Brixton Beach (24 page)

The next morning, Kunal left. It was the hospital doctor who drove the car. They were all present. Even Esther’s mother was there. Kamala had made a parcel of food for the journey. Bee would follow them in his own car as far as Colombo, then he and the hospital doctor would leave Kunal in the hands of the contact. After that he would rest for a while and then, if he was well enough, he would be taken by the back route to Elephant Pass and on, up to Jaffna. All in all, Kunal had been two months with the Fonsekas. Alice watched her mother walk with him out to the car. Kamala stood holding his arm with perfect ease, as if she had held his arm in this way for years and years. Kunal looked very frail; the skin on his face was the colour of the ash used
by holy Hindu men and his clothes hung loosely on him. One trouser leg flapped uselessly in the slight breeze. Everyone avoided looking at it.

‘Get his other bag, Alice,’ Sita said. ‘Quickly.’

She raised her hand to her throat and Alice saw she wore a necklace of milky moonstones. Alice was about to ask her where it had come from when Sita twisted her hand and suddenly the necklace snapped. It fell to the ground in a staccato of stones.

‘Never mind, never mind,’ Dias said quickly as they bent to retrieve it.

‘I’ll restring it,’ Kamala added.

‘Yes,’ Sita agreed, faintly.

She was watching Kunal, who stood, helpless. A swell of regret seemed to pass through her and her voice sounded low and without colour. Looking at her mother, Alice saw she had become her old cross self.

At the last moment, just as Kunal was being helped into the waiting car, they heard the gate open. Alice saw her grandfather turn around sharply but it was Janake. He carried a small parcel done up in plantain leaves which he gave Kunal. Janake began speaking to Kunal in a low voice. He was talking in Tamil. Alice watched, astonished. She had not known Janake could speak Tamil. Seeing her staring at him, Janake grinned.

‘You haven’t been to the beach,’ he said, switching to Singhalese.

‘No, I know.’

Kunal smiled a sad half-smile.

‘England will be better than you think,’ he told Alice.

She did not want to talk of England. Really all she wanted was to go to the beach.

‘When you stop worrying, you’ll get to like it there,’ Kunal was saying, but now he was looking at Sita, who had moved slightly apart and stood motionless beside the mango tree, her face pale against the lushness of the leaves. Again Alice had a sense of the tension flowing from her mother. Kunal held out his hand, hesitantly. For a split second Alice thought her mother was going to ignore him, but then
she stepped forward and, putting both arms around his neck, she kissed him lightly on both cheeks. After which Kamala and Dias kissed him too and wished him a safe journey.

‘Good-bye,’ he said, and the word spoken in English had the strangest finality to it. They stood and watched in silence as the car turned around and headed in the direction of Colombo. And then, slowly, they went indoors. There were only three weeks left.

On the afternoon of the last day, while her mother shut herself in her room, Bee took Alice to buy some fish. The men selling the catch were on the beach, carrying their huge flat baskets on their heads, trailing seagulls.

‘You’ll be sailing close to the equator before turning towards colder waters,’ Bee informed her. ‘Tomorrow,’ he added, pointing to the horizon, ‘you will be out there. And I will stand here, at this time, and watch for you.’

‘I shall wave,’ Alice told him and he nodded.

They were both determined to hold on to any certainties they could find.

Once again Alice had a curious feeling of standing on the edge of that shelving beach, with the sea dropping steeply, fathomless and mysterious before her. If she moved she would fall into the void. The day and all its iridescent loveliness were as insubstantial as a dream. A train rushed across the bay, hugging the coastline. Through the heat haze the brilliant blue carriages and the swaying coconut palms took on an air of unreality, as though they did not exist. Panic struggled in her. It was very simple. She did not want to go to England. A cry, mute and unheard, rose in her heart. And then her grandfather’s voice, already from some distance, came to her.

‘So will I,’ he said, quite seriously.

He was looking crossly at her.

‘No more biting your nails, huh!’

‘No,’ she agreed, but he didn’t seem to be listening.

Something was stopping her from breathing. Perhaps she was ill, she thought, and would not be able to go. Bee went on staring at her
and then beyond towards the sea. Fishing boats filled their view. Was it her imagination or did the men on stilts stand nearer to the shore? The sea was like crushed sapphires.

‘I’m coming back,’ she said again, uneasiness curdling and clutching at her stomach, for he seemed suddenly, unalterably old. ‘You’ll see.’

She tugged his hand and he nodded. After that he took a long time choosing and buying her favourite red mullet for lunch, even though eating seemed an irrelevance.

‘What a bit of luck,’ he said. ‘There must have been a good catch last night!’

She was puzzled. He talked as if the buying of the fish was of the utmost importance. They walked towards the hamlets in search of Janake, but he was still out with the fishermen.

‘He is coming to see you in the evening,’ Janake’s mother told Alice, smiling. ‘Don’t worry, he hasn’t forgotten you are going. He will come.’

It shocked her that life carried on, regardless of what was about to happen. Janake out in the boat, getting on with his life, just as he would tomorrow and the day after. But where would she be tomorrow? And one day, Bee was thinking, she will be a grown woman. I will not see that. This is the end of my sightline. The rest will be imagination.

Towards evening, when the house was a frenzy of last-minute packing, they went for a final walk on the beach. Sita had come out from her room and was collecting up the jars of pickles that Kamala was labelling. She looked pale and subdued. The servant wrapped each jar carefully in plastic sheeting and wedged them in the trunk. Then she slipped in a bag of
curra pincha
, curry leaves, and
umbalakada
, Maldive fish. There would be nowhere else in the world that Sita would find these ingredients, the servant knew.

‘Be careful,’ Kamala said. ‘Make sure it’s wrapped tightly’

‘Don’t go too far, Father,’ Sita called. ‘It’s getting late.’

‘Just up to the hotel and back,’ he promised.

‘I’ve finished packing, Mama,’ Alice told her.

‘Good girl!’

Both were speaking carefully to each other as if aware that from now on they would be thrown together for a long time. The house was stifling. Alice tugged at Bee’s hand. She wanted to get out.

They had walked the same stretch of beach hundreds of times, but tonight was different. Tonight they walked slowly and in silence. Darkness was descending, shadows lengthened imperceptibly and still there was no sign of Janake.

‘He’ll come,’ Bee consoled her, puffing at his pipe. ‘Maybe in the morning. He knows what time you’re leaving.’

Pausing, they watched the late Colombo express rush past. Two kites floated lazily in the rosy sky and the sounds of
byla
music came towards them on the breeze.

‘You’re coming to the boat, aren’t you?’ Alice asked suddenly, but Bee shook his head, sucking on his pipe.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, not tomorrow. It’s important for you to remember this place. If I say good-bye here, you will always remember it.’

And even though she was dismayed and tried to make him change his mind, he would not be budged. Some time later, when she sat on the verandah, and Bee had disappeared into his studio, Alice asked Kamala.

‘Why aren’t you both coming to the harbour?’

Kamala began combing Alice’s hair. She combed it silently and for so long that Alice thought she would not answer her. Then at last she spoke.

‘He can’t bear it, darling,’ she said. ‘He can only just manage to get to the station. Don’t make him.’

Kamala’s hands moved with soft and wide sweeps against Alice’s head, lingering against the dark hair, combing it into silk.

‘But I’ll be back,’ Alice said angrily. ‘Doesn’t he know that?’

‘Aha! Look what I have here,’ Bee cried, returning with false joviality.

He had made a present for her. A painting of the house, and the beach, with the sea glimpsed in the distance. He had used only cerulean blue and an emerald green and most of the light was defined by the brilliance of the white paper so that it seemed as though the
land and the water existed within a bowl of sunlight. On the back he had written,
For my beloved granddaughter Alice, from her grandfather with his blessing
.

‘It’s a watercolour,’ he told her, tapping his pipe, watching her. ‘You are going to the land of the most beautiful watercolours in the world. Did you know that?’

Alice did not know.

‘Well, you are, so go and see them for me, when you’ve settled in London. Tell your mother to take you. Look at the Turners and the Boningtons and the Cotmans. I believe you’ll be able to see Constable’s skies, too. The English are the best at using watercolours. You will have to look very closely at them to understand how they use the light.’

No one spoke. Alice could not bear the look on her grandmother’s face. Almost everything in this house will survive us, thought Kamala. We are already ghosts on this verandah. Each night, when my girls were small, I sat out here, but nothing could have made me imagine this night.

Outside, the darkness seemed full of ghosts. A bullock coughed nearby and the frogs that lived in the ditches began to croak quietly. Two lizards circled each other under the yellowing light. Tonight was full of insects, the servant complained, bringing in a mosquito coil.

‘I wonder where Kunal is,’ Kamala murmured.

‘Oh, he’ll be at the Pass by now,’ Bee told her.

Sita moved her head slightly. No one could see her face in the darkness. She was thinking of Kunal’s last night and how, when she had left his room, she had found her mother hovering outside, a worried look on her face, ready to hold her as she wept. At last, Kamala had told her, stroking her hair, she had found love. But that night now seemed like a million days ago.

‘He must be nearing Jaffna,’ Bee observed.

‘I’ll find a way,’ Kunal had told Sita. ‘I’ll come to England somehow, you’ll see.’

And she had whispered:

Or I’ll come back.’

‘I have the strangest feeling about leaving this place,’ she had admitted to Kunal. ‘Not only am I going to miss you, but I’m going to miss the person I am now, at this time, too. None of us will ever be the same again.’

And now he was gone, carrying his loss like luggage, his crutch under one arm, leaving her to continue alone. The day was almost over; tomorrow would bring the thing she had waited so long for. She saw how her desire to be gone had set her apart from everyone around her. It had put her into the same category as a person with a limp or an extra thumb. Her aunts used to say it had made her different, had attracted the wrath of the gods. Whenever she had observed any injustice, each time another Tamil was discriminated against, she had thought, I will leave. I will go away to a better life. Stanley had been merely a step in that direction, and the lost baby had compounded the feeling, making her need to flee even more urgently. But she had reckoned without Kunal. Meeting him, seeing
his
pain, had made her waver, fatally.

‘I am too burnt-out to stay and fight,’ she had said.

‘You don’t know what courage you possess until you are called to show it,’ he had replied. ‘You are the bravest of women. Wherever you are, here or in the UK, it doesn’t matter; you will remain brave. You represent all the women of this island to me.’

That was what he had said, lying there in the stifling heat, day after day with his phantom limb. But now the exodus, planned for so long, was almost upon them, and her mother with her mending, and her father in his planter’s chair, sitting as they would tomorrow, was too much for her to bear. A cockroach buzzed past. The servant began sweeping the verandah and all around the simple sounds she had listened to all her life gathered together with great sweetness in Sita’s head.

Alice sat quietly on the step.

‘You’d better go to bed,’ Sita murmured at last and her daughter, without protest, without fuss, stood up and kissed them all goodnight.

As she climbed into her small bed under the net, Alice heard the tell-tale whine of mosquitoes moving invisibly in the room. Far away
in some other part of the bay she heard a heavy thud followed by the plaintive noise of a police siren. It went on and on, an endless hyphenated crying, and it kept her awake for a long time. Her grandparents and her mother were moving outside. Sometimes one of them spoke in a low voice so as not to disturb her, but she could not sleep. Great tropical stars shone over the sea and she wondered once more if tomorrow night she would be able to see the house and her bedroom from the ship. She had made a flag and stuck it on a branch of the paw-paw tree outside her window. She had done it for Janake, but Janake too seemed to have vanished into thin air. For a long time she lay in this way, looking at the stars, until finally she fell asleep and sometime between midnight and dawn she dreamt her grandfather pushed aside the mosquito net and kissed her good-bye. Sighing, she turned over.

Morning came; the morning of departure. Issued to them with ease, fresh as a newly laundered sheet, clean and ordinary. There was nothing in its arrival that suggested any significance, nothing to prepare them for such a momentous moment. Too late, the day had arrived without fanfare or thunderclap. England, that strange amorphous shadow, had become a reality at last. Sita stared blankly at the sky, joined now so seamlessly to the sea, wondering if it had always looked this way. The morning lay before her in exquisite beauty. Blue softened the water, reflecting the light as never before, piercing and very lovely. She gazed out through her window, a stranger already in her own home, dimly wondering how all the years of her life had led so inexorably to this moment. She was thinking about Kunal. She had not stopped thinking of him. She did not expect him to ring. Realistically, she could not expect to hear news until she reached England.