The Sea Change (35 page)

‘Nothing.’

I stared flatly at him.

‘I can’t. It isn’t up to
me.’

‘Then who is it up to?’

He let out a frustrated sigh and faced the
pavement ahead to avoid my stare.

‘I told Freda about the American. It
was me, all right?’

‘But … I don’t
understand.’

‘She can tell you the rest.
She’s your sister when all’s said and done.’

‘No,’ I intervened.
‘I’m sure it wasn’t just you … Freda said she’d heard
rumours.’

He did not reply. I tested every excuse in
my mind but was left, only, with the certainty of my sister’s accusations.

‘You won’t gain anything taking
my side.’

‘Pete, it’s all right, I – She
had a right to know.’

‘What do I have to say to get you to
stop?’

‘Stop?’ I dropped the weight of
the sack as I spoke. ‘Are you bringing this to an end?’

‘Bringing what to an end? There never
was anything firm. There was no … I never promised anything.’

My breath sparrowed in my throat. I
couldn’t form my words. So I put down the sack and walked away from him, away from
his bags of belongings, back towards his letters, upstairs in the house. I shut myself
in the bedroom and sat on the floor with my back against the bed. Mama had filled the
tin pail with hot water ready for a wash. I did not have long before I was disturbed. I
watched
the steam drift blithely up towards the beams, its whiteness
dissipating somewhere between the floor and the ceiling.

Alice has grown so like Pete in recent
years. I wish he was around to see it. Like him, she keeps her cards close to her chest
– on good days, pretending not to care; on bad days, creating the pretence of love
before pulling the rug from beneath your feet.

When Tim and I first met, long after Pete
had gone, she was a picture of indifference. I would ask what she thought of him and be
met with an evasive shrug of the shoulders. ‘You do what you like, Mum. It’s
your life.’

I tried to explain that I wanted her to like
him, really like him, that it was important to me. But she pushed air through her lips,
flashed the whites of her eyes and, shortly afterwards, asked if she could go to her
room.

I found out after his proposal that it was
Alice who had suggested going shopping for a ring, Alice who had shown him the White
Horse at Westbury, and Alice to whom he broke the news first.

She’ll be the same with James, if she
sticks with him. She won’t ever tell him she loves him but it will escape from her
sometimes, when she thinks he’s not looking. I often wonder whether he and I see
the same things in her. Watching him there in the hospital bed, I want to ask him if she
still sleeps with her arms folded and whether she has grown out of the sulks that she
used to stage if I kept her indoors for too long. I am not afraid to acknowledge now
that he is more familiar with her ways than I am.

‘James,’ I say, without quite
intending to speak. He looks up from his ward bed and frowns, trying to place me for a
moment. Then he stiffens with recognition.

‘You’ve come to tell me
she’s dead, haven’t you?’ he murmurs tautly, fists pushed into the
mattress.

‘No, she’s alive. At least, we
had a telephone call from her.
That was all. She’s still in
Kanyakumari … as far as we know. She won’t leave until she’s found
you.’

‘She’s … My
God … Is she all right?’

‘I don’t know. It was such a
short call. Tim – my husband – spoke to her.’

‘Does she know I’m
here?’

‘No. I came straight from the airport.
I saw your name in the newspaper.’

I move over to the bed now and stand at the
foot.

‘I should never have gone to get
breakfast,’ he whispers, looking past me towards the bed opposite. ‘I should
have stayed. Then we wouldn’t have been separated.’

‘The most important thing is that
you’re both alive.’

I sit down on the mattress and, unsure what
to do next, I reach over and put a hand on his arm. The contact feels like a breach –
for both of us. ‘She’ll be so relieved when she finds out that you’re
all right.’

He turns his head. ‘You’ve no
idea how quickly it came. Masses and masses of it.’ He grips my hand out of
instinct. ‘Everybody’s talking about the wave like there was just
one … but the water just kept on coming. And it wasn’t even
water … It felt like –’ He cuts himself off and pulls away from me.
‘I’m pretty sure I was underneath for … It seemed like minutes –
but it can’t have been. I would have drowned.’

‘How did you get out?’

‘I … I don’t even
know. It took me past a building. Something sharp went into my neck. The water was so
black I didn’t even realize I was bleeding. There was a man who managed to get me
on top of the building somehow … If the helicopter hadn’t come when it
did, I would have bled to death. The doctor told me.’ He straightens his back and
pauses. ‘You must find her, Violet. What if there’s another wave?’

I open my mouth to dismiss the idea and
then, seeing the earnestness in his uninjured eye and the fear married to it, I
keep quiet. If you have been caught by one, it is only reasonable to
fear that you may be caught by another.

‘Please. You’ve got to find
her.’

He doesn’t need to tell me to go. I
ask him where I should look and to describe the places where she is likely to search for
him.

‘They’ve told me about a
lost-and-found board in the marketplace,’ he explains. ‘One of the rescue
workers said they’d put up a missing note for me. He said survivors come and check
it every day for new notes. She’s bound to go there. And try our guesthouse. The
Saravo.’

I stand up and turn to leave but he says
there is something he must tell me before I go. She may not have had the chance to share
the news on the phone but Alice and he are married.

I stare at his hand and imagine a ring on
hers – its meaning fixed. A closed circle.

‘It happened about a week
ago.’

Happened
. He is talking about it as
if it were a freak accident, like the wave. Married to a man I barely know.
You may
do as you wish, but do remember it’s for life.
My mother’s words to
Freda come cantering into my ears. She can be a stubborn, unthinking girl sometimes.

‘I sent a parcel … to Delhi.
Did she –?’ I stop in an attempt to compose myself.

‘Yes, she did.’

I glance at him only once to say, ‘I
must find her,’ and then I turn and walk out of the ward.

Even if, before the wave, they married on
impulse, it will carry more weight now. I think of Pete and the war, Freda and the
arrival of the wave. Things that perhaps would have drifted apart or never touched have
been thrown inseparably together.

I sit on my stone slab and wait for her to
come and find me. There is nowhere left to search. I’m afraid that, if I move, I
will become like a ship looking for its neighbour at night, passing yards from its
target without even realizing it is there.

Hour after hour has sunk before me and there
is no sign of her in the crowd. It is so hot that I want to peel back my skin: sweat
gathers and then settles on me. I find myself wishing for Imber’s breezes.

A woman approaches with a cup of water and
puts a shawl over my head. The cool of her shadow releases me momentarily from the heat.
She passes me the cup and I lift it to my lips. But the silk of the water in my throat
awakens – rather than quenches – my thirst. I pour some on my face, which is dry again
in moments. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper, but she’s already folded herself
into the crowd.

How many hours would James have waited
before getting up and searching again? I can’t help thinking that I have given up
before he would have. She met him at the festival on the Isle of Wight. They had barely
known each other a few weeks but he wasted no time in introducing her to his family –
all cordial and art-loving and as footloose as their son. They have had six homes since
he was a child. Six. London, Jerusalem, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong. The
names alone taste hot and green.

Six homes, stints in Asia and a mother whom
Alice thinks is
just what she ought to be
. When Pete moved towns, it broke my
heart. And yet these people skip from country to country as if they were pieces on a
Monopoly board.

‘I wonder what my dad would have thought
of him,’ she remarked, on the first and only time she brought James home. She
often talked of her father in that way, as if he were dead. I hadn’t the heart to
tell her that he probably wouldn’t have taken the time to form an opinion about
James. Loving Pete was like pouring water into a plugless bath; the thought of him
storing up our affection, or of letting us wallow in his own, was unsustainable.

Freda had always been quick to warn me about
Pete. She saw him for what he was a long time before I did. And sometimes I wonder
whether she made her mistake so that I wouldn’t have to.

After her return to London in the wake of
her falling-out with Mama, we wondered whether she would ever return to us. Granted, the
war was over, but she had been so upset about Sam that we feared she would stay in
London for good. Her telegram announcing her intention to move home came as a surprise
to both of us.

In the August after the war ended, she
arrived in Wiltshire with her silence and spread it throughout the house, just as she
had done with Father’s books. The afternoon of her arrival clenched into evening
and the three of us assembled around the kitchen table for dinner. Mama ladled stew onto
three plates and, after a short grace, entreated us to start eating. Freda and I sat on
one side of the table, my mother on the other. My sister did not eat hers; instead, she
drew patterns in the gravy. We might have grown accustomed to this habit, just as we had
done with her larder raids when Father died, but she had been away for so long that Mama
could not help but appear perturbed.

‘Tell us your news, then,
Freda,’ my mother began, looking down at the untouched vegetables on my
sister’s plate. ‘You mentioned that you had something important to tell us
in your telegram. A reason for coming home.’

Freda swallowed air and glanced at me.

‘I’ve … given notice at
the hospital.’

This was not the news; it was simply the
garnish. I could tell there was more to come.

‘And I’m engaged.’ She
rushed through the words. There was no smile.

‘To whom?’ my mother enquired,
lowering her fork.

‘To Pete,’ she answered.

When I think back to her words and my
reaction, I am overridden by one feeling only: a sense that I had known what was coming
and had always known. Perhaps it is just the way I have remembered it: enhancing the
tell-tale signs of their attachment to each other as a means of protecting myself from
feeling that incision of pain all over again.

‘But how?’ my mother stuttered.
‘He’s in love with Violet!’

‘If he loved Violet, he would have
proposed to her, not me.’ She kept her words flat and plain, as if the logic of
what she had announced was as simple as solving a sum.

‘Freda, I cannot –’ Mama stood
up from her chair and put a hand to her head. ‘You had such high
notions … He’s a farmhand and one year your junior. I don’t
understand.’

‘I was snobbish, Mama, that’s
what.’

‘How could you do this? To your own
sister?’ she choked out. ‘What would your father say?’

A tremor invaded my fingers. I removed them
from the table and dropped them onto my lap so that they could not be seen.

‘If you loved your sister, you would
think twice about such spitefulness!’ She took a breath and hung her head.
‘The fact that you could be so unfeeling towards your own family … You
can’t love him, Freda. I won’t believe it. It’s malice.’

‘Think what you like, Mama. It’s
settled.’

‘Where will you live? What will you
live on? For you shan’t receive a penny from me.’

‘We’re to move to Leconfield.
Pete’s joined the RAF.’

Mama threw up her hands vaguely and turned
towards the
sink. Finally, I felt capable of speech, the words
emerging, lemon-sour, on my tongue.

‘Has he told you he loves you?’
I shifted in my chair and fixed my stare on her.

She did not return it. ‘Of
course.’

‘And do you love him?’

She bowed her head in a vague nod.

‘Then you should marry. I
wouldn’t want to get in the way of his happiness.’

‘Violet!’ exclaimed my mother. I
stood up and tucked my chair under the table. Then I left the kitchen.

‘Well, if Violet won’t defend
herself, I don’t stand a chance of dissuading you,’ hissed my mother, as I
made my way towards the stairs. ‘You can marry him if you like, but do remember
that it’s for life.
Life
, Freda. And that’s a very long time to
hold a grudge.’

Upstairs in the bedroom I longed for a lock
and key. I tried to keep my composure. But I was unable to swallow my hopelessness any
longer. It was all I could do to cry noiselessly into the back of the wardrobe, opening
the doors to hide my face from anyone who might disturb me.