Constance

Angela and Rayner were conferring over the schedule of the day’s shots.

‘I’ll just get some breakfast,’ Connie murmured.

Two Balinese men in white jackets were clearing plates. Connie followed them out of the back of the tent. Behind the scenes, enclosed by canvas screens, Kadek Wuruk, who was moonlighting from Le Gong Restaurant (‘Don’t Go Before You Come’), was frying eggs on a two-ring gas burner. He beamed at Connie and waved his spatula at her.

‘Hello! Welcome, Ibu. Egg for you? Very good, you know. My own chickens.’

‘Yes, but no thanks. It’s a bit early for me. I’ll have some coffee, though. Everything okay, Kadek?’ There was quite a limited range of Balinese first names.

‘Everything fine, great.’

His assistant was chopping onions, three women were peeling vegetables, two young girls were washing up, and a line of boys processed by with cases of bottled water. Connie was reluctant to pass back through the canvas flap that separated kitchen from tent. It was more comfortable out here, with the women laughing and chattering and the shy girls with their bare lovely feet planted in front of the portable sink unit. She poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup, and watched Kadek Wuruk and his assistants at work as she drank. There would be nasi goreng for lunch.

She heard a crackle of walkie-talkies.

‘We’re in,’ the first assistant called to the crew. It was the signal for work to begin on the other side of the canvas. People began shifting towards the set, but there would be several hours of waiting and watching while the rest of the gear was brought in and lights and cameras were set up. If everything went really well the camera would be turning over before the lunch break was called. Connie’s gamelan orchestra was listed as the first shot.

When she had first arrived in Bali, Connie had been intending to make a short stopover on her way to London from Sydney. The plan had been to keep still, to take stock of what was left of her life, and let her bewilderment subside a little. It was only a few weeks since Seb had told her that he was in love with a Chinese violinist, and intended to marry her.

At that time Sébastian Bourret was becoming a soughtafter conductor. When he made the announcement, sitting on the balcony of their rented flat overlooking Sydney Harbour, Connie had been his lover and partner for more than six years. Their home was nominally in London but Seb travelled so much that they were away more than they were there, and this had suited Connie well. Their peripatetic life together had been comfortable and civilised, and she had been sure that it was what they both wanted and needed. She had her own work, composing music for television and commercials, and as technology developed it was becoming increasingly easy to do that work anywhere in the world.

She wasn’t under the illusion that Seb was wildly in love with her, at least after their first year together, any more than she was with him. But they had much in common, and they were considerate and mutually respectful and deeply fond of one another.

Then Sebastian really had fallen in love, with the gifted Sung Mae Lin who was no bigger and looked hardly older than a child, even though she was almost thirty. Unwittingly Mae Lin made Connie feel too big and the wrong age, and unwanted, and unhappy in a way that was too familiar, however hard she fought against that and the memories that were stirred by it.

None of it was Mae Lin’s fault, or Seb’s, really, or her own for that matter. It was just one of those things that happened. There had been no alternative for Connie but to withdraw from her own life, as quickly and as gracefully as she could manage it.

Seb and Connie had said goodbye to each other gently, and with regret, but there had been no question that he might change his mind. Connie had seen him only once since then, when he was conducting a Beethoven Festival concert series in London. He and Mae Lin had two children now. Twin girls.

Connie’s London home was still the apartment that she had shared with Seb. He had made his share of it over to her and she had kept the place, although it was bare of most of the furniture they had chosen and there were few of her possessions set out in it. She liked it better that way; it was easier to slip in and out of an almost empty space. Minimalism was closer to invisibility.

When she’d arrived in Bali, she had had no plans and no expectations of the place. It had simply been somewhere to put herself that felt like nowhere in particular.

In her raw state she had fled from the big hotels and beaches and cocktail bars of the coastal strip close to Denpasar and headed inland. It was here in the village that she first heard gamelan music played live, by solemn musicians, not for tourists but for the musicians themselves and their knowledgeable friends. This was temple music, and music for festivals and processions and weddings. She had loved the sonorous gongs, and the shimmering notes of metal that fell through the air like drops of clear water.

Angela peered from between the flaps of canvas.

‘I’m here,’ Connie said, rapidly gathering her thoughts. She drank the last mouthful of her coffee and stood upright.

‘I’ll be on set.’

The day’s set was the temple at the edge of the rice paddy – permit to use for filming applied for and finally granted by the authorities in the nick of time – over which the set dressers were swarming.

Constance consulted her watch, having already looked at it more times this morning than she would normally do in a week. ‘The musicians will be here in fifteen minutes or so.’

‘Right. Straight to costume and make-up, then.’

The bus carrying the musicians arrived punctually and Connie hurried forward to meet them. Battling with their instruments, a line of six men spilled down the steps. They were not much bigger than their metallophones, big xylophones with keys made of bronze, and considerably smaller than the great gong. They were her friends.

‘I am very, very nervous,’ Ketut called as soon as he saw her.

Connie held out her hands to him. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t want to do it?’

There were beads of sweat on his forehead and above his long-lipped mouth. Ketut had smooth skin and it gleamed in the bright sunlight like oiled wood. ‘Oh, no. We are film stars already in Seminugul, let me make clear. There is no going back. But I am afraid of letting you down, Connie.’

Ketut was one of the most talented musicians she had ever worked with. She had been recording some of his performances with the big ensemble of fifty musicians called the gamelan gong, and she counted herself lucky to be able to play percussion with this smaller, less perfectionist group. Connie knew that she was not the best drummer in the world, but she loved the sessions when they played together. Sometimes, during the rainy season, they could make music for hours under a roof of palm thatch while water dripped from soaking leaves.

The musicians clustered around her.

‘You won’t, Ketut. You don’t even have to play if you don’t want to, just look as though you are for the camera.’

The actual music track would be laid down in postproduction. This was the music that Connie had been commissioned to produce. She found herself blushing in retrospect at the memory of the demo disc she had supplied.

‘Light and poppy, but unmistakeably tropical-island exotic,’ was the agency’s brief.

Confronted by Ketut and the others, combed and dressed in their best clothes, and versed as they were in the classical traditions of their native music, she felt embarrassed.

Behind her she could hear the Australian gaffer routinely cursing into his walkie-talkie because someone hadn’t brought over a camera dolly. All the musicians were staring into the snake-pit of cables, and at the little temple caught under the brilliant ultra-sunshine of the lights.

‘Don’t worry, really, don’t worry,’ she reassured them all. She asked if they wanted anything to eat or drink and they shook their heads. So she led them over to the caravan that was being used for male costume and make-up and left them there.

The script called for a Balinese wedding.

The temple was dressed up with flowers and baskets of fruit. Over the pop-eyed stone statues props people had fixed parasols of bright yellow silk with lavish fringes, and there were rakish garlands of scarlet and orange blossoms draped around the necks of stone dragons and snakes. The hot colours seemed to vibrate under the lights.

Eleven o’clock came and went. Connie supervised the unpacking and setting up of the instruments, on the exact spot that the crew indicated. The musicians emerged from make-up, giggling among themselves. They had been costumed in sarongs of black and white checks with broad saffron-yellow or vermilion satin sashes tied round their middles. They wore flowers around their necks, their eyes had been painted and their lips reddened. Their ordinary haircuts, as worn by waiters and teachers and shopkeepers, which is what they were, had been combed and gelled into slick quiffs. Every time Ketut or one of the others caught a fresh glimpse of a fellow musician there was another explosion of laughter. Trying not to laugh herself, Connie shepherded them onto the set.

Another long interval of adjusting lights and equipment followed. It was hot, and hotter still under the lights, and a Balinese make-up girl kept darting forward to powder a shiny face.

Connie positioned her recording equipment and ran the players through an approximation of the twenty-two seconds of music that would accompany the finished commercial.

‘This is really not Balinese wedding music,’ Ketut protested.

‘I know. Forgive me?’

Angela came across and reassured the musicians that they wouldn’t have long to wait. Connie could read the anxiety in her rigid shoulders. The schedule listed the bridal-attendants shot for completion before the lunch break as well as the gamelan orchestra, and that called for ten little Balinese girls wearing complicated headdresses who were at present corralled in the female wardrobe caravan. Connie began to sweat in sympathy with Angela, who had reckoned up and costed every minute of a week on location. Rayner Ingram was still frowning and shaking his head as he looked into the monitor.

But then, suddenly, there was a flurry of action.

‘We’re going,’ the first assistant called. ‘Camera rolling.’

Connie gave the signal to Ketut. As if there were no lights, microphones, cables or cameras, as if they were doing it for their own pleasure under a bamboo shelter in a rainy village forsaken by tourists, the little orchestra played her makeshift music.

Their faces lit up. The camera rolled towards them.

After twenty-two seconds, she gave them the cut signal. Reluctantly the metallophones and kettle gongs pattered into silence.

Rayner and Angela conferred. Then Angela and the first assistant crossed to the agency people and consulted with them. The musicians waited, their eyes fixed on Connie.

‘Going again,’ came the call.

They did three more takes. The agency indicated to Angela that they would like yet one more, but she shook her head and tapped a fingernail on her watch face.

The first assistant told the musicians, ‘That’s fine with the orchestra. Director’s happy. We’re done with you.’

It was Connie they looked to for confirmation. She beamed and applauded.

‘Ketut, you were brilliant. All of you. Thank you.’

‘I don’t know. There were some things,’ Ketut began, but the crew were hurrying them and their instruments off the set. Time was money.

Connie and the file of musicians heading back to the caravan passed another procession coming the other way. The bridal attendants were overawed eight-year-old girls cast from the nearby school. Their faces had been painted to resemble dancers’ masks, with eyes outlined in thick lines of kohl that swept up at the corners, rouged cheekbones and brilliant crimson lips. With tall gilt crowns on their heads and tunic dresses of pale gold tissue, they looked exquisite. Their role was to scatter flower petals in the path of the as-yet-unseen bride as the bridegroom and his supporters waited for her at the temple steps.

Behind the children came their mothers in a swaying group, chattering and exclaiming. Some of the mothers knew some of the musicians and there was a slow-moving bottleneck as everyone stopped to talk and laugh and exchange views on the filming. Crew immediately hurried them apart. The children were needed on set.

Once 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 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 radio. To Connie’s ear these first musical experiments sounded festive in the quiet house.

In time, music and musical composition became Connie’s profession.

Success came early, almost by accident, with the theme music she wrote for a confectionery commercial.

The Boom chocolate-bar tune turned into one of those rare hits that passed out of the realm of mere advertising and drilled straight into the collective consciousness. For a time the few bars turned into a shorthand trill for anything that was new and saucy and self-indulgent. Builders whistled it from scaffolding, children drummed it out on cans in city playgrounds, comedians referenced it in their acts. The confectionery company used it not only for Boom, but in a variety of mixes for their other products so that it became their worldwide aural signature. The royalties poured in and Connie’s small musical world acknowledged her as Boom Girl.

Nowadays the money from her early work had slowed to a trickle, but Connie still earned enough to live on. When she needed more it was possible to make a rapid sortie from Bali to London and put in some calls to old friends like Angela. Quite often, she could bring the bacon of commissions home to Bali and work on them there.

She had no idea how long this arrangement would remain possible, but Connie didn’t think about the future very much.

The past was much more difficult to evade: it was there in her dreams, and the long bones and ridged tendons of it lay always just under the skin of consciousness, but in her quiet daily life among the villagers and the gamelan musicians she could easily contain it.

Now Angela and all the people with her had landed like a spaceship on Connie’s remote planet, and they brought London and memories leaking out of the airlocks and into this untainted atmosphere.

Not that her old friend was a taint, Connie hastily corrected herself, nor were her colleagues, or the business that had provided her with a living for more than twenty-five years. But their company, the banter and the jostling for position and the surge of adrenalin that came with them, caused her to examine her life more critically than she would otherwise have done. As she sat in the warm, scented night she was asking herself unaccustomed questions.

Is this a useful way to live?

Is this what I want?

These questions seemed unanswerable.

She shifted in her rattan chair and it creaked accommodatingly beneath her weight. She let her head fall back against the cushions and listened to the rustling of leaves and the throaty frogs.

And am I happy?

That was the hardest question of all. In this beautiful place, living comfortably among friends and making music with them, she had no reason for unhappiness.

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.