Bone China (34 page)

Christopher came, shaking his head with anger. ‘Just look what she’s gone and done,’ he said to Alicia. ‘Thanks to her stupid father.’

Christopher would not have come if he did not love the girl so much. ‘What the hell do I want with weddings?’ he asked, loudly.

He had spotted the groom. ‘Weddings are a state-organised form of capitalism suitable only for the bourgeois bastards,’ he told Naringer, pointedly.

He started handing out Socialist Party leaflets until the priest told him to stop. Christopher let out a short barking laugh and went outside for a cigarette. The truth was he was deeply upset by his niece’s choice of husband.

‘She’s my niece,’ he told the photographer waiting for the bridal car. ‘She could have made something of her life, but no, she has to marry a doctor, to please her bloody father!’

The photographer smiled thinly.

‘She’s very talented. I used to hope there was a chance she would escape from drudgery. I told them to encourage her music, but no one listens to me.’

In the distance coming slowly towards them with a streaming ribbon was the wedding car. Nodding hastily, the photographer went to meet it.

On the morning of her niece’s marriage Frieda was tending her mother’s grave, taking fresh flowers to it, talking to her of what was happening so far away.

‘She has grown up,’ said Frieda. ‘Imagine! Alicia says she looks
just
like you, Mummy. She must be so beautiful. Thornton’s broken-hearted. No one will be good enough for Anna-Meeka.’

It was the hot season and the air was very still and golden. A large lizard darted jerkily across the ground, reappearing against the white marble of Grace’s headstone. Frieda stood, head bowed, thinking of her niece and her brother’s broken heart, imagining her mother’s voice chiding them. Anna-Meeka was still young; she had time on her side. Wait, her mother’s voice seemed to say. Wait. And it seemed to Frieda that the jasmine bush she had planted waited, and the crows perched on the telegraph poles waited, and the land, war-torn and exhausted, waited for the rains to come, as Anna-Meeka de Silva was married on that summer’s day in the church on the Brixton Road.

Savitha sat in the front row with an enormous orchid caught in her hair, hoping her sewing of Meeka’s jacket would not unravel. Christopher, drinking from his hip flask, glared at anyone who looked at him. Thornton walked his daughter up the aisle. How lovely she looks, thought Robert Grant. He was
looking at Alicia. The lightness in her face was his doing;
he
had given her something. Alicia was looking at her niece, remembering that other wedding long ago. Only now could she face the memory of it without flinching.

Thornton took his place next to Savitha. He felt defeated. The church was full of family friends, far more than they had expected. Mr and Mrs Smith from next door, smiling broadly and nodding their approval, the office girl from Thornton’s office now married with two children, all the girls from the typing pool, little Cynthia Flowers no longer so little (she had found another sort of love, less exciting, more stable and the baby was due in a month) and Mr Wilson, Savitha’s boss, standing at the back. Savitha had worn the orchid specially to impress him. Then, before they knew it, it was over.

‘You look great, Meeka!’ shouted her friends.

‘Be happy, darling,’ cried Alicia wiping her eyes.

‘Well, what happens now?’ asked Geraldine.

Time was money; the twins had been babysat for nearly four hours already. Silly cow, thought Savitha, looking at Geraldine, why can’t she wash properly? But then her daughter was gone, with a quick flurry of hugs and confetti, in her father’s arms fleetingly, all those years of goodnight kisses distilled into this public moment, and Savitha, glancing at her husband, thought with shock, How frail he looks.

I
T HAD NOT WORKED OUT AS
F
RIEDA
hoped. Perhaps it was too late for a new beginning. The Tamil boy did not want what she could offer. He had seen his father’s throat slit and their sub-post office in Jaffina burnt to the ground. His sister had been raped and shot, together with his mother. One by one he watched them die. Frieda’s kindness had no real bearing on his life. Kindness was like chocolate. It could not satisfy hunger. Kindness only made him rage. The Tamil boy tore through the house like a hand grenade. Frieda saw that the laws governing his small life could only work if he had his own victim. The Tamil boy was eight, but he had lived several lives already. He went back to the orphanage. It was the best solution. The Devil was the best painkiller. The Devil danced inside him, telling him that love was safer at a distance.

Aloysius began to complain of stomach pains and the doctor had him admitted into hospital. Frieda rang Thornton and Savitha. She heard their desolation even before she gave them the news. It matched her own. Aloysius was eighty-four. His
liver had finally given up. In the early hours of that morning, at the beginning of a rose-pink dawn, surrounded by the sounds of police sirens, he had died. Only his younger daughter and an empty glass were at his side.

‘No,’ Frieda told them. ‘I am not leaving. Not now. This is where I belong.’

She found it difficult to express her feelings. She had never been good at that. But she felt one of them should remain and, she saw, with exceptional insight, she was that one.

After the wedding the Guptas moved out of London, into a suburb of Oxford where Naringer had a job. He had fallen in love (he supposed it was love) with Meeka swiftly. She was beautiful in the way privileged Asians were, although of late he was beginning to see how odd her family was, full of inexplicable habits, full of pride in the things they might have achieved rather than what they actually had. They talked constantly about Meeka’s grandmother as though she was a legend, as if she was still among them. He could not understand this. They were all uneducated, without a single university degree between them, but even though he had married Meeka, he sensed his father-in-law disapproved of him.

The move out of London had come as a shock for Anna-Meeka too. She got a job in a hairdresser’s salon but the women she met there were not like the Londoners she had grown up with. She gave up the job and found she was both lonely and bored. The de Silvas came to visit. Christopher was the first, a bottle of whisky in each pocket and a carrier bag filled with books and flyers. Meeka was overjoyed to see him. Ah yes, thought Christopher, I’m not surprised.

Naringer was at work.

‘Good!’ said Christopher.

That settled it. He opened one of his bottles of whisky and poured himself a celebration drink.

‘Uncle Christopher,’ said Meeka laughing. ‘It’s not lunchtime yet!’

‘Now don’t turn into your bloody parents, please, putha!’

Meeka played the piano for him. She had just written another piece of music. ‘Listen to this one, Uncle Christopher.’ She had no one to play to since her marriage. Naringer did not like music. ‘Listen to the tone of this piano. Isn’t it beautiful?’

Christopher closed his eyes enjoying the smoothness of the whisky as it slipped down his throat. You are too, he thought grimly.
And
talented, and you had your whole life in front of you. So why the hell did you marry this cloth-eared, humourless man? For once, Christopher refrained from comment. Instead, he suggested they go for a walk.

It was cold and windswept outside. Once this village must have been small and pretty and well planned. Now it had grown like a weed into a long shapeless sprawl, full of sixties houses and ugly estates. There was a supermarket, a petrol station and a row of indifferent shops. Women with pushchairs bent double in the cold sharp wind, red-and-blue plastic bunting flapped unhappily over the car showroom. A few of the shops had started putting up Christmas decorations. Seeing this, Christopher snorted.

‘Capitalist bastards,’ he muttered.

Meeka slipped her arm through his and hugged him. She was surprised at how glad she was to see him.

‘Is that a library?’ asked Christopher, suddenly alert.

And he darted in. Pulling out some Socialist Party leaflets from his pocket, he began to pin them on the public notice-board. Then he went over to the desk and placed some on the counter. An elderly man was having his books stamped.
Christopher gave him a leaflet, winking at the girl behind the desk at the same time.

‘Uncle Christopher,’ said Meeka tugging at his arm, laughing a little, ‘Uncle Christopher, what are you
doing
? Come on, let’s go. Dad would be mad as hell with you if he could see you now!’

‘Your father is an idiot, putha,’ said Christopher, belching loudly. ‘Don’t talk to me about him.’

The librarian was approaching. ‘Shh!’ she said loudly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Meeka apologised, suppressing a giggle. ‘We’re just going.’ And she dragged her uncle out before he could reply.

Outside it had begun to drizzle. The sky was an opaque impenetrable layer of clouds. Nothing except the bunting and a few sticklike trees moved. No birdsong, no flowers, nothing.

‘Oh God,’ said Christopher, unhappily, ‘I hate this weather. I hate this bloody place. I want to go home. Come on, let’s find a pub.’

Naringer hated the visits from his wife’s relatives. Coming home late, hoping for a quiet end to the day, his heart would sink at the sight of the lighted windows and the strains of music. Always the damn music. He knew that if the visitor was Christopher, he would probably be drunk. He would give Naringer a book on the political crisis in Sri Lanka or the theory of socialism or some other rubbish. Then, although he said it was a gift, Christopher always somehow managed to extract money from him for it.

‘Why does he think I want these books?’ Naringer would ask irritably afterwards, when Christopher had gone. ‘What’s the matter with him? Doesn’t he know the East is always in crisis? It’s a Third bloody World, innit?’

At first Meeka tried reasoning with him. Christopher, she told him, was only being friendly.

‘Then why does he charge me for them?’

Meeka laughed. ‘He’s probably short of cash!’ she said.

Thankfully, Meeka’s parents preferred the Guptas to visit them. In the early days she only went with Naringer, but it was soon clear he was bored.

‘They are all is-snobs,’ he told Meeka.

Meeka made no comment. She began going home alone. Christopher, turning up, watched with interest.

‘That husband of hers is a bloody cold fish!’ he remarked to Jacob. ‘How long do you give this marriage then?’

Nobody was prepared to bet on it. The unsuitable, hasty match continued to baffle them. Thornton in particular was non-committal. Lately he had settled on an unspoken truce with his daughter and did not want to spoil things. Whatever disappointment he felt he had learned to keep to himself. Only Savitha knew of it. Only she saw how the events of the last year, the marriage and Aloysius’s death, had aged him.

So a quieter, less robust Meeka, more subdued than before, came home to eat her mother’s comforting boiled rice, her crab curry and her
brora
. To be served string hoppers by Savitha in her grandma Grace’s bone china, and to listen to her father play his recording of
The Magic Flute
. Then, barely a year into her marriage, she discovered she was pregnant and everything changed. Little things about her husband that irritated her floated like scum to the surface. The way he sneezed for instance, wiping his hands all the way down his trousers.

Disgusting! she thought. She began to hate the way he prefixed the word ‘is’ before anything beginning with ‘s’.

‘I will drive you is-slowly to the is-station,’ he said.

It made her want to scream. She decided she did not much like his mouth either or the way he spat into the washbasin every night before they went to bed. She made a list of her
dislikes. Her husband, on the other hand, hardly speaking, hardly noticing, took to coming home early to prepare the meals she did not cook. He suggested that now that she was about to become a mother, she should start wearing a sari again. Meeka stared at him. Was he mad?

A strange in-between time began. Meeka did what she pleased. Sometimes she cooked. Sometimes she went into the town window-shopping, half-heartedly gorging on ice cream, dimly aware of an increasing well of loneliness. The one real pleasure she had was in playing her piano. During the day, when Naringer was at work, she lifted the lid and the rich dark tones poured through the tiny house, but at night, when he returned, the house was silent. She began to phone her mother more often. Savitha, aware of her daugher’s need, knowing that many changes lay ahead, talked to Anna-Meeka endlessly in a way she had not done since she had been a little girl. What she had been waiting for was emerging slowly. At last, her daughter was growing up.

For Meeka, however, time ceased to have any meaning. She existed in a somnambulant state with the piano and her conversations with her mother as her anchor. Thornton, noting the frequency of the phone calls and his wife’s laughter on the phone, was surprised.

‘What’s the joke?’ he asked Savitha after a particularly long conversation.

Savitha folded her lips and refused to speak.

‘Heh?’ persisted Thornton. ‘What’s she say?’

‘Nothing,’ Savitha said, suppressing a laugh.

‘What about that husband of hers?’

‘What about him?’

‘Well, you know his ears are pasted. That’s not a good thing. In Jaffna –’

‘Yes, yes, I know. In Jaffna they say you can’t trust a man with pasted ears.’

Savitha was laughing openly. Thornton gave up. I’m glad they’re getting on so well, he thought, a little jealously. His poor, dead father had been right. Women were all the same in the end. Mistaking his daughter’s state of mind for contentment, he was marginally relieved. At least, he thought, Meeka is settling down. Maybe the fellow with the lobeless ears isn’t so bad after all.

‘Pregnancy!’ he declared, folding his newspaper. ‘I told you, didn’t I, that’s what she needed. No?’

Savitha grunted. It was not the new baby she was waiting for. It was something more elusive, something she was not prepared to discuss with her husband.

As the summer wore on Meeka began to garden. She bought climbing roses and honeysuckles, clematis and foxglove seeds. Next she bought an ornamental cherry. Soon her garden began to take on the appearance of a tumbling chaos of greenery. The month of October drew to a close. Meeka’s baby was born just as the leaves began to fall, during the November rain. A little girl with dark eyes that shone like beacons in the night. She called the baby Isabella. Her parents filled her house with flowers. Savitha made tiny clothes, sewing soft cotton cloth by hand. Thornton was starry-eyed and ready to forgive Naringer, almost prepared to call him by his name. He was unable to keep away from his precious granddaughter. Christopher snorted and, as a joke, sent the baby her own book on imperialism. He meant it as a warning for her parents.

Jacob visited once but he was busy. These days Jacob was trying to distance himself from his family. They were too difficult and his hands were full with Geraldine and the twins. Geraldine wanted them to go back to Ireland. She hated it here
in England and continued to dislike his relatives. In the end, thought Jacob, Anna-Meeka is just another ordinary Asian girl, marrying, having children, living an unremarkable life. What a disappointment!

‘I have become a realist,’ he told Christopher privately.

‘Don’t you mean a capitalist, men?’ was all Christopher said in response.

Jacob shook his head at the predictability of the remark. He no longer got any pleasure from the trips to the pub. He was tired of Christopher’s drunkenness.

‘Thornton’s become a different person,’ Jacob told Geraldine, determined to slowly distance himself from his brothers. It was, he felt, best all round.

Alicia, abroad for the third time in a year, sent Anna-Meeka music by Saint-Saëns and an exquisite christening gown. She seemed happy.

I have a wonderful little flat overlooking the canal
, she wrote to Savitha.
And there’s even a piano. Would you believe, I’ve started playing again!

Frieda, working in the orphanage and unable to send presents, phoned the new mother. Ranjith Pieris, hearing the news, had visited her and sat for a long time talking about the past. He had looked so desolate that Frieda had asked him to stay for dinner.

But they could not flourish. Too much had grown the way it wanted. Too much needed cutting back. It would need more than pruning shears, it would need an axe. Savitha, baking her cake, icing it with royal icing, finishing it off with pink rosebuds on top, travelled up by train from Paddington and watched. Thornton watched without knowing what it was exactly he watched. He took his wife’s word that changes were afoot and
came with his spade to dig a hole, to plant an apple tree and a rose bush.

Before the baby was born Naringer had been optimistic that Meeka would change. That change had not come. Except when his mother-in-law was visiting, the house was filthy; there were soaking nappy buckets, piles of unwashed dishes, and terrible meals. Naringer placed a statue of the goddess Kali in the hall; it stared at him every time he came home from work. On a bad day he confused Kali with his wife. He felt he was carrying them both on his back. He felt the filth in the house was worse than the stink of Calcutta. He was drowning in it. There was only so much a man could take. Naringer was a man of science. He had a logical mind and he was able to admit defeat. It was probably the saving of him.

One afternoon he returned home early and packed a bag. He found his passport. He informed Anna-Meeka he was leaving. He had had enough. He was going back to the purple water hyacinths that grew beside the canal where he had been born. Savitha, feeling as though she had been waiting for a bus to arrive, now stopped waiting.

‘Well, it’s no loss,’ said Christopher when he heard.