Constance (22 page)

‘Were you nominated for something?’ Noah asked.

‘No. I’m
way
out of touch. I went with a friend of mine.’

Connie had been Angela’s guest.

‘Please come,’ Angela had begged her. ‘The cat-food commercial’s up for best use of classical-style music in a thirty-second TV spot. The client’s a total nightmare, but you needn’t have anything to do with him. You know everyone, anyway.’

So Connie had taken her place at Angela’s company’s table for twelve clients and agency people.

To her surprise, she found herself sitting next to Malcolm Avery of GreenLeaf Music.

Her first job, when she had turned sixteen and could at last leave school, had been at GreenLeaf.

Full of determination to make her escape from Echo Street by finding work in the music business, she had taken a bus and then the tube up to Soho one Saturday morning and walked into all the recording studios. The studio manager, Brian Luck, admitted that they needed a teenager to do odd jobs. They wanted a boy, really, but Connie insisted that she could make better tea and what’s more she could start at once. She added that they might as well give her the job right now, because she was going to sit there in the studio until they did.

When the job was hers, she bought a copy of the
Evening Standard
and went through the accommodation ads until she found a room she reckoned she could just about afford. She went home that first night to Echo Street, but it was the last time she ever slept in the house.

Once she was at GreenLeaf, she learned how to make herself useful and then indispensable. She gradually made friends among the loose tide of drummers and singers and keyboard artists who spent their days swirling around the studios and sitting in at recording sessions for whoever needed them. She did her share of playing and singing too, and in time a way of life established itself. It was an existence that centred on drinking heavily in Soho pubs, and rolling spliffs in stuffy rooms at the back of clubs, and from there watching quite a few of the people she knew descending into abysses of their own creation.

Connie didn’t fear the abyss for herself. She was learning that she was her own safety net, and probably always would be, and therefore it was important to keep the structure in good repair.

Constance Thorne acquired a reputation for being good for a laugh but quite straight, and therefore reliable in an emergency. Everyone at GreenLeaf was busy and she began to get odds and ends of commissioned work that led to writing jingles for commercials. Connie was too used to being poor, and the effect of having some money once in a while seemed to shoot straight into her veins like her own version of a fix. She worked feverishly, jazzed up by the earning potential, and soon she had a useful little showreel of her work.

She lived like this for four years, sharing a dingy flat in Perivale and keeping irregular hours, not seeing the sun often enough and always juggling with work and money. She had plenty of friends and few intimates. The digital age was arriving, and the old studios were slowly going
out of style. Jingle writers could come up with a tune on the way to a meeting with agency or television people, then call up and order a drummer, a flute-player and a violinist, record the separate tracks and mix them, sample some more, and the job would be done. Unusually for a woman, Connie watched and learned how to use the new equipment. She worked on a retainer for GreenLeaf during the day, then freelanced in the evenings, using the company’s studios for her own work.

Then one of the founding partners of GreenLeaf, the amiable but lazy Malcolm Avery, ran a deadline too close. The brief was to write a jingle for the launch of a new chocolate bar called Boom Bar.

Malcolm slumped in his studio chair at six o’clock in the evening, his headphones hanging around his neck like a noose and dark circles under his eyes.

‘I’ve got nothing here for the agency and I’m scheduled to meet them at ten tomorrow,’ he groaned.

Connie had a date, for once with a man who wasn’t a penniless drummer or trombonist. He was an agency account man, and he had even promised to buy her a meal rather than expecting her to stand alternate rounds in the pub.

‘I’ll have a go,’ she said to Malcolm.

‘Yeah, go on then. I’m going home. We’ll play them whatever we’ve got tomorrow morning, and promise them the earth in a couple of days’ time. See you, Con.’

Connie called to put off her date. The man didn’t sound pleased.

When GreenLeaf Studios went quiet for the evening, Connie sat down at the eight-track EMU 2 with a jug of coffee and the brief for the Boom Bar jingle. She worked all night, and in the morning the tune was there.

At eight o’clock, with traffic building up in the street below and the lift beginning to hum in the old building, she
picked out the tune on the keyboard one more time.
Boom boom baboom ba ba…

She went out to get coffee and a danish, finished this breakfast at her desk in the corner by the stairs, and waited for Malcolm to come in.

When he arrived she played the jingle to him. His face flashed with cunning and then went flat.

‘Well, yeah. Not genius, but not bad. I’ll chuck it in with the others, mix ’em up, see what the agency thinks. Give me the tape.’

Connie was red-eyed and wired from her sleepless night. Her hand shot out and caught Malcolm by the wrist.

‘No. I’m coming to the meeting. I’ll play the tape, and I’ll make sure everyone knows whose work it is.’

Malcolm laughed. ‘Whose brief is it, whose studio is this, who do you work for?’

Somehow, Connie found it within herself to shrug and turn away with the tape in her pocket.

‘Suit yourself. I did it in my own time, so it’s mine. Go and present whatever you’ve got.’

She could almost hear Malcolm Avery making calculations. It was an important commission, for a big agency, for a major product launch.

‘Oh, what the fuck,’ he sighed. ‘Come with me if you feel so strongly about it.’

The agency team and the clients all went mad for Connie’s tune.

For the first time in her life Connie found that she was able to call the shots. She agreed to split the commission fee with GreenLeaf, and gleefully put a cheque for a thousand pounds in her bank. But she made sure when she signed the contract that royalties would come to her alone.

Almost at once, the Boom tune became a huge hit.

By the time she was twenty-three Connie was living in her own large flat in Belsize Park, with a room in it converted to a studio. In time she formed her own company and employed a manager to run the business side, and to go to meetings and take the music briefs from advertising-agency creative departments or television producers, while she concentrated on writing the music. She could spend days at a time shut away in the soundproof studio, working less with live musicians and more and more via the spiralling trajectories of new technology.

She never wrote another Boom song, although the title stubbornly clung to her, but she was a good composer. Her work won some awards, her showreel gathered depth and range. After the first flood of royalties, her income was steady rather than spectacular, but she had come a long, long way from Echo Street.

Eight years later, when numbers of her friends were marrying and having babies, Connie was certain that neither option was open to her because she was deeply, unwillingly in love with the man who was already married to her sister.

Then one day she went along to the recording of the orchestral music she had written for a television serialisation of
Dombey and Son
. The orchestra was under the baton of Sébastian Bourret.

They edged together, over the space of a year.

Connie liked being with Seb because he was actually as rootless as she felt. Seb was Australian by birth, half Belgian and half South African by parentage. Home for him was wherever he was rehearsing the current ensemble, and Connie fitted well into that structure. She was as happy as he was to move on from Geneva to Philadelphia to Tokyo. The topic of marriage or the possibility of children was never seriously discussed, though, and that was as much Connie’s choice
as Seb’s. She couldn’t envisage having children by anyone except the man she still loved.

Then came Sung Mae Lin. Connie didn’t want to go back to Australia, and when she thought of London the streets were crowded with shadows. The Balinese village house with the veranda and the view stopped being a staging post and became her home.

Time had not treated Malcolm Avery kindly. He was three stone heavier and his cheeks were mottled dark mulberry red.

‘Christ. It’s Boom Girl, isn’t it?’

‘Hello Malcolm.’

‘Don’t see you around much these days. Are you still working? Wait a minute, you married Simon Rattle, didn’t you?’

Connie said, ‘I was with Sébastian Bourret for a few years. We never married, though. I live in Bali these days.’

‘Bloody good idea. Better than sodding London.’

Malcolm refilled his own glass with the not-bad California merlot and sloshed the remaining inch or two from the bottle into Connie’s.

There was a big silver-plated wine cooler in the centre of the table, filled with ice and bottles. Across the top of it Connie caught Angela’s eye and they smiled at each other. It was going to be a long evening.

Once the dinner had been cleared away, the moderately well-known comedian and the blonde television presenter who were jointly compering the event took the podium. There was a lengthy session of jokes and banter.

‘Bloody get on with it,’ Malcolm said, not quietly. He was an award nominee, having devised the music for the cat-food commercial. He poured three inches of brandy into a balloon glass as the presentation of awards finally began.
Nineteen minutes later Cosmo Reiss of Gordon Glennie Music lifted the award for the best use of classical style in a thirty-second television commercial over his head as if it were the World Cup.

Malcolm shouted, ‘Bollocks, mate.’ The cat-food client looked furious and Angela covered her eyes with one hand.

After the awards had all been presented the table-hopping part of the evening began. Among the well-dressed executives the composers looked like skinny angular children at a party for plump old relatives. Connie excused herself and went to the cloakroom. Angela came in a minute later and tossed her Lulu Guinness bag down beside the basin. They peered into their reflections in the mirror as Angela applied red lipstick.

‘Bad luck about the award,’ Connie commiserated.

Angela raised one eyebrow. ‘Worse luck for Malcolm. He needs it. But next year, darling, it’ll be yours for your Bali bank music. Trust me.’

‘I do, I do,’ Connie smiled. ‘Ange? How are things with…?’ Women were coming in and out behind them so she didn’t say Rayner Ingram’s name out loud.

‘All right. Well. You know. Quite difficult, actually.’

Angela looked unhappy, but determined to conceal it.

Connie couldn’t think of anything she could say that might improve matters. She murmured something anodyne, and they went back out into the party together.

At the end of the evening Connie returned to their table. Waiters had carried away all the debris except for the wine cooler, which now contained only a couple of detached wine labels and a scum of melting ice. A couple of agency account men were attempting to haul Malcolm Avery to his feet.

Malcolm rather thought he would like one more drink, and resisted their efforts to hustle him. He gripped the table edge and rotated his head as if he were blind in one eye.
Then he stood up, hauling on the cloth for support. The cooler slid towards him.

‘Check this,’ he suddenly roared. He moved fast, considering how drunk he was. He grabbed the wine cooler by its two little handles and tipped the contents over his head. Waves of icy water gushed over his shoulders and poured down his clothes. He gasped and shook himself like a walrus emerging from the sea. Constance gasped too, because quite a lot of the water had splashed over her.

‘There you are. Sober as a judge now. Sober as Constance,’ Malcolm shouted. He took off his shoes and tried to empty water out of them.

Connie told this story, complete with mime.

Jeanette and Bill and Noah all laughed, and after a second Roxana joined in too. She watched Connie admiringly as she pretended to wring water out of her hair, then glanced quickly round the table. This family laughed a lot, eagerly seizing every opportunity.

Bill sat back in his chair, grinning broadly.

‘What did you do?’

‘I personally saw him into a taxi and gave the driver forty quid to take him to West Hampstead.’

‘Bravo, Auntie Con,’ Noah applauded.

Connie didn’t tell them what one of the account men had murmured to her.

‘Poor sod, his wife’s just left him.’

Roxana said, ‘I thought it was only in Uzbekistan, like this.’ She tipped her left fist towards her mouth, thumb and little finger raised.

‘Ah, no. I am afraid you will encounter mass drunkenness in the UK. Even here in Surrey,’ Noah said gravely, as he poured more wine for everyone. They all laughed again.

Bill had made a summer pudding. They all admired the
crimson, slightly sunken dome before he stuck a spoon into it and rivers of juice escaped. Noah and Roxana ate most of it between them, then they cleared the table and went into the house together, claiming that they were going to do the washing-up.

Jeanette immediately raised her eyebrows at Bill and Connie.

Bill pretended to consider. ‘I like her…skirt.’

Jeanette pointed at him and sliced her finger across her throat. She turned to Connie.

‘She’s impressive,’ Connie said.

–
She liked you
, Jeanette indicated.

They faced each other, and the faintest shadow of ancient rivalry seemed to dim the afternoon sun.

Connie leaned forward and touched her sister’s hand.

‘I expect she just wants to get into advertising.’

Jeanette met her eye, and then smiled.

– She’d be mad, from the sound of it. Plant taxonomy would be far better.