Constance Read online

  ‘I meant it, you know. About not surviving this week without you.’

  ‘You would have done,’ Connie laughed.

  ‘I don’t think so. Christ. Tara? Sheringham? And that other woman, you’d think no one in the history of the world has ever had the shits before this week. Sorry. Listen to me. I just needed a quick moan.’

  ‘It’s over now.’

  ‘Until the next one.’ They clinked their glasses and drank.

  ‘How is it with you and Rayner?’

  Angela exhaled. ‘Oh. You noticed?’

  ‘Well. Yes. Probably no one else did, though.’

  Angela’s smile was a sudden flash in the gloaming. ‘He’s amazing. We’ve been working together quite a lot, and we started seeing each other…it’s difficult because he’s still officially married to Rose and he’s very close to his kids, so we’re keeping the lid on it, especially on shoots, but in time I think we’ll be really good together. You know, he’s so special, such a talented director; that has to come first a lot of the time.’

  Connie did her best to receive this information optimistically. Angela was elated now, probably because Rayner had given her a sign for later. She was revelling in the anticipation of him slipping into her room, locking the door behind him. Connie could remember what all that felt like, more or less. But the provisos sounded too ready, and they were ominous.

  Not that I’m the one to judge, she thought.

  Maybe Rayner Ingram will turn out to be loyal, tender, considerate and generous. And maybe he will be all of those things for Angela and no one else. And her friend was enviably happy tonight, Connie could feel the pulse of it in her. Somehow everything had turned round since the tense ending of the afternoon, and she should be able to bask in the moment without anyone spoiling it for her with sage advice. Angela wasn’t a child, or any kind of innocent.

  ‘Don’t put his happiness before your own,’ was all Connie advised.

  ‘They’re the same thing,’ Angela breathed.

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  ‘Anyway, I wanted to talk about you, not me,’ Angela began again.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  Angela waved her glass. ‘About here. And why you stay, and what…Are you hiding from something, maybe? Out here. On your own, you know what I’m saying, ever since you split from Seb. Why don’t you come back to London? Be with your friends, everyone you know. Don’t your family miss you, apart from anything else? You’ve got a…sister, haven’t you? And that amazing flat. And it’s not as though you don’t get plenty of work. Honestly. You can’t stay out here for ever, you need to come back and…connect. Think about it, at least, won’t you? Aren’t you lonely? Don’t you ever think, is this what I really want?’

  Angela was warming to her subject. She was happy, and in her benign daze she wished the same for everyone. They had both had quite a lot to drink, Connie allowed. She tilted her glass, then gazed around at the glimmering garden. The frogs were loud, but the noise of the party was eclipsing them. Soon, probably, the other guests in the hotel would start complaining. That would be something else that Angela would have to deal with.

  ‘Connie, are you listening?’

  ‘Yep.’

  She was wondering which end to pull out of the tangle of Angela’s speech. She didn’t say that she only asked herself what she really, really wanted when her solitude was compromised.

  ‘I do come back to London. Quite often.’

  ‘You slip in and out of town like a…like a…’

  ‘Mouse into its hole?’

  ‘I was trying to think of something polite.’

  ‘I like my life.’ It was true, she did.

  ‘But – don’t you want – love, marriage? A family?’

  ‘I’m forty-three.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘No, then.’

  That silenced Angela for a moment. Eight years younger and uncomfortably in love, she couldn’t imagine any woman not wanting those things.

  Love, marriage, family?

  Love Connie did have, and she had come to the conclusion that she always would. Love could exist in a vacuum, without being returned, with nothing to nourish it, without even a sight of the person involved. It was always there, embedded beneath her skin like an electronic tag, probably sending out its warning signals to everyone who came within range.

  Yes but no. Available but not.

  The truth was that Connie had loved Bill Bunting since she was fifteen, and Seb hadn’t been the first or even the last attempt she had made to convince herself otherwise. She wasn’t going to marry Bill, or even see him, because he was another woman’s husband. He wouldn’t abandon his wife, and if he had been willing to do so Connie would have had to stop loving him. That was the impossibility of it.

  And family…

  It was significant that even Angela, who had been a friend for more than ten years, had to think twice about whether Connie had a family or not, and what it consisted of.

  That was the way Connie preferred it to be.

  She turned to look at Angela and started laughing.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Your expression. Angie, I know what you’re saying to me, and thank you for being concerned. Your advice is probably good. But I’m happy here, you know. I’m not hiding. And it’s very beautiful.’

  ‘Do you feel that you belong here?’

  ‘Do we have to feel that we belong?’

  There was a sharp scream and a splash followed by some confused shouting.

  ‘What now?’ Angela groaned.

  ‘It sounded like Tara.’

  ‘Will you think about what I’m saying, though?’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘It’s mostly selfish. I want you to come home so we can see more of each other.’

  Connie smiled. ‘I’d like that too. But I am home.’

  The evening was finally over. Connie walked the empty side-roads back to her house, the way ahead a pale thread between black walls of dense greenery. It was a still night, and she brushed the trailing filaments of spiders’ webs from her face.

  When she reached home, she saw that there was a small, motionless figure sitting on a stone at the point where her path diverged from her neighbours’. The figure took on the shape of Wayan Tupereme.

  ‘Wayan? Good evening.’

  He got to his feet and shuffled to her in his plastic flip-flops.

  ‘I have a grandson,’ he said. ‘Dewi had a son tonight.’

  Connie put her hands on his shoulders. The top of his head was level with her nose.

  ‘That’s wonderful news. Congratulations.’

  Dewi was his youngest daughter, who had married and gone to live with her husband’s family. Wayan and his wife missed her badly.

  He nodded. ‘I wanted you to know.’

  ‘I’m so pleased. Dewi and Pema must be very happy.’

  ‘We all are,’ the old man said. ‘We all are. A new baby. And a boy.’

  THREE

  ‘Nearly there,’ Bill said unnecessarily, but in any case Jeanette’s head was turned away from him. She seemed to be admiring the bitter green of the hawthorn hedge and the froth of cow parsley standing up from the verge. It had rained earlier in the day but now the sky was washed clear, and bars of sunshine striped the tarmac where field gates broke the line of the hedge. ‘Nearly there,’ he repeated. Conscious of the bumps in the road, he tried to drive as smoothly as he could so she wouldn’t be jarred with pain.

  Their house was at the end of a lane, behind a coppice of tall trees. Jeanette had found it, two years after Noah was born, and insisted that they buy it. Bill would have preferred to be closer to town but in the end he had given way to her, and he had to concede that she had been right. They had lived there for more than twenty years. Noah had grown up in the house, had finally left for university and then gone to live in London; Jeanette and he were still there. It would be their last home together. Lately the
y had talked about moving, maybe into town, to a minimalist apartment with a view of the river, but it had been just talk.

  He swung the car past the gateposts and stopped as close as he could to the front door. Jeanette did turn her head now, staring past him and up at the house. It had a steep tiled roof with mansard windows that had always made him think of eyes under heavy lids. A purple-flowered clematis and a cream climbing rose grew beside the front door, the colours harmonising with the dusty red brick of the house. Bill didn’t know the names of the varieties, but Jeanette would. She was a passionate gardener.

  He turned off the ignition and the silence enveloped them. He took his wife’s hand and held it. He wanted to crush it, to rub his mouth against the thin skin, somehow revitalising her with his own heat, but he didn’t. He just let her fingers rest in his.

  Jeanette’s eyes were on him now.

  ‘Are you ready to go inside?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  He helped her out of the car and she leaned on his arm as they made their way. Once they were in the hallway she indicated that she wanted to stop. The parquet floor was warmed by the late sun, the long-case barometer indicated Fair, there was a pile of unopened post on the oak table next to the big pot of African violets.

  ‘Good to be home?’ Bill asked.

  – Yes, Jeanette said. – Thank you.

  But he could feel the rigidity of her arm, and her neck and her spine. Her fingers dug into his wrist. Gently he urged her forwards, thinking that he would establish her in her chair beside the French windows so that she could look out into the garden while he made her a cup of tea. She let him lead her but instead of sinking into her chair she stood and gazed at the room. It looked as it always did.

  Her sudden movement startled him.

  Jeanette broke away and snatched up a stone paperweight that stood on the glass-topped table. She raised her thin arm above her head and brought it down. There was a crack like a rifle-shot as the glass shattered. She lifted the paperweight once more and smashed it down again, this time catching the rim of a porcelain bowl and sending it spinning to the floor. Jeanette swung the paperweight a third and a fourth time and the tabletop shivered into a crystalline sheet. She kept on and on, her arm pumping in a series of diminishing arcs until she had no strength left.

  Appalled, and with a shaft of pain in his own chest that left him breathless, Bill tried to catch her wrists. She threw the paperweight away from her and it thudded and then rolled harmlessly on the rug. She clenched her fists instead and pounded them against Bill’s chest. Her mouth gaped and her head wagged and gusts of ragged sobbing shook her body.

  Jeanette had been deaf since birth. The sounds she was making now were shapeless bellows of anguish.

  He managed to catch her flailing arms and pin them to her sides.

  ‘I know,’ he crooned. ‘I know, I know.’

  She was gasping for breath, tears pouring down her face and dripping from her chin. She was too weak to sustain the paroxysm of rage. It subsided as quickly as it had come, leaving her shuddering in his arms. Bill stood still and held her, smoothing the tufts of her pale hair. When he thought she could bear it he took out his handkerchief and dried her cheeks. At length he was able to steer her towards the chair and she sank down. He brought up the footstool and sat close against her knees.

  Her wrists and fingers were limp now. It cost her a huge effort to speak.

  – I don’t want to die.

  Her words came as loose, blurted outbursts. Bill was the only person she trusted to decipher what she said. Even with her son, she preferred to use sign language for almost everything.

  ‘I know,’ he told her. ‘You aren’t going to die yet.’

  Jeanette gazed into his face, searching for the truth.

  She had always told him, from when they first knew one another, that he was easy to lip-read because he had a generous face. Some people were costive, keeping their lips pinched in and biting their words in half as if they were coins they were unwilling to spend, but not Bill Bunting.

  – No?

  ‘No, you are not,’ he said firmly.

  The oncologist had told them that she might have six months. It could be rather less, just conceivably more, but six months was what he thought they should allow.

  Her head drooped.

  – I’m sorry, she said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a table.’ He smiled at her. If he could have changed places with her, he would have done it gladly.

  – For being ill. Leaving you and Noah.

  ‘You haven’t left us,’ he said. His hands cupped her knees.

  The first time he saw Jeanette Thorne was at a student union party. She was with someone else, a mathematician he knew only slightly. The room was crowded and there was barely enough space for leaping up and down to the punk band. Through a thicket of legs he caught a flicker of her red shoes, platform-soled with a strap across the instep. Then she jumped in the air and the hem of her skirt flipped up to reveal the tender pallor of her bare thighs. He had elbowed his way through the sweaty crowd so he could stand behind her to watch, and ever since that moment he had loved the long blade of her shins and the bluish hollow behind her knees.

  That was when they were both twenty-one.

  Later that evening he had found himself next to her, packed in a wedge of people between the wall and an angle of the bar. He had studied her pale, abstracted profile against the surging crowd. She looked as if she was deep in thought and he had longed to talk to her. In the end he had positioned himself at her shoulder and had murmured something into the bell of blonde hair that swung to her shoulders, some banal question about what she thought of the band. She ignored him, and he had been about to creep away, abashed. Then a girl he knew pressed her elbow into his ribs.

  ‘That’s Jeanette Thorne. She’s in Biological Sciences. She’s completely deaf, you know. She does everything, just the same. Amazing, really.’

  At that moment Jeanette turned her head and for the first time looked straight into his eyes. It was as if she could see into his head, and read the sexual stirring in him before he had even registered it properly himself. Words would have been entirely superfluous. Jeanette’s mouth merely curved in a smile that transformed the dingy bar into some antechamber to Paradise.

  ‘I am Bill,’ he said.

  She placed the flat of her right hand over her breastbone and gently inclined her head. A lock of hair fell forwards and revealed the thick plastic aid that curved behind her ear. Bill wanted nothing more than to lean forward and kiss that faulty ear and tuck her hair back into place.

  It was only when he came to know Jeanette much better that he understood that her voluptuous body and her mass of blonde hair were at odds with her personality. Jeanette looked wanton, but she was not. She was too determined to be more than just a deaf girl to let even sex distract her for long.

  He fell in love with that contradiction.

  – When’s Noah coming?

  ‘He’ll be here for dinner.’

  – Will you tell him?

  ‘I don’t exactly know yet.’

  Noah would have to be told that his mother’s cancer was terminal.

  It was a terrible word, that.

  They sat with the overturned bowl and the hurled paperweight on the rug beside them, holding on to each other and looking out into the garden as the sun drifted behind the trees. Permanence had turned into fragility. What had been certain was now a series of questions, neither spoken nor answered.

  Later, after Jeanette had gone to bed, Bill and Noah sat in the small, cluttered downstairs room that Bill used as his study. They had eaten dinner together, or rather the two men had eaten and Jeanette had made a flattened mound of her food and then placed her knife and fork on top of it.

  – I’m tired, she had confessed. Noah made the slow journey upstairs with her, and then came down again to join his father.

  Bill poured himself a whisky. ‘The news about Mum
isn’t good,’ he began tentatively.

  ‘What? What do you mean?’ The aggressive edge to Noah’s voice suggested that on some level he had feared this and was now intending to contest the information.

  ‘The surgeon who did the operation told us this morning. They found when they reached the tumour site that there was only a part of it they could remove.’

  The television in the corner was on with the sound muted. Familiar newscaster faces floated between footage of soldiers in Afghanistan and the highlights of a football match. Bill kept his eyes on the screen as he talked because he was as yet unable to look at Noah without the risk of weeping.

  ‘So there was another part of it that they couldn’t remove? What does that mean? Is she going to die? Is that what you’re trying to say?’ Noah’s voice rose.

  With an effort, Bill kept his steady.

  ‘They think it’s likely to be about six months.’

  Noah had a bottle of beer. He rotated it on the arm of his chair, staring as if he hoped each time the label came into sight it might read differently.

  ‘I don’t understand. Wait a minute. Are they sure? They can’t be certain, can they? I mean, you hear of people who’ve been given a certain amount of time to live and who get better against all the odds?’

  The surgeon had been quite precise. Bill did not think he would ever forget the way the man’s hands had rested on the buff folder of Jeanette’s notes, the neutral odour of the room that seemed to have had all the air sucked out of it, and Jeanette sitting upright in her chair intently lip-reading as the doctor delivered his news. She had turned only once or twice to Bill for confirmation.

  Bill said, ‘You do hear of that. I don’t want to give you false grounds for optimism, but if you can believe that she will get better, maybe that’s how it will turn out. I don’t know. All I do know is what the specialist told us today. He didn’t leave any room for doubt in my mind. I wish he had done. I wish I could say something different to you.’

  There was no rejecting this, after all. Noah was beginning to take in what his father’s words really meant.