The sun had slid behind the cliffs that they had used for the backdrop to the set and the rock was now a wall of darkness crowned with a halo of golden light that no lighting cameraman could ever have created. The first bat of the evening flitted overhead. Set-dressers were rolling up an artificial lawn, the cast were changing in the caravans. The self-important world of the shoot was folding up on itself, shrinking back into the waiting trucks and Toyotas.
Tomorrow, when the cast and crew were on their planes home, the clearing would be deserted except for the birds and the bats.
‘Look at this,’ Angela sighed, as if she was seeing it for the first time. The trees were heavy with dusk.
‘Why don’t you stay on with me for a few days? Have a holiday. You’ve earned one.’
‘I’m fine,’ Angela said. She laughed. ‘Completely fine. I’ve got to start next week on pre-production for a yoghurt commercial. It’s really, really busy at the moment and that’s good, isn’t it? Can’t turn the work down while it’s there.’
‘Angie?’ It was Rayner Ingram’s voice. Her head turned at once.
‘Coming,’ she called. ‘Con, you’ll definitely be there tonight, won’t you?’
Tonight was the wrap party, traditionally hosted by the production company. Connie knew about last-night parties more by reputation than recent direct experience.
‘Yes. Course I will.’
‘See you later, then. You’ve been an absolute star all this week. I couldn’t have got through it without you.’
Left alone, Connie sat down on an upturned box. There were more bats now, dipping for insects against the blackness of the trees. She could almost feel the week’s edgy camaraderie being stripped away from her, rolled up like the fake turf and tossed into the back of a truck. She would feel lonely here next week, when Angela and the others had gone. She had her work, of course. She had planned to make some more recordings of the
gamelan gong
for her orchestral library. There was Tuesday night’s music to look forward to, and she should think about asking some people to the house, fill it up with talk and lights once in a while. The string quartet, for example. She should find out which was their night off and make dinner for them and their partners.
This time tomorrow, Angela and Rayner and Tara and all the others would be halfway back to London.
Connie found that she was thinking about London as she rarely did, remembering the way that lights reflected in the river on winter’s evenings, the catty smell of privet after summer rain, the glittering masses of traffic and the stale, utterly specific whiff of the Underground. She kept the focus deliberately general, excluding places and people for as long as she could.
‘I’m going to need that box.’ The voice made her jump. She saw it was the rigger who had whistled at her.
‘All yours,’ Connie smiled at him as she got to her feet. She wasn’t sorry to have her train of thought interrupted. In any case it was time to head home to change for the wrap party.
There were more than forty people for dinner. They ate in the garden of the better hotel, under the lanterns slung in the branches of the trees.
‘This place is a bit of all right,’ one of the Australians shouted up the table. ‘You guys did well.’
‘Next time,’ Angela called back.
‘Holding you to that, ma’am. They’ve even got beer here.’ In the last-night surge of goodwill, the disagreements of the week morphed into jokes.
The actress emerged from her room to join the crew for dinner. Draped in a pashmina against a non-existent breeze she was telling everyone who would listen that she had lost nearly a stone and wouldn’t be coming back to Bali in a hurry.
Tara was wearing a dress that measured about twenty centimetres from neckline to hem. Simon Sheringham’s arm rested heavily along the back of her chair, and he regularly clicked his fingers at the waiters to ensure that their two
glasses were kept filled. Marcus Atkins and the agency’s creative duo sat with their heads close together, planning how to make the best of the rest of the evening.
Rayner Ingram naturally took the head of the table. After a successful shoot everyone wanted their piece of the director, and there had been a scramble for the seats closest to him. Connie was relieved to see that he beckoned Angela to the place on his right. She was surprised, as she took her own seat near the other end, by the rigger darting into the next chair. He extended a large hand.
‘Hi. My name’s Ed.’
‘Connie Thorne.’
‘Boom Girl, somebody called you. What’s that about?’
She was entirely happy that he didn’t know. ‘Nothing. History. Let’s have a drink.’
‘Let’s make that our motto.’
The food came and they ate and drank under the lanterns.
Connie learned from Ed that he owned a ski lodge in Thredbo and only took on film work when he needed a cash injection.
‘You should come out. I’m heading back for the best of the ski season now.’
‘I can’t ski.’
He grinned. ‘No worries. I’ll teach you.’
You could go, Connie told herself. Ed’s blue shirt cuffs were rolled back and she noted that he had nice wrists. He seemed a good, dependable, practical sort of man.
Damn, she thought. Why can’t it happen?
That question did have an answer, but it wasn’t one she was prepared to listen to at this moment.
Glancing up the table she saw Angela’s and Rayner’s heads close together. They were deep in conversation. That was all right, then. For tonight at least.
People were already swaying off in search of further diversions. There were loud splashes and a lot of shouting and laughter from the swimming pool.
‘Think about it,’ Ed murmured. He took out a marker pen and wrote his email address on her bare arm. ‘It’s indelible ink, by the way.’
‘I will think about it,’ she promised, untruthfully.
Tara asked for the music to be turned up and began dancing, stretching out her hands to whoever came within reach. Simon Sheringham had a cigar and a balloon glass; Rayner was talking about the big feature he was soon to start work on. Someone had unwound a volleyball net on the lawn and several men were leaping and punching at the ball. Connie slipped away from the table and walked over the grass. She was hot and she had drunk more than she was used to, and it was soothing to drift in the dusk under the trees.
Someone rustled over the grass behind her.
‘There you are. I’ve been hunting for you.’ To her partial relief it was not Ed but Angela, and she was carrying a bottle and two glasses. ‘Shall we sit here?’
There was a secluded bench with a low light beside it that hollowed an egg-shape of lush greenery out of the darkness. They sat down and Connie obediently took the glass that Angela gave her. Angela kicked off her shoes and rested her head against the back of the bench.
‘I meant it, you know. About not surviving this week without you.’
‘You would have done,’ Connie laughed.
‘I don’t think so. Christ. Tara? Sheringham? And that other woman, you’d think no one in the history of the world has ever had the shits before this week. Sorry. Listen to me. I just needed a quick moan.’
‘It’s over now.’
‘Until the next one.’ They clinked their glasses and drank.
‘How is it with you and Rayner?’
Angela exhaled. ‘Oh. You noticed?’
‘Well. Yes. Probably no one else did, though.’
Angela’s smile was a sudden flash in the gloaming. ‘He’s amazing. We’ve been working together quite a lot, and we started seeing each other…it’s difficult because he’s still officially married to Rose and he’s very close to his kids, so we’re keeping the lid on it, especially on shoots, but in time I think we’ll be really good together. You know, he’s so special, such a talented director; that has to come first a lot of the time.’
Connie did her best to receive this information optimistically. Angela was elated now, probably because Rayner had given her a sign for later. She was revelling in the anticipation of him slipping into her room, locking the door behind him. Connie could remember what all that felt like, more or less. But the provisos sounded too ready, and they were ominous.
Not that I’m the one to judge, she thought.
Maybe Rayner Ingram will turn out to be loyal, tender, considerate and generous. And maybe he will be all of those things for Angela and no one else. And her friend was enviably happy tonight, Connie could feel the pulse of it in her. Somehow everything had turned round since the tense ending of the afternoon, and she should be able to bask in the moment without anyone spoiling it for her with sage advice. Angela wasn’t a child, or any kind of innocent.
‘Don’t put his happiness before your own,’ was all Connie advised.
‘They’re the same thing,’ Angela breathed.
They sat in silence for a moment.
‘Anyway, I wanted to talk about you, not me,’ Angela began again.
‘Why’s that?’
Angela waved her glass. ‘About here. And why you stay, and what…Are you hiding from something, maybe? Out here. On your own, you know what I’m saying, ever since you split from Seb. Why don’t you come back to London? Be with your friends, everyone you know. Don’t your family miss you, apart from anything else? You’ve got a…sister, haven’t you? And that amazing flat. And it’s not as though you don’t get plenty of work. Honestly. You can’t stay out here for ever, you need to come back and…connect. Think about it, at least, won’t you? Aren’t you lonely? Don’t you ever think, is this what I really want?’
Angela was warming to her subject. She was happy, and in her benign daze she wished the same for everyone. They had both had quite a lot to drink, Connie allowed. She tilted her glass, then gazed around at the glimmering garden. The frogs were loud, but the noise of the party was eclipsing them. Soon, probably, the other guests in the hotel would start complaining. That would be something else that Angela would have to deal with.
‘Connie, are you listening?’
‘Yep.’
She was wondering which end to pull out of the tangle of Angela’s speech. She didn’t say that she only asked herself what she really, really wanted when her solitude was compromised.
‘I do come back to London. Quite often.’
‘You slip in and out of town like a…like a…’
‘Mouse into its hole?’
‘I was trying to think of something polite.’
‘I like my life.’ It was true, she did.
‘But – don’t you want – love, marriage? A family?’
‘I’m forty-three.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘No, then.’
That silenced Angela for a moment. Eight years younger and uncomfortably in love, she couldn’t imagine any woman not wanting those things.
Love, marriage, family?
Love Connie did have, and she had come to the conclusion that she always would. Love could exist in a vacuum, without being returned, with nothing to nourish it, without even a sight of the person involved. It was always there, embedded beneath her skin like an electronic tag, probably sending out its warning signals to everyone who came within range.
Yes but no. Available but not.
The truth was that Connie had loved Bill Bunting since she was fifteen, and Seb hadn’t been the first or even the last attempt she had made to convince herself otherwise. She wasn’t going to marry Bill, or even see him, because he was another woman’s husband. He wouldn’t abandon his wife, and if he had been willing to do so Connie would have had to stop loving him. That was the impossibility of it.
And family…
It was significant that even Angela, who had been a friend for more than ten years, had to think twice about whether Connie had a family or not, and what it consisted of.
That was the way Connie preferred it to be.
She turned to look at Angela and started laughing.
‘What’s funny?’
‘Your expression. Angie, I know what you’re saying to me, and thank you for being concerned. Your advice is probably good. But I’m happy here, you know. I’m not hiding. And it’s very beautiful.’
‘Do you feel that you belong here?’
‘Do we have to feel that we belong?’
There was a sharp scream and a splash followed by some confused shouting.
‘What now?’ Angela groaned.
‘It sounded like Tara.’
‘Will you think about what I’m saying, though?’
‘Yes, I will.’
‘It’s mostly selfish. I want you to come home so we can see more of each other.’
Connie smiled. ‘I’d like that too. But I
am
home.’
The evening was finally over. Connie walked the empty side-roads back to her house, the way ahead a pale thread between black walls of dense greenery. It was a still night, and she brushed the trailing filaments of spiders’ webs from her face.
When she reached home, she saw that there was a small, motionless figure sitting on a stone at the point where her path diverged from her neighbours’. The figure took on the shape of Wayan Tupereme.
‘Wayan? Good evening.’
He got to his feet and shuffled to her in his plastic flip-flops.
‘I have a grandson,’ he said. ‘Dewi had a son tonight.’
Connie put her hands on his shoulders. The top of his head was level with her nose.
‘That’s wonderful news. Congratulations.’
Dewi was his youngest daughter, who had married and gone to live with her husband’s family. Wayan and his wife missed her badly.
He nodded. ‘I wanted you to know.’
‘I’m so pleased. Dewi and Pema must be very happy.’
‘We all are,’ the old man said. ‘We all are. A new baby. And a boy.’
‘Nearly there,’ Bill said unnecessarily, but in any case Jeanette’s head was turned away from him. She seemed to be admiring the bitter green of the hawthorn hedge and the froth of cow parsley standing up from the verge. It had rained earlier in the day but now the sky was washed clear, and bars of sunshine striped the tarmac where field gates broke the line of the hedge. ‘Nearly there,’ he repeated. Conscious of the bumps in the road, he tried to drive as smoothly as he could so she wouldn’t be jarred with pain.
Their house was at the end of a lane, behind a coppice of tall trees. Jeanette had found it, two years after Noah was born, and insisted that they buy it. Bill would have preferred to be closer to town but in the end he had given way to her, and he had to concede that she had been right. They had lived there for more than twenty years. Noah had grown up in the house, had finally left for university and then gone to live in London; Jeanette and he were still there. It would be their last home together. Lately they had talked about moving, maybe into town, to a minimalist apartment with a view of the river, but it had been just talk.