The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  ‘Meet you at the beach in half an hour, then?’ And, with that unanswered question, he closed the door.

  I think of him walking up to the dosa stall on the beachfront, ordering our breakfast and then waiting. Maybe he stepped onto the sand, like others, to stare at the mass of grey building and building in the distance. Perhaps he saw the sea being sucked out and drained, like I did from the hotel window, as if someone had pulled a plug from the seabed. I should have known then and gone to fetch him. But instead I was pleased, pleased, at not having to go for a swim. I didn’t know what it meant. Nobody did. I saw some of the locals running out and picking up fish, huge uncatchable things with purple markings, that had been left to flip themselves to death in the sand.

  Then the first person started to run. And another. Maybe James stood his ground, took out his camera. Maybe he ran too.

  CHAPTER 15

  The factory made me half deaf. It was lonely work – impossible to raise your voice over the hammer of a hundred sewing-machines. I knew the names of the girls on my bench but little else; conversation was impossible. At night, I dreamt of the motions I performed during the day – the pinning of a hem, the feel of the tarpaulin between my fingers. There was a rhythm for everything: folding, cutting, stitching. I tried to break free from the work of the others, do things in a different order or manner, but it did not last: soon I had fallen into line again.

  The larger equipment moved so quickly and with such sharpness that I feared for my fingers. One girl, Lucy, lost her thumb on her first day and couldn’t work after that. Others got pregnant – the only way you could get out of your job. After three weeks, I was half tempted to push my hand under one of the levers and injure myself deliberately but the blot of blood under the chair where Lucy used to sit did away with my courage; the stain remained there as a warning to us all.

  The day was split into three shifts: six until two, two until ten, and then the night session. Once you were allocated your shifts for the week, there was little opportunity for manoeuvring them. My mother – who had started work as a volunteer in the officers’ canteen at Wilton House – hardly ever saw me. On Tuesdays, at six in the morning, we’d pass in the road, she on the way to her work, me on the way back from mine.

  I began to wish it had been me, not Freda, who had run away to London and become a nurse. Anything but the bang, bang of metal hitting metal, of machine talking to machine.

  Sometimes, when the noise grew too tiresome, I thought of Imber’s winds. I pictured myself back in the parsonage cellar, listening to the bursts and flashes, beautifully irregular and erratic above us. But the factory noise was too harsh and fast to forget for long; even the most militant of Imber’s storms could not have drowned it out.

  I didn’t let on to Mama how difficult the work at the factory had proved. She had been set against me taking up a job there from the beginning, saying it was beneath me. I was still the parson’s daughter and the factory was unbecoming. But with Father gone, I had little choice but to work. The colourlessness in my face soon gave away my discomfort and she begged me to hand in my notice.

  ‘Your father would not approve, Violet. You know he wouldn’t. He’d much rather you were on a farm in the fresh air than cooped up in a factory all day.’

  ‘If I worked on a farm, I’d have to leave you, Mama. And I’m not prepared to do that, not while Freda is away. And, besides, the wages –’

  ‘I will not have you thinking of the roof! They pay you a pittance! They’ll wear you down until there’s not a scrap left of you. Mark my words, they will.’

  Even if Mama had persuaded me otherwise, I didn’t want Pete to be proved right. He didn’t approve of women in the factory any more than he did of the land girls and I wanted to show him that we, too, could pull our weight in a war. Whenever I saw him about town, I’d pinch my cheeks into a healthy glow and find someone to chat to, hoping he wouldn’t notice that I was out of sorts.

  In Imber, I could never track him down. He had always been off on errands – prising lambs from fences or mending a hedge beyond the Barrow. And he had had a knack for vanishing onto the Plain whenever I needed to find him. But in Wilton – now that I wanted him gone – he became impossible to avoid.

  I hated him for helping Freda, for putting his hands on her waist before I had let him near mine. I hated him for being there when Father died, for bearing witness to the one thing I wanted to forget. But the town kept knitting us together, as if we were a pair of terraced houses, irrevocably joined at the wall. The only way to ensure that I never saw or heard of him was to lock myself away in our fraying cottage. There I would stare for hours on end at the maps drawn by the damp across the walls of my bedroom. With my feet propped against the skirting-board, I would sit and read my makeshift atlas until its hills and valleys took on the shape of the ones I used to call home.

  Pete often came into town to pick up supplies for the farm. I frequently saw him queuing for sugar or tea with one of the land girls on my way back from the factory – always the same one. On the few occasions that he caught me looking, I buried myself in an errand until it was complete. Yet the more I came across him, the less I could channel myself into an attitude of indifference. He can’t have cared much for Freda if he let her run off to London without him. I began to concoct excuses for him, rehearsing them over and over until they resembled the truth. Mama told me to let him be. She didn’t trust him. But there was something in the rhythm of the factory machines that caused thoughts to turn over in the mind. Sally used to say the place wasn’t made for broken hearts. Her fiancé had been killed in action and the machines would not let her forget it. I resolved to call on Pete after my Thursday-night shift.

  I left the factory at sunrise and wove my way along the shuttered row of shops that lined North Street. As I reached the fringes of the town, the houses started to take on a different shape, the roofs slowly softening from tile to thatch. I could feel the rhythm of the factory lagging behind me as I walked, the whirr of the machines dissipating finally, like an ache in the head.

  Only in Coombe could I be free of the factory’s thud. It was a place with no rhythm: houses half gathered themselves into a hamlet yet maintained their distance from each other. It had no valley to hem its people in, no sudden dip in which journeys could be halted and forgotten, like in Imber. Instead, it clung loosely to the curve of a river where the water never paused. It was a place that people passed through in order to reach somewhere else – never a destination, always a turn in the road. If Pete were to make anywhere his home, it would be here.

  ‘He’s out milking,’ one of the girls shouted across the yard when, arriving at the farm, I knocked on the door of the farmhouse. I crossed to the milking parlour and stooped inside: it smelt of cud and cowpat and wet earth – the same smell that coated the floor of the valley back home. I could see his silhouette at the far end, hunched over a stool, arms working an udder. The sun had not yet fully come up.

  ‘What do you want, Violet?’ he asked, without turning round. He must have heard me in the yard, and I was caught for a moment by the thought that perhaps he recognized my gait.

  ‘To talk to you.’

  ‘What’s changed?’ He removed his hands from the cow and swivelled on his stool to face me. His hair and eyes – as dark as each other – caused something to dislodge inside me. I hated the way I was drawn to them. I felt as if I had been tricked, like the other girls, into losing my composure and settling my gaze on him.

  ‘I see you’ve been keeping an eye on that sugar queue,’ he continued. I could just make out his smirk through the darkness.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I retorted.

&
nbsp; ‘Bea’s a good girl.’

  ‘Oh, Pete, don’t start.’

  ‘You’re angry with me, aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  He stood up from the seat and waited for me to reach his end of the parlour.

  ‘I didn’t come here to … You can’t have expected things to stay the same after Fa–’ My eyes started to prickle so I turned away and walked back towards the entrance to the milking parlour. The light had entered the yard, pouring itself into the far corner and then spreading, slowly, like spilt milk.

  The cattle shifted and groaned. I could hear his steps behind me. I dreaded the feel of his hand on my arm, then wished for it when it didn’t come. ‘Look, I’m almost done here,’ he called. ‘We’ll take a walk up Throope Hill. You’d like that.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I’d like.’ I stooped back into the light. He drew level with me.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, finally taking my arm.

  The grass on the hill was still blurred with dew but the sun would make quick work of it; the sky had all the makings of a hot day. We cut our own wet trail up to the peak. I breached the silence by telling him how much I missed Salisbury Plain and how this landscape, with its wide-brimmed rivers and steep peaks, felt like a different country.

  Pete thrashed at a bush with a stick. ‘It won’t achieve anything thinking about it, Violet.’

  ‘That’s all very well for you to say.’

  ‘What do you want me to tell you? That I miss the place?’

  I only just caught his question, tangled as it was in a gust pushing at us from across the hill. ‘You must …’

  ‘I’m sorry, Vi, but I don’t miss it.’ He was face to face with me now. ‘I wasn’t like you. I couldn’t just sit around in the parsonage all day and go into town whenever I liked. The lambing was hard – the Archams worked me hard. I was fond of them. But I don’t miss it. Not a bit.’

  ‘But you had Annie and me,’ I murmured quietly, unsure of whether I would be heard.

  ‘I still have you,’ he replied, slowing his pace and reaching for my hand. He had never held it before, not properly. Our fingers had touched once, unconsciously, up on the Plain. We were keeping an eye on his flock, grazing up near Brouncker’s Well, and he had put his hand down flat, thinking there was grass beneath it, his smallest finger overlapping onto my thumb. And he didn’t move it. Not even when he must have realized his mistake.

  ‘Yes.’ I smiled, giving him my hand and letting him pull me up the path. ‘But I miss home …’ I added.

  ‘Do you miss Freda?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ I released my hand from his.

  ‘But she’s your sister.’

  ‘What does it matter, now Father’s gone for good?’

  ‘It’s difficult. I mean, I know how difficult …’ He trailed off. ‘I know how you feel.’

  ‘Do you?’ I asked, but the directness of my question seemed to silence him. It was a full minute before either of us spoke again. There was a lull in the wind as we reached the top of Throope Hill. A stillness seemed to fall on everything so that even the grass ceased to sing. ‘You spent six years there, Pete. Surely you must have thought of it as home.’

  ‘I went there for work – ’s all there is to it.’

  ‘But –’

  He let out the breath in his lungs and began walking again. I broke into a run to catch up with him. ‘If Imber’s not your home, then where is?’ We were descending the other side of the hill now. ‘You must come from somewhere.’ I drew alongside him and tried to take his hand again but his palm lay slack in mine as we walked. I wondered later, if I had been gentler, whether he might have told me more. But the fissure in our conversation made me fearful and I thought of how much I dreaded people bringing up Father when they talked of Imber. Whatever had happened before Pete had come to us, he had assigned it the same closeted silence as I had my father’s death.

  ‘Freda will be back,’ he said, after a while. I was so grateful to him for saying something that it took me a moment to register the mention of my sister.

  ‘Will she?’ I answered vaguely. There was nothing to lose in asking my next question. ‘Do you miss –’

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘Do you miss Freda?’

  He paused, taking up the slack in his grip on my hand. ‘I danced with her because she looked pretty …’ Then he watched as I swallowed my disgust. ‘But she’s not my friend,’ he added.

  ‘Friend?’ I echoed, the word coming out clipped and prickling. I found, however, that I could not let go of his hand.

  ‘I didn’t mean … What I wanted to say …’ A surge of scarlet invaded his cheeks mid-sentence. I had never seen his face burn like that. We reached the middle of the Down – a bed for sleeping bombs. I could already see a few, nesting in the grass.

  ‘Look!’ I wanted to save him the embarrassment of actually having to say it. It was enough for me to know he had been on the cusp. I pointed at one of the bombs – the biggest we had ever seen.

  ‘What a shocker!’ yelled Pete, as we ran towards it. I stopped ten yards short of its metal casing, suddenly scared. Pete kept running. ‘Come on, Violet!’

  ‘What if it goes off?’ I called.

  ‘Don’t be silly. None of the others have.’

  ‘But this one’s bigger.’

  Ignoring my protests, he bent down and tugged at the grass around it. Then he ran a hand across its skin, tracing the number etched on it with a finger.

  ‘It’s a Satan! I’ve never seen a Satan!’

  ‘You’ve probably felt its blast, though, that’s for certain. Please, Pete, it’s not safe.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ He backed away from the bomb slowly until he was level with me. We froze for a moment, fearful of disturbing it any further. Then he took my hand and marched back towards it, dragging me along behind. I dug my feet in.

  ‘Pete! No!’

  ‘There’s nothing to be scared of!’

  He stopped so close to it that I could reach out and touch the rusting metal. But he wasn’t looking at the bomb like I was. I felt his arm around my waist, his stare on my neck. Then he pulled me downwards, suddenly, so that we were sitting on the casing. He kissed me – a barely there kiss – but it felt perilous, as if we could be blown apart at any moment.

  CHAPTER 16

  The 3rd Armoured Division of the US Army arrived in Wilton two months after we did, in 1944. They brought telephone lines, and noise.

  My mother had been volunteering at Wilton House for a month now, serving tea in the NAAFI to the soldiers and bringing the homesick ones back to our cottage for a home-cooked meal. Their American accents cantered around Wilton in a way our English ones never could, like a saxophone outdoing a cello. Pete couldn’t stand them; whenever he caught sight of their uniform in town he’d mutter, ‘Yank,’ under his breath and spit out something about how late to the game they were. The rest of the town, however, was enamoured; he was forced to watch open-mouthed as they showered these transatlantic curiosities with their best tea and meat.

  On one of my trips to Wilton House with Mama, I picked up an American serviceman’s manual, which had been discarded on the floor of the dining room. On a small crowded island where forty-five million people live, I read, each man learns to guard his privacy carefully. Privacy did not abound here: I learnt the hard way that Wilton wasn’t built for secrets. Yet when confronted by a clamour of GI Joes coming towards me on the stairwell, I thought of that manual more than once – that you were better off keeping your distance on an island as small as ours. I tried to stay away from them, for Pete’s sanity more than my own. But any
reserve on my part only strengthened the resolve of the infantry to advance across the gap I had left between us.

  They came home for dinner in groups – two or three at a time, most of them four years my senior. When my mother was out of the room, they would lean across the table and ask if I was going steady with anyone. I would say yes, not entirely sure of what they meant, but thinking all the while of Pete.

  ‘Mrs Fielding, you cook like a dream!’ they’d coo, when my mother re-entered the kitchen, clattering their cutlery around their plates as if they were playing percussion. The accents soon got the better of me, each word sugar-coated and easy on the tongue. And when they laughed, they’d rock right back in their chairs and throw their heads back, letting themselves go in a way I had never seen anybody else do.

  It wasn’t just their homesickness that my mother was trying to cure: it was her own loneliness. Freda’s absence and my shifts at the factory meant that she often ate by herself. When the Americans were in the house, we could almost forget about the missing fractions of our family who used to occupy the chairs around the table. They were easier to befriend than the British soldiers: far away from home without their mothers and sisters, fathers and brothers. A whole ocean away from their wives.

  Sam – short for Samson – came home with her on a Tuesday. I remember the day because I was supposed to be working. Sally had begged me to swap shifts with her so that she could see her brother, who was home on leave.

  After letting myself into the house, I was met by the sound of that peculiarly American laughter pealing through the hallway from the kitchen.

  ‘You shoulda tasted it, Martie! I never tasted something so darn awful in my whole life!’

  Martie? I nudged the kitchen door open.

  ‘Hello,’ I interrupted.