by Roma Tearne
To his dismay, Christopher discovered the servant boy had been right. Jacob and Thornton were coming home. Alicia and Frieda, still stranded at the Carmelite Convent School, were waiting fruitlessly for another buggy to pick them up. In the end the priest, taking pity on them, drove them home and it was teatime before Grace was able to break the news to them all. The servant brought a butter cake and some Bora into the drawing room. She brought in small triangles of bread spread with butter and jaggery. And she brought in king coconut juice for the children and tea for Grace. The servant, knowing how upset Grace was, served it all on Grace’s favourite green Hartley china tea service. Alicia opened the beautiful old Bechstein piano and began to play Schubert. The others ate quietly. For a moment Grace was distracted. The mellow tone of this sonata was one she loved and Alicia’s light touch never failed to surprise her. She waited until the andante was over.
‘That was lovely,’ she said, putting her hand gently on her daughter’s shoulder. ‘It’s come along a lot since I last heard it.’
‘That’s because we’ve got a new piano teacher. She’s wonderful, Mummy!’ Alicia said. ‘She said I must be careful about the phrasing of this last section. Listen,’ and she played a few bars over again.
‘Yes, I see,’ Grace said. ‘Good! Now, I want to talk to all of you about something else. So could you leave the piano for a moment, darling?’
Five pairs of eyes watched her solemnly as she spoke.
‘We’re moving to Colombo,’ she told them slowly. ‘We’re going to live in our other house by the sea.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Because there’s going to be a war the British military needs this house, you see.’ There was a surprised pause.
Alicia was the first to speak. ‘What about the piano?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Oh, the piano will come with us, of course. Don’t worry, Alicia, nothing like that will change. I promise you.’
She smiled shakily. Jacob was watching her in stony silence. He had guessed correctly. The Greenwood days were over.
‘Myrtle will live with us,’ said Grace, carefully. ‘She’ll give you piano lessons, Alicia. And she’ll help in the house generally.’
No one spoke. Thornton helped himself to another piece of cake.
‘There’s a war on,’ Grace reminded them gently. ‘Everyone has to economise. Even us.’ She looked pale.
‘Good,’ nodded Thornton, having decided. ‘I think Colombo will be great. And we’ll have the sea, think of that!’
Grace smiled at him with relief. Christopher, noticing this, scowled. But all he said was: ‘Can I give you your present now?’
The servant boy, who had been hovering in the background, grinned and brought in the cardboard box. The family crowded around and the miaowing inside the box increased.
‘What on earth’s in there, Christopher?’ asked Alicia, astonished.
‘It’s a cat,’ guessed Thornton.
‘But we’ve already got one,’ said Frieda, puzzled. ‘We can’t have another. They’ll fight.’
‘Have you been stealing kittens again?’ asked Jacob, frowning.
‘Well, well, what’s going on now?’ asked Aloysius, coming in.
Having left his wife to break the news to his children he was now in the best of humours. A nap had been all he had needed. Glancing at Grace he assessed her mood correctly. There was still some way for them to go. The miaowing inside the box had turned to a growl. Everyone looked mystified and Christopher grinned.
‘What is it?’ asked Grace faintly, wondering how many more shocks there were in store for her.
Aloysius’s news had not come as a surprise. Grace had always known that one day they would have to leave the valley where she had been born. There had been too many rumours, too many hints dropped by the British planters during the past few months. It had all pointed to this. So much of their own land had gradually been sold off. British taxes, unrest among the workers and general mismanagement of the estates had all played a part. Her drunken husband had merely speeded things up. And with the onset of war they would lose the house anyway. She felt unutterably tired. The effort of waiting for something to happen had worn her out. Now, knowing just how bad things were, she could at least try to deal with them. In Colombo, she would take charge of her life; manage things herself. It should have happened years ago. In Colombo, things would be different, she told herself firmly. And when the war was over they would come back. To the house at any rate. Of that she was certain. Christopher was holding a box out to her. But what on earth had he brought home this time? she wondered, frowning.
‘It’s for you,’ Christopher said. ‘To take to Colombo.’
Slowly she opened the box.
‘Yes,’ said a hollow voice from within. ‘Hello, men.’
Then with a sharp rustle a small, bright-eyed mynah bird flew out and around the room, coming to rest on the grandfather clock, from where it surveyed them with interest. There was a shocked silence.
‘It’s a mynah bird,’ said Christopher unnecessarily. ‘And it can talk. We can teach it all kinds of things. It can say lazy boy, and –’
‘Lazy bugger,’ said the mynah bird, gazing at them solemnly.
‘Good God, Christopher!’ cried Aloysius, recovering first. He burst out laughing. ‘What a present to give your mother!’
They were all laughing now. The servant boy was grinning, and even Jacob was smiling.
‘But he’s wonderful,’ said Grace, laughing the most. ‘He’s a wonderful present!’
Later on she said, to Christopher’s intense joy: ‘I shall call him Jasper! And we’ll take him to our new life in Colombo.’
It was in this way that Grace de Silva dealt with their reduced family circumstance. Easily, without fuss, without a single word in public of reproach to her husband and with all the serene good manners that were the hallmark of her character. Aloysius breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever she felt, she would now keep to herself he knew. Outwardly, she would appear no different. And so, as the rumours of impending war on the island grew stronger, the house beside the lake with all its balconies and splendid rooms was emptied. Its furniture and chandeliers, its delicate bone china were packed away, and even as they watched, their beloved home was closed forever and given up to the British for their military efforts. In this way the de Silva family, cast out from the cradle where they had lived for so long, moved south to Colombo. To a white house with a sweeping veranda, close by the railway line where the humidity was very often oppressive, but where the sweet, soft sound of the Indian Ocean was never far away.
2
AUGUST WAS A DANGEROUS MONTH, when the heat, reaching unbearable proportions, created an oasis of stillness. Every flutter, every breeze, vanished, leaving an eerie calm. Nothing moved. Dogs stretched out on the dusty roads panting, too exhausted to move out of the shade, too parched to bark even. Dust lay tiredly on everything, on buildings, on the soles of the feet of the rickshaw men, on the sides of the old London double-decker buses. Disease scurried through the sun-crisped grass; some said there was typhoid in the south, others that the malaria season had begun. No one knew the truth. A pack of rabid dogs moved up the coast at a trot, and elsewhere in the crowds at Galle Face, baby-pink, raw-faced monkeys chattered and sometimes bit a passer-by. But this was August, when sanity was stretched to its limits.
Four years had vanished in the blink of an eye. Swallowed up beneath a peacock sky while the de Silvas grew and expanded into their new life by the sea. Five de Silva childhoods gone in a flash while the war still limped on unnoticed. It existed in places that were merely names on a map. Vichy, Paris, Dresden, Berlin, Vienna, London. But the hardships in these distant lands barely touched the fringes of the coral-ringed island. The war was a muffled drum, beating elsewhere and leaving the island largely untouched and unconcerned. Grace de Silva hurrying home after one of her trips to Colombo heard the familiar strains of piano music drifting through the long French windows that opened out into the garden. The
music cascaded out onto the bougainvillea and was absorbed by it. As she slipped in through the front door, escaping the wall of blistering sunlight, the music rose and swelled and fell delicately. Jasper, the mynah bird who sat by the meshed window in the wide cool hallway, watched her beadily. He had grown enormously.
‘Hello,’ he greeted her. ‘Hello, men,’ and he shifted on his perch.
Grace, who had been trying to be quiet, giggled.
‘Good morning,’ continued Jasper severely. ‘Good morning, men.’
Having been silent and alone all day he found it difficult to stop talking. Grace looked away, suppressing a smile. She kicked off her shoes, ignoring him. Any attention, she knew, was likely to make him garrulous. She poured a glass of icy water from the fridge, gasping as she drank.
The sound of the piano drifted through the interior of the house. It travelled softly across the shuttered rooms and along the yellow stick of light that escaped through them. Alicia was playing the second movement of a Mozart sonata with startling tenderness in one so young. Grace stood listening, holding her breath, waiting as though hearing it for the first time. On and on and on played her eldest daughter in an unbroken dialogue with the music. The notes ran like quicksilver through her fingers. Grace closed her eyes. Her body ached sweetly. Without a doubt, she thought, distracted by the music, Alicia ought to be studying at the Conservatoire. But she knew discussing the financial implications of this with Aloysius was an impossibility. Better to give a monkey a ladder, thought Grace wryly. All she would do if she voiced her anxieties was provide him with an excuse to start his poker up again. No, she decided closing her eyes, I will have to find the money. There was still some of her legacy left that Aloysius knew nothing about. Grace had hoped to keep it for a rainy day. She frowned.
‘Perhaps I shall have to sell the land after all,’ she said out loud.
‘Yes,’ said Jasper as though he understood.
‘Do you think so?’ asked Grace absent-mindedly, forgetting for a moment who he was.
‘Hello, yes, yes, men,’ said Jasper imperiously, preening himself and ignoring Grace’s peal of laughter. Then he squawked flatly and turned his back on her.
Outside, the air was heavy with the smells of late afternoon. The servants were cleaning out the clay pots from lunch, laying them out in the sun to dry. The heat flattened the noises all around into slow hollow slaps as the convent clock struck the hour in a strange flat monotone. Grace paused in the darkened room listening to these unfamiliar southern noises, of crows cawing and bicycle bells. She listened to the lilting sound of the Beethoven study Alicia was now playing. It was interspersed with her husband’s drunken snores in the next room. While the steady ticking of the metronome drew and fused all of it, weaving this fleeting moment in time forever. Grace sighed with pleasure. In spite of the difficulty, her family had made the transition into their new life with ease. Their circumstances had been reduced, but they were happy. The freedom of the big city and the unbroken views of the sea had made up for a lot. She poured herself another glass of water.
Myrtle Cruz, hearing the front door, sat up in bed. She had been resting. The heat in Colombo was intolerable. She missed the cool greenness of the hill station where she had been a governess to the British family. She missed the order and calm of the English children she had taught.
‘This place is a madhouse,’ muttered Myrtle, switching off the fan and getting out of bed.
The English family had long gone. And this, thought Myrtle, this is my karma. She disliked her cousin Grace. It had happened long ago when they had been young, when Myrtle had first met the new estate manager at her uncle’s factory. He had been penniless but handsome and ambitious, often invited to dine at the House of Many Balconies. In those distant, halcyon days Myrtle had understood nothing of the world. She had fallen hopelessly in love with the young Aloysius, with his intelligence, and his good looks. It had been an act of transformation, blinding and total. Unthinkingly, assuming his friendliness meant he felt as she did, she had revealed her feelings. She had not known his interests lay elsewhere. All she had seen was her own compulsive need, her own desperation, so that throwing caution to the winds she had declared her passion. The shame was unbearable. Afterwards she felt it was the single worst thing she had ever done in her life. He had looked at her, first with horror, and then with embarrassment. Aloysius had had no idea she felt that way. He had been bewildered but kind. His kindness had been her greatest humiliation and later on, when she saw all those things he had left unsaid, she realised there had never really been a chance. The presence of the wantonly beautiful Grace in the house would have stopped anything. Her hopes had fallen like ashes of roses, at his feet. No amount of visits to the astrologer, no amount of prayers or offerings made at sacred shrines, had altered anything. Karma was karma, Myrtle had realised with bitterness. She fled her uncle’s house imagining they were all laughing at her. She had not come back for the wedding; she had not seen Grace for years after that. By the time she finally met them both again, Grace had other things on her mind. All their money had gone, frittered away. Oh the sweet irony of it! Her cousin was still as beautiful, but Myrtle could see she was no longer happy. Five children and a useless marriage, she had thought, with a small glint in her eye, that too was karma. How different life might have been for Aloysius had he married her instead. She would never have let him go to the dogs. She would have loved him.
Myrtle could hear Grace moving around the house. She glanced at the clock. Then she pulled out her diary.
Two fifteen, she wrote. This is the second time in a week! So where the devil has she been? She’s missed lunch; she’s had no breakfast and it’s three o’clock. The shops would have shut long ago. So where’s she been?
Myrtle paused, staring out at the plantain tree outside her window. Two bright sunbirds hovered briefly on a bush before disappearing from view.
There are several things that interest me, she continued, writing furiously. One, why does she have to work with the Irish nuns in Colombo? Why not work in the convent here, why take the train to Colombo all the time? The chauffeur drops her off at the station, he picks her up, she comes in and goes straight to bed. There is something very, very fishy going on. Two, what is this work she’s so involved in?
Myrtle knew it was useless asking the children. Frieda and Alicia had only the vaguest idea of what their mother did and the boys were never home, anyway. Is she some sort of spy for the British? She certainly knows plenty of them.
Myrtle stared at what she had written. Like mother like sons, she thought sourly. Then she closed her diary and went off to have a wash.
The truth about Grace was simpler. She had taken a lover. Well, why not? She was still young. Had she not been a good mother, a good wife too? Did she not deserve a little happiness, having remained with the husband who had squandered her inheritance? Well then, thought Grace, who could argue with that? Grace’s lover was called Vijay. He worked in Maya’s Silk Merchants in Pettah. One day, soon after the de Silvas had arrived in Colombo, she had gone over to buy her daughters some saris and he had served her. She had noticed him even then, a lean, handsome man probably in his mid thirties, but with the air of someone much older. A few weeks later she had returned for more silk. He had looked at her in the way that she was used to, in the way men had looked at her all her life, but without, she felt, the suggestiveness that usually accompanied such a look. His look had struck her forcefully. Vijay’s eyes had been soft and full of exhaustion and something, some long-forgotten emotion, had stirred within Grace. Years of neglect on Aloysius’s part had taken its toll. Suddenly, and without warning, she saw that she had grown indifferent without realising it. Her patience had been stretched for too long. Perhaps her marriage had simply reached its outer limits. Perhaps the end had come long ago. Once Aloysius had been her whole world. But no more. So that eventually, after what felt like a moment’s blinding desire, before she could consult her better judgement, say a pra
yer or argue with her conscience, she found she had given herself to Vijay.
On the first occasion it had happened with a swiftness that took them both by surprise. Grace had been ordering silk. Yards and yards of the stuff. For Frieda and for Alicia.
‘I have two daughters,’ she had told Vijay.
‘Then you will have to come back often,’ Vijay told her softly.
He had not smiled. She heard him as though from a great distance. On the second occasion he had brought out a roll of pale, flamingo-pink material, letting it flow through his hands, letting it stream to the floor.
‘See,’ he said. He could not take his eyes off her. ‘Feel it,’ he said. ‘This is pure cashmere.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, feeling a constriction in her chest.
No one noticed. She saw, from this, they already talked a secret language. Her hand brushed the cloth and accidentally touched his. Something happened to her throat, something ancient and familiar, closing it up as though it were a flower. The shop had become stuffy in spite of the ceiling fan. She had felt she might faint. So that, stepping back, she pretended to look at other things while waiting for the room to clear. And afterwards, after she had bought her saris and given her address for them to be delivered, she had gone out into the blazing sun, only to hear a radio playing somewhere in the distance.
Love is the sweetest thing,
What else on earth could ever bring,
