Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  The driver leapt out as she emerged, and hurried to open the rear door for her.

  ‘Selamat pagi, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Good morning. All set now?’

  Connie knew him quite well. His name was Kadek Daging and he was Wayan’s relative by marriage. Usually he worked in his small general store up in the main street of the village and was famous as a source of local gossip, but today he would have left one of his several sons in charge of the shop in order to undertake this important driving assignment for ‘the movie company’, as he put it. Actually it was less a movie than a trio of expensive thirty-second commercials for an online bank that were being shot on the island. But Connie didn’t want to diminish his sense of importance by making the distinction.

  She would have shaken his hand, or even lightly touched his shoulder, but she took her cue from him and put the palms of her hands together to make a polite bow.

  ‘Good morning, Kadek. Thank you for coming.’

  To preserve the formality of the occasion she climbed into the back of the car, even though she would have preferred to sit up front. Kadek jumped smartly into the driver’s seat and eased the Toyota out into the stream of scooters and motorcycles. One young man on a motorbike tried to race them, his blue shirt ballooning and his black hair raked back in the wind, but Kadek hooted and they sailed majestically past him.

  Once they were established as the kings of the village traffic he asked over his shoulder, ‘Ma’am, would you care for a cold drink? A cool towel?’

  Normally he would address her as ‘Ibu’, as he called all the other European women customers and neighbours, or ‘Ibu Con’ when he remembered, although Connie tried to persuade him to make it just ‘Con’. Today, however, they were in a different relationship.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said gravely.

  ‘In the box,’ he reminded her.

  There was a cool-box in the foot-well, in which were bottles of water and soft drinks and a couple of rolled hand towels. Connie took out a towel and patted her hands and face with it, although she wasn’t hot. Kadek nodded with satisfaction at having done the right thing.

  ‘Busy day for you,’ he observed.

  ‘Yes.’

  It was going to be.

  After half an hour’s driving, away from the village and following the course of the river to where the valley spread in a series of pale ledges planted with rice, they reached the location.

  There were several Toyotas parked in a line, three bigger trucks standing with their doors open, two motor caravans, a trailer-mounted diesel-powered generator, a couple of pickups from which heavy boxes were being unloaded by local labour under the direction of one of the key crew, green awnings set up for shade, groups of people converging on a larger tent, and a general air of purposeful activity. Con looked at her watch. It was seven thirty precisely. The sun was gathering strength, promising a hot day ahead. On the horizon, across the shimmering paddy, the sacred Mount Agung was a pale-blue pyramid.

  ‘Thanks, Kadek.’

  He opened the door for her to step out. ‘Welcome, ma’am. Anything more for you? I have to collect other film people. The young girls, you know, who take part.’

  ‘Of course you do. Off you go. Thanks for getting me here so punctually.’

  As he prepared to reverse away, Kadek permitted himself a wink and a grin that revealed his filed teeth.

  Connie shouldered her bags and walked towards the set.

  ‘Hi,’ Angela called out, and waved her arm in welcome. Angela was Connie’s old friend from London, a producer with the company that was making the commercials.

  Connie gave her friend a hug. ‘You all right?’ she murmured in her ear.

  Angela had an unusually expressive set of features. With her back to the location, she made her wasps-invade-the-picnic face. ‘Couple of the crew complaining about their hotel. Ran out of beer last night is what it amounts to.’

  ‘That all?’

  Angela shrugged. ‘More or less.’

  Connie was relieved to hear it. Usually she worked alone in her studio, either here in Bali or in London, and she rarely came face to face with the agency who commissioned her work, let alone travelled to commercial shoots. But she knew enough about the ad business to be certain that worse things could go wrong on location than the booze being in temporarily short supply. Could, and probably would.

  She was anxious, and in Bali that was most unusual. Her life here was calm, pared-down and minimal like the interior of her little house, and in its own uneventful way it was satisfying.

  Now, disorientatingly, London had come to her.

  She put her arm through Angela’s. She said cheerfully, ‘So let them drink green tea. Or vodka. Or fresh mango and papaya juice. Be different. This is Bali, isn’t it? Come on, Ange, let’s get ourselves some breakfast. How’s Himself this morning, by the way?’

  There was no doubt who she was referring to.

  ‘Fine. In a pretty good mood. Really keen to get rolling.’

  Rayner Ingram, the director, was a tall, saturnine man who said little, but when he did speak he made his remarks count. He and Angela worked regularly together as a director– producer team.

  Connie had tried to joke mildly, privately, about him to Angela.

  ‘Rayner? What’s that about? Is his real name Raymond? Do you call him Ray?’

  Angela had reproved her, without a glint of a smile. ‘No, of course not. Why d’you say that? His name’s his name.’

  It hadn’t taken even this exchange for Connie to conclude that Angela was in love with Rayner Ingram. Producer– director relationships weren’t exactly uncommon in the business. It was just uncommon for them to have happy endings.

  Connie half-listened to Angela, but the other half of her attention was on the stacks of metal boxes and lights and cables being unloaded from the trucks, and the way people were rushing about, and the British and Australian colloquialisms shooting across the set.

  It was bizarre to contemplate this other world, this self-important capsule of schedules and shots and scripts, given birth to by a line of trucks drawn up beside a half-ruined temple in a rice paddy under the blue cone of a volcano. A few yards away, behind a loose cordon of local men who had been recruited to keep spectators off the set, Connie could see two women squatting at the edge of a green thicket of rice. They had been harvesting, and their hand-scythes lay at their feet. They looked as though they might be mother and daughter. The younger one, perhaps sixteen years old, wore a bright red sarong that made a brilliant slash against the green and the dark earth. She carried a baby bound against her chest. The two women watched the activity on the set with wide eyes and motionless attention.

  Connie tried fleetingly to establish which of these places was the more real to her: the silent women and the rice paddy or the ring of people within which a hairy man in shorts and a khaki waistcoat with a dozen pockets across the front was yelling for someone to bring over the genny cables. Both were familiar, she decided, and she could feel at home in either. Whatever home meant. It was the juxtaposition that was disconcerting.

  The two women reached the open flap of the tent, which had a fine netting screen across it to keep out the insects. As Angela gathered the netting in one hand she whispered, ‘You haven’t met the clients yet, have you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Now’s your chance.’

  Two men were sitting in canvas chairs at a folding table, surrounded by three others and a woman and a circle of cups and plates and cafetières. Both of them looked up at Connie. She had time to see that they were the kind of men who naturally wore grey worsted, and that now they were dressed in what Angela, using her primitive-tribe-found-in-Papua-jungle face, called ‘clients’ shoot clothes’.

  Angela said warmly, ‘Simon, Marcus? This is Constance Thorne. Our musical director, of course.’

  The older one half got to his feet and held out a big hand. There were croissant crumbs on his safari jacket.

&nbs
p; ‘Ah, Boom Girl,’ he shouted. ‘We’re honoured. Simon Sheringham.’

  ‘Hello,’ she smiled at him.

  She hated being called Boom Girl. If it had ever been welcome, it had stopped being so a very long time ago. She had written the Boom music when she was barely twenty. A fluke. A day’s work.

  ‘Boom, boom, baboom ba ba, bababa ba.’ The younger client sang the few bars as he also stood up. ‘And it was long before my time,’ he asserted, intending a compliment. ‘Hi. Marcus Atkins.’

  ‘Hello.’ Connie shook hands with him, and smiled some more. From further along the table the ad-agency copywriter and art director nodded at her, too cool for introductions. The agency producer was very pretty, Connie noted.

  Angela and Rayner were conferring over the schedule of the day’s shots.

  ‘I’ll just get some breakfast,’ Connie murmured.

  Two Balinese men in white jackets were clearing plates. Connie followed them out of the back of the tent. Behind the scenes, enclosed by canvas screens, Kadek Wuruk, who was moonlighting from Le Gong Restaurant (‘Don’t Go Before You Come’), was frying eggs on a two-ring gas burner. He beamed at Connie and waved his spatula at her.

  ‘Hello! Welcome, Ibu. Egg for you? Very good, you know. My own chickens.’

  ‘Yes, but no thanks. It’s a bit early for me. I’ll have some coffee, though. Everything okay, Kadek?’ There was quite a limited range of Balinese first names.

  ‘Everything fine, great.’

  His assistant was chopping onions, three women were peeling vegetables, two young girls were washing up, and a line of boys processed by with cases of bottled water. Connie was reluctant to pass back through the canvas flap that separated kitchen from tent. It was more comfortable out here, with the women laughing and chattering and the shy girls with their bare lovely feet planted in front of the portable sink unit. She poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup, and watched Kadek Wuruk and his assistants at work as she drank. There would be nasi goreng for lunch.

  She heard a crackle of walkie-talkies.

  ‘We’re in,’ the first assistant called to the crew. It was the signal for work to begin on the other side of the canvas. People began shifting towards the set, but there would be several hours of waiting and watching while the rest of the gear was brought in and lights and cameras were set up. If everything went really well the camera would be turning over before the lunch break was called. Connie’s gamelan orchestra was listed as the first shot.

  When she had first arrived in Bali, Connie had been intending to make a short stopover on her way to London from Sydney. The plan had been to keep still, to take stock of what was left of her life, and let her bewilderment subside a little. It was only a few weeks since Seb had told her that he was in love with a Chinese violinist, and intended to marry her.

  At that time Sébastian Bourret was becoming a soughtafter conductor. When he made the announcement, sitting on the balcony of their rented flat overlooking Sydney Harbour, Connie had been his lover and partner for more than six years. Their home was nominally in London but Seb travelled so much that they were away more than they were there, and this had suited Connie well. Their peripatetic life together had been comfortable and civilised, and she had been sure that it was what they both wanted and needed. She had her own work, composing music for television and commercials, and as technology developed it was becoming increasingly easy to do that work anywhere in the world.

  She wasn’t under the illusion that Seb was wildly in love with her, at least after their first year together, any more than she was with him. But they had much in common, and they were considerate and mutually respectful and deeply fond of one another.

  Then Sebastian really had fallen in love, with the gifted Sung Mae Lin who was no bigger and looked hardly older than a child, even though she was almost thirty. Unwittingly Mae Lin made Connie feel too big and the wrong age, and unwanted, and unhappy in a way that was too familiar, however hard she fought against that and the memories that were stirred by it.

  None of it was Mae Lin’s fault, or Seb’s, really, or her own for that matter. It was just one of those things that happened. There had been no alternative for Connie but to withdraw from her own life, as quickly and as gracefully as she could manage it.

  Seb and Connie had said goodbye to each other gently, and with regret, but there had been no question that he might change his mind. Connie had seen him only once since then, when he was conducting a Beethoven Festival concert series in London. He and Mae Lin had two children now. Twin girls.

  Connie’s London home was still the apartment that she had shared with Seb. He had made his share of it over to her and she had kept the place, although it was bare of most of the furniture they had chosen and there were few of her possessions set out in it. She liked it better that way; it was easier to slip in and out of an almost empty space. Minimalism was closer to invisibility.

  When she’d arrived in Bali, she had had no plans and no expectations of the place. It had simply been somewhere to put herself that felt like nowhere in particular.

  In her raw state she had fled from the big hotels and beaches and cocktail bars of the coastal strip close to Denpasar and headed inland. It was here in the village that she first heard gamelan music played live, by solemn musicians, not for tourists but for the musicians themselves and their knowledgeable friends. This was temple music, and music for festivals and processions and weddings. She had loved the sonorous gongs, and the shimmering notes of metal that fell through the air like drops of clear water.

  Angela peered from between the flaps of canvas.

  ‘I’m here,’ Connie said, rapidly gathering her thoughts. She drank the last mouthful of her coffee and stood upright.

  ‘I’ll be on set.’

  The day’s set was the temple at the edge of the rice paddy – permit to use for filming applied for and finally granted by the authorities in the nick of time – over which the set dressers were swarming.

  Constance consulted her watch, having already looked at it more times this morning than she would normally do in a week. ‘The musicians will be here in fifteen minutes or so.’

  ‘Right. Straight to costume and make-up, then.’

  The bus carrying the musicians arrived punctually and Connie hurried forward to meet them. Battling with their instruments, a line of six men spilled down the steps. They were not much bigger than their metallophones, big xylophones with keys made of bronze, and considerably smaller than the great gong. They were her friends.

  ‘I am very, very nervous,’ Ketut called as soon as he saw her.

  Connie held out her hands to him. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t want to do it?’

  There were beads of sweat on his forehead and above his long-lipped mouth. Ketut had smooth skin and it gleamed in the bright sunlight like oiled wood. ‘Oh, no. We are film stars already in Seminugul, let me make clear. There is no going back. But I am afraid of letting you down, Connie.’

  Ketut was one of the most talented musicians she had ever worked with. She had been recording some of his performances with the big ensemble of fifty musicians called the gamelan gong, and she counted herself lucky to be able to play percussion with this smaller, less perfectionist group. Connie knew that she was not the best drummer in the world, but she loved the sessions when they played together. Sometimes, during the rainy season, they could make music for hours under a roof of palm thatch while water dripped from soaking leaves.

  The musicians clustered around her.

  ‘You won’t, Ketut. You don’t even have to play if you don’t want to, just look as though you are for the camera.’

  The actual music track would be laid down in postproduction. This was the music that Connie had been commissioned to produce. She found herself blushing in retrospect at the memory of the demo disc she had supplied.

  ‘Light and poppy, but unmistakeably tropical-island exotic,’ was the agency’s brief.

  Confronted by Ketut and the others, co
mbed and dressed in their best clothes, and versed as they were in the classical traditions of their native music, she felt embarrassed.

  Behind her she could hear the Australian gaffer routinely cursing into his walkie-talkie because someone hadn’t brought over a camera dolly. All the musicians were staring into the snake-pit of cables, and at the little temple caught under the brilliant ultra-sunshine of the lights.

  ‘Don’t worry, really, don’t worry,’ she reassured them all. She asked if they wanted anything to eat or drink and they shook their heads. So she led them over to the caravan that was being used for male costume and make-up and left them there.

  The script called for a Balinese wedding.

  The temple was dressed up with flowers and baskets of fruit. Over the pop-eyed stone statues props people had fixed parasols of bright yellow silk with lavish fringes, and there were rakish garlands of scarlet and orange blossoms draped around the necks of stone dragons and snakes. The hot colours seemed to vibrate under the lights.

  Eleven o’clock came and went. Connie supervised the unpacking and setting up of the instruments, on the exact spot that the crew indicated. The musicians emerged from make-up, giggling among themselves. They had been costumed in sarongs of black and white checks with broad saffron-yellow or vermilion satin sashes tied round their middles. They wore flowers around their necks, their eyes had been painted and their lips reddened. Their ordinary haircuts, as worn by waiters and teachers and shopkeepers, which is what they were, had been combed and gelled into slick quiffs. Every time Ketut or one of the others caught a fresh glimpse of a fellow musician there was another explosion of laughter. Trying not to laugh herself, Connie shepherded them onto the set.

  Another long interval of adjusting lights and equipment followed. It was hot, and hotter still under the lights, and a Balinese make-up girl kept darting forward to powder a shiny face.