ALICE LOVED BRIXTON BEACH. Even at the very beginning she knew the house was not the problem. Once she had named it she set about painting the rooms. She painted the bedroom first; a deep aquamarine turquoise. But Tim hated it. It was an unhappy moment and brought on their first argument. Something had to, she supposed, surprising herself with a sharp flash of defiance. She apologised quickly, but the room was already painted. Then, after their disagreement had been brushed aside, she lime-washed the kitchen a delicate duck-egg blue. Feeling the urge to go back to her painting again she decided one of the rooms would be her studio. Tim agreed; he didn’t want her mess all over the house. So she turned the third bedroom into her studio.
Although,’ Tim said, frowning, ‘where will the visitors sleep?’
But there were no visitors, Tim’s parents, and Sita too, preferred to be visited in their own homes.
That was that. The routine of married life commenced. They both wanted it to work. In that at least there was no doubt. Around this time Sita began forgetting to telephone them.
‘Why don’t you ring us, Mama?’ Alice asked when she went round with the shopping.
‘I don’t know,’ her mother admitted. ‘I think I must have lost the phone number.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Let me write it down, again.’
On the third occasion, Tim looked at Alice archly. He understood what the problem was.
‘It’s obvious,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Can’t you see?’
‘What d’you mean?’ Alice asked him, a flash of anger crossing her face. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her!’
Tim grimaced.
‘I know she’s a bit young,’ he said. ‘But it has been known to happen. Take her to the doctor.’
Alice ignored him. Her mother was just fine and she herself was working well. She had stopped making the constructed pieces she had made at art school and was beginning to paint again. As she stood sorting out her colours, she thought suddenly about David Eliot. She had been angry with him because of Sarah Kimberley but, she thought a little wistfully, she would have loved to have a conversation with him about her work now.
‘I might build a conservatory,’ Tim said, ‘when we’ve saved up a bit. It will be cheaper if I do it myself.’
Alice had no interest in the subject.
They had been married for only three months when a package came through the post with her name on it. Luckily she was alone when it arrived. The parcel contained all the artwork Alice had given David Eliot. Included was the painting she had done when her grandfather had died. A hastily scribbled note was attached with the date of David Eliot’s funeral, which had now passed. His death had come as a shock because she had assumed his treatment was working. The uncharacteristic anger, seen only twice before, welled up in her so powerfully that she crumpled the note up and threw it violently into the bin, along with everything else. Then she burst into tears. Afterwards she rescued the painting, simply because it was of the sea. When she propped it up in her new studio, her anger died down almost instantly. Soon after, she began having conversations with her grandfather. These increased when, a few weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant. The shock seemed to energise the voices inside her head. They swam like great shoals of fish around her. The past, returning out of banishment, was paying her a long overdue visit.
‘Nonsense,’ Tim told her, not really listening to what she was telling him.
His new job and his new status as a father-to-be were preoccupying him. He was pleased, though his mother, when she heard the news, was less certain.
‘Alice,’ Tim said, ‘it’s no good, all this living in the past.’
He paused for a moment, searching around for the right thing to say. He didn’t wish to be too harsh, but sometimes he felt she should stop indulging in all this sentiment.
‘The past is best forgotten,’ he told her firmly. ‘You can’t live with a foot in two places. It’s too disturbing.’
Alice saw he had a point. But, as if they sensed her desire to do away with them, the voices became more insistent.
Sita received the news of the pregnancy several times over. As always, she kept forgetting about it.
‘I’ve told you,’ Alice said after the fourth time. ‘I told you yesterday too.’
Sita shook her head and swore blind that this was not the case.
‘Oh God!’ Alice cried, despairingly.
‘I told you,’ Tim replied. ‘I think you should get some tests done. I think you should find out, once and for all’
But Alice couldn’t bear to.
‘Is she doing this to punish me?’ she asked him now.
Tim shook his head. He had a clearer view of things. It was what Alice liked in him, although he did express himself clumsily.
‘She’s going batty, of course,’ he observed. ‘Haven’t you noticed how she forgets everything you tell her? Alzheimer’s, I’d say.’
He was not speaking unkindly and was unprepared for another of her flashes of rage. But there it was, the word was out. Alzheimer’s!
‘Stress can trigger it,’ Tim said knowledgably. And she’s certainly had plenty of that!’
Alice had a sudden memory of her mother walking in through the gate at the Sea House. The image was shockingly clear. Bee stood behind her mother in dappled sunshine, his face grim. The baby began it, Bee said. And later, Kunal had finished it. Alice swallowed.
Perhaps losing her memory was no bad thing to happen to her mother, she thought, given that she had no happy memories. Looking back over all the years of her mother’s forgetfulness, Alice wondered if Sita had in some way willed this to happen.
By and large, Sita ignored the pregnancy. She was still busy dealing with the facts, as she remembered them, of her own failed one. One afternoon when she visited her, Alice was startled to see a row of dolls lined up on the sofa. The clothes looked familiar and seemed at odds with the straight blonde hair and pink skin of the dolls. Seeing her daughter’s face, Sita began to put them away.
‘I wasn’t expecting you for another hour,’ she complained, without looking at Alice.
‘Where are they from?’ Alice asked, confused, but Sita turned her back on her and began packing them away under her bed.
Alice stared at the familiar yellow and tan eiderdown and the piles of folded clothes that she associated with her mother’s bedroom. Something caught her eye as Sita hastily arranged the bedcovers.
‘How many of them have you got, Mama?’
Sita did not answer.
‘Mama,’ Alice cried, alarmed, ‘you’ve got loads more under the bed!’
Sita refused to be drawn. Pursing her lips, she marched crossly into the kitchen. All the way back to Brixton Beach, sitting on the bus, Alice puzzled over her mother’s collection of dolls. She could not put her finger on what was wrong.
‘I never knew she had them,’ she told Tim urgently, later that night.
‘Well, maybe you didn’t,’ Tim said reasonably. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’
But Alice knew; something was not quite right.
‘I think she’s dressing them in the dead baby’s clothes,’ she said quietly.
‘Oh Gawd! You really should take her to the doctor, you know.’
His obvious irritation reduced her to silence. It was only on a subsequent visit that Alice discovered that it was the boxes and not the dolls that were the problem. When next she visited Sita she took a furtive look under the bed. Each box had been lined with white silk. The dolls were lying face up in them. And when Alice put the lids back on, she saw the boxes were coffin-shaped. Trembling, she had no idea what she should do. Her mother had constructed these coffin boxes, carefully, using cardboard and glue. It would have taken hours of work. When had Sita done this? Had she been making coffins while Alice was still living at home? Had she been making them before Stanley walked out? Why had no one noticed? While she was crouched down beside the bed, Sita walked in.
‘Satisfied?’ she asked coldly. ‘What are you going to do now? Take them away from me? Tell your husband, Ted?’
‘Tim,’ Alice said automatically.
‘Tim, Ted, what’s the difference?’ Sita asked nastily, but she too was trembling. Are you going to take them away from me? Answer me!’
‘Mama,’ Alice said. ‘We should talk…’
But what was there to talk about after all this time? Who was to be blamed, who called to account and made to pay for what had been done to her mother? Me, thought Alice, with sudden, clear, insight. I will. And as she grasped the thought, the child inside her sighed and turned over in its sleep. She waited.
‘No, Mama,’ she said finally, softly, shaking her head. ‘No one will ever take them away from you.’
She did not tell Tim. She did not feel it was a betrayal; there were simply some things that she thought were best kept from him. So she remained silent. But she had reckoned without Tim himself.
‘You shouldn’t upset yourself,’ he told her reprovingly after one of her visits home. ‘Think of the baby. And,’ he paused, an idea turning slowly in his mind, ‘it might be better if you didn’t see her on your own, any more.’
‘She’s my mother!’ Alice cried and, once again, rage swelled unexpectedly.
And died down again. Tim shrugged and the baby kicked Alice sharply.
The next time she saw her mother she noticed the coffins had disappeared from under her bed.
‘Where are the dolls?’ she asked casually.
‘Why?’ Sita demanded suspiciously.
She had made a cake and iced it with pink royal icing.
‘Are you hoping for a girl?’
‘No, no, not particularly. We don’t mind what we have,’ Alice said. ‘I think Tim would like a girl, but I don’t care, really.’
‘No!’ Sita said, grimly. ‘Your husband isn’t getting his hands on your sister’s clothes. And if you must know, I’ve buried them in the garden,’ she added.
Alice was frightened. Her mother was getting worse. She decided Tim was right after all and they would have to see the doctor.
‘Well, if she does get worse, she’ll have to go into a home,’ Tim said when he heard. ‘There’s no two ways about it. You aren’t going to be able to cope.’
Alice ignored him. Lately Tim had begun to make her feel hopeless. Was this how her mother had felt for years and years? The shine that had surrounded her marriage had become less bright. She had not bargained for that.
‘It’s an old grief,’ the doctor told her, after he had spent time talking to Sita. ‘I would have expected it to pour out at some time or other. It’s just happening now.’
The doctor made it sound logical and Alice was slightly reassured. She did not tell Tim everything the doctor said. Nor did she speak of the unexpected intrusion of her grandfather’s voice in her dreams. And then, when she had almost come to believe she would remain in this state of swollen, ungainly limbo forever, on a night of velvet stars, without any warning her waters broke and the baby, a boy, was born.
Nothing had prepared her for it.
‘I wish my grandfather could see him,’ she told Tim.
They had called the baby Ravi. Tim had been inclined to argue, but Alice had suddenly become fierce. She wanted the child to be called Ravi, she told him, in a manner that brooked no argument. Tim had no idea she could be so stubborn.
‘Hormones,’ his mother said, pessimistically. ‘It’s a pity, but I’d give in on this one. He can change it when he’s older. No doubt he’ll want to!’
Alice’s mother looked confused when she heard the name.
‘I remember that name,’ she mumbled. ‘Was it your father’s?’
Tim guffawed.
‘No, Mama, his name is Stanley,’ Alice told her patiently. ‘Can’t you remember how you loved the name Ravi?’
There was no point in bringing up the past, but she wished with passionate longing that her grandfather was alive.
‘Just so I could hear his opinion,’ she told Tim, unable to drop the subject. ‘I would have loved to know what he would think of his great-grandson! Although,’ she added, laughing, ‘I could just imagine it.’
Her face was startlingly animated. Tim stared at her. She looked flushed and desirable, reminding him why he had wanted her in the first place.
‘So could I,’ he said. ‘Didn’t he hate the English?’
‘Oh no, I don’t think so. It was just that…‘ she paused, struggling. ‘In any case, Ravi is half English, so how could he hate the English?’
But Tim was suspicious.
‘From everything you’ve told me, he might have caused trouble. Best the way things are.’
Hearing this, she wished she had kept her mouth shut. She had thought Tim would love everyone she loved.
‘He was very funny,’ she said faintly, unable to let go of the subject, yet having no means of expressing what she felt.
The child in her arms woke and cried. It was at that moment, as she rocked him back to sleep, that Alice began to realise how much she longed for the sea again. All her homesickness, dealt with so efficiently for so many years, had, with the momentous event of motherhood, returned to torment her. She felt an urgent desire to replicate those things that once had been hers for the sake of the sleeping infant; her son, Ravi. Sensing the impossibility of making amends, she was glad that at least she had won the right to name him. Ravi, the name of her mother’s forgotten dream-child.
Thinking this contentment would last, she watched as spring turned slowly into summer and the child grew. Sighing with a happiness of sorts, she believed life had at last moved full circle. Her dreams for Ravi began to grow. At last she had someone to dream for.
So, our Alice has a son, huh? she imagined her grandfather telling her grandmother. What d’you say to that?
And she imagined him nodding, for of course he would have been delighted by the news.
‘One day I will take you home,’ Alice told her sleeping child. ‘One day I will take you back to where I belong and you will see a sea so blue that it will appear joined to the sky, seamlessly. I will show you the rock where I carved my name,’ she planned. Alice Fonseka, Age 10, Colombo, Sri Lanka, The World, The Universe.
The child opened his dark eyes and in the moment before he cried, she saw herself reflected in them. Motherhood fluttered within her. By the time Tim returned from work, she had lost another day in dreams.
His wife’s island within its reef of bright waters was out of sight, and life teemed noisily in his own house but Tim was uneasy. His innate sense of order was being eroded. Ravi was what mattered, he insisted, needing to be sure that Alice’s past was erased. Tim knew he would have to be the one to banish it. The two lives could never be compatible. The sea and all it stood for would simply have to go.
‘I don’t mind,’ he said, reasonably. ‘I don’t have a problem with Asians, obviously, and I like the curries. But,’ he added, warming to the subject, ‘at the end of the day…’
Her heart sank. She was becoming a little too used to the idea of what happened at the end of Tim’s day.
At the end of the day, I don’t think of you as Asian, not really. You’re British, you’re one of us. You’ve lived here so long you wouldn’t know what to do even if you were forced to go back. In fact,’ he continued, glad she was not arguing with him for once, ‘I guarantee you’d be scared if you were suddenly told to go back to that bloody place!’
The thought amused him and Alice saw with relief that it was possible to hide all she felt and join in with his laughter. But later on, when he thought she was asleep in front of the television, she heard him telling his mother unhappily that he had married her without understanding this whole Asian thing.
‘They’re a bunch of weirdoes,’ he had said. ‘Not Alice, but I mean generally speaking. They’ve got a lot of mumbo-jumbo attached to them!’
He was silent.
‘It’s not Alice’s fault,’ he mumbled, finally. ‘I blame her parents.’
Tim sounded confused. He had married Alice in good faith, he told his mother.
‘It could be a touch of post-natal depression,’ the doctor said, when Alice visited him. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about your dreams. How’s your mother?’
Tim cooked their meals. Alice, up all night with the screaming Ravi, was exhausted. He cooked two sorts of meals. One where he emptied piles of spices into the chicken curry, and a second meal with mashed potatoes and cheddar cheese, for himself. They coped somehow and every morning, with more than a little relief, Tim escaped to work. The Health Visitor soon got the picture.
‘It’s your grandpa, luv, isn’t it?’ she asked, gently helping Alice clamp the baby’s pink mouth on the nipple.
Breast is best, she told the girl, thinking what a pity it was that these girls looked so lovely just when they felt so exhausted. Nature is full of wastage, the Health Visitor thought privately. And she didn’t like the husband either. The baby waved his tiny hand, suckling greedily.
‘Did you do these?’ the Health Visitor asked, picking up Alice’s sketchbook.
The book was filled with drawings of her grandfather.
Don’t take any notice, Bee’s voice so close in her ear made Alice jump. Get on with bringing up the child, my great-grandson. I don’t know where you found the fool you’re married to, but you are a mother now, so enjoy it. And don’t forget to plant those seeds. You’ve been a long time in growing them. I gave them to you when you were nine and you are twenty-one now. How long do they have to wait?
She heard the plaintive circular cry of a bird and for a split second could not imagine where she was, or even where reality began and ended. Her grandfather’s voice was very clear. It came from beyond the reef, floating somewhere on the horizon. There was a ship sitting on the horizon too. I wish you were here, she thought.
I’m already with you, her grandfather replied. And for God’s sake, feed the child. I can’t stand the screaming.
Out of the blue she got a letter. It had come via her mother’s address; Alice picked it up on one of her weekly visits. Sita welcomed her vaguely. She had given up her work some time ago, finding it too confusing to remember the names of her clients or the instruction for alterations. After a few disasters she was forced to stop, and now she lived on a disability pension. She showed only a marginal interest in the baby. When he cried she covered her ears with her hands, shouting to Alice that she couldn’t stand the sound, and she refused to hold him. After a while she tolerated his presence although she still would not touch him. But it was Tim whom Sita had begun to really loathe, confusing him with Stanley. Eventually, much to Tim’s relief, Alice began visiting Sita on her own, taking the baby with her. She went several times a week, doing the shopping, clearing up the kitchen, checking her mother was eating properly.
‘She’ll have to go into a home soon,’ Tim kept warning. ‘It’s a matter of time, that’s all.’
Alice continued to ignore his warnings. She was becoming adept at ignoring the things she didn’t want to face. The thought of her mother in a home was more than she could bear. On the morning she received the letter, Sita seemed more distracted than usual.
‘Have you brought me some fish?’ she asked.
‘No, should I have? Have you had breakfast?’
‘I’m very busy,’ Sita said coldly. ‘Can’t you see how busy I am? I don’t want any of the neighbours nosing around here.’
‘Mama,’ Alice said, and then she stopped.
The dolls were back out of their coffins.
‘Why have you got them out again, Mama?’
Ravi began to cry in his pram in the hall.
‘Don’t let any of those doctors near him,’ Sita said, disappearing into the kitchen.
In the hall was a pile of unopened letters that Alice picked up, with Ravi in her arms. A Sri Lankan stamp caught her eye, but she didn’t recognise the handwriting. It was not her aunt’s. The letter was addressed to her. There had been no response to her announcement about Ravi’s birth several months ago and she had assumed the post was not getting through again. But the letter, when she opened it, was not from May. It was from Janake.
‘Who?’ asked Sita frowning.
She had cooked Alice some hot boiled rice and was slicing a very ripe mango into it. Alice was feeding Ravi and reading her letter. Sita sliced some green chillies into the rice and served her daughter.
‘Who?’ she asked again.
Alice ate a spoonful of rice absent-mindedly.
‘He’s coming to England,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember Janake? I used to play with him by the rocks.’
She paused, her eyes sparkling. The beach came back to her fresh as a new day, served up with the fragrance of the hot rice her mother had cooked and the drawing sensation of Ravi’s small mouth as he fed on her.
‘He’s coming to Chiswick, to the Buddhist temple. I’d forgotten he was a Buddhist priest,’ she said, amazed.
And she saw again, with extraordinary clarity and a long, lost ache, the rocks, dark and cool against the sun as she carved her name on them. Her grandfather sat under the shade of the coconut palm, his back resting neatly against the broken catamaran, watching them splash in the shallows, listening to their laughter, knowing he was soon to lose her, unable to follow where she was going. How had the memory been lost?
‘I’ve begun to remember all sorts of things,’ she told Tim that evening when Ravi was asleep and they were eating their supper in front of the television. Tim grunted, his eyes fixed on the news. He reached for his can of beer. Since Ravi was born, there seemed less conversation between them.
‘I thought we would go home on Saturday. The little ‘un has grown so much since they have seen him last, I don’t want them to miss out on anything.’
Home, the word struck her with new resonance. The letter from Janake was in her studio; somehow it wasn’t the moment to mention it.
Nor did she, a month later, mention her meeting at a small café near the Buddhist temple in Chiswick. Janake stood at the entrance to Ravenscourt Park tube station. She knew it was him, even from behind; she recognised the back of his head. She had not known what to expect. Would he be in saffron robes like the Hari Krishna tribes who wandered the streets of London with their tambourines? Would people stare at them? At the last moment she hadn’t wanted to go. But Ravi was in his pram asleep and the day was one of late winter sunshine, casting shadows on the pavement. Fake spring, thought Alice, knowing by now how the weather could take a turn for the worse when it was least expected. It was too late to change her mind. Janake saw her as she crossed the road. He stood uncertainly, recognition instant. He’s grown up, she thought, confused by the current of emotion that flooded over her.
Alice?’ he asked as she hurried towards him, tangling up in his mind with the flower stall selling tulips beside the tube station.
Alice? Is it really you?’
He was wearing a thin coat and dark trousers. She saw he was wearing closed-toed shoes. No, she decided later, it wasn’t what she had expected.
‘Janake! Oh my God!’ she laughed, delighted, feeling the warmth of this February sun as though it was suddenly tropical. ‘I would have recognised you anywhere!’
‘How long has it been?’
‘How are you?’
They spoke together. And then laughed together. She’s beautiful, he thought, astonished. Why does he look so sad? she wondered.
The moment froze even as the traffic moved. Like parts of a silent film, thought Janake. Red buses, dark blue cars. Everything must look so dark to him, she thought, seeing the street with his eyes. But he was looking at the tulips, wishing he had some money to buy her some, thinking how bright they looked. Just like her.
‘So?’ he said instead, peering at the contents of the pram where a tightly bundled Ravi slept.
Alice was lost for words, wreathed in smiles. They were both lost for words.
‘There is a café nearby,’ he said when he had hugged her, taking her arm.
It amused her that he showed such confidence here in London after such a short time. There was so much to talk about and she wanted to make a start before Ravi woke. The last time they had seen each other had been with the sea as a backdrop.
‘So long ago,’ she sighed as she stirred her tea. ‘How long are you here for?’
‘One month,’ he said helplessly.
He should not have come, he realised. It had been a foolish desire to see her again. It astonished him, the look of her, the instant effortless connection, the way the day had begun to clutch at his heart. He swallowed. There were things he had to say.
‘I know we’ve lost touch,’ she was saying. ‘Ever since…’ she stopped, not wanting to mention her grandparents.
Janake nodded. He could not stop looking at her. It was as though he had been denying an undetected thirst for a long time.
‘You know my aunt never even replied when I wrote and told her Ravi was born,’ Alice complained, before she could stop herself. ‘She has forgotten us.’
Janake glanced at her. Again he swallowed.
‘No,’ he said.
He could not bear this. Alice did not seem to hear him.
‘Sometimes I think I just dreamed my childhood,’ she said, shaking her head so that her hair loosened itself from the pleat at the back of her head.
Laughing she brushed it away from her face. Time is like the sea against the rocks, thought Janake. Changing everything, very slowly, as if by magic. We were both such children.
‘It hasn’t been all that easy for us here,’ she said, thinking of her absent father and her mother, absent in a different way.
She wanted to tell Janake about her mother’s dolls. She wanted to tell someone who would not judge her for it. Someone who would still love Sita even though her mind was going. She wanted, she realised, her own people.
I must have always felt it, Janake thought. I must have always thought of her in this way, without knowing it. He felt he was in danger of losing his grasp on everything he had built up; his life, without her. I shouldn’t have come, he thought again. Danger lurked within his heart.
‘I know the war was terrible,’ Alice said. ‘But—’
‘There is something I must tell you,’ Janake said quickly, interrupting her.
The palms of his hands were clammy.
‘Alice…your cousin Sarath has disappeared,’ he said. ‘One night there was a dawn raid on the town and a white van appeared driving up the coast. The van went on a house-to-house search. Everyone was asleep, but one by one the street was woken. The men knocked at your aunt’s house. When your uncle tried to put the light on, they hit him until he was unconscious. Your aunt was screaming and the noise woke Sarath. He switched on his torch and as he came out they grabbed hold of his arm and tried to drag him away. Your aunt was crying and holding on to him, but they pulled him away even as she sobbed. She begged them in Singhalese, as she had begged over a Tamil boy in her school, many years ago. You won’t remember, you were small. But it was no use. They hit her and punched Sarath across the face. Then they dragged him out into the van and drove away. The whole thing must have taken about five minutes. That was all. Your uncle Namil was lying in a pool of blood.’
Janake stopped and took a deep breath. Alice sat motionless, her face frozen.
‘That was ten months ago. Just before Ravi was born. Your uncle was in a coma for several weeks. The local doctor would not touch him. A neighbour took him to the hospital in Hikkaduwa. Eventually he regained consciousness, but then he had a stroke and now he is an invalid. May has to do everything for him; she bathes him, feeds him—everything. He cannot speak. But sometimes he starts crying, and that is the worst thing for her. Because, however hard she has tried to find him, there has been no news about Sarath. He has simply vanished,’ Janake said, lowering his voice, looking into Alice’s dark and luminous eyes.
Alice saw Janake once more before he returned to the university in Peradeniya. The temple in Chiswick allowed him no more time for anything else. His face had looked pinched with the cold, and the sense of the sea that he had brought back to her so vividly had faded. Already he looked as though he was preparing for flight.
‘How do you stand this cold?’ he asked, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘It reaches my bones!’
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.
‘I’m tired,’ she told Alice peevishly. ‘I don’t want anything to eat.’
‘But I’m just serving the rice, Amma,’ Alice protested.
‘No, no, Bee, I don’t want anything to eat. Good-night.’
And she disappeared into her room.
‘She called you “Bee”,’ Ravi said, not taking his eyes off the television.
‘Yes, I know. She hasn’t done that before.’
Alice found her later when she went in to check on her before going to bed. Sita’s eyes were closed. She was cold. Colder than she had been since the day, twenty years before, when she had left the tropics.