Homesick Page 17

  Her father was the same shade as she, what her friends called “red Indian colour,” and when her aunts stroked her cheeks, they looked at her fondly and said, “She is so fair! So beautiful!” Her father, she remembered, was good-looking, with the wide eyes and aquiline nose of a Westerner or an Indian film star. If she was not playing with her cousins that summer, she would sit on her father’s lap as he lounged in a planter’s chair on the veranda of his parents’ old colonial house, on the Galle Road just outside Colombo. The fan would be brought out for “baby,” as the old servants called her, and sometimes she would read as she listened to her father and his father talking in their peculiar mix of Sinhala and English. And sometimes she would doze off and wake to find the light already dimming at five and her father heaving her into the arms of her grandmother, who would take her to the bathroom to douse her awake with a cold-water shower. Then off they would go again, into the evening’s heat in her grandfather’s old Austin, to visit more friends or cousins, uncles or aunts, or to eat in restaurants that looked out to an always-raging sea.

  One night they were coming home late and she was talking to him, she remembered, but he was quiet, and he listened and laughed at whatever silliness she was saying. She was holding his hand, and she traced the veins on the back of it, knowing that he belonged only to her. He said, “Do you like it here?” He said, “Little Lolly?” No, he never called her Lolly, nor did he call her Louisa. What did he call her? She could not remember. He looked out of the window into the dark night, and he cried out suddenly. They were driving up from Matara along dark, unmade country roads, and the driver swerved and stopped. Her father told the driver to stop, and he leapt out of the car. And this is what Louisa remembers most clearly: her father’s face as he looked back into the car at her, his hand outstretched to her, and she knew that hand would always be there as an offering, as an assurance. “Come, darling,” he said, and she slid against the sweaty, leather seat, out into the dark.

  All around her, dancing about her head and shoulders, were fairy lights. Fairy lights that flew around and around. Her eyes stilled so that she saw only lights and the whites of her father’s eyes. “See if you can catch them, darling!” he shouted, laughing and dancing about her as he cupped his hands and lunged. Here, she loved him, here. This moment was in a cream envelope, in stasis. The glowworms flew around and around inside that cream envelope, and she had not opened it, had left it on a shelf behind a strong door, in case his hand had never been there—in case, in the interim years, the glowworms had flown away.

  •

  The librarian phoned down from the reading room.

  “Tony’s here. He says he made an appointment, but he’s not in the book.” Louisa sat back in her chair, looked about her office, at its shelves full of accession registers and the dogeared poster of common paper-eating insects taped to the filing cabinet, the old rattling radiator.

  “Ask him where he wants to start,” she said. She heard her question relayed to Tony.

  “He says—at the beginning.”

  She took her bunch of keys and went across the corridor to the locked storeroom: her domain, with its stale smell of dust and creaky leather and the bad breath of dead paper and ink. Margaret sat nearest to the door, the newest collection, not catalogued but in perfect chronological order. Margaret had been easy to organise: she was a meticulous writer, keeping working notes with her daily diaries, letters, too, within the day in the diary when it was received. She had even marked envelopes with “important” or “should throw away.” It had been easy for Louisa to package up the papers and notebooks and diaries, pencilling dates onto the envelopes and then onto the boxes, before she put each on top of the other, the layers the strata of a poet.

  The first box contained Margaret’s teenage years. This would not be what Tony wanted to read about, Louisa was certain. After all, he was born when Margaret was twenty-five: surely he would want these diaries? But she took him at his word and brought out the first envelope, her diary for her fourteenth year. He wanted to start at the beginning.

  She took the envelope up to the reading room herself. She held it the way she held all scripts that came from the vaults, her left hand a tray under the envelope, her right hand resting on top. She walked slowly up the stairs, passing a boy with his earplugs in and a girl shouting directions into her phone. She walked slowly, ploddingly. Reaching the top of the stairs, she smiled bravely, but suddenly she kissed the envelope, as if it were a child fostered in her care and now to be handed over to its real parent. She pushed open the door of the reading room, and there he stood, awkwardly, like a stranger, the man who brought her a cup of tea this morning, the man whose easy nakedness was comical in his strides about her attic flat, his head grazing against sloping ceilings, his discordant singing filling the quiet spaces of her life. She handed the envelope to him as though he were any other reader with an appointment. Tony took it as if he were any other reader, too. He nodded and sat at a table, his hands reaching eagerly into the envelope, extracting the diary, his head sinking toward it as though the tiniest invisible hairs on his face were ashy filaments of iron pulled by his mother’s words. Louisa turned away and went back down to her office.

  •

  Louisa walked about her mother’s house with her naked feet sloshing. The pregnancy had been relatively trouble-free, except now, in the heat, water swam under her skin. Her feet were swollen into a caricature of themselves, the lines on her normally elegant toes had almost all disappeared, and the toes laughed up at her like ten swollen Buddhas. In the distension of her body, there was a calm, rhythmical verse, she thought, and the words that made it were limbs, hands, face, head, cord: all her daughter, all her secret. She called her Margaret already, and the child was as much the outcome of the love Louisa bore for her grandmother as of that for her father. She balanced, head nestled into Louisa’s cervix, ready to be pushed forth, and every now and then Louisa would feel the muscles tighten, and she would breathe slowly out, allowing the air to hiss away. Tony would glance up then, smile, watch her in her compact, private world.

  He was looking through an album of photographs. It was Louisa’s childhood, just one album. Faded photographs of Deirdre and Louisa in matching Crimplene frocks at a Sri Lankan wedding; another of Louisa by herself peering upward, through a curtain of hair on one side, hands behind her back, in a skirt that was too short, her knees dirty and socks around her ankles. Deirdre always smiled. Often Louisa looked to the side, as if looking for someone behind the camera. No smile for Lolly, Louisa thought. She paused in her walk about her mother’s living room to look over Tony’s shoulder.

  “Why did I never smile?” she asked no one in particular. At the moment she never stopped smiling. Tony and she just had to look at each other, and she would grin, dance with the knowledge of what she carried. A child! Her child!

  “Oh, you. You were miserable. Never smiled, always moody,” her mother said. Shamini shifted in her seat, to pull herself up to look at the pictures more clearly. Tony looked back and winked at Louisa. She did not mind her mother. It did not matter. She walked on. The room no longer bothered her: for years the chaos of boxes and magazines, the old furniture in disrepair, the dirty yellow carpets, the piles and piles of books, unsorted on shelves and stacked on the floor, would have ruined a visit to her mother’s. She would have started to clear small pockets, putting black bags of ten-year-old Sunday-supplement magazines out to be recycled, taking Deirdre’s broken Barbies to the charity shop, while Shamini would sit impassively in the middle of the room, telling her how unnecessary her actions were. “I can never find anything when you have visited,” she would say. And of course, when Louisa returned, fresh chaos would await, to scold her and make her feel lost within it. Now her feet splashed about the puddles of magazines and books and albums and unfinished knitting, and she cared very little about any of it, for somehow the space between her mother and herself was no longer filled with yearning or pain. The space was filled with
flesh growing inside her, flesh that could be given time and love and protection and the kindness that had somehow passed the child Lolly by.

  “Who is this?” Tony asked, almost too eagerly. Louisa walked back and stopped. Over his shoulder, she saw a picture of Kumar. Even he could not stop her smile.

  “That is my cousin,” replied Shamini. “He is dead now. He lived with us for a few months, and then he was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit—do you know, these ‘miscarriages of justice,’ they are a terrible thing. But now, you see, he is dead anyway. I never liked him, though, filthy habits. Never washed. And he was a drunk.…”

  Louisa said, “You never told me he died.”

  “Why should you want to know?”

  “So I could dance on his grave.”

  Shamini looked around quickly. “Why would you say that? What a strange thing to say.”

  “I hated him, Ma.”

  “Why? What harm did he do to you?” And then Louisa’s mother understood. She understood her daughter’s eyes, understood the years of hurt: she had known already. Louisa could see. She had known but had put it aside, and Louisa recognised herself in her mother’s pursed lips. “No, they cleared him—ten years later, they cleared him,” Shamini said.

  “Yes,” Louisa said, and she started her journey back toward the French doors, deciding to step into the sunny garden beyond and leave it all behind. But then she stopped.

  “How did he die? I wonder if it hurt?”

  “Oh, well, you may as well know. He was strangled, and someone threw him down a well.”

  Tony laughed. Louisa turned back and laughed, too.

  “It is no laughing matter, child! It’s a family secret, you know?”

  “Whose family? Our family? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you never asked about him. Deirdre asked about him, and I told her. But you never ask about anything.”

  “I asked about my father—almost a year ago, and you wouldn’t give me the address.”

  “I was upset.”

  “Someone threw him down a well?” Tony said, incredulous and brave at last. “Louisa’s uncle was strangled, and they threw him down a well?” And then he laughed again.

  “These things happen,” Shamini said expansively. “Now that you … I am glad of it,” she said finally, patting Louisa’s hand. “Come, let’s go and eat. I made chicken curry. And vambuttu the way you like it.” She got unsteadily to her feet and pulled herself this way and that, loosening her arthritic hips. “If you would have told me, Lolly, I would have killed him myself.” She turned to Louisa and affectionately pulled her daughter’s bulk to her chest, hooking her arms about her neck. “Poor little Lolly,” she said.

  •

  In the car, Tony was silent. Louisa, weary and lacking the physical strength to think, closed her eyes and leaned back.

  “You shut everything away,” he said into the dark. She opened her eyes, saw his face light up with the motorway lampposts, then close into the night. Her eyes drooped again, and she placed her hand on the hand or foot that waved across her abdomen.

  “I … don’t know what to say,” she said. “It was something private that happened. Something that was—done—to me. It isn’t something I should have to explain. Things are done, and we learn to just forget, to stop remembering, stop holding on to it all, because it hurts too much.”

  “But it seems to me that it is so integral to your growing up—it is all so huge. And your father not being there. And your mother being mad …” She laughed. She made the same sort of jokes.

  “Having a mad mother has actually saved me, I think. When you’re a child and things happen, you just get on with it, don’t you? Why we are as we are—well, it is not something we should stop and fathom. I mean, it isn’t just one thing, or two or even three things. Being the child you were, without a mother, I mean, is not why you are who you are, is it?”

  “No.” He was terse. She put her head back again, closed her eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “You. You and my mother.” She felt the coldness from him.

  “She was such a good friend,” she started.

  “No,” he said into the darkness. “I know you must be ‘L’ in her diary.”

  “Yes? And?”

  “She describes her love for you. She loved you, for Christ’s sake. But you didn’t tell me about that either. You just put things away, and you don’t analyse, and you don’t try and understand how other people feel, and—”

  “Oh, stop,” she said. They drove on in silence. She dozed and woke into a murky, postprandial evening with a dry mouth and an ache in her lower back. The sounds of his driving gave her pleasure, the ticking of the indicator louder than she remembered it from before her sleep. He was still here, in the car, driving, even though she had dreamt he had left the car during the journey and put her in the care of a faceless man who unquestioningly drove her home.

  “Tony,” she said. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he said, and his steady driving pushed and pulled them along, toward their little flat, full of their sturdy life.

  •

  From the start of her, from her very conception, Louisa noted Meg down in a little book. The pregnancy test, its blue line, was taped into the front, and then the black-and-white scan, its white fairy form stark and clear on the black background, Meg’s stubby nose already like Louisa’s own. And when she was born, Louisa began to write, clear descriptions of love for her child. It was an opening-up, a discovery of a life that had been parallel to her for all these years. Postnatal elation, she thought, because the rest of her life before this had been the depression. So Meg gave Louisa life. It was a fine discovery, and if she were to choose the happiest day in her life, she could have chosen any day after Meg was born: she could have chosen every day.

  She chose one of these days, filled with nappy changing and feeds, to write to her father. Tony was fascinated by this last piece, this final person that made up Meg. So, she wrote. She did not say very much—I have a child now. She is called Meg, after her paternal grandmother (and Shamini to please Mum), and she is beautiful, with skin like a coral mermaid’s and curly red-brown hair. Did you stop the car when I was six, so we could chase glowworms? I can’t remember what you used to call me. Why did you leave me? I miss you—and she added, rashly (but she was happy)—I think I always did. When Meg woke, Louisa walked down to the post office and sent the letter off, with the photo they were sending to everyone, of the three of them, lying on their bed in their attic nest.

  He phoned her five days later. It was almost normal, she thought afterward, to pick up the phone and hear him say, “Hello?” in his quavery, uncertain voice, clearing his throat, and then saying, “Louisa? Is that Louisa?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Is that … you?” She sat down on the side of the bed, next to the cot where Meg lay sleeping.

  “Yes,” he said. She could hear an echo of his voice coming down the line from Sri Lanka, as if he were talking from the past. “You know, I used to call you Lulu. You were my little Lulu. There was that pop star when you were little—and you were dazzling, like a pop star, you know. You were …,” and his voice broke, and he coughed again.

  “Dad. It’s you,” she said.

  “Yes. We did try and catch glowworms! We did! I am so glad that you remember! Oh, my little Lulu!”

  She laughed out loud into the quiet room full of its settling dust. The child’s arms jumped sideways, but she sighed and slept on. They talked for a long time, Louisa thought, but it was only twenty minutes. He said he would send her a letter. “And when will you come here? When can I meet my granddaughter?”

  “Not for a little while. It’s too early for her to travel,” Louisa said preciously. “But soon. Can you come here?”

  “No, darling. I am ill. I cannot leave the country. My doctors will be very angry.”

  That came hard, and she started to cry. “Oh, Dad, I didn�
�t know. Why didn’t Ma tell me? Why wouldn’t she let me have anything about you?”

  “Louisa, she was protecting you. She has always said you were the vulnerable one.” This was shocking.

  “No, she never behaved that way,” she interrupted.

  “She was trying to make you stronger.”

  “Why are you defending her?”

  “Because I’m old, child. And tired, and possibly, I might be dying. Oh, Lulu, don’t cry. You know,” he said in a sort of whisper, “we try our best. I failed, because, well, because your mother and I could not love each other and could not agree on anything. I wanted you. I wanted to bring you here. That is why I brought you on that holiday. That night—the glowworms night—I asked you if you would like to stay, and you said yes. So I thought—that’s it, I will just keep her here, with me. We won’t go back to England. We will forget the other side of the family. And then, that night, I put you to bed and you had a nightmare—and you called out for your mother, and you called out for Deirdre. So I knew: it would be better to take you home. I thought that someone had to make the hard decisions.”

  “You made the wrong decision,” she said, through her sobs.

  “Well.” He waited for her to stop. “Every day I think how I wish I had known more about children and how they can get over anything.”