Brixton Beach (44 page)

In the diaphanous sky, still light, for it was not quite midsummer, small birds darted about. There was nothing more to discover, he told her, candidly. Not even anger. Just nothing. They had read each other completely. Some books you read only once. Alice was looking at him unflinchingly. She nodded and he watched her hands as she folded the bill into a small boat. Then she uncreased the paper and smoothed it flat. She told him about Tim, and less easily, about Ravi.

‘He comes home very occasionally,’ she said. ‘We are very different. That will always be a problem.’

She hesitated.

‘He wants to simplify his life. My presence in it makes it messy’

She laughed nervously. Again he looked at her hands, the long slender fingers of a sculptress. She was thinking she had never had this kind of conversation with anyone before.

‘The young need to have a fixed position,’ she said, her eyes searching for some invisible horizon.

‘They go on about the world being a global village,’ Simon said. ‘I thought a fixed position was the last thing they wanted.’

Certainly it was what his daughter always told him.

‘Cressida tells me she could live anywhere in the world and feel comfortable because of this.’

Alice shook her head, smiling.

Ah, but your daughter looks like you and your wife, I imagine. It’s different for my son. He feels as if he is neither one thing nor another. Really,’ again she hesitated, ‘it would have been better if he looked more like his father. People would see him simply as an English boy’

‘You mean his looks cannot hide his connections?’

‘Yes.’ Again she nodded, her eyes steady on him.

‘But it’s such a rich connection,’ he said, wanting to say it was exotic, but not daring to.

She grimaced.

‘Theories are fine if you have a secure life already. My son has had to carve out an identity for himself. Ordinarily, divorce muddles things. In Ravi’s case the choices are harder.’

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:

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 grandfather 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!’