How much did I want for a book to come into my heart and change my life? As I read Connie’s words, it was a terrifying delight to me that according to my father, this woman had known my mother so intimately, and might know exactly what had happened to her. It was painful to me to be aware of this connection, yet not to know what to do with it, except read her fiction. I didn’t want the fiction: I wanted somebody to tell me the truth.
*
I asked Zoë, Clean Bean’s resident English undergraduate and bookworm, whether she’d heard of Constance Holden. Zoë’s eyes widened as she pulled down the steam nozzle into a customer’s cappuccino. ‘Oh, man,’ she said. ‘Green Rabbit’s one of my favourite books.’
‘I’ve just read it,’ I said.
‘I’m just sad she only wrote two,’ said Zoë.
‘Do you know why she didn’t write more?’
Zoë, who was twenty, with her septum pierced and her fine blonde hair dyed blue, took everything very seriously, from novelists to Netflix, and I adored her for it. ‘There are some theories,’ she said. ‘She wrote this really famous essay a year after Green Rabbit came out, and it’s literally included in every feminist theory class I’ve ever taken.’
‘Did she say in it that she wasn’t going to write again?’
‘Not exactly. But it was the last thing she ever published. It’s called The Locust Plague. I can bring you in my copy if you like?’
‘That would be really cool. Thanks, Zoë.’
‘No worries.’
‘Do you know if she’s still alive?’
Zoë frowned. ‘I’m pretty sure there’d have been an obituary in the papers for her. I don’t think she’s dead. She was a big deal. She still is, in a culty, weird recluse way.’
‘Weird recluse way?’
‘Well, why would she stop writing like that at the height of her success? She needed to write more. We needed her! But she stopped. It’s such a shame.’
Zoë shuddered; she felt things deeply. I felt ashamed, because I, being fourteen years older, had forgotten how.
*
Back at our flat, sitting at the kitchen table, I looked Constance up on the Internet. Zoë was right: whether it was the case that Constance Holden wanted to be forgotten, or whether other people chose to forget her – or whether it was nothing so deliberate at all – she wrote those two books, then The Locust Plague, then nothing more. The only photos I could find were grainy headshots from the eighties: black and white, pumped-up messy hair, baggy blouse, prim but lipsticked mouth. She looked young, and I began to think of her like that – though by now she’d be into her seventies. The biography on the back of Dad’s books was wildly out of date, but there was no new information online to supplant it. Where was she now?
‘Who’s that?’ said Joe, looking over my shoulder at the laptop screen.
‘Constance Holden,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘A writer. I’ve just read her books.’
‘She’s a fox,’ he said.
‘These are old photos,’ I said. ‘But she might be an old fox.’ I swivelled round to face him. ‘Joey,’ I said. ‘Dad told me something when we were in France. This woman knew my mother.’
Immediately, Joe looked wary. Any mention of my mother made him look like that; he couldn’t help it. He’d witnessed too many tears, had waded through too many of my black fogs. ‘Right,’ he said.
‘And I’m going to find her.’
‘Rosie—’
‘I am.’
‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’
‘Of course I’m not. But I have to try. It’s the first time—’
‘No, I understand. OK.’
‘What?’
‘Well, just don’t get your hopes up, OK?’
‘I won’t.’
We both knew that wasn’t true.
‘We’ve got to leave for my parents’ now,’ he said. ‘Are you ready?’
I sighed and closed the laptop, unwilling to be drawn back to reality. ‘How did last night go?’ I asked. Joe had taken an investor ‘angel’ for drinks to see if he’d be interested in funding our new business idea for the burrito van.
‘Good!’ he said brightly.
‘And?’
‘These things take time,’ I heard as he walked away.
Inside I was screaming. My mouth, whilst seemingly closed, was fully ajar, a preternatural hurricane bawling out of it. For two years, I’d done the heavy lifting in our team of two. I closed my eyes, crushed by his lack of enthusiasm over the discovery of Constance Holden and her potential connection to my mother. These things took time and they never gave it back.
Two years ago Joe had wanted to turn his love for Mexican food, new music and travel into something solid, and an internationally roaming festival burrito van was to be the intersection where these three loves met. I had agreed it was a great idea – it was a great idea, it was romantic! – and as we submerged into our thirties it felt important to cling to any visible signifiers of romance and adventure. It made Joe happy, and initially he was enthusiastic about getting vendor licences, reaching out to festival organizers.
It was not a great idea, however, to quit his job as a broker in the City at the same time, and to use his inheritance from his dead grandfather to buy a van, and live off the remainder. He needed to convert the interior into a state-of-the-art kitchen, but that, too, ‘would take time’. Joe was stubborn and he did not realize – or would not acknowledge – how brutal and competitive the festival food van business actually was. You had to want it, but Joe only loved it. He was completely unequipped, or unwilling, to push himself.
Joe’s parents had bought him the flat we shared, and I lived there rent-free. This fact always held my tongue (unless alcohol had been involved) on the lack of progress with Joerritos – I had no stake in his property, so for some reason I had no stake in his behaviour with his business and how it affected our relationship. It was far from ideal. The flat protected Joe like some sort of fairy circle, and in my opinion had left him without much of an appreciation for what hard work really was, and what it felt like not to have a safety net.
We’d been together nine years. We did have good times, of course we did. Lots of them. Otherwise why else would we have been together? I did love him. I just sometimes wondered if other couples dragged themselves across the seabed like this, and why they did it. Because they all believed in love? Because there was nothing else to do? When we argued, I would know a heaviness to my arms, my stomach, my shoulders, that was not an afternoon slump. Fights with Joe weighted down my body. But more recently, I felt no longer furious at him: it was too exhausting. It was a sulk; it was nothing. Instead, perhaps a new sense of resignation was coming; this subaquatic feeling being mine to keep. Every day I felt I had to carry it. To break up with him was inconceivable. We’d seen each other through half our twenties, and that is no mean feat. Kelly had had many boyfriends, many lovers; so did several of the girls from school. Not me: I’d found my rock and I had clung.
Joe wasn’t an archetypal wastrel; he didn’t spend lots of money he didn’t have, but what he did have went on ‘investing’ in the business. And love was less appealing when I was the only one remembering to keep us in loo roll, the provider of intermittent dinners out, the means of a holiday for two weeks in the summer, and the only one who ever thought to buy a nice candle or a cushion as some pathetic marker of adulthood in our shared existence. My own grandparents had left me a bit in their wills, and I’d put half of it into Joerritos, without telling my dad. It was unlikely he would ever be able to hand me down a property.