by Rosie Thomas
‘It’s called Buff Beauty,’ Connie said.
Jeanette released their arms and leaned into the flowerbed. She broke off one of the blooms and put it into Roxana’s hands. The outer petals were pale cream, the colour of elegant, expensive paper, but in the tight centre they were apricot gold. Noah’s mother’s scrutiny made her feel exposed, and she felt uncertain with these two women and their family party and this big house with about fifteen windows blinking at them, and the scented depths of their flower garden.
Whenever Roxana had thought or dreamed of England, it was London in her mind’s eye. She had never even considered that there would be places like this, set behind hedges and buried in trees. There were houses quite close at hand because she had seen them as she passed by with Noah, but from here she could see nothing but the birds. Only a week ago she had felt her place in the rich city streets, and now she was where Noah belonged and she was out of her depth all over again. It was quite likely, she thought, that she would never be able to fathom what Englishness meant. It would keep evading her, and then where would she be?
‘It’s nice,’ she said flatly, turning the rose in her fingers.
Connie took it from her and twisted the stem in the buttonhole of Roxana’s denim jacket.
‘There. That looks good,’ she smiled and lightly touched her shoulder.
Jeanette nodded her approval. They began to walk again, slowly. Leaves brushed against Roxana’s ankles, releasing aromatic scents.
At the far end of the garden, partly screened by tall bushes and backed by trees, they came to a little green-painted structure with a low door and a pitched roof.
Both of the women stopped walking.
Connie said, ‘Do you know what I remember?’
Jeanette made a little roof shape by placing her fingers together and then moved her bunched fingertips to her lips and on upwards in an extravagant arc. She was laughing. Connie was laughing too.
‘Yes, yes.’
They had forgotten Roxana. There was a ladder leaning against the trunk of one of the trees. Connie ran forwards and seized it, propped it against the side of the hut and clambered up. She balanced in a duck-walk, arms outstretched. She perched unsteadily, feet on either side of the roof ridge, struck a pose and then began singing. In a high, loud voice. About a prince, and when he would come to carry her away.
Roxana gaped, thinking that the two of them had perhaps been drinking. She peered back towards the house and saw Noah carrying plates out to the round wooden table, and his father shaking out the folds of a big umbrella.
Jeanette was leaning back against the trunk of a tree, laughing so much that she seemed hardly able to stand, so much that Roxana wondered if she ought to try to help her. But Connie slithered down the roof and vaulted back down to the grass. She ran to Jeanette and the two of them fell into each other’s arms. The noise Jeanette made was loud, a hoo-hoo sound against Connie’s lighter, normal laughter. Then there was a point when they both took a breath and looked into each other’s faces.
They weren’t laughing any more.
Connie touched her sister’s cheek, and then Jeanette’s head slowly came forwards until it rested against her shoulder. They stood there, swaying a little, arms round each other.
Roxana walked a few steps onwards, not wanting to intrude on this, and stared over at Noah. He was wiping cutlery and laying it on the checked cloth that had been spread over the table. He looked up and saw her watching him, gave her a wave and then blew a kiss.
After a minute or two the women rejoined her.
Connie said, ‘We were just remembering when we were little. We used to have a shed at home, quite like that one. I used to…sing.’ They were both shaking with laughter again, and Roxana wondered if they were perhaps not drunk but a little bit crazy.
With an effort, Jeanette composed herself. She put her hands together and inclined her head, making such an eloquent apology that Roxana was disarmed. She fell into step when Jeanette indicated that they were to traverse the opposite side of the garden.
This was the shadier half, and here there were big dark leaves splashed with silver, and wiry stems that held up bronze leaves shaped like hearts. Noah’s mother made some more of her quick gestures and his aunt translated them into words.
‘What do you think of England?’
‘I like it very much,’ Roxana answered, choosing the obvious response. She added carefully, ‘And Noah has been kind. Now I am looking for a flat to share. There is a room in, what is it, North Ealing? Noah says he will come with me to look at it. London is a big city, and it’s very expensive, but I have a job. Perhaps Noah will have told you what work I do?’
Both women casually nodded, careful not to place too much emphasis on knowing about it.
‘Are you going to stay in London? Don’t you miss home?’
‘Not so much. Uzbekistan is a poor country. People work hard, there is some discontent, little freedom to speak. We don’t have too much of anything, except cotton fields and policemen.’
Jeanette smiled, but Noah was right, his mother didn’t miss anything. She signed again, and Connie spoke for her. ‘Noah told us about your brother. I’m sorry.’
‘Thank you,’ Roxana said.
She did not want to think about Niki now, although the memories of the Friday Massacre, the images of the main square in Andijan under a rain-heavy sky and the armoured trucks full of men with guns were seldom far from her mind. She added, because it seemed that she ought to say something more, ‘Niki was a good boy. A Muslim boy, and he believed in certain things. Me, however, I am not so good.’
To underline her point she did a couple of little dance steps and the folds of her short skirt swung around her thighs. ‘And now I am here in England,’ she finished.
– That’s good, Jeanette indicated.
Noah’s family were kind, like him, Roxana decided.
Noah’s mother wanted to find out about his girlfriend. That was all right, Roxana thought philosophically. Any boy’s mother would want to know things about her, she had arrived from nowhere, that was natural. She wished she had a family of her own exactly like this one. But at least she was here, included in the lunch party, just as if she were an English girl. Suddenly she smiled, basking all over again in the white light of freedom and opportunity.
Connie saw the smile. She was thinking, This girl is quite formidable.
Jeanette pointed. Bill was waving the barbecue tongs, beckoning them.
‘Lunch,’ Connie said.
They all sat down under the shade of the big parasol. Jeanette supervised the seating. She put Roxana opposite her where she could see her face more clearly, and there followed an interval of drink-pouring and complicated passing of various dishes of food. Roxana watched covertly to see what Noah did and then copied him. He glanced across and winked at her.
When they all had some of everything, Bill filled Jeanette’s glass with wine and Jeanette raised it in Roxana’s direction.
‘Cheers,’ the other three all said.
Roxana put her hand over her heart. ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’
Jeanette ate hardly anything, but she sipped some of her wine and she followed the conversation. The others seemed to orbit around her, and whenever she broke in with her signing or the occasional unformed, liquid syllables that they seemed to understand perfectly well, they all stopped to listen. For all her physical fragility, her strength was evident.
‘How’s the music biz, Auntie Con?’ Noah asked after a while. ‘Connie writes music for films and commercials, Roxana. Very big-time.’
Roxana liked Noah’s mother and father, but it was Connie who increasingly drew her attention. She seemed different from the others, and not just in her appearance. Roxana was very interested to hear what she did.
‘Really? What is the work like?’
Connie raised her hands now, laughing and twisting back her dark hair. ‘It’s a circus. Always has been. I was at the EMMAs in the week. That’s t
he Electronic Music Marketing Awards,’ she said for Roxana’s benefit. ‘The ad industry is one of the best there is for awarding itself awards.’
‘Were you nominated for something?’ Noah asked.
‘No. I’m way out of touch. I went with a friend of mine.’
Connie had been Angela’s guest.
‘Please come,’ Angela had begged her. ‘The cat-food commercial’s up for best use of classical-style music in a thirty-second TV spot. The client’s a total nightmare, but you needn’t have anything to do with him. You know everyone, anyway.’
So Connie had taken her place at Angela’s company’s table for twelve clients and agency people.
To her surprise, she found herself sitting next to Malcolm Avery of GreenLeaf Music.
Her first job, when she had turned sixteen and could at last leave school, had been at GreenLeaf.
Full of determination to make her escape from Echo Street by finding work in the music business, she had taken a bus and then the tube up to Soho one Saturday morning and walked into all the recording studios. The studio manager, Brian Luck, admitted that they needed a teenager to do odd jobs. They wanted a boy, really, but Connie insisted that she could make better tea and what’s more she could start at once. She added that they might as well give her the job right now, because she was going to sit there in the studio until they did.
When the job was hers, she bought a copy of the Evening Standard and went through the accommodation ads until she found a room she reckoned she could just about afford. She went home that first night to Echo Street, but it was the last time she ever slept in the house.
Once she was at GreenLeaf, she learned how to make herself useful and then indispensable. She gradually made friends among the loose tide of drummers and singers and keyboard artists who spent their days swirling around the studios and sitting in at recording sessions for whoever needed them. She did her share of playing and singing too, and in time a way of life established itself. It was an existence that centred on drinking heavily in Soho pubs, and rolling spliffs in stuffy rooms at the back of clubs, and from there watching quite a few of the people she knew descending into abysses of their own creation.
Connie didn’t fear the abyss for herself. She was learning that she was her own safety net, and probably always would be, and therefore it was important to keep the structure in good repair.
Constance Thorne acquired a reputation for being good for a laugh but quite straight, and therefore reliable in an emergency. Everyone at GreenLeaf was busy and she began to get odds and ends of commissioned work that led to writing jingles for commercials. Connie was too used to being poor, and the effect of having some money once in a while seemed to shoot straight into her veins like her own version of a fix. She worked feverishly, jazzed up by the earning potential, and soon she had a useful little showreel of her work.
She lived like this for four years, sharing a dingy flat in Perivale and keeping irregular hours, not seeing the sun often enough and always juggling with work and money. She had plenty of friends and few intimates. The digital age was arriving, and the old studios were slowly going out of style. Jingle writers could come up with a tune on the way to a meeting with agency or television people, then call up and order a drummer, a flute-player and a violinist, record the separate tracks and mix them, sample some more, and the job would be done. Unusually for a woman, Connie watched and learned how to use the new equipment. She worked on a retainer for GreenLeaf during the day, then freelanced in the evenings, using the company’s studios for her own work.
Then one of the founding partners of GreenLeaf, the amiable but lazy Malcolm Avery, ran a deadline too close. The brief was to write a jingle for the launch of a new chocolate bar called Boom Bar.
Malcolm slumped in his studio chair at six o’clock in the evening, his headphones hanging around his neck like a noose and dark circles under his eyes.
‘I’ve got nothing here for the agency and I’m scheduled to meet them at ten tomorrow,’ he groaned.
Connie had a date, for once with a man who wasn’t a penniless drummer or trombonist. He was an agency account man, and he had even promised to buy her a meal rather than expecting her to stand alternate rounds in the pub.
‘I’ll have a go,’ she said to Malcolm.
‘Yeah, go on then. I’m going home. We’ll play them whatever we’ve got tomorrow morning, and promise them the earth in a couple of days’ time. See you, Con.’
Connie called to put off her date. The man didn’t sound pleased.
When GreenLeaf Studios went quiet for the evening, Connie sat down at the eight-track EMU 2 with a jug of coffee and the brief for the Boom Bar jingle. She worked all night, and in the morning the tune was there.
At eight o’clock, with traffic building up in the street below and the lift beginning to hum in the old building, she picked out the tune on the keyboard one more time. Boom boom baboom ba ba…
She went out to get coffee and a danish, finished this breakfast at her desk in the corner by the stairs, and waited for Malcolm to come in.
When he arrived she played the jingle to him. His face flashed with cunning and then went flat.
‘Well, yeah. Not genius, but not bad. I’ll chuck it in with the others, mix ’em up, see what the agency thinks. Give me the tape.’
Connie was red-eyed and wired from her sleepless night. Her hand shot out and caught Malcolm by the wrist.
‘No. I’m coming to the meeting. I’ll play the tape, and I’ll make sure everyone knows whose work it is.’
Malcolm laughed. ‘Whose brief is it, whose studio is this, who do you work for?’
Somehow, Connie found it within herself to shrug and turn away with the tape in her pocket.
‘Suit yourself. I did it in my own time, so it’s mine. Go and present whatever you’ve got.’
She could almost hear Malcolm Avery making calculations. It was an important commission, for a big agency, for a major product launch.
‘Oh, what the fuck,’ he sighed. ‘Come with me if you feel so strongly about it.’
The agency team and the clients all went mad for Connie’s tune.
For the first time in her life Connie found that she was able to call the shots. She agreed to split the commission fee with GreenLeaf, and gleefully put a cheque for a thousand pounds in her bank. But she made sure when she signed the contract that royalties would come to her alone.
Almost at once, the Boom tune became a huge hit.
By the time she was twenty-three Connie was living in her own large flat in Belsize Park, with a room in it converted to a studio. In time she formed her own company and employed a manager to run the business side, and to go to meetings and take the music briefs from advertising-agency creative departments or television producers, while she concentrated on writing the music. She could spend days at a time shut away in the soundproof studio, working less with live musicians and more and more via the spiralling trajectories of new technology.
She never wrote another Boom song, although the title stubbornly clung to her, but she was a good composer. Her work won some awards, her showreel gathered depth and range. After the first flood of royalties, her income was steady rather than spectacular, but she had come a long, long way from Echo Street.
Eight years later, when numbers of her friends were marrying and having babies, Connie was certain that neither option was open to her because she was deeply, unwillingly in love with the man who was already married to her sister.
Then one day she went along to the recording of the orchestral music she had written for a television serialisation of Dombey and Son. The orchestra was under the baton of Sébastian Bourret.
They edged together, over the space of a year.
Connie liked being with Seb because he was actually as rootless as she felt. Seb was Australian by birth, half Belgian and half South African by parentage. Home for him was wherever he was rehearsing the current ensemble, and Connie fitted well into that structure. S
he was as happy as he was to move on from Geneva to Philadelphia to Tokyo. The topic of marriage or the possibility of children was never seriously discussed, though, and that was as much Connie’s choice as Seb’s. She couldn’t envisage having children by anyone except the man she still loved.
Then came Sung Mae Lin. Connie didn’t want to go back to Australia, and when she thought of London the streets were crowded with shadows. The Balinese village house with the veranda and the view stopped being a staging post and became her home.
Time had not treated Malcolm Avery kindly. He was three stone heavier and his cheeks were mottled dark mulberry red.
‘Christ. It’s Boom Girl, isn’t it?’
‘Hello Malcolm.’
‘Don’t see you around much these days. Are you still working? Wait a minute, you married Simon Rattle, didn’t you?’
Connie said, ‘I was with Sébastian Bourret for a few years. We never married, though. I live in Bali these days.’
‘Bloody good idea. Better than sodding London.’
Malcolm refilled his own glass with the not-bad California merlot and sloshed the remaining inch or two from the bottle into Connie’s.
There was a big silver-plated wine cooler in the centre of the table, filled with ice and bottles. Across the top of it Connie caught Angela’s eye and they smiled at each other. It was going to be a long evening.
Once the dinner had been cleared away, the moderately well-known comedian and the blonde television presenter who were jointly compering the event took the podium. There was a lengthy session of jokes and banter.
‘Bloody get on with it,’ Malcolm said, not quietly. He was an award nominee, having devised the music for the cat-food commercial. He poured three inches of brandy into a balloon glass as the presentation of awards finally began. Nineteen minutes later Cosmo Reiss of Gordon Glennie Music lifted the award for the best use of classical style in a thirty-second television commercial over his head as if it were the World Cup.
