Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Isn’t it private?’ Connie asked curiously.

  ‘Not so much that you should not see it.’

  Connie changed the angle of her chair so that she could see the screen more clearly. Roxana took a long gulp of her drink. Connie read,

  Hi Roxy, how’s it going?

  I miss you, babe, same as always. Life still seems so quiet without you. I’ve been working hard – – no, it’s okay really, just got a pay hike which helps.

  Strange to think it’s nearly a whole year since my mum died. I think of her every day, and sometimes I still go, ‘must tell her about this or that’, and then remember that I can’t – but I don’t have to tell you what that feels like, do I? But time is doing its thing. She was such a great mother and such a good person to know, and I feel lucky to have had all that.

  Been spending quite a lot of time with my dad. He’s pretty good, considering. Time’s doing its thing for him as well. He’s lonely, though. I asked him this weekend if he could imagine being with someone else some day and he gave a smile and said yes, he imagined it regularly.

  Have you heard from Connie? I know Dad hasn’t, and neither have I. Did anything come of that plan for her to come and visit you?

  What’s the latest news on Niki?

  Connie read on down to the end of the message.

  There was a PS.

  My sort-of ex Lauren is back in town. I had a couple of emails and texts from her, wanting to hook up. I’m going to give her a call, Roxy, but just wanted you to know that if you were in London there’d be no question, no contest. Nxxxxxx

  Then Connie looked at the date. The message was several days old. Of course Roxana had been intending all along for her to read it.

  Roxana got up and strolled to the entrance. She gazed out into the baking street, standing half in and half out of the doorway as if the rest of the world pulled at her in one direction via the computer terminal, and Niki and Bokhara and Uzbekistan pinned her in the other. Then she looked back at the café interior, to where Connie was still sitting, and gave her a brilliant smile of expectation and encouragement.

  Connie’s mind was spinning.

  She had been running away: constructing defences and then racing behind them whenever a breach was threatened.

  She had started to put up the barriers long ago, years before she met Bill, even before the day of Tony’s funeral and Elaine’s blurted truth, he wasn’t your dad…you’re adopted, aren’t you? That had only been putting into words what troubled her already and the trouble had started before she could even articulate the word different.

  Connie thought, I rejected them, Hilda and Jeanette, just as much as the other way round.

  That one word – adopted – and all the longing, and mystery, and opportunities for disappointment and betrayal that crowded with it, had always stood between them.

  What chance did we have, in the face of that? she asked herself.

  As the realisation dawned on her, she braced herself for the sadness and regret that might have followed it.

  But all that happened was the joy and lightness that had been with her since the hammam lifted her to her feet. She floated to the door where Roxana was waiting for her.

  ‘Thank you for letting me see Noah’s email. You wanted me to read about his dad being lonely and the implication that I could change that, didn’t you?’

  ‘I am not so cut off from my friends that I cannot help out here and there, you see.’

  Connie touched her hand. ‘What about you and Noah? And Lauren?’

  Roxana sighed. ‘I am jealous, of course. But I am Niki’s sister first and always, before I can be girlfriend to an English boy. And I don’t want Noah to be waiting for me for ever. Nobody waits for ever, do they?’

  A lick of a breeze chased down the street, raising plumes of dust and stirring the coarse hair on the dog’s back.

  ‘No, they don’t,’ Connie agreed.

  Roxana said softly, ‘Do you want to know what I think?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think you should go back to England. I think you should go to see Mr Bunting, and tell him that you love him.’

  ‘Do you? Why?’

  ‘Because it is the truth.’

  Roxana’s smile flashed at her. She made a loose fist and tapped at the air six inches from Connie’s shoulder.

  ‘Knock, knock. Open the door in this wall, Connie. Walls keep out bad things, yes, but they trap you inside in the dark.’

  Slowly, Connie raised her hands, palms outstretched. She pushed outwards until her arms were fully extended, and there was nothing to block her way. There was nothing but the air and the light on the old walls.

  By the time Connie reached England, it was almost summer again.

  The trees in the parks were in leaf and at lunchtimes girls with bare arms poured into the streets. From her apartment, which seemed empty without Roxana, she telephoned Bill.

  ‘It’s Connie,’ she said.

  ‘Connie. Are you in London?’

  Bill’s warm voice was very close, as if it came from somewhere within her own head.

  ‘Yes. How are you? You sound different.’

  There was a silence while they listened to each other.

  ‘It’s you who sounds different,’ he said at length.

  Connie took a breath. ‘I’ve been bouncing round the world like a ping-pong ball. I want to stop now.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Can I see you? I want to so much, but maybe it’s too early, or you may feel that it wouldn’t be right?’

  ‘I want to see you too,’ Bill answered. ‘Just lately, it seems that you’re in my head more than ever. I wasn’t even surprised to hear your voice just now.’

  Connie looked out at the cranes angled over the city’s building sites. Skeletons of towers had risen in her absence.

  ‘Shall I come up to London?’ Bill asked.

  Connie thought quickly. London’s streets were mapped out by the past. Nowhere came to mind that was not touched in some way either by the years of being painfully apart from him, or by the snatched intervals of their love affair.

  ‘No, not London,’ she said hastily. ‘Somewhere else.’

  She didn’t know what was going to happen next, and she was so used to defending herself that this degree of exposure left her feeling like a vertigo sufferer on the lip of a precipice. All she did know was that whatever was to be written, she wanted this new chapter to begin on a fresh page – not in London, or Surrey, or even in Bali.

  ‘Where?’

  She knew why he sounded different. The ripple in his voice that had faded years ago was there again.

  ‘I know. Let’s go to the seaside.’ The wind and the tides would do their scouring work.

  ‘That’s a good idea. Do you want to go a long way from home? Abroad?’

  ‘No more planes and airports. Let’s go to…Devon.’

  Connie couldn’t recall ever having been there. They would have to take the opposite direction out of London, away from the route they had followed on the day of the picnic and the way she had taken Roxana on their trip to the sea. And an English shingle beach with mild, greyish breakers would be far enough removed from the last beach they had visited, back in Bali.

  ‘Devon?’

  Bill was laughing openly now. But he understood what she was thinking, and he entered into the idea with her. There would be an unmarked page for both of them, without even a shared journey to preface it. ‘I will meet you in Devon in…let’s see. Forty-eight hours from now. Look at your watch. It’s three o’clock. Take your mobile with you. I’ll call you at eleven a.m. the day after tomorrow, and tell you where.’

  Connie laughed too, although her heart was thumping.

  ‘Forty-eight hours,’ she repeated.

  The spell of early summer fine weather continued. In the morning sunshine before she set out to meet Bill, Connie put on a bright red cotton dress and stared at herself in the mirror. There were deep li
nes bracketing her mouth and at the corners of her eyes, but at the same time she felt stripped of all the armour of experience, as if inside her skin she was sixteen again.

  She drove out of London and at eleven a.m. precisely, her mobile rang. His voice in her ear stilled the roar of motorway traffic.

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘I am at the service station just before the M5 junction.’

  He gave her the exact details of where he was waiting.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ she promised. She drove carefully, like the mature woman she was, but at the same time she was thinking that this was the most erotically charged moment of her life.

  It was a weekday, but the car park of the little seaside town was almost full. As Connie searched for a space, men with bare, sun-reddened chests padded towards the sea front laden with body boards and heavy cold-boxes, and children chased between the cars. It was a few minutes before three o’clock. She parked at the end of a row and sat with her hands still resting on the steering wheel. The hot smell of the car merged with salt and sun-cream and frying fish, and a pair of kites tugged towards freedom in the blue space between earth and sea. All her senses were sharpened.

  I am alive.

  A swell of amazed gratitude and happiness lifted her.

  Before she went to meet Bill, there was one more conversation she must have.

  I am alive, she repeated. And I wish you were alive and here with me. With us. I miss you, Jeanette, every day.

  Connie let her hands slip into her lap.

  Afterwards was now.

  She loved Bill and had always loved him, and whereas that had once been wrong she didn’t believe it was wrong any longer.

  I love you just as much, she added to Jeanette. Forgive me now, if there is anything still to forgive.

  A man carrying a deckchair glanced through the windscreen at the woman talking to herself in her car. It was two minutes to three.

  Connie walked across the road to the sea front. Outlined against the glitter of the water a man was standing against the railings with his back turned, his arms spread and his hands resting on the top rail. He was the only person in the world.

  She ran forwards and put her hands over his, fitting her body against him.

  They hung there for a moment, their faces hidden from each other, waiting for the future.

  Then Bill spun round and caught her face between his hands. He kissed her, blotting out the sun-dazzle and the twirling kites. Without lifting his mouth from hers he murmured, ‘It felt like making an assignation with a stranger. Driving down here, waiting for you to arrive. It was extremely exciting.’

  ‘I know. I felt that too.’

  ‘But now I see you and touch you, you’re the opposite of a stranger. You fit me, Connie.’ His voice was very low. As he had done many times before, he drew her closer to him so that her head rested at the angle of his jaw. She let herself melt against him and the easiness of it surprised her. There had always been a thin layer separating them, she realised now. It had been her own guilt interleaved with his, and her old, wary defensiveness. The barriers felt stale and constricting and she wriggled to free herself like a snake shedding its skin. His body felt very warm and solid.

  ‘Is it less exciting, me turning out not to be a stranger?’

  ‘No,’ he said roughly. ‘I want you to know straight away that I have booked a room. I want you to come back there with me. Will you do that?’

  ‘I will,’ she said.

  Her composure suddenly struck both of them as funny. They laughed, and a teenaged couple glanced back at them as if they were wondering what two middle-aged people could find so comical.

  They linked hands and began to walk along the sea front. A wall projected out into the waves, enclosing a little harbour where fishing boats and sailing dinghies were moored.

  ‘How have you been, Bill?’

  He said, ‘Grief is a strange commodity, don’t you think? I thought it was something you dealt with. I thought you either coped well or not, depending on who you were and the particular circumstances, but that you handled it in some way. But I have found that it doesn’t make much difference what you do. You can go out and be with friends or strangers, or you can go to a film or look at art. You can stay in with a book or a bottle of whisky, or just yourself and silence. You can square up to it, saying, “Come on, wash right over me, do your worst because I’m ready for you.” Or you can try to ignore it. Whatever you do doesn’t matter, because grief is still just there. What happens, of course, is that as time passes the presence becomes less constant. Now I can see how its absence begins to take shape.’ He looked down at her, his mouth curling in the way it always did. ‘That’s how I’ve been. What about you?’

  Connie nodded. ‘Similar, only I didn’t handle it as well as you. I miss her so much, so I tried to escape the loss by running away. True to form, you might say. It wasn’t until Roxana took me to the hammam in Bokhara that I broke up and cried properly, from right inside myself.’

  Bill gazed at her. ‘Noah’s Roxana, is that? Bokhara?’

  ‘I have been bouncing around the world…’

  ‘Are you ready to stop now, or are you still my wild, wandering girl?’

  ‘I am ready to stop,’ Connie said soberly. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot. About Jeanette and me when we were girls, about Echo Street, and when Noah was born and when Hilda died. All those years.’ With the hand that wasn’t linked in Bill’s she lightly touched the silk pouch that still hung at her throat. ‘And I have been making peace, with Jeanette and my real mother and with myself.’

  They were walking out along the harbour wall now, where waves slapped against slippery stone steps. They reached a line of bollards at the far end, and a stone bench set into an angle of the wall that reminded Connie of her perch in the hammam with Roxana. They sat down and Bill’s arm circled her shoulders while they watched the strutting gulls at their feet and the kite-flyers out on the beach. Connie told him about Roxana and the email from Noah, and Roxana’s words of advice.

  ‘And what exactly was her advice?’ Bill murmured.

  Connie turned to face him. ‘She said that I should come back to England, see Mr Bunting, and tell him that I love him.’

  ‘I see. You know what? Despite what I know about Roxana, I’d say that was very, very sound advice.’

  Their mouths were almost touching now.

  ‘Yes,’ Connie agreed. ‘And so I am acting on it.’

  Arm in arm, as if they had been together for ever, they retraced their steps along the harbour wall. The wind had strengthened and the rigging of the dinghies tapped out a metallic rhythm. There were families picnicking on the shingle, light glinting off the cars crawling along the sea-front road, the distant tinkle of music from a child’s fairground ride. To both of them, the world looked new and fresh and completely enticing.

  Bill said suddenly, ‘I’d like an ice cream, wouldn’t you?’

  There was a kiosk directly across the road from the harbour wall and they hurried to it, dodging cyclists and pensioners out with their dogs. Behind a sheet of glass, square metal tubs were full of fondant colours.

  ‘Look, coconut ice,’ Bill exulted. ‘One scoop or two?’

  Connie made a face that Angela herself might have been proud of.

  ‘Coconut? I loathe coconut. Don’t you know that?’

  He admitted that he did not.

  As trivial as an ice cream or as important as happiness, they still had as much to learn about each other as the wealth they already knew.

  With Bill’s double coconut scoop and Connie’s single chocolate in hand, they turned away from the kiosk and joined the afternoon strollers.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Connie smiled.

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘How far is it, to this room you booked?’

  ‘About…ten minutes.’

  ‘That far?’ she whispered.

  She shaded her eyes so that the sunny afternoon was
squared down to contain nothing but Bill’s face. He caught her raised wrists and held them.

  ‘Much less if we run,’ he said.

  ‘Race you,’ she countered.

  Holding their melting ice creams aloft, they chased each other through the gentle crowds.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to

  Jonny Bealby, Lynne Drew and HarperCollins, Camilla Goslett, Sally Halstead, Angela Harding, Toby Jarvis, Jonathan Lloyd, Alice Lutyens, Fiona McMorrough and everyone at FMcM Associates, Richard Mitchelson and Melissa Ong, Adrian Morris, Freya North, Carla Poole, Susan Watt, and to Charlie and Flora King and George Theo.

  Constance

  Rosie Thomas is the author of a number of celebrated novels, including the bestsellers Sun at Midnight and Iris and Ruby, which won the 2007 Romantic Novel of the Year Award. Once she was established as a writer and her children were grown, she discovered a love of travelling and mountaineering. She has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, spent time on a tiny Bulgarian research station in Antarctica and travelled the Silk Road through Asia. She lives in London.

  Praise for Rosie Thomas:

  ‘Her evocation…touches on the variances and nuances of love between men and women, and the power of family relationships to destroy lives’

  ELIZABETH BUCHAN, Daily Mail

  ‘Thomas can write with ravishing sensuality’

  KATE SAUNDERS, The Times

  ‘Rosie Thomas writes so beautifully about the feelings of people in war, the imminence of death and the importance of passionate and romantic love’

  DAME TANNI GREY-THOMPSON

  ‘Honest and absorbing, Rosie Thomas mixes the bitter and the hopeful with the knowledge that the human heart is far more complicated than any rule suggests’