Joanna Rossiter
THE SEA CHANGE
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Sea is Never Full
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue: I Lift Up My Eyes
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE SEA CHANGE
Joanna Rossiter grew up in Dorset and studied English at Cambridge University before working as a researcher in the House of Commons and as a copywriter. In 2011 she completed an MA in Writing at Warwick University. The Sea Change is her first novel. She lives and writes in London.
For Bill, who, when the pages were blank, saw only opportunity. To Imber – for giving so much, so quietly.
‘But you can say, you can guess, that it
is you yourself, your own roots, that clutch
the stony rubbish, the branches of
your own being that grow
from it and from nowhere else’
Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness
Prologue: The Sea is Never Full
Kanyakumari, India, 1971
It is there before we know about it. Being born. A Persian rug, unrolling. Our wave, heavy, like death.
‘Up! Up!’ a voice shouts from outside the guesthouse. It doesn’t belong to James. ‘It’s coming!’
Where is he?
Stone. Bone. Think hard and then harder. That’s how it hits the shore. It takes the beach in one breathtaking gulp, palm trees dominoing down and fishing boats scattering as easily as the seeds of a dandelion. Streets fuse into the flesh of the water, like new limbs, new skin, until it morphs into a moving city. Trucks and tuk-tuks roll over and over like shirts in a washer; houses are picked up whole. Then, with sea-soaked hands, the water sets itself alight. Flames – blinding and orange – buoy themselves forward on black, black, mirrorless liquid.
One man runs. And is outrun.
It’s not James. James isn’t on the beach. James gets away in time. He went, before it came, to pick up breakfast. I was going to meet him on the beach. I was late, faffing about in the room with our luggage, remaking the bed. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where he is but I was going to meet him on the beach. The beach. And then it came. He’ll have thought better of it. He’ll have gone up the hill to get us some lassi instead; he’ll come running up the stairs any second now. He’ll be here. And safe.
It’s about to hit the guesthouse. I don’t have time to think about how thick it is. I just feel its thickness beneath me. You’d think that it would strike you once, hard in the face. And then it would be over. But it isn’t like that. Instead it arrives and leaves, advances and retreats, bringing more of itself each time.
Our room is about to go under. I reach for Mum’s letter on the bedside table – it can have everything else. Then I take the stairs two at a time. James’s last packet of Player’s No. 6 is probably pregnant with saltwater by now. He could have gone straight up to the roof, forgetting to fetch me. Please, God. The staircase is inking up with water, like mercury rising inside a thermometer. Furniture and luggage froth up from the ground floor. Everything keeps moving, stirring; nothing is still.
Guests on the floors below reach out into the rising wreckage as I climb the stairs, eyes hollow with what is brewing beneath them.
‘My husband. Have you seen my husband?’ The word feels new and unused, still fresh out of its packaging.
‘What’s the husband’s name?’ asks the landlord. We’re on the roof now.
‘James. It’s James,’ I say, as if it will help.
‘It’s going to take us!’ blurts the American whose room is on our floor. He’s still in his dressing-gown and his eyes are glued to a block like ours across the road, which topples and is carried off. But our building stays standing, sacrificing its organs – curtains, windows, cabinets and beds – until we’re left teetering on its bones.
I’ve gone back to the stairs but the landlord is standing in my way.
‘Madam.’
‘What are you doing?’ My voice is hoarse and high. ‘I need to go! Let me go!’
‘Please, madam. It is not safe.’
I tuck the letter – still in my grasp – beneath the padding of my bra. Then I push past him to the stairs. I’m level with the water now, and looking. Outside the window, all the inanimate things – the cars, the trees, the boats and the barns – have been brought to life, rolling and writhing in the sea. But there are no human faces – not even a body. These it keeps hidden from sight.
I shout his name. I shout it again. The water is goaded, and rises – I can’t get back to the roof. It’s ripped my feet from the floor and forced me through the window. Down the rabbit hole I go. Like Mum used to say when I stared into space too often and for too long. Alice is down the rabbit hole, she’d mouth in code to Tim. She was always afraid that I wanted to get away. There’s no choice now. It’s taking me. Not forwards, like I expected, but backwards. Out to the ocean; towards home.
The water feels magnetic: the more I strain, the more it pulls. Did I not tell you this would happen? Mum would say. Didn’t I warn you not to go away with him? As if James himself were responsible for my being dragged out to sea.
The shoreline depletes. I’m flailing about, trying to grab hold of the horizon and drag it towards me but it’s drifting further and further away. I can’t keep this up for much longer. It’ll only take another wave. Send another. Anything but drowning. After a while, there’s just breath. The sea’s lungs swell in time with mine until I find I can’t keep its rhythm – chest quivering into a frantic staccato. Every bit of me aches. So I rest. For a second. It’s enough for the water to pull me under. I resist its muzzle but it’s no use.
There is noiselessness underneath. Nothing but the push and tug of the sea. A giant swell of ocean, colder than the rest, swarms below. I let go of my muscles, my fists. I give in to lightness.
CHAPTER 1
Wiltshire, England, 1971
Pete used to say that a place isn’t everything: people can make a home out of a cardboard box, if you give them half a chance. He didn’t understand why I clung to Imber as if it were a lost soul. But perhaps if he were here with me now, standing in the dip of the church doorstep, I would see something give way in that flint face of his.
The earth has run its fingers all over the church. Clots of moss bloom in green seas on
the roof. Ivy has prised open windows and doors and clawed at the fissures in the stonework. Nesting birds leap up at the smallest of movements – mistaking every sound for a bullet. As I step into the porch, they splash through the glassless windows and ghost through the air above the nave. So immersed is the stone in creepers and lichen that it is as if the church is Nature’s own creation; born from the ground like a new breed of tree.
The sight of my mother’s note on the door stills my breath. The rain has had nearly three decades to invade the ink but, sheltered as it is by the porch, I can still read its message as if it had been written yesterday.
We have given up our valley where many of us have lived for generations, entrusting it to you for the sake of the war. Please take good care of the church in our absence; to us it is more than stone and glass. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.
I often wonder whether, if my mother had known the fate of our village, she would have written something different on the church door. Would the words have come less easily? Or would she have gone on believing, blithely, that our sacrifice was worth all those unborn memories? The ones we would have reared in the cottages, in the fields, in our very own nook of earth.
Today is the first time I have been back in twenty-six years. It should have felt like any other day: the same wrestle with the alarm clock; the same small battles with Tim about when he last heard from Alice, and who is to blame for the gold- not silver-topped milk bottles outside the door. Except I woke early, unsure of whether I had slept at all. I slipped off before the alarm and left him asleep in bed. Outside the house, the light was still threadbare.
I began the short drive in Tim’s Cortina through the military firing range – no more than five miles – across land I had not touched since I was nineteen.
Boreham Down slipped by on the left. As I drove, the Plain rose and fell into muddy gullies and chalked ridges, like the peak and trough of a petrified wave.
I could see the bell tower through the windscreen, pressed into the cushion of Salisbury Plain. But the rest of the village was hidden – just as it used to be – below the camber of the Downs.
Shooting targets were pinned, like my mother’s note, to the nape of South Down where they labelled the land’s anatomy: ‘1’ for the patch where the knapweed grows thickest; ‘2’ for the hill’s hip; ‘3’ for the spot that is last to capture the sun; and ‘4’ for the valley floor. The corpses of tanks clung to the side of the ridge, housing flowers and grasses and empty metal cartridges. The hills seemed to have borne their scars well. Somewhere under the grass, I knew there would be bullets, hidden like cysts in the soil. But in this morning’s light, I couldn’t distinguish the marks of the shelling from the indents made by the rain. The Plain has survived what no city or body ever could.
It is necessary to evacuate the major part of the valley, including your dwelling. The letter was so matter-of-fact. And I had never seen, only felt, the damage that their shells could do. Even before the war, explosions as far away as two miles would cause our windows to quiver and crack, the glass falling from its frame, like a cloud emptying itself of water. For months after we were evicted, I dreamt of rain – metal rain – lodging in the walls of our parsonage and spidering across the mirrors.
I have driven Tim mad with my quietness about this place. It is as if, by not talking, I talk about it all the time. He told me it is because of here – a plain on which he has never set foot – that Alice started to drift. I boxed her in, he said, with my memories. And so I stood and watched as he packed her bags and let her drive all the way to India with a man we barely know. Then I kept silent, so that he wouldn’t drift too.
I don’t talk to him about Imber any more because I know what he’d think. I’d give him the valley – all its names, faces, places – and he’d imagine it as something golden and lost. It is not golden; it is not lost; if it were, I would long since have escaped its ghost. But I can only ever give him the shell of what it was – a washed-up periwinkle that you hold to your ear to listen to, only to be told that it’s not the real sea that you can hear. Just air. A place made of air.
After South Down, the road eased me into the base of the valley. To the right, I could trace the old divides: the stone walling that separated one family’s farm from another. The walls reared up high in places and crumbled in others, leaving the fields half finished. The land around the village wasn’t tamed in the same way as it had been before. Ivy has been left to run over man-made things, to knead the angles of the outhouses into unliftable curtains of green.
I half expected to see the army keeping guard but they were nowhere to be seen.
Inside the ruins of Seagram’s Farm, I kicked a gold-coloured cartridge across the floor and ran a finger along the graffiti on the walls. Names and dates of squadrons littered the chimney breast. I saw a ghost called Clara was carved above the hearth.
Past Seagram’s Farm, the redbrick skull of the post office gawped across the road at the roofless remains of Parsonage Farm. If I shut my eyes, I could see how it used to be – the roadside all cobbled and complete with a ribbon of cottages, villager knitted to villager, like knots on a length of string. When I opened my eyes, it was like taking the pin out of a grenade: the memory was left in pieces, the walls reduced to the height of my knees and the doorways mangled by barbed wire. Inside the post office, the divide between upstairs and down had all but disappeared so that Mrs Carter’s fireplace looked as if it were built to heat the sky. I wanted to cover the place up, as one does a body once the life has left it.
I imagined Mrs Carter standing behind the post-office counter, sorting letters. When she thought no one was looking, she’d halt the flick of her fingers and stare at the window. She was not sad or happy; she just stood there, immersed in thought, until a customer interrupted her and she would carry on with her day. I would not have picked anyone else to receive the news of the eviction first; it was hardly a message to which you could put words. And Mrs Carter, whose hands spent all day ferrying other people’s words from place to place, was a silent old soul, not one to speak unnecessarily. Her silence, we agreed, was the only thing fit for that letter.
I was in a queue of customers waiting to drop off my post when she picked up an envelope with her own address on the front. It had a military stamp on the seal – the same as the others she had sorted that morning. She turned away from the counter and we heard her slide her fingers through the paper. She walked out of the room shortly afterwards. I was sent to fetch her: it was not like her to forget about the customers. I found her staring into an empty flowerbed at the back of her garden – the patch of soil where she could make nothing grow.
It is hoped that you will be able, through your own efforts, to find alternative accommodation and, if appropriate, fresh employment, and that you will be able to make your own arrangements as to removal. I took the letter from her, as if robbing a statue of its sceptre, and ran into the post office to break the news to the rest of the village. We were all nosing in on the note – everybody wanted to read it for themselves before they believed it – when Mrs Carter reappeared.
‘Don’t fuss, don’t fuss,’ she murmured. ‘There’s one for each of you in the postbag.’
They moved us out in December, a week before Christmas. I say they moved us – in fact they had very little to do with the evacuation. It is necessary, it is hoped. Nobody was going to take the blame.
There was talk of them sending lorries, only some of which came. The rest of us were left to depend on Major Whistler’s kindness; Imber Court had a cart at its disposal, which was duly loaded with furniture, pots and pans and a bath full of M
rs Carter’s crockery. Mrs Carter tried to stay calm. It was only china after all – not even matching china, she whispered guiltily to me, as she climbed onto the cart; still, if it could survive thirty years of marriage, it could endure this. As the horse turned out of the village and down the track to Heytesbury, the chime of her cups and saucers crossed the Plain. We knew, then, that the crockery would not make it to town intact.
If my father had been with us, we would never have left in time. He would have fussed endlessly over his books. My mother put me in charge of packing them; she could not have borne it herself. I did my best, placing heavier volumes at the bottom of the case so as not to damage the lighter ones. It pained me to think of the books packed away in their boxes without Father to read them. ‘Don’t you worry, my girl, they’re all up here,’ he said, giving his head a tap. But I knew better. I had seen the way he pored over each cover, smoothing down the pages with care as he read and returning the book with the precision of a pharmacist to its designated spot on the shelf. Had he not been ordained, I half wondered whether he would have become a bookbinder – not that there was any need for such a thing in Imber. It was a blessing that he wasn’t around to see the fate of Imber Court’s library, from which he was a frequent borrower. The lack of lorries left the Major carting clocks and books and desks down into the cellars. He would never have said anything but Pete had gone to the Court to ask about moving Albie Nash, the blacksmith, whom he had found hunched over his anvil, weeping. He found the servants cradling piles of books quietly down the stairs like sleeping children. Pete offered to help but the Major reddened and, in a hushed voice, asked after Albie.
My father’s books were the last thing we packed. I took them in their boxes and placed them with our other possessions in a pile outside the parsonage door. It wasn’t until it came to leaving that I saw how much there was that I couldn’t take with me. Walking into my sister’s empty room, I tore off a loose piece of her rose-patterned wallpaper and placed it in my pocket; I had always been secretly jealous of it. Having spotted it in a shop window in Wilton, she had pleaded with Father for weeks to buy it for her eighteenth birthday. My father often joked that she would have been better off being born in the city: she battled constantly against the mud that gathered in strips under her fingernails and in clods on the soles of her shoes. And she could not pass through the parsonage hallway without noting the thin grey skin of chalk dust that coated the floor. I used to tell her there was no escaping the land – it was in our name. I don’t think Freda liked ‘Fielding’ much: it was too plain. The name was a better fit for me: I spent more time on the Downs with Pete than I did in the house.
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