Constance (30 page)

‘I don’t know anything about being a bridesmaid. Jeanette? What’s this? I don’t want to be a bridesmaid. Thank you, and all that.’

Patiently, Jeanette fluffed the blonde wings of her new shorter hairstyle over her ears, in case her hearing aids were protruding.

– Why not?

‘I just don’t. Get Jackie or Elaine.’

Hilda clicked her tongue. ‘Jackie’s due six weeks after the wedding, she can’t possibly do it. And Elaine, what will people think if she’s Jeanette’s bridesmaid and you aren’t?’

‘They’ll probably think how pretty Elaine is, and how lovely she looks in pale-blue satin. I’m just not doing it, all right? Anyway, wouldn’t it have been a nice idea maybe to
ask
me?’

Bill watched her. He wasn’t smiling now.

‘I’ve tried to talk to you about plans, I don’t know how many times, Connie. Haven’t we, Jeanette? You’re never, ever at that flat of yours, wherever it is. And even when someone else answers the phone they sound half-witted.’

That wasn’t surprising, Connie thought, given what went on. And it was true that she was rarely there. She was making unpredictable new friends, and it was fun to go out after work to drink with them in a noisy throng at the French pub or to fuel up with moussaka at Jimmyz.

‘And I can’t ring you at that place you work.’

‘No, please don’t. I’m not allowed to have personal calls.’

Connie felt fierce about GreenLeaf Music. After more than a year she was still only a glorified cleaner and messenger but she was learning, every day, and she was making herself useful. She was superstitiously afraid that if she relaxed her attention even for a moment, she would miss the one crucial detail that would enable her to impress Brian Luck or Malcolm Avery or one of the others.

‘Well, then. You see what I mean.’

Hilda was going to pursue the subject to the point of combustion, but Jeanette held up her hand.

– We’ll talk about it.

These days, Jeanette was very calm and practical.

After the apple pie and ice cream, Connie went out into the garden. She kicked damp leaves off the path and walked the short distance to the shed. A train rattled through the cutting and as another handful of yellow leaves drifted towards the earth she became aware that Bill had followed her outside. He took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one,
then stood on the path and looked at the cobwebs spun between the dead twigs of border plants.

‘Can I have one of those?’

He offered her the pack without comment, and struck a match for her. Connie inhaled and watched him through a slice of her hair.

‘What will
you
have to wear for this wedding?’

‘Lounge suit. Flower of some sort in buttonhole arrangement. Sheepish smile.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because I love Jeanette. Because if that’s all it takes for us to get married, it’s nothing. Even if I have to wear a Tarzan suit I’ll do it.’

Shit, shit, Connie thought. I didn’t want to hear that. The pain it caused her was like a meat skewer stabbing between her ribs straight into the thick muscle of her heart. She had to breathe in hard to stop herself actually wincing.

She managed to say, ‘I suppose you think that if I love Jeanette too, I should dress up in whatever she wants me to wear on her wedding day and be happy for her?’

Bill hesitated. ‘I think you should do what you decide is right, Connie.’

They were standing quite close together. There seemed to Connie to be a light directly behind Bill that gave him a bright outline and trapped tiny rainbow filaments in the nap of his clothing. She could see the fine hairs on his wrists and a pulse in his throat just above the line of his collar.

She wanted to confide in him about how she didn’t love Jeanette, not the way you were supposed to do when you were sisters, because sometimes she hated her and the rest of the time she felt mostly indifferent. She didn’t think he would even be that surprised. Bill had always given her the impression that he noticed and understood what went on at Echo Street. But the very idea of mentioning love, and Jeanette and
herself, and including Bill in the equation, was much too dangerous.

She said with her teeth clamped together, ‘I’ll do what’s right, then. I’ll be a bridesmaid if I have to.’ But I’ll be doing it for you, she silently added. Just for you.

To her dismay, and choked delight, Bill put one arm around her and drew her close as she had seen him do with Jeanette.

‘Good,’ he said into her ear.

Connie shivered. She pulled away from him, hard, and threw the glowing end of her cigarette into the next garden. Bill watched its trajectory.

‘You should have put that out. You could start a fire.’

‘It’s soaking
wet
everywhere.’

‘But the man next door might just have left a crate of firelighters on his lawn.’

‘Yeah,’ Connie said. They both started laughing.

Before she left Echo Street that afternoon she told Jeanette and Hilda that she’d do it.

‘Well, now you’re talking sense, thank goodness. Why would any girl not want to be her sister’s bridesmaid?’ Hilda wondered.

Jeanette squeezed her arm with unusual warmth.

– I’m glad. Thank you
. ‘All right. Just promise me that it won’t involve powder blue or baby pink.’

A busy period followed. GreenLeaf were commissioned to compose and record the music for the television serialisation of a Le Carré novel, and Malcolm Avery’s solution required a choir of twenty gospel singers that Connie had to book and then look after for two days. Next she found herself flying to Switzerland at two hours’ notice, to dress up as a Bavarian milkmaid and sing on camera for a chocolate ad. This was the first time she had been abroad. On the plane
home one of the other musicians, drunk on duty-free whisky, told her that he loved her. It was fun. Connie was having a good time.

From a swatch of fabrics posted to her by Jeanette she chose a pale gold not-too-shiny satin. She examined the rough sketch that accompanied the material. The dress looked as if it would at least be quite plain, close-fitting, nothing too extreme.

The next thing she heard, she was summoned to a measuring and preliminary fitting. Jeanette’s dress and her own were being made by the sister-in-law of old Mrs Polanski, Connie’s one-time piano teacher. The dressmaker lived somewhere not very accessible, in Bow, and Hilda told Connie that to save time Bill would give her a lift from work. He was going to be in the West End that afternoon, and he could drive her out to Mrs Tesznar’s.

Connie walked down the gritty stairs. There was a session in progress, and a clash of cymbals and then a ponderous drum roll made the walls vibrate. She saw Bill from above, sitting on the battered sofa with musicians dashing past him and a slice of busy street visible through the open door. He was chatting to Sonia who worked on the reception and switchboard.

‘Hi,’ Connie said. He stood up at once.

‘Hi. Are you ready to leave?’

‘Yes, let’s go before anyone finds something else for me to do.’

‘Bye, Bill,’ Sonia called. She gave Connie a wink.

Outside it was smoky and damp, the lights were coming on and it was easy to remember that in only a couple of weeks’ time it would be winter-dark at five o’clock.

‘That’s an interesting place to work,’ Bill remarked. ‘Are you happy there?’

Connie skipped a couple of steps and he grinned down at her.

‘Yes. It’s really pretty cool, sometimes. Elvis Costello came in the other day with a keyboard player who was doing some work. He sat in reception in exactly the same place as you. Where’s your car?’

‘On a meter in Wardour Street. Actually, there’s been a change of plan. Hilda rang, with a message from Jeanette. There’s some drama with her dress, the woman’s cut it too big and there’s more complicated work to do. I’m not certain, but I think that’s the gist. Anyway, apparently they’re going to concentrate on that this evening and start on yours next week. So you and I are surplus to requirements tonight.’

Connie stopped walking and Bill bumped into her. They apologised simultaneously and Connie hesitated.

‘Does that mean you’ve got to go?’

‘Not really. I thought we might have a drink,’ Bill said. ‘You’ll pass for eighteen,’ he added.

Connie skipped again, full of excitement at the legitimate prospect of having Bill all to herself.

‘It’s only a few
months
off. I’m in pubs all the time.’

‘Are you really? Come on, then. There’s a place off Regent Street that’s quite respectable.’

‘What? What do you mean? I don’t need
respectable.
’

‘Maybe not. But I do.’

They went to a wine bar, densely furnished with twining plants in wicker baskets. Connie found herself sitting opposite Bill in a ferny alcove scented with damp earth, drinking wine and talking, talking as if a cork had been drawn out of her as well as from the bottle. She told him about Switzerland and the flat in Perivale and some of the friends she had made since leaving Echo Street.

‘You’re very independent, Con.’

‘I am, aren’t I?’

She gulped some more of her wine, feeling that what she was saying was interesting, and that Bill was very easy to
talk to. People in work suits passed their alcove, carrying drinks. The volume of noise was rising.

‘Anyway, who else can you depend on but yourself?’

‘Family?’ he answered. ‘Friends?’

Bill talked a lot, too. She found out things about him that she had never known before. He had elderly parents and he had grown up as an only child in a suburb in the Midlands. His mother had suffered for years from agoraphobia, and rarely left the house.

Connie’s eyes widened. With her increasing freedom, she was just discovering the thrill of travel.

‘That’s tragic,’ she breathed. ‘Doesn’t she go
anywhere
?’

Bill grinned at her dismay. ‘No. And that means my dad doesn’t either. But they’re not unhappy, Con. There are many worse situations.’

He told her about the PR business he was setting up with two partners.

‘You can really make a difference. For instance, we’re doing some work for a charity that raises money to buy special wheelchairs made in Germany, for badly disabled children. We’ve just had a promise from the sports minister that he’ll look into putting some government backing into a nationwide series of wheelchair athletics, and we managed
that
because one of my partners is related in some way to Mrs T and got himself invited to a reception at Number Ten.’ He was leaning forward in his seat, full of enthusiasm. ‘It’s about connections, but not using those connections in a crass way. Of course, we have to take on some less – um –
radiant
accounts to underwrite that sort of work. But I love it, you know. You place a little piece in a newspaper for your client, and it’s worth thousands in direct advertising.’

Connie was dazzled. She could feel a hot wire running beneath her cheekbones. They had almost finished the wine, although Bill had drunk more than half.

‘It’s not that I’m fixated on making money,’ he said earnestly. ‘But I want to be able to take care of Jeanette, and our children if we have them. That’s not very modern-sounding, but it’s the truth. I know Jeanette could look after herself, of course she can, she’s the most determined and capable person I’ve ever met, but I want to make it so that she doesn’t
have
to. I do feel an extra responsibility because she’s deaf. Not that we’ve ever talked about it. She wouldn’t want to admit that her deafness makes any difference and I suppose I’ve joined her in a kind of conspiracy that it doesn’t matter, doesn’t really even exist. I’ve never spoken about this to anyone. Do you mind, Connie?’

‘No.’

Yes. But she didn’t want him to stop confiding in her.

‘It’s so good to talk to you. I can tell you that before I asked Jeanette to marry me, I thought very hard. But the deafness and her determination are so much part of the person she is, I can’t untangle them. I can’t say to myself I love this part of her and if she wasn’t that it would be easier for me. She’s a whole person and that’s the person I’m going to marry, and once I’d worked that out, it was simple. I knew what I had to do. I won’t let her down, you know. You can rely on that. I do love her very much.’

Bill drank the last inch of his wine. When he put his glass down his hands rested on the tabletop and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to Connie to reach out her own to cover them.

‘I know,’ she said. Although she did wonder,
So why do you need to say it
?

She stared very hard at some drops of wine that had spilled on the varnished wood.

He squeezed her hands and then released them.

‘Well. Time. I’ve got my car, too. I shouldn’t drive before having something to eat.’ He hesitated. ‘I wonder – shall we
go somewhere and have dinner? I know you’ve got to get home. But at least it’s not all the way from Bow.’

‘Yes, let’s do that,’ Connie said hastily.

They went to a place a few doors further down the street. There were red tablecloths and oversized pepper grinders, and they ordered food without Connie paying an instant’s attention to what it was going to be. They were both reminded of La Osteria Antica and Uncle Geoff, and Bill did such note-perfect imitations of Uncle Geoff and the waiter’s Italian that Connie coughed into her third glass of wine and Bill had to thump her on the back until she caught her breath. She mopped her eyes with her napkin.

‘You’re not about to choke to death, are you?’ he asked.

She nodded, and laughed some more.

As they ate they went on talking. There seemed to be a lot to say, and there were none of the awkward pauses or sudden speaking over each other or moments of incredulity at what the other person was saying that Connie was used to with other men. It was like a dream to be facing Bill across the red tablecloth, sharing an order of fried potatoes, and at the same time it felt as natural and easy as it had in the wine bar.

This was an evening when nothing could go wrong, whatever she said or did. She was slightly drunk, but it was happiness and not wine that made her feel giddy.