by Roma Tearne
I will be starting my new school, she wrote. Mama thinks I will like it.
She paused. The mention of her mother made her uneasy, so she crossed out the sentence. She wondered what she might say instead.
I’m reading a book about a painter called Constable.
It was a lie. She was only looking at the pictures.
And I’ve been drawing a lot.
That at least was true. She wrote a few more sentences, but because she censored them so heavily, even she could see they were dull. Almost without thinking, she withheld all information of her parents’ rows or her mother’s remote air. She never mentioned her own loneliness or the fact that the house they lived in was constantly cold even on the warmest of days. Neither did she tell her grandfather that she was always hungry or that she quite often prepared her own food with whatever was left in the kitchen.
Sometimes Stanley took her to her uncle Rajah’s, but her uncle, Alice sensed, did not like her much. Their own house, so empty when they had first arrived, was slowly taking on another, different kind of bleakness. In that first summer in London Sita discovered the vegetable and fruit markets of Balham. This was closer to home and full of the exotic produce she had given up hoping to find. Joyfully she began to buy boxes of over-ripe mangoes and ladies fingers that had to be thrown away before they could eat them.
‘I can’t eat this shit,’ Stanley bellowed, pushing the crates of rotting fruit off the Formica table so they crashed to the ground. ‘Why are you wasting money on this rubbish!’
Sita watched him silently, making him apoplectic with rage.
‘Why don’t you open the curtains, for God’s sake!’ he screamed at her.
‘What for?’ asked Sita calmly. ‘There’s nothing to look at outside.’
In answer Stanley stormed out of the house and headed for Dorset Road where a prayer meeting was under way in Manika’s bright brass shrine. The lignums, the picture of the beloved Bhagavan, the smell of incense and cooked rice was a comforting compromise.
The following September Alice started at Stockwell Manor School. She was the youngest intake in the school. It was further away from the house but still within walking distance. She had felt lost in her primary school but this new one was so vast that she found disappearing in it was easier to do. By now the winter came as no surprise and another Christmas came and went unremarked with a sprinkling of snow followed by a series of bitter grey days when the wind blew harshly as if from the Steppes. Sita bought Alice a pair of fleece-lined boots from Petticoat Lane market and a thick coat for herself. There was no card from Esther this year and no letter from Bee either. Looking at the unmovable blanket of clouds overhead, Sita felt her mind stretch into a perfect blankness.
This second winter seemed endless and spring, when it finally came, had no effect on Sita. The young green fritillaries, the pale glow of cherry blossom, the delicate tint of a sky becoming lighter, earlier, all these things were of no interest to her. She felt only the cold north wind, drying her skin and making her bones ache. It was the final straw for Stanley. After a particularly protracted row he told Sita he was leaving. Consumed with guilt, he glared at her.
‘I can’t waste any more time. I need to have a life.’
And me?’ Sita asked him, her mouth twisting. ‘What about me?’
She knew the answer.
‘I don’t know,’ Stanley cried in despair.
He was taken aback at how painful this was proving.
‘Go back, perhaps.’
She saw his guilt before he did. He thought it wasn’t his problem. In the face of Sita’s blank, helpless face he just saw freedom, tantalisingly close, strained at the leash.
And so the door to their marriage clanged shut. Without fuss, without tears, with Alice watching, wordlessly.
‘Don’t!’ Stanley cried, seeing his daughter’s tearless reproach.
Oh God! he thought, she’s becoming like her mother. Oh God! Two of them are too much for me.
‘You can come and visit me, I promise,’ he told Alice, slipping up, giving Sita another handle on his guilt.
Rubbing it in. Ending what should never have begun, after breakfast, with the taste of Ceylon tea still on their tongues. It was a bittersweet moment, much to Stanley’s surprise, with his brother’s don’t-be-a-fool voice ringing in his ears and Manika’s buck-toothed smile. That was how it was; both so easy and so hard to leave. On his way out he noticed he had taken Sita’s smile with him. Her early-on-in-their-marriage laugh, her I-am-going-to-defy-convention determination. Unexpectedly, leaving behind his own convictions. Becoming even more disorientated than this migration had already made him.
So there it was. Done. Hope you are satisfied, he thought, looking at his brother with a new indifference. Giving money to the Tamil cause without passion, and finding himself saddled with a Sri Lankan servant woman. Ringing the changes while persuading himself of her worth. Had Sita discussed it with him she could have told him there were no winners in this game. But Sita was too busy with the voices living in her head to talk to anyone very much.
Alice could never quite remember the actual moment of her father’s final departure. The emptiness of his presence was simply replaced by his absence. They had been rudderless for so long that a further drift was hardly noticeable. She saw that the most important thing for her mother was the fact that the shoebox could now come out of hiding, its contents displayed like market-stall wares on her unnecessarily large bed. Perhaps the most significant change was that at last Alice could daydream about her grandfather more than ever.
‘Do you remember the eclipse?’ she asked out loud. ‘The way the darkness swallowed up the day and came rushing into the house?’
How wonderful it had been when the light had faded and the sun disappeared over the sea. She remembered the darkness muffling the bird sounds. A solitary crow perched on a gutter pipe in the gloom. Growing afraid, it had begun to moan like a lost soul, until at length, gathering what vestige of courage remained to it, it had flown away.
And then it passed, her grandfather’s voice reminded her in the daydream. And we had two dawns in one day. Don’t forget, it passed as all of this will pass too.
It was a conversation she was to re-run regularly.
10
THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED STANLEY’S DEPARTURE turned slowly. But at least they knew what to expect from the changing seasons now. On one occasion during the holidays Alice went to visit her father at Rajah’s flat. The two Swiss German girls were long gone and Rajah seemed mellow. There were a few presents for Alice, a meal of rice and curry and later, as she was leaving, some money.
‘I don’t want you to do without,’ her father said, giving her an unexpected hug.
Rajah winked at her.
‘You’ll have to stop being so shy, Alice,’ he said, not unkindly.
Alice was relieved to return home for unexpectedly she found she enjoyed living alone with her mother. The atmosphere in the house was peaceful now. Stanley still paid the rent but Sita had taken on all their daily expenses. She doubled and trebled her workload. There was a great deal of sewing available for a good seamstress and plenty of men who needed their trouser legs shortened. At least, thought Sita, bitterness never far away, they all had two legs. Months passed in this way. The long summer holidays came and went with stretches of idleness when Alice lay on her bed staring into space or simply drawing. Sita bought back poster paints from one of her foraging trips to the market so Alice began to paint small still-life studies interspersed with startling blue images of the sea.
In September Alice went reluctantly back to the brutish building and harsh environment of her school. She was a second-year pupil now, slightly below average in her work, conscientious if somewhat uninspired. She had still made no real friends to speak of. The following spring, when Stanley had been gone for a whole year, Alice discovered hawthorn buds, shrivelled by a late, destructive, frost. She hadn’t noticed the hedges before. She began to walk h
ome through the park and she saw that the sky was exactly like a painting in the National Gallery. Forever after she would think of spring having Constable skies.
Sita was working hard and with more energy than she had ever had, but she had also begun to forget things; little things, things that were not really of great significance. Turning off the lights, finding her glasses; Alice frequently found the kettle had boiled dry.
‘Oh, never mind,’ Sita would say carelessly when Alice showed her another burnt-out pan. ‘I’m too busy to think of everything.’
So Alice got into the habit of checking that everything was switched off before she went to bed. Their life was not exciting, but in a way they both were content. Every evening, after she packed away her sewing Sita would at the kitchen table writing out her accounts into a small notebook, adding and subtracting the details of her finances. Alice could see that this moment at the end of the day, with the house so tranquil and the sewing machine stilled, was the best moment of all for her mother. Because of this she loved it too. Something about its peacefulness always stirred the distant memory of nights at the Sea House. There was no sea, no express train rushing past; but the sound of cars starting and stopping, of dustbin lids rattling and Cockney voices calling to each other made her feel safe.
‘We’ll be fine as long as we’re careful,’ Sita informed her. ‘Your father’s money covers the big items. I can make up the rest.’
It was her only reference to Stanley.
Alice had no reason to address her father’s departure at all until the October of her third year at the school. It happened by chance during an art lesson. The teacher was taking the register when someone pushed her and she slipped off her stool, knocking over a tray of green paint. The class rocked with laughter. The teacher looked up and glared at Alice, causing more guffaws.
‘Pack it in,’ he said wearily. ‘Alice could you clear it up, now!’
Alice stared hard at him, stung. Silently she went to the sink.
‘Cheer up,’ the teacher said flippantly, noticing the look. ‘It’s not that bad.’
A bit later on she became aware he was watching her mix some colours. When the lesson was finished and the children were rushing out he called her over.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
She nodded without speaking. The teacher hesitated fractionally, considering her.
‘Why didn’t your parents come to the parents evening last week?’ he asked, not unkindly.
Alice stared at her feet.
‘My mum doesn’t like going out on her own, Mr Eliot,’ she mumbled.
The bell had just gone announcing the lunch break. The art teacher stubbed out his cigarette. He waved the smoke away and pulled a face.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he said, pushing the contents of the ashtray into the bin. ‘I must be an addict!’
Alice looked at him so expressionlessly that he sighed and perched himself on the edge of the table. He picked up the construction she had just finished painting.
‘I like it,’ he told her, glancing slyly at her.
She didn’t know what to say. The thing he was holding was shaped like a cupboard. When opened, a boat emerged. He looked enquiringly at her.
‘I found the wood in the skip outside school,’ she volunteered finally.
‘I know that skip,’ Mr Eliot said.
And he grinned suddenly.
‘I’ve watched you foraging in it!’
Startled, she fell silent again. Unlike the other children in her class, Alice had made several pieces of work. All of them were constructions; all had the same peculiar originality. They were dotted around the room.
She had painted her cupboard white. David Eliot felt around the sides of it, checking the glued edges. Frowning, he closed the doors again. It was not his usual policy to comment on work in progress, but this was work of a more sophisticated nature than he was used to seeing in this rough-at-the-edges inner-city school. Here, in this concrete wasteland, as Mr Eliot often complained, talent was thin on the ground.
‘What are you going to do now you’ve painted it?’ he asked, noncommittal.
‘I want to make it look old,’ Alice said.
She spoke reluctantly. He waited.
‘I’m going to rub cardamom powder along the edges and then paint it with glue and water.’
David Eliot raised an eyebrow.
‘Cardamom powder, Alice? Where on earth will you get cardamom powder from?’
‘My mum’s got loads of it in her spice drawer,’ she said. ‘We brought it with us from Ceylon, but we never use it.’
She hesitated again, uncertain. The art teacher was turning over the construction in his hands and frowning slightly. He has nice hands, Alice thought suddenly. The sun appeared from behind a cloud highlighting the grubbiness of the long windows and the dust on the still-life table. The art room felt warm and safe.
‘Of course!’ the teacher said absent-mindedly. His words dropped into the empty classroom. ‘Couldn’t your dad have come to the parents evening instead?’
Alice shook her head. She shook it so hard that her hair went over her eyes.
‘My dad’s left, sir. He left last year.’
It was her first acknowledgement of the fact.
‘Oh, okay,’ the teacher was saying, easily. ‘Well, finish the piece and let me look at it when it’s done.’
He smiled down at her again, catching her unawares so that without thinking she smiled back. There was the smallest of pauses. Then Mr Eliot stood up and nodded before sneaking off to his makeshift office for another fag.
Some weeks later, during one of the double art lessons, David Eliot handed Alice a book to look at.
‘Heard of her?’ he asked.
Alice shook her head. The book was full of the strangest pictures.
‘They’re sculptures,’ the teacher said, watching her turn the pages.
Several other children came over curiously to look at the book. Towards the end of the lesson Mr Eliot wandered casually back around the room looking at the work. When he came to Alice’s table he stopped. Her cupboard-boat construction was finished. She had rubbed cardamom powder mixed with dirt all over it and had scratched and gouged holes in the wood. She had papered the inside of the doors with an old Singhalese newspaper.
‘Where did you find this?’ David Eliot asked.
His voice was neutral.
‘We lined the trunk we brought to England with it,’ Alice told him, aware the class was watching her, too.
She felt her face grow hot with a mixture of emotions, but all Mr Eliot said was, ‘I you’re planning to do GCE Art.’
‘Yes,’ she said, adding, ‘I used to make things like this when I lived in Ceylon.’
She stopped abruptly. For one sharp moment her grandfather’s studio flashed before her eyes and she smelled linseed oil. A shadow fell across the whitened beach. Then it was gone and Mr Eliot was speaking to someone else in the class.
After the lesson ended Alice took the book back. She could see Mr Eliot in his office, tapping a cigarette on its packet before putting it between his lips. Alice noticed his fingers were nicotine-stained. She frowned. His fingers reminded her of someone else’s, but she couldn’t think whose. Once again an image flashed past her.
It was of her grandfather tapping his pipe.
‘Yes, what d’you want?’ asked one of the other staff, sharply, seeing her hovering. ‘Always knock before you come in here, please.’
‘Sorry, Miss Kimberley’
An inexplicable stab of anger, not evident for years, rose within Alice. It took her by surprise so that her face glowed. She had never liked Miss Kimberley.
‘What is it, Alice?’ asked Mr Eliot, coming out. ‘Oh, the book. Would you like to borrow it until next week?’
She nodded and scuttled off before he could change his mind. But not before she heard the art teacher say to Miss Kimberley, ‘Stop being a dragon to her, Sarah. She’s scared.’
; The idea that they thought she was scared mortified Alice. Embarrassment flushed over her. She felt humiliated. Momentarily she saw herself as the teachers did. Was that what they thought of her? The rage made her want to cry. Vowing to stand up for herself against Miss Kimberley, she hurried home with her book.
That night in her bedroom Alice read the book from cover to cover. There were facsimiles of some of the artist’s diaries. The dedication in particular caught her eye and she read it with some difficulty.
May this book of your childhood become a guide in your later life: in it you’ll realise how you grew up, you’ll find names and dates, you would otherwise forget; events that might drown in the stream of experience, but are important for you. None of this may get lost, my beloved child. Because there is nothing that sustains us more in the hardship of our lives than a review of our childhood.
Alice read very slowly, twice, not fully understanding everything. Then she paused for a moment before copying it down in the front of her sketchbook. She could not understand why her chest tightened at the sight of the words.
As the school year moved slowly on, Alice found she spent more and more time in the art block. With David Eliot’s encouragement, she began to work on her constructions and paintings in the much-hated lunch break. At home, life had settled into a rhythm. It was the happiest it had been for years. Conversation between Alice and her mother was desultory. Relieved to be let off the communication hook, they both sank gratefully into what passed for a companionable silence. The summer of 1976 turned out to be blistering hot. It was their third summer in England with hardly a cloud in the sky and day after day of sunshine and dust. London was emptied of its residents, beating a steady path to the sea. Sita, busy with her orders from the dry cleaners and her private clients, barely noticed the heat. In her mind the sound of her sewing machine had completely replaced the sound of the Indian Ocean. For both mother and daughter, keeping their heads above water took most of their effort, and when they saw an advertisement in a shop window for a holiday let beside the sea, they simultaneously looked away. They had no need to consult each other; the sea was part of an intractable past. In the first week of the summer holidays Sita took a week off work, telling the dry cleaners that she needed to spend some time with Alice. In fact she had decided to dig the garden up. She planted three rose bushes of such garish colours that the old woman next door objected.