Brixton Beach Read online

  Organising a home-help for Sita, they went to Cornwall.

  ‘July!’ Tim declared, glad it was all settled. ‘I’m owed time off then.’

  Cornwall was a long way from Brixton. The car was burdened with beach paraphernalia, windbreak, inflatable rubber dinghy, bucket and spade.

  ‘Okay, little ‘un,’ said Tim with a touch of excitement in his voice. ‘We’re all going on a summer holiday!’

  And so, with the thrill of her growing son refusing to be denied, Alice spent every summer on the beach. The slightest hint of sun turned Ravi brown as a berry.

  ‘Looks like a proper little Asian!’ said Tim, not unkindly.

  She saw that at least she had picked a man who loved his child. The thought comforted her in the long, featureless days sitting on the sands watching Tim sunbathe and Ravi make sandcastles.

  ‘I might do some drawing again,’ she said out loud.

  Tim nodded, pleased.

  Good girl, her grandfather’s voice said, alarmingly close and approving. Took you long enough.

  Alice jumped. To begin with, she drew everything she saw on the beach. But sometimes other things, things not there at all, appeared in her drawing. She had no idea how the Colombo express strayed on to the page, or how the wardrobe in her grandparents’ old garden wandered into their rented cottage, which in turn had a distinctly odd interior.

  ‘Weird!’ Tim laughed, when he saw. ‘What sort of chair is that?’

  ‘A planter’s chair,’ she told him.

  Tim groaned.

  ‘You’ll damage the boy, at this rate,’ was all he said.

  For five years they returned like the tide, nearly always picking the weeks that rained, missing the summer sun, effortlessly getting it wrong. The cottage waited for them with its rented furniture, faceless and noncommittal. Tim clearly enjoyed every moment of it; Ravi delighted in the beach, running towards it as soon as they began their descent from the car park. Alice followed, shivering.

  For five years. Then, one dark January, when a cold watery moon was high in a frosty sky, with the unexpectedness of a fairytale gone wrong, Tim left. There was no warning. The moon filled the small leafless garden, light outlining the motionless, empty swing. Apart from the few stray hairs on the bar of soap in the bathroom, embedded like ticks, advertising his vacancy, there was nothing left. Had she not been involved she would have raised an eyebrow, such was the efficiency of his departure. He had discovered something that corresponded more easily to his idea of love, he told her. Someone normal, he added. Someone who had grown up with the cold, so that sleeping with the windows open in winter was not difficult.

  ‘I’ve had enough!’ he said, sweeping away the years they had spent together in a gesture of farewell.

  She could see he had.

  ‘Some marriages,’ he cried, looking suddenly as though he might weep, ‘are not meant to last forever.’

  He was more upset than one would expect from somebody who had freedom in his sight. For the first time, Alice felt pity for him touch her. It was not his fault.

  ‘I am tired of hearing about all your dead relatives, the endless war in your savage country, your talk of politics, your spicy food, your foreign ways.’

  His words lay between them. Everything had become irreversible, she saw. He had been stretched too far and for too long. But so have I, she thought in silent despair.

  ‘I have found someone more balanced,’ he confessed.

  And now he began to sound angry.

  ‘Someone who actually loves being part of this country. Someone grateful. D’you know what that is like?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Alice, before she could stop herself.

  ‘She’s Jewish,’ Tim said. ‘Her mother was in a concentration camp.’

  Alice was paralysed. Tim loaded his bags into his car and returned to the house, carefully wiping his feet on the mat for the last time. He wanted to say good-bye to his son. He had a pile of photographs in his hand.

  ‘Look,’ she heard him say to the six-year-old Ravi, ‘this is the house where I am going to live. Here is the sitting room, here is the kitchen, and look, here is the garden. I’m going to put in a climbing frame and a swing for you. And your bedroom will be here. It’s all ready and Ruth can’t wait to meet you. Okay? So think about what you would like to do next weekend?’

  He left soon after that, taking with him all her own anger. Ravi was sitting in his room, building the Starship Enterprise out of Lego bricks. The photographs of Tim’s new home lay scattered on the floor beside him. Turning one of them over, Alice began to draw.

  ‘This is the coast where I grew up,’ she said, hesitantly. ‘Here is the headland with the lighthouse that still flashes. Night after night, it flashes, right across the bay.’

  She knew she must keep talking, that it didn’t matter what she said so long as she didn’t stop. She ran her hand across the boy’s smooth, thin arm. She had read somewhere that the touch of a mother’s hand on her newborn was different from her touch later on as the child grew. Instinct, she thought, stroking her son’s bent head. Why then, since she possessed so much instinct, had she gone astray?

  Now when she wanted most to hear her grandfather’s voice it seemed to have deserted her. From this distance his promises seemed hollow. She thought of an old jumper, knitted by her father’s office girl, that she had discovered in the back of her mother’s wardrobe, shrunk and unwearable. Her mother’s life had collapsed too, falling away without fanfare, insignificantly. This is how we have ended, thought Alice, stroking the bent head of her silent, beautiful son, wondering what long, sad shadows were already casting themselves on his life. Love was not enough. How will we manage? she worried, feeling the weight of all the years ahead. She saw that she had even less certainty in giving this child those things he would need in order to find his footing in this country. I am only half his story, she thought, too late and with terrible sharp understanding of the foreshortening of her own life. She had travelled the ocean and tried to understand this alien place, but she was still struggling, she thought in pain, astonished by the years of effort. And she thought again of all the messages she had thrown overboard, day after day.

  I want to come back. Write saying you’ve changed your mind. Say I can live with you instead. Tell them to put me on another ship. Send me home.

  The sea had changed its colour the further she had travelled from her grandfather.

  Sitting on the floor beside Ravi with her drawing and Tim’s photographs, she remembered again, as though it was yesterday, the faint smell of diesel oil and ozone.

  ‘One day, when you are older,’ she said, hugging her son’s unresponsive body, ‘you might like to visit the place where I came from. And see the Sea House.’

  They did not go back to the sea in Cornwall ever again. Other events of more significance occurred. Sita moved into Brixton Beach. Her landlord was harassing her and, besides, Alice told her firmly, it was time for her to be closer to her grandson. Sita brought her dolls with her; she would not be parted from them, but she learned to keep them in her room. She was disintegrating fast.

  ‘I’m potty,’ she told Ravi. ‘Your grandma has no memory left. It’s worn out. From over-use!’

  Ravi laughed, delighted. He loved his grandmother.

  ‘I don’t have any memory either,’ he said. ‘Let’s just have now, Grandma.’

  As he grew from six to seven and then towards eight, Sita sometimes mistook Ravi for someone else. Each time it was a different person. They grew used to it and hardly noticed her ramblings now.

  ‘Take no notice of my grandma,’ Ravi would tell his school friends when they called round for him. ‘She’s batty!’

  But he always gave her a hug before he went out to play, Alice noticed.

  In Sri Lanka things were in a mess. Janake’s letters, which for a while had been frequent, now stopped altogether. Alice’s own letters had trailed away, receiving no encouragement and although she had written repeatedly
to her aunt, there had never been a reply. Tim came every fortnight to take Ravi for a sleepover at his new house. He nodded to Alice but avoided looking at her. With the money he was forced to pay her for maintenance and the money she made from her paintings, she was able to survive. Her paintings were always of seascapes, but she had begun to make small sculptures again using odd bits of wood and found objects that caught her eye. They reminded her of the box she had once made with the driftwood Janake had found buried in the sand. Sita watched her daughter. It was difficult to know if she knew who Alice was, but her eyes followed her around her studio without comment. The rest of the time she would fall asleep in front of the television. One night, having dozed beside Ravi as he watched his favourite programme, she decided to go to bed early.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she told Alice peevishly. ‘I don’t want anything to eat.’

  ‘But I’m just serving the rice, Amma,’ Alice protested.

  ‘No, no, Bee, I don’t want anything to eat. Good-night.’

  And she disappeared into her room.

  ‘She called you “Bee”,’ Ravi said, not taking his eyes off the television.

  ‘Yes, I know. She hasn’t done that before.’

  Alice found her later when she went in to check on her before going to bed. Sita’s eyes were closed. She was cold. Colder than she had been since the day, twenty years before, when she had left the tropics.

  Bel Canto

  15

  ONE EVENING TOWARDS THE END OF May 2004, at the moment between twilight and darkness, a man approaching late middle-age stood gazing out of the window of a first-floor flat in Kennington Park Road. The man was Dr Simon Swann, senior vascular consultant at St Thomas’s Hospital. Almost forty-five years old, he was the holder of what could be called a liberal, carefully compartmentalised life. In his quiet, focused way he had achieved most of those things a man of his age could want, with his teenage daughter Cressida and his wife Tessa of twenty years. It was a considerable achievement, given that this was post 9/11 with its rolling rogue wave of terror. It seemed only yesterday that Simon and Tessa had marched up to London, carrying one of Cressida’s WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER placards. It had been a rare moment of unity between the Swanns, who had seen eye to eye with a feeling akin to passion for the whole of that hot summer’s day. It hadn’t worked, of course. Neither the eye-to-eye business as a family nor, as it turned out, the nation’s desire to stop the war. Given the undermining clashes they suffered as a family, how could he be surprised by the subsequent decision of the government to invade Iraq? Simon merely lost a little more hope. For a while he saw the years ahead rattle like dead leaves. But then time had gently blunted his dismay, turned it into the more acceptable philosophical approach, shifted his melancholy a little. So that now, a year later, the whole sorry mess was something one read about in the newspapers and occasionally shook one’s head over. For after all, what could anyone do? Realistically speaking, life had to go on. So in order to ensure this dreary fact, Simon continued to do the bit he had always done, and was good at: saving what life was put in his hands without discriminating between race or class or creed. Patients, those in the know, always asked for him.

  The Swanns still had two houses. One an angular and efficient flat in town, close to the hospital where Simon worked, and another, softer, more faded house in the country, where the china was Eric Ravilious and there were Nicholsons on the walls and some wonderful Bloomsburyish and delightfully English curtains. Outside this house there were sheep, the cliffs and the sea. The beautiful Sussex coastline. Now, as he stood in the London flat listening to his favourite opera broadcast live over the radio, Simon Swann felt the approaching summer flex its green fingers, reaching upwards towards him through the open window. It was still light outside, the pure full light before twilight. He could see the park reflected in the windows. The air was pleasantly warm and the sky was stained pink with the remains of an unusually beautiful day. Tomorrow will be fine, he thought, watching the evening star rise above him. Below him, the traffic was flowing easily at last in the busy London street. The rush hour was almost over as the music he listened to began reaching its climax. As he listened, in a silent space inside him, muffled by his external life, he felt another self, marking time. Overhead the twinkling lights of a plane coming into land at Heathrow was followed almost immediately by two more planes hovering into view. The voices on the radio rose and fell, supported by a sweep of violins as he stared with blank eyes at the activities outside. However many times he listened to this final act of Tosca it never failed to move and remind him of another time, a lifetime ago now, when he had first heard it. So many years later it still sounded fabulous.

  A tissue of memories floated along with the final moments of the opera, carrying him with it. He had been a young man then, sitting in the darkness of the Royal Opera House. The world had become a different place since that evening, changed beyond recognition—9/11 had altered everything. The country he lived in was no longer what it once was. Terror had returned to Britain and it was here to stay, leaving the inhabitants of this small island xenophobic and fearful. Once we had an Empire, he often thought, wryly; now we just have the suspicions left by the Empire! Simon hardly ever played this recording, knowing he would remain possessed by low-level depression for hours afterwards. It was a foolish thing, this conjuring up of a fragmentary time from his youth for which there was no room in his life now. He had been at medical school, going to the opera as often as he could afford to, hiding from everyone else the passion that had no place in his mundane, hard-working, existence. The girl had been sitting in front of him, close enough for him to see her profile, close enough for him to see she was alone. When the lights went on at the end he saw she was wearing a red dress. Her hair was very long and black. Something made her turn her head and their eyes met. He was close enough to see the dark downward sweep of her lashes and the perfection of her teeth as she smiled before he stood up to let someone pass. When he looked back at her seat, she was gone. On an impulse, brought on no doubt by the music, he left the auditorium but could not find her anywhere outside. She was lost amongst the crowds. He had bought a book of cheap tickets for the season but, by the time he saw her again, he had given up looking for her. It was a different opera this time: Mozart. As soon as the first act ended he saw her stand up and, making up his mind he hurried out, determined to accost her. But once again she disappeared. It was the same in the next interval. Then at last when the performance ended he followed her out of the building until, as they were both hurrying towards the tube station, he managed to talk to her. It was nothing really, he would tell himself later, nothing worth making a fuss about. They had gone into a pub for a drink, she had looked anxiously at her watch, not wanting to miss the last train, and they had talked. She was training to be a schoolteacher, she sang a little, there was no one special in her life at the moment, she told him. They had talked without stopping for over two hours. She missed the last train and he had found her a black cab. She gave him her phone number, scribbling it on a scrap of paper (why had he not given her his?) and he had promised to call her the next day. But carelessly, as he made his way home he had lost it. Perhaps it had fallen out of his pocket when he took his ticket out. Simon had gone back to Covent Garden, even though it meant he missed his last train and had to walk back to his lodgings. But although he had scoured the pavement he never found that piece of paper.

  In the days that followed, he had looked everywhere in the street, going back again and again to the opera, queuing outside for returns. Paying far more than he could afford. Then, when he still did not see her, he had taken to waiting for the crowds to come out at the end of some of the performances, but to no avail. Cursing himself for his stupidity, he was unable to stay away from Covent Garden. Finding the girl had become a kind of obsession and for a time it was impossible to concentrate on anything else. His work began to suffer. A few months on, he met Tessa at a party. She had been surrounded by a group of people
, mostly men. One man in particular appeared utterly infatuated with her, causing Tessa much amusement. Simon had noticed her derisive laughter and had been appalled. Unwisely, when she had come over to speak to him, he told her so. They had had a terrific row that had somehow ended with her going back to his place. She was not his type, their interests were very different, but a few weeks later he caught chickenpox and Tessa arrived to nurse him. One thing led to another. Too late, he saw what he had done. Fleetingly he thought of the dark-haired girl at the opera. But Tessa with her blonde hair and icy blue eyes had become his reality. Soon all their friends began to see them as a couple. Their mutual, hidden loneliness formed a cocoon around them both. It had been enough. He proposed marriage and she accepted without hesitation. Twenty years later here they were, with the life they had built together. Solid as a monument.

  The music was over. Sensing someone had come into the room behind him from a waft of perfume, Simon turned. He picked up the invitation on the mantelpiece.

  Drinks at six, he read. Followed by dinner. And please bring Tessa if she’s free! I haven’t seen you two together for ages.

  So that was what he was doing. And they were late because of the music. It was his fault, he knew. Even before Tessa pointed it out to him.

  ‘I’m on call,’ he warned her as they left. ‘I might have to leave early. You’ll have to get a cab.’

  She nodded slightly.

  ‘You never know, it might be interesting,’ he said, knowing Tessa did not want to go but wanting to break the slightly frosty silence.

  He knew she was annoyed and trying not to be. She hated it when he listened to opera, particularly this one, aware it did strange things to him. The opera was one of many bones of contention between them, he thought heavily, manoeuvring his way through the traffic. Another was that he played his music too loud. She didn’t understand you needed to hear everything as though it were a live performance. She just thought he was going deaf. The evening light was beautiful. The mild depression had settled over him, just as he had known it would. The music threaded through his thoughts, regardless, conducting a conversation of its own. He had never told Tessa about his foolish non-encounter at Covent Garden.