Constance (48 page)

‘Did you marry someone else in the end?’ Connie asked. There were no rings on Kathy’s fingers.

‘I did. It lasted ten years. I was a staff nurse on a paediatric
ward, and I did quite a lot of night shifts. What happened was just about what you’d expect.’

‘Children?’

‘No. I’ve looked after plenty, though. You were the first, and there must have been hundreds since then.’ Kathy sniffed. ‘I’m a health visitor now. Hospitals are more about management than nursing these days.’

She drained her glass of wine.

‘Are you married, Constance?’

‘No,’ Connie said.

Kathy didn’t miss much. ‘I see,’ she said gently. ‘And are you in love?’

‘No. Yes. Or I
was
.’

‘Do you want to tell me any more?’

Connie lifted her head. She found that she did want to talk to Kathy Merriwether. She liked her for her warmth and matter-of-factness.

‘There’s not much to tell. Not now, because it’s over. A married man. It’s painful, but I’ve been lucky in many other ways. That’s what my life feels like. Luck. A lottery.’

‘And you’d rather have facts and tidy explanations?’

Connie thought for a moment. Except with Bill, and the woman she had met on the plane, she wasn’t used to discussing these matters.

‘I think if you don’t have a history, the randomness of life strikes you harder. I also feel that if I knew my real mother, if I could find out what has happened to her, even if it was just enough to know that it wasn’t all tragedy, I wouldn’t always have this sense of another parallel existence that’s waiting for me to step into it. It’s partly a sense of foreboding, and partly of something very precious that I lost and need to find again.’

Connie suddenly leaned forward in the velour armchair, fierce with urgency.

‘Can you remember anything else about that night, Kathy? Any small thing that might be a clue?’

Sadly, Kathy shook her head.

Connie realised that she hadn’t heard a train go by for quite a long while. The city’s commuters would all be home by now, and it was time she went home herself.

Kathy offered, ‘You could speak to Myra, my nurse friend. I still write to her. She retired a few years ago and went back up to Aberdeen with her husband. He works on the rigs. Maybe she can think of something else. I’ll jot down the address for you.’

They both stood up. Connie waited as she searched for her handbag, found a little address book and scribbled on a torn-off scrap of paper. Connie knew that she would contact Myra, who would probably tell her a few more details about a foundling infant who had long ago spent a couple of weeks on her ward. She could try through the Royal London nurses’ association to trace the other nurses who had worked on the same ward, and they might remember more tiny details, but none of them was likely to lead her to her vanished mother.

Kathy saw her expression.

‘Here,’ she said. She held out her arms. For a moment, held in a weighty hug and breathing in another woman’s smell of cosmetics with the faint trace of sweat caught in folds of flesh, a memory of babyhood and the knowledge of a mother passed over Connie like a shadow from a bird’s wing.

‘Thank you,’ Connie whispered.

Kathy came back down the steep stairs with her. She stood in her slippers on the top stone step, looking up and down the street. It was almost dark.

‘You keep in touch, Constance Merriwether.’

‘I will,’ Connie promised, and she kept the promise.

But her premonition had been correct. None of the investigations she made yielded a trace of her mother.

Connie locked up the Bali house and gave the key to her neighbour Wayan Tupereme. The little man bowed his forehead to the tips of his folded hands and she returned the salute.

‘May the
pengabenan
of your sister be blessed, and may her spirit ascend to
suarga.
’

‘Thank you, Wayan. You know, funerals in England are not very like Balinese ones.’

‘This I have heard.’ Wayan sighed in sympathy. ‘However, when the rituals are complete, please come back to the village and to your friends. Dewi and my grandson will miss you, and so will I.’

Connie felt the loss of Jeanette like a solid thing, a heavy oak door or a stone pillar that she might batter with her fists until they bled raw, but which would not yield an inch. She had made no plans beyond flying to England for the burial.

‘I hope to,’ she said.

A taxi driven by Kadek Daging’s wife’s brother was waiting to take her to the airport. Connie put her suitcase inside and climbed in. Wayan stood in the lane, his hand raised, until the car overtook the stream of scooters and a bullock cart and passed out of sight.

Connie flew up to Singapore and took an overnight flight onwards to Gatwick. It was just getting light as she boarded the train for Victoria, and the day revealed itself as a sullen midwinter apology with the trees shawled in grey mist. The carriages were overheated and crowded with bewildered new arrivals, but Connie shivered after the heat and brilliance of Bali. She shrank into her seat, breathing in grime and watching the backs of the houses,
sliced gardens and curtained windows and occasional yellow eyes of light as they swept past her and dropped back into the grey vacuum.

In the apartment at Limbeck House, Roxana was remorsefully waiting for her.

SIXTEEN

‘Let us pray.’

Connie bowed her head.

She could see a double row of black-shod feet: opposite her were Bill’s shiny Oxfords, Noah’s less well polished boots revealed beneath the hems of black trousers that were too short for him and therefore probably belonged to his father, and some improbable Italian loafers sported by a cream-haired, red-faced old man with a wheezy chest who had turned out to be Uncle Geoff, whom Connie had not seen for twenty years.

On Connie’s side was a pair of matronly heels, sturdily planted but even so seeming to shudder with the force of Sadie’s weeping. Next to those were two sets of black knee-boots, Jackie’s and Elaine’s, and a shuffled-up line belonging to the cousins’ children. When Connie raised her chin she saw out of the corner of her eye the fluttering hem of the vicar’s surplice as he read the short prayer. The vicar was wearing wellingtons beneath his cassock.

Between the two rows of shoes lay Jeanette’s open grave.

The cemetery path a few yards away was grey, the dolorous marble headstones were grey, and also the squat tower of
the church and the bare trees and the swollen sky, and what colour there remained in the thin grass seemed leached away by the murk. At three in the afternoon the daylight was almost gone, and apart from the white flag of the surplice there was not a shiver of movement anywhere. Even the morning’s rain had stopped, and although the branches and monumental masonry dripped steadily the undertakers’ discreetly fielded black umbrellas had not been called for. Sadie caught her breath, and there was a short break in her sobbing.

Funerals in England are not much like Balinese ones
, Connie had told Wayan Tupereme. She thought briefly of the
wadah
and the single swoop of the paper dragon’s wings before they were consumed by a sheet of fire, the stench of kerosene and flakes of soot gently drifting in the twilight, and Jeanette’s observant admiration of the ceremonies.

Today’s event could not have been more different, or more mutedly English and monochromatic by comparison, and yet it was also fitting. Jeanette had expended so much of her formidable energy on living a normal life, and to be conventional in her taste and behaviour – to have chosen a traditional funeral – was all of a piece with that.

At the short church service that had preceded the committal there had been familiar hymns and Psalm 23, and Bill had spoken briefly and movingly about Jeanette’s life. Noah had recited from memory – rather well – ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, which he described as Jeanette’s favourite poem.

Connie could read nothing of Bill himself in any of this. He and Jeanette would have discussed the arrangements, and these choices must all have been hers. As she had done often enough before, she thought how remarkable it was that a man as imposing as Bill could be so self-effacing.

Now his black shoes took a step forward out of the opposite line. The toes were almost at the edge of the grave, where
the raw earth walls had been masked with a roll of fake turf. Connie lifted her eyes from the ground but she did not venture a glance at him. Instead she looked at Noah. He was red-eyed, and he seemed painfully young.

Bill had been holding a tiny bunch of flowers. There were some twigs of rosemary and three frail white roses, the margins of the tissue petals browned by frost, picked that morning in Jeanette’s garden and tied with a piece of thin white ribbon. He kissed the blooms and then let them fall onto the coffin lid.

But that was you
, Connie silently said to him, and the blood in her veins seemed to make a complicated double surge.

Sadie choked into her handkerchief, and one of her daughters placed an arm around her shoulders.

Almost briskly now, Bill took the very clean spade that one of the undertaker’s men handed to him. He dug one spadeful of earth from an uncovered corner of the mound piled on boards next to the grave and scattered it over the flowers, then Noah took the spade and did the same thing. Cut off by the grave from his ex-wife and daughters, Uncle Geoff seized the spade from Noah and contributed his own few clods of earth. Connie couldn’t see beneath the brim of Auntie Sadie’s big black hat, but she sensed a glare that smouldered hot enough to dry the flood of tears.

The vicar closed his prayer book. There was a moment’s silence as they each attended to their own thoughts. Then he turned and led the family procession away from the grave. Bill and Noah walked side by side, straight-backed, and the rest of them closed into a black phalanx. The heels of their various shoes clicked on the cemetery asphalt path.

Behind them, Connie supposed, the undertakers would remove their trappings and roll up the turf, and then the gravediggers would come and fill in the earth.

The word
gravedigger
was just about as archaic as
foundling
, she thought irrelevantly. Irrelevance was hardly a sin, though. All this black clothing and the line of waiting black cars beyond the Victorian lych-gate, the polished coffin and the artificial grass and
we are gathered here to remember our dear sister Jeanette
seemed in that moment supremely irrelevant.

–
Bones,
Jeanette had said. –
They don’t mean anything. Just dry bones…and the spirit set free. I like that.

Connie was only walking away from bones. She was dry-eyed in front of other people, and she hoped that her back was as straight as Bill’s.

‘You know,’ her own voice ran in her head, words as clearly enunciated as if she were speaking for Jeanette to lip-read, ‘you know I love you, don’t you?’

The answer was loud, shapeless, formed with effort and with determination that had its roots in the stony subsoil of Jeanette as she had always been.

– Yes. I know that.

Minus the hearse, the cortege took the reverse of the twomile route back to the house that it had followed on the way out. The lead car, carrying Bill in the front and with Connie between Noah and Auntie Sadie in the back, made just one three-quarter circuit of the roundabout, exactly as on the outward journey.

Connie realised that she was smiling quite broadly at the memory of Jeanette’s order –
twice round the roundabout on the way to the cemetery for me
. She adjusted her expression before Auntie Sadie could see her.

There were already cars parked up and down the lane outside the house when the cortege drew up, and the caterers were opening the front door to muted couples and groups. The African violets in the big brass bowl in the hallway
looked lush and well watered, and the finger of the long-case barometer indicated
Rain
.

On the parquet stood a pinboard on which Noah had put up a series of photographs of his mother. Connie briefly paused to look at them. There was the picture of Jeanette as a baby and the one of her wearing a little kilt and holding Connie on her lap that had stood on the top of the piano in Echo Street. Her graduation picture, in mortarboard and BSc gown and hood, smiled out from among the holiday snaps and Christmas party groups and proud events with Noah. The wedding picture took pride of place. Jeanette had looked so beautiful that day, her arm linked through Bill’s and her face bright as a beacon. Off to one side Connie noted herself, scowling in her tight, shiny bridesmaid’s dress.

The most recent picture had been taken by Bill. Jeanette sat in the rocker on the veranda, smiling into the lens with the green wave deep behind her. Connie met her eyes and returned her smile.

She moved on into the drawing room that was filling up with dark suits. There were neighbours to meet, and the colleagues Jeanette had introduced her to were waiting to shake her hand and murmur appropriately, and Uncle Geoff was wedged in the corner beside the fireplace.

‘I thought the world of her,’ he told Connie, sticking out his chin and squaring his shoulders in a double-breasted suit now much too big for him. ‘There was no way I was not going to be here. Whatever
she
might think, or say.’ He jutted his chin further, at Auntie Sadie’s turned back.

‘Of course you did, of course you had to be here,’ Connie agreed.

Later, when people were beginning to leave, she took some empty glasses out to the kitchen and found Elaine propped against the sink. Connie put down her tray, remembering
three empty sticky sherry glasses on Jeanette’s dresser on the day of that other funeral, Tony’s.

Elaine stubbed out a cigarette and moved aside to let Connie reach into the dishwasher. Two caterers were drying knives and replacing them in a drawer. All these knobs and handles, Connie was thinking again, fingerprinted by the years of Bill and Jeanette’s marriage, and the invisible paths between the table and the larder, worn by their passing feet.