Constance A Novel

FOURTEEN

At midday Wayan unhooked the coconut-oil lamp from the pole at his gate. The lane was so packed with people he could hardly turn.

‘Everyone from the banjar is here,’ Connie said. ‘The whole neighbourhood.’

The latest arrivals noisily greeted her as they passed her house. Kim and Neil the property developers waved from the other side of the lane and Werner the sculptor accompanied by his latest boyfriend positioned themselves in the best place for taking pictures. Drums and gongs were pulsing from inside Wayan’s compound. Some of the young girls began dancing.

‘It’s like a huge party,’ Bill said.

‘That’s just what it is. A send-off for the spirit.’

A big group of laughing young men pushed by. They wore long tunics with bright yellow sashes, and head-cloths knotted round their foreheads.

Jeanette’s eyes glittered as she watched. She was holding Dewi’s baby in her arms. Dewi was wearing her best clothes, a brocade skirt with her upper body tightly bound in pale gold cloth. Her head was crowned with flowers and the baby reached out his fat hands and tried to pick off the petals. Jeanette stopped him by whirling him away and burying her face in his brown neck. He turned his attention to her hair and she let him tug at it with his fists.

In the middle of the lane towered the wadah. It was decorated now to the tip of the highest tier with a mass of coloured streamers, tinsel and branches and garlands of flowers, and on the back of it a grotesque painted mask bared its fangs over the heads of the crowd. The monster had huge paper wings on bamboo frames that flapped and creaked.

‘Look,’ Bill pointed. Out of the house compound came a group of relatives, carrying an object wrapped in white cloth. Two dozen pairs of hands grabbed it and hoisted it onto a shelf within the level of the tower that represented the world of men. He muttered, ‘That’s not the body?’

‘An effigy. The real body’s been buried in the ground all these months, so it’s impure and can’t be brought to the house. They’ll have dug it up and it’ll be waiting in the cemetery.’

‘I see.’

The tower shook as two boys scrambled up it. They wedged themselves among the decorations and waved to the cheering crowd. There was a fresh burst of shouting and laughing and further down the lane the throng parted. A pair of horns was all that was visible at first, but then a larger-than-life carving of a black bull appeared, standing tall on four splayed legs and borne on a platform of bamboo poles by yet more of the dead man’s family and neighbours.

The carving of the bull was realistic, down to the last detail. One of the men obligingly demonstrated that its large penis was moveable. The streamers and strips of cloth with which it was decorated fluttered and everyone laughed and cheered.

A loose procession began to form. Kadek waved his plump arms to marshal the crowd. At the head of the line, a young cousin lifted the coconut-oil lamp to guide the spirit to its destination. The bull came lurching and capering to the front and another boy jumped up onto its back. The sweating men carrying the platform tilted and swung it to try and throw him off but he clung on like a rodeo rider. The rows of women in their gold and best brocades came next, balancing silver dishes heaped with rice cakes and fruit and with flowers on their heads. Dayu and her sisters were carrying bamboo poles speared with carved pineapples and papayas. Dewi held out her arms for her baby before taking her place, and Jeanette reluctantly handed him over. He surveyed the scene with mild interest.

A long white cloth was unfurled over everyone’s heads. A mass of people rushed underneath it, reaching up to grab a handful of the cloth. Connie explained to Bill and Jeanette that the cloth was for everyone who couldn’t carry the tower itself to share in bearing the dead man’s remains to cremation. At the tail-end of the procession the strongest men were straining to lift the poles supporting the tower onto their shoulders.

The bull sarcophagus, the pyramids of multicoloured offerings, the cloth, the tower and the hubbub of supporters began the journey through the village. The procession moved slowly enough for Jeanette to keep pace without difficulty because the bull kept wheeling away from the route and making feints into the crowd. The bearers capered and spun in circles to confuse the spirit, so it would never be able to find its way back to the house and haunt the family.

Jeanette clapped.

– So remember, twice round the roundabout on the way to the cemetery for me, she ordered Bill. He caught her hand and kissed the knuckles.

Under its own momentum now, the procession roared through the market, past the clicking cameras of packs of tourists. The boys in the tower pelted the crowd with handfuls of rice and the crowd threw flowers. The bull danced under rows of coloured penjor flags, and a man with a forked pole hoisted low-slung power lines along the route so the wadah could pass beneath. Young men in the procession chucked water at each other and soaked the onlookers, and the fighting spread until dozens of hooting people were scooping handfuls out of the puddles and splashing it over everyone within reach. The insistent rhythm of drums and metal gongs grew louder and the men carrying the tower sweated and staggered beneath the weight.

As they came to the cemetery, they could see three more towers bobbing over the low roofs of the houses. Wayan’s family procession merged with the other three funerals and hundreds of people surged towards the cremation ground.

Connie gasped as a scattered handful of rice stung her cheek. She took Jeanette’s hands and they guided her away from the mob.

– What happens now?

Connie pointed.

In a quiet corner under the shade of a huge tree, the robed priests were waiting in a circle of musicians and dancers. The bull and the wadah were manoeuvred into place.

The musicians began to play. As the chains of notes swelled against an expectant hush, the people pressed round a pavilion hung with plain white draperies. The bull was carried into its shelter and set down, with a collective groan of relief from the bearers. At the side, on a low platform, a bundle wrapped in white cloths lay waiting.

The music grew louder and the whole crowd surged three times round the pavilion. Wooden cages were opened and chickens flapped and squawked to freedom, with dozens of pairs of hands waving them off in the auspicious direction.

There was a roar from the crowd. The hinged back was torn off the bull as the body was snatched up from its resting place. As it was manhandled to the sarcophagus, the cloths fell back to reveal a little heap of bones and hair and leather skin.

Bill put his arm out to shield Jeanette but she shook her head. She was watching intently.

The family piled the remains into the belly of the bull. More people tore the shrouded effigy from the shelf within the tower and crammed it in alongside the real bones. A jingling skeleton of human form made from pierced coins was thrown in on top. The priest poured holy water from an earthenware jar, then smashed the jar to fragments.

Now Wayan and Kadek and the other men packed kindling and logs into the space that was left. Brushwood was piled between the bull’s legs and the two boys reluctantly jumped from their perch in the wadah.

The stench of kerosene was momentarily overpowering.

Wayan stepped forward with a blazing torch. Flame leapt in a sheet and tore a long aaaaah from the throats of the crowd. They stumbled backwards as heat singed their faces. The wadah was torched in the same way, causing the monster’s paper and bamboo wings to arch and swoop just once as the heat rose, as if the creature would take flight from the fire. Flames licked from the snakes and serpents twining at the base and up towards the pagoda roofs of heaven.

Black smoke swirled through the crowds, and the brass music rose as the funeral dancers chopped and sliced with their swords, defending the spirit from evil as it made its way upwards.

Connie and Bill and Jeanette sank down, huddled together against the trunk of a tree, mesmerised by the blaze and showers of sparks that shot over the treetops. The other pyres were blazing too and the cremation ground became a nether world of drifting smoke, gyrating dancers and milling soot-blackened faces split into white smiles of elation.

The priest leapt onto a platform in the midst of the crowd. Over the crackle of the fires and the patterns of drums and gongs he shouted mantras at the sky. Processions of women laid their offerings in the flames as the bull and the tower and the bones were gradually consumed.

It took a long time for everything to be burned.

The musicians mopped the running sweat from their faces. The wood and metal patterns slowly unwound and separated into falling notes.

The priest’s arms fell stiffly to his sides and the dancers slowed to a shuffle, their heads drooping.

A stillness spread through the cemetery, and flakes of soot drifted through the leaves and settled like black snow.

Jeanette’s eyes followed the smoke up into the sky. The sun would soon be setting.

– Just bones, she said. – Dry bones on the blaze and the spirit set free. I like that.

‘So do I,’ Bill murmured.

Connie’s throat and lips were burning.

She took a bottle of water out of her bag. Jeanette and Bill gulped thirstily, and Connie finished what was left. Water trickled down her chin and when she wiped it with the back of her hand she saw a slimy trail of soot. Jeanette’s face was similarly smirched, but it was smoother than it had been for weeks. Her head rested against the rough bark of the tree and the soot flakes spiralled past her.

Bill rested too. When she stole a glance at him, Connie caught another brief glimpse of the young man of thirty years ago.

The smouldering ashes were finally doused with jars of water, and children raked through them with sticks to collect the coins. The families had been kneeling on the grass to pray, but now they brought urns and scooped up the ashes. Carrying the filled urns between them they began to leave in slow groups, walking through the twilight. Bill and Connie and Jeanette followed them, out of the cemetery and back towards the village. After the tumult of the day, people were quietly gathering in their house compounds to eat and talk. Lights shone across the village street and long shadows flickered whenever someone crossed in front of the lamps. Bats had come out as they always did with the darkness, and now they swooped in complicated skeins between the power lines and the overhanging trees.

Back in the lane, Wayan’s immediate family climbed into a line of waiting cars.

– Where are they going? Jeanette asked, as they stood aside respectfully to let them pass.

Connie said, ‘They are taking the ashes down to the sea. They’ll wade with them into the water, and then the tide will carry them away. The body has been reduced to its five elements, earth, water, fire, air and space, and the spirit has started on its journey. That’s all there is. It’s over.’

The three of them stood still, watching the red tail-lights of the vehicles until they turned out of sight.

‘Wayan and Dayu will be pleased. It was a good cremation.’

Jeanette surprised them with her smile.

– It was. The sea, you said? I’d like to go and see the sea, before we leave.

‘I know a place,’ Connie answered. ‘We can go there. It’s on the way to the airport.’

In two days’ time, Bill and Jeanette would be flying back to London.


Connie made a picnic, and the airport taxi driver took them down a winding road that turned away from the high-rise hotels and cheap shopping malls that blighted most of the coastal strip.

The beach was a thumbnail curve of silver-grey sand overhung by coconut palms, and the midday sea was a sheet of sapphire scalloped with foam where the tiny waves tipped over into the sand. It was Roxana’s picture postcard, almost to a detail.

Connie smiled as she thought of her insistence, ‘But I prefer Suffolk.’

They paddled along the water’s edge. Bill carried Jeanette’s flip-flops for her. Connie picked up bleached shells with salt crystals in their ribbing and Jeanette held out her hand for them, cupping her palm and smelling the ocean trapped in the whorls. But after only a hundred yards she was tired.

Bill spread out a blanket in the shade of the nearest clump of trees and Jeanette lay down, propping her head on one hand. A jet crossed in front of them, on a direct line to the airport.

– Will we really be in England tomorrow? I don’t want to leave this place.

Bill and Connie glanced at each other. They were expert collaborators now in giving Jeanette whatever she wanted.

‘You don’t have to. You could stay here with me,’ Connie said at once.

Jeanette shook her head.

– It’s time to go home. I miss Noah.

She stretched out her arms and sifted warm sand through her fingers. She had given up pretending to eat, but Connie and Bill peeled fruit and drank white wine out of the cool box.

– Remember that day? Jeanette asked. Sand spilled out of her fists and she dug her hands more deeply.

‘The picnic,’ Bill said.

We are too wound up in our damned memories, Connie thought. Jeanette had been brave and capable when the accident happened, and Bill was loving and good, and I was afraid and angry. But that’s not all each of us was, or is. It’s only what we remember. Is it our memories that make us what we are?

She wished it were possible to step out of the past, and the deep parallel grooves the three of them had worn, separately and in their pairs.

Connie and Jeanette, Bill and Jeanette, Bill and Connie.

Within her sister’s changed face she could see again the girl she had once been, just as at the cremation ground she had glimpsed the young man in Bill.

If we were young again, she thought. If we could do everything again, and differently, with more words and less bitterness, what would we say and do today, now we are nearing the end?

Sadness gripped her. They were sitting on the sand together just a few hours before Bill and Jeanette had to get on a plane. Jeanette was going to die before many more weeks passed, and here she was still thinking if and if.

Connie said, ‘It isn’t then that’s important, is it? We can make now matter, this minute, instead of Echo Street and whether it was harder for you to be born deaf or for me to be a foundling.’ Without glancing at Bill she went on, ‘We could forget what Bill and I did. Or we could acknowledge it and say that was a mistake, and not let it matter any more. Could we do that?’

She knelt down in the sand, stretched out and took her sister in her arms.

Jeanette’s eyes widened.

‘I love you,’ Connie said.

She had to strain to catch the blurred syllables of the answer.

– ‘Do you? I haven’t always been lovable.’

‘I love you now. And I always will.’

– ‘I love you too.’ The words almost inaudible now, from Jeanette who usually spoke much too loudly. Her breath was warm on Connie’s cheek.

Bill lay down on the other side of Jeanette. He folded himself against her spine, knees pressed into the crook of her knees. As they would have lain for a lifetime of nights, Connie thought, in their marital bed. They cradled Jeanette between them. Connie felt the ancient scabs of jealousy as if they were peeling off her skin and drifting like the flakes of soot.

‘I’m sorry,’ she breathed.

Jeanette studied her. Connie could see the mesh of wrinkles that netted the loose skin beneath her sister’s eyes, and the beads of sweat caught in the fine hair above her top lip. Light filtered by the palm leaves patterned her skin, and beyond her shoulder it caught the thatch of grey in Bill’s hair. It seemed that each of them was holding their breath, in case a clumsy word or movement from anyone might divide them again.

– I am sorry, too. But we are here now. I am so happy that the three of us are here.

Bill looked up into the clear sky. It was harder to speak than he could have imagined, and he was the one who had long ago railed to Connie about the damage of silence. The two women seemed to slide together, Connie’s warm brown skin enveloping his wife’s brittle bones, Jeanette’s vowels filling Connie’s throat.

He wanted to tell Jeanette that he loved her, and honoured her, but there would be enough time and privacy for that. He wished he could have told Connie out loud that he held her in his heart, then and now and always, but he believed she knew it without his bathetic words.

‘Connie is right,’ he said. He could just see the pulse beating beneath his wife’s ear. ‘What matters is now.’

Through the band of colourless, shimmering air between blue sky and sea, another plane roared towards Denpasar. The airport was waiting, already full of people, each of whom was shuttling around the globe like a restless atom, charged with their own concerns, winging towards families or taking flight from them, children and patriarchs, brothers and sisters and parents, healthy and sick, weighted with schedules, laptops, souvenirs, notes for meetings, all the travellers with their guilt and good intentions, each with their dreams and memories.

Jeanette watched the diminishing arrow of the plane.

– I want to go home to Noah, but it’s hard to leave Bali. I’m not ready to die. But I’m ready to consider the prospect.

Bill reached for Connie’s hand, found it, and drew it across Jeanette’s shoulder. They held her more tightly between them and Jeanette smiled at the sky.

– I smashed a table, you know, she said.

‘How did you do that?’ Connie asked.

– Didn’t Bill tell you?

‘No.’

– After I came home from the hospital. After the operation when they couldn’t do what they planned. I saw the glass coffee table we used to have. Smooth and whole. And I couldn’t see why a table should be like that, and not me. I smashed it to pieces. Pounded it with a paperweight.

‘I never liked that table,’ Bill said.

– You were shocked.

‘Yes, that’s true. It was so unlike you.’

– Dying was unlike me.

Not is, Connie noted. She was finding it very hard to keep back her tears.

‘Did smashing it make you feel better?’ she asked.

– No. Not at all. I was shocked at myself. But you know what? Bali has helped me. Your green wave, that was beautiful. The smell in the village of earth, pig-shit, rain, incense. The bodies burning, the party. It was apt. Just life and death. It made me think of Mum and Dad. Us three. Even Noah, some day. Only bones. And then the spirit set free. Maybe. You never know.

Her face split suddenly into a pumpkin-lantern smile.

– You could say, Bali has helped me see the bigger picture.

It was so like Jeanette not to try to speak of spiritual enlightenment or any kind of epiphany. The bigger picture was as big a metaphor as she was likely to use.

‘That’s the best recommendation for the island I’ve ever heard,’ Connie replied.

They lay back with their heads in the sand. A line of giant ants ran from a coconut shell into the coarse grass at the back of the beach, and another plane roared and dipped out of the sky.

Jeanette yawned.

– Have I got long enough for a nap? she asked.

Connie looked at her watch. ‘Maybe half an hour?’

They released her and she curled up on her side, sighing with satisfaction as she pillowed her cheek on her folded hands.

In the wake of the plane the air seemed to expand, the rustle of the waves and the palm leaves exerting an unwelcome pressure in Connie’s ears. Bill shook himself and sat up.

‘I’m going to have a swim,’ he said.

Jeanette seemed already to be dozing.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Connie said.

She was thinking of the unoccupied rattan chair on her veranda, of returning to her own bed and trying to sleep, and the knobs and handles in her kitchen where his fingers had rested.

They walked down to the water’s edge and waded in. Bill stared out to sea.

Abruptly he said, ‘Has Jeanette ever talked to you about afterwards? About what is supposed to happen when she’s gone?’

A breath of wind dragged puckers across the surface of the water.

‘Only at the beginning, that first day when I came down to Surrey. She told me then that she loves you and that you love her, and I agreed that there has never been any doubt of that.’

‘Did you?’

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Connie heard herself say. ‘And I’ve been able to share the weeks since then with the two of you. I’ve been included in her dying, even though the three of us made it impossible to share life. And I am grateful for it,’ she truthfully concluded.

Like Bill, she kept her eyes fixed on the horizon.

‘Yes,’ Bill agreed. ‘I understand.’

He stripped off his shirt and threw it onto the sand, then dived under the skin of the water. Connie stood and watched him swimming powerfully out to sea as if he would go on and on, over the various bars of paler and deeper blue to the glittering line of the horizon, and never turn back again.





The telephone used to ring in the flat in Belsize Park and she would hear Bill’s low voice.

‘I could see you for an hour, this evening.’

And without a thought even taking shape in her head she would answer ‘Yes’, blinded by a flash of delight at the prospect of a single hour. That was how it was.

From their first evening together after the Docklands party, they both knew that there was no hope of a happy ending. It was even true that to be stalked by the twin threats of imminent discovery and impending pain gave an extra edge to their temporary ecstasy, defining it with the same sharp glitter as the rim of frost on a dead leaf.

Connie told herself that it was enough – more than enough – to revel in the time that Bill could spare away from Jeanette and Noah.

From being an independent woman with money and freedom she willingly became the embodiment of a cliché, the lover of a married man, who sat waiting for him to telephone and who counted the hours until their next snatched meeting.

‘Why?’ Bill asked her.

They were lying in each other’s arms and she pressed her face to his so that their mouths touched.

‘Let me think.’ She played for time, trying to come up with an answer that wouldn’t sound needy or grandiose, when she needed him so much and loved him with an intensity that – in anyone else – she would have called dangerous. Or insane.

Then she laughed, giving up the struggle. ‘Because it’s what I want.’

‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think it’s extraordinary, magical, that it’s so exactly what I want too? How often does it happen that two people stumble on a passion like ours?’

‘Rarely. Eloise and Abelard? Maybe Antony and Cleopatra?’

‘Ha. Don’t cheapen us with pale comparisons, Connie Thorne.’

‘Sorry. Never before, then. Not in the history of the universe.’

He cupped her face in his hands, holding it away from his so he could search her eyes.

‘That is how I feel,’ he said.

Bill could switch from playful to serious in half a sentence, and she knew he did it with her just because he could. She tried never to compare herself with Jeanette where Bill was concerned – but Jeanette couldn’t hear the alteration in his voice from lazy to imperative, or the dip from elation into melancholy, and Connie hugged that advantage to herself with guilty greed. To Bill, the shorthand intimacy of some of their exchanges was as much of a luxury as their long, rambling conversations about music or Italy or food.

Most of the time they spent together, in the fourteen months before the end came, was snatched in brief hours after work when Bill could plausibly have been with clients. They retreated to Connie’s apartment and set about constructing a miniature universe together.

‘I know this isn’t real,’ she said once, sadly. ‘We long for each other so much, and every meeting is like drinking champagne on Concorde. We never see each other on irritable weekday mornings, or when one of us has flu, or when we’ve been spending so much time together that there isn’t anything particular left to say.’

‘It’s real to me. The benchmark of reality isn’t necessarily sharing the breakfast cornflakes.’

‘What would it be like, if we were married?’

As soon as she asked, she wished she had resisted the temptation. But Bill didn’t hesitate.

‘It would be wonderful. I imagine it all the time. To be together like this every day, to see you in the instant before I fall asleep and as soon as I open my eyes. And don’t you think I ask myself every day, how has this happened? How is it that I am married to the wrong sister?’

There was a bitter edge in his voice that was quite unlike him.

‘Bill, I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘Why not? I don’t want there to be even one forbidden topic between you and me.’

Maybe not, Connie thought, but there will be. Not now, but once the inevitable happens.

‘But I can’t leave Jeanette and Noah, you know. I won’t ever do that.’

‘Have I ever asked you to? Even hinted at it?’

‘No, you haven’t,’ he said humbly. ‘What we have now isn’t enough for either of us, but it’s all there can be. Will you forgive me?’

‘No. Because there’s nothing to forgive. We made this choice together. And it’s good.’ Her voice cracked.

‘It’s not good. It’s all wrong, but I love you so, so much.’

A handful of times, when Bill was legitimately away on business, they managed to spend a night together. Connie would travel separately to a hotel in Manchester or York or some other place she had never been to before in her life, check into a hotel, and wait for him to join her. The anonymity of hotel bedrooms, the signs to dangle on doorknobs and the miniature packaging of toiletries and minibar drinks became almost unbearably erotic. The few hours that followed contained the essence of happiness.

And while her affair with Bill continued, for the first time in her life Connie stopped probing at the riddle of her identity. She defined herself simply as a woman in love and all her being was concentrated in the present. It was possible, she discovered, to live almost from one breath to the next.

Just once, they spent three days in Rome.

Bill crammed three days of meetings with an Italian client into a single day. For the rest of the time they walked the streets, drank coffee in tiny bars, and sat in the shadows of baroque churches. They went to Il Trovatore, and came back hand in hand to the home they had made out of a hotel suite.

Then, very suddenly, the end came.

Connie and Bill had flown back from Rome, and they were standing at the carousel at Heathrow waiting for their bags. Two whole days and nights with Bill had lulled Connie into a wifely rhythm. She linked her arm through his as streams of luggage circulated on the belt, then stretched up to kiss the corner of his mouth.

An instant afterwards they turned their heads, sensing that they were being watched.

The moment froze into horror for ever afterwards.

Cousin Elaine – who was returning with her best friend from a fortnight in Tenerife – was staring at them across the revolving suitcases.

It was immediately clear to all three of them that a bomb had silently exploded in baggage reclaim and that the fallout was going to affect every corner of their lives.

Within twenty-four hours Elaine had told Jeanette exactly what she had seen.

(‘Well. Not to tell would have implicated me in the affair, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t expect me to enter into that sort of conspiracy with Bill and her against my own cousin. No right-thinking person would do such a thing. No, I did what was right and proper and I’m not ashamed of it.’)

Jeanette made an unprecedented journey to Belsize Park.

She marched into the flat with her coat pulled round her body as if to let it fly loose might expose her to lethal contamination. She refused even to sit down. Instead she stood in Connie’s kitchen, her eyes burning and the muscles in her throat working as she fought for the words.

She told her adopted sister that she was a despicable adulterer, ungrateful, a liar and a cheat, and not worthy of having been taken out of council care and welcomed into the Thorne family.

– That’s what we did, and this is your response.

Connie stood and silently took it all. In the grip of hurt and fury Jeanette looked like an avenging angel in a Renaissance painting. With a kind of bleak detachment, Connie had to admire her magnificent passion. Back came the memories of clawing and scratching at each other as children. Those battles seemed almost affectionate compared with this one-sided fight.

– You are not my sister. You never were, Jeanette said.

Connie didn’t point out that the biological bare fact was hardly news to her. And if Jeanette now chose to sever the remaining connection, with all its patina of Echo Street and the crannies and knobs of resentment that had accumulated over all their years – then Connie couldn’t really blame her.

– You will not see my husband again.

Connie couldn’t disagree with that either. She said that she was very sorry, and ashamed. She could have tried to add that Jeanette loving Bill so much herself might at least have lent her some sort of understanding of why Connie should love him too, but her fingers felt too cold and heavy to sign one more syllable and her face was stiff with misery.

– I don’t want to see you ever again.

Connie tipped her head in silent acknowledgement. Jeanette wrapped her coat even more tightly around her and swept out of the flat.

After she had gone, Connie stood behind her front door and listened to the silence. She had never felt as lonely as she did then.





‘How bad was it?’ Bill asked in a low voice.

Connie pressed the receiver to her ear as if that would bring him physically closer.

‘It was bad. What about you?’

‘The same.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at the office. I want to see you.’

‘No.’

‘Is that all, Con? Just no?’

‘You know that this is not just anything.’

‘I do. You’re right. You’ve got more guts than I have. Listen: remember what I told you.’

Bill had told her many things, but what he meant was I love you.

‘Me too,’ Connie breathed. She reached out and put the receiver back in its cradle.





Jeanette and Hilda formed an alliance of two. Bill was to be forgiven, eventually, once he had endured enough reproach. But Connie was never to be properly rehabilitated. She tried to forget Bill by immersing herself in work, by travelling to wherever she could reach that was a long way from London, by constructing all the appearances of a happy and productive life.

Over time, the absolute exclusion from the family softened a little. She was invited to set-piece events like Jeanette’s fortieth birthday and Noah’s eighteenth, but by then she was with Seb Bourret and this thawing of the ice probably had more to do with his glamor and fame than with Jeanette’s or Hilda’s reviving affection for herself. But still she went to the parties. The Thornes and the Buntings were the only family she had. And it meant that from time to time she saw Bill, or at least a quiet and correct version of him. They never touched each other, and spoke hardly a word in private. There was, in any case, nothing they could have said that they did not know already.

Then Hilda died, and there was one more terrible argument on the day Connie saw the contents of the old cardboard box.

She and Jeanette did not speak again until Jeanette knew how ill she was.

Connie waded through the water, the soaked hem of her skirt clinging to her legs. At last she saw the dot that was Bill’s head dip as he swam in a circle and headed back to the beach.

She waved her arm over her head and pointed to her watch.

Jeanette was lying on her side, but her eyes were open.

‘Did you sleep?’ Connie asked.

– No. I just wanted to lie here.

Connie helped her to sit up. Jeanette rubbed the sand out of her hair and her face twisted because the movement hurt her. Connie put her wrap around her sister’s shoulders, and chafed her hands as if she could massage some more life back into them.

Bill sprinted the short distance up the beach. He hopped on one leg as he dragged on his trousers.

‘Let’s get going.’ He took Jeanette’s hand to lead her.

Connie picked up the folded blanket and the picnic box and they began the slow walk back. The sand was hot under their feet.

Their taxi was parked in the shade of some scrubby bushes, with all four doors open to catch a breeze. The driver had been asleep on the back seat, but he leapt up as soon as they approached.

‘Lapangan terbang. Airport, quick, quick,’ he beamed, and they settled Jeanette into her seat.

They had spent longer at the beach than they intended, and the checkin queue had shortened to a handful of people. Connie could see from the sign that the Singapore flight was already boarding. Jeanette stood with her hand tucked under Connie’s and her slight weight resting against Connie’s arm while Bill checked them in.

– I wish you were coming home.

‘I’ll be there in a couple of weeks,’ Connie said with an easiness she didn’t feel. She had deliberately chosen not to return with Bill and Jeanette because she thought it would be right for them and Noah to have a few days alone together, without having to work out whether or not she should be with them. After that she would fly back to London for what they all knew was likely to be the beginning of the end.

‘We’d better go through,’ Bill said.

At the barrier Jeanette turned and held up her arms, like a child.

Connie kissed her, and closed her arms around her sister’s shoulders. There was almost nothing left of Jeanette’s once luscious body.

– Thank you. It was wonderful, Jeanette signed.

‘It was,’ Connie agreed. A man in a booth held out his hand for passports and boarding passes.

Bill and Connie exchanged the briefest hug. Bill and Jeanette held hands, and walked through the barrier. They turned back just once to wave before they passed out of sight. The last thing that Connie noticed was that the backs of Jeanette’s legs were still lightly powdered with sand.

The taxi driver was waiting for her in the line outside Arrivals. Connie waved and he pulled over. ‘Back to the village,’ she told him.





Noah was driving home from Surrey. He stared at the lines of rush-hour traffic but he couldn’t get his mother’s changed face out of his mind. In the two weeks since he had last seen her, she had faded and shrunk. Her skin was like stretched tissue paper over knobs of bone. Instead of firing questions at him and demanding to be told the latest details of his life, she was content to sit quietly and hold his hand.

‘Mum? Tell me all about Bali. What was it like?’

– Beautiful, she smiled. ‘Do you feel rested?’

– Yes, she agreed, but he knew that she said it only to please him.

‘Okay,’ Noah murmured. He squeezed her brittle fingers.

– How is Roxana?

‘She’s fine. Very good. She’s still working for Auntie Connie’s friend, in the film business.’

Jeanette didn’t ask any more, whereas once she would have wanted to know all about it.

‘Dad? She looks terrible,’ Noah burst out when they were alone together.

‘The flights were very hard for her,’ Bill said.

‘She’s…’ Noah began, then stopped. He had been about to exclaim, She’s going to die. It was stupid; he had known for months. But it was not until now, this minute, that he properly understood what dying was going to mean.

‘I should have come with you to Bali,’ he said despairingly. ‘I didn’t realise.’ Instead he had gone to meetings, and played football, and made love to Roxana.

Bill smiled at him. ‘Bali was very good, for all three of us. You’d have enjoyed it, but it wasn’t essential for you to be there.’

Noah absorbed this. ‘Was it all right with Auntie Connie?’

‘Yes,’ Bill said. ‘It was.’





Noah blinked, but he couldn’t see properly to drive. He pulled over and called Roxana on her mobile.

‘Where are you, Rox?’

‘Still at work. How is your mother?’

‘She’s very weak. Not seeing her for two weeks has made me realise how fast she’s going.’

‘That’s bad, Noah. I’m really sorry.’

‘What are you doing? I want to see you.’ He needed very much to hold her and let some of her life and strength seep into him.

‘I was going back to the apartment. But I’ll meet you. We can have a drink and talk.’

He smiled, fastening on to the prospect. ‘I’ll be there in an hour.’

They went to a pub they both liked. Nowadays Roxana knew all about how to order beers and which ones Noah preferred. She came back to their table and set his drink in front of him.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Cheers.’

‘Good health,’ Noah said sadly.

They had several drinks. Roxana listened to him talk about his mother, but she didn’t try to offer too much sympathy. She just accepted what was happening, and Noah thought that she did it in just the right way. He knew that he loved her, and looking at the angle of her thigh and the way her forearm lay along the back of an empty seat he was even more strongly aware, right now, of how much he wanted to f*ck her.

He shifted in his chair.

His mother’s hold on life was loosening, and his response was to feel an overwhelming need for sex? Was that shocking, or was it perhaps the normal, selfish response of those who were still healthy?

‘Roxana?’

‘Yes, Noah?’ Her mouth curved in a smile he recognised. She knew what he was thinking.

He leaned forward, caught her by the lapels of her jacket with the big buttons and drew her an inch closer.

‘Can we go back to Limbeck House?’

Noah didn’t feel particularly easy about using Auntie Connie’s place, but Andy was in the flat in Hammersmith and Auntie Connie herself was still out in Bali, so it wouldn’t matter that much.

Roxana’s forehead touched his.

‘Why not?’ she teased him.





In the mirrored lift as it rose to the top floor, Noah trapped Roxana in a corner. She pretended to dodge him, then crooked her arms to draw him closer.

‘Ha ha, now I have you,’ she murmured.

The lift doors parted and they stepped out into the lobby. A slit of window gave a different view of the city from the one inside the apartment. Roxana lingered to gaze at the chains of lights separated by mysterious wells of darkness.

‘Look, it’s so beautiful.’

‘I’ve seen it.’ Noah’s mind was on other matters.

‘Hey. Wait a minute. Let’s go inside.’

Roxana searched her bag for the keys, found them, and singled out the heavy Chubb. She fitted it into the lock, laughing a little because she had drunk enough to find the process a challenge. She turned the key to the left, expecting the familiar resistance and then a click, but instead the key refused to turn at all. The door was already unlocked.

Frowning now, she let her shoulder fall against it. The very slight give indicated that the Yale latch was in place.

When she went out to work she must have forgotten to secure the Chubb.

She fitted the Yale without difficulty and the door smoothly opened. She turned on the lights and the white walls were flooded with brightness.

She knew that she hadn’t forgotten to lock up properly, that was just the explanation she allowed herself to reach for, but at first glance everything seemed as it always did. Relieved, Roxana took a few steps forward into the big room. Noah turned towards the bathroom and she continued down the corridor towards Connie’s music room and bedroom.

And then she saw the open doors and she knew that the worst had actually happened.

The tidy work area had been turned upside down. The computer and the keyboard had gone. File cabinets and drawers stood open and the floor was a drift of music manuscripts and papers and strewn debris. She had no idea what else might have been taken.

A tide of horror swept through Roxana. She wanted to run and bury her head, but she made herself walk on into Connie’s bedroom.

Every drawer and cupboard stood open. The mattress had been pulled off the bed. Clothing and lingerie and photographs and emptied boxes had been flung everywhere.

She pressed the heels of her hands into her stinging eyes, then looked again.

The devastation was still there.

She walked back to the big room, although her legs were shaking.

Noah was standing by the window.

‘What?’ he demanded as soon as he saw her face. ‘What’s happened?’

Roxana’s hands were at her mouth.

‘A bad thing.’ In her anguish, language escaped her. She couldn’t remember the English words for burglar or break-in.

In her room, the mess was the same as in Connie’s but Roxana had nothing worth stealing. Her savings were in the bank, thanks to Connie’s intervention. Even her beach postcard was still on the wall beside her bed.

Noah was at her shoulder. ‘Shit, look at this place,’ he breathed.

Cold shockwaves were breaking over Roxana, and the breath was torn out of her as if she were fighting the Suffolk sea all over again.

‘It is my fault, it is my fault,’ she kept repeating. The whole picture now played itself out in her mind.

Noah put his hands on her arms. ‘You’ve been burgled. How did they get in?’

Roxana could see it all. She was standing over there by the kitchen counter, where she had made unwanted tea for Cesare, and then tried to kick Philip in the balls. The evening’s silly golden glow of champagne and sumptuous food had already faded into the dull reality of stale old bargains and men wanting sex from her. Philip had muttered that he would use the bathroom before Roxana threw them out, and she had let him go.

She had stood there and allowed Cesare to soft-soap her with apologies.

Philip must have crept down the corridor and gone swiftly through Connie’s belongings. And somewhere in a drawer he must have discovered a set of keys. How perfectly delighted he would have been with that.

Roxana screwed her eyes shut. If only she and Noah could be coming up in the lift again, with everything still fine, before she had betrayed Connie’s trust in her.

‘How can it be your fault?’ Noah insisted. When she looked again he was picking up clothes from the floor, laying them on the overturned mattress.

‘Come and see in Connie’s rooms.’

He followed her.

‘Shit,’ he said again. ‘Look, we shouldn’t be touching anything. How did they get in? The front door was locked, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Roxana said miserably. ‘I mean, no. I’m sure it was the men who did it.’

‘What men?’

‘I asked them up here.’ She could easily have cried, but she kept her neck and mouth frozen. She could have tried to tell a lie, but honesty seemed the last thing she had left to offer.

Noah gazed at her. ‘Go on.’

‘Mr Cesare Antonelli,’ she whispered.

‘Who is he?’

‘A film director.’

Disjointedly, while Noah still stared at her, Roxana told him about the evening.

‘Nothing happened, Noah. I know I was foolish. I was thinking about movies, about maybe being a model. They said I could be.’

‘I thought you were pretty streetwise, Rox, but you still brought them up here, to Auntie Con’s place? What were you thinking?’

‘Nothing. I got rid of them. But one of them, the bad one, I let him go to the bathroom.’ She pointed.

Noah let out a long sigh.

‘Noah, I am so sorry. I…wanted to seem like a London girl. I let them think that this was my place. I wanted to be like your Auntie Con.’

‘Well, you aren’t, are you?’ His voice sounded hard. ‘Right. Let’s think. We’ve got to start by calling the police. You’ll have to tell them everything.’

Roxana sank down onto a chair. She was afraid of the police. At home, they were not the people you looked to for any help.

‘And then we’ll have to telephone Auntie Con. What’s the time in Bali?’

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

‘We’ll have to deal with everything. I don’t want to tell my parents. I don’t want Dad to have to think about anything except Mum.’

‘I am sorry,’ she said again.

Noah took out his mobile, frowned at it, then tapped out 999.