Constance A Novel

SIXTEEN

‘Let us pray.’

Connie bowed her head.

She could see a double row of black-shod feet: opposite her were Bill’s shiny Oxfords, Noah’s less well polished boots revealed beneath the hems of black trousers that were too short for him and therefore probably belonged to his father, and some improbable Italian loafers sported by a cream-haired, red-faced old man with a wheezy chest who had turned out to be Uncle Geoff, whom Connie had not seen for twenty years.

On Connie’s side was a pair of matronly heels, sturdily planted but even so seeming to shudder with the force of Sadie’s weeping. Next to those were two sets of black knee-boots, Jackie’s and Elaine’s, and a shuffled-up line belonging to the cousins’ children. When Connie raised her chin she saw out of the corner of her eye the fluttering hem of the vicar’s surplice as he read the short prayer. The vicar was wearing wellingtons beneath his cassock.

Between the two rows of shoes lay Jeanette’s open grave.

The cemetery path a few yards away was grey, the dolorous marble headstones were grey, and also the squat tower of the church and the bare trees and the swollen sky, and what colour there remained in the thin grass seemed leached away by the murk. At three in the afternoon the daylight was almost gone, and apart from the white flag of the surplice there was not a shiver of movement anywhere. Even the morning’s rain had stopped, and although the branches and monumental masonry dripped steadily the undertakers’ discreetly fielded black umbrellas had not been called for. Sadie caught her breath, and there was a short break in her sobbing.

Funerals in England are not much like Balinese ones, Connie had told Wayan Tupereme. She thought briefly of the wadah and the single swoop of the paper dragon’s wings before they were consumed by a sheet of fire, the stench of kerosene and flakes of soot gently drifting in the twilight, and Jeanette’s observant admiration of the ceremonies.

Today’s event could not have been more different, or more mutedly English and monochromatic by comparison, and yet it was also fitting. Jeanette had expended so much of her formidable energy on living a normal life, and to be conventional in her taste and behaviour – to have chosen a traditional funeral – was all of a piece with that.

At the short church service that had preceded the committal there had been familiar hymns and Psalm 23, and Bill had spoken briefly and movingly about Jeanette’s life. Noah had recited from memory – rather well – ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, which he described as Jeanette’s favourite poem.

Connie could read nothing of Bill himself in any of this. He and Jeanette would have discussed the arrangements, and these choices must all have been hers. As she had done often enough before, she thought how remarkable it was that a man as imposing as Bill could be so self-effacing.

Now his black shoes took a step forward out of the opposite line. The toes were almost at the edge of the grave, where the raw earth walls had been masked with a roll of fake turf. Connie lifted her eyes from the ground but she did not venture a glance at him. Instead she looked at Noah. He was red-eyed, and he seemed painfully young.

Bill had been holding a tiny bunch of flowers. There were some twigs of rosemary and three frail white roses, the margins of the tissue petals browned by frost, picked that morning in Jeanette’s garden and tied with a piece of thin white ribbon. He kissed the blooms and then let them fall onto the coffin lid.

But that was you, Connie silently said to him, and the blood in her veins seemed to make a complicated double surge.

Sadie choked into her handkerchief, and one of her daughters placed an arm around her shoulders.

Almost briskly now, Bill took the very clean spade that one of the undertaker’s men handed to him. He dug one spadeful of earth from an uncovered corner of the mound piled on boards next to the grave and scattered it over the flowers, then Noah took the spade and did the same thing. Cut off by the grave from his ex-wife and daughters, Uncle Geoff seized the spade from Noah and contributed his own few clods of earth. Connie couldn’t see beneath the brim of Auntie Sadie’s big black hat, but she sensed a glare that smouldered hot enough to dry the flood of tears.

The vicar closed his prayer book. There was a moment’s silence as they each attended to their own thoughts. Then he turned and led the family procession away from the grave. Bill and Noah walked side by side, straight-backed, and the rest of them closed into a black phalanx. The heels of their various shoes clicked on the cemetery asphalt path.

Behind them, Connie supposed, the undertakers would remove their trappings and roll up the turf, and then the gravediggers would come and fill in the earth.

The word gravedigger was just about as archaic as foundling, she thought irrelevantly. Irrelevance was hardly a sin, though. All this black clothing and the line of waiting black cars beyond the Victorian lych-gate, the polished coffin and the artificial grass and we are gathered here to remember our dear sister Jeanette seemed in that moment supremely irrelevant.

– Bones, Jeanette had said. – They don’t mean anything. Just dry bones…and the spirit set free. I like that.

Connie was only walking away from bones. She was dry-eyed in front of other people, and she hoped that her back was as straight as Bill’s.

‘You know,’ her own voice ran in her head, words as clearly enunciated as if she were speaking for Jeanette to lip-read, ‘you know I love you, don’t you?’

The answer was loud, shapeless, formed with effort and with determination that had its roots in the stony subsoil of Jeanette as she had always been.

– Yes. I know that.





Minus the hearse, the cortege took the reverse of the twomile route back to the house that it had followed on the way out. The lead car, carrying Bill in the front and with Connie between Noah and Auntie Sadie in the back, made just one three-quarter circuit of the roundabout, exactly as on the outward journey.

Connie realised that she was smiling quite broadly at the memory of Jeanette’s order – twice round the roundabout on the way to the cemetery for me. She adjusted her expression before Auntie Sadie could see her.

There were already cars parked up and down the lane outside the house when the cortege drew up, and the caterers were opening the front door to muted couples and groups. The African violets in the big brass bowl in the hallway looked lush and well watered, and the finger of the long-case barometer indicated Rain.

On the parquet stood a pinboard on which Noah had put up a series of photographs of his mother. Connie briefly paused to look at them. There was the picture of Jeanette as a baby and the one of her wearing a little kilt and holding Connie on her lap that had stood on the top of the piano in Echo Street. Her graduation picture, in mortarboard and BSc gown and hood, smiled out from among the holiday snaps and Christmas party groups and proud events with Noah. The wedding picture took pride of place. Jeanette had looked so beautiful that day, her arm linked through Bill’s and her face bright as a beacon. Off to one side Connie noted herself, scowling in her tight, shiny bridesmaid’s dress.

The most recent picture had been taken by Bill. Jeanette sat in the rocker on the veranda, smiling into the lens with the green wave deep behind her. Connie met her eyes and returned her smile.

She moved on into the drawing room that was filling up with dark suits. There were neighbours to meet, and the colleagues Jeanette had introduced her to were waiting to shake her hand and murmur appropriately, and Uncle Geoff was wedged in the corner beside the fireplace.

‘I thought the world of her,’ he told Connie, sticking out his chin and squaring his shoulders in a double-breasted suit now much too big for him. ‘There was no way I was not going to be here. Whatever she might think, or say.’ He jutted his chin further, at Auntie Sadie’s turned back.

‘Of course you did, of course you had to be here,’ Connie agreed.

Later, when people were beginning to leave, she took some empty glasses out to the kitchen and found Elaine propped against the sink. Connie put down her tray, remembering three empty sticky sherry glasses on Jeanette’s dresser on the day of that other funeral, Tony’s.

Elaine stubbed out a cigarette and moved aside to let Connie reach into the dishwasher. Two caterers were drying knives and replacing them in a drawer. All these knobs and handles, Connie was thinking again, fingerprinted by the years of Bill and Jeanette’s marriage, and the invisible paths between the table and the larder, worn by their passing feet.

‘How are you, Connie?’

‘I’m all right, thanks.’ A colourless answer, but it was difficult to be any more expressive to cousin Elaine.

‘I still can’t believe it,’ Elaine sighed. Like Jackie she was divorced. Her two non-committal boys were now in their twenties. They came briefly back to the house to escort their mother, but had already left.

Elaine was reaching for another cigarette. She exhaled smoke and crossed her leather-booted ankles, ready for a talk, while Connie wondered vaguely how to make an escape.

‘It was nice, that music of yours,’ Elaine offered.

‘Was it? Thank you.’

Bill asked Connie if she would play some of her music during the funeral service. ‘Jeanette would have wanted this,’ he said.

They had decided on a version of the tune she had been working on the day of Jeanette’s death, a simple melody into which she had attempted to weave some of the Balinese gong notes and sinuous drumbeats. In the end, however, the piece had sounded to Connie like an awkward hybrid, without proper roots in either tradition, when she would have wished it to be the best music she had ever composed.

Even worse, as she played it with the polite audience ranged in their pews, she had felt an incongruous resemblance to Elton John.

Funerals were like this, she knew. You tried to concentrate on the person who was no longer there, and tides of inapt reminders of the busy, clamorous, still-living world swept in and eddied distractingly around you.

Connie tried to listen to what Elaine was saying. She felt all her perceptions distorted and her responses headed off into dead ends and irrelevances by the bulky interposition of grief. Elaine was waiting for an answer to a question, her mascara-ed eyes fixed on Connie’s face.

‘Yes, still doing the composing. Commercials, some film work when I can get it,’ Connie managed to say.

‘That’s nice. It sounds glamorous, anyway,’ Elaine sighed.

‘What about you?’

‘Oh, you know. I work in admin, NHS.’

Connie couldn’t even remember the last time she had spoken to Elaine or Jackie. Not at Hilda’s funeral, certainly, since that had taken place before she could get home from Tasmania.

Weddings and funerals, when families that were not familial briefly and painfully got together.

Elaine’s thoughts must have been following the same path. ‘I was thinking about when Uncle Tony died.’

‘He wasn’t your dad.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re adopted, aren’t you?’

‘We weren’t very nice to you in those days, Jackie and I, and we deliberately got Jeanette on our side as well. I’ve been meaning to say this for years, and now I’m going to. I shouldn’t have told you about being adopted, that was wrong of me.’

‘I suppose it was, yes. But I would have had to find out somehow, in the end. Perhaps you did me a good turn.’

Connie tried to imagine how Hilda might have told her, but couldn’t envisage it. Maybe Tony would have done it, if he had lived.

Elaine clearly wanted to say more and Connie waited. The caterers had moved away and were stacking up the serving trays that had been used to hand round sandwiches cut into pale triangles and small pieces of sombre cake.

‘We were so against anything that was different, back then. So suspicious. You were only such a little bit different, weren’t you, really? But it seemed an immense secret, that you weren’t born into the family. Whereas nowadays…’ Elaine sighed again, looking through the door of the kitchen and out into the hall where people were passing on their way to the front door. Bill and Noah were out there, quietly thanking people for coming. ‘…nowadays, we’re all alike, everyone. Community, that’s the word, isn’t it? Ours is the middle-class community, the one that Mum and Auntie Hilda were so dead-set on belonging to. Now we find ourselves stuck in it, a bit of difference would be quite welcome, funnily enough.’

Connie realised that Elaine was slightly drunk and that she was talking about her own life, or some choice she had made that Connie would probably never know about. At the same time she reflected that it was Jeanette who had been truly, dramatically different from all of them.

That was why Bill had loved her. She was a series of contradictions: her luscious appearance against her puritanical spirit, her cloak of conventional behaviour adopted as a protection for her deafness, and her constant denial of deafness itself.

The past reared up within the Buntings’ kitchen. The whole of Connie’s life seemed now to have been lived by and against her sister. The sea of Jeanette’s absence swelled and pushed the continents of normality towards the horizon and almost out of sight.

‘Do you mind me saying this?’ Elaine was asking glassily. ‘Do you? I wouldn’t be surprised if you did.’

Connie wasn’t sure whether she meant the apology or the reference to her perceived difference from Hilda and Sadie and their three daughters.

‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ Connie smiled. She had warmed to Elaine. The other woman immediately grasped Connie’s wrists. Her nails were manicured ovals, painted red. She tilted herself forwards until their foreheads almost touched.

‘Friends, then,’ she murmured dramatically. ‘It’s taken long enough, hasn’t it?’

This was how Jackie and Sadie found them. Sadie’s arm was tucked under Jackie’s. She looked older than seventyfive and her face was grained and puffy after all the crying.

‘I’ve been saying to Connie that I’m really sorry,’ Elaine told them, and Jackie nodded wisely.

‘That’s what Jeanette would have wanted.’

Quite a number of things have been grouped under that umbrella today, Connie thought.

‘It’s been a sad day,’ Sadie said, in a voice that startlingly resembled Hilda’s. Uncle Geoff had already gone, sunk into his black overcoat, coughing with the onset of a chill from wearing thin shoes in the wet cemetery. Sadie hadn’t spoken a word to her ex-husband. Her ability to bear a grudge was as developed as Hilda’s.

Connie said goodbye, kissing all three of them. She watched them go, out into the night, with Jackie and Elaine supporting their mother on either side.

The last of the friends and neighbours also filtered away and the caterers ferried their equipment out to a waiting van.

Connie emptied ashtrays and put the remaining glasses into the dishwasher. Bill closed the front door.

The house was finally empty, except for the three of them.

‘Thank you for doing so much to help,’ Bill said to her. He spoke with an odd formality. His face was drained of colour; even his mouth looked bloodless. Connie ached to put out her arms and hold him.

Noah had undone his black tie and it hung loose from his collar. He said, ‘I’m going upstairs to phone Rox, then I’m just going to chill for a bit. Is that okay, Dad?’

Roxana had insisted that she would not come to the funeral.

‘I didn’t know Mrs Bunting so much, and all the family and friends will be there, I don’t feel it is quite right. And now, after all this that has happened because of me, I would prefer not.’

Bill answered now, ‘Of course, that’s fine. Are you all right?’

‘Yeah, Dad.’

Bill and Connie watched him walk up the stairs. His shoulder dragged slightly against the wall and he corrected himself before taking the last steps at a gallop.

Connie followed Bill into the drawing room, past the pinboard with the photographs. Bill poured himself a whisky and Connie shook her head to decline one. They sat down facing each other and silence crept round them.

‘Do you think that went the way Jeanette would have wanted?’ Bill asked abruptly.

‘Yes, I do.’

He let his head fall back against the cushions and gave a congested sound that was more a cough than a laugh. Silence fell again, in the muffled depth of which Connie thought she could hear a door closing upstairs, the creak of polished parquet, maybe even a whisper of the barometer’s metal finger creeping from Rain to Storm.

It’s here, Connie thought. Afterwards is now.

And then, I have to get out of this house.

‘I’m sorry,’ Bill said, even more abruptly. He sat up and drained the whisky and then rotated the glass on the sofa arm.

‘What for?’

‘Let’s see. For everything I have done, and also failed to do.’

‘Bill, don’t talk. There’s nothing to be said at this minute. It’s the day of Jeanette’s funeral.’

‘So it is,’ he said, with a hollowness she had not heard before.

For so many years, even when they hadn’t seen each other for months, whenever they spoke the words had been ready and fluent, seeming to spring straight from their hearts. Yet now they found themselves stiffly talking like two actors under a spotlight.

Connie would have gone to him, warmed his hands between hers and tried to offer what comfort she could, but even the way that Bill was sitting told her that he didn’t want – could not bear – to be touched. She sat in her place, her ankles together and her hands folded, and let the silence lengthen. After a moment Bill got up again, with the restlessness of exhaustion, and poured himself more whisky.

‘What were you talking to Elaine about?’

‘She wanted to say she was sorry for telling me I was adopted.’

‘Ah.’

‘Funerals are when people feel the need to confess that sort of thing. And weddings.’

‘Yes.’

This time the silence seemed to go deeper, into the core of both of them. It seemed that unlike other people on this day, they did not have anything to acknowledge or to confess to each other. Bill was staring out of the window into the dark garden. He knocked back another mouthful of whisky and Connie felt the shudder of it chasing through her own system.

‘I think’, she said carefully, ‘I should head back home now.’

‘I miss her.’ Bill’s words cut across hers and they jumped, because this dissonance was new to them.

‘I know you do. So do I. I wish it had been me, not Jeanette.’ She spoke impulsively, out of the whirl of her thoughts, not thinking she should measure what she said. To Bill, she had always spoken what she felt.

His eyes moved from the window and settled on her face. ‘I don’t think you do wish that,’ he answered. There was a thin metal edge in the words.

Connie was lost for a response.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, after a moment.

She got up from her seat and went to stand beside him. The black glass of the window reflected their faces.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘This week, I am going to look after Noah, do paperwork, write letters. Next week, go back to work. Next month, probably also work. Next year? The year after that? I don’t know, Connie. That’s the truth.’

‘You’re wise not to make too many plans. Or to place yourself under any obligations.’

She saw his reflection incline its head. He was so sad that her heart knocked in her chest with pity.

Connie half-turned from the window. She touched her hand to Bill’s arm, then withdrew it.

‘I’ll be at the flat if you need me.’

He came out into the hall, handed her her bag and helped her on with her coat.

‘If there’s anything I can do,’ she began again.

‘Thanks, Connie.’ He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead, cold-lipped, as if she were one of the neighbours. He stood in the doorway, his hands at his sides, watching her cross the gravel to her parked car. As she drove out of the gate the door closed behind him and the porch light blinked off.

She navigated the country lanes with furious concentration.

Grief. Everything that was happening to them was a manifestation of grief and it did not have an expiry date, or a set term to run. She was only just beginning to comprehend the pervasiveness of it, but one certainty was growing in her. Jeanette’s death was as much of a barrier between Bill and herself as their marriage had ever been. (Connie made herself articulate these thoughts with cold precision.) And that was as it should be. She had made her own pledge to Jeanette, back in the garden of the Surrey house. The separation that she and Bill thought they had endured for so many years was, in reality, only just beginning.





It was still only the middle of the evening, although it felt to Connie somewhere closer to the dead of night. As she came to the outskirts of London she saw the blue-and-green neon lights of a bar/café that she had often noticed on her route out to Surrey. She was very thirsty, and also hungry.

In a booth in the corner of the bar she ordered a drink and food. While she was waiting to be served she reluctantly turned on her mobile. Immediately it started to ring, and the text-message envelope simultaneously blinked at her.

The first voicemail message was from Angela.

‘Con, I got your email. I’m really worried. Of course you can count on me, whatever you need. Call me when you get this.’

There were three or four others, on similar lines. The last one was from Seb.

‘Connie? What’s happening? I’m in Chicago but you can reach me on this number any time.’

She read through the text messages, and found more of the same. She realised that she had more friends and supporters than she would have estimated, and that was a happy discovery. She didn’t know what was in the email all these people were referring to, but she could make an informed guess.

Blindly, she had put off doing anything about the escalating crisis in her affairs until the funeral was over. She had not been able to find the necessary reserves of energy and application even to think logically about it. But now, plainly, she was going to have to deal with the situation.

A waitress wearing a plastic name badge that read Olga put a bottle of water and a bowl of noodles in front of her. Connie drank all the water and attacked the food. It was, she thought, quite a long time since she had eaten a meal. The hot noodles quickly disappeared. As she ate she was working out what needed to be done.

The text message she sent to Angela read: Didn’t send email. Laptop stolen. My sister’s funeral today. I’ll call you. She dealt with the others in similar fashion. Restored by hot food she drank a cup of coffee, paid her bill with a generous tip for Olga, and headed back to her car.





The apartment was in darkness. Connie glanced out at the diamond grid of the city, then clicked on the lights.

‘Roxana?’ she called.

Roxana wasn’t at home. They had had one difficult encounter on Connie’s return from Bali, when Roxana had handed over keys for the new locks and blurted out apologies that Connie was too distracted to process, but since then she had made herself invisible.

Connie went down the corridor to Roxana’s room and looked in. The bed was made, the beach postcard was in its usual place and Connie was reassured by the sight, but she would have liked it even better if Roxana had been there in person. In spite of the mushrooming chaos the girl had caused, Connie found herself wishing for her company. She didn’t work at The Cosmos Club any longer, and she wasn’t with Noah because he was with Bill in Surrey. She hoped that wherever she actually was, she was safe.

In the room that before the burglary had been her office and studio, she studied the place on the desk once occupied by her laptop. The drawers of her cabinets were closed on the ransacked files; she had done that much after the police concluded their cursory investigations.

The red numerals on her landline’s answering function indicated that she had eleven messages.

Connie sighed. She looked at her watch. It was only ten forty.

‘Ange? You’re not in bed, are you?’

‘What? It’s only just past teatime.’ Connie could almost see her I’m-hardcore-me-I-am face, and it made her laugh. Angela was launching into rapid questions and assurances, cutting across Connie’s incongruous giggle.

‘I hope the funeral went all right.’

‘Yes. It was done as these things have to be done.’

‘That’s good, at least. Con, I’m so sorry you’ve got all this shit to deal with as well. I just wanted to say, money’s no problem, I can lend you a couple of grand straight off and if you need more we can work a commission of some sort through the company, I’ve got a commercial coming up that you could…’

‘Angie, Angie, hang on. What are you talking about? Money’s gone out of a couple of my accounts and it seems my credit cards are maxed out, but I’m not quite destitute. Thanks for the offer, but I don’t need a loan…’

‘So what did you mean in that email? You said you were in trouble with money, just cash flow, because you’d been the victim of some fraud, and could I help out for a week or so? You gave the details of a new safe account that you’d set up. Remember?’

Connie sat down.

‘You didn’t transfer any money to it, did you? Please tell me you didn’t.’

‘No. I thought I’d speak to you first. But the money’s yours as soon…’

‘It’s another scam. It’s from them. I think that message has probably gone out to every single person in my email address book.’

‘But the new account’s yours, it’s in your name.’

‘They’ve used my details to set it up, yes, but the access to it will be theirs. As soon as money comes in from anyone I know who falls for it, the account will be emptied and they’ll be off.’

‘You can’t set up an account just like that. Money-laundering regulations.’

‘Angie, I know. But they’ve hacked into my laptop. They’ve got all my account details, all my personal information. They went through my office. They took my UK driving licence with photo ID, they even took my file of utility bills. Of course they can set up another account, that’s the least of it. They’ll probably be in the office tomorrow, trying to sell you the music I was working on. And now it seems they’ve got all my friends and business contacts thinking I’m out on the street, and transferring money so I don’t have to sit on a sheet of cardboard next to the cash machine with a sign reading homeless and hungry. Even Seb got the touch from them.’

‘Shit,’ Angie said.

‘What did the email actually say?’

‘I’d have to go and look, to tell you the precise words. But it sounded just like you.’

‘Clever.’

‘I feel responsible. If Roxana hadn’t met that man in our office…’

‘You aren’t responsible, Ange. Not even Roxana is, really. Any word on Signor Antonelli?’

‘The police interviewed Max. Antonelli was just coldcalling, blagged his way to a meeting, came back a second time on a pretext, and met Roxana in reception. He’s disappeared. No one in Rome knows him, it turns out.’

‘What a surprise. Was Roxana working today?’

‘Yep, she was here. Are you unhappy about that? Because…’

‘No. I’m glad. I’m worried about her. Look, Angie, I’ve got to try to contact people before they deposit money in that account.’

‘How, if they’ve got your laptop and the address book?’

Connie thought rapidly. ‘That’s no problem, I’ve got all my files backed up. I’ll go out first thing, buy a new laptop…’

‘Er, I thought your cards were all duff?’

I have no being, Connie suddenly realised. No ready money, no credit, no way of buying what I need to set myself back on track. As panic seized her she remembered how, when they first met, Roxana had owned no bank account, had no security, and no one to turn to for help except the Buntings and herself.

Angela said, ‘Listen, bring your disks or whatever you’ve got into the office first thing. I’ve got a spare laptop and Jez from IT will do the business on it for you.’

She did have a being. Of course the theft of her credit cards and a few personal details couldn’t undermine it.

‘Thanks, Ange. You’re a real friend.’

‘I’ll see you in the morning, then.’

Connie lay awake until she heard the sound of Roxana’s key in the lock, and her soft footsteps on the way to her own bed. Then she turned over and fell asleep.





‘I’ll come in with you,’ Connie said to her in the morning. Roxana spun round from the sink where she was rinsing her plate and mug.

‘What? Where to?’

‘To Oyster Films. That’s where you’re going, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I still have some work for them, I do not know how long it will last.’

Roxana’s mouth turned down at the corners. Connie noticed that she had discarded her big-buttoned jacket in favour of her old Soviet-style denims, and her crest of blonde hair was showing dark at the roots. All the gleam and bounce had gone out of her. She looked smaller, with the doughy softness of vulnerability about her.

‘Come on then,’ Connie said gently. ‘We’ll get the bus together.’

They found adjacent seats. Roxana stared past Connie at the rush-hour streets and the bobbing heads of people bearing newspapers and Starbucks lattes and shoulder-bags weighted with work towards their desks. To Roxana, the city tide seemed to be streaming away from her and leaving her on an uncomfortable shore.

Connie sent another batch of text messages.

Please DO NOT deposit any money. All a hoax. I will explain today.

Then she stowed her phone away. Roxana’s face was turned aside.

‘Roxana?’

‘Yes.’ The syllable slid out between frozen lips.

Connie told her, ‘No one’s blaming you for anything. I can imagine exactly how it happened. It was a mistake, and you won’t make it again.’

Roxana’s shoulders twitched. ‘I don’t know. There are too many things I do not understand. At first it seems a simple business, that you can step into another country and work hard and make yourself what you want. But that is only what you see at first look, because when you look again there are so many things you cannot see. How can you learn them? Not at English language classes. These do not teach you how to be English, do they? You and Angela, even that Zoe, you would know at once that Mr Antonelli is not a person to trust. But all I see is a man with a fine watch, and charming behaviour and a card that tells me he is in the movie business. So I believe what he says to me, and I take him and his friend as guests up to your apartment because I want to make them think I am someone who matters in this world. Then it turns out that he is not what he says, much more than I am not.’

Her lovely mouth twisted. ‘All I am is a stupid girl with stupid ideas about being an English girl. And this is the way I repay you for your kindness and for pulling me out of the sea. How much money have these men stolen from you, Connie? Because I will pay it back to you. I will do it if it takes me my whole life.’

Connie’s mobile rang in her bag. She thumbed it into silence without a glance.

‘I’m going to show you something, Roxana.’

She reached inside the collar of her coat, searching for where the thin cord lay next to her skin. She drew out a tiny silk pouch that hung from the loop of cord and eased it open, then withdrew the marcasite earring. Since the news of the burglary, she had taken to carrying it everywhere with her. She held it cupped in the palm of her hand for Roxana to examine.

‘Money, credit cards? None of that matters in the least. The bank and the card issuers will be responsible for most of it anyway. What else? Laptop, musical and studio equipment, a few rings and necklaces, a camera, some clothes? All of those I can easily replace. I am insured. Putting my affairs to rights again? That will take some time and a bit of effort, but I’ve got time to spare. This earring is the only thing, the one and only inanimate object I possess, that I truly value and could never replace. And I’ve still got it. It’s safe here, in my hand.’

Connie closed her fist over it, and smiled.

A spark had rekindled in Roxana’s eyes.

‘It is pretty, yes, but you have only one?’

Connie craned to see the bus’s whereabouts. They would reach their stop in not more than five minutes.

‘Long story. I’ll tell you quickly.’

Roxana listened. After a minute she kept her eyes on Connie’s clenched fist, as if the bus might give a more than usually brutal jolt and shake the earring out of her grasp.

At the end of the brief recounting, Roxana breathed out through parted lips.

‘If those men had stolen your mother’s earring away from you, I think I would have died,’ she said.

Connie was going to laugh with her, but then she saw that Roxana was serious.

They reached their stop. Connie slipped the earring back into its pouch and buried it beneath the layers of her clothes.

At Oyster Films, Roxana made her way, head down, to her desk where her pre-production legwork for the St Petersburg shoot was waiting. Angela was in her office, on the telephone, with the door shut. Connie collected the spare laptop from the receptionist and carried it off to Jez. He was frowning and clicking at the keys when her mobile rang yet again. Sorry, she mouthed at him, and retreated to a quiet corner.

‘Hello, is that Ms Thorne?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Hello there, this is Annette from Harrods’ fine jewellery department? Just a courtesy call to make sure you’re happy with those adjustments to your necklace, Ms Thorne?’

A few questions established that Ms Constance Thorne had purchased a diamond and pearl necklace, had requested that two links be removed to ensure a better fit around her slim neck – urgently, because she was going abroad and wanted to take the lovely necklace with her – and had paid for the item (more money than Connie had ever spent on a single purchase in her life) with her new store card.

The statement and the first payment demand, Connie estimated, would drop through her letterbox in the next two or three weeks. And this was probably only the beginning. There would be statements and demands for purchases made on whichever other major store cards the thieves had also taken out, probably using her existing credit cards as collateral and her driving licence and utility bills as proof of identity. Somewhere out there, Connie thought, was a woman who was not Constance Thorne but who looked like her or was made up to look enough like her (Wig? Coloured contact lenses? How far did they bother to go?) to convince busy bank-counter staff and shop assistants that she actually was herself, or at least as she appeared in the tiny photograph on her driving licence.

‘You okay?’ Jez wanted to know.

‘Yeah. Fine.’ She meant it. This, at least, was a set of circumstances she could deal with.

She picked up her mobile again. A moment later she was speaking to a credit reference officer about the startling debts that were being run up in her name.

‘I am afraid we see a lot of this. You are a victim of what we call…’ the woman solemnly paused ‘…identity theft.’

Connie concluded the call, and then stared at the long list of authorities to be contacted and steps that would have to be taken to restore the credit ratings and various degrees of purchasing power that seemed to constitute her identity, as far as the outside world was concerned.

The more she thought about it, the more absurd and perfectly ironic the situation seemed. She sat back in her chair and began to laugh.

Jez flicked her a nervous glance, then hunched attentively over the laptop once more. Clearly, he was keen to get shot of the madwoman as soon as possible.

Connie went across to Angela’s office, intending to share with her the comedy of Mr Antonelli and his associates making off so successfully with an identity that she had spent most of her adult life trying to define.

Can I replace it with a nice, plain, utilitarian one? she was going to ask. No problems, no missing history, no racial or social ambiguities? Will my insurance cover that?

But through the glass panel in the door she could see that Angie was still on the phone. Her shoulder was turned away, and she was shading her eyes with her free hand. Connie backed away.

In a windowless cubicle behind the reception area Roxana was also on the phone, speaking Russian very quickly in a wheedling tone of voice.

Connie looked around her. These were the offices of a busy film production company. A motorbike courier in leathers and a Darth Vader helmet was collecting a package from reception and two ad-agency account executives were sitting over a set of A3 storyboards while they waited for a meeting. She had no place here. She picked up her coat and bag, told Jez that she would be back in half an hour, and went down the street to a coffee shop.

Sitting on a tall stool, she gazed out through the faintly fogged plate-glass window into the street. Crowds passed by, but today their faces leapt out as if they were known to her. She saw how each individual had a different gait, a different path, and the ability to follow it without colliding with anyone else; each one had a set of unique motives that was propelling them past this window at just this hour. The variety of humanity within a few yards of inner-city pavement on an ordinary mid-morning suddenly took her breath away. She was warmed by the sight, and her feeling of separation melted like ice in the sun.

Connie realised how much she would have liked to talk to Bill about this, and about many other things – all the random coincidences and dislocations that made up a life. It took a great effort of will not to reach for her mobile, but she didn’t do it. She wouldn’t discuss the repercussions of the burglary with him, nor would they laugh about the definitions of identity.

Bill had the broad dimensions of grief to map, and then learn to inhabit.

As she did herself.

The split-second impulse to tell Jeanette about the theft flickered and then snuffed itself out when she recalled – with the same stab of pain that came a hundred times a day – that she couldn’t tell Jeanette anything.





Roxana finished her work. It was the end of the day, at last.

Angela had given her some notes but then had hurriedly left for home more than an hour ago, without speaking to anyone. Connie had picked up the laptop computer that Jez had prepared for her and had gone again before it was even lunchtime. For Roxana in her cubicle it had been a very long day. Film pre-production work seemed mostly to consist of trying to persuade local suppliers to offer more of their services for less money, and this was not a system that the Russians were very amenable to.

As she was putting on her coat, Noah called her.

‘Where are you?’ he wanted to know. When he was at the house in Surrey he was always asking her this, as if he felt trapped there, and feared that she might slip away from him.

‘I am still at work,’ she said. ‘How is your father today?’

‘He’s quiet. Just – very quiet. Are you going back to the apartment?’

‘Yes, in a bit,’ Roxana admitted.

She didn’t want to go back there yet, because she felt she didn’t deserve the privilege. When Noah was with his father, she had taken to staying out on her own until it was late enough for her to slip into Limbeck House and go straight to bed. London was losing the warmth it had briefly acquired and once again beginning to gape around her, a chilly place full of strangers’ faces and eyes that never met hers – unless they were men’s eyes, with the usual speculation in them.

‘Call me, then, when you get there?’

She didn’t want to hear the insistent note in Noah’s voice. It told her that his mother’s death and her mistake with Mr Antonelli had changed matters between them, and they were not as innocent or as easy as they had been.

‘If…’ she began, and then thought that whatever she said it was unlikely to satisfy either of them. ‘All right,’ she said.

Some evenings, Roxana went to the cinema. It was expensive, though, in the West End. She didn’t like sitting alone in pubs or bars, not because that in itself was particularly lonely, but because she was obliged to defend herself. So she went back to the Best Little Internet Café on the Planet. When he saw her, the owner called out that he thought she had deserted them.

‘No,’ Roxana smiled. ‘I have been working very hard, that’s all.’

‘Good. Work is very good. What will you eat? Souvlaki salad?’

Roxana ate her solitary dinner, saving for later the possibility that there might be an email from Fatima. Afterwards she took her cup of thick sweet coffee back with her to the internet section, even though there was a notice saying that drinks were forbidden near the keyboards. The café man winked at her.

Roxana logged on, and went automatically to the Uzbek language portal. Up came the picture of the blue domes against the desert-blue sky.

Until this moment Roxana would have denied that she ever felt a moment’s homesickness, but now she felt an unwieldy longing to be in this place again.

The news that scrolled underneath the picture was the usual bland propaganda put out by the government. Everything that she had left behind was no doubt still the same – corruption, intimidation, religious hostility. But her gaze kept returning to the picture of Chor Minor. The sights and smells and memories of home rose up, thicker and heavier and more real to her than the damp London street outside the café.

Roxana sat forward in her chair. Abruptly she clicked at the keyboard and the picture of Bokhara disappeared. She opened her email inbox, and saw that there was a message from Fatima.

It was very short, without any of the usual stories about her biznez men. It said simply that she had been talking to people, friends from home, and she had heard from them that Yakov wanted to speak to Roxana. It was very urgent, and if it was possible she should telephone him right away.

Fatima gave her a number to ring, but Roxana already knew it. She stood up, pushing back her chair so hard that it almost tipped over.

‘You want another coffee?’ the owner called to her.

She left the terminal and the usual row of hunched Asian students.

‘Not tonight,’ she said.

‘See you tomorrow, maybe,’ echoed after her as she went out into the rain.

There was another shop a few yards away. Peeling signs read Cheap Calls/China/Russia/Asia. It was late, too late really to be making this call, but Roxana could not possibly wait until the morning. Yakov didn’t sleep much anyway.

He answered within a few seconds, so she knew he had been awake.

She could see him clearly, a shapeless dome of flesh topped with a bald bean of a head, a man grown so fat that he rarely left his shuttered apartment. Her mother’s old friend, the one-time scholar.

‘My daughter. I have some news to tell you,’ Yakov gasped.





‘Roxana?’

Connie had been sitting in the semi-darkness, watching the lights beneath her and the planes on their winking descent.

‘Yes.’

‘Noah called. He’s been trying your mobile. Can you…Roxana? What’s happened?’

Roxana let her bag and her coat fall to the floor.

‘My brother.’ She had held herself together all the way home but now her face was beginning to work out of control.

‘My brother. He did not die in Andijan. He is in prison, but he is not dead.’





It was the same golden-lit bar that had so impressed Roxana when Cesare Antonelli took her there. Connie and Angela strolled in, choosing one of the leather-circled booths as if the place belonged to them. They scanned the drinks menu and told each other that tonight was definitely the night to have the cachaça and absinthe mint cocktail, and when the drinks came they clinked glasses with each other. They told Roxana to remember that friends were what mattered.

‘They are all that matters,’ Angela said. Deliberately she made a face like someone trying to be tragic in a TV comedy show.

Angela smoked constantly and kept taking off her tinted glasses and then putting them on again, but she and Connie both laughed a lot as well, and teased each other and Roxana, and even after all that had happened they made her feel as if she was one of them, one of the confident women who were at home in places like this.

When the second round of cocktails arrived Connie became serious. She raised her glass again.

‘Here’s to you, Roxana. I’m so happy for you and your brother, and I hope you’ll be able to see him soon. I hope he’ll be out of prison before too long, and I know you’ve got to go back right away to do whatever you can to help him. But I’m really going to miss you.’ She took a big gulp of her drink. ‘Good luck. Bon voyage,’ she added.

‘You’ll miss me, even though I let those men into your home?’

‘Those men took the things that don’t matter and I’ve still got everything that does.’

Roxana’s eyes went to the thread that held the pouch, just visible in the V of Connie’s top.

‘Nobody can steal who you are. I’m glad to have found that out,’ Connie said. ‘I owe the discovery to you, in a way, don’t I?’

Connie had even said that she would pay for Roxana’s flight home, but Roxana had money saved and wouldn’t let her. There had been a joke about how Connie didn’t have money or cards anyway.

‘Good luck, Roxana,’ Angie added. ‘Now, are we going to have another of these?’

They went on to dinner in a restaurant. In the taxi on the way there, Roxana looked out of the window at the shiny shop windows and the neon signs in Piccadilly Circus, the strings of blue twinkling lights strung in the bare branches of trees along the river, and all the big, imposing old buildings. She wasn’t seeing them as a stranger any longer, but still, London was slipping away, receding from her, already turning from what was real into what was only recollected, or imagined, a trick of the light, like a mirage in the desert. Her moment of longing for Bokhara now felt like a premonition.

It was not the same restaurant as the one Cesare Antonelli took her to, but it looked quite similar. Angela knew the man at the desk inside the door, and he said good evening and led them to a table in the corner with a view of all the other tables. Roxana noticed that none of the other diners glanced at her this time, and she didn’t feel the need to watch them either, or to compare her clothes with theirs. Instead of having to say and be what sounded right for the two men, she could speak as a friend to her two friends.

The day after tomorrow she would be in Tashkent.

To have Niki given back to her, even Niki imprisoned on such serious charges without trial and without a release date, was the best thing that could and would ever happen.

Caught on the cusp between two worlds, this night made her glow with a rare happiness.

They were all a bit drunk by now.

They were still talking and laughing when, without any warning, Angela’s eyes filled up with tears. She gave a sob and then tried to cover it up, and Connie gently grasped her wrist.

‘Bugger it,’ Angela sniffed. ‘Sorry.’

Roxana knew that Angela had just split up with her boyfriend. She guessed it was the man who had been with her in Suffolk, after the night of the storm, although she couldn’t be sure.

Angela said, ‘I am going to give you some advice, Roxy. Don’t ever get involved with a married man. Conmen, nightclub owners, even ad men if you must. But never ever, take it from me, lose your heart or give your life to a man with a wife and children.’

Roxana felt awkward, because of Connie and Mr Bunting. It came to her that even Angela did not know about this piece of Connie’s life, and when she met Connie’s dark eyes she saw that this was the case.

‘I will remember,’ she said carefully.

Connie squeezed Angela’s hand. ‘Have some coffee.’

Roxana tried to pay for the dinner, but they wouldn’t let her. Angela took one of about a dozen cards out of her wallet.

‘It’s on expenses. Pre-production meeting, St Petersburg shoot.’ The tears had dried up and she was smiling again.

Connie and Roxana saw her into a taxi, and then took another back to Limbeck House.

Roxana’s bag was packed, ready to go, and her room was bare except for the postcard.

Connie went into her bedroom and came out with something draped over her arm.

‘Would you like to have this, as a goodbye present? The burglars didn’t take it. Probably too last season for them. I know it won’t be that much use in the desert heat, but as a souvenir?’

It was the Chloé suede jacket that Roxana had once borrowed without Connie’s permission. She took it now and eased her arms into the sleeves. She couldn’t help stroking the soft lapels, and then giving a dancer’s pirouette.

‘Yes, I would love so much to have this,’ she said.

She saw the direction of Connie’s glance, and laughed, because she had already thought of it. She eased the postcard off the wall, and gave it to her.

Connie held out her arms and they hugged each other. It was a motherly and sisterly embrace, and it acknowledged that they were more equal than either of them had thought.

‘Maybe some day you will come to visit me and Niki in Uzbekistan,’ Roxana said.





Noah took her to the airport.

He didn’t want her to go, but there was no hope of her staying. Her brother had been delivered back from the dead, and there wasn’t a single card in the pack that he could play to trump that. He was happy for her, and bereft for himself.

‘Are you sure you will be able to get on the flight? And back into Uzbekistan, on an expired holiday visa?’

She reassured him. The confidence and determination that had temporarily seeped away were back again.

‘At Tashkent I will have to pay some fine, for an expired visa, I think. Your people, the British, will be happy to see the back of me.’

‘I have never so not wanted to see anyone’s back.’

He grasped the lapels of her denim jacket as if he could physically prevent her from leaving. Noah had always hated goodbyes.

She was so beautiful. He stared down into her eyes, then outlined her mouth with the tip of his finger, like some romantic loser in a date movie. He acknowledged to himself that that was quite close to what he was. He was losing her to Uzbekistan and history.

‘Roxana, you have to promise that you’ll call me, and email. I want to know about Niki. I want to know you’re safe and well.’

‘Yes.’ She pressed her warm mouth to his. ‘Noah?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Thank you for all the times we have had. You have been kinder to me than anyone else in my whole life. You and Connie.’

If only we could leave Auntie Con out of this, Noah thought in despair.

They were at the Departures line.

‘Tell your father I send him my best wishes,’ Roxana said.

‘I’ll do that.’

‘It’s time for me to go,’ she whispered.

‘Roxana, wait. What about us?’

For a second, he was going to ask her to marry him. That would solve everything.

Gravely, she shook her head. ‘I am from Uzbekistan,’ she said.

‘F*ck that. I love you. I…’

‘Shhh.’ She placed her finger on his lips. ‘Don’t say any more.’

They kissed each other, and then very firmly she put her hands on his arms and turned him to face away from the line. She gave him a gentle but definite push.

‘Are you coming back?’ Noah insisted.

‘Maybe one day I will come back,’ Roxana grinned. Then she shrugged, a fatalistic, comical gesture that was more eloquent than any words. ‘But…I never was an English girl, was I? I don’t think I ever will be.’

She stepped back and blew him a kiss. Then she walked towards the departure gate and out of his sight.