The Sea Change (12 page)

I tried to tell Mum, but the words never
came. Every time I saw her looking at the uniformed photograph of my father, something
caught in my throat and I felt unable to supplant this framed, fixed, knowable version
of him with the one the woman had given me. It was an anchor to which Mum had tethered
everything, and I wasn’t going to be the one to cut the rope.

The engine has failed us completely. There is
no choice but to try to wade to shore. I roll over the rim and drop down into the water
to join Ravindra. I can feel the debris close in on me, melding me into its ill-fitting
jigsaw. Eyes shut, I start to swim.

Every few seconds, waves roll under us, like
fists under blankets. The shore inches nearer. Ravindra is ahead by a good few strokes,
needling through the patchwork of wreckage. I’m floundering in the same segment of
water, paddling through it again and again, urging the beach to arrive. After a while, I
find I can’t keep a steady rhythm, stopping between each stroke to take a breath.
Ravindra lets out a shout. He is standing, two feet rooted on the seabed. We’ve
reached the shallows. I lower my legs timidly, not quite believing that I can step on
actual ground. Just as I gain my balance, a wave picks me up from nowhere – along with
my panic – and sets me down. I swallow the urge to scream. It could drag me out again in
seconds if it wanted to. I push as quickly as I can through the water, dreading the next
swell. The sea drops to my waist, then to my thighs and finally to below my knees. Here,
the water rushes through the gaps between my toes. I’m aware, suddenly, of its
warmth. It regains the texture of my childhood – those days spent darting into the
shallows, surrendering gleefully to the water’s grip. Mum used to get so worried
about me going swimming. She wouldn’t sunbathe: instead she would stand like a
watchman on the shore’s lip, fixing her eyes to the crest of my head as I leapt
into the smother of another wave. I thought her silly for believing the sea could be
anything other than benign.

Her first letter had arrived when we were in
Istanbul. James had picked it up from the post office, expecting that she’d write.
I’d refused to read it at first, but eventually he persuaded me to open the
envelope. Her handwriting, unlike mine, was compact and efficient: it stretched in
impeccable lines across the blue airmail paper, filling every inch of the page.

Dear Alice,

I hope you’ll forgive me for writing. I couldn’t bear the thought of
us parting ways on such bad terms.

What a time you must be having. Tim says Istanbul is a fascinating place; the
gateway to the East. Already you are doing things that I never dreamt of doing
and you are not even in India yet. I won’t pretend it doesn’t worry
me, but I am proud. You are bolder than I ever was.

Tim and I are well. He is about to start his new job for the electricity board
in Oxford. It’s quite a task he’ll have, with the workers proposing
yet another strike: power cuts are already two a penny in the south. The board
seems to be happy with his plans to continue living in Salisbury. It’s
quite a drive for him and we did consider moving but, well, you know what a
hassle it would be. Besides, Tim understands that you grew up here – and we both
want you to have a home to return to, should you choose to come back.

I’m thinking of you, darling, all those miles away. Take care of yourself
and send my regards to James.

With love from
Mum

Her meanderings seemed different on paper. I
could see her holding back, attempting to phrase things in ways that I would understand.
I had been so angry with her for so long, and for no good reason. Yet she didn’t
retreat: she continued to move, vulnerably, towards me, in the hope that I would give
in.
That’s what mothers do
, I thought: they love out of reflex – like
moths returning blindly to a flame. Except she was different: it seemed more conscious,
her decision to persist and be burnt.

On the morning after the dance, the words
I’d planned to say to my sister at the breakfast table emptied from my head when
she entered the dining room. It was as simple and sudden as the pouring away of water.
She yawned, took a seat and began speaking to me but I could not muster a reply.

‘Violet?’

I watched the roses claw up the trellis on
the other side of the window. We had knocked together the frame last summer, using
Father’s hammer and nails. Freda and I had grown the roses for Mama’s
birthday. It had been my idea – and it was my fingernails that had carried a crescent of
soil beneath them for weeks on end. My sister had joined in just as the roses had
budded.

‘Violet, I asked if you could pass the
toast.’

I withdrew my eyes from the window and
handed my sister the rack.

She frowned at me. ‘You look awful.
Trouble sleeping?’

Mama carried in a pot of honey and took a
seat next to us. Father’s steps were heard on the stairs and he joined us at the
head of the table.

‘Pass me the toast, Freda,
that’s a good girl. I want to hear all about the dance. I gather there was quite a
turn-out.’

‘Jack,’ hissed Mama, drawing his
eyes towards my place at the table.

Father looked down at his toast.

‘It’s all right,
really … I don’t mind.’ I tried to sound sincere but, catching
sight of Freda’s face, I lowered my eyes to my plate.

‘You’re a good sport, Vi. I knew
you’d be fine with it,’ she cooed.

‘Violet, forgive me for keeping it
from you,’ said my mother, placing a hand on my arm. ‘I thought it would be
less trying for you if you didn’t know. You can go too when you’re
older.’

‘It’s only two months until your
sixteenth birthday,’ chipped in Father. ‘Perhaps Pete will take you
then.’ Under the table, I tightened my grip on a fold in my skirt and twisted it
into a knot. Freda picked up her knife, which was lying on the table opposite me, and
shaved off a sliver of butter from the dish next to her. She caught my eye as she
withdrew the knife to her plate and smiled as if the butter were our secret.

‘Mama,’ I murmured, which caused
my mother to look up from her toast.

‘Freda, what do you think you’re
doing bringing the butter out from the larder?’ came her remonstration. ‘I
shan’t tell you again – it’s not to be wasted on toast. Put it back this
instant.’

Later, on the way to church, I crossed the
field with the rest of my family and prayed Pete would have a reason to miss the
service. Enduring my sister was one thing; seeing him was quite another. Noticing that I
had fallen behind, Freda slackened her pace, drew level with me and took my arm.
‘Chin up, Vi. Don’t be down-hearted. I promise you, as soon as Ma and Pa let
you, we’ll go to a dance together.’

I detached my arm from hers and bent down to
attend to my shoelace, which was already well tied.

‘I’m more than happy to take you
for your birthday,’ she continued. ‘After all, I wouldn’t want you to
count on Pete. He may not ask you, you know, and then who will you go with?’

I stood up from my shoe and met her stare.
‘Freda …’ The sentence fossilized inside me, and before I knew quite
what my feet were doing, I was walking away from her back towards the house.

‘Violet!’ she called.
‘Violet, you can’t miss church – Father …’

Nobody followed. They could not afford to be
late for the service.

Letting myself in through the back gate, I
went up the length of the lawn to the house. I could hear tanks moaning, like overgrown
flies, on the Plain and, every now and again, the guttural stutter of an unknown gun.
These sounds, previously alien, had imbued themselves slowly on my consciousness so that
now they seemed as natural as the wind and the birdsong. I reached the terrace at the
end of the lawn and looked up at the parsonage. It had two triangle-roofed wings that
jutted onto the terrace from the main body of the house. I loved its red brick, which
glistened in the rain and gave off a rasping scarlet dust in the summer – perhaps one
always feels this way towards a home once it is gone, but I would not have laid a single
brick differently. I flopped down on the bench next to the roses and breathed in the
scent. I had deliberately chosen to plant them there because it was sheltered from the
wind by the west wing of the house. Here, in this small pocket of still air, the scent
could mill and linger. Mama had thanked Freda and me equally for the roses when we
presented the bed to her on her birthday. I suppose, in their fully grown form, the
flowers suited my sister more than they did me so it was easy for Mama to think of them
as Freda’s idea. She forgot the boyish hours of digging, training and watering
that had given birth to them, and saw only the stems and petals before her, as feminine
and effortless as her elder daughter.

Annie would have no trouble guessing why I
wasn’t at church. I only hoped she wouldn’t give me away to Freda. The
notion that Pete might also be aware of my absence rose briefly before I dismissed it as
pure fancy. The realization – there, in the garden – that I would not be the one in his
thoughts made me retreat into the house. I removed my shoes and went into Father’s
study. I liked being with the books: they reminded me
of how many ways
of thinking existed outside my own – how small and fleeting my pulse was when set
alongside those ageing spines. The headiness I had experienced since waking up that
morning seemed to disperse beside them. On the shelves by the door, I found the ship in
the bottle that Father had kept since he was a boy. His own father, my grandfather, had
left it to him. As a child, I used to puzzle over the bottle, pondering ways of
extracting the ship without breaking the glass. Freda had different concerns: she was
always asking Father how the ship had got into the bottle in the first place. But at
fifteen, alone in the study, I was caught not by these questions but by the thought that
the ship would outlive both Freda and me and, most likely, our children; sealed inside
the bottle, the only storms it would ever face would be imaginary. When I think of what
came later, of how ill prepared I was for everything that occurred, that hour in the
study seems absurd – as isolated as the ship I held in my hand. The shallow hurt that I
felt towards my sister for something as small as a dance seems illusory now: I can never
retrieve it, or imagine, even, how it came to feel so deep.

When I saw where it had seeded itself, I
thought of a rose, dark as soil, flowering from the mouth. Or maybe the rose came later
– to cover something I did not want to see.

Major Whistler had been enthusing about the
Salisbury Plain demonstration for weeks, telling Father how he would hear up close a
Hurricane’s throbbing song and witness the effect of live ammunition.
Live
ammunition
,
Mr Fielding
. There would be no other opportunity like it
before he went to war. My father needed little persuasion.

I begged him to take me too – anything to
distract me from Freda and the dance – but he refused. In a crowd of over a thousand,
all jostling for their own piece of sky, I would only be a nuisance. I did not protest.
I knew Pete would find a way of getting us there, whether my father approved or not.

I did not talk to Pete about Freda. When,
two days after the dance, he appeared at the parsonage door, asking for me and not my
sister, I convinced myself that maybe he was sorry or had thought better of his actions.
So hungry was I for things to go back to how they had been that I fed this notion of his
repentance until it gained flesh and bones and had a life of its own. I did not have to
worry about him broaching the subject. He talked of nothing but the demonstration,
concocting plans about how we would get into the audience.

When the day of the exercise arrived, a
thick mist pasted itself across the Plain. Father stared glumly at the sky from the
dining-room window with a piece of toast in hand and bemoaned the fact that it would be
tricky to see the planes. Major Whistler
soon called at the door for
him and they set off on foot. Pete had agreed to meet me at the back of the school so
that we could follow them at a distance. I waited at home for a few minutes, then told
Mama that I was going to the Archams’ farm to play ‘kick the can’.