Brixton Beach (35 page)

When she had finished reading the letter, Sita folded it back along the creases it had come with. She tucked the photographs inside the envelope and resealed it. Then she put it on the mantelpiece for Alice to see when she came home that night. And taking up her scissors she began her work. She had three pairs of trousers to alter before five o’clock. May’s reply would have to wait.

W
ITH THE BEGINNING OF THE RAINS
, the steamy, oppressive heat and the spiders that curled in fistfuls of rigor mortis below the ceilings, an immense inertia took hold of the Sea House. Nothing could shift the humidity, the acidic smell of sea heat, which crept in through the boarded-up windows and the cracks in the doors. Their lives stilled like a painting. In this neglect, everyday objects, no longer in daily use, edged towards their own extinction. A table worn by years of constant use, useless now. A chair, its cane disgorged in upward movement like tufts of sea grass on the beach, empty of any human shape. There was no one to say who might have occupied it once, no one to blow away the fine sea dust that had crept in with the storms. Sunlight slithered in whatever slit it could find. But it was the moon, heavily pregnant with religious fullness, that lit the house where they had once all lived together. Shining on the leaves of the paw-paw tree that drifted in through the front door. Revealing the painting that had buckled with the damp. When the full moon shone a whole terrible history seeped out of fabric and wood, exposing un-erasable marks and stains on objects that had finished one life of plenitude and were moving into another of decay.

After a year had passed May returned, following the ghostly path trodden by her parents. She wandered the house and took away their wedding photograph in shocked silence. The photograph, fixed in
innocent smiles, gave nothing away. It haunted May. How could she have known what effect this image would have on her one day? Her parents, not yet her parents when it was taken. A butterfly, sulphur yellow and enormous, drifted in through the window and settled briefly on her hair. Fearing madness, she fled. The landscape had an air of menace. I’ll come back another day, she told herself, rage and grief overwhelming her yet again. But then she fled. When she was stronger, when many more months had passed, she crept slowly back to collect a few more things. A tea service, an embroidered jacket. Her books from the days of the Girls’ High School. A rice-paper edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, the prize her father had won forty years before. A copy of the Bible. What made them own a Bible? Karma lay scattered everywhere, issuing its warning. It appalled May afresh. The violence of their death was stronger than the smell of the sea. It was stronger than the sunlight that dried the house up, turning it into a shrivelled skeleton. It was too much for May, who vowed never to return. She forgot the pair of shoes belonging to her mother tucked under the bed. She forgot her father’s pipe, still with the toothmarks from when he chewed it. These things were left. Someone else in the future would have to rescue them.

Namil came and dismantled the studio. He sold the etching press and took whatever had not been already been destroyed by marauding thugs. He took what paints remained, encrusted and useless. He took a pot of brushes bearing traces of colour. There were no etching plates. Unknown hands had destroyed them. Then, tucked away behind a shelf, Namil found something else. It was a small painting made a short time before Alice had left.

‘We should send it,’ Namil suggested tentatively, wiping the dust off its surface. ‘One day it might mean something to her.’

The painting was of the sea, viewed from what had been Alice’s bedroom window. Time had not changed the view. However many years passed, it would not alter the blueness of the ocean, and Namil hoped the painting would move his niece.

‘It is not her fault,’ he consoled May, referring to the continued silence from overseas. ‘Be patient.’

But even though they waited hopefully, nothing happened. The old doctor who had lived behind the coconut grove had gone. On the night of the Sea House murders, a van had come for him. His manservant told May how the men had bundled the doctor into the van. As it drove off, the manservant heard the doctor cry out with pain. He was not seen again. A new doctor, a younger Singhalese man, had replaced him. Time passed. Like the sea and the sky and the shoreline, the days and months blended together. The mango tree in the front garden bore fruit. Small boys from the fishermen’s huts, seeing the house was empty, stole the fruit. Small girls, finding the dried mango stones, played hopscotch with them. No one cut back the undergrowth and the orange-blossom tree soon overshadowed the verandah, choking it of light. Nature entered the house, bleaching it, camouflaging it, making it its own. In Colombo and in other parts of the country the war continued regardless, appearing in small deadly pockets, creating craters of despair. The airport was destroyed. Suicide was the new destroyer, dropping its human remains as bombs everywhere. The cries of death were no longer distinguishable from the cries of birth. And while the world turned a blind eye and paradise blinded itself, the rich continued to travel home each night in armour-plated cars.

Alice saw him crossing the road before he even noticed her. He had a bottle of milk in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She knew he was hurrying to get back before she arrived at his flat. A bright August sun shone through the plane trees as she walked past the park and towards the block of Victorian flats where he lived. She was carrying a small portfolio.

‘Alice,’ he called, seeing her suddenly, waving the milk bottle. ‘I’m here!’

She turned and stopped, waiting for him solemnly. Ever since the dreadful day of her grandparents’ murder David Eliot had become her friend. He had seen her through two exams and a successful place on the foundation course at Camberwell. In the following July, after she finally left school, he’d invited her for the first time to his flat. She had been back several times since then, treasuring each visit. His flat, like
his art department, was chaotic. She had never seen anything like it, except perhaps her grandfather’s studio. There were posters on the walls, shelves rising to the ceiling, filled with books, photographs, plants and of course ashtrays full to the brim. She had discovered that, in the privacy of his house, David Eliot smoked a pipe. And although the smell of the tobacco he used was different, still the sound of him puffing on it filled her with contentment.

‘Coffee?’ he asked, closing the door.

She spread out the contents of her portfolio on his kitchen table. Sketchbooks, drawings, some paintings.

‘What’s this about?’ he asked.

‘I’m clearing up,’ she said, smiling, unaware how changed he found her since the first time he had noticed her. ‘And I found this—’

She held out a small oil painting of sea and sky, not her usual style.

‘It’s for you,’ she said. ‘I found it last night. I think I did it after my grandfather died.’

He was looking at the painting and did not look up. When he did his eyes were unreadable.

‘I’ll buy it from you.’

‘No! No!’ she said in horror. ‘It’s a present!’

He frowned and moved away from her. For a moment she wondered if she had offended him. He did not look pleased. She thought he was the most wonderful person in the world.

‘But if you don’t like it…’ she trailed off.

‘I shall sell it when you are famous,’ he said only half joking. ‘Thank you.’ He had told her many times that she was his best pupil. He would never have another like her again. All the others paled into insignificance, he often said. The difference is you actually have something to say, he had told her. She knew he was sorry to lose her but she was determined; she would always know him.

‘I wish you were teaching the foundation course,’ she said tentatively, sitting back on her heels, looking at the drawings in her portfolio.

There was a stale smell of cooking, and the rubbish he had once again forgotten to put out was everywhere, but she hardly noticed.

‘More coffee?’ he asked, his face helpless.

Misunderstanding, she looked at him anxiously.

‘Can I still come and see you when I start the course?’

For all that she was constantly visiting him, there wasn’t much they discussed that was personal. He did not encourage it and she did not want to be a nuisance. Which made the little she had told him about her life all the more precious. She fixed her eyes, beautiful and compelling, worriedly on him.

‘Well, it’ll cost you!’ he said, lighting another cigarette.

‘You smoke too much,’ she told him bossily, adding, ‘I can’t manage the foundation if I don’t keep seeing you!’

She almost bit her tongue, but he was still smiling, if a little ironically.

‘Oh, I don’t think so. You’re your own person now, you’ll see.’

Again the flippant tone she did not fully understand. August stretched luxuriously ahead.

‘My mother works through the summer,’ she told him. ‘We need the money, sir.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, call me David,’ he replied impatiently.

Her father, she confessed, sent most of his money to the Tamil cause in Jaffna and there wasn’t much left over for them. Besides, her father had another life now with a new woman. David Eliot listened without commenting. She had no idea if he secretly disapproved of her family. Once, during this long, wonderful August, he had taken her to a West End gallery to see the work of an artist he admired. She had stood for a long time staring dreamily at a painting called
Say Good-bye to the Shores of Africa
. On another occasion he took her to the Hayward Gallery and talked to her about a sculptress who was very old. Whenever he talked to her about art he was deadly serious. She loved listening to him talk in this way. Always he brought the subject around to her own work. Then, a few days before the bank holiday as a belated eighteenth birthday present he took her to a small restaurant he frequented in Goodge Street and gave her a first sip of wine, laughing when she wrinkled up her nose at the taste. He ordered lasagne and listened to the story of the first time she tasted pasta on board
the ship that had brought her to England, and how she had for years hated the smell of tomato sauce because it reminded her of leaving her home. He had listened intently to her story. He always gave her his full attention when she spoke. Then he had asked her, hesitatingly, if she would ever want to go back.

‘There’s no point,’ she told him. ‘I have all of it in my head.’

‘You should do more paintings from your head,’ he said now, looking at the oil she had given him.

He began to cough suddenly and she stood up.

‘Shall I get you some water?’

He didn’t answer. When the coughing stopped he reached for his cigarettes again. Then he waved his hand towards the door.

‘Time you went,’ he said, with a small grimace.

Unknown to anyone, Janake had taken to visiting the Sea House. Memories propelled him towards it, pity kept him silent. Every time he returned from Colombo, on his way back from the station he would stop off to visit his elderly mother. He loved to listen to the sounds in the house, the murmuring and whispering that went on in it; like a shell echoing the waves. There was no one but Janake to listen to these unresolved voices. Alice, they called, Alice! Ordinarily the house would have been sold, ordinarily another family would have moved in. But these were not ordinary times and May and Namil were too crushed, too frightened, too traumatised to bother with the house. So it remained, sighing and whispering its tale of neglect. The death stains had all gone, washed away by wind and rain, veiled in dust, suppressed by time. The house stood eyeless and terrible. And the mango tree fruited and the coconuts fell to the ground and the frangipani blossomed under the blistering tropical sky. It was how this time passed, with slow indifference, with Janake as its only witness.

At eight Sarath already acted much older than his age. He still wanted to attend medical school. His parents said nothing. After what had happened, all that interested them was Sarath’s safety. They had not heard from Sita for a long time; years. After May’s last letter there had been silence for several months and when finally the longed-for
reply came, it was cold and unsatisfactory, a mere formality that had hurt May more than she could say.

‘She has become a white woman,’ May told Namil, after reading it. ‘She doesn’t want to know about us, now.’

Namil had been more optimistic.

‘Be patient,’ he said. ‘Your sister has had a hell of a life.’

May had cried herself to sleep for many nights after that. Who would have thought the Fonseka family would end up this way?

Some months later, after one of his visits to the Sea House, Janake called round to see May. Janake was twenty two, but still small for his age. Sarath was nearly as tall as him.

‘How are things going for you, Janake?’ Namil asked gently.

‘All right, Uncle,’ Janake said with a shake of his head.

Always after his secret visits to the Sea House, Janake was full of sadness. Full of memories of Alice. They had never written to each other as they had promised. By the time Janake had been able to write in English, the moment for writing had passed.

‘There’s a slight chance,’ he said, and then he stopped.

He was thinking of the box Alice had given him on her last day. A box that would never open, she had laughed. And when he had asked her why this was she had told him she didn’t want the memories to be lost. Janake hesitated. He had always been aware that a rift existed between the remaining Fonsekas.

‘What sort of chance?’ Sarath was asking.

‘Well, it might not happen,’ Janake said a little reluctantly, ‘but next year I might go to the UK.’

‘What!’ May cried. ‘Oh, Janake, really? When next year?’

She looked shocked.

‘I don’t know, Aunty. It’s just talk at the moment. I have to finish my exams first.’

He wondered if they knew of his secret visits to the Sea House and if he could talk freely about Alice without angering them. He understood the hurt caused by Sita’s neglect. But did they blame Alice, too?

‘If I go, I shall want to see Alice,’ he said, thinking how much he would love that.

‘Bring some photos, if you do,’ Sarath said excitedly. ‘And ask them why they don’t write. I’m going to England one day, too,’ he said confidently. ‘Not yet,’ he added, catching sight of his mother’s face. ‘Not till I’m a doctor!’