The Sandglass

I

MORNING

‘Is she really dead?’ Prins stared at me, his breath wreathing in the frosty air outside my front door.

I clasped his arm and embraced him awkwardly, ‘I’m sorry.’ His blue shoulders seemed padded with ice. I ushered him in.

He blinked under the hall light.

‘You OK?’ I didn’t know what else to say.

‘You know, I took a taxi straight to the crematorium. It was freezing. My mouth was dry. I thought I was late. But, thank God, I could see a crowd still waiting to go in. I headed straight for the middle thinking who are all these yakkoes? I didn’t recognize a single face around me.’ Prins spoke with bewildering speed, clutching the banister in the hallway.

‘Why suddenly swoop here, all making the place even grimmer with those dark polypropylene half-wool winter coats? Those heaps of shapeless bloody Kashmir shrouds. They were beginning to stir with anticipation, but I kept thinking: Where is Chip – you? Or anyone I might know? What has been going on these last dozen years? What the hell has the old girl been up to? Reviving Sheba’s court?’ He widened his eyes in disbelief. ‘Then this small man with gold spectacles tugs my sleeve, Excuse me, are you friend or relative?

‘Relative, I say. I am the son, Prins.

‘The fellow jumps back, startled. Oh, I see. He looks around for help but by then the whole bloody crowd has vanished. The other relatives are inside, he stammers, but nobody said anything about Dr Viswanathan’s son . . .’

Prins shoved his big hand up in the air. ‘Who the hell is Dr Viswanathan? And the fellow whispers, the deceased.

‘What about my mother?

‘Your mother? he says.

‘Jesus bloody Christ! Where is my mother? She is meant to be here. Dead. What the hell is going on?

‘Next second the bugger had bolted into the crematorium like someone had lit a fuse up his arse.’ Prins shook his head from side to side in exasperation.

‘There I am, hatless, tieless, coatless, frigorific in the pol-polar wind and surrounded by a forest of bare bloody saplings commemorating everyone in London but her. I felt like a damn fool. The whole thing seemed a stupid joke. And if it was true, maybe I should have gone to the cemetery in Colombo – Kanatta – by the golf course and meditated. Or played putt. Or just got plastered.’

‘But the funeral is not until Friday,’ I managed to interject.

‘So I discovered, but on Naomi’s fax the 19 looked like a 17. Today.’ He glared defiantly.

‘The funeral will be on the 19th,’ I confirmed. ‘Friday at nine o’clock.’

‘I know. I’ve got to fly back the same night.’

Prins had tried calling Naomi, his niece, at his mother’s flat several times but there had been no answer. The first fax she had sent about Pearl’s death was indecipherable and the second, with the date of the funeral, was smudged and had no reply number. He had tried to get hold of me but my answering machine had run out of tape. He had to work out what had happened. It had been a rush then to catch a plane in time. He had tried Naomi again from the cemetery but had had no success. ‘As your phone was now engaged I reckoned you, at least, must be home.’

I said I was between assignments. I didn’t say I had been calling my office to extend my leave because I couldn’t face going back to work so soon after Pearl’s death. ‘Anyway, you’re here now.’

He peered at the mirror on the wall next to him. ‘It was a hellava journey – all the direct flights were fully booked – but I managed to get into a VIP lounge at the last stop: you can get really spruced up in those, you know. Shit, shave and shower all in one go. But the damn tie, I lost.’ He pulled at the collar under his long jaw. He still had the face of an agitated ram, but he’d become greyer in the two years since I’d last seen him. That was in Sri Lanka, in 1991, the first time I had been back since I came to England. Prins had gone back to live there nearly ten years earlier when he’d chucked his striped shirts and kitsch-links in a black bin-liner for Oxfam and set off to find his true self in the sun. ‘My destiny is not in this place,’ he had grumbled, aping Marlon Brando. It was easy in those days to have heroes who were not like us, to borrow icons even as we smashed our own. Now with about every tenth hair turned silver he looked as if he lived permanently under moonlight. But his gaberdine blazer and brushed-cotton trousers, with their fine glacial sheen, made him look as though he was going yachting in the Mediterranean instead of to his mother’s funeral; the outfit was the warmest he could find at home.

‘I feel so cold and hungry. Everything is almost out-of-control, you know. Like I’ve misread the road signs but not quite let go of the wheel.’ Prins moved his hands on an imaginary steering wheel. ‘What’ll happen if I go hirivatuna and let go?’ A shiver shook his body as he stretched, tilting his face: a misbegotten coconut tree in search of the sun.

‘Where’s your stuff? Don’t you have a suitcase or anything?’

‘We are very modern in Colombo now, you know: carry only plastic – like our smart-ass politicos. Otherwise they think you are packing a bomb.’ All he had was a small black bag on his shoulder which I hadn’t even noticed before. ‘I knew I’d have to dash for a taxi and go straight to the crematorium. Couldn’t lug a suitcase there anyway, could I?’

I took Prins into the kitchen and gave him a bowl of bran muesli. Wednesday morning, ten o’clock. Simon & Garfunkel were on the radio. I made coffee. Prins said he felt as if he was back in his mother’s kitchen twelve years ago: golden oldies, Pearl pouring coffee. But the Pearl he remembered was rather different from the one I had come to know.

I felt a little apprehensive. I didn’t know how Prins would react to me now, back in London: to my closeness to Pearl, made possible only by his absence, by my not being one of her children, perhaps by my not having a mother to call on. But I was the one who was there, willing to share the reality of her words and peek into another world.

On the side of the dresser behind him, above the telephone, I had pinned my only photograph of Pearl. A snapshot from before I was born. I had never got round to framing it properly. A drift of mauvish fluff and dust had collected on the curled-up corners. I wiped the photograph on my sleeve and slipped it into the drawer underneath the stack of telephone directories.

II

TEN O’CLOCK

I first met Pearl when I came to London in the autumn of 1975.

I had left Sri Lanka some years before but still had no place of my own. Not having a job at the time, I had borrowed some money and travelled to London determined to live out what was perhaps a misplaced but youthful dream. Staying with Pearl, at 52b Almeida Avenue, made it possible. She had a spare room because Prins – her elder son – had gone to Oldham on a ten-month stint learning to sell woollen yarn. His younger brother, Ravi, was living with Pearl but he tended to lock himself away in the darkest bedroom of the flat.

Most evenings during that first cold year I would sit on a brown leatherette armchair opposite Pearl, sipping sherry and listening to her stories, while she knitted shawls or cardigans on the sofa, between scenes of vintage movies and episodes of Kojak on TV. Even then I was looking for a way to shape my life in the wake of her own effervescent trail. Pearl, then Prins, became the cardinal points for my uncertain identity.

‘The trouble started when he got that tomfool idea into his head about owning a house,’ Pearl put down her knitting needles and patted her lips lightly, as if to coax out one of the mischievous phrases with which she used to mock the priggish English of her childhood. ‘What for owning an inchy-pinchy graveyard, I ask you? But that man was so desperate for his own dung heap, he thought of nothing else.’

He was her husband, Jason Ducal.

Pearl would recount the story of those early days with such candour that I felt I was there with her, an invisible eavesdropper in the twilight of a camphoric age.

Pearl had been brought up almost in quarantine, in houses with acres of empty space; but they were never houses owned by her parents. Her father, a doctor, had moved from place to place trying to give help wherever it was needed. He had died in the malaria epidemic of 1935. Her mother had been a victim of the disease earlier, but Pearl never spoke about her – except to give me her name, Sikata, and say that as a result her father always found a house with clean sea or mountain air for his only child. Pearl grew up revelling in Father Brown mysteries and English romances under mango trees in secluded gardens. Other people entered her world only through the surgery door: vulnerable, hurt people seeking a bit of help in their struggle to survive from one day to the next.

That was why Jason had seemed so fascinating when he arrived at their house. He had no obvious afflictions or injuries. ‘He didn’t look ill,’ she would say with real surprise in her voice. He rode a bicycle and acted as though he belonged in a Russian play. He would arrive riding with just one finger on the handlebar and a flower in his other hand. While his contemporaries swotted night and day for their future status in a ramshackle empire, Jason spoke enchantingly about the need for beauty, and the transmigration of souls. ‘But there was never any boru-part about him, you know. I have to say.’ Pearl would shake her head in admiration, even after all these years. ‘No, not in those early days. Never, I guess. He was sincere. He didn’t put on airs like the rest of them,’ she sighed. She was young then. She had believed in Jason and his sparkling bicycle, his neatly plucked flower, his deliciously heady words. She married him for romance, she said, but Jason, it seems, quickly came to feel that he needed to replenish her world with the accoutrements of her late father’s home: a sideboard, bookshelves, a garden, rather than simply with a good doctor’s flair.

All the months of their courtship he had been so debonair. ‘He’d recite poems to me, you know, real poems. And sometimes we would walk together in the evening by the sea and he would tell me about the stars and Venus, The eye of love in the sky.’ She had been impressed by the way he could brush away the cares of the world and simply look into her face; enter her almost, through her eyes, like a smile lodged somewhere between her throat and her heart. But that ability to be inside her without even touching her had disappeared after the wedding, as if physically entering her that first night made it impossible for him to ever reach her any other way. Pearl was concerned that she did not become pregnant immediately, in the way that she had been led to expect by her father’s abbreviated biology lessons. ‘I felt it was my fault that it had not happened right away,’ she giggled, ‘some instinctive technique which I missed out, you know, that would have released an egg like a ping ball, at the same-same instant that he sprung his sperm.’ Jason had seemed disillusioned.

Each successive day after the wedding he became more and more obsessed with finding something that would launch their lives into a richer orbit. He ridiculed the examination system for public service and bemoaned his lost opportunities with the professions. He became determined to break the mould and breach Colombo’s foreign mercantile sector. All signs of levity evaporated. ‘You’d think our wedding had triggered a mission.’ She couldn’t understand the transformation. ‘What was this urge? I used to ask myself, this urge to go out? Why was he not there with me all the time, while I was still in such a state over my father’s death?’ Pearl would look at me as if the answer was lodged in my head. But she was the one who knew everything, not me. Jason Ducal was a man of no means. Although Pearl’s father had provided for her, before donating the rest of his small estate to a hospice, Jason had no money of his own. And, after his marriage, this seemed to have troubled him greatly.

Before the end of their first year of marriage, in 1936, Jason had secured a unique position with Sanderson Bros., a relatively new British firm in Colombo dealing with tea, shipping and the regular cosseting of an ageing empire. It was a coup. No Ceylonese had ever before penetrated this last bastion of British colonial conservatism, not at the level he did. ‘The only brownskins before him had been peons and clerks,’ Pearl sniffed. The firm, at the time, was exceptionally prescient; it recognized the need to ride the wave of nationalism sweeping the island and develop local managers, cultivate the indigenous elite and turn itself into a genuine Ceylonese entity before the inevitable transfer of power. While other British firms rubbished all talk of Ceylonization, Sanderson Bros. had cautiously welcomed the idea; they were prepared to experiment. Jason convinced the senior partners that he was the man who would show them the future and they appointed him to an executive position that baffled all the gazetteers of the annual Ceylon Directory. ‘Who is this squirt? The planters at the Hill Club were thoroughly miffed,’ Pearl added with pleasure. But neither Jason nor Pearl quite realized how much of a turning point his appointment would prove to be.

‘He was grinning like mad, the day he got that job. I don’t know what he did to get it, but he could pour on the charm when he wanted to back then.’ Pearl sucked in her lips, hiding them in her mouth. ‘I was happy to see him happy, but when I tried to kiss him, he pulled away. He wanted to talk. It was the last time he really wanted to talk. He hadn’t even got to the office yet, and already he was dreaming of his house. A proper house of our own, with a garden, you know.’

‘They gave a house?’ I asked.

‘No, not like that. He was the first kaluwa, no? In those firms only the British were given houses. But he saw how one day owning a house might be possible for folk like us. His face was so bright with hope. He was determined to make it on his own, unlike all those other Colombo dimbats with their creepy ancestors and shady money.’

Jason proved to be an extraordinary success at the firm. He quickly rose to a position which involved him in frequent excursions around the island. ‘He was invaluable to the Raj-barge who didn’t know what to do about all the Trades Union business and the new politics. So while that Bracegirdle chappie, the Commie, was fighting against deportation to Australia in that famous case before the war, Jason put in for a passage to England and got it.’ But the travel was, as always, two-edged. On the one hand his absence put their home on a precipice; on the other hand Pearl was able to go with him. The trip to England changed her life forever. She loved to talk about that journey as though it was the true culmination of their earlier courtship.

There is only one photograph of the two of them together from that time. On the back is the caption ‘1938’ and below that, rather more meticulously, ‘Jason & Pearl’. Pearl is looking at Jason, but Jason is looking straight into the camera lens like a slightly camp model. Displayed in his hand is an envelope emblazoned with the words ‘AIR MAIL’, the latest postal service, presumably with the details of their tour abroad. Pearl first told me about that trip after we watched The Thirty-Nine Steps on TV. She had come with Jason by ship to spend two months in England and Scotland early in the summer of 1938. ‘We took a train just like Hannay, but Scotland was nothing like as bleak as they made it look. It was wonderful. Iain met us at the other end and took us around.’

‘They filmed it in Ireland pretending it was Scotland – a bit of Hitchcock’s artistic licence plus the usual financial motive,’ I offered as justification. ‘Who was Iain?’

‘Iain Stevenson. A senior partner. Jason was his protégé. He was on furlough also. Imagine us on furlough. Pretending to go home from home. But Iain was a wonderful, kind man. He was the one who gave Jason a taste for real malt whisky. He took us to his favourite distillery on Speyside. Jason loved it: the idea of being a connoisseur or whatever. And then there was the golf.’

He had taken them to St Andrews. ‘I got a birdie,’ Pearl beamed. ‘At that stage I was a better golfer than Jason, you know. He was as jerky as a chicken wing; his swing was flatter than a Bambalapitiya cheesecake. But I gave it up because he would get so upset. Iain taught him first, and he taught me just for fun.’

‘You gave up?’ I couldn’t imagine Pearl giving anything up without a fight.

She turned away and looked out through the summer-glazed windows freckled with the soft grey rain she was so fond of. ‘They wanted to be champions, you know. Always playing the boys’ game. Later we had Ladies’ sections and all, but to tell you the truth, I found the clubby life back home a little vulgar. Non-stop innuendo.’ I could imagine the belly laughs, the loud jokes about improbably high