Constance A Novel

TWELVE

A tiny basket made from plaited coconut leaf and containing a few grains of red and white rice, a sliver of lime and a betel leaf lay on the veranda step. The thin white trail of smoke from a burning incense stick drifted in the still air.

Wayan Tupereme prayed for a moment after he had placed the offering. He waved his hand three times, to send the essence of the offering towards God, and then padded quietly down the path to his own house. The Englishwoman was back, and now she had guests staying with her. Putu, the taxi driver who had brought them up from Denpasar, was a relative of his wife’s and she had heard from Putu’s wife that the lady who had arrived was very sick.

Wayan was certain that a stay in his village would help to balance her again.





Connie had moved into the smaller bedroom in her house, to give Jeanette and Bill more space. When she woke up she had to open her eyes before she was able to work out where she was, and then the rooster in the nearest yard started crowing.

She got out of bed and wrapped herself in a sarong. The heat of the coming day was gathered in the corners of the room, waiting to reach out and envelop her. She padded across the bare floorboards to fold back the window shutters and immediately the early sun gilded the bare walls.

At first glance the veranda looked deserted. But then a tiny movement caught her eye. Jeanette was sitting in the rocking chair watching a cat-sized yellow-green lizard that was splayed on a corner of the decking, half-hidden by a fan of pleated leaves.

Connie slid open the screen door and stepped outside. The lizard blinked once, then flowed over the edge of the deck and vanished. Jeanette turned her head. When she saw Connie she pointed to where it had been a second earlier, chopping a bookends gesture with her two hands to indicate its size.

‘I know. He’s a big one. He lives under the boards. If I feel like some company, I feed him. He particularly likes ham, and cocktail olives.’

Jeanette smiled.

‘How do you feel? Did you sleep?’

Connie was thinking that she looked a bit better than she had done yesterday, although that wasn’t saying very much. When she had met them at the airport, Bill was pushing Jeanette in an airline wheelchair. Her face looked the colour and texture of tissue paper and she had seemed to lack the strength even to lift up her head.

‘Bad journey,’ Bill murmured.

‘It’s not far now,’ Connie rallied them.

She was shocked. Jeanette looked so weak and defeated, she was afraid that she was going to die there in the midst of the airport’s callous scramble of taxis and tour buses. She ordered their frightened driver to get them home, back to the village, as quickly and smoothly as he could.

And now, less than twenty hours later, Jeanette was up, her hair was combed, and she had dressed in a shirt with kindly folds that hid her sharp bones.

– Better. Thank you, she answered. – I was very tired.

Connie could only admire the depth of her sister’s resolve. However much pain she was in, however exhausted, if she wanted to get up she would somehow do it. She pulled a stool across and sat down next to her. They gazed out at the view.

Veils of mist were drawn upwards from the bends of the river. Diaphanous layers silvered the opposite wall of greenery and where the sun touched them droplets of moisture trapped in the fingers of the leaves twinkled with tiny points of light, as if the branches were hung with jewels. The palms on the farthest ridge were pale grey feathers.

Without taking her eyes off the line of sunlight as it slid down the side of the gorge, Jeanette let her head fall back against the cushions. Her arms dangled over the sides of the chair as if her hands were heavy weights. Her bare feet were planted flat, toes turned out.

Connie could hear the warring dogs and the buzz of traffic, splashing water from the spring and the screeches and chuckings of the various birds, but all Jeanette had was the vast green intricacy of the view, and the gentle pressure of heat and humidity.

– Look at it, she said. – It’s perfect. And it’s so hot.

Connie was solicitous at once. ‘A breeze gets up later. Come inside for now. It’s cooler. There’s air-con, I’ll turn it up.’

Jeanette shook her head. Her face and throat were lightly sheened with sweat.

– I like it. I’m usually cold.

‘If you’re sure.’

Connie thought that she must be all right. Jeanette’s body looked heavy, as if her sore bones were softening.

A long moment passed, comfortably silent.

– So many trees. I don’t know half of them.

‘Neither do I. We’ll get a book.’

– Good idea.

Another moment passed.

– Connie?

‘Yes.’

– I’m so happy we came.

‘I thought the journey was too much for you. I was angry with myself for having suggested you should come out here in the first place.’

Jeanette rolled her head and sighed.

– I threw up all the way. The shame. I hate Bill to see me like that.

Bill had told Connie that the motion of flight had disagreed with Jeanette almost from the moment of take-off. She hadn’t been able to keep down even sips of water. He had wanted to stop the journey at Singapore, but Jeanette had insisted on making the connecting flight. – I want to see Bali, she’d said, and kept saying it.

– But I’m all right now I’m here. In this place. It’s more beautiful than I imagined.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Connie said.

Jeanette shot her a sudden glance.

– It’s a long way from Echo Street.

The exotic walls of the gorge and the solid sunshine emphasised the physical distance, but Connie shook her head. ‘Only in miles. Sitting here with you, I feel as if we could be back there.’

The steep stairs rising from the narrow hallway, the residue of damp left by Hilda’s mopping, the piano and the line of photographs – Jeanette with Connie propped on her knee, Jeanette in her graduation gown – shapes, smells, ghosts. The architecture of these memories felt as real between them as the deck beneath their feet.

There was another glance.

– Bad or not bad?

Connie said, ‘Neither. Or both. It’s what connects us. Echo Street.’

The last time they had been there together, four years ago now, the rooms were being emptied. Two sweating men hoisted the piano onto a wheeled trolley and rolled it away. Dusty rectangles showed on the bare walls, and the living-room carpet was dimpled with brown-rimmed hollows where the same furniture had stood in the same places for more than thirty years.

That was the day they discovered the old cardboard box, the one with Fray Bentos printed on the sides in rubbed blue lettering and sealed with packing tape that had turned brittle with age.

That was the day when they had their last, seemingly irrevocable quarrel.

The last time they communicated with each other, until Jeanette emailed to tell her sister that she was dying.

Connie bowed her head. The arches of her sister’s feet were netted with blue veins and the five tendons fanned out like sash cords. The toes were absolutely white, bloodless, the nails as chalky as if they belonged already to a dead woman. She pulled her stool closer and lifted the feet into her lap. She began to massage them, running her thumbs over the ridges and feeling them slide away from the pressure, cupping the heels and squeezing the tired ligaments, as if she could rub the life back just by the force of her will and the warmth of her own flesh.

After a moment Jeanette sighed, and her eyes closed.

That was how Bill found them, Jeanette fallen into a doze with her mouth slightly open and Connie with her head down, stroking her feet.


– What do you do here? Jeanette asked later. – Every day?

Connie had brought out a bowl of salad and a dish of mango and guava and they ate the simple meal at the table drawn into the deepest shade at the back of the veranda, from where the afternoon sun striking two yards away was as powerful as a blow.

Bill sat in the rattan chair next to Jeanette’s rocker, checking her from time to time with a glance, but otherwise he was almost silent. Connie had read from the lines in his face precisely how exhausted with nursing and perpetual anxiety he was. To be so close to him, to know his whereabouts and what he was doing every hour, made her skin feel slightly raw. Even in the heat, goose bumps prickled on her arms.

She answered brightly, ‘What do I do with my time? You wouldn’t believe how busy it can be here. And that’s when I’m not working. When I’ve got a commission I have to lock myself away or it would never get done. There’s my orchestra, for instance. That’s Tuesdays, for rehearsal. Sometimes we put on a performance. There are other gamelan concerts, and shadow plays and temple festivals to go to. On a normal day if I just call in to the market in the village, it can take half a morning by the time I’ve greeted everyone I know and asked after the children and grandchildren. I visit my neighbours, the Balinese ones, and they visit me, on a strict turn-by-turn basis. That’s not to mention the Europeans, their drinks parties and swimming-pool barbecues and gallery openings…’

Bill said, ‘That’s busy.’

Connie thought, Yes. I am busy, because I need to be. It’s the life I’ve made for myself.

She smiled at him. She wanted him to know she had her place in the village. She was not an object for concern, and she was certainly not to be pitied.

‘Take today. There’s an invitation to go to my neighbour’s house, just over here.’ She pointed to the thick palm hedge that separated her garden from Wayan Tupereme’s house compound. ‘Wayan and his family have a big celebration coming soon, and today’s party is in preparation for that. All his relatives, the women especially, are coming to the house to help to prepare offerings for the ceremony. The men will be starting to build a roof to provide shade on the day itself. There’s a lot of work to be done, but it’s a social event too.’

Connie wondered if now was the right time to explain that the big event that was being so elaborately prepared for was the cremation of Wayan’s father. The old man had died more than a year ago and was buried in the village cemetery. The most auspicious day had been fixed on months ago, giving the best possible circumstances for the dead man’s atman, his immortal soul, to continue on its journey to heaven.

She added quickly, ‘You’re both invited too, of course, as my family. Wayan made a special call, to insist on that. But you are tired…’

Jeanette sat up.

– I would like to go to the party. Very much.

Her eagerness had a feverish glitter. Bill leaned forward to touch her arm, but she waved off the restraint.

– Why not? We are here. If you will take us, Connie?

Connie nodded. ‘Of course. And they will all want to meet you. They are very curious, always, about new people.’

Jeanette touched her fingers to her mouth in a question, and Connie wondered how she should answer it.

She picked an orchid flower from the vase on the table and placed it in a triangle with her water glass and a spoon. This was a difficult concept to sign, but she would do the best she could.

‘In Bali, everything is a matter of balance. Each living or inanimate thing is part of an ordered universe, each stands in relation to every other. This is called dharma, and our personal actions or karma must harmonise with our duty to dharma. To do this, Balinese Hindus try always to look at the world with regard for others, not themselves. To be old here is a matter for reverence. A new baby is pure and treated almost as a god. For a person to be deaf, or lame, or a stranger, this is also part of the balance of the universe. If a Balinese does not accept these differences, and acknowledge the grace in them, he causes disorder. Or adharma.’

Jeanette reached forward to stroke the flexed and velvety spotted petals of the orchid.

Slowly she mouthed the words.

– Dharma. Balance.

Bill sat with his hand shading his eyes.

– What time? Jeanette asked.

‘We should be there at about five o’clock. Once the day starts to cool down, but before it gets dark,’ Connie told her.

Jeanette took the orchid and tucked it behind her ear. It lent her a look of reckless gaiety.

– I will lie down for an hour.

Bill edged back his chair. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said at once.

Jeanette shook her head.

– Stay here with Connie.

Connie followed her into the bedroom. The shutters were closed and the ceiling fan stirred a draught of cool air.

‘Is there anything you need?’ she asked, as Jeanette lay down in the dimness. The flower glimmered against her temple.

Jeanette smiled.

– Dharma, she repeated.

Connie left her to sleep.

Bill had carried the plates and glasses into the kitchen. He was opening cupboard doors to find the right place to put things away, and keeping his face averted. Without needing to see, Connie knew the depth of pain in his eyes.

‘Those go in there,’ she pointed.

‘Thanks. And these?’

‘In the drawer.’

She was thinking about the kitchen in the Buntings’ house in Surrey and the way that the familiarity of their domestic routine, of their marriage itself, was printed all through it. Here in her own kitchen it would be difficult, after he had gone home again. She would look at this handle, that cup, and remember how he had touched them. He had been here, moving around in her small and self-contained universe, and from now on she would be obliged always to see the shape of him printed in the old rattan chair, and to direct herself away from the image of his long body curved into the yield of her mattress.

It was only a matter of weeks since the invasion of the film team, and it was strange now to remember how apprehensive she had been about this disturbance to her ordered life. In the end Angela and Rayner and the others had come and gone, bringing London to the village and then bearing it away again, and had left barely a trace of themselves except that the villagers still talked about the visit of the movie people.

It would not happen like that with Jeanette and Bill. Their impact on the village would be negligible, but for her everything would be changed.

Connie blinked. When she opened her eyes he was still there.

Bill collected up the salad trimmings and rinsed the sink, in the practised way that showed how he had learned to be cook and cleaner in the past few months.

The light surrounding them seemed to have turned very pale and crystalline.

She would remember exactly how he scraped the chopping board clean and rinsed it, and the way he had to stoop a little to do these tasks because the counter was too low for him.

What would Bill do when Jeanette was gone?

It seemed impertinent, almost, to speculate about his grief.

What will I do? Connie wondered. A stab of pure pain made her gasp.

Bill folded a cloth. His movements were very slow, indicating that he was experiencing some difficulty that she could only guess at. She resisted the impulse to touch him for comfort’s sake.

It dawned on her that she had barely thought about afterwards. All her concentration had been on the progress of the disease, on Jeanette, and on the business of dying and death. Afterwards remained a vacuum.

The only certainty was that it would not hold out any prospect for herself and Bill. That was implicit in before.

‘Thank you. That’s all done,’ she smiled.

‘It didn’t take long,’ he said, reflecting her own neutrality back at her.

Connie went into her room. There was still an hour or so before it would be time to go to Wayan’s house.





‘I should explain,’ Connie said, ‘before we go.’

Bill and Jeanette were ready. Jeanette had made up her face. They looked expectantly at Connie.

‘This evening marks the beginning of the send-off for my neighbour Wayan’s father. The cremation itself is next week, on the most auspicious day.’

Bill’s thumb moved to the corner of his mouth.

‘We’re going to a funeral? A sort of wake?’

‘Yes. And no, in fact. Of course it is a funeral and it’s a sad occasion because the family and friends are saying a final goodbye, but the old man died quite a long time ago.’

Jeanette was following the explanation carefully.

– How long ago?

There was no point in being evasive. The arrangements were according to Balinese custom, and Bill and Jeanette might as well hear about it now.

‘A little more than a year. A big, grand cremation costs a lot of money for the family, and they have to save up for it as well as wait for the auspicious date in the calendar. So the body is temporarily buried, and then when everything is ready they dig it up again in order to cremate it and set the spirit free. It tends to be a wild party.’

Jeanette started to laugh. The surprising sound of it bubbled out of her throat.

– I have to see this, don’t I?





Outside Wayan’s house, scooters and parked cars lined the narrow lane, and dozens of pairs of sandals and shoes were lined up at the step. The bale, the house pavilion, was overflowing with people. The bamboo pillars that supported the palm-leaf roof were decorated with strips of coloured cloth and the roof itself was swathed in more folds of colour. Most of the men wore white or crimson head-cloths and bright sarongs. The women’s long skirts were intricate ikat fabrics and frangipani and hibiscus blossoms were plaited in their hair. Children in their best clothes chased and played between the adults’ legs. The effect was of a brilliant moving sea of patterns and faces and smiles.

As the visitors passed through the outer gate into the open compound, Wayan and his wife came forward to greet them. Connie made the introductions, formally, in polite Balinese. Dayu, Wayan’s diminutive wife, placed her hands together and bowed to each of them in turn.

‘You are welcome,’ she said in English. ‘Please come to join us.’

The guests were crowding towards the family temple, placed in the most sacred corner of the compound and separated from it by a gate. Connie bowed her head to the nearest people she recognised in the throng.

A priest in white robes was preparing to make the offerings.

Chairs were ranged in a loose row for those who needed them, and without drawing attention to it Wayan made sure that Jeanette found her way to one. The priest lifted a small bronze bell and rang it. At once the talk and laughter died away.

A small group of gamelan musicians were gathered with their instruments in the inner enclosure. One of them struck a long, shivering gong note. It resonated in the warm, damp air. The daylight was fading, and the guttural boom of the first frogs could be heard against the brittle rasp of crickets and trills from birds hidden in the foliage. Thick wafts of incense rose through the leaves and coloured cloth hangings and twisted into the smoky evening sky.

The musicians began to play. It was sombre temple music, the metallophones with their bamboo resonators laying down a skeletal rhythm that was filled in with the drums and gongchimes. Connie listened with close attention.

The priest was chanting. He lifted and placed the offerings in turn, silver plates of rice cakes garlanded with flowers and bark-frilled bamboo skewers of fruit. The guests mumbled or chanted their prayers, holding a blossom between their fingers and pressing folded thumbs to their foreheads. The priest’s attendant came through the crowd with a clay jug of tirta, the holy water. Bill was somewhere behind Connie in the crowd, but she watched Jeanette observing and copying her neighbours. When Jeanette’s turn came she held out her cupped palm for the water as the others did, sipped three times at it, then dripped the remainder over her hair. She took a pinch of sticky rice too, and following the grandmother beside her she pressed a few grains to her forehead and temples.

The tempo of the music changed. It rippled now, faster, like running water with a silvery thread in it.

The prayers were over and people were turning away, laughing and gossiping again. Connie was struck, as she always was, by the seamless way that spiritual and secular life were woven together in the rituals of the village.

A small group of women had been in one of the enclosed rooms during the prayers. Now they came out, carrying huge bowls of rice and baskets of coconut leaves. The working part of the evening was about to begin. In the centre of a knot of young girls, Connie spotted Dewi. Her baby son was wrapped in a sky-blue shawl and tied against her, his smooth brown head just visible.

‘Dewi,’ Connie smiled and waved.

The girl flashed a smile in return and ducked through the crowd towards her. Jeanette reached Connie’s side at the same time. The grains of rice were still glued to her tissuethin skin.

‘This is my friend, Dewi. She is Wayan and Dayu’s daughter. And this is their grandson,’ Connie told her. The unfamiliar Balinese names took time to sign and Dewi waited, her bright eyes on Jeanette.

‘My sister,’ Connie completed the introduction. Dewi was too polite to show her surprise at the difference in their looks. She made her graceful bow, and Jeanette’s fingers fluttered close to the baby’s head.

Beautiful, her gesture said, and Dewi smiled proudly. She gestured in return, Would you like to hold him?

Jeanette opened her arms. One hand cupped the baby’s head, the other supported his tiny weight against her breast. She breathed in the scent of him and touched her lips to his gleaming cheek.

‘He’s a strong boy,’ Connie said to Dewi.

‘Oh, yes. Like his father,’ the girl beamed.

There were more people to greet. Wayan’s cousin Kadek from the village store came to touch her hand.

‘Good evening, Ibu Connie.’

Kadek was a relatively wealthy man. He and his brothers and all the other cousins would be helping to pay for the cremation. Connie had heard that three other families would also be sending off their relatives during the same ceremony. It was not unusual for people to club together to meet the heavy costs.

The women were settling at tables with the bowls of rice and coconut leaves spread between them. Connie talked to Dayu, and when Jeanette finally parted with the warm bundle of baby she joined them. Her face was faintly coloured under her make-up. She rocked her empty arms.

– That baby. The scent they have. The hollow at the back of his neck. I wish Noah had a son.

‘Maybe he and Roxana will.’

– Not in my time.

Jeanette’s face was smooth. Connie could see no bitterness or anger in it now.

‘He will some day,’ Connie murmured.

– I wish he could see this, too. The colours. The people. He would love this place.

Bill and Jeanette and Connie herself had all suggested to Noah that he should come out to Bali with them. But Noah had replied that he was busy at work and with Roxana, and that in any case his parents should take the opportunity to enjoy some uninterrupted time with Connie. Bill had confided to Connie that he hadn’t had the heart to push the suggestion any harder. He didn’t think Noah had acknowledged to himself how little time there was left.

Jeanette leaned closer.

– Will you do something for me?

‘Of course,’ Connie said.

– If. When. Will you be a grandmother in my place?

Connie took a breath. ‘Yes. I promise. Whatever Noah wants.’

Composedly, Jeanette nodded her head.

– Good. Thank you.

All round them, women were working. Some of them were scooping up handfuls of rice, coloured bright pink or yellow or pistachio green, and dextrously moulding them into animal shapes. These would be left to dry, and then incorporated into the high tiers of offerings on cremation day. Others were weaving strips of tough palm leaf into baskets. Their fingers flashed, folding and turning and skewering with sharp slivers of bamboo. They talked while they worked, hardly even glancing downwards as the intricate baskets took shape. The musicians played sweet, liquid music over the frog chorus.

Connie had been to one class, aimed at Westerners living in the village, on how to fold the simple triangular baskets used for daily offerings.

‘Shall we have a go?’ she said now. ‘Rice pigs or palm baskets?’

Dayu beamed her encouragement and gave them both a fistful of leaves. The women moved up on the benches, patting a free space among them. Connie and Jeanette took their places and spread out the leaves between them.

‘Hold like this. In and out.’ Immediately Connie’s leaf split, while Jeanette’s splayed into its fibrous components and all the women broke into peals of laughter.

Connie laughed too. ‘Wait. You fold, I’ll stick the skewer in.’

She and Jeanette began to work, clumsily, in tandem.

It was almost dark now, and the lights in the compound had come on. Some of the men were carrying in bales of leaves that would provide temporary thatch for the open compound. Others were putting up bamboo poles to support the new roof or carry long strings of lights. Connie saw Bill in the middle of one group. He stood head and shoulders taller than the other men, and they were using him as a prop to hold up a pole with one hand and run up a length of cable with the other. There was the usual village cacophony of waving and shouting and running about as the work progressed, with Wayan and Kadek directing the business. Bill pointed and gestured at another loop of cable, indicating where it should be fixed. He was good at fitting in. It was just one of the reasons why Connie loved him.

Between them, she and Jeanette managed one misshapen, ragged basket with a stray corner of palm leaf sticking out like the ear of a lame dog. Dewi held it up and the women giggled behind their hands, the flowers nodding in their hair. Dayu had left the tables to oversee another cohort of women in the kitchen, preparing food for the workers, and now they began to emerge with bowls heaped with hot food. It was important for the prestige of the dead man that everything should be of the best quality, and laid on in abundance. The musicians abandoned their instruments and the men put down their tools and cables. The women served them with big, steaming platefuls. The noise of talk and laughter grew louder. Children squirmed away from the attention of the adults, and some of them took up the musicians’ mallets and began picking tunes from the percussion instruments. A tiny, plump child was patting out a rhythm on one of the drums.

Someone tapped Connie on the shoulder. She turned round to see Ketut.

‘Connie, will you play? I think we should not let the people eat without music to help their digestion.’

She beamed at him. ‘Ketut, I didn’t see you in this crowd. You’re asking me to play one of my drum pieces? I think that baby’s doing better than I could.’

‘You have not been practising. We have missed you. You have been in London, I think?’

‘Yes, I have. Jeanette, this is Ketut, my friend and music teacher. Ketut, my sister.’

He bowed. ‘You have heard Connie play Balinese music?’

‘Jeanette is deaf, Ketut.’

Ketut bowed again in calm acknowledgement.

– I would like to see you play, Jeanette indicated. Connie passed this on to Ketut, who lifted his hand.

‘This shall happen. Connie, we have enough friends here to make some music while this ensemble is enjoying the food. Wait one moment, please.’

‘What have you done?’ she sighed to Jeanette.

Ketut darted off through the crowd. He whispered to several people and persuasively patted their arms. A minute later Connie was propelled to the corner where the instruments were set up. An impromptu, giggling group of musicians closed round her. She was relieved to see that she knew most of them from her regular ensemble. Ketut marshalled them into position.

‘Connie, you will play…’

‘Please, Ketut, not the kempli.’

The horizontal gong was the metronome of the group, providing the even beats that underpinned the texture of the music and incorporated the constant changes of tempo.

‘Perhaps not this evening. Maybe tonight you will take the wadon.’

Connie recoiled. This was even harder. The female drum was usually the leader of the ensemble, playing learned patterns that linked to the gong structures but which also had to be built up with considerable personal improvisation.

The other musicians were taking up their mallets and Ketut positioned himself in front of his regular instrument, the large gong. A couple of shy young women with frangipani blossoms in their hair took the paired cymbals. The crowd was still eating and chatting, but they were also waiting to see how the new performers would measure up.

It was too late to back out. Connie swallowed hard.

Ketut bent solemnly in front of his big gong. He took a pinch of rice and laid it on the floor beside the gong stand. The stand was carved in the shape of a giant tortoise, on which according to Balinese mythology the entire world rests. An offering to the spirit of the gong would ensure a harmonious performance.

A second of quiet gathered, broken only by the scrape of frogs and crickets.

Then Ketut struck a single note. The powerful reverberation sailed out over the walls of the compound and slowly faded away into the darkness. He gave Connie the conductor’s bow of introduction; she obediently settled the drum on its brocaded cushion on her lap and lifted her head.

You play with your head high and your heart open, Ketut always told her.

Jeanette was sitting in the chair from which she had watched the prayers. Connie didn’t try to look deeper into the crowd for a glimpse of Bill.

She struck the drum head with the flat of her left hand, and then another beat with the thumb of her right. She had begun with the certainty that she would forget the pattern of this sequence but now, miraculously, the first notes came back to her. Facing her was Bagus, a thin, bespectacled schoolteacher, who had taken the lanang, the male drum. His beats interlocked with hers and the metallophones and the gongs and cymbals fell into place, each pair of instruments tuned slightly apart so that the music breathed in and out, shimmering like rain caught in sunlight. The musicians’ dark heads dipped and their bodies swayed as the pulsing rhythms swelled and diminished.

Some little girls edged forwards and began to dance, tugging their mothers with them. The women extended their arms, the hands flexed and the fingers eloquently raised. The bright threads in their clothes shone as they circled their hips and the children wove between them. A flutter of laughter and appreciation ran through the crowd.

Connie let herself float away into the music. The pattern of drum beats, kap pek kap pek kum pung kum pung, that had started as a rigid imperative suddenly loosened its hold and turned into a platform from which her own pattern launched itself, gathered momentum and soared away. Bagus’s drumming was a sinuous thread, confidently rising and knitting with hers, seeming to know where she was heading before she led him there. Like the best of lovers, Connie would have thought, if she had not been too caught up in the music itself. The bronze and bamboo instruments elaborated the melody, all the time like waves breaking over the sonorous rock of the great gong. As the splash of the cymbals rose to her lead she knew for sure, here and now, what belonging meant.

The music reached a crescendo with a blare of bronze, and then the sequence unravelled again, simplifying itself down to the last drum beats, kap pek kum pung de tut kum pung.

The dancers let their arms fall to their sides. Laughing with exhilaration and the pure pleasure of being part of the music, Connie looked up at last. She saw Bill at the back of the crowd, his eyes fixed on her.

Ketut struck the last thrilling gong note.

The piece had been a short and simple one, but Wayan and Dayu’s guests and even the regular musicians were appreciative. Ketut’s ensemble all smiled at each other, and Connie formally shook hands with Bagus. Her hair was glued to her forehead and her shirt was damp against her back.

‘It was fairly good. You were a little stiff,’ Ketut said judiciously. ‘You should try to be more fluid in the arms, perhaps.’

‘I will try,’ Connie promised.

Jeanette was clapping her hands, and her eyes shone.

– How beautiful and graceful. I wish I could have heard it, but I felt the rhythm in here. She tapped her chest with the flat of her hand.

Bill appeared beside them. Connie pushed her damp hair back from her forehead and grinned at him.

‘That’, he said simply, ‘was the best music I’ve ever heard.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘It was,’ he insisted.

Jeanette nodded in agreement and as she sat between them Connie felt a wave of pride and happiness. Dayu brought a carved wooden dish of fruit and laid it in front of them. The proper gamelan players were taking their seats again.





It was late when the three of them made their way back to Connie’s house.

Bill opened the window onto the veranda and the night’s noises flooded into the room on warm, scented, moist air.

‘Do those frogs ever pipe down?’ he groaned.

Connie shook her head.

Jeanette spread her hands in a gesture of satisfaction, and all three of them laughed.





It was raining.

Fat raindrops slapped on the broad leaves, trickled from the fronds of the roof and drummed on bamboo pipes. The rush of water in stone drainage channels drowned out all the other island noises. For four days it had been thundery, and in the late afternoons swollen masses of cloud had sailed over the gorge and the rice paddies and blotted out the pale-blue cone of Mount Agung. Now the rain had finally come.

Jeanette spent most of the days reclining in the rocker. She studied the book of trees that Connie had brought back from the European bookshop in the village. Connie usually sat with her, while Bill sometimes went out with Wayan and his brothers and cousins to work on the building of the wadah. This was a bamboo cremation tower, with the tortoise and two dragon-snakes at the bottom, representing the universe. Successive tiers rose to a height of thirty feet, to a little pagoda that stood for heaven. It was a big construction job. Bill’s practical contribution was welcomed.

When it was ready the huge structure, with a symbol of the old man’s body in the bale within it, would be carried by his male descendants through the village to the cremation ground.

The hammering and sawing had been audible all day but the rain stopped the work. Connie and Jeanette sat and looked out through a curtain of falling water. The gorge swam with mist, and a miasma of damp rose between the planks beneath their feet.

– Is it often like this?

‘It rains sometimes, yes.’

Jeanette rocked gently.

– It takes a long time. Getting ready for the cremation.

‘Months.’

– I like that. The proper rituals. Everyone doing their part.

‘It’s seen as part of a natural cycle. Grief and the work going on. The body is only a container. The better the ceremony, the more likely that the spirit eventually becomes one of the deified ancestors.’

Jeanette’s head fell back. Connie was used to the way she would suddenly fall asleep, and then wake up and continue talking as if no interval had passed. But instead of drifting into a doze she said,

– I didn’t know it took so long just to die.

‘Does it seem so long?’ Connie kept looking at her sister’s hands.

– Yes. I thought death came quick in the Thorne family.

‘It seemed that way,’ Connie agreed.





She had been away with Seb.

Sébastian Bourret with the Sydney Symphony had been a big event in Hobart, Tasmania. After the series of concerts they had gone up for a few days’ holiday in Cradle Mountain Park. It was cold, but fine clear weather. Seb had been irritable after the rehearsals and performances, and had wanted to get as far away from the music world as he could. On the spur of the moment they rented a motorhome intended for backpackers, and drove out into the park wilderness. For five days Seb fished in the lakes while Connie read, and in the evenings she grilled the fish he caught over an open fire. They went for walks and spoke to no one, and it had been an unusual interlude in their lives. Connie thought that they were happy, so far away from memories and the pull of desire.

On their way back through Hobart, Seb picked up a message that was waiting for him.

He studied it for a moment, then turned to Connie.

‘It’s for you,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m afraid it’s bad news.’

Bill and Jeanette had failed to reach her in London or in Sydney, and as a last resort had tried Seb’s management company.

Connie learned that her adopted mother had died one night, alone at Echo Street, of a cerebral haemorrhage. The funeral was taking place more or less as she stood trying to take in the news on the opposite side of the world.

‘Hilda is dead,’ Connie repeated, disbelieving.

Seb took Connie in his arms to comfort her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

Connie didn’t cry, but her eyes burned and she felt that there was a tourniquet around her throat, coming close to strangling her. In a voice quite unlike her own she whispered, ‘I never felt that she was my mother, even when I didn’t know that she wasn’t. I don’t think she ever convinced herself that I could be her daughter. It makes it harder to believe that she’s gone, because now it’s too late.’

‘Does her death make you think of your natural mother?’

‘Yes,’ Connie said.

The funeral was over; there was no reason to hurry home to London.





When she did get back, Jeanette was already clearing out the house in Echo Street before selling it.

Jeanette opened the door to her. The smell of the old house flooded into Connie’s face. The past was like a vapour, spiralling into the chambers of her head. Behind Jeanette the stairs that had once seemed to rear like a cliff-face now just looked awkwardly narrow and steep. A fragment of the old red-curdled lino was revealed again where the more recent carpet had been taken up. They stood and looked at each other.

– You’re here.

‘I would have come before now, Jeanette. You know I would. Given the chance.’

– I couldn’t postpone the funeral until you turned up.

‘That was your decision to make, of course.’

Two overalled men edged out of the kitchen doorway, hauling Hilda’s old refrigerator between them. In the confined hallway Connie and Jeanette had to flatten themselves against the wall. Connie remembered the day in 1969 when they moved into the house, when Tony and another set of removals men had carried in their belongings from the old flat and the new rooms had seemed big enough to echo with emptiness. The memories nudged against her, years packed on years, jostling for her attention. She could hear piano music. Für Elise, picked out by small fingers.

To get out of the way of the removers she angled past Jeanette and climbed the stairs.

Her old bedroom was already empty. Noah slept there when he stayed with his grandmother, and a couple of crumpled pages from a boys’ comic lay on the floor. The corner cupboard stood open. Connie rested her fingers on the old-fashioned latch that was swollen with a teardrop of gloss paint, trying to recall exactly why the musty enclosed space had frightened her so badly.

Jeanette had followed her. Now she stood framed in the doorway, her plump body held as taut as a wire. Connie turned.

– Bill’s not here, she indicated, as if Connie might have come up the stairs in search of him.

You are so bloody difficult, Connie thought. Why can’t you let it go, just for today?

Anger inflated like a balloon inside her. It swelled under her ribs and within her head, compressing the memories into shadows that had no depth, only darkness.

She said coldly, ‘Hilda has just died. Can’t we be civil to each other?’

Jeanette seemed to rear up.

– Civil? Was what you did civil?

‘No. It was wrong. We know that. But it’s over. It was over years and years ago.’

That’s all true, Connie thought. But I think of Bill every day. Does that make me guilty, still?

The balloon of anger collapsed again. The sound of heavy furniture being shifted came up the stairs.

She began again. ‘Today is not about what happened between Bill and me. It’s about Hilda, and you and me, the two of us, and what’s left in this house. If you can’t see that, shall we try to do what we’ve come here for? Then I’ll go.’

Jeanette lifted her chin.

– You think you can run away. You always did.

‘Jeanette. For Christ’s sake. Shut up. Shut the f*ck up, and stop it. Stop attacking. I’m not your enemy, I never was.’

– You are shouting.

It was true, she was. Connie rubbed her face with her hands.

It became very important to make Jeanette understand what she was trying to say. She took two steps across the room and caught hold of her.

‘I didn’t think Mum would just go and die like this. It’s a shock. I still thought there would be plenty of time for the three of us to work out the…the resentments. They were always there, weren’t they, long, long before Bill? In this house. At Barlaston Road, even. Isn’t that right? That must be what you feel too?’

Jeanette’s flesh was solid under her hands. She was angry too, Connie could feel the heat of it.

– Resentment?

‘Yes. Couldn’t we talk about it?’

– Talk changes nothing.

Jeanette made a twist, away from Connie, then beckoned. Connie followed her into Hilda’s bedroom.

The place where the divan base had rested was outlined in grey furry dust. The dressing table with the triple mirror was gone, and the bedside tables. In the bay window, the curtains with the garland pattern sagged in loops from their tracks. Connie looked at what had once been familiar, and wondered how a person’s absence could be so tangible.

A pyramid of cardboard boxes stood in the middle of the floor. Some of Hilda’s clothes had been packed into them. Connie recognised a checked tweed coat.

– Do you want any of this?

Connie looked again at the boxes of clothes.

‘No. But thank you.’

Hilda hadn’t owned much jewellery, and rarely wore any apart from her wedding ring. On a plain cushion cover on the floor, a few costume brooches and a couple of necklaces were laid out. Connie reached down to touch the tweed coat, and then the small heap of faded glitter.

It was cold, and she had the sudden sensation of great distances and a wind blowing across them.

There was nothing, nothing at all to keep her in this house. It was as if she had never belonged or even lived here.

She reached down and picked up a brooch more or less at random. It was a ring of polished stones in a vaguely art nouveau setting.

‘May I take this?’

Jeanette nodded.

– And there is something else. It’s yours, she added.

She pointed out to the landing, where the square trap giving access into the roof space stood open. There had never been anything much up there, apart from a broken stepladder, some paint kettles with cracked residue in the bottom, a pair of deckchairs with the canvas frayed beyond use, and ancient cobwebs thick with soot.

– It was up there.

A smaller cardboard box stood a little apart from the others. It had once contained tins of corned beef. Connie stooped down. She pulled aside the tape that had been used to seal it, grown brittle with age, and opened the flaps. A puff of dust rose. Inside the box, under some folded paper, she found an old brown leatherette shopping bag. It had looped handles, and the plastic material was torn around the rivets to reveal the yellowed padding beneath.

‘What’s this?’ she asked, although she already knew. Her heart was banging like a drum.

– You had better look.

Inside the bag, folded up together, lay a knitted baby’s blanket and a tiny yellow cardigan. As Connie unfolded the cardigan an ordinary cheap brown envelope fell out. Her hands were shaking as she opened the envelope’s flap. Into her uncertain hand an earring fell.

It was a little pendant of marcasites with a rod and a screw fastening for a pierced ear. She gazed at it, her mind racing. This, surely, had been her mother’s earring. The pair to it, she must have kept for herself.

Breathless, Connie closed her fist on it. It was more precious than the biggest diamond in the world.

‘These things are mine. They belong to me.’ She stared into Jeanette’s eyes. ‘Why didn’t Hilda give them to me?’

Jeanette shrugged.

– I suppose because you didn’t need them. Mum gave you a home, a new family. Why would you want those things?

‘Why? Why? Because these are mine. This is my identity.’

Angrily Connie shook the blanket at her.

Jeanette looked incredulous.

– An identity from someone who put you in a bag and left you under a hedge? You were lucky that Mum and Dad took you in. Even though you were what you were.

Connie kept her fist tightly closed. ‘What I was?’ she asked, dangerously.

– Not one of us.

Not creamy-skinned, plump, blonde, like Hilda and Sadie and their three pretty daughters. Different. Unidentified. Unidentifiable.

The divide had always been there.

At Barlaston Road, where old Mrs McBride brewed up her prejudice like a witch with a cauldron.

Inside the pin-neat rooms at Echo Street.

Not spoken of, never, of course not. But scrawny little Constance Thorne had always been different, with her loud voice and her singing, her tight hair and her skin a shade darker than anyone else’s in the street or the school. Not different by very much, but just enough for her to have to stand up to the schoolyard bullies and the casual taunts of girls like Jackie and Elaine.

Connie had learned to accept that she would never know her birth mother and father, or where they had come from or what their stories were.

There were tests, of course, modern ones, that would indicate exactly what mixture of blood ran in her veins. But no test, however elaborate, would tell her who she really was.

She folded the blanket, awkwardly because her hand was still closed on the earring. She tucked it and the cardigan away inside the bag.

‘“Lucky”,’ she said aloud.

Jeanette stepped close, putting her face up against Connie’s.

– Yes. Lucky.

‘Why did Hilda want to adopt a foundling?’

Jeanette’s face suddenly blazed with fury. She grabbed Connie by the shoulders and shook her. The loose words tumbled out and spit flecked Connie’s face.

– Why? Why do you think? Because of me. Deaf. Deaf. Deaf. They didn’t want another like me, did they? And with one deaf-and-dumb kid in the family, they weren’t going to get given a nice new pink baby. They were only going to get one like you.

Connie breathed in sharply. It was like being children again, fighting and scratching, trying to damage each other by any means.

‘You are a bitch, Jeanette.’

Jeanette ignored her. She was caught up in her own resentment.

– And what did you do in return? Tried to take my husband.

‘I didn’t try to take Bill from you. I made the mistake of loving him. I regret what I did.’

– If I am a bitch you are a liar.

Connie pulled away from her. She had to get away, out of the room before one of them hit out. She snatched up the bag, made sure of its contents, and ran down the steep stairs past the gaping removals men.

She heard Jeanette’s bellow.

– ‘Running away.’

The front door stood open. She ran out and slammed it behind her.

Leaving Echo Street for the last time.

She held the marcasite earring so tightly that the metal post dug deep into her palm.





It was still raining. The waterspouts gurgled with the rush of water and the palm leaves dripped a few inches from where they sat.

She glanced across at Jeanette.

‘Are you asleep?’ she whispered.

Jeanette opened her eyes and licked her dry lips.

– No.

‘Would you like some juice? A cup of tea?’

– No. My back aches.

It was an hour before she could take more of her drugs. ‘Shall I massage your feet again?’

– Would you?

Connie shifted her place, gently lifted her sister’s feet.

– What’s the time?

She told her and Jeanette smiled.

– Bill will be back in a minute.