Brixton Beach (28 page)

We’ll get her a job next, thought Stanley, noticing. She needs her independence. Things will improve slowly. Probably it was all due to Manika’s prayers. Stanley had not seen Manika for a fortnight but he spoke to her regularly from work. On Friday he would visit the temple and give thanks, he thought.

‘I’m working late tomorrow night,’ he told Sita casually.

The clock in Bee’s studio had stopped the day they left. It was not an old clock but for some reason it had given up at sixteen minutes past nine. The news of Kunal’s death had taken on the aspect of a nightmare that refused to end. No one had told Bee for days. They had let him deal with the loss of Sita and Alice first. Finally, late one night, when he was in his studio, the doctor risked a visit.

‘Killed by a bomb,’ he told Bee, drinking the whisky his friend poured out. ‘Planted deliberately for him.’

After all we did,’ he kept repeating, again and again, ‘after all we did to save him!’ Bee clenched and unclenched his fists. The shock
was physical. Kamala was shocked too, but Bee understood she was thinking of something else. Kamala was thinking of Sita.

‘Who will tell her?’ she cried later, when they were alone.

Alone after months with a house that had been bursting at the seams.

‘I will tell her,’ Bee said grimly. ‘I will write to her once she is no longer on the ship. She can get the letter when she has begun to settle on dry land.’

He had been keeping track of the days. Even allowing for the delay in the post, he calculated she would get the letter by the second week of September.

‘She fell in love with him,’ Kamala said, weeping softly. ‘She was hoping.’

Bee didn’t say anything; he could not trust himself to speak. He was frightened of what he was capable of doing. What he would have liked to do was walk up the hill to the army headquarters and find the sergeant in charge. Swallowing hard, he began to compose the letter he would write. A letter that would be delivered to her by an unknown postman. A stranger in an alien land.

As September drew to a close, Sita’s optimism began to falter. She had waited patiently, had stopped talking about the absence of post, but now Stanley began to urge her to look in the newspaper for jobs. As her longing for word from home returned she was once more paralysed with unhappiness. Since arriving in London she had written to her parents twice and still there was no letter. Walking back home, having dropped Alice off at school, she felt bitterness rise within her. They had been living here for a whole month. Had Kunal lied to her? she wondered. Had she misread him too? And why hadn’t her father written? Or her mother, or even her sister?

‘We’ll write home tonight,’ she had told Alice as she left her at the school gate, giving her something to look forward to. ‘I’ll buy some aerogrammes, huh?’

She felt a faint sense of optimism at the thought. Taking a short cut through Durant Gardens she noticed for the first time a small blue plaque on one of the houses.
Van Gogh lived here 1873-74
, she read. The house was tall and elegant. In the basement as she glanced in a woman was lifting a small child out of a high chair. The woman was smiling at the child. Sita walked on. Late summer roses tumbled over a high fence and the scent brushed delicately against her. She felt as though her heart would break.

When her mother did not come to collect her from school, Alice eventually decided to walk back home by herself. There had been some talk that, once Sita started a job, Alice would have to walk home alone, anyway. Perhaps, thought Alice vaguely, her mother had got a job and forgotten to tell her. There was no one to ask. After some time when the playground had almost emptied, the caretaker began to shut up the building and noticed her standing at the gate. ‘Is your mum late?’ he asked.

Alice nodded.

‘Well, you’d better come into the office and we’ll ring her.’

Alice shook her head. For some reason she felt ashamed to admit they had no telephone.

‘I just live over there,’ she said, pointing. ‘I’ll go back.’

‘No main road to cross, eh?’

Again she shook her head and then she hurried out before he could ask her anything else. The road was empty. Everyone from her class had gone; not that she had any friends there, for although she had tried attaching herself to various groups of children, no one had taken the slightest notice of her. Puzzled, she had not known what to do. It was clear to her, from past experience, that the friendship groups in the class had already formed. Feeling instantly defeated, she withdrew. However she did not altogether dislike school. The art room was very bright and she enjoyed using the powder paints on the rough sugar paper, although here too she felt a difference. Most of the children used the paints straight out of the tub, while Alice liked mixing other colours from the ones she was given. At one point the art teacher had noticed and praised her. It had been a moment of brightness in an otherwise silent, grey day. But the art lessons were only once a week and the playtimes were three times a day. Today they had had PE, which she disliked most of all as it brought her into a more intimate contact with the other girls. The effort of pretending she did not mind being ignored was more exhausting than the lesson itself. But at last it had been over and the bell had rung, signalling the end of the day.

Crossing the road, Alice hesitated. Never having walked home alone she was not sure if this was the right way. All the houses looked the same. A ginger cat jumped up on a low wall and she went over to stroke it.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Is your name Roger? I used to know a cat called Roger.’

The cat purred loudly and rubbed itself against her hand. I’d like a cat, thought Alice. Perhaps her parents would let her have one. The thought was a good one. She began to hurry along the road and the cat jumped down and followed her for a short distance before
disappearing. But she was going the wrong way, she thought in dismay. She did not remember seeing a postbox here. Turning, she crossed the road and tried to make her way back to the school but the school seemed to have moved. Confused, she stood still. The cat, having lost interest, had disappeared. Her school bag felt heavy. She re-crossed the road and made her way frowning across another street. There was no sign of her own road. Two children playing hopscotch stopped and stared at her. Alice walked on, wanting to cry. She was breathing hard. Looking back she could see the children were still staring after her. Suddenly she began to run. A church clock struck the hour. There was definitely no church near their house and now she had reached a main road. There was no main road near them either. Uncertain, she hesitated, wondering what to do next. Try as she might, she could not remember the name of the road where she lived. Panic fluttered within her. Her shoulder was hurting with the weight of her bag. She had no idea how long she had been lost. What if she never found her home again? She did not want to walk back past the girls playing hopscotch. There was nothing for it; she would have to cross the main road.

‘I’ll find the traffic lights,’ she said out loud.

She had no idea what she would do next. She was at the traffic lights when she saw Sita waving at her.

‘Alice! Alice!’

‘Mama,’ Alice cried and, forgetting where she was, she stepped straight out into the road.

‘Wait!’ Sita shouted. ‘Don’t cross!’

But it was too late. Two cars flashed their headlights at her, swerving and beeping their horns. There was a screeching of brakes and a sharp glint of metal as Alice ran across the road towards her mother.

They were both crying. Sita clutched her daughter.

‘You nearly got killed! Why didn’t you wait?’

‘I thought you’d got a job. I got lost coming home.’

‘Oh, Alice!’ wailed Sita. ‘Alice, you’re all I have.’

She went on crying for so long that Alice fell silent.

‘Mama,’ she said, bewildered. ‘I didn’t
get
killed.’

But Sita didn’t seem to hear. She was crying in great gulps as she walked, her face averted. Alice swallowed.

‘What’s wrong?’

Sita shook her head, hurrying on.

‘I’m sorry I was late,’ she said finally. ‘It will never happen again.’

And Alice, exhausted though she was, knew with absolute certainty that her mother was talking about something else. Later, after she had had a bath and while Sita was cooking, she saw a letter open on her parents’ bed. Recognising the Ceylon stamp, she picked it up and saw too that it was written in her grandfather’s hand.

The letter, which had taken Bee several hours to compose and had cost him many sleepless nights, had gone. Nervously, he waited for the reply. But silence had fallen. September drew to a close and the air cooled as the monsoons began again. In October, finally, a letter arrived, but it was from Alice. Very long and rambling, it described the house where they were living and her new school. There were several drawings and a list of all the books she was reading. The letter seemed muffled in some way.

Bee read swiftly on but there was no mention of Sita until right at the end.

The letter was oddly dispassionate. Both Kamala and Bee read it several times, but neither could put their finger on what was missing. May, too, commented on Sita’s silence.

‘How can she be so busy she can’t write!’ she asked indignantly.

‘Let’s not judge her,’ Kamala told her quickly. ‘Who knows what trouble she’s having with Stanley, or how the news of Kunal’s death has really affected her.’

Kamala hesitated.

‘Your sister’s life has been terrible, May,’ she said softly. ‘Until Kunal came. He was her last chance, you know.’

No one knew what to say.

Bee wrote back immediately, both to Alice and to Sita, long, loving letters. Another month went by. May had now been married five months and was pregnant. On the day Bee heard the news of the coming of his next grandchild they received two letters from England. I cannot love again in this way, he thought heavily, opening Alice’s first, with trembling hands. Sita’s letter, when he came to it, was brief; its text documentarily plain.

Bee was astounded. He read the letter in silence to its end. Then he handed it to Kamala without a word and went outside, taking Alice’s letter with him. There was, Kamala saw to her own astonishment, not one single mention of Kunal.

‘Perhaps she never got your letter,’ May suggested later.

She had come over after school to see what her sister’s reaction was.

‘Perhaps she still doesn’t know? Have you thought of that?’

No one knew what to make of it. Then Bee remembered.

‘She
must
have got it, you know, because Alice said something about being sorry Kunal died.’

It was a pointless discussion. Thank God, thought Kamala, May’s news will give us something different to think of. Her youngest daughter was looking radiant. In spite of all the uncertainties of their future, still
she
bloomed. Kamala could see that, until this moment, it had not occurred to May to consider the possibilities in her own life.

‘I’ve decided to work right up until the birth,’ May told them happily. ‘And I’m going to have the baby at home, just like you, Amma.’

No one dared to disagree; no one mentioned what had happened with Sita. Calmly, such was her certainty, May told them that she would write to her sister with her own news.

I wanted you to hear from me
, she wrote.
I know that in spite of everything that has happened you’ll be glad for your sister
.

When she was alone, Sita re-read her sister’s letter. The distance helped to ease reality. There was no Kunal. She found it hard to remember her past optimism; that naïve belief that she might have seen him again. Strangely, almost immediately after reading her father’s letter, Kunal’s face had begun to blur in her mind. She did not even have a photograph of him. Like her dead child, there was nothing left. It must have happened when they were on the ship, she thought listlessly. The anguish of her father’s letter had been overlaid by the horror of what had very nearly happened to Alice. In spite of her utter desolation, it occurred to Sita that Alice understood what had happened. Later, when she had looked for the letter again in order to destroy it before Stanley came home, she realised that Alice had read it. But what did it matter? thought Sita. Alice, having eaten the hot rice that Sita handed her, had finished her homework and went up to her room to draw. She too was exhausted. Neither of them said another word, but that night, when Stanley had still not still returned home, before she went to sleep Sita had given Alice a kiss and the child had put her arms around her and hugged her. That had been all. By the time
Stanley returned smelling of whisky and cheap perfume, a thick sheet of glass had fallen between Sita and her heart. It locked her out, mercifully anaesthetising her with practised efficiency from the pain. It had been a blessing. Stanley had noticed nothing; Sita was already in bed feigning sleep.