The Sea Change (13 page)

‘With Pete?’ Freda cut in.
‘Isn’t he a little old for games?’

‘We’ll go for a walk as well.
See the sheep,’ I murmured, fumbling around for my boots on the hall floor. I
avoided my sister’s stare, which I knew had settled on me from where she stood in
the kitchen doorway. Ever since the dance, I had tried to limit our exchanges to as few
as possible – a knot of anxiety tied itself inside me every time I was forced to address
her. I finished lacing my boots and listened with dread to her approaching steps.

‘If I were you, Violet, I would steer
clear of him. He’ll only upset you,’ she whispered, standing over me.

‘I don’t know what you mean.
He’s my friend,’ I replied, rising to return her gaze. It was the first time
I had met her stare directly since the dance. She was the first to look away, searching
the coat rack behind me with her eyes.

‘There are things you don’t know
about Pete …’ she added, putting a hand on my forearm and meeting my eye
again. ‘Things he won’t tell you.’

‘And you’re the expert?’ I
replied, shrugging off her touch and letting myself out of the house.

I followed my father and Major Whistler
with Pete along the Imber road towards Warminster, careful to keep a distance.

As we climbed a gully wall, we were met by
the tiered terraces of Battlesbury Fort sunk in the haze ahead of us, like the pleats in
poured cream. Pete drew me behind a tumulus while my father and Mr Whistler exchanged
greetings with an officer on the track ahead. With his eyes focused on my father, Pete
kept his hand on my arm as we crouched and watched them. I tried desperately to quell
the quickening beat in my chest. Perhaps he
simply forgot to let go of
me. I wondered what it was that Freda knew and why he hadn’t told me. Dancing was
one thing; secrets were quite another. Once my father and Major Whistler had set off
again, we skimmed the edge of Bowls Barrow and immersed ourselves in the cover of the
swelling crowd. Our youth drew a few stares but I whispered to Pete that, once the
fighter planes arrived, everybody’s eyes would be pinned to the sky; we would soon
be forgotten.

At first, stories of air raids minnowed
among us, darting from person to person until the excitement was such that I could not
make myself heard.
I spotted a Hurricane over Chipping Norton the other week,
I’m sure of it. You’re in for a treat, old chap.
A moustached old
man in a waistcoat with a pipe between his teeth angled his head towards the sky and
cried,
Well, if it teaches those dirty Jerries a lesson, I’m all for it.
A low chuckle rippled through the bellies of those around him. As the wait increased,
the talk diminished, with more and more heads tilting towards the sky in search of the
planes.

About five hundred yards from us there was a
convoy of dummy soldiers and battered lorries, flanked by two tanks, whose wrinkled
armour cast jagged shadows on the grass. Someone had painted a moustache on the face of
one of the dummies so that it matched the man in the waistcoat in front of us.
That
one’s got it coming to him!
He chortled, pointing towards the dummy with
his pipe. The crowd inched over the dotted line of tape in front of them, eager to get
as close to the firing zone as possible. Tapping his watch, an officer crossed the
boundary and turned to address the crowd with a megaphone. We were about to witness two
affronts, he told us. The first was to be a dry run in which no ammunition would be
fired.

‘Move, Vi, you’re treading on my
foot!’ hissed Pete, as he bent in to get a better view of the officer.

During the second affront, he continued, the
convoy ahead of us would be shelled and shot at to
demonstrate the damage
that fighter aircraft equipped with cannon and machine guns could do
to soldiers on the march.

The officer stepped back behind the dotted
line, lowered his megaphone and adjusted his cap for a better view of the sky. No sooner
had he positioned himself in the safety zone than the shudder of an engine could be
heard gaining volume, like growing applause. The crowd jostled. Heads were raised. I
spotted Father near the front in his dog collar, beaming boyishly up at the sky.

The nine Hurricanes dipped one by one
through the haze above us, sketching the swoop of a valley with their smoke. The crowd
stilled their lungs. We watched them loop back over to Battlesbury.

‘Here we go,’ breathed Pete,
clutching the sleeve of my blouse. ‘The dummy run’s over.’ I could
feel the nearness of his fingers, as thrilling as the closeness of the aeroplane’s
underbelly, which broke into the body of air above our heads.

The sky let out another growl, engines
rising up their octaves, like a gathering wave. A stutter of bullets could be heard
breaching the haze, eliciting the same gasp from the crowd as a firework’s
crackle. All eyes were fixed on the convoy. Just then I heard the sound of a seam
ripping in front of me. A hole caused by I-don’t-know-what opened below the ear of
the man in the waistcoat. He dropped his pipe and slipped to his knees, liquid no
thicker than a pencil mark carving a path from his head to the nape of his neck.

‘Pete!’ I screamed, grabbing
hold of the man as he fell backwards onto my calves. ‘Pete!’

The bullets were hailing down on us now,
slipping as easily as a kitchen knife into the pith of the crowd. I felt a weight push
me to the ground and, at the sight of Pete’s shirt, thought, with horror, that
he’d been hit. But he yelled, ‘Stay where you are!’ So I cowered
underneath Pete, eyes drawn to the pupil of the man in the waistcoat in front of me –
bullet black. To my
horror, Pete reached for the man’s body and
hauled it across us to shield us from the bullets, while the rest of the crowd buckled
and scattered and flailed.

The air fell silent. There was a shudder.
The ground beneath gave way.

I let go of Pete and was propelled upwards.
My stomach folded in on itself, like it had on the Waltzer at the Warminster fair. I
clawed around for something to hold but felt only air. The ground arrived again with a
punch, stealing my breath and leaving me sprawled on my back. Then the dust came, in
rain, and sealed my eyes shut. I could feel it lining my throat and painting my skin. I
blinked. And blinked again. A man in uniform to the right of me stumbled, dazed, through
the dust cloud. His left arm was missing and blood, dark as tar, was seeping through the
chevrons on his uniform. I opened my mouth to tell him but there was no sound. Then Pete
came running, his skin as painted as my own. He pulled me to my feet, took me by the
hand and began to tug me out of the crowd. My head pounded and throbbed, pounded and
throbbed, until I thought I would drop into sleep and be done with running for ever.

Trampling over stained grass after Pete, I
saw a man my father’s age receive a river of bullets across his chest – the holes
following each other like a scattering of stones from his hip to his shoulder.

An officer with a leg wound was waving a red
flag at the planes overhead, upon which their metal hailstorm thinned and evaporated.
The dust parted. Sound came back in snatches. All around us were bodies and debris and
earth. The ordered rows of spectators were no more. It was as if the Plain itself had
reared up like a sea and sent its inhabitants flailing. There were no screams. Only
faint raspings and the slow movement of limbs through smoke.

I wish I could say that I thought of Father
straight away. That he was my first concern. I screamed at Pete to find him. He
must have been somewhere near the front. When Pete kept on running, I
turned, let go of his hand, and ran back in the direction from which we had come. Ahead
of me, emerging silently beyond the smoke, was the untouched convoy, the dummies in the
trucks wearing the same nowhere stare as they had done before the planes arrived.

I found him face down in the grass, set
apart from the rest of the crowd – a red shadow underneath him. I bent to see to his
wounds but Pete, who had run after me, put a hand out to stop me.

‘Don’t, Violet.’

‘You don’t know!’ I cried,
breaking free of his hold. I took Father by the shoulder and turned him.

A bullet was seeded

The stiffer and colder his body became, the
more quickly they moved on to those whose breath still lingered in them. I kept pleading
with the ambulances to take him but we were one of the last to be seen to. A nurse
helped me lift him onto a stretcher. She threw open a sheet as if to make a bed and laid
it across the entire length of him, even his face. I thought of Fred Batch, buried in
the snow. Perhaps then I knew. Whatever knowing means. Do you ever know? Because it
seemed as if he had just left something behind, something he would return for later. I
climbed into the back of the ambulance where he had been placed, along with two others,
and we trundled, with none of the urgency I had anticipated, down the Imber road. A blue
more delicate than a harebell threaded itself through the outer layer of skin on his
hand. I let go. And have spent years trying to let go again.

It was just him and me; no Mama; no Freda.
Pete ran from the Plain to fetch them from the parsonage. So there was no Pete either.
They put Father on a hospital bed in a room of his own. There were no nurses or doctors.
The curtains were drawn. I sat with him for an hour, thinking of the lump of lead that
had yet to be removed from his throat. I told him that he couldn’t go to war any
more, that he was to stay with us for good.

They arrived at the hospital, Freda coughing
tears and Mama bleached white with fear. We stood by his bed, as distant from each other
as milestones, none of us able to surmount the yards between us.

It was two days before we were allowed to
take him home. A full investigation into the demonstration was launched and a
post-mortem conducted.
A combat pilot … only his third ever
flight … in the glaring sun … Canadian
;
rumours ripened in every corner of the hospital. Mrs Whistler, who sent flowers by
mistake when she heard that Father was still alive, arrived and sat with us long enough
to watch them wilt.

Pete cut down one of the ash trees at the
end of the parsonage garden and had a coffin made from it. The gap that it left was far
from large, but it was enough for us to feel more keenly than ever the cut of the wind
come wintertime. A memorial service was held in the church. They rang the bell for him –
the one with the deepest knell. The noise moaned hopelessly across the Plain, dwindling
in the hollows of the Downs, limping across the expanses of grass that lay between
Chitterne and Lavington. There was not a soul outside Imber who would hear it.

He was buried in the churchyard, in a
freshly dug grave. The headstone, which was clean and pure compared to the weathered
ones around it, has now grown its own lichen skin and is hidden under a thick knot of
goose grass. Like the other graves, it is hemmed in by barbed wire and an eight-foot
fence – as if a fence alone were enough to keep the shells at bay.
And the old order
of things will pass away
was the scripture engraved under his name.

Freda became quieter and quieter in those
days. None of us spoke; inhaling the air was enough to contend with. But my
sister’s silence was of a different, more strangled, kind. She no longer joined
Mama and me for meals. Yet the food in the larder and even the pile of coupons in the
dresser kept being depleted. The sourer the food, the more likely it was to disappear. I
once found an empty pickled-onions jar discarded at the back of the house; raw runner
beans, tomatoes short of their blush and tins of peas soon followed. Mama said nothing.
Some days I wondered whether she even noticed.

Freda didn’t take the wireless up to
her room any more. There was no more singing. Sometimes, from outside her bedroom
door, I heard her crying. She wouldn’t let me in when I
knocked.

She disappeared in July, some months after
Father was buried. I woke in the night to the sound of an engine on Church Lane only to
lapse back into a thin sleep shortly afterwards. In the morning I knocked on
Freda’s door with a cup of tea. Silence was nothing out of the ordinary in the
parsonage now so, on not receiving a response, I went into the room. Her bed had been
stripped and the wardrobe was open.

Things were missing. Her nightgown. Her
shoes, the ones that she used to change into at the last gate along the track to
Warminster.
Town shoes
, she called them, if ever there was such a thing. Her
coat was gone too. Not the rough waxed one that she wore on our farm visits, but her
Sunday best. I crossed the room and opened the top drawer of the dressing-table. Her
hairbrush was not in its usual place and the small medley of makeup that she had eked
out of her pocket money over the years had vanished.