Homesick (22 page)

•

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.”

She said nothing more. He promised to write soon, told her to call whenever she wanted to call. Meg woke, and she put her in the pram and walked down to meet Tony for lunch.

•

In October Tony noticed a growth at the base of his spine. He continued with his work and with his reading of his mother’s papers. At first, she treated the growth with as much lighthearted disdain as he did, but she remembered his mother’s dying months, the way she dimmed, diminished. He refused to go to the doctor, and then, when he finally did, it was too late. They amputated a leg, and this seemed to him an easy bargain to make for his life.

When he was ready to come home, it was clear that he could not return to the flat, so they moved in with his father, Bill. Tony spent his final year sitting in the garden of his father’s sprawling country house, watching his daughter crawl, totter, then walk about in his father’s footsteps, while Louisa sat next to him learning to knit. They talked and loved each other quietly, and gradually came to a peace. One night, after she had helped him into his bed in his father’s study and bathed Meg, she sat at the kitchen table with Bill.

“Are you tired?” Bill asked.

“Only a little.”

“I don’t know how I would get through this if you and Meg weren’t here.”

She shrugged. She was no good at speculating. She was here, and Meg was here, and that was the only way it could be.

“I mean—well, Tony and I—we’re really lucky to have you, dear.” He was an old man, maybe seventy or so, she
thought. He stooped when he walked, and he had lost most of his hair. Tony had inherited his kind eyes, which smiled at her now. Meg had inherited his doglike smile: an immense swipe across their faces, toothy and honest. He broke down, making a gritty sound and sniffing loudly. She remembered Tony crying the first time she met him. “I suppose, well, you’ve been given a gift,” he said. “You understand people. You know how to—”

“Tony says I shut things away. But I don’t. I just know that my feelings aren’t as important as his at the moment. I’m not as important—”

“No. Well, you know that’s not true.”

“Yes. But it’s useful. It’s what I do.”

“I just wanted to say—”

“No, don’t,” she said, embarrassed, upset. She would just like to hold them all, there, in their small, significant space, before Tony was taken, before everything was taken away again.

•

Louisa woke up. It was the middle of the night. She was holding Meg tight to her belly and could hear Tony’s shouting. She thought—the morphine dose—and immediately rose, her head dizzy, her arms aching from holding the heavy child. But she could hear Bill’s voice, too. She could hear him talking calmly, saying, “No, darling, no.”

She sat up, placing Meg’s head on the pillow. When people die, she thought, it is like waiting for a baby. No one will tell you when. They come, they go.

Tony shouted again: “I hate her!” and she knew, somehow, he would die soon. It was like Margaret: how she got bitter and angry. When she saw her life drift beyond her reach, she turned on Louisa. She said, “Little Lolly,
so sweet and fragile. You
do
nothing! Slavish Lolly, stupid Lolly, dour Lolly, sallow Lolly. Lolly the Dolly. I want to—slam you against a wall and take your life! I want to fill it up with mine! I would live your life better! I would BE!” Her last poem, Louisa thought. And Louisa had taken a cloth and wiped the sweat away, kissed Maggie’s head, stroked her hands and arms, swaying back and forth all the while.

“No!” she heard Tony shout, and Bill’s calm voice all about him. Meg stirred, and Louisa pulled herself away from her baby, reaching for Tony’s old sweater on the end of the bed. She put it on and tiptoed down the stairs. She stood by the door of Bill’s study, which Tony had inhabited since the illness had crept to his liver and spleen. The violet smell of morphine and sweaty skin seeped out of the crack in the door, and she looked beyond it at Tony crying. He did not feel sorry for himself: it was not in him. It was something else.

Bill said, “There’s no reason to talk to her. If this is it, son,” and his voice broke, and she saw the gore of snot and tears and grief drip, “then it’s up to us to be the brave ones, isn’t it? She’s here, isn’t she? She had Meg for you, didn’t she?”

“Fuck it, Dad!” Tony shouted again. “I love her! And she doesn’t love me! She used me! She’s never wanted
me
. She’s never said it—never demanded:
me
. I wanted her to look up and only see
me
. But she saw Mum and me. She saw more than
just me
. She
loved
more than just me.” And then he cried. Louisa turned. She tiptoed back. She walked toward the stairs and at the top stood Meg.

“Dadda crying,” the baby said.

Louisa nodded.

“Dadda want me. Dadda want me.”

“You want to see Dadda?” Louisa asked through her tears.

The baby nodded.

Louisa carried Meg into the room, their arms about each other, scared and shy and knowing.

“Dadda want me,” Meg said loudly confident to Bill.

Bill sobbed. “Why you laugh at me, Grampy? Lulu, Grampy not laugh at me want Dadda.”

“I want you, Meggie,” Tony said.

Louisa carried Meg to the double bed and laid her in the middle so that Meg could lie on her side and look Tony in the eye. They stared at each other, and Louisa tucked the end of the sheet and quilt over the child’s feet and legs. She was soon asleep again.

Louisa sat in a chair next to the drip, next to Tony. “It hurts,” he said before he too drifted into sleep. Meg woke in the morning when the birds began to sing. She turned to her father and kissed his face, but he was gone.

•

The package her father sent to Louisa contained slide transparencies. There were pictures of their holiday when she was six, the picture of the sunrise at the airport in Bombay, the glowworms too, faded lines of light across her small Meg-like face, slides of her in nappies, sitting at tables with pens scrawling, and the detritus in the background of early toys, ornaments, shoes, and coats, like piles of dusty gold to Louisa. Pictures she had never seen of her life before a darkness had fallen and she had lost herself. And in every picture, she smiled or laughed or fell over with guffaws.

•

Louisa took the envelope back to the library. A single cream envelope with a few poems by Margaret, and a diary of the fledgling days of Margaret’s love for her. It was in this envelope that she discovered the poem about love, the one that became famous: the one that said,
“we search, and re-search, and sometimes, we find what we are looking for.”
She burned the diary, of course, and she knew it was a shame, a pity. But what was there to do? No one—not Meg, or anyone else—should know about Margaret’s feelings for her. They belonged to her. And putting them away in an envelope for others to discover was something that she could not do.

G
ertie got on the bus at ten past nine, on her way to see Nandini. Gertie was used to being a widow: it had been more than thirty years since her husband had died. Nandini had lost Victor so recently, the rawness of it was in every word she spoke, every smile that failed. Gertie took three buses there and three buses back, twice a week, in order to sit quietly with Nandini in her kitchen and sip tea. Her arthritis was acting up today, her bad hip aching. The world seemed in pain this morning, jittery. People fluttered on and off the bus, the voices more urgent than usual.