Brixton Beach (46 page)

‘Just you wait,’ Simon was saying in the same passionate way. ‘In less than three days you’ve a treat in store. I’ll pick you up at about six.’

She did something she hadn’t done since her wedding day. She wore a sari that was the colour of the roses she had placed in her glass bowl. She felt as though it had been years since she had seen him last. He was late, perhaps he wasn’t coming after all? At ten past six, feeling sick, she stared at herself in the mirror. What was wrong with her? Disliking the way she looked, she put her hair up in a French pleat. Simon Swann, arriving in evening dress, found himself gazing into a pair of dark eyes that had on them the late summer bloom of a grape. He had imagined this moment for so long that the reality of her took him by surprise again.

‘What?’ she asked, feeling shy, but he could only shake his head and smile at her. There were no words to explain the emptiness of his past. He smelled of shaving foam from another era, she thought. She left him prowling around the kitchen while she got her shawl.

‘I’ve cooked something,’ she called, ‘if you want to come back here to eat?’

‘Oh, that might be good,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how we feel’

He stared at the photographs curling at the edges, tucked into picture frames. The younger Alice, holding a small child on her hip. Ravi, he thought and then he saw other photographs on her dresser. Ravi blowing out seven candles on a cake, Ravi playing the piano, looking about eleven or twelve. The teenaged Ravi, thinned out, taller, with his mother’s face lurking in his.

Simon had bought tickets in the Dress Circle. Twenty years had passed since his encounter as a student. On an impulse he told Alice the story.

‘I’ve never told anyone,’ he said. ‘But you know, for years, every time I went to the opera I looked around hoping to find her.’

‘Tonight might be your lucky night!’ Alice teased and Simon, looking at her solemnly, replied:

‘Tonight
is
my lucky night!’

She had been prepared for the story of
Tosca
but not the drama of the whole production. A vast theatre, lavish costumes and an orchestra, not to mention the singing itself. At some point before the first interval she found he was holding her hand.

‘Are you enjoying it?’ he asked when the lights came on and the applause had died down.

He felt a wave of disturbing tenderness at the sight of her. They drank champagne sitting in a corner of the crush bar. He told her something about the singers; those who were on top form tonight and the ones who were a little disappointing. She caught a glimpse of a world she had not known existed.

‘I have never been to the opera with someone who’s interested in going. Tessa would come when we were first married as a sort of duty’ He paused, gazing at his empty glass. ‘That’s no use.’

Embarrassed, she didn’t know what to say. He glanced at her sharply.

‘Look, Alice…‘ he hesitated. ‘I was worried the other day when I rang you, in case you were annoyed I mentioned Tessa. But…I wanted to start with as clean a slate as I could. I wanted to mention her, so you didn’t think…I was doing anything you won’t fully understand.’

She was watching him gravely.

‘It’s too early for me to say anything…’ he began again when she interrupted.

‘There isn’t anything to talk about yet,’ she said, placing her hand on his arm.

He noted she used the word ‘yet’ and was thrilled.

‘I’m still thinking about all this,’ she said gesturing at the glittering chandelier and the plush crimson seats. ‘Tell me about the next act.’

So he told her about the aria,
Vissi d’arte, Vissi d’amore
, I lived for art, I lived for love, and how when Callas sang it in the early sixties, there wasn’t a dry eye in the auditorium.

As the lights went down for the second act he took her hand as though he had been doing this all their lives, and then it began again. Afterwards, as the curtain swept down and they sat for a moment in silence surrounded by the roar of applause, Simon looked at her. In the darkness he saw her face glistening with tears and the slow breaking of her smile seemed to wake him from his life’s dream, so that he cleared the distance between them and kissed her. And, as he held her hand, listening to the sound of the applause, there woke in him such a flood of feelings that he felt the whole enchanted evening spin together. And he understood at last how far he had needed to travel before he could recognise with certainty that he wanted her.

They drove back to Brixton Beach quietly; an air of contentment had spread itself over them. Neither wanted to dine out.

‘I’ll make a salad,’ she said, and went into the garden to pick some herbs, a lettuce and a few radishes.

From the house the light fell softly on her, deepening the darkness of her hair.

‘I didn’t know you gardened,’ he said, and stopped as she burst out laughing, making him smile too, for there was so much he didn’t know about her. The sky had no colour left in it except for the unearthly blue of the stars. Again he was certain that some part of himself had detached itself and now belonged to her. How ridiculous, he thought, again with happiness spinning around him like a carousel in a fairground. Taking her hand, he kissed it, fingertip by fingertip.

Excavating scents. Parsley, she has been tearing some from her herb patch; garlic, she crushed some earlier; hot rice, she has been sticking her fingers in it, he told her, like a fortune-teller, reading the traces of the journey of her hand. Then he enveloped her in his arms. He was hungry, but not for food.

‘All the stars are out,’ he said with amazement. ‘Every single one of them.’

Her hair too was full of the scents of the garden, he told her, marvelling how everything had changed so swiftly since the morning. Stunned, he thought: So this is what has happened to me! Miraculously, he was falling in love at last, and for the first time. And all the stars were out. She kissed him back, shaking a little with laughter and again he felt the slow beautiful unfolding of emotions suppressed for so many weeks. They stood with the light from the house streaming over them. Whatever he had been searching for all his life was here on the moonlit beach of Brixton. But then she silenced his thoughts with an upward gesture of her arms, and with great sweetness he turned and took her in.

Later, he would think it was as though he had never seen a woman before, for the sight of her nakedness overwhelmed him. The night gathered in the hollow of her neck, the arch of her back, the soft rise of her body as he tried in vain to hold on to the moment. He began to kiss her again, stumbling across places he had not known of moments before. Here was a faint scar left from a childhood fall, the sweep of skin, silkily soft, from ear to shoulder, the place where once her child had been nurtured. The night filled his ears with whispers. She unbuttoned his shirt, placing her cool hands on his pale skin. Searching for him, guiding him, taking him towards all the lonely, uninhabited parts in her world. He was crushed, made speechless by the simplicity of her generosity as he realised that no one had been this way for many years. A chill passed over him even as he felt the completeness of the moment. No one had showered him with such gifts; no one had slowed the night in such a way, with tongue and lips, and trails of phosphorescent love. Never for him before. A feast of love was beginning, as both fell silent now. All his life had been but an
overture to this. He rocked inside her tenderly, as though he was the sea breaking against her; wave upon wave, each one more dazzling than the last. Astonished, he saw he was crowning his life as in the intermittent light provided by passing cars he caught glimpses of her face. Through the woman she had become he was able at last to comprehend the girl she had once been. Later, much later, she began to speak, telling him
he
was the one to set her free. It was then that the last remnants of modesty broke free in her. So that kissing him back, encouraged by his tender consideration, she danced for him. All night long, like rain on a tropical roof, she danced for him. It was what she had been made for, he saw with astonishment. And when he could think again, when their closeness was the closeness of people who had travelled for a lifetime, they slept. Encircled in one another’s arms. Two sides of the sun. Dark and light. United as one.

Morning saw them sleeping, stretched out across the bed like starfish in some far-flung paradise. The light woke him first; stirring, but never letting go of his hold on her, he traced the line across her body straight to her heart. She slept without moving, tidily and without fuss. Impatiently, remembering all she had given him, he wanted only to begin again. There would be many things to be explained to others, he knew. Tessa, Cressida, Ravi…So many people. Already they floated past him, indifferent as fish from some other sea. They would deal with all of it, together. With her beside him, he could do anything. He would be guided by her, he thought. For the rest of his life, this would be how it was. Overwhelmed, he kissed the smooth brown shoulder, running his hands over the soft mounds of her breasts, towards her haunches and beyond. Waking her, so she came to life with a soft exhausted sound, like a person saved from drowning. Smiling, for the familiarity of the night had left its indelible mark, she raised her arms, wanting him again.

Finally they showered and Simon watched her comb her hair before putting it up with pins; girlishly slender and beautiful against the bluish morning light from the window. Unable to watch, he took her in his arms and kissed her. Laughing, Alice pushed him away. How ridiculous she felt, she told him, for a woman of her age.

‘Let me make breakfast for you,’ he said. ‘I make a wonderful breakfast!’

And even this remark made her giggle like a young girl. He had insisted that she stay out of the kitchen while he crashed around in the unfamiliar space, so Alice went into her studio instead to stare at a painting she had started a few days ago.

‘I want to take you back,’ she said, eating the toast he had made. ‘To my stretch of beach.’

He nodded. Saying it out loud made her realise how much she wanted this. Simon was following a thought of his own.

‘I must talk to Tessa,’ he said. Alice?’ He took both her hands in his. ‘I’m working tomorrow, but after that I’m going back to Sussex to talk to her.’

Alice was still, watching him, silently. The world stopped spinning and came to rest gently. She stopped eating and was no longer smiling.

‘Don’t look at me like that. I have to do it, face to face. I owe it to her—you do see, don’t you?’ he pleaded.

She nodded. The enormity of what had happened was beginning to hit her. She looked pale. What if it didn’t work?

‘It will,’ he said quietly. Certain. ‘You think it too. It wasn’t of our choosing.’

‘In Sri Lanka they would call it re-birth,’ she said.

It was his turn to stare at her. Could it be that the morning light made her more beautiful than she had looked last night? He thought of all the love that evaded the great central chamber of his life. Until now.

‘Let’s not go out,’ he said, looking at her seriously, feeling his heart melt. ‘Let’s just go to bed.’

When he had gone, her grandfather’s voice came to her:
He will love you forever, you know, Alice. Be comforted by this. I always said, One day my Alice will find someone to heal her broken roots. That is why I have stayed close to you. To keep you from falling
. She thought his voice sounded weary and seemed to come from a long way off, lulled by
the slow undulation of the sea, rich with the smell of ozone, deep as the deepest blue.
Brixton has its own beach now
, Bee said, breaking the silence. He sounded very sad.

S
ILENCE
. T
HE BEGINNING OF AN ORDINARY
summer’s day. In the dark-before-the-dawn hour the streets are awash with night waves from an imaginary beach. A spray of tail-lights from a passing plane pulsates as it waits, poised to land. Behind is another plane. And another. A thousand people riding the air waves, as day breaks over London. Men and women returning home, tourists with dogeared guidebooks crushed beside them. There are bleary-eyed children looking down on the Millennium Dome, the empty London Eye, the Thames. The flight attendants yawn over London and the businessman runs a large hand over his dishevelled hair. Pretty girls looking pretty even at this hour, the lovers peering out of the window, arms entwined. The pilot speaks. ‘This is London. The Queen is in Windsor,’ he says. ‘See, her flag is flying.’ Dawn-white and embalmed on a crack of sky, the day creeps up. The houses below sleep with eyes tightly shut, bat-blind and silent, too. The beach in Brixton is swept clean by invisible tides; the smell of seaweed, never far from the imagination, lingers. Invisible driftwood gathers like ghosts in pockets of this beach, but no one sees it. In Southey Road, between the junction of Brixton Road and Vassall Road, near the school where Ravi went long ago, sparrows gather like crumbs on chimney tops. Biscuit-brown flecks, rising and falling all together in a wave. While beside the children’s park, empty swings remain motionless. Light
creeps inside the old Victorian chapel, alabaster smooth against the tombs.

The inhabitants of Southey Road stir slightly, their eyelids moving rapidly as they watch the enactment of an undisclosed dream. Even the sound of the dawn chorus cannot penetrate their consciousness; cannot wake them. Maria di Stefano, sleeping above the Italian deli, smiles as she straightens a picture on the tea-rose wall of her Sicilian dream-home. She watches as her husband Giuseppe prises open a fig as though he is searching for a secret love-trinket. Giuseppe dreams on undisturbed. Outside their house an enormous torn cat investigates a dustbin overflowing with yesterday’s rubbish. Standing on his hind legs, he sends the bin lid clattering to the ground. At that the baker opens his back door and shoos the cat away, frowning. Then the baker takes a batch of bread out of his oven. And yawns. He is the last independent baker in the whole of Brixton. More than that, he is the last Cockney baker, born half a century before within the sound of Bow Bells. He knows he is living on borrowed time. There are probably only ten thousand loaves of bread left for him to bake before the council will buy him out of his livelihood, selling the site of his bakery at a good price for the building of a mosque. The baker will be angry when this happens. He will begin blaming the people who worship in the mosque for everything that has gone wrong in his life. Lucky for him, he does not have an exact day for this event.

At Patel & Son, the greengrocer is up. His harried, hardly-washed face grimaces as he opens his storeroom door for the delivery of greengages. They lie half-ripened, between green and amber and remind him of the colours of India. His father and his grandfather have been opening this same door for longer than he has been alive. So this dawn is no different from any before. The Halal butcher sleeps, his mouth shaped like a meat cleaver, dreaming of the Lebanon. The woman he once loved ended her life as a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv. When he heard the news, the butcher slaughtered another lamb and refused to comment. His sister rang him, but even the sound of her voice could not bring a tear to his eye. Something was locked inside the deep-freeze of his mind. He hung the carcass in the correct
way, watching its blood run cold. He was a butcher, after all. What could anyone expect?

In Cranham Park Road, SW9, in the top flat, Kavi Mustafa is praying. Dawn is a time for cleansing his soul in the warm summer air. Kavi is praying for peace. Not in the Middle East, that is something he has given up hoping for; no, he prays for peace in his neighbourhood. He is a citizen of this community, with a wife, two children and a sub-post office. Last week someone threw a brick through its window. It is the third brick this year. When he has finished his prayer, he will go to work, check his premises and do his accounts.

Two houses down a young man of Middle Eastern appearance stands in a doorway. Since he left his home, he has become a shadowy figure. As he stands watching the first plane over London, he notices a flock of sparrows rise from the trees. After his travels to foreign parts he has been living alone, moving from house to house, learning to sleep anywhere with the minimum of fuss. Last night he moved again. This time it is to a place south of the river. None of his family knows where he really is or what he is doing. His mother and sisters think he is elsewhere, studying. They have accepted that he has little time to phone them because he is so busy. The road sweeper walks past slowly and glances indifferently at him.

Inside Brixton Beach, behind its ultramarine-blue door and within its cobalt walls, Alice Fonseka lies asleep. She sleeps with her arms thrown back as though she has been swimming for hours and is now treading water. In her dreams she is watching the fishermen gutting fish into shallow woven baskets. They will balance these like scales on their shoulders when they knock on the doors of the squeamish Singhalese housewives, their cry of
Malu, Malu
resounding across the beach. And because she is so small in her dreams, perhaps no more than three years old, the fishermen appear very tall to Alice. Her bare feet burrow in the sand. Someone takes her hand and leads her away into the stone-dark coolness of the house, which after the blaze of heat, feels like water being thrown on her face. And she wakes.

Further away in a leaf-green cul-de-sac, nowhere near Alice and her dreams, an alarm goes off. It is an old-fashioned alarm, not electronic.

It wakes Simon, sleeping on the edge of his big smooth double bed. The night has turned restlessly towards the daylight. In his dreams Simon has been shaking an almond tree full of blossoms. His arms are aching with the effort. A beautiful woman wearing a yellow dress with a pattern of birds watches him as the blossoms turn to stones, clattering to the ground. Simon notices that the stones are really hailstones from a freak storm, crow-black and falling out of a blue sky. The alarm has woken him. In the still velvet darkness an owl hoots and for a moment he faces his fears squarely, lying all alone between clean white sheets. His feet, placed next to one another like kippers in a box, are cold and he wonders why he is so sad. But all in a rush he remembers he will never be alone again. Memory floods over him. This will be the pattern of all his waking days for the rest of his life. Last night he was late coming back but even so he had phoned Alice, unable to wait another moment. He has had a difficult two days with Tessa. He doesn’t want to think of the last two days now. Today he will see Alice again. Impatiently he throws the bedcovers off and gets out of bed. At four, when he finishes work he will meet her. He has a very light shift for the rest of the week and together they will go back to her place in Brixton Beach. Tomorrow night they are going to another opera, but he wants to be with Alice
now
, he thinks, smiling to himself. Facing Tessa was more unpleasant than he had expected. She will not let go of what she is used to that easily.

‘She knows, now,’ he had told Alice, late at night.

His voice had been sad, for he is aware this is the price he has to pay. For breaking the rules. Alice cannot think what to say that will comfort him.

‘If it helps, stay away from me for a while,’ she said.

But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

‘I want to see you,’ he had said into the phone. ‘Tessa and I are nothing to do with how I feel about you.’

In the bathroom, in the shower, Simon thinks about the last two days. Everything has been compartmentalised so carefully and now it is thrown up in the air. Happiness never comes without its own price; he smiles. That is one of Alice’s sayings, not his. He does not agree.

The thought of Alice makes him want her as he stands naked under the hot shower. In ten hours he will be with her. He will never leave her after this. In the shower he is transformed by the thought of her. A younger man once more. The dark rift of night has vanished and sunlight floods the bathroom; early morning and optimistic. The alarm clock has started bleating again and Simon hurriedly dries himself.

Alice wakes. The summer light enters the room with short stabbing marks across the floor. Her first thoughts are of Simon. It is the seventh of July. How her life has changed. Like a flick of a switch, everything is different. If only her grandfather were here to see it. She remembers the Sea House. It has belonged to her for years. One day it will be Ravi’s. Smiling, Alice picks up memories as though they are discarded clothes. Long ago her aunt May had rung her to tell her the house had been left to her, but Alice had not cared at the time. What use was the Sea House in her life? she had thought. But last night on the phone Simon had expressed a desire to visit it with her.

‘It will have rotted with neglect,’ she had warned him.

‘Then we’ll clean it up,’ he had told her, with a new youthful energy. ‘Start again. You can show me the rock where you carved your name!’

Maybe that was why she dreamed of Janake last night, she thinks, smiling, eating toast and drinking tea in her sea-blue kitchen.

‘Tomorrow is the last morning you will wake up alone,’ Simon has promised.

Sunlight is pouring into Brixton Beach through a hole in the sky. Never has the morning felt so transparently beautiful. Alice wriggles her bare toes, remembering how she used to burrow them in the hot sand. Her earlier life is scorched forever in her mind. She, too, counts the hours until they are to meet.

It is not yet seven o’clock but Friday traffic delays Simon as he crosses and re-crosses the one-way system on his way to work. On the river it is high tide. At the Elephant and Castle the traffic comes to a standstill and he waits impatiently, unable to see the obstruction. Opera pours out of his car’s CD player. The last act of
Tristan
. Simon notices as they
crawl past that the police have cordoned off a part of the road. Something serious must have taken place. Large police dogs pace the roads on thick chains, sniffing a mysterious trail of their own. A car, completely burnt out, lies on its roof in a pool of wetness; a few people stand silently on the pavement. That is all. In spite of this, even though he is still upset over Tessa, the day and all its summery light catches him in a web of happy anticipation. This summer will stay in his mind as the summer when he cherished the last drop of his youth. A taxi driver with his window down is shouting and Simon leans out to hear him but the man’s words plunge into a confusion of other words, other noise. Simon drums his fingers on the door of his car. Whatever has happened has been cleared up, the remains somewhere else, possibly in St Thomas’s Hospital. He will no doubt hear more when he finally gets into work. For terror lives in London now. Such are people’s expectations that no one is surprised. Yet for a fraction of a second, no more, he is unexpectedly fearful. He has always understood the fragility of life in practical terms, how to save it and when he cannot. He has lived his life with focused logic. Now he glimpses another side of this. Everything hinges on chance, he thinks. It frightens him for perhaps the first time in his life. Yet what has changed? Only him. The small ambitions of his youth, the desires, all his past aspirations are as nothing in the face of what he has acquired now. The traffic is flowing at last as he crosses Lambeth Road and heads towards Westminster Bridge. Impatiently, for he has lost nearly half an hour, he stops at another set of traffic lights. The last bars of
Tristan
draw to a close. He feels his heart rise. A huge advertisement features a picture of the Red Cross in some foreign war zone. The words ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN AT ANY TIME are emblazoned across it in large letters. The slogan sticks in Simon’s head as he turns into the hospital car park.

Alice leaves the house and turns right into Brixton Road. A notice outside the White Hart pub announces it is closed for restoration work. The notice makes it sound as though the White Hart were a listed building. A toothless drunk gives the door a sharp kick before cursing and walking away. A not-in-service bus sails past. Alice decides
to walk to the tube station, through the market and Brixton’s darkest heart. She is on her way to the gallery where her work is showing. Someone has bought her wardrobe sculpture for their museum collection and Antonia wants her to meet the buyer. For the first time she will get a large sum of money for one of her pieces. Years of worry about money are coming to an end. Alice has left early; her appointment is at nine and she doesn’t want to be caught up in the rush hour. She thinks she has plenty of time so she walks slowly. In her heart, unresolved emotions swell as sunlight falls slantingly across her path. Is it her imagination or is there a touch of autumn in the air? She walks past stallholders selling fruit and vegetables. Everywhere she looks there are yellow and indigo shapes piled high. African women in colourful batik headdresses sell guavas and dark African plums. She feels a strong urge to paint. There are images inside her, dark tropical things that flit across her mind. Perhaps painting is a happier occupation, she muses. Cautiously she wonders if this dream of going back to the Sea House and the beach might happen after all. Perhaps the troubles will finally end. She would like to see the place again, she thinks, with a thrill of happiness. The narrow spit of sand she played on, the view from the top of Mount Lavinia Hill, her beloved home. Now that they have started, memories are flooding out of her like love. Far away in the distance she hears the sounds of the carousel. The music, undisturbed in her head for decades, returns to astonish her, and her eyes fill with tears of happiness. She would like to introduce her aunt and Janake to Simon. Could this dream ever become a reality? She walks past the butchers with its sawdust spilling out on to the pavement. She has been walking this route for so many years that she hardly notices it any more. The large Muslim community, settled like a flock of birds on this part of Brixton, means nothing to her. They are merely another group of displaced people taking their chances like the rest, trying to make some sort of life. Alice is thirty years ahead in the struggle; she has done her time. Unfamiliar feelings tug at her heart as she walks. Her feet have wings. As she passes under the railway bridge she hears a run of piano notes and looks up towards an open window in a shabby house. Love comes from the most unlikely places,
she thinks, smiling to herself. She can’t stop smiling today. The day reminds her of her ninth birthday and the train that took her to her grandfather’s house.