Broken China

Yesterday I lost the last of my mother’s legacy. Twenty-five pieces of china and glass; gone in an instant when the shelf on which they stood came crashing down. Shattered porcelain and shards of crystal filled the room. Blue and white and strangely beautiful in their broken form. Four generations of use no longer usable. An entire history vanished even as I stared. I had a train to catch and so, shutting the door to the kitchen, I left. Numb. Looking at the fields rushing past, seeing my own face reflected in the glass, an old forgotten love like music ran through my mind.

All these things happen in one second and last forever.

Perhaps it was when the crow knocked a plate off the table that I had first noticed the crack. Yes, that was it; in the year when I was three. In order to fix the date it is important to remember the images clearly. The line across the plate was so faint as to be hardly noticeable. Except we all saw it.

‘It will only get worse,’ the servant said, picking it up. ‘This plate has been weakened.’

That was what she said. Weakened. I ran my finger across the hairline. I remember the hand that rested on the painted butterflies on that plate; a hand smaller than the butterflies themselves. How old would I have been? Two? Three? There is no one to ask, not now.

‘Eat up the murunga,’ my mother told me, ladling the hot rice onto the pale green curry.

The crack was by now a fixture on the plate and in my mind. The light it seemed was ever green. Saturated with movement. Piercing, like gold. The weakened plate was packed along with all the others, lovingly, into a rosewood trunk. My father had been to the market to buy a bunch of Asian watercress which he then chopped up and mixed with a little coconut and chilli. It was his invention on an old theme. We ate off Wedgwood plates because my mother said we must have standards.

‘When all around you there is chaos, that’s the time to keep your standards.’

‘Your mother is a mad woman,’ my father said, but still, he too ate his last meal on one of these fragile plates.

I traced my finger across his face. My finger, I noticed, had become larger, his face slightly smaller. He was leaving the island in a few days time and seeing him sitting with his back to the light I registered how very handsome he was.

‘This meal is the best you’ve cooked,’ he told my mother. ‘Must be because of the plates we’re eating them on!’ he added, winking at me. ‘Better bring them with you, then!’

We were following him to England. I would not have borne it otherwise. My father was the centre of the universe. Dappled sunlight shone on china bowls, cups and saucers, blue and white and paper-thin. This was my world, along with the sea breeze and the sun-warmed veranda steps. The crow glinted evilly at us from the mango tree. He was watching the china. Waiting for his chance. When he opened his mouth to squawk, I saw all the way back into his beak. In the silence that followed, the servant threw away some empty coconut shells. They clattered hollowly, like skulls.

After my father left, when there was time on our hands for such things, we packed the china. It was a way of keeping busy and in any case no one wanted to buy it. So that it was just as easy to take it on this epic journey.

‘What do we want your china for, child?’ the neighbours asked. ‘Lanka House is making its own bone china.’

But my mother, I sensed, preferred the delicate blues and faded pinks of a bygone era. My mother was, even then, politically incorrect and what might be called, nationally lapsed. Beauty, she subsequently told me, when I hit adolescence, had no barriers.

So they were packed in soft straw that smelt of rulang. The crack in my favourite plate was still there but the plate itself appeared strong; my memories, not yet fixed as memories. And then, in a moment, unremarkable and languid, we left the tropics. Taking with us the sound of coconuts being scraped and voices rising and finally, somewhere along the shore, the sweet sad words of our National Anthem. That was that. And now those receptacles of memory are broken.

In London I had an appointment to meet my editor. It was an icy February day, flat and very grey, with nothing to recommend it. I sat waiting in the restaurant, my mind a dull, blank void. All around, through cracks in my consciousness I noticed a patchwork of starched white tablecloths moving in and out of focus. Old black-and-white photographs lined the walls. Above me were deep yellow stained-glass widows. Like crocuses. Winter struggled, as indeed I did. The air was filled with unfinished thoughts, insubstantial and obscure with no words to access them. And then, as I sat there, half in a dream, I caught a glimpse of my editor hurrying towards me through a reflection of glass and mirror and pale blue hyacinths. Bringing in a rush of outdoor air, smiling.

‘Here it is!’ she cried, handing me a copy of my finished book, Bone China. I had written in the dedication: In memory of my parents.

Forty years before, when we first arrived in England, we continued to eat off those china plates and drink out of delicate porcelain teacups. They reminded us of the people we had left behind. It made us closer to them; their lips were where ours were now, their hands merged into ours. But these were utensils from another world; a slower, languid life of bicycle bells and the sudden thud of a coconut in the grove outside. And then when the four o’clock flowers turned their magenta faces from the light, as the sun tilted in the sky, there was the sound of the sea. Endlessly turning; clearer always in the evening air.

‘Tea time,’ my mother would say.

‘Go and wash your hands.’ On the train coming in to London, an acquaintance, hearing how the china had broken, told me, ‘You must go and buy yourself some pretty old blue and white plates with the insurance money!’

I did not have the heart to tell her that bought china, however pretty, would not conjure up the bright magenta voice that called, ‘Tea time.’

I saw the way in which we must have travelled, hopefully, never knowing how things might turn out, or even that our past might be unrecoverable. We had crossed seven thousand miles, chased by monsoons, shedding the heat so carelessly, never understanding that these small tokens carried with us were insubstantial as air. For time itself had been the enemy, washing the years, bleaching our memories, fragmenting them until the china became simply a symbol of all we had lost. No more. The china, too, was no more.

We sat talking over lunch, my editor and I, about books. My book, the books we both loved, the writers we admired. The waiter poured water into huge goblets. Through the meniscus, I saw her soft wool coat. Light streamed in as in a Dutch painting. Water sparking in a clear glass on a winter’s day. It had taken a lifetime for my novel to surface. The connection between what lay broken in my kitchen and the book now in my hand was clear as the glass. The fugitive recesses of the everyday, hidden memories of a searing heat, a vanished life laid bare; through fiction. I had wanted to preserve the house in which I lived, the plates we had eaten off, the cups we once had drunk from, the touch of hands no longer alive. And I had failed. Memory could neither be contained nor made accessible by itself. The last cup of hill-country tea my mother poured out for my father, the blue-black glint of the crow’s eye, a ripe, plump mango as it fell with a green and fragrant thud, the mood of my polka-dot dress; all these things moved within me. China carried twice around the world, first with my great-grandfather on a sailing ship to Galle, and then with us back to England. The memories had collected like rainwater in a porcelain bowl, filling up the cracks, inaccessible and silent. We had not seen how mute they were. We had not noticed how much was held in these objects. We had seen them as heirlooms, beautiful things to be passed seamlessly down through the generations. Like exhibits in a museum, we had treasured them and then abandoned them to stand uselessly on a shelf.

‘Keep going,’ my editor said, as we stirred our coffee and the waiter, almost redundant now, poured out the last drops of water.

The scents of spring mixed with the coffee. Only in fiction was it possible to capture the fragmentary nature of memory.

‘It’s why I love it,’ she said, softly. ‘Good fiction mediates and shares, fixing what would otherwise be lost.’

Sitting in the restaurant, on an unremarkable February afternoon, watching the people come and go, I saw how it was that art could, by some strange, sweet, indefinable metamorphosis, quite literally preserve life.