Constance A Novel

SIX

They were both older, but Bill was the same. He was the same as he always was, no matter how many years intervened, and just as necessary to her.

He held his arms out.

‘Thank you for coming, Con. I didn’t know whether I should tell you. It’s been worrying me for a long time.’

Connie lifted her head. He kissed her cheek, lightly and quickly, and then they studied each other’s faces. He cupped a shoulder with each hand, then gently released her. She saw that Bill had grown thin. There were lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, the same signs of age that marked her own, but the hollows in his cheeks were made deeper by the shadows of exhaustion. There was now much more grey than dark brown in his thick hair.

Connie said, ‘It’s much better that she told me herself. How is she?’

He shook his head. ‘Physically? As brave and determined as you would imagine. But she’s fighting a battle with herself as much as with the cancer. It’s difficult for her to accept what’s happening. If sheer willpower could change anything, she’d be healthier than you or me.’

‘Where is she?’

‘In the garden. She sits out there a lot of the time, communing with her plants. That seems to soothe her in a way not much else does. How are you, Connie? You look well.’

‘I am. But for this.’

‘Come and see her.’

Bill led the way through the house. Connie glimpsed a copper trough filled with pots of African violets and an expanse of polished parquet flooring divided into squares by the sun. It was very quiet.

‘I’ll leave you to talk to her,’ Bill said.

The French windows stood open. Jeanette was sitting to one side of the big garden in the shade of a copper beech tree, her head nodding. There was a rug over her knees and a newspaper had slipped to the ground at her feet. Connie walked quickly over the grass, but it seemed to take a long time to cover the few yards to her side. Even in the sunshine it felt as if she was wading against a strong current. Their last parting had been hostile. Neither of them had envisaged a reconciliation.

As soon as Connie’s shadow fell on the edge of the newspaper, Jeanette looked up.

– Here you are.

‘Here I am.’

Automatically they used the private, pidgin version of sign language that had been their way of talking to each other ever since they were children. Nowadays Jeanette wore tiny hearing aids, but they were tiring to use because as well as individual voices they amplified all the ambient sounds into a confusing roar. She preferred to rely on lip-reading with everyone except Bill; she could distinguish what Bill said even without looking at him. They had been listening to and talking and interpreting each other for more than twenty-five years.

– That was quick. All the way from Bali.

Connie did her best to smile through her shock at her sister’s appearance. The last time they met she had been plump, pretty, and now she looked like a woman whose flesh had all dissolved and seeped away. Instead of fitting closely her skin clothed her bones in a wrinkled sack. Her blonde hair, once her shining glory, was a cap of colourless tufts that barely concealed her scalp.

‘I came as soon as I got your email. Did I wake you?’

– No.

Connie made to kneel down on the grass beside her sister’s chair, so that it would be easier for her to lip-read, but Jeanette stopped her.

– Could you help me up?

They hardly ever touched each other. But now Connie gently put her hands under Jeanette’s arms and eased her to her feet. She felt as light as a child.

For a moment they stood uncertainly together, their cheeks not quite touching. Connie tightened her arms around her sister’s shoulders. She wanted to find a way to reach beyond words, to leapfrog the impediment that wasn’t lodged merely in Jeanette’s deafness – that being only a kind of clumsy metaphor for a different and more enduring silence – and to hug her so tightly that nothing could come between them ever again.

‘I’m glad to be here,’ she began. She stroked her sister’s thin hair, just once, very lightly.

We have to start somewhere, she thought.

– I wanted to tell you the news myself. I didn’t want you to hear from anyone else that I’m going to die. Not even Bill. But I didn’t expect you to come straight away like this.

‘Did you want me to come?’

Jeanette suddenly smiled. Her teeth looked too big for her mouth, but the lines in her face eased and there was a light in her eyes.

– Yes. You are the only one who remembers everything. That is odd, isn’t it?

‘I know,’ Connie said. ‘I feel the same. All the way in on the train I was thinking about Echo Street. The day we moved in and we fought over the bedrooms. The garden shed and the piano. The nightmares I used to have.’

– So much history.

Connie nodded. She was turning a question over in her mind. Was it their entangled history that made them who they were, the two of them, or were those clashing identities rooted elsewhere, much further off?

‘I’m so happy to see you,’ she said, and it was the truth.

Jeanette’s hand briefly masked her waxy face.

– Looking like this?

‘Looking anyhow.’

– Give me your arm. Let’s walk.

‘Can you manage? Bill said he’d make us some coffee and bring it out here.’

Jeanette’s eyes were also too big. Her gaze settled on Connie, then she looked away.

– Coffee. Like sitting in some waiting room. Drinking coffee. Waiting for your name to be called.

‘Is that how it feels?’

– Sometimes. Not always.

They began to walk, a slow shuffle past the flower border. To Connie, used to the coarse brilliance of Balinese vegetation, the blooms looked ghostly pale with petals as fragile as damp tissue, the embodiment of restrained Englishness.

– Look at my roses.

‘They’re very beautiful.’

But Connie didn’t want small talk starting to blur these first exchanges of their reunion. There was so much to say, right now, in case they should fall into the old evasions or even hostilities.

‘I’d have come long before this, if you had told me that you were ill.’

– Would you?

Jeanette seemed to be examining the words for layers of meaning. Then she sighed, wearied by the effort.

– I kept expecting to get better.

Connie asked, ‘Do you know for sure that you’re not going to?’

– It’s in my spine.

They took a slow step, then another, walking carefully in their new alignment.

If Jeanette had been healthy they would have maintained their distance. Now she was going to die, and the certainty was changing the attitudes of a lifetime.

Connie tried to calculate the combination of defiance and resignation that it must have taken for Jeanette to confess her condition.

Because Jeanette would regard it as a confession. For the whole of her life, it had been Jeanette’s intention and her satisfaction to do as well as everyone else, and then a bit better than that. She had always wanted to be bigger than her deafness, and to make it incidental that she couldn’t hear or speak like other people did.

In that, she had triumphantly succeeded.

So to succumb now to cancer might seem, in some guarded corner of Jeanette’s determined being at least, to be a form of weakness. As would acknowledging it to her sister, with whom she shared everything – and nothing.

Her message to Connie had been a way of asking her to come soon, that was clear. What was it, exactly, that Jeanette wanted?

Connie caught herself. Wait. That wasn’t the right way to pose the question.

What could Connie offer that might help her? All she had was a biting sense of how much had been missed, how much she had failed to do when she could have tried to make friends with her sister again, and how little time they had left to make amends.

‘Are you in a lot of pain?’

How bald these questions are, she thought. What other way is there, to find out what I don’t really want to hear in the way Jeanette wants me to hear it, which is from her, not from Bill?

– The chemo was awful. I was sick all the time. There won’t be any more of that, thank God. I have some good days, now.

‘Is today one?’

– Yes. Today is one.

Connie knew that was not just because she was in less pain.

Fifteen slow steps took them to the end of the flowerbed and the point where the lawn ran out into rough grass. Jeanette paused and shaded her eyes with her hand, and at first Connie thought the sun must be too bright for her. Then she saw that her shoulders were shaking. Jeanette was crying.

‘Don’t cry,’ Connie begged.

She realised that she didn’t know how to deal with this illness. She had never been ill herself, and had never looked after anyone who was suffering anything more serious than a dose of flu.

Quickly she corrected herself. ‘I don’t mean that. Cry all you want if that helps. What can I do? Tell me what to do.’

Jeanette sniffed and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

– I don’t want to die. You can’t do anything about that.

The obverse of Jeanette’s strength had always been anger. Connie could suddenly feel the dry heat of it coming off her thin skin, eating her up like a fever. Jeanette wasn’t going to see another spring in her garden. She wasn’t going to grow old with Bill at her side, or see her grandchildren, and she was raging at the loss.

– I am supposed to be brave. It’s expected. People want to be able to say, ‘She fought all the way. She was so brave.’ But I’m not. I don’t know how to be. I want to scream and yell. It’s not fair that I’m dying. I don’t mean just to me. To Bill and Noah as well.

Jeanette’s hands chopped at the air, then her doubled fists knocked against her breastbone.

Connie stared miserably. ‘That’s what I always used to say, not you. That was my refrain, don’t you remember? You never complained that life was unfair. You just lived it, made it do what you wanted.’

– But I can’t now. I can’t do this.

‘Yes, you can. If anyone can deal with it, it’s you. I’ll help you.’

– Will you?

It was a fair question.

‘If you’ll let me,’ Connie humbly said.

She caught hold of Jeanette’s raised wrists and held them. For a moment it was as if they were having one of their old fistfights. Then Jeanette’s eyes slid over Connie’s shoulder towards the house. Connie let go of her.

– Thank you.

Connie didn’t know whether her offer of help was accepted or dismissed.

A sudden smile glinted through Jeanette’s tears. For an instant, with the flesh melted away from her jaw line and her eyes widening, she looked like a girl again. Without turning round Connie knew that Bill was coming.

– Here he is.

Jeanette’s glance flicked back to Connie.

– I love him. He loves me.

She gave the signs an extra edge of precision, for clarity’s sake.

Connie met her sister’s gaze. She understood that one of the assurances Jeanette wanted from her was that she and Bill wouldn’t share anything more than memories and kinship, now or ever.

She could give her that. In effect she had done it already, long ago. But even so, with the reminder of the bitterness that linked and divided them the day seemed to lose some of its warmth and softness.

‘I know you love each other,’ she answered steadily. ‘There has never been any doubt about that.’

Connie held out her arm and Jeanette leaned on it again. They retraced their steps as Bill put down a tray loaded with cups and a coffee pot.

When they reached him he lowered Jeanette into her chair and tucked the rug over her knees, then folded the crumpled newspaper and laid it aside. He did everything deftly, clearly used to looking after her.

‘Next week you’ll be making the coffee for me,’ he told her.

‘If I have time,’ she murmured. ‘Busy, busy.’

Only Bill was trusted to distinguish her words without supporting signs.

Bill set up two more folding chairs in the shade of the copper beech tree, and they drew together in a triangle. If anyone had glanced over the hedge they would have looked like any family enjoying a summer’s day in a garden flushed with lavender and roses.





The first time Connie met Bill was at Echo Street, in the early summer of 1978. She was fifteen.

‘Stupid clothes,’ Connie said, so that Jeanette could see her, but Jeanette was as good at ignoring what she chose not to pick up as she was at intercepting anything not intended for her. She went on ironing, meticulously smoothing the nose of the iron into the ruffles of her white shirt. Her hair was wound on big, bouncy rollers. In a moment she would brush it out and loose waves would effortlessly tumble round her face.

Hilda was cleaning. Her ally was a little battery-operated vacuum cleaner that sucked crumbs off the table and she switched it on now to drown out Connie’s remarks.

Over the buzz of the cleaner Connie raised her voice to a shout.

‘Who is it tonight? Four Eyes? Or Mr Physics Club?’

Connie despised all Jeanette’s followers, as she despised almost everything except music and her tight coterie of like-minded friends. Jeanette whisked the finished shirt off the ironing board and held it up to admire her work. She slipped it on a hanger and took it upstairs with her, not even glancing in Connie’s direction.

‘Don’t call Jeanette’s boyfriends rude names,’ Hilda warned. ‘And don’t leave all that rubbish piled on the table, you’ll make this place look like a tip.’

Connie yawned.

‘I said, don’t leave all that rubbish there.’

‘It’s not rubbish. It’s my homework. So who is he?’

Hilda began swabbing the corner of the table with a bunched-up cloth that smelled of bleach. Her red knuckles jabbed against Connie’s wrist.

‘He’s a new one. You get a boyfriend yourself, you won’t want us calling him names.’

Connie gave her a blank stare. If only you knew.

Connie was fifteen and she had been having sex with Davy Spencer for the last three months. She didn’t really enjoy it; Davy pushed himself inside her, jiggled about for a few seconds and then came with a yell as triumphant as if he had just won a recording contract. But a lot of the girls in her year fancied him and he played the drums in the best band in their school – although that wasn’t saying much. Sometimes, after he had finished, they cuddled up together and talked about the music they both liked and the places they would go once they left school. When they lay like that Connie felt close to him, although at other times she thought she hardly knew him. But when they were lying cosily in each other’s arms, round at his place when his mum and dad were out, she could even convince herself that they were in love.

‘What’s his name, then?’

‘Bill Bunting.’

Hilda was so proud of Jeanette’s success and popularity, she couldn’t keep any details to herself. She’d talk for hours to anyone who would listen about how boys wrote love letters to her and dropped them through the letterbox at Echo Street because Jeanette couldn’t use the phone like other girls.

‘My Jeanette, she was born stone deaf but she never lets it stand in her way. She’s a university student, you know.’

Connie gave a disbelieving laugh. ‘What is he, some nursery-rhyme character?’

Jeanette came back. Her hair framed her glowing face and hid her hearing aids, her shirt ruffles were perfectly crisp and her tight jeans were tucked into soft suede boots. She trailed a waft of Charlie behind her, her favourite perfume. Connie slouched even lower in her chair. She was still in her school shirt and scratchy royal-blue synthetic-knit V-necked jumper.

‘Here she is, Pete the Pirate.’

Hilda and Jeanette ignored her.

‘Take him in the front room, when he gets here,’ Hilda said.

– It’s okay, Mum. He’s just an ordinary boy.

The doorbell rang.

‘He’s here,’ Hilda pointed. Jeanette performed a little pirouette of excitement before giving her hair a last shake and dancing to the door.

Connie deliberately stuck her nose in her English book. She heard his voice, and the busy silence of Jeanette’s responses. She didn’t look up even when they both came into the kitchen and Hilda was shaking hands and saying that she was pleased to meet him and he wasn’t to mind the mess the place was in because when you were on your own with a family to look after you couldn’t always have things looking the way you wanted, could you?

‘No,’ he said. His voice was distinctive: it sounded as though it had ripples in it. ‘It must be difficult. But it looks fine.’

Then she knew that his eyes were on her.

Connie couldn’t stop herself glancing up, even though she had meant to ignore all three of them.

She saw immediately that Bill Bunting was worthy of anyone’s attention.

He had the sort of long hair that Connie liked, shaggy but not matted, and not self-consciously combed either. He was wearing jeans, old battered ones, and a not-too-ridiculous shirt. He had dark eyes and a clear sort of face, and one of those curly mouths that always look as if they are about to smile even when the owner is being serious. He was holding Jeanette’s hand, without seeming to try to prove anything, but just as if he wanted to keep her close to him.

Connie swallowed.

‘Hi, I’m Bill. You must be Connie,’ he said.

What had Jeanette told him about her?

‘I am Constance,’ she replied stiffly. Her ears had turned red. She was conscious of the drips of something sticky and dark down the front of her jumper and her hair being a mess of dusty black spirals with plastic slides stuck in it, just like a kid.

He held his hand out. Hilda was asking him if he wanted a drink, a coffee maybe, or he could have a beer if he wanted one. Jeanette was leaning on him to indicate that they had to go.

In spite of herself, Connie shook his hand.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked. ‘It must be really good.’ He did smile now, his mouth curling.

‘Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s my set book in English.’

‘Yes. That’s a good book.’

Connie would have liked to ask him why he enjoyed it, because she didn’t particularly. It would have been interesting to talk to him, and a fully-fledged fantasy popped into her head in which she and Bill Bunting were sitting at an outdoor table in some exotic but unspecified place, drinking wine and discussing literature and music.

But in reality he was holding her sister’s hand and telling Hilda that they couldn’t stop, although he’d like to, because he was taking Jeanette for something to eat before they went to hear a new band at a place under a pub in Camden Town.

Jeanette was deaf. Why was he taking her to a gig?

Jeanette claimed that she didn’t have to hear the music, she could feel the beat in her bones, which was the kind of pretentious thing she was always suggesting, but Connie knew that the evening would be wasted on her.

‘Go on then, both of you,’ Hilda said. ‘Have a lovely time.’

Jeanette was almost bouncing with happiness, springing up and down in her little suede boots with the turnover tops. Connie thought that she was looking really pretty and sexy tonight, prettier and sexier than she had ever seen her look before.

‘Bye, Constance,’ Bill said. She knew that he was gently teasing her for having insisted on her full name, and she couldn’t bear to be teased. It took enough concentration to keep the blocks of her life piled up in the right precarious order, without someone dodging in and out and threatening to topple them by laughing and making her feel ridiculous. Especially not this Bill Bunting.

Connie wouldn’t look at him. She picked up her book again and stared at the grey paragraphs until he and Jeanette departed for their date. Hilda accompanied them to the front door, waved them off and then came back and picked up her cloth.

She resumed her rubbing and sighing.

Now that they were alone Connie was certain that Hilda wouldn’t talk to her, the way Davy’s mother and normal people talked, for example; she would just go on with the chores in a way that rejected any offer of help and never stopped implying that it was desperately needed. Hilda could make you feel superfluous and guilty all at the same time, even with her back turned. Being trapped in this house with Hilda and her martyred silences was what Connie disliked most, and it was happening more and more frequently these days as Jeanette’s life blossomed. She still lived at home, but reading Biological Sciences at Queen Mary’s College meant that she spent little time at Echo Street.

Connie sat and pretended to read for just long enough to make her motionless presence thoroughly irritating.

If Hilda suddenly boiled over and started shouting, at least that would be something happening. They would both have the release of an argument.

‘What do you want for your tea?’ Hilda asked at last, when there was no surface left in the kitchen that could conceivably benefit from further polishing, wiping, sweeping or disinfecting.

This evening, apparently, there wouldn’t even be the equivocal satisfaction of a proper row.

Connie shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘You can’t eat nothing.’

‘Really? Can’t I? What makes you think that?’

‘I don’t want any of your silly sarcasm, my girl.’

Connie gathered up her books and files.

‘I might go out.’

‘You’ve got the money for that, have you?’

In fact Connie did; she had a Saturday job in a record shop up in Hackney although that was more for the chance to gloat over the new and second-hand vinyl than for the cash it brought in. She shrugged again and this goaded Hilda enough to make her demand, ‘Why can’t you be more like your sister?’

Connie let three seconds tick by, deliciously.

‘You know why. You should have had another one just like her, if that was what you wanted.’

Hilda’s face went tight and dark. Connie strolled out of the kitchen and it was only as she was going up the stairs that Hilda was able to call after her in a loud, harsh voice, ‘You’ve got the devil in you, Connie Thorne. I don’t know what you’re doing in this house.’

Connie went into her bedroom and closed the door.

Anyway, she thought, I won’t be in this house for much longer.

It took a very long time to grow up, but with every week and month that passed she knew with greater certainty that it would happen in the end. In a year, or not much more than a year, she would be able to leave school.

She was going to move out and leave Echo Street far behind her, and she was going to find her real mother and father. Once she had found them she could become the person she was born to be, instead of having to be Constance Thorne.


Connie wondered whether Jeanette remembered that evening. She knew Bill did, because they had once talked about it.

‘You looked like an angry foal,’ he laughed.

‘A foal?’

‘Yeah. With a sort of matted forelock hanging down over your nose and the whites of your eyes showing.’

‘Oh, great. And I suppose thick knees and spindly legs, finished off with two pairs of unmanicured hooves.’

‘I couldn’t see your legs, you were sitting down.’

‘I thought you were gorgeous.’

‘I was pretty full of it in those days. I imagined that going out with someone who looked like Jeanette and who was deaf as well would make me look deeply cool and kind of committed and interesting.’

‘Yes?’

Bill had laughed again. ‘She outwitted me, though. Instead of being my accessory she made me hers.’

‘You fell in love with her.’

Bill nodded.





Jeanette tasted two or three sips of her coffee then replaced her cup on the tray. The saucer rattled. Bill passed her a glass of water instead and she took a brown bottle of pills out of her cardigan pocket and swallowed two capsules, then gave the glass back to Bill. They did all this without a word or a glance, and Connie saw how practised they were at being just the two of them.

Jeanette leaned back in her chair.

– What about you? she asked.

Connie said, ‘I’ve been at home, in Bali. Last week I was working on the music for a big commercial shoot.’

The bank clients and Rayner Ingram and Angela seemed already to have fallen into some distant other world. She was startled to think how recent the week’s miniature dramas had really been, and how very little they mattered now that she was here.

When Jeanette was settled Bill sat down and crossed his legs. He was wearing deck shoes without socks, and Connie remembered that this was a sort of uniform for Englishmen at home on summer days. She was sufficiently unused to England to start noticing such things again.

‘That sounds glamorous,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘It does, doesn’t it? I had two groups of musicians to look after and I enjoyed that, and some of my neighbours were involved as well. It felt a bit strange, though, seeing London in Bali. I wasn’t quite sure which environment was which. Life in the village isn’t usually so busy.’

Jeanette followed all this. Conversations when each person took a turn didn’t trouble her, only when everyone was speaking at once.

– But you said at home. Is Bali your home?

‘Did I say that?’

– Yes.

Connie thought about it, and Bill looked at her over his coffee cup. ‘I’ve been living there for a while now, so I suppose I do think of it as home.’ This wasn’t the time or the place to expand on anyone’s definition of home.

– What is it like? Jeanette leaned forward.

Connie’s face shone. ‘Beautiful. Hot. Different. Exotic. And that doesn’t do it justice.’

– I would love to have seen it.

‘Would you?’ Connie asked. Jeanette had never travelled much, preferring to take villa or hotel holidays with Bill and Noah in Italy or France. A flash of memory came back to her of Bill, in one of their snatched moments during the time long ago when everything hung in the balance between them, calling her his wild roaming girl because she was leaving him to go to Cambodia.

She’d go anywhere, in those days, anywhere in the world that was far enough to try to escape the problem that none of them could solve.

– Wishful thinking now, Jeanette indicated.

There was a small silence that was waiting for the comfort of words to be dropped into it. Bill rubbed the corner of his jaw with his thumb. A reddish patch in the skin showed that the gesture had become habitual.

Connie remembered that her camera was in her bag. She had dropped it in this morning before she left the apartment.

‘I’ve got some pictures here,’ she said.

– Show me?

Bill moved Jeanette’s chair further into the shade so the sun didn’t reflect on the camera’s little screen, and found her glasses for her, and Connie leaned over her shoulder. Their arms briefly touched and Connie’s warm skin looked darker next to Jeanette’s hospital pallor.

‘Press that button, the one with the arrow. There, that’s the view from the veranda of my house.’

Jeanette studied the image. It was an early-morning shot. Mist clung to the lower slopes of the gorge and the row of palms that crowned the ridge looked as if they had been drawn in soft pencil against the silvery sky. Over Jeanette’s bent head Connie pondered the contrast with the froth of roses clothing the back of this house, and the pots of agapanthus just breaking into flower on either side of the French windows.

The next picture was of a village festival. Men with drums and bamboo pipes, and laughing girls carrying towering piles of fruit and pyramids of flowers on their heads processed past a rank of snarling demons carved from tufa and winged dragons with jagged backs like dinosaurs. A line of scarlet and gold penjor flags flashed brilliance against the background mass of leaves.

Jeanette looked at that picture for a long time.

– How beautiful.

The next shot was of the pairs of exquisite Balinese schoolgirls dressed up for the bride commercial, and then there was one of Angela. Connie had caught her on the set with Ed and a couple of the other riggers. There were lights and cables everywhere, and darts of sunshine striking off the metal equipment boxes. Angela was standing upright among the chaos and giving her missionary-among-the-cannibals face straight into the camera lens.

‘It looks like fun,’ Bill said.

‘Well, yes. It was really.’

The last picture was of the gamelan ensemble with their instruments, dressed and made-up for the shoot, with Ketut beaming in the centre.

‘Who are these?’

Connie laughed. She was touched and pleased that Jeanette and Bill liked her photographs. ‘That’s my orchestra. But they’d soon tell you they’re not mine. More like I’m their eccentric Englishwoman. They were on screen here for the commercial, playing a few bars of the music that I wrote for it, but usually it’s me creeping along to play percussion with them and hoping not to make an idiot of myself. It’s a big privilege; generally the seka – that’s the village music club – is only open to men, but I suppose I don’t count because I’m old and regarded as harmlessly mad. Ketut – that’s him in the middle – is a very clever man, and a brilliant musician. He’s a good friend. He only rates me because we were in his brother’s café one afternoon and a local version of the old Boom commercial came on the telly over the bar. I told him I wrote the music and he was almost as impressed as if I’d said “A Hard Day’s Night” was one of mine. Ketut’s a very big Beatles fan.’

Jeanette was looking up at her, clearly trying to place Connie in a setting that was so remote from her English garden. Bill’s expression was harder to read.

Connie shifted slightly.

‘Actually my life’s quieter than it looks from these. I sit and stare at the view quite a lot.’

Jeanette clicked back to the first of the pictures.

– Do you? I think I would, too.

There was a faint flush of colour over her cheekbones.

‘It’s a lovely place,’ Connie agreed.

Bill hopped up and announced that he was going to go in and make some lunch, saying with a laugh he thought he was irritating Jeanette by always being under her feet.

Jeanette reached up and curled her fingers round his wrist.

– You are not, she told him. Never.

As Bill carried the tray back across the lawn to the house the two women settled themselves again.

‘What’s Noah doing?’ Connie asked.

As when Bill had come out into the garden, Jeanette’s face softened and brightened.

– Noah’s fine. He’s a joy.

She told Connie about Noah’s job and his flat and the girlfriend he had just split up with because she had gone travelling, and added that Bill and she thought there might be some new love interest although they hadn’t met her yet.

– He’s grown up now. That’s one good thing.

Connie remembered him as a teenager, protective of Jeanette, with a disconcerting physical resemblance to his father.

– I hope it won’t be too hard for him, Jeanette added.

Her sister’s tenderness for the boy moved Connie, and even without a child of her own she could imagine what anguish it must cause Jeanette to think of leaving him. But it also touched a place in Connie that she tried to keep covered up. Seeing a mother’s love was like placing pressure on an unhealed wound, an old, deep injury that scabbed over and seemed on the point of disappearing, but which broke open when she least expected it and made her wince with the sharpness of the pain.

The sudden exposure of it made her push back her chair and drop to her knees.

She had to move to ease the hurt so she knelt down and gathered her sister into her arms, stroking her sparse hair and rocking her as if she were a baby. This time Jeanette didn’t resist. Her head lay against Connie’s shoulder in just the way Connie’s used to do against Tony’s when she was a little girl. This connection was made more precious by its fragility, its limited life, then as now.

Hot, uncalculated words broke out of Connie like fresh blood from beneath the broken scab.

‘Jeanette. Jeanette, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I haven’t been here with you. So much in our childhood was wrong. It was nobody’s fault, not even Hilda’s. I ran away from home and from you. I was full of my own concerns, and I haven’t been the sister you wanted or deserved.

‘What I did with Bill was bad. But I didn’t plan to fall in love with my own sister’s husband, you know. None of it was intended. Once you were married I should just have kept running, off over the horizon, before anything else happened. Bill was in the wrong too, but he’s a good man. He loves you. He’s not the first or the last husband to make a mistake and to regret it ever afterwards.

‘I know you don’t trust me, why should you? But I’m trying to say I’ll do whatever I can now. If you let me. If you and Bill let me. If I knew Noah better, I’d promise you that he’ll never need a woman’s support while I’m here to give it.’

Over the years Connie had taught herself not to cry, but tears came now. They burned her eyes and the green garden blurred into splinters of silver.

She didn’t even know how much of what she said was intelligible to Jeanette. Most probably it was nothing more than a vibration in the locked bones and channels of her bent head, but she held her and rocked her and slowly Jeanette lifted her arm. She put her hand on Connie’s head and lightly stroked her hair, just once.

‘It’s not too late,’ Connie said. ‘It’s not. It can’t be.’

Jeanette made no response.

Silently they held on to each other.





Noah fell asleep with the lights and the television on, and the next thing he heard was a key in the lock. The front door of the flat opened and softly closed. He sat up and rubbed his face, then looked at his watch. It was ten past four in the morning.

‘Hi, Roxana?’ he called out.

The hall light clicked on and she appeared in the doorway. There were black marks like thumbprints where her thick eye make-up had smudged. She stood with her plastic handbag clutched across her chest, warily gazing at him. She looked dazed with exhaustion.

Noah stumbled to his feet. Roxana immediately took a step backwards.

He held his hands up. ‘It’s all right,’ he mumbled. ‘I just wanted to make sure you got back safely. It’s very late.’

She shrugged. ‘It is a club for men to enjoy themselves.’

Noah felt uncomfortable on behalf of his sex. ‘Did you have a bad night?’

Roxana’s mouth creased. Even when she looked plain, as she did now with her blotched make-up and late-night skin, her mouth made her beautiful.

‘I earn money,’ she said.

She burrowed her hand into the bag and brought out her wallet. ‘If you like I can pay you some money for rent. Here.’ She held out a note, but he wouldn’t even look at it.

‘Roxana, for God’s sake, put your money away. Look, I don’t know what’s been happening to you and I don’t know what you’re afraid might happen next. But you’re welcome to stay and I don’t need any rent from you and I told you this morning, yesterday morning, whenever the f*ck it was, you’re safe here. I’m not going to touch you if that’s what you’re concerned about.’

She slid him a glance under her blackened eyelids. Noah thought, I shouldn’t have promised that. Now I’m going to have to keep my word. With the flat of his hand he massaged the corner of his mouth towards his nose and sniffed hard.

‘Would you like a cup of tea or something?’

Roxana raised her thin shoulders. ‘I would like just to sleep,’ she said.

‘Go ahead.’ He indicated the door of his bedroom.

She gave him an awkward nod. ‘Good night. Thank you, Noah. You are a kind person.’ She slid away and the door closed behind her.

She must have pulled off her clothes and dived immediately into sleep because he didn’t hear any sounds of her moving about from then until he left for work.





Every evening of the following week Noah came home straight from work instead of going to the gym or stopping off at the pub, in the hope of overlapping with Roxana before she left for The Cosmos. If he was lucky he would find her still wandering between the bathroom and his bedroom with her hair wrapped in one of his towels, her muscled legs beaded with drops of water from the shower.

‘Hi, Noah. Did you have a nice day? What work did you do?’

He took a beer out of the fridge or made himself a mug of tea, and while Roxana perched on the sofa to paint her toenails with deft strokes of silver glitter he told her about providing technical support to editors who could spend days honing a manuscript, somehow manage to lose all their work with a couple of keystrokes, and want him to recover it for them.

‘It sounds highly responsible business. You have a good career.’

‘Oh, I don’t know that it’s a career. I haven’t made a policy decision on that yet. It’s just a job.’

Roxana laughed. ‘But you are lucky, aren’t you?’

He was puzzled for a moment until he realised that it would be a luxury, where Roxana came from, to be able to choose between a job or a career and to postpone one while indulging in the other.

When her hair and toenails were dry she would retreat into his bedroom and put on her street clothes.

‘I have to go,’ she would sigh. ‘Mr Shane tells all the girls, even the Brazilian one that he likes, that if we are late we need not come back another time.’

‘Don’t you get a night off?’

Roxana teasingly smiled at him. ‘Why do I need this? What will I do with a night off and not earning any money?’

‘You could come out with me. You could tell me about Uzbekistan, talk about your life.’

‘And why do you want to know about Uzbekistan, when you do not even know where it is?’

‘I do know. You told me quite precisely.’

Their hour’s overlap was already ending. Roxana took some small lacy items out of the tumble-dryer and placed them in a Tesco carrier-bag, together with an apple and a filled roll in a supermarket wrapper to eat during her break. He found it touching to think of her eating this humdrum meal in between dances, biting tidily into the doughy bread so as not to get blobs of mayonnaise on her chin or on her – whatever it was she wore, in order to take it off.

‘What time do you think you will be back?’ he asked, and then realised that he sounded like her husband. Or her brother.

She shrugged. ‘When the club closes. I will see you tomorrow, Noah, when you come back from work.’

Noah’s mobile rang and he dragged it out of his pocket. ‘Yeah, hi mate. Ner, I didn’t see it. Hang on a sec, will you?’ Roxana was on her way out of the door. He gave her a wave and made an unthinking kiss in the air, as he would have done to Lauren. To his surprise Roxana laughed and copied the gesture and then she was gone.

‘What’s that, mate? I am listening. Who? Ner, it’s a girl who’s staying here while And’s in Barcelona. No, I’m not. Nowhere near. I wish, in fact.’

He decided to wait for Saturday. On Saturday, he calculated, they should be able to spend the day together, and in the evening when Roxana went off to work he would go home again to see his parents.





On Saturday, Roxana didn’t stir until two o’clock in the afternoon.

He made a pot of coffee, thinking the smell might tempt her, and when that one went cold he made a fresh one. At last he heard the small creaks of furniture and soft footsteps as she got up and padded round his bedroom. He didn’t like the image of himself as an eavesdropper so he went to strip the covers off Andy’s bed and made as much noise as he could putting the sheets in the washing machine. When he slammed the door and turned round she was standing in the kitchen. Her face was scrubbed and she looked younger, and miserable. Her greeny-blonde hair stood on end, like a child’s.

‘Hi. What’s up?’

‘Nothing.’ She pressed the waxen wings of a carton of juice that he had left on the draining board and poured herself a glass. They stood in awkward silence as she drank it down and he knew that she wanted to be left alone. He supposed that he could go out for a while but then he thought, It’s my flat. So he sat down at the kitchen table instead and busied himself with the Guardian. Roxana went and took a shower and when she came back again she had on the pale jeans that she was wearing the first time he saw her and a grey T-shirt with the word free printed on the front. Her damp hair was combed flat.

‘You slept for a long time,’ he said.

‘I like to sleep. It is easy. Easier than to be awake.’

‘Is it? I suppose so. Listen, d’you want to come out for a walk? We could go down to the river and have a drink at a pub.’

Her first instinct was to refuse. Then she glanced at the slice of blue sky visible through the mansard window.

‘All right.’

They walked down the road to the Broadway and crossed under the flyover. It was a bright, windy day with the leaves of the trees all tossed up to reveal their pale undersides. Roxana walked quickly, and he could see her brightening up with the fresh air and the sight of people busy with their Saturday afternoon pleasures. At Hammersmith Bridge they descended the steps to the riverside and headed west among the couples with buggies and the joggers and children on trikes.

Roxana turned to him and smiled. Her eyes were dancing.

‘I like your Thames,’ she said. He noted with a touch of regret that she pronounced it correctly now. ‘I like all of London. In the daytime.’

Her English was improving and he wondered if he was only imagining that her heavy accent was fading slightly. Roxana was clever, there was no doubt.

‘Only in the daytime?’

‘Phhh. At night you see less of this…’ she waved at the benign scene ‘…and more of this.’ She grabbed her own throat, lasciviously crossed her eyes and drooped her tongue from one corner of her mouth in such a comic evocation of sicko psycho drooling that Noah burst out laughing. Roxana laughed with him.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Night bus, half the people. Believe me.’

‘Harmless munters.’

‘What is that?’

‘This.’ He grabbed his own throat and copied her face and Roxana gave a little scream and skipped out of his reach.

‘What’s it like where you come from?’ he asked.

‘I come from a very old city called Bokhara.’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘Very good. It has a small centre, the old city, where there are magnificent bazaars and madrassahs. You will have seen pictures, perhaps. And it has also a very big outside, very dusty, with railway lines and cement works and ugly blocks of apartments for the Soviet workers.’

‘What part do you live in?’

‘I live in London,’ Roxana said coldly.

‘Okay. Right. By the way, you know Andy, my flatmate, is coming back from holiday this evening?’

‘Yes. I remember this. I will have to move out. I will find a room, better than the last place. I was thinking this when I got up, and I was going to do it today, but now I am here walking with you.’

‘Much better. It’s fine, anyway. I’ll be at my folks’ tonight and I’ll just leave a note for And, tell him who you are and not to leap up in the night assuming you’re a burglar. After tonight I’ll be on the sofa until you get sorted.’

She stopped walking and laid her hand on his arm.

‘Thank you. I like staying with you, Noah. You have a good heart.’

They had walked a distance from the bridge and there were no people in the immediate vicinity. Roxana’s face was close to his, close enough for him to be able to smell the scent of her skin and hair, and the promise of her mouth was suddenly too much for him. He came in closer and kissed her. He didn’t intend anything heavy. It was supposed to be an appreciative sort of kiss, casually suggesting that there might be more to come if that happened to be acceptable.

Roxana’s reaction was startling. She whipped away from him as if he had seriously assaulted her and her arms came protectively across her chest. She glared at him.

‘Whoa. It’s all right,’ he murmured.

‘It is not,’ she snapped.

‘Roxana, don’t overreact. It was just a peck.’

‘Perhaps you believe that because I am just a lap dancer, I am for anyone? Perhaps now you will offer me some money? Or perhaps you think you let me stay in your flat and I am free?’

He gazed at her in dismay. ‘I don’t think any of those things. I think you’re pretty, and I like you. I’ve got no reason to believe you dislike me, in fact you just told me I’ve got a good heart. We’ve known each other a couple of weeks, I gave you a very quick kiss. It’s what men and women do. At least, they do in London.’

That touched a chord, as he had known it would. Roxana hoisted her shoulders towards her ears and with a long breath let them fall again.

‘I see.’

‘Here. Let’s sit down for a bit.’ There was a pub with wooden trestle tables and benches set out parallel to the river. They sat down facing each other at one end of a table, both of them reminded of their first encounter further downriver, with the robot man and the borrowed bicycle.

‘I am thinking you are the same,’ Roxana muttered.

‘The same as what?’

Her fingers drew a circle in the air.

‘My stepfather. My teacher. Dylan at my other house. Mr Shane at my work.’

Noah was aware that there was a big tangle here that he and Roxana might have to unravel together if they were to go any further. He picked at the nearest thread.

‘Mr Shane?’

‘He is the man who owns The Cosmos. He likes one of the Brazilian girls, Natalie she calls herself. But last night he came when I was in my break and tried to make some games with me.’

‘What did you do?’

Roxana laughed. ‘I know how to handle this by now, don’t you think? I am pleasant and I make him feel that he is big, but no, he doesn’t get me. Perhaps I can’t say no for ever, though. The worst is that Natalie is now my enemy. Soon I will find that I am given less good times to dance, and maybe some of my belongings will disappear while I am on stage.’

‘Roxy, you have to leave that place. You’re bright and lovely. You could get a completely safe, normal job. Even if it was in a bar, or as a waitress, for the time being.’

Roxana laughed again. She had the gift of good spirits. ‘Not for this.’ She rubbed her thumb against her bunched fingers.

‘Money isn’t everything,’ he told her pompously.

‘Maybe not for you, Mr Noah Bunting. But I need to make a good life here in England. I work, I save, and some day I will be somebody. I always keep this in mind, you know.’

They looked at each other, smiling but also weighing one another up.

‘Shall we have a drink?’ Noah asked after a moment.

‘This time, I’ll buy one for you. What would you like to have?’

‘All right, thanks. Just a half, then.’

He watched her, walking head up with her dancer’s poise through the knot of people at the doorway of the pub. A minute later she came out again, frowning.

‘You didn’t tell me a half of what drink?’

‘Beer, Roxana. A half of best is what you ask for.’

She came back with two halves in straight glasses, carrying the drinks as if they were molten gold.

‘Cheers,’ she said, and took a long swallow. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Is that what you say?’

‘Yes, it is. Very good. Cheers, Roxana.’

They clinked their glasses.