by Roma Tearne
‘God! You must be freezing,’ he said, hurrying towards me.
I lowered my eyes, not wanting him to see the expression on my face.
‘This is private land,’ he said. ‘They told me you had walked out without saying where you were going.’
He stopped, and stared at me. Then he took my arm and helped me off the muddy wet field and on to the path. All around were the bodies of dead birds that I had not noticed before. Their grey faces weary, their eyes sodden with defeat.
‘Come,’ Eric said carefully. ‘I told Ria I would fetch you.’
Once in the car he turned the heater full on and sat looking at me with an unreadable expression.
‘Oh, Anula!’ he said at last, shaking his head.
He went on saying my name over and over again. And then he was gripping me so I melted into his arms.
‘What had you in mind?’ he asked me gravely. ‘I thought we had made a pact?’
It was impossible to explain.
‘Did you think no one would care? Do you think I wouldn’t care?’
He continued to hold me fiercely against him.
‘It isn’t a lifetime I have to offer you. It isn’t happiness, even. The circumstances of our meeting could not be worse. But I am here, now, with you. I will bear witness to this event.’
I began to cry.
‘You are not alone, Anula. Don’t think that. If he were listening, don’t you think Ben would be glad? That you have some comfort? That there is a small candle held out for you in the dark?’
I kissed him.
‘All separation produces a wound, a rupture in the mind.’
He spoke very sadly. We drove back in silence. He held my hand all the way. The light was at its best. I suspected it could not get any brighter than this today. While I had been wandering in the fields the snow had begun to harden and the landscape was now a sharply defined, blinding white. Eric asked nothing of me. He did not even ask to see the drawing. His silence was like the landscape that flashed past. Only now, sitting on this coach I see how he knew, instinctively, what needed to be left untouched.
We came to the house where the terrorists had briefly lived. I had been shown photographs of the place, images of the bomb-making equipment, tins of chemicals; rubbish of sorts. All the windows were boarded up now. I would have liked us to stop, to peer in through the cracks. This place and the people in it were the reason Ben had been killed. He had never even known them. Ben’s voice came to me clearly.
‘Things happen, Ma, and people are killed. Nations rise and fall, not because of the men who think they are in control, but in spite of them! Remember Tolstoy?’
Finally we turned into the lane that led to Eel House. Eric switched off the ignition.
‘I’ll not come in. Ria is…she needs to be quiet. I’ve told her I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Neither of us spoke. Tomorrow was the funeral. He leaned towards me and kissed me on the forehead. Then he kissed the palms of my hands and then the top of my head. He told me he would be thinking of me all night.
Ria glanced at me indifferently when I walked in.
‘You’d better get out of those…clothes,’ she said, pressing her lips together.
We were back to covertly hating each other.
‘I have nothing else,’ I said. ‘Only the sari I want to wear to his funeral. Everything else needs washing.’
‘Well, for goodness’ sake give them to me to wash,’ she said, irritated. ‘And let me find you something to wear until these dry.’
She could not know, but I had pressed a photograph of Tara into the coffin before I left. The thought that it was lying there in the darkness beside him gave me some small comfort.
At eight the priest came. His first words set the tone of our brief and painful association.
‘Ah,’ he said, his kindly face unsmiling but full of warmth. ‘How are you, m’dear?’
Then he enveloped me in a hug. Refusing any refreshments, he took my hands and led me step by step through what was to come. Ria sat quietly listening, but saying little, and in this way, what was to happen was agreed by the three of us.
‘Tell me about the boy,’ he said.
Instantly, as though it were yesterday, I saw Ben hurrying through the fields behind our house with an armful of blown eggshells. Ria fetched the necklace he had made for her and even seeing this, remembering the other one he had given Tara, did not anger me as it had done before. The priest held the necklace in his large hands, marvelling at its delicate colours.
I could see Ria fold her pale hands together. She looked disapproving and ill at ease. I could see the blueness in her veins of her hands.
‘Tomorrow, I want you to think of his life,’ the priest said. ‘I’m not trying to ignore what was done, I’m not trying to wipe out the injustice or belittle it. That is the job of your lawyer, Ria,’ he said, looking at her now. ‘My job is to help the two of you to remember him as he was. To celebrate his life. Okay?’
We both nodded. Connection hovered between us, bitterness stood back for a moment. Pain waited, pulsating quietly in the background.
‘Tell me about the first time you saw him,’ he said, turning to Ria. ‘Tell me what you thought.’
So she told him what I had not known, how she had glimpsed Ben rising out of the water in her midnight garden, with the scent of flowers drifting in through the open window. She spoke as she had not spoken in all the days I had been with her, with a curious yearning and emotion at last in her voice. She had felt young, she said, that night, and for many nights after. I looked her full in the face and she smiled and made a gesture of depreciation. We looked at each other and then looked away again, connected for a moment.
‘And now, Anula,’ the priest said. The light from the fire flickered restlessly on his face. ‘Of all the memories you must carry within you of your son, tell me one that is more significant than the others.’
I was concentrating hard.
‘Maybe you need some time to reflect? Maybe you can tell me in the morning?’
I didn’t need time to think. I had a photograph of it, I told him.
‘We had been walking on the beach,’ I said. ‘In the days before the ceasefire ended we could walk undisturbed on the beach. It was Ben’s birthday and my mother had made him a yellow, short-sleeved shirt.’
The stretch of beach near our home is like no other. Even now, with the hidden land-mines and the discarded, burnt-out army tanks, it was astonishingly wide and beautiful. Imagine what it once was like!
‘Ben had strayed towards the water, moving closer and closer. Daring to go there without an adult.’
The waves that day were gentle, barely a movement. The wind was down, there were no kites in the sky and Ben walked as far as the water’s edge. All around were catamarans pulled up high on the sand dunes. A few children played with a tyre hanging on a coconut tree. It was an ordinary afternoon in our costal town. My father was shielding his pipe, trying to light it against the breeze. The sky was a blistering blue. Percy got out his camera.
‘Look at the fellow!’ he said with admiration. ‘See how fearless he is!’
At that moment, Ben turned and realised he was alone. We were high on the sand dunes and he probably couldn’t see us for a moment.
‘Mama!’ he screamed, his face wobbling, and he began to cry just as Percy snapped him.
‘Of course we rushed down the beach, laughing and waving. I remember scooping him up in my arms. I couldn’t bear to see him cry. How could we have played such a trick on him!’
I remember his chubby, rounded arms, hotly wound around my neck.
‘I have that photograph still,’ I said. ‘Even though the beach is no longer the stretch of paradise we once knew. And they are both gone.’
The fire had died down while I had been speaking. The priest nodded, waiting, giving me all the time I needed, knowing how this time could never be replaced. Outside, snow continued to fall unnoticed. Tomorrow we would bu
ry Ben and a bit more of paradise would be lost.
That night I could not sleep. Hours went by. Occasionally I went over to the window and looked out, but there was never anything to see. Towards morning, a sound, heavy with meaning, woke me. It was a cock crowing. I lay rigid, listening, struggling to get my bearings, desperate to hold back the day. I had not thought of Tara all these weeks and now I thought of her. Tara was from another kind of life. I looked at my watch. It was seven in the morning. It would be midday at home. Tara would be at her father’s shop and if there had been no trouble in the night she would be standing behind the till, staring out at the sea. She would be watching the glittering water, and waiting. I got out of bed. The sun glinted on the snow.
I washed and took out the sari I had brought specifically for this unimaginable day. Soft, white, like the whiteness outside, it was the sari I had worn last at my father’s funeral. Then Percy and a young Ben had been by my side. Slowly I began to wind the cloth around my body, all thirteen yards of it, pleating it carefully. I took a long time over it, making sure the edges were straight and the bottom of the sari almost, but not quite, touching the ground. I secured the train over my shoulder with the pin Tara had given me. My hands were clumsy and slow. I was dressing like a person who hadn’t been wearing a sari all their adult life. I put up my hair and after that I slipped on the black cardigan Ria had given me.
‘Come,’ I said out loud, to my reflection. ‘Come, darling, let’s go.’
There was no one about when I went downstairs and the first thing I saw was the newspaper open on the kitchen table. A small vase of some delicate white flower stood near it, trapped in sunlight. It was no ordinary day. A photograph stared out at me from the page. Confused, it was a moment before I recognised myself.
A moonlit night in Jaffna. A young man embraces his mother for the last time. He is about to leave on a long hazardous journey, fleeing to save his life…it read. Underneath, in capitals, were the words LIFE AND DEATH OF A REFUGEE. And then there were my words as I had spoken them to the journalist. There was a blurred photograph of Ben that I did not recognise, obviously taken here. I could dimly make out the river in the background and the trees appeared to be full of leaves. Ben was smiling.
‘I took it,’ Ria said, coming in unnoticed behind me. ‘In August.’
Her voice was a whisper.
‘Look, I’ve brought you the rose you wanted,’ she said. ‘It’s not fully open, but it was the only one they had in the village shop.’
She was dressed all in black and her short, severely cropped hair shone with an extraordinary sheen. She looked frightening and beautiful. It was too late for intimacies. The funeral was not for another hour. Shortly after we had drunk our first cup of tea, Eric arrived and I began to shake.
I remember almost nothing of the actual funeral. We drove to the crematorium where a Mass was said. I noticed the place was packed, but that was all. Eric and Ria flanked me, close enough to catch me, I suppose, should I stumble. But I did not falter and I walked up the aisle steadily to my seat at the front. Ben had died and been buried so many times since I had first heard the news. The priest told the story of Ben on the beach, but I’m not clear how much he said or what the reaction was. He talked about the tragedy of what had happened and the kind of world we lived in that forced people to travel huge distances from their homes. A shutter had gone down in my head again. We took communion, those of us who were Catholic; I seem to remember there were about three. It was all very civilised. A hymn was sung. Again, I’m unclear as to what it was. While they were singing I had one of the strange flashes, like a picture book, of the sitting room where Ben used to play the piano. But even that did not move me. We sang another hymn. I did not open my mouth for fear of what might come out of it. I found myself thinking of the snow and how its lightness had seeped in through the window the night before. The snow outside was affecting all the sounds inside, I thought listlessly. The hymn came to an end and the priest made the final address and there was music again. Everyone stood up and Ben’s coffin began to move slowly away. Still all I did was stare, and it was then, with no warning at all, with only a small, barely audible sound, Ria fell forward in a faint.
The odd thing was that I felt almost better for it. The sight of Ria’s grief made me feel I wasn’t struggling alone. I suppose that was it. I could see people looking at me, although, even that was possibly only in my imagination. My mind was having thoughts of its own, running away with itself, acting in ways I could not have anticipated. I noticed as we picked her up that although she was very tall, Ria was as light as a bird. Someone brought her a glass of water.
‘I’m all right,’ she said faintly.
The bluish circles around her eyes were very obvious and ugly. They made the rest of her face even paler. We went outside and many people came to speak to us. There was the lawyer who I had last seen only a few days ago. He came up to me and shook my hand, murmuring condolences. The journalist who had written the article was there, too. There would be more articles in the days to come, she told us, as other newspapers took up the story. There were photographers taking photos of us, and standing a little way away, heads slightly bowed, were two policemen and a policewoman. Eric was speaking very softly to me. It was a moment before I understood.
‘Just keep walking, darling,’ was what he said as we were ushered into the waiting cars.
15
TEN O’CLOCK. M11 EXIT. HEATHROW. IN the few days left to us, Ria withdrew completely. She had such an air of stunned and mistrustful defeat, of such private desolation, that I began to ask myself, had she had found out about Eric? I oscillated between fear that she might have found out and anger at her neglect of me. Didn’t she know how much I was suffering? In Sri Lankan society, I wanted to tell her, nothing is more sacred than the relationship a mother has with a son. Blessed are the women who have many sons, I wanted to say. Whoever seeks to reverse the order of things in Nature will be cursed, was another saying that hovered constantly on my tongue.
Although through a supreme effort I was managing to stay silent, suppressed rage, like flash floods, surfaced on and off. Had it not been for Eric, I would not have been able to control it for long. The truth was both Ria and I were both waiting for me to leave Eel House. Very slowly, the last days of our enforced time together drew to a close.
We had both decided tacitly that I would leave the business of the court case to her. I had no money nor would I ever return to Britain. Even if my airfare were paid again, I could not apply for a visa before several years had passed. I was overcome by new terrible lethargy. I barely slept, was always cold and the food Ria prepared in her desultory way was so alien to me that I ate very little. What daylight there was took on a hallucinatory air, adding to my sense of dislocation.
The one person in all of this who made things bearable was Eric. While Ria hid herself in her study, unable or unwilling to communicate with me, Eric arrived each morning. The snow had hardened into ice and the weather had become so utterly cold that I had no escape but to wear the trousers Ria had put out for me. And so, each morning, in those last days while we waited for Ben’s ashes, I would drive back to the farm with Eric. I sit on this coach now, free at last to think of him. I see it was good fortune that gave me Eric. In spite of my black present and hopeless future, even I can see, clearly, that he was my small portion of good luck. Brought to me by a flawed god in order to soften this body blow. It was the afterglow of all I had lost. He had loved me once more before I left. In all, we were intimate with each other five times. For a person like me, this was as strange and as beautiful as travelling to the moon.
The day after the funeral, with only two days left, at my request, Eric took me to look at the sea for one last time. He parked the car close to the front and we sat looking at the seagulls floating lazily above us. The overcast began to roll back and lift as if a blind was being drawn up. Underneath was a pale blue sky, clear as glass and with a greenish sheen.
&
nbsp; ‘Shall we take a walk?’ he asked.
There was hardly anyone on the beach, but today I felt it had too open an aspect for us to scatter the ashes. Eric agreed.
‘There’s another spit of land, further up the coast towards Dunwich,’ he said. ‘I think that might be better. Let me show it to you.’
The whole town had turned out for the funeral, he told me. I hadn’t noticed.
At the edge of the salt marshes, we stopped. Behind us was the dark wood full of regimented trees, like an army. A thaw was setting in. Once it began, Eric said, the snow would vanish rapidly. Again he stopped the car, leaving the engine on so a little warmth came through. And now he fell silent, taking out his pipe, filling it slowly. Hopelessly, I began to cry. We would not make love again. He sat, letting me cry on, not touching me. Really I didn’t know who I was crying for. Eric had offered me something that in the harsh, angry world I had come from, was astonishing, but it had never been intended to last. He would remain here, with his land, thinking of me often, loving me until he died. The knowledge brought no relief. Not then. Not now. Perhaps it never will.
I have no idea how long we sat in this way. Eric was in no hurry. He let me cry while he smoked his pipe, staring out into the marshes. Small black-and-white birds with spindly legs hopped about on the rough grass. A few seagulls called to each other across the water. The sun tipped their wings with gold. After a while, he suggested we stretch our legs a little. In spite of myself, I smiled. I had never heard the expression before.
He took me for a circular walk across the marshes. He had talked about this place on one of my visits to his house, but it was now that I saw its true beauty. In spite of all the crying I had done, or perhaps because of it, the air felt invigorating as we crossed the stile into the field. It was getting warmer. To our right in the distance was the Martello tower, silhouetted darkly against the expanse of snowcovered field and the sea beyond. The marshes, too, were deeply under snow, but here and there a few strands of scrub grass poked through. The sky was bright with the reflections of a sea almost out of sight and from where we stood we could see Eel House on the other bank of the river with more dark-spired trees behind it. Ria had told me it was here, from this point in the river, that Ben first swam towards the house. It was from here their fate was sealed.