Brixton Beach Page 41

  Again she laughed. So my opinion matters, he wanted to shout triumphantly. Instead he too laughed, delighted. They talked for a moment longer. He told her about Cressida’s car and her reluctance to drive her boyfriend around in her mother’s car. He tried to make the story funny, determined to mention their names, not wanting her to think he was evading the situation they were walking into. But the story came out all wrong. He heard the slight hesitation in her voice and then he asked her about Ravi.

  ‘Have you heard from him?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘No. I don’t expect to for a bit. He rang me last week. There’s another two weeks of term left. I expect he’s busy’

  Simon cursed his clumsiness. Was she comparing their different lives?

  ‘You could visit him,’ he said, trying to console her. ‘I could drive you up to Oxford and go off somewhere while you visited him?’

  There was a startled silence.

  ‘That’s kind of you,’ she said formally. ‘Maybe one day’

  Suddenly he felt worse than if she hadn’t rung him back. Had he said too much too quickly? What was she thinking? He told her a bit about his work but at the same time he was thinking anxiously about what was going through her mind. There was another awkward pause.

  In the end, Alice was the one who finished the conversation, saying she ought to go to bed as she had an early start in the morning.

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ he asked, uneasy, now.

  ‘I’ve got to take another piece of work up to the gallery and Antonia has someone from the press coming to meet me.’

  ‘You’ll be famous!’ he said admiringly, and she laughed.

  He was certain he was boring her.

  ‘Sleep well,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you. You too.’

  Putting the phone down he remembered the first time he had met her and how she had withdrawn from him. He felt she had done it again. Now he wouldn’t sleep, he knew. Calm down, he told himself, this is getting out of hand. It’s too quick. But he knew he wouldn’t sleep. Going back into the living room he turned on the light in search of his recording of Tosca.

  In Brixton Beach Alice washed her hands, scrubbing the plaster out of her fingernails. She didn’t know what had made her ring him. Staring at her hands under the running water she thought, Why on earth should this thing work out? Why had she told him so much about herself? She shook her head. Child, her grandfather’s voice came to her clear and real, he is a very fine man. It was possible, she thought. Best not to hope. Will he ring, again, she wondered? Of course, her grandfather said, mystified at her doubts. I told you, this man is not like the other. And besides, the time is right.

  Neither slept well. On Wednesday Alice thought, Only two more days to go. She found it difficult to concentrate on her work and decided instead to go into Brixton. It was hot. Jumping on a bus she made her way to the top deck and sat looking down at the street. The branches of the plane trees brushed past. The bus was empty and Alice sat quietly lost in thought. Every part of the Brixton Road, she realised, was filled with memories of Ravi. But I feel so old, she thought. She smiled ironically, aware that it had been a long time since thoughts about her age and appearance mattered. They passed the park where she had taught Ravi to ride his bicycle, running behind him, holding on to the back as he pedalled. Round and round she had run, laughing, her hair obscuring her view, while Ravi shouted at her not to let go. And the passers-by had stopped to smile at the girl, so young and small, with the dark flowing hair, teaching her son to ride. Simon Swann would never know that girl. She had vanished. The bus stopped beside another bus and she did something she hadn’t done for a long while. Years. She considered the face reflected in the window, scrutinising the ravages of time.

  There’s nothing there to worry about, her grandfather’s voice intercepted. You’re still beautiful, child. His voice came to her with the slap of waves carrying her youth with it.

  But what shall I do? she asked him, wordlessly.

  Nothing, Putha. Just be yourself.

  The long hot afternoon seemed deliciously filled with a sense of Simon Swann. Whichever way she turned, she felt his presence, rich with possibilities. Reaching Coldharbour Lane she stepped off the bus and headed for a record shop. Walking amongst the rows of CDs she found the section marked ‘opera’ and began to look through it, but she couldn’t remember the name of the opera they were going to. Frowning with concentration, she picked up one boxed case after another, not knowing what to do. A piece of music was playing. The voice was very deep and rich and melodious. Mesmerised, Alice listened. The singing was in Italian, she knew that much. On the counter was a notice that said what the music was: La Traviata. She was certain that wasn’t the name Simon had said. The music held her for a moment longer before it came to an end. Alice hesitated, wondering whether to buy it. At the last minute, superstition made her decide not to, but she wrote the name down. If he ever rang her again she would ask him about it. If he rings? chuckled her grandfather.

  But he didn’t ring that day, or the following day either. Alice worked in her studio, chiding herself for her foolishness. Later in the afternoon the phone did ring and it was Ravi. Such was her focus on Simon that for a moment she was taken aback.

  ‘Can you look for something in the loft?’ Ravi asked, without preamble. ‘There’s a box with my school maths books in it. Can you post it?’

  Yes, darling,’ she said. ‘When are you coming home?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m in a hurry, I can’t stop to talk now. I’ll let you know.’

  And then he was gone, leaving her wondering again how they had become strangers. Alice went back to sanding the piece of wood she was working on. Then she began to lime it with a rag. A small coil of barbed wire lay on the floor. There were drawings strewn around, pinned on the walls. The work was looking good, but her hard-won equilibrium had been disturbed and she had to force herself to go on working. At six o’clock, just as she was finishing for the day, the phone rang again. It was a woman she knew only slightly, a local artist she had occasionally shown her work with. Alice waited politely for the conversation to finish. Her head was beginning to ache with the fumes from the solvents she had been using and also from hunger.

  ‘What about coming over tomorrow?’ the woman persisted.

  Alice murmured her thanks and declined.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I’m busy,’ she said, wanting to get off the phone.

  She felt dizzy and wanted to cry. After an eternity, the woman rang off. Alice went outside and cut some roses. It was as she was putting them into water that the telephone rang once more.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Simon asked, his voice very clear and close to her ear.

  For a moment Alice could not speak. A constriction in her chest, a barely acknowledged longing burst inside her and she smelled the fragrance of old French roses, all in a bunch, in her arms.

  ‘Cutting roses,’ she said, and she described the pale creaminess of the flowers. She was breathless. Simon hesitated and then he laughed.

  ‘I’m still at work,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I will be here for some time, or I would suggest inviting myself over to Brixton Beach!’ he said.

  She heard faint music.

  ‘I was worried that you might have misunderstood something I said the other night,’ he told her.

  She could hear his uncertainty and felt relief flooding over her. With new confidence she told him about her trip to the music shop and her curiosity to hear what an opera was like. Simon was delighted.

  ‘Do you want to know the story before you go?’ he asked, and proceeded to tell her the doomed story of the painter Cavaradossi and his dark-eyed Tosca.

  ‘I once heard Maria Callas sing Tosca,’ his voice went on. ‘You know, I queued all night for a ticket and my God it was worth it! She was superb, brought the house down.’

  Alice listened, not understanding but mesmerised regardless. Her life balanced on a knife-edge.
A distant memory was disturbed as she listened to Simon Swann talk and she saw her younger self, listening to her grandfather telling her about his work.

  ‘Just you wait,’ Simon was saying in the same passionate way. ‘In less than three days you’ve a treat in store. I’ll pick you up at about six.’

  She did something she hadn’t done since her wedding day. She wore a sari that was the colour of the roses she had placed in her glass bowl. She felt as though it had been years since she had seen him last. He was late, perhaps he wasn’t coming after all? At ten past six, feeling sick, she stared at herself in the mirror. What was wrong with her? Disliking the way she looked, she put her hair up in a French pleat. Simon Swann, arriving in evening dress, found himself gazing into a pair of dark eyes that had on them the late summer bloom of a grape. He had imagined this moment for so long that the reality of her took him by surprise again.

  ‘What?’ she asked, feeling shy, but he could only shake his head and smile at her. There were no words to explain the emptiness of his past. He smelled of shaving foam from another era, she thought. She left him prowling around the kitchen while she got her shawl.

  ‘I’ve cooked something,’ she called, ‘if you want to come back here to eat?’

  ‘Oh, that might be good,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how we feel’

  He stared at the photographs curling at the edges, tucked into picture frames. The younger Alice, holding a small child on her hip. Ravi, he thought and then he saw other photographs on her dresser. Ravi blowing out seven candles on a cake, Ravi playing the piano, looking about eleven or twelve. The teenaged Ravi, thinned out, taller, with his mother’s face lurking in his.

  Simon had bought tickets in the Dress Circle. Twenty years had passed since his encounter as a student. On an impulse he told Alice the story.

  ‘I’ve never told anyone,’ he said. ‘But you know, for years, every time I went to the opera I looked around hoping to find her.’

  ‘Tonight might be your lucky night!’ Alice teased and Simon, looking at her solemnly, replied:

  ‘Tonight is my lucky night!’

  She had been prepared for the story of Tosca but not the drama of the whole production. A vast theatre, lavish costumes and an orchestra, not to mention the singing itself. At some point before the first interval she found he was holding her hand.

  ‘Are you enjoying it?’ he asked when the lights came on and the applause had died down.

  He felt a wave of disturbing tenderness at the sight of her. They drank champagne sitting in a corner of the crush bar. He told her something about the singers; those who were on top form tonight and the ones who were a little disappointing. She caught a glimpse of a world she had not known existed.

  ‘I have never been to the opera with someone who’s interested in going. Tessa would come when we were first married as a sort of duty’ He paused, gazing at his empty glass. ‘That’s no use.’

  Embarrassed, she didn’t know what to say. He glanced at her sharply.

  ‘Look, Alice…‘ he hesitated. ‘I was worried the other day when I rang you, in case you were annoyed I mentioned Tessa. But…I wanted to start with as clean a slate as I could. I wanted to mention her, so you didn’t think…I was doing anything you won’t fully understand.’

  She was watching him gravely.

  ‘It’s too early for me to say anything…’ he began again when she interrupted.

  ‘There isn’t anything to talk about yet,’ she said, placing her hand on his arm.

  He noted she used the word ‘yet’ and was thrilled.

  ‘I’m still thinking about all this,’ she said gesturing at the glittering chandelier and the plush crimson seats. ‘Tell me about the next act.’

  So he told her about the aria, Vissi d’arte, Vissi d’amore, I lived for art, I lived for love, and how when Callas sang it in the early sixties, there wasn’t a dry eye in the auditorium.

  As the lights went down for the second act he took her hand as though he had been doing this all their lives, and then it began again. Afterwards, as the curtain swept down and they sat for a moment in silence surrounded by the roar of applause, Simon looked at her. In the darkness he saw her face glistening with tears and the slow breaking of her smile seemed to wake him from his life’s dream, so that he cleared the distance between them and kissed her. And, as he held her hand, listening to the sound of the applause, there woke in him such a flood of feelings that he felt the whole enchanted evening spin together. And he understood at last how far he had needed to travel before he could recognise with certainty that he wanted her.

  They drove back to Brixton Beach quietly; an air of contentment had spread itself over them. Neither wanted to dine out.

  ‘I’ll make a salad,’ she said, and went into the garden to pick some herbs, a lettuce and a few radishes.

  From the house the light fell softly on her, deepening the darkness of her hair.

  ‘I didn’t know you gardened,’ he said, and stopped as she burst out laughing, making him smile too, for there was so much he didn’t know about her. The sky had no colour left in it except for the unearthly blue of the stars. Again he was certain that some part of himself had detached itself and now belonged to her. How ridiculous, he thought, again with happiness spinning around him like a carousel in a fairground. Taking her hand, he kissed it, fingertip by fingertip.

  Excavating scents. Parsley, she has been tearing some from her herb patch; garlic, she crushed some earlier; hot rice, she has been sticking her fingers in it, he told her, like a fortune-teller, reading the traces of the journey of her hand. Then he enveloped her in his arms. He was hungry, but not for food.

  ‘All the stars are out,’ he said with amazement. ‘Every single one of them.’

  Her hair too was full of the scents of the garden, he told her, marvelling how everything had changed so swiftly since the morning. Stunned, he thought: So this is what has happened to me! Miraculously, he was falling in love at last, and for the first time. And all the stars were out. She kissed him back, shaking a little with laughter and again he felt the slow beautiful unfolding of emotions suppressed for so many weeks. They stood with the light from the house streaming over them. Whatever he had been searching for all his life was here on the moonlit beach of Brixton. But then she silenced his thoughts with an upward gesture of her arms, and with great sweetness he turned and took her in.

  Later, he would think it was as though he had never seen a woman before, for the sight of her nakedness overwhelmed him. The night gathered in the hollow of her neck, the arch of her back, the soft rise of her body as he tried in vain to hold on to the moment. He began to kiss her again, stumbling across places he had not known of moments before. Here was a faint scar left from a childhood fall, the sweep of skin, silkily soft, from ear to shoulder, the place where once her child had been nurtured. The night filled his ears with whispers. She unbuttoned his shirt, placing her cool hands on his pale skin. Searching for him, guiding him, taking him towards all the lonely, uninhabited parts in her world. He was crushed, made speechless by the simplicity of her generosity as he realised that no one had been this way for many years. A chill passed over him even as he felt the completeness of the moment. No one had showered him with such gifts; no one had slowed the night in such a way, with tongue and lips, and trails of phosphorescent love. Never for him before. A feast of love was beginning, as both fell silent now. All his life had been but an overture to this. He rocked inside her tenderly, as though he was the sea breaking against her; wave upon wave, each one more dazzling than the last. Astonished, he saw he was crowning his life as in the intermittent light provided by passing cars he caught glimpses of her face. Through the woman she had become he was able at last to comprehend the girl she had once been. Later, much later, she began to speak, telling him he was the one to set her free. It was then that the last remnants of modesty broke free in her. So that kissing him back, encouraged by his tender consideration, she danced for him. All night long, l
ike rain on a tropical roof, she danced for him. It was what she had been made for, he saw with astonishment. And when he could think again, when their closeness was the closeness of people who had travelled for a lifetime, they slept. Encircled in one another’s arms. Two sides of the sun. Dark and light. United as one.

  Morning saw them sleeping, stretched out across the bed like starfish in some far-flung paradise. The light woke him first; stirring, but never letting go of his hold on her, he traced the line across her body straight to her heart. She slept without moving, tidily and without fuss. Impatiently, remembering all she had given him, he wanted only to begin again. There would be many things to be explained to others, he knew. Tessa, Cressida, Ravi…So many people. Already they floated past him, indifferent as fish from some other sea. They would deal with all of it, together. With her beside him, he could do anything. He would be guided by her, he thought. For the rest of his life, this would be how it was. Overwhelmed, he kissed the smooth brown shoulder, running his hands over the soft mounds of her breasts, towards her haunches and beyond. Waking her, so she came to life with a soft exhausted sound, like a person saved from drowning. Smiling, for the familiarity of the night had left its indelible mark, she raised her arms, wanting him again.

  Finally they showered and Simon watched her comb her hair before putting it up with pins; girlishly slender and beautiful against the bluish morning light from the window. Unable to watch, he took her in his arms and kissed her. Laughing, Alice pushed him away. How ridiculous she felt, she told him, for a woman of her age.

  ‘Let me make breakfast for you,’ he said. ‘I make a wonderful breakfast!’

  And even this remark made her giggle like a young girl. He had insisted that she stay out of the kitchen while he crashed around in the unfamiliar space, so Alice went into her studio instead to stare at a painting she had started a few days ago.

  ‘I want to take you back,’ she said, eating the toast he had made. ‘To my stretch of beach.’