Constance (45 page)

The taxi driver was waiting for her in the line outside Arrivals. Connie waved and he pulled over. ‘Back to the village,’ she told him.

Noah was driving home from Surrey. He stared at the lines of rush-hour traffic but he couldn’t get his mother’s changed face out of his mind. In the two weeks since he had last seen her, she had faded and shrunk. Her skin was like stretched tissue paper over knobs of bone. Instead of firing questions at him and demanding to be told the latest details
of his life, she was content to sit quietly and hold his hand.

‘Mum? Tell me all about Bali. What was it like?’

–
Beautiful
, she smiled. ‘Do you feel rested?’

–
Yes
, she agreed, but he knew that she said it only to please him.

‘Okay,’ Noah murmured. He squeezed her brittle fingers.

– How is Roxana?

‘She’s fine. Very good. She’s still working for Auntie Connie’s friend, in the film business.’

Jeanette didn’t ask any more, whereas once she would have wanted to know all about it.

‘Dad? She looks terrible,’ Noah burst out when they were alone together.

‘The flights were very hard for her,’ Bill said.

‘She’s…’ Noah began, then stopped. He had been about to exclaim,
She’s going to die
. It was stupid; he had known for months. But it was not until now, this minute, that he properly understood what dying was going to mean.

‘I should have come with you to Bali,’ he said despairingly. ‘I didn’t realise.’ Instead he had gone to meetings, and played football, and made love to Roxana.

Bill smiled at him. ‘Bali was very good, for all three of us. You’d have enjoyed it, but it wasn’t essential for you to be there.’

Noah absorbed this. ‘Was it all right with Auntie Connie?’

‘Yes,’ Bill said. ‘It was.’

Noah blinked, but he couldn’t see properly to drive. He pulled over and called Roxana on her mobile.

‘Where are you, Rox?’

‘Still at work. How is your mother?’

‘She’s very weak. Not seeing her for two weeks has made me realise how fast she’s going.’

‘That’s bad, Noah. I’m really sorry.’

‘What are you doing? I want to see you.’ He needed very much to hold her and let some of her life and strength seep into him.

‘I was going back to the apartment. But I’ll meet you. We can have a drink and talk.’

He smiled, fastening on to the prospect. ‘I’ll be there in an hour.’

They went to a pub they both liked. Nowadays Roxana knew all about how to order beers and which ones Noah preferred. She came back to their table and set his drink in front of him.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Cheers.’

‘Good health,’ Noah said sadly.

They had several drinks. Roxana listened to him talk about his mother, but she didn’t try to offer too much sympathy. She just accepted what was happening, and Noah thought that she did it in just the right way. He knew that he loved her, and looking at the angle of her thigh and the way her forearm lay along the back of an empty seat he was even more strongly aware,
right now
, of how much he wanted to fuck her.

He shifted in his chair.

His mother’s hold on life was loosening, and his response was to feel an overwhelming need for sex? Was that shocking, or was it perhaps the normal, selfish response of those who were still healthy?

‘Roxana?’

‘Yes, Noah?’ Her mouth curved in a smile he recognised. She knew what he was thinking.

He leaned forward, caught her by the lapels of her jacket with the big buttons and drew her an inch closer.

‘Can we go back to Limbeck House?’

Noah didn’t feel particularly easy about using Auntie Connie’s place, but Andy was in the flat in Hammersmith and Auntie Connie herself was still out in Bali, so it wouldn’t matter that much.

Roxana’s forehead touched his.

‘Why not?’ she teased him.

In the mirrored lift as it rose to the top floor, Noah trapped Roxana in a corner. She pretended to dodge him, then crooked her arms to draw him closer.

‘Ha ha, now I have you,’ she murmured.

The lift doors parted and they stepped out into the lobby. A slit of window gave a different view of the city from the one inside the apartment. Roxana lingered to gaze at the chains of lights separated by mysterious wells of darkness.

‘Look, it’s so beautiful.’

‘I’ve seen it.’ Noah’s mind was on other matters.

‘Hey. Wait a minute. Let’s go inside.’

Roxana searched her bag for the keys, found them, and singled out the heavy Chubb. She fitted it into the lock, laughing a little because she had drunk enough to find the process a challenge. She turned the key to the left, expecting the familiar resistance and then a click, but instead the key refused to turn at all. The door was already unlocked.

Frowning now, she let her shoulder fall against it. The very slight give indicated that the Yale latch was in place.

When she went out to work she must have forgotten to secure the Chubb.

She fitted the Yale without difficulty and the door smoothly opened. She turned on the lights and the white walls were flooded with brightness.

She knew that she hadn’t forgotten to lock up properly, that was just the explanation she allowed herself to reach
for, but at first glance everything seemed as it always did. Relieved, Roxana took a few steps forward into the big room. Noah turned towards the bathroom and she continued down the corridor towards Connie’s music room and bedroom.

And then she saw the open doors and she knew that the worst had actually happened.

The tidy work area had been turned upside down. The computer and the keyboard had gone. File cabinets and drawers stood open and the floor was a drift of music manuscripts and papers and strewn debris. She had no idea what else might have been taken.

A tide of horror swept through Roxana. She wanted to run and bury her head, but she made herself walk on into Connie’s bedroom.

Every drawer and cupboard stood open. The mattress had been pulled off the bed. Clothing and lingerie and photographs and emptied boxes had been flung everywhere.

She pressed the heels of her hands into her stinging eyes, then looked again.

The devastation was still there.

She walked back to the big room, although her legs were shaking.

Noah was standing by the window.

‘What?’ he demanded as soon as he saw her face. ‘What’s happened?’

Roxana’s hands were at her mouth.

‘A bad thing.’ In her anguish, language escaped her. She couldn’t remember the English words for burglar or break-in.

In her room, the mess was the same as in Connie’s but Roxana had nothing worth stealing. Her savings were in the bank, thanks to Connie’s intervention. Even her beach postcard was still on the wall beside her bed.

Noah was at her shoulder. ‘Shit, look at this place,’ he breathed.

Cold shockwaves were breaking over Roxana, and the breath was torn out of her as if she were fighting the Suffolk sea all over again.

‘It is my fault, it is my fault,’ she kept repeating. The whole picture now played itself out in her mind.

Noah put his hands on her arms. ‘You’ve been burgled. How did they get in?’

Roxana could see it all. She was standing over there by the kitchen counter, where she had made unwanted tea for Cesare, and then tried to kick Philip in the balls. The evening’s silly golden glow of champagne and sumptuous food had already faded into the dull reality of stale old bargains and men wanting sex from her. Philip had muttered that he would use the bathroom before Roxana threw them out, and she had let him go.

She had stood there and allowed Cesare to soft-soap her with apologies.

Philip must have crept down the corridor and gone swiftly through Connie’s belongings. And somewhere in a drawer he must have discovered a set of keys. How perfectly delighted he would have been with that.

Roxana screwed her eyes shut. If only she and Noah could be coming up in the lift again, with everything still fine, before she had betrayed Connie’s trust in her.

‘How can it be your fault?’ Noah insisted. When she looked again he was picking up clothes from the floor, laying them on the overturned mattress.

‘Come and see in Connie’s rooms.’

He followed her.

‘Shit,’ he said again. ‘Look, we shouldn’t be touching anything. How did they get in? The front door was locked, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Roxana said miserably. ‘I mean, no. I’m sure it was the men who did it.’

‘
What
men?’

‘I asked them up here.’ She could easily have cried, but she kept her neck and mouth frozen. She could have tried to tell a lie, but honesty seemed the last thing she had left to offer.

Noah gazed at her. ‘Go on.’

‘Mr Cesare Antonelli,’ she whispered.

‘Who is he?’

‘A film director.’

Disjointedly, while Noah still stared at her, Roxana told him about the evening.

‘Nothing happened, Noah. I know I was foolish. I was thinking about movies, about maybe being a model. They said I could be.’

‘I thought you were pretty streetwise, Rox, but you still brought them up here, to Auntie Con’s place? What were you thinking?’

‘Nothing. I got rid of them. But one of them, the bad one, I let him go to the bathroom.’ She pointed.

Noah let out a long sigh.

‘Noah, I am so sorry. I…wanted to seem like a London girl. I let them think that this was my place. I wanted to be like your Auntie Con.’

‘Well, you aren’t, are you?’ His voice sounded hard. ‘Right. Let’s think. We’ve got to start by calling the police. You’ll have to tell them everything.’

Roxana sank down onto a chair. She was afraid of the police. At home, they were not the people you looked to for any help.

‘And then we’ll have to telephone Auntie Con. What’s the time in Bali?’

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

‘We’ll have to deal with everything. I don’t want to tell my parents. I don’t want Dad to have to think about anything except Mum.’

‘I am sorry,’ she said again.

Noah took out his mobile, frowned at it, then tapped out 999.

FIFTEEN

Bill stood at his kitchen window and watched the sun rise. The branches of the beech trees formed a dark lattice against the dishwater sky, but then a shaft of light suddenly caught them and they glimmered with rainwater. He was holding a mug of tea; when he looked down it was with surprise because he couldn’t remember how it had got there.

The tea was stone cold, and his bare feet were cold on the tiled floor.

He listened, straining his ears. The house was silent, and the silence had a massive quality as if the pressure it exerted on the doors and windows might cause them to fly open.

Upstairs, Jeanette lay seeming to sleep, in the bed where he had finally left her.

The gorge was a ripple of leaves, and from her chair on the veranda Connie could hear the crisp, leathery rustle as a quick breeze sprang up.

In the house the telephone began to ring.

She put down her book and padded inside to answer it. The floorboards were striped with afternoon sunshine.

‘Connie.’ His voice with a break in it.

‘I’m here.’

‘Jeanette died about three hours ago. I lay there and held her for an hour or so. I didn’t want to come down and leave her all alone, Con, but she’s dead, you know?’

Connie took in the words.

‘Oh, my darling.’

It wasn’t clear to her whether she meant Bill or her sister.

‘Last night she was restless and she couldn’t find any way to lie that didn’t hurt her poor bones. I brought up all the pillows in the house and put them underneath her to make the bed softer. I held her hands, and she smiled at me and signed
good night
. Then in the middle of the night I knew she was dying.’

‘It’s too soon.’

He raised his head at that. ‘No. She’s been ill for a long time.’

‘I wish I had been there.’

Bill said, ‘I think she would have preferred it this way. It’s as if she left you straight from Bali. She wanted it to come, you know. She probably willed it. That will of hers was still strong, even at the end.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got to go now, Connie.’

‘Is Noah with you?’

‘It’s still early. I thought I’d let him finish his night’s sleep.’

‘I don’t want you to be on your own.’

‘I’ll call him now. Jeanette’s nurse will be here in an hour.’

‘All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

‘Connie, she’s gone. She’s dead,’ he repeated, trying to familiarise himself with the words. ‘There is no reason to hurry over here. I don’t think the funeral can be for a week or so.’

‘No,’ Connie agreed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ve lost her too. I’m not thinking properly. It’s strange in this house. It’s so quiet. The silence makes me think of her silence.’

Behind her eyes, Connie felt the first tears gathering.

After Bill had said goodbye, she went to sit down at her keyboard.

An unexpected phrase of music was running in her head and she picked out the sequence of notes, then repeated them. There was some of the deep humming of the gongs from the village cremation, overlaid by a shimmer of metal, and she frowned in the effort to harness her imagination to a lyrical line. The fingers of her left hand spanned the keys as she reached with her right for a sheet of manuscript paper and scribbled
For Jeanette
.

The music seemed to be caught like floodwater behind a dam. As she struggled to release it Connie lost track of the time. She reached out once to switch on the lamp, but she was surprised when she looked up for the second time to see that it was now pitch dark outside. The night was noisy, as it always was, with dogs barking and the conversation of frogs.

When the telephone rang beside her she thought it was Bill again.

‘I’m here,’ she said.

‘Ms Thorne?’ an unfamiliar voice asked.

‘Who is this?’

‘This is Lloyds Bank.’

She listened in bewilderment. A bank official who might have been in Scotland or Cornwall was telling her about some unusual spending patterns relating to her credit cards.