The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  No sooner had I left Father in the church than I began to fret again. I went and found Annie, who was fetching kale from the bottom of her cottage garden.

  ‘Something isn’t right.’ She frowned when I had told her everything – so much for keeping the pig a secret.

  ‘I’ve ruined it, haven’t I? Perhaps I was too keen.’ I stood up from the wall where we were both sitting and paced up and down its length.

  ‘Since when has your keenness stopped him?’ she quipped.

  ‘Oh, don’t! I can’t bear it! It’s all right for you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re the one he really likes, silly.’

  She looked at me vacantly.

  ‘Never mind.’ I sighed.

  ‘Maybe Mr Archam really does need him.’

  ‘Do you think …?’

  ‘Your father’s right. You know how it is with the lambing. Mr Archam will want an extra pair of hands at the ready.’ We stayed silent for a moment, testing Annie’s theory in the quiet between us.

  ‘No, it’s no use,’ I began. ‘You know how the Archams are. They’re too afraid to make demands on him. And he’s not the kind of boy to ever feel obliged, is he?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said Annie, with a wry grin. She paused. Her expression softened. ‘Vi … I don’t quite know how to say it – and I really don’t know whether it answers anything – but … there’s another dance on at the military camp tomorrow night. An ATS girl told me about it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, do you think Pete might be going?’

  ‘We both know he hates dancing,’ I scoffed, with slightly too much fervour. I could feel myself whitening.

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Annie waved her suggestion away.

  ‘You don’t think he’s taking someone, do you? I mean … a girl?’

  She met my stare and I held hers. There was no need for a reply.

  CHAPTER 5

  Father enlisted on the day after I found Mrs Shelton’s pig: it was 1942, the year before we were evacuated. His age and profession were enough to excuse him. But he felt duty-bound. As I listened to him discuss the matter with Mama, I found myself returning to our conversation in the bell tower: I had been so frivolous to worry over a pork dinner and a boy when, unbeknown to me, Father was contending with the prospect of war. It’s only a matter of persisting until every knot is untangled, until every rope is smooth.

  ‘It’s their labour and their crops that are feeding us right now,’ he protested to my mother, as they passed Mr Colton in his field on the way back from the church. He had a special solemn voice that he put on for this kind of comment, like the ones we heard on the radio whenever anyone discussed the war. ‘And what am I doing that’s useful?’

  Freda and I listened in as best we could from behind.

  ‘But they need you,’ my mother countered. ‘You’re feeding them different things.’

  ‘What good are my sermons at a time like this if I’m not out there pulling my weight? I’m a hypocrite, that’s what I am.’ He stopped in the middle of the path and turned to face her. At first, I tried out a smirk on Freda – he had talked in this manner on so many previous occasions and nothing had ever come of it – but she did not return it.

  ‘What about us?’ Mama waved towards Freda and me.

  ‘I’ll be going to protect you – protect what we have here.’

  ‘They’ll take you as a chaplain, Jack. You know that. How much help can you really be when they won’t permit you to fire a gun?’

  ‘It’s my being there that counts.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere. There’s no need.’

  Need or no need, he made himself known to the War Office and received his call-up within the week. The war had come to him so he might as well go to it. By then the army had arrived in the village – a scattering of Tommies occupied a deserted labourer’s cottage, and three evacuees were sent to the Court to live with the Major and his wife. When I was certain the Major was out on his rounds, I would peer over the wall at the back of the house to look at the disused tennis lawn where Freda and I had wiled away so many hours. The net sank in the middle, sullen under a coat of ivy, and a troop of dandelions marched across the baseline. Nobody had time for tennis any more. It was the start of an unseen invasion, which crept so silently over the house and village and church that we barely noticed its presence until the war was in full bloom.

  The military training on Salisbury Plain became more regular, and the explosions felt closer too, as if they were being detonated in the soil beneath us. Mama ran out to check the vegetables one night so convinced was she that a shell had landed in the garden. I joined her in my nightgown and we watched the sky stutter, like a frantic camera, between coal black and bleached white. The Downs were taut with mortars, each as prone to echoes as the skin of a drum.

  Soon after the arrival of the evacuees, the real incendiaries started to fall. Before the war, we could come and go as we pleased, puffing up the chalk on the tracks at any time of day or night, even burning candles in the windows to guide the farmers home. But by the time Father decided to enlist, our shepherds were forced to navigate the fields unaided and nobody was to drive with headlights at night. The Plain became bathed in an unbroken darkness – and we feared that more than we feared the bombs. Mr Batch’s lad Fred was the first to be lost; it was a death marked by its silence. The snow came down thick and fast in November, blanketing the entire Plain in the space of an evening. He had stayed up with the sheep to make sure none were lost but, with no light to help him, he could not find his way back to the village. The snow on Salisbury Plain had a way of cloaking the air in front of you so that north, south, east and west were obliterated; the only mercy it afforded you on nights like that was a glimpse of the space directly in front of your feet. Poor Fred must have found that no sooner had he laid a footprint in the snow than it was deleted. They discovered him two days later in a ditch, half a mile away from the door of his home.

  It was hard to know which was preferable in those days – snow and fog masking the village, making farming impossible, or a night free of clouds in which we became a sitting target for the Gerries. When we heard German engines across the sky, we could do nothing but stow ourselves in the cellar and pray that there were no lights left on upstairs.

  I hold myself responsible for the first raid. I was worried about Father, who had been kept out late visiting a colleague in Chitterne, so I left a single candle burning in the upstairs window to help bring him home across the tracks. I lit it out of habit without a thought for the blackout. Imber was distant from any town and folded away in a valley – the bombers wouldn’t give it a second look. But I forgot about the light, leaving it burning long after Father arrived home. I was in my room when I heard the mechanical cackle of an approaching aeroplane. My mother came running upstairs with him to fetch me while Freda fumbled with the trap-door down to the cellar. There was no explosion, just a bludge-like thud on the parsonage roof.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Father cautioned us. ‘It’s a delayed-release bomb. The Canadians at the camp warned me about them. It won’t detonate until it’s disturbed.’

  ‘We must send word, give the others a warning!’ cried Mama.

  ‘We can’t. It could be on the roof but it may have fallen onto the lawn. And I can’t risk lighting a lantern to look. We must wait until morning.’

  ‘We can’t just sit here!’ Freda protested. But Father told her we didn’t have much choice.

  When, finally, the night came to an end, he climbed the cellar steps gingerly and inspected the garden. The bomb was nowhere to be fo
und. The thought of it nestling among the roof tiles, digging its heels in ready for the explosion, made my stomach curl. He sent for two soldiers from the army camp and they climbed up a ladder to disarm it. Just as they were about to make it safe, the bomb dislodged and rolled down the roof with a rumble reminiscent of the tanks on the Plain. We watched it drop – all of us – knowing that we had no time to run.

  As it landed on the metal of the wheelbarrow it let out the murkiest of notes, like the mangled clank of a broken bell. There was no explosion, only an echo. I shut my eyes, expecting to be consumed by flying matter.

  We waited, muscles clenched, but the bang never came. I thought of the Coronation party at Imber Court – how we had all stood around the bonfire and sung ‘God Save The King’ for George VI and watched, blithely, as a barrel of tar dislodged from the top and rolled – poker hot and flaming – into the crowd. As quick as a flash, Albie Nash grabbed a rug from a nearby table and threw it over the barrel. Then we all laughed, fear dissipating as quickly as the barrel’s flames.

  Perhaps if that first bomb had gone off, we would have grasped sooner what it was that was enveloping us. But the war remained in its cask – a threat but never quite an explosion. We found ourselves being eased into each new peril as if it were no more daunting than that single drum of flaming tar: a small, conquerable danger that simply required smothering.

  CHAPTER 6

  We are alone with our own thirst. The sight of the sea soon becomes too much: void of rescue and empty of anything drinkable. Everything is easier with your eyes shut.

  We lie, like two wings of a butterfly, on top of his roof. I shake him once, to check he’s still conscious, and he bats me away as he would a fly. The lines on his face seem as deep as the trough of our wave. They press together, then pull apart again as he breathes, and I think of the folds in an accordion. In my head I give him three children: two boys and a girl – the youngest. His house, before the wave hit, had ice-blue walls, a vegetable patch at the back, maybe, and a view of the ocean. Perhaps, if we survive, he’ll move up the hill to a place where he can’t see it, where he’s high enough up to be out of its reach.

  And there was no more sea. That’s what it says at the end of the Bible when Heaven comes down from the sky as a city. When my grandmother died, Mum read it to me: I think she thought I’d like to know where Nana had gone. I was disappointed, though, to find out there was no sea in Heaven. To me, it smelt of Saturdays and Sundays and water so cold that it made me shriek with glee.

  But now I see. Useless liquid is all it is. Liquid you can’t even drink. A surface that’s too changeable to inhabit, too fluid to be called home. A substance that can muscle into everything you build – wipe it out as if it were nothing more than chalk on a blackboard.

  My grandmother wasn’t like Mum; Mum kept her sadness buried in her face. But Nana told me things – things Mum only spoke about with her eyes. She would have liked James. James never ran out of things to say, stories to tell, questions to ask. Imber, the war, all the things that Mum had seen, I heard about them only from Nana. She’d talk and talk, stringing together whole generations, like lines of laundry. Endless lists of who married whom and who had which children. As soon as Nana began one of her stories, Mum’s face would brighten, like a child’s. It didn’t matter how many times she had heard it, she’d hang on every detail as if it were new. But life for Mum stopped at Imber; she didn’t listen to me like she did to Nana. She wasn’t bothered about whom I would marry or what children I’d have. My stories – the ones from school or the park – would be greeted with a diluted smile, so weak it might almost have been a frown. The children she might have had in Imber – warless, naïve and grown from home – are what matter to her. They would have been as rooted and constant as trees: working the land, reading the weather, borrowing books from that grand old house and belonging to a man she really loved. A place she really loved.

  Had I never known you, such selflessness would have left me aghast. Whatever my dad meant by his letter to her, he was foolish to think my mother selfless. If the war hadn’t destroyed Imber, it would have crumbled under her love, so tight was her grip on it. And while she set about trying to preserve its memory, she lost sight of me – I, who was already adrift.

  Ravindra sits bolt upright and shouts something – one word, over and over, flinching round to look over his shoulder. The roof groans under the shift in his weight. He’s out of breath, sweating.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘It’s over.’

  He looks at me, the tension in his face softening into sadness, as if he has suddenly remembered where we are. Then he lies down again on his stomach, his hands flat on the roof, wanting to be as close as possible to his home.

  Most people think of a place when they think of home. But I think of the word – strewn all over the kitchen on cutesy little knick-knacks. They sit on the fridge, hang on door handles and drape themselves over the window, spelling themselves out in sickly shades of pink. The first and only time Mum met James, I told him to buy her one as a joke. She made such a show of loving it, putting it in pride of place in the window above the sink, fearing all the while that he’d take me away to places she’d never been.

  My step-dad tore one down once – a small cushion on a string with ‘Home is where the heart is’ embroidered on it. He threw it onto the floor beneath the sink where it bounced harmlessly on the lino and cosied up to his feet. He thought I hadn’t seen him do it.

  James was always too kind about my mother. He felt sorry for her, I suppose. Before we left for Istanbul, he drew up an itinerary for her, with the dates on which we were expecting to arrive in each town. Istanbul in early April, Tabriz two weeks later, Tehran the next day, Lahore at the beginning of May, Delhi in June, then again in August. I was furious with him when I found out.

  ‘It’s nothing, Alice. I can’t see how it will do any harm.’

  ‘I don’t want her to know where I am.’

  ‘It’s not as if she’s going to follow you out to Iran.’ He laughed.

  ‘I know. But it’ll nag me – the fact she knows where I’m going and where I’ve been.’

  ‘It’s just for her peace of mind. You’re her only daughter.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I scoffed. ‘And don’t I know it.’

  I wish I could sleep like Ravindra. But there’s so much sun and nothing solid to hide behind. It makes you crave darkness, dampness, a basement room with a floor and walls. I close my eyes and imagine our patch of the ocean evaporating, drop by drop, so that we are lowered into a vault of glassy columns and laid to rest on the seabed. The roof softens into a mattress and James is next to me. We’re back to back, as we always are, curled away from each other like an x in algebra. Sleep comes just as the sea caves in on us. I fumble around frantically for him, knowing that, if we’d broken a habit, if we’d slept nose to nose, I could have caught a final glimpse of his face.

  He gets angry when I don’t look at him properly. But he’s older. And, unlike me, he can hold a stare. I hoped my awkwardness would dissipate after I left school; Mum said that when I was older I would find it easy to talk to all sorts of people. But, to my dismay, it persisted through my adolescence and into my university years. Even after all our months together, I prefer the ground or the sky to the sight of James returning my gaze.

  ‘What are you drawing?’ he asked, when we first met. I was sketching the sea of tents that stretched over the fields ahead of us.

  I turned the pad over. ‘Nothing.’

  He sat down on the starched grass next to me and I was aware, suddenly, of his skin and eyes and mess of hair – aware of them without even looking.

  ‘I’ve seen you
r pictures – I’ve watched you work on them around the place.’ I thought of the drawings, hidden in my tent, of ruined abbeys and palaces with their hollowed windows and ivy-riddled stone. I felt exposed: he had glimpsed something he shouldn’t have.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,’ I ventured.

  Ignoring my question, he reached for the piece of paper in my hand. I snatched it into a ball just in time.

  ‘I just wanted a closer look.’ He smiled, unfazed.

  ‘I was going to throw it away.’

  ‘What was the point of drawing it, then?’ He laughed, pulling out his Player’s No. 6 instead and placing a cigarette between his teeth. He lit up with a match and cradled the flame with one hand. Then he took it from his lips and exhaled the smoke gradually, the wind carrying it off, like the carriages of a train. ‘I’m James.’

  I did not reply; instead, I tightened my grip on the screwed-up ball of paper as if to squeeze out the ink. I could hear the strum of a guitar muffling through the canvas of the tents and someone singing the Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’. The song flurried in places and faded in others. It spoke of sacrifice, of how they had given her most of their lives.

  ‘You’re not making this very easy for me.’ He sighed, wincing into his cigarette. I would soon learn that he had different ways of smoking for different ways of talking.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ He raised a hand and tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. I tried not to shrink away. ‘You’re interesting. I’d like to take your photograph.’ He patted a brown-leather case that hung on a strap over his shoulder, smoke unreeling in a river from between his two fingers.