The Sea Change (33 page)

Her drawing of our house coloured my view of
it irrevocably – so much so that when I approach the drive now I can no longer discern
whether the drawing caused my ill-feeling towards it or simply brought to the surface
something that was already there. I reverse the car onto the drive, turn off the engine
and breathe out. Tim is coming out of the front door. He’s running. He never
runs.

‘Get out,’ he mouths, through
the glass, pulling at the locked car door with one hand. He’s sweating.
‘It’s Alice.’ He takes my arm as I step out and guides me towards the
front door. ‘It’s Alice. She’s in trouble.’

We’re inside the house now. I try to
ask what he means but the words won’t arrange themselves in the right order.
‘She’s in Kanyakumari, Vi. Tamil Nadu.’ He pushes the name out as if I
should know it.

‘Kanyakumari …’ I scramble
around for a recollection of the word. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The tidal wave on the news. It hit
India,’ Tim answers, ‘and Alice is there.’

‘But …’ I think of the
television report – how we had heard about the vanishing of a whole town, without a
thought for our daughter.

‘She telephoned just before you got
here. Thank God she’s okay but we need to get her out. She’s refusing to
leave until she’s found James.’

‘James?’

‘James, her boyfriend. You met him,
remember?’ He points to the home-sweet-home heart that hangs above the sink.

‘Of – of course.’ I frown.
‘Her boyfriend.’

‘What do we do?’

I want him to be quiet with his questions.
She’s halfway across the world and she hasn’t spoken to me in more than six
months. I can’t even think of where to begin.

‘But we’ve no way of contacting
her. No number, no nothing.’ It is as if he’s objecting to a suggestion I
have made. I keep silent.

‘There must be a flight we can book
for her …’

I tell him that she won’t get on a
flight if James is still missing, that we need to go and fetch her.

He mutters under his breath.
She could
be anywhere
.

‘You stay. I’ll go,’ I
say.

‘Are you sure that’s wise given
– Maybe we should go together, darling.’

‘One of us has to stay. In case she
tries to get in touch again.’ I’m insistent now, my voice stiffening.

‘Yes, but –’

‘I can do it, Tim. I have to.
I’ll be okay, I promise.’

He says he’ll call to see when the
next flight is and tells me to start packing. We clasp each other tautly for a moment,
but there isn’t enough time. He doesn’t even know where I’ve been
today. But I can hardly explain now. He reaches for the phone and
dials Directory Enquiries. I leave the kitchen and climb the stairs two at a time,
fumbling under the bed for a suitcase and filling it with whatever comes to mind. In all
my life, I’ve gone no further than London. The only time that I have packed a full
suitcase is to move a few miles away – from Imber to Wilton, then out of my
mother’s house and into Tim’s. And now, instead of unstitching myself slowly
from this place, I am leaving with one swift rip. Tim must think I’m mad;
he’s stayed tethered to me all this time, travelling the country with his job,
making sure everybody can still turn their lights on. And I, all the while, have folded
myself away into my own peculiar shade of darkness.

How do I even begin to fill a suitcase? And
what will she need? Not me; she doesn’t need me.

Inside her bedroom, the walls are bare. The
drawing of Westminster Abbey is long gone: when she came back to find the picture on the
wall, she was furious with me. She kept her drawings hidden after that; I never saw them
again. The room became gradually sparser – as if, out of spite, she were removing
herself a fragment at a time.

There is a box of records by her bed, some
in their sleeves, others propped up, scratched and naked, next to the player. Inside the
wardrobe, I push past a sun-bleached gypsy skirt and retrieve a few T-shirts and a pair
of bell bottoms; the sensible trousers that I insisted on buying her are nowhere to be
seen. In spite of the tidal wave, I’ll probably have picked the wrong things. I
can picture us now, in the wake of the wave, arguing about the outfit I have packed.
When she was born, I couldn’t help myself, she was the most delicate thing I had
ever held. But as she grew, she became more and more like her father, flitting from
place to place, person to person, never quite able to settle. She told me I spoilt
everything, pulled her back, tied her down; if her father was around, she said, he
wouldn’t put up with it; he wouldn’t put up with me. She was all I had left
of him. It was no wonder I held on too tightly.

A few weeks ago, in a moment of rashness, I
had bundled his letters into a parcel and posted them to her in Delhi. It left me
swollen – letting go of secrets that I had stored still-born inside me all these years.
And yet I had acted out of cowardice. I did not have the courage to tell her to her
face.

His last letter – which I had placed at the
top of the box – contained everything she needed to know. Rereading it for the first
time in years, I had felt its bite as if it were written yesterday. I wonder, now,
whether she has felt it too – whether she has understood why I acted in the manner that
I did. To her, he’s just a ghost. And it took everything in me to give flesh and
bones to what he had done. I don’t know if she has received any of my letters
along the way – the ones I sent to Istanbul, Tehran and Lahore; she could have passed
through Delhi oblivious to it all. She and James were due home soon and I had wondered
for a while if they had received my parcel. It was always my fear that in sharing this
clot, this marker, of things I couldn’t undo, I would lose her for ever:

Dear Violet,

I learnt of Freda’s death yesterday. Mrs Archam sent word. There is
nothing I can say to comfort you. To tell you I’m grieving would only
break your heart and to say that I am sorry for your loss falls short of what
you must feel.

Mrs Archam has told me of all you intend to do. Had I never known you, such
selflessness would have left me aghast. But I have come to expect nothing
less.

I will not waste ink over an apology that I know you will rebuff as untruthful.
I can’t recover what I ruined any more than you can rebuild Imber. But you
must know that I did care for you. I ask you to raise her as your own. She is
what I would have given you, had I been a better man.

Your Pete

He had penned the letter himself – I was
familiar with the handwriting. Yet the unfamiliar script on the front of the envelope
and the turn of phrase in his sentences had made me suspect that he had written it under
duress; that somebody else had posted it on his behalf. No doubt his major – or some
other discerning officer to whom he had confessed his past – had insisted upon him
writing to me directly.

I received it a week after my sister’s
funeral. Mama was not there when I opened it but Alice was. She was bawling and bawling
because, unlike Freda’s, my chest was milkless and we had only condensed milk with
which to feed her. When the post arrived, I put her in her cot and opened the letter in
the hall. I hadn’t recognized the hand on the envelope so Pete’s words came
as a shock. I had to steady myself on the banister and sit for a moment on the bottom
stair. We had long since given up hope of hearing from him and this was hardly the
letter we would have wished for. We would have welcomed any pledge of support, however
small and detached: anything to make us believe that he intended to do his duty. He had
a military salary now and, although humble, it was more than Mama and I could ever
muster. But to Pete – the boy so keen to shed Imber – we were still the family of a
parson; he was under no obligation to provide for those whose status and standing he
perceived to be above his own.

But you must know that I did care for
you.
She cried in her cot while I sat blankly on the stair; her tears were not
enough for the two of us.

Mama came home to find me still perched
there. She took the letter from me and, after reading it once, put it away in a drawer.
Unlike me, she thought better of returning to it.

By the time Alice was older, Mama and I had
boxed up all of our wounds, thinking it better not to burden each other with the scars
that we believed we should have long since overcome. A war never leaves you, my mother
would say; only I knew it
was not the war that she was talking about.
And even if we had wanted to talk, it was not as if Alice would have been the one to
listen. She cared nothing for the past, only the day that lay before her. Mama
understood her better than I did: ‘Give her a little air,’ she warned,
‘a fraction more air.’

I wasn’t going to let her go to India.
But I knew it was what my mother would have wanted. So I sat Alice down and gave her my
permission, pretending I had a say in the matter. I know now that she would have left no
matter what authority I claimed to have.

‘Don’t take it to heart,’
was Tim’s advice when she told him – not me – that if she needed anything she
would get in touch. She made her own way to the station. The house moved invisibly from
one kind of hollowness to another. It was all right for Tim: he wasn’t her father.
He could treat her with the nonchalance she required. It was no surprise that she liked
him more than she did me.

I take a few more of her clothes down from
their hangers. Suitcase zipped, I carry it downstairs to where Tim is waiting at the
front door.

‘She asked for you, you know, when she
rang … You ought to know that,’ he says, taking my bag.

I follow him to the car. If I had stayed at
home, I would not have missed her call. ‘Where did you say I was?’

‘I didn’t. I just said you
weren’t in.’

There’s a pause. I know what he will
ask next.

‘Where were you, exactly?’

‘It doesn’t
matter … Let’s just get to the airport,’ I murmur, eyes fixed on
the road.

I’ve got to push through seventeen
hours of flying, landing and refuelling before I can search for her. On the aeroplane, I
keep my fingers sealed around my passport, shielding the virginity of its blank pages.
The engine heaves us into the sky above London and I watch, wide-eyed, as the streets
and towers and parks shrink into map-like patterns below. Every building and tree seems
suddenly intended; everything appears in its place. I’m gripping the side of my
seat, aware of nothing but a growing volume of air beneath us.

The passengers in my row seem used to the
sensation. They don’t start, as I do, when the plane sinks inexplicably, before
rising again.

‘Is it your first time flying?’
asks my neighbour. He has a burnished face whose tan matches the battered satchel under
his feet. Even his hands look travelled, worn-in.

‘Yes. I apologize, I’m a little
on edge.’

‘Well, you’re throwing yourself
in at the deep end with Delhi, that’s for sure. What takes you to India?’ He
runs his palms down the pressed lines of his linen trousers.

The tannoy cuts in to give us an estimated
time of arrival. But he looks at me expectantly, after the pilot has finished
speaking.

‘So, Delhi.’ He raises his
eyebrows.

‘My daughter … is in
India.’

‘Jolly good. She isn’t with the
Foreign Office by any chance?’

‘No.’

He pauses, waiting for more. When I
don’t speak, he shuffles through the newspaper on his lap. ‘Awful,
isn’t it? About the tidal wave.’ He gestures to a picture on the second
page.

I nod, trying not to look.

‘It’s going to take years to
sort out that mess.’ He points to a monochrome picture of the wreckage.

Raising his eyes from the paper, he frowns
at the sight of me. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you. If
you don’t mind, I might fetch a glass of water.’

‘Just press the button,’ he
says, reaching up and pushing it before I have a chance to object. ‘The air
hostess will come and you can ask her to bring some.’

I sit forward, unable to escape as I had
planned. Outside the window, beneath us, is sea – the troughs and peaks of which could
be mistaken at this height for valleys and mountains. The man flicks his wrists and the
newspaper obeys his command with a ripple. I turn to find him still reading the same
page. My eyes snag for a moment on a name, halfway down the first column.
James
Peak
.

James Peak, a British national, has spoken of the devastation in Kanyakumari
where he was seriously injured before being hauled from the water by a
fisherman. ‘Nobody knew what was happening. The tide came in faster than
anything and just kept on coming.’ Peak is currently undergoing medical
treatment in Trivandrum but, like many others in the hospital, will return to
the wreckage as soon as he has recovered in order to search for loved ones.