The Sea Change (24 page)

‘Sort of …’ I said.
‘You never know with Pete.’

‘Good for you, Vi.’ She smiled,
taking me by the arm and suggesting a place on North Street, which was rumoured to have
in stock a large batch of tea. ‘I have coupons – do let’s have a cup
together. It’s been too long!’

I don’t quite know why but I told
Annie about Sam. She leant over the tablecloth towards me with the same wide-eyed
disbelief as when I’d told her she was beautiful all those years ago.

‘But, Violet, it’s not two years
since … They could just be good friends.’

‘Yes, that’s all very well, but
I couldn’t just stand and watch in the hope that she didn’t develop
feelings, could I?’ I held the cup of tea to my lips and, on finding it was still
too hot, blew gently at the steam.

‘No, you couldn’t. You did the
right thing, Vi. I know it.’ She leant back in her chair and stirred a spoon
vaguely through her tea, as if imagining the absent sugar. She had started crossing her
legs, I noticed, sitting slightly sideways on her chair to make room for them.

‘I feel such a fool to have let it get
this far,’ I told her. ‘Freda would be furious if she knew.’

Annie laid a hand on mine and looked at me
earnestly. ‘He’s gone, Violet. Nobody is to blame … However raw
things might feel, your mother hasn’t done anything wrong.’

Flower. Bullet. Mouth. I stayed silent,
thinking only of him.

‘Chin up. You stepped in as soon as
you could.’

‘Tell me about David,’ I said,
after a pause, leaning in across the table to reinforce my change of subject.

‘Well, actually, he and you are
already acquainted. Remember that night at the dance?’

‘The soldier on the gate! Annie,
no!’

‘Yes! That’s him. He came all
the way to Imber to find me when we were told to evacuate and arranged for our
belongings to be transported to Devizes in a lorry. What a treasure!’

‘But … is he at war
now?’ I asked hesitantly.

Annie nodded, looking away and twirling her
ring absent-mindedly round her finger. ‘He’ll be back,’ she said
eventually. ‘And then we’ll be married.’

‘And do you see the Archams?’ I
asked. ‘Are they keeping well?’

Annie frowned. ‘Did you not hear about
Mr Archam?’

‘No, what happened?’

Annie met my stare over the rim of her
cup.

‘Why didn’t Pete tell me? Surely
he knows?’

‘Mrs Archam wrote to him to tell him
about the pneumonia but he never went to visit, not until after it was too late. She
seems fine on the surface, but you know her – the busier she makes herself, the more
troubled she’ll be inside. You can see it in her eyes. Nobody knows what to do.
It’s not as if we all live together any more. And the people in Devizes
don’t give two hoots about Imber. Most of them haven’t even heard of the
place.’

‘Do you think they’ll let us go
home?’ I said, watching her loop her finger daintily into the handle of her cup
and lift it to her lips like a lady. ‘If we go home, it might give Mrs Archam some
comfort.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Vi. What does
it matter? We’ve all got new lives now.’

I went quiet, not quite believing that she
could let go of the place so easily. ‘You have David, I suppose,’ I
murmured.

She looked up from her cup, puzzled.
‘And you have Pete.’

I held up my left hand and waved it at her,
bare and ringless. ‘Really?’ I smiled.

She broke into a grin. ‘Just you wait,
Vi. He’ll be down on one knee before you can say boo to a goose.’

‘There’s no second-guessing
him.’ I sighed, placing my empty cup back on its saucer with a clink.
‘He’ll do as he pleases.’

By the time I saw Annie again, May was
nearly over and summer was almost upon us. The sun muscled into the mornings and
lingered later into the evenings; the days opened and closed their lids in time with
ours. The longer days meant that I could make the trip to Devizes on my day off and
catch up with Annie every couple of weeks. It was easy to forget the war when we were
together. The air seemed designed for holidaying and harvesting, not fighting. It was
harder, somehow, to keep in mind what we were sending the troops to do.

My mother was asleep in bed one evening when
I heard the letterbox lift. It was far too late for the postman to be doing his rounds.
Still, I ran to the door and found an envelope on the mat. There were footsteps on the
street so I hurried outside and saw Sam walking away from the house back down Russell
Street towards the Pembroke Inn. The evening was so balmy that he had not brought his
jacket. He seemed in no rush.

‘Wait!’ I called, my voice
halting him in his tracks.

He turned and, with a glance over his
shoulder in the direction of the inn, he retraced his steps towards me.
‘Violet,’ he began, in a mumbling tone that I had never heard him use
before, ‘would you be so kind as to pass my letter on to your mom? I won’t
be bothering you again.’

I nodded. And he flinched, as if in a quandary
about whether to stay or go. Then, making a decision, he turned and resumed his walk
without a goodbye. I said nothing more, only dropping my eyes from the silhouette of his
back once he had rounded the corner of the road.

Inside the cottage, I examined the letter as
thoroughly as I could without opening it, unsure whether my mother would let me read it
with her as Sam had implied. I held it up to the light in the kitchen but could only
make out the word ‘away’ and my mother’s name at the top of the page.
His handwriting was as bold and uncontrolled as his gestures. From what I could see,
there was only a single sheet of paper inside the envelope. And there was no address,
only ‘Martha’ written on the front. I ran upstairs and woke my mother,
passing her the letter as she rubbed her eyes.

‘This came for you. Sam brought
it.’

My mother took it from me with a frown.
‘At this hour?’ she murmured, her voice still cracked with sleep.

‘Go on, open it.’

She pushed her thumb underneath the back of
the envelope and slid it along the seal. It always frustrated me how she insisted on
opening letters so neatly; it wasn’t as if she could reuse the envelopes. Once the
single sheet had been extracted, she held it close to her chest and ran her eyes across
each short sentence.

‘Mama, do please let me read it
too.’

‘Patience, Violet,’ she hissed,
her eyes not leaving the page. When she had finished, her arms dropped onto the bed, one
hand still holding the letter. I sat down on the mattress and looked at her. A sense of
reprieve flooded her face. ‘He’s leaving … for good, it
seems.’ She lowered her head onto my shoulder, all the muscles in her neck
unknotting at once. I took the letter from her limp fingers.

You will be relieved, and perhaps a little saddened, to hear that my infantry
will be on the move in a matter of days. I can’t say
what for or where to. But it is unlikely that we will ever cross paths again.
I cared for you a great deal, Martha, and for Violet. I will miss you both –
more, I think, than you will miss me. Rest assured that I will carry your
friendship with me until my end – whether it is brought on by the war or by the
years that I hope will succeed it.

Take care and may God bless you both,

Samson

He left no address by which to contact him.
I was glad of that. I sensed the word ‘friendship’ had been chosen with care
– however tattered its definition had become. Had he been certain that Mama would keep
the letter to herself, he might have been freer with his words – if, indeed, something
freer had ever existed between them; I was not brave enough to know for sure.

I walked up to Fugglestone the following
morning to find the American barracks almost empty. The cook informed me that they had
left on a designated military train in the early hours, bound for London. It was not
until a week later that we knew the reason for their departure: the Allies had launched
an assault – our biggest yet – on the Normandy beaches.

‘Do you think he’s involved in
the attacks?’ she asked me, as soon as we heard, her complexion blank as
flour.

‘He’ll pull through, Mama,
I’m sure of it,’ I replied. I wasn’t sure. Not at all. But we were
beyond wanting to find out.

I picked up Mum’s parcel from the
post office in Delhi on the same morning that I told James about Marc. The events merged
like two converging roads, equally potholed and perilous. I could have kept the kiss to
myself; the parcel could have been left, unopened, in Delhi.

His anger was deeper than I had predicted.
And the heat – the closeness of it – seemed to make everything worse. I had not been
able to eat for three days. James said it was dysentery – the fact that I couldn’t
keep anything down. But the address I had written in Marc’s notebook, and the
seconds that had followed it, left a stain in my stomach, perfidious, irrevocable,
forcing everything else out.

James asked me to draw one last picture of
the city before we began the journey home. He only suggested it to take my mind off the
sickness but I became obsessed with the detail: every stone and brick had to be right.
At dawn, we made our way to the Sheesh Gumbad. The rest of the park was empty. I put
pencil to paper but, instead of drawing, thought of lips meeting, of how astonishingly
reckless I had been. The shapes that emerged were not my usual solid forms; they did not
describe the dome in front of me. Instead I drew bewildered circles: closed, coded, from
which there was no way out.

‘It might be safer if you saw a
doctor,’ said James, picking up the drawing and reading it like a diagnosis.

‘I’m all right,’ I said
quietly. The grass in the Lodi Gardens was still cool from the dew – there was dampness
beneath my thighs and heat above. He put an arm around me and pulled me in close.
‘I’m worried about you.’

I stiffened, wanting to relent but instead
withdrawing.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked
gently.

‘Nothing.’

‘If something’s bothering you,
you can tell me. You know that?’

I frowned and drew my knees up to my
chest.

‘Alice …’

Nausea swelled inside me, drawing a haze
across everything – all the sections of our journey fizzed suddenly into a surge of
regret. ‘It’s Marc.’

James frowned. I dropped my stare to my
knees. ‘James, I’m so sorry.’ The tears, hotter than the air, burnt my
cheeks. ‘He kissed me … we kissed. I stopped it. But not as quickly as I
should have … I’m so sorry.’

He got up and walked some distance away. The
horror of what I had done – the knowledge of what I might lose – invaded the pit of my
stomach. I followed him quickly along the path but he seemed to sense my steps behind
him. He picked up his pace without turning to look at me. I trailed off, unsure for the
first time of where I should go.

I no longer had a route to follow. There was
no plan. Just a city, sprawling in every direction. I took myself to the post office to
see if Mum had written again. With James gone, I found myself craving her certainty, the
relentlessness with which she refused to let me go. When I saw that she had sent me a
parcel, I carried it back with me to the hotel grounds. James’s things were still
in his tent: his shirts, his bundle of postcards, his rucksack – nothing had been moved.
If I waited here for long enough, perhaps he would come back.

Inside the parcel was an old Church’s
shoebox. I had seen it once before – at the back of Mum’s wardrobe when I was
fishing around for a pair of sandals to borrow. Seeing there were no shoes inside, I had
shut it and thought no more of it. Opening it again in the tent, I found letters –
twenty or thirty of them – sent from my dad to my mum. Most of them had been written
when they were children. Silly, meandering things that you’d
find in a storybook, with poetry copied out and endless anecdotes about the harvests in
Imber. But there was one letter set apart from the rest, in a newer envelope with a
neater hand. Mum had laid this one on top of the others. I was about to open it when the
tent flap was pulled back and James stepped inside.

He glanced down at the box of letters and
saw the envelope in my hand.

‘It’s from my
mum … letters between her and my father. I haven’t read this one.’
I tried to stay composed, lifting the envelope vaguely.

He didn’t say anything.

‘James –’

‘I’m only here to collect my
things.’ He handed me a booklet. ‘And to give you this.’ I put down
the letter and took it from him. It was a ticket for a flight: Delhi to London.

‘You’re not coming?’

‘I can’t, Alice, not after –
I’m going down south. To clear my head.’

‘But where?’

‘I don’t know. Kovalam,
maybe …’

‘James, I know I – It’s
impossible to take back what I did.’ He turned as I spoke and began to fill his
holdall and rucksack. ‘But if you can bring yourself – I don’t deserve it –
but if you ever feel able to forgive me …’ I trailed off.