Theo liked to spend the morning writing, but lately it had been difficult to concentrate with the girl present. She sat against a wall, almost in the bushes, drawing him. He had tried to make her come inside but she was stubborn and stayed where she was, far back along the veranda, crouching beside the lilies and the ferns.
‘How can you draw like this? You can’t see me,’ he had protested. ‘Why do you want to crouch so low?’
She had refused his invitation and in the end he had just shrugged, leaving her alone, going back to his typewriter in the cool of his study. It was hot. For some reason the fans had all stopped working. Perhaps the generator had broken down again. He would have to get Sugi to look at it. Every now and then as he worked he would look up and catch a glimpse of her faded lime-green skirt translucent against the extraordinary light of the untamed garden. She folded and rearranged herself until from where he sat she was a smudge of green and white and black. He could not see her face; it was hidden by her dark hair. He found her presence disturbing. How was he supposed to work? Surely it must be lunchtime? He half hoped she would
stay to eat with him. Sometimes she did; at other times, although she hesitated, an inner tempo seemed to call her, guilt perhaps, a sudden memory of an uncompleted errand for her long-suffering mother. Every time Theo asked her to stay for lunch. He waited, unaware that his breath was bated, for her reply, knowing only his irrational disappointment if she went home.
He had decided then, the best thing to do was to commission her to paint him. It was clear that, once voiced, she would not give up the idea, so one evening he strolled over to Mrs Mendis with the suggestion. Mrs Mendis welcomed him with some
aluva
and coffee. He told her he wanted to commission Nulani to paint his portrait. He would like to pay her if Mrs Mendis did not mind. Mrs Mendis did not mind. Mr Samarajeeva was extremely kind. She just hoped Nulani would do a proper job.
‘The girl is a dreamer,’ said Mrs Mendis. ‘She does not talk much and she is stubborn. If you can get her to do anything it will be a miracle. Most of the time, if there is any work to be done, she disappears. She won’t help in the house or with any of my sewing. How am I to make a living, with no one to help me?’
Having started her complaints, Mrs Mendis found it curiously difficult to stop. Her thin, high voice rose like the smoke from a mosquito coil.
‘I am a widow,’ she said. ‘Has Nulani told you? Has she told you my husband was set fire to during the rioting in the seventies? They threw a petrol bomb at him. Aiyo, we watched as he went screaming down the Old Tissa Road. Fear kept all the people hidden behind closed doors.’ Mrs Mendis waved her hands about in distress. ‘Everyone watched through the shutters of their houses,’ she said. ‘But no one came to help.’
Harsh sunlight had pressed itself on the edges of the house and then Mrs Mendis had run screaming into the street, chasing hopelessly after her husband, but it was too late. He lay blackened and
burnt; clear liquid oozing out from his staring eyes, his body charred, the stench of flesh filling her open-mouthed screams.
‘The neighbours came out of the houses then and pulled me away,’ she said.
They had been fearful she might throw herself on to the flames. By the time the ambulance came he was beyond help.
‘Luckily,’ said Mrs Mendis, lowering her voice, ‘my son Jim was somewhere else and did not see his father’s life as it left this world.’
Lucky Jim. ‘He had been so close to his father,’ she said. ‘The shock is still with him.’
Only the girl had been at home. Mrs Mendis wasn’t sure how much she had seen. Always quiet, she became mute after that.
‘She’s difficult,’ said Mrs Mendis, ‘obstinate and odd.’
Theo Samarajeeva, who had not meant to stay for long, looked around for escape. There was no sign of Nulani, but something about the stillness of the air made him certain she was listening.
Walking home he turned several times, convinced he was being followed. But the road was empty. The air was choked with the heavy scent of frangipani. As he entered his house he noticed Sugi had lit some oil lamps. Theo could see him fixing a few cheap Chinese lanterns to the trees. He poured himself a whisky, and was still listening to the ice crackling in the glass when he saw her. Standing in his doorway holding out a branch of blossom, the rich scent filling the room, her smile wide, her eyes as bright as the new moon.
She came almost daily after that, before school, after her evening meal, at odd unexpected hours, nearly every weekend. A notebook was filling up with small studies of him. Sometimes she showed him what she had done. She seemed to be trying to record every slight movement of his face, he thought, amused. Such was the minute detail of the drawings. He was astonished
by her perception. Thin pencils, stubs of charcoal, delicate brushstrokes, whatever she used, all had the same fluid quality, the same effortless logic as they moved across the page. Each time she showed him what she had done, he was astonished all over again.
‘Nulani,’ he asked once, after looking at these drawings for a long time. ‘Why me? Why draw me? Why not someone younger, your brother’s friends perhaps?’
He was genuinely puzzled. But she had only laughed.
‘Wait till you see the painting!’ she promised.
Now he watched her as she drew him from the corner of the veranda.
‘Why don’t you sit somewhere better, child?’ he asked again. ‘You can’t possibly see me clearly from where you are!’
‘I don’t want to see you, Mr Samarajeeva. I’m learning to draw you from memory.’
‘Will you please stop calling me Mr Samarajeeva.’
‘OK, Mr Samarajeeva.’
He never knew if she was teasing him. He had a feeling she could read his mind, that she liked to make him feel older than he felt already, because it amused her, because in fact his age made no difference whatsoever to her.
‘I want to be able to draw you from memory, with my eyes closed,’ she said, ‘so I will never forget you.’
Startled, he stood up. Sugi came in to announce lunch was ready. Lunch was some fresh
thora-malu
, seer fish, from today’s catch.
‘When will you start painting?’ he asked while they ate. A small beam of sunlight fell on her face. Her skin glowed with a sheen of youthfulness. Through the curtain of thick hair her eyes were as bright as a pair of black cherries. He thought of all the years of living that lay between them, as heavy and
as sweet as a piece of sugared coconut jaggery, irreplaceable, unexchangeable, for ever between them.
‘I have already started the painting, but I must draw more. Can I come here and paint?’
Theo laughed. ‘At this rate you will always be here. What will your mother say? She won’t be happy with that idea. She must want to see her daughter
sometimes
.’
‘I want to be here all the time,’ she said.
Theo looked at her. The beam of sunlight had moved and rested on the top of her head. Her hair was a sleek smoky black; it reminded him of the blue-black cat he and Anna had once had, in that other life. But all he said was: ‘I have to go to Colombo tomorrow, is there anything you need? Any paints I can try to get you?’
He did not tell her that he had done no work since she had been drawing him; he did not tell her that her presence in his house, like a beautiful injured bird, was distraction enough without the drawing. London seemed far away.
‘Has your mother seen the painting?’
‘No. Amma, my mother, worries too much all the time. She doesn’t have time to look.’ She seemed to hesitate. ‘Her worry is because she hopes.’
‘She hopes?’
‘She hopes things will not get worse than they already are. She hopes my brother does not leave, go to England. But she also hopes he
does
go because he will have a better life there. She hopes she will never see the things she saw once. So she does not look.’
It was the first time she had made reference to her father’s murder.
‘We are not like you,’ she said.
‘But you paint,’ said Theo, ‘
you
still look.’ And he thought how it was, that this beautiful place, with its idyllic landscape
of sea and sky and glorious weather, had lost its way. Both through the lack of human intervention and, also, because of it. How many generations did it take before all the wondrous things of the island could be described again? Twenty years? Fifty years? Would a whole generation have to grow and be replaced before that could happen?
‘You must never stop looking,’ he said firmly. ‘Never. Even when it becomes hard you must never stop. Also, you are a woman. It is important for women to do something about what they see. Only then will there be change. My wife was like that, she would have loved your drawings.’
‘Your wife? Where is she?’
‘She’s dead,’ said Theo.
He kept his voice steady; surprisingly he did not feel the usual sharp stab of bitterness. The beam of sunlight had moved and now shone against the edge of the huge mirror that stood above the Dutch sideboard, reflecting the fine golden sea dust that foxed its surface. Sugi came in with some mangoes. The afternoon heat, dazzling and yellow, was at its worst. It stood in abeyance outside the open door.
‘What was her name?’ asked Nulani, after Sugi had gone.
‘She was called Anna.’
He noticed they had both slipped into their native Singhalese. Was pain easier to deal with in one’s mother tongue? Nulani was thinking too.
‘My brother has a long scar on his leg,’ she said.
When he cut it he had cried. She could remember how his leg had bled, she told Theo. The blood had poured out like rain.
‘There was no blood when Father died. After the ambulance took him away to the mortuary I went back to look at the road. I wanted to see the black dust. It was his dust, his body dust. That was all there was of him.’
She had rubbed the palm of her hand in it, she told Theo, until someone, some neighbour, had pulled her away. She still knew the exact spot where it was. There was a traffic island there now. It was her father’s headstone. It was her scar.
‘You have a scar, no?’ she said. ‘While I have been drawing you I have felt it. It is all over you, no?’ She traced the shape of his spine in the air. ‘It is under your skin, between the backbones,’ she said.
‘It was a long time ago now.’
‘Is that why you came back?’
‘No, yes…partly.’
‘It will get better here,’ said Nulani softly.
She was too young to give him firm comfort but her certainty, though fragile, comforted him anyway. He was twenty-eight years older than her. Mango juice ran down her arm as she ate. Her lips were moist. Anna would have loved a child, he thought. Her generosity would have rushed in like waves, enveloping Nulani. Why had they never come here when Anna was still with him? Fleetingly, he thought of his old home in London, with its books and rugs and old French mirrors that filled the apartment with the light that was always in short supply. How different it was now, where they shuttered out the light instead.
The sun had moved away from the glass as they finished their meal and Theo lit a cigar. Nulani was fidgeting, wanting to get on. She remembered she had to go home. Her uncle, her mother’s brother, was coming to see how his niece and nephew were. He was all they had for a father these days.
‘Sugi will clear the space at the back for you to paint,’ said Theo finally. ‘You can come any time you like, but I shall be in Colombo tomorrow.’
He waved, watching her walk away, the dust from the garden washing brown against her open-toed sandals.
After he had cleared the room Sugi polished the floor with coconut scrapings. He rubbed as hard as he could, using first his left and then his right foot until the house smelt of it and the floor shone like marble. Then he went outside into the backyard and chopped open a
thambili
, an orange king coconut, and drank from it. After that he went back to work. There were several jobs he hoped to finish before Mr Samarajeeva returned from Colombo. He liked to surprise him with some small task or other well done. Last time it had been the fixing of the stone lions to the garden wall. The time before that he had painted the shutters.
Mr Samarajeeva was always weary when he returned from Colombo. He looked as he did when Sugi had first seen him, on the day he came to live here, walking from the station with his bags, a piece of paper in his hand, the address of the beach house on it. He had asked for directions and Sugi had brought him to the house, and stayed ever since. At the time he thought Mr Samarajeeva was a foreigner, in his fine tropical suit, with his leather suitcases and his hat. But then Theo had spoken to him in their mother tongue with such fluency that Sugi had grinned.
‘I have been away a long time,’ said Mr Samarajeeva. ‘But my Singhala isn’t bad, is it?’
He had wanted Sugi to work with him, help him set up his life here in the house. He would need some cooking, some domestic chores and some house maintenance. Could Sugi manage all that? Sugi could. As there was no one else to talk to, Mr Samarajeeva talked to Sugi. When his things arrived from London he unpacked them with Sugi and talked about his life there. He unpacked several framed photographs. They were of the same woman, blonde, curly-haired, smiling at the camera.
‘My wife Anna,’ he told Sugi.
Then he unpacked his books. There seemed to be hundreds of books. There were other things from his old life. Later Sugi found out more about his wife. He tried to imagine the type of woman who had collected all these things. The mirrors, the plates, the cutlery. She must have been a fine woman, thought Sugi. When he found out Mr Samarajeeva was famous, the books he had written, and soon the film, he felt it his duty to warn him. These were troubled times. Envy and poverty went hand in hand with the ravaged land, he said. Even though he was a Singhalese, Mr Samarajeeva should be careful. His sympathy for the Tamil children was too well known. The house should be made more secure. Locks were needed for the shutters and the doors. The garden wall needed to be repaired in order to keep intruders out. Sugi made a list. Theo smiled lazily. He did not stop Sugi but he did not care much either.