by Roma Tearne
Alice said nothing.
‘Let me show you how to fill the bath,’ Stanley continued, aware of the bleakness of her stare.
Her face remained unchanged. What does a child of nearly ten think about? he wondered uneasily.
‘We don’t have showers here, only baths. You have to fill it with some water, hot and cold, and then you can put some bath salts in. Come, I’ll show you how it’s done.’
Once again he was met by a stony silence.
‘Alice,’ he said sharply, ‘come, I’ll show you, then tomorrow you can fill it yourself.’
Later, when the child was finally in bed, exhausted by the effort of getting her there, he tried talking to Sita. He realised that he had no means of communicating with her either. Their talk had stopped long ago. Watching her unpack her saris, he was puzzled. The silks he vaguely remembered as being saturated with colour now merely looked gaudy.
‘Evenings come early,’ Sita observed, making an effort.
He could see she was still worrying about the letters. Didn’t she know that letter writing would become an apathetic activity with absence acting as an impermeable barrier?
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
She looked at him with her large trusting eyes, reminding him of how she used to look when they had first met. For a moment he was unnerved.
‘Once the clocks go back it will be darker quicker but lighter earlier,’ he warned her, knowledgably, sounding gentler than he had felt for many years.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, after all, he thought, as he lay listening to her breathing when she finally slept.
‘My first night on dry land,’ she had said and, hesitating a moment, awkwardly, he had kissed her, finally.
He had been surprised by her response and the way she had clung to him, weeping suddenly, asking him to hold her. Oh no! he had thought, trying not to panic. What does she want of me? Not more children? Had she forgotten the doctor had told them there would be no more? Stanley stared into the darkness. He would have to get rid of Jacky. That much was clear. But what shall I do then? he wondered unhappily. He thought of Manika. As always, at the thought of her, feelings of excitement rose in him. Manika was playing hard to get. Stanley moved restlessly under the blankets. Beside him, Sita slept like a stone, exhausted. I can’t leave her, thought Stanley uneasily. It will kill her; she will never survive. Then what will happen? I’ll get the blame. It was all very well for his brother to issue orders, but he didn’t have to do the walking out, he didn’t have to lie beside this needy, desperate woman. Sighing, Stanley turned over. He had work in the morning, the child needed to be registered in a school, there was a lot to do. Sita needed to find a job. First, I’ll make her financially independent, he thought, shelving the problem for the moment, and falling, with no difficulty at all, into a dreamless sleep.
In her tiny attic room with its sloping ceiling and fading wallpaper, Alice lay staring into the darkness. Rain fell lightly against the window and once or twice she heard the screeching of tyres. The streetlight shone through the threadbare patches in the curtain so that when she moved Alice caught glimpses of condensation on the window ledge. The room was cold; she shivered and pulled the pink eiderdown up around her chin. She was far away from her parents; she had never been so far away from anyone. She had never been so far away from the sea, she thought. And then, swelling up within her, she felt the pain of her grandfather’s absence.
‘I want to go home,’ she muttered, tears trickling slowly down her face. ‘I want him.’
Later, when she could cry no more, when her throat was dry and she needed a drink but was too frightened to go in search of the kitchen, she sighed. She felt sleepy now. The sharpness of her longing had blunted slightly and her bed seemed warmer, so that turning over, facing the window, she slept. Towards dawn when the rain ceased and the streetlight was finally turned off, she dreamed she was running across the beach towards her grandparents’ house.
Both Sita and Alice slept late into the next morning. The early autumn sun was high in the sky and Stanley had left for work several hours before. There were still no letters.
‘I’m cold, Mama,’ Alice said.
Sita looked at her daughter in despair. I have made a mistake, she thought, staring at the empty mat. Oh God! What shall I do?
‘The paraffin heater has gone out,’ she told Alice, pulling herself together. ‘Come and help me light it, like Dada showed us. Then we’ll eat the cornflakes he’s left out for us. Come, Putha.’
Alice was shocked at the endearment. Her mother’s voice too was softer than she had heard it for a very long time. Opening her mouth to ask a question, she decided against it and nodded. She sensed her mother missed Kunal.
There were no letters all that week or the next. Stanley felt he was being driven mad by Sita’s pitiful questions. She was behaving like Alice, he thought, amazed, half inclined to laugh. What’s the matter with her? Doesn’t she know they’ve probably forgotten all about her by now? That out of sight usually means out of mind with those people! Stanley hadn’t dared to visit Manika. He had already warned Jacky that their meetings were at an end. Jacky’s unexpected tears had made him want to flee. He was beginning to feel hemmed in all over again, trapped wherever he went.
‘Rajah,’ he pleaded, ‘you’ve got to help me.’
Rajah fixed him with a stare.
‘I found you a house, I got you a job, what more do you want? Are you having an affair with Manika, by the way?’
‘No!’ bellowed Stanley. ‘For God’s sake, I can barely cope with a wife, let alone a bloody Tamil mistress!’
Rajah laughed.
‘Ma always said you’d get yourself in a mess. Well, you’d better bring your Singhala wife to meet me, I suppose!’
Another week went by. Stanley took a day off work and went with Sita and Alice to the local school.
‘I don’t want to go there,’ Alice said.
‘You have no choice,’ Stanley said. ‘It’s the law.’
He spoke more harshly than he had meant, but seeing the look on his daughter’s face he paused and ruffled her hair.
‘Don’t worry, Putha. You’ll enjoy it here. The schools are not like the ones in Colombo, thank God.’
Alice said nothing. This unexpected gentleness reminded her of Bee. She blinked. And the school, with its high grey walls and empty classrooms, reminded her of a prison. The headmistress talked to her parents, ignoring Alice.
‘Will she be having school meals?’ she asked. ‘Or will she bring a packed lunch? Some children go home but we don’t encourage it.’
‘Mama…’ Alice began, but Stanley was already nodding.
‘She’ll have the meals,’ he said. ‘My wife will soon be getting a job, so it will be more convenient.’
The headmistress looked doubtfully at Alice.
‘Here’s a list of what she’ll need for her school uniform. She’s quite small for her age. Try Morley’s in Brixton. They might have her size.’
And that was that. She would start school in the first week in September. On the way back they took the bus into Brixton and Stanley bought everything on the list, grumbling at the cost. The clothes were too large for Alice.
‘I’ll take them up,’ Sita said.
Her voice was strained, but she was nodding encouragingly at Alice.
‘Good!’ Stanley said, glad it was all settled. ‘And tonight when we go to see Rajah you can ask him to find us a sewing machine.’
For a brief moment a feeling of solidarity encircled them. They caught the bus back. Sitting on the top deck, Alice stared at the park with the children’s playground. Three boys raced around the roundabout and a small child swung standing up on a swing. A man walked his dog across the park and disappeared between the trees. Sita was looking at the row of shops as they passed. There was a launderette and next to it was a funeral parlour with memorial stones on display. Faint music from the bandstand drifted towards them through the open window. Someone rang the bell on the bus.
‘Vassall Road,’ shouted the conductor, and they got off.
Maybe the letter is waiting for me, now, thought Sita, as she watched the postman cycle past on his second delivery. The palms of her hands were suddenly clammy.
But there were still no letters, and that evening they went to Rajah’s place. Sita, feeling as if she was suffocating, changed her sari. In her entire married life she had only met Stanley’s mother half a dozen times. None of the visits had been successful. She did not want to meet Rajah.
‘What’s the point?’ she asked, combing her hair and putting it up. ‘I’m not in the mood for meeting him. We’ve been married for fourteen years and haven’t met. I don’t think it will make much difference, now’
Stanley sat on the end of the bed watching her. He felt he was living in a nightmare.
Taking a deep breath, he tried to stop his temper from flaring up. Alice, coming into her parents’ bedroom unannounced, saw a vein throb on his forehead.
‘You can see a bit of London on the way,’ Stanley told the child encouragingly, ‘get used to going out. You’ll be starting school in a few days’ time, after all. So, best to get acclimatised.’
There was an uneasy pause. Two nights ago when he had kissed Alice in his usual perfunctory manner at bedtime, she’d noticed he smelled of perfume mixed with whisky. But when she had asked him what the perfume was he had flown into a rage.
‘Let’s go,’ Stanley said now. ‘Come on, I’m starving and Rajah will have cooked a damn good curry.’
Rajah lived with two girls. He was, Alice saw, an older version of Stanley. Both girls talked to her in a friendly way. They were Swiss Germans, working as au pairs in Golders Green.
‘You look like your father,’ one of them told Alice, admiringly.
‘If you like, we can look after her one evening, so you two can go out,’ the other one told Sita.
Sita smiled timidly, and shook her head. Her Kandyian sari appeared out of place and she had begun to talk in a kind of broken English as though she was unused to the language. Alice looked at her mother in surprise. She sensed her father was irritated too.
‘Stanley told us about the baby who died,’ one of the girls said casually. Alice saw her mother stiffen. She held her breath, hoping nothing more would be said. She suspected her parents would fight later. But the Swiss girl, oblivious to the hostilities, continued talking cheerfully. She bent towards Alice and Alice caught a whiff of the perfume her father had worn two nights before.
‘Your daddy told me how he bribed the grave digger,’ she said, sotto voce.
Alice watched her father help himself to another glass of whisky. Suddenly, without warning, she heard her grandfather’s voice:
Listen, Putha, it will be fine in England too. You’ll just have to be patient, that’s all.
Confused, she turned to Sita.
‘I want to go home,’ she said uncertainly, but her mother wasn’t listening.
Later, as she had expected, her parents fought. Her mother started shouting.
‘How dare you talk about what happened,’ she raged. ‘How dare you talk to that tart about my private affairs?’
‘The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,’ Alice recited softly, looking at the lights of the passing cars on the ceiling of her room.
It was impossible to sleep. She could hear her father’s voice, slurred with the whisky.
‘What makes you think you have the monopoly of grief?’
‘The Queen of Hearts,’ said Alice, getting out of bed and going to the window.
Condensation lay across the glass. She wrote her name on it. Then she drew a face. Then she added a bubble coming out of the mouth. Help, she wrote. She wasn’t sure who could help her mother. The front door closing marked her father’s absence at breakfast the next day.
‘Life has moved you to a different part of the ring, men,’ Rajah said the next day at work. ‘You can go on straining at the ropes, bouncing back, smashing each other senseless. Or you can recognise that a Singhalese will always be different, think differently even. And here’s the problem in a nutshell. The bastards even do their grieving differently. If they could have their way, they would convince us that grief is something peculiar to them alone.’
He looked at Stanley’s blank face.
‘Think about it, Stan. How can you go on? We Tamils have been oppressed for far too long for these injustices not to matter.’
‘But that’s politics,’ Stanley said uncertainly.
His brother, having got hold of the idea, would not let go of it.
‘It’s all politics, men, all of it! Love and death. And birth, too. The accidental nature, the pity of it. Mark my words, you will not be able to live with this woman forever. How soon you leave is up to you.’
‘But there’s the child.’
‘The child is half-caste, men! For Christ’s sake, you’re such a damn fool. Why didn’t you think of that in the beginning? Your trouble is you don’t plan ahead. You’ll have to ditch the child. Let her find her own way in the world.’
He paused, glancing sharply at Stanley.
‘She’ll probably do quite well in this country. Look at the untouchables who come from India. They all qualify as bloody doctors, men. So you see, you’ve done her a big favour!’
‘Stop!’ Stanley shouted.
His brother was going too far.
Another week went by and Alice started school. The weather had turned cooler and the sun that had been so bright had become watery and pale. The air became damp and here and there amongst the very last of the summer nasturtiums, wasps crawled drowsily, occasionally stinging a passer-by as they neared the end of their life. The weather was disappointing; there would be no Indian summer, after all. Sita took a silent Alice to school wearing her new uniform.
‘You’ll be fine,’ she told her daughter hesitantly.
Preoccupied though she was by her own problems, Sita had registered Alice’s reluctance. Once or twice as that first week progressed she tried and failed to find out what Alice thought of the school. Alice would not be drawn. Then on Friday she brought home a drawing she had done.
‘Did you do that?’ Stanley asked, noticing it.
He, too, was preoccupied.
‘Yes,’ Alice said, and she went upstairs to her room.
‘Good,’ Stanley said absent-mindedly. ‘She’s settling.’
Sita had begun to cook. She had discovered where the market was one morning and had begun to enjoy shopping for vegetables on her own. On the way she had found the main post office. She hesitated. Then she walked timidly up to the counter and asked how long it would take for a letter to reach London from abroad.
‘The delay’s at the other end, probably,’ the man behind the counter had said. ‘Could take several weeks.’
His words had a miraculous effort on Sita, who cheered up considerably after that. She would wait patiently for one more week. Kunal’s letter would arrive, she was certain. The food that night was a feast of love in abeyance; she allowed herself to remember their last night together.
We’ll get her a job next, thought Stanley, noticing. She needs her independence. Things will improve slowly. Probably it was all due to Manika’s prayers. Stanley had not seen Manika for a fortnight but he spoke to her regularly from work. On Friday he would visit the temple and give thanks, he thought.
‘I’m working late tomorrow night,’ he told Sita casually.
The clock in Bee’s studio had stopped the day they left. It was not an old clock but for some reason it had given up at sixteen minutes past nine. The news of Kunal’s death had taken on the aspect of a nightmare that refused to end. No one had told Bee for days. They had let him deal with the loss of Sita and Alice first. Finally, late one night, when he was in his studio, the doctor risked a visit.
‘Killed by a bomb,’ he told Bee, drinking the whisky his friend poured out. ‘Planted deliberately for him.’
After all we did,’ he kept repeating
, again and again, ‘after all we did to save him!’ Bee clenched and unclenched his fists. The shock was physical. Kamala was shocked too, but Bee understood she was thinking of something else. Kamala was thinking of Sita.
‘Who will tell her?’ she cried later, when they were alone.
Alone after months with a house that had been bursting at the seams.
‘I will tell her,’ Bee said grimly. ‘I will write to her once she is no longer on the ship. She can get the letter when she has begun to settle on dry land.’
He had been keeping track of the days. Even allowing for the delay in the post, he calculated she would get the letter by the second week of September.
‘She fell in love with him,’ Kamala said, weeping softly. ‘She was hoping.’
Bee didn’t say anything; he could not trust himself to speak. He was frightened of what he was capable of doing. What he would have liked to do was walk up the hill to the army headquarters and find the sergeant in charge. Swallowing hard, he began to compose the letter he would write. A letter that would be delivered to her by an unknown postman. A stranger in an alien land.
My dearest daughter,
By the time you get this you will have arrived in your new home with the little one. I expect you will be tired. I hope Stanley will have found you at the harbour without difficulty. I hope too the journey was bearable, that leaving your home was an easier thing than we all feared. I have some news for you. It is not good news, Sita. My poor, dear child, before I tell you I want you to promise me, even as you are reading what is in your hand, that you will write straight back. I want you to talk to me as you once did, pouring out your thoughts. Do you remember, Sita, what it was like, when you were a child? How, just like Alice, you would follow me around talking, telling me things, your worries, your anxieties. Sita, I do not want you to feel alone. I cannot alter the distance, nor can I change the course of your life, but as long as I am alive, you will never be alone. So promise me, when you have finished reading this letter, you will write to me? Please?
What I have to tell you is this. Your mother and I have only just had word sent to us. Sita, my news is about Kunal. There is no easy way to tell you. Kunal died on his way up to Elephant Pass…