Constance

by Rosie Thomas

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

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

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

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

  It was unthinkable that Jeanette was going to die.

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

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

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

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

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

  If anyone picked up, it would be him.

  It was almost fifteen years ago, now.

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

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

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

  She put down her glass and went to him.

  ‘You look very beautiful tonight,’ he said.

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

  ‘Hello, Bill.’

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

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

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

  Connie and Sam had split up years ago.

  ‘No. I’m not here with anyone.’

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

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

  ‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Yes, you do.’

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

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

  ‘I don’t know where we’re going.’

  ‘Stop the car,’ he said roughly.

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

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

  Bill twisted towards her and their mouths met.

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

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

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

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

  ‘Where shall we go?’ he asked.

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

  ‘Where might that be?’ he almost laughed.

  ‘My home. Where I live, that is.’

  ‘You would take me there?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Of course.’

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

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

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

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

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

  This.

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

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

  ‘Hello?’

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

  ‘Bill.’

  ‘Connie,’ he said.

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

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

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Yes. She sent me an email.’

  She heard him taking in a breath.

  ‘Come tomorrow,’ Bill said.

  ‘Yes. All right. I’ll be there.’

  FIVE

  Echo Street, February 1974

  On Saturday mornings Hilda had started taking Jeanette to a special audiology clinic for extra therapy sessions. Jeanette’s teacher at the Joseph Barnes School for the Deaf reported that she was an exceptional academic pupil, but she needed more help with her speech if she was to live up to her potential. Hilda’s first instinct was always to shield Jeanette from outside pressure, but she was impressed by Mrs Archer and pleased to have her own faith in Jeanette’s abilities so definitely confirmed.

  ‘Well, I really don’t know. Do you want to go?’ she asked Jeanette.

  Jeanette was sixteen. It had become part of her philosophy to deny that she had any limitations.

  – Yes.

  So on Saturday mornings Connie went with Tony to the shop. She would sit in Hilda’s place in the front seat of the Austin Maxi and Tony would drive them there, turning to wink at her as they eased out of Echo Street and saying, ‘Just you and me, eh?’

  Thorne’s on the Parade was a hardware shop in a row of similarly siz
ed shops on a busy junction. As they searched for a place to leave the car Tony complained that there was too much traffic for anyone to get anywhere. Where could they all be going? People weren’t shopping, were they? The strikes meant there was no money in anyone’s pockets. But they were better off than some, he told Connie. He couldn’t sell enough candles for people to use during the power cuts, and there was a run on paraffin too because they were lighting up their old stoves and even lamps dragged out from their attics.

  ‘Who’d have thought the unions would take us back to the days of paraffin heaters, eh?’ he asked. ‘And when was the last time someone asked me for a new glass mantle for a pump-up lamp?’

  When Tony had unlocked the shop door and rolled up the heavy shutter that protected the front, Connie helped him to carry out the street stock. Tony shifted the heavy items, the bags of coke, bundles of sticks and metal step-ladders, and Connie made a dozen journeys with bunches of galvanised mop buckets, bristly yard brushes and festoons of mop heads like scarecrow wigs. She nudged them into what she judged to be inviting arrangements while Tony put on his brown working coat with biro stains over the top pocket and wound down the old canopy for the day. It usually served more as a partial rain shield than to protect anything from the sun.

  The interior of the shop was a cavern of shelves, with a range of goods from mousetraps to boxes of sugar soap and balls of tarry twine mounted on either side of a high wooden counter. Best of all, behind the counter were tiers of wooden drawers containing shiny screws, nails and tacks, and bolts with heads like thick silver threepenny bits. There was a specific, comforting smell of metal polish, paraffin and harsh yellow soap, and Connie had always loved everything about it.

  If there were no customers waiting for them at opening-up time Tony would unfold the Daily Express that he had bought on the way in, via a carefully judged ritual exchange with the son of the Pakistani newsagent’s next-door-but-one, smooth it out on the counter and say to Connie, ‘What kind of assistant are you? Is that kettle not on yet?’

  Connie would hurry round to the rear of the drawer tiers, into a cramped space where a cracked sink and draining board sagging away from the wall were almost cut off by baled packs of wire wool and bound slabs of abrasive sponges in sickly pastel shades, boil the kettle and make tea the way Tony liked it, in the brown pot with the tannin-enriched interior, two teabags (Tetleys), brewed until dark and then poured into the pair of mugs whose inner surfaces were marked with complex stains like annular rings. She would carry the mugs through and put them on the counter beside a packet of granulated sugar with a dug-in teaspoon, and they drank it accompanied by two fingers of KitKat each. They never discussed it, but they took their mutual pleasure in this sloppy behaviour because Hilda would never have allowed it at Echo Street. Connie would lick up the last crumbs of biscuit and chocolate and massage the silver foil with the side of her thumb until it was a smooth weightless sheet, then fold it into a wedding band.

  There was only one stool behind the counter, a high wooden one with the seat polished slippery with use. When she wasn’t counting stock against lists in Tony’s neat handwriting (144 pkts Decors wire wool 00) or tidying shelves, or peering into the wooden drawers and daydreaming that the brass-headed tacks were ancient coins, Connie perched on the stool to read her book or draw pictures. Tony was always on his feet, fetching and wrapping and ringing-up sales. He hated it when a queue of sighing and shuffling customers built up. Every time the door opened to admit another, bringing in a gust of cold wet air and a hiss of traffic noise, his frown would deepen and he would try to work faster. As he searched the shelves he twisted the pencil that lived behind his ear.

  ‘Where’s that box of rawlplugs got to? Won’t keep you a minute, Des.’

  ‘I see you got your assistant in today,’ Des or whoever would remark, before lengthily searching his mind for the last item he needed while the queue grew increasingly restive behind him.

  ‘Can’t I serve, Dad?’ Connie begged.

  ‘Not really, love. Tell you what, though, I could drink another cup of tea.’

  She would immediately slide off the stool to make it, but as often as not the tea would go cold under a strange brown skin while Tony worked. Saturday mornings were always busy, as men glumly equipped themselves for a weekend’s odd-jobbing and decorating. If there were no customers, there was always something to be done to maintain the unruly bulwarks of stock.

  At two o’clock, Connie would turn the sign that hung in the glass half of the door from Open to Closed and they would reverse the morning’s procedure with the outside goods.

  ‘That’s it then. Until Monday morning,’ Tony always said as the shutter unrolled with a shriek of tortured metal.

  Connie remembered these uncomplicated hours in the shop with Tony as the very happiest times of her entire childhood.

  Then in the darkest week of that bad winter of 1974, came the opportunity of piano lessons.

  Jeanette’s inspiring teacher was by that time becoming an advisor to the whole Thorne family in her efforts to help an unusually able deaf child. Hilda despairingly confided to Mrs Archer that Connie was disruptive at home, aggressive towards her sister, a poor sleeper and was becoming a problem at her mainstream school. Mrs Archer mildly suggested that Hilda might try to make Connie feel that she was special in some way as well as Jeanette, and what was she good at? Did she enjoy maths and biology, like her sister?

  ‘Not at all. She likes music and singing,’ Hilda eventually acknowledged. ‘She’s good at making a lot of noise, at any rate.’

  ‘What about channelling that into learning to play an instrument, perhaps?’

  ‘Our family doesn’t go in for music lessons,’ Hilda said stiffly. After a glance from Mrs Archer she added, ‘We’ve got a piano.’

  ‘Piano? Good idea. I’ll see if I can come up with a teacher in your area, shall I?’

  Not long afterwards, Hilda answered a telephone call that wasn’t from her sister Sadie or Tony’s brother in South Wales, who were the only people apart from Jeanette’s various therapists who normally rang them. It was Mrs Polanski, the piano teacher. She had one spare weekly slot, on Saturday mornings. Next term, maybe, the little girl could come on a Tuesday or Thursday evening.

  Connie had protested at first that she preferred going to the shop with Tony on Saturdays. But in the end, because she liked the idea of learning to play the piano, sheagreed.

  ‘I’ll do without my assistant for a few weeks. It’ll be difficult, but I’ll manage,’ Tony told her.

  Connie remembered thinking that Tony sometimes spoke to her as if she was younger than ten, turning eleven this summer. She was a thin, small child. Perhaps he simply forgot she was getting older. Or perhaps, she thought shrewdly, he didn’t want her to stop being like herself and start being like Jeanette, who wore a bra, and hideous fashionable shoes with thick platforms, and who – with the encouragement of Jackie and Elaine, their cousins who were the daughters of Auntie Sadie and well-off Uncle Geoff – was now experimenting with make-up.

  Piano lessons with Mrs Polanski were a success. Connie was allowed to catch the 274 bus to her house and back, the first time she had been trusted to go anywhere except school all by herself, and Hilda even gave her a door key to Echo Street because she and Jeanette had to go quite a long way to the speech therapist’s and were not always back before Connie came home. Hilda didn’t drive, so they had a Saturday bus journey too.

  Mrs Polanski was Polish. Her house smelled strange and there were gloomy religious pictures on the walls and a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece, but Mrs Polanski herself was fat and laughed a lot. Connie knew immediately and instinctively that she was a good teacher. She made everything fun, even C major and D major scales and finger exercises.

  ‘And one, two, three, play, my girl,’ she would trill as Connie launched into her piece, and she sang the notes to keep her in time and slid her ringed fingers over the backs of Connie’s hands to s
how her the proper positions. Connie practised eagerly every afternoon after school, racing through all the exercises that Mrs Polanski gave her in order to win even more of her liberal praise.

  ‘Well done, Constance. We will make a concert artiste of you, wait and see.’

  It was early in March. Constance had been learning the piano for two months and she could already play the right-hand part of Für Elise with the proper fingering. She would never have believed that a whole hour could pass so quickly.

  Mrs Polanski said, ‘Very good this week. Maybe I speak to your mother about some more teaching.’

  On the way home Connie sat happily in the front seat on the top deck of the bus and peered through sharp rain into bedroom windows and the unmasked upper regions of small shops. The route was familiar now. She flexed her fingers as she had seen Mrs Polanski do and thought about becoming a concert artiste. She was sure that it would involve a glittering dress with perhaps a gathered train that she would sweep aside with a flourish before taking her seat at the grand piano.

  She hurried through the rain from the bus stop to Echo Street, checking that the front-door key was securely in its place in the inner pocket of her blue zipper jacket. As she slid the key into the lock she heard the telephone ringing in the front room. This was unusual enough to make her fumble to turn the key more quickly and almost trip over the doormat as she catapulted herself inside, but the ringing stopped just as the door caught in a gust of wind and slammed shut behind her. Connie hung up her jacket on the hall stand and went into the kitchen. She knew that she was clumsy because Hilda was always telling her so, but she made herself a glass of orange squash without spilling a single drop of sticky concentrate. She shook droplets of water out of her hair and drank her squash. Hilda and Jeanette would be back soon. She rinsed the glass and upturned it on the draining board.

  She was sitting at the piano, about to start practising her new scales, when the telephone started to ring again. It made her jump.