Connie herself did not like to feel insecure, not physically or financially or emotionally. She had, she supposed, devoted a lot of energy to work that shielded her in the first two cases and to retreating from the demands of the third.
She went back and turned off the music. She rolled back the section of wall that hid the television screen, and sat down to watch that instead.
– Would you mind driving me there?
Jeanette asked.
‘Of course not. Shall we go now?’
Jeanette had been applying lipstick, holding up a compact mirror towards the light. She rolled her lips to smudge the colour, then ran her fingers through the blunt spikes of her hair. The make-up looked too bright against her skin.
– Yes
.
Jeanette had said that she wanted to call in at work, to collect some papers and other belongings. They drove the short distance and Connie parked the car next to a red-brick building set in the middle of a botanical garden. The arms of willow trees trailed in the water of a small lake.
Connie followed Jeanette through a set of double doors and up in a lift, then along a green-painted corridor. Jeanette’s office was a big room lined with desks and big chests of drawers made of dark wood. A handful of people had been working in silence, but they all looked up as Jeanette came in. A woman at the nearest desk was bending over a bound catalogue of drawings, then studying a section of a plant through magnifying lenses attached over her spectacles. She took off this apparatus and leapt from her seat.
‘Here she is, back to cause more trouble,’ she shouted.
The other taxonomists, quiet-looking people, pushed back their chairs and called greetings. They smiled warmly, and they didn’t stare too hard at Jeanette. The first woman patted her on the arm and told her she was amazing, she was, and she was looking great. Jeanette introduced Connie, and Connie exchanged small talk with the first woman and the man at the desk next to hers. The strip lights overhead hummed faintly, and a younger woman in a skirt that might have been woven from hemp slid open a drawer near Connie’s knee and took out a specimen sheet layered between sheets of protective paper. She peeled back the paper to reveal the tiny components of a plant, fixed and labelled in minute brown handwriting. The room was stuffy and smelled of dust.
Jeanette sat down at her desk. The others hovered, and then turned uncertainly back to their work. She indicated to Connie that she would need a few minutes, and that there was a coffee room on the ground floor if she wanted somewhere else to wait. Obediently Connie descended in the lift
again, and sat looking out at the miniature flanks of a rockery while she drank a cup of coffee from a vending machine. A gardener in green work clothes was stooping among the tiny alpines, picking twigs and debris from the cushions of leaves.
When she had finished her coffee Connie wandered back upstairs again. Jeanette nodded and began to gather up her papers. She put a book and a sheaf of notes into her briefcase, and rearranged more papers in neatly labelled folders. Her colleagues got up once more from their work and Connie watched as they said goodbye to her. They all agreed jovially that they would see her soon, but she wasn’t to rush back, not until she was good and ready.
‘When you do get back we’ll go out and have that dinner, all of us. A proper night out,’ the woman with the magnifying lenses cried as Jeanette passed between them.
But nobody looked her straight in the eye.
It was as if her sister was already a ghost, Connie thought.
In the car on the way home, as they queued up at a roundabout, Jeanette patted her briefcase.
– The Early Spider Orchid. Rare in Britain. I have been following a conservation project. The results are here.
‘That’s interesting,’ Connie said.
– I want to go back to work. In a week or so. Part time.
‘Good. If you think you can, that is.’
They had only been home for a few minutes when Bill’s car turned into the drive. Connie was making tea, opening and closing cupboard doors as she searched for cups, and Jeanette was reading the papers she had brought with her. Her head lifted at once, even though she couldn’t have heard the crunch of car tyres on gravel. Before his key turned in the lock she was touching her hair.
He came into the kitchen and Jeanette went straight to him. He folded her in his arms and rested his cheek on the top of her head.
‘Hello, Jan. What sort of a day have you had?’
Connie spooned tea into the warmed pot. She was conscious in this kitchen of weighted years of joint domestic life, drawer handles worn to the touch, a tea towel brought back from a trip to Dublin, pot basil on a sunny windowsill showing bare stalks where leaves had been picked off. The steps from the oven to the fridge, the view of trees and sky from the window over the sink, these would be as familiar to Bill and Jeanette as their own bodies. As each other’s bodies.
She loved them both.
The lid of the teapot clattered as she awkwardly dropped it into place.
After a moment she was able to turn and look at Bill. He looked formal, in a business suit with his tie loosened at the neck.
‘Con,’ he said quietly.
She smiled. ‘I saw where Jeanette works.’
‘The plant kingdom,’ he nodded. He unwound his arms from Jeanette’s shoulders.
–
Tea in here?
Jeanette wondered.
‘I should get home,’ Connie said.
– Stay for dinner.
‘Yes, do,’ Bill added.
‘Just tea. A quick cup.’
The next morning, Connie knew as soon as she opened her eyes that she wasn’t alone in the flat. There wasn’t a sound, but she could feel the comforting emanations of another person. She put on her dressing gown and shuffled into the main room. Roxana was standing by the window looking out, but she spun round as soon as Connie appeared.
‘Hi. You’re up early,’ Connie said.
‘I did not sleep so well.’
‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘How was your week?’
‘Fine. I have made altogether four hundred and seventy pounds.’
‘I think that’s pretty good,’ Connie laughed.
She opened a new vacuum pack of espresso coffee. Roxana came and stood by her elbow, watching closely as Connie pressed the ground coffee into the little holder and locked it into place. When she gave her the cup, Roxana took it and sat next to her on a high stool at the counter.
‘Thank you for the plant.’ Connie stroked the feathery leaves with the tips of her fingers. ‘And the strawberries.’
Roxana flushed. ‘I am glad you like them.’
Connie splashed some milk into the strong coffee and Roxana did the same.
‘What are you doing today?’ Connie asked.
‘I am going to meet Noah. He says we will see an art gallery.’
‘Very Saturday metropolitan.’
‘Yes. Then I must go to The Cosmos Club, of course. Noah is saying that he will be coming to watch me dance. He makes the threat, at least.’
‘You don’t want him to?’
Roxana jumped off her stool. Using the countertop as a pivot she gathered her face into a sultry pout, turned away from Connie while still holding her gaze, and mimed the slow removal of her top. She cast the imaginary garment away from her then rotated to face forwards with her hands coyly folded across her chest. She flung her head back and circled her tongue over her lips, sighing with apparent desire.
Connie coughed with laughter and a drop of coffee ran down her chin. Roxana snapped upright again.
‘You see? This is ridiculous, but I have to do it. I don’t want Noah to think that I am ridiculous.’
‘I don’t think he would, actually.’
Roxana raised an eyebrow. ‘Or, what might be worse, I would see him there with all the other men who come, with their money rolled up in their pockets and sit like
this
for their private dances.’ Now she sat on the stool with her legs splayed, hands in pockets and head cocked, more than filling an imaginary space. ‘And I’d think that he was the ridiculous one, for being the same as the rest. You see, when you go to work you can be one person. And then at home again you can be completely another. I think it is better that way.’
‘Yes, that’s quite true,’ Connie agreed.
They had finished their coffee and there was a clink as they both replaced their cups.
Roxana was suddenly beaming. ‘Yesterday I did some shopping. The first clothing I have bought since I was in Tashkent, with my friend Fatima. Except for stupid things, for working, I mean. I’d like to show you. Shall I bring it?’
‘I’ll come,’ Connie said. She followed Roxana along to her bedroom. There was a Topshop bag on the floor beside the wardrobe. Roxana reached in and brought out a short blue canvas jacket with oversized buttons. It was very like one that Connie owned. Roxana slipped it on, instinctively tweaking the cuffs and collar into a flattering shape. It suited her.
‘Do you think this is nice?’
‘I do.’
Carefully Roxana took it off again, smoothing the seams. She took a hanger out of the cupboard. The brown envelope still lay on the shelf. She sighed.
‘It cost thirty-five pounds. Is this too much money?’
‘No, Roxana, I don’t think it’s too much. And if it was, so what? It’s the money you earned from lap dancing, which must be extremely hard work. I can’t imagine doing it, not even if I had a body like yours. You can spend it exactly how you like. Although better if not on cocaine, perhaps.’
Roxana made a disgusted sound. ‘Some of the girls, Natalie and others, they do this. Myself, I think it is the most stupid pastime in the entire world.’ She picked up the envelope and opened it to show Connie a wad of notes.
‘After I had bought the jacket, I thought that before shopping I should really give you money for rent.’
‘Thank you. But I said you didn’t have to. If you’re here for a while, we can talk about you making a contribution towards the electricity bill, something like that.’
Roxana reflected on this. Whichever way she considered it, however pessimistically, it did not sound as though Connie was telling her to go.
‘I think you should put that money in the bank, though.’
‘I don’t have a bank.’
Connie considered. Roxana was almost certainly in the country illegally; she had no resources except her dancing and no one to stand up for her except Noah and Connie herself. However tough she might appear to be, she was vulnerable too. All Connie’s instincts were to help her as much as she could.
‘I can help you with that, if you like.’
Roxana looked pleased.
Connie’s eyes fell on the beach postcard again. ‘Where’s that? Did you go there on a holiday?’
‘A holiday? No. This place is my fantasy. My paradise. Whenever I was in a very ugly situation, before I left Uzbekistan or when I was here in London before I met Noah, I would stare very hard at this picture. I would tell myself, somewhere in this world that place exists. There is the heat of the sun and the cool water and lapping of waves. You are not here, you are there. Or’, Roxana shrugged as if to brush off the memories like a cobweb from her shoulder, ‘some day, you will be. The truth is that I have never seen the sea.’
‘Never?’
‘How would I have? Uzbekistan is a country that has no coast. Not even the countries that border it have any coastline.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Connie said, embarrassed by geographical ignorance. ‘Would you like to see the sea? I’m not saying the beaches in England are anything like that one, but we have plenty of coast. Or no, wait a minute, you’d rather go with Noah, wouldn’t you? I’m sure he’d like you to see it with him.’
They looked at each other.
‘I would like to go with you,’ Roxana said.
‘Then we’ll do it.’
Hilda wanted a big wedding for Jeanette –
a proper wedding
, was the way she described it.
Jeanette gave the impression that she was going to perform like a feature out of
Brides
magazine, wearing an ivory slub-satin dress and carrying a bouquet of stephanotis and white freesias, just in order to please her mother, with the implication that if left to themselves she and Bill would really have been just as happy to slip off to the registry office in their ordinary clothes and be back at work the same afternoon. But Connie suspected that even though Jeanette was now a lab technician who would frugally walk almost three miles to work in order to put the tube fare into the savings fund she and Bill were building up towards the deposit on a flat, she was actually almost as in love with the full bridal notion as Hilda was.
Connie steered clear of most of the early discussions about arrangements.
She knew that Jeanette and Bill had settled on a date, and that a church and a location for the reception had also been chosen. Beyond that she partly chose to be vague because she didn’t want to think too much about Bill being her sister’s
husband anywhere in the near future, and partly it was inevitable anyway because she worked at GreenLeaf Music from the moment the studios opened in the morning until the last person left at night, and then either went out or groped her way home to Perivale to sleep before starting over again. Her only real contact with Hilda and Jeanette was during Sunday lunches at Echo Street, and on some of these occasions Connie was concentrating too hard on staying awake or on facing down her hangover from Saturday night to take in much of what was being said.
She was taken aback, therefore, to realise that over one lunch the bridesmaid’s dress was being discussed with the understanding that she would be the one who was wearing it.
‘Apricot’s a nice warm colour, yes. But with Connie’s complexion, maybe there’s too much orange in it? What about a lovely pale blue?’
Connie chewed and swallowed a mouthful of Hilda’s granite-coloured roast lamb, and then put down her knife and fork. Bill was sitting directly opposite her at the kitchen table with which Hilda had recently replaced the old one that came with them from Barlaston Road. He flicked a glance at her, then ducked his head again. But not before Connie had seen the curl of his smile.