Rosie Thomas - Constance

The house clung to the upper rim of a steep valley. From beneath her feet the ground fell away into the gorge and rose again on the opposite side, densely clothed in a tangle of trees, feathery leaves against broad blades against sharp spikes, a lush billow of textured greenery. The crowns of the highest coconut palms spread against the sky, three-dimensional in the brightening light. At the bottom of the cleft lay the river, a wide silver sweep with the morning mist rising from it. The cocks were still crowing, and as the warmth of the sun filtered through the leaves the first cricket started up its dry rasp. From the road on the other side of the house came the distant buzz of motorbikes as people headed for work.

Connie smiled at her view, thinking how lucky she was to have all this. She rocked on her bare feet, spreading her toes to connect with the warm, varnished boards. On an ordinary day she would have made tea and sat out here, gazing at the green wave until it was time to do something else. But today was not ordinary. The outside world had arrived.

She had laid out the shooting script the night before, her tape-recorder and her laptop and the sheets of music, even her clothes. All she had to do was shower and dress, make a last check and pack her bag.

At 7 a.m., still with a persistent flutter beneath her ribcage, Connie carried her bag out of the house. The offering placed by Wayan lay in front of the house temple, a little shrine sited at the appropriate corner of the veranda. She nodded her head to acknowledge it and then stepped past. The car was already waiting for her, pulled off the road into the grass and bare-earth space where the way to her house joined up with the path to Wayan’s. It was a big silver-grey Toyota 4x4, with tinted windows and enough room to seat seven people.

The driver leapt out as she emerged, and hurried to open the rear door for her.

‘ Selamat pagi , ma’am,’ he said. ‘Good morning. All set now?’

Connie knew him quite well. His name was Kadek Daging and he was Wayan’s relative by marriage. Usually he worked in his small general store up in the main street of the village and was famous as a source of local gossip, but today he would have left one of his several sons in charge of the shop in order to undertake this important driving assignment for ‘the movie company’, as he put it. Actually it was less a movie than a trio of expensive thirty-second commercials for an online bank that were being shot on the island. But Connie didn’t want to diminish his sense of importance by making the distinction.

She would have shaken his hand, or even lightly touched his shoulder, but she took her cue from him and put the palms of her hands together to make a polite bow.

‘Good morning, Kadek. Thank you for coming.’

To preserve the formality of the occasion she climbed into the back of the car, even though she would have preferred to sit up front. Kadek jumped smartly into the driver’s seat and eased the Toyota out into the stream of scooters and motorcycles. One young man on a motorbike tried to race them, his blue shirt ballooning and his black hair raked back in the wind, but Kadek hooted and they sailed majestically past him.

Once they were established as the kings of the village traffic he asked over his shoulder, ‘Ma’am, would you care for a cold drink? A cool towel?’

Normally he would address her as ‘ Ibu ’, as he called all the other European women customers and neighbours, or ‘ Ibu Con’ when he remembered, although Connie tried to persuade him to make it just ‘Con’. Today, however, they were in a different relationship.

‘Thank you,’ she said gravely.

‘In the box,’ he reminded her.

There was a cool-box in the foot-well, in which were bottles of water and soft drinks and a couple of rolled hand towels. Connie took out a towel and patted her hands and face with it, although she wasn’t hot. Kadek nodded with satisfaction at having done the right thing.

‘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.