He glared at his wife as though it was her fault. No one spoke. Grace closed her eyes and waited while Aloysius drained the last drop in his glass, triumphantly.
‘Having finished playing merry hell the British fellows are off now, leaving us to pay the price. Is this fair play? Is this cricket?’ He was working himself into a frenzy. ‘Soon we’ll all be talking in Sinhalese. Except I can’t speak a bloody word of course.’
He belched loudly. Christopher made as if to leave the room but Aloysius held out his glass absent-mindedly.
‘Get me some ice, will you, putha?’ he said.
The radio droned on. It was beginning to give Grace a headache. She went over and switched it off. Then she looked at her watch. Although she knew he was right, Aloysius in this mood was best ignored.
‘That’s enough,’ she said finally. ‘Dinner will be ready in an hour. Myrtle,’ she smiled at her cousin, ‘can you tell the others, please?’ She would not have talks of politics at the dinner table. ‘And stop frowning, Christopher,’ she added. ‘Tonight we are celebrating your father’s retirement.’
She spoke firmly, hiding her anxieties. The signs of civil unrest had been growing steadily for months. Two weeks before independence had been declared a series of riots had broken out in the north of the island. The poorest outcasts, the coolies, had had their vote withdrawn. Predictions of trouble swarmed everywhere with a high-pitched whine. Rumours, like mosquitoes, punctured the very flesh of the island. Discrimination against the Tamils, it was said, had already begun in the north. When she heard the stories it was always Vijay that Grace thought of.
Their affair had run on for several years. It had exceeded all their expectations. It had proved that rights and wrongs were complicated things with mysterious inner rhythms. It had given them hope when they had expected none. Vijay was the most disturbed by this. Grace, having discovered her conscience was smaller, steadier than his, had never been as frightened as he was. It was Vijay who struggled to accept what had been given to him. He submerged himself in her, making no demands, never probing her on her other life which was so patently different, never questioning her on her sudden long absences. He loved her with a burning intensity, impossible to quench, existing only for her visits, trustingly, utterly faithful. His understanding still astonished Grace. Whenever she appeared at his door, tense and worn, he would unravel her sari and massage her with sandalwood oil, waiting until the strained anxious look left her face before he accepted what she offered. Silently. He did all this silently. Instinct kept him so. Instinct made him give her the passion she seemed so desperately to crave.
Occasionally, when news from his home town could not be ignored, he would talk about his childhood. Grace, unable to help him, listened as his anger burrowed a hole through his life. Vijay had grown up in a smallholding where the red-brick, earth and the parched years of droughts had made it impossible to grow much.
‘Our land was always tired,’ he had said, stroking her hair, lulling her to sleep, his voice husky. Usually it was after they made love that Vijay did most of his talking. ‘But my parents never stopped working.’
After his father died of dysentery Vijay’s older brothers took over the farm. His mother struggled on and although food was scarce there was always a pot of dhal and some country rice on the fire.
‘I couldn’t bear to watch my mother and my brothers becoming old before their time.’
He was the youngest child. He was bright. The schoolteacher, before he had lost his job, had wanted Vijay to continue with his studies, and maybe one day try for the university.
‘I thought, if I moved to Colombo, I could find work and send money home. Maybe I could even begin to study again.’
But it was not to be. The only work he could find in Colombo was tiring, and difficult to come by, and Vijay soon became dispirited.
‘There are too many prejudices towards the Tamils,’ he said. ‘And in this country, if you are born into poverty there is no escape.’
At first, alone and homesick, all he had been able to do was survive. He had never expected to stumble upon Grace. She had not been part of any plan, he told her, smiling a little.
‘I remember exactly how you looked, and where you stood!’
The light slanted down on them through his small window, casting long purple shadows on the ground.
‘I saw you first, long before you even noticed me!’ he told her, delighting in teasing her.
He had dropped a bale of silk in his astonishment, he remembered. The silk had slipped and poured onto the ground, so that he had to gather up armfuls of it before the manager saw him. He had stood holding the cloth, cool against his face, watching as Grace went out of the shop.
‘Do you remember? You had a young girl with you,’ Vijay told her, smiling. ‘I could see, one day she would be like you.’
Alicia. Grace had been glad that he had seen Alicia. She longed to show him the others, reckless though it was. She wanted him to meet Frieda and Jacob, her solemn son, and fierce, angry Christopher, and beautiful Thornton. But every time she voiced this thought Vijay shook his head.
‘It is enough for me to imagine them.’ Grace felt her heart contract.
Everything about him, his voice, his words, soothed her. Like the coriander tea he made whenever she came to him, exhausted from dealing with Aloysius. She found it unbearable that he asked for so little. It was the hopelessness of their love that hurt her most of all. But when she told him this he dismissed it lightly, with a small shake of his head.
‘It’s just a dream of ours,’ he said. ‘How can a high-caste woman like you make a life with someone like me? Let’s just dream!’
It pained her to hear him speak this way, so accepting of his place in society, with no attempt to change his lot. There were no words to express her own feelings. Not since her father had died had she felt so cherished.
‘But he loves you, doesn’t he?’ Vijay asked her once, referring to Aloysius. ‘How can he not love you? He cannot be a bad man, Grace, not if he loves you.’
She loved him for his generosity.
‘Yes,’ she had said, Aloysius loved her. It was not Aloysius’s love that was the problem any longer.
‘We belonged together in another life,’ Vijay liked to say. ‘In some other time. In another place. Perhaps you were my child, or my wife. Only the gods will know.’ Vijay was a Hindu. It was easy for him to think this way. ‘After you died,’ he said, his eyes shining as he kissed the hollow in her neck, ‘my grief was such that the gods told me, wait and she will come back to you.’
She wanted to believe him. Often, kneeling in the church, she heard his words. But when she looked all she saw was a cross.
‘You are such a courageous woman,’ he would tell her. ‘D’you know that? You have insights far in advance of these times we live in.’ He had learned much from watching her. Slowly he had begun to understand the rich Tamils in this country. ‘This gambling and drinking is just one more sign of what is happening.’ They had lost their way, he told her, earnestly. In the wake of British Rule, they shared a thread of hopelessness with the poor. ‘Aloysius is no different from the others,’ Vijay said, in his defence.
When he ran his hands over her fair, unblemished skin he felt as though he touched all the despair of the island, all their collective troubles, their desires, their confusions, here on this lovely, warm and unlined body.
‘For all of us,’ he told Grace, ‘are doomed in our different ways. Both rich and poor, it makes no difference. We are caught, in the wheel of history.’
Dinner that night was