The Sea Change (21 page)

This regular jaunt of ours had petered out
of late; Sam was almost guaranteed to be our guest at dinner on a Thursday and so, week
after week, I had made my excuses to Pete and went home to help Mama prepare the
meal.

As we skirted the edge of the American
barracks at Fugglestone, he seemed aloof, displeased with me, somehow, walking two steps
ahead of me no matter how much I picked up my pace. The air was full of those dark,
pregnant clouds typical of April. To begin with, it felt acceptable to leave the
unremarkable weather unremarked upon. But as our walk went on, I feared he was imposing
his silence on me, withholding words so that I would feel their absence. On previous
strolls – usually to take our mind off the rain or the cold – we had told stories: mine
from the factory, his from the farm. I had exaggerated the injuries some of the girls
had incurred, multiplying the volume of blood and the strictness of the supervisor. He
had done the same with the farm, laughing at the ineptitude of the land girls under his
watch. I would try to contradict him, telling him that I had met the girls and felt
their hardened hands in my own. I’d seen them fell trees and shear sheep
single-handedly, and knew what they were capable of. But he would always find another
way of discrediting them – broken eggs, sloppy hedge work, a cow that had been left to
wander more than two miles from its field. Today there were no stories to tell. He did
not speak a word to me until we reached the final stile before the farm.

On the other side of the fence, he stopped
me walking on and turned to face me. ‘Violet, there’s something I have to
tell you, but you won’t like it. Not a bit.’

I kept quiet, thinking through the
possibilities of what it might be: another girl, farm work in a different county. I
tried to prepare myself for either.

‘It’s about your ma,’ he
explained.

I frowned at him.

‘I know it’s tough for you to
hear – what with your father … Only, I’ve seen her … with
someone.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Mama would
never deliberately hurt Sam, I thought. Then I worried that I had thought of Sam before
Father.

‘He’s an American based at
Fugglestone. Big stocky fellow. I saw them walking together by the Nadder.’

I caught Pete’s eye.

‘You know about him?’

‘He’s a friend. He’s been
very good to us.’

‘It didn’t look like that to
me,’ he replied.

I asked curtly what he meant by
‘it’.

‘I saw how they were walking together
–’

‘It’s nothing,’ I
interrupted. ‘And why is it your business anyway?’

‘You can’t pretend he’s
just a friend of your ma’s.’

‘He’s looking after us. Doing
his duty. I don’t understand why it bothers you so much.’

‘’Cause the town’s
talking. Your pa’s not been gone that long, Violet –’

‘I’ll not have you speak of him
in that way!’

‘The Yank or your pa?’

I paused, chest tightening. ‘My mother
doesn’t need a lesson in what’s proper – least of all from you.’

‘I only thought you should know that
people are talking.’

I came to a standstill by the riverbank and
watched the water draw patterns in the silt. It couldn’t stop. It had to keep
going, following its course from source to sea.

‘What will happen after the war,
Violet?’ began Pete again.
‘D’you think the American
will come back to Imber with you, live in the parsonage and preach sermons like your pa
in St Giles?’

‘Stop it!’ I marched back in the
direction from which we’d come.

‘Fine!’ he shouted, behind me.
‘But you’ll want to go back after the war. I know it. And Imber’s not
a life that a Yank can share. He can’t ever be your pa.’

‘What do you take me for?’ I
turned towards him. ‘He’s dead and buried. I can’t change that any
more than I can wish us home again.’

Pete sighed and walked towards the farm,
leaving me faltering on the path behind him.
You’ll want to go back after the
war
. I should have known that, even if we were allowed back, Pete would not
come with us. I had lost all hope of life resuming its original course – so much so that
I was prepared to sit and watch while my mother, the wife of a parson whose fresh grave
went untended at home, fell in love with another man.

I caught up with Pete just before the gate
into the farmyard, out of breath, crimson-faced. ‘What should I do?’ I
asked, planting myself between him and the farm.

He pushed past me and clamped the gate shut
behind him, his eyes entreating me not to follow. ‘Speak to your ma, not
me.’

Ever since the bombing raid, Mama had been
shy around Sam and, at times, even short with him. She rebuked him when he offered to
peel the vegetables and cut himself with the knife; she asked him to leave the house one
evening when he suggested that the Allies couldn’t win the war without the Yanks.
Yet he continued to come to the cottage. If anything, he approached my mother with
renewed confidence since he had broached the subject of my father’s death. My
mother could no longer hide his attentions from me or herself. She relented, slowly,
with the unease of someone who knew what she had held and how difficult it would be to
make room for something more. We should
have hated Sam for muscling in
on our home, for touching my mother’s hair, for stirring up her feelings when he
didn’t understand how much she had lost.

He arrived late for dinner one evening,
brimming with stories of his latest exercise. He pulled back a chair from the table. The
hind legs jittered over the tiles. By the time he sat down, he was already in full
flow.

‘Violet, you would have loved this
place! So quaint and English.’

I took the pot out of the oven and smiled
weakly at him, not properly hearing his words.

‘It’s a darn shame they let us
train there, really. We try to be careful with the ammo – the genuine stuff, I mean –
but you can barely see it. It’s tucked up in a valley. And the fog’s so
thick in the mornings that we can’t even see the church tower.’

The pot in my hands thudded onto the
table.

My mother spun round from the sink.
‘Salisbury Plain – you’re training on Salisbury Plain?’

‘Yes.’ Sam frowned. I blinked
down at the steam coming off the dish.

‘This village – have you been into
it?’ asked my mother, with urgency.

‘Oh, yeah, hundreds of times. Nobody
lives there now, though. It’s like a ghost town. Some folk left their groceries
there, though, and the hymn books are still in the church. It’s like they all just
vanished. Creepy, if you ask me.’

‘They let you
inside
the
houses?’

‘Yeah, we pretend it’s a German
village. Half of us invade, half of us defend. It’s kinda fun.’

‘Fun?’ cried my mother, eyes as
full as inkwells. ‘Anyone would think you weren’t in a war!’ Mama
flicked her hands free of tap water as she spoke, mopping the remaining damp vigorously
on her apron. ‘You’re just playing soldiers … and playing in
places that you’ve no right to be in!’

After drying her hands, she left the room, the
food still steaming in the space between Sam and me.

‘The village,’ I murmured to
him, after a pause. ‘What is it called?’

‘I don’t think it has a
name,’ he replied, frowning at the door through which my mother had just left.
‘If it does, I’ve never heard it spoken.’

A single-limbed doll; a watch whose face
has filled with water; one gold chain. A plastic urn, fluorescent green – the kind that
would float; a number plate; two non-matching flip-flops; an empty suitcase. When I ask
where the suitcase was found, the woman from the hill bends down to read the chalk
letters in front of it. ‘In a car, sister.’

We have walked to the marketplace together
from the telephone booth. The line went dead after my call home. Mum wasn’t in.
The one time I call. She’s always in first thing in the morning. I try hard to
feel relieved but I’m craving her concern, her fear, even if it means breaching
months of silence.

A space has been cleared where the market
stalls used to be. Unclaimed belongings are laid out in rows, like clues, replacing the
mangoes, tomatoes and ladies’ fingers that were illuminated in green under
sun-soaked tarpaulins before the wave came. The women who used to draw chalk flowers on
their doorsteps now etch facts about each object into the dirt of the market square. A
house name, a street, a stretch of beach; the place where each item was found. James
dragged me to the market on our first day here so that I could copy the women’s
drawings. But instead of the patterns on the doorsteps, I sketched the women themselves:
the way they squatted for hours next to their work, gently teasing a new breed of
geometry out of the stick of chalk in their hands. Once I had finished we bought food in
the market from a man cooking
sambar
. He spooned the contents of the pan into
see-through bags – our own portions of sunlight, hot and bright in our hands. I think of
the pan upturned by the wave, the
sambar
painting the waters yellow.

On the fringes of the ruined square, I can see
the fruit from the stalls, pulped amid beams and bricks and roofs. Doorsteps are washed
blank. The women, like their patterns, are gone.

I bend to the suitcase on the ground in
front of me and unzip the pocket on the back of the lid. Inside there is a pencil, a
coin and a photograph. The photo is of an older woman with a bent spine and toothy grin,
her purple sari folded around her impeccably. A sentence is scrawled on the back in
Tamil. I show it to the woman. ‘It’s for her son Adesh
,
’ she
tells me, pointing to the woman in the photo. ‘So he will remember her.’ I
think of her searching for him, as I am searching for James.

A bicycle – royal blue with no spokes; a
fishing net. We were told on our first day here that each fisherman has a different way
of making his net: some string long diamond-shaped holes together; others have trademark
knots. This net’s owner will be identified by the weave of the thread. I wish
James’s traits could be woven into a net like that of a fisherman. I might stand a
chance, then, of having something left to hold.

An orange
dupatta
; a kitchen knife;
three glass bangles, blue and intact. It stripped the breath from hundreds of lungs, the
roofs from so many homes, yet it leaves these glass rings untouched. A woman in front of
me bends over them in silence. She takes them in her hands and lifts them to her cheeks,
her lips. Were they a gift? She slips them over her wrists, where they clink and collide
and mingle with one another, like old friends. Then she kneels, hands blossoming from
fists to open palms, and sends up a prayer.

Next in line is a rucksack: the shape and
colour are unrecognizable under the silt. I unzip it, forcing myself to assume
it’s not his, fingers oscillating. I rummage at first, and then, out of
frustration, I tip the bag upside-down, the contents scattering and settling in the
dust. My gaze falls on a dark blue cover: it is hunchbacked by the water. The gold crest
on the front has lost its glint, mud gathering in the grooves where the colour has
peeled away. Staring down at the other objects from the bag – five
dosa
s, a few
coins, a towel and a bottle of sun cream, I already know the face
that I am going to find in the passport. I know, and yet I’m hesitating,
scrambling around for a reason not to look. My fingers turn, before I’m ready, to
the front pages. He’s paler in the photograph than in real life. His hair – a
sandy mess in the mornings – has been tamed into place. I remember the way he took out
the passport at each of the borders along the overland trail, pushing it wearily across
the table towards the official. He always said that a border check was worse than a job
interview: the number of questions, the hours of waiting.

Every border check had gone smoothly until
we reached the edge of Pakistan. All of us passed through to India unscathed, apart from
Marc who was detained. Three hours became six and James was impatient. I thought him
irrational at the time for suggesting what he did – and perhaps he was. But if he had
followed his impulses, things would not have kicked off so terribly in Delhi, we would
not have married so hastily, and I would not be here, in the wake, without him.

‘We should order Marc a driver and
press on ahead.’ He sighed. ‘It’s not as if he’s paid his
way.’

‘We can’t just leave him,’
protested Sue. The others in the back of the van agreed.

‘It’s been six hours.
That’s practically a day of driving we’ve lost. What if he doesn’t
make it through?’

‘They’ve got no valid reason for
keeping him,’ I murmured. ‘They’ll get fed up soon enough.’

‘What makes you so sure?’ he
asked, looking me straight in the eye.

‘We can’t leave him, James. You
know we can’t. It wouldn’t be kind.’