by Roma Tearne
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Cynthia, covering her kissable mouth with her hand, giggling. ‘Is it that bit of land joined to India?’
Thornton sighed and shook his head, momentarily distracted.
‘No, men. If it was, the world might take more notice of what’s happening there.’
He went back to the problem in hand. The child did sound a bit of a handful, thought Cynthia. With the wisdom of her twenty-two years she decided she probably just needed a little mothering. Having listened carefully, Cynthia suggested Meeka come to the library to see her after school. Perhaps she could get her interested in reading the children’s classics.
‘You are so wonderful!’ said Thornton draining his pint, looking thin and interesting. ‘You have given me hope again. That I might save my child from these slummers!’
Cynthia gave a small gurgle. ‘I just want to help,’ she said, downing her Babycham with such speed that all the bubbles went down the wrong way making her laugh some more. She really could not help it. The early-spring evening glowed with promise. Dappled sunlight fell across the empty pub tables even though there had been no sun a moment before. It lifted the smoke in the air in shafts across the room and out through the windows which seemed high and majestic and wonderful.
Walking home, full of Guinness and largesse, thinking about the sonnet he would write, Thornton realised it was getting late. Letting himself into the house he felt a sudden urgency for the lavatory. Savitha, hearing this, thought, Yes, he’s been to the pub again. Meeka, also hearing the sound of the flush being pulled, thought, Oh good, he’ll be in a happy mood now. Then she remembered the news.
‘Auntie Alicia is coming to England! She’ll be here soon.’
Thornton sat down heavily at the table. He was hungry.
‘What’s to eat?’ he asked Savitha, feeling suddenly exhausted.
‘Drunk!’ said Savitha triumphantly, as though she had scored a hit. ‘I suppose you’ve been drinking with those brothers of yours? Like father like sons, is it?’
‘I am not drunk!’ bellowed Thornton, glaring at Savitha’s retreating back and at his daughter’s grinning face.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
Then he looked at his daughter again. She seemed normal enough.
‘What are you wearing?’ he demanded, confused.
Meeka, still in her school uniform, was doing her homework.
‘What do you think she is wearing, you stupid man?’ asked Savitha. ‘They don’t wear saris to school in this country, you know.’
Thornton’s eyes bulged. He wondered again if his wife was going mad. For the first time in his life he wished he had had a son.
‘My father was right,’ he informed Savitha. ‘Only now do I understand him. A man should have sons.’
Anna-Meeka giggled.
‘Respect,’ declared Thornton. ‘Without sons you cannot get respect.’
He glared at Savitha who looked as though she was trying not to laugh. Here he was in a household of bloody woman all laughing, all completely mad. The feeling of well-being had vanished, along with the inspiration for his new sonnet. There it was. He sighed again and began to eat the rice, the fried green beans and chilli Savitha had put in front of him.
15
AFTER THE REBELLION, NEARLY A HUNDRED THOUSAND people were thought to be dead or ‘disappeared’. A stillness fell over the island. It was the lethargy that only follows great violence. The heat in the south had intensified. There was no sign of rain. Everywhere, buildings were deserted, looted, burnt. Those who dared ventured onto the streets. There they found the bloodied remains of unidentified corpses, strewn at the crossroads. In the sprawling white house on Station Road the shutters were closed against the heat and the gunfire. Someone had thrown a brick against one of them and now and then a hinge creaked in the slight breeze. A thin sliver of light knifed through the gap, streaking across the floor inside. Otherwise all was quiet.
The manservant who had been a mere boy on the night of Alicia’s wedding came to see Grace. Word had come to him, he said, that someone had been murdered in his village. Murdered and strung high on a tamarind tree. The murdered man was young. He had swung for hours. No one dared touch him or take him down. No one dared even come out of the houses. The shadow of the dead man moved slowly across the ground. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards it swung. Carrion crows circled overhead. Silent, at the ready, waiting to swoop, in one graceful spread of talons and wings. Finally a woman, holding a blanket, screaming, inconsolable, racked with grief, had run out. Others followed; they had taken the body down for her. It was her son.
‘I don’t know if the victim is my brother,’ the manservant said. ‘We have not seen each other for nearly a year. After I left home we drifted apart,’ he told Grace. ‘Once we lived together, sleeping close to each other.’ The murdered man’s mother had gone mad, it was rumoured. ‘I need to go to my village, to see if it is my mother. If it is my brother,’ the manservant said.
Grace watched him go. He took nothing with him, no clothes, just himself. Grace watched his slim figure in its flapping white sarong walk out into the blinding heat, a fluidity of light around him. He looked like the distant figure from her past, a symbol of all she had tried to protect and all she had lost. Her thoughts moved slowly, backwards and forwards, like the shadow of the dead man. The many aspects of her life no longer surprised her. Only her capacity for loving remained constant. Untainted by time.
‘Imagine that poor woman!’ she told Aloysius later, visibly upset by the manservant’s story.
‘Her son’s age is immaterial. He remains her child, you know. Her feelings for him will be as strong as they were on the day he was born.’
Aloysius listened without comment, head bowed. He looked defeated.
‘However old she is, she is still his mother.’
Aloysius nodded. He went over to check the telephone but it wasn’t working. It hadn’t been working all day. Sometimes they would go for days with no phone. The last letter from England had been delivered over two months ago. Savitha would still be writing. She always wrote regularly, especially as she was so much happier in her new job. It was the fault of the post they had had no letters. There was a rumour circulating that it was censored. Other things were happening. Often the generator was broken, often they could not even tune into the World Service. They were cut off from the rest of the world, with only each other for company.
‘There is nothing more we can do,’ Grace told Aloysius.
‘Savitha will be Thornton’s rock,’ Aloysius reassured her. ‘His and Anna-Meeka’s. And the boys will have each other.’
This was how they comforted themselves. Outside, the sun was like a drum beating in a cloudless sky. The heat stretched tautly over the skin of the drought-ridden garden. The cook, scraping coconuts in the yard, saw something tossed over the wall; it landed among the hibiscus bushes and fell with a soft thud onto the ground. It was a woman’s arm, severed at the elbow, charred at the edges, congealed and black.
‘We can’t go on like this,’ cried Grace. She sounded hysterical. ‘It isn’t safe here for the girls,’ she told Aloysius. ‘They must leave.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Frieda said instantly. ‘I’m not leaving you. We are in this together.’
But Grace could not rest. ‘They must go to England. I cannot bear it,’ she begged Aloysius. You must do something. Alicia has suffered enough; Frieda, you must have some sort of life.’
It was not that easy. The smell of human flesh burning through the night filled the streets, and here and there across the city pyres, piled high with bodies, were openly set fire to. The elephants were not just out of the jungle, the elephants hardly existed any more. Aloysius, silent for so long, found a link from the past. Dodging the curfew he went out. Someone he knew, he told Grace, returning late that night, owed him a favour.
‘I’ve managed to buy a passage to England,’ he said. ‘But it is only one ticket. What shall we
do?’
‘Send Alicia,’ said Frieda instantly. ‘Send her. It might be what she needs. I don’t want to go. I will never leave. Don’t waste time asking me.’
Who would have said it of Frieda? No one had seen the colour of her stubbornness before. It encircled them like steel cables.
‘She is the strongest of us all,’ Aloysius said when they were in bed at last. ‘All these years, we hardly noticed her in the business of our lives, but Frieda is our anchor.’
Alicia did not want to go either, but Grace gave her no choice. A week later, they bundled her up and sent her out onto the harsh indigo sea. Sailing out towards safety. This time, Grace was dry-eyed.
Their second summer was hotter. London sweltered in a heatwave. The garden at the back of the flat in Brixton was a mess of builders’ rubble and years of weeds. In July Thornton began to clear it; the sun had given him heart. He would grow a lawn, he decided, and pomegranates, he told his wife. It would be a welcome for his sister.
‘How long do you think this weather will last?’ asked Savitha, surprised to find herself laughing. ‘Haven’t you noticed they don’t have pomegranates in this country?’
Still Thornton worked on the garden, after he finished at the office and at the weekends. It was light now, long into the evening, a soft violet light, mellow and very beautiful. They had not noticed this before. Last year they had only been aware of the cold. Now, already, they saw shades of colours and splashes of loveliness in this place. One evening, after Savitha had washed her soft-paste porcelain, her blue-and-white willow-patterned dishes, she stood watching her husband turning the soil and clearing the ground as though he had been a gardener all his life. Afterwards, sitting at the kitchen table, with the sound of Meeka playing the piano, she wrote her weekly letter home to Grace.
It is astonishing, she wrote, her admiration reluctant, but growing daily. Here is a man who had not polished his own shoes until a year ago and now he talks of growing potatoes. Here is man who, in spite of all the odds, is trying to adapt.
She paused, watching Thornton moving between his rose bushes. Since their marriage she had grown to understand him better. Once, this handsome husband of hers had wanted for nothing. And in those halcyon days the world had fallen at his feet when he smiled. The careless abundance in his life had attracted her. Now, without his family, Thornton had grown smaller and needier. His good humour was fading, he felt diminished. This move had affected them all but his unhappiness was the most apparent. She did not tell Grace any of this, but she let her admiration show.
Watching him as he gardens, she wrote, instead, I see he has inherited your green fingers, your ability to make something of chaos. I wish you could see it!
Savitha stared at what she had written. She knew now, in the face of Thornton’s unhappiness, what she had been uncertain of before. She knew she loved him, but she knew also that he was flawed. Raising her face to the soft summer warmth, feeling how her skin had aged since only a year ago, she thought, And I am the stronger of the two of us.
He’s looking forward to Alicia’s arrival, she continued. As we all are. And she sealed up the letter.
Privately, Savitha wondered how Alicia would cope away from her mother. She had never been close to Alicia. There had never been the time or inclination on either of their parts. Perhaps, she thought, the time had come for that now. The sound of the piano stopped. Meeka had finished practising. Thornton came in with a handful of runner beans.
‘If only she did her homework as well as she played the piano,’ he said disapprovingly, ‘she would be the best in her class.’
‘Perhaps we should be encouraging the music instead of all these other subjects she has no interest in?’ Savitha said, risking his annoyance.
‘Don’t start,’ Thornton said, his good mood evaporating. ‘There’s absolutely no future in it. She’ll never make a concert pianist, she’s not good enough.’
Savitha sighed. She heard Meeka heading towards the kitchen, looking for food. How her daughter was changing. These days she seemed to be eating all the time.
‘I’m starving!’ announced Meeka, coming in in a great hurry. ‘We had roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy for school dinner today.’
‘What’s all this school dinner?’ growled Thornton. ‘It’s called lunch.’ He washed his hands. ‘I’m just going to the library before it closes,’ he added. ‘I want to get a book on potatoes.’
And off he went, escaping with a splash of aftershave before his daughter could question him more closely or, worse still, insist on coming with him.
Savitha watched him go. Who would have thought it possible a year ago? Who would recognise them now? They were carving a little path for themselves, cutting a small road of near contentment. Bravely. Things are not so bad, she told herself. Many times in the past months she had badly wanted to go back. At nights, often after reading Grace’s letters, knowing Thornton’s unhappiness, she had wanted to admit defeat, return. Her homesickness had not disappeared, she doubted it ever would, but she knew now that they would stay. Besides, even if they could, there was no life in Sri Lanka for them. Something had gone terribly wrong. Their own people had changed beyond recognition. Their easy-going, gentle temperament had been transformed into an unscrupulous cunning. Some implacable force had taken root within them.
That July Mrs Smith next door began to speak to Savitha. First they had smiled at one another and then slowly, when she saw the de Silvas in the garden, she had come over with little gifts. A few plant cuttings, a packet of seeds, some radishes from her husband’s allotment. Shyly, for she was on uncertain ground, Savitha accepted. One day Mrs Smith made a remark about Mr Smith. Spontaneously, understanding the grumble, Savitha laughed. They had become friendly after that, the two of them, with caution acting as a fence between them.
At the end of July, as the summer holidays began, Meeka was once more left alone in the house. Thornton and Savitha gave her instructions on what she could and could not do.
‘I’ll just keep an eye open,’ said Mrs Smith to Savitha. And she winked knowingly. She did not call Savitha by name. She was not sure that she could say it right. Also, as she told her husband, it seemed disrespectful somehow. Savitha was a proper lady in Mrs Smith’s eyes. Savitha, liking this small formality between them, felt glad of Mrs Smith’s eye.
Meeka did not care. She knew her mother and Mrs Smith were friendly but, well, Mrs Smith could not stand at her window all day, could she? So Anna-Meeka joined forces with Gillian and Susan and Jennifer, and roamed the streets of London whenever she could. It was 1966. It was still possible to dodge the ticket collector and ride the tube, round and round the Circle Line, on a ten-pence ticket. They went with Jennifer’s gramps to the old pie and mash shop on Coldharbour Lane and ate jellied eels washed down with cider when no one was looking. They walked along the embankment eating ice creams, and they ran amok in the British Museum. All in all they had a wonderful time. It was in this way that Anna-Meeka began to understand the city, this adopted home of hers. She was certain she would never love another place in quite this way. The smell of the Underground soot and the sight of the river from the top of a double-decker bus were part and parcel of her life now. Sri Lanka was nothing to do with her. It belonged to some other life.
By the time her parents returned home in the evenings she was lying on her bed with the huge sash window open, reading. The librarian had taken a great interest in her and was forever finding her more and more books to read. When she was not reading, the thing she enjoyed the most was the piano. She played it endlessly, her head constantly filled with the sounds of the sea. Sometimes these textures were stormy and full of tempo, sometimes intense and melodious, but always at the very heart of her music was the sea, in all its endless vast expense of water. She played with great concentration. Mrs Kay, her piano teacher, had left before the school holidays. She had moved out of London. Before she left she quarrelled with Thornton.
‘Your daughter is very
musical,’ she had told him. ‘She needs nurturing. Music isn’t about mechanically sitting exams.’
Meeka, listening outside the door, could tell Mrs Kay was angry.
‘Thank you very much,’ Thornton said. He was polite but firm. ‘My daughter’s music is a hobby.’
Mrs Kay gave up. She had taught Meeka to transcribe the short pieces of music she was always making up and she had taught her how to see the sounds as notation. She had refused to allow Meeka to play only her examination pieces, insisting she learned other pieces, tackled more challenging music as well. She did all this with an air of furtiveness.
‘Get rid of the scaffolding, Anna-Meeka,’ she would say. ‘Just show me how you build your musical house! You don’t need so many notes to do that.’
Meeka had enjoyed those lessons. She had enjoyed the way Mrs Kay listened so seriously to what she played, her head tilted on one side. Mrs Kay never called these snatches of sounds ‘tunes’. She gave then names like ‘Study’ or Scherzo’. And now she was leaving, Meeka didn’t want another teacher.
‘I don’t need any lessons,’ she told her parents. ‘I can teach myself.’
She mastered the B minor scales. She was learning harmonics, and the results for her theory exam when it came showed she had got a distinction. Uncle Christopher bought her a wad of manuscript paper so that she could write down her pieces. The slow shift, the modulated harmonics and tender tones that she sometimes, accidentally, achieved were what she loved most of all. Thornton, returning from work on these warm summer evenings, hearing these tunes from afar, paused for a moment. Savitha listened as she opened the front door.
Then, as the summer turned a corner, Alicia arrived. Thin, beautiful Alicia, frail as the stalk of a lotus flower, silent and unhappy. She came with letters from home, and dust in her heart, shaken by so many days at sea, disorientated and utterly alone. The brothers were shocked. Savitha felt as though she had brought the island with her.
