Constance A Novel

FOUR

Suitcases and boxes of film equipment almost filled the hotel lobby. Taxis and 4x4s were waiting to sweep them away, Angela and Rayner and Simon Sheringham, the complaining actress, the creative duo who were hiding their hangovers behind dark glasses, and all the rest of the cast and crew.

‘Thanks for coming to see us off,’ Angela murmured to Connie in the hubbub of departure. ‘Think about what I said, won’t you? I mean, it’s beautiful here, but it’s not home, is it?’

‘Yes,’ Connie said, ambiguously.

Miraculously, the mounds of luggage fitted into the vehicles and people variously scrambled for places in the cars that looked as if they would have the best air-conditioning. Only two minutes ago it had seemed as if the point of departure would never arrive, and now everyone except Connie had piled into a seat.

She stood back and waved. Angela blew her a kiss and Rayner Ingram lifted one hand before adjusting his Ray-Bans. People shouted goodbye to her and then hastily wound up their windows to keep out the flies and the gusts of hot, steamy air. The convoy of cars rolled forwards and Connie saw Ed looking at her through the rear window of the last 4x4. He touched two fingers to his temple in an ironic salute.

Connie stood still as silence descended. There was no clamour of mobile phones, no crackle of walkie-talkies, and no one was shouting. There was only birdsong, and the faint scrape of rough-edged leaves spreading in the sun’s glare.

She drew in a long breath and then exhaled.

The week had been like a runaway train ride. She had been right to be apprehensive. She had been very thoroughly shaken out of her equilibrium.

Maybe she should have gone back to Ed’s room last night.

She muttered to herself, ‘How many more chances d’you think you’re going to get?’

Then she saw that the doorman was glancing curiously at her. She gave the man what she hoped was a composed smile, and set off down the hotel drive towards the village street.

Connie didn’t have a car. As with her choice not to have a pool, her European neighbours (Kim and Neil who were in property and rentals, the French couple who owned a gallery in the main street, Werner Baum the sculptor, and all the others) regarded this as wilfully eccentric. But Connie liked walking, she had a bicycle for errands, and on the island she was never in a hurry. If she needed to go further afield there were the public bemos, small buses that ran fixed routes all over the island, and taxis were cheap.

The main street was quiet this morning. She passed a couple of dogs lolling in the shade, and a young woman sitting on her step with two smooth, plump toddlers playing at her feet. In front of the Café des Artistes a group of tourists in shorts and Birkenstocks were consulting a map and talking about a visit to the monkey forest.

‘They bite,’ one of the girls warned the others. ‘And then you get rabies.’

‘Noooo? They look so cute.’

Connie crossed the road and took her favourite route through the village’s central market. She loved the blazing colour and exuberance of the enclosed square. Two-storey buildings with open fronts were hung from ground to roof with dresses and T-shirts, ikat weavings and multicoloured sarongs, and the paved space in the centre was jammed with blue and red parasols. In the shade the stallholders were selling racks of beads and earrings, woven baskets in all shapes and sizes, plastic toys and cheap CDs. It was too early for the tourist crowds to be out in any force and the vendors were quietly gossiping with their neighbours. Connie was heading for the flower stall in the far corner. The blooms made a wall of brilliance beneath a sun-bleached awning.

Recognising Connie, the broad-hipped woman who owned the stall sprang up and began yanking stems of orchids and tuberoses out of buckets and pressing them into her hands. Business wasn’t good for any of these traders. Tourists had almost disappeared after the Kuta bombing, and they were still not coming to the island in the same numbers. Connie went through the ritual of praising the flowers for their freshness and the elegance of their blooms and at the same time firmly putting them back in their places.

She saw what she wanted at the back of the stall. They were scarlet cannas, blisteringly bright, offset by ribbed bronze leaves. When she had chosen an armful and told the stallholder what she wanted them for, the woman wrapped them in a swathe of white tissue brought out from a special hiding place, and finished off the bouquet with a stiff crepe-paper bow. Connie counted out rupiah notes, worn as soft and floppy as thin cloth.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

She ducked out of the market, waving to two or three of the shoppers, and walked on towards Kadek Daging’s general store. He was back in his usual place after his week of driving for the movie people. As soon as he saw her coming he bustled out from between his sacks of rice and drums of oil.

‘Selamat siang, Ibu,’ he beamed. ‘Glamour all finished for you and me. Back to ordinary life.’

‘Selamat siang, Kadek. I don’t know about glamour. We had a busy week, though, didn’t we?’

Kadek glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘I did not see her myself, but she was here, wasn’t she? Working in the film?’

‘Who?’

He checked again to make sure that there was no one eavesdropping from behind a tower of detergent packets and then whispered,

‘Penelope Cruz.’

Connie considered this. ‘I’m not sure. In a bank commercial? I certainly didn’t see her.’

Kadek stood back with a satisfied nod. ‘Yes. I knew that she was. I heard it from the mother of one of the young girls. Very beautiful. Not as beautiful perhaps as Angelina Jolie, but still. I expect you didn’t get the chance to work with her?’

‘No,’ Connie agreed. ‘I didn’t, unfortunately.’

‘Never mind,’ he consoled her. ‘Films are being made all the time, here in Bali. Perhaps next time. Those are very good flowers. Are they a gift, wrapped like that?’

‘I’m taking them to Dewi. Wayan Tupereme told me last night that she has a son.’

‘Yes, the birth was yesterday. I hear the baby is very small. You will be needing some first-quality rice.’

‘That’s exactly why I’m here, Kadek.’

They spent five minutes debating a suitable choice, and then Connie made her way onwards with the two-kilo package under her other arm. The quickest way to Dewi’s husband’s family house, on the far side of the village where the paddy fields opened up, was to cut through the monkey forest. She walked briskly to where the street petered out in a clutch of little shops and open stalls.

The same group of tourists was now at the margin of the forest enclosure, negotiating with a small boy over the price of bunches of finger-sized bananas to feed to the monkeys.

It was cool and shady under the canopy of tall trees and the dirt tracks were easier on the feet than the uneven paving of the village streets. Connie often walked here, enjoying the quiet and the scent of damp leaves and trodden dust. She slowed her pace to a stroll, but she always kept an eye on the monkeys who sat in the branches or knuckle-walked at the edges of the paths. From behind her came a thin scream of alarm and then a chorus of shouts. She smiled; without even turning to look she knew that a troop of monkeys had executed a classic distraction manoeuvre followed by a pincer attack, and had successfully snatched the bunch of bananas from the grasp of the most monkey-friendly of the tourists.

In the middle of the forest was a temple complex. It was a mossy group of red-brick structures, open to the sky, the stone facings fleeced with lichen. A few people were on their way to or from prayer, women with baskets of fruit balanced on padded headpieces and men in the obligatory sarongs and bright sashes. Those who were returning had flowers behind their ears and grains of rice pressed to their cheeks, and their hair was beaded with moisture from splashing with tirta, holy water.

Monkeys prowled along the temple walls and sat in rows on the steps, picking fleas from one another’s backs. Several of them bit into the hijacked bananas. They were macaques with black-faced babies clinging to their fur. Connie noticed with sudden dismay that instead of a monkey baby, one male had a tiny, bedraggled ginger kitten. He detached the little creature from his chest and flipped it over the back of his hand like a set of worry beads. Then he tossed it in the dust at his feet, yawning as he poked at it with his prehensile fingers. The kitten gave out almost soundless mews of distress when the macaque upended it and delicately scratched its pale-pink belly with black hooked fingernails. But when the monkey withdrew its hand the kitten righted itself and crawled back towards its tormentor, searching for protection.

The temples had colonies of wild cats as well as monkeys. Connie stared around her, wanting to rescue the little creature and restore it to its proper mother. But if she tried to swoop in and snatch it away the monkeys would certainly attack her. The tourists were right about that; they did bite. The monkey picked up the kitten again, perhaps in response to its mewing, and tucked it against his chest. It glared at Connie and the kitten hung on like the other babies, blinking its pale gummed-up eyes at the world.

Connie walked on. Trying to get the little scene out of her mind, she told herself that without its mother’s milk the kitten wouldn’t have to suffer for very much longer. The back of her neck and her shirt where the packet of rice pressed against it were clammy with sweat.

The path out of the forest crossed a small gorge by way of a plank suspension bridge, the metalwork crusted with decades-worth of wood-pigeon droppings. The planks creaked and swayed under her feet and she broke into a laden dash for the safety of the opposite side, stepping onto solid ground again and then laughing at her moment of panic.

Out here was the real village. Tourists never penetrated this far from the centre and there were no coffee shops or galleries. A sprawl of smallholdings and palm-thatch houses were separated by rank ditches clogged with refuse. Connie ducked under the silver filaments of a spider’s web and noted the impressive size of the tortoiseshell-mottled spider gently swaying at the centre. She stepped over another ditch and made her way up to Pema’s family house. Today it was distinguished from the others by penjors, tall bamboo poles with curled bark and flags to denote a special occasion.

There was no one sitting on the frayed rattan chairs drawn up against the wall, only a line of washing suspended between two palm trunks. Underneath the laundry a row of woven bamboo cages the size and shape of large bell jars each housed a dusty brown hen. The dried mud around the cages was starred with the prints of chickens’ feet and speckled with scattered corn.

Connie tapped on the door jamb. After a moment a woman bobbed up out of the dimness of the interior. She was big, wearing a pink blouse and a faded sarong. Connie recognised Pema’s mother. She placed the flowers and rice on the nearest chair, pressed the palms of her hands together and bowed over her fingertips before murmuring the expected greeting and congratulations.

Pema’s mother returned the salute.

Connie handed over the traditional gifts, flowers for fertility and rice for prosperity.

‘Thank you. Please come inside.’

Connie left her sandals in the row beside the door and went in barefoot. A small fan churned the air, but the room was still stuffy and as hot as a furnace. It seemed to be crowded with people, most of whom were pressed between the two weaving looms that occupied two-thirds of the floor space. A very old woman, perhaps Pema’s grandmother, sat at the bench in front of one of the looms. Her brown hands rested on the unfinished length of ikat cloth, and she was so small that her feet dangled six inches short of the treadles.

Everyone bowed to Connie and she returned the salutes, working from the oldest down to whoever appeared to be the youngest. One of the teenaged girls, a sister, held a baby of a few months, a round-faced infant with the heavy-lidded stare of a miniature deity.

Dewi lay propped up on cushions on a wooden divan. She held a swaddled bundle in her arms. Two or three years back, Connie remembered, she had been hardly more than a little girl, and even now she looked far too young to be a mother. There were purple rings of fatigue around her eyes but her small, even white teeth showed in a broad grin of pride as Connie stooped beside her.

‘Well done,’ Connie smiled.

Before her marriage Dewi had often come over to Connie’s house to drink Cokes or make herself imaginative snacks from the sparse contents of Connie’s fridge, and to giggle over Western magazines. She had a good voice, and loved to sing or la-la the lyrics of pop songs while Connie sat at her keyboard playing the melody and joining in the choruses.

Pema’s mother asked if Connie would care to drink a glass of green tea, and Connie politely accepted. There was a stir of large bodies in the crowded room.

‘Would you like to hold him?’ Dewi whispered.

‘Yes, please.’

Dewi handed the tiny bundle into Connie’s arms. It weighed almost nothing. She looked down into the baby’s sleeping face. One purple-grey fist was bunched against his cheek, and two tiny commas of damp black eyelashes punctuated the wrinkled mask. He looked premature, and also prehistorically ancient. Connie’s throat tightened.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Wayan.’

Wayan or Putu for the firstborn of Balinese families, depending on caste; Kadek or Madé for the second; Komang or Nyoman for the third and Ketut for number four, then back to Wayan again. That was how it went. No fanciful baby names, even for a girl who pored over second-hand celebrity magazines as eagerly as Dewi did.

‘He’s beautiful,’ Connie told her.

Pema came in with another group of visitors in tow, also carrying flowers and packets of rice. Everyone in the room edged up to make space, and Connie thought that she would certainly melt if it got any hotter. She pressed her lips to baby Wayan’s forehead, breathing in the scent of fresh birth. There was an urge inside her to hold the child more closely, feeling his damp skin against her own, but instead she replaced the bundle gently in Dewi’s outstretched hands.

‘I’ll go outside. To make some room,’ she mumbled. Through the thickets of flowers and staring faces she made it into the air. She was sitting on one of the rattan chairs and watching a large black pig, tethered by the leg to a sapling, when Pema came out with one of his sisters behind him. The sister poured green tea into glasses and handed one to Connie and one to Pema. Pema sat down and they sipped their tea while the pig rooted in the ditch and contentedly grunted to itself.

‘You must be proud, Pema,’ Connie said.

He smoothed back his thick hair. He was small but quite good-looking. Before he and Dewi fell in love with each other, Connie had often seen him with a group of his friends, circling on their motorcycles like a flock of two-wheeled birds and eyeing the tourist girls in their shorts and bikini tops.

‘I am. But I am also worried about being responsible.’

Pema was an apprentice mechanic at a small garage on the road that led down to the coast. He would be earning very little money, which was why he and Dewi were living with his parents. Until the two of them could save enough money to buy or build their own house, they would have to stay here among the stepped generations of grandparents and brothers and sisters and the various other babies.

‘That comes with being a father,’ she smiled at him. Pema was a good boy, she thought. He was looking at her in that unspecifically hopeful, speculative way that meant he was wondering if her immense, uncountable Western wealth might somehow be harnessed to his advantage.

‘Do you have children, perhaps?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Connie told him.

‘That is a shame for you,’ Pema said, all sympathetic awareness of the divide that now existed between the two of them. He was probably thinking that piles of her money wouldn’t compensate for not having a baby son like day-old Wayan.

There wasn’t much else to say, and neither of them felt the need to make further conversation. They drank the rest of their tea and sat looking thoughtfully at Pema’s mother’s garden of peppers and chillies and coconut palms. Behind a small hedge flies swarmed around the brown haunches of a tethered buffalo.

More people kept arriving. When Connie went to say goodbye, she could only manage to wave to Dewi and blow a kiss from the edge of the crowd. Later in the day, according to custom, the washed placenta would be wrapped in a sacred cloth and the visitors would all witness its burial inside a coconut shell near the gateway to the house.





By the time Connie made it home the afternoon had reached the point where the light was at its ripest. It lay like melted butter over the vast swathe of gently stirring leaves, gilding the fronds of tree ferns and shining on the stippled trunks of palm trees so that they gleamed like beaten silver. Connie went out to her chair on the veranda and sat listening to the trickle of water and the various layers of birdsong.

She let the questions sink slowly to the bottom of her pool of thoughts. In time, as the shoot receded, the sediment of habit would cover up her memories.

Peace lapped round her once again.

She sat for a long time, until the tropical twilight swept up again from the depths of the gorge. As the sudden darkness fell, she wandered back into the house and poured herself a glass of wine. Connie seldom drank alone, but tonight she felt the need for just one drink.

There were no telephone messages. She took a long swallow of wine, and set the glass down on her desk as she switched on her computer. It was days since she had checked her emails. Broadband hadn’t yet reached the village and she wandered out to the veranda again while the unread messages slowly descended from the ether and filtered into her inbox. She drank some more wine and then, counter to her intentions, topped up her glass.

At the screen again Connie clicked through the spam and a couple of emails from London to do with work. There was a message from the leader of the string quartet, thanking her for booking them for the commercial. Connie closed that and her eyes flicked to the sender of the next message. Bunting. Her brain had hardly taken it in before her heart was hammering. She looked away from the screen and then back again, but it wasn’t an illusion. Bunting.

It was only then that she saw the sender wasn’t BBunting, but JBunting. Jeanette.

The last time she had seen her sister was four years ago, after Hilda’s funeral.

They hadn’t spoken since then, nor had they written.

That was the last time she had seen Bill, too.

She shouldn’t allow herself to remember their joint history, even to think about him. But what harm did it do to anyone, except perhaps herself?

A message from her sister now could only mean that something was wrong.

With Noah? With Bill?

Her mouth was dry and her hands shook as she opened the message. It took two readings before the news began to sink in.

There was indeed something very badly wrong.

Connie read and reread the brief lines.

Dear Connie,

I hope this address still finds you because I want you to hear this news from me, not from anyone else.

I have cancer. I won’t go into detail, but after several months of treatment and having our hopes raised and then lowered again, we were told this week that there isn’t any more to be done. Six months is the estimate.

I am beginning to work out for myself what this means. What does it mean?

It’s very hard for Noah. And for Bill. Both of them are full of love and concern for me, and I feel blessed in that.

There it is. I don’t want anything, except to know that you know.

Love (I mean this…)

Jeanette

Connie lowered her face into her hands. Her forearms pressed against the keyboard and, unseen, the screen split into layers of files. The immediate shock made her shiver. Jeanette had always been there: in her silence, in her brave focus on doing and being what she wanted, her influence most powerful – partly because of its very absence – in all Connie’s past life.

Behind her eyes, images of her sister receded into their remote childhood.

The chair she was sitting in became one of the pine set at the kitchen table in Echo Street. The desk became the knotty old table that had come with them from the flat before, the top half of a house in Barlaston Road, where old Mrs McBride lived downstairs.

Jeanette had planted the idea in Connie that their neighbour was a witch.

– At night, she rides in the sky. If you look, you can see the broomstick in her back kitchen.

Now Jeanette was sitting opposite her, eleven years old, full of hope and strength in spite of her deafness.

Connie lifted her head. She reached for her glass, and drank the wine.

The computer screen was blinking, asking her if she wanted to close down now.

It took an effort to reopen the email programme. Connie’s fingers felt uncertain on the keys, like a child’s.

She started a new message and typed a single line.


I’ll be there as soon as I can get a flight. Connie.


The train from the airport ran past the backs of Victorian terraced houses, irregular and broken like crooked teeth in an overcrowded jaw. There were brief glimpses of clothes lines, cluttered yards, interiors veiled in dingy grey, all pressed beneath a swollen grey sky. Connie watched the terraces sliding past, absorbing the steady flicker of snapshot images from other people’s lives. This couldn’t be anywhere but England.

In an hour, she would be back in her London flat.

She was glad of this interval between the long flight and whatever would happen next.

The backs of the houses were identical, all of them clinging to the curves of railway lines and arterial roads and abraded by the dirt and noise that rose off them. Their bricks were dark with soot and the wan trees in patches of garden were weighted with layers of grime.

Echo Street was a terrace just like one of these, with a railway line carrying local trains into Liverpool Street, running through a shallow cutting beyond a high fence at the end of the garden.

Connie closed her eyes.

There was lino down the narrow hallway, dark red with paler bluish-pink swirls in it that looked like skimmed milk stirred into stewed plums. The stairs rose steep as a cliff, each tread usually with a sheet of the Daily Express folded on it because Hilda had just mopped them yet again. Hilda had a fixation with cleanliness. The smell of bleach always sent Connie hurtling back into her childhood.

In the old flat, Connie and Jeanette had shared a tiny bedroom, the two divan beds separated by a channel only just wide enough for one of them at a time to put their feet to the floor. There was a shelf above each bed. Jeanette’s displayed a neat line of books, whereas Connie’s was silted up with scribbled drawings and broken toys and crushed wax crayons.

But in Echo Street they were to have their own rooms. Jeanette was delighted with hers. As Tony was downstairs helping the sweating removal men to carry in the piano, she stood in front of her door and held on to the knob to show that her sister wouldn’t be admitted. She signed to Connie, folded hands to the side of her head and then clenched her fist to her chest: my bedroom, mine.

When Connie looked into the room that was to be hers, she saw a narrow box with a window that faced the brick wall of the next-door back extension. The lino on the floor was the same as in the hallway and the only other feature was a tall cupboard built across one corner. She twisted the handle and saw that the cupboard was empty except for two coat-hangers on a hook. In the dim light the hangers suddenly looked like two pairs of shoulders that had mislaid their heads and bodies, but which might easily clothe themselves on a dark night and come gliding out of the cupboard in search of little girls.

She ran for the safety of the landing. Jeanette’s door stood open by a crack, allowing a glimpse of a bigger room where the sun cast a reassuring grid of light and shadow on the bare floorboards. Jeanette was sitting with her back against the wall, her knees drawn up and her books and magazines laid out beside her. Her fair hair was drawn in one thick plait over her shoulder and she was thoughtfully chewing the bunched ends.

It was Connie who started the fight. Overtaken by one of the surges of rage that were her last resort in the unending series of skirmishes against Jeanette, she launched herself through the doorway and fell on her sister. The square box of the bulky hearing-aid battery that Jeanette wore strapped to her chest juddered between them. Magazines slithered and tore under their flying feet.

‘It’s not fair. I want the big room. It’s not fair.’

Connie yelled and pummelled her fists, then tried to haul Jeanette up and out of the room. An earpiece dropped from one ear and the wire tangled between them.

Jeanette shouted back, but no words were distinguishable.

‘Listen to me,’ Connie screamed.

At the Joseph Barnes School for the Deaf the speech therapist had made little progress with helping Jeanette to talk. When she was upset or angry she gave up the attempt to verbalise and lapsed into shapeless bellowing.

In any case Connie and Jeanette had their own private hostile vocabulary, a shorthand matter of stabbed fingers and sliced-throat gestures that led to full-blown kicks and blows.

‘You sound like a cow mooing,’ Connie screamed. ‘I want this bedroom.’

Jeanette fought harder. Her face swelled close to Connie’s as she hooked her fingers in Connie’s tangled hair and propelled her backwards until her head smashed against the wall. Connie doubled up like a snake and closed her teeth on Jeanette’s upper arm.

The noise brought both parents running, their feet like thunder on the stairs.

Tony caught hold of Connie and hoisted her in the air, her arms pinioned and her feet kicking against nothing. He put his mouth against her ear and his moustache tickled her skin.

‘All right, Con. That’s enough. Calm down. Leave your sister alone now.’

Connie still wriggled and squawked that it wasn’t fair, but the rage was ebbing away. Its departure left her feeling breathless, and confused, and finally soaked in despair. She slumped against Tony’s shoulder, letting out little whimpers of grief. He stroked her hair off her hot face and rocked her against him.

Jeanette’s arm showed a ring of red puncture marks. Hilda pinched the corners of her mouth inwards and went for the first-aid box. She wrung out a hank of cotton wool in a bowl of water clouded with Dettol, and made a performance of disinfecting the tiny wound in front of Connie.

Jeanette’s eyes gleamed with the lustre of martyrdom.

‘Let go of her,’ Hilda said to Tony. He released Connie and Hilda took hold of her by the ear and marched her to the other bedroom.

‘You stay in here, my girl,’ she said.

Connie sat down, back against the wall and knees drawn up, instinctively copying Jeanette. She sat there until teatime, staring at the closed cupboard door, willing the ghosts to stay where they were and not come shimmering out through the keyhole.

That evening, the first in the new house, Hilda was still only speaking when she had to, even after the tea had been cleared and the plates washed and put away in the unfamiliar cupboards that had already been lined with fresh paper. She shook aspirin out of a brown bottle and swallowed the pills with sips of water, in front of both girls.

‘Your mum’s got one of her bad heads,’ Tony told them.

Jeanette gave Connie a look that said See? See what you’ve done?

‘Look at the state of this place,’ Hilda sighed. There were cardboard boxes stacked in the kitchen and along the hallway. Connie could see saucepan handles and the blackened underside of the frying pan sticking out of one of them. Everything ordinary looked strange because it was in a different place.

Tony said, ‘We’ve just moved in. There’s plenty of time. Why don’t you have a rest, love?’ But Hilda went on unpacking, wincing every time she stooped to a box. Jeanette sailed up to her bedroom to arrange her books.

Connie hated the thought of the darkness in her room. She had only been able to keep the ghosts in their cupboard in daylight by sheer effort of will. She knew that at night she would never be able to control them.

‘I won’t sleep in there.’

Hilda frowned at her. ‘Yes, you will.’ She massaged her temples and lowered her voice. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Constance.’ It wasn’t the first time Connie had heard her say this, and it always made her wonder whether she had swallowed a wriggling worm by mistake.

‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ Connie murmured. She turned to her father. ‘Tell me a story first?’

‘You’re a big girl,’ Hilda said, but Tony had already taken her hand.

‘Come and sit on Dad’s lap, then.’

Hilda looked at him over Connie’s head. ‘Don’t you think I need any help with all this?’

‘Five minutes, love.’

The three-piece suite was in the front room, but put down any old how. They sat down in the old armchair that was wedged up into the bay window, facing out into the new street.

‘Why does Jeanette have the best things always?’

‘She doesn’t, pet.’

‘I think she does.’

Tony hesitated. ‘You know your sister’s deaf.’

Connie didn’t understand rhetorical questions. She wondered how Tony could imagine that she might not have noticed. Joseph Barnes School had been a long way away from their old flat, and so they had moved here to be nearer to it. One way or another, Jeanette’s deafness seemed to steer most of the things that happened to all of them.

One of Connie’s earliest and clearest memories was of being in the steamy back kitchen of the old flat, standing on a stool at the sink to splash some dolls’ cups in a bowl of soapy water. She had looked out of the window and down into the branches of a stunted tree that grew over the fence in the next garden. There was a moment’s silence, the only sound the faint popping of bubbles in the sink. Then a bird began singing in the branches of the tree. It was a pure, flute-like sequence of notes that utterly entranced her.

Even as she listened, the knowledge that one day soon she wouldn’t be able to hear this melody fell on her from nowhere. It had the force of a physical blow.

She jumped from her stool and ran to where Hilda was standing at the stove. She wrapped her arms round her mother’s knees and hid her face in her apron. Even then, she could feel that Hilda didn’t yield to the touch, or offer a comforting pillow of flesh. Her arms bent under pressure and her back formed an angle, but they soon sprang back to their unbent positions.

‘I won’t hear the birds,’ Connie howled through her sobs, folds of apron stuffing her mouth.

‘What’s the matter? What are you talking about?’

‘I won’t hear the birds. Will I? When I’m deaf?’

Hilda took hold of Connie’s shoulders.

‘Don’t be silly. Jeanette’s deaf, not you.’

‘Won’t I be, when I’m big?’

Hilda shook her head. ‘No. You won’t. You’re just an ordinary little girl.’

This was how Constance learned that deafness wasn’t something that happened automatically to children in her family.

From about that time, whenever she looked at her sister a feeling that seemed bigger than herself had pumped through Connie. It was her first experience of pity and sympathy, and it was mixed with relief that she wasn’t going to be like her after all, and with guilt for being relieved.

She didn’t confess what she felt even to Tony – how could she explain what she didn’t properly understand herself?

It was just that plenty of people, not only Hilda, already made an extra fuss of Jeanette. Mrs Dix in the newsagent’s gave her a pink lipstick that came off the front of a magazine, and when Hilda took them to buy new shoes the shop man brought out half the pairs in the back room for her to try on. It took so long for her to choose that Connie had to have the same style as the old ones she had grown out of, which meant nobody could see they were brand-new. It wasn’t fair, even though Jeanette was deaf and Connie felt sorry for her.

Tony shifted Connie’s weight on his lap and hugged her tighter. ‘You know your sister’s deaf,’ he repeated. ‘Yes?’

Connie picked at one of the tiny brown looped threads in the arm of the chair. She tucked her head under Tony’s chin and gave the smallest nod.

‘It’s hard for her. She’s going to have difficulties in her life that you never will. We have to make allowances for her. It’s hard for your mum, too.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Jeanette inherited her deafness from Mum’s family.’

‘How?’

‘These things get passed down, from mothers to their babies. Like Martin’s hair, which is the same as his mum’s hair, isn’t it?’

Martin was a boy Connie knew from her old school – the one she wouldn’t be going to any more because it was too far from Echo Street. Martin and his mother both had hair the colour of the nasturtiums that grew in the front garden in Barlaston Road.

‘How do you get babies?’

‘Ask your mum about that. Do you want this story or not?’

‘Yes. Tell me about when you were little. About the milkman.’

Tony wasn’t good at making things up, but he often told her about what East London had been like when he was growing up. Connie loved these stories.

‘Oh, the milkman. In our street he had a little blue cart with a canvas canopy, and an old grey horse to pull the cart. The horse’s name was Nerys, and in the summer she’d have a bunch of cornflowers tied to her bridle. The coal used to come in sacks on the back of a wagon, and then the coal man carried the sacks on his back and tipped them into the cellars of the houses through a hole in the pavement. He had a leather coat with studs on the back of it, so it didn’t wear out so fast from the heavy sacks rubbing on it all day long. Another man used to come up from Gravesend with fresh fish off the trawlers to sell door to door. He’d say, “Lovely fish, Mrs Thorne. Lovely fresh herring.”’

Tony was good at doing the voices. Connie pressed her ear closer against his shirt-front because she liked the way his voice seemed to come from deep inside his chest. She could hear the steady rhythm of his heart, too. She didn’t know then how finite was the number of those beats.





Connie opened her eyes. The train crept past Battersea Power Station and made a sighing arrival at Victoria. Announcements washed over her head. She lifted her small bag, dodging the sharp corners and wheels of other people’s luggage, and let the surge of passengers carry her off the train and into the thick of London. Only a taxi ride separated her from home. A version of home.





It was three months since she had last been in her apartment.

From the front door she could see that there was dust on all the glass surfaces and dead flies speckling the white floor. The air smelled as if it had been hot too many times; all the moisture it had ever held had been leached out of it. Connie’s lips and the backs of her hands smarted with dehydration from the long flight. She walked down the white corridor to her bathroom and turned on the shower and all the taps. She breathed in the steam, stripped off her creased clothes and stood under the spray until she felt clean again. Then, without giving herself time to think, she wrapped herself in a towel and padded back to the main room.

When she and Seb had shared this tall white space, they had given parties for musicians and composers and cooked dinners for the loose network of their shared friends, but nowadays she rarely asked anyone to come here. It was quiet enough, she thought, to hear the dust settle.

She stood for a moment at the window that ran the length of one wall, staring out at the view. The apartment was on the top floor and she could see a broad sweep of the city from Canary Wharf tower all the way west to the dome of St Paul’s. There were different cranes positioned like storks over new developments, but everything else was the same. London glinted weakly under a dirty sky.

Connie’s desk faced the view. She stared out at the towers and the brown streets, knowing that she was delaying the moment.

She made herself open the address book that lay next to the telephone, and looked up Jeanette’s number. She hadn’t committed it to memory; she had hardly ever used it.

They never saw each other, but Jeanette’s massive presence was always there like a headland jutting out into the sea. Jeanette was the only person left in the world who knew the same things that Connie knew from long ago, and Connie held her sister’s memories furled tight within her in just the same way.

It was unthinkable that Jeanette was going to die.

Connie realised that she had made the headlong journey from Bali as if she believed she could do something to change that.

She pressed the buttons of the handset. Her heart was thumping as if she were running for her life.

She listened to the ringing tone. Another thought rushed in on her, one she had been keeping at bay by holding Jeanette in the forefront of her mind.

In a second or two I’ll hear his voice.

Because Jeanette wouldn’t answer. She never went anywhere near the telephone.

If anyone picked up, it would be him.





It was almost fifteen years ago, now.

Connie went to a party in a newly completed glass tower in Docklands. There had been a view not unlike the one that faced her now.

One of the advertising agencies was moving out there, with a big fanfare to announce to the known world that a building site east of the City was the new Soho.

She looked past a group of chattering account people and clients and with a shock saw Bill watching her from across the room.

She put down her glass and went to him.

‘You look very beautiful tonight,’ he said.

There were shadows under his eyes, and he had been drinking.

‘Hello, Bill.’

‘We don’t often run into each other, do we? I am here because I have the privilege of handling the PR account for TotalTime TV. What about you?’

‘One of the creative heads at the agency is a very close and dear acquaintance of mine.’

‘Small world. And are you here with…’ his eyes scanned the room ‘…Sam?’

Connie and Sam had split up years ago.

‘No. I’m not here with anyone.’

They turned to each other, as if there was no one else in the room, as if there was finally no other move they could make but this one.

Bill murmured, ‘Connie, can we get out of here?’

‘Yes.’

They rode down in the glass-sided lift and walked out into a bulldozer park. Bill blinked at the desolation.

‘If I could magic-up a taxi, would you run away with me?’

‘We don’t need magic, I’ve got my car,’ Connie said. ‘Where would you like to go?’

Inside the car, with his face lit by the dashboard lights, Bill said, ‘I don’t care where we go. As long as you are with me. I don’t care what happens.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘Don’t pretend to be rational, Con. Don’t pretend that what there is between us has ever been rational.’

She was driving an unfamiliar route past hoardings and cranes and what would some day be new roads raised on huge concrete stilts over the razed docklands. She had the strongest sense that they were running away, out of an old world and into a new one that hadn’t yet been made. He had said the words out loud: between us. What there is. He had acknowledged the existence of a truth, even though he hadn’t defined it, and now it couldn’t be unsaid. Alarm and joy and longing hammered in her chest. She had to remind herself how to breathe.

‘I don’t know where we’re going.’

‘Stop the car,’ he said roughly.

She circled the mire of a half-made roundabout, turned into a contractors’ by-way fenced off with tilted sheets of corrugated iron. Her fingers were shaking as she switched off the ignition.

It was almost dark now, and the cloudy sky was coloured orange by the fierce lighting on the new road.

Bill twisted towards her and their mouths met.

This time, as his fingers knotted in her hair and the blood surged in her ears, she knew that there was no way back. Even if she had wanted one.

They were doomed. Lost, and found in one another.

When they drew apart again, they were both gasping as if they had run a distance too fast.

‘Connie,’ he said wonderingly. She rubbed her bruised mouth, tasting him on her tongue.

‘Where shall we go?’ he asked.

‘Home,’ she answered. Her lack of hesitation should have shocked her, but it did not. Nothing about what was happening or about to happen was shocking, because of its inevitability. It was wrong, and it was dangerous because of the hurt it would certainly cause, but it didn’t take her aback.

‘Where might that be?’ he almost laughed.

‘My home. Where I live, that is.’

‘You would take me there?’

Her eyes widened. ‘Of course.’

They drove back into town, fast, in almost complete silence. When her hand moved to the gear lever Bill’s covered it, as if he wanted to make sure that she was real, that she wouldn’t escape.

They stumbled into the flat she had lived in back in those days like a pair of wild fugitives.

Bill had never even been here before. He slammed the front door behind them and at once they were in each other’s arms. He undressed her as they crossed the hallway. A trail of shoes and clothes marked their passage to the bedroom door.

‘Bill…’ she said, but his hand covered her mouth.

‘We’ll talk afterwards. Talk for hours if you like. But first this.’

This.

With the man she had loved since she was fifteen years old. With the only man she had ever truly loved. With her sister’s husband.





At home in Surrey, with Jeanette asleep in their bedroom upstairs, Bill picked up the phone.

‘Hello?’

She would have known his voice if she had heard him whispering in an earthquake.

‘Bill.’

‘Connie,’ he said.

He spoke her name as if he were holding her hand.

‘I am in London,’ she said carefully. ‘I want to come and see Jeanette.’

‘You know?’

‘Yes. She sent me an email.’

She heard him taking in a breath.

‘Come tomorrow,’ Bill said.

‘Yes. All right. I’ll be there.’