Constance. Rosie Thomas

they had changed into their own clothes the musicians settled into the service tent, eyeing the swooningly handsome Indonesian actor, cast as the bridegroom, who was busy with his mobile phone. Connie quietly handed Ketut the fee, in cash, for the orchestra’s work. At least, she thought, they had been well paid.

      On the set five pairs of beautiful Balinese girls scattered flower petals on a strip of crimson carpet. Out of shot, set dressers sprayed the temple garlands with water in an attempt to stop them wilting under the hot sun. Miraculously, the attendants were wrapped after just two takes.

      ‘Okay, people, let’s have lunch,’ called the first assistant.

      Within three minutes the service tent was full of ravenous crew. Ketut and the others politely took this influx as a signal to leave. Connie went with them to the bus.

      ‘We play again on Tuesday? You can come?’ Ketut asked her.

      Tuesday was their regular evening for music.

      ‘Yes, please,’ Connie said. It was one of the best times of her week.

      She stood and waved as the bus bumped down the ricepaddy track. The mother and daughter who were working in the paddy straightened their backs to watch too. They had been joined by several more women.

      In the service tent Angela was asking Tara, the pretty agency producer, what she thought they might do about the British actress who was playing the bride. She had spent the morning confined to her bathroom at the hotel. She must have eaten something that disagreed with her, Marcus Atkins remarked. The creative team sniggered.

      ‘I’ve absolutely no idea,’ Tara sighed.

      On their way out later, Angela said to Connie through clenched teeth, ‘If that damned woman says she has no idea once more about what is supposed to be her bloody job, I’m going to hit her.’

      ‘She’s getting a great tan, though,’ Connie laughed.

      In the absence of any bride, the afternoon was given over to the bridegroom and his friends. They marched out of wardrobe splendid in starched white jackets with red head-cloths knotted over their foreheads. Tara sat up in her chair at the sight of them and slipped her sunglasses down over her nose.

      It was a complicated reaction shot. The men were supposed to be waiting in profile in a proud, anticipatory little group for the big moment, the first sight of the bride following behind her petal-strewing attendants. Then, as they caught sight of her, the men were to register a sequence of surprise, disbelief and then dismay.

      Once the camera had captured all this the view then shifted to the other perspective.

      The bride’s father – an approximate Prince Charles look-alike – was to be kitted out in full morning dress. On his arm would come the bride, dressed in white meringue wedding dress with a bouquet of pink rosebuds and a dangling silver horseshoe, blonde ringlets framing her face within a froth of veil.

      With the establishing shot Connie’s music was to segue into a suggestion of ‘Here Comes the Bride’, then dip into a minor key to match the surprise and dismay, and end in a clatter of discordant notes. Then, on the screen would appear the bank’s logo and the words ‘The Right Time and the Right Place. Every Time. Always.’ To the accompaniment of a long, reverberating gong-note.

      ‘It’s advertising,’ Angela said drily.

      

      The day wore on. After five or six takes, Rayner Ingram declared that he was satisfied with the shot. The tropical dusk was beginning to collect at the margins of the paddy, and Mount Agung was a conical smudge of shadow on the far horizon.

      ‘That’s it for today, folks,’ announced the first assistant.

      The crew began dismantling the lights, and Simon Sheringham stood up and yawned. ‘Time for a drink, boys and girls,’ he said.

      ‘You are so completely right,’ Tara drawled.

      Angela murmured to Connie, ‘Are you joining us for dinner?’

      Angela’s duties would now shift to hostess and leisure facilitator for agency and clients, but her eyes were on Rayner Ingram who was stalking away towards the waiting Toyotas.

      ‘Do you need me?’

      Connie was thinking of tomorrow’s music – a reprise of the main theme for the closing shot of the bride’s father, the worse for wear, smoochily clinking his champagne coupe with a second glass crooked in the elbow of a grinning stone dragon.

      And she was also thinking of her secluded veranda and the frog chorus, which would sound like a lullaby tonight.

      ‘Well…not really,’ Angela said.

      ‘Then I think I might just quietly go home.’

      ‘Doesn’t anyone else want a drink?’ Simon bellowed.

      An hour later, Connie sat on the veranda in her rattan chair and watched the darkness. It came with dramatic speed, filling up the gorge and flooding over the palms on the ridge. Packs of dogs barked at the occasional motorbike out on the road, and sometimes she could hear a squeak of voices from Wayan Tupereme’s house, but mostly there were only the close, intimate rustlings of wildlife in the vegetation and the conversation of frogs. Damp, warm air pressed on her bare skin. Connie was never afraid to be alone in this house.

      She ticked off a mental list.

      After tomorrow, there were two more linked commercials to shoot.

      It was going to be a hard week’s work, but now it was under way her apprehension had faded and she felt stimulated. It was good to have a surge of adrenalin. And then when it was all over the agency people and the crew and Angela would disperse, back to the cities, and she would still be here quietly making gamelan music with Ketut and his friends and looking out at her view.

      At the same time the Boom music started running through her head, and obstinately stayed there.

      Damn Simon Sheringham and Marcus Atkins.

      It wasn’t just the bank clients, though. It was the disorientating effect of finding London in Bali. It was being made to feel alive, and the way that that stirred her memories and brought them freely floating to the surface of her mind.

      Connie’s thoughts tracked backwards, all the way down the years to when she was a little girl, to the day after they moved into the new house in Echo Street, London.

      She was six, and her sister Jeanette was almost twelve.

      On their first night she had had a terrible nightmare. A faceless man came gliding out of the wardrobe in her unfamiliar bedroom and tried to suffocate her. Her mother rushed in wearing her nightdress, with her hair wound on spiny mesh rollers. Connie was shouting for her father but Hilda told her that her dad needed his sleep, he had to open the shop at eight o’clock in the morning, like he did every day.

      ‘I don’t like this bedroom. It’s frightening,’ Connie sobbed.

      ‘I’ve heard quite enough about that.’

      Connie had had a fight with Jeanette over who was to get which bedroom. Jeanette had won, as she always did.

      Hilda scolded her. ‘It’s a lovely room, you’re a lucky little girl. Now go to sleep and let’s have no more of this nonsense.’

      In the morning, Connie had decided to put the spectres of the night behind her. She would impress herself on Echo Street, somehow or other.

      She marched through the house, past Hilda who was clattering the breakfast dishes, out into the garden and past the puffy blooms of hydrangeas and hazy billows of catmint, all the way to the garden shed at the far end.

      She climbed the garden wall and made the daring leap to the shed roof, and then perched on the sooty ridge. From that vantage point, with its view of the neighbouring gardens, she had launched into a long, loud song that she had made up herself. She stood on the shed roof and bawled out her