by Roma Tearne
Grace, watching this small girl with a stirring of interest, noticed her reaction to Thornton’s smile and smiled, too, in spite of herself. Myrtle, watching, knew exactly what would happen next. She wanted to laugh out loud, but something about Savitha made her wary. Instead she wrote her comments in her diary.
March 18. This latest is unpredictable. I’ve caught her watching me. I fear she’s here to stay. At first I thought she’d tire of our pretty idiot. Then I expected G to frighten her off, but the creature is clever, she seems to have won G over. Still, I have to admit, it’s very, very funny. G, not to mention the darling boy, are getting drawn into something beyond them. Must be karma!
‘All the troubles with Hildegard for this?’ she remarked casually to Grace one evening after dinner. Grace was silent, not knowing what to think. Some instinct told her Savitha might not be such a bad thing for Thornton.
‘She’s not as pretty as the others,’ she told Aloysius slowly. ‘Yet there’s something about her. She forces him to think about things. She’s good for him. I think she’s falling in love, don’t you?’
Aloysius did not care. He just wanted a drink. He thought the girl insignificant. Only Myrtle knew: the girl was not. Meanwhile Thornton, in the throes of some new confusion, was hooked. Perhaps it was her sharp intelligence, perhaps it was her humour and her constant enthusiasm. It certainly isn’t her looks, thought Myrtle nastily, but the idiot’s mesmerised, like a chicken before a rattlesnake.
Thornton immobilised! wrote Myrtle, in her diary. Quite a sight!
‘Hello, Sa-Sa!’ said Jasper who had mistaken her name. No one corrected him.
Savitha laughed delightedly, and Thornton laughed hearing her. She’s mad, he thought. He had never met anyone as ebullient as Savitha before. Laughing all the time they were, those two, in those early weeks, before they dropped the bombshell, when Thornton, taking even himself by surprise, brought his second bride home to his mother. He had done it again! Savitha’s dark face glowed with an inner light. For all her liveliness she was not used to being so impulsive. Have I really been thinking straight? she asked herself, head in a whirl. Then, before any of them had time to decide, it was too late and Aloysius, it appeared, was about to get his wish.
‘A grandson at last!’ he crowed. ‘A de Silva. A new generation on the way.’
‘Fool!’ said Jacob, who had booked a passage to England in two months’ time.
‘When?’ asked Grace. But she spoke softly, and she looked closely at Thornton, who was much more alert these days, and had just announced he needed a better job.
‘It’s exactly what we need, darl,’ Aloysius said delighted. ‘To cheer us all up in this wretched country.’ He glanced quickly at his wife, for still at the back of his mind was the residue of the old anxiety.
Frieda wrote to Christopher the very next morning, her tears (she was uncertain whether from joy or grief) smudging the words.
Thornton seems very happy about it, she wrote. Can you imagine Thornton as a father? Mummy doesn’t seem to mind too much. In fact, I think she’s secretly glad. Savitha makes her laugh, something Mummy hasn’t done much since you left.
The night of the announcement, Aloysius celebrated with a new bottle of whisky. Hang his liver.
‘A new generation is not announced every day, darl,’ he said sheepishly when Grace glared at him. The father-to-be was missing. Where the devil is he? wondered Myrtle. Thornton returned triumphant with a new job offer. In his hand were the application forms for a passport.
‘Idiot!’ said Jacob angrily, unable to leave the subject alone. ‘Throwing your life away. Saddling yourself with a wife is bad enough, but a child as well? What sort of job is it anyway? What makes you think they want you in England?’
Far away in Delhi, sandwiched between Schubert and Beethoven, Alicia heard the news of the coming of the new generation and she wept. For the smallpox Sunil had contracted as a child had left a hidden mark on him. There would be no new generation for Alicia. That night her music floated up towards the stars and her performance was filled with a yearning that had never been there before. Soon she would return home, in time for the general elections, to meet her sister-in-law.
Something was wrong with Myrtle. It was obvious to Grace, and to Frieda. But with Jacob’s departure imminent there was no time to find out what it was.
‘He’s off his food,’ said Jasper who seemed to have perked up with all the recent activities. ‘Hello, Shiny?’
Myrtle was crying. No one knew whether it was the thought of the New Arrival or Jacob’s departure. An exhausted Alicia, Sunil at her side, arrived to wish her brother goodbye. Frieda noticed their sorrow had bound them closer together. Myrtle, watching them, burst into tears.
‘Good morning, Shiny,’ observed Jasper helpfully and, when no one listened, made his now perfected devil-bird sound.
‘Hey, Jasp!’ said Thornton, who was in the best of moods these days. ‘Hey, Jasper, what’s shiny?’
Jasper barked loudly.
‘Jasper!’ said Savitha. ‘Jasper, you are so cute! Oh, let’s call the baby Jasper, Thornton!’
Jasper stared at her silently. He had no loyalties.
‘What is the matter with everyone?’ asked Uncle Innocent who had come down from the hills for Jacob’s farewell.
‘Silly old fool!’ said Jasper, sailing out through the window, frightening the cook, sending her into a frenzy of waving and screaming so that Grace had to be called in to speak sternly to him.
‘Stop it, Jasper,’ said Jasper, enjoying himself hugely, running through his repertoire: barking dog, saw drill, crow caws, Mozart, all in quick succession. So that Grace could not help but laugh and Savitha clapped her hands with pleasure.
The line-up at the harbour was the same for Jacob’s departure. Only Christopher was missing.
‘We will visit you,’ promised Frieda. ‘When you’re rich we’ll come to see you and Christopher.’
‘Get a big house,’ said Thornton laughing. ‘Because there will be a lot of us! Who knows, we might have twins.’
Jacob sighed. Would he never be free of his siblings?
‘Well,’ said Grace, taking comfort in the fact, ‘don’t forget Christopher will be there too. So you won’t be alone.’
Why should I want to see him? Jacob was puzzled. We hardly spoke at home, what will be different in England? However, he did not say this. He was prepared to wait and see.
‘Be good!’ said Uncle Innocent. ‘Or if not be careful!’ he said chuckling with delight. He wondered briefly if Hildegard was in England before hastily squashing the thought. Myrtle watched Jacob go. She was crying again.
‘What the devil is wrong with her?’ muttered Aloysius, irritated. Really, the woman had lived with them for too long. He wished Grace would get rid of her. She was no use in the house now that the children were all grown up.
‘Don’t forget to send me some shirts, putha,’ he told Jacob, ‘and some good whisky, and some chocolate for your mother,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘Some bath salts too,’ said Auntie Angel-Face. ‘They put bath salts in the bath in the UK.’
‘But we only have showers!’ said Savitha, amused. She liked Angel-Face.
‘Well, we can smell them instead,’ said Angel-Face, confusing them with smelling salts. She was reading Jane Austen at the moment.
Looking at his mother’s face, Jacob felt the stirrings of an old emotion from long ago. A leftover from those upcountry days. Savitha observed the family, her family now, and was silent; disturbed in a way she could not fully understand. Certain things, unclear as yet, mysterious and interesting, were beginning to reveal themselves. Veiled in morning sickness, part of Savitha had begun to feel trapped. Sometimes, very occasionally, Thornton irritated her a little. His smile of course remained devastating, but certain things about him, certain other shortcomings had begun to annoy her. Still, she brushed these thoughts aside feeling the new generation turn restlessly inside her. Respec
t for the unborn subdued her for the moment. The harbour sounds were strangely haunting. Noises that spoke of unknown lands and other lives. Savitha shivered. What would it be like to leave? From the corner of her eye she saw Aloysius stub out his cigarette. He was looking edgy and uncomfortable. The smell of diesel made Savitha heave. Glancing at Grace she felt the moment stretch and magnify with unbearable poignancy. This is where Crown Rule has brought us, she thought. Dissipated by drink, full of suspicion, wanting to leave the country. Thornton was talking to Jacob, laughing at some joke of his own, ever-cheerful. In spite of herself Savitha felt her heart contract. She had married him impulsively, loving his beautiful face, his optimism. She had been right, she thought, this country needed dreamers like Thornton. What will we be like, she wondered, when we are old? Keeping her thoughts to herself, Savitha watched them all. Silence was soon to become her best tool.
There were twenty-one stormy days ahead before Jacob would leave behind the heat at the tip of the Bay of Biscay. Sweating in the coarse wool jacket of his UK-bound suit, wanting only to go, he had no clear memory of his departure. At last, was all he thought, at last. And then he was gone, with his two Jaffna mangoes and his packet of curry leaves, off to a better life. Following Jacob’s departure Savitha wrote another article for the Colombo Times. It was an astringent little piece, cutting across social unrest and the looming elections. The article was about the rich stooges, as she called them, the nationalists who were forcing the Tamils to leave the country. They would go looking for a city paved with gold, taking all that was best in Ceylon with them. Savitha predicted there would be no rainbows, no golden treasures, and no happy ending, either abroad or on the island. It was a sharp piece on emigration, sending out a cry for island solidarity. The editor was struck again by the eloquence and wit of her prose. Grace, reading it, nodded. Once, long ago, she too had felt this way. Sunil read it and was amazed by her passion. He said nothing to Alicia, for Alicia, struggling with their joint sorrow, avoided Savitha of late. She was often at home, practising in between concerts, when Sunil was away canvassing for the elections.
It was July. The monsoons had broken again and the weather was tempestuous. Far out at sea, Jacob leaned over the side of the deck, looking out at the stormy inky water, longing for the voyage to end.
Which was where he was, on the morning of the general election in Ceylon. The island that was no longer even a speck on his horizon. The morning when Thornton, arriving at his parents’ house for breakfast, leaving his wife still asleep in the one-bedroom flat that was their married home, looked down to find a gecko land on his shoulder.
‘Thornton, master,’ said the servant horrified, seeing him brush it off, ‘that is very, very bad luck!’
Grace, irritated, shooed the servant away and laid another place for her son.
‘How is Savitha this morning?’
‘She’s still tired, after Jacob’s leaving party,’ Thornton said. ‘I thought I would let her rest.’
He was on his way to work but decided on the spur of the moment that he would stop off at what he still thought of as home, for breakfast. It was almost like the old days only now Thornton had got a decent job thanks to Savitha’s good influence. He sat down for a second breakfast and Grace smiled. She was pleased with the way things had turned out for him. Since the announcement of the new baby he had changed. Although they had all changed Thornton was the most altered.
‘Your brother is so much more content,’ she often remarked to Frieda. ‘Less restless, happier, don’t you think?’
And Frieda, agreeing, was glad it was Thornton who was the happy one.
On this morning of the election Alicia began her daily practice on the piano earlier than usual. She had slept at her parents’ house because Sunil had been working through the night. It was an ordinary day with sunlight slanting down through the trees. Grace cut some flowers for the vases before the heat ruined them and entered the house just as Alicia began to play an old favourite, a Schubert sonata she rarely played any more. The slow, lilting second movement of the andante was one that Grace had always loved. Pausing, she listened. The sounds pierced her heart and stirred up her buried grief. Looking around the table where various members of her remaining family sat, she allowed herself to be overwhelmed by sadness. Once she had stood in this very spot listening to this same piece of music, unaware of all that lay ahead. Lately, she had begun to bring fragments of certain images out into the open. Lately, she had felt able to do this without falling apart. Memory flooded out with the music. Vijay! Yes, she could say his name to herself at last but she no longer could recall his face clearly. He had been but a moment in her life, a flicker of light, going out like a shooting star. Doomed to fall. Yet the essence of him remained strong.
Alicia had reached the tricky part of the music, the part where she used always to go wrong, either stumbling over the chords or ruining the timing. Grace listened. How could C minor say so much? Today Alicia played with six years of experience, without smudging the notes, seamlessly shaping the phrases until it was no longer simply the melody they heard, but something more intrinsic, something more polished and complete than it had ever sounded before. Standing in the doorway, watching her elder daughter, seeing the young girl and now the woman absorbed into this slight figure, Grace closed her eyes. Even if she cannot have a child, she has her music. May it always see her through, prayed Grace, silently, as the andante was played out. No one heard the gate being unlatched. No one heard the knock on the door, or the simultaneous discordant ring of the telephone. No one bothered until a servant opened the front door and came looking for Aloysius.
‘The police are here. They want the Master,’ the servant called, alarmed.
Frieda, coming out from the cool interior of the house, saw the small crowd that had gathered outside, saw her father’s face, ashen and crumpled, heard Myrtle’s cry, calling for Grace.
‘Oh my God, my God! Grace, Grace, I didn’t mean it!’
Someone was screaming, over and over again. Frieda could not recognise her own voice, as she cried out for Grace, saying it was not true. For how could it be true, for there was Alicia sitting at the piano as she always did, calmly playing Schubert, dressed as she always was. There was Thornton, for all the world still a bachelor, eating his breakfast of hopper and jaggery before he went out. And there were the crimson gladioli that Grace had just cut for the vase in the hall, indeed there was Grace herself holding the flowers, about to plunge them in cold water, so how could it be true? This unknown stranger, this white-clad messenger, telling them again and again things they could not comprehend, things that made no sense, words without meaning. Frieda, rooted to the spot, watched all this. But Grace, with her arms full of the dark red gladioli, seeing the piece of paper the policeman held out to her, even as the shutters slammed against the sunlight outside, Grace understood, instantly, turning, blinded by her understanding, towards her elder daughter. For as the last notes were played, as they fell into the cool light of early morning, she saw that Alicia had been widowed. Playing Schubert. Widowed by a single stray bullet meant for someone else.
Which was how it was that, watching flying fish on the high seas and the dawn rising over the horizon, Jacob travelled onwards in blissful ignorance of the bloodshed in his homeland. Twenty-one days is a long time for the dead to remain unattended. There were so many in this latest massacre. A prime minister with good intentions, a minister or two, standing in the wrong place, what did they matter, a few civil servants doing their jobs, counting ballots, perhaps if they had counted faster they might have been spared. A chauffeur, a servant boy bringing refreshments, another bringing a marigold garland. A saffron-yellow robe splattered red, strangely vibrant. Blue canvas chairs overturned, fallen onto spilt rice, a begging bowl of smoothest ebony. What did any of the flies care as they feasted in the sunshine, covering vast tracts of unexpected pleasure? Twenty-one days is a long time for the dead to lie unburied in such heat. By the time Jacob heard the ne
ws from home, in his little bedsit in Brixton, reading the letter in his father’s beautiful handwriting, the first letter he had ever received from him, by the time he broke open the seal of the aerogramme, Alicia was already a widow of several weeks. The lid of the coffin and her piano simultaneously closed forever. All her life summed up in these simple gestures.
The recording of Alicia de Silva playing Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A minor, K310, was in the shops in time for Vesak. Sales were good, considering a state of emergency had been declared and a curfew was in operation. Her delicate, tender touch was instantly recognisable. A music critic on one of the English newspapers, who had followed Alicia’s brief career, picked up a copy of the recording. He wrote a glowing review about this unknown young artist. He wrote of ‘maturity and interpretation’, ‘virtuosity’ and ‘depth’. Would there be any other albums, he wondered, Liszt perhaps or Schubert? Uncle Innocent bought a copy of the record and played it in his house on the tea estate, listening to the familiar sounds of his childhood when Grace’s mother used to play this very same piece. The elderly doctor in the old hill station who had long ago loved Grace, and who had delivered Alicia and her siblings, bought a copy and listened to it in silence. Jacob bought a copy with some difficulty and listened to the sound of his sister from across the seas, unaware that his face was wet with tears. Christopher, on the other side of the river in Finchley, listened to it. It was music, he realised, that had filled his life and formed his childhood. Lately, he had successfully suppressed all thoughts of home, hoping to close all that had hurt him. He had joined the newly formed Tamil Resistance Party in London and written to the newspapers in protest against what was happening in his country. But he had distanced himself emotionally. The rage that flared so violently on the night of the riots of ’58 had very nearly finished him and ever since he had been living in this little corner of London, in his cramped bedsit, he had tried to see things differently. He had thought he had hardened his heart. He had hardened it. Until tonight. Tonight he was caught unawares. As he listened to his sister’s music, he heard again the other sounds he had tried to block out, saw himself struggling as his mother held him. Heard his own despair.
