The Sea Change (25 page)

‘How could you have let it
happen?’ he asked. The question hung, stagnant in the tent. It was me now, not
Mum, who couldn’t give an answer.

‘It was stupid … a moment of
complete stupidity …’ I sounded pathetic.

‘There must have been a
reason.’

‘I don’t know. I was being
petulant. It was frightening … the idea that you might love me. The thought
that one day you might not.’

‘It’s ridiculous even to say
it.’ He sighed through gritted teeth. ‘After everything. But it hurts like
hell what you’ve done.’ He pressed his hands down into the holdall as if to
suffocate the clothes inside. ‘And the worst part is that I can’t
stop … If only it were that easy.’

I picked out the absent words from his
stutter and held onto them as tightly as I could.

‘There’s a sleeper train heading
south. I have a ticket and it’s leaving in four hours,’ he began.
‘I’m getting on it but I need some time to think. Meet me at the station.
Either I go or … I’d like at least to say goodbye. Just meet me
there.’

He gathered up his things, pulled the zip on
his bag and left.

I didn’t read the letter from the
shoebox until I arrived at Delhi railway station. I was alone on the platform, waiting
for James. I couldn’t think about what would happen if he decided to leave me so I
took the letter from my pocket and removed it from the envelope as a way of keeping
myself occupied. For the briefest of moments, there were no crowds, no trains. The
emptiness felt eerie and scripted, intended for the opening of a letter like mine. The
paper was tinted with the faintest of yellows, like a waning summer. I read it once. And
read it again. A train came. And still I could not tear my eyes from the letter. The
platform filled with bags and families and men with huge urns of steaming tea.

‘Alice!’ I couldn’t trace
his voice on the teeming platform ‘Alice!’

Finally I saw him, weaving through
passengers and luggage. He stopped hesitantly in front of me but I clutched his shirt
and brought my forehead to rest on his chest. He took the letter from my shaking
fingers.

‘Is this true?’ he breathed, as
he finished reading the page. He didn’t need a reply. Instead, he gathered me up
and held me still until the platform was empty again.

‘Not far to go, Vi,’ Pete
called back to me. I followed him through a thin copse up to a stile, which he crossed
in three swift movements.

‘Tell me where you’re taking
me.’ I swung my right foot clumsily over the fence to join the left and thudded
off the plank to meet him in the field.

‘It’s a surprise.’ He
grinned, reaching for my hand. He had grown older-looking of late. His chin had gained
rough stubble and the hair on his arms had thickened into wire. His voice had deepened
as well, imbuing everything he said with a new air of purposefulness. I liked it. The
lower voice and the textured face made me feel as if he were moving towards something.
Yet I was also fearful – afraid he might leave me behind, trapped in my girlhood. Ever
since moving to Wilton, I had stuck stubbornly to my factory uniform, even donning it on
days off to avoid the skirts and stockings that I saw Mama slipping into.

Without Freda leading the way, I did not
know how to wear the months I had gained since Imber. The petticoats, and the curlers on
my mother’s dressing-table, had symbolized nothing to me but another outing with
Sam.

Yet since Sam’s departure, I had
examined my appearance with fresh interest; like a stork pecking at its reflection in a
pond, I perceived my own gawkiness and was frightened into flight. I was a woman now:
with legs and hips to match my breasts. I wondered what Pete saw when he looked at me
and, out of curiosity, decided to give him something to dwell on. I picked up an old
pair of high-heeled shoes in a second-hand
shop a day before we were
due to meet and slipped them on in the factory locker room.

‘You can’t walk back to the farm
in those!’ He laughed, looking down at my feet at the factory gate with his thumbs
tucked into his belt loops. I liked the feel of his eyes on my legs, though; he let his
gaze linger longer than usual. Annie sent some of her old makeup to me in the post; a
half-empty pot of powder, which was a few shades too light, and a lipstick. I loved
watching how the red paste puffed up my mouth into an exotic berry that bounced off the
colour of my coat, dress or cardigan. It was like glue for Pete: he barely looked me in
the eye any more. Instead, he talked to my lips, listened to them, his expression
constantly locked on them as if they were about to cough up treasure. Things between us
were much improved since Sam’s departure; he seemed pleased that my time was
entirely his again. It had never occurred to me that he might have been envious of the
evenings I had spent with Mama and Sam. I thought he had better things to do – prettier
girls to be going about with.

I tried to ignore all Annie’s talk of
engagements: it seemed there wasn’t a girl in Devizes who hadn’t become
attached to somebody or other. That the same trend was occurring in Wilton had
completely escaped me. Soon enough, I was searching the fingers of the factory girls and
starting to feel left out. It seemed the war had made everybody panic.

When Pete mentioned that he had a surprise
for me and asked if I could keep Saturday afternoon free, I became nervous. Annie said
she was sure that this was it; it was the lipstick that had done it and I had her to
thank. She lent me her best day dress and I invested in my second-hand shoes.

‘He’s probably going to take you
to that spot, you know, the one you always go to. On the Downs by Coombe. Oh, it’s
perfect, Vi! I knew he’d come round – didn’t I tell you?’

‘If he makes me sit on a bomb again,
I’ll refuse him.’ I laughed.

Annie beamed warmly at me across the table, as
if to congratulate me on becoming part of the club. ‘And how wonderful that
you’re in love,’ she exclaimed. ‘It will make the engagement so much
more enjoyable.’

When Pete had set off on a different route
from the one Annie had predicted, I was thrown. He wouldn’t answer my questions
about where we were going. After crossing two sets of fields, I followed him into a wood
that carried a dense smell of resin slipping through the veins of trees. The light here
fell in isolated pools, crisping patches of leaves while others disintegrated in the
damp. A feast of bluebells had been and gone, leaving their yellowed remains to droop
and sink into an unkempt carpet underfoot. I scoured the wood floor for a late-coming
flower but there were none to be seen. So immersed was I in the town that their bloom
had passed without me knowing. In Imber, I awaited the bluebell season eagerly and, come
May, I went and lay among them with Freda, leaving two sister-shaped imprints in the
middle of the purple sea. I gathered hordes of them in bunches to take back to Mama.
Freda said they would never survive outside the cool of the wood; I was determined to
prove her wrong. How could something so perfectly formed live only for a day? When,
eventually, their bruised heads bowed into a kiss with the side of the vase, I would
scurry, undeterred, back to the woods for a fresh bunch. I used to think that, if I
could die anywhere, it would be there amid the bluebells, like Ophelia floating in her
river. I would lie on my back, stare at the canopy above and picture the sky descending
until I dissolved into its hue. Sometimes I imagined the scent becoming so heavy that it
sent me into a thick sleep. It took a war to teach me that death was more than a scented
evaporation: it arrived with a jolt – a clenched fist that could never again be opened.
It was to be feared, not revered or craved or girlishly re-imagined in the depths of a
wood.

The trees became taller and thicker in the
centre of the wood. Their trunks towered on past us without a thought for who we were or
the war we were in; they were all-knowing, oblivious. Perhaps, from up there, they could
see an end coming – the end we were all wishing for. In the middle of the wood there was
a large crater where a bomb must have landed. There were no trees within twenty yards of
the hole, only charred stumps and ash. The pit itself was filled with a cacophony of
objects – broken chairs, old car parts and farm equipment.

‘Follow me.’ He beckoned,
stepping onto the pile and picking his way into the centre. He crossed a wooden door
with a number three on it and took hold of a rusted metal plough in front of him.

‘Wait!’ I called, teetering on
the edge of the pit.

‘Hurry up, then!’

‘I’m afraid I might tear the
dress.’ With a blush, I smoothed down Annie’s turquoise pleats with my hands
as if to prove how delicate it was.

‘What are you dressed up all fancy for
anyway? I told you we’d be walking!’

‘I’m just tired of my
uniform,’ I lied. ‘I thought I’d start to make an effort after
work.’

‘Don’t tell me that you’re
going to spoil our fun because of some dress. You’ll jolly well start climbing.
Come on.’

Reluctantly, I tried to follow the path he
had taken. Pete took hold of my hand once I had reached him and went on, stopping
finally at a lump of metal that rested on its side as if it were sleeping.

‘There!’ He brought his hands
down to rest on the bronze. Its colours stood out from the rust in the rest of the pit –
blue and green patches mingling like oceans and continents on a globe. I frowned.

‘Don’t you recognize it?’
Pete asked.

I studied it again – this time the shape
striking me as more
familiar. ‘How do you know?’ I
murmured, drawing nearer. ‘How do you know it’s from …’

‘The crack – look – it’s in
exactly the same place as the bell in the church tower. The one with the lowest tone. We
used to ring it on its own when there was a death.’

Imber’s bell – if, indeed, that was
what it was – sat redundant on the heap. It had neither the air nor the space to let out
its toll. And what good would it have been anyway when it was not a single man but a
whole village that had died?

‘It’s not the same
bell.’

‘Well, yes, perhaps the crack is a bit
bigger but, then again, maybe it fell.’

‘It’s not the same one,’ I
repeated.

‘It is, Vi, I know it is! Jim from the
farm is going to bring a cart round so we can take it to Wilton. You can have it in your
garden. A little piece of home!’

I thought of Imber’s fractured
cottages and of rifle fire making inroads into the parsonage roof. He meant well. I knew
he meant well.

‘Go on, touch it,’ he said. But
I did not need to reach out a hand to feel its coldness. I stood back, not wanting to
disturb its rest.

It took an entire hour to hoist the bell out
of the crater and onto the back of Jim’s cart. I couldn’t bear the sight of
it sealed tight against the wooden boards. It wasn’t supposed to be kept like that
– I wanted to suspend it in the tower again so that we could stare up into its hollow
and watch it rock.

I was relieved, though, that Pete had
brought me here to retrieve it rather than placing it as a surprise in the garden. I
could not imagine anything worse than waking up to it unawares, and finding it, inert as
a corpse, on the lawn. Every time I washed the inside of a cup in the sink, I would be
reminded of its interior – its overturned U a mirror of our valley – harbouring nothing
but stale air and starved grass.

As we carted the bell home, I shut my eyes and
tried to picture it as he saw it. To him it was a project – a way of buying us days in
the garden together, repairing it, polishing it, filling in the crack. It was his way of
retrieving time – Imber’s time – and giving us a reason to spend a piece of it
together.

My mother did not speak when we brought the
bell through the back gate. She did not even enquire about where we had found it. She
accepted its presence as one accepts an unwanted heirloom, issuing instructions about
where exactly we should place it as if she had always known that it would one day arrive
at her door.

‘Don’t tip it over just
yet,’ I told Pete, as he prepared to clamp it into place on the lawn below the
apple tree. I crouched and sat in its hollow, staring back at the house. Pete knelt on
the grass opposite me.

‘Remember Mrs Bexham who used to teach
us bell-ringing?’ he said. ‘What happened to her?’

‘I heard she was housed in Lavington,
with the Archams.’

Pete stared into the space between his knees
at my mention of the Archams and picked at the lip of the bell under my feet with his
finger. ‘You broke the stay once, remember? And she had to grab your feet to stop
you flying off up into the tower.’

‘I was always so terrible at
it.’ I blushed. ‘Too enthusiastic, that was my problem.’ I pulled my
dress over my knees and brought my chin to rest on them.

‘That dress suits you more than
Annie,’ remarked Pete.