The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  We could live hand to mouth, they said, and eschew the routines that shackled us at home – forget the mothers and fathers and the pasts that were not ours to bear. James said life didn’t have to be linear – a constant accrual of wealth and age. We could care only for the shoes on our feet and the shifting patch of earth that was our bed. I thought of Joni and the promise in her guitar. We’d wear the day until the night came, enjoy the sun-show while it lasted.

  I didn’t understand – then – what the wave would bring. That the cold horror of an irrational ocean would erase every mile of carelessness we had etched between Turkey, Persepolis, Lahore and Delhi. That it would throw into doubt the solidity of the future – and sear instead its uncertainty on our thoughts.

  I’d always thought of journeys as choices – between staying and leaving, between one direction and another. But here, boats have been thrown violently off course, fishermen dragged by unstoppable currents; and letters have been delivered deep into reefs where there is not a soul alive to read them. I’d thought James, like our journey, was a matter of choice: someone I could fall in and out of love with as I pleased. A person I could marry one day, without a thought for the next. But now it has nothing to do with me: our togetherness – or our separation – is in the hands of the sea.

  After we met at the festival, James did everything for me – he found me the job at Isabel’s, moved my things from Mum’s house to London and fixed me up with a place of my own near Mornington Crescent, just a handful of roads away from his. We did not act tentatively – as new acquaintances ought to have done.

  James was accustomed to the city – the way it invaded you with its ebb and flow of clocks and habits. He was not shocked, as I was, by the siege of wet weather, the paper chain of identical days. Nothing to him was ever permanent; soon enough he would find a way to move on.

  I got home from work early one day – I always left the café before he left the studio – and began plotting the trip he had talked of on the Isle of Wight: something to sustain us. By the time I heard the doorbell, I had covered the kitchen table with the maps I had bought in Stanford’s. I pulled back the latch to find Mum, not James, bedraggled on the doorstep in her old Dannimac jacket and wellingtons. Nobody in London wears wellingtons, I remember thinking.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Alice, thank God you’re all right.’

  She embraced me but I stood still, arms folded. ‘How did you get this address?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. What matters is you’re okay.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘I couldn’t just wait for you to come home …’

  ‘I’m not coming home, you know that.’ I paused, door half closed. ‘And don’t think I’m letting you in.’

  ‘I don’t expect – I just wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’

  ‘Please, Alice, just one minute.’

  I moved from the doorway with reluctance and she slipped hesitantly inside the flat. I could feel her eyes on the walls and furniture. I flicked the kettle on while she waited in the living room. It wouldn’t be long before she saw the maps. There was no point in trying to move them.

  ‘I rang,’ she began, ‘to tell you I was coming. The line wasn’t working.’

  ‘You didn’t think I’d give you my actual number, did you?’

  ‘Alice –’

  ‘You’re lucky you didn’t get through. I would have made sure I was out, otherwise.’ I caught her eye momentarily. She looked wounded – more so than I’d intended.

  ‘What are these?’ she asked, with faux-composure, pointing to the maps.

  ‘Maps of Iran and Pakistan.’

  ‘Quetta … I’ve never heard of such a place. Is that where he’s taking you?’

  ‘I’m not being taken anywhere.’ I passed her a cup of tea, milky with two sugars, the way she likes it.

  ‘You won’t be able to fly, at least not until you get a proper job.’ She pressed her lips together to stop herself saying more.

  ‘Actually, we’re going to drive. There’s a route that will get us all the way to Delhi – through the places we’ve dreamt of seeing.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘We’re thinking of turning it into a tourist operation. Regular trips – there’s quite a demand for it, you know. Among our sort.’

  ‘You’re not serious –’

  ‘Deadly.’

  She put her tea down on the maps and looked at me with incredulity. ‘But what about the café?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘They might make you permanent. That would be something at least.’

  Permanent. An indeterminate number of hours spent brewing tea and wiping surfaces began to ink itself onto the map of Delhi that I had in my mind.

  ‘Mum, I’m a French graduate. The café is hardly the be-all and end-all. I want to see things, like James.’

  She picked up her tea from the map again, leaving Tehran imprisoned in a milky ring. ‘But you’ve only known him a couple of months.’

  ‘It’s not important how long –’

  ‘It’s mad, Alice, that’s what it is.’

  ‘I’ve got James, I’ll be fine.’ I turned from her and spoke into the sink, pouring the rest of my tea away. Then I flicked the switch on the kettle again to make a cup for James. The sooner she was gone the better.

  ‘He probably didn’t mean it,’ she began again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He probably made promises … Some men are like that.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about him.’

  ‘I know more about his type than you think.’

  ‘Oh, here we go, back to Dad.’

  ‘That’s not –’

  ‘Why can’t you just accept that I’m happy?’

  She paused, seemingly flummoxed by the question. I stood, breath held, waiting for another outburst. ‘Please don’t go away,’ she whispered.

  The water in the kettle reached its crescendo and I began to pour it over the teabag in the mug. ‘I’m going, whatever you say, so you may as well be pleased for me.’ The liquid slopped over the rim and spilt on the surface.

  ‘Never mind,’ she murmured, crossing the kitchen, picking up a cloth and pushing it over the mess.

  ‘I can do it,’ I snapped. Something seized me – her impertinence, my anger. So I turned and quit the room. I grabbed a jacket in the hall – not checking if it was hers or mine – and slammed the front door behind me. Outside the apartment, I took a right turn and walked briskly to Regent’s Park. The gates were locked and I was left peering through the bars at the grass: sparse and wet. She had no right.

  Back at my flat, James had arrived and chopped onions and garlic in my absence. He took me out dancing on Fridays but on Tuesdays we always ate together. Sometimes I cooked for him at his and sometimes he came here. I walked towards the kitchen. He was browning onions in a pan with the record-player on. One of the folk songs we had discovered on the Isle of Wight sifted through the living room when I re-entered: James was humming something about being a river, which made me smile in spite of my anger at Mum. I removed my jacket, noticing hers had vanished from the rack. It must be gone eight: what if there were no more trains bound for Wiltshire? I knew – in a way that she wasn’t aware of – how much courage it would have taken her to come to London. On her own, not knowing if I would let her stay. I walked to the kitchen, looping my arms around James’s waist from behind. He let go of his breath and took my hands. His touch still came as a surprise to me – as if I were learning of his feelings for the first time.


  My skirt has dried in uneven pleats, mud trapped between each fold. Ravindra retrieved it from the water after he rescued me. When I came round, he covered his eyes and shouted Tamil at me until I had pulled it over my legs and made myself decent again. It is an old one belonging to Mum – borrowed once and never given back. I grabbed it from the suitcase without thinking before running from the wave. The coral-pink pattern is barely visible under the mud. I picture her wearing it, standing in the garden with laundry at her feet and an empty washing-line above her head, eyes lost in some arbitrary branch of the magnolia tree. The smallest of my mother’s tasks were always accompanied by the longest of pauses – pauses that seemed to lengthen as she got older. I remember the photographs of her days helping with the silage in Imber. She wore boyish overalls and a big grin; her hands seemed dirty and busy; and she stood as if it were a struggle to keep still for the camera. By the time I was born, the busyness had left her. And my only role, it seemed, was to wake her from each pause and remind her I was there.

  As well as my clothes, I have his hollow O on my fourth finger. I remove the ring and peer through it – a window into more sea and more sky. I still haven’t grown used to its grip. I am always aware of it. Out here, with only the sea to hear me, I’m starting to wonder what it means – this circle. Out here, I can say freely that perhaps I married him for the push – to push us on to something new: a bright, uncharted territory that wasn’t anything like the past.

  If I make it back home, it’ll be the first thing she notices. She’ll grab my hand, see the gold and say I’m headstrong and foolish. That I kick my way through life. But it’s not her place – she has no right – to tell me how to act.

  Ravindra is sleeping. I reach under my shirt and feel for Mum’s letter in my bra. There is nothing left of it. Somewhere inside the seasons of the wave, the ink is being washed from the paper. Each of its sentences is released eel-like into the water. She is what I would have given you, had I been a better man.

  CHAPTER 4

  We were the first family in the village to hear about the war – the only household other than Imber Court to own a wireless. Freda and I were peeling potatoes in the kitchen with Mama, having just returned from the morning service at the church. I tried to peel mine into one long strip so that it copied Freda’s hair, which helter-skeltered down her face opposite me. Her hair was curly; mine was straight; we both wished we had been born with the reverse of what we had been given. I could hear Father pacing the floorboards of the neighbouring study, dissecting the sermon he had just preached.

  ‘Throw me a potato to deal with, Freda. It will take my mind off it,’ he called down the corridor towards the kitchen. Freda stood up and tried to throw one under-arm through the doorway towards him. It barely reached the threshold between the kitchen and the hall, nosing at the wall sluggishly.

  ‘Freda, you throw like a girl!’ I laughed. She sat back down at the kitchen table, thrusting her arms together in a fold across her chest, then immediately standing up again to tuck her skirt underneath her in case it creased. I took a potato from the tub in front of us and raised my arm.

  ‘Don’t you dare, Violet!’ My mother turned from the sink. ‘One is enough!’

  I swung my hand into a cricket bowl as she spoke and watched the potato fly towards Father. It bounced at his feet and he caught it low off the ground.

  ‘See! That’s the way to do it.’ I smirked at my sister.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re so proud of, Vi. Mama told you not to.’ Freda dropped another bare-faced potato into the bucket as she spoke so that the water in it splashed me. Ignoring my indignation, she stared mournfully down at her hands. ‘Mama, why can’t we keep a cook? Look at the state of my fingers! People in town will think you’ve sent me to the workhouse.’

  I rolled my eyes at my mother, who caught my meaning but refused to be drawn, instead walking across to the stove to stir the stock.

  ‘I’m being serious, Mama!’ Freda moaned. ‘Why can’t we have a cook?’

  ‘Freda, that question has grown rather tired over the years, has it not? You know very well my answer.’ Mama drew circles in the liquid with her spoon and, rather than turning to face Freda, directed her words into the pan. ‘The living here is plenty,’ she continued. ‘It always has been. And your father couldn’t possibly impinge any further on the diocese. Many of his colleagues at Wycliffe would consider themselves blessed to be in his position.’

  ‘I heard Edward Bramley practically lives in a shed at Berwick!’ I chipped in. Mama gave me one of her chiselled looks and I lifted up my hands in innocence.

  ‘And so, Freda, no, we shall not keep a cook, or a parlourmaid for that matter.’

  ‘Do you mean to say, Mama, that Freda will be peeling potatoes every Sunday for the rest of her life?’ I brought my fist down on the table in mock outrage.

  ‘Enough,’ clipped my mother. She put down her spoon, rubbed her hands across her apron and glided down the corridor to the study. Father had propped himself up absent-mindedly against the doorframe and was studying his potato intently, as if its divots and moles were islands on a globe. ‘Jack, you shouldn’t encourage them to throw potatoes.’

  He met her stare as she spoke and, once she was close enough to him, placed his two hands on her waist. I watched the muscles in her back relax through the white of her shirt. Even though she was facing away from us I could tell he had freed a smile from her. ‘I stumbled over my point about St Peter walking on the water. I know I did. Did it make sense?’ he asked her.

  ‘It made perfect sense! What does it matter now, anyway? It’s been and gone.’

  ‘It matters to me.’

  ‘Don’t worry, my love, it came across well, didn’t it, Vi-vi? Freda?’ She turned back to the kitchen to look at us.

  ‘It was brilliant, Father. Even the Major liked it!’ I shouted through.

  ‘It’s quite a distraction to have him in the front pew,’ he fretted to Mama. ‘I know he needs to be there as much as the rest of us but – oh, I don’t know, it is a trifle off-putting. I never felt that way with Tom Dean …’ and on he went. My mother sauntered back to the kitchen as he spoke. She glanced at me and pretended to turn the wireless switch, showing me what I must do. So I meandered into the study and looped my arms around my father’s shoulders.

  ‘Can we listen to the wireless, Father? Please?’

  He sighed and then, after a pause, gave me the answer I had hoped for.

  ‘All right, then, darling, it’ll probably take my mind off it.’

  Mama, aware of her victory, returned to the stove and hummed contentedly to herself.

  The usual fuzz sounded as I turned the dial. It took a good few minutes to settle on the right station. None of us expected to hear the Prime Minister’s voice. This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note … My mother came running in with Freda, who still held a potato – cold, like a lump of meat – in her hand. We all stooped to get closer to the speaker … Consequently this country is at war with Germany.

  Is. At. War. With. He had separated the words, each one boulder-heavy on the ears.

  My father took hold of my mother’s hand. I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage … You will report for duty in accordance with the instructions you will receive. Freda held her breath and glanced across at Father. Now, may God bless you all, and may He defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting against: brute force, bad faith, injustice … They were grave words and, for a while, I believed they were only meant for faraway places – sprawling capitals like London, Paris and Berlin. Fighting a
gainst bad faith. I pictured St Peter stepping out onto the water to fight off his doubts.

  Bad faith. Someone somewhere had started to sink.

  I waited. And waited. But the war did not arrive – at least, not in the guise that I expected. Rationing tightened its grip on the village as the months went on. But, aside from our meals, it was easy to forget that anything had changed. Most of the village remained at home to farm the fields. The events in Europe seemed, at first, to be sealed inside the wireless, like a story we listened to at night.

  Pete, who by now was some years settled in Imber, began smuggling all sorts of paraphernalia into the village – things a thousand coupons couldn’t buy. Whisky, tobacco, bags of sugar the size of your belly. I don’t know who he got it from and what he did with all the money – squirrelled it away somewhere, I suspect. He showed no sign of being any better off than the rest of us. Yet he must have been – the amount people would pay for sugar. He wasn’t best liked by Mrs Tippets at the grocer’s. Ever keen to play her part in the war effort, she dealt strictly with our coupons, measuring our supplies to within a hair’s breadth of the nearest ounce. When Pete began undercutting her prices and handing out whole bags of sugar to whoever coughed up enough coins, Mrs Tippets’s trade dwindled and, the only grocer in the village, she grew suspicious. He was banned from the shop and it was only her deep-seated loyalty to the rest of the village that prevented her calling in the warden. Pete was looked after, though. Imber’s wives hated the thought of a farm boy going unfed: it wasn’t long before he had enough dinner invitations to last him a month. Even the most patriotic among us were wise enough to know a good thing when we saw it. When Mrs Tippets’s back was turned, respectable farmers would ply Pete with meat and milk eked from their coupons, knowing he would reward them with whisky when he next got his hands on a barrel.