Brixton Beach

by Roma Tearne

  ‘He left in a hurry,’ the neighbour informed her. ‘His cough got worse. The fags were the problem.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Alice asked with sudden, utter, desolation.

  ‘Dunno, me ducks. First he went off in an ambulance. Then he came back, then his missus came for him—carrying a suitcase, she was. Dunno. I think he don’t work no more, anyway’

  Seeing Alice’s face, the neighbour paused before shutting her door.

  ‘You one of his kids?’

  Alice nodded.

  ‘Why don’t you drop him a note, darlin’? Someone comes to collect ‘em every so often. Try it.’

  That evening, angry and hurt, telling her mother she was going to the cinema, she went out alone into the summer rain. The chestnut trees in the park gleamed in the twilight and all around was the earthy scent of dry grass, watered at last. London washed away its dust as the roads steamed. Alice stood at the bus stop waiting for a number 3 bus. The church clock struck six. There was one other person waiting for a bus. Standing, hunched and with her hands in her pocket, she thought dully, I’ve never been able to make friends. Ever since Jennifer discarded me there’s been no one else. What a fool I was to think David was my friend. Her eyes filled with tears. It would be difficult to visit him ever again without feeling bad. Suddenly, without warning, she thought of Janake. It had been so long since she had thought of him that she failed to notice the empty bus that sailed past.

  ‘Did you see that?’ the man beside her said crossly. ‘I’ve been standing here for twenty minutes and the first one that comes along doesn’t stop!’

  Alice pulled a face. It had begun to rain harder.

  ‘Oh no!’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘I’m going to be too late, now!’

  The man, he was quite young, about her age, shook his head irritably.

  ‘It’s a disgrace,’ he said. ‘I was going to the pictures. Hardly worth bothering.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Alice, without thinking.

  They stood for a moment longer. The rain increased. Alice raised her hand to her eyes and wiped them. The man glanced at her.

  ‘Oh Christ!’ he said irritably. ‘Call this a service? We’re both going to be soaked. Look,’ he glanced at her, ‘want to go for a drink in the Russell?’

  Alice was taken aback. In the early evening light the man looked very pale, his long floppy reddish hair fell over his forehead. She hesitated, but the rain was falling faster.

  ‘Okay,’ she nodded, making up her mind.

  Which was how she came to meet Timothy West.

  In Sri Lanka, a series of suicide bombers were creating a spectacle of horror. People who should have been in control had lost it. The Tigers, having begun a series of backlash retaliations, were finding that what had started in desperation was becoming a necessity for them. India watched and waited. India had its own vast problems. It had no desire to be netted by this tiny castaway island. Janake walked home from the railway station. The sun beat down on his head and his orange robe cast shadows as he moved. The road was hot and old tar had melted in some places. Janake put up his umbrella and crossed the railway line, heading towards the hamlet by the coconut trees. Scraps of washing hung out to dry. The sea shimmered. Janake had not been back for some weeks. The sea breeze felt cool and wonderful after the heat of Colombo. When he had finished his studies, he wanted to return to this part of the world. His heart belonged to the south. He wanted to do what he could here, teach at the local school perhaps. He closed his umbrella; there was no need for it in this breeze. Shading his eyes, he stared at the horizon where a white ship appeared pasted to the sky. He was nearly twenty-four now Some would call him handsome. Children’s voices came towards him faintly on the wind; a coconut scraper sounded flatly; two men walked past and bowed to him, hands together. Janake bowed back. He felt relaxed. Tension drained out of him as he stared at the sea. How he loved it here, he thought, breathing deeply. He could never leave it. Unexpectedly and with no warning, he thought of little Alice Fonseka. She had loved the sea, just as he did. Later, after he had seen his mother, after his furtive trip to sit on the verandah of the Sea House, he would walk up the hill to visit May and Namil. He had brought a small present for Sarath.

  By the time Alice sent her letter to David Eliot’s address, Timothy West had put down firm roots in her life. She wrote to the teacher with a certain air of triumph, telling him her news. She had left art school, she wrote. And, she added, with unusual confidence, she was getting married. There was a small gleam in her eyes as she posted the letter. Her father had told her she was a fool to leave art school, but she had ignored him.

  At least get your degree,’ he said, making no attempt to hide his disappointment. ‘I say, when you won that competition I had such high hopes for you,’ he added, forgetting the absent years. Alice shook her head, surprisingly stubborn. Tim West had wanted to marry her and she was very happy to accept. David Eliot wrote back eventually, giving her some of his news. His letter was guarded, as though, thought Alice, the effort of writing to her was too much.

  But we’d love to see you again, he wrote.

  Stung by the use of the word ‘we’, misunderstanding him, Alice did not follow it up.

  In September of that year England basked in a heatwave of spectacular proportions and things moved with surprising speed. Both Sita and Stanley were mildly surprised by the news. Stanley had secretly hoped Alice would find a nice Tamil boy, further the cause; bring more Tamils into the world to fight the bastards.

  ‘Sacrifice a few more lives, you mean?’ Sita asked, when he confessed his hopes.

  Stanley glared at his former wife. There was nothing vague about her, he decided. When she wanted to, she had no trouble in sharpening her tongue. But his daughter was a different matter.

  ‘What on earth do you see in him?’ Stanley asked, bemused.

  Unbeknown to him, Timothy West’s mother was asking the same question. Sita didn’t question Alice quite so openly, but when Alice introduced Tim to her the mutual apathy was so great as to be almost comical.

  ‘I know why you’re marrying him,’ Sita said shrewdly.

  But then she sighed and, with one of her rare gestures of affection she placed her hand on her child’s head in benediction. For a moment, Sita’s face looked startlingly like Bee’s.

  ‘Still,’ she continued, ‘maybe you’ll have less trouble this way.’

  She did not explain further. Alice was puzzled by her mother’s choice of words. She was doing a painting of the sea at the time and the water looked the colour of moonstones. It was a sign, she decided; she was doing the right thing. Cautiously she allowed herself to feel alive. Tim had more to him than met the eye. There were many good points to him, she told herself. She liked the way he had no time for disorder in his life, or superstition or other useless sentiments. And he hated obtuseness (his words, not hers). She did not feel what she had felt for David Eliot, of course. She did not love him as she had loved her grandparents, or Jennifer, or Janake. But she was not marrying any of them, she told herself. It was better this way, she decided, reassured. This way it was more real, more down to earth, more lasting. Feeling magnanimous, eventually she sent David Eliot and Sarah Kimberley a wedding invitation. David replied with a postcard almost instantly, accepting. He was too preoccupied with his illness to write more.

  Alice, thinking he was being sarcastic, put the matter out of her mind. Then, after years of silence, Alice decided to write to her aunt May. It was a tentative letter, brief and to the point, informing May of her imminent marriage. Sita, rousing herself, wrote too. Now at least she had something to write about. Neither wondered what effect their letters might have on the recipients.

  Time has flown, wrote Sita, feeling some satisfaction, like a flock of birds. We thought it never would, and now it has, thank God! The past has almost gone.

  Far away in the little costal town fringed by coconut trees where light spilled wastefully everywhere, May opened both her let
ters.

  ‘What does it say, Amma?’ demanded Sarath excitedly, wanting the stamps for his collection.

  Even though she was unable to read between the lines, May could see the curious mixture of defensiveness and desperation present in the letters. Emotions moved within her.

  ‘Poor thing,’ the soft-hearted Namil said. ‘It can’t have been easy with such parents. Anay, send her a sari!’

  May tried to imagine her elder sister.

  ‘Maybe when Alice has a child, things will heal within Sita,’ Namil suggested.

  A white boy,’ May said, wonderingly ‘What will the children be? Will they be English?’

  ‘What does it matter? They don’t have wars about caste over there. The English have better things to think about.’

  May tried and failed to imagine what England was like. None of them had seen even a photograph of Alice for years.

  ‘People are the same all over,’ Namil told her.

  But surely karma applied to everyone in the world, thought May, puzzled. It was hard to be sure of anything any more.

  ‘Send the child a sari,’ Namil said again. ‘The girl has lost out on most things.’

  In spite of all that had happened, May still only ever wanted to heal the rift between them all, so with this in mind she sent Alice a wedding sari of crimson rose. It was perfumed with rose petals and had been the one she wore at her own marriage.

  It was a marriage of all kinds of dependence, that much was clear. A needy, hasty, possibly desperate September marriage. Sita tried to imagine them in old age.

  ‘Well, it’s up to them,’ Stanley shrugged.

  He still found Sita impossible.

  ‘What’s wrong with your mother?’ he asked Alice irritably.

  Alice would not be drawn. Her mother was a little forgetful, that was all. Sita, displaying a new slyness, watched as Alice became annoyed with Stanley. Whatever this marriage was doing for her daughter, it was making her wake up.

  ‘My sleeping beauty,’ she murmured; but no one heard.

  In the last days of Alice’s presence in the house, Sita began to give her some of the tenderness reserved for the dead baby. She bought her daughter a wedding sari and even though Alice had never worn a sari in her life, she agreed, touched by the gesture, to wear it. Next, Sita, taking out an old, forgotten emotion, sewed a bridal jacket for her daughter, picking the pearl buttons with care, sewing them on by hand, slowly and painstakingly in the fading evening light. Mother-love, she supposed it was.

  Something dropped off the ledge in Alice’s heart and, eleven years after she had last seen him, she began to dream of her grandfather, Bee. She smelled the soft perfume of her grandmother’s Yardley apple-blossom powder, and then, a month before her wedding day, she heard Bee’s voice once again. Close in her ear:

  This bridegroom of yours, her grandfather asked in the dream. Is his hair really red?

  He sounded exactly as he used to. In her dream, Alice giggled. When she woke the next morning she could still hear his voice, very clearly. All that day and for most of the next, the voice stayed with her, and a few nights later she dreamed of him again. This time he was smiling, his eyes crinkling in the sun, and she could smell, very distinctly, pipe-smoke. In fact, when she woke up the following morning, her whole room smelled of tobacco.

  ‘Can you smell anything?’ she asked her mother, who had risen early and was doing her whirling dervish act with her sewing machine.

  ‘Only the paraffin heater,’ Sita replied. ‘I’ll probably die of paraffin poisoning,’ she said in conclusion. ‘Years of breathing in these fumes will kill me off.’

  Alice laughed; her mother was being silly. They no longer had paraffin heaters.

  ‘I dreamt of Grandpa last night,’ she admitted cautiously.

  She had not mentioned her grandfather since his death. Now that his voice was filling her head, refusing to go away, she looked for and found the painting her uncle Namil had sent her. Propping it up on her table in her bedroom, she drank in the view.

  Later, on her weekly trip to the temple, May saw Janake.

  ‘Alice is getting married soon,’ she told him.

  Janake glanced at her. May looked as though she had spent the night weeping. If he was shocked, Janake hid it. In all his childhood memories May had been the more beautiful of the two Fonseka sisters. Whereas once she had been the family joker, now she was simply depressed. He had heard rumours that she was no longer liked at the school where she taught. There seemed nothing specific, but things had changed, life had moved on. Her parents’ death had taken its toll; her sister’s absence didn’t help. Janake understood all this. But why had Alice forgotten them? Since he had become a monk, meditation and prayer had taught Janake to observe many things. He often thought about Alice and how he had helped her carve her name on the rocks. She had not known it, but afterwards he had carved his own name underneath hers, in the hope that some of her good fortune would rub off on him. There had been a time when he had envied her good fortune. But not now, thought Janake, shaking his head. Not now. It was impossible to imagine Alice being married.

  ‘I am happy for her,’ he said, at last.

  In a year or so, if the war lessened and the new government was able to reach a peace agreement with the Tamils as they hoped, Janake would go to England. To study at the Buddhist Centre, in Chiswick, London.

  I shall definitely see her then, he decided. I’ll be able to meet her husband too! he thought. But all he said to May was:

  ‘Do you know what time the ceremony is? I would like to pray for her.’

  Timothy West, accidental bridegroom-to-be, the man who hailed a wife instead of a bus, was shocked to see his bride walk into the registry office looking like a ‘proper Asian’, as he privately told his mother afterwards. David Eliot thought Alice breathtaking. He almost missed the ceremony, slipping in at the last moment looking very frail and disconnected. His hair had all fallen out, there was hardly anything of him, but he had been unable to stay away. He didn’t wish to be seen; all he had wanted was a glimpse of Alice, beautiful in white.

  The wedding reception of Mr and Mrs West took place at an old coaching inn called the Three Horseshoes, in a room that seemed too large for the small group of people who attended it.

  ‘It’s not a very auspicious hour,’ Sita told one of the guests, who didn’t know what she was talking about.

  She had not wanted to have her daughter’s wedding on a Saturday.

  ‘Better if it had been on a Thursday,’ agreed Stanley.

  He was with a new woman and was wearing a cheap, badly altered suit. Sita pursed her lips. All she wanted to do was laugh at the sight of her old love.

  ‘Hello, Sita, this is Sarah.’

  Stanley walked with a slight swagger and refused to be embarrassed. Life was life, people moved on. He would have liked to move on much more, he thought, eyeing one of the waitresses, but this new woman had him by the throat. He sighed, reminding himself that he was here to dispatch his duty as the father of the bride and give her hand away. The elder Mrs West smiled wanly, trying not to cry, She knew if she wasn’t careful she would lose her son in foreign waters. Alice’s reticence frightened her. She had thought Asians talked a lot, but she saw uneasily that this was not necessarily the case. There were all sorts of Asians.

  ‘Very exotic!’ mumbled the elder Mr West, trying to inject some humour into the proceedings.

  The bridegroom, hearing his father’s jokes, frowned. But then they cut the modest little cake and it was the moment for cheap fizz and paper roses.

  ‘She shouldn’t be carrying lilies,’ Sita told Stanley’s new woman. ‘Not right for her stars.’

  ‘Her sister would have been eleven!’ Stanley said, forgetting himself. The two women, both past and present, glared at him. Luckily, they were distracted, for the groom began to make his speech, about his new life and the home he hoped to make, and the children he hoped to have. The groom was still speaking. Some of the gue
sts shuffled, laughing uneasily. Sita watched in a dream. Her mind had blanked out temporarily. It was late summer here in England but in Colombo it would be the hot season now. Sita could not remember if she had written to her sister about the wedding. Frowning, Sita tried to remember the name of her daughter’s husband. Perhaps Alice was right and she was becoming forgetful.

  ‘Hello,’ said David Eliot, coming up to her. ‘I used to be her art teacher.’

  ‘Can you remember the name of her husband?’ Sita asked.

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Is she happy?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Sita, suddenly gloomy. ‘Alice has always been a mystery to me.’

  A bit of a dark horse!’ laughed Stanley, coming up to them. ‘Always was. Cared for no one except her grandfather, no, Sita?’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Sita coldly. ‘You’ve no business being here. You were my mistake.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope he’s not her mistake,’ Stanley said, moving his head in the direction of the groom. ‘Like mother, like daughter!’

  And he moved off. After that exchange, David knew he could not leave without kissing the bride.