The only two places I wasn’t allowed were the bedroom in which Connie slept at the very top of the house, and her office. I don’t think this was because Connie thought I might be a thief. I think it was because these spaces were psychologically off-limits to anyone but her, and I must be seen to respect that. And even if I was a thief, what was I here to rob? Something that had once belonged to me too, but might in the end prove impossible to steal.
We were having coffee on the first Friday morning when Connie asked me about Costa Rica. ‘What attracted you to the place?’ she said.
My skin went cold and my stomach loosened. Then I remembered: I was Laura, not Rose. Laura was not the type to get flustered. Laura had adventures, and skilfully recounted them. ‘The jungle,’ I said. ‘I was looking for jaguars.’
To my astonishment, Connie’s eyes lit up. It gave me a good feeling. ‘Did you find any?’ she said.
‘No. They were very elusive. Lots of sloths, though.’
Connie laughed. ‘And how were the children?’
‘Oh, they were lovely. I miss them,’ I said.
‘Did they like learning English?’
‘They did. Have you – travelled much?’ I asked her.
She seemed to consider the question. ‘I have.’
‘Have you ever lived anywhere else?’ I went on. ‘I mean – out of England?’
‘I have,’ said Connie again, but despite her affirmative, her tone did not invite more response. Perhaps Laura Brown had been too bold.
*
At home, Joe asked me how it was. ‘It’s . . . very different to Clean Bean,’ I said.
‘Has there been any mention of your mum?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You haven’t brought it up?’
‘No!’
‘I thought you wanted to know?’
‘I do, Joe.’
‘Then—’
‘Just don’t push it.’
‘So what are you going to do now?’
I placed the envelope Connie had given me onto the kitchen table. ‘Cash. Five hundred quid.’
‘Wow.’ He frowned. ‘She goes to the bank to take this out?’
‘She’s not a recluse, Joe. She goes out.’
‘I thought she was like a hundred years old?’
That night in bed, Joe rolled over to face me and started stroking my arm. ‘What are you listening to?’ he said.
I pulled out an earphone bud. ‘An audiobook.’
‘Good?’
‘Yeah.’
He nuzzled my neck and didn’t ask what audiobook. I was listening to Green Rabbit.
I loved her before I even met her, the narrator’s voice was saying. I loved her as an idea, and when she came into my life, she made me more myself.
Joe continued to nuzzle me, and I let him. He must have been thinking about my plea for the rescue of our lost passion, and he moved his mouth over my collarbone, over the starting curve of my breast. I closed my eyes and pulled out both earphones, pressing pause on the story in order to do what we’d done so many times before. As he entered me, I imagined I was made of a different body. Legs I’d had seen so many times in magazines. I imagined that Joe was not Joe, but a shadow in the back of my mind. That this was not South London, but a cool room in a hot country where outside everything was humid. A bed, with a curtain billowing, my life unhooked from any past or present, and the future not even a glimmer. Everything suspended, almost animated, nothing like the real.
I was Rose, but I was Laura. I didn’t know which woman I wanted to be.
18
I did not know how long my being in Connie’s house would work. Connie might press me more to open up about my life, and I would press too, and both of us would attempt to find out more about the other than she was willing to share. Her questions about Costa Rica were innocuous enough, but I wondered if we were embarking on a game that could only have one winner. I had another fear, too – that my father could be completely wrong about Connie. Connie might not know anything about what happened to my mother – Elise could have cut her out, just as she did my father. Maybe Connie was as much in the dark as he was. The only thing to do was stay in the position and see how things unfolded.
You’ve got to believe in yourself, Kelly would always say to me. I was trying, but I didn’t know whether to believe more in Rose Simmons or Laura Brown. I liked being Laura. She was bolder, more efficient and funnier than Rose. Rose was a very different creature indeed. Less confident, more frightened. She had never travelled very far: she wanted to stay in the house. She didn’t know what her life was supposed to be.
I couldn’t decide how far to develop my deception. Could I, if I wanted, invent a whole new biography for myself? I could eradicate Joe. I could invent a mother who I’d always known and loved. A different address. A new life – as I daydreamed about it, it shocked me how quickly I could find alternatives. I was currently single, though there was someone I was seeing casually – a museum curator, from New York whose name was Leo. I was seeing a woman, Carenza, a lawyer I met in a bar one night, who liked rock-climbing and was pestering me to go on some godawful action holiday that involved sheer cliff faces – oh, Carenza! – when I would rather sit by the hotel pool. I was a homebody, Carenza an adventuress, but somehow it worked. My parents lived in Bath, in Glasgow; they lived in a village near Dorking. They were happy, they were divorced, my mother, Sally, lived in Madrid, after falling in love with a Spanish real-estate developer. Let’s call him Geraldo. I often went there for weekends, and Sally and Geraldo would load my hand luggage with the best jamón.
It came smoothly to me, this loosening the threads of my own identity, weaving a new one. How had it become this easy to let go of myself, to pour words and fantasy into these gaping holes?
But if this was what I was good at, why not do it? No one would get hurt because no one would know. I assumed Connie would probably ask me about Laura’s life, and the more time we spent together the harder it would be for me to remain mute about it. And even if I made a story up, it wouldn’t affect my being in Connie’s house. If anything, it would act as a sort of protective shield, hiding my true self behind the verbal fortifications formed by a more exciting self. And, once I had the story of my mother I would depart, taking the trail of my fictions with me and leaving Connie with hers.
*
When it came to our next personal conversation, it seemed Connie had been thinking about all this too. About me, who I was, where I was from. Who I loved, what I wanted. Maybe Fiona Wilkins’ death had made her more expansive and ruminating, leaving her wanting to reach out to the closest human in her vicinity. Maybe she was just warming to me. But I still resisted telling her my life story, real or imagined. I only wanted hers.
She asked me to go for a walk on the Heath with her, so we found her a scarf and hat and a thick padded jacket. Her fingers grabbed awkwardly at the edges of the woolly hat almost as if they belonged to a child, and again I was surprised at the contrast between the rest of Connie’s elegant self and the snatchy, twitchy character of her hands.
It was a grey day, the sun hiding, but at least there was no rain.
‘Laura Brown,’ Connie said, as we crested the hill, playing with my name in her mouth. ‘Are you married, Laura Brown?’