The Sea Change (22 page)

‘Well, that’s just great,
isn’t it?’ He threw up his hands and brought them down onto the
steering-wheel. ‘A real vote of confidence.’

‘Don’t be –’

He started the engine and was about to pull
away when there was a rap on the window. ‘Sorry, mate, I thought I was going to be
in there all night.’ Marc grinned. He threw open the door and stooped inside.
James rolled his eyes. I felt a pang of relief, and swallowed it.

‘It’s spelt with a
c
not a
k
,’ he told me, when we finally reached Delhi. I wrote down
‘Marc Rawson’ in my address book, above his Auckland address. The
c
at the end of his name seemed incomplete somehow. A
k
would have been closed,
finished, unquestionable.

The van had failed us twenty miles from the
city centre; the gearbox had eaten its fill of desert sand. James stayed with the van,
hoping to flog it to a passing driver for a few thousand rupees. I wanted to stay with
him and let the others go on ahead but he said he needed space.

‘I’m happy to sit with
you,’ I offered.

‘Go on with the others. We said
we’d get them to Delhi. I don’t want to leave the job undone.’

‘You’ll be all right?’

‘Yes.’ Our eyes met. I sensed
distrust in his.

The rest of us caught auto-rickshaws to the
railway station and camped in the grounds of a nearby hotel. The girls stared enviously
up at the balconies on the first floor, imagining fresh towels and boxes of tissues. It
was our last night as a group. After four months together, we were to part ways in the
morning. Marc was following Rob, Sue and Clara to Kathmandu. The others were making
their own way to Thailand while I would wait for James in Delhi.

The symmetry of the hotel gardens felt
contrived, awkward even, after miles of unruly sand. The grass was ornamental – roped
off, luridly green and prickly. A shock to the eyes after the sand-blurred roads of Iran
and Pakistan.

‘And what’s your address?’
asked Marc, as we sat by the fountain. He handed me a notebook and gestured for me to
write mine in return. Without thinking, I scribbled ‘Alice Fielding, 8 Magnolia
Way, Salisbury, Wiltshire, England’. I could have put my London address but this
was the one that came to mind. It was a strange ritual to go through, when we knew
neither of us had any intention of keeping in touch. I flicked through the pages of his
notebook after I had finished writing and dislodged a folded sheet, which had been
pressed into the spine. It fell open on the paving – one of my drawings.

‘Where did you get this?’ I took
a closer look. It was the one I had drawn of a collapsed arch in southern Turkey – the
symmetry broken into two uneven columns.

Marc didn’t answer immediately. He
clasped his hands between his knees and tapped his foot up and down. It was the first
time I had seen him visibly unsettled. ‘You threw it away … in
Lyallpur.’

‘You should have asked before taking
it.’ I tried to harden my voice but the words came out porous and pleading.

‘It was … I
just … It was something to remember you by …’ Catching my frown, he
added, ‘This whole trip, I mean.’

I sighed and planted my hands on the hot
paving behind me.

He hung his head over his knees. ‘You
must think I’m an idiot.’

‘I’m thinking we’ve all
been shut up in that van for too long.’

‘Yeah, too right.’ He
laughed.

I thought of Mum and the Wiltshire address I
had written in his notebook. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how journeys can
make you feel things that you wouldn’t normally –’

He looked up suddenly, as if I had given
something away. ‘Alice …’

He was leaning in. I should have backed off.
It was a startling rush of attraction, one that caught you momentarily and then let go
of you as quickly as it had arrived. I already knew it was madness.

He put his lips to mine and I didn’t
move away, not at first.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said,
eventually pulling back.

‘Where?’

‘To James.’ I reached over and
took the drawing from under his knees. Then I stood up, put it in my pocket, and walked
away. He left in the morning. There was no need for a goodbye.

Each time I think of that kiss, I can
remember only the fringes: what came before and after. I have forgotten completely its
texture, the swell of feeling that must have brought it about – as if, by forgetting it,
I can pretend it never really occurred.

James’s passport is still in my hand.
I want it to tell me something more than I already know, give me a clue as to where I
can find him. Even touching something he has touched makes me feel closer to knowing his
fate, if only by a fragment. He could have left the rucksack behind in an effort to get
away more quickly; or someone could have removed it from him, from his … and
brought it here. I put the passport down and run my fingers around the inner seams of
the rucksack, checking I haven’t missed anything.

His wallet isn’t here. He must have
taken it with him when he ran. Surely. Out of instinct. Did he get away in time? I
gather up the objects. They carry the same dank, out-of-date smell as the rest of this
place. Any smell that he might have left has been superseded by the water. I try to
recall it but it is covered by burnt rubber mixed with trapped sewage and rot. There is
no escaping it in the heat. It follows you everywhere, permeating your clothing and then
your skin, until you, too, are its carrier.

Before the wave, the town was filled with
smells that reminded us of being somewhere other than home. Tamarind and turmeric
lingered on the shirt cuffs of store owners. And pollen – thicker than you’ve ever
smelt it – dangled blearily in the air around the market. Sometimes the air was so
pregnant with scent that it tasted overripe. Even before the wave, it felt as if
something were about to burst.

A place like this would frighten Mum. The heat
would make her giddy. The food would not sit still inside her.
Everybody is busy and
yet nothing is done
, she would say, in the exasperated voice she puts on when
she knows she is out of her depth.

When I made the mistake of bringing James
home to meet her, she was in a state about Tim wanting to sell the house. He’d got
a job for the electricity board in Didcot, or something like that. The agent called
round to put a sign up in the garden without checking first with Mum. Tim must have
known that she would be reluctant to move. But we had only been there for the six years
since they’d married and she’d never really liked the house anyway. To her
it was just walls; it was Wiltshire she couldn’t leave.

She tried her best to ignore the for-sale
sign while James was there, storing the thought of it under a pursed lip. But I saw her
glance out of the window at it every time we entered the kitchen. She couldn’t
help but linger on its shadow, as dark as a ghost on the front lawn.

When I was a child, I used to beg her to
take me to London, not knowing how the thought of it alone made her fearful. She gave in
when I was eleven and we took the train together to Paddington. By the end of the day, I
was wishing I had never made her come. I felt responsible, as if I’d taken her on
a rollercoaster and made her sick. The city dizzied her with its blur of trains and
buses and glass-fronted towers. She couldn’t seem to feed off its frenzy in the
way I did. I watched in horror as she stuttered on the sides of roads, waiting until
I
picked the gaps that were big enough to allow us to cross. Instead of
persevering through the crowds on the pavements, she would retreat periodically into
shops, only to find herself shoulder to shoulder with thicker, noisier crowds.

We caught the tube to St Paul’s from
Paddington; it was the only name she recognized on the map. I was disappointed, hoping
she’d choose Piccadilly Circus or Elephant & Castle or
Angel, any of the stops that sounded as if they might unleash an adventure. The heat
in the Underground made her skin sticky and her breath heavy, and she winced as a man in
a black coat stood close enough for her to breathe the breath that he had just exhaled.
We whizzed through the tube’s concrete veins and emerged at the other side,
climbing the steps to the cathedral and hiding ourselves in the quiet of its nave. Away
from the pulse of the traffic, the muscles in her face relaxed and she loosened her grip
on my hand. Finally, I was allowed to roam, albeit in silence. Meeting again in the
dome, we looked up. She seemed transfixed for a moment by its shape.

‘Did you know, Alice …’ she
began, trailing off as a string of tourists clustered nearby briefly, then departed.

‘What, Mummy?’ I asked, tugging
on her hand, pleased to hear her speaking.

‘When they bombed
London … when London was bombed in the Blitz … this dome here
managed to survive. Everything around it was destroyed. But this,’ she gestured up
to the light-filled arches above us, ‘this lived on.’

‘Can we go somewhere else now?’
I asked, swinging her arm with my hand. For a moment I thought that the day might be
saved, that she might even bring me to the city again.

But, as we walked outside and made our way
around the perimeter of the cathedral, I felt her hand tighten on mine. In front of us
was another church. Only, this one was ruined. In place of the nave there was an
overgrown garden, which had been allowed to roam over the remaining stone. It was as if,
a long time ago, in a fairytale, a wave like mine had passed over it, taking with it the
walls and windows and bells and doors, leaving only ruins.

In April, Mama stopped reading my
father’s books. I returned home from the factory one evening to find the boxes
taped up and the shells I had placed on the window-sills back inside their crate. The
ship was nowhere to be seen. She seemed to avoid the front room completely now, as if
the books could spy on her from their boxes.

Undoing the tape, I fished around for a
volume of Eliot’s
Four Quartets
, one of her favourites, and placed it
carefully on her pillow upstairs.

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble …

… in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

… old timber to new fires,

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth …

I found the ship tossed into a box on top of
Father’s dictionaries – a small fissure had appeared on the bottle’s neck. I
thought about the sails inside the glass, filling with air for the first time.

Returning from the canteen, she came and
joined me in bed. She picked the book up from her pillow before lying down and stared,
bewildered, at its cover.

‘I thought you might like to read
it.’

She held it out to me. ‘Put it back
where you found it.’

‘Mama …’ I paused, leaving
the book loitering in her hand.

‘It doesn’t belong here any
more. It never did.’ She thrust it
towards me again, and when I
still didn’t take it, she left the bed and carried it downstairs herself.

The following day, I found the book back
inside one of the boxes. I left it there but took one of his shells when she
wasn’t looking and kept it in my underwear drawer. I came home from my shift to
find Mama and Sam ferrying the boxes into the cellar. Sam was whistling, oblivious, as
he lugged one box after another down into the darkness. Mama avoided my stare. I wanted
to stop her but the words clotted in my throat. Instead, I ran upstairs and did not come
down until I was sure they had seen to the last box. Something changed that day. It was
as if a part of me had been taken down to the cellar to dwell with the books in the dark
and the damp. Something that I couldn’t recover. I wasn’t aware of what it
was until the trip to the beach.

Sam had use of an old army van for the week
and talked of taking us to the seaside. It was against the rules but he wanted to show
Mama the ‘ocean’. She told him that she had never seen the sea and I knew
why she lied: I, too, had thought of our day with Father in Bournemouth. On our first
night in Wilton – the night we had slept in the blitzed cottage – we laughed about that
trip, the only time we had seen the sea. Father had bought Freda and me ice-creams that
painted big, clown-like grins around our mouths. Mama had taken particular delight in
the sand, which slithered into the space between her toes, like thick, dry water.

I remember standing under the legs of
Bournemouth pier and squealing at the arrival of each wave on my shins. I stood for a
full hour, puzzled at the feeling of being tugged backwards as the waves retreated, only
to be told by Father that I had in fact not moved an inch.

Mama lied to Sam about never having seen the
sea because she couldn’t let him have any share in that day: it felt perfidious.
She had placed the memory of it high on a shelf, so high that she could no longer
retrieve it or tamper with it or bear to see it replaced. He could not understand her
reluctance to take the
trip so she persuaded him that she had heard
poor reports of Bournemouth. He suggested the Purbecks as an alternative and she could
think of no other way out, except to suggest bringing me, which did not deter him.