The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  ‘What’s a boy like you getting involved in things like this for?’ my mother would ask, when he turned up at her door with sugar. She would glare at me as if it were my idea.

  ‘Hold your hand out, Mrs Fielding,’ he’d say, and, rolling her eyes, she’d oblige. Then he’d hoist up the sack and pour a pool of crystals into her palm. ‘If you’re not at ease with buying some, then at least have a taste.’

  She’d lick her finger, dip it into the heap on her palm and a patch of sugar would stick to it. Then she’d lift her finger to her mouth, shutting her eyes to savour the taste. ‘You’ll be the death of me,’ she’d mutter, rummaging in her skirt pocket for a few coins. And I’d be there breathing a sigh of relief behind her. She could easily have reported Pete to the warden or, worse still, refused the sugar. Annie and Pete would have been going on about cake and biscuits for weeks while Freda and I made do with bread pudding.

  I went with him once, all the way to West Lavington to smuggle supplies sent from Devizes. I shouldn’t have gone but I wanted to know how he did it. We met at two o’clock in the morning. The sky was low and thick – no stars. It was so dark that even the lumps of chalk lining the path appeared blackened in the night. I could not trace the noises I heard – a disturbed bird, perhaps, or the blur of the wind through a copse. If it were not for the scuff of the track under my feet, I could have been forgiven for fearing that we had cut ourselves adrift from the land and were stranded on a barren stretch of anonymous sea. How Pete worked out which direction to take, I will never know.

  Once we had found the edge of Salisbury Plain, we climbed a hill – I could not say which one – and wove our way through a wood that backed onto a snatch of cottages. Pete picked his route with ease, his feet pressing noiselessly on the foliage beneath us. I, on the other hand, made quite a racket, snagging my skirt on the bushes and rifling through the undergrowth. But he was patient, waiting for me to reach him, then shepherding me through to the other side. I felt his hand on my back, as we emerged from the trees, lingering slightly longer than required.

  In the churchyard, he retrieved a sack from behind the grave of a Mr Alfred Stash.

  I started to giggle. ‘It’s a little bit …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Margery Allingham.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know, Albert Campion, Death of a Ghost …’

  He let out an impatient sigh.

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean! Hiding your loot behind the grave of a man named Stash. It’s … well, it’s obvious!’

  ‘What do I care what the poor fellow was called? I just come to where I’m told to come.’ He lifted the sack onto his shoulder as he spoke. ‘Anyway, keep quiet, won’t you? You’ll get us caught!’

  He set off into the thicket and I followed. At the other end of the wood, a half-moon emerged from behind the clouds. It lit Pete’s back with a watery light and set it against the expanse of the Plain – ‘second-hand sunshine’, my father used to call it. The Downs now decorated the horizon with dense silhouettes, making it easier to find our way home. I watched Pete cradle the sack across the fields as if it were a sickly lamb that needed taking to the barn for warming. Then I picked up my pace to close the gap between us, all the while wondering what was inside the sack.

  Pete wasn’t the only one going behind the wardens’ backs when it came to rationing. Word spread through Imber that the Sheltons, who leased the land up the side of Long Barrow, were planning to slaughter an extra pig.

  To this day, I do not know who called the warden. Everybody agreed that the Sheltons’ idea was unpatriotic, but we weren’t about to take the side of some toffee-nosed official sent by the military to check on us. Besides, the Sheltons had six little mouths to feed and a seventh on the way. They needed all the food they could get.

  When the warden stopped at the parsonage to ask for directions to the Sheltons’, I ran ahead to the farm to alert them. I took the back route, looping through the ash trees at the end of our garden and sprinting down the gully that ran immediately parallel to the church. In the summer the smell of hay starched itself into the air here; it seemed to reach right up into the attic of your head when you inhaled it, forcing you to remember it long after the season had gone. I had turned up my nose at it when I was younger. But after the evacuation, I used to walk all the way up to the farms at Compton Chamberlayne just to fill my lungs with its dryness.

  ‘Mrs Shelton!’ I exclaimed, arriving breathless at her garden gate. ‘Forgive the intrusion. I thought I should let you know that the warden is on his way. You have about ten minutes to hide the pig.’

  ‘Pig? Goodness, my girl, what makes you think we’re keeping back a pig?’ She smiled at me in a way that told me the rumours had in fact been true. To my amazement, she remained kneeling before her vegetables, as if I had interrupted a prayer she wished to finish. There was no frantic rush. She simply angled her trowel back into the ground and unearthed another leek. Soon enough, the warden arrived at the gate, eyeing me suspiciously.

  ‘Aren’t you Jack Fielding’s girl?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I spoke with your father earlier.’ He narrowed his eyes.

  ‘Violet wanted a leek for some soup, didn’t you, Violet?’ Mrs Shelton held out the soil-coated vegetable towards me, as if passing on the baton in a relay.

  ‘Yes … Mama’s got the chills. Nothing a bit of warm broth can’t cure.’ I took the leek from her with both hands and she turned her eyes back to the ground.

  ‘Mrs Shelton, if you please, I have come to check the farmhouse,’ began the warden.

  ‘Whatever for, sir?’ she asked, not looking up from her trowel.

  ‘I have been informed that your family may have become embroiled in some clandestine activity.’

  ‘Clandestine,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t think where you might have heard such a thing.’

  ‘We have eyes and ears in all sorts of places, Mrs Shelton. Eyes and ears.’ He placed his hands behind his back and peered towards the front door of the farmhouse. ‘Is Mr Shelton at home, I wonder? I hope it won’t be necessary to obtain a warrant.’

  ‘My husband is working in the fields. And, sir, there is certainly no need for a warrant. We are all friends here. I will show you around myself.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied, straightening his back.

  She rose from the vegetable patch in one single motion and wiped her blackened hands on her apron. The warden followed her inside the house while I sneaked round to the back to spy on them through the dining-room window. I could just make out three of the six Shelton children gawping through the oak banisters in the hallway, faces dirty from an afternoon’s work. The warden checked everywhere for the pig – he even rolled back the dining-room rug in search of a trap-door. Once he had finished with the house, he conducted a methodical search of the barns, only to return to the front garden empty-handed.

  ‘Thank you for your time,’ he muttered to Mrs Shelton at the gate, clearly unconvinced of her innocence. I stood with my back against the side of the house, fingers clawing at the bricks, watching.

  ‘And thank you for yours, sir. You were more than thorough.’ She unleashed a smile – similar to the one she had given me earlier.

  The warden frowned and started towards the house, before concluding that there was no point in searching again. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ he said curtly, tipping his hat in her direction as he made his way down the farm track to go back to the village.

  Once he was out of sight, I came out of my hiding place, accidentally kicking over an empty pail on my way. Mrs Shelton turned towards me calmly, as if she had been aware of my presen
ce all along.

  ‘I suppose you want to know where it is,’ she addressed me.

  I nodded back at her eagerly, not quite believing that she might let me in on the secret.

  ‘You mustn’t tell anyone, do you hear?’

  I shook my head. ‘I won’t breathe a word, Mrs Shelton, I promise.’

  ‘Not even your father. He’s a good man. But he can’t know.’

  ‘What about Pete?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘The Archams’ lad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That boy knows everything that goes on in this place as it is.’ She smiled. ‘He’s Imber’s spy.’

  She led me through the hall and into the dining room where she proceeded to heave a large wooden dresser back on its haunches, causing it to take one cumbersome step across the floorboards. I smelt the meat before I saw it, running a finger over the seamless wall, confused. As I reached the centre of the space behind the dresser, the consistency of the wall changed from solid to soft, as if there were nothing behind the wallpaper but air. I breathed in.

  ‘Give the paper a push,’ said Mrs Shelton. ‘We might as well break in. I promised the children a pork dinner. It was the only way to keep them quiet.’

  She nodded towards the wallpaper, which was covered with thin navy blue stripes. I placed a palm on the wall again, feeling my way into the space where the paper became flimsy. Pushing harder, I made a puncture, then tore off the sheet cleanly in a strip. There was a cupboard-like alcove behind it and I could just make out the head of the pig, buried deep in a salt trough. The pork smelt almost foreign to me, I had gone without meat for so long.

  ‘Ingenious!’ I whispered.

  ‘Join us for dinner next week and you can taste some yourself.’ She smiled and placed a hand on the small of my back to guide me, like a sailboat, to the front door. I was already imagining a chop between my teeth and thanking her for it.

  ‘You’d best be off. Or else folk will start wondering. And we wouldn’t want that.’

  ‘Are you sure about dinner?’ I asked her.

  ‘Certainly.’ She smiled. ‘Saturday next.’

  I pushed the gate open and began the walk home.

  ‘Violet!’ she called after me. ‘Why not invite the Archams’ lad along?’

  I stood still on the road. Did people think there was something between Pete and me? The idea bloomed. I loved speaking for him, receiving an invitation on his behalf.

  It was a long run from the Sheltons’ farm to Dog Kennel Lane, taking me through the entire length of the village. I passed along the ribbon of cottages to the north end of the valley and climbed the gradient of the lane, the houses vanishing one by one into the valley’s bowl. The land on the surrounding hills was sparse and treeless; it did not try to compete with the sky. Here, the sky took prominence: it bullied the Plain with bulbous clouds and deep, heady blues, eschewing the neatness of the fields below with its boundlessness. I had become fixated by its depth – how, even on overcast days, it seemed colossal, unthinkable, a limitless expanse of blankness.

  I arrived at the Archams’ farm to find that Pete was still out on the Plain with the sheep. So I sat on the yard wall, scouring Rough Down for a sign of his flock. To sit like this was a luxury. The children from the farms hardly ever had a chance to enjoy the Plain for its own sake. And I felt I always had to find a practical reason to roam it so as not to appear as if I had too much time on my hands. Father didn’t like me wandering around for the sake of it. He said it singled us out. Yet here I was, absorbing the whole scene as if it were a picture on a wall. Around Imber, there was no flat idleness – the Plain made us earn our presence in the fields. Unless you were from Imber Court, you had to be walking or working or else not there at all. Nothing was ever still up here, not on the surface; the air was always on the move, sifting through the grass in whispers before carrying on its way. Sitting on the wall, I felt like one of the Whistlers, surveying the view simply for its beauty, walking the hills for no reason other than my own leisure. I’d often hear them readying their cart from inside the school house, loading it up with blankets and hampers for a picnic. It was the one thing I was glad of after the evacuation: I was spared the thought of them eating strawberries in the long grass and knapweed while I was trapped indoors solving equations.

  At last a dot appeared on the far side of Rough Down. It grew like a pool of ink, gaining detail gradually until I recognized it as Pete’s flock. I ran up the hill to meet him, full to the brim with the news of Mrs Shelton’s pig.

  ‘Hello, Miss Violet!’ Mr Archam shouted, when he was close enough to make out my figure. ‘Lend us a hand, won’t you? This one’s a little weary.’ He passed me a lamb, which I took awkwardly, unfamiliar with the best way to hold it. ‘Ah, she’s no farmer’s daughter, is she, Pete?’ He chortled. ‘Give her some grip, miss, or she’ll bleat the houses down.’

  I tried my best to cradle the animal, dropping behind Mr Archam in embarrassment when the lamb continued to flail in my arms.

  ‘What brings you up Dog Kennel?’ he asked.

  ‘I wanted a word with Pete.’

  ‘A word, eh? It’ll be more than a word you’ll give him, I’m sure of that.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll be heading on now. That one you’ve got there is sickly.’ He pointed to the lamb.

  ‘Will she be all right?’ I asked, passing the struggling animal to Mr Archam.

  ‘Nothing that a cosy night by the hearth can’t solve, Miss Violet. Don’t you lose sleep over it.’ He pulled the lamb close to his chest as he spoke and her legs became limp. She seemed calm all of a sudden; she knew her keeper. ‘See you back at the house, Pete.’ He tipped his cap at him and Pete nodded back. We watched him complete his journey to the bottom of the Down and turn into the farmyard. Mrs Archam would be happy to have a lamb by the fire for the evening: the flock was as precious to the pair of them as children.

  ‘I discovered where the Sheltons were keeping their pig,’ I told Pete, once Mr Archam was out of earshot. He kept quiet, eyes watching the flock. I caught myself craving his gaze – dark and unflinching – and tried to quell my disappointment when he didn’t look up as I spoke. ‘It was behind the dresser – they covered a hole in the wall with wallpaper, would you believe it?’

  ‘You shouldn’t tell me that, Vi. It’s Mrs Shelton’s business.’

  ‘No, she showed me. And she said I could tell you.’ I drew a breath. ‘Actually, she invited both of us for a pork dinner on Saturday.’

  Pete frowned. ‘That’s kind.’

  A gust of wind caught my skirt and I rushed to pin it to my knees. ‘I thought you’d be more pleased.’

  ‘It’s just that I’m busy.’

  ‘But you will come, won’t you?’

  ‘No, Vi … I mean, it’s difficult. I’m … Mr and Mrs Archam need me.’

  As we reached the neck of the hill he busied himself with the flock so that they clung together more tightly. I tried to meet his eye but he would not look up from the field beneath his feet.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I faltered. ‘Annie will be just as pleased to come.’

  At the crossroads, I turned in the opposite direction to the farmhouse, knowing he would not follow or call after me. Clouds blossomed and parted, and the light grew in intensity – the final swelling of the sun before dusk. The brightness – as sudden as a gasp – made me wish for shade but there were no trees for a mile, only the Downs. I felt exposed, as if the sky had witnessed everything. As soon as I had rounded the corner and was out of Pete’s sight, I ran, red-faced, down into the valley.

  The church was dark inside; I could sense the cool balm of the walls without tou
ching them. All the light was shut out except for six shafts that fell in pillars across the nave. I settled myself in a side pew beneath the west window. The church was empty except for the dust that drew slow circles inside each line of light. In Imber, where every building had a dual purpose, where even houses doubled as barns for lambs, it felt rare to have a space so completely void of toil, movement and activity. And yet, somehow, I needed it, returning, as the other villagers did, to its quiet whenever I felt out of sorts. Only in the church could I still myself for long enough to feel as immutable as the vast expanse of the Plain outside.

  From my place in the pew, I heard a shuffle in the base of the tower. I crossed to the back of the nave and found Father sorting a pile of bell ropes. He always punctuated his days with physical jobs like this one. Such was the pleasure he took in caring for the church that he refused to appoint a verger. It was only later, once we had left Imber and I came across other well-read men, that I realized how rare this was – to take as much trouble over fixing a bell as he would over writing a sermon.

  ‘Hello, Violet.’ My father did not need to look up from the ropes to know who had entered. He was familiar with my steps – my incapacity for stillness. ‘Come and help me with these,’ he gestured to the ropes, ‘and tell me what’s the bother.’

  I crossed the floor of the tower and delved my hands into the pile, selecting a rope to untangle from the rest.

  ‘Mrs Shelton offered Pete and me a pork dinner but Pete won’t come with me,’ I blurted, the problem shrinking even as I voiced it.

  Father smiled to himself as he prised apart another knot. ‘It takes a foolish boy to refuse a pork dinner in the midst of a war.’ He laughed. Then he put down his completed rope and pulled me under his arm. ‘Don’t take it to heart, Vi. He’ll be thinking of the lambs, that’s all.’

  Father knew exactly how to get me to let go of my worries – how to place them next to a simple task so that I could examine them from a distance and think, There, it’s only a matter of persisting until every knot is untangled, until every rope is smooth. But I was not a girl who could let things rest. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on the ropes, I returned to Pete’s words again and again, knotting and unknotting them and not getting any nearer to the truth.