Bone China (38 page)
Authors: Roma Tearne
Carl Schiller began to play. His slender fingers formed a chord, they ran headlong across the keys, clear and unhesitating. The sounds fell into the darkened room, parting the silence as though it were an overgrown path. They cascaded in a waterfall of notes, overlaying each other, dissolving gently, phrase echoing phrase. Fluid, haunting and unending. He played with a piercing yearning, turning inexorably, just as you thought he might pause, into a minor key and then back again, before being lifted by the music somewhere else entirely. The sounds moved across the room, unstoppable now, effortless and breathtakingly lovely.
A soft rustle went through the audience. Whose music was this? How astonishingly beautiful! How it sparked, how it lilted, how it turned on a chord, unpredictable and always with the melody never far away. A distant voice from long ago returning again, when it was least expected, brushing lightly against them.
Here was how it was, the music seemed to say. Of these things were our lives made. Here was the substance of our sorrows and our joy. Exactly like yours. How we laughed, and how we loved, in the place that was once our home. With its coconut palms, its sun-washed beaches, its ancient tea-covered hills. This land of ours where all our earliest desires are housed,
and which, however far we may roam, will remain with us forever. For like you, we carry our youth in our hearts.
On and on the music flowed, brimming over in the oak-panelled room, telling of these things; new longings joining the others that the centuries had absorbed. Pressing insistently into the memory of this new space, crossing continents, moving boundaries, connecting. In a language without barriers, in ways that could no longer be denied.
In the darkness, above the familiar sounds, Anna-Meeka looked at Henry Middleton. He sat with her hand tightly in his, watching her, no longer able to hide his tenderness, his pride in her. Wishing that her father, and her mother, and her grandmother, all of them, all those people he had only heard about, could see just how long the journey had been, how far her music had brought her.
And, thought Meeka, looking at him now with eyes that shone, for all his paleness and all his Englishness, still, his ears were not pasted. His lobes hung freely! Happiness welled up in her, rising from a new depth. How pleased her father would have been. For what difference was there in the end? she wondered, smiling at him. There
was
no difference. People were people. Only their fears had made them struggle. And then, suddenly, she knew. In that moment, as the sounds of her music, submerged for so long, cascaded around her, she knew. With all the clarity that had been missing on the evening in the head teacher’s office so many years ago, she knew what she must do. She needed to see her home once more. She needed to see that long-forgotten place, with its sweet, soft sound of the ocean, its wide sweep of beaches, and its clear tropical skies. That place, lodged forever within her heart, where the heat of the day glistened and trailed far into the night. Where her aunt Frieda waited so patiently with her moth-dusty sorrow for the
past to be dispelled. For clearly she saw it, in spite of the shock, she saw that the things that had been mislaid, the history that had been buried and the memories no longer spoken of, all these things, were somehow being given back to her. And she saw too, at last, that here within this remarkable Englishman, with his sense of the ridiculous, his understanding and his love for her, was something of her beloved family. Returning again. Far away in the distance, as a dream realised at last, came the rush of thunderous applause, rising and falling like surf-green waves, crashing against her and catching the dazzling sea light.
I would like to thank my agent Felicity Bryan, for her unfailing encouragement and kindness to me; Kathy van Praag, also, for her endorsement of the book; and of course Clare Smith, my inspired editor at HarperPress.
Thanks to Michele Topham from the Felicity Bryan Agency for her hours of endless discussion; and to Mally Foster and Annabel Wright from HarperPress for their humour and support throughout.
Also to Richard Blackford, who talked to me about musical composition; Maureen Lake, my long-suffering piano teacher; my friends Tessa Farmer and Jane Garnett, who read the manuscript in single, swift sittings; and my brother-in-law Paul, who pleased me by laughing uproariously while reading the manuscript but then informed me it was my spelling that amused him.
I would like to pay special tribute to the rest of my family, to whom this book is dedicated. Like the passengers of a very large and boisterous ocean liner ploughing the seas, it was they who provided the environment in which I could write.
Thank you.
Mosquito
Brixton Beach
Bone China
Copyright © 2008 by Roma Tearne.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-554-68971-2
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Originally published in Great Britain by Harper
Press
in 2008
‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’ Words and Music by Ray Noble © 1932.
Reproduced by permission of Francis Day & Hunter Ltd, London
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8 5
SW
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Quotations by E.M. Forster used by kind permission of The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Society of Authors as the Literary Representatives of the Estate of E.M. Forster.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Tearne, Roma
Bone china : a novel / Roma Tearne.
I. Title.
PR6120.E27B65 2009 823’.92 C2008-907961-2
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