Constance A Novel

EIGHT

June 1979

They drove out of London on a Sunday morning, the four of them in Bill’s old car, Hilda taking the place of honour in the front passenger seat and Jeanette and Connie corralled in the back. Jeanette kept angling her left hand towards the light in order to admire the sparkle of her diamond engagement ring. Connie turned away from this spectacle and pressed her forehead to the window glass as the suburbs finally gave way to countryside. She was a few days short of her sixteenth birthday.

The picnic had been Hilda’s idea.

‘We should have a family day out together. Jeanette, what do you say? To welcome Bill to this family? Tony and I – that’s Jeanette’s dad, Bill, of course – we had a picnic to celebrate our engagement. We went in Geoff’s car. He was doing nicely for himself even in those days, you know. There was Sadie and Geoff and Tony and me, and we drove all the way up to Constable country. That’s on the river Stour, in Suffolk.’

‘I expect Bill knows where Constable country is,’ Connie interrupted.

Hilda ignored her. Bill’s interested expression didn’t change but Connie caught a glimmer of – what? Complicity? – behind his eyes. She stored up that one look as if they had shared an hour’s private conversation.

‘My Tony’s family originally came from up in Suffolk, Bill. Farm workers, they were, generations of them. It was his father who moved down to Essex, to work for a butcher. My family were quite different, proper East Enders, bombed out in the war. My granddad worked on the docks.’

Connie listened even though she had heard all this before from Tony, many times, and Hilda’s retelling made her miss him. She was interested in the old stories, though, because everyone had their stories. Somewhere, in a place that she hadn’t yet discovered, her own story was waiting for her. Maybe her real mother was waiting, too. Some day she would find out exactly what painful circumstance had forced this unknown woman to give her up, and then she would be able to dress herself in her own history.

She thought often about this process, imagining it as if the details of her bloodline were glamorous garments that she could pull on, transforming herself like Cinderella from Connie Thorne into…well, not a princess, that was just a kid’s idea, one she used to play with once she had worked out what her cousin Elaine’s words on the day of Tony’s funeral really meant. She had long ago discarded that babyish fantasy. Today she was thinking that perhaps her mother was an opera singer. Or maybe she was French, something like Edith Piaf, or possibly Simone de Beauvoir.

She would find out.

In the meantime, she pushed her hands into her pockets and sat expressionlessly as Hilda chattered on to Bill.

‘It was a perfect day, I remember. Warm; sunny. Sadie and I made a lovely picnic. Cold chicken, and that was when it was a real luxury, not like these days. Meat rationing only ended in 1954, you know, and this was just a year later. We lay on the riverbank and it was as beautiful as any picture.’

‘It sounds it,’ Bill said.

‘We stopped at a country pub on the way home. We sat out in the garden, in the twilight, drinking cider. There were bats flying between the trees and Sadie got quite hysterical, moaning that one of them was going to get tangled in her hair. Tony and Geoff laughed at her, the mean things. I’ll always remember that day. He was a wonderful man, my Tony.’

– Yes, Mum, he was, Jeanette gently agreed.

‘I’m sorry I never met him,’ Bill said.

Connie was pondering the fact that once people were dead, you didn’t speak ill of them. It was as though they turned into a different person, just through having died. While he was still alive Hilda had always been going on at Tony. She would go on until he couldn’t put up with it any longer, and then there would be an argument. Usually it was about money, and how Sadie and Geoff lived in a detached house with a front garden and garage parking for two cars, or else it was about Jeanette and how the Joseph Barnes School for the Deaf wasn’t giving her the right opportunities, not with her abilities, until Tony gave in and agreed to the expensive private speech-therapy lessons.

And the lessons had made a big difference.

‘She’s doing well, our Jeanette,’ Tony had conceded. ‘You were quite right, love, to send her for extra help. I’m sorry, I should have seen it for myself.’

Tony never believed in letting the sun set on an argument, whereas that was one of Hilda’s specialities. Hilda could bear a grudge as though she had invented the process.

After Tony died, though, their marriage could only be viewed as perfect, its shining face never having been rippled by discord. Tony was a hero. Hilda would not hear a murmur to the contrary. Connie knew that this tribute, too late, ought to have pleased her, but instead the distortion made her feel angry.

Money was short. The piano lessons that Connie loved so much had to stop, but Hilda managed to go on paying for the speech therapy. She couldn’t afford to keep the shop going once the creditors were paid off. They would have had to put a manager in and there wasn’t enough turnover for a man’s wage as well as an income for the family. Corner hardware shops couldn’t compete with the DIY stores that were opening up along the North Circular. The shop was sold as a going concern, quickly and not very well.

Hilda took a part-time job in a school, preparing and serving dinners, and Jeanette became her lieutenant in the house. She did more of the cooking and cleaning, and delegated a proportion of the rest to mutinous Connie.

Uncle Geoff helped out financially. He never missed an opportunity to remind them, in a low, almost prayerful voice, of how generous he was being. Hilda was usually thin-lipped and long-suffering, sometimes seeming actually to vibrate with the effort of bearing all her burdens. Occasionally her veneer of control shattered into fits of hysterical weeping. Jeanette would fill a hot-water bottle and give her headache tablets. When an attack became more serious than Jeanette thought she could deal with, she would indicate to Connie that it was time to call in Auntie Sadie. Connie would telephone, Uncle Geoff would drive Auntie Sadie over in his red Triumph Stag, and Auntie Sadie would sit with Hilda in her bedroom until the weeping subsided. Eventually Hilda would emerge, white in the face and swollen-eyed, and make no reference to the outburst.

Their mutual difficulties might have brought Jeanette and Connie closer, forging a bond in adversity. But what happened in fact was that Jeanette’s increased confidence, and the responsibilities that she was shouldering, lifted her forward onto a different plane. She simply stepped ahead of Connie. From being Connie’s near-equal and constant adversary it seemed that in a matter of weeks she became an adult, moving beyond childish fistfights, out of Connie’s realm altogether. From a chaotic sea of grief, the messy aftermath of Tony’s business affairs and Hilda’s shaky control of herself and their lives in Echo Street, the deaf and nearly speechless daughter sailed like a swan.

It was Connie who didn’t deal well with her loss.

After Hilda had given her a brief and featureless account of her adoption – We didn’t know who your mother was. We adopted you through a council home in North London. It was done properly, formally, through a court order. We wanted Jeanette to have a little sister – this new, immense piece of information wasn’t manipulated at all. It was just left there, knocking up against all the other new truths; that Tony was dead and the shop was bankrupt and Hilda, who had once seemed made of iron, was threatening to dissolve.

Tony had been Connie’s champion and now he was gone. She would have liked to run away from home, and dreamed of doing it, but she didn’t have enough life or daring in her. Instead she took refuge in her music. She played the piano as much as she could and she listened almost obsessively to pop on the radio. She made up her own charts, and squirrelled away tunes and trends. She loved Roxy Music and hated Abba. Connie knew that she was waiting for her life to start.





Hilda had forgotten the whereabouts of the first picnic spot.

Bill obligingly turned the car off the main road and they followed country lanes through villages on the Suffolk border until it became clear that they were pursuing a dream rather than a memory. The objective became to find any secluded place that offered a riverbank, shady trees, an unspoiled view, and no cows because Hilda was afraid of them. The discussion was happy and animated at first, but quite soon became impatient.

Bill made the decision for them. He swung the car into a field-gate opening and turned off the ignition with a decisive click.

‘This will be a good place,’ he announced firmly.

Beyond the gate there was a rough field, with no livestock visible, and a line of trees indicating the course of the river.

‘Are you sure?’ Hilda demurred.

Jeanette swung out of her seat and opened up the boot. She began lifting out baskets and a rug and the insulated picnic box that had been bought for the occasion. Connie saw her framed in the rear window, and was struck again by how happy Jeanette was. The word that came into Connie’s head was joy. Joy shone out of her sister’s face like a searchlight. Bill got out and went round to join her. He quickly kissed the back of her neck and then they began passing camping chairs to each other, laughing and enjoying the job.

Connie unfolded herself. Her limbs were stiff, she had hardly moved all through the journey. She stood beside the open car door, yawning and rubbing her upper arms.

‘Here, Con,’ Bill said. He passed her a heavy basket and she took it from him, and she bowed her head submissively as he draped the rug around her shoulders. ‘Can you manage that?’

‘Yeah. Course.’

They marched in a line down the edge of the rough field, skirting patches of nettles. The river lay at the bottom of a small incline. There were a few trees, mostly stunted alders, but the view was of a field of young corn opposite and a copse on the higher ground beyond. There was a small crescent of dirt at the near margin of the river, deeply pocked with dried-out animal prints, but the grass at either side looked quite inviting, although it was thistly. Jeanette was beaming her approval.

‘Are you sure there are no cows in this field?’ Hilda wondered, peering back up the rise.

Bill and Jeanette were already trampling down the thistles. Bill kicked aside a dried cowpat and took the rug from Connie’s shoulders. He spread it on the grass and set up four low chairs with seats and backs made from faded green canvas.

‘If any cows come, Hilda, I’ll defend you,’ he laughed. Jeanette unwound the ties of her espadrilles and balanced over the hoof-marks in dried mud to the water. She paddled in, found a couple of stones and weighted the six-pack of beer that she had brought for Bill. But the current was deceptively strong and as soon as she turned away the pack toppled and was dragged downstream. She waved her arms and plunged after it, and Bill vaulted in off the bank shouting ‘Catastrophe!’ He rescued the beer and Jeanette, and brought them both back to dry land. Jeanette happily squeezed river water out of the hem of her floppy skirt.

Bill rummaged in the bag that he had brought with him and produced a bottle of white wine.

‘Hilda, this is for you,’ he said.

Hilda flushed with pleasure and told him that he really shouldn’t have.

The picnic was a success, only slightly marred by the large orange flies that hummed from the cowpats to the Tupperware. Bill and Jeanette waved them away as they talked about the future, touching on Jeanette’s plans to find a job as a laboratory assistant, her imminent exam results, Bill’s job that he had now been doing for a year, a possible date for the wedding. Bill and Jeanette had agreed that they should wait for at least a year, maybe two, until they had saved some money. Bill asked Connie what she was going to do next year at school, as if he expected that she would have plans and intentions like everyone else. She couldn’t think of what to say, as the idea of another year at school seemed real only in its utter implausibility.

‘I dunno,’ she shrugged, and hitched her black sleeves over her knuckles. Connie had made no concession in her clothes to the occasion or the weather, and was layered in shapeless dark garments as usual. Next to Jeanette in her floaty skirt and white pin-tucked top she felt hot and grubby, and the wrong shape.

‘With all your opportunities, I’d have thought you’d be full of ideas, Connie,’ Hilda reprimanded her.

Jeanette smoothed back a ripple of blonde hair, momentarily exposing the heavy hearing aid she wore. She was so comfortable with Bill now that she didn’t try to conceal it from him.

– Mum, she’s all right. Don’t go on at her.

It was Jeanette’s defence of her that was almost the hardest to bear. Connie frowned hard and chewed her lip.

When the food had all been eaten and the bottle of white wine was empty, Jeanette lay on the rug with her arms outstretched. Hilda sat in her canvas chair and looked through Woman’s Own. Bill and Connie carried the plates and cutlery down to the water to rinse them before packing them away. Connie passed each piece to Bill and he swilled it clean, then handed it back. They worked comfortably together, and with the cool water swirling round her ankles Connie felt better. She caught his eye, and grinned at him.

‘There,’ Bill said as the last plate was done. He looked into her eyes. ‘You okay?’ he asked, and she was sure that he was concerned for her.

‘Yes,’ Connie said.

Hilda was reading, and after two glasses of wine Jeanette had drifted off to sleep. Bill wandered away down the bank of the river. Connie would have liked to go with him, but she was too shy to follow. Instead she lay on the rug beside Jeanette, taking care to leave as much space as she could between them.

In the afternoon’s humid silence she fell asleep too.

When she woke up, disorientated and with her temples throbbing with heat and wine, she turned her head and saw Jeanette asleep a foot away. Her sister’s mouth hung open and a tiny snore clicked in the back of her throat. Bill was sitting in the nearest chair, and it was as if he had been watching over both of them.





Not long afterwards a few heavy drops of rain fell. Jeanette yawned, stretched, and sat up. A smile lit her face as soon as she saw Bill.

‘It’s going to pour down,’ Hilda said. The light was purplish, as sore as a bruise, and there was not a breath of air. They packed up the remains of the picnic, folded the chairs, and trudged back along the field edge to the gate and the car.

They drove back towards London, but the thunderstorm never managed to break. After forty minutes Hilda leaned towards Bill and murmured something.

‘Sure, of course we can,’ he said at once. ‘I’ll look for somewhere.’

A mile or so further on he stopped just past another field gate, waited for a car to pass, then reversed into the gateway. There was a high hawthorn hedge separating the field from the road.

‘Will this do?’ Bill asked. ‘Behind the hedge?’

Hilda peered out. ‘I should think so. Won’t be long.’

Jeanette went with her. The next thing Connie registered was Hilda’s alarmed voice calling out that she couldn’t go here, there were cows in the field.

A car was approaching, travelling fast. Connie saw a second blurred image, swinging across the path of the oncoming car. There was a long, jarring screech of brakes and an explosion of metal, a deafening whump that discharged itself in breaking glass and Connie’s scream. The blurred thing had been a motorbike and rider, and now it split into two parts and she saw the bike skidding sideways in one direction and the dark shape of the rider bumping and rolling down the crown of the road. The noise seemed to last for a long time, and then it stopped abruptly, apart from tinkling glass and the creak of buckled metal. The car was in the ditch, rear-end up. The motorbike lay on its side, handlebars askew like broken limbs, one wheel still revolving. The rider was a motionless hump.

Jeanette and Hilda ran out of the field.

Bill was already out of the car, and Jeanette followed him into the road.

Hilda began moaning, ‘Oh God.’

Connie knew that she must do something, but every fibre in her body told her not to move, not to go and see what lay there in the road. Jeanette had already dropped to her knees beside the prone biker.

From the crashed car Bill shouted, ‘Connie, run to those houses and call an ambulance.’

In the distance, back down the road with the broken white line seeming to point straight to it, was the brick and flint end-wall of a cottage. Connie started running, over broken glass and the black skid marks and then along the verge. Her footsteps pounded in her ears and gravel crunched under her feet.

She reached a pair of cottages and an old man came to the door.

‘An accident? What kind of accident?’ He had a pendulous lower lip, and a huge stomach with shirt buttons straining across it.

Connie gabbled out the account again and pointed back down the road.

‘Telephone?’ the old man repeated after her, as if she was using a foreign language. She made him understand at last.

After he had called the ambulance the old man struggled to get his arms into the sleeves of a stained fawn-coloured jacket. Connie noticed the incongruity of a pink rosebud secured through a buttonhole in the lapel. He followed her back up the road.

Jeanette was sitting with the biker’s helmeted head in her lap. The black sheen of the helmet was scraped and dented. Her head was bent and blonde hair waved around her cheeks. Her lips moved as she seemed to talk to the injured man.

There was a second man sitting at the roadside, propped up against a tree trunk. There was blood down one side of his shockingly white face.

Bill walked across the road with the picnic rug in his arms. He went round to the passenger side of the crashed car, shook out the rug and covered up the person who was still sitting in the passenger seat. Connie began moving towards him but Bill held up his hand.

‘Don’t come over here,’ he said quietly. Then he pointed to Hilda, indicating that Connie should go to her instead. Hilda was leaning against the bonnet of Bill’s car, the heel of one hand pressed into her mouth.

‘The ambulance is coming,’ Connie heard herself say. Two more cars had arrived. People began to pass across Connie’s line of vision, but all she could really see was Jeanette in the broken glass and tyre marks, cradling the injured biker. She couldn’t see much of the biker’s face, just enough to note that his skin was a terrible grey colour. His eyes seemed to be open and he looked straight up into Jeanette’s face. She was smiling and silently talking, words of encouragement and reassurance that only the two of them could understand.

Hilda was shivering and weeping.

‘Mum, why don’t you sit in the car?’

A police or ambulance siren sounded in the distance.

The old man from the cottage mopped his face with a red handkerchief.

Five minutes later the emergency services were doing their work. Bill and Jeanette watched the ambulance crew tending to the biker. Bill’s hand rested on her shoulder, but her attention was still entirely fixed on the injured man. His eyes closed as they all bent over him.

The police wanted to take their names and addresses, and brief witness statements. Jeanette would not be distracted until the biker had been put on a stretcher and lifted into the ambulance.

Connie gave a brief account of what she had seen. The biker had fatally turned in front of the oncoming car.

‘Are you certain of that?’ a policeman asked.

She nodded her head. She had been certain, but now the images were melting behind the biker’s grey face, Jeanette’s bowed head, the rosebud in the old man’s buttonhole. She was trying not to see a knot of uniforms over by the crashed car, lifting out the passenger’s body still blanketed in tartan, laying it at the roadside. The driver was trying to walk, but his legs would not carry him. The ambulance men supported him on either side.

A policeman tried to speak to Jeanette. She shook her head and Bill said tersely, ‘She’s deaf.’

‘I see, sir.’

It seemed that they were at the roadside for a long time, but at last the police indicated that they could go. The front of Jeanette’s white pin-tucked top was covered in blood. A policeman beckoned them out of the field entry, pointing to the line they were to take so as not to drive over any evidence.

Bill drove with exaggerated care. Raindrops starred the windscreen. Within seconds, rain was sheeting down. The windscreen wipers whined, struggling with torrents of water. Words similarly began to flood out of Hilda as if a tap had been turned on.

‘I’ve never seen anything like that, not as bad as that,’ she kept repeating. ‘Not even in the Blitz. It was so sudden, one minute just the birds singing and then bang.’

Jeanette couldn’t have known what she was saying, but she leaned forward and stroked her mother’s neck and shoulder. Bill didn’t take his eyes off the road. Hilda’s hands shook.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Just like that, it happened so fast. I couldn’t believe my own eyes.’

The torrential rain slowed the traffic and it took a long time to get back to Echo Street.

They trudged into the house, carrying the bags and chairs. Jeanette stood in the kitchen, seeming to notice her bloodstained clothes for the first time. She stared down at her blouse.

– I need to change.

‘Come upstairs, love. You should have a hot bath,’ Hilda insisted. Now that they were back in the house she was regaining her equilibrium.

When Hilda and Jeanette had both gone Bill carried out the folding chairs and put them away in the shed in the garden. Connie wondered what she could do, and then remembered that at times like this people made tea. She filled the kettle and clicked the switch, and while she was waiting for it to boil she tipped some of the picnic litter into the kitchen bin. Bill came back, shaking off the rain.

He said, ‘Tea, that’s a good idea’, so warmly that she felt useful. Carefully she poured a cup and passed it to him.

He drank some and looked at her. ‘You look very pale.’

Images of the accident flickered in her head.

‘I’ve never seen anyone dead before.’

‘Neither have I,’ he told her.

‘Was the…was the bike man going to die as well?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Jeanette comforted him.’

‘Yes, she did. She was amazing.’

Connie hunched her shoulders. Everything to do with the day was raw, bulging and swollen, and she felt as if the slightest pressure would puncture a membrane and out would come spilling all kinds of things that she feared and tried to keep hidden because they were bad and secret and known only to her. Her jealousy of Jeanette was only one of them.

‘Connie…?’ Bill murmured. Then he put down his tea and gathered her in his arms. He pulled her closer until her cheek and the corner of her mouth creased up against the collar of his shirt, which was warm and slightly damp and smelled of him. He combed his fingers through her hair and rocked her against him, settling her head in the crook of his shoulder. He rubbed her shoulders and her back.

‘You’re shocked. I’m not surprised. Listen. Terrible things happen, Connie. They happen every day, and there’s no reason, and all you can do is try to help out and then be grateful that it wasn’t you or anyone you love in that car or riding the motorbike. You have to just go on doing what you do, and try to do it as well as you can, and be happy doing it. That’s all life is.’

To her surprise, Connie’s body was loosening and relaxing.

She whispered, ‘Yes. I know.’

Her shoulders dropped as she felt her weight supported in Bill’s arms. They stood locked together, gently swaying. Then a different feeling spread through her, like a tide of warm honey, thick and slow. Connie had long ago left innocence behind, but none of the boys she had known, dirty-minded and fumbling and of a different species as they were, had ever made her feel like this.

She wanted nothing more than to turn her mouth to discover Bill’s bare neck beneath the shirt collar. Then she wanted to lick her sister’s fiancé’s skin, and measure out her hips and the length of her legs against his. Somewhere close at hand, tantalisingly close, mysterious and yet obvious, there was a connection that would answer all the questions that teemed around her.

For a second, a brief interval of delight as brilliant as a flash of lightning, she was certain that Bill felt the same and wanted exactly what she did.

She felt rather than heard him draw in a breath, and they seemed poised on the edge of a great space through which they might fall or fly.

Then he abruptly withdrew. He patted her hair with the flat of his hand as if he were her uncle, and at the same time pecked her on the cheek.

He was suddenly so awkward, so unlike himself, that she knew he was trying to disguise feelings that were not avuncular at all. She was bewildered, and it was bewilderment that made her suddenly want to scowl and even punch him with her knuckles, as if she were nine years old again.

She stared at him with reddened cheeks.

‘Drink your tea,’ Bill said gently, moving away from her and leaning back against the pock-marked old kitchen cupboard. ‘Put some sugar in it. Sugar’s good for shock.’

Connie turned her back on him and began unpacking the picnic dishes that were smudgy with river water. There was a frond of weed trapped between the tines of a fork. Her racing heart slowed, and she began to breathe again.

A little later Jeanette came downstairs. She was pink and shining from her bath, and her dressing gown didn’t quite cover her breasts. Her damp hair was pinned up on the top of her head, but tendrils escaped to frame her face. Hilda came too, having changed her clothes and dabbed some make-up on her face. They all sat down round the kitchen table and began to talk about the accident. Hilda reached across for Connie’s hand and squeezed it.

‘Don’t be too upset, love, will you?’

Jeanette smiled at Connie too.

– You were good. You ran for help. They came quite quickly, didn’t they?

‘It seemed a long time to me,’ Bill said.

He and Jeanette kept glancing at each other, and even though they were talking about death, about how one person was dead and another might die, they couldn’t help covertly smiling. All of them knew how capable Bill and Jeanette had both shown themselves to be in the emergency. They were justified in feeling proud of themselves and even excited. Connie was thinking that she and Hilda had appeared in quite a different light.

It was almost as if she were Hilda’s real daughter and not just the adopted one, which was another disorientating thought.

Dry-mouthed, Connie looked down at her plate.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see Jeanette’s left hand with the diamond ring lightly resting on Bill’s thigh. She knew with sudden and absolute certainty that she could not go on living at Echo Street. If she stayed here she would have to watch Bill and Jeanette touching and smiling and kissing each other. She wanted Bill to do those things to her. And Bill was her sister’s fiancé.

I have to get out of this place. Just as soon as I can.

Suddenly she stood up. ‘Do you feel sick, Connie? You’ve gone white.’

‘I’m okay. I’m going upstairs.’

She closed her door and sat down on the bed. She tried to empty her head of sudden death at the roadside. She thought about Bill instead, guiltily and hungrily.





The following Saturday, the day after Jeanette learned that she had gained a 2:1 in Biological Sciences, Connie turned sixteen. The planned family celebration was dinner with Uncle Geoff, Auntie Sadie, Elaine and Jackie in an Italian restaurant, the invariable festivity for each of their birthdays. Connie got up early, before either Hilda or Jeanette, and left a note on the kitchen table saying that she was going up to the West End to do some shopping and would be back in good time. By ten o’clock she was in Soho.

She had no idea, back then, what a fluke it was to find the manager of GreenLeaf Studios in his chaotic office cubicle at any time on a Saturday. That her appearance at his door should coincide with his tired acknowledgement that they could do with a kid to help out, somebody who wouldn’t mind a bit of hard work and didn’t have too many ideas above his station, seemed no more than an average stroke of good luck. It was only when she was established in the business that she understood the scale of improbability. Once she had her foot inside his office, though, she had been determined not to give in.

‘I can do the job. Just let me try, and I’ll show you,’ Connie begged. Something had happened within Connie since witnessing the accident. She defined it approximately to herself as What have you got to lose? You could choose to be polite, you might feel that it wasn’t right to stand in a man’s office and insist, refusing to budge until you got what you wanted, but that would achieve nothing and nobody really cared about you being a nice, considerate person, did they?

Bill found out that the motorcyclist had died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

Jeanette turned away in tears when he told them, but Connie just gazed back at him thinking that it could happen to her tomorrow, to him, to Jeanette, to anyone at all. The way it had happened to Tony. You might as well live the way you wanted while you were here and while you could. She was tired of waiting, and now there was the other reason as well. Sometimes, when she looked at Bill she found that he had been looking at her first. They would both turn away, sharply, and Connie felt her face burning.

‘Shall I start now? Look, I could make you some coffee and then I could clean up a bit,’ she persisted. The GreenLeaf Studios were a mess. There were dirty cups and full ashtrays and collapsed heaps of tapes, the waste bins overflowed and the kitchen cubicle smelled of sour milk.

‘We’ve got cleaners,’ Brian Luck said.

‘They’re not very good, are they?’ Connie rejoined.

Brian laughed. ‘Go on, then. See those tapes? Check the label, or put them in the player there, find out what’s on ’em, work out a filing system. Can you do that?’

‘Yes.’

She worked all day. At lunchtime, Brian went out for a sandwich and brought one back for her. While she ate it they talked about music. He knew a lot, but he also listened quite kindly to what she had to say about writing songs and singing with the band at school.

By six o’clock, when Brian said he was locking up, Connie had catalogued the tapes and made space on shelves to store them.

‘I’ll come in on Monday morning, shall I?’

Brian said he would have to consult his partners.

‘I’ll come anyway. They can’t decide without taking a look at me, can they?’

There were still three weeks to go before the school year ended. But Connie already knew that she wouldn’t be going back.

She was late getting home to Echo Street. Uncle Geoff’s new car was already parked outside when she jogged breathlessly up to the house. Geoff and Sadie were sitting with Hilda in the front room, Elaine had gone with Jeanette and Bill to the pub for half an hour while they all waited for Connie to reappear. Jackie wasn’t coming; she had been married for two years but whenever the name of her husband had been mentioned recently she sighed and looked up at the ceiling. Tonight it seemed that there was some kind of crisis. Sadie and Hilda had been discussing the situation in low voices while Geoff watched football on television.

Hilda jumped up. ‘Connie! Where have you been all day? You’ve worried us half to death. Your auntie and uncle have been here since seven o’clock.’

‘Sorry. I told you, I went up west. There wasn’t a bus for ages.’

Sadie was wearing tight cream trousers and a low-cut top. She checked her lipstick in her compact mirror then arched an eyebrow at Connie over the disc of gilt.

‘Happy birthday, love. Where’s your shopping? What did you buy?’

‘Thanks, Auntie Sadie. I didn’t really see anything I liked. Shall I just quickly run up and change, Mum?’

‘All right,’ Hilda sighed.

When Connie came down again, Jeanette and Bill and Elaine were filing in through the front door. Blushing, Connie submitted to birthday wishes and kisses from everyone except Bill. Bill didn’t kiss her, he just gave her his curly-mouthed smile.

When they were all crammed into the front room Uncle Geoff made a show of telling everyone to hush. Then from a carrier-bag he produced a package.

‘Now, young lady, this is from your Auntie Sadie and your cousins and me. Many happy returns.’

Connie took the package, shook it and listened to it. She knew that Bill was watching her. Hilda sat on the edge of an armchair, smoothing the folds of her skirt over her knees. Jeanette and Elaine leaned against the closed piano keyboard, looking alike except that Elaine was the ‘before’ version and Jeanette the ‘after’, in some advert for a miracle beauty product perhaps.

‘What is it?’ Connie murmured.

‘That’s for you to find out,’ Uncle Geoff smiled.

She undid the wrappings, and discovered a Sony Walkman.

Uncle Geoff’s presents to the Thornes were always generous to the point of being slightly embarrassing, because they highlighted the difference between what the two families could afford. Personal cassette players had only just come on to the market and Connie was amazed to receive one.

She went to Geoff and hugged him. ‘Thank you, Uncle Geoff.’

He put his arm round her waist and kept it there. ‘Sixteen, eh? Big day. It doesn’t seem a minute since you brought in this little scrap of a black-haired thing to show us all, Hilda, does it?’

There was a pause in which everyone seemed to be waiting for someone else to mention adoption, and at the same time willing them not to. Connie moved hastily to Sadie and hugged her too.

‘We’re all family, aren’t we?’ Sadie said, as if this point needed clearing up.

Geoff began showing Connie how the Walkman worked (although she knew already what every function was) and telling her that she must handle it carefully.

Bill said, ‘I’ve got a present for you, too.’

He handed over two small rectangular packages and Connie opened them to find the new Police and Ian Dury albums in cassette form. This gift of music seemed to speak to her so personally that she couldn’t quite look at him in case she gave herself away. From beneath the veil of her hair she murmured, ‘How did you know about the Walkman?’

‘I heard,’ he said drily. This meant he had thought about her birthday, talked about it, and then gone to a record shop and made a choice just for her. He did it out of affection, nothing more, but she felt riven with love for him and with dismay at the impossibility of her situation.

It’s all right, she reassured herself. You’re going to move out. You won’t be here any longer.

‘Thanks a lot,’ she muttered.

To her relief Hilda and Sadie were getting ready to leave for the restaurant. Elaine went with Bill and Jeanette in Bill’s car, and Connie with Hilda in Uncle Geoff’s. His latest car was a silver-grey Jaguar that he parked right outside the window of La Osteria Antica, where he could keep an eye on it.

‘It’s this young lady’s sixteenth birthday today,’ Geoff announced to the maître d’. The man seized Connie’s hand and kissed it, murmuring bella, bella signora. By accident, Connie caught Bill’s eye. His mouth curled extravagantly and she knew that he was on the point of bursting into laughter. It would be so easy to laugh with Bill, she thought; there were so many ridiculous things. It would be as easy to laugh as to be serious.

Once they were seated round the centre table and had ordered their various tagliatelles and saltimboccas, Uncle Geoff and the others wanted to hear all about the accident. Hilda covered her eyes with one hand and shuddered, so Bill gravely told the story again, with signed interventions from Jeanette. Next there was Jeanette’s degree to discuss. She was the first person in the family to graduate from university.

‘This is a double celebration,’ Uncle Geoff said. ‘We should drink to two fine young women.’

These days Jeanette easily outshone her cousin, who worked in a bank. Elaine compressed her lips slightly but she drank the toast with everyone else. Uncle Geoff didn’t look for interventions from his wife and daughters.

He was in his stride now. ‘So, Connie. You’ll be following in your sister’s footsteps, I expect. Which A levels are you going to choose?’

Connie gazed at the red tablecloth and a slice of tiled floor. She was overtaken by an irresistible impulse not to be patronised by Uncle Geoff, not to do what was routinely expected of her, and most of all not to place herself next to Jeanette in Bill’s eyes.

‘I’ve got a job,’ she said quietly.

‘Holiday job? Very good. It’s important to get some practice in the real world. It’s a harsh climate out there. Nobody knows that better than I do.’ Uncle Geoff was chewing and pointing at her with his fork.

Connie raised her voice. ‘It’s a real job. In the music business. I’m not going back to school next year.’

Six faces stared at her.

Hilda said sharply, ‘Don’t talk rubbish. You’re staying at school. While you’re under my roof, you…’

‘I start work on Monday morning. I’m leaving home.’

Hilda laid down her knife. Elaine smiled.

She hadn’t planned this, not in any way, but Connie’s head swam with sudden elation. The Osteria Antica was lit up with the insanely flickering glow of burning bridges. If she didn’t get a job at GreenLeaf Music, if Brian Luck and his colleagues decided they didn’t want her, she would find a different place to work. She saw that the door of Echo Street was opening and all she had to do was walk – run – out of it.

The waiting was finally over.

‘What do you mean, leaving home? How do you think you’ll cope on your own, my girl?’

She had no idea, but already she was improvising temporary solutions. Ideas cascaded through her head. Her one-time boyfriend Davy’s parents had just gone away on holiday to Spain for two weeks, so she could almost certainly sleep round there for a few nights. She had a little money saved from her Saturday job, so she’d get a room somewhere. She had never experienced such a moment of euphoria. She was sharply aware of Bill, across the table, and it was only later that she wondered if she had correctly read admiration in his eyes. Jeanette turned her head between them and the bell of hair swung round her jaw.

Uncle Geoff’s eyes bulged. ‘Don’t you think, young lady, that after all she has done for you in sixteen years, from the moment she took you in, you owe your mother a debt of gratitude?’

The clamour in the restaurant seemed to die away.

‘I will find a way to repay my debts,’ Connie said.

Then she stood up and weaved between trolleys and waiters to the cloakroom.

When she came out of the cubicle, breathing more calmly and with the elation already draining away like water into sand, leaving her feeling cold and shaken, she found Jeanette standing by the basins.

– Did you mean all that? Jeanette asked.

There was a smell of liquid soap and air freshener, and an echo of dripping taps.

‘Yes.’

Their reflections glanced back out of the peach-tinted mirror. Connie caught a glimpse of how different they looked, angel and demon.

– Why do you really want to leave home?

She could hardly tell her sister what had actually precipitated the decision.

‘It’s time. I want to find out who I really am.’

Jeanette raised an eyebrow.

‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’

– No, Jeanette agreed. She turned to wash her hands, carefully soaping around her diamond ring. Connie stared at her bent back, wanting to fight her as much as she had done when she was six, and at the same time thinking that love and hate were so close as to be nearly the same thing. Like sisters.

Jeanette stood upright again and shook water from her hands.

– You’ve spoiled your own birthday.

‘Yes,’ Connie agreed. There was something definitively Thorne family about the disintegration of the evening. They tottered against the clanking roller-towel holder as laughter swept over them.

‘Have I got to go back in there?’ Connie murmured, when she could speak once more.

– Definitely.

‘I’ll go if you come.’

They went. At the table Hilda was smoking one of Sadie’s cigarettes, looking as tragic as if she was bereaved all over again. Geoff was telling Bill that when he was his age, he already owned his own business and didn’t owe a penny to a soul.





Hilda always maintained afterwards that Connie left home just like that, walked out on them on the day she was sixteen and never came back.

It was true that she left Echo Street quietly the following morning, with a rucksack containing her clothes and Uncle Geoff’s Walkman, and went to stay at Davy’s house. The job at GreenLeaf Music paid twenty-eight pounds a week, and she managed to live on that when she moved to her room in Perivale. The only times she ever went back to Echo Street were for Sunday lunches. A square meal was welcome, for one thing.

Three weeks after the birthday evening, she and Hilda and Bill went to Jeanette’s graduation ceremony. The hall was packed with hundreds of parents. Before Jeanette’s turn a blind boy, led by his guide dog, crossed the platform to shake the hand of the Vice-Chancellor and collect his degree. The dutiful, bored applause from the audience rose into a wave of cheering and foot-stamping in acknowledgement of his achievement.

When Jeanette came up in her dusty black academic gown and rabbit-fur hood, she looked the same as all the other young women in her group. There was no extra volume of clapping as she took her scroll and descended the steps from the stage to take her seat again.

Afterwards they emerged into the July sunshine. Hilda had brought her camera and she made them all pose in every possible permutation with Jeanette, who smiled serenely from beneath the tilted edge of her mortarboard. It was one of those family-album, framed-photograph days. Connie knew that these pictures would always be with them, capturing a momentary theorem of family life that reality constantly disproved.

‘If only Tony could see you today,’ Hilda sighed.

Connie protested, ‘Nobody knew you were deaf. You should have had all the extra clapping and cheering, like that blind guy did.’

Jeanette took off the mortarboard and slipped the gown down her shoulders.

– Better for no one to know. That makes it more of an achievement. Anyway, I wouldn’t have heard them, would I?

‘You did well,’ Connie said simply.

Jeanette suddenly laughed with pride.

– I did, didn’t I?

Hilda needed to change the film in the camera and Bill showed her how to do it. Jeanette took Connie’s arm and steered her to one side.

– Are you coming back home?

Connie shook her head.

‘No. I can’t.’

The way she was living now was far harder than she had imagined it would be, and she was lonely, but she was not going back to Echo Street.

– Can’t?

‘Won’t, then.’

– Mum misses you.

‘Does she?’ Connie could not quite believe the transparency of this. It went with the family theorem, sunny for a day, for the camera’s benefit.

– And I’m not going to be there. Not for ever.

Jeanette and Bill were going camping in France. They were talking about moving in together, once Jeanette had started work.

Connie looked back over her shoulder, at Bill with the body of the camera open in his hands, at Hilda in her summer dress, both of them dappled with sunlight. She felt the pull in too many directions, responsibility quartered with desire, selfishness shot through with an unwieldy sympathy. The only way to extricate herself seemed to be to move out of this magnetic field altogether.

She found the self-interest to say what she really meant.

‘I want to live on my own.’

Jeanette studied her. Don’t judge me, Connie thought hotly. I’m doing this for you as well as me.

The ground between them was too complicated, too obscured, for her to map it out. It always had been.

Hilda called out, ‘Bill’s done it. I want one more picture. Jeanette, come here.’

She took a picture of the two of them, Jeanette standing in the circle of Bill’s arms, sun on their heads, both of them looking into the long lens of the future.

This was the image that Connie took away with her.