Bone China (20 page)

It was not the time to argue. It was up to the child, to show them what she really wanted. So thought Savitha as she embroidered her daughter’s name on her socks and her PE clothes. So thought Savitha as she checked on the sleeping child, removing the new school tie from her hand, only to have it tucked under the pillow again by Thornton when he looked in on her later.

It took nearly three weeks to reach them. The servant brought in the post while they were having breakfast. There were four letters. The sight of them filled the day with translucent light. Which one should they open first?

‘Thornton’s,’ said Frieda.

‘No, let’s see what the little one makes of the place,’ chuckled Aloysius.

I start my new school TOMORROW!
Anna-Meeka had written.
And I’m going to make lots and lots of English friends. Please could Auntie Frieda send some more
vadi
so I can give some to them.

The child seems a bit of a handful
, wrote Jacob.
Thornton is right to be worried. I told him he’d need to be firm with her. This isn’t Ceylon. Things are different here.

‘Nonsense!’ laughed Frieda. ‘Thornton will never be able to refuse her anything.’

‘Savitha will have to keep them all in order,’ chuckled Grace.

‘Why are they so worried? She’s in England,’ Aloysius said. ‘It’s the children in this country who we should worry about. What’s the matter with that boy?’

The little one is an absolute delight,
wrote Christopher.
So clever, so inquisitive, so funny, so like Jasper really! As for Thornton and his wife, I can’t imagine what they have in common of course. Meeka is certainly the best thing this family’s ever had! She’ll be the one to succeed in life, where all of us failed. She should have all the opportunities we did not. As far as I can, I shall make sure of that.

Christopher has changed
, wrote Thornton rather non-committally.
I’ve no idea what has happened to him but he is very strange. He seems fond of Meeka, which is worrying too. I hope he won’t start talking politics with her.

‘Oh listen to this,’ read Frieda laughing, ‘they’re squabbling over Anna-Meeka already!’

I haven’t heard Frieda laugh for such a long time, thought Grace, glancing at the empty place set for Alicia. Her elder daughter seldom arose before the afternoon.

‘She’ll shake them all up,’ said Aloysius, enjoying the conversation hugely, glad to see Grace look so happy.

He misses them too, thought Grace. Aloysius looked frail.
He had developed a persistent cough and was easily tired. After Sunil’s death his hair had whitened dramatically. These days, he drank less and because of the intermittent curfew seldom went out.

‘D’you remember how we used to be?’ she asked them both, smiling a little. ‘All together, in this house, milling around, coming and going, talking, arguing. Remember how this place was filled with music?’

They nodded, remembering. It was hard to believe.

‘No one could keep the boys in for long,’ Frieda said, wistfully.

‘And then Thornton went and married that woman, Hildegard,’ Aloysius reminded them, shaking his head.

They burst out laughing. They could laugh about it now.

‘Mummy, you were so angry,’ Frieda told her. ‘We thought you’d be angry forever!’

‘Poor Hildegard,’ agreed Grace. ‘I wonder what became of her.’

What’s become of any of us? she thought later when she was alone. How have we come to this? What would you make of me now, Vijay, if you were here, if you could see me? Could you have predicted any of this on that terrible night before the eclipse? Now you are all gone, Sunil, my sons, and Alicia too, in her way.

Outside a few monkeys chattered angrily in the trees. They had taken up residence in the small coconut grove nearby. The owners of the grove had tried and failed to have them caught. The monkeys were raw-faced and defiant. They were outlaws. There was a rumour they had a fever-carrying disease and the owners of the coconut grove were frantic to have them caught before they bit someone. But the monkeys did not care. They laughed and pulled faces at the passers-by. A man had been
sent from the army barracks to scare them away. He had fired a shot but they had simply raced off, swinging across the branches as they ran. The army man had lost his temper. Not wanting to be beaten by monkeys, he had fired away at them all morning but with no success. All morning he stood in the raging heat firing into the horizon, unable to see the pointless-ness of it. Those who saw him dared not laugh for he might have turned the gun on them.

‘Fools,’ said Grace, closing the shutters against the noise.

‘I will write to them,’ decided Frieda. ‘I will tell them about the monkeys.’

She would not tell them about the Tamil boy who had died yesterday in the centre of Colombo. He had strapped some explosives to his chest and blown himself up at the Fort. Six other people had died with him. The boy had been the same age as Anna-Meeka.

‘I’m ready!’ said Meeka, coming into her parents’ bedroom in her school uniform. White shirt, navy blue pleated skirt, sweater, long white socks, new polished shoes. A huge chorus of birds had woken her. The sounds were very different from the birds she knew; softer, insistent in a different way. She hummed quietly to herself.

‘I can’t do my tie,’ she said holding it out.

It was five thirty in the morning. A chink of light showed through the dull mustard curtains. Thornton woke with a start. The street lights had not been turned off yet. He waited for the barrage of sounds to assail his ears, the crows, the servant girl using her coconut scrapers, discarding the shells one by one hollowly on the ground, the sound of the fisherman crying ‘
malu, malu
’, dogs barking, bicycle bells, whistles. He waited for the lurking heat outside the darkened room to come in, ready
to pounce at the merest hint of movement, making itself felt, flooding the room with sweat. He waited, his heart pounding, but all he could feel, all he could hear was the sound of his daughter’s humming. Close by, Savitha was snoring gently. Thornton had been dreaming of the girl with the ramrod hair. She had been smiling at him, moving threads of gold away from her mouth. He had been showing her around the Fort before the curfew, they were eating
thosai
and drinking king coconut. The girl kept smiling, telling him how wonderful his poems were, and Thornton was just reaching out to touch that great shining mane of cashmere gold with his long sensitive fingers, when Anna-Meeka woke him. He groaned, pulling the eiderdown away from his chin. Could a man not have a bit of peace, even in his own bed?

‘Can you do my tie,’ said Meeka firmly, tugging at the bed covers, soaking him in cold air, determined.

The dawn chorus had got louder and she hummed louder too.

‘It’s five thirty in the morning!’ said Thornton, squinting at his watch.

Regretfully, promising to return at a later date, he put Miss Ramrod away. You understand, he told her, it’s nothing personal, nothing to do with how I feel, but it is just not possible to have any conversation when my daughter is around. She is a fearsome presence, you know, a barrier to all carnal pleasure. Miss Ramrod smiled, still removing hair from her mouth (how much hair did the girl have? Thornton wondered fleetingly), and swiftly faded. She knew when she was beaten.

Later, even Meeka could smell the change in the air; a subtle shift here and there, some traces of dew on the uncovered earth, soft mist on the horizon. Thornton, walking her to the new school, bleary-eyed from his early start, felt it and was
pierced with a sharp longing for the hills of his childhood. Meeka felt it and associated it forever with the first day of term, new pencils, ruler, rubber, resolutions. All across the street were children walking to school, calling out to their friends, laughing, chewing bubblegum. Meeka was entranced by them. She skipped along beside her father, singing softly to herself. At the gate her father kissed her goodbye. He smiled, a tall handsome man, waving to his daughter as she disappeared into the crowd. Several mothers noticed him and would look for him again in vain. Tomorrow Meeka would walk to school alone.

But, in spite of the early start, in spite of all the eager anticipation, the day did not go well. She could not remember when it began to go wrong. Was it during break when she could not drink the cold milk they were given? Was it the awful lunch, which for some reason was called ‘dinner’, or perhaps it was when she called the ‘dinner ladies’ the servants and everyone shouted at her? They had offered her something they called pineapple but it had borne no resemblance to any fruit she knew. Clearly the pineapples that grew in England were a different kind. Perhaps it was simply the fact that she had no one to talk to all day, no one to have as a best friend that had made the day go so badly. This very first day at her new school in England, which she had longed and waited for, from as far back as she could remember. In the afternoon she wondered what her granny might be doing, in her beautiful house by the sea. She had wanted to tell someone about her granny, but there was no one to tell. The tune she had been humming repeated itself over and over again in her head. It reminded her of the sea she had left behind.

When the bell finally rang, she was lost in thought staring at the floor, watching it dissolve before her eyes, for something was wrong. No, thought Anna-Meeka,
everything
was wrong,
from the way she spoke, to what she said, and how she looked. It dawned on her at that moment, in a flash of piercing insight, with belated astonishment coming from the morning’s solitude, that she was very different from these large, fair-skinned children.

Savitha was waiting at the gate. Anna-Meeka could see her sari, tea-green and yellow, through the railings. She was standing alone, away from the other parents. She looked cold. Meeka swallowed. Her mother looked wrong too, as well as unhappy.

‘Did you enjoy your day?’ asked Savitha.

‘Yes,’ said Meeka, walking hurriedly on, pulling her by the hand, moving as fast as she could from the school building, the teacher on playground duty and all the throngs of children.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Can I have some rice when we get back?’

She had nearly said ‘get back home’, but somehow, what with one thing and another, the word ‘home’ was beginning to confuse her too.

T
HERE WAS NOTHING TO BE SAID.
They were here to stay. Having finally unpacked all their luggage, Savitha threw away the things that had mould on them or were broken or stained by all the blood-red spices. The moment the trunks were opened, great clouds of powdery smells were released into the air, leaving traces of pungent condiments. She sat with the old newspapers that lined the trunks, reading about events from months ago. Already the paper was torn and yellowed. Here was a photograph of the murdered Prime Minister; there was another of a saffron robe splattered with blood. A review of a piano recital said the air conditioning had failed that night but the Beethoven was unbelievably beautiful. A report of the New Year festivities stated they were subdued. Like us, thought Savitha.

She felt desperate. Her loneliness frightened her. Being on her own in the house for many hours, with nothing to do and no one to talk to until Meeka returned from school, her thoughts circled around the past. She had often been lonely in the orphanage, but she had been younger and in those days she had been fearless. This feeling was different. Ceylon appeared
to belong in another life. Savitha felt as though she had been cast adrift, abandoned in ways she had not thought possible. All that she had lost appeared before her, vast and incommunicable. Anna-Meeka no longer wanted Savitha to walk her back from school and Thornton, when he returned from work, was too exhausted to speak much. Savitha watched as her once cheerful family became slowly more preoccupied and withdrawn. She was bewildered and wanted only to spend her days dreaming of the time when she used to pick her daughter up from school in Colombo, returning home after a hot dusty train journey with Meeka in her white school uniform, a hard white hat keeping out the sun. In that other, extinct life.

‘Mama!’ Anna-Meeka would yell as soon as she came into view at the school gate. ‘Can we go to Elephant House, and have a Lanka lime?’

They would walk towards the station, Savitha holding her sari high above the filth on the road, Meeka begging for some ambarella, or mango rolled in chilli powder and salt, from some filthy fruit sellers. Why had her daughter always wanted to eat from the dirtiest stall? wondered Savitha, smiling at the memory. How impossibly difficult it had been to drag the complaining Anna-Meeka onto the hot crowded train, to even find a seat.

But then, thought Savitha, dreamily, sitting on the carpet, watching the flames from the paraffin heater, the train would begin to move and there below them, a little way from the rocks, would be the sea. Miles and miles of endless golden sand, miles and miles of blistering beach. Only mad dogs would be out on it. And the sea would swish and the cool breeze would waft in through the carriage and Meeka would stop scowling and grin and sit there, with the sweat trickling down from under her hat, her sweet small face streaked with dirt, demanding to know when Thornton would be home to take
her for a swim. Thus remembered Savitha, feeling the salty spray against her face, and the sense of bereavement all around.

Nevertheless, Savitha was nothing if not resourceful. She had not lived all her life in that convent orphanage without a strong feeling of self-preservation. She had, after all, that famously sharp mind of hers and she realised dimly that it was time to use it. One morning she came to a decision. She had, with some difficulty, made a cake. She had begun to understand that the Cambridge Certificate in English and those brilliant pieces to the newspapers back home were as nothing here in Brixton. Shopping for the sugar and the flour, the eggs, the butter, and then afterwards negotiating the unexpectedly well-trained traffic (would it suddenly lunge out at her, would a bullock cart appear from nowhere to knock her down and break her eggs?), all needed care and concentration. She was exhausted by the effort of venturing forth, of contact with people, even before she started baking. While she had been buying the ingredients at the corner shop, she had caught sight of a notice in the window. It said: ‘WANTED. SEAMSTRESS FOR PIECEWORK. SMALL FACTORY. FLEXIBLE HOURS. 195 RAILTON ROAD, SW9.’

Later on, in the afternoon, and before Meeka came home from school (why
did
she insist on walking home alone?), she was going for a job interview. She had told no one. For who was there to tell? In any case her husband lived in a mysterious world of his own, and the child could not be counted on.

Sewing was something Savitha could do. Often during those Cambridge Certificate years sewing had been her recreation, her right arm occasionally turning the wheel of her Singer, her foot pedalling furiously. It was what she did when she had a lot to think about, and, without a doubt, she had much on
her mind at the moment. Changing into her brightest red-and-orange sari, she left the house, caught a bus (so like the ones back home, but smarter, newer), and headed in the direction of Brixton. The bus drove past the arcade and a crockery stall caught her eye. It was piled high with a wonderful array of blue and white, willow-patterned china. Another stall flashed by. It had trousers hanging up all over it, flapping in the breeze. Savitha wondered curiously what it would be like to wear a pair. The bus passed under the bridge. The stalls here were run by black people. Savitha watched them curiously. They sold a confusion of interesting vegetables. A streak of red, a splash of dark green leaves, the sun-baked saffron insides of fruit, all flashed past her, jostling happily alongside stalls of apples piled high, and tight pale cabbages. Savitha’s heart missed a beat. These black people appeared to be conversing easily with the white people on the nearby stalls. Even from a distance she could see their ease of manner. The experiences of the past weeks had almost overwhelmed her, shutting down the desire for analytical thought, but sitting here on the bus, lulled by its rocking movement and without the fear of bombs or gunfire, Savitha felt a sudden unexpected interest in her surroundings. The bus stopped at the terminus and she walked,
A–Z
in hand, towards Railton Road. So many closed faces. Here oppression descended once again so that it was something of a relief to climb the narrow stairs of 195, past the dingy passageway with ‘Dora’s Place’ and ‘Sally’ on the doors until at last she reached the door marked ‘Rosenberg’s Retail Studio’.

He’s Jewish, thought Savitha, looking at the man, shaking his hand and looking at the rows and rows of women, mostly pale, one or two of them black. Fleetingly she thought of Hildegard. The room was huge and high-ceilinged with large
windows divided into many panes of glass. The lower ones were covered over in white paint.

‘We don’t want distractions, do we!’ said Mr Rosenberg heartily, seeing her look at them.

‘Come into my office,’ he said, shouting above the noise of the sewing machines, eyeing her up, taking in her sari, her open-toed shoes, her feet without any stockings. Clearly this would not do. He made a clucking noise.

‘One o’clock until four p.m. Starting tomorrow, promptly,’ he said, standing legs apart, tilting backwards so as to balance the weight of his stomach. ‘You will have to wear trousers. D’you have any? Well, you’ll have to get some. We can’t have all this.’ He waved his hand in the direction of her sari. ‘It wouldn’t be safe with all the machinery. Besides,’ he added jovially, almost as an afterthought, ‘there’s no heating here in the winter so you will get a trifle cold!’

And he laughed a long, long laugh that followed her back all the way down the stairs, echoing out onto the street, ringing in her ears all the way to her front door.

Full of energy she put some rice on to boil. Next she scraped two carrots and one of those peculiar things called parsnips. She fried some coriander and some cumin from her precious spice jar and then, as a treat, she added a little of the fast-diminishing dried Maldive fish, bought specially from Wallisinga & Sons in Pettah. The hot smell hissed and spluttered, filling the kitchen and swarming out through the extractor fan. Out it went through the communal garden, over Mr Smith’s vegetable patch and through his wife’s kitchen window so that Mrs Smith, sniffing the air, could not think what on earth to make of these new neighbours with all their curious smells. Savitha stirred the saucepan vigorously, adding onions, garlic and small chillies sliced diagonally, a dollop of tomato sauce,
some chopped lamb, coconut milk and then the vegetables. There, it was done. She lifted the lid off the rice, fluffing it with a fork so each grain gleamed white, and the hot fragrant steam rose, engulfing her with a wonderful sense of comfort like no other. Meeka would be home soon. She would be pleased to have a bowl of hot rice.

While she waited she decided to reorganise the cupboard that held her collection of bone china, miraculously unharmed by the journey. But when she opened the cupboard, hidden memories tumbled out, competing with each other. In the flurry of leaving, Savitha had not paid much attention and only now did she see the extent of Grace’s generosity. Her mother-in-law had given her the best, most treasured pieces of her china. Savitha gazed at them, unexpected tears springing up. Some of the china was much older than the rest. All of it would need protecting from Thornton who, unused to the task, was clumsy with the washing-up.

‘I want you to keep them for Anna-Meeka,’ Grace had said. It had been late afternoon, everyone, even the servants, had been resting. Savitha could still hear her mother-in-law’s voice clearly, could see her standing in the shuttered dining room.

‘It’s all I can give her,’ Grace had said. She had smiled, but her eyes were unfathomable. ‘Everything else, the house, the land, all of it was sold off years ago, you know, Savitha. All I have of any value is the china.’

And Savitha had answered, ‘It is enough. I will keep it safe, I promise. I am its custodian!’ With new admiration she recognised Grace’s courage. Dimly she saw what these treasures, taken for granted by her children, meant to her mother-in-law. Things of beauty in a hostile land.

‘In my safe keeping,’ she murmured to the empty room. ‘Until Anna-Meeka is old enough to have them.’

Loss scattered like drops of rain around her. She imagined the grand old house in the hills, not as she had witnessed it on that terrible trip, but as it must have been long ago, in its heyday. When the de Silva women, wearing gorgeous cashmere saris, ate Tamil sweetmeats piled on these Hartley Green plates, and drank tea from W.T. Copeland cups. Lost in her daydream, Savitha stared at the flamboyant Royal Doulton dinner service, the pale Wedgwood. Silent receptacles of memory; witnesses to a vanished way of life. Here were the tea plates on which Sunil had been served petits fours. The touch of his hands remaining long after he had gone. Here in the cupboard in Brixton. Who could have imagined such a journey? Holding the tea-rose cups high up to the light, Savitha felt as though she was cradling her own fragile existence. Fiercely, stacking the lily-of-the-valley tureens, she decided, I will
never
stop using them. I will
never
allow Meeka to forget her home. A faint scent of straw from the ship’s packaging filled the air, engulfing her in a terrible wave of sadness. As if in response, the sun broke through a cloud, exposing the dirt on the windows from many years of winter neglect, now unreachably high.

She did not tell Thornton about her job until the next morning. If she had wanted to surprise him she did. She wore her new slacks and made the breakfast. It was a brave decision and at first Thornton did not even notice. He was looking very handsome in his new work suit. The table was set; all seemed normal. An English breakfast, with toast, marmalade, string hoppers, last night’s lamb curry, tomato ketchup and a kettle of water for the tea. There were his mother’s pink-and-white cups and saucers, gold-rimmed and delicate. As far as Thornton could see everything was as usual. Why should he suddenly look more closely? Why should he have to keep an eye on everybody
all
the time? He knocked loudly on the wall of his daughter’s bedroom.

‘Meeka,’ he said, ‘Meeka, get up. You’ll be late for school.’

Letting out a small sound of fury, Anna-Meeka thumped out of bed and shot straight out of her room. She glared at her father who was about to bang on her wall again. Then she stopped, and stared at her mother. Thornton went back to his toast with its coating of thick-cut marmalade. He was reading the newspaper.

‘There’s something here about Ceylon,’ he said to his wife. ‘You know, you should start writing for the papers here.’ And he held out his cup for more tea.

‘What are you wearing?’ asked Meeka dubiously.

Savitha eyed her daughter. The good thing about Anna-Meeka, she decided with satisfaction, was that she
always
noticed everything. But she did not say this.

‘Hmm?’ asked Thornton, not looking up. ‘I’m wearing my new suit of course, for work. Now hurry up and get ready.’

He picked up another of the newspapers he had bought that morning. He was trying to decide which paper to take regularly. Christopher had said he should only buy the
Guardian
but Thornton had no intention of taking his advice untested. He wanted to check out all the possibilities for his future poems. It would be a pity to lose the momentum he had almost gained back home. Meeka stared at her mother.

‘Mama!’ she shrieked, suddenly wide awake and horrified to see her mother’s legs evident in this way. ‘You can’t go out like that.’

‘Aha!’ said Savitha triumphantly, waggling her head from side to side. ‘Good morning, everyone. So finally someone speaks! My husband is blind but thankfully my daughter has inherited her sight from me. Well, I’m exceedingly sorry, men,’ she said, addressing the dining room in general, ‘in case you’re interested, I have got a job!’

And she went back to pouring the tea into their lovely bone-china cups. But it was not that simple. Whatever made her think it would be? Later on, even though she was busy, there was plenty of time for her homesickness to return. Mr Rosenberg had put her in the corner of the room, a little away from the rising and the falling of machines, the movement of the pedals beating the air like wings and the sound of scissors against cloth. She sat working, her own rhythm out of step with the rest of them. A small exotic seabird, stranded on a narrow spit of land, her wings closed. Sewing together this thing called denim: piece against piece, raw edge against raw edge. She wore black slacks.