‘I came as soon as I got your email. Did I wake you?’
– No.
Connie made to kneel down on the grass beside her sister’s chair, so that it would be easier for her to lip-read, but Jeanette stopped her.
– Could you help me up?
They hardly ever touched each other. But now Connie gently put her hands under Jeanette’s arms and eased her to her feet. She felt as light as a child.
For a moment they stood uncertainly together, their cheeks not quite touching. Connie tightened her arms around her sister’s shoulders. She wanted to find a way to reach beyond words, to leapfrog the impediment that wasn’t lodged merely in Jeanette’s deafness – that being only a kind of clumsy metaphor for a different and more enduring silence – and to hug her so tightly that nothing could come between them ever again.
‘I’m glad to be here,’ she began. She stroked her sister’s thin hair, just once, very lightly.
We have to start somewhere, she thought.
– I wanted to tell you the news myself. I didn’t want you to hear from anyone else that I’m going to die. Not even Bill. But I didn’t expect you to come straight away like this.
‘Did you
want
me to come?’
Jeanette suddenly smiled. Her teeth looked too big for her mouth, but the lines in her face eased and there was a light in her eyes.
– Yes. You are the only one who remembers everything. That is odd, isn’t it?
‘I know,’ Connie said. ‘I feel the same. All the way in on the train I was thinking about Echo Street. The day we moved in and we fought over the bedrooms. The garden shed and the piano. The nightmares I used to have.’
– So much history.
Connie nodded. She was turning a question over in her mind. Was it their entangled history that made them who they were, the two of them, or were those clashing identities rooted elsewhere, much further off?
‘I’m so happy to see you,’ she said, and it was the truth.
Jeanette’s hand briefly masked her waxy face.
– Looking like this?
‘Looking anyhow.’
– Give me your arm. Let’s walk.
‘Can you manage? Bill said he’d make us some coffee and bring it out here.’
Jeanette’s eyes were also too big. Her gaze settled on Connie, then she looked away.
– Coffee. Like sitting in some waiting room. Drinking coffee. Waiting for your name to be called.
‘Is that how it feels?’
– Sometimes. Not always.
They began to walk, a slow shuffle past the flower border. To Connie, used to the coarse brilliance of Balinese vegetation, the blooms looked ghostly pale with petals as fragile as damp tissue, the embodiment of restrained Englishness.
– Look at my roses.
‘They’re very beautiful.’
But Connie didn’t want small talk starting to blur these first exchanges of their reunion. There was so much to say, right now, in case they should fall into the old evasions or even hostilities.
‘I’d have come long before this, if you had told me that you were ill.’
– Would you?
Jeanette seemed to be examining the words for layers of meaning. Then she sighed, wearied by the effort.
– I kept expecting to get better.
Connie asked, ‘Do you know for sure that you’re not going to?’
– It’s in my spine.
They took a slow step, then another, walking carefully in their new alignment.
If Jeanette had been healthy they would have maintained their distance. Now she was going to die, and the certainty was changing the attitudes of a lifetime.
Connie tried to calculate the combination of defiance and resignation that it must have taken for Jeanette to confess her condition.
Because Jeanette
would
regard it as a confession. For the whole of her life, it had been Jeanette’s intention and her satisfaction to do as well as everyone else, and then a bit better than that. She had always wanted to be bigger than her deafness, and to make it incidental that she couldn’t hear or speak like other people did.
In that, she had triumphantly succeeded.
So to succumb now to cancer might seem, in some guarded corner of Jeanette’s determined being at least, to be a form of weakness. As would acknowledging it to her sister, with whom she shared everything – and nothing.
Her message to Connie had been a way of asking her to come soon, that was clear. What was it, exactly, that Jeanette wanted?
Connie caught herself. Wait. That wasn’t the right way to pose the question.
What could Connie offer that might help her? All she had
was a biting sense of how much had been missed, how much she had failed to do when she could have tried to make friends with her sister again, and how little time they had left to make amends.
‘Are you in a lot of pain?’
How bald these questions are, she thought. What other way is there, to find out what I don’t really want to hear in the way Jeanette wants me to hear it, which is from her, not from Bill?
– The chemo was awful. I was sick all the time. There won’t be any more of that, thank God. I have some good days, now.
‘Is today one?’
– Yes. Today is one.
Connie knew that was not just because she was in less pain.
Fifteen slow steps took them to the end of the flowerbed and the point where the lawn ran out into rough grass. Jeanette paused and shaded her eyes with her hand, and at first Connie thought the sun must be too bright for her. Then she saw that her shoulders were shaking. Jeanette was crying.
‘Don’t cry,’ Connie begged.
She realised that she didn’t know how to deal with this illness. She had never been ill herself, and had never looked after anyone who was suffering anything more serious than a dose of flu.
Quickly she corrected herself. ‘I don’t mean that. Cry all you want if that helps. What can I do? Tell me what to do.’
Jeanette sniffed and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.
– I don’t want to die. You can’t do anything about that.
The obverse of Jeanette’s strength had always been anger. Connie could suddenly feel the dry heat of it coming off her thin skin, eating her up like a fever. Jeanette wasn’t going
to see another spring in her garden. She wasn’t going to grow old with Bill at her side, or see her grandchildren, and she was raging at the loss.
– I am supposed to be brave. It’s expected. People want to be able to say, ‘She fought all the way. She was so brave.’ But I’m not. I don’t know how to be. I want to scream and yell. It’s not fair that I’m dying. I don’t mean just to me. To Bill and Noah as well.
Jeanette’s hands chopped at the air, then her doubled fists knocked against her breastbone.
Connie stared miserably. ‘That’s what I always used to say, not you. That was my refrain, don’t you remember? You never complained that life was unfair. You just lived it, made it do what you wanted.’
– But I can’t now. I can’t do this.
‘Yes, you can. If anyone can deal with it, it’s you. I’ll help you.’
– Will you?
It was a fair question.
‘If you’ll let me,’ Connie humbly said.
She caught hold of Jeanette’s raised wrists and held them. For a moment it was as if they were having one of their old fistfights. Then Jeanette’s eyes slid over Connie’s shoulder towards the house. Connie let go of her.
– Thank you.
Connie didn’t know whether her offer of help was accepted or dismissed.
A sudden smile glinted through Jeanette’s tears. For an instant, with the flesh melted away from her jaw line and her eyes widening, she looked like a girl again. Without turning round Connie knew that Bill was coming.
– Here he is.
Jeanette’s glance flicked back to Connie.
– I love him. He loves me.
She gave the signs an extra edge of precision, for clarity’s sake.
Connie met her sister’s gaze. She understood that one of the assurances Jeanette wanted from her was that she and Bill wouldn’t share anything more than memories and kinship, now or ever.
She could give her that. In effect she had done it already, long ago. But even so, with the reminder of the bitterness that linked and divided them the day seemed to lose some of its warmth and softness.
‘I know you love each other,’ she answered steadily. ‘There has never been any doubt about that.’
Connie held out her arm and Jeanette leaned on it again. They retraced their steps as Bill put down a tray loaded with cups and a coffee pot.
When they reached him he lowered Jeanette into her chair and tucked the rug over her knees, then folded the crumpled newspaper and laid it aside. He did everything deftly, clearly used to looking after her.
‘Next week you’ll be making the coffee for me,’ he told her.
‘If I have time,’ she murmured. ‘Busy, busy.’
Only Bill was trusted to distinguish her words without supporting signs.
Bill set up two more folding chairs in the shade of the copper beech tree, and they drew together in a triangle. If anyone had glanced over the hedge they would have looked like any family enjoying a summer’s day in a garden flushed with lavender and roses.
The first time Connie met Bill was at Echo Street, in the early summer of 1978. She was fifteen.
‘Stupid clothes,’ Connie said, so that Jeanette could see her, but Jeanette was as good at ignoring what she chose
not to pick up as she was at intercepting anything not intended for her. She went on ironing, meticulously smoothing the nose of the iron into the ruffles of her white shirt. Her hair was wound on big, bouncy rollers. In a moment she would brush it out and loose waves would effortlessly tumble round her face.
Hilda was cleaning. Her ally was a little battery-operated vacuum cleaner that sucked crumbs off the table and she switched it on now to drown out Connie’s remarks.
Over the buzz of the cleaner Connie raised her voice to a shout.
‘Who is it tonight? Four Eyes? Or Mr Physics Club?’
Connie despised all Jeanette’s followers, as she despised almost everything except music and her tight coterie of like-minded friends. Jeanette whisked the finished shirt off the ironing board and held it up to admire her work. She slipped it on a hanger and took it upstairs with her, not even glancing in Connie’s direction.
‘Don’t call Jeanette’s boyfriends rude names,’ Hilda warned. ‘And don’t leave all that rubbish piled on the table, you’ll make this place look like a tip.’
Connie yawned.
‘I said, don’t leave all that rubbish there.’
‘It’s not rubbish. It’s my homework. So who is he?’
Hilda began swabbing the corner of the table with a bunched-up cloth that smelled of bleach. Her red knuckles jabbed against Connie’s wrist.
‘He’s a new one. You get a boyfriend yourself, you won’t want us calling him names.’
Connie gave her a blank stare.
If only you knew
.
Connie was fifteen and she had been having sex with Davy Spencer for the last three months. She didn’t really enjoy it; Davy pushed himself inside her, jiggled about for a few seconds and then came with a yell as triumphant as
if he had just won a recording contract. But a lot of the girls in her year fancied him and he played the drums in the best band in their school – although that wasn’t saying much. Sometimes, after he had finished, they cuddled up together and talked about the music they both liked and the places they would go once they left school. When they lay like that Connie felt close to him, although at other times she thought she hardly knew him. But when they were lying cosily in each other’s arms, round at his place when his mum and dad were out, she could even convince herself that they were in love.
‘What’s his name, then?’
‘Bill Bunting.’
Hilda was so proud of Jeanette’s success and popularity, she couldn’t keep any details to herself. She’d talk for hours to anyone who would listen about how boys wrote love letters to her and dropped them through the letterbox at Echo Street because Jeanette couldn’t use the phone like other girls.
‘My Jeanette, she was born stone deaf but she never lets it stand in her way. She’s a university student, you know.’
Connie gave a disbelieving laugh. ‘What is he, some nursery-rhyme character?’
Jeanette came back. Her hair framed her glowing face and hid her hearing aids, her shirt ruffles were perfectly crisp and her tight jeans were tucked into soft suede boots. She trailed a waft of Charlie behind her, her favourite perfume. Connie slouched even lower in her chair. She was still in her school shirt and scratchy royal-blue synthetic-knit V-necked jumper.
‘Here she is, Pete the Pirate.’
Hilda and Jeanette ignored her.
‘Take him in the front room, when he gets here,’ Hilda said.
– It’s okay, Mum. He’s just an ordinary boy.
The doorbell rang.
‘He’s here,’ Hilda pointed. Jeanette performed a little pirouette of excitement before giving her hair a last shake and dancing to the door.
Connie deliberately stuck her nose in her English book. She heard his voice, and the busy silence of Jeanette’s responses. She didn’t look up even when they both came into the kitchen and Hilda was shaking hands and saying that she was pleased to meet him and he wasn’t to mind the mess the place was in because when you were on your own with a family to look after you couldn’t always have things looking the way you wanted, could you?
‘No,’ he said. His voice was distinctive: it sounded as though it had ripples in it. ‘It must be difficult. But it looks fine.’
Then she knew that his eyes were on her.
Connie couldn’t stop herself glancing up, even though she had meant to ignore all three of them.
She saw immediately that Bill Bunting was worthy of anyone’s attention.
He had the sort of long hair that Connie liked, shaggy but not matted, and not self-consciously combed either. He was wearing jeans, old battered ones, and a not-too-ridiculous shirt. He had dark eyes and a clear sort of face, and one of those curly mouths that always look as if they are about to smile even when the owner is being serious. He was holding Jeanette’s hand, without seeming to try to prove anything, but just as if he wanted to keep her close to him.