Constance. Rosie Thomas

him.

      ‘That is a shame for you,’ Pema said, all sympathetic awareness of the divide that now existed between the two of them. He was probably thinking that piles of her money wouldn’t compensate for not having a baby son like day-old Wayan.

      There wasn’t much else to say, and neither of them felt the need to make further conversation. They drank the rest of their tea and sat looking thoughtfully at Pema’s mother’s garden of peppers and chillies and coconut palms. Behind a small hedge flies swarmed around the brown haunches of a tethered buffalo.

      More people kept arriving. When Connie went to say goodbye, she could only manage to wave to Dewi and blow a kiss from the edge of the crowd. Later in the day, according to custom, the washed placenta would be wrapped in a sacred cloth and the visitors would all witness its burial inside a coconut shell near the gateway to the house.

      

      By the time Connie made it home the afternoon had reached the point where the light was at its ripest. It lay like melted butter over the vast swathe of gently stirring leaves, gilding the fronds of tree ferns and shining on the stippled trunks of palm trees so that they gleamed like beaten silver. Connie went out to her chair on the veranda and sat listening to the trickle of water and the various layers of birdsong.

      She let the questions sink slowly to the bottom of her pool of thoughts. In time, as the shoot receded, the sediment of habit would cover up her memories.

      Peace lapped round her once again.

      She sat for a long time, until the tropical twilight swept up again from the depths of the gorge. As the sudden darkness fell, she wandered back into the house and poured herself a glass of wine. Connie seldom drank alone, but tonight she felt the need for just one drink.

      There were no telephone messages. She took a long swallow of wine, and set the glass down on her desk as she switched on her computer. It was days since she had checked her emails. Broadband hadn’t yet reached the village and she wandered out to the veranda again while the unread messages slowly descended from the ether and filtered into her inbox. She drank some more wine and then, counter to her intentions, topped up her glass.

      At the screen again Connie clicked through the spam and a couple of emails from London to do with work. There was a message from the leader of the string quartet, thanking her for booking them for the commercial. Connie closed that and her eyes flicked to the sender of the next message. Bunting. Her brain had hardly taken it in before her heart was hammering. She looked away from the screen and then back again, but it wasn’t an illusion. Bunting.

      It was only then that she saw the sender wasn’t BBunting, but JBunting. Jeanette.

      The last time she had seen her sister was four years ago, after Hilda’s funeral.

      They hadn’t spoken since then, nor had they written.

      That was the last time she had seen Bill, too.

      She shouldn’t allow herself to remember their joint history, even to think about him. But what harm did it do to anyone, except perhaps herself?

      A message from her sister now could only mean that something was wrong.

      With Noah? With Bill?

      Her mouth was dry and her hands shook as she opened the message. It took two readings before the news began to sink in.

      There was indeed something very badly wrong.

      Connie read and reread the brief lines.

       Dear Connie,

       I hope this address still finds you because I want you to hear this news from me, not from anyone else.

       I have cancer. I won’t go into detail, but after several months of treatment and having our hopes raised and then lowered again, we were told this week that there isn’t any more to be done. Six months is the estimate.

       I am beginning to work out for myself what this means. What does it mean?

       It’s very hard for Noah. And for Bill. Both of them are full of love and concern for me, and I feel blessed in that.

       There it is. I don’t want anything, except to know that you know.

       Love (I mean this…)

       Jeanette

      Connie lowered her face into her hands. Her forearms pressed against the keyboard and, unseen, the screen split into layers of files. The immediate shock made her shiver. Jeanette had always been there: in her silence, in her brave focus on doing and being what she wanted, her influence most powerful – partly because of its very absence – in all Connie’s past life.

      Behind her eyes, images of her sister receded into their remote childhood.

      The chair she was sitting in became one of the pine set at the kitchen table in Echo Street. The desk became the knotty old table that had come with them from the flat before, the top half of a house in Barlaston Road, where old Mrs McBride lived downstairs.

      Jeanette had planted the idea in Connie that their neighbour was a witch.

      – At night, she rides in the sky. If you look, you can see the broomstick in her back kitchen.

      Now Jeanette was sitting opposite her, eleven years old, full of hope and strength in spite of her deafness.

      Connie lifted her head. She reached for her glass, and drank the wine.

      The computer screen was blinking, asking her if she wanted to close down now.

      It took an effort to reopen the email programme. Connie’s fingers felt uncertain on the keys, like a child’s.

      She started a new message and typed a single line.

      

       I’ll be there as soon as I can get a flight. Connie.

      The train from the airport ran past the backs of Victorian terraced houses, irregular and broken like crooked teeth in an overcrowded jaw. There were brief glimpses of clothes lines, cluttered yards, interiors veiled in dingy grey, all pressed beneath a swollen grey sky. Connie watched the terraces sliding past, absorbing the steady flicker of snapshot images from other people’s lives. This couldn’t be anywhere but England.

      In an hour, she would be back in her London flat.

      She was glad of this interval between the long flight and whatever would happen next.

      The backs of the houses were identical, all of them clinging to the curves of railway lines and arterial roads and abraded by the dirt and noise that rose off them. Their bricks were dark with soot and the wan trees in patches of garden were weighted with layers of grime.

      Echo Street was a terrace just like one of these, with a railway line carrying local trains into Liverpool Street, running through a shallow cutting beyond a high fence at the end of the garden.

      Connie closed her eyes.

      There was lino down the narrow hallway, dark red with paler bluish-pink swirls in it that looked like skimmed milk stirred into stewed plums. The stairs rose steep as a cliff, each tread usually with a sheet of the Daily Express folded on it because Hilda had just mopped them yet again. Hilda had a fixation with cleanliness. The smell of bleach always sent Connie hurtling back into her childhood.

      In the old flat, Connie and Jeanette had shared a tiny bedroom, the two divan beds separated by a channel only just wide enough for one of them at a time to put their feet to the floor. There was a shelf above each bed. Jeanette’s displayed a neat line of books, whereas Connie’s was silted up with scribbled drawings and broken toys and crushed wax crayons.

      But in Echo Street they were to have their own rooms. Jeanette was delighted with hers. As Tony was downstairs helping the sweating removal men to carry in the piano, she stood in front of her door and