lay propped up on cushions on a wooden divan. She held a swaddled bundle in her arms. Two or three years back, Connie remembered, she had been hardly more than a little girl, and even now she looked far too young to be a mother. There were purple rings of fatigue around her eyes but her small, even white teeth showed in a broad grin of pride as Connie stooped beside her.
‘Well done,’ Connie smiled.
Before her marriage Dewi had often come over to Connie’s house to drink Cokes or make herself imaginative snacks from the sparse contents of Connie’s fridge, and to giggle over Western magazines. She had a good voice, and loved to sing or la-la the lyrics of pop songs while Connie sat at her keyboard playing the melody and joining in the choruses.
Pema’s mother asked if Connie would care to drink a glass of green tea, and Connie politely accepted. There was a stir of large bodies in the crowded room.
‘Would you like to hold him?’ Dewi whispered.
‘Yes, please.’
Dewi handed the tiny bundle into Connie’s arms. It weighed almost nothing. She looked down into the baby’s sleeping face. One purple-grey fist was bunched against his cheek, and two tiny commas of damp black eyelashes punctuated the wrinkled mask. He looked premature, and also prehistorically ancient. Connie’s throat tightened.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Wayan.’
Wayan or Putu for the firstborn of Balinese families, depending on caste; Kadek or Madé for the second; Komang or Nyoman for the third and Ketut for number four, then back to Wayan again. That was how it went. No fanciful baby names, even for a girl who pored over second-hand celebrity magazines as eagerly as Dewi did.
‘He’s beautiful,’ Connie told her.
Pema came in with another group of visitors in tow, also carrying flowers and packets of rice. Everyone in the room edged up to make space, and Connie thought that she would certainly melt if it got any hotter. She pressed her lips to baby Wayan’s forehead, breathing in the scent of fresh birth. There was an urge inside her to hold the child more closely, feeling his damp skin against her own, but instead she replaced the bundle gently in Dewi’s outstretched hands.
‘I’ll go outside. To make some room,’ she mumbled. Through the thickets of flowers and staring faces she made it into the air. She was sitting on one of the rattan chairs and watching a large black pig, tethered by the leg to a sapling, when Pema came out with one of his sisters behind him. The sister poured green tea into glasses and handed one to Connie and one to Pema. Pema sat down and they sipped their tea while the pig rooted in the ditch and contentedly grunted to itself.
‘You must be proud, Pema,’ Connie said.
He smoothed back his thick hair. He was small but quite good-looking. Before he and Dewi fell in love with each other, Connie had often seen him with a group of his friends, circling on their motorcycles like a flock of two-wheeled birds and eyeing the tourist girls in their shorts and bikini tops.
‘I am. But I am also worried about being responsible.’
Pema was an apprentice mechanic at a small garage on the road that led down to the coast. He would be earning very little money, which was why he and Dewi were living with his parents. Until the two of them could save enough money to buy or build their own house, they would have to stay here among the stepped generations of grandparents and brothers and sisters and the various other babies.
‘That comes with being a father,’ she smiled at him. Pema was a good boy, she thought. He was looking at her in that unspecifically hopeful, speculative way that meant he was wondering if her immense, uncountable Western wealth might somehow be harnessed to his advantage.
‘Do you have children, perhaps?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Connie told him.
‘That is a shame for you,’ Pema said, all sympathetic awareness of the divide that now existed between the two of them. He was probably thinking that piles of her money wouldn’t compensate for not having a baby son like day-old Wayan.
There wasn’t much else to say, and neither of them felt the need to make further conversation. They drank the rest of their tea and sat looking thoughtfully at Pema’s mother’s garden of peppers and chillies and coconut palms. Behind a small hedge flies swarmed around the brown haunches of a tethered buffalo.
More people kept arriving. When Connie went to say goodbye, she could only manage to wave to Dewi and blow a kiss from the edge of the crowd. Later in the day, according to custom, the washed placenta would be wrapped in a sacred cloth and the visitors would all witness its burial inside a coconut shell near the gateway to the house.
By the time Connie made it home the afternoon had reached the point where the light was at its ripest. It lay like melted butter over the vast swathe of gently stirring leaves, gilding the fronds of tree ferns and shining on the stippled trunks of palm trees so that they gleamed like beaten silver. Connie went out to her chair on the veranda and sat listening to the trickle of water and the various layers of birdsong.
She let the questions sink slowly to the bottom of her pool of thoughts. In time, as the shoot receded, the sediment of habit would cover up her memories.
Peace lapped round her once again.
She sat for a long time, until the tropical twilight swept up again from the depths of the gorge. As the sudden darkness fell, she wandered back into the house and poured herself a glass of wine. Connie seldom drank alone, but tonight she felt the need for just one drink.
There were no telephone messages. She took a long swallow of wine, and set the glass down on her desk as she switched on her computer. It was days since she had checked her emails. Broadband hadn’t yet reached the village and she wandered out to the veranda again while the unread messages slowly descended from the ether and filtered into her inbox. She drank some more wine and then, counter to her intentions, topped up her glass.
At the screen again Connie clicked through the spam and a couple of emails from London to do with work. There was a message from the leader of the string quartet, thanking her for booking them for the commercial. Connie closed that and her eyes flicked to the sender of the next message. Bunting. Her brain had hardly taken it in before her heart was hammering. She looked away from the screen and then back again, but it wasn’t an illusion. Bunting.
It was only then that she saw the sender wasn’t BBunting, but JBunting. Jeanette.
The last time she had seen her sister was four years ago, after Hilda’s funeral.
They hadn’t spoken since then, nor had they written.
That was the last time she had seen Bill, too.
She shouldn’t allow herself to remember their joint history, even to think about him. But what harm did it do to anyone, except perhaps herself?
A message from her sister now could only mean that something was wrong.
With Noah? With Bill?
Her mouth was dry and her hands shook as she opened the message. It took two readings before the news began to sink in.
There
