Constance A Novel

FIFTEEN

Bill stood at his kitchen window and watched the sun rise. The branches of the beech trees formed a dark lattice against the dishwater sky, but then a shaft of light suddenly caught them and they glimmered with rainwater. He was holding a mug of tea; when he looked down it was with surprise because he couldn’t remember how it had got there.

The tea was stone cold, and his bare feet were cold on the tiled floor.

He listened, straining his ears. The house was silent, and the silence had a massive quality as if the pressure it exerted on the doors and windows might cause them to fly open.

Upstairs, Jeanette lay seeming to sleep, in the bed where he had finally left her.





The gorge was a ripple of leaves, and from her chair on the veranda Connie could hear the crisp, leathery rustle as a quick breeze sprang up.

In the house the telephone began to ring.

She put down her book and padded inside to answer it. The floorboards were striped with afternoon sunshine.

‘Connie.’ His voice with a break in it.

‘I’m here.’

‘Jeanette died about three hours ago. I lay there and held her for an hour or so. I didn’t want to come down and leave her all alone, Con, but she’s dead, you know?’

Connie took in the words.

‘Oh, my darling.’

It wasn’t clear to her whether she meant Bill or her sister.

‘Last night she was restless and she couldn’t find any way to lie that didn’t hurt her poor bones. I brought up all the pillows in the house and put them underneath her to make the bed softer. I held her hands, and she smiled at me and signed good night. Then in the middle of the night I knew she was dying.’

‘It’s too soon.’

He raised his head at that. ‘No. She’s been ill for a long time.’

‘I wish I had been there.’

Bill said, ‘I think she would have preferred it this way. It’s as if she left you straight from Bali. She wanted it to come, you know. She probably willed it. That will of hers was still strong, even at the end.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got to go now, Connie.’

‘Is Noah with you?’

‘It’s still early. I thought I’d let him finish his night’s sleep.’

‘I don’t want you to be on your own.’

‘I’ll call him now. Jeanette’s nurse will be here in an hour.’

‘All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

‘Connie, she’s gone. She’s dead,’ he repeated, trying to familiarise himself with the words. ‘There is no reason to hurry over here. I don’t think the funeral can be for a week or so.’

‘No,’ Connie agreed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ve lost her too. I’m not thinking properly. It’s strange in this house. It’s so quiet. The silence makes me think of her silence.’

Behind her eyes, Connie felt the first tears gathering.





After Bill had said goodbye, she went to sit down at her keyboard.

An unexpected phrase of music was running in her head and she picked out the sequence of notes, then repeated them. There was some of the deep humming of the gongs from the village cremation, overlaid by a shimmer of metal, and she frowned in the effort to harness her imagination to a lyrical line. The fingers of her left hand spanned the keys as she reached with her right for a sheet of manuscript paper and scribbled For Jeanette.

The music seemed to be caught like floodwater behind a dam. As she struggled to release it Connie lost track of the time. She reached out once to switch on the lamp, but she was surprised when she looked up for the second time to see that it was now pitch dark outside. The night was noisy, as it always was, with dogs barking and the conversation of frogs.

When the telephone rang beside her she thought it was Bill again.

‘I’m here,’ she said.

‘Ms Thorne?’ an unfamiliar voice asked.

‘Who is this?’

‘This is Lloyds Bank.’

She listened in bewilderment. A bank official who might have been in Scotland or Cornwall was telling her about some unusual spending patterns relating to her credit cards.

‘Hi-fi equipment?’ she repeated. ‘No, I haven’t. No, nor leather goods. What is this about?’

She listened.

‘That can’t be right. These purchases were made in the UK and I have been out here in Bali for more than three weeks.’

Connie wondered whether this could be to do with Roxana, and then decided that that was impossible.

‘Yes, put a stop on the card, please. I will, yes. Yes, thank you.’

Jeanette and the music were filling her mind. Credit-card fraud was profoundly unimportant and she easily dismissed the thought of it. She returned to the keyboard, but only half an hour later the phone rang again.

‘Bill?’

‘Connie, this is Roxana. I am calling from London on your telephone, I am very sorry, but my mobile will not…’

‘That’s all right, Roxana. What’s the matter?’

‘I have bad news to tell you and Noah said for me to call you at once about it. He has gone home now to his father because, you know…’

‘Yes,’ Connie interrupted gently. ‘Just tell me what has happened, please.’

Roxana’s fractured English, breaking up as she tried to explain the news, was eloquent of her distress.

‘You know, we are broken into, the things gone, beautiful things belonging to you and all of this because I am stupid and I believe what a man says to me when all my life I am knowing better than to think such words are true. You have been so kind to me and I have paid you like this, Connie, and I don’t ask that you forgive me but you will let me pay back everything over some time, I will do this I promise…’

Even as she listened, she could not believe that the girl was culpable.

‘Roxana, be quiet, stop talking for one minute. The flat has been burgled, is that right?’

‘Yes. I’m trying now to find out all what has gone because the police are here making questions and I don’t know…’

‘Listen. If the police are there I’ll speak to them in a moment. Just tell me how the burglars got into the flat.’

‘It was because of me, and I am so sorry for it.’

‘How is that?’

Roxana said that she had met some men and she had been a fool to trust them, such a big fool, and she had let them into the apartment and this had happened…

‘I see,’ Connie sighed. ‘What have they taken?’

‘I am afraid to tell you. Your music machines and the computer.’

‘Oh dear.’

Connie couldn’t work out yet what the extent of the damage might be. Nor, at this moment, did she care very much.

‘And in your bedroom, clothes and such and your little boxes, you know, where jewellery is kept, I think, these are empty now.’

Among her jewellery there were pieces that Seb had given her, and the circle of polished stones in a vaguely art nouveau setting that she had chosen from Hilda’s small collection.

From the strangled sound of her voice, Roxana was now in tears.

As calmly as she could, Connie said, ‘All right. Let me talk to the police now.’

She discussed with the officer the probability that the thieves had found a spare set of keys in her bureau drawer, and had chosen a convenient time to let themselves in and go through her possessions.

‘I understand from your young lady lodger here that she met one of the men through her place of work.’

‘Did she? The lap-dancing club?’

‘That she didn’t mention. No, in her statement she said it was…’ there was a pause while he seemed to consult his notes ‘…Oyster Films.’

Connie put her hand to her head and pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. Now Angela would be involved. She felt rather as if she were in a novel with a very convoluted plot that wasn’t holding her attention.

‘Officers will be pursuing that line of investigation,’ the policeman droned.

‘Thank you.’

‘I understand they have taken your computer.’

He advised her to put a stop on all her cards and to change her PIN numbers and passwords immediately.

Connie thanked him once more, and asked him to put Roxana on again.

‘You see, Connie? It is very bad.’

‘It’s not very good, but we’ll deal with it. The first thing you must do is get in an emergency locksmith to change the locks and make the place secure again.’

‘But…’

‘Just do it, Roxana. Ask the police to help you. One thing I do not want you to do is to trouble Noah or Mr Bunting with any of this.’

‘You do not have to tell me such a thing,’ Roxana shot back. ‘I also have had my family dead. Do you think I do not know what this feels like?’

‘Of course you do. I’m sorry.’

‘Please. I will make the locks good.’

‘Thank you. I’ll be home in a day or so, I don’t know exactly when. You’ll have to be there to let me in.’

‘Of course. I dread to see you, Connie, but I will be glad as well.’

Connie smiled, in spite of everything. ‘Listen. Whatever the burglars have taken, it’s only things. Just stuff. A computer, a few rings and necklaces. No one can break in and steal from us what really matters.’

‘I hope so,’ Roxana said bleakly. ‘And I am very sorry indeed that you have lost your sister.’

Connie booked and paid for a ticket to London. After making sure she had enough cash in dollars to see her home, she made a series of calls to cancel her cards, as the policeman had advised. She found that it was helpful to concentrate on these practical matters. The pressure of grief was steadily gathering inside her skull.

At length, she decided there was nothing more she could do until she reached London again.

In Bali it was just coming up to midnight on the day of Jeanette’s death.

The fragments of music that she had been working on meant almost nothing to her when she glanced at them again. She shuffled the jottings into a pile and put them aside. When she stood up her back and legs ached from having sat so long in the same position.

In her bedroom, the bed was neatly made under its white cover. She sat down where Jeanette had slept, and gently touched the pillow.

Beside the bed stood a small wooden cabinet, locally made, with a single drawer. Connie slid the drawer all the way out, unhooked a latch and lifted it out of the way. At the back of the recess was a hidden compartment.

The only item in the secret place was a small box.

She opened the box with a practised twist of her fingers, and tipped the marcasite earring with an old-fashioned screw fastening into the palm of her hand. It glinted in the light of her bedside lamp.

A gecko ran up the white wall behind the bed, briefly startling her.

The burglars hadn’t got her earring. It was always with her, her talisman.

She closed her fist on it now. The post dug into the palm of her hand as she clenched her fingers more tightly, and began to cry for Jeanette.





Connie’s affair with Bill lasted for fourteen months, and in that time they spent a total of perhaps three hundred hours together.

It was such a brief interval within the drawn-out stretch of the rest of her life that Connie was surprised, once it was all over, by the abject loneliness that descended on her. She responded by parcelling up her days with mechanical attention, immersing herself in mere existence.

She ached for Bill, even to hear the sound of his voice, but she didn’t see or speak to him.

There was an instinct for survival buried deep in her.

She had work to do, and plenty of friends who were loosely connected with work. Six months after everything ended, she won an industry award. A piece appeared in Campaign titled ‘Boom Girl Booming’. More commissions come in, and she wrote the theme music for a hit television serial. Money accumulated in blocks and wedges, but it seemed to hem her in rather than offer greater freedom.

She began to travel, to India and the Far East and South America, with friends or more often alone. She visited temples and archaeological sites, made notes and searched for inspiration and wrote music, and all the time she felt as if she was drifting without an anchor.

One day, drinking Thai beer beside the slow brown river in Bangkok and watching the crowds flooding onto an upriver ferry, she realised with a jolt that in this distant place she was searching the faces for any features that bore a resemblance to her own.

Her companion was a dry Australian woman whom she had met on a plane a few days earlier.

‘What’s up?’ the woman asked.

‘I don’t think I know what I’m doing here,’ Connie responded with deliberate vagueness.

The woman raised her eyebrows. ‘What you’re doing here is what you’re doing, having a beer with me and wondering about heading north. What else is there? What do you want to know?’

‘All right. I want to know who I am.’

Connie had told her a little about her history. It was easy to confide in a stranger.

The Australian woman rolled her lower lip over the upper, removing a tideline of beer.

‘Why don’t you try to find out about your real mother, if it’s biting you so hard?’

Connie smiled at the over-simplification of this. But once she was back in England she extracted her short birth certificate from a file of papers and studied it. The baldness of the two shreds of information she possessed reminded her of how difficult the search would be.

On or about 17 June 1963. Found in garden at 14 Constance Crescent, London E8.

Foundling. Such a Victorian word. It seemed to have nothing to do with the 1990s but it was at the heart of her, even as much as Bill was.

She prickled with renewed desire to trace her real mother and as the days passed the need increased, occupying more and more of her thoughts. It was not just in order to experience that maternal tie, blood to blood, that she would never know with Hilda. If she only knew her mother’s story, however sad it might be, she could then continue her own, like adding chapters to a serial novel. It was having no beginning, Connie thought, that made it hard to develop a coherent narrative.

She began to read books and memoirs about other foundlings. She felt no less lonely, but to compare her experiences with those of other people provided a kind of comfort.

Fresh determination galvanised her.

She made an appointment, and went back to discuss the circumstances of her adoption with a different social worker. Mrs Palmer had retired. She learned that the social-work file that she had not been allowed even to see would have been kept in a safe place until twenty-five years after her birth, but now it had been removed and destroyed.

‘It’s a shame, that,’ sighed the young woman who interviewed her. ‘It’s quite a small window, really, for people to apply for the facts. Can’t you ask your adoptive mother about the details?’

‘Not really,’ Connie said.

She refused to be disheartened. She wrote an advertisement giving the date of her birth and the circumstances of her discovery, asking for anyone who might know any more to contact her, and placed it in a series of newspapers and magazines. When the ads appeared in print she sat and gazed at them. She fantasised about how her mother might at that moment be reading the same words, and realising with a flash of joy that this was a message from her lost daughter.

The only response came from a journalist.

A famous actor much older than Connie had published a popular memoir revealing that he had been a foundling, and so it briefly became a hot topic.

Connie agreed to be interviewed by the journalist for a colour supplement article, which appeared alongside a fullpage colour picture of herself looking wistfully out of the window of the Belsize Park flat. The introduction read, ‘Connie Thorne is a successful musician and composer. But there is a hollow at the centre of her life.’

Although it was a mass-circulation paper, the article produced no response except a sharp note from Jeanette to say that its appearance had really upset Hilda, and did Connie never think about the consequences of her actions?

After the interview, the journalist asked Connie if she had searched the national newspaper archive for any press coverage following her rescue. It was quite likely that there would have been several local news items about Baby Constance. If it had been a slack news day, the writer pointed out, the story might even have made the national news.

A few days later at a desk in a utilitarian library reading room in a North London suburb, Connie opened up a bound volume of the Hackney Gazette for June 1963.

She found herself staring in amazement at a picture of herself as a two-day-old baby.

She was loosely swaddled in a blanket, and her tiny, crunched-up face looked surprisingly serene.

‘Baby Constance is being cared for by nurses at the Royal London Hospital who have named her after the street in East London where she was discovered in the front garden of a house. Two-day-old Constance was tucked inside a shopping bag that had been left under the hedge. Police and medical staff are anxious to trace the baby’s mother, who may be in urgent need of medical treatment.’

Connie studied the picture for a long time. A hedge and a shopping bag, she thought. They were antecedents of a kind. Better than knowing nothing at all.

Later, she contacted the records department of the newspaper. They provided her with a photographic print of the baby picture. She framed it, and it stood on a shelf in her flat.

Hunched over the newspaper volumes in the dry library atmosphere, greedily absorbing the smallest details of her history, Connie first read the name Kathleen Merriwether. The Gazette journalist had even interviewed the girl.

‘“My boyfriend Mike thought it was a cat,” Kathleen reported, “but I knew straight away it was a baby…”’

Connie sat back, staring at the name as it jumped out at her from the grey mass of newsprint.

Kathleen Merriwether had found her, surely only a matter of minutes or a bare hour after her mother had crept along the hedge like a shadow and left her there. If she could find Kathleen, maybe she could cajole her into remembering some tiny scrap of a fact or impression that had been overlooked until now, a detail that would bring her mother closer. Perhaps even close enough to reach.

In her desire not to think about losing Bill, the search began to obsess Connie.

She was having vivid dreams of meeting her mother in strange places – in a laundry, in a flat-bottomed boat in a mangrove swamp – and then having disjointed conversations with her about gardening, or shoes. A sense of urgency grew in her heart, filling some of the space left by Bill’s absence. She wanted a real connection, not these phantoms dredged out of her subconscious. She felt her roots like vestigial fibres, coiled up, waiting to reach down into the ground and anchor her at last.

How, she wondered, did you go about tracing someone when all you had was their maiden name and their age? She thought of birth records, but that wouldn’t give much of a clue to Kathleen’s present whereabouts, and of electoral rolls, but that might well mean searching the whole country for someone who in all probability would now be known by her husband’s name.

Connie decided she might as well begin close to home. She took down the London telephone directory and counted the listed Merriwethers. There were only a handful with exactly that spelling, always assuming that the newspapers in 1963 had spelled the name correctly in the first place. With luck, she thought, she might end up speaking to Kathleen’s brother or a cousin.

It took her a few days to find the right frame of mind. Then one early evening, alone in her flat after a day in a studio, she began making the calls.

The first four led nowhere. Two were picked up by answering machines and Connie immediately hung up, not wanting or knowing how to leave an appropriate message. Another call was answered by a foreign au pair with small children clamouring in the background, who advised her in a strong Spanish accent to call back when Mrs Merriwether was at home. A very old man in response to the fourth call said that he had no relatives by the name of Kathleen, but told her a very long anecdote anyway about his daughter who was now living in Western Australia. Connie listened, hearing the note of loneliness in his voice.

A woman answered the fifth call.

Connie’s speech was well-rehearsed by this time. ‘Good evening, I’m sorry to trouble you, I’m trying to contact a Kathleen Merriwether.’

‘This is Kathy Merriwether,’ the brisk, pleasant voice said. ‘How can I help you?’

Surprise almost took her breath away. It took her a moment before she could say, ‘My name is Constance Thorne.’

‘It’s baby Constance, isn’t it?’ the woman replied at once. ‘You know, I’ve always wondered if I’d hear from you.’





To have found her so easily was such a stroke of good luck that it seemed almost inevitable to learn that Kathy Merriwether lived in Kentish Town, only two miles from Connie’s flat.

It was a warm spring evening when Connie walked up the street. The plane trees were putting out sprays of tender leaves, and music and voices floated out of open windows. Kathy’s house had stone steps leading up to the front door, net-curtained bay windows, and three doorbells mounted one above the other.

Connie rang the one marked Merriwether and as she waited she heard the whistling rush and then the buried thud-thud of a fast train in a deep cutting, very close at hand. Echo Street might have been just round the next corner.

The woman who opened the door was in her late forties. She was broad, with heavy shoulders and pretty plump arms exposed by a pale-blue T-shirt. She was wearing loose trousers and house slippers.

‘So you are Constance,’ she smiled. ‘Baby Constance, after all this time.’

Connie held out the flowers she had brought.

Everything was as she expected yet she felt awkward, and dull with the sudden certainty that this meeting that she had set up with so much eagerness wasn’t going to deliver any of the clues she longed for.

Kathy Merriwether’s path had briefly intersected with hers more than thirty years ago, that was all. It was difficult not to feel a sense of anticlimax when confronted with this ordinary, heavy-set stranger.

Kathy accepted the flowers and sniffed them appreciatively.

‘How lovely. You didn’t have to do that.’ She shook Connie’s hand. ‘Come on up. It’s the top floor, I’m afraid.’

Kathy puffed slightly as they climbed the steep stairs.

‘Dear me. Here we are, then. Make yourself at home.’

The sitting room was over-full with a squashy sofa and a pair of armchairs. China ornaments were lined up on the plain wooden mantelpiece over a gas log fire. The window looked down into a garden that sloped to a high wall, and just as Connie was registering that beyond this was the railway cutting another train whistled through. Vibrations set the window glass rattling in its frame.

‘You get so used to them, you don’t even hear them go by,’ Kathy said.

‘I know. The house I grew up in was the same.’

Kathy smiled. ‘Was it? Where was that?’

Connie accepted the offer of tea rather than a glass of wine. She sat down in one of the armchairs and called out her answers to questions while Kathy clattered in the kitchen, coming back first of all with the flowers arranged in a jug that she placed on the coffee table, then with a tray. She poured tea into cups patterned with rosebuds and handed one to Connie.

‘Echo Street? East London, is that? You know, I’ve thought about you so often over the years. I wondered how life had turned out for you.’

She glanced at Connie’s shoes and the soft leather bag in which she carried her papers. ‘It turned out all right, by the look of it. That’s very good.’

She offered a plate of foil-wrapped chocolate biscuits. Connie shook her head and Kathy unwrapped one for herself and laid it ready in her saucer.

‘Now. What can I tell you?’ she began.

Connie hesitated. Now that the moment had come the only question that properly formed itself in her mind was, Who am I?

She put it as neutrally as she could. ‘What happened when you found me?’

Kathy’s laugh turned into a sigh.

‘Well. I was sixteen, and out with my boyfriend. I was supposed to be back home by ten o’clock at the very latest. My dad was quite strict.’

Connie put down her cup. Every word was important, and she didn’t want to miss a syllable.

Kathy Merriwether told her about the empty street, the way the arched plane trees made a dark tunnel of the pavement. In her mind’s eye Connie saw Constance Crescent as it had been on the day she went there with Bill.

‘We were behind a hedge in one of the gardens. There was a smell of privet, dustbins and cats. Mike was trying it on, and maybe I was leading him on a bit. Then I heard a cry. It was a baby, I knew that straight away.’

‘What did you do?’

‘It was there, under the hedge. I picked it up. Brown plastic shopping bag, with handles. And you were inside.’

‘Was there anyone else there? Could someone have been watching?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Kathy said. ‘There wasn’t so much as a shadow moving anywhere.’

Another train plunged through the cutting.

‘Perhaps…’ Connie said ‘…perhaps she hid nearby, to make sure someone found me?’

The thought that her mother might have fixed her eyes on the woman she was now looking at seemed to create two spans of a bridge, airy yet almost solid enough to dash across.

‘Perhaps,’ Kathy said doubtfully.

The noise of the train faded and the flat was silent for a moment. Then Kathy went on, and from the way she talked Connie could tell that she was used to retelling the story.

‘Mike went to the house next door and rang the bell, and the woman who lived there ran out in her dressing gown. We took you inside and the woman’s husband rang for the police and ambulance. While we waited, I held you inside my cardigan. Trying to keep you warm against my skin.’

Even though the story was so well-rehearsed, Kathy’s voice caught a little. Connie kept her eyes on the patch of sky outside the window.

‘And there was the earring.’

‘What? What’s that?’

‘It was a single earring, I can see it now, fastened to the blanket you were wrapped in. One little glittering droplet. The mother, your mother, must have kept the other one. A keepsake, one for each of you. Maybe it was all she had to leave. I thought it was the saddest thing I had ever seen. It still makes me cry, thinking of it.’

Kathy reached into the pocket of her loose trousers and extricated a tissue. Connie kept on looking at the sky.

Kathy blew her nose. ‘What could have happened to that poor girl? What circumstances was she in, that made her abandon you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Connie managed to say. ‘I’d like to find out.’

‘Of course you would. That’s only natural,’ Kathy was saying. ‘It’s why you’re here. I’ll tell you what I can, but I’m not sure it will be all that much help.’

She poured more tea and resettled the cosy on the pot.

‘I would have loved to keep in touch with you, you know. I felt so responsible for you, after that night. I went three times to visit you, while you were still in the Royal London. It wasn’t too far, just a bus ride after I came out of school, and the nurses used to let me pick you up and give you a cuddle or a feed. You were the sweetest little baby.’

Connie risked a glance at her rescuer.

‘Did you? Was I?’

‘Oh, yes. So pretty and alert. More than any of the other babies on the ward. I didn’t have a camera in those days, not like everyone does now, but I’d have loved a picture of me holding you. Myra, she’s the nurse I made friends with, she’d have taken a photo of the two of us. She used to say that I should have been your mother, I’d have taken better care of you. I’m sorry, that sounds a bit harsh. We don’t know what made your real mother do it, do we?’

‘It’s all right,’ Connie whispered.

She was moved to hear the words us and we.

There was a new story involving Kathy, and a nurse with a name, and a ward with other babies on it who would all now be adults, and it affected her to realise that this was her story and theirs, before Hilda and Tony and Jeanette. Along with the photograph this was her own small fragment of a history, tiny but significant.

‘Then they took you off to the LCC children’s home, didn’t they? That was over this side of town so it wasn’t on the cards for me to carry on visiting you. I felt very sad about it. I’d even asked my mum if we could try to adopt you but she said she wasn’t about to start all over again thank you very much now she’d finally got me and Mark to the age we were.’

Kathy hesitated.

‘There was another question too, about you maybe being a bit of a mixture. No one even thinks about that sort of thing nowadays, do they? But it was a lot different back then and my mum and dad were very old-fashioned, Dad especially.’

Kathy bit into another chocolate biscuit as Connie met her eyes.

‘You just look very elegant now. Hard to place, that’s what I’d think if I met you and I didn’t know anything about you.’

Hard to place. That’s true enough, Connie thought.

‘Go on,’ she smiled.

‘One day I rang up the home to get news of you, and the clerk there told me that a family had come forward for you, a very nice family, and the adoption procedure was now complete. I asked, but they wouldn’t give me any details. It was confidential. So I never heard any more and it’s been in my mind ever since then. Do you know, at the hospital they gave you my name? Babies have to have names. Constance Merriwether, that’s who you were.’

Connie looked at her again. Constance Merriwether. There was a bond between her and Kathy after all: she could feel it tightening, pulling at her.

‘I didn’t know that,’ she said in surprise. ‘I never saw the adoption papers.’

‘The family who adopted you were called Thorne?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is like when you’re doing a jigsaw, isn’t it, and two big pieces suddenly fit together. Tell me some more.’

Connie told her about the Thornes. She realised that Kathy was a good listener.

‘So it was a successful adoption,’ the other woman concluded, but with a question in her voice.

‘Yes, I think so,’ was all Connie would say.

‘And now? What do you do now?’

Connie told her, briefly. Kathy clapped her hands in delight.

‘Really? You wrote that? Boom, boom, baboom, ba ba…’

‘Yes, and the theme music for…’

‘…bababa ba.’

‘What do you do, Kathy?’

‘Do you want to know about all that?’

‘Yes, I do. You found me, and you gave me a name.’ Nowhere near a mother or even a sister, but a significant connection just the same.

Kathy looked pleased. ‘I’ll need a glass of wine,’ she said.

She went into the kitchen, came back with a bottle and poured two generous glasses.

‘Well now. I went into nursing. Because of you, you could say. That night changed things for me.’ Kathy’s broad face turned solemn.

‘Up until then, I was a silly girl. You know…boyfriend, clothes, trying not to let my dad find out the half of what I got up to. Then I saw you, dressed in nothing but a little cardigan and a blanket, and left in a bag under a hedge. Once I’d held you, like this, in my arms, I knew I’d never forget you. I was playing about with Mike, and this was before the pill, remember, and I realised all of a sudden that what all that would inevitably lead to was you – not you, of course, but a baby who was a scrap of humanity, full of the potential to be someone and to love and be loved, not just me getting pregnant and having to leave school. It was a big, serious world. I looked at poor Mike a bit differently after that, I can tell you.’

‘I can imagine,’ Connie said. She was gazing at Kathy’s plump, pretty arms that had once held her.

‘All the boys, they just wanted what they wanted. But when I thought about it, I could just about guess at the mistakes and the bad luck that might have driven your mother to do what she did. She was probably only a girl herself. In the hospital when I visited you, Myra and the other nurses talked to me about their work. I was impressed because it seemed really important and valuable. My mum and dad were quite pleased when I decided to go for nursing training. I finished with Mike and they didn’t mind that, either.’

‘Did you marry someone else in the end?’ Connie asked. There were no rings on Kathy’s fingers.

‘I did. It lasted ten years. I was a staff nurse on a paediatric ward, and I did quite a lot of night shifts. What happened was just about what you’d expect.’

‘Children?’

‘No. I’ve looked after plenty, though. You were the first, and there must have been hundreds since then.’ Kathy sniffed. ‘I’m a health visitor now. Hospitals are more about management than nursing these days.’

She drained her glass of wine.

‘Are you married, Constance?’

‘No,’ Connie said.

Kathy didn’t miss much. ‘I see,’ she said gently. ‘And are you in love?’

‘No. Yes. Or I was.’

‘Do you want to tell me any more?’

Connie lifted her head. She found that she did want to talk to Kathy Merriwether. She liked her for her warmth and matter-of-factness.

‘There’s not much to tell. Not now, because it’s over. A married man. It’s painful, but I’ve been lucky in many other ways. That’s what my life feels like. Luck. A lottery.’

‘And you’d rather have facts and tidy explanations?’

Connie thought for a moment. Except with Bill, and the woman she had met on the plane, she wasn’t used to discussing these matters.

‘I think if you don’t have a history, the randomness of life strikes you harder. I also feel that if I knew my real mother, if I could find out what has happened to her, even if it was just enough to know that it wasn’t all tragedy, I wouldn’t always have this sense of another parallel existence that’s waiting for me to step into it. It’s partly a sense of foreboding, and partly of something very precious that I lost and need to find again.’

Connie suddenly leaned forward in the velour armchair, fierce with urgency.

‘Can you remember anything else about that night, Kathy? Any small thing that might be a clue?’

Sadly, Kathy shook her head.

Connie realised that she hadn’t heard a train go by for quite a long while. The city’s commuters would all be home by now, and it was time she went home herself.

Kathy offered, ‘You could speak to Myra, my nurse friend. I still write to her. She retired a few years ago and went back up to Aberdeen with her husband. He works on the rigs. Maybe she can think of something else. I’ll jot down the address for you.’

They both stood up. Connie waited as she searched for her handbag, found a little address book and scribbled on a torn-off scrap of paper. Connie knew that she would contact Myra, who would probably tell her a few more details about a foundling infant who had long ago spent a couple of weeks on her ward. She could try through the Royal London nurses’ association to trace the other nurses who had worked on the same ward, and they might remember more tiny details, but none of them was likely to lead her to her vanished mother.

Kathy saw her expression.

‘Here,’ she said. She held out her arms. For a moment, held in a weighty hug and breathing in another woman’s smell of cosmetics with the faint trace of sweat caught in folds of flesh, a memory of babyhood and the knowledge of a mother passed over Connie like a shadow from a bird’s wing.

‘Thank you,’ Connie whispered.

Kathy came back down the steep stairs with her. She stood in her slippers on the top stone step, looking up and down the street. It was almost dark.

‘You keep in touch, Constance Merriwether.’

‘I will,’ Connie promised, and she kept the promise.

But her premonition had been correct. None of the investigations she made yielded a trace of her mother.

Connie locked up the Bali house and gave the key to her neighbour Wayan Tupereme. The little man bowed his forehead to the tips of his folded hands and she returned the salute.

‘May the pengabenan of your sister be blessed, and may her spirit ascend to suarga.’

‘Thank you, Wayan. You know, funerals in England are not very like Balinese ones.’

‘This I have heard.’ Wayan sighed in sympathy. ‘However, when the rituals are complete, please come back to the village and to your friends. Dewi and my grandson will miss you, and so will I.’

Connie felt the loss of Jeanette like a solid thing, a heavy oak door or a stone pillar that she might batter with her fists until they bled raw, but which would not yield an inch. She had made no plans beyond flying to England for the burial.

‘I hope to,’ she said.

A taxi driven by Kadek Daging’s wife’s brother was waiting to take her to the airport. Connie put her suitcase inside and climbed in. Wayan stood in the lane, his hand raised, until the car overtook the stream of scooters and a bullock cart and passed out of sight.

Connie flew up to Singapore and took an overnight flight onwards to Gatwick. It was just getting light as she boarded the train for Victoria, and the day revealed itself as a sullen midwinter apology with the trees shawled in grey mist. The carriages were overheated and crowded with bewildered new arrivals, but Connie shivered after the heat and brilliance of Bali. She shrank into her seat, breathing in grime and watching the backs of the houses, sliced gardens and curtained windows and occasional yellow eyes of light as they swept past her and dropped back into the grey vacuum.

In the apartment at Limbeck House, Roxana was remorsefully waiting for her.