Constance A Novel

SEVENTEEN

Connie had been travelling for almost a year.

She had been working, writing music, and watching the constant flow of the crowds in a series of cities from Berlin to New York and Mumbai. She hadn’t been alone all the time: in New York she went to a Beethoven concert given by Sung Mae Lin, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Sébastian Bourret. The three of them had dinner afterwards, and she was even on the point of accepting their invitation to spend a weekend with them and their twin girls at their Long Island home. Seb confided that he had always believed they would be good friends, given time. But then Connie had a call to do some urgent rescue work on the musical score for a Bollywood/Pinewood joint film production, and she had flown out to Mumbai instead. There had followed a month of intense collaboration with people she didn’t know well, which had been stimulating but also very hard work. Afterwards she felt tired and full of a kind of shapeless desperation, so she thought a holiday might be a good idea. She went to China and travelled overland to Kashgar, a remote trading city in the far west that she had always wanted to visit.

It was an interesting trip, although as soon as it was over Connie realised that since Jeanette’s death she had been moving constantly from place to place, meeting people, listening and responding with only a part of herself, all the while telling herself that everything was fine and that this was the way her life was lived.

But she felt more rootless than she had ever done, and now she was bone-weary as well.

After China, while staying with friends in Singapore, she had a sharp urge to go back to Bali and look at her green wave. She flew down to Denpasar, and took the public bemo up to the village.

‘Long time, my friend,’ Wayan Tupereme said to her.

‘Long time,’ Connie agreed, bowing over her folded hands to return his greeting.

Dewi had just given birth to another baby, a second boy. Connie went to visit them with gifts of flowers and rice, as she had done the first time.

The view from her veranda pleased Connie as much as it had ever done. But as she had guessed she might do, she kept seeing Bill sitting in the old rattan chair or opening the drawers in her simple kitchen. This almost-presence only highlighted the real absence.

She could see Jeanette just as clearly, but Jeanette was a more peaceful memory now.

Then an email arrived from Roxana.





Hello Connie! How are you? I am well. I have been visiting my brother in jail in Tashkent. It is a bad place, but at least I can see him. I miss you and London and Noah, but this is where I must be and where I want to be because Niki is my brother and to me that is the most important thing in this world.

So this is to ask, when can you come to Uzbekistan to visit me, my friend?

Connie walked out onto her veranda again and studied the silver loops of the river far beneath her. A breeze laden with moisture shivered the leaves. The little house and the village and the view all soothed her, but there was nothing tangible to hold her here. It would be good to see and talk to Roxana.

Travelling on was more than a habit, she reflected. It was becoming a way of life. She wrote back:





I’ll look into flights and mail you in a day or so.





Less than a week later she found herself in Bokhara, waiting for Roxana in the shade of the mulberry trees that fringed an ancient pool.

After the mists of her fecund Balinese valley and the air-conditioned voids of Singapore, she was finding it hard to adjust to the desert furnace of Central Asia. She felt not unlike one of the dogs that lay panting in the dust beside the outer wall of the mosque, or perhaps a camel taking advantage of a lone palm tree. A yellow-and-brown hornet the size of a cockroach was hovering over her chai glass. With an effort, she lifted her hand and batted it away.

Connie blinked to clear her eyes of dust and the harsh dazzle of the sun, and saw Roxana striding towards her.

They had met briefly the night before when Connie flew in. Today Roxana had been at her job. She was still wearing her work clothes – a hotel receptionist’s frumpy skirt-suit and open-necked blouse, with a pair of mid-heeled court shoes, clunky, probably manufactured in China. She was bareheaded even in the baking mid-afternoon, and she carried bulging string bags that swung and bumped with the rhythm of her stride.

‘You are here already,’ Roxana exclaimed as she reached Connie’s table. ‘I hope I am not late?’

Connie edged along the bench, making room for her in the mulberry shade.

‘I was early,’ she smiled. ‘It’s very warm.’

It was almost forty degrees. The light was blinding, flat out of a white sky, striking into the crucible of baked mud walls and dust-coated streets and further concentrating the heat. Roxana sat down and spoke quickly to the waiter, then turned back to Connie.

‘And so, tell me, what sights of Bokhara have you seen so far?’

Roxana was taking her role as hostess and tour guide quite seriously.

‘Let’s see. I went up the minaret.’

From one hundred and fifty feet up a slim brown tower there had been a wide view over turquoise-blue domes and tiled archways, and a jumble of smaller brown domes and arches cracked by dog-leg alleyways, away to the city’s flat outskirts marked out in Soviet-built apartment blocks, and beyond that to the limitless, colourless extent of the desert that faded into a purple-grey haze on the horizon. At that height a breeze had been stirring, but it was as hot and abrasive as the lick of an animal’s tongue.

‘And then I went to the Ark.’

‘First built here, you know, over one thousand years ago.’

The ancient fortress and home to the Emirs of Bokhara, massive in shimmering brick, was now mostly given over to a series of museums. It had been slightly cooler within the thick walls. Connie trod her way past the various exhibits along with a trickle of Dutch and German couples.

Outside, strings of entrepreneurial small girls chased after the tourists. They tugged at the pockets of Connie’s khakis and the hem of her shirt. The biggest skipped in front of her, blocking her path.

‘What’s your name? What’s your name?’

‘Connie. I’m from England. What’s yours?’

‘Samida. Come, see my pottery. I give you best price.’

‘Maybe later.’

The child snatched a handshake and offered her a wide, mirthless, professional smile. ‘Okay, we are friends. You come back. I saw you first, you come to me.’

‘It sounds like a deal, Samida.’

Connie had walked on past the carpet bazaars and postcard sellers, and the one-time madrassah niches where men wearing traditional four-cornered hats now sat amid heaps of decorative wrought-iron, and rows of scissors, and wickedly curved knife blades. She made her way to the ancient tree-shaded tank in the middle of the old town and chose a seat at one of the chaikhanas that lined it. The scummy water was as thick and green as pea soup and the huge yellow-and-brown hornets skimmed across the surface, but the reflections of twisted branches gave the illusion of coolness.

She was thinking about Roxana at Samida’s age, growing up in this place, scurrying and fistfighting her way towards the top of a heap that was about as stable as a sand dune.

Roxana quickly drained her Coke. She was eager to show Connie something new.

‘And now, are you ready for the women’s hammam?’

‘I’m ready,’ Connie said equably. She had no idea what to expect. Roxana had told her only that this was a proper Bokharan tradition, for women of the city, not tourists.

Roxana set off, heading at an angle away from the central pool, with Connie walking quickly to keep up. Within ten steps sweat glued her shirt to her back.

They ducked beneath the domes and multiple arches of a covered bazaar, where the carpet hucksters and the hordes of children ignored their passing because Roxana was one of them. They came out again into a warren of streets, barely wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side. The mud walls were broken by wooden doors, painted flat blue or green, peeling and blistered by the sun, all of them tightly closed. Black or blue numerals marched haphazardly on the doorposts, 67 next to 17 and also to 93. Power lines drooped and knitted from brackets on every corner, and the only sign of life was the scabbed dogs keeping pace with them in the thin ribbons of shade.

‘It is not so far,’ Roxana called over her shoulder.

The low, domed building was buried deep in a maze of unmarked streets in the old town. Connie knew that she could never have found it on her own. Above the brown doorway, in both Arabic and Cyrillic scripts, the single word Hammam was carved in stone.

Inside the doors was a dim, cool passage. Thick walls closed out the sounds of the street. There was the steady drip of water, a faint sulphurous whiff, and the sunless scent of old stone. Connie followed Roxana into a room lit from above by skylights.

The first impression was of a mass of female bodies, which resolved itself into a group of women undressing and stowing their clothes in rickety lockers. Copying Roxana and the others, Connie stripped off too. Naked except for the silk pouch containing her earring, she felt ridged and bony, and conspicuously hairy among such lush expanses of billowy, smooth flesh. All the other women were fully depilated, even the oldest ones. Feeling like Effie Ruskin on her wedding night, Connie suppressed a snort of laughter.

Slowly, she undid the strings of the pouch. Roxana briskly took it from her, extracted the earring and fixed it to Connie’s ear lobe. She studied the effect with her head on one side.

‘Nice,’ she said. She tossed the pouch in after the rest of their clothes and shut the tin locker, then gathered up the soap and shampoo and towels that she had brought in one of her bags.

‘Now, come.’

Connie hooked her hair behind her ears and meekly followed Roxana down a spiral of hollowed stone steps. The drip of water grew louder, and a thin veil of steam rose to meet them.

There was a circular stone room under the dome, insulated because except for the dome itself the building was all underground. Water splashed from ancient piping and ran over the stone slabs. The walls and the stone benches dripped and steam curled lazily through metal grilles. The room was full of pairs of women, coils of hair wound on their heads, their broad backs and buttocks and thighs shining. They were talking and laughing and scrubbing each other.

Connie gazed around her.

A series of smaller, domed alcoves led off the central space. Roxana beckoned. The first was the hot chamber. Steam hissed from the gratings and swirled in dense clouds, and the women lay like basking seals on tiers of stone slabs. Their talk subsided to a low murmur as they gave themselves up to the heat.

As they progressed through the sequence of hammam chambers, Connie was thinking of the thousands of women, Bokharans and travellers alike, who had preceded her through these stone arches. The hammam itself had stood here, at the heart of its Silk Road oasis, for more than four hundred years.

She felt herself slipping and sliding, out of her present self, into a place of unexpected comfort. She didn’t any longer feel conspicuous among the languid, smooth, fleshy women of the city. Roxana was one of them too, even with her bleach-blonde hair and her dancer’s body. They moved slowly, all of them, through the steam and through curtains of tepid water, over the corroded gratings where the water ran away through subterranean channels, and into cooler rooms where the talk and laughter broke out afresh.

Roxana reached for the soap and shampoo, and like the other pairs of women they took turns at rubbing each other’s skin with a coarse mitt, shampooing one another’s hair and bringing buckets of water to sluice over their heads.

Connie scrubbed Roxana’s long shins and the curved wings of her shoulder blades. With a swell of affection, she noted the hollows on either side of her heels, the undulations of her ribs and the enviably taut span between the crests of her hipbones. She submitted to the same attentions from Roxana, without trying to shrink away or to hunch inwards to protect herself.

Afterwards, with their skin tingling, they sat in a tepid room to rest. Connie fingered her rakish earring.

‘It is still there,’ Roxana assured her. She leaned back against the stone seat and sighed with satisfaction, ready for a talk. ‘Tell me, how is Angela?’

‘It’s taken time, but I think she’s forgetting about Rayner.’

‘She has fallen in love again?’

‘Not that. Not yet.’

‘Have you heard any news from Noah?’

‘Hardly anything. His father told me he is fine, more or less, although he misses his mother a good deal.’

Roxana waited attentively.

Connie’s communications with Bill over the past months had been brief and businesslike, mostly concerned with Jeanette’s estate. They were respectful of each other, and concerned not to intrude on one another’s private mourning. Or to intrude in any way, Connie thought with a touch of bleakness.

When Connie didn’t expand further, Roxana remarked, ‘I have had some emails from Noah, you know.’

‘What does he say?’

‘One of the things he said is that he would like me to go back to London.’

‘And what do you feel about that?’

‘What do I feel about London, or Noah?’

‘Okay. Noah first.’

Roxana drew up her legs and rested her chin on her knees.

‘He is the best person I ever met.’ Then she laughingly rolled her head to look at Connie. ‘I don’t mean that! You are the best person, of course. Noah is only the best boy I know, but that is by a very long way, believe me. But he is in London and I am here. I want to be in Uzbekistan to be near to Niki, and to work with Yakov and Niki’s friends to get him out of prison. So that is also the answer to the other half of your question, about London, isn’t it? I dreamed of it, yes, and of being an English girl, and I tried very hard to – what is the word? – integrate myself. I thought that by making myself similar to you, and being a part of Noah’s beautiful English family, I could belong even more in England.’ She sighed, and her expression was eloquent. ‘But as you know, that was not such a success because if I was truly English I would not have been taken in for one moment by Mr Antonelli.’

Connie patted her shoulder. ‘That’s all in the past. It’s dealt with, finished.’

It had taken some time, and it had been complicated, but her formal identity was her own once more.

‘I’m so glad of that. I learned a very big lesson. You know, Connie, what truly matters is your family. Niki is my family and Noah is not, even though I like him so much. It was all very well when I believed I had only myself to consider, I could decide to make myself like that because like this was not good enough. But now my brother is alive again. The first time I went to the prison I was – oh – so happy to see him. Can you imagine what that was like? He had come back from the dead. He is very thin and he had been beaten, and he had spent many days locked up alone, but still he was there, the same smile, the same person. My brother. Now I know what is important. Here I am. In Uzbekistan. This must be my place.’

The passion in her words touched Connie. Her admiration for Roxana renewed itself.

‘I understand,’ she murmured. ‘And you are quite right.’

There was a burst of laughter from the main chamber. The pairs of glistening, wobbling women passed from the heat to the cooler rooms, gasped as they were deluged with water, or sat and gossiped on the old stone benches.

Roxana beamed. ‘You see? You come here with your mother or your sister, and if you are not lucky to have them you are like us, with your good friend, and you talk and talk. You are scrubbed clean and you have opened your heart, and then you go out into the world again. Look, over there.’

Roxana pointed at a larger group of women. There were two elderly ones, one fat, and the other tiny with breasts like two dead leaves. They were issuing orders to a circle of laughing girls with one at the centre. The whole group was busy with white towels and jars of cream and lotion, and they set about scrubbing and massaging the girl’s skin and teasing out the thick coils of her black hair.

‘What’s happening?’

‘That one in the middle, she is a bride. These are her sisters and friends and those two, they are her grandmother and her fiancé’s grandmother. It is our custom. They are making sure that she is prepared for her wedding night. She will be beautiful for her husband, the grandmothers must see to that. And the bridegroom’s family, they must pay for all the cosmetics to make her ready. Combs and towels and soap, everything.’

The fat grandmother slapped a paste like thick red mud into the roots of the laughing bride’s hair.

‘Would you like to get married?’ Connie asked.

‘Ha. I have other things to attend to first. And I will wait my turn, after you.’

‘That might be a little too long to wait,’ Connie smiled.

Roxana sniffed. ‘We shall see. We will have another turn in the hot room now. And after that, the massage.’

Later they went back up the spiral stone steps. Off the upper corridor was another, much grander salon with a marble floor and lamp sconces made of wrought-iron. There were towel-covered divans against the wall and rugs and cushions on the floor. After their hammam, the women lounged and drank tea. Their hair was tied up in coloured turbans, naked fat babies lay on blankets and brown-skinned toddlers ran between them. Connie thought it was like walking into a Victorian academician’s painting of a seraglio. Roxana delivered her to an enormous, towelled Russian woman with a wide slash of gold tombstone teeth.

‘Massage, da?’

‘Um, yes. Thank you,’ Connie murmured, as she was stretched out like a sacrifice on one of the divans.

The Russian masseuse was strong as well as big. Under her vigorous hands Connie’s joints creaked and snapped and the women within earshot all laughed appreciatively. At the end, when her muscles were unknotted and her limbs felt like jelly, the woman scooped her up like a rag doll and cradled Connie’s head against her immense bosom.

It was like being held by Mother Earth herself.

Fingers massaged Connie’s scalp and her neck, even her ears, with as much love and tenderness as if she were a baby.

And without the slightest warning, without the accompaniment of pain in her chest or a clutch to her heart, Connie began to cry.

The tears poured out of her eyes. She wept like a baby in its mother’s arms, hiding her face against the massive breasts as the woman hummed and crooned to her. She stroked Connie’s hair and patted her hands, waiting until she was done with crying and began to regain possession of herself. When the flood finally stopped the woman dried her face for her, and gently set her upright once more.

‘Oh dear. I am so sorry,’ Connie gulped.

She pressed her hands to her eyes. The women in their turbans – daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers – were still drinking tea and playing with the babies.

Then she realised that she didn’t feel sorry at all.

She felt light, and calm, and peaceful. A small, hard knob of anger that she had carried within her for too long had detached itself from the place beneath her breastbone, and it had floated clean away.

She wasn’t going to know the woman who had given birth to her, and she would never learn why – in all the years since then – she hadn’t tried to find her lost daughter.

She would have her reasons, whatever they were, whoever she was.

That was all there was to know. The difference was that now, among all these women in this strangest of places, Connie thought truthfully, for the first time, that she could forgive her.

The masseuse leaned forward and pointed with a sausage finger at Connie’s marcasite droplet. She asked a question in Russian.

Roxana had retreated to have her eyebrows threaded, but now she came back.

‘What’s she saying?’ Connie asked.

‘She is worried that you have perhaps lost your earring in here.’

‘Tell her I only have one. My mother –’ the word unfamiliar on her tongue, but also satisfying ‘– has always kept the pair to it.’

Roxana relayed the information. The masseuse was folding towels. Her huge arms swallowed up the pile.

‘Mother. Very good,’ she said in English, and beamed at Connie.





Outside the hammam it was stiflingly hot, and growing dark. They walked slowly, scuffing up the dust, and Connie’s feet and head felt light with happiness.

‘Where are we going?’ she murmured to Roxana.

There was no one to be seen in the narrow streets of the old city, but from one window came the blare of a televised football game and from another a steamy waft of cooking. Doors stood ajar to admit the suggestion of a breeze, and from a third house came the sound of a baby crying.

Roxana hesitated. ‘I am going home to Yakov, to take this shopping.’ She held up her string bags. ‘Maybe you would like to come with me?’

Connie interpreted that Roxana would like her to meet Yakov and see where she lived but wasn’t sure what she would make of it.

Without placing undue emphasis she answered lightly, ‘Yes, I’ll come. I’d like to meet him.’

A sequence of alleys and squares guarded by closed mosques brought them into a slightly more modern quarter. They passed a butcher’s shop with muslin-wrapped animal shanks hanging in the opening. The shop’s sign was a stuffed cow’s head, complete with horns and whiskered muzzle. The animal’s sceptical glass eye followed Connie as she walked by. Next door was a cavern heaped with hundreds of onyx-green watermelons. Roxana stopped her march to buy one and drop it into another string bag. Connie offered to carry it for her, but Roxana wouldn’t permit it.

They came to a brown door in a blank wall, as anonymous as each of its neighbours.

Roxana unlatched the door and they stepped over a wooden sill into a courtyard.

There was silence, broken by the scratch of music and a sudden flutter of wings. One entire wall of the courtyard was taken up by a cage full of green finches. Roxana put down her bags and called out, ‘Yakov! We are here.’

She held aside a curtain of beads. Connie blinked in the light. The whole room was taken up with crowded bookshelves, and there were stacks and pyramids of books on the tiled floor and on the table in the centre.

In an armchair sat one of the fattest men she had ever seen. He had an oval, bald head, and a neck that seemed to slide downwards into unconfined billows of flesh. Even his feet in leather slippers were monstrously fat, and his bruise-purple ankles seemed as thick as a man’s thigh. He looked up at them and shuffled his bulk to the edge of his seat.

‘You are here, that’s good. Please. Please come and be comfortable.’

‘Yakov, this is my good friend Connie.’

Connie held out her hand and he grasped it. His skin was smooth and very soft, almost liquid, as if it was close to dissolving point.

Roxana was moving books and papers off a straight-backed sofa draped with worn throws. ‘Sit here, Connie. Yakov, would you like chai? Some fruit? Connie and I were at the hammam.’

He nodded, and Roxana ducked out of the room.

‘So,’ Yakov breathed.

His glance was very sharp. He might have been immobilised by his bulk, but Connie did not think that he would miss very much. Her eyes slid over the books. The titles were in English, Russian, Arabic, and other languages that she couldn’t even identify.

Yakov said, ‘You have been very kind to the child. I want to thank you.’

Connie smiled. ‘I don’t know about kind. I loved her company. You taught her to speak English, didn’t you?’

He nodded. The small movement set up a ripple under his loose grey pyjama suit. There were dark rings under his arms and another patch over his chest. Connie speculated about the precise arrangement between Yakov and Roxana. He had been a friend of her mother’s, maybe at one time her protector, and then he had extended that protection in some way to Roxana when Leonid, the stepfather, had mistreated her.

Whatever had happened, Roxana never spoke of such things. She just did what it was necessary for her to do, crimping the corners of her mouth and setting her shoulders with renewed determination.

‘She was an apt pupil. I did not have to repeat myself very many times. What brings you to Bokhara, Connie?’

‘I have been travelling, and when Roxana left London I promised I would visit her. Will her brother be released, do you think?’

‘When you come to know this country, Connie, you will understand that that is a question that does not have a simple answer. It depends on many things.’

There was a clink of glass as Roxana nudged the beads aside and came in with a beaten-metal tray. She had taken off her shoes, and replaced them with leather slippers like Yakov’s. The effect was to shorten her legs and broaden her hips, as if she was edging out of girlhood. She poured tea into three glasses and held out a dish of sliced watermelon. Yakov took a piece and gobbled it, catching the juice with his hand as it ran down his chin and then licking each of his fingers. He belched loudly. Roxana glanced to see Connie’s reaction as Yakov tossed the melon rind back into the dish.

‘I am an old man,’ he snapped, and crooked his finger to indicate that he wanted another piece. ‘Now. We are talking about Niki.’

Niki was allowed one visit a month. It took a ten-hour bus journey to reach the prison where he was held, and the same for the return trip. Roxana had told Connie that in order to be nearer to him she could try to find work in Tashkent – ‘like my friend Fatima’ – but she had stayed here in Bokhara because she could live with Yakov without paying any rent, and thanks to her experience in London she had been able to get a very good job at the old Intourist Hotel.

‘The fact is, Connie, that Niki will not choose to say or do what will help himself,’ Yakov added. ‘So his release is not likely to come soon.’

Roxana jumped to her feet. She stood in front of Yakov, hands on her hips.

‘Niki has a belief. I do not want him to change his belief or pretend that he does not have it, because then he will not any longer be Niki and he might as well have died in the square at Andijan with his friends.’

Yakov shrugged and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

He spoke quickly, dismissively, in Russian.

Roxana ran at him and drummed her fists on his chest and shoulders, shouting into his face. Moving with surprising speed Yakov caught her wrists and held her off to one side. Connie was going to intervene, but Yakov only laughed.

‘You see, Roxana always has a temper.’

‘When you are speaking about my brother, yes,’ Roxana spat back at him. But she detached herself and flopped back into her chair. She said to Connie,

‘Niki is a Muslim. He is gentle and his beliefs are peaceful but our government does not like independent practices, and religious men are called by this label of fundamentalists. This is what Comrade Yakov here is saying.’

Her face went tight and dark. ‘I have seen what it is like for Niki and all religious prisoners. They try to make him renounce his faith, confess to terrorism, beg our President for forgiveness. Niki will not do it, and so he is beaten and put in punishment cells. But if he does confess, he will be sentenced for many years for crimes that are not his. There is no point, because now at least he is true to himself. He is a brave man. It is terrible, what happens, but I am so proud of him.’

‘He is an idealist, and therefore a fool,’ Yakov snapped.

Roxana rounded on him. ‘And you? What are you? Who is proud of you, I might say?’ She waved her hand. ‘Look at all this, all that you have read and everything you know. But still you will say any lie, pretend anything people want to hear, just to be comfortable.’

‘I am a realist. And therefore I am not only alive, but also a free man.’

Roxana’s laugh was like a splash of acid. She waved her hand again, at the shuttered room and at Yakov’s beached body.

‘Free? You call this freedom?’

He slumped slightly, and then nodded as if to say touché.

‘Two idealists, you and your brother.’

He turned his gaze to Connie. He held up a finger and pointed at her, then to the shuttered window. ‘This is one of the first things you will learn about our precious Uzbekistan. Always, we will be caught between Marx and Mohammed. And me, I care little for either.’

Connie shivered, in spite of the heat. She was only glimpsing a corner of Roxana’s world and a fragment of the history of this ancient oasis city, but she began to understand the obstacles her friend had negotiated in order to escape. That she had come back again for her family made her love Roxana and admire her even more.

Yakov was bored by the argument.

‘Tell me now, is Roxana showing you the famous remains of Bokhara?’

‘Yes, she is,’ Connie said.

‘Good. You will not want to miss anything. There are some fine sights in this city of ours.’

‘I will show her. I am proud of Bokhara, even if am not proud of what our country has become.’ Roxana was on her feet, gathering up melon rinds and the empty chai glasses.

‘Ha.’ Yakov laced his fingers over his belly. ‘Now, please, let me have some peace.’

Roxana led the way out, and Connie hung back to say goodbye. Yakov pushed out his lower lip and studied her face for a moment.

‘I have not given up hope for Niki, you know. There are ways, and there are some people who can help him,’ he murmured. ‘Roxana sees only one way. But she is young.’

‘Is there anything I could do, perhaps?’ Connie asked. He laughed at her naiveté.

‘Thank you. But you do not know Uzbekistan. Enjoy your visit.’ Then he raised his hand, dismissing her.

Connie followed Roxana up the shallow outside steps to the upper floor. There were herbs and scented plants in pots against the wall, and the caged finches fluttered between their perches.

Roxana’s room was small and bare. Her work shoes were neatly placed against the wall, a rail across one corner held her clothes – including the Chloé jacket – on a few hangers. Two narrow windows looked out on starry sky and a series of flat roofs, and there were no pictures. Connie wished that she hadn’t kept the beach postcard.

Roxana’s face was more shadowed than it had been, and there were faint lines just beginning to show at the sides of her mouth. Her beauty was only increased by this intimation of maturity.

‘Is it…comfortable, living here?’ Connie asked her. She didn’t mean in the physical sense, exactly.

‘Yakov reads books, and listens to his music. I go to the market for food, and make some meals for him. It’s not such a bad arrangement, you know. I have work, and I save a little money. I am only a bus journey from Niki. Yakov is…you saw, like he is. Not very similar to Mr Bunting, or any of your English men. But he is kind to me. In his way.’ She lifted her chin and stared straight at Connie. ‘I would not stay here if it did not suit me and Niki, as well as Yakov.’

‘Good. Forgive me for asking, then.’

Roxana looked round the confined space. ‘Do you remember, when we were in Suffolk?’

‘Yes. I remember everything about it.’

‘We talked, in that bedroom, in the storm. And now it is the other way round for us, because your sister is dead and my brother is alive. That is very strange.’

‘It is,’ Connie agreed.

Roxana turned her head again, to look full at her. ‘I would rather be in this country, and have my brother still alive and with some hope in the future, than be in England for ever without him. To be a sister comes from in here.’

Roxana pressed her fist against her breastbone.

Connie knew what it meant. ‘Yes. Niki is lucky to have you for his sister.’

‘Mrs Bunting was lucky to have you.’

Connie said quietly, ‘Actually, I think it was the other way round.’

After a moment Roxana’s face brightened again. ‘At least I saw the sea. I am so pleased I saw the sea, even that I fell in it. And you saved me from drowning. You remember what you said afterwards, You know that life is precious, if you can’t bear to lose it? It’s true.

That beach, those waves, that was amazing.’

Connie nodded, but she was wondering whether her own life meant so much, whether it meant anything at all, without Bill in it.

‘You’ll be able to come back to London some day,’ she said. ‘And you’ll see plenty of other beaches. Maybe the very one on your postcard. We could plan to meet there.’

Roxana pursed her lips. ‘Maybe. But I prefer Suffolk.’

They both laughed.

‘It’s late,’ Roxana said. ‘Come on, I’ll walk you back to your hotel.’

‘I think you’d better. I don’t stand a chance of finding the place on my own.’





There was another session of sightseeing.

It was Roxana’s half-day and following in her energetic wake Connie toured the Mosque of Forty Pillars, and the Chor Minor, a tiny architectural jewel of a madrassah with four towers topped with azure tiles. Roxana stood with her feet planted in the dust, gazing up at the intricate brick facade.

‘You know, Connie, this place is the picture I saw inside my head when I was in England and I thought of home. And what is it? Just an old building. History is only what has gone, religion I don’t care about, and still this is what appears to me. I don’t see the places that are real Uzbekistan, the cement works or the bus station, or even the hammam. That’s funny, isn’t it?’

Connie leaned in the shade against a wall and fanned herself.

‘It’s very beautiful,’ she said. Roxana’s appreciation of it didn’t surprise her at all. If only it wasn’t so hot.

Roxana looked at her. ‘You are tired,’ she said.

‘A little,’ Connie admitted.

‘Come. We will go and have a cold drink. There is a place near here.’

They were threading their way through the old centre when Samida and her cohorts dashed out in front of them.

‘Hello, Connie from England. You look at my pottery now.’

It was not a question. Insistent fingers tugged at her clothes.

Roxana tried to dismiss the children with a few sharp words, but Connie looked down at the circle of narrow brown faces.

‘Show me,’ she said. At once she was propelled towards a cloth laid out in the shade of a wall.

‘Don’t buy these dishes. This is machine-made, just rubbish for tourists,’ Roxana cried. But Connie filled a bag with painted earthenware plates and bargained energetically to reduce Samida’s price.

The children giggled as they pocketed her money, and scampered off in search of the next target.

‘Why did you buy these?’ Roxana demanded. ‘If you want dishes you should tell me, I will take you to the best place.’

Connie grinned at her dismay. ‘I don’t care about the plates, it was the children. They made me think of you when you were small.’

Roxana only glared. ‘Of me? Let me tell you that compared to my friend Fatima and me, in our day, those children are amateurs.’

Laughing, they reached a low concrete cube of a building with faded awnings offering some shade from the sun.

‘Here,’ Roxana said. They passed inside to a line of metal-topped café tables beside a tall counter. Connie glanced to the back of the room and saw three computer terminals with keyboards cased in plastic to protect them from the all-pervading dust. ‘Maybe I will check my mail while we are here,’ Roxana casually added.

‘This is the Bokhara internet café?’

‘Why not?’ Roxana countered. ‘I used to go in London, when I lived there, to somewhere calling itself The Best Little Internet Café on the Planet, which is quite funny, but I think personally this place is better. Of course if I was lazy I could do the same thing at my work, but…’ she glanced round at the bare walls, the dog panting on the threshold, the chest freezer humming and shuddering in the corner ‘…from here for a few som, I am free to surf the net, to chat to Fatima and my other friends, whatever I wish.’

‘Of course,’ Connie agreed.

A boy of about ten brought their drinks and they settled at one of the terminals. Roxana peered and tapped at the plastic-shrouded keyboard.

‘And here is an email, for example, from Noah. Hm. Hm. Would you like to read it, Connie?’

‘Isn’t it private?’ Connie asked curiously.

‘Not so much that you should not see it.’

Connie changed the angle of her chair so that she could see the screen more clearly. Roxana took a long gulp of her drink. Connie read,

Hi Roxy, how’s it going?

I miss you, babe, same as always. Life still seems so quiet without you. I’ve been working hard – – no, it’s okay really, just got a pay hike which helps.

Strange to think it’s nearly a whole year since my mum died. I think of her every day, and sometimes I still go, ‘must tell her about this or that’, and then remember that I can’t – but I don’t have to tell you what that feels like, do I? But time is doing its thing. She was such a great mother and such a good person to know, and I feel lucky to have had all that.

Been spending quite a lot of time with my dad. He’s pretty good, considering. Time’s doing its thing for him as well. He’s lonely, though. I asked him this weekend if he could imagine being with someone else some day and he gave a smile and said yes, he imagined it regularly.

Have you heard from Connie? I know Dad hasn’t, and neither have I. Did anything come of that plan for her to come and visit you?

What’s the latest news on Niki?





Connie read on down to the end of the message.

There was a PS.





My sort-of ex Lauren is back in town. I had a couple of emails and texts from her, wanting to hook up. I’m going to give her a call, Roxy, but just wanted you to know that if you were in London there’d be no question, no contest. Nxxxxxx

Then Connie looked at the date. The message was several days old. Of course Roxana had been intending all along for her to read it.

Roxana got up and strolled to the entrance. She gazed out into the baking street, standing half in and half out of the doorway as if the rest of the world pulled at her in one direction via the computer terminal, and Niki and Bokhara and Uzbekistan pinned her in the other. Then she looked back at the café interior, to where Connie was still sitting, and gave her a brilliant smile of expectation and encouragement.

Connie’s mind was spinning.

She had been running away: constructing defences and then racing behind them whenever a breach was threatened.

She had started to put up the barriers long ago, years before she met Bill, even before the day of Tony’s funeral and Elaine’s blurted truth, he wasn’t your dad…you’re adopted, aren’t you? That had only been putting into words what troubled her already and the trouble had started before she could even articulate the word different.

Connie thought, I rejected them, Hilda and Jeanette, just as much as the other way round.

That one word – adopted – and all the longing, and mystery, and opportunities for disappointment and betrayal that crowded with it, had always stood between them.

What chance did we have, in the face of that? she asked herself.

As the realisation dawned on her, she braced herself for the sadness and regret that might have followed it.

But all that happened was the joy and lightness that had been with her since the hammam lifted her to her feet. She floated to the door where Roxana was waiting for her.

‘Thank you for letting me see Noah’s email. You wanted me to read about his dad being lonely and the implication that I could change that, didn’t you?’

‘I am not so cut off from my friends that I cannot help out here and there, you see.’

Connie touched her hand. ‘What about you and Noah? And Lauren?’

Roxana sighed. ‘I am jealous, of course. But I am Niki’s sister first and always, before I can be girlfriend to an English boy. And I don’t want Noah to be waiting for me for ever. Nobody waits for ever, do they?’

A lick of a breeze chased down the street, raising plumes of dust and stirring the coarse hair on the dog’s back.

‘No, they don’t,’ Connie agreed.

Roxana said softly, ‘Do you want to know what I think?’

‘Go on.’

‘I think you should go back to England. I think you should go to see Mr Bunting, and tell him that you love him.’

‘Do you? Why?’

‘Because it is the truth.’

Roxana’s smile flashed at her. She made a loose fist and tapped at the air six inches from Connie’s shoulder.

‘Knock, knock. Open the door in this wall, Connie. Walls keep out bad things, yes, but they trap you inside in the dark.’

Slowly, Connie raised her hands, palms outstretched. She pushed outwards until her arms were fully extended, and there was nothing to block her way. There was nothing but the air and the light on the old walls.





By the time Connie reached England, it was almost summer again.

The trees in the parks were in leaf and at lunchtimes girls with bare arms poured into the streets. From her apartment, which seemed empty without Roxana, she telephoned Bill.

‘It’s Connie,’ she said.

‘Connie. Are you in London?’

Bill’s warm voice was very close, as if it came from somewhere within her own head.

‘Yes. How are you? You sound different.’

There was a silence while they listened to each other.

‘It’s you who sounds different,’ he said at length.

Connie took a breath. ‘I’ve been bouncing round the world like a ping-pong ball. I want to stop now.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Can I see you? I want to so much, but maybe it’s too early, or you may feel that it wouldn’t be right?’

‘I want to see you too,’ Bill answered. ‘Just lately, it seems that you’re in my head more than ever. I wasn’t even surprised to hear your voice just now.’

Connie looked out at the cranes angled over the city’s building sites. Skeletons of towers had risen in her absence.

‘Shall I come up to London?’ Bill asked.

Connie thought quickly. London’s streets were mapped out by the past. Nowhere came to mind that was not touched in some way either by the years of being painfully apart from him, or by the snatched intervals of their love affair.

‘No, not London,’ she said hastily. ‘Somewhere else.’

She didn’t know what was going to happen next, and she was so used to defending herself that this degree of exposure left her feeling like a vertigo sufferer on the lip of a precipice. All she did know was that whatever was to be written, she wanted this new chapter to begin on a fresh page – not in London, or Surrey, or even in Bali.

‘Where?’

She knew why he sounded different. The ripple in his voice that had faded years ago was there again.

‘I know. Let’s go to the seaside.’ The wind and the tides would do their scouring work.

‘That’s a good idea. Do you want to go a long way from home? Abroad?’

‘No more planes and airports. Let’s go to…Devon.’

Connie couldn’t recall ever having been there. They would have to take the opposite direction out of London, away from the route they had followed on the day of the picnic and the way she had taken Roxana on their trip to the sea. And an English shingle beach with mild, greyish breakers would be far enough removed from the last beach they had visited, back in Bali.

‘Devon?’

Bill was laughing openly now. But he understood what she was thinking, and he entered into the idea with her. There would be an unmarked page for both of them, without even a shared journey to preface it. ‘I will meet you in Devon in…let’s see. Forty-eight hours from now. Look at your watch. It’s three o’clock. Take your mobile with you. I’ll call you at eleven a.m. the day after tomorrow, and tell you where.’

Connie laughed too, although her heart was thumping.

‘Forty-eight hours,’ she repeated.





The spell of early summer fine weather continued. In the morning sunshine before she set out to meet Bill, Connie put on a bright red cotton dress and stared at herself in the mirror. There were deep lines bracketing her mouth and at the corners of her eyes, but at the same time she felt stripped of all the armour of experience, as if inside her skin she was sixteen again.

She drove out of London and at eleven a.m. precisely, her mobile rang. His voice in her ear stilled the roar of motorway traffic.

‘Where are you now?’

‘I am at the service station just before the M5 junction.’

He gave her the exact details of where he was waiting.

‘I’ll be there,’ she promised. She drove carefully, like the mature woman she was, but at the same time she was thinking that this was the most erotically charged moment of her life.





It was a weekday, but the car park of the little seaside town was almost full. As Connie searched for a space, men with bare, sun-reddened chests padded towards the sea front laden with body boards and heavy cold-boxes, and children chased between the cars. It was a few minutes before three o’clock. She parked at the end of a row and sat with her hands still resting on the steering wheel. The hot smell of the car merged with salt and sun-cream and frying fish, and a pair of kites tugged towards freedom in the blue space between earth and sea. All her senses were sharpened.

I am alive.

A swell of amazed gratitude and happiness lifted her.





Before she went to meet Bill, there was one more conversation she must have.

I am alive, she repeated. And I wish you were alive and here with me. With us. I miss you, Jeanette, every day.

Connie let her hands slip into her lap.

Afterwards was now.

She loved Bill and had always loved him, and whereas that had once been wrong she didn’t believe it was wrong any longer.

I love you just as much, she added to Jeanette. Forgive me now, if there is anything still to forgive.

A man carrying a deckchair glanced through the windscreen at the woman talking to herself in her car. It was two minutes to three.

Connie walked across the road to the sea front. Outlined against the glitter of the water a man was standing against the railings with his back turned, his arms spread and his hands resting on the top rail. He was the only person in the world.

She ran forwards and put her hands over his, fitting her body against him.

They hung there for a moment, their faces hidden from each other, waiting for the future.

Then Bill spun round and caught her face between his hands. He kissed her, blotting out the sun-dazzle and the twirling kites. Without lifting his mouth from hers he murmured, ‘It felt like making an assignation with a stranger. Driving down here, waiting for you to arrive. It was extremely exciting.’

‘I know. I felt that too.’

‘But now I see you and touch you, you’re the opposite of a stranger. You fit me, Connie.’ His voice was very low. As he had done many times before, he drew her closer to him so that her head rested at the angle of his jaw. She let herself melt against him and the easiness of it surprised her. There had always been a thin layer separating them, she realised now. It had been her own guilt interleaved with his, and her old, wary defensiveness. The barriers felt stale and constricting and she wriggled to free herself like a snake shedding its skin. His body felt very warm and solid.

‘Is it less exciting, me turning out not to be a stranger?’

‘No,’ he said roughly. ‘I want you to know straight away that I have booked a room. I want you to come back there with me. Will you do that?’

‘I will,’ she said.

Her composure suddenly struck both of them as funny. They laughed, and a teenaged couple glanced back at them as if they were wondering what two middle-aged people could find so comical.

They linked hands and began to walk along the sea front. A wall projected out into the waves, enclosing a little harbour where fishing boats and sailing dinghies were moored.

‘How have you been, Bill?’

He said, ‘Grief is a strange commodity, don’t you think? I thought it was something you dealt with. I thought you either coped well or not, depending on who you were and the particular circumstances, but that you handled it in some way. But I have found that it doesn’t make much difference what you do. You can go out and be with friends or strangers, or you can go to a film or look at art. You can stay in with a book or a bottle of whisky, or just yourself and silence. You can square up to it, saying, “Come on, wash right over me, do your worst because I’m ready for you.” Or you can try to ignore it. Whatever you do doesn’t matter, because grief is still just there. What happens, of course, is that as time passes the presence becomes less constant. Now I can see how its absence begins to take shape.’ He looked down at her, his mouth curling in the way it always did. ‘That’s how I’ve been. What about you?’

Connie nodded. ‘Similar, only I didn’t handle it as well as you. I miss her so much, so I tried to escape the loss by running away. True to form, you might say. It wasn’t until Roxana took me to the hammam in Bokhara that I broke up and cried properly, from right inside myself.’

Bill gazed at her. ‘Noah’s Roxana, is that? Bokhara?’

‘I have been bouncing around the world…’

‘Are you ready to stop now, or are you still my wild, wandering girl?’

‘I am ready to stop,’ Connie said soberly. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot. About Jeanette and me when we were girls, about Echo Street, and when Noah was born and when Hilda died. All those years.’ With the hand that wasn’t linked in Bill’s she lightly touched the silk pouch that still hung at her throat. ‘And I have been making peace, with Jeanette and my real mother and with myself.’

They were walking out along the harbour wall now, where waves slapped against slippery stone steps. They reached a line of bollards at the far end, and a stone bench set into an angle of the wall that reminded Connie of her perch in the hammam with Roxana. They sat down and Bill’s arm circled her shoulders while they watched the strutting gulls at their feet and the kite-flyers out on the beach. Connie told him about Roxana and the email from Noah, and Roxana’s words of advice.

‘And what exactly was her advice?’ Bill murmured.

Connie turned to face him. ‘She said that I should come back to England, see Mr Bunting, and tell him that I love him.’

‘I see. You know what? Despite what I know about Roxana, I’d say that was very, very sound advice.’

Their mouths were almost touching now.

‘Yes,’ Connie agreed. ‘And so I am acting on it.’



Arm in arm, as if they had been together for ever, they retraced their steps along the harbour wall. The wind had strengthened and the rigging of the dinghies tapped out a metallic rhythm. There were families picnicking on the shingle, light glinting off the cars crawling along the sea-front road, the distant tinkle of music from a child’s fairground ride. To both of them, the world looked new and fresh and completely enticing.

Bill said suddenly, ‘I’d like an ice cream, wouldn’t you?’

There was a kiosk directly across the road from the harbour wall and they hurried to it, dodging cyclists and pensioners out with their dogs. Behind a sheet of glass, square metal tubs were full of fondant colours.

‘Look, coconut ice,’ Bill exulted. ‘One scoop or two?’

Connie made a face that Angela herself might have been proud of.

‘Coconut? I loathe coconut. Don’t you know that?’

He admitted that he did not.

As trivial as an ice cream or as important as happiness, they still had as much to learn about each other as the wealth they already knew.

With Bill’s double coconut scoop and Connie’s single chocolate in hand, they turned away from the kiosk and joined the afternoon strollers.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Connie smiled.

‘Anything.’

‘How far is it, to this room you booked?’

‘About…ten minutes.’

‘That far?’ she whispered.

She shaded her eyes so that the sunny afternoon was squared down to contain nothing but Bill’s face. He caught her raised wrists and held them.

‘Much less if we run,’ he said.

‘Race you,’ she countered.

Holding their melting ice creams aloft, they chased each other through the gentle crowds.