Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  ‘It has a lovely smell in here,’ she says to him, quietly, ‘of wood and oil.’

  ‘What’s with the maps of America?’ Rhona asks, suddenly.

  ‘Oh, they’re nothing,’ Guy says, ‘just something I’m working on.’

  Guy sees his working area of the saloon for what it is - covered with road maps of the southern states, travel guides and city plans and, at the same time that Rhona spies it, his open diary.

  ‘What are you writing?’

  ‘It’s a - story, I guess.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Rhona closes the book, politely. ‘Couldn’t help noticing the word “doughnuts”,’ she says, cheekily.

  ‘Stop playing your games, Ro,’ Marta says, sharply.

  ‘Ah - I’m teasing,’ Rhona replies wearily, as Guy hears himself saying, ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Well don’t,’ Marta says, keeping her harsh tone. But Rhona’s already moved on, she’s in an odd mood, pulling their attention to the piano at the end of the room.

  ‘I had it bolted to the floor,’ Guy explains, wondering if he’s facing some kind of interview here. ‘It was best there because of the weight.’ He offers them drinks and Marta comes to stand by him at the galley, leaning against the worktop, looking shy and tired. Judy used to do that, he remembers, Judy loved to lean against a worktop and pour out her mind while Guy made tea or coffee around her. She wouldn’t even move to give him space - it was one of their domestic routines - Judy on stage even in the kitchen, making him laugh with her deliberately cruel gossip about all she’d done that day while he smiled privately to himself. Secure. Half a couple. At least, that’s how he looked back on it now.

  ‘What did you do today?’ he asks Marta.

  ‘We had a walk, and a long discussion about the future.’ She rolls her eyes, in mock exasperation. Her eyebrows remain raised, questioning. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A bird,’ he says, ‘have a look.’ He lifts the flaps of the cardboard box so she can glimpse the greenfinch. ‘I found it floating in the sea,’ he says, ‘about fifteen miles offshore.’

  ‘It’s alive?’

  ‘Only just. Half-drowned really. But every time I try to let it go it looks more dead than before. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘You must give it time.’ She looks into the box thoughtfully. ‘I’m glad you were there, to save it.’

  ‘Me too,’ he says. ‘It’s a greenfinch.’

  ‘Mind if I play something?’ Rhona asks, a little annoyed that she’s being ignored.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he says, ‘I didn’t know you played.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Rhona begins to play the TV theme from White Horses. Marta smiles. ‘I taught her this,’ she says, a little reflectively. It’s a sweet tune, and Rhona plays it with surprising concentration, her bottom lip slightly drawn in as she remembers the notes. Even the tiny breaks and halts - when she reaches and resets her hands seem to emphasize the poignancy of the song.

  ‘I thought you’d forgotten this,’ Marta whispers, more to herself than anyone, and Guy studies his two guests - a mother looking at a daughter, both of them remembering a tune they’ve learned together, a tune that no doubt bound them many years ago and still, years later, a thing they cherish. He remembers his own mother - how she used to sit on a stool on the far side of the room while he played the piano. How her expression was like a pleasant dream she was remembering. It used to annoy and bewilder him, but now he’s thankful for her moments of reflection. He’s discovered them for himself, and through it a new understanding of his mother. Women are less of a mystery to him than they once were.

  If only he’d managed to tell his mother that. She had died when he had just turned twenty-one. She died the way she had lived, without fuss, from a bronchial pneumonia brought on after a Christmas cold. East Anglia’s notorious winter dampness had claimed her, and even as Guy travelled up on the train from London, having dropped out of music college in his second year, he had pictured himself in a dreary provincial funeral parlour, wrestling with the business of form-filling, wearing a suit he was uncomfortable in, every inch the man he must now become. But his mother’s funeral had been surprising, because it had been full of people he’d never met. Women hugged him, chatty, able women who met life head-on, and in all of them he saw shades of his mother. Shades he’d never quite acknowledged in her. Of resourcefulness, of faith. After all that time he realized she’d been liked, and was popular. It was just one of the many surprises he’d had; like the discovery that his mother had once been an accomplished tennis player, that she’d sold paintings at local fairs, that she’d been a visitor to the sick for many years. Guy rapidly had to replace the image he’d had of her - the one where she accepted hardship with a kind of dreamy resignation - to this new expansive and generous woman. He hardly recognized her. And sometimes he thinks he learned more about her after she had died, than he ever did when she’d been alive.

  ‘You’ll make me cry, Rhona,’ Marta says, listening to the piano.

  He’s never played the theme tune to White Horses, but he mentally pictures the notes now, as they step down the treble stave, while the bass rises up to catch them, a head coming to rest on a pillow, he lets the music affect him, he feels its romantic persuasion, and he begins to gaze at Rhona, at the tightness in her neck and shoulders but the casual way her legs are bent on the piano stool, one shin tucked round the leg of the stool with the foot angled to the side. Blackcherry nail varnish on his keys. Her back, a shallow S shape, the breaths she takes nervously, endearingly, when the little bar-shape of a rest appears in the tune.

  ‘How am I doing, teacher?’ Rhona says, slowly. It looks like the kilt’s been customized to make it shorter.

  ‘Fine, just fine,’ he says, wanting to give it away, there and then, just how gorgeous she appears, how, in that brief moment, he wishes he was alone with her, that this glowing young woman had come by herself, playing piano, then leading him, in this subtle or not so subtle performance, towards the cabin behind the wheelhouse.

  Just to think - three days ago he was swimming off into the North Sea, suspended on that perilously taut line of nothingness between water and sky. But here - here he’s out of his depth. In this shallow estuary, a sea and a river pressed in by a soft land, now pressed further by this feeling of company. Companionship, attraction, it raises things he’s lost, it makes him more lonely in fact, he wants them to leave and to leave himself.

  But just then a new sound mixes in with the music. A clattering of rain falling on to the pitched roof-lights. They watch the storm from the wheelhouse. The leading edge of the clouds has brought a wild wind, sending the rain to hit like gravel against the windows and, across the water, the lead-grey estuary gets a pitted texture as if it’s boiling from underneath. For a quarter of a mile on either side the shores are shadowed and immobile and a kind of steam seems to be rising from the banks.

  All three of them look on in awe at the estuary as parts of it vanish in shadow and then begin to re-emerge, and at the darkness of the trees on shore, weathering it out. There’s a flash of sheet lightning, just the once, illuminating the view. The impression it leaves is of a large flat expanse of water, the deck of his boat in the foreground, the masts of other dinghies, and the fringes of marsh, reed banks and trees, all, reduced momentarily to the colour of bone.

  Guy looks at Marta and sees her in profile - a slight upturn to her nose, a lack of Englishness there, he thinks. She’s looking at a fisherman sitting at the back of his cuddy, moored half-way across the water. Guy’s noticed this fisherman before - he seems to have been in the same position since Guy arrived, dressed in his oilskins, staring at the tip of his rod.

  When the storm subsides, they go out on deck, smelling the wet wood and the rising vegetable stink of the estuary and the smell of iron in the air. The rain drips from the scuppers in thin streams all round them. Across the water, people are emerging from where they’ve been sheltering, and Guy wonders briefly how he and the othe
rs must appear, at distance. He has the feeling that for the first time in five years, he is part of a little group that could loosely resemble a family. Marta, standing by his side, the place a wife would naturally fill, within his circle, tall, like him, a slow thoughtful way when she walks which is similar to his own. Maybe they feel it too, Guy wonders. He looks every inch a possible father, a possible husband, once again. Yet he seems curiously in the middle of these two women, their ages are ten-to-fifteen years either side of him, and someone on shore might have to consider this when putting together the family ties: is he a younger husband to one, or an older boyfriend to the other?

  It’s not what Guy had intended when he motored out of the Blackwater estuary four days ago, bumping his way between the sandbanks. He’d been heading out to sea, where waves might have risen to shake him, where you can really face the things you spent the rest of your life avoiding.

  A muffled noise interrupts his train of thought. Next to him is Marta, sitting on the wet roof of the saloon, looking towards the Lora. He sees her in detail - the faint weave of crows-feet by the side of her eye, the lines of a laughter he hasn’t really seen in her yet, and her lower eyelid, which is tender in shape, and wet. He realizes that small noise had come from her - it had been a cry, of sorts. There’s a mark on her cheek where a tear has braved it out in this enormous view of wetness. To the side of her nose he can see the fleshless skin of worry. Her face looks like it may have thinned with age, her mouth was probably wider twenty years ago, had more expression, was better exercised. Maybe we have fewer expressions, each year, or just new ones that reveal less?

  Another tear begins to form, filling the curve of her eye, and he wonders how he should console her. Should he put his arm round her? But she interrupts his thoughts.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she says, ‘don’t worry,’ and she glances at him, raising her jaw in self-control. ‘It’s just that boat, that’s all.’

  ‘OK,’ he says. It begins to rain again, softly.

  She sits still for a while, her head angled as if she’s seeing something dawn for the first time. It’s such a powerfully preoccupied expression that he actually looks toward the Lora himself, as if there might be something he’s missed.

  ‘You should keep out of the rain,’ he says, quietly. He thinks she might not have heard.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I must keep out of the rain.’ And with that she gets up and walks slowly to where her daughter is, at the front of the barge. He watches them. Sees Rhona touch her mother’s cheek and then put an arm round her.

  Guy sighs. He goes to the wheelhouse and sits in his pilot’s chair. Captain of nothing, he thinks, sipping the iced tea he’d prepared, thinking the afternoon would stay sunny.

  He closes his eyes and immediately pictures Freya. She’s sitting on his lap in front of the piano, hitting the keys with both hands. She’s three years old and the piano’s in the corner of the living-room and there’s a fire lit in the grate and there’s a sound of rain in the garden outside. Dampness and smoke and cold keys and a hot fire, it’s the essence of East Anglia, and Freya’s whacking the piano so hard her fingers have a slapped look.

  ‘Like this,’ he says, holding her hands in his and pushing one finger at a time on to the keys. How her finger bends and slips on each note but he gets a tune, nonetheless, and Freya goes limp in his embrace while the tune emerges, his tune, but played by her. She angles her head, watching how it’s made and he smells the woody smell of her hair and the warm cotton of her collar. Then she pulls her hands out of his and twists in his grip and looks at him, shyly, telling him off, mimicking a teacher as she says I like your tune, Daddy, but my tune is better, and the smile breaks out across her face - he sees the thin row of her milk teeth and the way the smile makes a single crease in her cheeks, and the tiny pink triangle of skin at the very corner of her eyes, he’s sure he’s never quite noticed that detail before.

  Then Freya blurs as she whacks the piano keys once more, knocking hell out of them and he laughs, really laughs. Judy comes into the room and she says What a racket and, although she’s joking, Freya immediately calms down and the moment is gone. And then so is Judy, back to whatever chore she was doing, and Freya wants to watch the telly now. She climbs off his lap, saying You need to practise more to him, an echo of the moment they had, the moment that is now lost, and Guy looks out through the wintry window at his garden in the rain.

  Guy becomes aware that Rhona has joined him in the wheelhouse. She’s sitting on the padded bench by the sliding door.

  ‘Mum’s upset,’ she says.

  Guy turns to face her, wondering how long she’s been watching him. She has her sketchbook open on her lap.

  ‘She wanted me to say sorry to you,’ she says. ‘She’ll be OK.’

  Rhona sits next to him, and on impulse has a swig of his iced tea. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and sniffs loudly. She smells of damp hair and shampoo.

  ‘She’s very sensitive, isn’t she,’ he says.

  ‘Very.’

  He picks up her sketchbook. ‘May I?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  He looks through the pages. Suffolk churches and Martello towers, saltmarsh plants, staithe posts and wading birds, the occasional seal, drawn comically with big eyelashes, and more interesting, sketches of Marta, illuminating the boat-bound side to these two he knows so little about.

  Then a final few sketches with a starkly different theme: Rhona naked, in frank self-portrait, in the saloon of the Lora. The first has her reclined, one arm trailing along the back of the bench seat while her left leg angles provocatively to one side. An indecent view, in detail, between her legs, and Guy feels challenged, not just by the open-eyed expression in the picture, but by Rhona there by his side, watching him watching her. He’s aware of her mouth, drawn tight, close by.

  ‘You did these today?’ he says, calmly.

  ‘This afternoon.’

  ‘Very revealing,’ he quips, looking at two more sketches, just of her breasts this time, darkly shaded around the nipples.

  Rhona leans forward. ‘I like those,’ she says, cheekily. ‘Do you?’

  ‘You’re quite a tease, aren’t you?’

  ‘My finest feature.’

  He closes the book. ‘I like the Suffolk churches,’ he says, with a smile, not quite managing to shake the fantasy he’d had of her, while she played the piano, of taking her to his cabin.

  Rhona reaches for a hipflask from her bag. ‘You mind?’ she says, in a slightly challenging tone. It’s clearly a secret from her mother. She takes a long deep swig from it, and puts it back in her bag. ‘Rum,’ she says, popping a mint into her mouth to mask the smell.

  ‘Are you married?’ Rhona asks.

  ‘Why d’you ask?’

  She’s being casual, but there’s a hint of a natural flirtation too. ‘Most men your age are hitched.’

  ‘Just how old do you think I am?’

  ‘You could look younger, if you cared more.’

  ‘I’m separated,’ he says, hating the word and its association with failure. Of damaged goods.

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘Yes. It does.’

  ‘Any children?’

  That’s the question Guy dreads, in fact, has dreaded every time it’s been asked in the last five years. Any children? Yes, but no. What can he say? How can he possibly answer this? That he has a father’s heart, but that he isn’t a father any more? Being a father is complicated, it can’t be so easily undone. There’s a reason there’s no word for when you are a father no more.

  ‘No. I don’t,’ he says, with a helpless sense of betrayal against Freya, whose presence he still feels hauntingly by his side. Rhona looks at him watchfully, she’s picked up on something, but this time doesn’t pursue it.

  ‘I always pry,’ she says, humorously, ‘it’s one of my things.’

  ‘And what about you? Are you with anyone?’

  She laughs. ‘I’m with my mother, stupid.’<
br />
  ‘You know what I mean.’

  She smiles widely, revealing a clean white row of teeth. A beautiful barrier. She’s very attractive. ‘Thanks for the iced tea,’ she says, before getting up and leaving the wheelhouse.

  As she crosses the deck to her mother, Guy notices, ruefully, that he’s checking her figure. The small grey kilt seems to reveal more than it hides, or at least promises that. She has smooth-skinned legs and thin ankles. Two half-moons of dryness on the backs of her heels - skin that would soften up over the winter. A lightness to her walk he’s long since lost. Her back tapers gracefully. She probably knows it too. He sees the faint knuckles of her spine as she bends to climb the saloon roof, and between the shoulder blades, there’s the smallest glisten of sweat. The hair is lovely, he thinks, the way those brown curls - coppery in this after-storm light - hang spring-like on her shoulders, making their own little patterns of shade across her back. Oh boy. He’s decided: once that tide rises, he should go.

  Position: Waiting for the tide. At the desk. Late.

  Georgia has surprised him, it’s so wooded. As soon as the hills started it had reminded him of England, Northern England, with a smell of dampness and soil which felt comforting and old, like the smell of an overgrown garden. The air had cooled as they wound their way into the mountains, and the trees became thicker, taller, closer to the road, with rocky outcrops tumbling down to the verge.

  After it went dark he couldn’t see how high these hills were, couldn’t see any of the landscape they drove through, in fact, just a winding road that seemed to go ever upwards, ever turning, a smooth surface as if newly poured through the mountains. And it had started to rain, heavily, making him put the wipers on full and take the corners more carefully. The rain thundered on the roof of the car and down the windscreen, washing away the super-sized Floridian insects that had met their death there, and the rain mixed with the busy rushing sound of passing streams and rivers, somewhere in the dark, in tight narrow valleys, running alongside the road.