by Roma Tearne
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.
He would shake his head.
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 ta
ken 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 n
othing. 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.’