The Sea Change (37 page)

‘You cannot be serious,
Violet!’ exclaimed Mama.

‘They’ve tried everything –
letters to the War Office, pleas to the council. Their only option is to break in at
night.’

‘But I can’t believe you’d
want to subject yourself to such a thing –’

‘Will you come with me?’

‘Certainly not. I know how you feel
about that place – it was you who talked of getting married there, not Freda.’

‘Please, Mama, I’m not asking
you to come for my sake. Father wouldn’t have wanted us to carry on like
this.’

Before Mama knew how to put a stop to it, a
plan had been forged. We were to drive cross-country from Chitterne to avoid the
military barriers, then join the track on Fore Down, which led into Imber. The Reverend
Mr Dalton, from Bratton, was to meet us at the church at just gone ten o’clock at
night, and we had arranged to borrow a car from the landlady at the Pembroke Inn.

Freda put on her wedding clothes before we
left. We did not have any money for a dress and Mama’s had been destroyed by the
damp. Before the war, Freda would have made a fuss about not wearing her own but she had
no grounds for complaint in the circumstances. I asked Annie, who had recently worn her
mother’s dress to marry her officer in Devizes, if she would lend her wedding
clothes to Freda. She refused at first, saying she was not going to play a part in
helping my sister break my heart. But eventually my persistence paid off.

By now, Freda’s stomach had begun to
swell and the dress was not an easy fit. Mama kept silent on the subject but she
must have guessed about the baby. On the night of the wedding, she
threw Pete’s coat over Freda to keep out the cold, eyes lingering on her waist. I
pinned up my hair and masked my face in powder. Mama wore a hat and a frown.

As the car sidled across the Plain, the sky
over Bowls Barrow stuttered like a chessboard between white and black; the army were
firing thunder flashes again. Gunfire could be heard cackling across the Downs. I began
to worry that they might be training in Imber but Pete had received word from one of the
wardens that a practice was taking place on another part of the Plain. Each hill spoke
the gunfire back to its neighbour, like a game of Chinese whispers. These sounds had
become as common as gales during the war, embedding themselves in the fabric of our
valley so that they were as inevitable to us as the wind.

It was difficult terrain – the tracks from
Chitterne were not suited to vehicles and Mama refused to turn on the headlights for
fear of being spotted; we could see barely more than a few feet ahead of us. Shortly
before joining the track at Fore Down, the engine choked and brought us to a halt.

‘Darn!’ whispered Mama, leaping
out of the driver’s seat to turn the crank handle. She tried several times but to
no avail. Pete took over but the car remained taciturn.

‘What did I tell you? I knew it would
struggle off the road,’ she said.

‘We’ll walk,’ said Pete.
‘The church can’t be more than a mile away.’

‘A mile?’ Freda protested.
‘What about my dress?’

We climbed out of the Hillman Minx and I
carried the back of Freda’s dress to prevent it dragging in the mud. Approaching
the village was different from how it had been on my dawn visit with Pete. Having
confronted the ruins once before, I felt drawn back to them, like a moth to a flame,
preferring to arrive and be burnt than turn and be forever cold. The grass beneath our
feet – sodden
with a full day’s rain – inked into our boots and
hems. I lifted Freda’s dress higher off the ground.

Every now and then, the landscape lit up,
lightning white, and we would have half a second to locate the church tower and alter
our direction. Finally Pete stumbled across the fence encircling the church – barbed
wire concertinaed around the rim. He hooked his fingers on to it and rattled it, the
vibrations ricocheting across the Plain.

‘There’s no need,’ Mama
muttered fiercely, ‘for a fence.’

‘I suppose they wanted to protect
it,’ Freda bleated.

‘There’s a hole,’
whispered Pete. ‘I made it last time we were here.’ He nodded in my
direction. Mama transferred her glare from Pete to me, then back again, but refrained
from asking how and why we had returned. Freda frowned at me before smoothing the pleats
in her dress. ‘Follow me,’ Pete murmured.

Locating the hole in the fence, he held open
the gap in the wire with one hand. ‘After you,’ he instructed Freda, guiding
her through. I watched their touch, the way his eyes followed her to the other side.
Once I had made my way through the fence, I saw Mama’s gaze wander across the
grass towards the parsonage. Despite the darkness, I could just make out the shape of
our old home – as barren as a skull – on the other side of the field. Once she became
aware that I was looking at her, she quickly turned her attention back to the fence.

The church stood shipwrecked in the
graveyard. It was shrouded in moss and ivy, its windows as hollow as the craters on the
Plain. We scrambled between the graves, now enveloped in grass and knapweed.
Father’s was on the far side of the church.

Mama took out the key to the vestry from the
pocket of her dress and slotted it into the lock. Then Pete put a shoulder to the oak so
that it groaned open in baritone. My sister started suddenly at a rattle of the fence
behind us but it was only the vicar arriving from Bratton.

The church had always been dark, even in
daylight. But the
ivy had since blocked out the little light that was
left; it had lowered itself over the windows like the slow blink of an eyelid. The lead
frames were so high up on the walls that the sunlight used to enter the nave in shafts,
missing the pews and illuminating instead the paint on the opposite wall. My father
would wonder why they had not built the church on the height of the Plain so that it
could enjoy the sunlight. For a building surrounded by undulating Downs, it was strange
that its architect had shut out the view. And yet a small part of him, he used to say –
the part he carried with him from his childhood – knew why it had been built that way.
Sitting in this small space for hours with the four walls cocooning him, it seemed more
possible to meet the God of the landscape outside. When eventually his eyes became
hungry for the light, for the feel of the chalked wind on his skin, he would emerge from
the church, surprised at how the land exceeded the image he’d had of it in his
mind – at how its creator could sit with him for a moment, like a companion, in a house
built by human hands.

There was no separation between outside and
inside any more. The old patterns of movement and stillness, weekdays and Sundays, of
morning communion and evensong, had ceased to exist; the church stood timeless – an
ancient cliff rebutting the drum of the sea. All that was left was a vast expanse of
time – charted only by the growth of the creepers up the walls. I took a step towards
the altar and disturbed a bird in the roof. It shook like a black rag through the gaping
window and Mama turned to face me from the other end of the aisle. She was calm, not
distraught as I had expected her to be. Maybe she sensed, like I did, that the bricks
and stones were not everything.

Mama saw to Freda’s outfit in the
roofless vestry, smoothing the creases that the fabric had acquired during the walk. She
straightened my sister’s veil and whispered something to her that I could not
hear. Freda seemed to tense. I wondered whether Mama had told her it was not too late to
call it off.

She did not leave. She did not remove her
veil. Instead, she stood before the altar and made her pledge, as erring as the ivy that
moved from pew to pew. I listened with wonder as she took his hand and said that she
would keep him for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in
health, till death parted them. For his sake, I willed it to be true. Pete’s
features were full of the stone that I had seen in them when I’d first met him.
The affection that he had shown by the hole in the fence had vanished: the cold reality
of his duty – a mother and her child – stood, immovable, before him. I knew then that,
for them both, it was not a case of love but of nearly, nearly loving.

Once the vows were complete, Pete approached
the one remaining bell in the tower and I had to call after him to stop him ringing it.
I could not have borne the sound of that solitary knell, its dirge echoing across the
Plain.

Freda lost her veil on the way out of the
church – the wind ripping it clean from her head. We watched it snake over the barbed
wire at the end of the churchyard. Nobody tried to stop it. Not even Pete.

Mama took Freda’s flowers and put them
on my father’s grave. ‘He would have liked to know that his daughter’s
wedding was in Imber,’ she murmured, tugging at the weeds around his
headstone.

‘There’s no such place,’ I
replied.

Dusk comes. The sun slips, like a coin from
a pocket, out of the sky and into someone else’s morning. It is unfathomably dark.
Somebody rigs up a lantern by the lost-and-found board where it bores a hole through the
blackness. Crowds disperse and people in search of sleep crawl under scraps of metal or
overturned cars, or scuttle away up the hill.

I pick up my suitcase, full of Alice’s
things, and plant it next to the lantern. Sitting just outside its glow, I watch the
filament lure in finger-length dragon flies and other fist-sized bugs. They tether
themselves to its yellow stain and butt blithely against the glass, always an inch away
from settling into its impossible scorch.

At last I am free of the heat, and the cool
of the evening settles on my skin. How many more nights will I spend like this, in the
open air with no shelter, waiting for my daughter to come back to me? Right now, I could
spend a million, anything to be away from the day with its sun and crowds and corpses.
The dead are still here, lining the square. But, hidden as they are in the darkness, I
can forget about them. They are not my own after all; and here, you must blot from your
memory anything that is not your own.

I think of Freda, as unburied as those
bodies, despite the grave we gave her. Mama wanted her to be laid to rest in Imber. But
I could not bring myself to place her in another’s tomb. So much had died there.
We hardly needed to add to its toll.

I should have known that, like Imber, there
would be no easy way of forgetting her – that Alice would grow into her likeness, not my
own. I wish, for Alice’s sake, that Freda had
been happier with
Pete. Perhaps then I would have passed on the truth to their daughter more easily. Wars
begin and end. Things clash. And there are a thousand other beginnings and endings in
between – things that, perhaps, would never have come into being, or simply would have
carried on existing, untouched. Maybe, if Alice had come later when love had been given
the chance to take root, events might have unfurled differently. But Pete knew from the
onset that he had never had Freda’s heart, just as I knew I lacked his. When his
mother sent for him again in London, telling him she was sick and in need of his care,
he deserted my sister – it was no life for her, with her fancy things and her unborn
baby. He took his mother and her daughter to live with him in Leconfield and left Freda
behind. She might have gone with him, if he had asked, but he didn’t. He chose his
mother over her – a single, barren act of loyalty.

After she died, I raised Alice as my own, as
he had told me to do in his letter. But I knew I would have done the same, regardless of
whether or not he had written. So many mistakes had come together to form her, and yet,
when I held her, it was as if they could all be undone.

Sleep comes to me in the marketplace. Only a
thin layer but I give in to it. The lantern flickers between itself and my vision of it
until I don’t know which is real. The sea unravels on the beach ahead, then rolls
itself up again, inhaling whenever I inhale and breathing its rhythm into my dreams.

Just then, in the corner of the square, the
darkness is disturbed by somebody else’s light. A white orb sways in time with
their step, growing from a pinprick into a cat’s eye until it is the size of an
apple. Closer and closer come the steps, the sea ssshing beneath their staccato.

Soon they adopt a shape and, once in range
of my lantern, collect features and, finally, a face.

‘Alice?’ I test through the
darkness.

‘Who’s that?’ The shadow
flinches back. I bend into the glow of the lantern and the torch is dropped. It falls
and rolls and draws an arc in the dirt, like a needle spinning inside a compass.

What is the difference between an ocean and
a sea? Where does one start and the other end? If you were to find the exact point – a
hairline crack in the surface of the water running all the way down between the two –
would you see any contrast between them? A variation in the colour or texture or
thickness, perhaps?