Constance A Novel

THIRTEEN

Noah stood aside in the kitchen to call Roxana on her new mobile. Andy went on unloading shopping from supermarket bags and flinging open the doors to cupboards.

‘Forgot the bloody bog roll,’ he shouted.

Noah stuck a finger in his free ear. ‘Rox? Can you hear me? Where are you?’

Roxana had just left the offices of Angela’s production company. She was out in the street, dodging the home-going crowds on her way to the bus stop. She rocked on the edge of the kerb, her bag hitched over her shoulder and her phone clamped to her ear, then dived confidently through the stream of buses and taxis.

‘What is that? I am in the street, Noah. I am going to work, I can’t be late.’

She had done three hours on the telephone in Angela’s office, talking in Russian to unimportant officials in the Russian Film Institute who would eventually open the doors to conversations with the more senior officials who had the power to grant the production company the permits they needed to film in St Petersburg. Angela seemed pleased with her. Now she had to get to The Cosmos before Mr Shane noticed that she was late.

‘When can I see you?’ Noah asked.

‘I am not sure. On Saturday?’

‘That’s four days’ time.’

‘I know that. What can I do?’

Roxana could see her bus, stalled in the traffic a hundred yards down the road. She attached herself to the crowd of people waiting at the stop, then began the process of slipping between them to bring herself closer to the point where she calculated the jaws of the bus would open up.

Noah frowned. He admired Roxana’s capacity for work, but her availability as a girlfriend was severely limited by it.

‘You can let me pick you up from the club tonight.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want you to see me in that place. You don’t understand why, but I don’t want it.’

‘I do understand. Sort of,’ Noah sighed. ‘But…’

‘Noah, here is my bus. I will call you tomorrow.’ She chirped a kiss to him. She was at the front of the crowd now, and as the doors opened she skipped inside and inserted herself into a just-vacated seat.

Roxana couldn’t help smiling. She kept counting them up, as if the wonders of her life might otherwise be snatched away. She had two jobs, one of them in the film business. She had an English boyfriend who called her more often than she needed to hear from him, a savings account, a mobile phone, an Oyster card, and a place to live that made her feel as if she was in a movie. She was a London girl.

The bus lurched and a man fell against her. He took longer than necessary to get up again.

‘Sorry, love.’

Roxana straightened her skirt over her thighs. ‘No worries,’ she said, as the production-company receptionist did about a hundred times a day.

Noah helped Andy to put away the rest of the shopping. He balled up the empty bags and threw them into the cupboard where they kept the ironing board.

‘You okay, mate? Is everything all right with you two?’ Andy asked him.

‘Yeah. Sure. Well, in a way. Roxana seems full-on, but at the same time you know that she’s keeping quite a lot back. She’s protective of herself. I suppose that’s the way you have to be, where she comes from, and after what she’s been through. But I wish I could convince her she doesn’t have to be like that with me.’

Andy eyed him. ‘You’re serious about her.’

‘It takes two to make a relationship serious, I find.’

‘Yeah. It does. I thought when you first brought her back here that she might turn out to be just a gold-digger. But she’s not like that. What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to see her tonight, for a start. I’ll pick her up and take her home from that pole-dancing club.’

‘Right. Need any help with that? You know, I could come with you, take a look round, see if any of her friends need to work on their self-revelation issues?’

‘Yes. No thanks, mate. I’ll manage.’

‘Sure?’

‘Certain.’





It was a quiet night at The Cosmos, which was always harder than when it was busy. When there weren’t enough customers to fill the bar and the tables, even the low lighting couldn’t quite conceal the tatty fittings and grimy carpets. Roxana worked the pole as enthusiastically as she could, exaggerating every undulation of her body. She locked eyes with each of the men in turn but she couldn’t make a single one of them pay for a private dance. Towards the end of the interminable evening, Mr Shane sent for Roxana to come to his office. Scarlet, the girl who delivered the message, wiggled her hips and smirked.

‘F*ck off,’ Roxana hissed at her.

Mr Shane took his cigar out of his mouth and exhaled a swirl of dirty blue smoke.

‘Shut the door. Come here.’

Roxana took one small step forwards.

‘Here,’ he indicated with the butt of the cigar. ‘That’s better. Well, now. Hmm.’

His manicured hands twitched her lace top away. He put the cigar back in his mouth, reached up and with a deft, insolent movement unhooked her bra.

Roxana looked straight over his bald head. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting.

Casually he fondled her. ‘You were late tonight, weren’t you? But you’re quite good, the punters like you. Do you enjoy your job here?’

‘It is a job.’

‘Like to keep it, would you?’

Now his hands slid over her breasts and insinuatingly over her hips. There was no doubt what Mr Shane had in mind. The same thing as Leonid. Always the same. Hatred stabbed through her.

‘Yes.’

‘Take that thing off,’ he ordered. His legs splayed on either side of her. His lower lip was wet, glinting in the light.

Roxana smiled down at him now. She reached behind her, undoing her miniskirt with deliberately slow movements as Mr Shane waited. The smoke from his cigar drifted into her face. She slid the skirt down over her hips, further down to her knees. Then she raised her leg, as if she was about to step out of the little garment. The man’s eyes travelled down the length of her thigh and calf, down to the stiletto heel of her shoe.

Roxana let her skirt drop. She jack-knifed her knee to her chest, then used the momentum to stamp her foot hard into his crotch.

There was a liquid gasp, like a bubble of air escaping from a blocked drain. As Mr Shane doubled up into his own lap, Roxana grabbed her skirt and ran for the door. Scarlet and one of the other girls were smoking in the corridor and they gaped at her as she pushed by. In the cubby-hole that the dancers used as a dressing room she collected up her belongings and stuffed them into her bag. She put on her outdoor coat and hurried up the customers’ stairs to the ground floor. A large group of flush-faced drunken men mobbed the entrance, trying to get into the club past the Maltese doorman who was barring the way and insisting that they must pay for membership first.

Roxana knew that this was her last-ever moment inside The Cosmos Club.

She felt no regrets.

She elbowed her way out through the crowd before Mr Shane could send anyone to catch her and repay her for stamping on him.

‘Some guy was in here asking for you,’ the doorman shouted after her.

Roxana ignored him. She let the heavy door swing shut. The night air tasted cool and fresh.

Noah had been waiting only a few minutes. He saw her erupt from the club, the light briefly catching her blonde crop. He also saw that she was laughing. Roxana slowed her pace and strolled away down the street, her stilettos click-clicking and her bag swinging from her shoulder. He jumped out of the car and ran to catch up with her.

Roxana heard the hurrying footsteps, and then an arm caught hers. She wheeled round, two hands grasping her bag with the intention of using it to batter her attacker rather than to secure it.

‘Hey. Hey, Roxana, it’s me.’

‘Noah, what are you doing here?’

‘Picking you up from work.’

‘I said not to.’

‘Not inside the club. Nothing wrong with waiting outside, is there?’

‘No, I suppose. Anyway, there is no argument. I won’t be going back there again. I don’t have a job any more.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I kicked my boss in the testicles.’

‘What for?’

Roxana shrugged. ‘The usual reason.’

Noah shouted, ‘What? What did he do to you? I’m going to go in there and do worse than just kick him in the balls, I’ll tear them off and stuff them down his throat.’

Roxana let herself briefly imagine what would happen if Noah tried to do anything of the kind, and what he would look like after Maltese Mike and Mr Shane’s driver had finished with him.

‘Thank you for the idea, but you don’t need to. I have looked after myself already.’

Noah wound his arms round her and kissed her. She was tough, but she was vulnerable too and the combination seemed to him almost unbearably lovely.

‘That was why you were laughing, when you came out of there?’

She kissed him back. ‘If you knew Mr Shane, you would be laughing too.’

‘Would that be before or after I ripped his balls off? Come on, let’s go. I’m taking you back to Auntie Con’s place.’

With their arms round each other and Roxana’s head tipped on Noah’s shoulder, they retraced their steps to the car. A few late-night pedestrians passed by, and Roxana remembered the night when she was leaving The Cosmos and had seen a boy and girl together, just like she and Noah were now, and how lonely she had felt because all the world seemed to be made of couples hurrying home to bed together. To anyone looking at her it would seem that she had joined the lucky people, and yet now she was here she knew the world was still a precarious place where you could lose your job in a flash of anger.

Even so, she was glad she had kicked Mr Shane where it really hurt.





Roxana noticed that the man was there again, waiting in reception with his laptop case.

He sat with one leg crossed over the other, the shiny toe of his loafer gently tapping the air. Once he turned back the immaculate blue cuff of his shirt with his little finger and glanced at his thin gold watch. He caught Roxana’s eye again through the glass door of the office where she was working, raised one eyebrow by a millimetre, and flashed a smile back at her. This was his second visit to Oyster Films, and Roxana had been aware of him right from the start because he kept looking at her. He would smile and not seem at all embarrassed to be caught staring.

He was very good-looking. He looked rich, too. She wondered who he was.

‘Mr Antonelli?’

The unfriendly girl who was the boss’s PA had come downstairs. The man got up and followed her out of Roxana’s sight.

Roxana went back to work. Angela had asked her to obtain the details of several Russian companies who might supply catering on location in St Petersburg, and to compare their quotes. In the back of her mind, as she tallied the boring figures, was worry about money and finding a new job. Working a few hours a week for Oyster Films was fine, better even than fine, but it paid next to nothing. Money was what counted, in the end.

Roxana did everything that Angela might possibly want, but at half past six there was nothing left to deal with. Noah was playing football tonight for his office team, and the prospect of an empty evening ahead of her was unfamiliar and slightly unwelcome. She put on her jacket with the buttons and went out into reception. Zoe had already chirped no worries for the last time that day, switched the phones to the night answering service and gone home. Then the lift doors slid open and Mr Antonelli emerged.

‘Hello,’ he smiled. ‘Finished for today?’

He held open the street door, and when she began walking he fell into step beside her.

‘How long have you been working at the company?’ he asked in a companionable way, as if they already knew and liked each other.

‘Not so long. But it is a good job, I like it very much.’ She wasn’t going to let on quite how menial or how temporary her role was.

He gave her a glance. ‘Are you a producer?’

‘No, in fact. I am, er, a translator.’

He looked impressed. ‘Is that so? What languages?’

‘I am working in Russian. I am from Uzbekistan, but now I live in London.’

‘Of course.’ Mr Antonelli nodded, as if something had fallen into place. They reached the end of the street and he glanced at his thin gold watch again. ‘I have an hour before my next appointment. Would you like maybe to have a drink?’

Roxana considered. Mr Antonelli was obviously important. Maybe he could be a useful person to know.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That would be very nice.’

He seemed to know his way around. He briskly steered her towards a place she had often passed but never thought of going into. Even this early in the evening, a big man wearing a black suit and a headset was guarding the doorway.

‘Good evening, sir; good evening, madam,’ he said, as they swept past.

The bar was flooded with soft golden light. The low furniture was all made of brown leather, wall mirrors reflected the backs of the women’s smooth blonde heads and the shoulders of men in City suits. There were waitresses in black uniforms, and low music playing. Mr Antonelli steered them to a table in a little alcove. Roxana blinked as a glass of champagne materialised in front of her. When she went out with Noah it was to pubs, or to indie music gigs in underground venues in Camden Town.

‘I am Cesare Antonelli.’ He took a card from his wallet and slid it across to her. Underneath his name it said Film Director, with an address in Rome. Roxana sat up. This was exactly the sort of person she needed to meet.

‘My name is Roxana.’

‘How do you do?’ Cesare Antonelli clinked his glass to hers. He leaned back against the leather seating.

‘So, Roxana. Do you do some acting, or modelling perhaps, as well as translating? You look as though you might.’

Her attention sharpened even further. This could be an opportunity much bigger than making phone calls to Russian caterers.

‘Not at the moment,’ she smiled. Her fingers moved on the cool stem of her champagne flute. ‘But I am interested, of course.’

‘And you are a good dancer, that is always useful.’

She stared at him. A flush rose from her throat to her cheeks and Cesare lightly gestured. ‘I was at The Cosmos Club with some Japanese business associates, after a long evening, you know what it can be like, and I saw you dance. You were really very good.’

Roxana was embarrassed. She had been thinking that Mr Cesare Antonelli recognised her talent, but it was only that he had seen her pole dancing. She was fairly sure she hadn’t done a private dance for him, at least, although she had become quite good by the end at blocking out the men’s faces, even at blocking out the fact that they were people at all.

Now she would have to make little of The Cosmos and at the same time convince Mr Antonelli that she could easily do whatever acting or modelling work he had in mind.

She lifted one shoulder. ‘I don’t work at that place any longer,’ she said coolly. Which was turning out to be a blessing. ‘I am concentrating on Oyster Films and my work across the board in the movie and advertising business. Are you going to direct a picture for them, perhaps?’

He said that he was setting up an Anglo-Italian coproduction deal for a big feature film, which he would be producing and directing, and he had been visiting Oyster Films to see if they might be a suitable partner for the enterprise.

‘But they are not really in the big league, you know. They are mostly commercials and small stuff. Nice people, but I don’t think I am going to be able to make it work with them, very unfortunately.’

In answer to his questions she told him about Noah and, without quite mentioning Connie, about living in her beautiful apartment, making it all sound as though she had lived in London for a long time. She liked talking to Cesare. He was never short of something to say, and yet he paid her the compliment of listening to her.

Cesare kept looking at his watch. When they had finished the bottle of champagne he said that he was afraid he would have to go and meet an associate to discuss some business over dinner. He hesitated, then added that if Roxana didn’t think that would be too boring, she could perhaps join them? His colleague might be a useful contact for her.

Roxana was thinking the same thing.

They took a taxi to a restaurant, another place with rich golden lighting. Some of the women at the tables glanced at her as she passed. Cesare’s associate was waiting at a table for two, but it was quickly re-laid for three. The man was called Philip. He was younger than Cesare and his clothes were scruffier. He had a tiny patch of hair sculpted under his lower lip.

Roxana waited until the introductions had been made, then she excused herself and went to the cloakroom.

The lighting was quite dim, but she came up close to the mirror and studied her reflection. The women in the restaurant looked smart, but then they were mostly quite old. She rubbed some more foundation on her face, thickened her mascara and finally stroked her eyebrows into place with a licked fingertip.

Critically, Roxana met her own gaze.

Noah constantly told her she was beautiful. She wasn’t sure quite how much she would be telling him about this evening; that would depend on whether it led to a job. But the thought of him made her face soften into a sudden smile. Now, she thought, she looked all right.

Over dinner she learned that Philip was a photographer. Fashion, glamour, he said airily. He looked round the room as he talked, clicking his lighter to the cigarette he held in the corner of his mouth and inhaling with one eye half-closed against the smoke. An understanding had arisen that Roxana would be doing some as-yet-unspecified work in the area of business that he and Cesare dealt in. Before anything could go ahead, though, she would need to get some shots in her book. He thought he could help her with that. Cesare listened to all this, but without much enthusiasm.

They encouraged Roxana to order food from the big, tasselled menu.

When it came it was delicious, the most elaborate food she had ever tasted, with layers of little crispy pancakes and soft, glistening meat and small puddles of unctuous sauces. She ate everything and tried hard not to look too greedy. Cesare and Philip had similar dishes but they only took a few mouthfuls. They smoked and talked, and drank wine followed by whisky with a lot of ice in short, chunky glasses. Roxana drank quite a lot too. She sank into a honeyed daze of optimism.

Of course she could be an actress, or a model.

After a while, the food and the drinks and the series of espressos that followed were all finished. They were out in the twinkly night, and Cesare hailed a taxi. Both men insisted that they couldn’t let her go home unescorted. Roxana confidently gave the driver the address of Limbeck House. When they reached her building, to her faint dismay they got out and Cesare paid the fare and the cab drove off. They were talking about coming up with her for a final nightcap.

Roxana hesitated. They had bought her dinner, and she was going to be working with them. She had talked – yes, too much – about her beautiful apartment. They took the lift to the top floor.

Once they were in the big white room the two men strolled to the window and gazed out at the city.

‘Nice place,’ Cesare said.

‘Live here on your own, do you?’ Philip wanted to know.

‘I…have a flatmate. She is away tonight.’ As soon as she said it, she cursed her stupidity. She should have said she would be back any minute now.

Philip wanted whisky. Cesare examined the music stacked on the top of Connie’s grand piano.

‘Are you a musician, too?’ he smiled.

‘No.’ Roxana searched through the cupboards. She knew that Connie kept drink somewhere, but she couldn’t remember where she had seen it. Cesare took pity on her and said that he would like a cup of tea. She filled the kettle and while she was waiting for it to boil she drank a glass of cold water. The room settled into clearer focus, and she realised she very much didn’t like the way Philip was wandering about picking up Connie’s possessions and putting them down again. Cesare was all right, but she didn’t care for this Philip. He saw her watching him and grinned at her. Very casually, he produced a little camera from the pocket of his jacket.

‘Now we’re here, shall we take a few pictures? Just some nice informal shots?’

‘Perhaps it is too late for that,’ she said.

‘It’s early. Isn’t it, Cesare?’

Roxana closed the door of the last cupboard with a snap. ‘I am sorry that I don’t have whisky.’

Philip studied her through half-closed eyes. ‘What have you got?’

A shiver of apprehension passed through her, followed by a dull sense of familiarity, disappointment and absolute recognition.

Model, indeed. Actress, ha ha.

She could forgive herself the first mistake of the evening, which was assuming Cesare might be useful to her, instead of the other way round. But now she found herself in the middle of a much bigger mistake.

‘Nothing. It’s time for you both to go.’

Philip came at her. ‘Come on, darling. A nice picture or two. On that lovely sofa, eh?’

‘No. If you don’t leave I will have to call for the police.’

Her hand stretched out to the telephone on the counter. Philip caught her wrist and Roxana squirmed in his grasp, trying to bring her knee into his groin.

Is this all that is ever going to happen to me? she wondered.

The answer came at once. Noah had never given her cause to kick him in the balls.

If only he was here now.

Cesare dashed forwards. He looked genuinely distressed. ‘Now, now. Don’t spoil a beautiful evening. Stop that, Philip. If the lady doesn’t want you to take her picture, you can’t force her.’

Philip let go, reluctantly. He slicked back his hair with two hands and adjusted his expression.

‘There we are. All friends again,’ Cesare smiled. ‘And Roxana is quite right. It’s late, and past everyone’s bedtime.’

She breathed again. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘I’ll just use the bathroom before you throw us out,’ Philip muttered. Roxana silently pointed along the corridor.

While he was out of the room Cesare apologised for him. He hoped very much that Roxana hadn’t been upset.

‘I am all right. Thank you,’ she said stiffly.

There was no more talk of opportunities in the film business.

When Philip reappeared his coat was done up and he stood by the front door without coming back into the main room.

Cesare kissed her on the cheek. ‘Goodbye, Roxana,’ he said.

Roxana locked the door after them, and slid the chain into place. She let her head fall against the heavy door, her shoulders sagging in relief. Then she walked down the corridor, past the cloakroom door and glanced into Connie’s bedroom. In the shaft of light falling from behind her, the room seemed undisturbed.





In the morning, even though the girl was so unfriendly, Roxana casually asked the boss’s PA about Mr Cesare Antonelli.

‘Him? Oh, turns out he’s just a bullshitter. Max checked him out, then told me not to set up another meeting. Why?’

Roxana only shrugged. ‘I wondered.’

‘You get all sorts,’ the PA said, as if Roxana might not have noticed this fact.





Jeanette slept better than she had done for months. She explained to Bill and Connie that the heat was soporific. It drew some of the pain out of her.

The pace of the village matched her invalid rhythms. Dewi would come to call, and sit drinking tea for an hour at a time with her baby shawled against her chest while Jeanette rocked in her chair. Sometimes Jeanette would make a slow walk to the market with Connie, and sit on a stallholder’s plastic stool while Connie tested the mangoes for ripeness.

‘Selamat pagi,’ Kadek and the other shopkeepers greeted them both.

Jeanette went with Dayu once or twice to the village temple with an offering, and came back with the symbolic grains of rice pressed to her temples. She said that for almost the first time since she had fallen ill, she didn’t feel that the whole world was racing ahead and leaving her like a piece of broken machinery at the side of the road.

Bill and Connie dovetailed their days around her. When she was awake and wanted to talk or just to look out at the view they sat beside her, and when she was asleep they stepped quietly through the house and spoke to each other in low voices.

The wet weather persisted. One afternoon Connie looked into the bedroom while Jeanette was taking a rest. Rain rustled in the palm thatch and dripped from the water spouts outside the shutters, until the whole house seemed enveloped in a thick cocoon of damp that furred all the cushions in the house with a silvery nap and tried to embroider their leather shoes with mossy green patches. Jeanette was fast asleep, lying on her back with her mouth slightly open and her hands, palm up, defencelessly uncurled. Connie thought she could see daylight between her ring finger and the wedding band.

Bill had come from the opposite direction with the same intention. He stood close behind Connie, looking over her shoulder as if they were a mother and father checking on a sleeping child. It was as if with the progression of the disease they had become Jeanette’s parents, Connie thought. They fed her, and encouraged her with affectionate words, and watched over her. Only they weren’t proudly watching her grow up. They were bringing her towards death.

She turned abruptly, almost colliding with Bill. As always, her skin felt minutely sensitive to his nearness. They were only six inches apart.

Gently, he cupped her face in his hands. He kissed her forehead and then involuntarily they folded together, listening to one another’s breathing and the steady drumming of the rain.

Connie wondered how it was that you could love one person so much, for so many years, and yet have so few shared memories. So little to sustain you, and no hope left at the end. Except for those few months when neither of them had been able to stop themselves, everything between them – chains of days, months and years – had been made up of absence.

Bill traced the line of her cheekbones. The palms of his hands were very warm. She thought how much she wanted to kiss him. She wanted it so badly that she felt dizzy, and now she asked herself how desire could sprout so nakedly and unashamedly out of the desert of Jeanette’s illness.

Tears gathered and ran out of the corners of her eyes. Bill trapped them with his thumbs and then touched his mouth to her wet skin.

‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear it if you cry.’

Connie made a sound in her throat that wasn’t a word or – not quite – a murmur of pure pain. She turned her head to escape his scrutiny, then pulled herself out of his arms.

‘I’m going out,’ she managed to say. ‘I’m going for a walk.’

She pulled on a nylon jacket and ran into the rain. Outside Wayan’s house was a row of scooters and bicycles belonging to the relatives who had come for the last flurry of preparations. Tomorrow was the day of the cremation.

Connie began walking. The raindrops landing on her face and lips felt warmer than blood temperature. The dirt road was reduced to a muddy ribbon threading through khaki puddles. Ahead of her a young woman hitched up her skirt and ran with her black umbrella bobbing over her head. Under all the awnings and shelters families were gathered, white-robed grandmothers and men in sweat-ringed T-shirts, mothers and impassive toddlers, sitting and staring out at the downpour. Even the dogs had crawled away to find cover.

She walked a circle round the outskirts of the village and came to the entrance to the monkey forest. The peanut vendors had withdrawn under the canopy of leaves, and only a small handful of tourists shrouded in plastic rain capes hesitated and discussed whether to abandon their itinerary for the nearest cappuccino bar.

Under the trees inside the forest enclosure, though, only occasional drips fell from the interlaced leaves to spatter the grey dust with percussive insistence. The macaques were drawn up in size order on the temple walls, tails dangling like inverted question marks. Connie squeezed some of the water out of her hair and strolled down the nearest path. The light was greenish, subaqueous.

Her intention had been to shut out all the thoughts of Bill, hurrying away from him yet again and closing up her mind as if she were preparing the defences against a tidal wave. But the wave smashed through the barriers and swept her away.

She was submerged in memories.





Bill and Connie saw each other at Christmases and birthdays, marking the milestones of the years. Without ever speaking of it, they had tacitly agreed never to hug each other like a brother- and sister-in-law, because they knew such an embrace would never be fraternal. They never even allowed their hands to touch.

Then came Noah’s tenth birthday. There was a football party, with Bill acting as referee for twenty boys who ran up and down the Surrey garden.

In the kitchen, Connie (‘I’ve only dropped in for an hour, just to bring Noah his present, I’ve got to go back to London for a screening tonight’) helped Hilda to lay out plates of sausages and bowls of crisps.

At the end of the game the pack of boys chased into the house. These days Jeanette didn’t enjoy parties or crowds, and she was white in the face with the strain of communicating with children who didn’t understand her signs and who tried not to giggle at her blurted words. Her jaw and back were rigid with determination to make her boy’s party a success. Noah was flushed and boisterous and he pushed past his mother to get to the table. In doing so, he knocked a big bowl of sliced fruit off the counter and onto the tiled floor. Chunks of pineapple and chips of broken china flew up into the air. Jeanette swung round in mute, boiling anger. Up to her ankles in fruit and unable or unwilling to strike out at Noah, she raised her hand at Bill as if to hit him.

A flash of loathing passed between them.

Connie saw it. A terrible, wild excitement shot through her.

Bill caught his wife by the wrist and gently steered her away from the mess. Hilda dashed forwards with a cloth and a bucket and the boys cheered and began like a multiheaded monster to stuff food into its many mouths. A minute later Bill was telling knock-knock jokes and Jeanette was triumphantly bearing the birthday cake to Noah at the head of the table.

Connie waited just long enough to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and then hurried away.

All marriages go through dark patches, she told herself.

Jeanette was by then studying plant taxonomy in the spare hours that were not devoted to Noah. She was a committed mother. Everything that was done for and by Noah Bunting had to be the best.

Perhaps Jeanette the perfectionist, Jeanette who loved her husband so much, who had never thought or dreamed of any man but Bill, had not left quite enough room in her arrangements for the awkward reality of Bill himself, the man and not the ideal.

Connie told herself that in any case whatever was happening between the two of them did not, must not, mean anything to her.





Then, a month later, she went to the party given by the agency in Docklands.

Bill was there and she walked towards him, knowing that she should turn and run, because if she didn’t it would be too late.

But that night, the will and the determination to keep on running finally deserted her.

Bill was waiting. He knew as surely as Connie did that they had reached the point of no return. He had been drinking, but he was clear in his mind. His marriage was a shaky edifice and the woman who came towards him was solid reality. She was light and warmth and food and water to him. To hold her at arm’s length tonight would have been to ask his heart to stop beating.

They left the party. As soon as they had taken a single step out of the room, there was no going back. Every evasive action that they had both taken over the years now seemed to have been leading directly to this moment.

Instead of extricating herself and sending him home to Jeanette, Connie took Bill home with her.

All Bill’s careful structures of duty and responsibility were burning down, and he let them blaze and then collapse into ashes.

They stumbled into the refuge of her flat, and the heat of passion melted and fused them.

He said, ‘I want you. I can’t sleepwalk through one more day.’

She tightened her arms round him and he kissed her as if he were a starving man.

‘I have been so lonely without you,’ she whispered.

‘I’ve been like a machine. But without you, everything’s starting to break down and run out of power.’

He undressed her, there in the hallway. She pulled off his clothes, just as greedy as he was. Reckless, laughing, they scattered a trail of discarded shoes and shirts behind them.

Bill was familiar to her, the shape and even the scent of him, but he was also brand-new. She had never seen this insistence in him.

‘Connie, Connie,’ he whispered. He marched her backwards, step by step, until they fell onto her bed.

There were no miracles, but Bill’s presence in her bed, in her body, closed a circle. Connie felt for a brief few moments that she wasn’t searching the landscape for signposts or trying to decipher a mysterious language. For the first time in her life she was at home, where she belonged, in a place that wasn’t defined by time or history.

Afterwards she held him against her.

His breathing slowed and steadied.

‘Why tonight?’ Connie whispered.

‘Because I can’t go on persuading myself that what’s true is not. And you?’

‘Truth and reality aren’t necessarily compatible, are they? The truth, if I’m going to admit it, is that I fell in love with you the minute you walked into Echo Street on your first date with Jeanette. Before I even saw you. As soon as I heard your voice.’

‘Look. You’re blushing,’ he smiled. His finger touched her cheek.

‘We’re talking about truth, remember? It’s often embarrassing. Reality is that you are Jeanette’s husband. But tonight the truth is that I still love you and you are here with me. I don’t know about tomorrow. I don’t even care.’

He held her closer.

‘Remember the day of the picnic? The motorbike accident?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘You were such a contrast to Jeanette. Jeanette was sunny. You were so dark and intense, coiled up in the back of my car.’

His mouth moved over her face. ‘And do you remember the wet night just before the wedding, when we kissed on the way to the tube station?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘That was a shock. You were supposed to be just a kid.’

‘I was seventeen.’

‘And then I took you out to find Constance Crescent, that empty street that didn’t tell your story, and afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about you. You wanted so much to find where you came from, and I wanted to tell you that it mattered much less than where you were going. I don’t know if it was then that I realised it, or if it came to me more gradually, but I was beginning to suspect that I might be marrying the wrong sister. I told myself that it was absurd, plain wrong, imagination, a trick of the light, a vertigo sufferer’s compulsion to haul himself to the edge and pitch himself over the precipice…all kinds of explanations. Justifications. But I couldn’t escape the conviction. It was there.

‘It wasn’t that I didn’t love Jeanette, because I did. I do still. And Noah. I have to tell you that now, Con. But how many variations of love are there? I kept seeing you and wanting to know you more; it wasn’t desire precisely – even though it was that too. Sometimes I could hardly be in the same room with you, I had to go outside and walk up and down until the urge subsided and it was safe for me to venture back again. It was more a certainty – I’m putting this very badly, and it isn’t as if I haven’t thought about it constantly – that if I could get close enough to you, if you would allow me to, if I could suspend all the other realities, then I would find – I don’t know – yes, I do – the love of my life. I’m making this sound so narcissistic, I’m sorry. All I can do is try to tell you the truth. The truth as it seems to me, in my heart. I know that your truth is likely to be different. Jeanette’s will be totally other, God knows.’

Connie tried to interrupt, to tell him that she knew what he was trying to say and that it was the same for her, but he gently put his fingers to her mouth.

She understood how much he needed to talk.

‘You seemed opaque. But inside here, Connie,’ he touched his fist to her forehead, ‘I knew you were as clear as spring water. Does that sound fanciful?’

‘No. Although I don’t think I’m either clear or opaque. Just a mixture, like everyone.’

‘It’s a matter of contrasts. You see, Jeanette is the opposite of you. Is this presumptuous of me, telling you what your own sister is and is not?’

‘No.’

‘On the outside, Jeanette is translucent. Her pale skin. That smile. But I made the classic bloke’s mistake of confusing looks with character. Jeanette’s inside is your outside. It’s dark. Of course she’s angry, that’s understood. You would be, I would be, if either of us had to contend with what she does.

‘I know it’s her anger that gives her the will to shape her life the way she wants it. That’s all right, it’s admirable. It’s just the silence, Con. It’s the silence I can’t bear. Not the deafness. In a way that’s only external. I mean the real silence.’

He tightened his arms, as if she might try to escape from him. His face was hidden in her hair but she could hear the grief in his voice.

‘I know,’ Connie said.

Echo Street had bred that deeper silence. It was rooted in the cultivation of appearances, the fear of exposure, the pin-neat, net-curtained, buttoned-lip and averted-glance rebuttal of the unwieldy and passionate world, as invented by Hilda and upheld by Jeanette.

After Tony died, those standards had gone so much against the grain for Connie that she had run away as soon as she was old enough to be alone.

‘At Noah’s birthday party. You saw what happened when he smashed the bowl.’

‘Yes.’

‘You or I would have yelled at him. Or just yelled. But that’s not what Jeanette does. Her only outlet is me. Everything is channelled through me. I am her lightning conductor.’

‘It looked for a second as though you hated each other.’

‘We do, sometimes. I don’t want to be a lifeline, Connie. All I can be is a man.’

There was a break in his voice that she had never heard before. She couldn’t see Bill’s face, but she was sure that he was close to tears.

In all the time she had known him, she had never before felt that he needed her or that she could help him, instead of the other way round. The wash of tenderness that came with the recognition was as powerful as desire. She hadn’t guessed that it was possible to love someone so much.

She rocked him gently in her arms. She talked in a low voice, words that were hardly connected, telling him that everything would be all right.

She couldn’t see how, but maybe they would find a way.

After a while he collected himself.

‘I have to go soon,’ he whispered.

‘Please don’t go yet.’

‘Con, what are we going to do? This is all we’ll ever say to each other.’

‘I know.’

‘Just a few more minutes.’

He made love to her again, roughly this time.

‘I want to go on holding you for ever,’ Bill said.

‘I want you to.’

She stretched herself beneath him.

She was discovering that it was possible to be wildly, exotically happy, even when you were in despair.

Connie walked back through the village, calculating that Jeanette would be awake by now. People had emerged from beneath their awnings and were hurrying to the market, and the street was noisy with the buzz of scooters. The puddles gaped like lunar craters. She jumped aside to avoid a tiara of spray as a scooter shot through the nearest one.

She found Bill and Jeanette sitting in their accustomed places on the veranda. The low sun had emerged into a broad band of pistachio-green sky, and the margins of the banana palm leaves were glinting gold. Steam gently rose where the sun struck the thick-knit vegetation and the frogs were clearing their throats for a long night.

Jeanette pointed, beyond the greenery, over towards Wayan’s house.

The upper storeys of the thirty-foot-high cremation tower constructed over the past weeks that had been shuddered and tipped sideways. Jeanette’s hands flew to her mouth as the whole edifice lurched and threatened to topple over. There was an echo of shouting and laughter before it righted itself again.

‘Don’t worry,’ Connie said. ‘Now they are decorating the wadah, ready for tomorrow.’





As the dusk gathered, Wayan emerged from his house compound. Two bamboo poles, one tall and one short, were planted beside the entrance. From the shorter one hung a bird woven from bamboo and decorated with coloured feathers, and from the taller a coconut-oil lamp covered with a white cloth. Wayan used another pole to unhook and lower the lamp. He cleaned the wick and filled the oil reservoir, then made sure that the flame was bright before he raised the lamp into its place once more. It made a pale glow in the fading light.

The bird was the watchman and the lamp was kept alight to guide his father’s soul back to its home. It would burn until the cremation was over.