‘I’ve told you everything I do,’ Elise said, leaning against the door frame, trying to be casual. ‘Everything you ask me, I tell you.’
Connie swung round on her office chair. She looked exasperated. ‘I’m writing about a green rabbit,’ she said.
‘A what?’
‘A green rabbit.’
‘OK.’
Connie’s jaw tightened. ‘Please. Don’t do that.’
‘Don’t do what?’
Connie rubbed her forehead. ‘I’m sorry. I just – let me show you it when it’s finished.’
‘OK.’ But Elise still hesitated. ‘What d’you think it’ll be like?’
‘The book?’
So she was writing a book. ‘No. Los Angeles.’
‘Oh. A Hockney swimming pool,’ said Connie. ‘Sunshine. Make-believe.’
‘And will Sorcha really look after Ripley?’
Sorcha was a friend of Connie’s from her days as a student at Manchester. Now she was a professor in modern history. But like many of Connie’s friends, Elise had never met her.
‘Of course she will.’ Connie scrutinized her. ‘Is something wrong, El? You want to keep on at Seedling? You don’t want to go? What is it?’
‘No. Nothing. Don’t worry.’
Elise went up to their bedroom and lay back and thought about LA. She knew little about it. It seemed a place of dreams, a place where the inheritances of fame were grotesque. Film stars through the century, killing themselves with drugs and alcohol, falling prey to the humiliation of obsolescence or the hubris of too much exposure. It seemed a place where the race was for dollars, where an actress was valued not for her talent but for her receipts. A bad film topples you, Connie had said. I hope to god we don’t make a bad film.
*
Despite Mary banging cupboards downstairs, Elise loved Connie’s house for its peace, a peace which she had never known before and was proud she’d managed to find for herself. Connie had lured her in, and Elise longed not to escape, but to stay. This was the first place that had felt like it could be home. She had been free to project her daydreams onto Connie’s overloaded bookshelves and mismatched furniture, like a stage-set in an amateur theatre after the actors had left.
That night as they were lying in bed, Elise told Connie she was like an almond. It felt as if they’d had an argument earlier, and something needed to be righted. Some silliness needed to be introduced. ‘If you were a nut, that’s the nut you’d be,’ Elise said.
Connie was on her side with her back to Elise, and Elise put her hand on her lover’s neat-shaped skull, inhaling Connie’s hair, as sweet as marzipan. ‘I could grind you up and put you in a cake,’ Elise said. Connie laughed, and Elise watched the flexing of her pointed shoulder blades, feeling desire rise up inside her.
‘I don’t feel like an almond,’ said Connie. ‘Aren’t I more of a cashew?’ She rolled to face Elise and tucked her into the arch of her armpit. ‘What nut are you?’
Elise loved the fact that Connie did not reject these bedtime meanders, as they carried each other in the ebb and flow of words and ideas, as they talked a world into being together, a riverbed of time that was theirs alone. ‘I’m a Brazil,’ she said.
‘You creamy Brazil.’ Connie made a hungry rumble noise. ‘My favourite.’
This is what Connie did. She turned them from being nuts into a reflection of their love, a magician of metaphysics who left Elise enraptured. She placed her hand on Connie’s cheek, moving it down to that collarbone, those pale shoulders flecked with freckles. Connie drew your eye; but once your eye was drawn, you didn’t know what to do next. You didn’t necessarily want to go much nearer, for fear of not being permitted. Connie never seemed aware of how strong she was. She didn’t register how dismissive her voice could be. But now, she was silent, waiting. She would not move until Elise did something more.
Elise kissed her on the mouth, gently, hearing Connie’s exquisite sigh of pleasure as she did, feeling Connie’s hands reach for her and draw her to her own body, the most natural thing in the world.
*
Elise woke early. Connie was a beautiful sleeper, so still and quiet, like a woodland creature come in from the trees to shelter next to Elise’s human heart, unaware that any minute Elise might skin and eat her alive. Connie was a miracle, but Los Angeles was coming, and Elise feared it. She buried this fear, a corrosive thing that had led to many problems before. It was rust in her soul and it was always there.
‘I love you,’ she whispered, and the words hovered on the air, waiting to be taken up.
Connie woke, her face a page of surprise. Her limbs underneath the bedsheets sounded like the rustle of leaves. ‘El,’ she said, smiling, burying her face in Elise’s neck. ‘El. I love you too.’
2017
7
I started Wax Heart on the ferry back to Portsmouth, barely exchanging a word with Joe. I hadn’t told him what Dad had told me. I was angry with him for discussing our imaginary babies with Dad. I suppose I felt that stuff – the inner workings of our relationship, of my body – shouldn’t be discussed over a casual coffee in a French bistro. Joe seemed to read my mood and knew to leave me be, mooching around the deck, before plonking himself down on a seat and scrolling the Instagram accounts of food bloggers and chefs.
Wax Heart had been published in 1979, followed by Green Rabbit in 1983. Wax Heart was slim and elegiac, with hints of a seventies setting yet strangely timeless. It was about a woman called Beatrice Jones, whose husband conducts a long series of affairs, after the discovery of which she ends up alone yet victorious. Green Rabbit was an angry, more rooted and sensual book – but still a variation on the first. It told the tale of a woman in love, although in the case of Green Rabbit, one who does not wish to be alone. I tried to imagine my father reading these books, and found the vision of it disorientating. But if I was going to hunt for secrets about Elise and Constance, then I had to accept that he had his secrets, too. Finally, he’d given me what I’d always wanted – a window on his life with my mother, albeit one that was still half-closed, a room with a compromised view – and I didn’t know if I liked it.
Nevertheless, I persisted. Now that Dad had – reluctantly, painfully – given me Constance Holden, I was hardly going to hand her back. I particularly loved Green Rabbit, the lives lived and lost inside it, and those allowed to bloom beyond the final paragraph without definitive answers. Back in London I stood on the bus to the coffee shop, swaying side to side reading it. I sat on the loo with it. I waited for the kettle to boil with it, turning for two days into a one-handed woman, whose head and heart had integrated with the heads and hearts of Connie’s characters. Of course I sought my mother in these pages, but how was I to know her if I saw her? She was invisible, but crowding me at the back of my mind nevertheless, like a clutch of funfair balloons, buffeting me out of space and time, their strings about to lift me off my feet.
Constance Holden didn’t seem to exist in that group of writers whose names you know, even if you haven’t read their books. She wasn’t a Spark or an Angelou or a Lessing or an Atwood. She’d faded – like so many women’s writing lives, eclipsed by other names. And yet Connie’s style was inimitable – though people, I realize, have subsequently tried. Green Rabbit is a book about the solitariness of life, the devastation of love gone wrong. It’s a book about the ever-enduring need to be with others, and the ever-present desire to push them all away. But how much, standing on that bus, did I want it to come out well for Rabbit, a green woman, a woman of hope and jealousy and new beginnings.