ONE EVENING TOWARDS THE END OF May 2004, at the moment between twilight and darkness, a man approaching late middle-age stood gazing out of the window of a first-floor flat in Kennington Park Road. The man was Dr Simon Swann, senior vascular consultant at St Thomas’s Hospital. Almost forty-five years old, he was the holder of what could be called a liberal, carefully compartmentalised life. In his quiet, focused way he had achieved most of those things a man of his age could want, with his teenage daughter Cressida and his wife Tessa of twenty years. It was a considerable achievement, given that this was post 9/11 with its rolling rogue wave of terror. It seemed only yesterday that Simon and Tessa had marched up to London, carrying one of Cressida’s WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER placards. It had been a rare moment of unity between the Swanns, who had seen eye to eye with a feeling akin to passion for the whole of that hot summer’s day. It hadn’t worked, of course. Neither the eye-to-eye business as a family nor, as it turned out, the nation’s desire to stop the war. Given the undermining clashes they suffered as a family, how could he be surprised by the subsequent decision of the government to invade Iraq? Simon merely lost a little more hope. For a while he saw the years ahead rattle like dead leaves. But then time had gently blunted his dismay, turned it into the more acceptable philosophical approach, shifted his melancholy a little. So that now, a year later, the whole sorry mess was something one read about in the newspapers and occasionally shook one’s head over. For after all, what could anyone do? Realistically speaking, life had to go on. So in order to ensure this dreary fact, Simon continued to do the bit he had always done, and was good at: saving what life was put in his hands without discriminating between race or class or creed. Patients, those in the know, always asked for him.
The Swanns still had two houses. One an angular and efficient flat in town, close to the hospital where Simon worked, and another, softer, more faded house in the country, where the china was Eric Ravilious and there were Nicholsons on the walls and some wonderful Bloomsburyish and delightfully English curtains. Outside this house there were sheep, the cliffs and the sea. The beautiful Sussex coastline. Now, as he stood in the London flat listening to his favourite opera broadcast live over the radio, Simon Swann felt the approaching summer flex its green fingers, reaching upwards towards him through the open window. It was still light outside, the pure full light before twilight. He could see the park reflected in the windows. The air was pleasantly warm and the sky was stained pink with the remains of an unusually beautiful day. Tomorrow will be fine, he thought, watching the evening star rise above him. Below him, the traffic was flowing easily at last in the busy London street. The rush hour was almost over as the music he listened to began reaching its climax. As he listened, in a silent space inside him, muffled by his external life, he felt another self, marking time. Overhead the twinkling lights of a plane coming into land at Heathrow was followed almost immediately by two more planes hovering into view. The voices on the radio rose and fell, supported by a sweep of violins as he stared with blank eyes at the activities outside. However many times he listened to this final act of Tosca it never failed to move and remind him of another time, a lifetime ago now, when he had first heard it. So many years later it still sounded fabulous.
A tissue of memories floated along with the final moments of the opera, carrying him with it. He had been a young man then, sitting in the darkness of the Royal Opera House. The world had become a different place since that evening, changed beyond recognition—9/11 had altered everything. The country he lived in was no longer what it once was. Terror had returned to Britain and it was here to stay, leaving the inhabitants of this small island xenophobic and fearful. Once we had an Empire, he often thought, wryly; now we just have the suspicions left by the Empire! Simon hardly ever played this recording, knowing he would remain possessed by low-level depression for hours afterwards. It was a foolish thing, this conjuring up of a fragmentary time from his youth for which there was no room in his life now. He had been at medical school, going to the opera as often as he could afford to, hiding from everyone else the passion that had no place in his mundane, hard-working, existence. The girl had been sitting in front of him, close enough for him to see her profile, close enough for him to see she was alone. When the lights went on at the end he saw she was wearing a red dress. Her hair was very long and black. Something made her turn her head and their eyes met. He was close enough to see the dark downward sweep of her lashes and the perfection of her teeth as she smiled before he stood up to let someone pass. When he looked back at her seat, she was gone. On an impulse, brought on no doubt by the music, he left the auditorium but could not find her anywhere outside. She was lost amongst the crowds. He had bought a book of cheap tickets for the season but, by the time he saw her again, he had given up looking for her. It was a different opera this time: Mozart. As soon as the first act ended he saw her stand up and, making up his mind he hurried out, determined to accost her. But once again she disappeared. It was the same in the next interval. Then at last when the performance ended he followed her out of the building until, as they were both hurrying towards the tube station, he managed to talk to her. It was nothing really, he would tell himself later, nothing worth making a fuss about. They had gone into a pub for a drink, she had looked anxiously at her watch, not wanting to miss the last train, and they had talked. She was training to be a schoolteacher, she sang a little, there was no one special in her life at the moment, she told him. They had talked without stopping for over two hours. She missed the last train and he had found her a black cab. She gave him her phone number, scribbling it on a scrap of paper (why had he not given her his?) and he had promised to call her the next day. But carelessly, as he made his way home he had lost it. Perhaps it had fallen out of his pocket when he took his ticket out. Simon had gone back to Covent Garden, even though it meant he missed his last train and had to walk back to his lodgings. But although he had scoured the pavement he never found that piece of paper.
In the days that followed, he had looked everywhere in the street, going back again and again to the opera, queuing outside for returns. Paying far more than he could afford. Then, when he still did not see her, he had taken to waiting for the crowds to come out at the end of some of the performances, but to no avail. Cursing himself for his stupidity, he was unable to stay away from Covent Garden. Finding the girl had become a kind of obsession and for a time it was impossible to concentrate on anything else. His work began to suffer. A few months on, he met Tessa at a party. She had been surrounded by a group of people, mostly men. One man in particular appeared utterly infatuated with her, causing Tessa much amusement. Simon had noticed her derisive laughter and had been appalled. Unwisely, when she had come over to speak to him, he told her so. They had had a terrific row that had somehow ended with her going back to his place. She was not his type, their interests were very different, but a few weeks later he caught chickenpox and Tessa arrived to nurse him. One thing led to another. Too late, he saw what he had done. Fleetingly he thought of the dark-haired girl at the opera. But Tessa with her blonde hair and icy blue eyes had become his reality. Soon all their friends began to see them as a couple. Their mutual, hidden loneliness formed a cocoon around them both. It had been enough. He proposed marriage and she accepted without hesitation. Twenty years later here they were, with the life they had built together. Solid as a monument.
The music was over. Sensing someone had come into the room behind him from a waft of perfume, Simon turned. He picked up the invitation on the mantelpiece.
Drinks at six, he read. Followed by dinner. And please bring Tessa if she’s free! I haven’t seen you two together for ages.
So that was what he was doing. And they were late because of the music. It was his fault, he knew. Even before Tessa pointed it out to him.
‘I’m on call,’ he warned her as they left. ‘I might have to leave early. You’ll have to get a cab.’
She nodded slightly.
‘You never know, it might be interesting,’ he said, knowing Tessa did not want to go but wanting to break the slightly frosty silence.
He knew she was annoyed and trying not to be. She hated it when he listened to opera, particularly this one, aware it did strange things to him. The opera was one of many bones of contention between them, he thought heavily, manoeuvring his way through the traffic. Another was that he played his music too loud. She didn’t understand you needed to hear everything as though it were a live performance. She just thought he was going deaf. The evening light was beautiful. The mild depression had settled over him, just as he had known it would. The music threaded through his thoughts, regardless, conducting a conversation of its own. He had never told Tessa about his foolish non-encounter at Covent Garden.
‘Meeting his new woman, I mean,’ he continued regardless, glancing at her sideways.
‘Nothing could be worse than his last,’ Tessa said shortly. ‘She was truly dreadful.’
And she shuddered delicately, making him smile inwardly, in spite of the fact he’d rather liked the last one. He stopped the car and they got out in silence.
‘Well, here we are, Ralph!’ he said too heartily as the host opened the door.
And then they went in.
‘Just orange juice for me,’ he said. ‘I’m on call tonight.’
He watched as a beautiful nineteenth-century glass was filled with wine for Tessa. Tessa was looking around discreetly for the new woman.
‘I’m Simon Swann,’ he said to the man standing near him.
He turned to introduce Tessa but she had been whisked away by Ralph. There were hungry, admiring lions waiting, he guessed, pleased for her.
‘On the wagon, then?’ asked the man next to him.
‘Pardon?’
‘Not drinking?’
‘Oh, I see. No, no, I’m on call at the hospital tonight, that’s all’
‘Really? Can’t have an inebriated doctor, I suppose!’
‘No, exactly.’
‘What d’you do? Stitch up drunks?’
‘Bit of everything really. Emergency surgery, on nights like these,’ he said, sipping his orange juice and surveying the room.
There were a lot of people tonight, mostly here out of nosiness, he suspected. It would certainly not be for the food, Tessa had remarked earlier, for the host was well known for his uncertain culinary talent. The man next to him was looking a bit green. Liverish, thought Simon, out of habit.
‘So they know, when they see you, what’s coming, eh?’
Simon smiled gently, not minding, knowing how people were about the subject: squeamish, not wanting to see what might be around the corner of their own lives. So he smiled.
‘They’re not usually conscious,’ he said mildly.
Excusing himself, he went in search of Tessa. Snatches of music filled his head like ghosts. He could see her talking to the host’s new woman with a look of intense curiosity. He hoped she was not disappointed.
The empty glasses were cleared away by the new woman in a proprietorial way. They went into dinner, and Ralph, himself a medic, served up the veal.
‘Vitello Brasato all’ Uve!’ he announced, holding it high above the table, raising their hopes and expectations, toying with their appetite only to dash it hopelessly, so that several guests would stop at the fish-and-chip shop on the way home, and snuffle down a double cone of chips, all salt and grease and warmth straight from the fryer, before they would at last feel sated. But that was later. For the moment he simply brought in this dish, conjuring up in their minds the beautiful early summer full of expectancy and colour and surprise, the grapes plump and softened in the wine, the warm tartness of the fruit against the sweetness of the veal making a fine marriage. The guests waited with the fine claret in its cut-glass glinting ruby-red, and the candles in the polished holders glowed in the lit room, a token reference to bygone ages. The host placed his dish, rather as a conjurer would, on the mat on the high-gloss mahogany table to the soft sounds of appreciation around him. The women all wore black.
Tessa Swann glanced at her plate, her eyes glinting sharply. She’s in good form, thought Ralph, with the sharp eye of the psychiatrist. It did not stop him noting shrewdly that she had begun to wear the shadow of disappointment sometimes seen on the faces of once attractive women. She was not ageing well, he mused, chewing on his veal, frowning slightly with the effort. It wasn’t obvious to the casual observer yet, but Ralph wondered how conscious she was of the fact. Tessa Swann had always relied on her good looks, he decided, warming to his ruminations. But they had let her down now! Ralph imagined her forging ahead each morning with her brushes and her cover-up creams, unable to believe in her body’s betrayal. She had such an air of holding on. With a small frisson of excitement he began to think of her naked and in bed with him. Tessa smiled, aware of some approval on his part. Satisfied that his new woman wasn’t up to much, she relaxed. Triumph made her sharply defined, like a newly sandblasted statue. The host grinned. He felt a stirring in his elderly groin, a rising of what might pass for sap. He breathed in spring, when for him it was really autumn. It was a pity, but the new acquisition would have to go, thought Tessa, leaving the field clear for their continued, gentle flirtation conducted over many years and wholly undetected by Simon himself.
At the other end of the table Simon Swann was only half listening to a convoluted story told by the new woman. He had forgotten her name and was waiting for a pause in which to ask her it again. She was a long woman, he saw, with a torso that took up most of her frame, giving the appearance of a body stocking accidentally stretched in the wash. And, he observed mildly, she had a hypnotic manner. She was American and every subject that she raised—motherhood and adoption (she had tried neither, she told him), psychoanalysis and the nature of the soul or literacy in Bradford—every subject discussed was washed with the all-consuming twanginess of her voice. How did she do it? marvelled Simon. She had a lot to say, mesmerising them all, so that even the veal became unimportant in the face of so much energy. When she began to talk about the war in Iraq, Simon felt his eyelids become heavier. He stifled a yawn; he had been working late just recently. The American’s voice seemed to be running down, like vinyl being played at the wrong speed. Or perhaps she had simply lost interest in him, for she was now addressing her remarks to the man on her right. The veal was inedible, a discovery that spread slowly around the oval table, but even this did not bother Simon too much as with professional instinct and courteous manners he pushed the congealed cream, like regurgitated sick, around his plate. And then, just at that moment, the woman to the left of him spoke.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, startled out of his dream. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’
He had not seen her sitting there beside him, she was so small and the American woman had absorbed too much of the atmosphere, he realised, belatedly. The woman beside him sighed. She flashed him a look from huge dark eyes and for an instant Simon could not conceal his astonishment.
‘I was talking to myself,’ she said, slightly defiantly. ‘I was wondering how much more of this I would have to endure.’
Taken aback he laughed out loud. An alarming amount of defiance here, was his first amused thought.
‘I was thinking the same thing,’ he said before he could stop himself.
Across the table Tessa’s crystal earrings glinted dangerously. The light seemed to have a surge of sudden power, falling on the sparking table with new force.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, wishing the woman would look at him again. ‘How rude of me. I should have introduced myself. I’m Simon Swann.’
‘I’m Alice,’ the woman said unsmilingly.
He had to bend to hear her and then he caught a glimpse of her eyes once again. That was what he saw first, those eyes.
Are you a psychiatrist too?’ he asked.
She smiled unexpectedly. Her eyes went on smiling far longer than they needed to, he noticed. There was something very arresting about her appearance, which was dark. Exotic, he supposed, was the word.
‘Oh God, no!’ she was saying. I’m not quite sure why I’m here. Antonia invited me. She thought it would be good publicity.’
Antonia?’
‘The woman you were talking to,’ she said, nodding in the direction of the American, who had moved on and was now deep in conversation with the man across the table.
‘She’s a friend of yours?’
‘God no! She just exhibits my work. I believe she thought it would be good for my next exhibition. Actually, I think she wanted me as moral support. Not that she needs any’
Simon looked confused.
‘She’s just met Ralph,’ Alice said patiently. ‘Our host. And she told me this would be a dinner for medics and she wouldn’t know anyone. So,’ she shrugged, ‘I said I’d come. I must say, he can’t cook, can he?’
Simon gave a shout of laugher, hastily stifled, and the woman stared at him.
I’m sorry,’ she said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘But he can’t, can he?’
Again he noticed her eyes. They were truly enormous, he thought, mesmerised. And a little at odds with her manner, which had a curious flatness to it. He hesitated, wanting to ask her where she was from, but afraid of giving offence.
‘What sort of work do you do?’ he asked instead.
‘Me? I make sculptures.’
‘Really!
She glanced at him sharply. Evidently he passed the test because she seemed to relax a little.
‘What sort of sculptures?’ he asked once more, encouragingly.
About my life.’
He registered the deadpan inflection in her voice again and was silent, not knowing what to say.
‘What I mean is, they’re not pretty nudes,’ Alice said, with the faintest trace of amusement in her voice.
She took a small sip of wine and pulled a face, keeping her eyes lowered. He had the distinct feeling she didn’t want to have anything more to do with him, maybe even regretted talking to him. In fact, he had a strong sense that she had withdrawn from the table altogether. Her face in profile was arresting. Also her voice had no trace of an accent, he thought, puzzling over this. Obviously she was from some Asian country but he could not decide where it might be. It was not, he felt sure, India. And although he would have liked to ask several questions, the woman’s shuttered face seemed to forbid it. Her dark lashes covered her eyes, turning them into elongated buds. He stole another look at her.
Ah! I see you’ve met Alice,’ Ralph cried, appearing from behind and removing their plates. He replaced them with small pudding bowls. ‘Alice is an artist, you know.’
‘So I hear,’ Simon nodded.
‘Has she told you, she’s got an important exhibition coming up soon? I’ve told Antonia she must send us an invitation. You mustn’t forget,’ he added loudly, smiling broadly at Alice. Tessa was staring steadily at Simon across the table.
‘Yes,’ Alice said softly. ‘I do understand. I speak English!’
Only Simon heard her. Touchy, he thought, noticing Ralph had had a bit too much to drink. Antonia must have had the same thought, for suddenly she was beside him, holding a dish.
‘Now, who’s for summer pudding?’
‘Not for me, thank you,’ Alice said.
Simon had the feeling that she was fuming quietly. He opened his mouth to say something and, just at that moment, just as he felt he had discovered someone interesting in the evening, his bleeper went off.
‘Damn,’ he said gently. ‘I’m on call tonight.’
‘Oh dear! Now you won’t be able to sample my excellent pudding,’ Ralph said plaintively.
‘Lucky you!’ murmured Alice.
Tessa, watching across the table, made a small moue of irritation and the man next to her laughed sympathetically. Twice in two days.
What’s the point? Tessa was thinking privately. After all, he hardly ever saves them.
‘Should I drive you?’ she asked, her concern suddenly and sharply proprietary.
‘Oh, goodness, no,’ murmured Simon. ‘I’ll drive myself, no need to worry. I’m afraid there must be a rush on if they’re calling me.’
He took out his pager.
‘Bad luck,’ Ralph commiserated.
‘For whom?’ asked one of the guests nervously.
Simon Swann pushed back his chair regretfully.
‘If I could just use your phone, Ralph. Very nice to have met you, Alice. Sorry I couldn’t stay. You must send us an invitation to your exhibition. When is it?’
She was looking at him as if she didn’t believe he was interested. Again he noticed how small she was. Her eyes reflected the candlelight unnervingly. Fleetingly she reminded him of someone he had met many years before.
‘In about a month,’ she said.
He searched in his pocket and found a piece of paper and scribbled his address down.
And then he was making for the door, checking he had his house keys, telling Tessa not to wait up for him. With a quick peck on her cheek, he was gone.
Far away in another time zone, dawn was breaking. It had been breaking for years on an unrecoverable past. The Sea House sighed and sank a little more into disrepair. Over the years it had slowly given up, loosening its hold on its past life, gently absorbing all that the elements threw at it. Accepting defeat. Only memory remained, possessing each of its rooms; folded inward with dust, undisturbed by human presence. There was no one to pick them up and shake them open. May had not been back. She had not found it possible to walk the path beside the coast, bending low under the bougainvillea branches grown heavy and unruly with neglect. The path held too much for her to bear. It was filled with the footsteps of her journeys to school; it had been the way she had walked as a young bride and then with her beloved son. She had thought his absence had defeated her completely, but then she had received a bundle of clothes. Only then did she understand the true depths of loss.
Through all of this, the Sea House soldiered on regardless, wreathed in neglect and unshed tears. The monsoons swept through it, making the rooms their own, and when they passed, the garden claimed the house again. Birds settled all over it while the paw-paw tree thrust its branches in through the open window. Chairs and tables, beds and hammocks, everything that once held life crumbled while the Sea House buckled under its fate. Janake visited it after Namil’s funeral. When the bundle of clothes had arrived, Namil, like the house, had given up. May had thought he had not understood, but it seemed he had. He died in his sleep a day later. A blessing, Janake said, when he came to comfort May. At her request, he went back to the Sea House in search of a letter Namil had written when he had first met May. But the letter was not to be found, even though Janake looked everywhere. Instead he found other things that had been overlooked. A pair of child’s shoes belonging to Alice, a lump of glass that he had given her, some driftwood they had found together on the beach, and then, to his delight, a photograph of her standing beside the rocks with him. Janake stared at it for a long time. His heart contracted. Buddhism was about letting go, he knew, but he longed for the simplicity of his past. He took the photograph, adding it to his small collection of possessions. He would keep it, he thought, in case the time should ever come when he might give it to Alice or her son.
Eleven years had passed since Alice’s uncle Namil died. Peace of a sort had come to her island home. Sri Lanka had become a place that many people knew about. Thanks to cheap air travel, it had become a honeymoon destination, but for Alice the place held nothing but painful memories. Her aunt had disappeared, like all the people in her life, unintentionally, inevitably. Ravi at almost eighteen was a handsome boy with a shock of curly black hair. Although he did not know it, he had grown into the image of his great-grandfather, Bee. Every time he smiled, Alice’s heart missed a beat. They still lived in the house in Brixton. She had converted one of the rooms downstairs into a proper studio and here she had begun to make the large sculptures that were becoming increasingly well known. Yet she was not happy. As he grew, Ravi began to change. The slow breaking away process, the growing distance between mother and son that was so necessary for the boy’s entry into adulthood, had come as a shock to Alice. She felt each step away from her as a terrible wrench. There had been so many separations in her life. She saw her son’s apparent indifference as one more. Ravi had always visited his father regularly, his parents’ divorce having made little difference to his relationship with Tim. The plan of Tim’s new home as he had drawn it on the day long ago had changed and changed again. Tim was no longer with the woman for whom he had left Alice. Other loves had come and gone with only his affection for his son remaining intact. Now, as he grew independent, Ravi began to take himself to his father’s house on the other side of Brixton more frequently. He went after school, without bothering to inform his mother, letting himself in before Tim returned from work, and the first Alice knew of it was when she rang Tim’s house. Often Ravi ended up staying the night. Shocked to discover feelings of jealousy within herself, struggling to acknowledge them, silent with hurt Alice watched as Ravi drifted away from her. Adolescence had brought the end of his love for her, she believed. All that she had tried to hold on to, she told herself, had vanished into nothing, and only her work remained. This was beginning to be noticed, first locally and then in a slow, haphazard fashion, further afield.
One day a woman from a newspaper came to interview her. She was about to have an exhibition in a gallery on the Railton Road. The journalist had come wanting to see her studio. She smiled with pleasure when Alice opened the door.
‘I love the name of your house,’ she said. ‘Where’s the beach!’
Alice had looked at the woman, unsmiling.
‘It’s in my head,’ she said.
After she had made a pot of tea in her blue kitchen with its brightly painted shelves, its cheerful pottery and geranium plants that dotted the room, she suggested they look at the work.
‘Who’s the boy?’ the journalist asked, peering at the photographs pinned up everywhere.
‘My son,’ Alice had answered shortly, and then they went into her studio.
Later, when she read what had been written about her studio, she was surprised.
Her studio gives the appearance of emptiness, apart from the solitary armoire and table. At first glance nothing is out of ordinary, yet the effect of stepping into a room lit from above by two spotlights gives an uneasy edge that is bewildering. There is something a little shocking about walking between table and armoire, their very ordinariness, the break from the daily business of living that invites one to view the experience of the ‘disappeared’ in a new and shocking light. This, the Sri Lanka-based artist tells me, a little hesitantly, is what she wants, this bridging of the spaces between one person’s experience and another’s.
Alice read the article over and over again, feeling an inordinate sense of pleasure. Put like this, those things she had wordlessly tried to do from a young age began to be clearer to her. Reading the article she felt close to tears. Someone, a person who had no connection with her, had understood. After so long this seemed a miracle. She toyed with the idea of contacting the journalist but was ashamed at her desperation. Instead she began to work with renewed determination, trying to forget Ravi’s indifference towards her.
Soon after the piece in the newspaper, she was offered two prestigious exhibitions. She began to have recurrent dreams that she was back at Mount Lavinia. Always she would enter the house in these dreams, crossing the threshold of the boarded-up rooms where many years of darkness pressed against her. Butterflies fluttered before her eyes, thin and transparent as rice paper intermingling with the sea, a distant, repeated, inescapable sound. And always now, her grandfather’s voice:
The jak-fruit have all burst.
I told your grandmother to get the boy to cut them down before they rotted. But she forgot.
In her dream, Alice saw her small self, spindly brown legs hurrying along beside his. Her grandfather was rubbing gingili oil on his legs. The black pottu in the middle of her forehead, put there by her mother to ward off the evil eye, had the effect of making her look fierce. Perhaps that was the effect it was meant to have.
I don’t know why your mother insists on such rubbish, her grandfather laughed, watching her scratch it off.
Something happened to her when she got married. You mustn’t get like her, Alice. You mustn’t become frightened by life.
She never wanted to wake up from those dreams. But when she tried to tell Ravi, she only irritated him.
‘You’re insane,’ he groaned. ‘You and your bloody memories are nothing to do with me! I belong here.’
At other times he would shout:
‘The people in that place make me sick. Your country is nothing to do with me. Don’t you understand? I’m English!’
And he was. He looked like her, but his personality, all his gestures, even his laugh, was his father’s. She could not hold him responsible for her folly. He stopped eating rice and curry and asked for Shepherd’s Pie instead. He told her she did not make apple crumble like his grandmother. He began walking around the house with his headphones on in case she tried to talk to him, and then finally, one late spring afternoon halfway through his A levels, he told Alice he wanted to live with his father.
‘Until I go to university,’ he said.
Alice was speechless, what had she done?
‘Nothing,’ Ravi said, avoiding her eye. ‘I just need to think of the best option for me, don’t I. Dad can help me with my Maths homework, that’s all.’
And make you apple crumble, I suppose,’ she said, before she could stop herself. She heard her mother’s bitterness in her own voice. Ravi stared at her.
‘I’m nothing like you,’ he said quietly and with the certainty of youth. ‘I don’t think like you, I’m not interested in the things you are. It’s best we do our own thing.’
He sounded like his father. Alice felt winded. The tall, leggy youth towering over her looked blankly back.
‘But I am your mother,’ was all she could whisper.
‘So? I never said you weren’t! You’re just too emotional for me.’
It was the most she got out of him. Nothing would change his mind. He had hit upon the best course of action and would now stick to it. She had always known he possessed this cold determination. She could not beg, and as she watched him load his things into his father’s car it was Tim, surprisingly, who came to her with an air of faint embarrassment.
‘It’s just a phase he’s going through,’ he mumbled, without looking at her. ‘I expect he’ll be back in the holidays.’
Tim’s voice was softer than usual. She saw traces of something in his eyes. Some feeling that clearly disturbed him.
‘It’s his age,’ he added, and the unexpected kindness pressed on her wound the harder. ‘He does love you.’
The sudden generosity on Tim’s part caught her unawares. I have nothing left, she thought through a waterfall of grief as she watched the car drive off.
Nonsense, her grandfather said, unexpectedly. You have your work, that’s what you must get on with. What d’you think I did when you went?
The room was empty. Outside in the deep soft dusk of early evening, light poured over the garden she had tended for so long. The sandpit, the swing, the childhood toys had all gone. The apple tree had matured and grown. In a few weeks a flush of roses would cascade across the weather-beaten fence. She could hardly breathe. Somewhere far above her in the limitless sky an aeroplane moved slowly, its sounds faint against a coloratura of birdsong.
See, her grandfather said. Look what a beautiful evening it is. Don’t cry, my darling. The boy will be back; even his idiot father can see that! Come now, dry your eyes. I’m here.
She had laughed, for her grandfather had not changed a bit. And then she had done what he said, burying herself in her work, welcoming Ravi when he came home, hiding the pieces of her broken heart, disguising her pain, pretending it didn’t matter. A year later, having done brilliantly in his exams, Ravi was offered a place at Oxford to read Mathematics.
All the mathematicians come from the south of India, Bee told her. He sounded slightly disapproving. The boy will grow up soon enough, you’ll see, he said.
A few weeks after he went up to Oxford, kissing his mother briefly on the cheek for the first time in years, Alice got a phone call from an American curator. The woman’s name was Antonia Stott and she ran a gallery in the East End of London, close to Hackney. She wanted to show some of Alice’s work. It was the breakthrough she had waited for.
Well done, her grandfather said. That’s the best news you’ve had in a long time. Now, work! This woman will lead you to other things.
What those things were, Alice was not to find out for some months.
By the time the invitation arrived he had forgotten all about her.
‘It’s from that woman you met. At Ralph’s place,’ Tessa said, handing it to him.
‘Who?’
It was a Saturday afternoon. This time he wasn’t on call.
‘You were chatting her up. She was Indian, I guess.’
‘Oh…her. I was not! And I don’t think she was Indian, but she was interesting.’
‘So I noticed,’ Tessa said.
Simon glanced at her. Something was irritating Tessa.
‘Could you clear up your mess on the dining-room table, Simon?’ she asked. ‘The idea is you use your study to work in. Not the whole house.’
There, he thought triumphantly, having found the obstruction. That was the problem! He picked up an apple from the fruit bowl and bit into it.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Simon, stop eating. You’re always eating whenever I look at you. We’re going out to dinner soon.’
‘It’s only an apple,’ he said mildly. ‘And we’re not going out for ages yet.’
But Tessa had gone, crossly clattering her way into the kitchen. He could hear her on the telephone. He glanced at the invitation. It was printed on glossy white card. Alice Fonseka, it said. In Search of Lost Time. Private view: Thursday 14 June, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. And underneath was the address of the gallery. Not too far, he thought, turning the invitation over. He would be back in the flat in London next week. On the other side of the card was an image of a glass-fronted cupboard. The glass was covered in white plaster. Embedded in it were glimpses of clothing: men’s shirts of different patterns. He could see cuffs, frayed at the edges, parts of collars pressed against the glass, partially covered in the plaster, looking as though they were struggling to get out. Interested, he turned the card over again and stared at the title. What did it mean, Searching For Lost Time? he wondered. And then, without warning, he remembered Alice’s extraordinary eyes. Had he taken her number? He couldn’t remember.
‘Simon,’ Tessa said, coming in again. As you don’t seem to have anything to do, could you put the rubbish out, please? I’m fed up with doing everything. You’re never here. I might as well be living alone.’
She was getting in a froth, he thought tiredly.
‘Well, I’m on call-out all weekend,’ he said, making it sound as though he were giving her a present, making her crosser.
‘What difference does that make?’ she asked. ‘You’re absent whether you’re here or not.’
He didn’t say anything, speculating on the nature of absence. He knew she was watching him as he tried to toss the core of the apple into the pedal bin and missed. Everything he did, thought Simon, picking it up again, irritated her. He lifted the black bin liner out of its carcass.
‘Shall we go to it?’ he said, his mouth still full of apple, pointing to the invitation.
‘Simon!’ shouted Tessa. ‘Mind the rubbish, for God’s sake. Look, you’re spilling everything on the floor. Oh, give it to me, I might as well do it myself!’ she cried, snatching it out of his hand and going outside.
In the end he went on his own. Probably Tessa didn’t want to come up to London so soon, or maybe it had been something to do with Cressida that stopped her. Whatever the reason, he was alone when he next saw Alice. The gallery was filled with people he did not recognise. Simon had not been to a smart exhibition in London for ages. Usually the only art he saw was when he went with Tessa to some dreary local show of paintings to buy another charmless landscape. This exhibition, he saw immediately, was different. For a start, the first two rooms were strictly minimal. On the floor in front of him were three piles of shirts, neatly folded and stacked into high columns. Behind them on the wall hung an exquisite seascape, shimmering with light. Simon stared at it. A woman in a low-cut black dress and red high heels clipped over to him, her hips as flexible as a scorpion’s tail, a flute of champagne in her hand. A group of people stood in a corner of the room staring down at something he couldn’t see. They were making a lot of noise. After a while he tore himself away from the painting and walked around the stack of shirts. Then he wandered into the next room. Alice was nowhere in sight.
There were two more rooms, each with a couple of free-standing sculptures. One was the wardrobe that had appeared on the front of the invitation. It was filled with shirts pushed up against the glass. What was it about shirts? he puzzled, staring at it. In the last room there was a painting on the wall. And again it was a small luminescent seascape. The sculpture here was the strangest of them all. He wondered how he could describe it later on to Tessa. A cross between a table and a cupboard, perhaps? It occurred to him, all these things were hybrids of some sort. That’s it, he thought, pleased with himself. Another piece of unusable furniture with bits of other furniture grafted on to it, like limbs, taking on a strange alien life of its own, filled the room with its oppressive personality. He moved closer and peered at it. The object had been limed and rubbed over with plaster. Now it was partially white with traces of paint from some other life showing through here and there. Simon stared at it. Lost in thought, he sipped his champagne, puzzled over it. He saw the whole surface was scratched and covered in fine hair. For some reason he felt certain the hair was human. A sense of menace struck him forcefully He went closer and examined the table. Again he had the vague sense of knowing what he was looking at but still he couldn’t put his finger on what it might be. Was it an operating table, he wondered? No that wasn’t quite right, he frowned. Under the pool of gallery lights it no longer was a table. The sense of a sinister presence deepened in his mind. Had he been asked he would have said the room made him think of a torture cell. He was trying to work it out when he heard a small sound. Glancing up, he saw Alice Fonseka watching him with an unreadable expression in her eyes. He stared at her for a moment crushed by the complexity of his own thoughts. Again, he experienced the feeling he’d had the first time he met her: she reminded him of someone.
‘Oh it’s you,’ she said, unsmiling, in that disconcertingly flat voice that he had forgotten, ‘I didn’t think you would come.’
‘I almost forgot,’ he admitted, smiling boyishly, taking her aback, so that she wondered how old he was.
Later, after the private view was over they had a drink together before she went home. She had wanted to duck out of the party Antonia had laid on, she told him, because she wanted an early night. She was talking on the radio in the morning. At the last moment she agreed to Simon’s invitation to go around the corner with him to a small bar for a quick drink. All she wanted was a cup of tea, she said.
‘Tell me about your work,’ he asked, really wanting to ask her if she would have dinner with him, but knowing instinctively this could prove tricky. He didn’t want to frighten her off, he was thinking. The light from the window was unnaturally bright as though a storm was brewing. All around them were the silvery shadows of the summer evening. The unusual heat was making him drowsy and he felt the whole of the day come to a halt as she spoke. She seemed unaware of the sorrow in her voice.
‘I loved the paintings,’ he said carefully. ‘But the other things disturbed me.’
Instinct told him honesty was best. She was looking him full in the face.
‘I’m just a medic,’ he said self-deprecatingly.
She smiled then and the unexpected force of it threw him.
‘You were right to be disturbed,’ she told him. ‘They disturbed me too. What happened.’
‘Where are you from?’ he asked before he could stop himself.
In the slight pause that followed he felt a faint fragrance drift towards him. He wanted to touch her hair. Outside a police car screamed and faded as it passed. Dust motes filled the air. Time stood still.
‘I’m from Sri Lanka,’ she said, and he realised she had understood his nervousness and was enjoying it. He laughed, delighted. A last ray of late sun caught the edge of her hair and the urge to touch her grew stronger within him.
‘Do you go back often?’
She shook her head and he saw again how dark her eyes were.
‘I haven’t been back for thirty-two years,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve been carrying that stretch of beach around with me for a long time.’
She had a way of speaking very quietly so he found he had to lean forward to catch her words. Again he could smell the unidentifiable fragrance.
‘But how old are you?’ he asked, puzzled.
With a flick of her hand she pushed her hair back, watching him with dark brown eyes that held him with something between gravity and the gentlest of irony.
‘I’ve just turned forty-one,’ she told him, pulling a face, and now she was laughing at him openly. He felt a stab of excitement leap up in his heart. She seemed, even as he looked at her, suddenly identifiable with all the rising summer, exquisite and still young, desirable as sunlight and exotic. What was there to do? What should they talk about? Words clothed his turmoil. Frightened, he suggested instead he drove her home after a snack. Again Alice smiled. Light danced in her eyes. A dimple appeared on her cheek, and vanished. He longed to see it again. She looked him unexpectedly full in the eye, and shook her head. Tea, she just wanted another cup of tea. Maybe next time.
So there was to be a next time. Who would have thought this simple certainty could bring such joy?
Simon was talking; telling her about Tessa. With a compulsion only barely understood, he knew he wanted to explain Tessa, to sweep all obstacles aside so nothing and no one should stand between them from this first moment. The impulsiveness of his youth, denied for so long, returned with a rush of intoxicating certainty. If he could have explained this he would have said simply that he had no time to waste.
‘We’ve been married for twenty years,’ he told her.
In the diaphanous sky, still light, for it was not quite midsummer, small birds darted about. There was nothing more to discover, he told her, candidly. Not even anger. Just nothing. They had read each other completely. Some books you read only once. Alice was looking at him unflinchingly. She nodded and he watched her hands as she folded the bill into a small boat. Then she uncreased the paper and smoothed it flat. She told him about Tim, and less easily, about Ravi.
‘He comes home very occasionally,’ she said. ‘We are very different. That will always be a problem.’
She hesitated.
‘He wants to simplify his life. My presence in it makes it messy’
She laughed nervously. Again he looked at her hands, the long slender fingers of a sculptress. She was thinking she had never had this kind of conversation with anyone before.
‘The young need to have a fixed position,’ she said, her eyes searching for some invisible horizon.
‘They go on about the world being a global village,’ Simon said. ‘I thought a fixed position was the last thing they wanted.’
Certainly it was what his daughter always told him.
‘Cressida tells me she could live anywhere in the world and feel comfortable because of this.’
Alice shook her head, smiling.
Ah, but your daughter looks like you and your wife, I imagine. It’s different for my son. He feels as if he is neither one thing nor another. Really,’ again she hesitated, ‘it would have been better if he looked more like his father. People would see him simply as an English boy’
‘You mean his looks cannot hide his connections?’
‘Yes.’ Again she nodded, her eyes steady on him.
‘But it’s such a rich connection,’ he said, wanting to say it was exotic, but not daring to.
She grimaced.
‘Theories are fine if you have a secure life already. My son has had to carve out an identity for himself. Ordinarily, divorce muddles things. In Ravi’s case the choices are harder.’
Simon was amazed. Vast oceans stood between them both and his mind was in turmoil. He talked of Cressida and the strange cyber world she lived in. Perhaps it was reality.
‘My son has no use for my memories,’ Alice was saying. ‘They aren’t his memories, so,’ she shrugged, ‘why should he care?’
He could see she was hurt.
‘The thing Ravi needs most of all is to belong somewhere, totally. He needs to be grounded in an identity before he can feel at ease.’
‘But you’ll see,’ Simon said lightly, wanting to offer some comfort, ‘he will find out one day that belonging is not about appearance.’
A little later on when he saw she was getting restless he drove her home.
‘I shouldn’t ask,’ he said, when he stopped the car.
He smiled. He could barely see her face. It had become dark without them noticing.
‘But can I phone you?’
You needn’t ask,’ she said, and he sensed with enormous relief she was smiling too.
Briefly, he placed his hand over hers. Then she was out of the car and gone with hardly a breath’s disturbance to the air.
When he got back to his flat, the answer phone was flashing. Tessa had left a message about a quote from the builders.
‘I don’t know where the devil you are, Simon,’ she said in her economic and clipped way, ‘at some opera, no doubt. But can you ring him in the morning? I think we’re being overcharged. And can you let me know when you’re coming home. I wanted to invite the Richards to supper.’
A shock like cold electricity darted up Simon’s arm and into his heart so that he pressed the delete button abruptly and began searching through his collection of CDs. He knew exactly what he wanted to listen to and here he was free to turn the volume up. He went to the window, through which the lights of London were strung like jewels across the night sky. All summer spun in his head. The music swept over him in a wave of pure joy, swamping him in an ache of wanting to see the woman he had just left. The longing surged over him, quivering through his body. A complex web of happiness had been thrown over the familiar view, turning it into something rare and utterly beautiful. He could not think. Thinking was too much tonight. All he wanted was to have this feeling go on exactly like this, with the music and the night full of stars and tomorrow somewhere nearby. He doubted he would sleep.
Across the river in Brixton Beach, sleep evaded Alice, too. Not since David Eliot had first befriended her had she had an evening remotely like this. Her skin felt stretched and tired as if she had been swimming for a long time. For some reason the feeling made her think of Janake. She allowed herself to bring out the memory of the last time she had seen him. Outside, the traffic rushed past. Night noises of police cars and ambulances flashed by and disappeared. The moon was full in the sky, shining through the curtains of Brixton Beach. Simon Swann, she thought, saying his name aloud. She was stunned. Then in order to calm herself, she tried out the sobering thought of his marriage.
That was broken already, her grandfather’s voice said, close by. You’re living in a different era, both of you, to the one you were born into. Don’t you know? A person has many lives.
I don’t want to do anything to his wife, she thought. I don’t want to be the one to break anything. This is crazy, I don’t even know this man, she said out loud. Her grandfather’s voice seemed to have deserted her. What should she do? Sleep was impossible.
The next morning, having left it as late as possible, Simon rang her.
‘Do you like opera? Would you like to go to Tosca?
‘The opera?’
He might as well be suggesting they went to the moon.
‘I don’t know any opera,’ Alice confessed.
Her life had no history of opera, she told him, a little defensively. Had he forgotten she had different cultural references from his? Not British taste. She felt as though her grandfather was floating about near her, listening. Simon Swann glimpsed another, darker, more interesting layer that he would want to unwrap later. He tried to think of the Asians he worked with. He was a politically correct man, but he wondered if he had been thinking in clichés. He could not remember a time when he had ever given the matter much thought. How many had he worked with in his career at the hospital? Twenty, thirty?
‘Well then,’ he told her, easily, ‘you have a treat in store! I’ve got two tickets for a performance next month. Friday the twenty-fifth’
It was clear to him they would have to make another meeting. And another. And instinctively he knew these meetings alone would not be enough. Alice was thinking the same thing too, but Simon had no way of knowing this. She smiled into the phone. There were things she should have been asking him, but he beat her to it.
‘Tessa’s gone back to Mortimer. She hates London. And the opera.’
‘Who’s Mortimer?’
Her voice was so close to his ear. He badly wanted to see her.
‘It’s the name of the house in Sussex. It’s been in my family for years. I think it was my mother who named it,’ he said. ‘She always felt the house was a person, you see.’
‘How funny,’ she said, faintly. ‘That was how I felt too!’
And she gave him her address.
He was with her sooner than she expected, leaning against the door frame when she opened it, smiling at her, familiar already. How could this be?
‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked, and then he laughed.
The interior of the house had a tropical feel to it. There were cracks all over the yellow walls. All the way here his mind had been going over some lines from a poem he had once read:
You are many years late,
How happy am I to see you.
She was laughing too.
‘You should take my pulse!’ she said.
‘I have to be at work by two,’ he told her, regretfully. ‘I’ve got a rotten rota for the next ten days but then I’m free again on Friday the twenty-fifth.’
They both sighed, paused startled, and then laughed. Oh God! thought Simon.
He had the feeling that a part of him had severed itself of its own violation and would now forever belong to her. He thought this sort of thing happened only to young men.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly. ‘I’m a medic, you see.’
She saw. She was already getting used to the idea, she wanted to tell him. I will ring you every day he wanted to say, and think of you all the time. Neither said a word.
Alice took him through into the kitchen, which was surprisingly large. The cupboards were made of driftwood, bleached and blanched with sun and salt-water.
‘I used to beach-comb in Cornwall,’ she told him, seeing him look at them. Through the doorway he caught glimpses of other rooms, a length of ultramarine silk draped over furniture; sea glass of a piercing blue reflecting the light. He felt disorientated. The London traffic, still only a pace away outside, did not penetrate or remove the feeling that, somewhere, nearby there was bound to be the sea.
‘I love the name!’ he said. ‘I mean, Brixton Beach.’
Alice handed him a mug of milky tea. The day was like a seashell. You looked inside it and it was impossible to see beyond the middle. And the end of course was in complete shadow. You put it to your ear and all you heard were the half-understood sounds of the sea: waves, voices, the wind. The walls of the kitchen were hung with a series of small paintings. All of them were very beautiful. All were of the sea.
‘But the sea is everywhere!’ he said with amazement.
‘I grew up by it,’ said Alice. ‘It’s inside me, I suppose, wherever I go. The horizons, the greys,’ she waved her hands in the air. ‘People think the tropics have to be all colour, jungle green and hot reds. But it’s not necessarily so.’
They stood side by side, gazing at the paintings.
‘I used to walk on the beach at dawn and the sky was often a soft grey and pearly white. And sometimes, far out on the horizon, was a touch of a very pale yellow. My grandfather would point it out to me.’
Tell him I’m dead, her grandfather said succinctly, interrupting her with a faint chuckle in his voice. He’s no fool; other people’s memories won’t frighten him.
Startled, Alice smelt a whiff of pipe tobacco.
‘Where do you make your work?’ Simon asked, curiously. ‘Do you have a studio in the house?’
Alice nodded. ‘Would you like to see it?’
The room startled him further. Unfinished work was strewn everywhere. The high ceiling light he had noticed in the gallery was here too, giving the room the same feeling of menace, completely at odds with the rest of the house. Simon felt as though he had stepped into another world; one he could only guess at.
‘It’s very powerful,’ he said, uncertainly. ‘What’s this work about?’
Good! her grandfather’s voice intervened. Tell him, then! So haltingly, she spoke of her mother’s ordeal, the cousin she had never met, and finally, of Bee. They were the things that history remained silent about, she told him.
‘He was the only person I’ve ever loved with all my heart,’ she said simply. Apart from Ravi, of course.’
In the English summer daylight her words were more startling.
‘My friend Janake said the floor was marked by their shoes. No one saw the footprints until afterwards, and by then it was all that was left,’ she said. ‘I remember being struck by his words, most of all by the thought of the struggle. It was somehow so utterly shocking that I could visualise it.’
She fell silent at the memory.
‘These scratches?’ Simon asked, pointing to the marks on a door resting against the studio wall.
‘Yes.’
Simon too was shocked. He was used to death sanitised and made reasonable. He was used to kindness being drawn like a sheet across suffering, not this. Tessa, and his life in Sussex, seemed very far away.
It was this, this righting of a terrible injustice, that had informed her work, Alice continued, quietly. Made her turn from the fluid seascapes to sculptures.
All my life is built on memories,’ she said over lunch.
Her eyes glowed with dark intensity. Sunlight poured into her colourful kitchen, slanting across her face. She’s beautiful, he thought, mesmerised.
‘To be an immigrant is to be sandwiched between two worlds,’ she told Simon Swann, without a trace of self-pity.
The flatness that he had heard when he had first talked to her had gone from her voice.
‘The effort it takes to be a person who does not belong is unimaginable, you know. I am one of those people, living that life.’
But inside, she told Simon Swann; she was still Alice Fonseka who had once belonged.
They talked all that long hot afternoon with the hours flying around them like late summer gulls. Simon wanted to sort everything out in his mind, wanted her to understand that he was going to change the world she had inhabited.
‘I’m too old to waste any more time,’ he said firmly.
‘How old?’ she asked boldly, laughing.
‘Forty-five!’ he said, pulling a face.
She continued to laugh.
‘You look younger.’
It was true. Sunlight on his greying hair gave him the look of a much younger man. He felt himself sink down into the dark place of awful loneliness she had been describing. He wanted to erase it. He wanted to do many things; to touch her, for a start, to trace an unwavering line from eye to eye and down across her mouth. Wanting to touch her shouted in his head above every other thought, but he ignored it. Smiling, she wanted it too, although what she wanted was slower, harder to put into words. Neither of them requested anything of the other. Both were filled with old-fashioned courtesy. Both waited for the other, averting their eyes, suddenly, conveniently, blind. Alice felt her heart was bursting.
Good, good, her grandfather said, sucking on his pipe. But on this occasion, Alice did not hear. There was an orchestra playing in her head. She was not altogether certain what it might be playing. Simon too was listening on invisible headphones. He was listening to Mozart.
‘The twenty-fifth,’ he said, in a voice he hardly recognised as his own. ‘I’ll pick you up at six and we’ll go to the opera. I know you’ll love it!’