said. ‘I was in a hurry. I thought if I cleared up quickly I might be able to come here. But then I dropped the dishes and Amma shouted at me. So I couldn’t escape.’
‘What happened then? Were you punished or something?’ It all sounded ludicrous.
Nulani shrugged. ‘No. Amma just said, “ What’s wrong with the girl? ” and that started my uncle off again, only this time he began to shout at me. He said I hadn’t been trained properly and I needed a husband!’
‘What?’ asked Theo in alarm.
‘Oh, he’s full of talk,’ Nulani said dismissively. ‘He can’t do anything. And I just ignore him anyway. He told Amma he would find someone suitable for me to marry, but Amma was too angry about what he had said to Jim to worry about me.’
The sky seemed cloudless and suddenly overbright.
‘I don’t have to do what he tells me,’ said Nulani. ‘My father hated him.’
But her father could no longer help her, Theo thought uneasily. Thinking also, in spite of this new threat from the uncle, how glad he was she was here now, and how empty the days had been while she had stayed away, wondering too, what he might do that would be of any help to her. Wondering if the chasm of age and life and experience left room for giving her anything on his part.
‘I haven’t seen you for five days,’ she said, suddenly, and in that moment, it seemed to Theo, the sky had changed and was now the timeless blue of the tea-country lakes.
‘But I have been drawing you from memory. Look, they’re nearly perfect,’ she told him, moving her chair closer and handing him her book. Once again images rose from the pages, tossed carelessly out, those aspects of himself that he barely intuited. There he was smiling, pensive, staring owlishly into the distance, cleaning his glasses. Oh Christ, he thought, Christ! What was this? He looked at the drawings helplessly, feeling his heart contract painfully. Lighting his pipe he drank his tea in silence. Then he stood up and held the door of her new studio open, smiling down at her.
‘Work,’ he said firmly, wanting for some aching, unaccountable reason to touch her long dark hair.
What remained of the morning was spent in this way. Nulani worked on the two canvases that would eventually be the portraits of Theo. The smell of her colours, mixed with the turpentine, filling the house. Outside a monkey screamed and screamed again. The heat draped itself like a heavy leaded curtain across the veranda. They would have to take their lunch indoors. Somewhere in the kitchen Sugi was scraping coconuts. Theo had so far written two sentences towards his new book. The image of the girl wove into his thoughts; it ran with the sound of the piano music from the record, it merged confusingly with the heat outside. Why had he ever imagined he could work in this place? I need the cold, he thought, restlessness stirring in him. He thought of the muffled noise of traffic rising up towards the tops of the plane trees in Kensington. A memory of his wide airy flat returned to him with the mirrors and the pale duck-egg walls, broken by patches of Kandyan red and orange cloth. Once he had been able to work among all that elegance, once he had had another life. Perhaps, thought Theo, perhaps I have no more to say; perhaps this latest book is doomed? Perhaps the sun has sapped my inspiration?
But then he went to get the girl, for the lunch was ready, and he saw the light flickering against the walls of the room where she worked. Her small face was smudged with paint, and it struck him forcefully that no, his book was not doomed at all. For the early-afternoon sun seemed to turn and pivot on a new axis of optimism. Sugi too seemed to have excelled himself with the lunch. All he said was that the market had been good as he set the jug of lime juice down and brought in the curries; murunga, bitter-gourd, brinjal, fish and boiled rice. He was smiling broadly and his previous disapproval of the girl seemed to have evaporated. Nulani, unaware of any difference, chattered happily with him as he brought in the food. But he would not stay while they ate, shyly asking instead if he might take a look at the painting of Sir.
‘Yes, yes,’ the girl said delighted. ‘But Mr Samarajeeva must not see it yet.’
‘Will you stop calling me that!’ Theo laughed. ‘Come back and tell me what you think.’
But Sugi could not be persuaded. He had work to do, he said. He was going to put barbed wire over the back-garden wall, whether Sir liked it or not.
So that it wasn’t until much later, when they were alone and he smoked his cigarette on the veranda with Theo, that he said, ‘She is very talented, Sir.’
They sat for a moment in companiable silence.
‘And she has become too attached to you,’ Sugi said.
All afternoon he had been working on the garden. The heat had eased off slightly, and then the girl, having cleared up her paints, had gone home. Huge tropical stars appeared between the leaves of the plantain trees. The garden was as secure as it was possible to make it, he told Theo. It had not been easy to get barbed wire; in the end, hoping no one had seen him, Sugi had picked up what had been lying around the beach. He was still worried about the boy from the night before, he told Theo.
‘You worry too much,’ said Theo, smiling at him. His affection felt clumsy. Again he recognised his own inability to speak of the growing bond between them.
He is like a brother to me, he thought with amazement. If I believed in it, I would say we had known one another in a previous life. It occurred to him that he would like to give Sugi something to mark his feelings, some tangible thing, a talisman for the future that was nothing to do with payments or employment. But he did not know how, or even what. And then, once more, he found himself thinking of the girl and her extraordinary quiet ability to make sense of all she saw, with delicate pencil lines overlaying more lines. The evening, and the night ahead, seemed suddenly interminably long until the morning. He hoped she had reached her home safely. He worried that she let neither Sugi nor him walk her back. He worried that her uncle was waiting for her. What on earth is wrong with me, he muttered, half exasperated, half amused at himself. I’m acting like her mother. And then he thought, Am I simply being sentimental? Perhaps this is what middle age is about. As he lit the mosquito coil, before he got under the net, he remembered again that he had forgotten to ask Sugi who had delivered Nulani’s drawing the night before.
One morning, some weeks later, Theo decided to visit the temple on the hill. The girl had told him it was very beautiful.
‘You should go,’ she had said. ‘We held my father’s funeral there.’
He had sensed she wanted him to go for this reason and he thought of the irony of it. Burning the man who had already been burned. Mrs Mendis was leaving the temple as he entered. He heard her calling him and looked around for an escape but there was none.
‘I have brought an offering for my son,’ she said. ‘He sits his scholarship exam this morning. I think his karma is good but I want to be sure he passes. I don’t want him to join the army. I don’t want him to die like my husband,’ she said, talking too loudly.
Theo looked at the woman with dislike. She had not mentioned her daughter once. Inside the temple it was cool and dark, and further back, out of sight, the monks sat in rows, their chants rising and falling in slow, low folds. The air was crowded with sounds, like the hum of hundreds of invisible birds. It reminded him of his childhood, of his mother. He had not been in a temple for many years. He stood in the coolness, thinking of Mr Mendis, wondering what he might have been like. And then he thought of the girl, wishing he had known her as a small child. Thinking how fleeting glimpses of that lost time often emerged in her mischievous laugh. Certain, too, that her
