by Roma Tearne
‘You like them?’ asked Alison Fielding. Rohan stared.
‘They’re wonderful,’ he said. ‘Did you say…?’
‘Yes, the artist is Sri Lankan. A woman.’
‘There is only one,’ said Rohan slowly, ‘only one Sri Lankan artist that I can think of. Only one who…’ He broke off, unable to go on.
‘Her name is Nulani Mendis,’ said Alison Fielding, smiling broadly. ‘D’you know of her? Good! I was thinking of showing you both together actually. You must meet her. But first, let me see what you have brought me.’
‘And that was how I met her, finally,’ said Rohan.
He was back, with the promise of an exhibition with Nulani. His excitement was infectious. Since he had returned he had been unable to stop smiling. All evening they had sat drinking wine and he had talked non-stop. Giulia could not get a word in edgeways. She felt light-headed, drunk with astonishment and unanswered questions. When would Giulia see her? How was she? How did she look? What did she say when she met Rohan? Rohan laughed, delighted, remembering.
‘She simply could not believe it when Alison rang her. It was comical really,’ he said, pausing. ‘If it wasn’t so sad,’ he added. ‘Alison picked up the phone and just called her up. “There’s a painter friend of yours from Sri Lanka,” was all she said. Just like that. Can you imagine it? And half an hour later there she was, little Nulani Mendis, changed and yet not so changed, at all. Breathless with shock and beautiful as ever.’ He paused, again. ‘We spent the whole evening together. In the end Alison had to send us tactfully away, so she could shut the gallery.’
They had stepped out into the street. The weather had changed. He had noticed it had been raining. Fine, autumn rain, bringing a few leaves down. The air was edged with a sharp chill, but they had not cared, for home cried out to them. The smell of it, the sounds. It had been a low and haunting call, insistent and lovely, refusing to be ignored. They had gone into a pub and he had bought her a lemonade.
‘She doesn’t drink,’ Rohan said. ‘And she’s very thin, and…’ He hesitated, not knowing how to go on. How to describe the dark eyes that had looked back at him, unfathomable and softened, with a distant cast of pain.
‘She’s a wonderful painter,’ he said instead. ‘Alison’s going to arrange the exhibition. She’ll be in touch soon. And d’you know what her first words were? “Where’s Giulia?”’
He grinned. Tears pricked the back of Giulia’s eyes. Was it really true?
‘So when can I see her?’
‘Whenever you want,’ said Rohan, laughing boyishly. ‘I can’t believe it either. It felt as though we had been talking together only moments before, as though no time had elapsed at all. Well…’ he hesitated, ‘almost.’
They had gone on in this way all evening, saying everything and nothing. Feeling the slow ebb and flow of memory thread lightly between them, drawing them closer. How had they lost touch? At some point Rohan had sensed she had no desire to go back to her flat. He had asked her about her brother then.
‘Jim?’ asked Giulia. ‘Theo used to call him Lucky Jim.’
Rohan nodded, his face inscrutable. Yes, they had talked about her useless brother.
‘She never sees him. Hardly, anyway. Once a year perhaps.’
And then, he told Giulia, they had alluded to other things; the years that had passed. And Rohan had felt admiration rise up and astonish him and he had understood, perhaps for the first time, her terrible struggles, and the acceptance of what had happened to her life.
‘You were the one who told me to accept,’ she had reminded him. ‘“Like a coconut palm in the monsoon,” you said. “You must bend in the wind.” D’you remember?’
Rohan remembered. Why had he not been able to take his own advice?
‘She’s given me her telephone number,’ he told Giulia. ‘Naturally she’s frightened of losing us again. I said you’d want to ring. I said, knowing you, you’d ring whatever the time was tonight!’
They both laughed and Rohan poured more wine.
‘Oh, it’s good to be back,’ he said, meaning something else entirely.
The air was charged with unspoken things. Refreshed, reborn. They felt alive in ways only dimly remembered.
‘And she’s all right?’ asked Giulia, eventually, as they sat in companionable silence, forgetting to turn the lights on. She did not want to probe too much, too soon, but the memory of Theo stretched in a long, sorrowful shadow between them. As it always will, reflected Giulia. Rohan sighed deeply. They continued to sit without speaking in this way. At last he stirred himself.
‘Yes and no.’ He was silent for a moment longer. ‘She’s living with some man. It doesn’t sound as if it’s working. She wants to leave. I think. They…haven’t much in common except, she said, maybe a mutual loneliness at the beginning. Anyway, it’s been wrong for some time. They are both aware of this.’
Once again shadows passed between them.
‘But habit has kept them together. For how much longer, who can say?’
‘Like us,’ said Giulia softly, before she could stop herself.
Startled, Rohan glanced sharply at her. Outside the window the twilight was fading fast. Giulia’s face, silhouetted against it, looked tired. She had aged, he saw, but still there was something infinitely lovely about her. Shocked, he looked at her anew and saw the light which once, many years ago, had shone faintly and transparently within her, was now very clear and very pure. As if the shaping and chiselling of all the years of her life was revealed at last, in the many fine lines of her face. Why had he not seen this before? Why had he taken her for granted? And then, with sudden insight, he knew she had very nearly given up. But how long has she looked this way, without me caring? he thought with amazement. They had embarked on a journey together. It had not been easy. Giulia had not been able to have children yet somehow they had weathered that storm. And he paused for a moment, head bowed, recalling again the friendship, first with Anna, and later with Theo. Anna’s death, he saw, had been the foreshadow of what was to come. How happy they had been once, he thought, how young! They would never be young again. And in that moment, halfway between evening and night, with a feeling of great sweetness, he saw, at last, they had reached a different kind of peace. She was his wife. He loved her, still. After all these years, after all they had been through, he could still say this and mean it. In the bluish half-light reflecting the surface of the canal water, he reached out and clasped her hand. It was soft and warm and it carried within it a lifetime of touch.
‘No,’ he said at last, his voice firm. ‘Not like us. We have come through this together. What happened to Anna and then to Theo was terrible but I no longer look for explanations. I accept, Giulia. This is life. These are the fruits of war, inescapable and terrible. I see now how important it is to end this struggle, to accept my own helplessness in all that has happened. My problem was that I always thought it was my fault and I carried the burden alone. But,’ he gestured towards his paintings, ‘I can’t do any of this without you, you know. You have borne witness with me. We tell this tale together. You, Giulia, you are the mainstay of my life.’
She smiled at him, and he saw her eyes still shone with the grace he had always associated with her. He saw in that smile, mellow and very wonderful, that she understood. And, he thought with astonishment, she had always understood.
Later she rang the girl. Bridging the years, hearing again the voice that sounded the same, yet was not. Guessing at all the invisible changes that must have taken place. All that probably could never be spoken of now. First excitement gave way to caution.
‘We brought your notebooks,’ she said, hesitantly. ‘We had no address to send them to.’ She paused, waiting.
‘And your paintings, did Rohan tell you?’
And in a rush of emotion, Giulia remembered how she had longed to find her, how the absence had served only to compound the other losses, of Anna and of Theo. Of her own marriage. So many lives unravelled by
the chain of terrible events. So much destroyed by war. They talked for a while longer, laughing, interrupting each other, and slowly, imperceptibly, she began to hear the subtle changes in the girl.
‘She’s grown up,’ she told Rohan afterwards. ‘It isn’t anything she says, specifically. It isn’t what she says. More how she says it.’
‘She’s a serious artist, now,’ said Rohan. ‘People have begun to notice her. D’you remember what I told you, on that terrible night? How it would all feed into her work?’
Giulia nodded. How could she forget that night?
‘I wish it could have happened in a different way, but…’
They had promised to meet in a few weeks, just as soon as Giulia could arrange some time off. When they had finished talking she offered Rohan something to eat. It was late but he showed no sign of tiredness.
‘I could hear someone, a man’s voice in the background, calling her,’ Giulia said. ‘But she ignored him.’
‘Yes,’ Rohan said, slowly. ‘And, you know, the feeling I had was that all the time we were talking about other things really we were talking about him. All the time.’ He wouldn’t say Theo’s name. Still. That hadn’t changed. ‘She hasn’t got over him. Why should she? She was never that kind of person. They were similar in that way.’
‘Yes.’
In the semi-darkness Rohan’s face was gentle.
‘It will never fade, Giulia. I can tell you, she will always love him. And the threads that bound them together will weave through her work for ever. Not in any physical presence, you understand. In fact, Alison Fielding was very interested when I told her of the earlier portraits. She would like to see them. I’m not sure Nulani will ever part with them, of course, but she might show them, she might be persuaded.’
‘Poor Nulani,’ said Giulia softly. ‘How old is she now? About twenty-eight?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘All those years in London, grieving. Alone. Did she talk about them?’
Rohan shook his head.
‘Not much. Her brother found her a place to live and then more or less abandoned her. She got a job in a café; she painted. She was cold.’ He shrugged. ‘What is there to say after all? When I asked her about that time, she just said she painted what she felt. Everywhere she looked, everything she caught sight of, she said, reminded her of how she felt. Staining the light, catching at the colours, moving her to mark it. She said she felt as though her whole body was branded by it.’
He smiled, suddenly, brilliantly.
‘An abstract painter, that’s what she is now. Who would have thought it!’
‘And us? Did she wonder why we never wrote?’
‘She didn’t say. I think she assumed the letters didn’t get through. She loves us, Giulia, in that trusting, straightforward way that was always hers. She knew we would get in touch if we could and the fact that we didn’t could only mean one thing. You know what she was like.’
‘Oh God!’ said Giulia. ‘Tomorrow I’ll book a flight to London.’
19
THEO’S AGENT LIKED WHAT HE READ.
‘At last!’ he said, jokingly.
Privately, Theo astonished him. Having read his letter, having known his past, he was amazed by what he read. Tiger Lily had been a bleak novel, successful perhaps because of its bleakness. The film had brought a short-lived fame for its author. But this manuscript was different. The agent had a hunch that this new book, when finished, would be a success in a different kind of way. Yes, thought the agent, confidently, a slow burner. Slow and steady. It was an elegiac book, filled with optimism and awash with tenderness.
‘The language is very beautiful,’ he said, when he finally got through to Theo on the telephone. ‘Your best work yet,’ he enthused. ‘I recognise the character of Irene, but Helena, where’s she come from? Honestly, Theo, you’re a marvel. I thought you’d disappeared and then up pops another book! You must never stop writing, d’you hear me? When you’re ready, I’m going to sell this book at the Frankfurt fair. So will you come back to Britain, now?’
‘You should go,’ was all Thercy said when he told her.
But Theo had no interest in travel, to Britain or anywhere. He continued rewriting sections of the book, honing it painstakingly. It would be ready by October. Every morning, before sitting at his desk and opening the manuscript, he tried to conjure up as true a picture of the girl as possible.
I want to see you objectively. In the way you appeared to others. You see how far I have moved since that day I lost you? How time has changed me? You, the last love of my life, would understand that. If you could see me now, what would you think? Would you remember how I worried over the difference in our ages! How I agonised. You were the child I never had, the wife I had lost, but most importantly of all, you were yourself. They said we were destined to find each other. What we didn’t know was that our time was wrong, the planets discordant or whatever they call it here. Karma, I suppose. Prison made me believe that. All the endless violence I witnessed has convinced me. And as I see you now, quietly sitting within the pages of what I write, distanced by words and time, detached and perfect, I know it was a gift; you were the gift.
He paused, staring out into the garden, overgrown and neglected. He wondered why, in spite of all his understanding, he was still weak with sadness? He told himself, had she returned to him both of them would have suffered. What had been taken from him was too great and because of this, he knew, he would have in turn taken too much from her. So much had changed; even his own soul had changed. He felt a stranger to himself.
‘Some day,’ he told Thercy, ‘perhaps I might bump into her, in Colombo, on a train, somewhere by chance.’
Months passed. The new novel continued to grow with a logic and a rhythm of its own. It took its time, following a path of its own. The atmosphere of brooding darkness in a jungle of noxious violence and superstitions had developed in a manner that had nothing to do with him. And always in the midst of it was the figure of the girl, steeped in sunlight. It was, he told himself again and again, a novel about love. Anna would have been proud of him. Finally, then, it was finished. He had settled it to his satisfaction. Life in this paradise, he felt, was exactly as the beautiful mosquito that lived here, composed in equal parts of loveliness and deadliness. And he felt, too, that at the heart of all he had written, remained the puzzle of humanity. Long ago Rohan had said that only art could change evil. It was art, he had said, that changed people’s perceptions. How they had disagreed in those light-hearted days, when a good argument was all there was to win. But perhaps Rohan had been right.
Later, when he had finished the last correction, replaced the last words with those he had wanted, Theo sent his manuscript reluctantly to England.
‘It’s over,’ he told Thercy.
The agent was right. It was the best he had ever written. Anna and Nulani, he thought. A novel about them both. Why couldn’t I see this before? And he thought, pouring himself a glass of arrack, I will dedicate this book to Nulani. The girl who painted the invisible.
That night, he slept dreamlessly, and without effort. And the bed where briefly love had once slept, and the room where a pair of straw sandals still remained, watched him sleep the gentle sleep of peace. The monsoons were almost over. Thercy was going to visit her sister-in-law for a while. She felt she could leave him, now. Soon it would be October and the weather would be cooler. Then I will paint the front of the veranda, thought Theo, I will make that my next task. And he remembered Rohan and Giulia. And he remembered Sugi, whom he had loved, and the girl and Anna and all the things that had made up his other life. And he thought, I have lived, I have loved, what more can a man ask for?
In London, Alison Fielding, working on a hunch that their paintings would sell, was getting excited. The exhibition was called ‘Two Sri Lankan Painters’.
‘They’re very different,’ she said. ‘Similar experiences, I think. Pretty grim, actually, civil war is no joke. Things have ca
lmed down a little, but they’ve suffered. Lost friends, relatives, become displaced.’ She was talking to someone from an art journal.
‘They’re haunting,’ the man from the magazine said. ‘Darkly atmospheric, grainy, overcast. Every gesture is eloquent.’ He thought for a moment. ‘They reflect the spirit rather than the outer world,’ he added, nodding, thinking of what he would write later.
‘I’ve decided to show some of their earlier work as well, by the way,’ said Alison. ‘It gives the current work more context. But none of the earlier pieces by Nulani are for sale.’
‘Pity,’ said the reviewer, looking at them closely. ‘They’re beautiful. They’d be snapped up.’
He paused, looking at the three small portraits, all of the same man, still and arrested against a dazzling tropical blur of light. Caught with the sun in his eyes. Smiling.
‘Who is it?’ asked the journalist, curiously. ‘He seems vaguely familiar.’
Alison Fielding shrugged. ‘Someone she knew, I think. Her father, an old friend, she won’t say, and I don’t like to pry too much. She’s a private person. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. With some portraits, that sort of information is important, but with these, I somehow don’t think it matters. There is a quality, an essence, a…’ She tailed off.