Homesick Read online

“I wish they had let me visit you, you know, after.”

  “After I tried to kill myself, you mean?” She glanced down at the thin, silvered scars on her wrists. Even in the shadow, she could see him blush. “Did you try to visit?”

  “I wrote letters. I came to your house. They wouldn’t let me in. I begged Rohan.”

  “Lovely Rohan,” she said.

  “How is he? Still a doctor? I Googled him once, to see if he was a consultant or …”

  “He’s in the States. He’s a heart surgeon. Has a son. But he and his wife have split up. I think he just works and sleeps. It’s sad, really—he should be happy, our Ro. What a family, eh?”

  Freddie shrugged. She had meant: you were in love, and you wanted to marry me—what a lucky escape.

  “It was a selfish thing to do,” he said.

  “Yes. You mean trying to kill myself?”

  “Yes.”

  “But we were all selfish—children are selfish. I didn’t know what else to do at the time. Are you asking for an explanation?”

  “No. Not at all.” He paused. And then he looked into her eyes: “You couldn’t love me because I’m ugly. But I loved you so much.” It winded her.

  “Did you? Can it have been love when we were so young?” From his eyes, she knew the answer.

  “Shall I get another drink?” he asked.

  “Why not?”

  He got up and went in to the bar. She watched the dancers, the others sitting on the side at tables and standing around. Simon moved toward Emma now. Preethi saw him framed in the doorway. She sat backward into the darkness a little farther, so she could watch them undisturbed. He clinked his glass to Gary’s, looked down at Emma, and Preethi watched Emma carefully as she smiled up into Simon’s eyes. She could see Simon’s face fully: did his eyes acknowledge Emma the way that his eyes acknowledged her? They did not. Simon put his hand in his pocket, and Preethi wondered if he was stopping himself from reaching forward and touching Emma. He walked on. Preethi turned around, away from the doors, and looked into the dark, into the night. She stood, facing the trees, listening to the breeze and the snatches of conversation about her:

  “… nah, he said he had to see his ma in hospital …”

  “… get us one, Chris …”

  “… but I think roses are always best for weddings, so I said to her …”

  She felt a nudge at her elbow. “Did you dance?” It was the old lady.

  “No. I watched. It looks exhausting.”

  “Yes. Exhausting.” The woman looked around. “I’ve lost Anthony.”

  “Tony?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Does he work for them?”

  “Well, of course. What else do retired politicians do? Just a little consultation, you see? He tips them a wink here and there, and they get the contracts.”

  Preethi smiled. “Is he very famous, your husband?”

  “Oh, yes,” the lady said matter-of-factly. “He did single-handedly win a war, you know. Well, at least, that’s what he tells us. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. It’s all men’s work, boys’ games. We’re just here to shit out the next cannon fodder, love ’em till they’re thirteen, ship ’em off to boarding school, officer’s training, then the next bloody war. Feed ’em, wipe their arses, send ’em orff.” She paused to take another slurp of wine. She tilted into Preethi’s body, and Preethi felt her arm being taken, the unsteadiness of the other woman. “What are we for but to prop and hold and hope and fucking save ’em?”

  Preethi smiled, but she realised the undying truth of this: how she had done the same. Brought Simon’s children into the world, fed them from her body, and through the years obeyed the rhythms of the marital, familial dance. Women are ruled by the cycles of life, she thought, and whether we like it or not, we do it, we sarabande around and around our days, our months, our years. Men blast through our patterns sometimes, uprooting our even work with their sudden decisions and victories, and we steadily cast over the holes, knit them together with patience and silent bravery, obeying the patterns of our small routines. And the earth turns round and round, and we turn round with it. Preethi walked the woman into the hall and sat her next to Anthony. They remained together against a wall, their glasses being filled by every passing drunk with a wine bottle, and they looked steadfastly ahead, at the dancers, at the band.

  When Preethi was twenty-one, she had asked Simon to meet her in Trafalgar Square one Saturday afternoon. He was just finishing his articles in a pompous law firm in the City, and she knew if she told him it was a march against nuclear weapons beforehand, he would not have come. She told him which lion to stand by, told him it was important that she had been specific, and when the first speakers were in full throttle, he arrived, and she kissed him as if he had done a marvellous thing. In the event, they marched shoulder-to-shoulder, arms about each other. He had not resented the deceit. He had enjoyed the experience. His parents were Tories—there had never been a need for him to march against anything. Every political decision any government had made in his lifetime had been for him and people like him. Anthony, drunk in the corner, would have been a man with the power to detonate. She watched him now and marvelled at how small the world had become.

  Simon waved at her from the other side of the hall. She raised her hand, and he mouthed, “Dance?” She nodded assent.

  The accordion player arpeggioed through a chord, but the caller said, “And now we will sing a song for you before we take a small break.” There were muted cheers, and someone shouted something from another corner of the room, and people cheered again. Simon shrugged at Preethi and started to walk toward her, but the music started, and instead of crossing the empty dance floor, she watched him walk around the crowd, to make his way to her more discreetly. He was a cautious man.

  “I know a girl that you don’t know,” the singer started, “little Liza Jane,” the rest joined in. The crowd began to clap. Preethi started to clap, too, her hands automated, her feet more independent, tapping a different, faster rhythm. If Simon had walked across to her, placed his hand about her waist, and swung her around, she would have danced with him, cheery and carefree.

  “Oh, Eliza!” they sang, and she mouthed the words with them.

  A young woman skirmished into the centre of the hall, hair hanging down in greasy spurts from under a full-brimmed hat. She wore a denim miniskirt and a revealing shirt, her breasts threatening to gate-crash. On her legs she wore a pair of PVC cowboy chaps. She turned to her friends and beckoned them, but they shook their heads and shrugged.

  “Ruthie!” one of them shouted. “Get ’ere!” But she began to dance. It was not a fluid dance or a hopping-stamping movement. Ruthie put her hands out in front of her, as if to perform what the British think of as an Egyptian dance, straight arms sliding back and forth like a clock stuck at a quarter past three. Preethi was discomfited. She let her eyes film over, to transform the scene to the forest she wanted to see, of drunk locals in cotton shifts, their hair covered in roses and tumbling honeysuckle, curls of blond and auburn grazing loose breasts, plumply tempting men in breeches. Her eyes glazed, and she saw a wisewoman standing in the middle of the hall, beckoning people to come to her, summoning forth the evil of rain that would spoil the crop, dancing it away with sudden thrusts to the ceiling and the sky beyond. People around Preethi watched silently as the song continued and Ruthie’s drunken swayings diminished her, until her legs began to give way and she stumbled toward the floor, pulling at the chaps so that she made a drunken striptease, which some men stood and watched and jeered and others turned from, ashamed that they had seen.

  Freddie thrust a glass toward her.

  “Thank you,” she said. Simon had been stopped by a colleague, a middle-aged woman, who was trying to convince him to dance. She watched him, and Freddie followed her eyes.

  “Is that your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looks nice.”

  She laughed. “What’s nice? H
ow can you tell?” It was strange, but despite the years, this boy, this man, seemed more familiar to her than Simon. She turned to look at him. “Do you remember how earnest we were about everything?”

  “Oh, yes. But that’s every teenager, isn’t it? Knowing everything. We would have made a funny pair, wouldn’t we?”

  “Do you think? I think—together—we could have conquered the world!”

  He laughed. She had used a stock phrase, a journalist’s cliché.

  Simon reached his arm about Preethi as he halted at her side.

  “Where have you been?” he asked her.

  “Outside. I met a friend. This is Freddie.”

  “Hello, Freddie. Now, who are you married to?”

  And she watched her husband charm Freddie, holding the handshake a little longer than necessary, looking up into his eyes.

  He turned to her: “Look, I need to go and talk to other people. Are you all right here? When do you want to go?” he asked, and she heard the new note that had chilled his voice toward her recently. The children were older, their youngest almost sixteen. Perhaps, oh, God, perhaps he has someone else, she thought.

  “No, not go. Just spend some time together?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Come and talk to George. He’s been asking after you.”

  “No. Time, just you and me.”

  “At a barn dance?” His eyebrows raised.

  “Yes, at a barn dance.”

  He turned as someone tapped his shoulder. She turned to Freddie and began talking again. But soon his sister came and claimed him, took him away. Simon took her hand, and they walked purposefully through the crowd. He took her to the bar, and when they were given two glasses of red, he clinked their glasses. He turned to face her and smiled, so he was completely hers. There was no malice that she could detect in his face.

  “Do you still love me?” she asked. It was not a sudden question, she thought, just a curiosity, now that she was drinking her third glass of red.

  He looked astonished. “Why even ask? Of course I do. I could not love you more if I tried!”

  She laughed. “What an unfortunate turn of phrase,” she drawled, and turned away from their introspection. “Who was that girl, Ruth?”

  “Why did you ask me?”

  “About Ruth?”

  “No. About loving you? Of course I love you. There’s no one else for me.”

  “Fine. Why did they let her dance all by herself?”

  “Oh, she’s just one of those girls who always get drunk. Look, do you doubt me?”

  “No. Well, I … no. No, I don’t doubt you. At least—it’s different here. Different with these people. I need the loo, Simon. Why does someone keep shouting ‘Si’ at you?”

  “They think it’s funny. Look, the loos are that way. Come on,” he said and pulled her hand. He led her into an atrium to the side of the hall. There they parted, he to the men’s, she to the ladies’. When Preethi emerged, Simon had vanished. She looked about the atrium, and where there had been people walking to and fro, there was no one. Not one person. The toilets had been empty, and when she emerged from the smelly sterility, she felt transformed, as if she had travelled into another time, another place. There were no sounds, no noises at all. She stood and waited. And then she heard hurried footsteps, a man’s feet coming toward her from the gravel outside.

  A fat man in a white shirt and white trousers stepped through the doorway.

  “Where are we?” he asked. He fanned his face with a straw hat.

  “I … I don’t know. I—well, I don’t live around here,” Preethi said.

  “Nay, lass. What’s the village? What’s the nearest town, then?”

  She smiled at him, dumb, listened for the noise of the crowd, for the racket of the playing band or the child-adults shouting. Nothing. Just her, and this man. He looked about him, gazed at her blank, tipsy face. He strode toward the hall, grasped the double doors, and suddenly sound entered her vacuum and the buzz and flow of the dance came out to the atrium, and the man walked into it and away from her. He walked across the dance floor and to the band, and the caller clapped him on the back. The man threw his hat to the ground and, behind the band, picked up a guitar, nodding his head again and again as the band teased him. Preethi watched him from where she stood. She had been certain; she had been afraid but certain that she was the only one here, in this building, and that the fairies she was so sure she would see had finally arrived.

  •

  George said, “Come, now, you haven’t danced one dance.”

  “Are you asking me to dance, George?” Preethi said, smiling sweetly.

  “Well, would you dance with me if I asked?”

  “No. You’re a bloody awful dancer.” He laughed rowdily.

  “Thing is, Preethi, I thought when I said ‘barn dance’ that people would understand that I meant, you know, English country dancing. But look, they’ve all got these bloody cowboy hats, and they’re yee-ha-ing as if they were from Texas or something.”

  She was suddenly animated. “I know! I don’t understand. I was expecting a clear demonstration of Englishness. I was expecting chocolate-box Englishness. I was expecting to watch, like a tourist; I was expecting—”

  “But you’re not a tourist, are you?” George pointed out. “You’re from England. You were born in London, I remember you telling me.”

  “Yes. But …”—but he had wrong-footed her. Yes, she was from England, by birth. She was from England the way she certainly was not from Sri Lanka. Her demands of Sri Lanka were as stringent as her demands of England. She had an impression of the way countries should be, the way their inhabitants should behave, the way everything should be.

  “I know what you mean, though.” George sighed. “These idiots don’t know how lucky they are. They have so much that’s good here. They’re surrounded by countryside and tradition, good food, the land, and what do they do? Sit at home and watch American crap on the telly.”

  Simon had joined them. “Not all of them, George. The rest of them are out getting legless.”

  “Well, at least that’s a good British tradition,” George said, and he and Preethi giggled, but Simon looked out at the crowd, and Preethi noticed his jaw twitch.

  Anthony and his wife were walking unsteadily toward them. She held his arm by the sleeve, at the elbow, like a nanny leading a child. They came to a stop in front of George, Preethi, and Simon.

  “Well, boss,” Anthony slurred, “it’s been a fine party. A fine dance you have led me!”

  “Thanks, Anthony. Have you had a nice time, Beatrice?”

  And as they conversed with Simon, George said softly to Preethi, “Drinks like a fish, both do, since they lost their son in Iraq,” and he smiled kindly at them. “Have you met Simon’s wife?”

  “Oh, Pretty,” Beatrice said. “Yes, we met outside. We talked about bringing up children and how it ruins our lives.”

  George laughed and dug Preethi’s ribs with his elbow. “You turning Beatrice into a fucking feminist?”

  Preethi smiled. She thought of her days, the rhythms of her days. The back-and-forth walks to schools, the buying of food, the preparation of meals. She thought of the years and years of PE kits and music lessons, chess clubs and drama productions. She thought of Simon’s daily arrivals home, how she would tease their daughter that she would be taken to the Beast’s house because she was always the first to greet her father at the gate, and how lately it was only a dog who waited patiently for his car door to slam. She thought of her garden, and the beans and courgettes that magically appeared every summer from seeds she had planted, and the vines that climbed her golden-bricked house, and the marigolds that dotted the beds orange so that from heaven it would look like the sun had shattered and sprinkled itself all over their land. Her children walked in sunshine; her children danced in sunshine. She had never claimed it had ruined her life. She and Simon had had a good life, and if it were to end today, or tomorrow, it would have been as good as it pos
sibly could have been.

  George had his arm about Anthony’s shoulders, and Simon on the other side held Beatrice about the waist. Preethi put her arm about George’s shoulders, and there they stood, she thought, as she and Simon had stood at the CND march, with the politician who had won the war. The caller shouted, “Last dance, everyone, last dance!”

  Simon escorted Beatrice to a chair, and George walked Anthony to the chair next to her.

  Simon turned to Preethi. “Will you dance with me, my love?” he asked. She took his arm, and they walked to the centre of the hall.

  “This one’s an easy one,” the caller said. “No circles or moving on or anything. Just promenade about the hall, and when I say, ‘Spin your partner,’ then promenade again. See—easy!”

  And then she and Simon were walking together, arms linked, as if they were an old couple taking a daily stroll, or a newly married couple walking up an aisle, or a couple in love absorbed in each other, or they were just themselves, just Simon and Preethi, the golden ones, who walked in sunshine their lives through. When the caller shouted “Spin!” she took his hands and they spun, with their eyes only on each other, and she laughed and she grimaced, her face distorted and excited. Simon’s face was the same each time, though, a smile, passive and unafraid. On their last spin, he let go too soon. She fell, but he leaned over her, right down, and, holding her arm, lifted her, so that to anyone who watched, it looked as if she had made a low curtsy and he had pulled her up into a twirl. When she glanced about, embarrassed, she noticed that Emma stood alone, at the side, watching them. Her face was sullen, and Preethi smiled, walked forward to break the silence between them, but Emma had been watching Simon. Preethi looked back to Simon, too. He smiled at Preethi only, and they linked arms again and walked away. Emma was only at the beginning of her dance, Preethi thought, and they were at the end. And we have done it well. They walked back to the open door, to where George stood with Anthony and Beatrice.

  The caller said, “Before we finish, we’d like to sing a last song for you. It is called ‘Rolling Home.’ ” He played a chord on his accordion. The man all in white—my fairy, Preethi thought—sang the first verse as a solo: