The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  ‘May I speak to Freda Fielding, please?’ I put on my best telephone voice, elongating my vowels and clipping my consonants.

  ‘What’s the name?’

  ‘Oh, um, Violet. I’m her sister.’

  ‘Sister? She ain’t mentioned a sister.’

  ‘Sorry, no, of course … I have papers?’

  ‘Whatcha gonna do? Read them to me? We’re on the bloody telephone, darling!’

  My mother, who was straining to hear the other half of the conversation, took the receiver from me.

  ‘Look here, this is Freda’s mother. Please fetch my daughter this instant. I’m telephoning on urgent business.’

  ‘Urgent business, eh? All right, missus. I’ll call her down.’

  There was a pause. The line muttered softly to itself.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Freda! Thank God!’ cried Mama.

  ‘Hello, Mama,’ she replied matter-of-factly.

  ‘Freda! Are you all right?’ I interrupted.

  ‘I’m perfectly fine.’

  ‘We were worried sick!’ my mother exclaimed, the weight of her voice landing on the last word.

  ‘And you left no note!’ I chimed in.

  ‘What were we to think, my darling? Anything could have happened.’

  ‘Well, I’m fine. I’ve enlisted. As a nurse.’

  ‘Darling, why didn’t you tell me? I could have telephoned Aunt Dorothy, made arrangements.’

  ‘I want to do this my own way, Mama. No one else’s.’ The muffled sound of a siren began to sing in the background.

  ‘What’s that? Freda? What’s going on?’ Mama’s voice started to fray.

  ‘I’ve got to go, Mama. I’ll write and explain.’

  ‘Write?’ The word came out of Mama’s mouth as high as opera while the siren grew louder at the other end of the line. The noise went blank, suddenly, and my mother dropped the earpiece. I said nothing, watching it pirouette on its cord.

  CHAPTER 12

  Three nights. That was all we’d spent in Kanyakumari before the wave came. But I find that I’m hunting around for surviving buildings – fragments of places that he took me to. We never had a home together and neither did we plan to make one; instead we littered the East with pieces of ourselves – a row in Zahedan, a kiss in Quetta. We’d plant minuscule roots without realizing it. And yet there was so much more to discover.

  ‘What did you buy that for?’ I said to him in a Frankfurt flea market, when the giddiness of our first months together had begun to wane. He had picked up a postcard of a seafront, the colours of the houses almost neon against the cliff. A blonde girl posed in a bikini on the front, her curves superimposed on the coastline with ‘Ich denke an dir’ scrawled across her breasts. ‘You’re not thinking of sending it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he quipped. ‘I thought your mum might appreciate the thought.’ I laughed and watched him slip it, when he thought I wasn’t looking, into his camera bag.

  A month later, when we had reached Pakistan, I came across an entire pile of postcards bound together with an elastic band in his luggage; they were from Belgium, France, Austria, even Istanbul, always the most lurid and hackneyed images he could find. Afterwards, I couldn’t help but notice how, in every town we travelled through, he rifled through markets on the sly – the kind that were stuffed with plastic knick-knacks, flip-flops and faux-gold jewellery. Whenever I scarpered off to find a toilet or scout out a place to stay, I’d return to find him in the shade of a new stall, thumbing his way through boxes of photographs and cards. I refrained from asking him what the point of it was, other than to stockpile junk in a loft he was yet to own; but three months into the overland trail, once we had reached Kashmir, I formed my own theory.

  ‘It’s strange, isn’t it, how you can’t ever piece together a place once you’re away from it?’ He nosed into the Kashmiri heat with his camera lens and pressed the button. ‘It doesn’t matter how many pictures you take.’ We were sitting on the edge of the Dal lake, warming the backs of our calves on the boards of the houseboat, and I murmured something about the trip being unforgettable with or without the photographs. It was only afterwards that I thought properly about what he had said and remembered the postcards. He liked to examine every crevice of a city, absorb its layers, without exchanging a word about why it was made that way or how it differed from home. A visitor couldn’t grasp what it was like to breathe the air of a place for thirty or forty consecutive years, how it changed your understanding of the city. The postcards were talismans, telling him of how he had only skimmed the surface and, once he had departed, how much he would leave behind.

  As time went on, I did this more and more – created a theory about him and then bound him to it, so that it started to suit him and then was him. It mattered to me immensely why he behaved as he did – I wanted to know the origin of every habit. I was envious, I suppose, of him having a past that existed outside my own. But now, in India, with the beachfront in ruins, I feel only that first sting of seeing him stare at another girl’s breasts.

  Ravindra is the first to leave the sea. He shakes it from his feet and does not look back. He doesn’t stop to take in what I see – the town pushed down flat. Instead he walks with purpose towards the ruins, not even pausing for breath. I bend down, with my hands on my knees, and lap up the air. The sea pushes its plunder onto the sand behind me and returns, seconds later, to reclaim it.

  There is a pool of green to my right. A woman’s sari, half unravelled from her body, lies in a coil beside her on the sand. A sling, empty, is still in her grasp – the kind she would have used to carry a baby. I look around for the child. It seems important, somehow, that she should hold it in her sling, that the two should lie together. Of all the things the wave has carried off, this is the smallest, the most precious, no heavier than a small sack of rice. And yet I still search, as if somehow the wave might have mustered the kindness to return what it so coldly took away.

  Ravindra looks back and sees the woman. He points at her body and twirls his finger around as if he were stirring something in a bowl. I know what he is asking me to do. So I approach her, quietly, not wanting to wake her up. The sea has decked her in its ugliest perfume. I choke, burying my mouth and nose in the damp cuff of James’s shirt. Taking hold of her sari, I unravel it. She is not heavy to lift. I roll her slowly along the stretch of cloth until she is folded inside, embalmed in green.

  Had a Tamil woman found her, she would have been able to dress her properly. I try to picture the sari I wore for our wedding but I can’t settle on which shoulder I should drape the end of the cloth over. Ravindra motions towards the left so I roll her one more time, tucking the fabric underneath her as if closing a book.

  We stand for a moment, not moving. Neither of us lifts our eyes from the woman. There are more bodies nearby, washed up like shells, half buried in the sand. Some are curled in on themselves limply, trying to hide. There are so many. We can’t see to them all.

  At the nape of the beach, we walk across together to the place where the town once began. From here the wreckage continues all the way to the foot of the hills. Hardly hills, more like raised plains. I hadn’t noticed them before. But now my eyes latch onto any kind of high ground they can find, making note of it – for next time.

  The line of palm trees that used to break the ocean winds has been deleted. Five clay huts at the head of the beach have been hollowed inside – barren without their fruit and hot snacks and the women who used to sit, hands on knees, watching the day. The third hut along is where James went to buy breakfast. There are no bodies, no shopkeeper, no girl ladling dosa batter into the pan outside the
door. And no James. Shashi Kapoor’s wave-rippled face rests on a billboard blocking the entrance. I have to duck under it to get inside. Behind the counter is the girl who makes the dosa. She is lying, arms close to her sides, her ladle a few metres away – its inner curve licked clean by the sea. There is no one else. I search between pots and jars and tubs of near-fluorescent spices for a sign of James: a piece of fabric, an English coin – my mind fumbles for the memory of what might have been in his pockets.

  Behind the counter is a wooden till – drawers gaping and empty. Either the sea looted it or someone has come since the wave. Next to it is a metal prong where the paper orders for each hot snack are impaled. Lifting the wet mass off the spike, I try to separate the scraps from each other. James’s breakfast order must be here somewhere. But the Tamil lettering is nothing but a string of pictures to me. I can’t decipher it. Even if it is only a pencil mark confirming that he was there, it’s something at least. A beginning.

  CHAPTER 13

  Father’s name was at the top of the evacuation letter, along with Freda’s, Mama’s and my own. Mama was angry with the War Office for not consulting their records: they of all people should have known that he was gone. We wrote to tell Freda of our removal to Wilton and she might have replied, but we had no forwarding address to give her: we received word of a vacant town house on 15 December, just two days prior to the departure deadline; there was no time to send word.

  Mama had not tampered with Father’s belongings since he had died – no new vicar had been appointed so she had not needed to do so. If a letter arrived for him in the post, she would continue to place it on his study desk as if we were expecting him to return any day now to open it. She could not bring herself to load his things into boxes so, when the evacuation order came, I was left to dismantle his study alone. I packed all the books but kept back the ship, which I determined to hold on my lap in the lorry.

  We had been informed of the evacuation only a week earlier. The army subsequently called a meeting in the school. Not everyone was invited but my mother insisted on attending on my father’s behalf. The Archams had wind of a rumour that they were going to announce the construction of a military road through the village. But Mama returned from the meeting as white as a sheet. It was a day before she could bring herself to tell me what had been said. I heard the news, along with others, through Mrs Carter, the post mistress. Rumours gathered pace that they were to use the village as a training ground for the Yanks. To prepare the troops for inland assaults on urban settlements. Allies, they called them. We were to be invaded by our own friends.

  On our moving day, Annie called in to say goodbye. Her mother and father had found accommodation in Devizes; we would be living twenty miles apart.

  ‘You will write?’ she asked, with a note of uncertainty.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I can’t imagine us not being friends, Vi. I know there’s a war on but we must stay in touch.’

  I told her we would arrange to meet up soon, but we both knew it was a lie; since Father had died, Mama and I could ill afford to travel. Annie and I hugged tightly and she scampered back to her cottage. There were so many goodbyes to be said that we kept them brief. Everything seemed bearable when completed with as little fuss as possible.

  An ATS girl arrived with the lorry to collect our belongings and we tried our best to load Father’s desk into the back of the vehicle. But, between us, we could not lift it, not even with a third pair of hands. There were few men left in the village who could offer help and those that remained had their own homes to see to. I feared for a moment that Mama might ask me to send for Pete. Instead, she extracted the drawers like organs from the desk. As we drove away, she clenched her fists and tried with all her might not to look back at the oak frame which stood, as firm as a custodian, in front of the house.

  We were taken to a terraced cottage in Wilton whose owner – a widower – had recently passed away. His relations had no need of the house and were prepared to let it to us for a modest sum. Since they had not been to visit the place, they could not vouch for its upkeep, but we were not about to refuse a roof over our heads, offered on such reasonable terms.

  ‘There we are, Mama. It’s not so bad,’ I remarked, as we drew up outside our new lodgings. The cottage had a sandstone front with arched windows that looked as if they had been borrowed from a church. ‘Quite cosy, really.’

  The ATS girl helped us unload the lorry into the front garden but Mama insisted on sending her back to Imber directly to assist other households who were yet to move. We were left alone to shepherd our belongings, one box at a time, into the cottage. Mama let herself in with a key and carried the first through the hallway. Upon entering the kitchen at the far end of the house, I heard the box of crockery drop clean onto the tiles. I followed into the room to find her staring up at the clouds, our teacups in fragments at her feet. The walls had been reduced to rubble and there was little left of the roof. Surveying the damage from the lawn, we saw that the entire back of the house had been blown open by a bomb. The kitchen, the bedrooms and the landing were all exposed to the open air as if someone had unhinged a doll’s house and rifled through the rooms.

  The War Department’s Estate Office was alerted to the situation but the clerk informed us that accommodation could not be found on our behalf with so little notice. Mama appealed to the landlords in writing that same afternoon but the letter would take two days to arrive. I doubted they would be able to afford the repairs.

  We had no other option but to leave our belongings in the ruined cottage and seek a room at a guesthouse. An elderly lady living at number ten directed us to the Pembroke Inn, just a street away. We entered to find it brimming with men in uniform, some stooped over the bar in the corner, others immersed in newspapers spread wide in the leather chairs by the fire. I tried not to think about the warmth of the flames.

  The landlady at the desk was sympathetic but said it would not be appropriate to house two lone women in a makeshift officers’ mess, even if she did have rooms available. ‘It’s been nothing but trouble since they took over Wilton House,’ she explained. ‘Air raids every week.’

  She arranged for a small supper of bread and broth to be brought to us before regretfully sending us on our way. We retraced our steps along King Street.

  ‘What would he do,’ Mama asked, ‘if he were with us?’

  The air had sharpened with the light’s departure and I dreaded arriving back at the cottage. ‘He’d say that things are bound to seem better in the morning,’ I replied.

  ‘Warmer, yes, but I don’t know about better.’

  Inside the cottage, we retrieved as many blankets as we could find from our luggage and pulled my parents’ mattress into the space next to the hearth. The living room was the only part of the house with its ceiling still intact. As we crawled into our nightgowns and hid our shivers in the blankets, I heard Mama’s laughter filter through the cold.

  ‘I’m just thinking of Freda,’ she whispered. ‘She’d be wallpapering the place in no time.’

  ‘Wallpapering what?’ I smiled. ‘It’s not as if we’re spoilt for walls.’

  Then, side by side in the quiet, we waited for our laughter to melt underneath the ache of everything – his death, our departure, this poor excuse for a home.

  We spent three nights – cold and awful – in that blitzed shell before we were offered a vacant cottage on Russell Street. Mama and I were in no fit state to spend another night in the freezing air without a fire so we accepted the property, regardless of its reputed disrepair. Damp and lack of electricity were nothing to contend with compared to the near-open air of Horton Cottage, King Street. />
  Once we had installed ourselves, we spread our saucepans across the loft to collect the rain and resolved to fix the holes as soon as we could gather together the funds.

  Upstairs, the damp had drawn maps – strange, expanding continents – over the walls of the bedrooms. Mama kept telling me that we would be able to find something better as soon as the war was over. She was talking as if we would never be allowed back home and I told her as much. But she had no reply to give me.

  Father’s belongings stayed in their boxes. There was no room for shelving. Mama removed one volume at a time, working her way religiously through them in the evenings. The Observer’s Book of British Birds, Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, Spenser’s Faerie Queene – no matter how dense the book, she would press on through it until it could be returned to its box with a deeper crease in its spine. She’d read with such vigour that it seemed as if she were searching for something, some clue as to why he was still gone.

  I found a window-sill in our bedroom for the bottled ship. I surrounded it with some of the shells he used to collect and display on the window-sills of his study. Their shapes always seemed so foreign under the landlocked parsonage windows, surrounded on every side, not by a sea, but by a vast plain. But to Father, the Plain was a kind of ocean; it behaved in mysterious ways. He always said he would not be surprised if it had claimed as many lives as our nearest stretch of sea. Mama used to complain about how the shells collected dust but he was resolute about keeping them there. I would catch him from time to time, standing by the window with a shell pressed to his ear, listening for the breath of a wave.