The Sea Change (31 page)

‘Freda, please come inside,’ I
said softly.

‘It’s ruined everything.
Everything
,’ she cried. ‘We haven’t a home, we
haven’t a father – we haven’t even a proper mother any more. And
I’ve … It’s my –’

I waited. But she didn’t finish. I
knew what I should do: I should stoop down and touch her, let her know that, for her
part, she was forgiven. But I remained standing.

‘It was auspicious, sister. All my
family live in the hills. There are no fishermen in my family. Only shopkeeper. None was
taken, sister, none. They are all alive,’ explains Suganthi, the woman from the
hill. ‘So I help you. I will help find your husband.’

Her husband had sent for her after I had
telephoned the deputy high commission from his booth. I was inconsolable, and I could
tell he didn’t know what else to do. I’m grateful she’s with me. She
speaks Tamil, for one thing, and can ask the nurses at the hospital about James. Yet I
can’t understand how she can muster up such kindness towards a stranger when her
town – the place she has lived all her married life – has been swallowed whole by the
sea. I think of the letter Mum sent me.
Such selflessness would have left me
aghast.

‘My mother lost her home once,’
I say, as we cut a path towards the hospital.

‘How, sister, in a fire?’

‘No, it was taken from her by the
army. But she only had to move to the next town.’

‘A home is a home, sister. When I left
my family to live with my husband, I cried for days in secret. And they live only one
mile! But my daughter goes to live in London. So far away. I visited two years. My first
visit. She didn’t say it on the telephone, sister, but in London, every day is
monsoon day. Rain, rain, rain. They live in a small, small house, with fifteen family.
There is no space for her children. Where will she put them? In the cupboards? She
wanted to find us work there. But I tell her, no. It is a bad plan. I see life is good
for me here – auspicious,
sister.’ She clasps her hands together
as if to thank God. ‘Your mother, did she ever go back to her home?’

‘No, never.’

Suganthi frowns at me.

‘She can’t settle in her new
home. She thinks her old home would have been better.’

‘Ah, but if she stay in her old home,
she could not have such a beautiful daughter.’ She stops me in my tracks and cups
a hand around my cheek with a wide smile.

She is what I would have given you, had
I been a better man.
I keep quiet, thinking only of the letter.

Suganthi turns to face down the hill,
breathless from our walk. ‘Alice, the wave brings bad things,’ she spreads a
hand across the view of the debris sprawled beneath us, ‘but your Amma, she cares
for you. You go home and see. The water, it comes and goes and everything
changes.’

If I am to stand any chance of reaching the
deputy high commission before my flight, I must leave Kanyakumari today, travelling
first to Madras and then to Delhi. There was still no sign of James in the hospital. I
telephone the deputy high commission again to see if they have received any further
news. But the call yields nothing, only a repeat of the information I heard
yesterday.

‘I did take the liberty of calling the
airport to confirm your flight,’ says the man at the end of the line. ‘If
you do intend to travel home, we can make arrangements for your journey from Madras to
Delhi airport. You can telephone your family once you arrive here to let them know your
plans.’

I avoid an affirmative answer and hang up.
There are very few buses travelling between here and Trivandrum. They are still clearing
the roads. I don’t even know if the trains are running.

Suganthi arranges for a driver to take me to
the station in
exchange for a handful of rupees – worthless since the
wave – and a packet of Ceylon tea from her kitchen. I don’t even know if I’m
set on going yet but I climb into the car with the holdall full of James’s things
and head for the station all the same. Tree after tree has been felled and laid to rest
along the road. We frequently have to turn off the tarmac and drive through the dirt to
avoid them. This place used to be so green, as if it did nothing but rain. But any
foliage that has survived has lost its colour to the mud and silt and travelling sand.
The entire landscape looks sick – like something that should have long since been
buried.

The station is packed with people trying to
get away. There are guards blocking the entrance to each platform. Whole families sit
perched on the contents of their houses. People have loaded their remaining belongings
into vegetable crates and flour sacks – any container they can lay their hands on. The
luggage has a watery look – suitcases misshapen by the sea, then cemented in the sun;
salvaged papers and photographs, all carrying the trace of the wave in the ripple of
their skin. A couple of people stand with nothing but the clothes on their back in the
ticket queue, casting an eye at the belongings other people have brought and realizing
they have nothing to barter with. One man offers his watch, miraculously still ticking
on his wrist, and is given a ticket. A murmur jostles through the queue and people root
around for similar objects. The next woman can hand over only a twenty-rupee note, its
ink half erased. She is turned away. A husband approaches the window offering the gold
from his wife’s ears. James said an Indian wife carries her gold everywhere except
to her grave, her family’s inheritance judged safest when fashioned into jewellery
and pressed against the warmth of her skin. The man behind the desk nods and holds out
his palm. The wife nurses each of her earrings from her lobes and drops them, with
hesitation, into the outstretched hand. In exchange, they are given two paper
tickets.

I wait my turn in the queue and pull out my
ticket to Madras
from my pocket once I am beckoned forward to the
window. I have been told it requires a stamp from the ticket office before I can board
the train. The sight of the ticket elicits a muttering from the crowd. But the man
behind the counter remains stern.

‘No gift, no stamp,’ he tells
me.

‘You’ve got to be joking!’
I cry. ‘I already have my ticket.’

‘Okay, okay, madam, that is fine, you
will not be travelling. Move aside, please.’

‘No. Wait.’ I unzip the suitcase
and fumble around inside for something to give him. My fingers pause over the cover of
James’s passport, feeling its permanence.

‘Madam, if you please, there is long
queue here.’ He is pointing not at the passport but at my wedding ring and
motioning for me to hand it over to him. James bought it just before the ceremony from a
man whose shop sign claimed with much bombast that he was the best goldsmith in Tamil
Nadu. Every surface in his beachside cabin was drenched with jewellery. The walls
shimmered so vehemently that they looked wet. The shopkeeper had strung up a strip light
along the length of the ceiling and the brightness of the gold inside had made our eyes
ache with delight. This was what it had felt like, marrying James: the smallest of acts
stuffed full of the shiniest treasures.

‘I can’t. My husband gave me
this,’ I tell the ticket officer.

‘Then move aside,
please … Madam?’

I slip it off my finger, dropping it onto
the map of my open palm. It is only four days old. You can’t form an attachment to
something in four days. It’s just a cheap piece of metal. I hold it out towards
the counter. I try to let go. The clock in the station stutters into its fifth hour. The
queue throbs behind me. It is only a matter of unclenching my fist.

Imber’s parsonage, which used to
house our every hour, now gives birth to egg-yolk yellows, ether blues and bulging
greens: a greenhouse that breeds verdant rooms – great webs of ivy that string
themselves up over the ghosts of old walls to form inner chambers of their own. I touch
the remains of the doorframe. The brickwork on either side of it has buckled and
crumbled to reveal haggard cracks out of which nobody looks and into which nobody
stares. I shouldn’t be here. Somebody should have stopped me entering. Had I known
how easy it would be to reach this place, how little effort I would need to exert, would
I have come back sooner?

Inside the house, the bottom half of the
staircase is missing, leaving steps that lead up to the sky. I cannot reach my bedroom,
in ruins, upstairs. The glass that remains in the windows downstairs has splintered into
muddied blades, and ivy twists across their vistas. A knit of goose grass has prised its
way through the fireplace in the drawing room and milkwort cleaves to the cracks in the
hearth. Everything conspires to pull the house down into the earth for burial. After all
my fears of shells and bullets, it is Nature, not war, who has had her way. And I find
that I am pleased for her.

In the centre of the drawing room, gangling
stalks of hoary plantain tower up towards the ceiling. Their lamps of eerie violet bend
whenever there is a gust of wind, surrendering their wisped petals, like strands of
ageing hair. The entire house reminds me of an old face whose skin, no matter how thin,
will not surrender its secrets – will not give a name to the little tremors that carved
each wrinkle and deepened each crack.

The flowers cluster into a space no bigger
than an armchair in the far corner of the room. They are fed by a pure bath of sunlight.
If I stand among them, I can see right up through the first floor above and the roof: an
ellipse of sky has emerged eye-like among the rafters, light flooding through the gap
onto my upturned face. The rest of the room sits in darkness.

In the kitchen I find a rusted can of pears,
teeming with ants searching for an opening. I remember my mother leaving a host of food
in the larder – a seal of her ownership, perhaps, or of her will to return.

With difficulty, I cross the field opposite
the parsonage, stamping down great swathes of grass to forge a path back to the car. To
my right is the empty casket of the church – as weathered by the passing years as my own
body. Despite everything I witnessed there, it is the only building in Imber to harbour
a soul in its ruined frame. It still quietens me when I pass. The bells in the tower are
long gone – looted, melted down and sold, maybe. Or rusting in my mother’s old
garden.

I didn’t take the bell when I moved
out of my mother’s house. Once all hope of going home had been extinguished, she
grew quite attached to it. I could not ask her to give it up. And Tim would not have
understood. He knew about Imber. But he did not ask questions. He was not the kind to
pry: he had a past of his own – women I did not care to know about – that he preferred
to keep to himself. It felt strange, at first, to share a life with someone whose ways
were so different from my own. I had not witnessed his ageing; his face was creased with
unfamiliar folds – singular experiences had ploughed each line. I knew when I married
him that a part of us would always remain a stranger – sharing houses and beds and
weekends but remaining mute about the past. It was what we both wanted. The unknown part
of him reminded me of something I had known before: I liked how he kept things back, how
we agreed, silently, to keep secrets. We married a year after meeting, in 1965. He
loved Alice as his own and that, for me, was enough. Now I only envy
him the way she warms to him, tells him the things that I wish she would tell me. It
seemed so effortless: she took to him so quickly. It made me wonder how, after so many
years of trying, I could have failed to win her over.

I am on my way out of the village now,
retracing my steps past Seagram’s Farm and finding my way back to the car. He will
be expecting me.

The door is opened; I climb inside,
steadying myself on the steering-wheel and not looking back. My hands are ageing by the
day, the skin on the backs coming away loosely from the bone, veins mapping an
ever-starker path to my wrist. I’m still wearing Freda’s band. Then
there’s my wedding band and my engagement ring and my mother’s wedding ring,
which I wear on my other hand.