Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  But Judy choosing Phil? It doesn’t make sense. After all these years of his support and love. This is how he’s to be repayed?

  He cuts the engine, defeated. To calm himself he tries to remember Judy as she was. His Judy, not the one she has become, full of secrets and unpredictability, but the one he remembers. And the image he has of her is beautiful. She’s surrounded by a soft blue light. But this time she’s not on stage. They’re in a bluebell wood. It’s early spring, and they’re entering the hazel copse - a gentle place full of birdsong and a smell of earth and dust but in this moment, transformed, as it was every year, by the flowers. Together, they walk in the shadows under the slender trees, spellbound by the emerging haze of eerie deep blue that surrounds them, under their feet, rising like a tide.

  They stand, in awe.

  ‘We mustn’t tread on them,’ Judy whispers, her voice already affected by this special place.

  ‘There are more than last year, I think,’ he replies, and he squats on his haunches, to maximize the sight of pure blue above the stems of the flowers. ‘Wow,’ he says, simply, then prefers not to say anything more.

  ‘Guy,’ she whispers, ‘I’m going to write you a song about this place, so we can remember coming here.’ She wanders off, into the maze of flowers, and he sees their colour saturating the air around her. He sees her as a soft object herself, in a suede jacket, with high boots made out of some synthetic fur, a small brown shape moving among the blue. She appears as if she’s weightless, in a dry watery glow that seems to lift her.

  ‘How can this come out of the soil?’ she asks, inspired and amazed. And he remembers it now - the song she wrote:

  I’ll remember you in a soft blue light

  Each year,

  A softened air, arriving

  Never fear

  Blue-bell

  I’ll hold you in a soft blue light

  A petal’s clasp,

  With the birdsong, rising

  Heartbeats last.

  Blue-bell

  That’s his image of her. His perfect image. His life had been without anchor really, till he’d met Judy. Judy who’d stood outside that cabin in Norway letting the drips from the icicles splash on her face, who’d put her whole head into that ridiculous fountain at the Rushcutter’s after their first gig. ‘Promise me we’ll go, Guy,’ she’d said. Across America. ‘OK, I promise,’ he’d replied, and he’d kept that promise to her, in the diary. But now she’s looked back at him in the stolen reflection of a brass coal scuttle, and she’s broken all her promises to him in return.

  There’d be nothing in the bluebell wood now, no sign of the flowers or the plants, the coppice would have an extra absence to it, like looking at a meadow after the fairground has packed up and left. You’d think all that blue would stain the ground, but it never does. Vivid colours never last.

  It’s after midnight when Marta returns, tying her boat to the side, climbing quietly on deck and letting herself into the wheelhouse. Guy’s in his bunk, just about to turn in, when he sees her shadow, long and undecided, being cast across his cabin floor.

  For a moment, Marta stays like that, her shadow coming into his cabin, but not herself. Then she gives a polite knock to the side of the hatch frame and begins to climb down the ladder, afraid to look him in the eye, but unafraid to be entering his room, which seems suddenly very small for them both. She’s holding her plimsolls in one hand, by their laces. Her feet look cold and muddy and have red marks where the shoes have rubbed.

  ‘I’ve come back.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He looks calmly at her, trying to gauge the situation. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Just rowed.’ She smiles, embarrassed. ‘Sorry for being upset before.’

  ‘You don’t need to be.’

  ‘I feel I need to explain. Rhona thinks these migraines, they might be the same thing, that her father had.’

  Marta sits down at the foot of his bunk, suddenly full of purpose. She puts her shoes on the floor and rests her hands on her lap. ‘And I’ve been thinking about what you told me. I think you should probably stop writing that diary. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but this fiction of yours, because that’s all it really is, it sounds like it’s more important than the rest of your life, and probably will be until you move on from it.’ She pauses. ‘Am I speaking out of turn?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The first few days after Howard died I felt like that. I felt like I’d died too, but somehow they’d forgotten to bury me - like in that film with David Niven when he’s an airman. I just couldn’t contemplate carrying on. I really expected to fall asleep one night and not wake up the next morning. Well, I felt like that, but it never happened. I think I’m too healthy, really. And then I began to wonder whether it was Rhona who was keeping me going. Having a daughter meant I couldn’t give up. But you know what - I was wrong - it was me who wanted to keep on going.’

  Guy listens to her - the effort of saying all this is taking its toll - and he thinks about Freya, her small limp body as he ran with her from the field, even the stallion knowing that something unnatural had occurred - it had walked away, defeated; he thinks about this Howard man, in a hospital bed, covered in wires and tubes and hooked up to colourful monitors. The dead seem to be with them, always. And if it’s not the dead themselves, it’s the closeness to death that’s with them, too. His swim into a North Sea wilderness, Marta’s quiet wondering whether her heart will give up, even Rhona, afraid of a darkness within her, afraid there might be a path between regular migraines and the stealthy wound which grew and grew in her father’s brain until it killed him.

  He looks at Marta’s subdued profile, and realizes she is now nearer to him on the bed. The intimacy of the moment has brought them closer, quietly, they’ve been working together, taking the obstructions away in a calm order, so that Marta leans towards him, softly, and kisses his neck. A warmth from her touch spreads through him, he smells the scent of her hair, and feels her lips kissing his cheek, her hand holding his shoulder, and then she guides him towards her and kisses him again, more fully. He feels his glasses being nudged aside by her cheek. He kisses her, like that, for a few seconds it seems, before he pulls away, and looks at her, so close, so changed with the arrival of what they have just done. Her expression looks dreamy, a little drugged even, with the slackness of her mouth, still opened, still shadowed within. A tiny glimpse of that quirky tooth, between her lips. And when her eyes open he sees them change shape a little as she focuses. A moment later, and a small frown appears between her eyebrows, the hint of fear and embarrassment he knows might come if he doesn’t kiss her again.

  For some reason he is paralysed, by indecision, or by a fear of consequences. He doesn’t know. But he doesn’t move, and gradually he sees Marta drifting back a little. She looks down, away from him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, quietly. ‘That was a mistake.’

  He feels terrible then. Terrible to have seemed to have rejected her. Maybe he had, he’s not quite sure.

  ‘Don’t,’ he says, then doesn’t know what else to say.

  She looks up at him, braver now. ‘I shouldn’t have come back,’ she says, ‘it was bound to have ended like this, and now I feel stupid.’

  ‘You’re not. I’m the stupid one.’

  ‘You don’t have to make me feel better.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So don’t.’

  ‘I’m, confused I suppose.’ He anticipates the conversation tripping down familiar alleyways of explanation and excuse, all of them inadequate and all of them utterly predictable. He doesn’t want to spoil things like this, not with her.

  ‘I’ll leave now,’ she says, firmly.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ he says, unsure what he might be promising. She’s no fool, she’s not going to make herself vulnerable again.

  She stands and pulls her skirt straight - curious how our clothes take it upon themselves to go
ahead of the situation. That skirt, it’s trying to be taken off already. He smiles.

  A hardness seems to come over her expression. ‘Is it Rhona?’ she asks. ‘It’s Rhona you want isn’t it? I’ve seen you look at her. Oh Christ, what a mess I’ve made of this.’

  ‘No,’ he says, confused, ‘that’s not it.’

  ‘You’re what, thirty-seven, thirty-eight? I’m ten years older than you, and Rhona’s fifteen years younger than you. I mean, I’m too old and she’s too young - is that it?’

  ‘Marta - you’re getting hysterical. It’s nothing like that.’

  ‘But I can see it’s quite a dilemma for you.’

  He realizes, quite suddenly, that he’s been a fool. All he has is nothing compared to the love of someone else. Company. Friendship. All the world can offer a man in the prime of his life - it means nothing if there is no one to share it with. Otherwise, his days are like an endless collection of events and experiences, to be housed in cabinets that are never opened, display cases that have no visitors. This might just be a moment that could change his life. Marta is a wonderful warm-hearted woman and he’s made her feel hurt and rejected and he had no intention of that at all. Not at all. He stands, always so big under the cabin’s low wooden ceiling, and he moves towards her, wanting to wrap her in his arms and hold her, all night, regardless of what it may or may not lead to, he’ll take whatever comes. All he knows is that he wants to share with this woman, at this moment he wants to share everything with her. He’s been such a fool. But as he approaches her she is retreating, steadily, misreading him as a man who’s trying to let her down gently, not wanting to put herself on the line again.

  He stops, clumsily, midway between her and his bed. All he needs to do is go to her, hold her, but he can’t. He just can’t move.

  She looks at him from the hatchway ladder. ‘You know, she says, ‘I meant everything I said to you.’ She smiles at him, and climbs out of his sight.

  Guy looks at his abysmally empty cabin, which still has the gentle fragrance of the woman who has just left. His space, again, but he’s not enough to fill it. He should go after her. Go after her. But he doesn’t, he stays in his cabin, feeling wretched, yes, that’s it, wretched, no other word for it.

  And while he’s thinking this way, he imagines he hears a tiny tap on the wheelhouse glass, but he knows it’s not a tap on the glass at all, it’s a vibration coming from the engine, that’s all, a sound coming from the car or the road - Judy hasn’t heard it yet, and Freya might already be asleep in the back of the car, he’s not sure.

  He sits down to write, looking ahead of him, at the relentlessly straight American road with its central yellow ribbon in his headlights, as it stretches through the night into Mississippi.

  They have driven all day and much of the night, too far and too long. He can feel the ache of the journey throughout his body and he knows that Freya and Judy are feeling it too. It’s been the biggest distance yet, and he’ll probably have to suffer the consequences of that, he thinks. A sense of argument is already there, in the car, without anything having been said. Right now, it’s just a looming worry, shapeless and vague, but it’s there nonetheless.

  ‘I need to stop soon,’ Judy says, rather suddenly, from the passenger seat. She’s been quiet for some time, and the voicing of her tiredness is a real alarm bell. He knows she’s right. He’s been driving this straight road all day, and now, in the dead of night, it’s still not letting him feel he’s getting closer. At every sign that slides forward out of the dark he expects to see the name of the town he’s aiming for, but it never arrives. Other place names, more lengths of straight road, it has the feeling of a dream he can’t escape from.

  Even America seems to have vanished. The hills and rolling countryside of much of their journey has been replaced by a sudden and frightening flatness. Pitch black. Featureless. It’s the Mississippi Delta, and there’s no end to it, there’s nothing he can grasp out there.

  ‘Where is this place?’ Judy says impatiently. He wants to snap at her, tell her to shut up because he’s trying his best, he’s doing the driving, but he’s learned over the years to hold his tongue - she can elevate an argument effortlessly, citing a whole bagful of resentments he never knew she was carrying and, right now, he’s not really in a state to defend himself. Yes, he’s driven them as far away from Nashville as he can today, but why the hell not, given what he left behind?

  ‘OK, I think this is it . . .’ he says, calmly, offering her some hope and taking a sheer gamble that he’s close now. Sometimes, you just have to stick your neck out. There are some dotted lights out there, in the cotton fields. This must be right. But there again he’s been looking at the same patterns of lights in the fields for about forty minutes now. He’s been driving fast, too, trying to eat up those miles while the others have been unaware.

  ‘I thought you might be asleep,’ he says, taking a glance at her. The dim light of the dashboard picks out her profile, giving her a mournful, overly absorbed look. He wants to chase up his comment with a question about how she is, how she really is, but he knows he has to wait for that. No point breaking down walls when the roof might fall on you.

  ‘This is like the fens,’ she says. It is, he thinks, it’s as flat and as agricultural. Replace the sugar beet with cotton, that’s all. ‘We’ve come a long way just to be driving through Lincolnshire, ’ she adds. He smiles at that, hopeful that her joke might buy them some time. Then he wonders at her, how she can flip from acerbic comment to gentle humour so easily. She’s a puzzle to him.

  Suddenly the sign he’s been looking for flies by like a ghost, dirty and half-forgotten. God, if he’d have missed it! He slows the car and a second sign confirms he wasn’t just seeing things. Not quite the lights he’d been looking at, but another vague collection of lights and windows not far off in the field to the right. He slows more, and turns the car off the road on to a rough farm track, and they bounce their way carefully along that until they reach the buildings.

  It’s an old plantation house, with guest rooms out the back, but to Judy and Guy it seems like a film set, with wide wooden verandas wrapping round it, old clapboard facades, and bales of cotton tied up on the back of flat-bed trucks parked in front. They drive round the building, watching it pass like a slowly tracking shot in an old movie, till they find a space that looks fine to leave the car.

  When he opens the door he’s struck by how warm the air is. Again, they seem to have driven into a different climate. It’s exciting. Judy is gently waking Freya up, and Guy steps away from the car in order to get a glimpse of how it looks, from the outside, with the thin shine of its courtesy light glowing from inside. He sees Judy, her face shadowed, bending over Freya, adjusting the seatbelt, and Freya waking up disoriented, surfacing from wherever she was.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ Freya says, through the glass, and Guy raises his hand back in greeting. This is like when she was young, he thinks, he and Judy driving through the night with Freya bent double in a child seat in the back, her tiny head lolling with the motion of the car, so painful it looked, although no manner of clever cushioning could keep it from doing so. They’d arrive and Freya would gradually come round, bleary and tearful, with hot cheeks and red crease marks from the fabric on her skin. It felt so cruel, always.

  The girls close their doors and join him on his side of the car. There’s a soft wide sound of insects, filling the night air - a distant enveloping hum of crickets and cicadas, and every so often a thin reed of that hum slides forward in the air, separating from the background noise and rising in pitch as something indecipherable flies though the air before them.

  ‘Are we staying here, Dad?’ Freya asks, confused.

  ‘I hope so,’ he replies, noticing how undecided Judy looks. She’s not going to back him up until she sees what kind of place it is.

  The main building is long and grey and unlit, with no clear entrance and no apparent sign of life. But then he sees it, a glimmer round the windows at
the far end of the building - there must be heavy curtains hanging inside.

  ‘This way,’ he says, hopefully.

  He opens a screen and knocks on the door, then opens that too.

  Inside he’s amazed to see a warm golden-lit room, full of books and shelves and several chairs and tables. Oddly, there’s the sound of a blues guitar playing, though he can’t see anyone, and as he leads his family in he realizes there are three men seated at the far end of the room. One of them says hi, then continues to watch the guitar being played.

  Guy and the others walk right up to them while the song plays out. The guitarist is fairly old, black, in denim dungarees, and he’s bent right over the fret board. He has long dry fingers, curling round the chords like crab claws, but when he stops his hand hangs down, his fingers relaxed and loose.

  ‘Sweet tune, P,’ one of the men says. He’s a greying man with a wide waxed moustache and a pleasant smile. ‘I real lyak that,’ he adds, drawing his words out in a Southern drawl.

  The black guy, P, shakes his head and laughs deeply, then looks at Guy. He has small glistening eyes and grey stubble, and he wipes his forehead with a bright red neckerchief. ‘’s hot tonight,’ he says, his arm hanging over the guitar.

  The third man decides to stand up. He walks languidly across the room to a shelf, goes to a second shelf and finds some specs there, then goes to a desk and switches on a small lamp, as if he’s finding his way around. He introduces himself as the owner, and welcomes them. It’s so wooden everywhere. The floor, shelves, walls and ceiling are all planked or clapboarded, and the smell of dryness and wood dust is overwhelming. The lights have the glow of a subdued fire. Still, Guy can see Judy’s mood is immediately lifted - these kinds of strange little worlds really inspire her. Freya’s less sure. She stands shyly behind Judy while the moustached man smiles at her, probably hoping she won’t be asked anything.