The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  The sky let out another growl, engines rising up their octaves, like a gathering wave. A stutter of bullets could be heard breaching the haze, eliciting the same gasp from the crowd as a firework’s crackle. All eyes were fixed on the convoy. Just then I heard the sound of a seam ripping in front of me. A hole caused by I-don’t-know-what opened below the ear of the man in the waistcoat. He dropped his pipe and slipped to his knees, liquid no thicker than a pencil mark carving a path from his head to the nape of his neck.

  ‘Pete!’ I screamed, grabbing hold of the man as he fell backwards onto my calves. ‘Pete!’

  The bullets were hailing down on us now, slipping as easily as a kitchen knife into the pith of the crowd. I felt a weight push me to the ground and, at the sight of Pete’s shirt, thought, with horror, that he’d been hit. But he yelled, ‘Stay where you are!’ So I cowered underneath Pete, eyes drawn to the pupil of the man in the waistcoat in front of me – bullet black. To my horror, Pete reached for the man’s body and hauled it across us to shield us from the bullets, while the rest of the crowd buckled and scattered and flailed.

  The air fell silent. There was a shudder. The ground beneath gave way.

  I let go of Pete and was propelled upwards. My stomach folded in on itself, like it had on the Waltzer at the Warminster fair. I clawed around for something to hold but felt only air. The ground arrived again with a punch, stealing my breath and leaving me sprawled on my back. Then the dust came, in rain, and sealed my eyes shut. I could feel it lining my throat and painting my skin. I blinked. And blinked again. A man in uniform to the right of me stumbled, dazed, through the dust cloud. His left arm was missing and blood, dark as tar, was seeping through the chevrons on his uniform. I opened my mouth to tell him but there was no sound. Then Pete came running, his skin as painted as my own. He pulled me to my feet, took me by the hand and began to tug me out of the crowd. My head pounded and throbbed, pounded and throbbed, until I thought I would drop into sleep and be done with running for ever.

  Trampling over stained grass after Pete, I saw a man my father’s age receive a river of bullets across his chest – the holes following each other like a scattering of stones from his hip to his shoulder.

  An officer with a leg wound was waving a red flag at the planes overhead, upon which their metal hailstorm thinned and evaporated. The dust parted. Sound came back in snatches. All around us were bodies and debris and earth. The ordered rows of spectators were no more. It was as if the Plain itself had reared up like a sea and sent its inhabitants flailing. There were no screams. Only faint raspings and the slow movement of limbs through smoke.

  I wish I could say that I thought of Father straight away. That he was my first concern. I screamed at Pete to find him. He must have been somewhere near the front. When Pete kept on running, I turned, let go of his hand, and ran back in the direction from which we had come. Ahead of me, emerging silently beyond the smoke, was the untouched convoy, the dummies in the trucks wearing the same nowhere stare as they had done before the planes arrived.

  I found him face down in the grass, set apart from the rest of the crowd – a red shadow underneath him. I bent to see to his wounds but Pete, who had run after me, put a hand out to stop me.

  ‘Don’t, Violet.’

  ‘You don’t know!’ I cried, breaking free of his hold. I took Father by the shoulder and turned him.

  A bullet was seeded

  dark as soil

  in the flower of his

  mouth.

  CHAPTER 11

  The stiffer and colder his body became, the more quickly they moved on to those whose breath still lingered in them. I kept pleading with the ambulances to take him but we were one of the last to be seen to. A nurse helped me lift him onto a stretcher. She threw open a sheet as if to make a bed and laid it across the entire length of him, even his face. I thought of Fred Batch, buried in the snow. Perhaps then I knew. Whatever knowing means. Do you ever know? Because it seemed as if he had just left something behind, something he would return for later. I climbed into the back of the ambulance where he had been placed, along with two others, and we trundled, with none of the urgency I had anticipated, down the Imber road. A blue more delicate than a harebell threaded itself through the outer layer of skin on his hand. I let go. And have spent years trying to let go again.

  It was just him and me; no Mama; no Freda. Pete ran from the Plain to fetch them from the parsonage. So there was no Pete either. They put Father on a hospital bed in a room of his own. There were no nurses or doctors. The curtains were drawn. I sat with him for an hour, thinking of the lump of lead that had yet to be removed from his throat. I told him that he couldn’t go to war any more, that he was to stay with us for good.

  They arrived at the hospital, Freda coughing tears and Mama bleached white with fear. We stood by his bed, as distant from each other as milestones, none of us able to surmount the yards between us.

  It was two days before we were allowed to take him home. A full investigation into the demonstration was launched and a post-mortem conducted. A combat pilot … only his third ever flight … in the glaring sun … Canadian; rumours ripened in every corner of the hospital. Mrs Whistler, who sent flowers by mistake when she heard that Father was still alive, arrived and sat with us long enough to watch them wilt.

  Pete cut down one of the ash trees at the end of the parsonage garden and had a coffin made from it. The gap that it left was far from large, but it was enough for us to feel more keenly than ever the cut of the wind come wintertime. A memorial service was held in the church. They rang the bell for him – the one with the deepest knell. The noise moaned hopelessly across the Plain, dwindling in the hollows of the Downs, limping across the expanses of grass that lay between Chitterne and Lavington. There was not a soul outside Imber who would hear it.

  He was buried in the churchyard, in a freshly dug grave. The headstone, which was clean and pure compared to the weathered ones around it, has now grown its own lichen skin and is hidden under a thick knot of goose grass. Like the other graves, it is hemmed in by barbed wire and an eight-foot fence – as if a fence alone were enough to keep the shells at bay. And the old order of things will pass away was the scripture engraved under his name.

  Freda became quieter and quieter in those days. None of us spoke; inhaling the air was enough to contend with. But my sister’s silence was of a different, more strangled, kind. She no longer joined Mama and me for meals. Yet the food in the larder and even the pile of coupons in the dresser kept being depleted. The sourer the food, the more likely it was to disappear. I once found an empty pickled-onions jar discarded at the back of the house; raw runner beans, tomatoes short of their blush and tins of peas soon followed. Mama said nothing. Some days I wondered whether she even noticed.

  Freda didn’t take the wireless up to her room any more. There was no more singing. Sometimes, from outside her bedroom door, I heard her crying. She wouldn’t let me in when I knocked.

  She disappeared in July, some months after Father was buried. I woke in the night to the sound of an engine on Church Lane only to lapse back into a thin sleep shortly afterwards. In the morning I knocked on Freda’s door with a cup of tea. Silence was nothing out of the ordinary in the parsonage now so, on not receiving a response, I went into the room. Her bed had been stripped and the wardrobe was open.

  Things were missing. Her nightgown. Her shoes, the ones that she used to change into at the last gate along the track to Warminster. Town shoes, she called them, if ever there was such a thing. Her coat was gone too. Not the rough waxed one that she wore on our farm visits, but her Sunday best. I crossed the room and opened the top drawer of the dressing-table. Her hairbrus
h was not in its usual place and the small medley of makeup that she had eked out of her pocket money over the years had vanished.

  I ran across the landing to find my mother, still in her bed, with one arm cast protectively over the pond of space where my father would have slept.

  ‘Mama, it’s Freda,’ I mouthed, almost inaudibly. She didn’t stir. ‘Mama, please, wake up.’

  She opened her eyes and, seeing me at the door, sat up and whispered, ‘Come in, my darling.’

  ‘No, Mama, listen, it’s Freda … She’s … Her things are gone.’

  ‘Violet –’

  ‘Her town shoes are missing, and her coat, her hairbrush and toothbrush. I think she’s run away.’

  ‘But … She’s probably just gone out for a stroll, darling.’

  ‘No, I went into her room, you see, to take her some tea. If you don’t believe me, go and look for yourself.’

  Mama rose from her bed and, sliding on a loose dressing-gown, glided across the landing to Freda’s room. She emerged again a minute or so later, her dressing-gown pulled more tightly around her ribs. She hastened down the stairs and I followed.

  ‘Get your boots on,’ she ordered sharply, rummaging around on the coat stand. ‘I’m going to the Court to see if Mrs Whistler will lend us a car. And don’t you go anywhere without me, Violet. One daughter’s enough to be worrying about.’ The door slammed behind her and I was left alone in the hallway, Father’s old boots next to mine.

  It wasn’t long before I heard the rasp of a car outside. I pulled on my shoes and an overcoat and opened the door onto the dawn. Mist moved in barrels along the lawn. I stowed myself in the back of the car; Mama was at the wheel. Noting that I had left the front seat empty, she turned her head for a moment towards the space where Father might have sat. Then, with one swift press of her foot on the pedal, we sped away.

  ‘Blast this mist,’ she gasped, as she pulled out onto the road. ‘Where do we even start?’

  ‘Pete,’ I whispered. ‘We start with Pete.’

  At the end of Dog Kennel Lane, the mist began to lift. The birch trees outside the Archams’ farmyard glimmered like ornaments; palm-sized cobwebs crocheted the spaces between the branches and caught the dew in beads.

  ‘I don’t understand. Why are we looking for her here?’ my mother protested, as we switched off the engine and entered the yard on foot.

  ‘Pete might know something. It’s just a … I’ll explain afterwards.’

  Mrs Archam looked up from inside the farmhouse kitchen, her face filling with the same clash of dread and pity that met us everywhere we went in the village, these days.

  ‘You know what he’s like, Miss Violet,’ she told me, when I asked to see him at the door, ‘always disappearing off here, there and everywhere.’

  ‘You mean he’s not here?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve not seen him since dinner yesterday.’

  ‘He’s with her,’ I muttered to Mama. ‘You have to trust me.’

  Mama only frowned.

  ‘He did say something about meeting a friend at the station,’ continued Mrs Archam. ‘When I pressed him, that is. I didn’t like to trouble him too much – it upsets him when I interfere.’

  I thanked her and took my mother’s arm. We strode over the yard back to Mrs Whistler’s old Crossley. The journey to the station began in silence. There was something about the fog – the way it deleted the folds and creases and divides of the Plain – that insisted on no noise. I felt that if I were to speak my words would be swallowed instantly and reduced to a mere shape on my lips. The whites of Mama’s knuckles became more and more pronounced the closer we got to the edge of the Plain, forming a line of moons as she tightened her grip on the steering-wheel.

  ‘Vi, I know you know something,’ she asserted, once we had crossed the Plain.

  I faltered at first. But, inch by inch, the explanation came to me. I told her about the dance, how I had seen Freda with him, how I didn’t know whether they had gone together or simply met there, but that it had been clear he felt something for her.

  ‘They’ve eloped?’ she asked, aghast.

  ‘I don’t know, Mama. I’ve given up trying to make sense of it.’ My voice did not lose its steadiness, as my mother’s had, but instead slipped into flat resignation. Father’s death had eclipsed everything. Any recollection of the hurt my sister had inflicted elicited nothing from me but guilt – regret at having spent my worry on something so slight.

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me about what you saw at the dance? I could have put a stop to it! Your father – he – your father would …’

  Mama’s resolve seemed to fold in on itself at the mention of him. I shrank into the back seat as the car picked up speed. The road dipped and rose beneath us with a haste to which I was not accustomed. I held my stomach and thought of them, tucked away in the corner of a carriage, her head on his shoulder, city-bound. Flower. Bullet. Mouth. That was why I hadn’t told her.

  We arrived at the station to find the platform deserted. I stared down the tracks, willing a train to arrive and carry me towards them. I made compromises in my head. If only they would both come back, I could live. I wouldn’t care that they were together: it would be enough just to have them here. I thought of the bombs – as common as rain – in the cities. They needed to come home, the pair of them. It was no use losing them as well as Father. I turned round to see my mother opening the door to the waiting room and walking up to a bundle stretched along one of the benches. A pair of shoes coated in chalk dust was pressed together on the floor below and I recognized them instantly as Pete’s. There was a time, before the accident, when I would have cried at the sight of him still there and not far away on a train with my sister. Mama shook his shoulder and woke him.

  ‘Pete,’ she began coldly, before he had had a chance to rub the sleep from his eyes. ‘For Heaven’s sake, wake up.’

  He sat up, momentarily unsure of his whereabouts.

  ‘Where’s Freda?’

  He fumbled around for his hat, stood up and placed it on his head. Why he felt the need to put his hat on, I do not know. Perhaps he was buying time. He locked his hands behind his back. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Fielding …’

  ‘An apology is not going to achieve anything, young man. Where is my daughter?’ Her tone hardened.

  ‘In London. She’s gone to London.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go with her?’ I blurted. Pete frowned at me briefly before returning his gaze to the floor.

  ‘I was never going to take the train myself,’ he replied. ‘She asked for help. Said she couldn’t make it to the station on her own.’ He rubbed at the patch of skin under his nose and looked past us towards the door.

  ‘And to think we counted you as a neighbour, Pete – all of us,’ exclaimed my mother.

  ‘You wouldn’t have behaved so despicably had my father been around,’ I added.

  ‘If a person’s fed up with a place, you should let them go,’ Pete retorted. ‘There’s no point trying to keep them when they don’t want to be kept … Mrs Fielding.’ He added my mother’s name as an afterthought, all the while glaring at me.

  ‘She’s lived here all her life, Pete,’ I cried. ‘She wouldn’t just pack up and leave without a good reason. Father’s gone and she doesn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Look here,’ my mother intervened. ‘This isn’t solving anything. You must tell us which train she caught – it’s the very least you can do.’

  ‘The last one to London yesterday. It left at midnight.’

  ‘And what will she …? Where will she stay?’ I asked.

  ‘I swear to you, Mrs Fielding,�
� he said, ignoring my questions, ‘I’ve told you everything I know.’

  Mama checked her watch, turned her back on him and took me by the arm. ‘Listen here, Violet. We can make enquiries from Imber. I’ll telephone Aunt Dorothy in Battersea. But there’s little point in trying to fetch her back ourselves. She’ll only dig her heels in. Once we’re sure that she’s safe, we must let her be. Do you understand?’

  I nodded and followed her out of the waiting room back towards the car. To my disgust, Mama paused, turned back to Pete and said, ‘You’d better come with us in the Crossley. I don’t see how else you’re going to get home.’

  By the time we reached the Imber road, the mist on the Plain had dissipated into a mute sky. I kept my eyes on the window the whole way into the village, only releasing them when Pete had been deposited at the Archams’. Like me, Mama did not see fit to shed tears. We had nothing left to give Freda but wide-eyed fright.

  In the days that followed, evidence of my sister’s getaway began to surface. Mrs Taylor was the first to call on the evening after our drive to the station. My mother bowed her head over the kettle, bleary-eyed, as her visitor began to speak.

  ‘I did wonder why the girl wanted so much laundry done at once. I was cross with her, you see. We’re overrun with all the uniforms as it is, and I told her she’d have to wait her turn.’

  ‘Oh, Kathy, why did you not think to tell me? I should have known straight away what she was up to.’ Mama put her head into her hands and sighed.

  ‘Fancy running away without leaving so much as a note! She was brought up better than that, Martha, don’t blame yourself,’ our guest responded. Mama raised her head again and Mrs Taylor, whose fingers were so creased from the wash-house that they had started to resemble a wrung-out cloth, put a palm on my mother’s shoulder and took my hand in hers.

  ‘Do you think she’s gone for good?’ I murmured.

  She telephoned from London a week later, leaving a number with Mrs Carter and a time at which we could ring. Mama wasted no time in arranging for a trunk call at the post office but we were forced to wait several days before the call could be made. When the moment finally arrived, and Mrs Carter held out the earpiece, Mama’s courage failed and she gestured for me to take it instead. Mrs Carter thrust it into my hand before I could refuse; the call had already connected. Mama came near to the earpiece so that she could hear. But it wasn’t my sister who answered.