Constance

Except that this island life – for all its sunshine and scent and richness – did not have Bill in it.

Connie had learned to live without him, because there was no alternative. But happiness – that simple resonance with the world that came from being with the man she loved – she didn’t have that, and never would.

The thought of him, as always, sent an electric shock deep into the core of her being.

Connie leapt from the chair and paced to the edge of the veranda. The invisible wave of leaves and branches rolled away beneath her feet, all the way down to the curve of the river.

By concentrating hard she cut off the flow of thoughts and brought them back to the present. She had work to do, and that was a diversion and a solace as well. She had learned that long ago.

She would do the work and maybe the questions would answer themselves, or at least stop ringing in her ears.

There was a seven-thirty call in the morning.

TWO (#ulink_ef9353b5-acad-571c-bdf0-3e797b993f1f)

Noah headed downriver, towards the battlements of Tower Bridge and the pale shard of Canary Wharf tower in the hazy distance. It was the beginning of June, a warm and sunny early evening. The Embankment was crowded with people leaving work and heading home, or making for bars and cinemas. The girls who passed him were bare-legged, the skin above the line of their tops showing a pink flush from a lunchtime’s sunbathing.

Noah had sat with his mother for over an hour. He linked his fingers with hers, not talking very much, rubbing his thumb over the thin skin on the back of her hand. Sometimes she drifted into a doze, then a minute or two later she would be fully awake again, looking into his eyes and smiling.

‘Do you want anything, Mum?’ he asked, leaning close to her so she could see his face.

She shook her head.

At the end of an hour, she had fallen into a deeper sleep. He sat beside the bed for a few more minutes, then slid his hand from beneath hers. He stood up carefully, bent down and kissed her forehead where the faint lines showed between her eyebrows.

‘I’ll be in tomorrow, same time,’ he murmured, for his own benefit rather than hers.

Noah hadn’t worked out where he was going; he just wanted to be outside in the fresh air. Even though there was a thick waft of grease and fried onions from a hot-dog stand and a blast of beer and cigarette smoke rising from the crowded outdoor tables of a pub, it still smelled better out here than inside the hospital. He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked more slowly, threading through the crowds, his head turned towards the khaki river. A sightseeing boat slid by, trailing a noisy wake of commentary and the smell of Thames water.

Under a plane tree, just where the shade from the branches dulled the glitter of dusty cobbles, one of the performance artists who regularly worked there was setting up his pitch. He was wearing a boxy robot costume sprayed a dull silver colour, and all the exposed skin of his body was painted to match. As Noah idly stood watching, the performer laid out a blanket and placed a silver-painted box on it, and positioned a small matching plinth behind the blanket. He made the arrangements with mechanical precision, his head stiffly tilted in concentration. Then he tapped a silver metal helmet over his silver-sprayed hair and took a step up onto the plinth. His arms rotated through a few degrees and froze in midair. A few of the passers-by glanced at him, probably wondering why an able-bodied individual should choose to spend an evening locked into immobility on a plinth instead of heading for the pub. Losing interest, Noah was about to walk on when he noticed the girl standing on the opposite side.

She was watching the performance with surprise and delight, as if it was completely new to her. After a moment she took a step closer, then cautiously skirted the blanket to stand directly in front of the robot. She waved her hand in front of his face. The man gave a reasonably convincing impression of being made of metal and Noah remembered how tourists used to make similar attempts to distract the Guardsmen frigidly mounted on horses in front of the sentry boxes in Whitehall.

The girl was laughing now. She reached out a hand with the index finger extended and gently prodded the robot in his metallic middle.

The girl was very pretty, Noah noticed. Her head had the poise of a marble sculpture, and her mouth had a chiselled margin to it that made her lips unusually prominent. She really did have an amazing mouth. He considered the rest of her. Her hair was short and spiky, blonde with a greenish tinge that suggested it was dyed. She was quite tall, thin, with long thighs and calves. Her clothes were similar to those worn by all the girls in the passing tide, but at the same time there was something very slightly wrong with them. Her top was flimsy and gathered from a sort of yoke and her jeans were an odd pale colour. Her open-toed shoes were thick-soled and dusty and their heaviness made her protruding toes look small and as fragile as a child’s.

Noah experienced a moment’s dislocation, as if he were drunk or had just stepped off a theme-park ride that had been whirling too fast for him. His body felt very light and insubstantial, and the plane tree and the metallic man and Tower Bridge seemed to spin around him and the girl. He rocked on his feet, establishing a firmer connection with the ground beneath.

The girl drew back her hand, still laughing.

Noah took a breath. The world steadied itself.

He said to her, ‘You won’t be able to make him move. It’s more than his job’s worth.’

She gave no sign of having heard him.

Disbelief flooded through Noah. It wasn’t possible. Maybe it was possible, maybe that’s why he had noticed her in the first place.

Then she slowly turned her head. It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard, he realised, rather that she hadn’t understood what he was saying.

‘Do you speak English?’ he smiled.

‘Of course. Why not?’ she shot back. She did have an accent. It sounded Slavic, or Russian.

‘I thought you were, you know, perhaps a tourist.’

‘No,’ she said flatly.

‘Ah. Right.’ She was making Noah feel a bit of a fool. As if she sensed this and regretted it, she jerked her chin at the robot man.

‘This is clever. Not moving one muscle.’

‘Yeah. Sometimes there’s a Victorian couple, and there’s a gold man who does it as well. Usually you see them at weekends in Covent Garden. It always looks to me like a really hard way of earning money.’

The girl’s eyes turned to him. She looked disappointed, and at once Noah felt sorry that he had diminished the originality of the spectacle for her. ‘But it is clever, you’re right.’

‘I was not trying to tease him, you know? I was thinking he cannot be a real man because he is so still, even though I saw him walk up on his step.’

‘He won’t move, though. That’s the point.’ Noah was beginning to feel that it was time to steer this conversation forwards. ‘Um. Are you on your way somewhere? Would you like to have a drink? There’s a bar just here. Bit crowded, but we can sit outside…’

Suddenly an empty table to one side of the open space looked intensely inviting.

‘I have the bicycle with me.’ The girl pointed to a bright yellow mountain bike propped against the river wall.

‘Nice bike. We can lock it up…’

‘I do not have a lock.’

‘Really? You should have one, someone’ll nick a bike like that in five seconds. Look, we’ll just park it beside us so we can keep an eye on it.’

They were walking towards the table, the girl wheeling her bicycle, when she suddenly stopped.

‘We did not give him money.’

Noah was pleased with the we. He grinned at her. ‘You can, if you want.’

She didn’t smile back. ‘I don’t have any. Not today.’

He sighed. ‘All right.’ He made a little detour and dropped a pound coin into the robot’s box. The man’s head gave a sudden jerk and his hands rotated. ‘Thank you,’ a robot’s voice mechanically grated. The girl beamed and clapped, and Noah judged that that was easily worth a pound of anyone’s money. He touched her elbow. ‘Let’s be quick, before someone grabs the table.’

He left her sitting with the bicycle, fought his way to the bar for two beers, and was pleased and relieved when he got back to find that she was still waiting for him.

‘Cheers,’ he said as they drank. ‘My name’s Noah, by the way.’

‘I am Roxana.’

‘Hello Roxana.’ He put out his hand. I am acting like a total prat, he was thinking, but he couldn’t stop staring at her mouth. He wondered what it would take to make her laugh again, the way she had done when she prodded the robot. Roxana took his fingers, very cautiously, and allowed an infinitesimal squeeze before drawing back again.