Bone China

by Roma Tearne

  ‘Hmm,’ said Savitha, cryptically. ‘One in the family is quite enough.’

  In spite of the fact that she was hallucinating most of the time through lack of sleep, Savitha was maturing nicely.

  ‘Yes!’ Grace told Aloysius, with mild surprise. ‘I see the family resemblance!’ She felt a little detached from the event. ‘Almost like Thornton.’

  For the new generation, that milestone for which Aloysius had waited with such eagerness, hiding a special bottle of Scotch to wet its head, was not quite as he had imagined. Benedict Aloysius de Silva (as he was meant to be called) had not behaved according to plan. He was, in fact, a girl. Yes, yes, fooled you, fooled you, bawled Anna-Meeka de Silva, berating her exhausted parents, the visitors to the cradle, and anyone in fact who dared look at her.

  ‘My God!’ said Thornton again, having given in to his wife’s fanciful choice of names, feeling the weight of parenthood press down sharply on him.

  ‘My God! I’ve got a daughter!’ Something stirred within him, some vaguely familiar feeling. Fragile and unexpected, it rushed towards him. Was this how his mother felt about them all? Rousing himself from the terrible events that had occurred, he found his carefree youth had vanished.

  Perhaps, reflected Frieda, with amazement, he had been changing anyway. They had all changed, she realised sadly. While they were grappling with their sorrow, time had moved on. Frieda knew from his brief letters that Christopher had hardened his heart towards his homeland. She knew he would never return. What’s left? thought Frieda. She was still lonely. Nothing had changed for her. Alicia was reduced to a ghostly presence in the house while Grace had become slower these days and easily confused. Their mother was growing old. The thought brought tears to Frieda’s eyes. Myrtle of course had gone. Myrtle, who used at least to talk to Frieda, had moved back upcountry. No one kept in touch. Neither Aloysius nor Grace talked of what had happened and no one ever mentioned her name. The revelations of that day were buried once more. Often at night, after writing to one of her brothers or returning from Mass, having checked on her sister and her parents, Frieda would lie on her bed and return to her hopeless fantasies of Robert Grant. Their first meeting remained as fresh for her as though it had occurred yesterday. Distance had inscribed it with an unreal substance. She no longer cared about reality, she saw only what might have been. And now she added Catholic guilt to this. Remembering her past jealousy, Frieda chided herself inwardly. Alicia has nothing either. It must be my fault, my life is my punishment, she argued silently, grappling with her burden of guilt.

  Thornton had no guilt. Guilt had never been his problem. His problems were different. His new daughter was barely six weeks old. Her smile pierced his heart, and when she cried he found he was paralysed with love and anxiety. He wondered if Savitha was up to the task of bringing the child up. Then he noticed something else.

  ‘Savitha!’ he said excitedly. ‘She is going to be really very clever!’

  ‘Not the way she’s going,’ said his wife, who planned to kill the child if she did not sleep tonight.

  ‘How on earth will we give her the education she needs?’ Thornton wondered. ‘She must be educated in English!’

  Grace looked at the child; Thornton’s child, her first grandchild. Things had not worked out in the way she had expected. There was no longer any music in the house. All that she had once hoped for, all that she had longed so ardently for, had gone its own way, the family she had nurtured was slowly being torn apart. Alicia hardly ventured from her room, and since Sunil’s funeral, Aloysius had begun to drink again. There should have been no hope left. But somehow she felt closer to Aloysius than she had ever been before. Knowing what he had kept hidden for years had impressed her far more than the illegitimacy of her birth and a new gentleness crept into her voice when she spoke to him. Slowly beneath the surface, invisibly, the house was stirring. It had new life in it, vigorous and noisy. Grace felt it move impatiently. She felt it tug and pull at her and urge her to smile. It refused to take no for an answer. Grace looked again at Thornton. She felt a glimmer of amusement at the sight of her son’s new life. Responsibility had settled on Thornton like thick tropical dust.

  Unknown to his mother, other changes were occurring in Thornton. Sunil’s death had affected him more than he realised. It had taken on a different, more sinister meaning. For Thornton, never having shown the slightest anxiety about the race riots, now began to listen daily to the news. How safe was this country for his daughter to grow up in? Should they too leave the island? Politics were pressing in on Thornton’s life in a way it had never done before.

  ‘Well,’ remarked Jacob, reading the news from home, and ringing up Christopher, ‘he’s got his comeuppance. Time he joined the real world. He should try living here.’

  Christopher made no comment. He seldom wrote home. He had nothing more to say. Since Sunil’s death he felt as though all ties with his family had been severed. It had happened slowly, but he felt there was no point in dwelling on the past. He saw it as a hostile place of no return. Only when he thought of his mother was he was filled with an unbearable anguish. Her grief still communicated itself to him subliminally even though Christopher no longer had the capacity to deal with it. She had let him go; she would always be with him but having learned to hide his hurt Christopher wanted no reminders. It had become easier for him to go to the pub than to write home. His only concessions were the occasional phone calls and spasmodic meetings with Jacob.

  Thornton began planning. Panic had made him active.

  ‘We can’t bring Anna-Meeka up in this country,’ he declared, realising what Frieda had already seen coming. ‘Not with all that’s going on. What on earth will her life be like?’ It was clear, even at this stage, that nothing was too good for his tiny daughter. ‘We must go to England,’ he decided. ‘Anna-Meeka can have a good education there. She is clever. She might become a doctor. Who knows?’

  ‘Clever like her father, then,’ said Savitha who, having discovered the delights of sarcasm during the long sleepless nights, was beginning to sharpen her teeth. It seemed there might be a shift in their lives. For a moment it seemed as though there might even be a little hope.

  ‘Hello?’ said Jasper with what appeared to be false jollity, ruffling his feathers and preening himself.

  He loathed the baby. She was larger than all the cats put together, and commanded more attention. Her screams confused him.

  ‘Be quiet!’ he said querulously.

  Grace smiled. She had taken to waiting eagerly for their visits.

  ‘You know,’ she told Frieda, ‘Savitha is exactly what Thornton needed. She is what we all need.’

  And she gently picked up the yelling child and carried her out into the great garden where Jasper sat sleepily in the murunga tree.

  ‘Oh no!’ said Jasper turning his back to them, but the baby stopped crying and began to laugh.

  Savitha looked closely at Grace. Through her exhaustion (for the new generation had energy on its side), she turned her clever eyes on Grace. She watched as the baby was introduced to the servants, noticed how they carried her when she cried and listened as they talked to her in Sinhalese and in Tamil. Seeing the unshakeable affection for their mistress spill over and envelop Anna-Meeka, Savitha’s admiration for her beautiful mother-in-law increased. Slowly, hesitantly, in the moments when the baby slept, and Jasper approached the house with caution, she talked to Grace.

  ‘There are so many things that have to change,’ Grace told her. ‘The government should be focusing on these things, instead of being obsessed with eradicating the English language. There is so much superstition everywhere, crippling our lives.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just ignorance,’ Savitha said, ‘that’s what that’s all about!’

  ‘Take Myrtle, for instance,’ Grace continued, casually. ‘She should have known better.’

  Savitha hesitated. ‘Why was she so jealous?’ she asked, at last.

  ‘It’s an old story,�
� Grace said lightly. ‘From when we were young! She loved Aloysius once, you know.’ She paused, on the brink of saying more. ‘If we are ever to move forward, we must rid ourselves of all this useless superstition,’ she said, finally.

  Savitha nodded, absent-mindedly.

  ‘Do you remember the eclipse?’ Grace asked. ‘Everyone was frightened by it. People thought it was the cause of the riots!’ She laughed, softly, her face sad.

  ‘I remember,’ Savitha said.

  ‘Someone I knew was killed on that night,’ Grace said.

  She spoke faintly and Savitha, who had been daydreaming, glanced sharply at her. Grace’s eyes were full of unshed tears.

  ‘It was all such nonsense,’ she was saying. ‘But you couldn’t convince anyone, even –’ And she stopped speaking abruptly.

  ‘Only education will sweep those devils out,’ Savitha agreed.

  She didn’t know what else to say. Averting her gaze she waited. At last Grace nodded, smiling gently. A light breeze had sprung up, shaking some blossom to the ground.

  ‘It needs to be offered to everyone or it simply won’t work,’ Grace said.

  Savitha was at a loss for words. She had lived most of her life with only her sharpness of mind and her passionate desire for the truth as her companions. She had lived for so long without love or family affection, without encouragement or good looks and she was unaccustomed to such intimacy. Her mother-in-law astonished her. We think in the same way, she told herself, basking in this unexpected affection.

  ‘How wonderful to hear you say that,’ she told Grace.

  ‘We were very privileged, you know,’ Grace said. ‘When Thornton was growing up, we had everything we wanted. My father always used to say we should put some of it back into the country. The country is like a garden. It has to be tended, he used to say.’

  It was dark now. The evening star was out. Savitha felt as though some danger had passed.

  ‘It wasn’t easy for Aloysius,’ Grace continued. ‘He was very handsome when I first met him. Like Thornton. But the British kept him in their pockets, you know. He used to tell me he was just their puppy, everything was fine if he did what they wanted. It wasn’t any life for a man like him.’

  Savitha listened intently. She was slowly beginning to understand.

  ‘In the end…all that eternal gambling, endlessly trying to prove himself…it was such a mess. Vijay…someone I knew, a long time ago…said it was because Aloysius had lost his way. He is a clever man. He could have done anything he wanted.’ She sighed. ‘It was all wasted. Then after Sunil’s death…’

  Her voice tailed off. One generation forever trying to put right the mistakes of another. All of them ground down and exhausted.

  Later, when she was alone with her daughter, back in their little annexe, when Thornton had gone to meet a contact for the UK, Savitha mulled over the conversation with Grace.

  ‘You must not be like them, Anna-Meeka,’ she told the sleeping infant, seriously. ‘You must be the one to change your family’s history.’

  Perhaps, after all, Thornton was right and they should go to England. With the future here so uncertain, England might save them. Her daughter must learn to be resilient, Savitha sighed. That was what was important. The child stirred and sucked her thumb. Savitha gazed at the tiny dark lashes sweeping down from closed eyes.

  ‘Your father is a handsome man, Anna-Meeka,’ she told the baby. ‘But he doesn’t always know what’s best. He’s making plans for your future; he’s full of ambitions. He wants you to be a doctor, to be famous, to be rich, God knows what he wants. Your Dada is bursting with love for you, but…’ and she paused. She folded her lips together as though they were a paper bag, looking disapprovingly at the framed photo of her husband, hanging on the wall.

  ‘You must do what suits you best,’ she said out loud, firmly to the sleeping baby. ‘I don’t care what it is,’ she added, tenderly rocking the cot, ‘so long as you do it well.’

  Anna-Meeka grew rapidly. In no time at all she began to talk.

  ‘Jasper!’ she said as soon as she could. Both her mother and grandmother were delighted. Cautiously, for he was still uncertain, Jasper approached the house. Softly, fearful of the response, he made a whirling noise like the grandfather clock. Then, because the hideous screaming seemed to have stopped, he began to whistle his favourite bar from The Magic Flute.

  ‘Look!’ said Savitha to her daughter. ‘Jasper wants to be friends with you.’

  And indeed Jasper, whose affection had been only for Grace until now, began to follow the child around.

  When she was two, Anna-Meeka began to sing. Savitha and Grace listened entranced. Their friendship was growing, unnoticed by anyone. Something tender and unspoken, a thread of kinship, invincible and unexpected, surfaced and became stronger. Immeasurably and powerfully it arose. Effortlessly it linked them, for here were two generations of women springing from the same nation, their love for their family enduring and certain. Feeling some impermanence in the air, Savitha brought the child almost daily to the house in Station Road while Grace lived moment by moment, a hostage to fortune.

  Thornton made his application to leave the island. The troubles had worsened and many Tamils were leaving Colombo. Thornton wanted to leave while they still could.

  ‘Oh, not yet!’ cried Grace, before she could stop herself. She hoped the little girl would have a few more years of sun, some time to grow with them, as a talisman for the future.

  As her daughter grew, the change in Savitha became more visible. She had started out with fixed ideas but motherhood had begun its rich transformation. The sharpness in her face had softened and her passionately held values became more complex. These days she felt the insistent stirrings of some other inexplicable and complicated emotion. It gathered strength within her, glowing softly, as though being stored for what lay ahead. It coursed through her tenderly, drawing from the air what fragrance it could find, collecting up those everyday sounds, of bicycle bells and barking dogs, and shouts and bangs, and the sudden dull thud of a coconut falling in the grove nearby. And all the time, as the bright colours fixed themselves unconsciously on her mind, as the monsoons came and went, Jasper sat somewhere in the plantain tree, whistling small snatches of The Magic Flute, reminding them of a slowly receding era.

  That year the rainy season was late. When it arrived the daily downpour seemed relentless. The child had grown like a plant. Looking at her daughter, Savitha knew she would resemble Grace; she would be beautiful. With unaccountable sadness, she knew that some day others would see this too and would remember Grace. At five, Anna-Meeka started school in the little convent next door to the cathedral where her silent aunt Alicia had been married. The nuns knew the de Silvas. They remembered Frieda, and they knew Grace. When Anna-Meeka began to learn to play the piano they were not surprised by her talent. They had all heard her aunt on the radio. Savitha was delighted; here were the signs of the family talent. Only Thornton was uneasy. Sunil’s death and the change in his sister had affected him. He too had not touched the piano since that day and although he was pleased to let Anna-Meeka learn he informed his wife it would be bad luck for her to follow in his sister’s footsteps. Savitha was puzzled. She had not realised Thornton was so superstitious. She saw with amazement that many things had begun to frighten him. History frightened him. He did not want it to repeat itself. He did not want Anna-Meeka to go down that particular road. Thornton was no longer happy as he once was. The changes in him were imperceptible. It touched the luminosity in his eyes, dampening the glow of youth. He stopped dreaming and became anxious. As the hatred for the Tamil people grew he wanted only to leave. His brothers received the news of the family’s unease in the thin blue-paper letters that arrived with regularity, difficult to comprehend and, very soon, impossible to connect with. What was there to say about the shortage of food, the lootings, the random destruction of property? How to explain that a pint of Guinness and a pie spelt happiness at the end of a lo
ng grey London day, when the thick fleece of clouds left no room for the sun?

  As two more years went by, Thornton made his preparations. Civil unrest was no longer a rumour. It was a fact. Tamil youths were set upon in the street, a bus carrying Tamil students was fire-bombed, a sweep seller lynched because of his name. Trouble erupted at unexpected moments. An exodus to Jaffna was under way. Some Tamil families applied to leave for Australia. In just over five years, as predicted, the jungle had crept into the towns. Grace could do no more than accept the inevitable. Alicia’s arpeggios were a phantom presence; the bone china in the glass-fronted cupboards remained unused. Few people visited them these days.

  At seven, Anna-Meeka was enchanting. Whenever Savitha brought her to see her grandmother the silent house at Station Road became filled with noise and laughter. She followed her aunt Frieda like a shadow; she loved it when her grandfather teased her. Grace’s letters to her sons were full of all of this. They were interspersed with other disconnected things from long ago, from her memories of the House of Many Balconies with its faded water-lily gardens, for lately she longed to see the place again. She wrote telling them of the deaths of Uncle Innocent and Auntie Angel-Face. Did they remember Mabel? Her son had been born deformed, her husband taken by the rebels into the jungle. He was never seen again. Someone, a relative, found a bundle of his clothes, torn and mangled, left by the Mahaweli River. Jacob and Christopher receiving this information did not know how to reply.

  Months went by. When Thornton received his visa for entry into the UK departure became a certainty. Seeing this, stirring herself, Grace began to give Savitha some of her precious china. She gave her the blue-and-white bowls, the tureens, some delicately painted teacups, a dinner service.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said, pressing them on Savitha. ‘Keep it in memory of us.’ She wanted her little granddaughter to enjoy them in her new life in Britain. It was a gesture of acceptance of their impending separation; a torch to be held by Savitha in all the long lonely years of their coming exile, until Anna-Meeka would be old enough to receive her legacy. Then, with their departure hanging over them, with civil unrest reaching boiling point, Grace decided to visit her childhood home one last time. To show Anna-Meeka where her father had been born. Late in June, when the heat in Colombo was unbearable once more, and the sea breeze no longer strong enough to keep them cool, Grace and Aloysius, with Thornton and Savitha, with Anna-Meeka (now nearly nine), made the trip upcountry on the grand black-and-red steam train.