Brixton Beach (32 page)

T
HE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED
S
TANLEY’S DEPARTURE
turned slowly. But at least they knew what to expect from the changing seasons now. On one occasion during the holidays Alice went to visit her father at Rajah’s flat. The two Swiss German girls were long gone and Rajah seemed mellow. There were a few presents for Alice, a meal of rice and curry and later, as she was leaving, some money.

‘I don’t want you to do without,’ her father said, giving her an unexpected hug.

Rajah winked at her.

‘You’ll have to stop being so shy, Alice,’ he said, not unkindly.

Alice was relieved to return home for unexpectedly she found she enjoyed living alone with her mother. The atmosphere in the house was peaceful now. Stanley still paid the rent but Sita had taken on all their daily expenses. She doubled and trebled her workload. There was a great deal of sewing available for a good seamstress and plenty of men who needed their trouser legs shortened. At least, thought Sita, bitterness never far away, they all had two legs. Months passed in this way. The long summer holidays came and went with stretches of idleness when Alice lay on her bed staring into space or simply drawing. Sita bought back poster paints from one of her foraging trips to the market so Alice began to paint small still-life studies interspersed with startling blue images of the sea.

In September Alice went reluctantly back to the brutish building and harsh environment of her school. She was a second-year pupil now, slightly below average in her work, conscientious if somewhat uninspired. She had still made no real friends to speak of. The following spring, when Stanley had been gone for a whole year, Alice discovered hawthorn buds, shrivelled by a late, destructive, frost. She hadn’t noticed the hedges before. She began to walk home through the park and she saw that the sky was exactly like a painting in the National Gallery. Forever after she would think of spring having Constable skies.

Sita was working hard and with more energy than she had ever had, but she had also begun to forget things; little things, things that were not really of great significance. Turning off the lights, finding her glasses; Alice frequently found the kettle had boiled dry.

‘Oh, never mind,’ Sita would say carelessly when Alice showed her another burnt-out pan. ‘I’m too busy to think of everything.’

So Alice got into the habit of checking that everything was switched off before she went to bed. Their life was not exciting, but in a way they both were content. Every evening, after she packed away her sewing Sita would at the kitchen table writing out her accounts into a small notebook, adding and subtracting the details of her finances. Alice could see that this moment at the end of the day, with the house so tranquil and the sewing machine stilled, was the best moment of all for her mother. Because of this she loved it too. Something about its peacefulness always stirred the distant memory of nights at the Sea House. There was no sea, no express train rushing past; but the sound of cars starting and stopping, of dustbin lids rattling and Cockney voices calling to each other made her feel safe.

‘We’ll be fine as long as we’re careful,’ Sita informed her. ‘Your father’s money covers the big items. I can make up the rest.’

It was her only reference to Stanley.

Alice had no reason to address her father’s departure at all until the October of her third year at the school. It happened by chance during an art lesson. The teacher was taking the register when someone pushed her and she slipped off her stool, knocking over a tray of
green paint. The class rocked with laughter. The teacher looked up and glared at Alice, causing more guffaws.

‘Pack it in,’ he said wearily. ‘Alice could you clear it up,
now!’

Alice stared hard at him, stung. Silently she went to the sink.

‘Cheer up,’ the teacher said flippantly, noticing the look. ‘It’s not that bad.’

A bit later on she became aware he was watching her mix some colours. When the lesson was finished and the children were rushing out he called her over.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

She nodded without speaking. The teacher hesitated fractionally, considering her.

‘Why didn’t your parents come to the parents evening last week?’ he asked, not unkindly.

Alice stared at her feet.

‘My mum doesn’t like going out on her own, Mr Eliot,’ she mumbled.

The bell had just gone announcing the lunch break. The art teacher stubbed out his cigarette. He waved the smoke away and pulled a face.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he said, pushing the contents of the ashtray into the bin. ‘I must be an addict!’

Alice looked at him so expressionlessly that he sighed and perched himself on the edge of the table. He picked up the construction she had just finished painting.

‘I like it,’ he told her, glancing slyly at her.

She didn’t know what to say. The thing he was holding was shaped like a cupboard. When opened, a boat emerged. He looked enquiringly at her.

‘I found the wood in the skip outside school,’ she volunteered finally.

‘I know that skip,’ Mr Eliot said.

And he grinned suddenly.

‘I’ve watched you foraging in it!’

Startled, she fell silent again. Unlike the other children in her class, Alice had made several pieces of work. All of them were constructions; all had the same peculiar originality. They were dotted around the room.

She had painted her cupboard white. David Eliot felt around the sides of it, checking the glued edges. Frowning, he closed the doors again. It was not his usual policy to comment on work in progress, but this was work of a more sophisticated nature than he was used to seeing in this rough-at-the-edges inner-city school. Here, in this concrete wasteland, as Mr Eliot often complained, talent was thin on the ground.

‘What are you going to do now you’ve painted it?’ he asked, noncommittal.

‘I want to make it look old,’ Alice said.

She spoke reluctantly. He waited.

‘I’m going to rub cardamom powder along the edges and then paint it with glue and water.’

David Eliot raised an eyebrow.

‘Cardamom
powder, Alice? Where on earth will you get cardamom powder from?’

‘My mum’s got loads of it in her spice drawer,’ she said. ‘We brought it with us from Ceylon, but we never use it.’

She hesitated again, uncertain. The art teacher was turning over the construction in his hands and frowning slightly. He has nice hands, Alice thought suddenly. The sun appeared from behind a cloud highlighting the grubbiness of the long windows and the dust on the still-life table. The art room felt warm and safe.

‘Of course!’ the teacher said absent-mindedly. His words dropped into the empty classroom. ‘Couldn’t your dad have come to the parents evening instead?’

Alice shook her head. She shook it so hard that her hair went over her eyes.

‘My dad’s left, sir. He left last year.’

It was her first acknowledgement of the fact.

‘Oh, okay,’ the teacher was saying, easily. ‘Well, finish the piece and let me look at it when it’s done.’

He smiled down at her again, catching her unawares so that without thinking she smiled back. There was the smallest of pauses. Then
Mr Eliot stood up and nodded before sneaking off to his makeshift office for another fag.

Some weeks later, during one of the double art lessons, David Eliot handed Alice a book to look at.

‘Heard of her?’ he asked.

Alice shook her head. The book was full of the strangest pictures.

‘They’re sculptures,’ the teacher said, watching her turn the pages.

Several other children came over curiously to look at the book. Towards the end of the lesson Mr Eliot wandered casually back around the room looking at the work. When he came to Alice’s table he stopped. Her cupboard-boat construction was finished. She had rubbed cardamom powder mixed with dirt all over it and had scratched and gouged holes in the wood. She had papered the inside of the doors with an old Singhalese newspaper.

‘Where did you find this?’ David Eliot asked.

His voice was neutral.

‘We lined the trunk we brought to England with it,’ Alice told him, aware the class was watching her, too.

She felt her face grow hot with a mixture of emotions, but all Mr Eliot said was, ‘I you’re planning to do GCE Art.’

‘Yes,’ she said, adding, ‘I used to make things like this when I lived in Ceylon.’

She stopped abruptly. For one sharp moment her grandfather’s studio flashed before her eyes and she smelled linseed oil. A shadow fell across the whitened beach. Then it was gone and Mr Eliot was speaking to someone else in the class.

After the lesson ended Alice took the book back. She could see Mr Eliot in his office, tapping a cigarette on its packet before putting it between his lips. Alice noticed his fingers were nicotine-stained. She frowned. His fingers reminded her of someone else’s, but she couldn’t think whose. Once again an image flashed past her.

It was of her grandfather tapping his pipe.

‘Yes, what d’you want?’ asked one of the other staff, sharply, seeing her hovering. ‘Always knock before you come in here, please.’

‘Sorry, Miss Kimberley’

An inexplicable stab of anger, not evident for years, rose within Alice. It took her by surprise so that her face glowed. She had never liked Miss Kimberley.

‘What is it, Alice?’ asked Mr Eliot, coming out. ‘Oh, the book. Would you like to borrow it until next week?’

She nodded and scuttled off before he could change his mind. But not before she heard the art teacher say to Miss Kimberley, ‘Stop being a dragon to her, Sarah. She’s scared.’

The idea that they thought she was scared mortified Alice. Embarrassment flushed over her. She felt humiliated. Momentarily she saw herself as the teachers did. Was that what they thought of her? The rage made her want to cry. Vowing to stand up for herself against Miss Kimberley, she hurried home with her book.

That night in her bedroom Alice read the book from cover to cover. There were facsimiles of some of the artist’s diaries. The dedication in particular caught her eye and she read it with some difficulty.

Alice read very slowly, twice, not fully understanding everything. Then she paused for a moment before copying it down in the front of her sketchbook. She could not understand why her chest tightened at the sight of the words.

As the school year moved slowly on, Alice found she spent more and more time in the art block. With David Eliot’s encouragement, she began to work on her constructions and paintings in the much-hated lunch break. At home, life had settled into a rhythm. It was the happiest it had been for years. Conversation between Alice and her mother was desultory. Relieved to be let off the communication hook,
they both sank gratefully into what passed for a companionable silence. The summer of 1976 turned out to be blistering hot. It was their third summer in England with hardly a cloud in the sky and day after day of sunshine and dust. London was emptied of its residents, beating a steady path to the sea. Sita, busy with her orders from the dry cleaners and her private clients, barely noticed the heat. In her mind the sound of her sewing machine had completely replaced the sound of the Indian Ocean. For both mother and daughter, keeping their heads above water took most of their effort, and when they saw an advertisement in a shop window for a holiday let beside the sea, they simultaneously looked away. They had no need to consult each other; the sea was part of an intractable past. In the first week of the summer holidays Sita took a week off work, telling the dry cleaners that she needed to spend some time with Alice. In fact she had decided to dig the garden up. She planted three rose bushes of such garish colours that the old woman next door objected.

‘I don’t want yellow roses growing up against my fence,’ the woman said. ‘Can’t you see mine is a blue-and-white cottage garden?’

Sita apologised and uprooted them. She didn’t mind. It had been a half-hearted attempt at gardening. She disliked going outside. In the autumn of that same year, with some of the money she had saved, she concreted over the garden, leaving only a small square patch of grass that was soon overgrown with dandelions.

The new school year began and with it came another letter from home. When she opened it, a photograph of May’s young son fell out.

‘Can I see,’ Alice asked.

Sita read the letter and passed it on to Alice. She made no response and once again silence fell.

At Christmas, two more photographs arrived. This time they were of May, with the sheen of motherhood on her, holding Sarath’s hand. Alice ignored the pictures, only to pick them up when her mother was not around and stare at the blurred black-and-white images, searching for signs of anything she might recognise. There was one picture of her grandfather carrying the child.

You must be very busy
, her grandfather had written.
But when you have a moment, do write
.