The Sea Change (26 page)

My heart knocked around my chest, like a
trapped fly. ‘How do you know it’s Annie’s?’ I asked, ignoring
his other concession.

‘She told me,’ he said, brushing
away my curiosity with his hand. I wondered what else she had told him but did not have
to wait long to find out. He stood up so that his face was obscured from me by the upper
lip of the bell. ‘I wanted to do something to show you I care for you,
Violet …’ he paused, unsure how or
whether to continue
‘… because, well, the truth is … I can’t marry
you.’

I fell still.

‘Not yet … at
least.’

‘What makes you think –’

He raised a hand. ‘I know what you
were expecting. Annie let it slip, by accident.’ He crouched down to my level and
I turned my head to face the inside of the bell. The thought of him and Annie colluding
like that, laughing at me, even, made me want to pull at the rim and seal myself inside
it for ever.
Not yet
. I tried to stop myself snatching at the only slice of
hope he had given me.

‘How can you really care for me if you
don’t want to marry me?’ It sounded too simple to be a proper quandary.

‘We’re still young, Vi, and
there’s a war on. I don’t know where I’ll be in a year. I’m
eighteen. If things stay the way they are, I’ll have to enlist.’

‘Well, bully for you,’ I
quipped. He had been itching to go to war ever since it first broke out – anything to
escape to somewhere new.

‘Don’t look at me like that. I
don’t want to go. Not even the toughest of men looks forward to war.’

‘You wouldn’t survive without
it, Pete,’ I cried. ‘What would you do? Stay here with me? Make a home, have
a family? Return to Imber, even?’

I watched his face tighten.

‘The war suits you and you’ll be
nothing but glad when it comes your way.’

‘Violet –’

‘Would it have been different,’
I interrupted, ‘if we had stayed?’

Pete kept quiet. I listened to the creak of
the tree, aching with its burden of apples above us.

‘Thought not,’ I whispered. Then
I stood up from the bell and pulled at its crown so that it clamped down onto the grass
with a single, echoless knock.

I deserved to be left on the platform at
Delhi, to lose him for ever. But my mother’s letter – while destroying so much –
fused us together inexorably. He took me onto the train with him because I was too
distraught to be left behind. And we began the journey that he had intended to make
alone. I did not ask again for his forgiveness but, as Delhi faded and the stations
flashed by, he gradually surrendered it. It took time: fists of words and glass-sharp
silences; hours and hours alone together in the carriage. Not the easy bud of a flower.
But the pearl-hard grind of something costly.

Mum would say that we were mad to swing so
quickly from these fractures into marriage. But it was all or nothing – I had to find a
way of showing him I would never be so foolish again.

With his discarded rucksack on my back, I
walk from the marketplace to our ruined guesthouse – the only other place that I can
think of to look. The bottom half of the building has been stripped completely of glass
and doors. Cracks forge valleys down the walls. It seems on the verge of collapse.
Rescue workers have left a ladder leaning on the back of the building; they must have
used it to reach the guests on the roof.

The door to our room on the first floor is
jammed shut – warped against its frame by the water. I shoulder into it until it springs
open. A groan heaves from deep within the fabric of the house. I freeze, but it falls
silent. Every piece of furniture inside the room – from the bed to the chairs to the
wardrobe – has amassed against the right-hand wall. It is as if someone entered in a
rage and, with a single movement, swept it across the floor.
The
french windows have disappeared completely, leaving nothing but air between me and the
bare sea. We paid a few extra rupees for a sea view; now I would do anything to shut it
out.

Two of James’s shirts and one of my
kaftans are draped over the blades of the ceiling fan. Their colours are barely
discernible under the silt. I find another shirt and a wave-beaten copy of
Moby-Dick
under the upturned bed. James confessed to me once that he had
been trying to finish it for years. Every time he made an indent in its spine,
he’d put it down for a month and forget his place. I’m surprised the wave
hasn’t washed its pages clean of words. Instead the sentences have thickened and
mingled into a deep bruise of ink. Half his bags were taken up with cigarettes and
books; he left little room for clothes. Unlike his No. 6s, whose fumes he inhaled
religiously, he could never settle on a single book but dipped in and out of several,
depending on the time of day. I was not much help. Whenever he started reading at a
border or in the van, I’d find a reason to wrestle his attention away from the
page. We could share the world outside the window but the one in the book was his and
his alone. I didn’t like it. I wanted his eyes, his thoughts, his words. Even if I
didn’t give him mine.

I bend down to the wardrobe and place my
hands on its side. It is difficult to lift but eventually I manage to roll it over so
that I can flip the doors open. The sari I’d bought for our wedding fills the
inner space, looped over the rail and threaded through the clothes hangers. Silt has
greyed the silk and the gold borders are inlaid with mud, like the crest on
James’s passport.

‘White is for funerals,’ the
tailor in the shop had told me. ‘It is inauspicious, sister, to wear this on your
wedding day.’

‘I don’t mind. White is what I
would wear at home.’

He shook his head at me as he handed me the
bag across the counter. The next day, he sent Mala, his daughter, across to the hotel to
dress me for the ceremony. I did not know how to put on a sari myself. Before she began,
she handed me a pile of pleated red material.

‘A wedding sari, sister. Gift from my
father.’

I take the silted, unworn sari from the
wardrobe now and lift the silk to my face. The red one is nowhere to be seen. I imagine
it being drawn out to sea, like I was, weaving its way through the waters like a new
breed of python. Perhaps somebody is bending over it on the beach, wondering where the
bride has gone.

On the morning of our wedding, the scarlet
sari looked so rich in Mala’s hands. I forgot about home, about the white I had
always had in my head when I thought of marriage. And I wore red – fire red. James
grinned when I met him at the beach. He should have known that I would do something
different. But for every mould you break, you are filling one elsewhere. As Mala and her
father stood watching, I could see in their faces the pleasure at having guided me into
a custom – not my own, but a tradition nonetheless.

I unravel the sari from the rail. Taking his
rucksack from my back, I put it inside. This and the ring are the only proof that we
were ever married.

There are more clothes under the bed – a
Genesis T-shirt, which he is too old to wear, and a pair of brown shorts. Inside the
pocket, there’s a piece of card. A photo – wave-beaten and faded. It’s of us
at the bottom of his parents’ garden in Kew. It was one of those evenings that
takes you by surprise in England, making all the muscles in your body relax with its
warmth. James’s mother was putting on an open-air concert. She always wears the
most beautiful clothes – fresh off the peg from Liberty. She hosts high tea for a
hundred as if it were as simple as combing out her elbow-length hair. James gets his
poise from her; he can befriend anyone.

It seems ridiculous now, the idea of sipping
wine next to a clematis-clad summer-house, wishing I could exchange my family for his.
If I were to whisper to the girl in the photograph exactly what she would come to feel –
the ache of home, the need to bind herself fast to something – she would only laugh and
take another sip.

I feel it before I hear it: a slow crack
spreading its capillaries through the core of the building. I run to the landing to see
the stairs give way, falling with the wall into the lobby. There’s no way down. I
bundle our things into James’s holdall and make for a window.

‘Get out!’ shouts a passer-by
from below. ‘The whole place is about to go!’ I throw the bag down to him.
It’s the American whose room was on the same floor as ours. He grabs the ladder
from the other side of the building and props it up against my window. I clamber down,
hands slipping on the bamboo.

‘What the hell were you doing up
there?’ he yells, taking my arm and pulling me away from the building.
‘You’ll get yourself killed.’

‘Wait! The bag!’ I break free of
his grip and run back to grab it. The house quietens. There are no more groans, only
widened cracks.

‘What’s in there anyway?’
He points at the holdall. I frown and pull it close to my chest. ‘Your
husband … I’m sorry, I don’t know his name. Have you found
him?’

I tell him no.

‘Have you tried the
hospital?’

The hospital seems so obvious. Why did I not
think of it?

‘It’s on the far west side of
the town. They’re taking everyone there who they find alive.’

‘Thank you,’ I murmur. I turn to
go and then pause, remembering that he wasn’t travelling alone. ‘What
happened to your …?’

‘She’s in the hills. Safe. Thank
God. I came back down to see if I could help with the rescue operation.’

I look at him, incredulous. If I found James
alive and in one piece, I wouldn’t leave his side again.

I leave the American by the guesthouse and
follow the stretchers being carried out of the town. After a mile or so, the hospital –
a concrete oblong with impossibly high windows – becomes visible at the end of the road.
Inside, the central corridor is clogged with
victims on trolleys. I
check every one for James. Then I push my way through the crowd into the ward. Sunlight
falls in shafts through the glass, spotlighting particular mattresses. The rest of the
room sits in clammy darkness. Beds are separated into sections by threadbare curtains,
which have been hauled back and pinned to the wall to make room for more patients. The
nurses have given up trying to keep the aisles clear, instead filling the room with as
many mattresses as possible. I pick my way through the maze of furniture, scouring the
beds for a sign of him. Nurses weave through the hall and stop indiscriminately to wrap
steam-white bandages over darkening wounds.

I ask a nurse carrying a clipboard if she
has a list of patients. ‘His name is James. James Peak.’

She flicks through her papers and runs down
the length of the margin with the lid of her pen but I’m told there is no record
of him. A fly dizzies itself on the ceiling above me. I want to sit down but there is no
room. I have noticed that the doctors stay out of sight.

A woman with a thick Tamil accent, sitting
on a nearby bed, starts telling me of a snake, ten feet long, which pulled her through
the water with her children. It took them to the edge of the wave and deposited them in
the shallows where they could scramble, bedraggled, onto higher ground; her daughter
could not have swum without it, her leg ensnared as it was in a ball of barbed wire. I
ask her if maybe it was a rope they held and she laughs and says, no, it was not a rope,
it was a snake, and why would I not believe her? Just days ago, nobody believed in waves
the size of houses. Today anything goes. It was a snake, she repeats; she has never been
more sure. I ask where her children are and she points to the next bed. Two sisters lie
head to toe, eyes wide open, incapable of sleep. The second girl tries not to look down
at her leg, which has yet to be freed from the wire.

It is the dead, not the living, who garner
the most attention from the staff. As soon as the life leaves a person, the nurses
pounce, carrying them off to the courtyard at the back of the
hospital where the body joins a line and, if fortunate, is covered. I check the corpses
outside but he’s not among them.

A man comes into the courtyard to speak with
a nearby nurse.

‘Ravindra?’

He’s so desperate to speak to the
nurse that he barely notices me at first. He clasps her uniform and pleads with her.

‘Ravindra! It’s me,
Alice.’

The nurse moves on. He starts towards me,
taking me by the arm and pulling me back inside the ward. I can’t understand what
he’s saying. The woman who told me of the python frowns and gets up from her bed.
I beckon her over and ask her what he means.

‘His wife. She is not well.’

‘She’s alive?’ I ask,
following him to a bed by the wall. The colour has drained from her face and her pupils
are unfocused, void of movement. Her lips have morphed from brown to blue. I can feel
her coldness without even laying a hand on her. A nurse shouts something across the ward
and Ravindra looks up, panicked. Two more nurses approach us and delve under the
mattress on the bed. They lift his wife and carry her towards the double doors that lead
into the courtyard. He clings weakly to the mattress.