Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘You keep in touch, Constance Merriwether.’

  ‘I will,’ Connie promised, and she kept the promise.

  But her premonition had been correct. None of the investigations she made yielded a trace of her mother.

  Connie locked up the Bali house and gave the key to her neighbour Wayan Tupereme. The little man bowed his forehead to the tips of his folded hands and she returned the salute.

  ‘May the pengabenan of your sister be blessed, and may her spirit ascend to suarga.’

  ‘Thank you, Wayan. You know, funerals in England are not very like Balinese ones.’

  ‘This I have heard.’ Wayan sighed in sympathy. ‘However, when the rituals are complete, please come back to the village and to your friends. Dewi and my grandson will miss you, and so will I.’

  Connie felt the loss of Jeanette like a solid thing, a heavy oak door or a stone pillar that she might batter with her fists until they bled raw, but which would not yield an inch. She had made no plans beyond flying to England for the burial.

  ‘I hope to,’ she said.

  A taxi driven by Kadek Daging’s wife’s brother was waiting to take her to the airport. Connie put her suitcase inside and climbed in. Wayan stood in the lane, his hand raised, until the car overtook the stream of scooters and a bullock cart and passed out of sight.

  Connie flew up to Singapore and took an overnight flight onwards to Gatwick. It was just getting light as she boarded the train for Victoria, and the day revealed itself as a sullen midwinter apology with the trees shawled in grey mist. The carriages were overheated and crowded with bewildered new arrivals, but Connie shivered after the heat and brilliance of Bali. She shrank into her seat, breathing in grime and watching the backs of the houses, sliced gardens and curtained windows and occasional yellow eyes of light as they swept past her and dropped back into the grey vacuum.

  In the apartment at Limbeck House, Roxana was remorsefully waiting for her.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘Let us pray.’

  Connie bowed her head.

  She could see a double row of black-shod feet: opposite her were Bill’s shiny Oxfords, Noah’s less well polished boots revealed beneath the hems of black trousers that were too short for him and therefore probably belonged to his father, and some improbable Italian loafers sported by a cream-haired, red-faced old man with a wheezy chest who had turned out to be Uncle Geoff, whom Connie had not seen for twenty years.

  On Connie’s side was a pair of matronly heels, sturdily planted but even so seeming to shudder with the force of Sadie’s weeping. Next to those were two sets of black knee-boots, Jackie’s and Elaine’s, and a shuffled-up line belonging to the cousins’ children. When Connie raised her chin she saw out of the corner of her eye the fluttering hem of the vicar’s surplice as he read the short prayer. The vicar was wearing wellingtons beneath his cassock.

  Between the two rows of shoes lay Jeanette’s open grave.

  The cemetery path a few yards away was grey, the dolorous marble headstones were grey, and also the squat tower of the church and the bare trees and the swollen sky, and what colour there remained in the thin grass seemed leached away by the murk. At three in the afternoon the daylight was almost gone, and apart from the white flag of the surplice there was not a shiver of movement anywhere. Even the morning’s rain had stopped, and although the branches and monumental masonry dripped steadily the undertakers’ discreetly fielded black umbrellas had not been called for. Sadie caught her breath, and there was a short break in her sobbing.

  Funerals in England are not much like Balinese ones, Connie had told Wayan Tupereme. She thought briefly of the wadah and the single swoop of the paper dragon’s wings before they were consumed by a sheet of fire, the stench of kerosene and flakes of soot gently drifting in the twilight, and Jeanette’s observant admiration of the ceremonies.

  Today’s event could not have been more different, or more mutedly English and monochromatic by comparison, and yet it was also fitting. Jeanette had expended so much of her formidable energy on living a normal life, and to be conventional in her taste and behaviour – to have chosen a traditional funeral – was all of a piece with that.

  At the short church service that had preceded the committal there had been familiar hymns and Psalm 23, and Bill had spoken briefly and movingly about Jeanette’s life. Noah had recited from memory – rather well – ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, which he described as Jeanette’s favourite poem.

  Connie could read nothing of Bill himself in any of this. He and Jeanette would have discussed the arrangements, and these choices must all have been hers. As she had done often enough before, she thought how remarkable it was that a man as imposing as Bill could be so self-effacing.

  Now his black shoes took a step forward out of the opposite line. The toes were almost at the edge of the grave, where the raw earth walls had been masked with a roll of fake turf. Connie lifted her eyes from the ground but she did not venture a glance at him. Instead she looked at Noah. He was red-eyed, and he seemed painfully young.

  Bill had been holding a tiny bunch of flowers. There were some twigs of rosemary and three frail white roses, the margins of the tissue petals browned by frost, picked that morning in Jeanette’s garden and tied with a piece of thin white ribbon. He kissed the blooms and then let them fall onto the coffin lid.

  But that was you, Connie silently said to him, and the blood in her veins seemed to make a complicated double surge.

  Sadie choked into her handkerchief, and one of her daughters placed an arm around her shoulders.

  Almost briskly now, Bill took the very clean spade that one of the undertaker’s men handed to him. He dug one spadeful of earth from an uncovered corner of the mound piled on boards next to the grave and scattered it over the flowers, then Noah took the spade and did the same thing. Cut off by the grave from his ex-wife and daughters, Uncle Geoff seized the spade from Noah and contributed his own few clods of earth. Connie couldn’t see beneath the brim of Auntie Sadie’s big black hat, but she sensed a glare that smouldered hot enough to dry the flood of tears.

  The vicar closed his prayer book. There was a moment’s silence as they each attended to their own thoughts. Then he turned and led the family procession away from the grave. Bill and Noah walked side by side, straight-backed, and the rest of them closed into a black phalanx. The heels of their various shoes clicked on the cemetery asphalt path.

  Behind them, Connie supposed, the undertakers would remove their trappings and roll up the turf, and then the gravediggers would come and fill in the earth.

  The word gravedigger was just about as archaic as foundling, she thought irrelevantly. Irrelevance was hardly a sin, though. All this black clothing and the line of waiting black cars beyond the Victorian lych-gate, the polished coffin and the artificial grass and we are gathered here to remember our dear sister Jeanette seemed in that moment supremely irrelevant.

  – Bones, Jeanette had said. – They don’t mean anything. Just dry bones…and the spirit set free. I like that.

  Connie was only walking away from bones. She was dry-eyed in front of other people, and she hoped that her back was as straight as Bill’s.

  ‘You know,’ her own voice ran in her head, words as clearly enunciated as if she were speaking for Jeanette to lip-read, ‘you know I love you, don’t you?’

  The answer was loud, shapeless, formed with effort and with determination that had its roots in the stony subsoil of Jeanette as she had always been.

  – Yes. I know that.

  Minus the hearse, the cortege took the reverse of the twomile route back to the house that it had followed on the way out. The lead car, carrying Bill in the front and with Connie between Noah and Auntie Sadie in the back, made just one three-quarter circuit of the roundabout, exactly as on the outward journey.

  Connie realised that she was smiling quite broadly at the memory of Jeanette’s order – twice round the roundabout on the way to the cemetery for me. She adjusted h
er expression before Auntie Sadie could see her.

  There were already cars parked up and down the lane outside the house when the cortege drew up, and the caterers were opening the front door to muted couples and groups. The African violets in the big brass bowl in the hallway looked lush and well watered, and the finger of the long-case barometer indicated Rain.

  On the parquet stood a pinboard on which Noah had put up a series of photographs of his mother. Connie briefly paused to look at them. There was the picture of Jeanette as a baby and the one of her wearing a little kilt and holding Connie on her lap that had stood on the top of the piano in Echo Street. Her graduation picture, in mortarboard and BSc gown and hood, smiled out from among the holiday snaps and Christmas party groups and proud events with Noah. The wedding picture took pride of place. Jeanette had looked so beautiful that day, her arm linked through Bill’s and her face bright as a beacon. Off to one side Connie noted herself, scowling in her tight, shiny bridesmaid’s dress.

  The most recent picture had been taken by Bill. Jeanette sat in the rocker on the veranda, smiling into the lens with the green wave deep behind her. Connie met her eyes and returned her smile.

  She moved on into the drawing room that was filling up with dark suits. There were neighbours to meet, and the colleagues Jeanette had introduced her to were waiting to shake her hand and murmur appropriately, and Uncle Geoff was wedged in the corner beside the fireplace.

  ‘I thought the world of her,’ he told Connie, sticking out his chin and squaring his shoulders in a double-breasted suit now much too big for him. ‘There was no way I was not going to be here. Whatever she might think, or say.’ He jutted his chin further, at Auntie Sadie’s turned back.

  ‘Of course you did, of course you had to be here,’ Connie agreed.

  Later, when people were beginning to leave, she took some empty glasses out to the kitchen and found Elaine propped against the sink. Connie put down her tray, remembering three empty sticky sherry glasses on Jeanette’s dresser on the day of that other funeral, Tony’s.

  Elaine stubbed out a cigarette and moved aside to let Connie reach into the dishwasher. Two caterers were drying knives and replacing them in a drawer. All these knobs and handles, Connie was thinking again, fingerprinted by the years of Bill and Jeanette’s marriage, and the invisible paths between the table and the larder, worn by their passing feet.

  ‘How are you, Connie?’

  ‘I’m all right, thanks.’ A colourless answer, but it was difficult to be any more expressive to cousin Elaine.

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ Elaine sighed. Like Jackie she was divorced. Her two non-committal boys were now in their twenties. They came briefly back to the house to escort their mother, but had already left.

  Elaine was reaching for another cigarette. She exhaled smoke and crossed her leather-booted ankles, ready for a talk, while Connie wondered vaguely how to make an escape.

  ‘It was nice, that music of yours,’ Elaine offered.

  ‘Was it? Thank you.’

  Bill asked Connie if she would play some of her music during the funeral service. ‘Jeanette would have wanted this,’ he said.

  They had decided on a version of the tune she had been working on the day of Jeanette’s death, a simple melody into which she had attempted to weave some of the Balinese gong notes and sinuous drumbeats. In the end, however, the piece had sounded to Connie like an awkward hybrid, without proper roots in either tradition, when she would have wished it to be the best music she had ever composed.

  Even worse, as she played it with the polite audience ranged in their pews, she had felt an incongruous resemblance to Elton John.

  Funerals were like this, she knew. You tried to concentrate on the person who was no longer there, and tides of inapt reminders of the busy, clamorous, still-living world swept in and eddied distractingly around you.

  Connie tried to listen to what Elaine was saying. She felt all her perceptions distorted and her responses headed off into dead ends and irrelevances by the bulky interposition of grief. Elaine was waiting for an answer to a question, her mascara-ed eyes fixed on Connie’s face.

  ‘Yes, still doing the composing. Commercials, some film work when I can get it,’ Connie managed to say.

  ‘That’s nice. It sounds glamorous, anyway,’ Elaine sighed.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Oh, you know. I work in admin, NHS.’

  Connie couldn’t even remember the last time she had spoken to Elaine or Jackie. Not at Hilda’s funeral, certainly, since that had taken place before she could get home from Tasmania.

  Weddings and funerals, when families that were not familial briefly and painfully got together.

  Elaine’s thoughts must have been following the same path. ‘I was thinking about when Uncle Tony died.’

  ‘He wasn’t your dad.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re adopted, aren’t you?’

  ‘We weren’t very nice to you in those days, Jackie and I, and we deliberately got Jeanette on our side as well. I’ve been meaning to say this for years, and now I’m going to. I shouldn’t have told you about being adopted, that was wrong of me.’

  ‘I suppose it was, yes. But I would have had to find out somehow, in the end. Perhaps you did me a good turn.’

  Connie tried to imagine how Hilda might have told her, but couldn’t envisage it. Maybe Tony would have done it, if he had lived.

  Elaine clearly wanted to say more and Connie waited. The caterers had moved away and were stacking up the serving trays that had been used to hand round sandwiches cut into pale triangles and small pieces of sombre cake.

  ‘We were so against anything that was different, back then. So suspicious. You were only such a little bit different, weren’t you, really? But it seemed an immense secret, that you weren’t born into the family. Whereas nowadays…’ Elaine sighed again, looking through the door of the kitchen and out into the hall where people were passing on their way to the front door. Bill and Noah were out there, quietly thanking people for coming. ‘…nowadays, we’re all alike, everyone. Community, that’s the word, isn’t it? Ours is the middle-class community, the one that Mum and Auntie Hilda were so dead-set on belonging to. Now we find ourselves stuck in it, a bit of difference would be quite welcome, funnily enough.’

  Connie realised that Elaine was slightly drunk and that she was talking about her own life, or some choice she had made that Connie would probably never know about. At the same time she reflected that it was Jeanette who had been truly, dramatically different from all of them.

  That was why Bill had loved her. She was a series of contradictions: her luscious appearance against her puritanical spirit, her cloak of conventional behaviour adopted as a protection for her deafness, and her constant denial of deafness itself.

  The past reared up within the Buntings’ kitchen. The whole of Connie’s life seemed now to have been lived by and against her sister. The sea of Jeanette’s absence swelled and pushed the continents of normality towards the horizon and almost out of sight.

  ‘Do you mind me saying this?’ Elaine was asking glassily. ‘Do you? I wouldn’t be surprised if you did.’

  Connie wasn’t sure whether she meant the apology or the reference to her perceived difference from Hilda and Sadie and their three daughters.

  ‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ Connie smiled. She had warmed to Elaine. The other woman immediately grasped Connie’s wrists. Her nails were manicured ovals, painted red. She tilted herself forwards until their foreheads almost touched.

  ‘Friends, then,’ she murmured dramatically. ‘It’s taken long enough, hasn’t it?’

  This was how Jackie and Sadie found them. Sadie’s arm was tucked under Jackie’s. She looked older than seventyfive and her face was grained and puffy after all the crying.

  ‘I’ve been saying to Connie that I’m really sorry,’ Elaine told them, and Jackie nodded wisely.

  ‘That’s what Jeanette w
ould have wanted.’

  Quite a number of things have been grouped under that umbrella today, Connie thought.

  ‘It’s been a sad day,’ Sadie said, in a voice that startlingly resembled Hilda’s. Uncle Geoff had already gone, sunk into his black overcoat, coughing with the onset of a chill from wearing thin shoes in the wet cemetery. Sadie hadn’t spoken a word to her ex-husband. Her ability to bear a grudge was as developed as Hilda’s.

  Connie said goodbye, kissing all three of them. She watched them go, out into the night, with Jackie and Elaine supporting their mother on either side.

  The last of the friends and neighbours also filtered away and the caterers ferried their equipment out to a waiting van.

  Connie emptied ashtrays and put the remaining glasses into the dishwasher. Bill closed the front door.

  The house was finally empty, except for the three of them.

  ‘Thank you for doing so much to help,’ Bill said to her. He spoke with an odd formality. His face was drained of colour; even his mouth looked bloodless. Connie ached to put out her arms and hold him.

  Noah had undone his black tie and it hung loose from his collar. He said, ‘I’m going upstairs to phone Rox, then I’m just going to chill for a bit. Is that okay, Dad?’

  Roxana had insisted that she would not come to the funeral.

  ‘I didn’t know Mrs Bunting so much, and all the family and friends will be there, I don’t feel it is quite right. And now, after all this that has happened because of me, I would prefer not.’

  Bill answered now, ‘Of course, that’s fine. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, Dad.’

  Bill and Connie watched him walk up the stairs. His shoulder dragged slightly against the wall and he corrected himself before taking the last steps at a gallop.

  Connie followed Bill into the drawing room, past the pinboard with the photographs. Bill poured himself a whisky and Connie shook her head to decline one. They sat down facing each other and silence crept round them.