Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘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 wi
th 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.’