The Sea Change (32 page)

‘You’ve got no hope of floating
with that lot on!’ Tim cried, when we went swimming in Bournemouth with Alice one
summer and I refused to take them off. He’s right: it can’t be good for you,
carrying a whole life, unlived, in circles around your fingers.

I start the ignition and pull away. The road
lifts me up to the lip of the valley and over the top of West Lavington Down. I pass the
military booth that seals their land like a letter. It is still empty.

As soon as I have passed it I want to turn
back and open the place up again, leaf through its pages and linger indefinitely on its
last word. The car has carried me away with such fluidity that my coming and going seems
as easy as sleep. Last time I came back, there was no car to hush me down the road or
cover over the fissures in my nerves. Instead, we had had to walk across the Downs
behind Bratton before dawn and come in from the north. The only way to reach the village
undetected during the war was by foot; and that was not permitted. A week before he
disappeared, Pete and I set off for the Plain in the early hours. Had
I known where he was taking me, I would not have agreed to go. It was only once we
passed the well near Wadman’s Coppice that I realized we were on military
territory – that he was trying to take me home.

‘Let’s go back, please,’ I
begged.

‘Come on, you’ll enjoy
it.’

‘
Enjoy
it? Do you have any
idea what they’ll have done to the place?’

‘Nothing much will have changed, Vi,
don’t you worry.’ He pressed on ahead of me towards the base of the
valley.

‘What if there are soldiers
around?’ I asked, as he joined the chalk track that led into the village.

‘There won’t be,’ he
replied. ‘It’s not even dawn yet.’

A dense mist had descended, shrouding the
Downs and the tracks so that I couldn’t see Pete if he wandered more than a few
yards ahead of me. The fog ebbed and flowed in front of us like a giant tide and I began
to notice the ways in which the army had laid claim to the land. Battered tanks pierced
the haze like aged rocks; signs denoting ‘unexploded military debris’
confronted us suddenly from inside the fog’s folds. Pete wavered off the path for
a moment to examine an overturned tank, sullen and rusting among the dewed grass. He
threw a kick at it and the sound bounced from Down to Down. If it wasn’t for the
echo, I wouldn’t have known that the hills were there.

As we joined the neck of the valley, a new
body of fog enveloped us. Murmurs of light had entered the sky by now, purifying the
mist into a receding veil of white.

The first building that we came to was the
Bell Inn, its faded sign fanning the mist on its hinges. The inside was little more than
a carcass – a series of hollow caverns stripped bare of their bottles and glasses,
tables and chairs, harbouring instead darkened air and gun cartridges. Holes blossomed
like moles in the brickwork, letting in the moonlight in pencil-straight shafts. Pete
bent down
and picked up a cartridge from where the bar would have
been; it lay as rigid as a dead finger in his open palm.

‘Would you look at that, Vi!
It’s the cartridges they use in their Number Fours!’

He uttered these last words with such
vibrancy that I had to turn away. I couldn’t fathom how he could stare at the
rifled fragments of his old home with the same indifference that he afforded to dead
cattle or a storm-ravaged barn.

I followed him onwards into the village.
They had built a metal blockade around Imber Court, so tall that we had to clamber onto
a stack of barrels to see inside the grounds. I wanted to vomit. The house had been
boarded up with copper-green shutters and a matching roof so that it resembled a face
whose features had been gouged out and bandaged. The front lawn was now asphyxiated
under a thick layer of concrete and a sign had been stitched to the side of the house:
Nothing of value is kept inside this building
. Only remembrances perhaps,
and a life still-born. I could think of nothing but our parsonage and the church and how
it would be better for a bomb to have fallen on them than for them to suffer the same
slow rape as Imber Court.

Pete jumped down from the barrels and broke
into a whistle, carrying on past me towards the church. I stayed where I was. The rest
of Imber was hidden from my view by the thickened copse flanking the right side of the
Court. ‘I can’t carry on. I’m sorry,’ I called across to him,
unable to inject enough strength into my voice for him to hear me. ‘I’ll see
you back at Bratton.’

I turned, but was stopped in my tracks by
the sound of air being released from a bottle, only louder and more pressured. A red
flare inked through the mist’s capillaries and spread like blood through the fog.
It drifted towards me, dissipating into flesh pink. They were here.

‘Pete!’ I called, in a thick
whisper. ‘Pete!’

Swallowing my fear, I ran back to the
village, skirting the
edge of the copse in case I needed to hide. I
couldn’t find him in the fog. Perhaps he hadn’t seen the flare. The sun
inched further up into the sky and gained strength. The mist thinned. Soon our cover
would be gone. I could see the church tower now, the air around it still tinged scarlet
from the flare. Then the gunfire started: it barked its way from one side of the valley
to the other, producing so many echoes that it was impossible to distinguish the
original sounds from their offspring. A sudden flash lit the mist. I heard the shuffle
of feet and buried myself in the trees.

There was a break in the firing. A slow
droning sound seeped from somewhere beyond the church, like a tractor, only deeper. The
growl carved into the silence, stalking the Plain like an injured beast.

‘Violet! Psst!’

I slipped from the wood to see Pete
scurrying down the track towards me.

‘They’ve got three Shermans and
about fifty men – that’s just the ones I can see! Come and look!’

‘Pete!’ I cried. ‘Please
take me back!’

‘But it’s too good to
miss!’

‘Good?’ I echoed. ‘What do
you know about good?’

He took hold of my hand and bolted towards
the church. I resisted, but the strength of his grip forced me into following. Pulling
me into a bush, he caught his breath and then peered eagerly out at the Plain. The fog
began to part. I thought of the rising folds of a theatre curtain – the pattern made by
a receding wave.

Then it began. In full. Boots thudded on
chalk. Gunfire rebounded between walls. A shell was fired in the direction of the
parsonage. Smoke billowed. Soldiers ran. A boy – no older than twenty – snared his leg
in wire outside the school. I imagined him bleating, a flailing lamb caught on a fence.
There was a smashing sound. I looked up as a soldier put his elbow
through the glass of Mrs Mitchell’s upstairs window and aimed his gun downwind.
I thought of the laundry press – her pride and joy – broken and in pieces on the
floor.

Before he’d left, Sam had told me
there were ghosts here, hidden in the hearth of every house. He said the Yanks drew lots
to decide who would keep guard and sent the others to sleep rough on the Plain, so
perturbed were they by the voices they heard in the cottages. He talked of words –
chalk-white – that appeared on the ruined walls in the morning, words listing the
purpose of each room – ‘Pantry’, ‘Larder’,
‘Bedroom’, ‘Hall’ – as if staking a claim to them again. He did
not know that the ghosts he believed in were of the living, breathing kind.

‘I can’t watch,’ I cried
to Pete, leaving him in the bush and stumbling away in the first direction I could think
of. I ran as fast as I could to the track that led to Coombe Hill. He didn’t come
after me. But I could feel his eyes on my back. I didn’t know it at the time but
things would never be the same between us, just as Imber would never take on the same
shape in my mind. Unknown to me, it was the last time I could fool myself into thinking
that this place – and that boy – were mine.

Perhaps it would have been different if I
had gone there with Mama, or even Freda. Pete was too enamoured of the guns and shells
and bullet holes to see what had been taken from us. To him it was just broken
stone.

I kept thinking of Father, of how his grave
had witnessed these assaults day in day out, how he had watched as stray shells embedded
themselves in the thatch and bit through wall after wall. Even if we were allowed to
return, there would be nothing left to inhabit. We had lulled ourselves into thinking we
could mend things. But it wasn’t merely a case of damp and rain, floods and
storms. Now there was the damage of an entire army to contend with.

And there were other ruins – gifts of the
war – that had different shapes. A daughter, a husband, a marriage, a home: there
was nothing the war couldn’t invade or appropriate as its
own.

The White Horse tattooed into the chalk skin
of Westbury Hill met me as I emerged at Bratton. Gunfire continued to stutter across the
Downs. I curled up in the nook of the horse’s hoof and felt the dawn roll in
behind me, sleep arriving just as the sun began to whiten the horse and bleach its mane.
The light brought rest and, with it, the thinnest of dreams. The horse gained breath and
a kick in its feet and galloped away without me. Its flat shadow skimmed like a
travelling cloud across the length of Salisbury Plain. And, with a shake of its mane, it
quilted the ruins of Imber in an ashen layer of dust.

Years later, when I took her up the hill to
that same horse, she complained about the walk. The view at the top silenced her, as
I’d known it would. We sat in its eye and she said she could see all of England.
The berries we picked from the bushes on the way up darkened our fingertips; we licked
them so that they turned from dusk black to dawn purple. She asked about her father. And
for once I managed to meet her eye and tell her what I could. I was happy. I felt brave
for having brushed against the truth. There is something about seeing England from a
height – years of buying and selling, growing and reaping mapped across the fields –
that makes the past easier to understand. I told her I’d loved him and that
he’d left of his own accord. There was nothing else I could say. She could not
know, at that age, that her mother was as much to blame.

The village sinks back into the valley. In
the rear-view mirror, I can just make out the spire of the church, submerged under the
brow of the hills. The Cortina completes the curves and dips of the firing range,
passing through the unmanned military barrier as if it were perfectly permissible for me
to be there. With Imber behind me, I thread my way back to the suburbs.

Lines of houses with matching doors and
windows duplicate themselves along streets named after flowers. Ours has always been
difficult to distinguish from the others, even after several years of living there. It
is newly built with thin, oblong windows and a garage that juts out at one end. Tim
bought it for practical reasons – the space, the neighbourhood, the short commute.
Returning to it evokes no sense of homecoming. I used to worry about this inertness
until it dissolved into habit and I no longer gave it thought. Alice’s room is at
the front of the house, although I don’t know why I still refer to it as that. All
that is left of her is a couple of boxes of records set down next to the player, a few
clothes she no longer wears hung in the wardrobe and a bed made up with fresh sheets for
when she needs it. On the back of the door is a jaded newspaper cut-out of Joni Mitchell
sitting cross-legged with a guitar, which she has forgotten to take down. We moved into
the house when she was nineteen and she never properly unpacked. Once, when she was in
Salisbury with friends, I discovered a drawing under her bed that she had made. She was
always artistic as a child but I thought she had long since given it up. I tacked it to
the wall, thinking it would make her feel at home. The drawing was of Westminster Abbey
– full of thin, spindly pencil marks: frightening in their
precision.
As I looked more closely, I saw that the Abbey was ruined: roofless and crumbling with
an invasion of creepers scaling the walls. The structure was so convincing, it was as if
she had witnessed its destruction. Staring at it on the wall, I felt something inside me
unravel uncontrollably: for a moment, it was as if she and I shared the same fears. The
pictures were almost spectral – her pencil ghosting the paper with lines that were
sometimes barely visible. It frightened me, yet I did not want to tear my eyes away from
it.

There was another drawing under the bed that
I did not pin to the wall; instead, resisting the urge to screw it up, I folded it into
four and placed it back where I had found it. It was of our house, with its
insubstantial walls and doors, its modern fittings and close-cut lawn: the windows were
glassless and a thickly scrawled darkness reigned in the inner rooms. Here her pencil
had pressed hard into the paper. No ivy, no wild flowers bloomed from the foundations.
The lawn in front of the house was clipped and in order. The roof in the picture
remained in place, as did the bricks, but everything else was vulnerable and hollow.
There was no life inside the walls – just a dark absence.