‘It’s this young lady’s sixteenth birthday today,’ Geoff announced to the maître d’. The man seized Connie’s hand and kissed it, murmuring
bella, bella signora
. By accident, Connie caught Bill’s eye. His mouth curled extravagantly and she knew that he was on the point of bursting into laughter. It would be so easy to laugh with Bill, she thought; there were so many ridiculous things. It would be as easy to laugh as to be serious.
Once they were seated round the centre table and had ordered their various tagliatelles and saltimboccas, Uncle Geoff and the others wanted to hear all about the accident. Hilda covered her eyes with one hand and shuddered, so Bill gravely told the story again, with signed interventions from Jeanette. Next there was Jeanette’s degree to discuss. She was the first person in the family to graduate from university.
‘This is a double celebration,’ Uncle Geoff said. ‘We should drink to two fine young women.’
These days Jeanette easily outshone her cousin, who worked in a bank. Elaine compressed her lips slightly but she drank the toast with everyone else. Uncle Geoff didn’t look for interventions from his wife and daughters.
He was in his stride now. ‘So, Connie. You’ll be following in your sister’s footsteps, I expect. Which A levels are you going to choose?’
Connie gazed at the red tablecloth and a slice of tiled floor. She was overtaken by an irresistible impulse not to be patronised by Uncle Geoff, not to do what was routinely expected of her, and most of all not to place herself next to Jeanette in Bill’s eyes.
‘I’ve got a job,’ she said quietly.
‘Holiday job? Very good. It’s important to get some practice in the real world. It’s a harsh climate out there. Nobody knows that better than I do.’ Uncle Geoff was chewing and pointing at her with his fork.
Connie raised her voice. ‘It’s a real job. In the music business. I’m not going back to school next year.’
Six faces stared at her.
Hilda said sharply, ‘Don’t talk rubbish. You’re staying at school. While you’re under my roof, you…’
‘I start work on Monday morning. I’m leaving home.’
Hilda laid down her knife. Elaine smiled.
She hadn’t planned this, not in any way, but Connie’s head swam with sudden elation. The Osteria Antica was lit up with the insanely flickering glow of burning bridges. If she didn’t get a job at GreenLeaf Music, if Brian Luck and his colleagues decided they didn’t want her, she would find a different place to work. She saw that the door of Echo Street was opening and all she had to do was walk – run – out of it.
The waiting was finally over.
‘What do you mean, leaving home? How do you think you’ll cope on your own, my girl?’
She had no idea, but already she was improvising temporary solutions. Ideas cascaded through her head. Her one-time boyfriend Davy’s parents had just gone away on holiday to Spain for two weeks, so she could almost certainly sleep round there for a few nights. She had a little money saved from her Saturday job, so she’d get a room somewhere. She had never experienced such a moment of euphoria. She was sharply aware of Bill, across the table, and it was only later that she wondered if she had correctly read admiration in his eyes. Jeanette turned her head between them and the bell of hair swung round her jaw.
Uncle Geoff’s eyes bulged. ‘Don’t you think, young lady, that after all she has done for you in sixteen years, from the moment she took you in, you owe your mother a debt of gratitude?’
The clamour in the restaurant seemed to die away.
‘I will find a way to repay my debts,’ Connie said.
Then she stood up and weaved between trolleys and waiters to the cloakroom.
When she came out of the cubicle, breathing more calmly and with the elation already draining away like water into sand, leaving her feeling cold and shaken, she found Jeanette standing by the basins.
–
Did you mean all that?
Jeanette asked.
There was a smell of liquid soap and air freshener, and an echo of dripping taps.
‘Yes.’
Their reflections glanced back out of the peach-tinted mirror. Connie caught a glimpse of how different they looked, angel and demon.
– Why do you really want to leave home?
She could hardly tell her sister what had actually precipitated the decision.
‘It’s time. I want to find out who I really am.’
Jeanette raised an eyebrow.
‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’
–
No
, Jeanette agreed. She turned to wash her hands, carefully soaping around her diamond ring. Connie stared at her bent back, wanting to fight her as much as she had done when she was six, and at the same time thinking that love and hate were so close as to be nearly the same thing. Like sisters.
Jeanette stood upright again and shook water from her hands.
– You’ve spoiled your own birthday.
‘Yes,’ Connie agreed. There was something definitively Thorne family about the disintegration of the evening. They tottered against the clanking roller-towel holder as laughter swept over them.
‘Have I got to go back in there?’ Connie murmured, when she could speak once more.
– Definitely.
‘I’ll go if you come.’
They went. At the table Hilda was smoking one of Sadie’s cigarettes, looking as tragic as if she was bereaved all over again. Geoff was telling Bill that when he was his age, he already owned his own business and didn’t owe a penny to a soul.
Hilda always maintained afterwards that Connie left home just like that, walked out on them on the day she was sixteen and never came back.
It was true that she left Echo Street quietly the following morning, with a rucksack containing her clothes and Uncle Geoff’s Walkman, and went to stay at Davy’s house. The job at GreenLeaf Music paid twenty-eight pounds a week, and she managed to live on that when she moved to her room in Perivale. The only times she ever went back to Echo
Street were for Sunday lunches. A square meal was welcome, for one thing.
Three weeks after the birthday evening, she and Hilda and Bill went to Jeanette’s graduation ceremony. The hall was packed with hundreds of parents. Before Jeanette’s turn a blind boy, led by his guide dog, crossed the platform to shake the hand of the Vice-Chancellor and collect his degree. The dutiful, bored applause from the audience rose into a wave of cheering and foot-stamping in acknowledgement of his achievement.
When Jeanette came up in her dusty black academic gown and rabbit-fur hood, she looked the same as all the other young women in her group. There was no extra volume of clapping as she took her scroll and descended the steps from the stage to take her seat again.
Afterwards they emerged into the July sunshine. Hilda had brought her camera and she made them all pose in every possible permutation with Jeanette, who smiled serenely from beneath the tilted edge of her mortarboard. It was one of those family-album, framed-photograph days. Connie knew that these pictures would always be with them, capturing a momentary theorem of family life that reality constantly disproved.
‘If only Tony could see you today,’ Hilda sighed.
Connie protested, ‘Nobody knew you were deaf. You should have had all the extra clapping and cheering, like that blind guy did.’
Jeanette took off the mortarboard and slipped the gown down her shoulders.
– Better for no one to know. That makes it more of an achievement. Anyway, I wouldn’t have heard them, would I?
‘You did well,’ Connie said simply.
Jeanette suddenly laughed with pride.
– I did, didn’t I?
Hilda needed to change the film in the camera and Bill showed her how to do it. Jeanette took Connie’s arm and steered her to one side.
– Are you coming back home?
Connie shook her head.
‘No. I can’t.’
The way she was living now was far harder than she had imagined it would be, and she was lonely, but she was not going back to Echo Street.
– Can’t?
‘Won’t, then.’
– Mum misses you.
‘Does she?’ Connie could not quite believe the transparency of this. It went with the family theorem, sunny for a day, for the camera’s benefit.
– And I’m not going to be there. Not for ever.
Jeanette and Bill were going camping in France. They were talking about moving in together, once Jeanette had started work.
Connie looked back over her shoulder, at Bill with the body of the camera open in his hands, at Hilda in her summer dress, both of them dappled with sunlight. She felt the pull in too many directions, responsibility quartered with desire, selfishness shot through with an unwieldy sympathy. The only way to extricate herself seemed to be to move out of this magnetic field altogether.
She found the self-interest to say what she really meant.
‘I want to live on my own.’
Jeanette studied her. Don’t judge me, Connie thought hotly. I’m doing this for you as well as me.
The ground between them was too complicated, too obscured, for her to map it out. It always had been.
Hilda called out, ‘Bill’s done it. I want one more picture. Jeanette, come here.’
She took a picture of the two of them, Jeanette standing in the circle of Bill’s arms, sun on their heads, both of them looking into the long lens of the future.
This was the image that Connie took away with her.
Until she saw his parents’ house and its garden full of flowers, Roxana thought that Noah’s flat in Hammersmith was the most comfortable place in the world. Now Connie unlocked the door to her apartment on the top floor of a tall, anonymously modern building – not so very far, Roxana worked out, from the bad house where she had stayed with Dylan.
‘Come in,’ Connie said.
Noah and Roxana shuffled in behind her.
Their first impression was of a space that opened straight out into the sky, a smoky summer’s-evening London sky now fading from amethyst into horizontal bars of grey and rose-pink cloud over tower-blocks and trees and the spires of city churches. The wall facing the door was an almost complete run of plate glass.
Noah looked about him. The family rift meant that he had never been here before.
‘Nice place, Auntie Con,’ he murmured.
Worrying a little that she might be leaving dirty footprints, Roxana walked over to the huge window and looked out. To her right was the strange bulging tower that Noah referred to as the Gherkin, the domes of St Paul’s Cathedral bathed
bronze by the floodlighting, and the arrow shape of a descending plane given definition by its winking lights. In the distance to her left was another group of towers, seeming to float in the purple twilight. Below her spread layers of rooftops bisected by orange-lit streets, the crowns of big trees – the jumble of London that she was beginning to know, smelling at ground level of dirt and fast food, clogged with traffic, and crackling with the jolts of human static electricity discharged through sudden snarling altercations – and yet which, from up in this eagle’s nest, looked serenely beautiful.
The room itself was almost empty. There were no ornaments, hardly any furniture. A pair of sofas faced each other across a low table. A lamp hung on a swan’s neck of arched metal. In the distance, in the dimness, Roxana could see a countertop that looked as if it was made from some kind of stone, the glinting metal curve of a tap, some glass shelves.
This emptiness struck her as immensely restful, as well as opulent.
At home in Bokhara the ordinary places to live, her stepfather’s apartment among them, were in cheap Soviet-built blocks made of stained and crumbling concrete where the walls excluded no sound louder than a whisper and where the decoration consisted of pungent oilcloth table coverings, gaudy Chinese rugs, tin trays, and bulbous glass vases in shades of orange and purple bathed by the flickering light of the television screen. In the old city, down alleyways behind wooden doors, the old houses were kept dark against the heat, lined with ornamental plaster-work and painted into every cluttered crevice with brilliant patterns and colours. All of it was bright, in a monotonous desert landscape, but it was not restful.
To Roxana this pale apartment of Connie’s went with the glimpse of London that she had caught from the top deck
of the bus. This huge city was a mass of contradictions, and of systems of possession and exclusion that she couldn’t fathom, but her hunger to be a part of it was steadily increasing. Noah’s family very obviously had their established place, which made her want even more to be accepted and included by them.
From the little she knew of Noah’s auntie’s history, and seeing her apartment, she reckoned that Connie had launched herself onto this glittering, wide London river with notable success. She herself did not have the advantage of being a genuine English girl, but Roxana would find her own way.
She breathed deeply, pushed her hands into the pockets of her denim jacket with the paper-coloured rose wilting in the buttonhole, rocked upwards on the balls of her feet and lengthened all the muscles of her back and her bare, dancer’s legs.
She became aware that Noah and Connie were both looking at her. She quickly lowered her weight back onto her heels, extricated her hands and let them hang at her sides.
‘I’ll show you the spare room,’ Connie said, clicking on the swan-shaped lamp and creating a pool of pale gold light.
Roxana followed her down a high, pale, empty corridor and they came to a flat door in the bare wall. Connie pushed it open.
The room was unfurnished except for a small double bed framed by built-in cupboards and the air smelled unused, faintly stuffy. The window came higher up the wall, giving a slice of a different view. Connie nudged open an inner door and this time Roxana saw a small bathroom lined with some light-coloured stone. Glass and polished mirrors showed her reflection and Connie’s retreating into infinity, but otherwise it was completely bare. She frowned.
‘Where are your…things?’ she began, imagining that
Connie’s talcum powders and face creams must be hidden away somewhere.