Constance (15 page)

She hurried through the rain from the bus stop to Echo Street, checking that the front-door key was securely in its place in the inner pocket of her blue zipper jacket. As she slid the key into the lock she heard the telephone ringing in the front room. This was unusual enough to make her fumble to turn the key more quickly and almost trip over the doormat as she catapulted herself inside, but the ringing stopped just as the door caught in a gust of wind and slammed shut behind her. Connie hung up her jacket on the hall stand and went into the kitchen. She knew that she was clumsy because Hilda was always telling her so, but she made herself a glass of orange squash without spilling a single drop of sticky concentrate. She shook droplets of water out of her hair and drank her squash. Hilda and Jeanette would be back soon. She rinsed the glass and upturned it on the draining board.

She was sitting at the piano, about to start practising her new scales, when the telephone started to ring again. It made her jump.

She told the woman caller that Mrs Thorne wasn’t at home. This was her daughter. Yes, Mrs Thorne would be back soon. Yes, she would get her to call this number as soon as she came
in. The woman was very insistent that Connie fetched a pen and wrote it down. She made Connie read it back to her, to make sure that she had noted it correctly. Mrs Thorne was to ask for Sister Evans. As soon as she came home, because it was urgent.

Connie replaced the receiver and went back to the piano.

The front door slammed again.

Hilda and Jeanette bundled down the hallway. Hilda’s umbrella rustled into the recess in the hall stand. Connie let her hands fall into her lap, then stood up and followed her mother and sister into the kitchen.

‘There was a telephone call,’ she began.

Hilda was unpicking the knot in the ties of her plastic rain hood.

‘Let me get in the house, Connie.’

‘It’s urgent.’

Hilda’s eyes flicked to her. ‘Well, what is it?’

Connie gave her the number she had written on the cover of the
Radio Times
. Ignoring Connie, Jeanette filled the kettle and put out two mugs and a jar of Nescafé. Hilda went into the front room to make the call, closing the door behind her.

Jeanette poured boiling water, clinked a spoon, unscrewed the lid of the biscuit jar. She sat down at the table and began to read a magazine. Hilda’s coffee mug stood on the kitchen counter waiting for her to come back.

Connie stared out of the window into the damp passage that separated their house from the next in the terrace. As the minutes passed she slowly became aware of a silence that drew all the oxygen out of the air. Her lungs felt tight with the change in pressure and she could hear the slow surge of blood in her ears. The only movement in Echo Street was Jeanette turning the pages of
Woman’s Own
.

After what seemed a long time, Connie followed Hilda.
At the closed door to the front room she cupped her fist over the doorknob and turned it, listening for the familiar click of the metal tongue. She pushed the door open and looked in.

Hilda was sitting in the armchair next to the telephone table. She was white, dry-eyed, frozen. Her eyes moved, settled on Connie as if she had never seen her before.

‘Mum?’

Hilda’s hands lifted as if to ward her off. Her tongue passed slowly over her lips.

‘Tony’s gone. He’s left us.’

Connie frowned. She knew this wasn’t possible. Tony was at the shop, just like always. ‘Gone where?’

‘Gone,’ Hilda repeated.

The telephone began shrilling again. With a shocking, uncoordinated lunge, Hilda launched herself at it. The white mask of her face suddenly split, broke up into teeth and tongue and twisted lips.

‘Sadie? Sadie, he’s dead.’

She was gripping the receiver with two hands but she was shaking so much that she could hardly hold it in place.

‘Tony’s
dead
.’

Connie took two steps backwards. She reached behind her with the flat of her hands, pressed herself against the wall and tried to retreat further as fragments and then huge chunks of her world began to rain down around her.

Hilda kept on repeating these two inconceivable words, louder and louder, while her sister on the other end of the line tried to make herself heard.

Suddenly Jeanette was there, in the doorway. Hilda was sobbing and coughing. Connie shrank, knowing instinctively that she couldn’t run to her mother. Jeanette’s head turned from one to the other. She couldn’t hear, even though Hilda’s voice was rising to a shriek.

Jeanette’s fingers came up to her lips.

–
Speak
, she signed.

Connie stuttered. Her mouth wouldn’t form any words. Isolated in silence and incomprehension, Jeanette turned wild with bewilderment and terror.

– Speak, speak.

She dug fingers like claws into Connie’s arms and shook her until Connie’s head banged against the wall.

‘It’s Dad,’ Connie screamed into her contorted face.

The funeral service was held at the crematorium near Thorne’s on the Parade. Tony’s brother and his wife came from Newport, Sadie’s husband Geoff took the day off from his garage business and drove his wife and daughters in from their detached house in Loughton, Mrs McBride came from Barlaston Road, and some of Tony’s old friends and shop owners and customers from the Parade gathered in the colourless room. Hilda and Jeanette and Connie sat in the front row of chairs and listened to a stranger telling the mourners what a devoted husband and loving father Anthony Thorne had been. Connie gazed at the plain coffin under its purple cloth and tried to believe that her father was lying inside it.

She was cold. She had felt either cold or hot ever since last Saturday when Auntie Sadie and Uncle Geoff had arrived at Echo Street and immediately called the doctor. While he was upstairs with Hilda, their auntie and uncle told Jeanette and Connie that their father had suffered a huge heart attack while he was carrying out the pavement stock. The son of the Pakistani newsagent had called an ambulance and Tony had been taken to the East London Hospital, but he had not survived the journey.

By the end of the stiff little funeral ceremony Connie felt as if she were frozen. Her jaw and neck seemed to be made of some splintery material that was nothing to do with her
own flesh and bone, and her eyes were dry as she watched the curtains briefly part and Tony’s coffin slide out of sight.

Jeanette was crying. Silent tears ran down her pale cheeks and Hilda’s arm protectively circled her shoulders, although it might equally have been that Hilda was using Jeanette to support herself.

After the cremation, and the inspection of the flowers laid out in the chilly wind with no grave to make sad sense of them, the mourners were invited back to Echo Street.

Mrs McBride and another neighbour from Barlaston Road had made sandwiches and finger rolls and Uncle Geoff had unloaded two heavy, clinking cardboard cartons from the back of his Jaguar. The front room and the hallway and even the kitchen filled up with sombre people in dark clothes who quickly held out their tumblers to a shopkeeper from the Parade as he circulated on Geoff’s instructions with a bottle of sherry in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other.

Hilda sat in the front room, bright spots of colour showing high on her cheeks, and gravely accepted condolences. The cousins, Jackie and Elaine, were seventeen and fifteen. Jackie was already working as a hairdresser, and her fair hair was done to lie very smooth and flat over the top of her head and then to spring out around her ears in a flurry of sausage-shaped curls. Elaine would soon be leaving school to go to secretarial college, and like her sister she was accorded semi-adult status. The two girls sometimes called their parents by their first names. Geoff had given them a glass of sherry each without any questions asked, and somehow Jeanette had taken one too.

The level of talk rose perceptibly as an hour passed. Connie sat awkwardly on the piano stool, holding a glass of orange squash. The people who nudged up against her ruffled her hair, or patted her shoulders with hands that seemed to grow hotter and heavier.

‘All right, my love?’ someone asked her.

‘Yes, thank you,’ Connie mechanically replied.

After a time Connie noticed that Jeanette and the cousins were missing, and guessed that they had gone upstairs together.

The door to Jeanette’s bedroom stood ajar. Jeanette was sitting on her green satin-covered eiderdown with Elaine holding her hand. Jackie was standing in front of her, combing out her hair with long, gentle strokes. Fine silvery-blonde feathers floated upwards, following the teeth of the comb, and Jeanette’s eyes were closed with the luxury of this tender grooming. Three sticky, empty glasses with nipped-in waists stood on the dressing table.

Connie edged into the room. The cousins glanced over their shoulders at her, then at each other. Nobody spoke.

‘Do my hair as well?’ Connie asked. Her voice sounded loud in her own ears. She hadn’t spoken much in the last few days.

‘Yours?’ Jackie said. Connie’s scalp immediately prickled, her dark hair seeming to spiral more tightly and thickly.

‘Yes. Will you?’

Jackie sighed, glancing again at Elaine.

‘I don’t think I can do much with it.’

Suddenly, Connie was angry. From feeling shivery with cold a flash of heat ran through her, making her face burn.

‘You know, you ought to be nice to me as well as Jeanette. My dad’s dead, too.’

Elaine’s face was flushed and her eyes looked strange. Her thumb massaged the back of Jeanette’s hand, moving in slow circles.

‘He wasn’t your dad.’

Connie saw that Jeanette’s eyes were open now. They were wide, and as blue as the sea.

‘What do you mean?’

Jackie shook her head in warning and the comb dropped from her hand.

Elaine’s flushed face turned darker, meaner.

‘You’re adopted, aren’t you?’

Connie looked from one to the other.

She understood in that moment a mystery that had always been there, nagging like an invisible bruise under the eventless skin of her life, and she also knew with perfect certainty that it had been a mystery to her alone.

She bent her head and saw the pale brown of her wrists emerging from the knitted cuffs of her jersey. She felt the dusty twists of her hair, and the narrowness of her shoulders and hips, and then she looked with her dark eyes back at Jeanette, and Jackie and Elaine. They all had pale fine hair, like their mothers’, and they had full breasts and hips and round blue eyes.

Jackie had drawn her lower lip between her teeth and Elaine looked hot and angry. Only Jeanette’s expression was unchanged; she had heard none of those words of Elaine’s that could never be withdrawn or unsaid, but she hadn’t needed to. She looked like an angel in a painting.

Connie turned and left the room.

She went into her bedroom, closed the door behind her and sank to the floor with her back against the wall. She took up the position out of habit, because it was as far as she could get from the cupboard and whatever lurked within it.

There was a roaring in her ears, like surf in a storm.

SIX

They were both older, but Bill was the same. He was the same as he always was, no matter how many years intervened, and just as necessary to her.

He held his arms out.

‘Thank you for coming, Con. I didn’t know whether I should tell you. It’s been worrying me for a long time.’

Connie lifted her head. He kissed her cheek, lightly and quickly, and then they studied each other’s faces. He cupped a shoulder with each hand, then gently released her. She saw that Bill had grown thin. There were lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, the same signs of age that marked her own, but the hollows in his cheeks were made deeper by the shadows of exhaustion. There was now much more grey than dark brown in his thick hair.

Connie said, ‘It’s much better that she told me herself. How is she?’

He shook his head. ‘Physically? As brave and determined as you would imagine. But she’s fighting a battle with herself as much as with the cancer. It’s difficult for her to accept what’s happening. If sheer willpower could change anything, she’d be healthier than you or me.’

‘Where is she?’

‘In the garden. She sits out there a lot of the time, communing with her plants. That seems to soothe her in a way not much else does. How are you, Connie? You look well.’

‘I am. But for this.’

‘Come and see her.’

Bill led the way through the house. Connie glimpsed a copper trough filled with pots of African violets and an expanse of polished parquet flooring divided into squares by the sun. It was very quiet.

‘I’ll leave you to talk to her,’ Bill said.

The French windows stood open. Jeanette was sitting to one side of the big garden in the shade of a copper beech tree, her head nodding. There was a rug over her knees and a newspaper had slipped to the ground at her feet. Connie walked quickly over the grass, but it seemed to take a long time to cover the few yards to her side. Even in the sunshine it felt as if she was wading against a strong current. Their last parting had been hostile. Neither of them had envisaged a reconciliation.

As soon as Connie’s shadow fell on the edge of the newspaper, Jeanette looked up.

– Here you are.

‘Here I am.’

Automatically they used the private, pidgin version of sign language that had been their way of talking to each other ever since they were children. Nowadays Jeanette wore tiny hearing aids, but they were tiring to use because as well as individual voices they amplified all the ambient sounds into a confusing roar. She preferred to rely on lip-reading with everyone except Bill; she could distinguish what Bill said even without looking at him. They had been listening to and talking and interpreting each other for more than twenty-five years.

– That was quick. All the way from Bali.

Connie did her best to smile through her shock at her sister’s appearance. The last time they met she had been plump, pretty, and now she looked like a woman whose flesh had all dissolved and seeped away. Instead of fitting closely her skin clothed her bones in a wrinkled sack. Her blonde hair, once her shining glory, was a cap of colourless tufts that barely concealed her scalp.