Constance (54 page)

Connie shivered, in spite of the heat. She was only glimpsing a corner of Roxana’s world and a fragment of the history of this ancient oasis city, but she began to understand the obstacles her friend had negotiated in order to escape. That she had come back again for her family made her love Roxana and admire her even more.

Yakov was bored by the argument.

‘Tell me now, is Roxana showing you the famous remains of Bokhara?’

‘Yes, she is,’ Connie said.

‘Good. You will not want to miss anything. There are some fine sights in this city of ours.’

‘I will show her. I am proud of Bokhara, even if am not proud of what our country has become.’ Roxana was on her feet, gathering up melon rinds and the empty
chai
glasses.

‘Ha.’ Yakov laced his fingers over his belly. ‘Now, please, let me have some peace.’

Roxana led the way out, and Connie hung back to say goodbye. Yakov pushed out his lower lip and studied her face for a moment.

‘I have not given up hope for Niki, you know. There are ways, and there are some people who can help him,’ he murmured. ‘Roxana sees only one way. But she is young.’

‘Is there anything I could do, perhaps?’ Connie asked. He laughed at her naiveté.

‘Thank you. But you do not know Uzbekistan. Enjoy your visit.’ Then he raised his hand, dismissing her.

Connie followed Roxana up the shallow outside steps to the upper floor. There were herbs and scented plants in pots against the wall, and the caged finches fluttered between their perches.

Roxana’s room was small and bare. Her work shoes were neatly placed against the wall, a rail across one corner held her clothes – including the Chloé jacket – on a few hangers. Two narrow windows looked out on starry sky and a series of flat roofs, and there were no pictures. Connie wished that she hadn’t kept the beach postcard.

Roxana’s face was more shadowed than it had been, and there were faint lines just beginning to show at the sides of
her mouth. Her beauty was only increased by this intimation of maturity.

‘Is it…comfortable, living here?’ Connie asked her. She didn’t mean in the physical sense, exactly.

‘Yakov reads books, and listens to his music. I go to the market for food, and make some meals for him. It’s not such a bad arrangement, you know. I have work, and I save a little money. I am only a bus journey from Niki. Yakov is…you saw, like he is. Not very similar to Mr Bunting, or any of your English men. But he is kind to me. In his way.’ She lifted her chin and stared straight at Connie. ‘I would not stay here if it did not suit me and Niki, as well as Yakov.’

‘Good. Forgive me for asking, then.’

Roxana looked round the confined space. ‘Do you remember, when we were in Suffolk?’

‘Yes. I remember everything about it.’

‘We talked, in that bedroom, in the storm. And now it is the other way round for us, because your sister is dead and my brother is alive. That is very strange.’

‘It is,’ Connie agreed.

Roxana turned her head again, to look full at her. ‘I would rather be in this country, and have my brother still alive and with some hope in the future, than be in England for ever without him. To be a sister comes from in here.’

Roxana pressed her fist against her breastbone.

Connie knew what it meant. ‘Yes. Niki is lucky to have you for his sister.’

‘Mrs Bunting was lucky to have you.’

Connie said quietly, ‘Actually, I think it was the other way round.’

After a moment Roxana’s face brightened again. ‘At least I saw the sea. I am so pleased I saw the sea, even that I fell in it. And you saved me from drowning. You remember what you said afterwards,
You know that life is precious, if you can’t bear to lose it?
It’s true.

That beach, those waves, that was amazing.’

Connie nodded, but she was wondering whether her own life meant so much, whether it meant anything at all, without Bill in it.

‘You’ll be able to come back to London some day,’ she said. ‘And you’ll see plenty of other beaches. Maybe the very one on your postcard. We could plan to meet there.’

Roxana pursed her lips. ‘Maybe. But I prefer Suffolk.’

They both laughed.

‘It’s late,’ Roxana said. ‘Come on, I’ll walk you back to your hotel.’

‘I think you’d better. I don’t stand a chance of finding the place on my own.’

There was another session of sightseeing.

It was Roxana’s half-day and following in her energetic wake Connie toured the Mosque of Forty Pillars, and the Chor Minor, a tiny architectural jewel of a
madrassah
with four towers topped with azure tiles. Roxana stood with her feet planted in the dust, gazing up at the intricate brick facade.

‘You know, Connie, this place is the picture I saw inside my head when I was in England and I thought of home. And what is it? Just an old building. History is only what has gone, religion I don’t care about, and still this is what appears to me. I don’t see the places that are real Uzbekistan, the cement works or the bus station, or even the
hammam
. That’s funny, isn’t it?’

Connie leaned in the shade against a wall and fanned herself.

‘It’s very beautiful,’ she said. Roxana’s appreciation of it didn’t surprise her at all. If only it wasn’t so hot.

Roxana looked at her. ‘You are tired,’ she said.

‘A little,’ Connie admitted.

‘Come. We will go and have a cold drink. There is a place near here.’

They were threading their way through the old centre when Samida and her cohorts dashed out in front of them.

‘Hello, Connie from England. You look at my pottery now.’

It was not a question. Insistent fingers tugged at her clothes.

Roxana tried to dismiss the children with a few sharp words, but Connie looked down at the circle of narrow brown faces.

‘Show me,’ she said. At once she was propelled towards a cloth laid out in the shade of a wall.

‘Don’t buy these dishes. This is machine-made, just rubbish for tourists,’ Roxana cried. But Connie filled a bag with painted earthenware plates and bargained energetically to reduce Samida’s price.

The children giggled as they pocketed her money, and scampered off in search of the next target.

‘Why did you buy these?’ Roxana demanded. ‘If you want dishes you should tell me, I will take you to the best place.’

Connie grinned at her dismay. ‘I don’t care about the plates, it was the children. They made me think of you when you were small.’

Roxana only glared. ‘Of me? Let me tell you that compared to my friend Fatima and me, in our day, those children are
amateurs.
’

Laughing, they reached a low concrete cube of a building with faded awnings offering some shade from the sun.

‘Here,’ Roxana said. They passed inside to a line of metal-topped café tables beside a tall counter. Connie glanced to the back of the room and saw three computer terminals with keyboards cased in plastic to protect them from the all-pervading dust. ‘Maybe I will check my mail while we are here,’ Roxana casually added.

‘This is the Bokhara internet café?’

‘Why not?’ Roxana countered. ‘I used to go in London, when I lived there, to somewhere calling itself The Best Little Internet Café on the Planet, which is quite funny, but I think personally this place is better. Of course if I was lazy I could do the same thing at my work, but…’ she glanced round at the bare walls, the dog panting on the threshold, the chest freezer humming and shuddering in the corner ‘…from here for a few
som
, I am free to surf the net, to chat to Fatima and my other friends, whatever I wish.’

‘Of course,’ Connie agreed.

A boy of about ten brought their drinks and they settled at one of the terminals. Roxana peered and tapped at the plastic-shrouded keyboard.

‘And here is an email, for example, from Noah. Hm. Hm. Would you like to read it, Connie?’

‘Isn’t it private?’ Connie asked curiously.

‘Not so much that you should not see it.’

Connie changed the angle of her chair so that she could see the screen more clearly. Roxana took a long gulp of her drink. Connie read,

Hi Roxy, how’s it going?

I miss you, babe, same as always. Life still seems so quiet without you. I’ve been working hard –
– no, it’s okay really, just got a pay hike which helps.

Strange to think it’s nearly a whole year since my mum died. I think of her every day, and sometimes I still go, ‘must tell her about this or that’, and then remember that I can’t – but I don’t have to tell you what that feels like, do I? But time is doing its thing. She was such a great mother and such a good person to know, and I feel lucky to have had all that.

Been spending quite a lot of time with my dad. He’s pretty good, considering. Time’s doing its thing for him as well. He’s lonely, though. I asked him this weekend if he could imagine being with someone else some day and he gave a smile and said yes, he imagined it regularly.

Have you heard from Connie? I know Dad hasn’t, and neither have I. Did anything come of that plan for her to come and visit you?

What’s the latest news on Niki?

Connie read on down to the end of the message.

There was a PS.

My sort-of ex Lauren is back in town. I had a couple of emails and texts from her, wanting to hook up. I’m going to give her a call, Roxy, but just wanted you to know that if you were in London there’d be no question, no contest. Nxxxxxx

Then Connie looked at the date. The message was several days old. Of course Roxana had been intending all along for her to read it.

Roxana got up and strolled to the entrance. She gazed out into the baking street, standing half in and half out of the doorway as if the rest of the world pulled at her in one direction via the computer terminal, and Niki and Bokhara and Uzbekistan pinned her in the other. Then she looked back at the café interior, to where Connie was still sitting, and gave her a brilliant smile of expectation and encouragement.

Connie’s mind was spinning.

She had been running away: constructing defences and then racing behind them whenever a breach was threatened.

She had started to put up the barriers long ago, years before she met Bill, even before the day of Tony’s funeral and Elaine’s blurted truth,
he wasn’t your dad…you’re adopted, aren’t you?
That had only been putting into words what troubled her already and the trouble had started before she could even articulate the word
different
.

Connie thought, I rejected
them
, Hilda and Jeanette, just as much as the other way round.

That one word – adopted – and all the longing, and mystery, and opportunities for disappointment and betrayal that crowded with it, had always stood between them.

What chance did we have, in the face of that? she asked herself.

As the realisation dawned on her, she braced herself for the sadness and regret that might have followed it.

But all that happened was the joy and lightness that had been with her since the
hammam
lifted her to her feet. She floated to the door where Roxana was waiting for her.

‘Thank you for letting me see Noah’s email. You wanted me to read about his dad being lonely and the implication that I could change that, didn’t you?’

‘I am not so cut off from my friends that I cannot help out here and there, you see.’

Connie touched her hand. ‘What about you and Noah? And Lauren?’

Roxana sighed. ‘I am jealous, of course. But I am Niki’s sister first and always, before I can be girlfriend to an English boy. And I don’t want Noah to be waiting for me for ever. Nobody waits for ever, do they?’

A lick of a breeze chased down the street, raising plumes of dust and stirring the coarse hair on the dog’s back.

‘No, they don’t,’ Connie agreed.

Roxana said softly, ‘Do you want to know what I think?’

‘Go on.’

‘I think you should go back to England. I think you should go to see Mr Bunting, and tell him that you love him.’

‘Do you? Why?’

‘Because it is the
truth.
’

Roxana’s smile flashed at her. She made a loose fist and tapped at the air six inches from Connie’s shoulder.

‘Knock, knock. Open the door in this wall, Connie. Walls keep out bad things, yes, but they trap you inside in the dark.’

Slowly, Connie raised her hands, palms outstretched. She pushed outwards until her arms were fully extended, and there was nothing to block her way. There was nothing but the air and the light on the old walls.

By the time Connie reached England, it was almost summer again.

The trees in the parks were in leaf and at lunchtimes girls with bare arms poured into the streets. From her apartment, which seemed empty without Roxana, she telephoned Bill.

‘It’s Connie,’ she said.

‘Connie. Are you in London?’

Bill’s warm voice was very close, as if it came from somewhere within her own head.