Homesick (21 page)

“Mum!” But Shamini launched into another story.

“… the little man said something
so funny
the other day. He is
so
intelligent. Who knows, he may become the first doctor in the family!”

“Will you stop for a minute? I need to ask you something …”

“Let me finish, will you? It is
so funny
.”

“Mum—what happened to Dad? I mean, I’ve never asked you. Has Deirdre ever asked you?” She heard Shamini pause, take a breath.

“Of course she hasn’t asked me, because she is my
daughter
, who
cares
about my
feelings
!”

“Oh, Ma. Don’t start now.”

“How is Tony?” Shamini asked, with a sniff.

“Don’t change the subject. Did he die?”

“Did he die? Did he
die
?! Don’t you think I would have told you?”

“You haven’t told me anything. And Tony is the reason I’m calling.”

“He’s asked you to marry him, hasn’t he?” Suddenly she was elated. “You can get married in the university chapel. There is a chapel there, isn’t there?”

“Ma, I’ve got to go—”

“And then I won’t hear from you for another three months. I’m getting old, darling. What if I were to just roll over and die one morning? I know who I would call—Deirdre,
that’s
who.”

“So if he didn’t die, why did he not contact us? Why have we just got on with everything without him?”

“Because it is better that way.”

“What is? Life? My life? Deirdre’s life? Your life? I think I have a right to know my own father.”

“Hoity-toity, little Lolly,” she chanted, something she had started to do in those grim months after her cousin had been arrested.

“Don’t, Mum. I need his address, then.”

“Why? What will you do?” She sounded panicked, perhaps even afraid.

“I’ll write to him, and then Tony and I will go and see him.”

“No. I refuse to give you his address.”

“Don’t be stupid, Ma.”

“You use
this
language to me? Wait till I tell Deirdre—”

“Just give me the address.”

•

When she was six, her father took her to Sri Lanka. He took her by herself, and she remembered the glory of being completely his and he being completely hers. She did not now remember why he chose her and why he left Deidre
behind. They took two planes, landing in Bombay at dawn: she remembered his carrying her off the plane and raising her head from his shoulder to show her the sunrise. She remembered his camera, a Leica, which he carried as close to his chest as he carried her: he put her down on the tarmac and took a photo of the rising sun. He turned to her and said—what was it he said? He said, “For you to remember.” She had never been anywhere so hot or been awake so early in the morning. Of that trip, all she remembered was scattered moments of joy: meeting cousins who played and laughed in just the same way as her friends at school, yet who sounded more true, more real, and who looked beautiful despite being brown. At school, her friends said, “You have to be the clever one—you can’t be the pretty one, because you’re coloured.” In Sri Lanka there were beauty queens and ugly beggars with leprosy on the street and grandmothers and schoolchildren and Buddhist priests and market tradesmen and great-aunts who were troublesome and uncles who could do tricks with slim silver coins—and all of their faces were varying shades of brown, from tan to blue-black-brown, and Louisa stood among them and not apart from them.

Her father was the same shade as she, what her friends called “red Indian colour,” and when her aunts stroked her cheeks, they looked at her fondly and said, “She is so fair! So beautiful!” Her father, she remembered, was good-looking, with the wide eyes and aquiline nose of a Westerner or an Indian film star. If she was not playing with her cousins that summer, she would sit on her father’s lap as he lounged in a planter’s chair on the veranda of his parents’ old colonial house, on the Galle Road just outside Colombo. The fan would be brought out for “baby,” as the old servants called her, and sometimes she would read as she listened
to her father and his father talking in their peculiar mix of Sinhala and English. And sometimes she would doze off and wake to find the light already dimming at five and her father heaving her into the arms of her grandmother, who would take her to the bathroom to douse her awake with a cold-water shower. Then off they would go again, into the evening’s heat in her grandfather’s old Austin, to visit more friends or cousins, uncles or aunts, or to eat in restaurants that looked out to an always-raging sea.

One night they were coming home late and she was talking to him, she remembered, but he was quiet, and he listened and laughed at whatever silliness she was saying. She was holding his hand, and she traced the veins on the back of it, knowing that he belonged only to her. He said, “Do you like it here?” He said, “Little Lolly?” No, he never called her Lolly, nor did he call her Louisa. What did he call her? She could not remember. He looked out of the window into the dark night, and he cried out suddenly. They were driving up from Matara along dark, unmade country roads, and the driver swerved and stopped. Her father told the driver to stop, and he leapt out of the car. And this is what Louisa remembers most clearly: her father’s face as he looked back into the car at her, his hand outstretched to her, and she knew that hand would always be there as an offering, as an assurance. “Come, darling,” he said, and she slid against the sweaty, leather seat, out into the dark.

All around her, dancing about her head and shoulders, were fairy lights. Fairy lights that flew around and around. Her eyes stilled so that she saw only lights and the whites of her father’s eyes. “See if you can catch them, darling!” he shouted, laughing and dancing about her as he cupped his hands and lunged. Here, she loved him, here. This moment was in a cream envelope, in stasis. The glowworms flew
around and around inside that cream envelope, and she had not opened it, had left it on a shelf behind a strong door, in case his hand had never been there—in case, in the interim years, the glowworms had flown away.

•

The librarian phoned down from the reading room.

“Tony’s here. He says he made an appointment, but he’s not in the book.” Louisa sat back in her chair, looked about her office, at its shelves full of accession registers and the dogeared poster of common paper-eating insects taped to the filing cabinet, the old rattling radiator.

“Ask him where he wants to start,” she said. She heard her question relayed to Tony.

“He says—at the beginning.”

She took her bunch of keys and went across the corridor to the locked storeroom: her domain, with its stale smell of dust and creaky leather and the bad breath of dead paper and ink. Margaret sat nearest to the door, the newest collection, not catalogued but in perfect chronological order. Margaret had been easy to organise: she was a meticulous writer, keeping working notes with her daily diaries, letters, too, within the day in the diary when it was received. She had even marked envelopes with “important” or “should throw away.” It had been easy for Louisa to package up the papers and notebooks and diaries, pencilling dates onto the envelopes and then onto the boxes, before she put each on top of the other, the layers the strata of a poet.

The first box contained Margaret’s teenage years. This would not be what Tony wanted to read about, Louisa was certain. After all, he was born when Margaret was twenty-five: surely he would want these diaries? But she took him at his word and brought out the first envelope,
her diary for her fourteenth year. He wanted to start at the beginning.

She took the envelope up to the reading room herself. She held it the way she held all scripts that came from the vaults, her left hand a tray under the envelope, her right hand resting on top. She walked slowly up the stairs, passing a boy with his earplugs in and a girl shouting directions into her phone. She walked slowly, ploddingly. Reaching the top of the stairs, she smiled bravely, but suddenly she kissed the envelope, as if it were a child fostered in her care and now to be handed over to its real parent. She pushed open the door of the reading room, and there he stood, awkwardly, like a stranger, the man who brought her a cup of tea this morning, the man whose easy nakedness was comical in his strides about her attic flat, his head grazing against sloping ceilings, his discordant singing filling the quiet spaces of her life. She handed the envelope to him as though he were any other reader with an appointment. Tony took it as if he were any other reader, too. He nodded and sat at a table, his hands reaching eagerly into the envelope, extracting the diary, his head sinking toward it as though the tiniest invisible hairs on his face were ashy filaments of iron pulled by his mother’s words. Louisa turned away and went back down to her office.

•

Louisa walked about her mother’s house with her naked feet sloshing. The pregnancy had been relatively trouble-free, except now, in the heat, water swam under her skin. Her feet were swollen into a caricature of themselves, the lines on her normally elegant toes had almost all disappeared, and the toes laughed up at her like ten swollen Buddhas. In the distension of her body, there was a calm, rhythmical
verse, she thought, and the words that made it were limbs, hands, face, head, cord: all her daughter, all her secret. She called her Margaret already, and the child was as much the outcome of the love Louisa bore for her grandmother as of that for her father. She balanced, head nestled into Louisa’s cervix, ready to be pushed forth, and every now and then Louisa would feel the muscles tighten, and she would breathe slowly out, allowing the air to hiss away. Tony would glance up then, smile, watch her in her compact, private world.

He was looking through an album of photographs. It was Louisa’s childhood, just one album. Faded photographs of Deirdre and Louisa in matching Crimplene frocks at a Sri Lankan wedding; another of Louisa by herself peering upward, through a curtain of hair on one side, hands behind her back, in a skirt that was too short, her knees dirty and socks around her ankles. Deirdre always smiled. Often Louisa looked to the side, as if looking for someone behind the camera. No smile for Lolly, Louisa thought. She paused in her walk about her mother’s living room to look over Tony’s shoulder.

“Why did I never smile?” she asked no one in particular. At the moment she never stopped smiling. Tony and she just had to look at each other, and she would grin, dance with the knowledge of what she carried. A child! Her child!

“Oh, you. You were miserable. Never smiled, always moody,” her mother said. Shamini shifted in her seat, to pull herself up to look at the pictures more clearly. Tony looked back and winked at Louisa. She did not mind her mother. It did not matter. She walked on. The room no longer bothered her: for years the chaos of boxes and magazines, the old furniture in disrepair, the dirty yellow carpets, the piles and piles of books, unsorted on shelves and stacked on the
floor, would have ruined a visit to her mother’s. She would have started to clear small pockets, putting black bags of ten-year-old Sunday-supplement magazines out to be recycled, taking Deirdre’s broken Barbies to the charity shop, while Shamini would sit impassively in the middle of the room, telling her how unnecessary her actions were. “I can never find anything when you have visited,” she would say. And of course, when Louisa returned, fresh chaos would await, to scold her and make her feel lost within it. Now her feet splashed about the puddles of magazines and books and albums and unfinished knitting, and she cared very little about any of it, for somehow the space between her mother and herself was no longer filled with yearning or pain. The space was filled with flesh growing inside her, flesh that could be given time and love and protection and the kindness that had somehow passed the child Lolly by.

“Who is this?” Tony asked, almost too eagerly. Louisa walked back and stopped. Over his shoulder, she saw a picture of Kumar. Even
he
could not stop her smile.

“
That
is my cousin,” replied Shamini. “He is dead now. He lived with us for a few months, and then he was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit—do you know, these ‘miscarriages of justice,’ they are a terrible thing. But now, you see, he is dead anyway. I never liked him, though, filthy habits. Never washed. And he was a drunk.…”

Louisa said, “You never told me he died.”

“Why should you want to know?”

“So I could dance on his grave.”

Shamini looked around quickly. “Why would you say that? What a strange thing to say.”

“I hated him, Ma.”

“Why? What harm did he do to you?” And then Louisa’s mother understood. She understood her daughter’s
eyes, understood the years of hurt: she had known already. Louisa could see. She had known but had put it aside, and Louisa recognised herself in her mother’s pursed lips. “No, they cleared him—ten years later, they cleared him,” Shamini said.

“Yes,” Louisa said, and she started her journey back toward the French doors, deciding to step into the sunny garden beyond and leave it all behind. But then she stopped.

“How did he die? I wonder if it hurt?”

“Oh, well, you may as well know. He was strangled, and someone threw him down a well.”

Tony laughed. Louisa turned back and laughed, too.

“It is no laughing matter, child! It’s a family secret, you know?”

“Whose family?
Our
family? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you never asked about him. Deirdre asked about him, and I told her. But you never ask about anything.”

“I asked about my father—almost a year ago, and you wouldn’t give me the address.”

“I was upset.”

“Someone threw him down a well?” Tony said, incredulous and brave at last. “Louisa’s uncle was strangled, and they threw him down a well?” And then he laughed again.

“These things happen,” Shamini said expansively. “Now that you … I am glad of it,” she said finally, patting Louisa’s hand. “Come, let’s go and eat. I made chicken curry. And
vambuttu
the way you like it.” She got unsteadily to her feet and pulled herself this way and that, loosening her arthritic hips. “If you would have told me, Lolly,
I
would have killed him myself.” She turned to Louisa and affectionately pulled her daughter’s bulk to her chest, hooking her arms about her neck. “Poor little Lolly,” she said.