana insisted.

‘No. Really. I’ve swum off this coast before, that’s all.’

‘To me, you are.’

‘You’d better not tell Noah I led you into trouble.’

Roxana nodded. ‘If you think that is best, I will not say a word to him.’

‘I didn’t mean you had to keep it a secret,’ Connie laughed.

The second bottle was empty and they had finished their dinner. They could hear the whump of waves driving against the sea wall. Spray hit the windows with a rattle like thrown gravel. In the bar the barman was polishing glasses, talking to a fisherman about the storm at sea.

‘Rough night,’ said the fisherman.

‘Good night, ladies,’ the barman called.

Connie went to bed and slept for three or four hours, then woke up again. For a few minutes she lay listening to the wind and the pounding waves. She waited to see if she was going to fall asleep again, but the roar of the surf swelled until it pressed inside the bones of her skull. She sat up, switched on the light and got out of bed. When she pulled aside the curtains, the streetlights on the sea front seemed to flicker through the streaming rain and spray. As she pressed her forehead against the chilly glass she heard the floorboards creak in the next room. The storm had woken Roxana, too.

She returned to bed and picked up her book. She heard a soft knocking. Roxana was standing out in the corridor, wearing her jacket with big buttons over a long T-shirt.

She said in a small voice, ‘I am afraid that the waves will knock this house down.’

‘No. It’s quite safe. Come in here.’

Roxana followed her in. The room was small, and the only place to sit apart from on the double bed was the stool in front of the old-fashioned dressing table. They caught each other’s eyes and started laughing.

Roxana raised her shoulders to her ears. ‘I don’t understand this sea of yours,’ she repeated.

‘I know. But this pub has probably been standing here for three hundred years, and the storm will have blown itself out by the morning.’

Connie opened the minibar and took out a couple of miniatures. ‘Let’s see. Whisky? Or brandy?’

‘Either one.’

‘Sit on the bed. Might as well be comfortable if we’re going to have a small-hours drinks party.’

They stretched out, side by side, and Roxana let her head fall back against the pillows. Companionably, they lay and listened to the sea.

‘Such waves. It is like…nothing I know, that’s the truth. I am trying to imagine. Maybe, let me think, this little room is like a ship. Maybe we are in a wreck. We have to cling on for our lives.’ She gripped the edge of the mattress as if she was about to be tossed into the depths. ‘I am lucky, and so are you, Connie. We are alive on our ship, and we are not going to drown. Not today. Maybe never.’

Roxana reached for her glass and drank. The rim clinked against her teeth.

‘I wish my brother was on our ship with us.’

‘Yes.’

‘But Niki is not lucky. Not at all. He did not travel to England, and he has not been into the sea, like me.’

‘Were you thinking about him, this afternoon in the café?’

Roxana didn’t answer. Her chin was tipped forwards and she was staring at the tumbler balanced on her diaphragm.

‘You could talk about him, if you wanted,’ Connie gently prompted.

The glass clinked again as Roxana drank.

‘I cried more for myself, if you want to know the truth,’ she said abruptly. ‘There is no point in tears for him, because he is dead. He did not have much life, and now it is over. Me, I am still here without him.’

‘Go on.’

‘Go on to what?’

‘Well. Let’s see. What happened to your brother? And to you? Why are you here, in this ship? And where are you sailing to?’

‘That is many questions, Connie.’

‘You don’t have to answer. You can tell me to shut up, if you like. Or you could take them one at a time.’

There was a silence.

‘I will be needing more whisky, to talk so much.’

‘That can be arranged.’

Connie slid off the bed and opened the minibar again.

‘My brother Niki, I told you about him, that time in the garden at Noah’s house. He was two years older than me. Even when times were very bad, he was funny, and brave, and always company. Then, because my friend Yakov helped me, I was able to go to Tashkent, away from our stepfather and from our home in Bokhara, to study the dance. Niki, when he grew older, became more serious. He went to the madrassah with his friends, he read the Koran and went to the mosque. But he was not angry; Niki was never an extreme person. He believed only in each person’s right to follow their beliefs, without threat from the government. But that is not easy to do, in our country.

‘When I was away Niki went with his friends to stay in Andijan, which is in the far east of Uzbekistan, in the Fergana Valley. This is a very poor place, very traditional. There was an uprising there, a protest because some men were arrested for religious crimes. I am not sure if this was right or wrong, but the protest grew in Andijan until thousands of people were gathered in the square before the government houses. Then soldiers came and sealed off the square, and they started shooting.

‘Many hundreds of men and women were killed. This was exactly one year and four months ago.’

Connie waited.

‘I didn’t hear from my brother, not a word. I feared for two months, then I went by bus to Fergana and in Andijan at last I found one of his friends who was not in prison or already dead. This boy told me that he had seen Niki that day. It was raining, the stones of the square were shining with water. Then the tanks and soldiers came, and the bullets. People were running and screaming and falling down, and then the stones shone with blood. He said to me that when he saw Niki he was lying on the ground and people were tripping over him and he didn’t move. He was dead, this friend told me. I hope he did not suffer much.’

‘Roxana, I’m so sorry. Was there any compensation, or a trial, or an official inquiry?’

She waved her hand. ‘This uprising was said to be a crime of extremist people who were unlawfully trying to create a state for Islam in Fergana. That is the way it is, in my country. It is sad, and life there is hard for many of us. But there are also beautiful places and good people, I have not forgotten that.

‘Without Niki, there was no reason left for me to stay. My stepfather Leonid is a bad man. But Yakov, who was my mother’s good friend, and who has some care for me too…he helped me to get a passport, and a visa from the British embassy to come to England for a tourist visit. So here I am, and now I will be a new Roxana. Since I have luckily not drowned in the sea, after all.’

‘Was it Yakov who helped you with the dance studies and taught you to speak English so well?’

‘Yes.’

‘He must be a good man. Is he still in Uzbekistan?’

‘In Bokhara. He is like men are, you know. Some good parts, some bad. I have not always done the best things in my life, Connie, but I have done what it seemed needful to do. And I am glad that you think my English is good. I try hard.’

‘Your English is excellent. You know – if I can do anything to help you, I will.’

‘You have let me stay in your home, that’s quite enough. I am saving all my money and soon I’ll have an apartment of my own.’

‘Soon you will be ruling the world,’ Connie murmured, only half-joking. She was wondering what Noah’s long-term chances were with this girl of his.

‘I hope so. So that’s my life,’ Roxana smiled. ‘Not much like yours. Your life is beautiful.’

Connie considered. In most of the ways she could bring to mind, compared with what Roxana had actually described and the likely history behind that, it was true. Her life was enviable.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘In some ways. Although like most people’s lives, probably, it feels different inside from the way it looks.’

‘Tell me one thing. Why do you not have a husband?’

Connie took a mouthful of her drink. ‘Never met the right man,’ she said lightly.

Roxana gave her a hard look. ‘How can that be right? You are pretty and you are rich, and you are a good person. If I was a man I would ask you to marry me right now.’

‘Thank you. But if you were a man, I would also have to want to marry you. It takes two to make that decision, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, you are right.’ There was a pause. ‘Noah told me, you and his mother are not real sisters.’

‘Oh yes, we’re sisters. Not by blood, but we’re sisters just the same. I am only just realising it, but our childhood together made us that. There are times in my life that only Jeanette remembers, and times in hers that only I do.’

Connie was surprised by the speed and ease with which she made this admission, but there was no doubt in her mind that it was the truth. Even though she and Jeanette had never shared even a single hour of drink and talk like this one.

‘Me and Niki, too. When you lose that person, and your memories, it is like a death of part of you.’

I should be with Jeanette right now, Connie thought. That’s where I belong.

‘Noah said to me that it is difficult in your family, for years you did not see him and Mr and Mrs Bunting.’

‘Did he say that? And did he tell you why?’

‘In about one word only.’

‘That was a bit indiscreet of him.’

‘Maybe. But,’ she puffed out a breath, ‘I’m a stranger. What do I matter?’

‘It all happened a long time ago,’ Connie mused. And it might just as well have been yesterday, she thought.

She closed her eyes and let her mind wander. She was drowsy, and the din of the wind and waves had become soothing.

‘Shall we try to sleep for a bit?’ she murmured. When she turned her head on the pillow, she saw that Roxana had already drifted off.





It was daylight when she woke again. Roxana was still asleep, lying on her side with the bunched pillow creasing her cheek. She looked very young. Connie slid out from under the bedclothes, taking care not to disturb her. With an awkward, motherly gesture she pulled the covers up over the girl’s shoulders.

When she came out of the bathroom, showered and dressed, Roxana was up and gazing out of the window.

‘Look,’ she said. Huge, glassy waves were driving against the sea wall and occasionally breaking over into the road. A delivery van crawled past, sending up grey plumes of seawater. It had stopped raining, and there were streaks of brightness showing in the fleecy sky. ‘Let’s go out.’

‘You want to risk it again?’

‘Of course I want to, before we have to go back to London.’

The pub’s breakfast room was heavy with the smell of frying. Connie thought that when Roxana had seen enough of the sea they might try to find a coffee place. They went out into the salt air and ran along the road beside the sea wall, listening for the warning thump of the biggest waves and then dodging the spray that came over the wall. Roxana was radiant with exhilaration.

Ahead of them stood the lifeboat station. There was a knot of cars beside it, men in orange oilskins and a scramble of other people. Connie pointed and shouted.

‘I think they might be going to launch the lifeboat.’

‘What is this?’

In the shelter of a sea-front kiosk they stood to watch. There was a whine of power winches and the high prow of the boat emerged from the station and rocked above the short slipway. It dipped forwards, gathered momentum and crashed into the sea, sending up a double arc of water almost as high as the mast. It wallowed dangerously and then as the propellers bit the water it corkscrewed forwards. The orange blobs of the crewmen swarmed on the heaving deck.

Roxana’s eyes were completely round.

A man in chest-waders passed by. Connie asked him what was happening.

‘Trawler with engine trouble. They’re going to take the crew off.’

‘What?’ Roxana repeated. Connie told her what the lifeboat did and she shook her head in amazement.

‘I think these brave men must be paid a lot of money.’ The boat was breasting the huge waves, heading straight out to sea.

‘No, it’s voluntary. They do it for nothing.’

‘My God,’ Roxana breathed. ‘My God.’

They watched it go.

‘I think I’m ready for a cup of coffee,’ Connie said firmly, once it was out at sea. She steered Roxana into the town. Shaking the drops of spray off their hair, they opened the door of a new coffee shop.

There were only two other customers, sitting knee to knee at a corner table away from the big windows that overlooked the street. Connie glanced at them, and then stopped in her tracks.

It was Angela with Rayner Ingram.

There was no way that either pair could pretend not to notice the other, although Angela and Rayner would clearly have preferred it.

‘Ange, hello,’ Connie called, trying to inject sympathy and apology into her smile. Angela looked as if she might have been crying. It was clear that they had been arguing.

‘Connie? I mean, what are the chances of this happening? Rayner and I are…up here scouting locations for a shoot.’

‘Why don’t you join us?’ Rayner drawled. He hooked a chair forwards.

Connie said, because there was no alternative, ‘Well, for a quick coffee. We’ve just been watching the lifeboat go out. This is Roxana, she’s my nephew’s girlfriend and she’s staying with me at the flat while she’s working in London.’

‘Hi,’ Roxana said. Rayner looked at her as she folded herself into a chair.

They ordered breakfast. Angela put on a pair of glasses with tinted lenses and with her little finger surreptitiously smeared some coloured gloss on her lips. Chiming in together, Connie and Angela told Roxana about the Bali shoot. Adopting her enforced-contact-with-a-highly-contagious-disease face, Angela said she had been doing some more work with Tara. Rayner curled his arm over to reach the back of his head and raked his hair with his fingers.

‘You did well out there, working with that bunch,’ he told Angela, and her tense expression softened at the compliment. He added to Connie, ‘The commercials turned out a treat, considering the problems we had. The bank loved them. Blinding music, by the way. Awards material, no question.’

‘Thank you, Rayner.’

Roxana watched and listened. Connie could feel the forcefield of her concentration on these new people.

‘What are you doing in London?’ Angela asked in her friendly way.

Quickly Roxana answered, ‘I am going to study, English and business. I have some part-time work, not very interesting, and Connie is very kind to let me stay with her for now. I am from Uzbekistan.’

‘I thought you might be Russian,’ Rayner put in. He stirred his coffee and raised one eyebrow as he drank.

‘My father was from Novosibirsk, my mother from Bokhara, where I was born. I speak Russian, of course.’

‘We’re just setting up some work in St Petersburg. It’s not the easiest location to shoot in,’ Rayner sighed.

‘You have to know the people,’ Roxana smiled. ‘I do not mean the people individually, of course, but I think no one from the West knows how a Russian thinks. The only person who does is another Russian.’

Connie waited, wondering if Roxana was now going to ask for a job, and if so how she would go about it. But all she did was bite into a triangle of toast and smile again. ‘It is more interesting to be in England. Yesterday, for example, was the first time in my life I saw the sea. And I almost drowned. Connie saved me.’

Rayner’s eyebrow flicked again. Angela wanted to hear what had happened so Connie told them, relating it as a comedy rather than a drama. Roxana kept chipping in with contradictions, making it sound as though Connie had hauled her from the jaws of death. Angela laughed. She was enjoying herself enough to remove the shield of her glasses.

‘Is this actually the same day you’re both talking about?’

‘Oh, yes. I was there,’ Roxana insisted.

Rayner turned his chair a little aside to take a call on his BlackBerry, then began checking his messages. Breakfast was clearly over.

‘We’re heading back to London today,’ Connie said.

‘But I would like to know first that the lifeship has not sunk.’

Angela corrected Roxana, ‘It’s lifeboat. That’s the first slip I’ve heard you make, though. Is your Russian as good as your English?’

‘Much better. Russian and Uzbek, these are my own languages.’

Angela nodded thoughtfully. Rayner put away his mobile and looked at his watch.

‘We’re going to have to make a move. We’ve got a couple more locations to check out,’ Angela said at once. She gathered up the papers and notes she had piled on the table. Connie wished she didn’t always jump with such alacrity to do what Rayner wanted. ‘Amazing to bump into you like this. I’ll call you, Con. We’ll have that movie night together.’

Rayner was ready to leave. He raised one hand in an allpurpose salute and settled his sunglasses on his nose. Angela was looking through her wallet. She found a card and handed it to Roxana.

‘All set, Angie?’ Rayner asked, as if she was keeping him waiting.

‘Bye,’ Angela said to both of them.

After they had gone, Roxana tucked the card away in her plastic zipper purse. ‘Your film people are very interesting, I think.’

Back on the sea front beside the lifeboat station, they learned from the onlookers that the trawlermen had all been taken off. Connie said she didn’t think they had time to stay to watch the boat come in again.

‘I know,’ Roxana sighed. ‘We have work. Always the same story.’

But as they drove up the small hill that led out of the town, she begged Connie to stop for a moment. She scrambled out of the car and stood looking at the sea. In the distance the lifeboat could just be seen, pitching through the waves on the way back to the shore. Roxana stared at it, and sucked in a great gulp of the salt air, as if she were trying to fill her eyes and lungs and carry the coast away with her.

Once they were finally out of sight and sound of it, and the nacreous light was fading into flat grey over the fields, she shook her head and gave a deep sigh.

‘Amazing. Totally amazing,’ she sighed. ‘Thank you for showing it to me.’

Connie noticed that she gave the pronouncement exactly the same upwards inflection as Angela would have done.

‘I enjoyed myself more than I’ve done for ages,’ Connie said with a smile, and it was the truth.





‘How is Jeanette tonight?’ Connie asked Bill on the phone that evening, once Roxana had gone off to work.

‘Not very good,’ he told her. ‘She was practically transparent with exhaustion when I got her home. She went straight up to bed. I couldn’t persuade her even to try to eat something. I don’t see how she can go back tomorrow, although she insists that she will.’

‘She wanted so much to prove she was still strong enough to do some work, didn’t she?’

‘Not to me, or Noah, or you.’

‘To herself,’ Connie said, stating the obvious. ‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ she promised.

‘Have you been away?’ Bill asked.

‘Just one night, in Suffolk. I took Noah’s Roxana, she wanted to see the sea and we ended up staying over. I’ll tell you about it.’

‘I’d like to hear.’

His voice in her ear was as warm as ever, and as familiar, but there was also a note of imprecision in it.

Everything else, all their history together, the joy and the long denial, now seemed compacted and whittled down to this single, brittle point of caring between them for Jeanette.

‘Tomorrow,’ Connie repeated softly.


Jeanette was sitting in her chair with a shawl round her shoulders. She was looking out into the garden, a green and buff expanse of fading leaves and grass now, with the evening sunlight slanting on spiders’ webs. It was a moment before she sensed that Connie was there, but then she turned her head. Her eyes burned in their deep sockets.

– I had to come home today after just two hours.

‘That must have been tough.’

– I opened my files. I sat there. My head was useless. Everyone looked at me, then pretended not to. Full of sympathy. Embarrassed, as well. Other people’s weakness is embarrassing, isn’t it? I felt as if I was already dead.

‘No,’ Connie tried to soothe her. ‘You’ve just gone back there too early after the operation. Rest for another week or two, then see how you feel.’

Jeanette lifted her hand again. Connie was almost surprised that the light didn’t shine through it.

– Too early. Too late. They overlap, don’t they?

There was a new, mordant edge to her anger at what was overtaking her.

‘Jeanette, try to be a bit patient. You’re too harsh on yourself.’

Jeanette regarded her. Then she jerked her head.

– I will have to do something else. I can’t just sit here. Waiting.

Bill brought in a bottle of wine and some glasses. From the slope of his shoulders Connie could see his despair.

‘It’s not waiting, Jan. It’s being with us.’

There was a pause.

– Yes. Of course it is. You’re right. I’m sorry.

Connie stared into the garden, not wanting to risk seeing the look that passed between the two of them. She felt her own spike of anger at the finality ahead.

‘Here.’

Bill put a drink into her hand. Jeanette took hers, the finger of wine heavily diluted with water, and sipped at it. Her lipstick left a pink print on the rim of the glass, and Connie remembered the night before last with Roxana in the storm, when talking to another woman had seemed so easy.

It still wasn’t easy to talk to Jeanette: their legacy still affected them.

Change that. It’s not too late, Connie told herself.

‘I think we should have a holiday, instead of worrying about plant taxonomy,’ Bill said.

A glorious idea delivered itself to Connie.

‘Why don’t you both come out and stay with me in Bali?’ As soon as the thought came to her she was longing to take Jeanette straight there, to the green wave. ‘It’s beautiful, and it’s always warm. My house is comfortable enough. There’s a view from the veranda you could look at for ever.’

– For ever?

She met her sister’s gaze.

She guessed Jeanette would be wondering about moving from her own safe realm into Connie’s unknown one, and whether it would be risky to allow her sister and her husband to spend so much time together.

Then, just as clearly, Connie saw her dismiss the questions. They didn’t matter any longer. Jeanette’s face changed completely, flowering into a beam of excitement. She held out her hand towards Connie, and they matched their palms together. Affection seemed to flow like a current between them.

– I’d like that so much.

Then she remembered how weak she had become and turned to Bill.

– Can I? Can we? Those pictures Connie showed us, remember? They were wonderful.

Bill said, ‘Of course we can. We’ll go as soon as you want.’





It took a week to finalise the arrangements. Connie was to fly out first, to make the house ready, and Jeanette and Bill would follow her two days later.

The night before she left London, she spoke to Angela.

‘Sounds a good idea, Connie. Bali will do your sister good.’

‘I hope so. I think it will.’

‘Email me, let me know how she is, and how you are. By the way – did you know that your friend Roxana came into the office to see me?’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’ They had hardly seen each other in the past week. Connie had been working, but she’d had the impression that Roxana was tactfully absent so as not to intrude on her.

‘She turned up in reception and very politely but very insistently announced that she would wait there until I was free to see her.’

‘Yes?’

‘I had her into my office and she sat down and told me exactly how she wanted to help me with setting up this shoot in Russia. I made the point that we work with the Russian Film Institute, and that I deal with difficult foreign locations every day. But she insisted that she could make herself useful in reading between the lines. With the Russians, you have to appreciate the nuance, she said. Nuance was the word she actually used. I was fairly impressed, I can tell you.’

‘That sounds like Roxana. So what’s the deal?’

‘I had to give in. I’m going to employ her informally for a few hours a week, on the phones, looking at the contracts, finding suppliers out there, that sort of thing. Twenty quid an hour, cash in hand.’

‘Informally or otherwise, that’s her entry into the film business. You know she’ll probably be running the show within a couple of months?’

‘Very likely,’ Angela agreed. ‘Who am I to stand in the way of ambition? Anyway, Rayner liked the look of her. There’s one other thing, Con…’

‘What’s that?’

‘When she came in she was wearing your Chloé suede jacket, or an identical version of it.’

‘I expect it looked better on her than on me?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’

They both laughed. ‘Thanks, Ange.’





Connie was almost ready to leave for the airport when she heard Roxana moving about in her room. She opened her door as soon as Connie knocked, and beamed at her.

‘Are you all prepared to go?’

‘Yes, just about. I talked to Angela last night; I hear she’s offered you a part-time job.’

‘That’s right. I am very lucky.’ Roxana’s face glowed. She looked very young and beautiful, Connie thought. ‘And I owe thanks to you, Connie, yet another time.’

‘I’m glad about the work. That’s good news. But Angela also told me that when you went in to see her, you were wearing what looked like one of my jackets.’

Roxana stared, and then drew her lower lip between her teeth. Colour flooded into her face.

‘I…I wanted very much not to – not to appear like a girl from Uzbekistan. I wanted to seem like a London girl.’

‘I understand that. But you went into my room, and looked through my cupboards?’

And I did the same thing myself, Connie remembered. The only real difference was that there was nothing among her few possessions to appeal to me. She felt her own colour rising.

Roxana nodded unhappily. ‘I wanted to be like you,’ she whispered.

Like me? And who is that?

‘You are yourself. Why do you want to be someone else? To be Constance, or anyone? Why not be proud of being Roxana?’

Roxana still stared, with a light kindling in her eyes that seemed to indicate that she had never properly explored this question. She had just made the assumption. She shrugged, unwillingly.

‘I have not always done good things.’

‘Maybe you haven’t always had the chance. You’ve had a hard life, up until now, haven’t you?’

Roxana shrugged again.

Connie said quickly, ‘You’re going to stay here in my flat, while I’m in Bali with Noah’s parents.’

‘Please, if I can. Perhaps now you don’t want…’

‘I don’t want to turn you out. I’ve got two homes, you have nowhere to live. But can I trust you, if you live here without me, to look after my home and respect my belongings?’

Roxana put out her hand, then drew it back again. ‘Yes, yes, I promise.’

There was a moment when Connie stepped forward and Roxana began to duck away, almost as if she expected to be struck. Instead Connie put her arms round the girl. As she hugged her she felt the wary set of her shoulders, the taut line of her neck.

‘All right,’ she murmured. ‘It’s all right.’

Roxana’s shoulders loosened. They held on to each other for another moment.

‘How old were you when your mother died?’ Connie asked.

‘Nine. Niki was eleven. We stayed with Leonid, my stepfather. This was not what we chose, you know, but we had no other place where we could go.’

‘Can you remember your mother?’

‘Not so well. A little.’

Connie could guess, just from the touch of her, that Roxana hadn’t known much mothering.

‘I don’t know who my real mother was.’

‘No,’ Roxana acknowledged.

The simplicity of her agreement reminded Connie: there it is. That’s the truth. Now and always will be.

She dropped her arms. ‘Oh, Lord. Look at the time. I’ve got to go or I’ll miss the flight.’

Roxana stood back at once.

‘Have a safe journey,’ she said. ‘I am sure it is very nice in Bali.’

‘There are beaches. White sand and palm trees, even.’

‘That will be good for Mrs Bunting. Myself, I prefer Suffolk.’