The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  The woman stared expectantly at me. Don’t you know your own family, Alice Fielding? I scanned the picture again for a clue as to what to say.

  ‘Did your mum tell you he had a sister?’ she asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘We were quite a complicated family,’ she added. ‘It wasn’t easy for my mother – to do what she did …’

  I frowned. The woman caught my confusion and stepped away from the door uneasily. ‘I’m sorry … I thought …’ There was another pause. Again she seemed to be weighing up whether to stay or go. After a moment’s thought, she reached into her handbag again and handed me a card hesitantly. ‘This is my number. If you ever have any questions, you only have to call. Do you understand?’ I nodded. Sadness reared momentarily from under her makeup, but before I could ask her anything else, she twisted on her shoes and walked back down the drive. Before long she was hidden from sight by the rhododendron and all I could hear was the slick clop of her heels on the road.

  I tried to tell Mum, but the words never came. Every time I saw her looking at the uniformed photograph of my father, something caught in my throat and I felt unable to supplant this framed, fixed, knowable version of him with the one the woman had given me. It was an anchor to which Mum had tethered everything, and I wasn’t going to be the one to cut the rope.

  The engine has failed us completely. There is no choice but to try to wade to shore. I roll over the rim and drop down into the water to join Ravindra. I can feel the debris close in on me, melding me into its ill-fitting jigsaw. Eyes shut, I start to swim.

  Every few seconds, waves roll under us, like fists under blankets. The shore inches nearer. Ravindra is ahead by a good few strokes, needling through the patchwork of wreckage. I’m floundering in the same segment of water, paddling through it again and again, urging the beach to arrive. After a while, I find I can’t keep a steady rhythm, stopping between each stroke to take a breath. Ravindra lets out a shout. He is standing, two feet rooted on the seabed. We’ve reached the shallows. I lower my legs timidly, not quite believing that I can step on actual ground. Just as I gain my balance, a wave picks me up from nowhere – along with my panic – and sets me down. I swallow the urge to scream. It could drag me out again in seconds if it wanted to. I push as quickly as I can through the water, dreading the next swell. The sea drops to my waist, then to my thighs and finally to below my knees. Here, the water rushes through the gaps between my toes. I’m aware, suddenly, of its warmth. It regains the texture of my childhood – those days spent darting into the shallows, surrendering gleefully to the water’s grip. Mum used to get so worried about me going swimming. She wouldn’t sunbathe: instead she would stand like a watchman on the shore’s lip, fixing her eyes to the crest of my head as I leapt into the smother of another wave. I thought her silly for believing the sea could be anything other than benign.

  Her first letter had arrived when we were in Istanbul. James had picked it up from the post office, expecting that she’d write. I’d refused to read it at first, but eventually he persuaded me to open the envelope. Her handwriting, unlike mine, was compact and efficient: it stretched in impeccable lines across the blue airmail paper, filling every inch of the page.

  Dear Alice,

  I hope you’ll forgive me for writing. I couldn’t bear the thought of us parting ways on such bad terms.

  What a time you must be having. Tim says Istanbul is a fascinating place; the gateway to the East. Already you are doing things that I never dreamt of doing and you are not even in India yet. I won’t pretend it doesn’t worry me, but I am proud. You are bolder than I ever was.

  Tim and I are well. He is about to start his new job for the electricity board in Oxford. It’s quite a task he’ll have, with the workers proposing yet another strike: power cuts are already two a penny in the south. The board seems to be happy with his plans to continue living in Salisbury. It’s quite a drive for him and we did consider moving but, well, you know what a hassle it would be. Besides, Tim understands that you grew up here – and we both want you to have a home to return to, should you choose to come back.

  I’m thinking of you, darling, all those miles away. Take care of yourself and send my regards to James.

  With love from

  Mum

  Her meanderings seemed different on paper. I could see her holding back, attempting to phrase things in ways that I would understand. I had been so angry with her for so long, and for no good reason. Yet she didn’t retreat: she continued to move, vulnerably, towards me, in the hope that I would give in. That’s what mothers do, I thought: they love out of reflex – like moths returning blindly to a flame. Except she was different: it seemed more conscious, her decision to persist and be burnt.

  CHAPTER 9

  On the morning after the dance, the words I’d planned to say to my sister at the breakfast table emptied from my head when she entered the dining room. It was as simple and sudden as the pouring away of water. She yawned, took a seat and began speaking to me but I could not muster a reply.

  ‘Violet?’

  I watched the roses claw up the trellis on the other side of the window. We had knocked together the frame last summer, using Father’s hammer and nails. Freda and I had grown the roses for Mama’s birthday. It had been my idea – and it was my fingernails that had carried a crescent of soil beneath them for weeks on end. My sister had joined in just as the roses had budded.

  ‘Violet, I asked if you could pass the toast.’

  I withdrew my eyes from the window and handed my sister the rack.

  She frowned at me. ‘You look awful. Trouble sleeping?’

  Mama carried in a pot of honey and took a seat next to us. Father’s steps were heard on the stairs and he joined us at the head of the table.

  ‘Pass me the toast, Freda, that’s a good girl. I want to hear all about the dance. I gather there was quite a turn-out.’

  ‘Jack,’ hissed Mama, drawing his eyes towards my place at the table.

  Father looked down at his toast.

  ‘It’s all right, really … I don’t mind.’ I tried to sound sincere but, catching sight of Freda’s face, I lowered my eyes to my plate.

  ‘You’re a good sport, Vi. I knew you’d be fine with it,’ she cooed.

  ‘Violet, forgive me for keeping it from you,’ said my mother, placing a hand on my arm. ‘I thought it would be less trying for you if you didn’t know. You can go too when you’re older.’

  ‘It’s only two months until your sixteenth birthday,’ chipped in Father. ‘Perhaps Pete will take you then.’ Under the table, I tightened my grip on a fold in my skirt and twisted it into a knot. Freda picked up her knife, which was lying on the table opposite me, and shaved off a sliver of butter from the dish next to her. She caught my eye as she withdrew the knife to her plate and smiled as if the butter were our secret.

  ‘Mama,’ I murmured, which caused my mother to look up from her toast.

  ‘Freda, what do you think you’re doing bringing the butter out from the larder?’ came her remonstration. ‘I shan’t tell you again – it’s not to be wasted on toast. Put it back this instant.’

  Later, on the way to church, I crossed the field with the rest of my family and prayed Pete would have a reason to miss the service. Enduring my sister was one thing; seeing him was quite another. Noticing that I had fallen behind, Freda slackened her pace, drew level with me and took my arm. ‘Chin up, Vi. Don’t be down-hearted. I promise you, as soon as Ma and Pa let you, we’ll go to a dance together.’

  I detached my arm from hers and bent down to attend to my shoelace, which was alrea
dy well tied.

  ‘I’m more than happy to take you for your birthday,’ she continued. ‘After all, I wouldn’t want you to count on Pete. He may not ask you, you know, and then who will you go with?’

  I stood up from my shoe and met her stare. ‘Freda …’ The sentence fossilized inside me, and before I knew quite what my feet were doing, I was walking away from her back towards the house.

  ‘Violet!’ she called. ‘Violet, you can’t miss church – Father …’

  Nobody followed. They could not afford to be late for the service.

  Letting myself in through the back gate, I went up the length of the lawn to the house. I could hear tanks moaning, like overgrown flies, on the Plain and, every now and again, the guttural stutter of an unknown gun. These sounds, previously alien, had imbued themselves slowly on my consciousness so that now they seemed as natural as the wind and the birdsong. I reached the terrace at the end of the lawn and looked up at the parsonage. It had two triangle-roofed wings that jutted onto the terrace from the main body of the house. I loved its red brick, which glistened in the rain and gave off a rasping scarlet dust in the summer – perhaps one always feels this way towards a home once it is gone, but I would not have laid a single brick differently. I flopped down on the bench next to the roses and breathed in the scent. I had deliberately chosen to plant them there because it was sheltered from the wind by the west wing of the house. Here, in this small pocket of still air, the scent could mill and linger. Mama had thanked Freda and me equally for the roses when we presented the bed to her on her birthday. I suppose, in their fully grown form, the flowers suited my sister more than they did me so it was easy for Mama to think of them as Freda’s idea. She forgot the boyish hours of digging, training and watering that had given birth to them, and saw only the stems and petals before her, as feminine and effortless as her elder daughter.

  Annie would have no trouble guessing why I wasn’t at church. I only hoped she wouldn’t give me away to Freda. The notion that Pete might also be aware of my absence rose briefly before I dismissed it as pure fancy. The realization – there, in the garden – that I would not be the one in his thoughts made me retreat into the house. I removed my shoes and went into Father’s study. I liked being with the books: they reminded me of how many ways of thinking existed outside my own – how small and fleeting my pulse was when set alongside those ageing spines. The headiness I had experienced since waking up that morning seemed to disperse beside them. On the shelves by the door, I found the ship in the bottle that Father had kept since he was a boy. His own father, my grandfather, had left it to him. As a child, I used to puzzle over the bottle, pondering ways of extracting the ship without breaking the glass. Freda had different concerns: she was always asking Father how the ship had got into the bottle in the first place. But at fifteen, alone in the study, I was caught not by these questions but by the thought that the ship would outlive both Freda and me and, most likely, our children; sealed inside the bottle, the only storms it would ever face would be imaginary. When I think of what came later, of how ill prepared I was for everything that occurred, that hour in the study seems absurd – as isolated as the ship I held in my hand. The shallow hurt that I felt towards my sister for something as small as a dance seems illusory now: I can never retrieve it, or imagine, even, how it came to feel so deep.

  CHAPTER 10

  When I saw where it had seeded itself, I thought of a rose, dark as soil, flowering from the mouth. Or maybe the rose came later – to cover something I did not want to see.

  Major Whistler had been enthusing about the Salisbury Plain demonstration for weeks, telling Father how he would hear up close a Hurricane’s throbbing song and witness the effect of live ammunition. Live ammunition, Mr Fielding. There would be no other opportunity like it before he went to war. My father needed little persuasion.

  I begged him to take me too – anything to distract me from Freda and the dance – but he refused. In a crowd of over a thousand, all jostling for their own piece of sky, I would only be a nuisance. I did not protest. I knew Pete would find a way of getting us there, whether my father approved or not.

  I did not talk to Pete about Freda. When, two days after the dance, he appeared at the parsonage door, asking for me and not my sister, I convinced myself that maybe he was sorry or had thought better of his actions. So hungry was I for things to go back to how they had been that I fed this notion of his repentance until it gained flesh and bones and had a life of its own. I did not have to worry about him broaching the subject. He talked of nothing but the demonstration, concocting plans about how we would get into the audience.

  When the day of the exercise arrived, a thick mist pasted itself across the Plain. Father stared glumly at the sky from the dining-room window with a piece of toast in hand and bemoaned the fact that it would be tricky to see the planes. Major Whistler soon called at the door for him and they set off on foot. Pete had agreed to meet me at the back of the school so that we could follow them at a distance. I waited at home for a few minutes, then told Mama that I was going to the Archams’ farm to play ‘kick the can’.

  ‘With Pete?’ Freda cut in. ‘Isn’t he a little old for games?’

  ‘We’ll go for a walk as well. See the sheep,’ I murmured, fumbling around for my boots on the hall floor. I avoided my sister’s stare, which I knew had settled on me from where she stood in the kitchen doorway. Ever since the dance, I had tried to limit our exchanges to as few as possible – a knot of anxiety tied itself inside me every time I was forced to address her. I finished lacing my boots and listened with dread to her approaching steps.

  ‘If I were you, Violet, I would steer clear of him. He’ll only upset you,’ she whispered, standing over me.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. He’s my friend,’ I replied, rising to return her gaze. It was the first time I had met her stare directly since the dance. She was the first to look away, searching the coat rack behind me with her eyes.

  ‘There are things you don’t know about Pete …’ she added, putting a hand on my forearm and meeting my eye again. ‘Things he won’t tell you.’

  ‘And you’re the expert?’ I replied, shrugging off her touch and letting myself out of the house.

  I followed my father and Major Whistler with Pete along the Imber road towards Warminster, careful to keep a distance.

  As we climbed a gully wall, we were met by the tiered terraces of Battlesbury Fort sunk in the haze ahead of us, like the pleats in poured cream. Pete drew me behind a tumulus while my father and Mr Whistler exchanged greetings with an officer on the track ahead. With his eyes focused on my father, Pete kept his hand on my arm as we crouched and watched them. I tried desperately to quell the quickening beat in my chest. Perhaps he simply forgot to let go of me. I wondered what it was that Freda knew and why he hadn’t told me. Dancing was one thing; secrets were quite another. Once my father and Major Whistler had set off again, we skimmed the edge of Bowls Barrow and immersed ourselves in the cover of the swelling crowd. Our youth drew a few stares but I whispered to Pete that, once the fighter planes arrived, everybody’s eyes would be pinned to the sky; we would soon be forgotten.

  At first, stories of air raids minnowed among us, darting from person to person until the excitement was such that I could not make myself heard. I spotted a Hurricane over Chipping Norton the other week, I’m sure of it. You’re in for a treat, old chap. A moustached old man in a waistcoat with a pipe between his teeth angled his head towards the sky and cried, Well, if it teaches those dirty Jerries a lesson, I’m all for it. A low chuckle rippled through the bellies of those around him. As the wait increased, the talk diminished, with more and more heads tilting to
wards the sky in search of the planes.

  About five hundred yards from us there was a convoy of dummy soldiers and battered lorries, flanked by two tanks, whose wrinkled armour cast jagged shadows on the grass. Someone had painted a moustache on the face of one of the dummies so that it matched the man in the waistcoat in front of us. That one’s got it coming to him! He chortled, pointing towards the dummy with his pipe. The crowd inched over the dotted line of tape in front of them, eager to get as close to the firing zone as possible. Tapping his watch, an officer crossed the boundary and turned to address the crowd with a megaphone. We were about to witness two affronts, he told us. The first was to be a dry run in which no ammunition would be fired.

  ‘Move, Vi, you’re treading on my foot!’ hissed Pete, as he bent in to get a better view of the officer.

  During the second affront, he continued, the convoy ahead of us would be shelled and shot at to demonstrate the damage that fighter aircraft equipped with cannon and machine guns could do to soldiers on the march.

  The officer stepped back behind the dotted line, lowered his megaphone and adjusted his cap for a better view of the sky. No sooner had he positioned himself in the safety zone than the shudder of an engine could be heard gaining volume, like growing applause. The crowd jostled. Heads were raised. I spotted Father near the front in his dog collar, beaming boyishly up at the sky.

  The nine Hurricanes dipped one by one through the haze above us, sketching the swoop of a valley with their smoke. The crowd stilled their lungs. We watched them loop back over to Battlesbury.

  ‘Here we go,’ breathed Pete, clutching the sleeve of my blouse. ‘The dummy run’s over.’ I could feel the nearness of his fingers, as thrilling as the closeness of the aeroplane’s underbelly, which broke into the body of air above our heads.