Constance A Novel

SEVEN

Andy came back from Barcelona, leaving a lava trail of damp and pungent clothing between his room and the washing machine. He was very large and suntanned.

‘Uh, hi,’ he said, when Roxana emerged from Noah’s room early on Sunday afternoon.

‘Yes, hi,’ she said quietly. They exchanged some pleasantries but it was impossible not to feel like an intruder while this young man was scratching himself and frying sausages in his own kitchen. Roxana packed her work clothes into a carrier-bag and went out into the bright afternoon. She turned in the opposite direction from the way she and Noah had gone yesterday, and found herself thinking it would be nice if he was with her now. She remembered how amused he had been at the pub, when she hadn’t known what drink he wanted a half of, but he had been laughing about it, not at her. Noah was very kind.

There was a McDonald’s in the main street, with a lot of empty cartons outside blown into the gutter and against the gritty walls. She went inside and bought a burger and a waxed cylinder of cola and sat in the window to eat her meal. The seat was uncomfortable because it was sloping, and a girl in a nylon uniform was wetly mopping the tiles close to Roxana’s feet. She was troubled by the thought that in Uzbekistan a visit to McDonald’s had been a rare treat, whereas in London it seemed a less satisfying experience. She was realising that to become an English girl might just mean exchanging one set of things that you wanted for a different set.

‘Excuse me,’ the girl with the mop said to Roxana, and Roxana answered her in Russian.

The girl shrugged wearily. ‘Polish,’ she muttered, and went on mopping.

Roxana ate slowly but the meal only took fifteen minutes to consume, which left her with three hours to fill before she need even think about taking the tube to The Cosmos. She went out into the sunny, cheerfully dirty street again and saw an open shop with a lot of pictures of apartments in the window. On impulse she went inside and was waved to a seat across a desk from an Asian boy wearing a smart tie and a very clean, large-sized shirt. She told him that she was looking for a place to live.

Yes, near here.

It would be good to be close to Noah. It was dawning on her that Noah might after all just want to talk and laugh and have fun at first, the way people did in some of the movies she had seen. Maybe the way he had kissed her meant that it was just a kiss and not a prelude to something worse. What had he said?

In London, it’s what men and women do.

Roxana’s experience in Uzbekistan was entirely different, and she would not think about that just now. Even in London, with Dylan and Kemal and Mr Shane, and the men at the club, it had been much the same as back there. But, just conceivably, Noah might be like none of these men and more like a guy in a film.

She felt full of a sudden longing for a new world that for the first time since she had left Bokhara seemed three-dimensional, and close enough to grasp.

‘One bedroom please,’ Roxana heard herself grandly saying. She hadn’t been able to specify what her price range was because she had no idea, none whatsoever, how much it would cost to rent a flat that was like Noah’s, and also close to Noah.

The Asian boy stabbed at his computer keyboard.

‘Here you go. Brook Green, yeah?’

He turned the screen to face her. Roxana saw photographs of a gleaming steel kitchen and a bed with layers of covers and pillows.

‘How much?’

‘Four nine five. Might take a near offer.’

‘Pounds?’

‘This is London, innit?’

‘Pounds, is that, a month?’

Roxana saw a flash of contempt. In a much less polite voice he said, ‘A week. Two months in advance, plus one month deposit. Minimum one year, six-month break clause.’

She did the mental arithmetic, then hardened her voice.

‘I want something cheaper.’

‘Not a lot round here. If you’re looking at a small studio, maybe.’

‘I see.’

Half out of his chair, he was looking at his watch.

‘We close at four, Sundays.’

Roxana stammered, ‘Where do people live who are not rich?’

He hesitated, then took pity. ‘Rent a room in a shared flat, innit? Look online, or in the free sheets.’

Roxana stood up, hoisted her carrier-bag, squared her shoulders.

‘Thank you.’

She walked quickly away from the place so that he wouldn’t be able to watch her through the big windows, then slowed her pace to an aimless meander.

A bus came towards her, trundling over the McDonald’s litter that blew into the road. A small file of people stepped forwards as the doors swished open, and Roxana joined the line. She made her way up to the top deck and found a seat next to the window, near the front. She had no idea where the bus was heading, but she had time and nothing else to do. She rested her temple against the glass and stared out as they began to sway and rock through London. The traffic was lighter than usual because it was a Sunday, and the bus seemed to move quite fast. She could see over a hoarding into a parking lot chequered with cars, and over the hooped roof of a big supermarket, and into a little park with tennis courts behind wire lattices and boys playing football with clothes for goalposts, just like the boys did in the evenings in Bokhara.

Now they were passing red-coloured apartment blocks with heavy white facings round the windows, and she could see over net half-curtains or between grey loops of torn material into crowded rooms with the tiny busy screens of televisions and lines of washing and a bed all stirred up after a long night.

To her surprise, Roxana didn’t feel as lonely looking at all this as she had done when she first came to London. She was curious, even affectionate, as if she had suddenly slipped from the outside into familiarity.

The bus turned a corner and the scenery changed. Here there were trees, big ones, taller than the bus, all together in a leafy clump like a slice of forest, but set around with high white houses. The houses had steps up to grand doors, and little lacy iron balconies, and window boxes planted with green and silver leaves. Parked all round the squares were BMW and Mercedes cars. Roxana had never seen this part of London before and she stared out on it as hungrily as if she were going to eat it.

Then everything changed again and they were passing the plate-glass windows of glittering shops. Here elongated mannequins stood in hips-forward poses, and there little velvet recesses contained a spot-lit blaze of jewels. All the abstract wealth and beauty and grandeur that she had dreamed of in London seemed scooped together and made real in one place, with majestic trees and glimpses of polished houses giving way to the rows of prosperous, shining commercial facades.

It wasn’t even a matter of wanting in much the same way but on a different scale, as she had suspected earlier in McDonald’s. Roxana was suddenly quite certain that whatever had happened in the past, whatever was written in her passport or bred in her bones, whatever history or heritage might otherwise suggest, here in these wide streets was where she belonged. The Cosmos, Mr Shane, a room for herself, her illegal status, what to do next, all of these were just details and she would find a way to deal with them.

She was at home. Just to know it was almost as good as possessing it, she thought.

She smiled as she looked out at the gilded day. London was a wonderful place, so wonderful that she would have liked to share the discovery with someone who would understand how far she had already travelled. Most of all, she wished that person could be Niki, even though he would disapprove of all these material goods.

Niki. Roxana’s smile faded. It was still hard to come to terms with a world that didn’t have her brother in it.

There was always Yakov. She owed him a letter because he had helped her to get here. She thought of him in his curtained room, always reading, with the books piled up to the ceiling and stacked in pyramids on the floor. Yakov had been her mother’s friend, though. He was well-disposed to Roxana, even though she sometimes had to move out of range of his plump hands, but it wouldn’t be like telling someone of her own age.

Then she thought of Fatima, her old friend from school, who she had last seen when they were both briefly studying in Tashkent. She had an email address, Roxana knew that; Fatima was very proud of her business skills these days.

Maybe, Roxana thought, she would find an internet café and send her a message.





It was 4 a.m. when she returned to the flat in Hammersmith. She tiptoed in without turning on a light and almost immediately collided with the sofa end. Noah was wrapped in a blanket, his large bare feet sticking up over the low arm, and he was gently snoring with his broad, good-humoured face creased up against a cushion. Roxana went into his bedroom and climbed into the now familiar bed.

The next afternoon she left the flat early, before either Noah or Andy were home from work. She had bought a copy of the newspaper and circled some rooms to let that she reckoned she could afford. Until she had found a place, she thought, it might actually be possible to live at Noah’s without him or Andy ever having to bump into her. Except for Noah on the sofa, it was a good arrangement. She decided to tell Noah that it would be better if she took the sofa.

On Tuesday, she discovered the Best Little Internet Café on the Planet. It was in a side street, a very dingy street that was full of bagged refuse from fast-food restaurants. The pavement outside was slippery with grease and the air was rank with the breath of kitchen ventilators. But still, the café itself looked inviting. The funny name was printed above the window, in square red letters. Inside at the front there was a handful of small wooden tables, with mismatched chairs and old-fashioned glass salt and pepper sets. At the back, on a slightly raised section of the floor, she caught a glimpse of a row of terminals. Some young men who looked like Asian students were perched in front of them.

Roxana went inside and ordered a Greek coffee, as the menu described it. The café proprietors were Greeks, obviously. One of the Asian boys got up from his terminal, tapped the others on the back, and paid some money to the owner.

‘See you,’ the man called after him.

Roxana asked if she could use the terminal that was now free.

‘Sure,’ the owner answered. ‘Half an hour, or one hour?’

She sat down in the still-warm seat. There was a laminated card with printed instructions taped to the tabletop. Roxana read it carefully.

Fumbling with the English keyboard, she chose an Uzbek-language portal offering news and cultural commentary. Obligingly it came straight up, headed by a tourist-brochure picture of four sky-blue tiled majolica domes surmounting four brick minarets. It was the Chor Minor, gatehouse to a ruined madrassah, one of the most famous of the many famous buildings in Roxana’s home town of Bokhara.

Roxana blinked at the domes, and at the sky behind them that was even more brightly and intensely blue with the heavy pulse of heat within it. The view was very familiar, but she needed to feel her distance from the alleys and concrete blocks and the hot white light of Bokhara. Outside the café, taxis reassuringly rumbled in the city street.

There was a boy leaning back in the next seat and covertly eyeing her.

‘Excuse me?’ Roxana said to him, quickly closing the window. ‘How do you send email from here?’





That night at The Cosmos was the worst yet. None of the men had wanted a dance from her, however hard she worked at making eye contact from the pole. There had been a sour, uneasy atmosphere in the club and Mr Shane had been vicious to all the girls, even Natalie.

Roxana was about to get her period, so her face looked pale and spotty and her stomach was distended. She felt ugly and bone weary and contemptuous of the men who lined the bar at the back of the club, staring at her as she went through her routine as if she were meat in a market. If she couldn’t make them do what she wanted, she felt naked instead of clothed in self-confidence.

As soon as she closed the front door of the flat with the softest possible click, she knew that Noah was awake. She moved as silently as she could, to the bathroom and from there into the bedroom. When she lay down in the darkness, she saw a stripe of light under the door. She suddenly wanted very much to see Noah and talk to him.

She sat up abruptly, swung her legs out of bed, adjusting the vest and shorts that she wore to sleep in.

Noah was in the kitchen, two hands wrapped round a mug. His hair stood up at the back of his head and he was yawning and blinking. He took a gulp from the mug, looking at Roxana over the rim.

‘I knew you were awake,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘You should get to bed, though. You look really tired.’

They looked at each other under the twinkling, over-bright kitchen lights.

‘Do you want some tea?’ he asked. They were speaking very quietly, not wanting to risk disturbing Andy.

‘Tea? Okay, why not?’

He juggled with a teabag and a mug and the kettle, then handed the mug across to her. They sat down at the kitchen table.

‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘I have missed speaking to you.’

‘I come home at the usual time, hoping to see you, but you’re never here.’

Roxana pushed out her lower lip and he studied the faint indentations in the fullness where her teeth had rested.

‘I don’t want to be in the way, for you and Andy.’

She drank some of her tea, put the mug down and spread her hands flat on the table. Noah matched the gesture and without speaking or looking directly at each other they slid their hands closer until the tips of their middle fingers were just touching. After a moment of this most tenuous connection Noah ventured to raise his hands to cover hers. When he glanced at her face he saw that she was blushing, and the contrast between what she did and what she was like touched him deeply.

Behind her the fridge shuddered and the motor began its low hum. Roxana stirred herself and withdrew her hands from beneath his.

‘It is very late.’

‘When can we see each other?’ he asked.

‘We are seeing each other now.’

‘You know what I mean.’

She said abruptly, ‘Yes. Of course I know.’

‘And so?’ He might as well be persistent, he thought. You could only get so far with tact and circumspection.

Roxana appeared to consider. ‘I would like to be friends.’

For Roxana this was an offer of far greater value than mere sex, because sex was handed over in a transaction or taken in violence. For Noah, it was a brush-off. They misunderstood each other.

He sighed, and then smiled.

‘Okay. So we will. And now I think it will be best if I take myself off to the sofa.’

They both stood up, bumped into each other as they tried to place their mugs in the sink, stepped quickly back again, turned awkwardly aside. Roxana saw him resignedly ease himself down on the sofa, bend his long legs to fit the shorter space and pull the cover up to his chin. She clicked the light off at the wall and retreated into the bedroom.

She lay down too, but sleep was a long way off. All she could think of was Noah’s face, crumpled against the cushions, and the way the tip of his finger had nudged against hers. She was lying in his bed, safe under his roof, with the New Zealand boys who played rugby lined up downstairs like a row of innocent, beefy bodyguards. In spite of her uncertainty, in the darkness she laughed. Then she kicked off the bedclothes and marched back to the door. She switched the light on again and Noah sat up, blinking at her.

‘Come in?’ she asked.

He hesitated, but it was an invitation that he was physically incapable of refusing.

Still, he went slowly, knowing that she was offering herself because she felt indebted to him, because he had manoeuvred her into an awkward position. Roxana lay down on her side, her knees drawn up and her hand curled out towards him.

The edge of the mattress gave under his weight. He lay down with his body as far away from hers as possible, then he gently took her hand. She sighed and clasped his in return. Noah looked up and saw that there was grey light creeping round the edges of the skylight blind.

‘Close your eyes,’ he murmured, stroking the back of her hand with his thumb. ‘Everything is all right.’

To his surprise, he fell almost immediately into a deep sleep.

When he woke, the first thing he saw was Roxana’s shoulder and the rounded swell of her upper arm. He lay without moving, listening to the sound of her breathing. He heard the water running as Andy took a shower, then a series of bumps and a brief snatch of music before the radio was turned down. The smell of burned toast made Roxana stir. She rolled onto her back and in the pale light he saw her eyes open.

She turned her head towards him, her face still filmed with sleep.

‘Hello?’ he said.

‘Hello Noah.’ Her mouth curved in a smile and they lay looking into the worlds within each other’s eyes. Slowly, Noah shifted himself towards her. She didn’t move back or try to push him away. Her smile broadened slightly, and then his lips touched hers.

There were some more thumps, and finally the door slammed as Andy departed for work.

‘What time is it?’ Roxana murmured when the kiss ended. Noah’s fingertips gently traced her jaw line, then ran down to the warm notch at the base of her smooth throat.

‘No idea. Half eight?’

‘You have to go to work.’

‘I think…I think I might pull a sickie.’

Roxana’s eyes were dancing.

‘What is that?’

‘A sickie is when you don’t go to work for a whole day. You stay in bed, like this. Doing this…’ His fingers trailed downwards, found a small round breast.

‘I see,’ she sighed. Her spine arched, like a stroked cat.

‘Come here.’

She didn’t move. But she was still smiling. ‘Why don’t you come here?’

He slid across the remaining inch or so of sheet and suddenly connected with the whole silky length of her body. Her arms snaked round him and held him tight.

‘Now I have you.’

‘So you do,’ he agreed. He took her hand, and guided it.





Andy came in at about seven o’clock.

Roxana had left for The Cosmos and it was eight hours before Noah could even hope to see and touch her again. He’d wanted to take her to work, and to stay there to watch over her, but she had absolutely forbidden him to do anything of the kind. She had plastered her two hands over his mouth as a gag.

‘No. No. Do you understand me?’

He broke away and rolled on top of her. ‘Not really. You have this very, very strange accent.’

‘Listen to me. Dancing is just dancing. It doesn’t mean anything.’

He kissed the inside of one wrist. ‘I know. Just come back soon, right?’

She had gone, and now he was sitting watching the Channel 4 News.

‘All right, mate?’ Andy said. He let his bag flop off his shoulder.

‘Yeah, thanks, not bad at all.’

‘How was your day?’

‘I didn’t go in.’

Andy reached into the fridge and took out a beer. He popped the ring and expertly captured the rising froth beneath his upper lip. He took a long, eager swallow.

‘Ah. That’s better. So, are you shagging her yet, then?’

Noah raised his eyebrows. He didn’t even need to glance about him to see their shared quarters in full detail. There were magazines and last weekend’s colour supplements on the floor and sofa, interleaved with takeaway flyers. Clothing belonging to both of them hung on the backs of chairs and there was a jumble of trainers in the niche to the left of the front door. It wasn’t squalid, but it wasn’t orderly either. They both understood the unwritten rules of sharing, one of which was that they should conduct most of their sex lives elsewhere. More recently, in Noah’s case, it had happened at Lauren’s neat flat. When he had removed her teddy bear from its place of honour on the pillow.

When Noah didn’t answer, Andy grinned. ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

‘Take it as whatever you want.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Andy drank some more beer, settled himself into his usual chair and paid a minute’s attention to Jon Snow.

‘So,’ he began again. ‘Does it look serious?’

‘Too soon to tell,’ Noah conceded. Remembering the details of the day made him almost lose the studied cool he and Andy maintained around each other. He allowed himself a smile, though. ‘Maybe.’

‘Look, mate. Whatever. It’s just that…’ Andy waved his hand to indicate the limitations of their space.

‘I know,’ Noah interrupted. ‘It’s only till the weekend. She hasn’t a clue about the Western world, let alone London. I’ll help her find a room, and then she’ll be sorted.’

Andy nodded and returned his attention to the television. ‘Sweet, mate.’ He found the remote down the side of his chair and began to click through the channels. ‘Isn’t the athletics on now?’

‘No idea,’ Noah sighed.





Bill fanned the coals until they glowed, and then stood back to watch the scarlet fade to ash-grey. It was a warm Sunday in July, and therefore, in theory, the perfect opportunity for a family barbecue.

In many ways his marriage to Jeanette had been a conventional one. He had built up a business, a City PR firm that had remained small but was now well-regarded and quite successful, while Jeanette had run their home. Once Noah was old enough for school, with Bill’s encouragement Jeanette had built on her undergraduate science degree by taking a postgraduate diploma in plant taxonomy. She had discovered a passion for botany and plant classification. For years she had worked at a botanical garden, with a small team of long-standing colleagues who specialised in plant diversity and conservation techniques. It was stimulating work in an environment where her deafness was not a serious impediment, but it had also left her with enough time to be a regular wife and mother.

Lately, though, Bill had had to take over responsibilities around the house. He thought his cooking was improving, and Jeanette insisted that it was, but still a barbecue had seemed the best option for today. Bill had always done the barbecuing.

Noah was coming to lunch, and he had asked if he could bring his new girl. He wanted Jeanette to meet her. Both of them to meet her, he had corrected himself, without managing to withdraw the implication that Jeanette didn’t have much time to take the measure of new girlfriends.

Connie was coming too.

Jeanette had asked for this, and Connie had accepted the invitation.

It was going to be a family party. Bill could count the precedents for this on the fingers of two hands.

Jeanette was sitting in her usual place in the shade of the tree. She was wearing a straw hat, her head bent to deepen the shade over her face, intent on shelling peas into a colander. Bill straightened up to look at her.

It was simple, he thought. After twenty-five years loyalty and affection and habit took the place of love. Or perhaps at some point in their history, love had become these things. Whichever way it was, when he remembered that next summer she would not be here in her garden, he found himself in tears. He often cried these days. The tears came without warning, like a child’s or an old man’s. Then, just as suddenly, the grip of sorrow released him again.

Whereas where Connie was concerned, nothing was simple.

All their long history had been constructed out of negatives: out of guilt and then denial, pain, then more guilt and absence, and long silence.

And yet still, with the knowledge that soon he would see her, even with his dying wife quietly shelling peas a few feet away from him, Bill was fired up with anticipation as fierce as a boy’s.

The coals in the barbecue pan were breaking into surreptitious flames. From his array of barbecuing equipment, mostly past birthday offerings from Noah, he selected a metal spray canister and spritzed the flames into submission. When he looked up again Connie was walking across the grass. She was wearing jeans, flip-flops, a basket slung over her shoulder.

‘There was no answer to the bell so I came round the side,’ she called.

He met her halfway, grasped her by the wrists and kissed her cheek. She was warm, flushed with the sun, and her hair was damp at the nape of her neck.

‘Glad you’re here,’ he said.

Jeanette sat up. Connie turned so she could read her lips.

‘How are you? How’s the week been?’

– Good. Quite good today, Jeanette answered. – How about you?

Connie knelt beside the chair and Jeanette leaned forwards, pushing back the brim of her hat so their cheeks touched. From her basket Connie produced a row of little gifts: a magazine with an article on plant names, a jar of manuka honey, a ridged wooden cylinder that you were supposed to roll beneath your feet to massage away tension.

Bill watched as they passed the various items back and forth between them. There was no physical resemblance, of course, but their gestures mirrored each other. At a glance you might assume that they were siblings, and then wonder why you had jumped to that conclusion.

‘Let me get you a drink, Con. Glass of wine?’

‘Please.’

– Me too, Jeanette indicated.

‘Coming up.’ Bill carried the colander full of shelled peas into the house, tipped them into a pan, took a bottle of white wine out of the fridge. When he went out into the garden again he saw that Connie was sitting on the grass beside Jeanette. They were not quite looking at each other and a pool of silence spilled between them, but even so, for the first time that he could ever remember, it was Bill who felt like the outsider.

He poured wine into three glasses. Jeanette lifted her head and smiled at him; as Connie reached upwards she angled her legs and her ankles showed under the turned-up bottoms of her jeans. All three raised their glasses in a wordless toast. There were wood pigeons throatily cooing in the tall trees.

Noah and a girl emerged round the side of the house, the same way that Connie had come.

‘Hi, here we are. Mum, Dad, this is Roxana.’

Roxana was wearing a denim jacket over a short full skirt made of some sort of sweatshirt material that revealed an almost unfeasible length of leg; it wasn’t a reticent outfit, but her expression contradicted her appearance. She looked taken aback by the size of the house and the expanse of the garden.

She shook Jeanette’s and then Bill’s hand very quickly and stepped back beside Noah.

Noah turned to his aunt. This was not the time to let the faintest wrinkle of uncertainty crease the smooth surface of goodwill. Noah gave her a generous hug and Connie embraced her nephew warmly in return.

‘Hello Auntie Con,’ Noah said. ‘How’ve you been?’

‘Noah. It’s so good to see you,’ she smiled. He had filled out and lost the accusatory glare of adolescence, and the resemblance to his father had deepened.

He introduced Roxana. Roxana’s hand was cool. She gave Connie a quick glance under mascara-heavy lashes.

‘You are Noah’s aunt, he told me.’

Connie was thinking how striking she was.

‘Yes. Jeanette and I are sisters.’ It sounded simple enough.

Jeanette stood up. She was the shortest of the group anyway, and so reduced now as to seem hardly bigger than a child, but she commanded attention. She took Roxana firmly by the arm.

‘I like your garden very much,’ Roxana told her politely, then glanced to Noah for confirmation that she was doing the right thing.

‘Mum can follow everything,’ Noah told her. ‘You’ll be surprised. It’s difficult for her when everyone speaks all at once, but otherwise it’s no problem. And she can talk. You’ll get the hang of it. It’s stopping her that’s the problem, half the time.’

He grinned and Jeanette shook her head at him. She held on to Roxana’s arm and pointed towards the length of the garden. With a sweep of a hand she encompassed her flowerbeds.

– Come with us, she beckoned Connie. Connie took her other side and they began a tour of the borders.

Bill and Noah watched them.

‘It’s okay that Connie’s here, then?’ Noah said in a low voice.

‘Yes. Your mum wants to see her. I’m glad of that.’

‘It still feels a bit weird to me.’

Bill put on an apron with Natural Born Griller printed on the front, another of Noah’s offerings.

‘Cool pinny, Dad. Suits you.’

‘Yes. Thank you. Everything about dying is weird, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. How are you with it?’

‘Death?’ Bill used a pair of tongs to lift chicken portions out of a marinade, and laid the meat on the barbecue. Dripping juices caused the red coals to sizzle and spit. ‘I’m finding the inevitability, the non-negotiability, quite hard to accept. Just at the moment. I’ll probably get my mind round it.’

‘I know what you mean. I keep on thinking, look, this isn’t right. Surely we could do this, or that, and she’ll get better. Even though we know she won’t. I was asking more about Connie being here, though.’

‘I see. Well. Jeanette and Connie predate you, you know. They predate me as well. It’s right that they should come back together now, in spite of all the problems in their history. It’s important. It’s all that matters, in fact. I’m full of admiration for your mother, for having the will to make it happen. And I admire Connie too.’

Noah put an arm round his father’s shoulders. ‘You’re such a good, good person, Dad, you know?’

Bill laughed briefly. ‘You didn’t always think that.’

‘You know what kids are like.’

‘Righteous.’

‘A total pain. But I’m a grown man now, I’m not insisting on black or white. I can acknowledge grey. You know, Dad, I love you.’

‘Yes,’ Bill said, as composedly as he could. He turned a chicken portion, revealing a browned underside frilled with burned edges. ‘I love you too.’

They could say these things to each other now, whereas once it would have seemed impossible. Bill told himself that here was something to hold on to, at the very least. He slung the tongs over the rail at the side of the barbecue burner and wiped his palms over the Griller slogan. He nodded his head towards the three women, who were just reaching the end of the garden.

‘She looks like an interesting girl.’

Noah beamed. ‘Roxana is an amazing girl,’ he said. ‘I have never met anyone like her.’

‘That’s good to hear. I’m very pleased. I’m looking forward to getting to know her. Now, how are we doing with this food? Noah, will you go in the house for me and put the potatoes on? Just the spuds, not the peas yet, otherwise the peas’ll be…’

‘…Yeah, Dad, right. I’m not a total loser in the kitchen, as it happens.’

‘Just do it.’

‘Christ,’ Noah sighed.





Roxana gazed at the tall blue spires and the low misty-blue mounds and the clumps of grey velvet leaves. She had never been in a garden like this. She had no idea what the flowers were called, she had never even seen most of them. Noah’s mother and aunt were making a kind of duet out of telling her about them. They seemed to talk fluently, with only one of them speaking.

‘Those are delphiniums. Those, I don’t know – Jeanette? Oh yes, it’s nepeta.’

Jeanette made a low sound and Connie added, ‘Catmint, yes.’

‘These, um, roses, what a nice colour. I have never seen one like this. What kind are they?’

At least she knew roses. Roxana was trying hard. Her jaw muscles strained with politeness, and all the time Noah’s mother was looking at her with inquisitive eyes.

The two women conferred. Noah’s aunt was quite tall, and interesting to look at. Her plain white shirt with rolled-up sleeves set off her beautiful skin and she was wearing a very thin gold bracelet around her right wrist. Roxana thought she looked very chic, so much so that she made Roxana want to tug at the hem of her own skirt and straighten out the creases in her jacket. It was difficult to make the same sort of appraisal of Noah’s mother, and Roxana knew that that was because she was very ill. Her face had an ageless look to it, so that she might have been sixteen or sixty, with too-big eyes and faded hair as thin and tufty as a young child’s. She and Noah must once have looked quite alike, with similar mouths and cheekbones, but now Noah was more like his father. They had the same fair, faintly reddish tinge to their skin and the same amused quietness in their manner that still expected to be heard.

‘It’s called Buff Beauty,’ Connie said.

Jeanette released their arms and leaned into the flowerbed. She broke off one of the blooms and put it into Roxana’s hands. The outer petals were pale cream, the colour of elegant, expensive paper, but in the tight centre they were apricot gold. Noah’s mother’s scrutiny made her feel exposed, and she felt uncertain with these two women and their family party and this big house with about fifteen windows blinking at them, and the scented depths of their flower garden.

Whenever Roxana had thought or dreamed of England, it was London in her mind’s eye. She had never even considered that there would be places like this, set behind hedges and buried in trees. There were houses quite close at hand because she had seen them as she passed by with Noah, but from here she could see nothing but the birds. Only a week ago she had felt her place in the rich city streets, and now she was where Noah belonged and she was out of her depth all over again. It was quite likely, she thought, that she would never be able to fathom what Englishness meant. It would keep evading her, and then where would she be?

‘It’s nice,’ she said flatly, turning the rose in her fingers.

Connie took it from her and twisted the stem in the buttonhole of Roxana’s denim jacket.

‘There. That looks good,’ she smiled and lightly touched her shoulder.

Jeanette nodded her approval. They began to walk again, slowly. Leaves brushed against Roxana’s ankles, releasing aromatic scents.

At the far end of the garden, partly screened by tall bushes and backed by trees, they came to a little green-painted structure with a low door and a pitched roof.

Both of the women stopped walking.

Connie said, ‘Do you know what I remember?’

Jeanette made a little roof shape by placing her fingers together and then moved her bunched fingertips to her lips and on upwards in an extravagant arc. She was laughing. Connie was laughing too.

‘Yes, yes.’

They had forgotten Roxana. There was a ladder leaning against the trunk of one of the trees. Connie ran forwards and seized it, propped it against the side of the hut and clambered up. She balanced in a duck-walk, arms outstretched. She perched unsteadily, feet on either side of the roof ridge, struck a pose and then began singing. In a high, loud voice. About a prince, and when he would come to carry her away.

Roxana gaped, thinking that the two of them had perhaps been drinking. She peered back towards the house and saw Noah carrying plates out to the round wooden table, and his father shaking out the folds of a big umbrella.

Jeanette was leaning back against the trunk of a tree, laughing so much that she seemed hardly able to stand, so much that Roxana wondered if she ought to try to help her. But Connie slithered down the roof and vaulted back down to the grass. She ran to Jeanette and the two of them fell into each other’s arms. The noise Jeanette made was loud, a hoo-hoo sound against Connie’s lighter, normal laughter. Then there was a point when they both took a breath and looked into each other’s faces.

They weren’t laughing any more.

Connie touched her sister’s cheek, and then Jeanette’s head slowly came forwards until it rested against her shoulder. They stood there, swaying a little, arms round each other.

Roxana walked a few steps onwards, not wanting to intrude on this, and stared over at Noah. He was wiping cutlery and laying it on the checked cloth that had been spread over the table. He looked up and saw her watching him, gave her a wave and then blew a kiss.

After a minute or two the women rejoined her.

Connie said, ‘We were just remembering when we were little. We used to have a shed at home, quite like that one. I used to…sing.’ They were both shaking with laughter again, and Roxana wondered if they were perhaps not drunk but a little bit crazy.

With an effort, Jeanette composed herself. She put her hands together and inclined her head, making such an eloquent apology that Roxana was disarmed. She fell into step when Jeanette indicated that they were to traverse the opposite side of the garden.

This was the shadier half, and here there were big dark leaves splashed with silver, and wiry stems that held up bronze leaves shaped like hearts. Noah’s mother made some more of her quick gestures and his aunt translated them into words.

‘What do you think of England?’

‘I like it very much,’ Roxana answered, choosing the obvious response. She added carefully, ‘And Noah has been kind. Now I am looking for a flat to share. There is a room in, what is it, North Ealing? Noah says he will come with me to look at it. London is a big city, and it’s very expensive, but I have a job. Perhaps Noah will have told you what work I do?’

Both women casually nodded, careful not to place too much emphasis on knowing about it.

‘Are you going to stay in London? Don’t you miss home?’

‘Not so much. Uzbekistan is a poor country. People work hard, there is some discontent, little freedom to speak. We don’t have too much of anything, except cotton fields and policemen.’

Jeanette smiled, but Noah was right, his mother didn’t miss anything. She signed again, and Connie spoke for her. ‘Noah told us about your brother. I’m sorry.’

‘Thank you,’ Roxana said.

She did not want to think about Niki now, although the memories of the Friday Massacre, the images of the main square in Andijan under a rain-heavy sky and the armoured trucks full of men with guns were seldom far from her mind. She added, because it seemed that she ought to say something more, ‘Niki was a good boy. A Muslim boy, and he believed in certain things. Me, however, I am not so good.’

To underline her point she did a couple of little dance steps and the folds of her short skirt swung around her thighs. ‘And now I am here in England,’ she finished.

– That’s good, Jeanette indicated.

Noah’s family were kind, like him, Roxana decided.

Noah’s mother wanted to find out about his girlfriend. That was all right, Roxana thought philosophically. Any boy’s mother would want to know things about her, she had arrived from nowhere, that was natural. She wished she had a family of her own exactly like this one. But at least she was here, included in the lunch party, just as if she were an English girl. Suddenly she smiled, basking all over again in the white light of freedom and opportunity.

Connie saw the smile. She was thinking, This girl is quite formidable.

Jeanette pointed. Bill was waving the barbecue tongs, beckoning them.

‘Lunch,’ Connie said.

They all sat down under the shade of the big parasol. Jeanette supervised the seating. She put Roxana opposite her where she could see her face more clearly, and there followed an interval of drink-pouring and complicated passing of various dishes of food. Roxana watched covertly to see what Noah did and then copied him. He glanced across and winked at her.

When they all had some of everything, Bill filled Jeanette’s glass with wine and Jeanette raised it in Roxana’s direction.

‘Cheers,’ the other three all said.

Roxana put her hand over her heart. ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’





Jeanette ate hardly anything, but she sipped some of her wine and she followed the conversation. The others seemed to orbit around her, and whenever she broke in with her signing or the occasional unformed, liquid syllables that they seemed to understand perfectly well, they all stopped to listen. For all her physical fragility, her strength was evident.

‘How’s the music biz, Auntie Con?’ Noah asked after a while. ‘Connie writes music for films and commercials, Roxana. Very big-time.’

Roxana liked Noah’s mother and father, but it was Connie who increasingly drew her attention. She seemed different from the others, and not just in her appearance. Roxana was very interested to hear what she did.

‘Really? What is the work like?’

Connie raised her hands now, laughing and twisting back her dark hair. ‘It’s a circus. Always has been. I was at the EMMAs in the week. That’s the Electronic Music Marketing Awards,’ she said for Roxana’s benefit. ‘The ad industry is one of the best there is for awarding itself awards.’

‘Were you nominated for something?’ Noah asked.

‘No. I’m way out of touch. I went with a friend of mine.’

Connie had been Angela’s guest.

‘Please come,’ Angela had begged her. ‘The cat-food commercial’s up for best use of classical-style music in a thirty-second TV spot. The client’s a total nightmare, but you needn’t have anything to do with him. You know everyone, anyway.’

So Connie had taken her place at Angela’s company’s table for twelve clients and agency people.

To her surprise, she found herself sitting next to Malcolm Avery of GreenLeaf Music.

Her first job, when she had turned sixteen and could at last leave school, had been at GreenLeaf.

Full of determination to make her escape from Echo Street by finding work in the music business, she had taken a bus and then the tube up to Soho one Saturday morning and walked into all the recording studios. The studio manager, Brian Luck, admitted that they needed a teenager to do odd jobs. They wanted a boy, really, but Connie insisted that she could make better tea and what’s more she could start at once. She added that they might as well give her the job right now, because she was going to sit there in the studio until they did.

When the job was hers, she bought a copy of the Evening Standard and went through the accommodation ads until she found a room she reckoned she could just about afford. She went home that first night to Echo Street, but it was the last time she ever slept in the house.

Once she was at GreenLeaf, she learned how to make herself useful and then indispensable. She gradually made friends among the loose tide of drummers and singers and keyboard artists who spent their days swirling around the studios and sitting in at recording sessions for whoever needed them. She did her share of playing and singing too, and in time a way of life established itself. It was an existence that centred on drinking heavily in Soho pubs, and rolling spliffs in stuffy rooms at the back of clubs, and from there watching quite a few of the people she knew descending into abysses of their own creation.

Connie didn’t fear the abyss for herself. She was learning that she was her own safety net, and probably always would be, and therefore it was important to keep the structure in good repair.

Constance Thorne acquired a reputation for being good for a laugh but quite straight, and therefore reliable in an emergency. Everyone at GreenLeaf was busy and she began to get odds and ends of commissioned work that led to writing jingles for commercials. Connie was too used to being poor, and the effect of having some money once in a while seemed to shoot straight into her veins like her own version of a fix. She worked feverishly, jazzed up by the earning potential, and soon she had a useful little showreel of her work.

She lived like this for four years, sharing a dingy flat in Perivale and keeping irregular hours, not seeing the sun often enough and always juggling with work and money. She had plenty of friends and few intimates. The digital age was arriving, and the old studios were slowly going out of style. Jingle writers could come up with a tune on the way to a meeting with agency or television people, then call up and order a drummer, a flute-player and a violinist, record the separate tracks and mix them, sample some more, and the job would be done. Unusually for a woman, Connie watched and learned how to use the new equipment. She worked on a retainer for GreenLeaf during the day, then freelanced in the evenings, using the company’s studios for her own work.

Then one of the founding partners of GreenLeaf, the amiable but lazy Malcolm Avery, ran a deadline too close. The brief was to write a jingle for the launch of a new chocolate bar called Boom Bar.

Malcolm slumped in his studio chair at six o’clock in the evening, his headphones hanging around his neck like a noose and dark circles under his eyes.

‘I’ve got nothing here for the agency and I’m scheduled to meet them at ten tomorrow,’ he groaned.

Connie had a date, for once with a man who wasn’t a penniless drummer or trombonist. He was an agency account man, and he had even promised to buy her a meal rather than expecting her to stand alternate rounds in the pub.

‘I’ll have a go,’ she said to Malcolm.

‘Yeah, go on then. I’m going home. We’ll play them whatever we’ve got tomorrow morning, and promise them the earth in a couple of days’ time. See you, Con.’

Connie called to put off her date. The man didn’t sound pleased.

When GreenLeaf Studios went quiet for the evening, Connie sat down at the eight-track EMU 2 with a jug of coffee and the brief for the Boom Bar jingle. She worked all night, and in the morning the tune was there.

At eight o’clock, with traffic building up in the street below and the lift beginning to hum in the old building, she picked out the tune on the keyboard one more time. Boom boom baboom ba ba…

She went out to get coffee and a danish, finished this breakfast at her desk in the corner by the stairs, and waited for Malcolm to come in.

When he arrived she played the jingle to him. His face flashed with cunning and then went flat.

‘Well, yeah. Not genius, but not bad. I’ll chuck it in with the others, mix ’em up, see what the agency thinks. Give me the tape.’

Connie was red-eyed and wired from her sleepless night. Her hand shot out and caught Malcolm by the wrist.

‘No. I’m coming to the meeting. I’ll play the tape, and I’ll make sure everyone knows whose work it is.’

Malcolm laughed. ‘Whose brief is it, whose studio is this, who do you work for?’

Somehow, Connie found it within herself to shrug and turn away with the tape in her pocket.

‘Suit yourself. I did it in my own time, so it’s mine. Go and present whatever you’ve got.’

She could almost hear Malcolm Avery making calculations. It was an important commission, for a big agency, for a major product launch.

‘Oh, what the f*ck,’ he sighed. ‘Come with me if you feel so strongly about it.’





The agency team and the clients all went mad for Connie’s tune.

For the first time in her life Connie found that she was able to call the shots. She agreed to split the commission fee with GreenLeaf, and gleefully put a cheque for a thousand pounds in her bank. But she made sure when she signed the contract that royalties would come to her alone.

Almost at once, the Boom tune became a huge hit.

By the time she was twenty-three Connie was living in her own large flat in Belsize Park, with a room in it converted to a studio. In time she formed her own company and employed a manager to run the business side, and to go to meetings and take the music briefs from advertising-agency creative departments or television producers, while she concentrated on writing the music. She could spend days at a time shut away in the soundproof studio, working less with live musicians and more and more via the spiralling trajectories of new technology.

She never wrote another Boom song, although the title stubbornly clung to her, but she was a good composer. Her work won some awards, her showreel gathered depth and range. After the first flood of royalties, her income was steady rather than spectacular, but she had come a long, long way from Echo Street.

Eight years later, when numbers of her friends were marrying and having babies, Connie was certain that neither option was open to her because she was deeply, unwillingly in love with the man who was already married to her sister.

Then one day she went along to the recording of the orchestral music she had written for a television serialisation of Dombey and Son. The orchestra was under the baton of Sébastian Bourret.

They edged together, over the space of a year.

Connie liked being with Seb because he was actually as rootless as she felt. Seb was Australian by birth, half Belgian and half South African by parentage. Home for him was wherever he was rehearsing the current ensemble, and Connie fitted well into that structure. She was as happy as he was to move on from Geneva to Philadelphia to Tokyo. The topic of marriage or the possibility of children was never seriously discussed, though, and that was as much Connie’s choice as Seb’s. She couldn’t envisage having children by anyone except the man she still loved.

Then came Sung Mae Lin. Connie didn’t want to go back to Australia, and when she thought of London the streets were crowded with shadows. The Balinese village house with the veranda and the view stopped being a staging post and became her home.





Time had not treated Malcolm Avery kindly. He was three stone heavier and his cheeks were mottled dark mulberry red.

‘Christ. It’s Boom Girl, isn’t it?’

‘Hello Malcolm.’

‘Don’t see you around much these days. Are you still working? Wait a minute, you married Simon Rattle, didn’t you?’

Connie said, ‘I was with Sébastian Bourret for a few years. We never married, though. I live in Bali these days.’

‘Bloody good idea. Better than sodding London.’

Malcolm refilled his own glass with the not-bad California merlot and sloshed the remaining inch or two from the bottle into Connie’s.

There was a big silver-plated wine cooler in the centre of the table, filled with ice and bottles. Across the top of it Connie caught Angela’s eye and they smiled at each other. It was going to be a long evening.

Once the dinner had been cleared away, the moderately well-known comedian and the blonde television presenter who were jointly compering the event took the podium. There was a lengthy session of jokes and banter.

‘Bloody get on with it,’ Malcolm said, not quietly. He was an award nominee, having devised the music for the cat-food commercial. He poured three inches of brandy into a balloon glass as the presentation of awards finally began. Nineteen minutes later Cosmo Reiss of Gordon Glennie Music lifted the award for the best use of classical style in a thirty-second television commercial over his head as if it were the World Cup.

Malcolm shouted, ‘Bollocks, mate.’ The cat-food client looked furious and Angela covered her eyes with one hand.

After the awards had all been presented the table-hopping part of the evening began. Among the well-dressed executives the composers looked like skinny angular children at a party for plump old relatives. Connie excused herself and went to the cloakroom. Angela came in a minute later and tossed her Lulu Guinness bag down beside the basin. They peered into their reflections in the mirror as Angela applied red lipstick.

‘Bad luck about the award,’ Connie commiserated.

Angela raised one eyebrow. ‘Worse luck for Malcolm. He needs it. But next year, darling, it’ll be yours for your Bali bank music. Trust me.’

‘I do, I do,’ Connie smiled. ‘Ange? How are things with…?’ Women were coming in and out behind them so she didn’t say Rayner Ingram’s name out loud.

‘All right. Well. You know. Quite difficult, actually.’

Angela looked unhappy, but determined to conceal it.

Connie couldn’t think of anything she could say that might improve matters. She murmured something anodyne, and they went back out into the party together.

At the end of the evening Connie returned to their table. Waiters had carried away all the debris except for the wine cooler, which now contained only a couple of detached wine labels and a scum of melting ice. A couple of agency account men were attempting to haul Malcolm Avery to his feet.

Malcolm rather thought he would like one more drink, and resisted their efforts to hustle him. He gripped the table edge and rotated his head as if he were blind in one eye. Then he stood up, hauling on the cloth for support. The cooler slid towards him.

‘Check this,’ he suddenly roared. He moved fast, considering how drunk he was. He grabbed the wine cooler by its two little handles and tipped the contents over his head. Waves of icy water gushed over his shoulders and poured down his clothes. He gasped and shook himself like a walrus emerging from the sea. Constance gasped too, because quite a lot of the water had splashed over her.

‘There you are. Sober as a judge now. Sober as Constance,’ Malcolm shouted. He took off his shoes and tried to empty water out of them.





Connie told this story, complete with mime.

Jeanette and Bill and Noah all laughed, and after a second Roxana joined in too. She watched Connie admiringly as she pretended to wring water out of her hair, then glanced quickly round the table. This family laughed a lot, eagerly seizing every opportunity.

Bill sat back in his chair, grinning broadly.

‘What did you do?’

‘I personally saw him into a taxi and gave the driver forty quid to take him to West Hampstead.’

‘Bravo, Auntie Con,’ Noah applauded.

Connie didn’t tell them what one of the account men had murmured to her.

‘Poor sod, his wife’s just left him.’

Roxana said, ‘I thought it was only in Uzbekistan, like this.’ She tipped her left fist towards her mouth, thumb and little finger raised.

‘Ah, no. I am afraid you will encounter mass drunkenness in the UK. Even here in Surrey,’ Noah said gravely, as he poured more wine for everyone. They all laughed again.

Bill had made a summer pudding. They all admired the crimson, slightly sunken dome before he stuck a spoon into it and rivers of juice escaped. Noah and Roxana ate most of it between them, then they cleared the table and went into the house together, claiming that they were going to do the washing-up.

Jeanette immediately raised her eyebrows at Bill and Connie.

Bill pretended to consider. ‘I like her…skirt.’

Jeanette pointed at him and sliced her finger across her throat. She turned to Connie.

‘She’s impressive,’ Connie said.

– She liked you, Jeanette indicated.

They faced each other, and the faintest shadow of ancient rivalry seemed to dim the afternoon sun.

Connie leaned forward and touched her sister’s hand.

‘I expect she just wants to get into advertising.’

Jeanette met her eye, and then smiled.

– She’d be mad, from the sound of it. Plant taxonomy would be far better.

There was relief in their laughter. Connie wondered, Might it have been as simple as that all along, to defuse the hostility? Why do you have to die for us to find out?





Noah and Roxana did most of the washing-up. Then they wandered through the house and Noah led her into his old bedroom. Roxana rested her elbows in the deep window embrasure and peered down into the garden. Jeanette and Connie were lying on a rug in the shade of the big tree, seemingly asleep. Bill sat in a deckchair beside them, reading a newspaper.

‘Your mother and your auntie are not very like each other.’

Noah leaned behind her and kissed the back of her neck.

‘They’re not but they are, if you see what I mean. They’re not real sisters, Auntie Connie was adopted. I haven’t seen her for years. Not since my grandmother’s funeral, come to think of it. Mum and Auntie Connie really didn’t get on.’

‘Why is that?’ Roxana asked. Noah was thoughtfully sliding his hand over her hip.

‘Well. My dad and Connie. They had a sort of relationship, long ago. An affair, I think you’d call it that. Yeah. I was only a kid and I didn’t know much, but my mum was wild. She’s always loved my dad extravagantly. My dad went very quiet and dignified about it, even though you could tell he was massively confused and in pain. He hated hurting my mother, he’s always protected her by encouraging her. That’s partly why she’s been a successful scientist, he saw his job as enabling her, not further disabling. Connie was the loser in the end. She just sort of evaporated. Went to live abroad, and we never saw her. Dad kind of made a point of being exemplary after that, making up for it all. I mean, I don’t think it was a penance because I know he loves Mum. There are different kinds of love, that’s stating the obvious. But once the blood-letting was over there was a silence around it all. Taboo subject, you know, don’t mention. Elephant in the corner. And then it’s too late to mention anyway, because it’s got hidden behind the rest of the furniture. It takes the prospect of someone dying to get anyone to expose the old carcass again.’

He looked over Roxana’s shoulder at the tranquil scene in the garden. Then he buried his face in the nape of her neck.

‘English middle-class silence. Profound deafness has got nothing on the silence of comfortable family dysfunction.’

Roxana was quietly working out where an elephant fitted into this plush house, and why its presence seemed to matter so much.

Noah added hotly, his lips against her skin, ‘I want my family, the family I will have, to talk to each other all the time. No silences.’

Roxana tilted her head and wriggled round to face him.

‘Of course. You can have the family you want. You can make it that way.’

He gazed at her. Her belief was so strong, and yet she was the one who was a stranger to this house and alone in England. She didn’t seem particularly shocked about his father and Connie, although his father’s betrayal and his mother’s distress was the single biggest trauma Noah had had to deal with in his life, up until the present one.

Roxana had lost her mother and father and her only brother and left her whole world behind. He didn’t know what she had suffered at the hands of her stepfather after her mother died, although he could guess.

He held her face between his hands and smoothed her broad Asian cheekbones with his thumbs. Compared with Lauren and her predecessors, who had had to deal at the very worst with an overbearing mother, or a father who ran off with his secretary, Roxana’s experience was unfathomable.

‘I love you,’ he blurted out.

Roxana laughed. ‘Is that the truth, or are you saying what men say?’ Her mouth was the loveliest shape he had ever seen.

‘It’s the truth,’ Noah said humbly. ‘Do you love me?’

She turned serious. ‘Yes. Maybe. That is a difficult question. I want to give a proper answer.’

‘Then let’s leave it at yes, for the time being,’ Noah advised. ‘Here. Lie on my bed for a minute with me. See, up there, the cracks in the ceiling look like a map. When I was a kid I made up a whole imaginary country to go with it. I called it Outlandia.’





Connie opened her eyes. The leaves overhead created an abstract pattern shot through with darts of light. The remains of sleep, the scent of grass and the sun-warmed wool rug made a complex net of memory that held her captive. With an effort of will she turned her head and saw Jeanette asleep on her back a foot away. Her mouth was slightly open and a tiny snore repeatedly caught in the back of her throat, and this was part of Connie’s memory too.

Bill’s shadow fell over her.

He was holding out a mug of tea to her. She pushed herself to a sitting position and took it from him.

A picnic. That was it. The day and the place and the time swam out of her subconscious and delivered themselves to her, complete. Connie shook herself.

‘How long have I been asleep?’

‘Maybe an hour.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why? You looked very comfortable, both of you.’

‘Where are Noah and Roxana?’

Bill rubbed with his thumb at the raw patch near his mouth. ‘Upstairs. No, here they are.’

They spilled out of the door leading to the kitchen. They were scuffling, trying to trip one another and grabbing at each other’s arms for support.

‘They’re very young,’ Bill said quietly.

Jeanette stirred. She coughed and sighed, and he went to her and helped her to sit up.

‘That was a good nap,’ he said, holding her against him, and she nodded, still dazed with sleep.

Noah and Roxana chased across the grass and came to a panting standstill in front of them. Roxana tugged at the hem of her skirt again and composed her face, and Connie involuntarily smiled. This girl was endearing, as well as formidable.

‘Dad? Mum? We might have to head back quite soon. I’m going to take Rox to North Ealing to look at the room.’

Connie sat more upright. There were midges coming out as the sun sank, and she had to put her mug aside to slap at her exposed ankles. An idea had taken shape.

‘Roxana? This might not suit you, but I’ve got a spare room. It’s a big flat, and I’m not there all that often. You’d be welcome to stay. It’s not all that far from where you work.’

Roxana’s self-possession finally deserted her. She looked from Noah to his parents, then back at Connie. Jeanette was fully awake now, following the conversation intently.

‘With you? In your place?’ Roxana stammered. Her face flushed with surprising colour.

‘Yes. It might not be what you want at all, but until you get your bearings and decide what you really need?’

‘Connie?’ Bill murmured.

Roxana nodded very quickly. ‘Thank you. Yes, please. If you think it would not be a trouble. Thank you.’

Connie wondered, too late, if Jeanette might interpret the offer as an attempt to infiltrate Jeanette’s family, and Jeanette did seem to struggle with herself before she responded. But then she nodded.

– That’s kind of you, Connie. What a good idea.

Directly to Roxana, Connie added, ‘Maybe you and Noah could come back via my place this evening. You could take a look at the room.’ She felt suddenly absurdly pleased with the thought of company, of Roxana’s company, in her bare white apartment.

‘Noah, can we do this?’ asked Roxana.

In his easy-going way, Noah said, ‘Yeah. Sure we can. Thanks, Auntie Con.’