The Sea Change (30 page)

‘There’s a box over
there.’ My mother pointed towards a trunk in the far corner. I walked across the
room and pushed back the lid. Inside were all his belongings – three shirts, two pairs
of cords and an officer’s coat he had picked up from Wilton House after the
Americans had left. I was familiar with the cut and weave of each item. And yet I had
never considered how small the sum of his possessions would be once they were assembled
– how they barely filled even half of a single trunk.

I delved further inside. My fingers stumbled
on what felt like a stack of papers beneath a layer of clothes. Freeing them from a
tangle of shirts, I tried not to attract Mama’s attention. They were letters: my
letters, from Imber.

‘That can’t be all of it!’
my mother exclaimed, coming over to my side of the room and bending to inspect the
contents of the trunk.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked,
pulling a shirt over the letters to hide them.

‘Nothing … no, of
course.’ She collected herself. ‘I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
For all we know, he could be an orphan, God bless him.’

She paused, pressing her lips together as if
deciding whether to go on. ‘You’re not still thinking
of … marriage, are you, Violet?’

‘If he’ll have me,’ I
whispered. ‘I’d be miserable without him.’

‘You’ll be miserable
with
him, my darling. Just look.’

She gestured towards the trunk but all I
could see were my letters, grouped carefully in chronological order, each one filed in
its correct envelope.

As his trunk was too heavy to carry, we took
his belongings in sacks back to the house. I made neat piles of his things and stored
them under our bed. Remembering Sam’s note, I removed it
from
under the mattress, where it had torn slightly, and kept it with Pete’s letter in
my drawer.

Another week passed and I was still hopeful
of Pete’s return. He had probably gone to scout out work at a nearby farm: it was
not difficult to imagine him tiring of Mrs Hooper’s briskness in Coombe. Two more
weeks went by and I started to worry. I feared that he had left for good and wondered
what I had done to deter him from calling to say goodbye. I took to sitting by the bell,
running my hand through the thin skin of dew that was deposited on it each morning. It
had become so embedded in the surroundings of the garden that it now stirred in me only
the faintest memories of Imber. Moss had begun to attach itself to the rim and spread
across the surface like a knitted garment. At first I had scraped it off dutifully every
couple of weeks, washing the bronze with a sponge until I could see its green and umber
markings once more. But I had given up of late, letting Nature have its way. As the moss
thickened, so the separation grew between the mute bell in the garden and the ones in my
memory – strung up high and full of song.

One night in June, when Pete had been gone
six weeks, there was a knock on the door. Mama did not rouse so I crept down on my own
in the hope that it might be Pete.

At the door, I could just make out a
nurse’s cape through the flap of the letterbox.

‘Hello?’

‘Hurry up and open the door!’
Freda hissed at me. ‘I’ve been out here for ages.’

I lifted the latch and she pushed past me,
depositing her suitcase on the hallway floor.

‘Freda, what are you doing here? Are
you home for good –’

‘Where’s Mama?’ she
interrupted coolly.

‘It’s past midnight. She’s
asleep upstairs.’

My sister let out a frustrated sigh and
paced the hallway. Then she turned towards me and grasped my arm, her hand cold from
the night air outside. ‘Violet, please tell me you didn’t
know.’

‘I don’t underst–’

‘You know perfectly well what
I’m talking about.’

‘I –’

‘I’ve heard talk, Violet, in
town, about an American officer.’

My ribs tensed.

‘An American officer with whom
Mama … became acquainted.’

‘I never heard …’

‘Will you swear to me that you
don’t know anything about it?’

‘It’s just aimless chatter,
Freda. You know what people in Wilton are like. Everything has to be taken with a pinch
of salt around here.’

‘Except I didn’t hear it from
anyone in Wilton.’

‘Then where?’

‘Never you mind.’

She did not drop her eyes from my face, not
even when I looked into the living room towards the hearth, which was in need of
sweeping.

‘There’s nowhere for you to
sleep,’ I mumbled weakly.

‘I’ll make do with
Father’s chesterfield.’

Her words made me colour. I walked up the
hall under the pretence of fetching a blanket and pillow. Then I climbed the stairs with
dread in my stomach that I felt certain would only be compounded in the morning.

Freda could stay for two whole days. After
relating the severity of her family’s situation to her matron, she had been
granted emergency leave for the weekend. For the entirety of Saturday and Sunday, my
mother and sister became like figures in a weather house – Mama appearing only when she
was sure that Freda was out of sight. She seemed to sense instinctively that Freda had
heard something.

I expected her to intervene and pre-empt a
confrontation but
instead she hid herself away guiltily. She kept
disappearing to run errands around the town, anything that kept her away from the house.
For her part, Freda became increasingly frosty towards me. Now that the war was over, my
shift at the factory had ended, and I could hardly avoid her in the way that Mama did:
it would only make us seem more culpable. Mealtimes were the worst – a million and one
silences passing across the table as one of us conveyed the salt to another, poured
water or enquired hesitantly after a second helping.

Our stalemate finally fell apart on Sunday.
I had stayed on to attend to the flowers at church and, through an unlucky lapse on the
part of my mother, she and Freda had been present in the house without me for over an
hour. If either of them was hoping that my return would relieve the tension between
them, I was to be a disappointment. We sat down to eat in silence, the pressure rising
like the damp on the walls with every conversation that refused to start. It was left to
me to break the silence.

‘How wonderful that the war is over,
Freda, and that you can be with us for Sunday lunch,’ I said. Mama looked up and
smiled tensely at me. My sister said nothing. ‘I imagine London was quite the
place to be. Was there much celebrating?’

Instead of launching into the merits of
London, I was surprised to see my sister whitening and staring down at her plate.
‘I suppose so … I wouldn’t really know. I was on a
shift … I had work to do.’ I sensed I had upset her but couldn’t,
at the time, work out why.

‘But there must have been some
celebrations on the ward. With the other nurses?’

Freda shook her head. ‘The sick still
need tending, regardless of whether there’s a war on or not. There’s always
work to do.’

‘Oh, but I was reading in the
newspaper that everybody went out on the streets. I saw a picture of a nurse in her cap
dancing with a soldier on the Mall. It made me think of you,’ I pressed.
‘I was certain you’d be joining in with all the dancing.
You love to dance.’

Freda set down her cutlery a little too
vehemently. ‘I told you I was working … I don’t have the time to
swan off and go dancing in the street.’

‘Nonsense, Freda! Since when have you
been such a prude?’

‘I’ll tell you since when. Since
I discovered that, while the rest of us were doing our best for the war effort, my
mother had taken up with a Yank.’

I didn’t know what I had been
expecting, but it wasn’t that harsh assertion of the facts. They seemed all the
more horrible, the way she had set them before us. And yet she hadn’t been here.
She hadn’t been here to stop it. Mama stared at her plate intently, refusing to
look at Freda. I tried to think of a change of subject for her sake but there seemed
nowhere to go. I waited for my sister to speak again.

‘I was in town yesterday, Mama, and I
came across a Mrs Grey. Do you know of her? I’m sure you do. She worked at Wilton
House with you – as a cook.’ She clipped the consonants in the word as if it bore
a world of significance and leant back in her chair, waiting for my mother’s
response.

‘Yes, I do. A very generous woman,
always passing on spare carrots and potatoes from the garden at the house.’ She
held onto her composure so well that I started to doubt whether she had anticipated the
direction in which Freda intended to take the conversation. Then she shot me a
frightened look from across the table, which quashed the doubt.

‘It’s just hearsay,’
blurted Mama, before settling herself as much as she could. ‘Whatever you’ve
heard, it’s just talk.’

‘What is hearsay?’ Freda looked
at our mother, her eyes wide with contrived innocence.

My mother tightened her grip on her knife
and fork. ‘I don’t think you can be in any doubt as to what I’m
referring.’ She put down her cutlery as she spoke, pushed her plate to one side
and
leant into the space across the table. ‘Whatever they have
said at the house, it is not what it seems. Violet will tell you.’

I stiffened, glancing at Mama, who avoided
my eyes, abashed at having to bring me into the debate.

‘Oh, yes! Of course.’ Freda
turned in her chair towards me so there was no escaping her glare. ‘There you
were, Violet, looking
genially
on as Father was betrayed in broad daylight and
Mama made herself the talk of the town.’ Her eyes bored into me until they had
extracted a deep blush from my cheeks. I wanted to hide my face from her, run upstairs
and bury it in a pillow. But I knew what it would mean for Mama if I looked away. Freda
had only heard gossip: she had no proof and nor would she find any.

‘It isn’t just gossip,’
she continued, her voice becoming angular. ‘Everybody here
knows
. I have
it from a reliable source.’

Mama turned rigid.

‘Why do you care, Freda? You left
us!’ I cried, standing up and moving round to our mother’s side of the
table.

‘Oh, that’s just perfect,
isn’t it?’ she snapped, jabbing a finger in my direction. ‘How can I
be responsible for an affair that happened entirely in my absence?’

‘Don’t use that word,’ my
mother retorted. ‘There was no such thing.’

‘That is not what the town is saying,
Mama!’ my sister exclaimed.

‘The town?’ Mama repeated with
alarm. ‘We’re decent people, Freda. Nothing untoward happened.’

‘Would you have any old Tom, Dick or
Harry read this, then?’ She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and cast it
onto the table. It came to rest by my mother’s plate. I looked down at Sam’s
note and knew the game was up.

Mama picked it up. ‘Where did you find
this? You had no right to rummage through my belongings.’

‘Ask Violet. It was in her
drawer.’

Mama stared at me, forlorn. She took a
breath. ‘Freda, you
must realize … how hard it was for
Violet and me after the evacuation, without your father …’

Freda’s eyes narrowed. ‘Forgive
me, Mother, but I don’t see the other widows pouring out their grief to any
willing soldier who might happen to drop by.’

‘How can you be so unfeeling? He was a
friend! He was a good friend to both of us.’

‘Oh, please!’

Mama’s voice was wavering now, her
eyes rabbit-wide. ‘There might have been more to it had it been allowed to
grow … But I dealt with the matter swiftly as soon as I realized the extent of
my feelings.’ She nodded in my direction, as if remembering my words to her in the
kitchen on the day she had brought it to an end.

‘So you did love him.’

‘That is not what I –’

‘But he said in the note that he cared
for you.’

‘Did he not also say that he cared for
Violet?’

‘That is not –’

‘And do you not care for me as a
daughter? It’s the same, is it not?’

‘But he’s a man, Mama, and
you’re a woman!’

‘I know I’ve been blind to how
others might have interpreted the situation. But for your part, Freda, will you not see
that I meant no harm by it and I put an end to it as soon as I grasped what it might
become?’ Mama extended a hand towards her.

Freda wavered. A few seconds later, she was
on her feet and moving towards the door. ‘How are we to go on after this?’
she asked. ‘What would he think?’

Then I let slip what my sister had been
baiting us to admit: ‘Father’s dead, Freda. It wasn’t … it
wasn’t wrong … because Father is dead.’ I was crying. ‘Soon
we’ll go back to Imber. That way, we’ll be near him.’

Freda dropped her voice to a murmur, her
eyes stone cold.
‘Do you honestly think that all this can be
magicked away just by going home? Nothing will ever be the same again.’ Then she
left the room, taking Sam’s note with her. We listened to her steps, bullet-like,
on the stairs.

I waited a while in silence with my mother.
Then I readied myself to go and fetch her. ‘Be kind, Violet,’ my mother
murmured, as I stood up. ‘Be kind to her.’

I crossed the landing to find our bedroom
empty. Sam’s note had been shredded and discarded in the fireplace. There was no
sign of Freda. I should have burnt the note before she had a chance to find it.

I collected up the paper from the grate and
put it in my pocket. I would have held a match to it there and then, but the fireplace
in our bedroom did not work: the chimney had long since caved in and the chute was full
of bird nests. A single glance out of the window told me where Freda had gone. She was
sitting with her back against the bell in the garden, knees pressed up against her
chest, crying like a little girl. I could hear her sobs from the window. Downstairs, I
padded across the lawn past the bomb shelter and over to the apple tree.