Constance. Rosie Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 song to the backs of the houses and the railway line beyond the fence until Hilda shouted through the kitchen window that she was disturbing the whole neighbourhood.

      Almost forty years later, what Connie recollected most clearly about that day was the singing itself, and the complicated song, and the importance that both had assumed – like a reef in the turbulent currents of daily life. Music was already becoming her resort, in a family with a mother and father who would have had difficulty in distinguishing between Handel and Cliff Richard, and a sister who could not hear a note of music. Or any other sound.

      In the new front room at Echo Street there was the upright piano that had come with them from their old flat. No one else in the family ever played it and it was badly out of tune, but the instrument had belonged to Connie’s father’s mother and Tony always insisted that it was a good one, worth a bit of money. Hilda kept it well dusted and used the top as a display shelf for the wedding photograph (Tony Brylcreemed in a wide-shouldered suit, Hilda in a ruched bodice, a hat like the top off a mince pie, and very dark lipstick), a photograph of Jeanette as a newborn asleep in layers of pink knitwear, and one of Connie as an older baby, propped up in Jeanette’s lap.

      As soon as she was old enough to lift the gleaming curved lid for herself, Connie had claimed the piano for her own. When she perched on the stool her legs were too short to reach the pedals, but she loved the commanding position and the way the ivory and black notes extended invitingly on either side. She splayed her hands over the keys, linking sequences of notes or hammering out crashing discords. She could sit for an hour at a time, absorbed in her own compositions or in picking out the tunes she heard on the СКАЧАТЬ