Brixton Beach (40 page)

She smiled and he thought that was what had been wrong with this visit. The childhood picture he had carried of her over the years had been of her smiling. But now she no longer smiled.

And your husband?’ he asked gently. ‘Tell me about him.’

‘Tim?’ she said. ‘He loves me. And he loves Ravi.’

The child looked a miniature version of her, wriggling and wanting to be on the move.

‘You should bring him back,’ he said. A feeling of helplessness engulfed him. What could he offer her? ‘When the war is over, I mean.’

He couldn’t bear her suppressed unhappiness, nor she his. Was she aware how lonely she was? he wondered. He has the look of someone who is barely alive, she was thinking, shocked by the reality of it. She wanted to ask him why Sri Lanka cared so little for its own people. He listened to the traffic rushing past and watched the rain dripping slowly along the window of the café where they were sitting as she spoke softly, for the first time, he suspected, of what had become of her life since she had left the island. Loneliness consumed her. He felt it
had probably done so since the moment she left. Listening to her talk, dimly he saw the effort it cost her. No one had thought of what the experience would do to her. They had been children, caught up in hatred not of their making, he thought sadly. Accepting whatever life threw at them.

‘There was this teacher,’ she was saying. ‘He was called David Eliot. He was the only one who understood.’

Janake could not bear it. Alice hugged the child, holding him like a shield.

‘But you know, he was just a teacher,’ she told him lightly. ‘I wasn’t the only pupil with problems. I think I leaned too heavily on him. I think he got fed up with me.’

She laughed without joy, and he saw that this too had hurt her. They talked about Sita.

‘She’s losing her mind, Janake. She sits in the house all day. Luckily, the rent is fixed and the landlord can’t throw her out. She would never live with us, even if Tim felt she could. They don’t like each other much, you see. It’s a little difficult.’

He saw that the situation was an impossible one.

‘Can I visit her before I go?’

‘Of course. But I warn you, she won’t remember you.’

Of her father she said nothing. They had gone in the rain to Cranmer Gardens to see Sita. It was only then that Janake realised the extent of what they had been through. Sita, unrecognisable, staring at him blankly, was uneasy with his presence in her house. So they had left. It was late afternoon by now. Tim would be returning from work in a few hours and Alice needed to get home to tidy the house and cook a meal. She was beginning to get restless.

‘I have to go and pack,’ Janake said.

He felt the afternoon break up before his eyes. His plane was leaving at midnight.

‘Will you come back?’ she asked.

He thought she was going to cry. For a moment she had a look on her face that held traces from her lost childhood. He saw that he was
taking her home away from her, all over again. But he could not give her false promises. He could not tell her that the war would end soon, that her aunt would reply to her letters, that her cousin would be found. Or that he and she would ever be free to explore other avenues. While they were looking elsewhere, their lives had taken different paths. It had been ordained in this way. They were passing like ships in the night. That was all. Sitting on the bus that was taking him away from her forever, waving, smiling his promises to write, he thought they had loved one another in a different life. Perhaps they would meet again in some other time.

Spring when it came was bitter that year. The daffodils were scentless and the wind was relentless. Everyone said it was the worst spring in decades. Tim repainted the front door and Ravi, crawling now, put his hand on it before it was dry.

‘Alice, where are you?’ Tim said crossly. ‘Take him away—can’t you see I’m doing something?’

But Ravi had triumphed. The ultramarine imprint of his hand remained forever on the door of Brixton Beach.

Sometimes, in the months that followed, Alice began to imagine she had dreamed Janake’s visit. She had not expected to feel as she had done when he kissed her good-bye. Confused she had run back home with Ravi and put the moment out of her mind. But the image of Janake’s face as the bus took him away kept replaying itself. He is like my brother, she told herself, but the thought did not satisfy her. It seemed as though they had shared a whole life together instead of the few years it had been in reality. Feeling unhappy and worried at her disloyalty to Tim, she decided to bury herself in looking after Ravi, but all she did was spend hours staring at the sandpit outside the newly built patio. The sandpit was small and made of a surreal blue plastic. There was a spade and a cheerful red bucket beside it. Ravi had been sitting in it earlier that day. He was a year old now and on warm days she sat with him outside and let him play in the sand. He loved throwing the sand outside the square box. In fact, he preferred it to anything else.

‘Try to stop him doing that,’ Tim told her almost every day. ‘Otherwise, we’ll have bloody sand all over the place. Look, it’s in the flowerpots.’

Alice could hear Tim’s unhappiness in his voice. She knew that he too was beginning to feel things were not right. Something seemed to have stuck in the throat of their marriage, making it impossible for them both to breathe. But he’s a good man, Alice scolded herself. He’s not like Dada.

‘That was the wind,’ Alice said, referring to the sand.

She had not worried about things like that, she told Tim, when she was a child.

‘Well, this isn’t
your
childhood,’ he told her, crossly.

She saw how right he was. But what else had she to go on?

‘If it’s a beach you want, then how about we go to Cornwall?’ he said after some time, not wishing to prolong what he thought of as her sulkiness, wanting to compromise. ‘I went there when I was about five.’

Organising a home-help for Sita, they went to Cornwall.

‘July!’ Tim declared, glad it was all settled. ‘I’m owed time off then.’

Cornwall was a long way from Brixton. The car was burdened with beach paraphernalia, windbreak, inflatable rubber dinghy, bucket and spade.

‘Okay, little ‘un,’ said Tim with a touch of excitement in his voice. ‘We’re all going on a summer holiday!’

And so, with the thrill of her growing son refusing to be denied, Alice spent every summer on the beach. The slightest hint of sun turned Ravi brown as a berry.

‘Looks like a proper little Asian!’ said Tim, not unkindly.

She saw that at least she had picked a man who loved his child. The thought comforted her in the long, featureless days sitting on the sands watching Tim sunbathe and Ravi make sandcastles.

‘I might do some drawing again,’ she said out loud.

Tim nodded, pleased.

Good girl
, her grandfather’s voice said, alarmingly close and approving.
Took you long enough
.

Alice jumped. To begin with, she drew everything she saw on the beach. But sometimes other things, things not there at all, appeared in her drawing. She had no idea how the Colombo express strayed on to the page, or how the wardrobe in her grandparents’ old garden wandered into their rented cottage, which in turn had a distinctly odd interior.

‘Weird!’ Tim laughed, when he saw. ‘What sort of chair is that?’

‘A planter’s chair,’ she told him.

Tim groaned.

‘You’ll damage the boy, at this rate,’ was all he said.

For five years they returned like the tide, nearly always picking the weeks that rained, missing the summer sun, effortlessly getting it wrong. The cottage waited for them with its rented furniture, faceless and noncommittal. Tim clearly enjoyed every moment of it; Ravi delighted in the beach, running towards it as soon as they began their descent from the car park. Alice followed, shivering.

For five years. Then, one dark January, when a cold watery moon was high in a frosty sky, with the unexpectedness of a fairytale gone wrong, Tim left. There was no warning. The moon filled the small leafless garden, light outlining the motionless, empty swing. Apart from the few stray hairs on the bar of soap in the bathroom, embedded like ticks, advertising his vacancy, there was nothing left. Had she not been involved she would have raised an eyebrow, such was the efficiency of his departure. He had discovered something that corresponded more easily to his idea of love, he told her. Someone
normal
, he added. Someone who had grown up with the cold, so that sleeping with the windows open in winter was not difficult.

‘I’ve had enough!’ he said, sweeping away the years they had spent together in a gesture of farewell.

She could see he had.

‘Some marriages,’ he cried, looking suddenly as though he might weep, ‘are not meant to last forever.’

He was more upset than one would expect from somebody who had freedom in his sight. For the first time, Alice felt pity for him touch her. It was not his fault.

‘I am tired of hearing about all your dead relatives, the endless war in your savage country, your talk of politics, your spicy food, your foreign ways.’

His words lay between them. Everything had become irreversible, she saw. He had been stretched too far and for too long. But so have I, she thought in silent despair.

‘I have found someone more balanced,’ he confessed.

And now he began to sound angry.

‘Someone who actually loves being part of
this
country. Someone grateful. D’you know what that is like?’

‘Who?’ asked Alice, before she could stop herself.

‘She’s Jewish,’ Tim said. ‘Her mother was in a concentration camp.’

Alice was paralysed. Tim loaded his bags into his car and returned to the house, carefully wiping his feet on the mat for the last time. He wanted to say good-bye to his son. He had a pile of photographs in his hand.

‘Look,’ she heard him say to the six-year-old Ravi, ‘this is the house where I am going to live. Here is the sitting room, here is the kitchen, and look, here is the garden. I’m going to put in a climbing frame and a swing for you. And your bedroom will be here. It’s all ready and Ruth can’t wait to meet you. Okay? So think about what you would like to do next weekend?’

He left soon after that, taking with him all her own anger. Ravi was sitting in his room, building the Starship
Enterprise
out of Lego bricks. The photographs of Tim’s new home lay scattered on the floor beside him. Turning one of them over, Alice began to draw.

‘This is the coast where I grew up,’ she said, hesitantly. ‘Here is the headland with the lighthouse that still flashes. Night after night, it flashes, right across the bay.’

She knew she must keep talking, that it didn’t matter what she said so long as she didn’t stop. She ran her hand across the boy’s smooth, thin arm. She had read somewhere that the touch of a mother’s hand on her newborn was different from her touch later on as the child grew. Instinct, she thought, stroking her son’s bent head. Why then, since she possessed so much instinct, had she gone astray?

Now when she wanted most to hear her grandfather’s voice it seemed to have deserted her. From this distance his promises seemed hollow. She thought of an old jumper, knitted by her father’s office girl, that she had discovered in the back of her mother’s wardrobe, shrunk and unwearable. Her mother’s life had collapsed too, falling away without fanfare, insignificantly. This is how we have ended, thought Alice, stroking the bent head of her silent, beautiful son, wondering what long, sad shadows were already casting themselves on
his
life. Love was not enough. How will we manage? she worried, feeling the weight of all the years ahead. She saw that she had even less certainty in giving this child those things he would need in order to find his footing in this country. I am only half his story, she thought, too late and with terrible sharp understanding of the foreshortening of her own life. She had travelled the ocean and tried to understand this alien place, but she was
still
struggling, she thought in pain, astonished by the years of effort. And she thought again of all the messages she had thrown overboard, day after day.

I want to come back. Write saying you’ve changed your mind. Say I can live with you instead. Tell them to put me on another ship. Send me home
.

The sea had changed its colour the further she had travelled from her grandfather.

Sitting on the floor beside Ravi with her drawing and Tim’s photographs, she remembered again, as though it was yesterday, the faint smell of diesel oil and ozone.

‘One day, when you are older,’ she said, hugging her son’s unresponsive body, ‘you might like to visit the place where I came from. And see the Sea House.’

They did not go back to the sea in Cornwall ever again. Other events of more significance occurred. Sita moved into Brixton Beach. Her landlord was harassing her and, besides, Alice told her firmly, it was time for her to be closer to her grandson. Sita brought her dolls with her; she would not be parted from them, but she learned to keep them in her room. She was disintegrating fast.

‘I’m potty,’ she told Ravi. ‘Your grandma has no memory left. It’s worn out. From over-use!’

Ravi laughed, delighted. He loved his grandmother.

‘I don’t have any memory either,’ he said. ‘Let’s just have
now
, Grandma.’

As he grew from six to seven and then towards eight, Sita sometimes mistook Ravi for someone else. Each time it was a different person. They grew used to it and hardly noticed her ramblings now.

‘Take no notice of my grandma,’ Ravi would tell his school friends when they called round for him. ‘She’s batty!’

But he always gave her a hug before he went out to play, Alice noticed.

In Sri Lanka things were in a mess. Janake’s letters, which for a while had been frequent, now stopped altogether. Alice’s own letters had trailed away, receiving no encouragement and although she had written repeatedly to her aunt, there had never been a reply. Tim came every fortnight to take Ravi for a sleepover at his new house. He nodded to Alice but avoided looking at her. With the money he was forced to pay her for maintenance and the money she made from her paintings, she was able to survive. Her paintings were always of seascapes, but she had begun to make small sculptures again using odd bits of wood and found objects that caught her eye. They reminded her of the box she had once made with the driftwood Janake had found buried in the sand. Sita watched her daughter. It was difficult to know if she knew who Alice was, but her eyes followed her around her studio without comment. The rest of the time she would fall asleep in front of the television. One night, having dozed beside Ravi as he watched his favourite programme, she decided to go to bed early.