Constance

‘Busy day for you,’ he observed.

‘Yes.’

It was going to be.

After half an hour’s driving, away from the village and following the course of the river to where the valley spread in a series of pale ledges planted with rice, they reached the location.

There were several Toyotas parked in a line, three bigger trucks standing with their doors open, two motor caravans, a trailer-mounted diesel-powered generator, a couple of pickups from which heavy boxes were being unloaded by local labour under the direction of one of the key crew, green awnings set up for shade, groups of people converging on a larger tent, and a general air of purposeful activity. Con looked at her watch. It was seven thirty precisely. The sun was gathering strength, promising a hot day ahead. On the horizon, across the shimmering paddy, the sacred Mount Agung was a pale-blue pyramid.

‘Thanks, Kadek.’

He opened the door for her to step out. ‘Welcome, ma’am. Anything more for you? I have to collect other film people. The young girls, you know, who take part.’

‘Of course you do. Off you go. Thanks for getting me here so punctually.’

As he prepared to reverse away, Kadek permitted himself a wink and a grin that revealed his filed teeth.

Connie shouldered her bags and walked towards the set.

‘Hi,’ Angela called out, and waved her arm in welcome. Angela was Connie’s old friend from London, a producer with the company that was making the commercials.

Connie gave her friend a hug. ‘You all right?’ she murmured in her ear.

Angela had an unusually expressive set of features. With her back to the location, she made her wasps-invade-the-picnic face. ‘Couple of the crew complaining about their hotel. Ran out of beer last night is what it amounts to.’

‘That all?’

Angela shrugged. ‘More or less.’

Connie was relieved to hear it. Usually she worked alone in her studio, either here in Bali or in London, and she rarely came face to face with the agency who commissioned her work, let alone travelled to commercial shoots. But she knew enough about the ad business to be certain that worse things could go wrong on location than the booze being in temporarily short supply. Could, and probably would.

She was anxious, and in Bali that was most unusual. Her life here was calm, pared-down and minimal like the interior of her little house, and in its own uneventful way it was satisfying.

Now, disorientatingly, London had come to her.

She put her arm through Angela’s. She said cheerfully, ‘So let them drink green tea. Or vodka. Or fresh mango and papaya juice. Be different. This is Bali, isn’t it? Come on, Ange, let’s get ourselves some breakfast. How’s Himself this morning, by the way?’

There was no doubt who she was referring to.

‘Fine. In a pretty good mood. Really keen to get rolling.’

Rayner Ingram, the director, was a tall, saturnine man who said little, but when he did speak he made his remarks count. He and Angela worked regularly together as a director– producer team.

Connie had tried to joke mildly, privately, about him to Angela.

‘Rayner? What’s that about? Is his real name Raymond? Do you call him Ray?’

Angela had reproved her, without a glint of a smile. ‘No, of course not. Why d’you say that? His name’s his name.’

It hadn’t taken even this exchange for Connie to conclude that Angela was in love with Rayner Ingram. Producer– director relationships weren’t exactly uncommon in the business. It was just uncommon for them to have happy endings.

Connie half-listened to Angela, but the other half of her attention was on the stacks of metal boxes and lights and cables being unloaded from the trucks, and the way people were rushing about, and the British and Australian colloquialisms shooting across the set.

It was bizarre to contemplate this other world, this self-important capsule of schedules and shots and scripts, given birth to by a line of trucks drawn up beside a half-ruined temple in a rice paddy under the blue cone of a volcano. A few yards away, behind a loose cordon of local men who had been recruited to keep spectators off the set, Connie could see two women squatting at the edge of a green thicket of rice. They had been harvesting, and their hand-scythes lay at their feet. They looked as though they might be mother and daughter. The younger one, perhaps sixteen years old, wore a bright red sarong that made a brilliant slash against the green and the dark earth. She carried a baby bound against her chest. The two women watched the activity on the set with wide eyes and motionless attention.

Connie tried fleetingly to establish which of these places was the more real to her: the silent women and the rice paddy or the ring of people within which a hairy man in shorts and a khaki waistcoat with a dozen pockets across the front was yelling for someone to bring over the genny cables. Both were familiar, she decided, and she could feel at home in either. Whatever home meant. It was the juxtaposition that was disconcerting.

The two women reached the open flap of the tent, which had a fine netting screen across it to keep out the insects. As Angela gathered the netting in one hand she whispered, ‘You haven’t met the clients yet, have you?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Now’s your chance.’

Two men were sitting in canvas chairs at a folding table, surrounded by three others and a woman and a circle of cups and plates and cafetières. Both of them looked up at Connie. She had time to see that they were the kind of men who naturally wore grey worsted, and that now they were dressed in what Angela, using her primitive-tribe-found-in-Papua-jungle face, called ‘clients’ shoot clothes’.

Angela said warmly, ‘Simon, Marcus? This is Constance Thorne. Our musical director, of course.’

The older one half got to his feet and held out a big hand. There were croissant crumbs on his safari jacket.

‘Ah, Boom Girl,’ he shouted. ‘We’re honoured. Simon Sheringham.’

‘Hello,’ she smiled at him.

She hated being called Boom Girl. If it had ever been welcome, it had stopped being so a very long time ago. She had written the Boom music when she was barely twenty. A fluke. A day’s work.

‘Boom, boom, baboom ba ba, bababa ba.’ The younger client sang the few bars as he also stood up. ‘And it was long before my time,’ he asserted, intending a compliment. ‘Hi. Marcus Atkins.’

‘Hello.’ Connie shook hands with him, and smiled some more. From further along the table the ad-agency copywriter and art director nodded at her, too cool for introductions. The agency producer was very pretty, Connie noted.

Angela and Rayner were conferring over the schedule of the day’s shots.

‘I’ll just get some breakfast,’ Connie murmured.

Two Balinese men in white jackets were clearing plates. Connie followed them out of the back of the tent. Behind the scenes, enclosed by canvas screens, Kadek Wuruk, who was moonlighting from Le Gong Restaurant (‘Don’t Go Before You Come’), was frying eggs on a two-ring gas burner. He beamed at Connie and waved his spatula at her.

‘Hello! Welcome, Ibu. Egg for you? Very good, you know. My own chickens.’

‘Yes, but no thanks. It’s a bit early for me. I’ll have some coffee, though. Everything okay, Kadek?’ There was quite a limited range of Balinese first names.

‘Everything fine, great.’

His assistant was chopping onions, three women were peeling vegetables, two young girls were washing up, and a line of boys processed by with cases of bottled water. Connie was reluctant to pass back through the canvas flap that separated kitchen from tent. It was more comfortable out here, with the women laughing and chattering and the shy girls with their bare lovely feet planted in front of the portable sink unit. She poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup, and watched Kadek Wuruk and his assistants at work as she drank. There would be nasi goreng for lunch.

She heard a crackle of walkie-talkies.

‘We’re in,’ the first assistant called to the crew. It was the signal for work to begin on the other side of the canvas. People began shifting towards the set, but there would be several hours of waiting and watching while the rest of the gear was brought in and lights and cameras were set up. If everything went really well the camera would be turning over before the lunch break was called. Connie’s gamelan orchestra was listed as the first shot.

When she had first arrived in Bali, Connie had been intending to make a short stopover on her way to London from Sydney. The plan had been to keep still, to take stock of what was left of her life, and let her bewilderment subside a little. It was only a few weeks since Seb had told her that he was in love with a Chinese violinist, and intended to marry her.

At that time Sébastian Bourret was becoming a soughtafter conductor. When he made the announcement, sitting on the balcony of their rented flat overlooking Sydney Harbour, Connie had been his lover and partner for more than six years. Their home was nominally in London but Seb travelled so much that they were away more than they were there, and this had suited Connie well. Their peripatetic life together had been comfortable and civilised, and she had been sure that it was what they both wanted and needed. She had her own work, composing music for television and commercials, and as technology developed it was becoming increasingly easy to do that work anywhere in the world.

She wasn’t under the illusion that Seb was wildly in love with her, at least after their first year together, any more than she was with him. But they had much in common, and they were considerate and mutually respectful and deeply fond of one another.

Then Sebastian really had fallen in love, with the gifted Sung Mae Lin who was no bigger and looked hardly older than a child, even though she was almost thirty. Unwittingly Mae Lin made Connie feel too big and the wrong age, and unwanted, and unhappy in a way that was too familiar, however hard she fought against that and the memories that were stirred by it.

None of it was Mae Lin’s fault, or Seb’s, really, or her own for that matter. It was just one of those things that happened. There had been no alternative for Connie but to withdraw from her own life, as quickly and as gracefully as she could manage it.

Seb and Connie had said goodbye to each other gently, and with regret, but there had been no question that he might change his mind. Connie had seen him only once since then, when he was conducting a Beethoven Festival concert series in London. He and Mae Lin had two children now. Twin girls.

Connie’s London home was still the apartment that she had shared with Seb. He had made his share of it over to her and she had kept the place, although it was bare of most of the furniture they had chosen and there were few of her possessions set out in it. She liked it better that way; it was easier to slip in and out of an almost empty space. Minimalism was closer to invisibility.

When she’d arrived in Bali, she had had no plans and no expectations of the place. It had simply been somewhere to put herself that felt like nowhere in particular.

In her raw state she had fled from the big hotels and beaches and cocktail bars of the coastal strip close to Denpasar and headed inland. It was here in the village that she first heard gamelan music played live, by solemn musicians, not for tourists but for the musicians themselves and their knowledgeable friends. This was temple music, and music for festivals and processions and weddings. She had loved the sonorous gongs, and the shimmering notes of metal that fell through the air like drops of clear water.

Angela peered from between the flaps of canvas.

‘I’m here,’ Connie said, rapidly gathering her thoughts. She drank the last mouthful of her coffee and stood upright.

‘I’ll be on set.’

The day’s set was the temple at the edge of the rice paddy – permit to use for filming applied for and finally granted by the authorities in the nick of time – over which the set dressers were swarming.

Constance consulted her watch, having already looked at it more times this morning than she would normally do in a week. ‘The musicians will be here in fifteen minutes or so.’

‘Right. Straight to costume and make-up, then.’

The bus carrying the musicians arrived punctually and Connie hurried forward to meet them. Battling with their instruments, a line of six men spilled down the steps. They were not much bigger than their metallophones, big xylophones with keys made of bronze, and considerably smaller than the great gong. They were her friends.

‘I am very, very nervous,’ Ketut called as soon as he saw her.

Connie held out her hands to him. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t want to do it?’

There were beads of sweat on his forehead and above his long-lipped mouth. Ketut had smooth skin and it gleamed in the bright sunlight like oiled wood. ‘Oh, no. We are film stars already in Seminugul, let me make clear. There is no going back. But I am afraid of letting you down, Connie.’

Ketut was one of the most talented musicians she had ever worked with. She had been recording some of his performances with the big ensemble of fifty musicians called the gamelan gong, and she counted herself lucky to be able to play percussion with this smaller, less perfectionist group. Connie knew that she was not the best drummer in the world, but she loved the sessions when they played together. Sometimes, during the rainy season, they could make music for hours under a roof of palm thatch while water dripped from soaking leaves.

The musicians clustered around her.

‘You won’t, Ketut. You don’t even have to play if you don’t want to, just look as though you are for the camera.’

The actual music track would be laid down in postproduction. This was the music that Connie had been commissioned to produce. She found herself blushing in retrospect at the memory of the demo disc she had supplied.

‘Light and poppy, but unmistakeably tropical-island exotic,’ was the agency’s brief.

Confronted by Ketut and the others, combed and dressed in their best clothes, and versed as they were in the classical traditions of their native music, she felt embarrassed.

Behind her she could hear the Australian gaffer routinely cursing into his walkie-talkie because someone hadn’t brought over a camera dolly. All the musicians were staring into the snake-pit of cables, and at the little temple caught under the brilliant ultra-sunshine of the lights.

‘Don’t worry, really, don’t worry,’ she reassured them all. She asked if they wanted anything to eat or drink and they shook their heads. So she led them over to the caravan that was being used for male costume and make-up and left them there.

The script called for a Balinese wedding.

The temple was dressed up with flowers and baskets of fruit. Over the pop-eyed stone statues props people had fixed parasols of bright yellow silk with lavish fringes, and there were rakish garlands of scarlet and orange blossoms draped around the necks of stone dragons and snakes. The hot colours seemed to vibrate under the lights.

Eleven o’clock came and went. Connie supervised the unpacking and setting up of the instruments, on the exact spot that the crew indicated. The musicians emerged from make-up, giggling among themselves. They had been costumed in sarongs of black and white checks with broad saffron-yellow or vermilion satin sashes tied round their middles. They wore flowers around their necks, their eyes had been painted and their lips reddened. Their ordinary haircuts, as worn by waiters and teachers and shopkeepers, which is what they were, had been combed and gelled into slick quiffs. Every time Ketut or one of the others caught a fresh glimpse of a fellow musician there was another explosion of laughter. Trying not to laugh herself, Connie shepherded them onto the set.

Another long interval of adjusting lights and equipment followed. It was hot, and hotter still under the lights, and a Balinese make-up girl kept darting forward to powder a shiny face.

Connie positioned her recording equipment and ran the players through an approximation of the twenty-two seconds of music that would accompany the finished commercial.

‘This is really not Balinese wedding music,’ Ketut protested.

‘I know. Forgive me?’

Angela came across and reassured the musicians that they wouldn’t have long to wait. Connie could read the anxiety in her rigid shoulders. The schedule listed the bridal-attendants shot for completion before the lunch break as well as the gamelan orchestra, and that called for ten little Balinese girls wearing complicated headdresses who were at present corralled in the female wardrobe caravan. Connie began to sweat in sympathy with Angela, who had reckoned up and costed every minute of a week on location. Rayner Ingram was still frowning and shaking his head as he looked into the monitor.

But then, suddenly, there was a flurry of action.

‘We’re going,’ the first assistant called. ‘Camera rolling.’

Connie gave the signal to Ketut. As if there were no lights, microphones, cables or cameras, as if they were doing it for their own pleasure under a bamboo shelter in a rainy village forsaken by tourists, the little orchestra played her makeshift music.

Their faces lit up. The camera rolled towards them.

After twenty-two seconds, she gave them the cut signal. Reluctantly the metallophones and kettle gongs pattered into silence.

Rayner and Angela conferred. Then Angela and the first assistant crossed to the agency people and consulted with them. The musicians waited, their eyes fixed on Connie.

‘Going again,’ came the call.

They did three more takes. The agency indicated to Angela that they would like yet one more, but she shook her head and tapped a fingernail on her watch face.

The first assistant told the musicians, ‘That’s fine with the orchestra. Director’s happy. We’re done with you.’

It was Connie they looked to for confirmation. She beamed and applauded.

‘Ketut, you were brilliant. All of you. Thank you.’

‘I don’t know. There were some things,’ Ketut began, but the crew were hurrying them and their instruments off the set. Time was money.

Connie and the file of musicians heading back to the caravan passed another procession coming the other way. The bridal attendants were overawed eight-year-old girls cast from the nearby school. Their faces had been painted to resemble dancers’ masks, with eyes outlined in thick lines of kohl that swept up at the corners, rouged cheekbones and brilliant crimson lips. With tall gilt crowns on their heads and tunic dresses of pale gold tissue, they looked exquisite. Their role was to scatter flower petals in the path of the as-yet-unseen bride as the bridegroom and his supporters waited for her at the temple steps.

Behind the children came their mothers in a swaying group, chattering and exclaiming. Some of the mothers knew some of the musicians and there was a slow-moving bottleneck as everyone stopped to talk and laugh and exchange views on the filming. Crew immediately hurried them apart. The children were needed on set.

Once they had changed into their own clothes the musicians settled into the service tent, eyeing the swooningly handsome Indonesian actor, cast as the bridegroom, who was busy with his mobile phone. Connie quietly handed Ketut the fee, in cash, for the orchestra’s work. At least, she thought, they had been well paid.

On the set five pairs of beautiful Balinese girls scattered flower petals on a strip of crimson carpet. Out of shot, set dressers sprayed the temple garlands with water in an attempt to stop them wilting under the hot sun. Miraculously, the attendants were wrapped after just two takes.

‘Okay, people, let’s have lunch,’ called the first assistant.

Within three minutes the service tent was full of ravenous crew. Ketut and the others politely took this influx as a signal to leave. Connie went with them to the bus.

‘We play again on Tuesday? You can come?’ Ketut asked her.

Tuesday was their regular evening for music.

‘Yes, please,’ Connie said. It was one of the best times of her week.

She stood and waved as the bus bumped down the ricepaddy track. The mother and daughter who were working in the paddy straightened their backs to watch too. They had been joined by several more women.

In the service tent Angela was asking Tara, the pretty agency producer, what she thought they might do about the British actress who was playing the bride. She had spent the morning confined to her bathroom at the hotel. She must have eaten something that disagreed with her, Marcus Atkins remarked. The creative team sniggered.

‘I’ve absolutely no idea,’ Tara sighed.

On their way out later, Angela said to Connie through clenched teeth, ‘If that damned woman says she has no idea once more about what is supposed to be her bloody job, I’m going to hit her.’

‘She’s getting a great tan, though,’ Connie laughed.

In the absence of any bride, the afternoon was given over to the bridegroom and his friends. They marched out of wardrobe splendid in starched white jackets with red head-cloths knotted over their foreheads. Tara sat up in her chair at the sight of them and slipped her sunglasses down over her nose.

It was a complicated reaction shot. The men were supposed to be waiting in profile in a proud, anticipatory little group for the big moment, the first sight of the bride following behind her petal-strewing attendants. Then, as they caught sight of her, the men were to register a sequence of surprise, disbelief and then dismay.

Once the camera had captured all this the view then shifted to the other perspective.

The bride’s father – an approximate Prince Charles look-alike – was to be kitted out in full morning dress. On his arm would come the bride, dressed in white meringue wedding dress with a bouquet of pink rosebuds and a dangling silver horseshoe, blonde ringlets framing her face within a froth of veil.

With the establishing shot Connie’s music was to segue into a suggestion of ‘Here Comes the Bride’, then dip into a minor key to match the surprise and dismay, and end in a clatter of discordant notes. Then, on the screen would appear the bank’s logo and the words ‘The Right Time and the Right Place. Every Time. Always.’ To the accompaniment of a long, reverberating gong-note.

‘It’s advertising,’ Angela said drily.

The day wore on. After five or six takes, Rayner Ingram declared that he was satisfied with the shot. The tropical dusk was beginning to collect at the margins of the paddy, and Mount Agung was a conical smudge of shadow on the far horizon.

‘That’s it for today, folks,’ announced the first assistant.

The crew began dismantling the lights, and Simon Sheringham stood up and yawned. ‘Time for a drink, boys and girls,’ he said.

‘You are so completely right,’ Tara drawled.

Angela murmured to Connie, ‘Are you joining us for dinner?’

Angela’s duties would now shift to hostess and leisure facilitator for agency and clients, but her eyes were on Rayner Ingram who was stalking away towards the waiting Toyotas.

‘Do you need me?’

Connie was thinking of tomorrow’s music – a reprise of the main theme for the closing shot of the bride’s father, the worse for wear, smoochily clinking his champagne coupe with a second glass crooked in the elbow of a grinning stone dragon.

And she was also thinking of her secluded veranda and the frog chorus, which would sound like a lullaby tonight.

‘Well…not really,’ Angela said.

‘Then I think I might just quietly go home.’

‘Doesn’t anyone else want a drink?’ Simon bellowed.

An hour later, Connie sat on the veranda in her rattan chair and watched the darkness. It came with dramatic speed, filling up the gorge and flooding over the palms on the ridge. Packs of dogs barked at the occasional motorbike out on the road, and sometimes she could hear a squeak of voices from Wayan Tupereme’s house, but mostly there were only the close, intimate rustlings of wildlife in the vegetation and the conversation of frogs. Damp, warm air pressed on her bare skin. Connie was never afraid to be alone in this house.