The Sea Change (18 page)

‘He’s out milking,’ one of
the girls shouted across the yard when, arriving at the farm, I knocked on the door of
the farmhouse. I crossed to the milking parlour and stooped inside: it smelt of cud and
cowpat and wet earth – the same smell that coated the floor of the valley back home. I
could see his silhouette at the far end, hunched over a stool, arms working an udder.
The sun had not yet fully come up.

‘What do you want, Violet?’ he
asked, without turning round. He must have heard me in the yard, and I was caught for a
moment by the thought that perhaps he recognized my gait.

‘To talk to you.’

‘What’s changed?’ He
removed his hands from the cow and swivelled on his stool to face me. His hair and eyes
– as dark as each other – caused something to dislodge inside me. I hated the way I was
drawn to them. I felt as if I had been tricked, like the other girls, into losing my
composure and settling my gaze on him.

‘I see you’ve been keeping an
eye on that sugar queue,’ he continued. I could just make out his smirk through
the darkness.

‘I don’t know what you
mean,’ I retorted.

‘Bea’s a good girl.’

‘Oh, Pete, don’t
start.’

‘You’re angry with me,
aren’t you?’

‘No.’

He stood up from the seat and waited for me
to reach his end of the parlour.

‘I didn’t come here
to … You can’t have expected things to
stay the same
after Fa–’ My eyes started to prickle so I turned away and walked back towards the
entrance to the milking parlour. The light had entered the yard, pouring itself into the
far corner and then spreading, slowly, like spilt milk.

The cattle shifted and groaned. I could hear
his steps behind me. I dreaded the feel of his hand on my arm, then wished for it when
it didn’t come. ‘Look, I’m almost done here,’ he called.
‘We’ll take a walk up Throope Hill. You’d like that.’

‘Don’t tell me what I’d
like.’ I stooped back into the light. He drew level with me.

‘Come on,’ he said, finally
taking my arm.

The grass on the hill was still blurred
with dew but the sun would make quick work of it; the sky had all the makings of a hot
day. We cut our own wet trail up to the peak. I breached the silence by telling him how
much I missed Salisbury Plain and how this landscape, with its wide-brimmed rivers and
steep peaks, felt like a different country.

Pete thrashed at a bush with a stick.
‘It won’t achieve anything thinking about it, Violet.’

‘That’s all very well for you to
say.’

‘What do you want me to tell you? That
I miss the place?’

I only just caught his question, tangled as
it was in a gust pushing at us from across the hill. ‘You must …’

‘I’m sorry, Vi, but I
don’t miss it.’ He was face to face with me now. ‘I wasn’t like
you. I couldn’t just sit around in the parsonage all day and go into town whenever
I liked. The lambing was hard – the Archams worked me hard. I was fond of them. But I
don’t miss it. Not a bit.’

‘But you had Annie and me,’ I
murmured quietly, unsure of whether I would be heard.

‘I still have you,’ he replied,
slowing his pace and reaching for my hand. He had never held it before, not properly.
Our fingers had touched once, unconsciously, up on the Plain. We were
keeping an eye on his flock, grazing up near Brouncker’s Well, and he had put
his hand down flat, thinking there was grass beneath it, his smallest finger overlapping
onto my thumb. And he didn’t move it. Not even when he must have realized his
mistake.

‘Yes.’ I smiled, giving him my
hand and letting him pull me up the path. ‘But I miss home …’ I
added.

‘Do you miss Freda?’ he
asked.

‘No.’ I released my hand from
his.

‘But she’s your
sister.’

‘What does it matter, now
Father’s gone for good?’

‘It’s difficult. I mean, I know
how difficult …’ He trailed off. ‘I know how you feel.’

‘Do you?’ I asked, but the
directness of my question seemed to silence him. It was a full minute before either of
us spoke again. There was a lull in the wind as we reached the top of Throope Hill. A
stillness seemed to fall on everything so that even the grass ceased to sing. ‘You
spent six years there, Pete. Surely you must have thought of it as home.’

‘I went there for work – ’s all
there is to it.’

‘But –’

He let out the breath in his lungs and began
walking again. I broke into a run to catch up with him. ‘If Imber’s not your
home, then where is?’ We were descending the other side of the hill now.
‘You must come from somewhere.’ I drew alongside him and tried to take his
hand again but his palm lay slack in mine as we walked. I wondered later, if I had been
gentler, whether he might have told me more. But the fissure in our conversation made me
fearful and I thought of how much I dreaded people bringing up Father when they talked
of Imber. Whatever had happened before Pete had come to us, he had assigned it the same
closeted silence as I had my father’s death.

‘Freda will be back,’ he said,
after a while. I was so grateful to him for saying something that it took me a moment to
register the mention of my sister.

‘Will she?’ I answered vaguely.
There was nothing to lose in asking my next question. ‘Do you miss –’

‘Do I what?’

‘Do you miss Freda?’

He paused, taking up the slack in his grip
on my hand. ‘I danced with her because she looked pretty …’ Then he
watched as I swallowed my disgust. ‘But she’s not my friend,’ he
added.

‘Friend?’ I echoed, the word
coming out clipped and prickling. I found, however, that I could not let go of his
hand.

‘I didn’t mean … What
I wanted to say …’ A surge of scarlet invaded his cheeks mid-sentence. I had
never seen his face burn like that. We reached the middle of the Down – a bed for
sleeping bombs. I could already see a few, nesting in the grass.

‘Look!’ I wanted to save him the
embarrassment of actually having to say it. It was enough for me to know he had been on
the cusp. I pointed at one of the bombs – the biggest we had ever seen.

‘What a shocker!’ yelled Pete,
as we ran towards it. I stopped ten yards short of its metal casing, suddenly scared.
Pete kept running. ‘Come on, Violet!’

‘What if it goes off?’ I
called.

‘Don’t be silly. None of the
others have.’

‘But this one’s
bigger.’

Ignoring my protests, he bent down and
tugged at the grass around it. Then he ran a hand across its skin, tracing the number
etched on it with a finger.

‘It’s a Satan! I’ve never
seen a Satan!’

‘You’ve probably felt its blast,
though, that’s for certain. Please, Pete, it’s not safe.’

‘All right, all right.’ He
backed away from the bomb slowly until he was level with me. We froze for a moment,
fearful of disturbing it any further. Then he took my hand and marched back towards it,
dragging me along behind. I dug my feet in.

‘Pete! No!’

‘There’s nothing to be scared
of!’

He stopped so close to it that I could reach
out and touch the rusting metal. But he wasn’t looking at the bomb like I was. I
felt his arm around my waist, his stare on my neck. Then he pulled me downwards,
suddenly, so that we were sitting on the casing. He kissed me – a barely there kiss –
but it felt perilous, as if we could be blown apart at any moment.

The 3rd Armoured Division of the US Army
arrived in Wilton two months after we did, in 1944. They brought telephone lines, and
noise.

My mother had been volunteering at Wilton
House for a month now, serving tea in the NAAFI to the soldiers and bringing the
homesick ones back to our cottage for a home-cooked meal. Their American accents
cantered around Wilton in a way our English ones never could, like a saxophone outdoing
a cello. Pete couldn’t stand them; whenever he caught sight of their uniform in
town he’d mutter, ‘Yank,’ under his breath and spit out something
about how late to the game they were. The rest of the town, however, was enamoured; he
was forced to watch open-mouthed as they showered these transatlantic curiosities with
their best tea and meat.

On one of my trips to Wilton House with
Mama, I picked up an American serviceman’s manual, which had been discarded on the
floor of the dining room.
On a small crowded island where forty-five million people
live
, I read,
each man learns to guard his privacy carefully.
Privacy
did not abound here: I learnt the hard way that Wilton wasn’t built for secrets.
Yet when confronted by a clamour of GI Joes coming towards me on the stairwell, I
thought of that manual more than once – that you were better off keeping your distance
on an island as small as ours.
I tried to stay away from them, for Pete’s
sanity more than my own. But any reserve on my part only strengthened the resolve of the
infantry to advance across the gap I had left between us.

They came home for dinner in groups – two or
three at a time, most of them four years my senior. When my mother was
out of the room, they would lean across the table and ask if I was
going
steady
with anyone. I would say yes, not entirely sure of what they meant, but
thinking all the while of Pete.

‘Mrs Fielding, you cook like a
dream!’ they’d coo, when my mother re-entered the kitchen, clattering their
cutlery around their plates as if they were playing percussion. The accents soon got the
better of me, each word sugar-coated and easy on the tongue. And when they laughed,
they’d rock right back in their chairs and throw their heads back, letting
themselves go in a way I had never seen anybody else do.

It wasn’t just their homesickness that
my mother was trying to cure: it was her own loneliness. Freda’s absence and my
shifts at the factory meant that she often ate by herself. When the Americans were in
the house, we could almost forget about the missing fractions of our family who used to
occupy the chairs around the table. They were easier to befriend than the British
soldiers: far away from home without their mothers and sisters, fathers and brothers. A
whole ocean away from their wives.

Sam – short for Samson – came home with her
on a Tuesday. I remember the day because I was supposed to be working. Sally had begged
me to swap shifts with her so that she could see her brother, who was home on leave.

After letting myself into the house, I was
met by the sound of that peculiarly American laughter pealing through the hallway from
the kitchen.

‘You shoulda tasted it, Martie! I
never tasted something so darn awful in my whole life!’

Martie? I nudged the kitchen door open.

‘Hello,’ I interrupted.

‘Violet!’ She scraped her chair
back over the tiles and tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘You’re back early!
Don’t you have a shift, my darling?’

‘I swapped with Sally.’

I walked over to the American – an officer,
I noticed, from his
chevrons, not a boy – and offered my hand.
‘I’m Martha’s daughter.’

‘Samson,’ he replied, taking my
hand and shaking it with vigour. ‘Most folk here call me Sam. I take it
you’re the famous Vi-vi?’

I informed him that, given the freshness of
our acquaintance, I would prefer it if he called me Violet.

‘Violet, darling!’ my mother
intervened, smiling fixedly at me. ‘Come and have some food with us.’ She
got up from her chair and ladled some stew onto a plate. I watched as a generous hunk of
bread was placed in the centre of the table. Sam winked at me. The loaf was clearly his
doing.

‘The chef at Wilton House likes to
spoil him,’ explained my mother.

‘It’s worth a few greenbacks
over here, I’ll guess,’ Sam added. ‘There you are, take a slice. I
brought it for you.’ He reached over and pushed the bread towards me.

‘You didn’t know I’d be
here,’ I muttered, glaring down at the loaf.

‘We would have kept some.’ Mama
waved away my comment as she spoke.

‘She’s a tough cookie!’
laughed Sam, clapping a palm on my shoulder from all the way across the table. ‘I
have a feeling we’re going to get along just fine.’

He was right. It pains me to think of it,
but he was. To begin with, I hated everything about him – the big movements he made with
his big hands; the way he did everything far too vigorously. Sometimes he’d rip
whole sections of the newspaper just by turning a page. And when he talked, he’d
fling his arms about and knock ornaments or crockery from their places, getting carried
away with some story or other. Doors were slammed rather than closed, in spite of his
constant good mood. But the house had noise in it again. And that in itself was enough
to make me thaw.

The frequency of his visits increased until
barely three days would pass without him coming home for dinner. I tried to arrange my
shifts so that I would be there on the days that Sam came. I even stopped meeting Pete
at the factory gate on Thursdays. At first I convinced myself that I was merely
protecting Mama; we both knew how the town could talk. But when I arrived home to find
him absent, I would feel the disappointment of it so keenly that I could no longer
ignore my fondness for him. On the days he did come, he would take me down to the bomb
shelter at the bottom of the garden after dinner and tell ghost stories with a torch
while my mother washed up. I protested – tried to look bored, but then he would coax out
a twist when I was least expecting it, causing me to jump or wince or put a hand to my
mouth and give myself away. When Mama had finished at the sink, she would join us in the
shelter with hot cups of Horlicks. Sometimes I wished the sirens would sound just so I
could stay there with the two of them all night, swallowing story after story with each
sip of my drink.