We watched as more couples made their way into the centre of the hall, taking each other by the hand or arm and catching the cymbals’ rhythm in the swish of their jackets and skirts.
It was then that I saw her. Dancing in her best dress, every step perfect, in Pete’s arms. Annie gawped through the pane, raising her hands to her temples to get a better view.
‘Is that …?’ She stopped herself. We both knew what we had seen.
The rain came from above, filthy and filmic, forcing us to leave the window. I was relieved to be away from the dance at first. But as we sheltered under a garage awning opposite the hall, I couldn’t help but replay in my mind what I had seen through the window. It’s all right, I told myself. They seemed so awkward together and that means he doesn’t love her. But each time I revisited the scene, Pete looked at my sister a little more fondly and she took his hand a little more coyly until I could no longer bear it.
‘Can we go now?’ I murmured to Annie, who was poised patiently beside me, pawing at my elbow.
‘We can’t just leave,’ she whispered. I had forgotten for a moment that she was as mad about Pete as I was. ‘Not after seeing that.’
‘Father can’t have given her permission to be here. He’d – he’d be so angry. I must tell him. And Mama.’
I took my weight off the post I had been leaning on and started into the rain towards the barrier.
‘Violet, wait! What will he say when he hears that you’ve been here too? You’ll get in so much trouble! And then your mother will tell mine …’
‘I have to do something! I can’t just stand here getting wet while my sister waltzes off with – with him in there!’ I thrust a hand towards the hall. Then I trudged down the path to the barrier and waited for the scurry of her feet on the paving behind me.
‘Don’t ruin things just for the sake of it, Vi,’ she called, catching up. ‘She’s your sister, after all.’
‘What do you know?’
I pressed my lips together and took a breath but it was no use. My eyes filled and I hoped the rain would hide my tears from Annie.
‘Oh, don’t fret. It’s just a daft crush,’ she soothed, braving a hand on my shoulder. ‘We’ll grow out of it. Just you wait, when we’re older and we’ve left Imber behind, we’ll have so many boys to choose from. It’ll be like one of those sweet shops they have in Wilton with so many jars it makes your eyes boggle. You’ll see, Vi. You and me, we’ll do perfectly well without him.’
We reached the barrier, me red-eyed and hobbling in my too-high heels and Annie hitching up her dress to keep it out of the puddles.
‘Leaving so soon?’ asked the officer who had driven us there.
‘We’ve been jilted,’ said Annie, with all the melodrama she could muster.
‘Gosh, I’m sorry to hear it,’ he replied, looking not in the least bit sorry. ‘Our shift finishes in half an hour. If you wait a short while, I can take you home.’ He was addressing Annie now; I had walked on ahead. ‘There is one condition,’ he added, with a lowered voice. ‘You must do me the honour of a dance.’
‘I can’t,’ I heard her whisper. ‘I really ought to stay with my friend.’
‘But how will you get back to Imber, miss?’
‘You’re quite right,’ she said. ‘We are in need of a ride. If you could wait there for one second.’
And with that, she skipped after me, gathering up her dress as she came. I could hear the two other officers at the barrier goading our new friend behind us.
‘Violet, that nice officer back there is offering us a ride home. It’d be sensible to take it in this weather.’
‘Will you dance with him?’ I asked glumly.
‘No, I shan’t. I’ll ask him to take us home directly.’
‘But he asked you, didn’t he?’
Annie stayed silent and, with a tug on my stole, persuaded me to retrace my steps to the barrier. True to her word, Annie refused the dance and asked to be taken home. The officer must have caught sight of my blotched face because he didn’t question her and instead went to fetch the troop-carrier. Soon, we were negotiating our way back up Sack Hill in the military truck and riding along the potholed track to Imber. The rain had cleared to reveal a crowded sky – stars scattered across it like dropped sprockets. Just this once, I willed the enemy planes to come. I wanted them to tear open the Plain with craters to match the one Pete had inflicted on me. But the air above us remained blank and beautiful.
‘You’re dressed for bed already. Good girl,’ my mother remarked, putting down her book as I entered the kitchen in my nightgown. I had had to wait in the bedroom for at least half an hour so that my rain-soaked hair could dry off. I had hidden Freda’s dress under my bed, quelling the urge to cut it into a million pieces with Mama’s sewing scissors.
‘How was dinner at Mrs Shelton’s?’ Father asked.
‘Delicious,’ I murmured.
‘It was so kind of her to have you,’ mused my mother. ‘I’d like to call and thank her, but clearly I can’t.’
‘Don’t worry, Mama. I did tell her how grateful you’d both be.’ My voice sounded flat but I couldn’t lift it, no matter how hard I tried.
‘Is everything all right? You seem a little out of sorts,’ remarked my father, who was laying a pair of his socks on the hearth to dry.
‘I’m fine … thank you, Father.’ I tried to unearth a way of telling him but the words shrivelled inside me. It was as if, by giving it air, I would make it more real.
‘Off to bed, then. We shan’t keep you up any longer.’ My mother nodded towards the hallway, leant back in her chair and relocated her place on the page with a finger. She always read in the kitchen, hauling in one of the comfy chairs from the study and thumping it down next to the stove. There was hardly any point in us having the other rooms because we spent most of our time in there.
‘Good night. Sleep well,’ I said to them both, walking towards my mother’s chair.
‘Sleep tight, my darling,’ she replied, pulling me towards her for a kiss. I glanced at the volume of poetry in her right hand and thought again of Pete. There would be no more letters. Perhaps he had been writing to Freda as well as me. I rummaged around for a memory of her opening an envelope with the same texture and shade of cream as the ones Pete sent to me. Unable to recall one, I set about inventing one: a morning when I arrived at the breakfast table to find Freda’s head bowed over a sheet of familiar handwriting. Then, in my mind’s eye, I burnt the letter in the fire, right in front of her nose, watching the edges curl and vanish.
Father kissed me on the forehead. I left the kitchen and climbed the stairs. Rather than returning to my room, I slipped through Freda’s door and sank down on her bed. She had made an eiderdown quilt with the same pattern of pink roses as the wallpaper she had selected from the shop in Wilton. I ignored my reflection in the mirror above her dressing-table; the rain had brought out all the scarlet in my cheeks and the crying had left small sacs of skin under my eyes. I thought of Freda’s face – the notion of it marking me in a way it had not done before. Her conker-brown curls. Her button nose. Her doll-like skin. I couldn’t believe how naïve I’d been, worrying all this time about Annie when the real threat was my own flesh and blood. Freda and I were not at all alike; if there had been a resemblance, perhaps I could have forgiven him more easily.
I lay awake in bed, the inside of me a cave, listening for her return. I tried to predict which door she would come in through and what excuse she would give Father and Mama. Maybe she, too, had had a change of clothes hidden in the churchyard. When, at last, I heard the latch, I crept onto the landing. I heard my mother’s voice, as co
mposed as a cantata, in the hall.
‘Hello, my darling, did you enjoy yourself?’
Freda’s reply was lost in the folds of the coat she was taking off. I watched her hang it on the stand.
‘Oh, I am glad. I expect the NAAFI girls were good company. So kind of them to invite you.’
‘Yes, Marie’s a good sport. I wish you’d been there, Mama. The hall was full to bursting.’
‘Your father never did like to dance in public. He gets so bashful – you should see him!’ She seemed lost for a moment in recollection. Then she looked up again at Freda. ‘Hurry on up to bed now. Father and Violet are already fast asleep …’ She paused. ‘And, Freda, I must ask that you don’t tell your sister about the dance,’ she instructed, in a whisper. ‘If she discovers your whereabouts this evening, she’ll only want to go along to the next one. Heaven knows, Pete has probably tried to take her already. He’s harmless enough right now but we wouldn’t want it to … develop. And these dances have a way of fostering … Do you understand?’
‘Perfectly, Mama. Pete’s a farm boy. Violet is the parson’s daughter.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t put it –’
‘We may as well call a spade a spade.’
A faint look of surprise drifted across Mama’s face. I wanted to call down from the banisters and tell her everything – how she was wasting her concern on me. Freda was right: he was a farm boy. Just a farm boy, for pity’s sake. And two years her junior. So why him? Of all people, why him?
It was a redundant question. As Freda turned from the coat stand, her eyes rose to the banisters and fell on my shadow. A smile ghosted across her lips – so ethereal that only a sister could have seen it. She had danced with him because, of all people, he was mine.
CHAPTER 8
I lie down in the hull of the dinghy and try to delete the sound of the sea from my ears. The water clenches and unclenches beneath me. If it wasn’t for the thought of finding James, I would be wishing I was back on the tanker. An hour or so later, Ravindra tugs at my shirt, thinking that I’m asleep. I sit up to see the ocean brimming with cars, bits of buildings and snaking cables. The wreckage gets denser the closer we sail to the shore.
It is then that we see the first body – face down in the water, limbs splayed in a star, as if in awe of something on the seabed. It’s a man. I’m sure of it. A white man. ‘Stop! Please stop!’
The driver cuts the engine and we drift sideways towards the body. Both men cover their noses. I want to back away as much as they do. But I can’t. Not without knowing if it’s him. Ravindra sees what I’m thinking of doing before I do it. ‘Illay!’ He tries to pull me back.
I lean over the rim. My hands lock on the body’s fingers, which have turned to putty from having spent so long in the water. Then the smell arrives in full: putrid rot for which there is no word that fits – the opposite of blossom. Holding onto my nausea, I roll the man over and he starts to sink. His face is blank, descending. There is nothing left of his features, the wave having plundered the eyes, nose and lips and, with them, any trace of a name or even a race.
They weren’t James’s clothes. He was wearing a striped shirt: blue and green. I want to sigh, feel relieved, but when I slump down on the deck and shut my eyes, the face appears again, refusing to be drowned. How many more will I have to search? What right do I have even to be looking for him? When he married me, I felt too flimsy for what had occurred – as if ‘marriage’ were too heavy a word for what existed between us; as if I would sink beneath it. It’s the kind of word that takes years to own, more suited to my mother than to me. But James and I – we married as a way of introducing ourselves to each other: an act of childish curiosity that, to others, is the crest of something full-bodied and substantial. And now his whereabouts is in my hands. Eleven months. That’s all we had together before he asked me. And I’m left searching for him, rooting him out from among the dead, convincing myself that if I’d said no, losing him would not have meant so much.
‘Marry me.’ He’d said it as if it were a dare. We were leaving Delhi at the time, pressed together on the top bunk of a sleeper train with a fan whirring bird-like above our heads. His fingers had laced into the gaps between mine as we hurtled towards the southern tip of India. This closeness felt new to me – as if I were emerging from a deep sleep and had forgotten everything that occurred before. I had missed him: the day – our argument – had left me raw with longing. But now we were acting like one and the same person again, and I had thrown myself into him, not knowing how long it would last.
‘You don’t mean it,’ I replied.
‘You’re barely giving it a second thought.’
‘You’re being facetious, that’s why!’
‘I’m serious.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. Somewhere in the south. On the tip of India.’
‘But what about Delhi – everything that happened?’
‘But you love me?’
I paused. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d told Mum, even, that I loved her. And here was James, who made the word feel effortless. ‘You know I do.’
‘Then you can marry me.’ He was closer now – our knees and noses were touching.
‘You’re not serious.’
‘So it’s a definite no?’ He smiled, putting a hand on the small of my back and pulling me towards him.
‘Not definite. No.’ Mum would kill me. She’d only met him once.
We try to start the boat but the throttle chews laboriously at the water and, with one last gulp, the engine dies. We are just a few hundred yards from the shore. The thought of lowering my legs into that open tomb, swimming through everything that was loved and lost, makes my throat contract. Other bodies, numberless, must be hidden under the water, fingers flowering upwards towards my soon-to-be-kicking feet. The man at the wheel reaches into a compartment and pulls out two life jackets. Ravindra throws one to me and puts on his own before climbing over the rim of the boat. Doesn’t he care what’s in the water? The driver drops his anchor and Ravindra calls for me to follow. I stay rigid.
‘Husband!’ Ravindra shouts, treading the sea and waiting for me to join him. For a second, there is understanding between us. James. I must find my husband. And Ravindra must get back to his wife.
He might be drowned or buried. Or, worse, he’s seen through our spontaneity – the haste of it all – and left me in the wave’s wake. How unswerving he was, saying that he’d known from the start we’d be together. But my father saw Mum for what she was and gave up. It can happen to me too: I can be left. I can’t recover what I ruined any more than I can rebuild Imber, was what Dad said to her in the letter. Perhaps, after all this, James and I will suffer the same fate.
I only came close to Dad once. It was summer and I was on the verge of my thirteenth birthday. Mum and Tim were out when the doorbell rang. Through the spy-hole, I could see a woman with a thick, bleached bob and a paste of makeup on her face, which, instead of covering her skin, settled in the contour of each wrinkle. I’d heard her heels on the paving before she rang the bell. Mum didn’t wear heels. I slipped the chain into its rivet before opening up.
‘Hello there … Are you Alice?’ she asked. I nodded and narrowed the gap in the door.
‘Don’t be frightened … please … I’m … I’ve come about Peter Statton – or Archam, as you might have known him.’ She seemed to be testing the name on me, to see if I would recognize it. In my childishness, I frowned.
‘You know who he is, don’t you?’
My head bowed in an uncertain nod.
‘I’m wondering. Is Violet at home?’
‘No,’ I murmured. ‘Mum’s out.’
The woman faltered slightly on the doorstep. For a moment, I thought she was going to make her excuses and leave. Instead, she turned to her handbag – a big cream thing on her arm, whose lacquer caught the sunlight like the enamel of a car. She fished out a photograph and handed it to me. The man in the picture, who was my father, was much changed from the portrait my mother kept of him. There were so many things that were unfamiliar; it was hard to decide what to look at first. He was dressed in jeans and a chequered workman’s shirt, not a uniform like in Mum’s frame. A muddy stubble had spread itself over his jawline and his hands were rough – not like Tim’s, which tapped at a typewriter all day. He had my eyes, and I wanted to take them back.
‘You know my dad?’ I whispered.
‘No … Well, yes … I’ve known him.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I won’t trouble you for long … Alice.’ My name clunked uncomfortably on her tongue. ‘I thought you and your mother might like to see the photo. That’s all.’
‘Does my mum know you?’ I asked. She returned to her handbag again without answering and brought out another photograph. It was of a girl, sitting on a stool, with a stone-hard face that seemed to resist the camera. I took hold of the photo. Again, I saw my eyes staring back at me.
Was this a test? If I got the right answer, would there be other pictures? I wasn’t sure I wanted more; I wanted her gone. ‘Who’s this?’
‘It was taken a long time ago … It’s me … as a girl.’ She paused. ‘I’m Peter’s sister.’
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