Constance (25 page)

‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Just like that, it happened so fast. I couldn’t believe my own eyes.’

The torrential rain slowed the traffic and it took a long time to get back to Echo Street.

They trudged into the house, carrying the bags and chairs. Jeanette stood in the kitchen, seeming to notice her bloodstained clothes for the first time. She stared down at her blouse.

– I need to change.

‘Come upstairs, love. You should have a hot bath,’ Hilda insisted. Now that they were back in the house she was regaining her equilibrium.

When Hilda and Jeanette had both gone Bill carried out the folding chairs and put them away in the shed in the garden. Connie wondered what she could do, and then remembered that at times like this people made tea. She filled the kettle and clicked the switch, and while she was waiting for it to boil she tipped some of the picnic litter into the kitchen bin. Bill came back, shaking off the rain.

He said, ‘Tea, that’s a good idea’, so warmly that she felt useful. Carefully she poured a cup and passed it to him.

He drank some and looked at her. ‘You look very pale.’

Images of the accident flickered in her head.

‘I’ve never seen anyone dead before.’

‘Neither have I,’ he told her.

‘Was the…was the bike man going to die as well?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Jeanette comforted him.’

‘Yes, she did. She was amazing.’

Connie hunched her shoulders. Everything to do with the day was raw, bulging and swollen, and she felt as if the slightest pressure would puncture a membrane and out would come spilling all kinds of things that she feared and tried to keep hidden because they were bad and secret and known only to her. Her jealousy of Jeanette was only one of them.

‘Connie…?’ Bill murmured. Then he put down his tea and gathered her in his arms. He pulled her closer until her cheek and the corner of her mouth creased up against the collar of his shirt, which was warm and slightly damp and smelled of him. He combed his fingers through her hair and rocked her against him, settling her head in the crook of his shoulder. He rubbed her shoulders and her back.

‘You’re shocked. I’m not surprised. Listen. Terrible things happen, Connie. They happen every day, and there’s no reason, and all you can do is try to help out and then be grateful that it wasn’t you or anyone you love in that car or riding the motorbike. You have to just go on doing what you do, and try to do it as well as you can, and be happy doing it. That’s all life is.’

To her surprise, Connie’s body was loosening and relaxing.

She whispered, ‘Yes. I know.’

Her shoulders dropped as she felt her weight supported in Bill’s arms. They stood locked together, gently swaying. Then a different feeling spread through her, like a tide of warm honey, thick and slow. Connie had long ago left
innocence behind, but none of the boys she had known, dirty-minded and fumbling and of a different species as they were, had ever made her feel like this.

She wanted nothing more than to turn her mouth to discover Bill’s bare neck beneath the shirt collar. Then she wanted to lick her sister’s fiancé’s skin, and measure out her hips and the length of her legs against his. Somewhere close at hand, tantalisingly close, mysterious and yet obvious, there was a connection that would answer all the questions that teemed around her.

For a second, a brief interval of delight as brilliant as a flash of lightning, she was certain that Bill felt the same and wanted exactly what she did.

She felt rather than heard him draw in a breath, and they seemed poised on the edge of a great space through which they might fall or fly.

Then he abruptly withdrew. He patted her hair with the flat of his hand as if he were her uncle, and at the same time pecked her on the cheek.

He was suddenly so awkward, so unlike himself, that she knew he was trying to disguise feelings that were not avuncular at all. She was bewildered, and it was bewilderment that made her suddenly want to scowl and even punch him with her knuckles, as if she were nine years old again.

She stared at him with reddened cheeks.

‘Drink your tea,’ Bill said gently, moving away from her and leaning back against the pock-marked old kitchen cupboard. ‘Put some sugar in it. Sugar’s good for shock.’

Connie turned her back on him and began unpacking the picnic dishes that were smudgy with river water. There was a frond of weed trapped between the tines of a fork. Her racing heart slowed, and she began to breathe again.

A little later Jeanette came downstairs. She was pink and shining from her bath, and her dressing gown didn’t quite
cover her breasts. Her damp hair was pinned up on the top of her head, but tendrils escaped to frame her face. Hilda came too, having changed her clothes and dabbed some make-up on her face. They all sat down round the kitchen table and began to talk about the accident. Hilda reached across for Connie’s hand and squeezed it.

‘Don’t be too upset, love, will you?’

Jeanette smiled at Connie too.

– You were good. You ran for help. They came quite quickly, didn’t they?

‘It seemed a long time to me,’ Bill said.

He and Jeanette kept glancing at each other, and even though they were talking about death, about how one person was dead and another might die, they couldn’t help covertly smiling. All of them knew how capable Bill and Jeanette had both shown themselves to be in the emergency. They were justified in feeling proud of themselves and even excited. Connie was thinking that she and Hilda had appeared in quite a different light.

It was almost as if
she
were Hilda’s real daughter and not just the adopted one, which was another disorientating thought.

Dry-mouthed, Connie looked down at her plate.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see Jeanette’s left hand with the diamond ring lightly resting on Bill’s thigh. She knew with sudden and absolute certainty that she could not go on living at Echo Street. If she stayed here she would have to watch Bill and Jeanette touching and smiling and kissing each other. She wanted Bill to do those things to her. And Bill was her sister’s fiancé.

I have to get out of this place. Just as soon as I can.

Suddenly she stood up. ‘Do you feel sick, Connie? You’ve gone white.’

‘I’m okay. I’m going upstairs.’

She closed her door and sat down on the bed. She tried
to empty her head of sudden death at the roadside. She thought about Bill instead, guiltily and hungrily.

The following Saturday, the day after Jeanette learned that she had gained a 2:1 in Biological Sciences, Connie turned sixteen. The planned family celebration was dinner with Uncle Geoff, Auntie Sadie, Elaine and Jackie in an Italian restaurant, the invariable festivity for each of their birthdays. Connie got up early, before either Hilda or Jeanette, and left a note on the kitchen table saying that she was going up to the West End to do some shopping and would be back in good time. By ten o’clock she was in Soho.

She had no idea, back then, what a fluke it was to find the manager of GreenLeaf Studios in his chaotic office cubicle at any time on a Saturday. That her appearance at his door should coincide with his tired acknowledgement that they could do with a kid to help out, somebody who wouldn’t mind a bit of hard work and didn’t have too many ideas above his station, seemed no more than an average stroke of good luck. It was only when she was established in the business that she understood the scale of improbability. Once she had her foot inside his office, though, she had been determined not to give in.

‘I can do the job. Just let me try, and I’ll show you,’ Connie begged. Something had happened within Connie since witnessing the accident. She defined it approximately to herself as
What have you got to lose?
You could choose to be polite, you might feel that it wasn’t right to stand in a man’s office and insist, refusing to budge until you got what you wanted, but that would achieve nothing and nobody really cared about you being a nice, considerate person, did they?

Bill found out that the motorcyclist had died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

Jeanette turned away in tears when he told them, but
Connie just gazed back at him thinking that it could happen to her tomorrow, to him, to Jeanette, to anyone at all. The way it had happened to Tony. You might as well live the way you wanted while you were here and while you could. She was tired of waiting, and now there was the other reason as well. Sometimes, when she looked at Bill she found that he had been looking at her first. They would both turn away, sharply, and Connie felt her face burning.

‘Shall I start now? Look, I could make you some coffee and then I could clean up a bit,’ she persisted. The GreenLeaf Studios were a mess. There were dirty cups and full ashtrays and collapsed heaps of tapes, the waste bins overflowed and the kitchen cubicle smelled of sour milk.

‘We’ve got cleaners,’ Brian Luck said.

‘They’re not very good, are they?’ Connie rejoined.

Brian laughed. ‘Go on, then. See those tapes? Check the label, or put them in the player there, find out what’s on ’em, work out a filing system. Can you do that?’

‘Yes.’

She worked all day. At lunchtime, Brian went out for a sandwich and brought one back for her. While she ate it they talked about music. He knew a lot, but he also listened quite kindly to what she had to say about writing songs and singing with the band at school.

By six o’clock, when Brian said he was locking up, Connie had catalogued the tapes and made space on shelves to store them.

‘I’ll come in on Monday morning, shall I?’

Brian said he would have to consult his partners.

‘I’ll come anyway. They can’t decide without taking a look at me, can they?’

There were still three weeks to go before the school year ended. But Connie already knew that she wouldn’t be going back.

She was late getting home to Echo Street. Uncle Geoff’s new car was already parked outside when she jogged breathlessly up to the house. Geoff and Sadie were sitting with Hilda in the front room, Elaine had gone with Jeanette and Bill to the pub for half an hour while they all waited for Connie to reappear. Jackie wasn’t coming; she had been married for two years but whenever the name of her husband had been mentioned recently she sighed and looked up at the ceiling. Tonight it seemed that there was some kind of crisis. Sadie and Hilda had been discussing the situation in low voices while Geoff watched football on television.

Hilda jumped up. ‘Connie! Where have you been all day? You’ve worried us half to death. Your auntie and uncle have been here since seven o’clock.’

‘Sorry. I told you, I went up west. There wasn’t a bus for ages.’

Sadie was wearing tight cream trousers and a low-cut top. She checked her lipstick in her compact mirror then arched an eyebrow at Connie over the disc of gilt.

‘Happy birthday, love. Where’s your shopping? What did you buy?’

‘Thanks, Auntie Sadie. I didn’t really see anything I liked. Shall I just quickly run up and change, Mum?’

‘All right,’ Hilda sighed.

When Connie came down again, Jeanette and Bill and Elaine were filing in through the front door. Blushing, Connie submitted to birthday wishes and kisses from everyone except Bill. Bill didn’t kiss her, he just gave her his curly-mouthed smile.

When they were all crammed into the front room Uncle Geoff made a show of telling everyone to hush. Then from a carrier-bag he produced a package.

‘Now, young lady, this is from your Auntie Sadie and your cousins and me. Many happy returns.’

Connie took the package, shook it and listened to it. She knew that Bill was watching her. Hilda sat on the edge of an armchair, smoothing the folds of her skirt over her knees. Jeanette and Elaine leaned against the closed piano keyboard, looking alike except that Elaine was the ‘before’ version and Jeanette the ‘after’, in some advert for a miracle beauty product perhaps.

‘What is it?’ Connie murmured.

‘That’s for you to find out,’ Uncle Geoff smiled.

She undid the wrappings, and discovered a Sony Walkman.

Uncle Geoff’s presents to the Thornes were always generous to the point of being slightly embarrassing, because they highlighted the difference between what the two families could afford. Personal cassette players had only just come on to the market and Connie was amazed to receive one.

She went to Geoff and hugged him. ‘Thank you, Uncle Geoff.’

He put his arm round her waist and kept it there. ‘Sixteen, eh? Big day. It doesn’t seem a minute since you brought in this little scrap of a black-haired thing to show us all, Hilda, does it?’

There was a pause in which everyone seemed to be waiting for someone else to mention adoption, and at the same time willing them not to. Connie moved hastily to Sadie and hugged her too.

‘We’re all family, aren’t we?’ Sadie said, as if this point needed clearing up.

Geoff began showing Connie how the Walkman worked (although she knew already what every function was) and telling her that she must handle it carefully.

Bill said, ‘I’ve got a present for you, too.’

He handed over two small rectangular packages and Connie opened them to find the new Police and Ian Dury albums in cassette form. This gift of music seemed to speak
to her so personally that she couldn’t quite look at him in case she gave herself away. From beneath the veil of her hair she murmured, ‘How did you know about the Walkman?’

‘I heard,’ he said drily. This meant he had thought about her birthday, talked about it, and then gone to a record shop and made a choice just for her. He did it out of affection, nothing more, but she felt riven with love for him and with dismay at the impossibility of her situation.

It’s all right, she reassured herself. You’re going to move out. You won’t
be
here any longer.

‘Thanks a lot,’ she muttered.

To her relief Hilda and Sadie were getting ready to leave for the restaurant. Elaine went with Bill and Jeanette in Bill’s car, and Connie with Hilda in Uncle Geoff’s. His latest car was a silver-grey Jaguar that he parked right outside the window of La Osteria Antica, where he could keep an eye on it.