Constance (35 page)

‘What?’ Roxana repeated. Connie told her what the lifeboat did and she shook her head in amazement.

‘I think these brave men must be paid a lot of money.’ The boat was breasting the huge waves, heading straight out to sea.

‘No, it’s voluntary. They do it for nothing.’

‘My God,’ Roxana breathed. ‘My God.’

They watched it go.

‘I think I’m ready for a cup of coffee,’ Connie said firmly, once it was out at sea. She steered Roxana into the town. Shaking the drops of spray off their hair, they opened the door of a new coffee shop.

There were only two other customers, sitting knee to knee at a corner table away from the big windows that overlooked the street. Connie glanced at them, and then stopped in her tracks.

It was Angela with Rayner Ingram.

There was no way that either pair could pretend not to notice the other, although Angela and Rayner would clearly have preferred it.

‘Ange, hello,’ Connie called, trying to inject sympathy and apology into her smile. Angela looked as if she might have been crying. It was clear that they had been arguing.

‘
Connie?
I mean, what are the chances of this happening? Rayner and I are…up here scouting locations for a shoot.’

‘Why don’t you join us?’ Rayner drawled. He hooked a chair forwards.

Connie said, because there was no alternative, ‘Well, for a quick coffee. We’ve just been watching the lifeboat go out. This is Roxana, she’s my nephew’s girlfriend and she’s staying with me at the flat while she’s working in London.’

‘Hi,’ Roxana said. Rayner looked at her as she folded herself into a chair.

They ordered breakfast. Angela put on a pair of glasses with tinted lenses and with her little finger surreptitiously smeared some coloured gloss on her lips. Chiming in together, Connie and Angela told Roxana about the Bali shoot. Adopting her enforced-contact-with-a-highly-contagious-disease face, Angela said she had been doing some more work with Tara. Rayner curled his arm over to reach the back of his head and raked his hair with his fingers.

‘You did well out there, working with that bunch,’ he told Angela, and her tense expression softened at the compliment. He added to Connie, ‘The commercials turned out a treat, considering the problems we had. The bank loved them. Blinding music, by the way. Awards material, no question.’

‘Thank you, Rayner.’

Roxana watched and listened. Connie could feel the forcefield of her concentration on these new people.

‘What are you doing in London?’ Angela asked in her friendly way.

Quickly Roxana answered, ‘I am going to study, English and business. I have some part-time work, not very interesting,
and Connie is very kind to let me stay with her for now. I am from Uzbekistan.’

‘I thought you might be Russian,’ Rayner put in. He stirred his coffee and raised one eyebrow as he drank.

‘My father was from Novosibirsk, my mother from Bokhara, where I was born. I speak Russian, of course.’

‘We’re just setting up some work in St Petersburg. It’s not the easiest location to shoot in,’ Rayner sighed.

‘You have to know the people,’ Roxana smiled. ‘I do not mean the people individually, of course, but I think no one from the West knows how a Russian thinks. The only person who does is another Russian.’

Connie waited, wondering if Roxana was now going to ask for a job, and if so how she would go about it. But all she did was bite into a triangle of toast and smile again. ‘It is more interesting to be in England. Yesterday, for example, was the first time in my life I saw the sea. And I almost drowned. Connie saved me.’

Rayner’s eyebrow flicked again. Angela wanted to hear what had happened so Connie told them, relating it as a comedy rather than a drama. Roxana kept chipping in with contradictions, making it sound as though Connie had hauled her from the jaws of death. Angela laughed. She was enjoying herself enough to remove the shield of her glasses.

‘Is this actually the same day you’re both talking about?’

‘Oh, yes. I was there,’ Roxana insisted.

Rayner turned his chair a little aside to take a call on his BlackBerry, then began checking his messages. Breakfast was clearly over.

‘We’re heading back to London today,’ Connie said.

‘But I would like to know first that the lifeship has not sunk.’

Angela corrected Roxana, ‘It’s lifeboat. That’s the first slip I’ve heard you make, though. Is your Russian as good as your English?’

‘Much better. Russian and Uzbek, these are my own languages.’

Angela nodded thoughtfully. Rayner put away his mobile and looked at his watch.

‘We’re going to have to make a move. We’ve got a couple more locations to check out,’ Angela said at once. She gathered up the papers and notes she had piled on the table. Connie wished she didn’t always jump with such alacrity to do what Rayner wanted. ‘Amazing to bump into you like this. I’ll call you, Con. We’ll have that movie night together.’

Rayner was ready to leave. He raised one hand in an allpurpose salute and settled his sunglasses on his nose. Angela was looking through her wallet. She found a card and handed it to Roxana.

‘All set, Angie?’ Rayner asked, as if she was keeping him waiting.

‘Bye,’ Angela said to both of them.

After they had gone, Roxana tucked the card away in her plastic zipper purse. ‘Your film people are very interesting, I think.’

Back on the sea front beside the lifeboat station, they learned from the onlookers that the trawlermen had all been taken off. Connie said she didn’t think they had time to stay to watch the boat come in again.

‘I know,’ Roxana sighed. ‘We have work. Always the same story.’

But as they drove up the small hill that led out of the town, she begged Connie to stop for a moment. She scrambled out of the car and stood looking at the sea. In the distance the lifeboat could just be seen, pitching through the waves on the way back to the shore. Roxana stared at it, and sucked in a great gulp of the salt air, as if she were trying to fill her eyes and lungs and carry the coast away with her.

Once they were finally out of sight and sound of it, and the nacreous light was fading into flat grey over the fields, she shook her head and gave a deep sigh.

‘Amazing. Totally amazing,’ she sighed. ‘Thank you for showing it to me.’

Connie noticed that she gave the pronouncement exactly the same upwards inflection as Angela would have done.

‘I enjoyed myself more than I’ve done for ages,’ Connie said with a smile, and it was the truth.

‘How is Jeanette tonight?’ Connie asked Bill on the phone that evening, once Roxana had gone off to work.

‘Not very good,’ he told her. ‘She was practically transparent with exhaustion when I got her home. She went straight up to bed. I couldn’t persuade her even to try to eat something. I don’t see how she can go back tomorrow, although she insists that she will.’

‘She wanted so much to prove she was still strong enough to do some work, didn’t she?’

‘Not to me, or Noah, or you.’

‘To herself,’ Connie said, stating the obvious. ‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ she promised.

‘Have you been away?’ Bill asked.

‘Just one night, in Suffolk. I took Noah’s Roxana, she wanted to see the sea and we ended up staying over. I’ll tell you about it.’

‘I’d like to hear.’

His voice in her ear was as warm as ever, and as familiar, but there was also a note of imprecision in it.

Everything else, all their history together, the joy and the long denial, now seemed compacted and whittled down to this single, brittle point of caring between them for Jeanette.

‘Tomorrow,’ Connie repeated softly.

Jeanette was sitting in her chair with a shawl round her shoulders. She was looking out into the garden, a green and buff expanse of fading leaves and grass now, with the evening sunlight slanting on spiders’ webs. It was a moment before she sensed that Connie was there, but then she turned her head. Her eyes burned in their deep sockets.

– I had to come home today after just two hours.

‘That must have been tough.’

– I opened my files. I sat there. My head was useless. Everyone looked at me, then pretended not to. Full of sympathy. Embarrassed, as well. Other people’s weakness is embarrassing, isn’t it? I felt as if I was already dead.

‘No,’ Connie tried to soothe her. ‘You’ve just gone back there too early after the operation. Rest for another week or two, then see how you feel.’

Jeanette lifted her hand again. Connie was almost surprised that the light didn’t shine through it.

– Too early. Too late. They overlap, don’t they?

There was a new, mordant edge to her anger at what was overtaking her.

‘Jeanette, try to be a bit patient. You’re too harsh on yourself.’

Jeanette regarded her. Then she jerked her head.

– I will have to do something else. I can’t just sit here. Waiting.

Bill brought in a bottle of wine and some glasses. From the slope of his shoulders Connie could see his despair.

‘It’s not waiting, Jan. It’s being with us.’

There was a pause.

– Yes. Of course it is. You’re right. I’m sorry.

Connie stared into the garden, not wanting to risk seeing the look that passed between the two of them. She felt her own spike of anger at the finality ahead.

‘Here.’

Bill put a drink into her hand. Jeanette took hers, the finger of wine heavily diluted with water, and sipped at it. Her lipstick left a pink print on the rim of the glass, and Connie remembered the night before last with Roxana in the storm, when talking to another woman had seemed so easy.

It still wasn’t easy to talk to Jeanette: their legacy still affected them.

Change that. It’s not too late
, Connie told herself.

‘I think we should have a holiday, instead of worrying about plant taxonomy,’ Bill said.

A glorious idea delivered itself to Connie.

‘Why don’t you both come out and stay with me in Bali?’ As soon as the thought came to her she was longing to take Jeanette straight there, to the green wave. ‘It’s beautiful, and it’s always warm. My house is comfortable enough. There’s a view from the veranda you could look at for ever.’

– For ever?

She met her sister’s gaze.

She guessed Jeanette would be wondering about moving from her own safe realm into Connie’s unknown one, and whether it would be risky to allow her sister and her husband to spend so much time together.

Then, just as clearly, Connie saw her dismiss the questions. They didn’t matter any longer. Jeanette’s face changed completely, flowering into a beam of excitement. She held out her hand towards Connie, and they matched their palms together. Affection seemed to flow like a current between them.

– I’d like that so much.

Then she remembered how weak she had become and turned to Bill.

– Can I? Can we? Those pictures Connie showed us, remember? They were wonderful.

Bill said, ‘Of course we can. We’ll go as soon as you want.’

It took a week to finalise the arrangements. Connie was to fly out first, to make the house ready, and Jeanette and Bill would follow her two days later.

The night before she left London, she spoke to Angela.

‘Sounds a good idea, Connie. Bali will do your sister good.’

‘I hope so. I think it will.’

‘Email me, let me know how she is, and how you are. By the way – did you know that your friend Roxana came into the office to see me?’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’ They had hardly seen each other in the past week. Connie had been working, but she’d had the impression that Roxana was tactfully absent so as not to intrude on her.

‘She turned up in reception and very politely but very insistently announced that she would wait there until I was free to see her.’

‘Yes?’

‘I had her into my office and she sat down and told me exactly how she wanted to help me with setting up this shoot in Russia. I made the point that we work with the Russian Film Institute, and that I deal with difficult foreign locations every day. But she insisted that she could make herself useful in reading between the lines. With the Russians, you have to appreciate the nuance, she said.
Nuance
was the word she actually used. I was fairly impressed, I can tell you.’

‘That sounds like Roxana. So what’s the deal?’

‘I had to give in. I’m going to employ her informally for a few hours a week, on the phones, looking at the contracts, finding suppliers out there, that sort of thing. Twenty quid an hour, cash in hand.’

‘Informally or otherwise, that’s her entry into the film business. You know she’ll probably be running the show within a couple of months?’

‘Very likely,’ Angela agreed. ‘Who am I to stand in the way of ambition? Anyway, Rayner liked the look of her. There’s one other thing, Con…’

‘What’s that?’

‘When she came in she was wearing your Chloé suede jacket, or an identical version of it.’

‘I expect it looked better on her than on me?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’

They both laughed. ‘Thanks, Ange.’

Connie was almost ready to leave for the airport when she heard Roxana moving about in her room. She opened her door as soon as Connie knocked, and beamed at her.

‘Are you all prepared to go?’

‘Yes, just about. I talked to Angela last night; I hear she’s offered you a part-time job.’

‘That’s right. I am very lucky.’ Roxana’s face glowed. She looked very young and beautiful, Connie thought. ‘And I owe thanks to you, Connie, yet another time.’

‘I’m glad about the work. That’s good news. But Angela also told me that when you went in to see her, you were wearing what looked like one of my jackets.’

Roxana stared, and then drew her lower lip between her teeth. Colour flooded into her face.

‘I…I wanted very much not to – not to appear like a girl from Uzbekistan. I wanted to seem like a London girl.’

‘I understand that. But you went into my room, and looked through my cupboards?’