Mosquito

by Roma Tearne

  ‘Well,’ he said, coming swiftly towards her, his worries all ironed out by the sight of her. ‘Are you going to stand there for ever?’

  He made as if to touch her but then, changing his mind, smiled instead. The rain vanished and the previous day’s vague anxieties disappeared with it. The leaves shone as though they were studded with thousands of precious stones. And the whole day suddenly seemed extraordinarily iridescent and beautiful.

  ‘Well,’ he said again, and he felt, without quite understanding, the light touch of her gladness.

  The girl was smiling at him with barely suppressed excitement. Taking his hand she led him back to the veranda, making him sit down, laughing, making him wait. She gave him her latest notebook to look through, while she went to fetch the paintings. But where was Sugi?

  ‘Wait,’ said Theo, but then Sugi appeared from nowhere and he too was smiling, for Sir’s face had suddenly become transformed.

  Sugi came out with the tray on which was a beer for Theo and a jug of Nulani’s favourite lime juice. There was a small plate of boraa. Theo would not look at the paintings until Sugi had poured himself a beer. Sugi grinned. Sir was impossible of late. Sunlight danced across the canvases as she turned them round.

  They were smaller than he expected. In one, Theo sat at his desk in front of a lacquered bowl of bright sea urchins and red coral. The mirror, scratched and marked with age, reflected a different interior. It was of his flat in London. There were peonies in the mirror-interior but none beside the bowl of sea urchins. A small mosquito with spindly legs rested on the edge of the polished wood. Theo sat working at his typewriter. The portrait he had glimpsed months earlier was the largest of them all. It too was finished. The girl had painted herself in one corner of it, as a splash of green and white and black hair. A thin glass jug, cracked and brittle, stood on a corner of the shelf beside Theo. Sunlight poured into it. His face was turned towards the light, looking out at the trees, caught in the moment between thinking and writing. And with an expression in his painted eyes that now confused him. It was the expression of a younger man, he felt; himself perhaps in another life. How had she caught it? How had she even known of it? Oh! Christ, he thought. Oh! Christ. He felt a wave of something, some rush of clumsy tenderness wash over him. It left him suffused with certainty so that when finally he could speak again the day poured its endless light over him too.

  ‘You are a truly beautiful painter,’ he said at last, feeling the weightlessness of his words, the mysterious nature of the language as it floated dreamily, tumbling into the thick and languid air. ‘Others must see your work,’ he said, taking in her shining eyes, thinking, no, there were no words for what he felt. No language, however many civil wars were fought, was fine enough to describe his thoughts. Thinking too, certain also, that her paintings must go to England. It was the thing he could do. Somehow.

  The rain was terrible. It filled the upturned coconut shells that littered the ground everywhere. Clear, round mirrors of water reflecting patches of the sky. The Buddhist monks, when they remembered, kicked them over, spilling water. But mostly they did not remember. The curfew was back and there were new things on their minds. Although they knew it was the time when the swarms of mosquitoes appeared, thick as smoke and deadly as flying needles, they were busy with other matters. Language was on their minds, the importance of Singhalese as opposed to Tamil. The army too, who in peacetime might have been employed to spray every house with DDT, now had more important preoccupations. So the rains fell largely unheeded, forming glassy ponds in the shade of the coconut palms, in ditches and in stagnant tanks. Reflecting the sky. It was a mosquito’s paradise. They floated their dark canoes on these ponds among the lotus flowers and the water lilies. Waiting for the night. But for humans this was no paradise, and those foolish enough to think this a place to toy with, did so at their peril.

  Two British journalists were shot dead. A third man, a photographer, escaped with his life, having lost his left eye. Two Indian students had limbs mutilated. Their stories eventually made news and the international press issued a worldwide warning. Stay away, for the unseen laws that governed this place were not to be tampered with. But the rains, unheeding in the midst of all that was terrible, fell indifferently, and many people thought this was a blessing.

  Later, after they had hung the paintings and the girl had gone home, Theo went back to look at them. Paint and linseed oil gathered in the room where they were hung and her presence was everywhere. Again he felt the dull ache of it. He remembered her, in her red dress, with patches of rain falling on it, looking at him, alert as a bird that had evaded a storm. He thought of her silent concentration over the past months as she worked in the studio, and once again he was filled with wonder. At her youth, at her unwavering certainty, and her talent. Staring at the smudges of paint, the light and shade that transformed into the edges and corners of things, he felt privy to her thoughts. He noticed she had placed the framed photograph of Anna in the reflected mirror room. Petals from a vase of peonies fell beside it. She had painted not just a likeness; she had painted some other dimension, some invisible otherness of how he must once have been. And the look on his face, where was that from? Closing his eyes, Theo felt the heat and intimacy of the moment. Sugi, coming in just then, stood looking silently with him. He too saw the face of a much younger man. How had this happened, so quickly?

  ‘I must take her to Colombo,’ Theo said, ‘to meet a painter friend of mine. I must ask her mother if she will allow it. We could go up on the train.’ He nodded, his mind made up.

  ‘Sir,’ said Sugi, but then he hesitated.

  What could he say? It was too late, what had not meant to be had already happened. He saw it clearly; Sir’s eyes were shining like the girl’s. Trusting like a child’s, full of unspent love. So what was there to say? What was there to stop?

  ‘Be very careful, Sir,’ was all he said in the end. ‘I told you this girl’s family is watched. You do not yet fully understand this ruined place. The uncle does not know you yet but, now that the boy is going to the UK, he is there all the time of late.’

  Sugi hesitated again, not knowing how to speak of those things lodged in his heart.

  ‘You do not see how we have changed,’ he said eventually. ‘We are so confused by this war. Sometimes I hear people arguing that it is the fault of the British. That even though they have gone, we still have an inferior feeling in us. Who can tell?’ He shrugged, helplessly. ‘Our needs are so many, Sir, and our attitudes have changed because of them.’

  A paradise that has been lost, thought Theo, staring out to sea. Before he could speak, Sugi remembered the chicken.

  ‘Who knows where the enemy is, Sir?’ he told Theo. ‘There are many people who will envy you, who might put the evil eye on you.’

  Sugi spoke earnestly, even though he knew his words fell on deaf ears. Sir, he saw, would take no notice. He knew it was not in Theo’s nature to be careful. He had been away for too long and too much living in alien places had affected him; it had made him fearless. And he had no time for these dark, pointless evil eyes that could decide what should and could not be. So he watched as Theo went to see Mrs Mendis.

  It was as Sugi said: the uncle was there but there was no sign of the girl. The uncle listened without comment. Theo talked quickly, drinking only milk tea, refusing offers of beer, as he tried to impress on them the girl’s talent.

  ‘My friend teaches at the British School, he is a well-known painter. He has many contacts in the art world. He is an elderly Singhalese,’ he added, speaking to the uncle directly, knowing the man’s politics, his prejudices. The uncle said nothing.

  ‘If she is taken on at the art school she’ll be funded by a scholarship,’ Theo continued, not knowing if this was really the case.

  The uncle swirled his beer. His face was set. What is wrong with me? thought Theo. I am behaving as though he frightens me, when in fact he’s harmless, just a provincial man. Sugi’s anxiety has rubbed
off on me, that’s all. The uncle looked at Theo. Then he squashed and tossed the empty can out into the darkening garden. Mrs Mendis began to scold him, calling the servant to pick it up. The uncle stood up, tightening the belt of his khaki trousers. He looked across at Theo; he was smaller than Theo but wider, fatter. His lips were soft mounds of flesh, well defined and full of blood. He laughed a strange high-pitched laugh, ironic and humourless.

  ‘Art!’ he said. His voice was falsetto with amusement. ‘We are a country at war, trying to survive in spite of the Tamils. What do we need art for, men?’ He looked briefly and threateningly towards the house. ‘It isn’t art she needs. At this rate, she will have a serious problem finding a husband. But it is not up to me, it’s up to her mother, no?’ And then he went, down the veranda steps, into the threatening rain and out to his waiting jeep, his headlights probing the silent road ahead like yellow sticks of dynamite.

  Well, thought Theo, breathing a sigh, that wasn’t so bad after all. The man is harmless enough. They would go to Colombo the next morning. Because the paintings were still wet he decided they would go by car. He would pick the girl up early and, with luck, they would be at his friend’s studio by mid-morning. And because of the curfew they would be back by dark.

  ‘Tell her to bring her notebooks,’ he said to Mrs Mendis.

  Sugi lit the paper lanterns. They cast a trelliswork of patterns on the walls of the house. Geckos moved between the shadows. He fastened a shutter against the breeze. Then he went into the girl’s studio to look at the paintings of Theo. He was alone; Sir was still over at the girl’s house. He seemed to have been gone for a long time. Sugi’s unease was increasing. He remembered the first time he met Sir, on that afternoon as he walked from the station, carrying his smart leather bags. Sugi had had a good feeling about Mr Samarajeeva. He had thought, ah, here is a real gentleman. He had not known what an important man he was then, of course. But he had seen in him the kind of person that no longer existed. Someone fine and just and clever, thought Sugi, staring at the paintings. Someone who had not been corrupted by the war. It had all been there, quite plainly in Sir’s face, even on that very first day. Which was why Sugi had agreed to work for him. When he had found out that Theo was a widower, he began to wonder what had driven him to come back to this place. And later, when he knew more, he had hoped the old home would heal him.

  ‘They are my people here, Sugi,’ Theo had told him many times in the following months, as they sat drinking their beer late into the night. ‘I have nothing more in Europe.’

  ‘Did your wife have family, Sir?’

  ‘Oh yes, but…well, she was not close to them, and after she died they had nothing more to say to me. Anna and I were too bound up in each other, you see. Perhaps it was a bad thing, I thought afterwards it probably was. I don’t really know.’

  He had fallen silent, straining to remember her voice. Bullfrogs croaked in the undergrowth and in the distance the Colombo express hooted as it rushed past.

  ‘We never seemed to need other people much,’ he had continued, lighting his pipe. ‘That was part of the trouble. So that even the absence of children did not matter in the end. Only our friends Rohan and Giulia understood.’

  Sugi had made no comment. He would not pry. The shadows from the oil lamp had lain in a dark band across Theo’s eyes. It had the curious effect of making him look as though he wore a blindfold. His voice had been barely audible, suddenly without energy.

  ‘We had wanted children. But then she died. After that, what was there to want? I was glad we had none.’

  He had spread his hands helplessly in front of him as the silence between them lengthened. The air had been soft with unspoken affection.

  ‘You know, Sir, you will meet her again,’ Sugi had said finally. ‘These things are not lost. Loving someone is never wasted. You will find her again some day, when you least expect. I have heard of such things happening.’

  Theo had sighed. He was tired, he’d said. Tired of running.

  ‘I simply had to come back home, Sugi,’ he had said again. ‘It was the only place I could think of. After she died everything I did, every place I went to reminded me of all I had lost. I was like a man suffering from burns. Even breathing was difficult.’

  He had shaken his head, unable to go on. In the distance the sea, too, had sighed. At last he had roused himself.

  ‘In the end, I knew, if I were to survive I would have to come back. I thought I might make sense of events once I was here.’

  Sugi had nodded, moved. He understood. Underneath the mess they had created for themselves, the land still had powerful ancient roots. It was still capable of healing. One day it would go back to what it had been before.

  ‘I know. I can wait,’ Theo had said as they had sat surveying the garden. ‘I’m in no hurry.’

  Sir is an idealist, thought Sugi, now, going over the conversation in his mind, staring at the painting, astonished all over again at the Mendis girl’s talent. The child has seen into Sir’s heart. She knew. Because she felt it too. Sugi shivered; in spite of the heat, he shivered. They are both such children, he thought. The girl is too young, and he is too innocent. It is left to me to look after them. This is a fine state of affairs. And then Sugi went to fetch a glass of cold beer, thankful that the sound of the gate being opened meant, at least, that Sir had returned from Mrs Mendis’s house unscathed.

  There had been no problem with Nulani leaving. Contrary to what Sugi had said, the uncle did not return in the morning, and Mrs Mendis had been friendly enough. She asked Theo if Nulani was likely to get another commission. The money was always useful and what with Jim leaving for the UK there were even more expenses. Theo continued to dislike the woman but, folding these thoughts, he slipped them out of sight. He smoothed them down like a sheet on an unmade bed. And then the girl came out with her bouquet of excitement, her dress a scarlet splash across the day, and all his momentary irritation with the mother, and his anxiety over the uncle, all of it vanished and the morning shifted and changed into a different, glorious focus. He turned the car around on the gravel and they left. The edges of her hair were still damp from her early-morning shower.

  Theo thought it was best to take the coast road. In spite of the checkpoints and occasional roadblocks, it was quicker and more straightforward. He had wedged two of the paintings in the boot of the car but the third, being so much larger, rested on the back seat. The girl was trying to hide her excitement and failing. It escaped in little green tendrils, curling itself around him, rising like the wisps of mist that were coming in from the sea. It was going to be another scorching day. The girl’s excitement was such that Theo was certain she had not slept much.

  ‘You’ll be exhausted by lunchtime,’ he said looking at her, thinking she looked as though it was Christmas. As though she was about to open her presents. He hid his own excitement at having a whole day with her, talking to her, having her paintings looked at, keeping his delight quiet and cool, even though all he wanted was to hold her small hand. The day lay ahead of them, as clear as the sea emerging from its mist. It felt, for Theo, a snatch-back from his youth. He did not think all this, not in so many words. All he saw was the smoothness of the beach and the shining excited eyes of the girl.

  ‘Why don’t you try to take a nap?’ he said, pretending to be tired, trying to sound bored. ‘It will take an hour to reach Colombo, maybe longer. Why don’t you have a little sleep, no?’

  And then he burst out laughing, looking at her astonished face and her total incomprehension.

  ‘Well,’ he said, smiling, pretending to yawn, teasing her some more, ‘It’s what you would do if you were my age!’

  And he thought again how her eyes were like dark cherries.

  ‘Your friend, what is he like?’ asked Nulani.

  The road wound its way along a picturesque stretch of the coastline. Groups of rocks thrust their way into the sea. Giant cacti clung to the edges of the sand. Coconut palms fringed the beach,
sometimes so densely that only glimpses of sea could be seen. At other places whole stretches of white sand, empty and clean, unfolded before them, fringed by the lacy edge of the waves and marked by the empty railway line.

  ‘Rohan? He is a fine painter. He used to live in London, which was where I met him. He was my wife’s friend to start with. She knew him long before I did; she used to buy his paintings. Then, after I met Anna, I saw one of them hanging in her apartment and I wanted to meet him too. Because I liked the painting, and because he was my countryman.’ Rohan, he thought, how to describe Rohan? How to describe the times they had spent together? Rohan, with his Italian wife Giulia, and Anna, in that other, distant life. The years of holidaying together, in Venice, in the Tuscan hills. The evenings spent arguing and drinking wine, the affection. And afterwards, Rohan and Giulia at the funeral, beside him as he stood blinded by the unnatural brightness of his pain, rejecting all offers of friendship. But they had not minded. Like the true friends they were, they had understood, had waited patiently, year upon year, writing to him, telling him about their lives, their decision to return to Rohan’s home in Colombo, in spite of the trouble. So that slowly, given time, Theo began to write back to them. They were his dearest friends. Nulani was watching him intensely.

  ‘You will like them both,’ he said, knowing that they would love the girl.

  The sun was climbing to its hottest point as they reached the first checkpoint. The currents had subsided and the sea was calm. There were hardly any waves now. The fishing boats had put out to sea again. At the checkpoint a woman soldier examined their passes and searched the car.

  ‘The paintings are wet,’ Nulani said, but it was too late, she had already touched them.

  ‘You can’t go much further,’ the soldier told them flatly. ‘The road is blocked. You will have to leave the A2 and go inland through the coconut groves until you get to the ruined city and then you can pick up the Colombo road again after that. There is another checkpoint further up. After that you will have to turn right.’