Brixton Beach Read online

  Simon was amazed. Vast oceans stood between them both and his mind was in turmoil. He talked of Cressida and the strange cyber world she lived in. Perhaps it was reality.

  ‘My son has no use for my memories,’ Alice was saying. ‘They aren’t his memories, so,’ she shrugged, ‘why should he care?’

  He could see she was hurt.

  ‘The thing Ravi needs most of all is to belong somewhere, totally. He needs to be grounded in an identity before he can feel at ease.’

  ‘But you’ll see,’ Simon said lightly, wanting to offer some comfort, ‘he will find out one day that belonging is not about appearance.’

  A little later on when he saw she was getting restless he drove her home.

  ‘I shouldn’t ask,’ he said, when he stopped the car.

  He smiled. He could barely see her face. It had become dark without them noticing.

  ‘But can I phone you?’

  You needn’t ask,’ she said, and he sensed with enormous relief she was smiling too.

  Briefly, he placed his hand over hers. Then she was out of the car and gone with hardly a breath’s disturbance to the air.

  When he got back to his flat, the answer phone was flashing. Tessa had left a message about a quote from the builders.

  ‘I don’t know where the devil you are, Simon,’ she said in her economic and clipped way, ‘at some opera, no doubt. But can you ring him in the morning? I think we’re being overcharged. And can you let me know when you’re coming home. I wanted to invite the Richards to supper.’

  A shock like cold electricity darted up Simon’s arm and into his heart so that he pressed the delete button abruptly and began searching through his collection of CDs. He knew exactly what he wanted to listen to and here he was free to turn the volume up. He went to the window, through which the lights of London were strung like jewels across the night sky. All summer spun in his head. The music swept over him in a wave of pure joy, swamping him in an ache of wanting to see the woman he had just left. The longing surged over him, quivering through his body. A complex web of happiness had been thrown over the familiar view, turning it into something rare and utterly beautiful. He could not think. Thinking was too much tonight. All he wanted was to have this feeling go on exactly like this, with the music and the night full of stars and tomorrow somewhere nearby. He doubted he would sleep.

  Across the river in Brixton Beach, sleep evaded Alice, too. Not since David Eliot had first befriended her had she had an evening remotely like this. Her skin felt stretched and tired as if she had been swimming for a long time. For some reason the feeling made her think of Janake. She allowed herself to bring out the memory of the last time she had seen him. Outside, the traffic rushed past. Night noises of police cars and ambulances flashed by and disappeared. The moon was full in the sky, shining through the curtains of Brixton Beach. Simon Swann, she thought, saying his name aloud. She was stunned. Then in order to calm herself, she tried out the sobering thought of his marriage.

  That was broken already, her grandfather’s voice said, close by. You’re living in a different era, both of you, to the one you were born into. Don’t you know? A person has many lives.

  I don’t want to do anything to his wife, she thought. I don’t want to be the one to break anything. This is crazy, I don’t even know this man, she said out loud. Her grandfather’s voice seemed to have deserted her. What should she do? Sleep was impossible.

  The next morning, having left it as late as possible, Simon rang her.

  ‘Do you like opera? Would you like to go to Tosca?

  ‘The opera?’

  He might as well be suggesting they went to the moon.

  ‘I don’t know any opera,’ Alice confessed.

  Her life had no history of opera, she told him, a little defensively. Had he forgotten she had different cultural references from his? Not British taste. She felt as though her grandfather was floating about near her, listening. Simon Swann glimpsed another, darker, more interesting layer that he would want to unwrap later. He tried to think of the Asians he worked with. He was a politically correct man, but he wondered if he had been thinking in clichés. He could not remember a time when he had ever given the matter much thought. How many had he worked with in his career at the hospital? Twenty, thirty?

  ‘Well then,’ he told her, easily, ‘you have a treat in store! I’ve got two tickets for a performance next month. Friday the twenty-fifth’

  It was clear to him they would have to make another meeting. And another. And instinctively he knew these meetings alone would not be enough. Alice was thinking the same thing too, but Simon had no way of knowing this. She smiled into the phone. There were things she should have been asking him, but he beat her to it.

  ‘Tessa’s gone back to Mortimer. She hates London. And the opera.’

  ‘Who’s Mortimer?’

  Her voice was so close to his ear. He badly wanted to see her.

  ‘It’s the name of the house in Sussex. It’s been in my family for years. I think it was my mother who named it,’ he said. ‘She always felt the house was a person, you see.’

  ‘How funny,’ she said, faintly. ‘That was how I felt too!’

  And she gave him her address.

  He was with her sooner than she expected, leaning against the door frame when she opened it, smiling at her, familiar already. How could this be?

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked, and then he laughed.

  The interior of the house had a tropical feel to it. There were cracks all over the yellow walls. All the way here his mind had been going over some lines from a poem he had once read:

  You are many years late,

  How happy am I to see you.

  She was laughing too.

  ‘You should take my pulse!’ she said.

  ‘I have to be at work by two,’ he told her, regretfully. ‘I’ve got a rotten rota for the next ten days but then I’m free again on Friday the twenty-fifth.’

  They both sighed, paused startled, and then laughed. Oh God! thought Simon.

  He had the feeling that a part of him had severed itself of its own violation and would now forever belong to her. He thought this sort of thing happened only to young men.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly. ‘I’m a medic, you see.’

  She saw. She was already getting used to the idea, she wanted to tell him. I will ring you every day he wanted to say, and think of you all the time. Neither said a word.

  Alice took him through into the kitchen, which was surprisingly large. The cupboards were made of driftwood, bleached and blanched with sun and salt-water.

  ‘I used to beach-comb in Cornwall,’ she told him, seeing him look at them. Through the doorway he caught glimpses of other rooms, a length of ultramarine silk draped over furniture; sea glass of a piercing blue reflecting the light. He felt disorientated. The London traffic, still only a pace away outside, did not penetrate or remove the feeling that, somewhere, nearby there was bound to be the sea.

  ‘I love the name!’ he said. ‘I mean, Brixton Beach.’

  Alice handed him a mug of milky tea. The day was like a seashell. You looked inside it and it was impossible to see beyond the middle. And the end of course was in complete shadow. You put it to your ear and all you heard were the half-understood sounds of the sea: waves, voices, the wind. The walls of the kitchen were hung with a series of small paintings. All of them were very beautiful. All were of the sea.

  ‘But the sea is everywhere!’ he said with amazement.

  ‘I grew up by it,’ said Alice. ‘It’s inside me, I suppose, wherever I go. The horizons, the greys,’ she waved her hands in the air. ‘People think the tropics have to be all colour, jungle green and hot reds. But it’s not necessarily so.’

  They stood side by side, gazing at the paintings.

  ‘I used to walk on the beach at dawn and the sky was often a soft grey and pearly white. And sometimes, far out on the horizon, was a touch of a very pale yellow. My gra
ndfather would point it out to me.’

  Tell him I’m dead, her grandfather said succinctly, interrupting her with a faint chuckle in his voice. He’s no fool; other people’s memories won’t frighten him.

  Startled, Alice smelt a whiff of pipe tobacco.

  ‘Where do you make your work?’ Simon asked, curiously. ‘Do you have a studio in the house?’

  Alice nodded. ‘Would you like to see it?’

  The room startled him further. Unfinished work was strewn everywhere. The high ceiling light he had noticed in the gallery was here too, giving the room the same feeling of menace, completely at odds with the rest of the house. Simon felt as though he had stepped into another world; one he could only guess at.

  ‘It’s very powerful,’ he said, uncertainly. ‘What’s this work about?’

  Good! her grandfather’s voice intervened. Tell him, then! So haltingly, she spoke of her mother’s ordeal, the cousin she had never met, and finally, of Bee. They were the things that history remained silent about, she told him.

  ‘He was the only person I’ve ever loved with all my heart,’ she said simply. Apart from Ravi, of course.’

  In the English summer daylight her words were more startling.

  ‘My friend Janake said the floor was marked by their shoes. No one saw the footprints until afterwards, and by then it was all that was left,’ she said. ‘I remember being struck by his words, most of all by the thought of the struggle. It was somehow so utterly shocking that I could visualise it.’

  She fell silent at the memory.

  ‘These scratches?’ Simon asked, pointing to the marks on a door resting against the studio wall.

  ‘Yes.’

  Simon too was shocked. He was used to death sanitised and made reasonable. He was used to kindness being drawn like a sheet across suffering, not this. Tessa, and his life in Sussex, seemed very far away.

  It was this, this righting of a terrible injustice, that had informed her work, Alice continued, quietly. Made her turn from the fluid seascapes to sculptures.

  All my life is built on memories,’ she said over lunch.

  Her eyes glowed with dark intensity. Sunlight poured into her colourful kitchen, slanting across her face. She’s beautiful, he thought, mesmerised.

  ‘To be an immigrant is to be sandwiched between two worlds,’ she told Simon Swann, without a trace of self-pity.

  The flatness that he had heard when he had first talked to her had gone from her voice.

  ‘The effort it takes to be a person who does not belong is unimaginable, you know. I am one of those people, living that life.’

  But inside, she told Simon Swann; she was still Alice Fonseka who had once belonged.

  They talked all that long hot afternoon with the hours flying around them like late summer gulls. Simon wanted to sort everything out in his mind, wanted her to understand that he was going to change the world she had inhabited.

  ‘I’m too old to waste any more time,’ he said firmly.

  ‘How old?’ she asked boldly, laughing.

  ‘Forty-five!’ he said, pulling a face.

  She continued to laugh.

  ‘You look younger.’

  It was true. Sunlight on his greying hair gave him the look of a much younger man. He felt himself sink down into the dark place of awful loneliness she had been describing. He wanted to erase it. He wanted to do many things; to touch her, for a start, to trace an unwavering line from eye to eye and down across her mouth. Wanting to touch her shouted in his head above every other thought, but he ignored it. Smiling, she wanted it too, although what she wanted was slower, harder to put into words. Neither of them requested anything of the other. Both were filled with old-fashioned courtesy. Both waited for the other, averting their eyes, suddenly, conveniently, blind. Alice felt her heart was bursting.

  Good, good, her grandfather said, sucking on his pipe. But on this occasion, Alice did not hear. There was an orchestra playing in her head. She was not altogether certain what it might be playing. Simon too was listening on invisible headphones. He was listening to Mozart.

  ‘The twenty-fifth,’ he said, in a voice he hardly recognised as his own. ‘I’ll pick you up at six and we’ll go to the opera. I know you’ll love it!’

  16

  ALL THAT WEEK AND THE NEXT two after that Simon Swann felt as though he was a wind-up bird functioning perfectly well on mechanical energy, but absent in spirit. His staff asked him questions and he looked blankly at them. The patients greeted him in their usual subdued way with the mixture of fear and awe the occasion demanded. Tessa rang him once to inform him the builders had arrived and were at work. They were trampling all over her plants and she was convinced they were stealing the best roses.

  ‘I think it’s the younger one who’s the culprit,’ Tessa said. I’m certain he’s taking them home to his wife,’ she said crossly. ‘I need to catch him at it,’ she added.

  ‘It’s just a few flowers,’ Simon said mildly. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It’s dishonest,’ snapped Tessa. ‘Why doesn’t he buy his own, like the rest of us?’

  Cressida wanted to speak to him and Tessa passed the phone to her.

  ‘There’s something wrong with my car, Daddy,’ Cressida complained. ‘The gears are sticking again.’

  Simon placated her and promised to look at them when he got back.

  ‘Can’t you drive Mummy’s car till I’m next home?’ he asked when she continued to grumble.

  ‘That’s not the point!’ Cressida said, impatiently. ‘Tom hates her car!’

  ‘Well, tell Tom to get a car of his own, or else fix yours.’

  ‘Why? When will you be back?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’m going to the opera on the twenty-fifth. Put Mummy back on, I want to talk to her.’

  Cressida groaned.

  ‘The opera!’ she cried, handing the phone back to her mother.

  ‘I take it from that you won’t be here when the Richards come?’ Tessa asked waspishly.

  Simon sighed.

  ‘You knew about the tickets ages ago! I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry! What good is that?’

  It was the usual rejoinder.

  ‘Look,’ he said, reasonably, ‘put them off till the following week.’

  ‘No, Simon, I will not. If you’re going to the opera on Friday, why can’t you come home on Saturday? Cress needs her car fixed.’

  There was a short pause.

  ‘I’m not coming home just to fix Cress’s car,’ he said, suddenly riled.

  He could hear his daughter shouting in the background.

  ‘I think you’re being exceptionally mean to both of us,’ Tessa was saying.

  That was how it had always been, he thought: Tessa and Cressida against him.

  ‘In any case, I’m working on Saturday’

  The lie, taking him aback, slipped out with startling ease. The silence on the other end of the phone grew.

  ‘Put the Richards off until the following week or have them without me.’

  ‘Well, of course you never liked them,’ Tessa said.

  There, it was out. All the knives, he thought, wincing, slightly. Soon they would be sharpening them. When would they start drawing blood? Taking a deep breath, he wondered what he could do to resolve it. Feelings he had not thought he possessed were clamouring inside him, crying to be let out. He didn’t want a scene but it was heading towards him like a tidal wave. He had never quarrelled with his life until now. Wait! he told himself. Wait! Maybe he was mistaken. But it was no mistake.

  He opened his computer. His e-mails remained unanswered from days before. Invitations to dinner, to play squash, his friend Ralph offering him two tickets to a concert, another invitation to give a paper at a conference. A colleague, writing to him from the States. A long letter from the editor of The Lancet with queries about the article he had submitted some months ago on pain relief. They were going to publish it. Next Simon listened indifferent
ly to his telephone messages.

  The days crawled slowly on. He hurried back to the flat in the early hours of each morning impatiently, wanting only to ignore the telephone, his mobile, his e-mails, everything. Wanting only to listen to his music and wait. Friday the twenty-fifth seemed a lifetime away. He rang Alice twice in that time. The first time was a few days after he had seen her last when, unable to bear it any longer and with a feeling of slight sickness, he dialled the number. What if she had changed her mind and couldn’t face the opera? After all, hadn’t she warned him that opera was outside her experience? What if she couldn’t stand the thought of an evening with a married man? The world was full of unattached men, he thought, his head swimming. Like a schoolboy, he plucked up courage and rang her. He let the phone ring and ring but there was no answer. Feeling let down, he went into the kitchen and cooked himself a boiled egg, opened the tin of anchovies he found in the cupboard and ate supper. Then he drank some whisky and listened to a recording of Tristan and Isolde. The old magic flooded over him so that for a while he was distracted. At ten o’clock, feeling unaccountably restless and depressed, he decided to go to bed but as he was cleaning his teeth the phone rang. Her voice sent him into paralysis.

  ‘I was in my studio,’ she said, sounding very young. ‘I didn’t hear the phone.’

  ‘You’re still working, then?’

  ‘I can’t sleep.’

  There was a pause, as though she felt she had said too much. Unvoiced questions gathered in his head. But luckily she couldn’t see. Neither of them knew what came next. He wanted to say, he couldn’t sleep either, that all he had done was think about her, that if he had half a chance he would jump in a taxi and come over. But he said none of these things. Instead he told her about the music he had been listening to. It seemed safe to admit he was looking forward to Friday, so he said that too. He heard her laugh slightly, as though she was reading his mind.

  ‘I was on the radio again, yesterday,’ she said, ‘promoting the exhibition.’

  ‘Oh God, I completely forgot! How did this one go?’

  ‘Well!’ she said. ‘I was nervous thinking you might be listening. I hate the sound of my voice. But it was okay. I’m glad you forgot!’