Constance Read online

  Connie positioned her recording equipment and ran the players through an approximation of the twenty-two seconds of music that would accompany the finished commercial.

  ‘This is really not Balinese wedding music,’ Ketut protested.

  ‘I know. Forgive me?’

  Angela came across and reassured the musicians that they wouldn’t have long to wait. Connie could read the anxiety in her rigid shoulders. The schedule listed the bridal-attendants shot for completion before the lunch break as well as the gamelan orchestra, and that called for ten little Balinese girls wearing complicated headdresses who were at present corralled in the female wardrobe caravan. Connie began to sweat in sympathy with Angela, who had reckoned up and costed every minute of a week on location. Rayner Ingram was still frowning and shaking his head as he looked into the monitor.

  But then, suddenly, there was a flurry of action.

  ‘We’re going,’ the first assistant called. ‘Camera rolling.’

  Connie gave the signal to Ketut. As if there were no lights, microphones, cables or cameras, as if they were doing it for their own pleasure under a bamboo shelter in a rainy village forsaken by tourists, the little orchestra played her makeshift music.

  Their faces lit up. The camera rolled towards them.

  After twenty-two seconds, she gave them the cut signal. Reluctantly the metallophones and kettle gongs pattered into silence.

  Rayner and Angela conferred. Then Angela and the first assistant crossed to the agency people and consulted with them. The musicians waited, their eyes fixed on Connie.

  ‘Going again,’ came the call.

  They did three more takes. The agency indicated to Angela that they would like yet one more, but she shook her head and tapped a fingernail on her watch face.

  The first assistant told the musicians, ‘That’s fine with the orchestra. Director’s happy. We’re done with you.’

  It was Connie they looked to for confirmation. She beamed and applauded.

  ‘Ketut, you were brilliant. All of you. Thank you.’

  ‘I don’t know. There were some things,’ Ketut began, but the crew were hurrying them and their instruments off the set. Time was money.

  Connie and the file of musicians heading back to the caravan passed another procession coming the other way. The bridal attendants were overawed eight-year-old girls cast from the nearby school. Their faces had been painted to resemble dancers’ masks, with eyes outlined in thick lines of kohl that swept up at the corners, rouged cheekbones and brilliant crimson lips. With tall gilt crowns on their heads and tunic dresses of pale gold tissue, they looked exquisite. Their role was to scatter flower petals in the path of the as-yet-unseen bride as the bridegroom and his supporters waited for her at the temple steps.

  Behind the children came their mothers in a swaying group, chattering and exclaiming. Some of the mothers knew some of the musicians and there was a slow-moving bottleneck as everyone stopped to talk and laugh and exchange views on the filming. Crew immediately hurried them apart. The children were needed on set.

  Once they had changed into their own clothes the musicians settled into the service tent, eyeing the swooningly handsome Indonesian actor, cast as the bridegroom, who was busy with his mobile phone. Connie quietly handed Ketut the fee, in cash, for the orchestra’s work. At least, she thought, they had been well paid.

  On the set five pairs of beautiful Balinese girls scattered flower petals on a strip of crimson carpet. Out of shot, set dressers sprayed the temple garlands with water in an attempt to stop them wilting under the hot sun. Miraculously, the attendants were wrapped after just two takes.

  ‘Okay, people, let’s have lunch,’ called the first assistant.

  Within three minutes the service tent was full of ravenous crew. Ketut and the others politely took this influx as a signal to leave. Connie went with them to the bus.

  ‘We play again on Tuesday? You can come?’ Ketut asked her.

  Tuesday was their regular evening for music.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Connie said. It was one of the best times of her week.

  She stood and waved as the bus bumped down the ricepaddy track. The mother and daughter who were working in the paddy straightened their backs to watch too. They had been joined by several more women.

  In the service tent Angela was asking Tara, the pretty agency producer, what she thought they might do about the British actress who was playing the bride. She had spent the morning confined to her bathroom at the hotel. She must have eaten something that disagreed with her, Marcus Atkins remarked. The creative team sniggered.

  ‘I’ve absolutely no idea,’ Tara sighed.

  On their way out later, Angela said to Connie through clenched teeth, ‘If that damned woman says she has no idea once more about what is supposed to be her bloody job, I’m going to hit her.’

  ‘She’s getting a great tan, though,’ Connie laughed.

  In the absence of any bride, the afternoon was given over to the bridegroom and his friends. They marched out of wardrobe splendid in starched white jackets with red head-cloths knotted over their foreheads. Tara sat up in her chair at the sight of them and slipped her sunglasses down over her nose.

  It was a complicated reaction shot. The men were supposed to be waiting in profile in a proud, anticipatory little group for the big moment, the first sight of the bride following behind her petal-strewing attendants. Then, as they caught sight of her, the men were to register a sequence of surprise, disbelief and then dismay.

  Once the camera had captured all this the view then shifted to the other perspective.

  The bride’s father – an approximate Prince Charles look-alike – was to be kitted out in full morning dress. On his arm would come the bride, dressed in white meringue wedding dress with a bouquet of pink rosebuds and a dangling silver horseshoe, blonde ringlets framing her face within a froth of veil.

  With the establishing shot Connie’s music was to segue into a suggestion of ‘Here Comes the Bride’, then dip into a minor key to match the surprise and dismay, and end in a clatter of discordant notes. Then, on the screen would appear the bank’s logo and the words ‘The Right Time and the Right Place. Every Time. Always.’ To the accompaniment of a long, reverberating gong-note.

  ‘It’s advertising,’ Angela said drily.

  The day wore on. After five or six takes, Rayner Ingram declared that he was satisfied with the shot. The tropical dusk was beginning to collect at the margins of the paddy, and Mount Agung was a conical smudge of shadow on the far horizon.

  ‘That’s it for today, folks,’ announced the first assistant.

  The crew began dismantling the lights, and Simon Sheringham stood up and yawned. ‘Time for a drink, boys and girls,’ he said.

  ‘You are so completely right,’ Tara drawled.

  Angela murmured to Connie, ‘Are you joining us for dinner?’

  Angela’s duties would now shift to hostess and leisure facilitator for agency and clients, but her eyes were on Rayner Ingram who was stalking away towards the waiting Toyotas.

  ‘Do you need me?’

  Connie was thinking of tomorrow’s music – a reprise of the main theme for the closing shot of the bride’s father, the worse for wear, smoochily clinking his champagne coupe with a second glass crooked in the elbow of a grinning stone dragon.

  And she was also thinking of her secluded veranda and the frog chorus, which would sound like a lullaby tonight.

  ‘Well…not really,’ Angela said.

  ‘Then I think I might just quietly go home.’

  ‘Doesn’t anyone else want a drink?’ Simon bellowed.

  An hour later, Connie sat on the veranda in her rattan chair and watched the darkness. It came with dramatic speed, filling up the gorge and flooding over the palms on the ridge. Packs of dogs barked at the occasional motorbike out on the road, and sometimes she could hear a squeak of voices from Wayan Tupereme’s house, but mostly there were only the close, intimate rustlings of
wildlife in the vegetation and the conversation of frogs. Damp, warm air pressed on her bare skin. Connie was never afraid to be alone in this house.

  She ticked off a mental list.

  After tomorrow, there were two more linked commercials to shoot.

  It was going to be a hard week’s work, but now it was under way her apprehension had faded and she felt stimulated. It was good to have a surge of adrenalin. And then when it was all over the agency people and the crew and Angela would disperse, back to the cities, and she would still be here quietly making gamelan music with Ketut and his friends and looking out at her view.

  At the same time the Boom music started running through her head, and obstinately stayed there.

  Damn Simon Sheringham and Marcus Atkins.

  It wasn’t just the bank clients, though. It was the disorientating effect of finding London in Bali. It was being made to feel alive, and the way that that stirred her memories and brought them freely floating to the surface of her mind.

  Connie’s thoughts tracked backwards, all the way down the years to when she was a little girl, to the day after they moved into the new house in Echo Street, London.

  She was six, and her sister Jeanette was almost twelve.

  On their first night she had had a terrible nightmare. A faceless man came gliding out of the wardrobe in her unfamiliar bedroom and tried to suffocate her. Her mother rushed in wearing her nightdress, with her hair wound on spiny mesh rollers. Connie was shouting for her father but Hilda told her that her dad needed his sleep, he had to open the shop at eight o’clock in the morning, like he did every day.

  ‘I don’t like this bedroom. It’s frightening,’ Connie sobbed.

  ‘I’ve heard quite enough about that.’

  Connie had had a fight with Jeanette over who was to get which bedroom. Jeanette had won, as she always did.

  Hilda scolded her. ‘It’s a lovely room, you’re a lucky little girl. Now go to sleep and let’s have no more of this nonsense.’

  In the morning, Connie had decided to put the spectres of the night behind her. She would impress herself on Echo Street, somehow or other.

  She marched through the house, past Hilda who was clattering the breakfast dishes, out into the garden and past the puffy blooms of hydrangeas and hazy billows of catmint, all the way to the garden shed at the far end.

  She climbed the garden wall and made the daring leap to the shed roof, and then perched on the sooty ridge. From that vantage point, with its view of the neighbouring gardens, she had launched into a long, loud song that she had made up herself. She stood on the shed roof and bawled out her song to the backs of the houses and the railway line beyond the fence until Hilda shouted through the kitchen window that she was disturbing the whole neighbourhood.

  Almost forty years later, what Connie recollected most clearly about that day was the singing itself, and the complicated song, and the importance that both had assumed – like a reef in the turbulent currents of daily life. Music was already becoming her resort, in a family with a mother and father who would have had difficulty in distinguishing between Handel and Cliff Richard, and a sister who could not hear a note of music. Or any other sound.

  In the new front room at Echo Street there was the upright piano that had come with them from their old flat. No one else in the family ever played it and it was badly out of tune, but the instrument had belonged to Connie’s father’s mother and Tony always insisted that it was a good one, worth a bit of money. Hilda kept it well dusted and used the top as a display shelf for the wedding photograph (Tony Brylcreemed in a wide-shouldered suit, Hilda in a ruched bodice, a hat like the top off a mince pie, and very dark lipstick), a photograph of Jeanette as a newborn asleep in layers of pink knitwear, and one of Connie as an older baby, propped up in Jeanette’s lap.

  As soon as she was old enough to lift the gleaming curved lid for herself, Connie had claimed the piano for her own. When she perched on the stool her legs were too short to reach the pedals, but she loved the commanding position and the way the ivory and black notes extended invitingly on either side. She splayed her hands over the keys, linking sequences of notes or hammering out crashing discords. She could sit for an hour at a time, absorbed in her own compositions or in picking out the tunes she heard on the radio. To Connie’s ear these first musical experiments sounded festive in the quiet house.

  In time, music and musical composition became Connie’s profession.

  Success came early, almost by accident, with the theme music she wrote for a confectionery commercial.

  The Boom chocolate-bar tune turned into one of those rare hits that passed out of the realm of mere advertising and drilled straight into the collective consciousness. For a time the few bars turned into a shorthand trill for anything that was new and saucy and self-indulgent. Builders whistled it from scaffolding, children drummed it out on cans in city playgrounds, comedians referenced it in their acts. The confectionery company used it not only for Boom, but in a variety of mixes for their other products so that it became their worldwide aural signature. The royalties poured in and Connie’s small musical world acknowledged her as Boom Girl.

  Nowadays the money from her early work had slowed to a trickle, but Connie still earned enough to live on. When she needed more it was possible to make a rapid sortie from Bali to London and put in some calls to old friends like Angela. Quite often, she could bring the bacon of commissions home to Bali and work on them there.

  She had no idea how long this arrangement would remain possible, but Connie didn’t think about the future very much.

  The past was much more difficult to evade: it was there in her dreams, and the long bones and ridged tendons of it lay always just under the skin of consciousness, but in her quiet daily life among the villagers and the gamelan musicians she could easily contain it.

  Now Angela and all the people with her had landed like a spaceship on Connie’s remote planet, and they brought London and memories leaking out of the airlocks and into this untainted atmosphere.

  Not that her old friend was a taint, Connie hastily corrected herself, nor were her colleagues, or the business that had provided her with a living for more than twenty-five years. But their company, the banter and the jostling for position and the surge of adrenalin that came with them, caused her to examine her life more critically than she would otherwise have done. As she sat in the warm, scented night she was asking herself unaccustomed questions.

  Is this a useful way to live?

  Is this what I want?

  These questions seemed unanswerable.

  She shifted in her rattan chair and it creaked accommodatingly beneath her weight. She let her head fall back against the cushions and listened to the rustling of leaves and the throaty frogs.

  And am I happy?

  That was the hardest question of all. In this beautiful place, living comfortably among friends and making music with them, she had no reason for unhappiness.

  Except that this island life – for all its sunshine and scent and richness – did not have Bill in it.

  Connie had learned to live without him, because there was no alternative. But happiness – that simple resonance with the world that came from being with the man she loved – she didn’t have that, and never would.

  The thought of him, as always, sent an electric shock deep into the core of her being.

  Connie leapt from the chair and paced to the edge of the veranda. The invisible wave of leaves and branches rolled away beneath her feet, all the way down to the curve of the river.

  By concentrating hard she cut off the flow of thoughts and brought them back to the present. She had work to do, and that was a diversion and a solace as well. She had learned that long ago.

  She would do the work and maybe the questions would answer themselves, or at least stop ringing in her ears.

  There was a seven-thirty call in the morning.

  TWO

  Noah headed downriver, towards the battlements of T
ower Bridge and the pale shard of Canary Wharf tower in the hazy distance. It was the beginning of June, a warm and sunny early evening. The Embankment was crowded with people leaving work and heading home, or making for bars and cinemas. The girls who passed him were bare-legged, the skin above the line of their tops showing a pink flush from a lunchtime’s sunbathing.

  Noah had sat with his mother for over an hour. He linked his fingers with hers, not talking very much, rubbing his thumb over the thin skin on the back of her hand. Sometimes she drifted into a doze, then a minute or two later she would be fully awake again, looking into his eyes and smiling.

  ‘Do you want anything, Mum?’ he asked, leaning close to her so she could see his face.

  She shook her head.

  At the end of an hour, she had fallen into a deeper sleep. He sat beside the bed for a few more minutes, then slid his hand from beneath hers. He stood up carefully, bent down and kissed her forehead where the faint lines showed between her eyebrows.

  ‘I’ll be in tomorrow, same time,’ he murmured, for his own benefit rather than hers.

  Noah hadn’t worked out where he was going; he just wanted to be outside in the fresh air. Even though there was a thick waft of grease and fried onions from a hot-dog stand and a blast of beer and cigarette smoke rising from the crowded outdoor tables of a pub, it still smelled better out here than inside the hospital. He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked more slowly, threading through the crowds, his head turned towards the khaki river. A sightseeing boat slid by, trailing a noisy wake of commentary and the smell of Thames water.

  Under a plane tree, just where the shade from the branches dulled the glitter of dusty cobbles, one of the performance artists who regularly worked there was setting up his pitch. He was wearing a boxy robot costume sprayed a dull silver colour, and all the exposed skin of his body was painted to match. As Noah idly stood watching, the performer laid out a blanket and placed a silver-painted box on it, and positioned a small matching plinth behind the blanket. He made the arrangements with mechanical precision, his head stiffly tilted in concentration. Then he tapped a silver metal helmet over his silver-sprayed hair and took a step up onto the plinth. His arms rotated through a few degrees and froze in midair. A few of the passers-by glanced at him, probably wondering why an able-bodied individual should choose to spend an evening locked into immobility on a plinth instead of heading for the pub. Losing interest, Noah was about to walk on when he noticed the girl standing on the opposite side.