The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  ‘Violet!’ She scraped her chair back over the tiles and tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘You’re back early! Don’t you have a shift, my darling?’

  ‘I swapped with Sally.’

  I walked over to the American – an officer, I noticed, from his chevrons, not a boy – and offered my hand. ‘I’m Martha’s daughter.’

  ‘Samson,’ he replied, taking my hand and shaking it with vigour. ‘Most folk here call me Sam. I take it you’re the famous Vi-vi?’

  I informed him that, given the freshness of our acquaintance, I would prefer it if he called me Violet.

  ‘Violet, darling!’ my mother intervened, smiling fixedly at me. ‘Come and have some food with us.’ She got up from her chair and ladled some stew onto a plate. I watched as a generous hunk of bread was placed in the centre of the table. Sam winked at me. The loaf was clearly his doing.

  ‘The chef at Wilton House likes to spoil him,’ explained my mother.

  ‘It’s worth a few greenbacks over here, I’ll guess,’ Sam added. ‘There you are, take a slice. I brought it for you.’ He reached over and pushed the bread towards me.

  ‘You didn’t know I’d be here,’ I muttered, glaring down at the loaf.

  ‘We would have kept some.’ Mama waved away my comment as she spoke.

  ‘She’s a tough cookie!’ laughed Sam, clapping a palm on my shoulder from all the way across the table. ‘I have a feeling we’re going to get along just fine.’

  He was right. It pains me to think of it, but he was. To begin with, I hated everything about him – the big movements he made with his big hands; the way he did everything far too vigorously. Sometimes he’d rip whole sections of the newspaper just by turning a page. And when he talked, he’d fling his arms about and knock ornaments or crockery from their places, getting carried away with some story or other. Doors were slammed rather than closed, in spite of his constant good mood. But the house had noise in it again. And that in itself was enough to make me thaw.

  The frequency of his visits increased until barely three days would pass without him coming home for dinner. I tried to arrange my shifts so that I would be there on the days that Sam came. I even stopped meeting Pete at the factory gate on Thursdays. At first I convinced myself that I was merely protecting Mama; we both knew how the town could talk. But when I arrived home to find him absent, I would feel the disappointment of it so keenly that I could no longer ignore my fondness for him. On the days he did come, he would take me down to the bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden after dinner and tell ghost stories with a torch while my mother washed up. I protested – tried to look bored, but then he would coax out a twist when I was least expecting it, causing me to jump or wince or put a hand to my mouth and give myself away. When Mama had finished at the sink, she would join us in the shelter with hot cups of Horlicks. Sometimes I wished the sirens would sound just so I could stay there with the two of them all night, swallowing story after story with each sip of my drink.

  Mama did not like to talk about the past. And Sam learnt not to ask. As far as he was concerned, we had lived in Wilton all our lives. He guessed what he could about my father but Mama never spoke of Imber or the accident. Despite her guardedness, I became greedy for details about Sam – what he had done before the war and what he would do after; what the cities in America were like and how much he missed home. Mama loved to listen to him talk and, while she refrained from asking him questions, she was secretly glad of mine.

  After a while, she started to do her hair differently. She bought pins and a net from town. It puzzled me for weeks – the neat bun at the back of her head. Among Imber’s farmers, she had never fussed over her looks for fear of being accused of having too much time on her hands: her hair had roamed free in strands across her face and she had had no qualms about letting the sun brown her skin. Father had liked it that way. Yet she had taken to wearing wide-brimmed hats of late while tending the vegetables in the garden. And, despite the soil, her fingernails were always kept filed and clean.

  I caught Sam once, removing one of the pins from her hair. He backed away calmly when I entered the room, as if he didn’t mind the disturbance. ‘It was giving her a headache,’ was his placid excuse. My mother was more flustered, swivelling towards the sink and turning on the tap, as if the sound could blot out the memory of what I had just seen.

  One night in March, when the sirens wailed across the town, I was on a night shift in the factory. The supervisors were stubborn with their evacuation orders, ordering us out of the building only when they could see the bellies of the planes opening above them and the baskets beginning to fall. Quotas, it seemed, were more important than limbs. I watched Sally’s eyes widen with fear opposite me as she restarted her sewing-machine under the whine of the sirens. We all knew we’d go up in flames as fast as a box of kindling, were anything to land on us.

  I was about to return to my work when I spotted Sam at the door, out of breath and arguing with the supervisor. I couldn’t hear what he was saying: the noise of the machines stamped out their discussion. But he caught my eye from across the factory floor.

  Before he could be stopped, he strode over to me and took my hand. ‘Martha sent me. We’ve got to get into a shelter, they’re aiming for the factory and you’ll be done for if you stay here!’

  ‘I can’t leave the girls!’ I yelled, over the hammer of the machinery, glancing across at Sally, who had stood up, bemused.

  ‘Violet, I’m serious,’ he urged. ‘We have to get you out!’

  Before I could stop him, his hand had locked itself onto one of mine and he dragged me through a door at the far end of the floor, swearing loudly when he found himself in the supply cupboard. He pulled his jacket sleeve over a clenched fist and smashed through the window at the back, lifting me up and pushing me through the gap as if he were posting a parcel. I cut my leg on the glass and the blood trickled down the back of my calf, like the stocking lines I’d once drawn on myself to impress Pete. Sam followed me.

  We ran as fast as we could down three blacked-out streets to my front door, the sirens still cawing dizzily over our heads. Mama was already inside the shelter, peering out of the opening. ‘I thought you’d never come!’ she shrilled, as we climbed down inside with her. I assumed she was talking to Sam but it was me she pulled into her chest, so close that I could feel the breath shuddering up from her lungs.

  We couldn’t see the sky from the shelter. We didn’t need to, though, to know when an incendiary was on its way. The inside of the shelter would glow orange so that, for a few seconds, you could see everyone’s face. It was as if somebody had struck a match and held it up to find their way. The illuminations happened five or six times as each bomb fell. We watched in shock as one landed in the garden, near to our timber-framed porch. Before Mama could protest, Sam jumped out of the shelter and emptied rainwater from the wheelbarrow over it, my mother all the while screaming for him to get back inside.

  ‘I’m not having you risk your life over that shabby excuse for a house,’ she chastised him, in the darkness. I listened to her words dissolve without an echo into the dirt walls and floor.

  ‘Don’t think they’ll find you another, Martie, if you get hit,’ Sam warned. ‘If you’re not careful, there won’t be a home for him to come back to.’

  I could feel my mother’s horror, hooking darkly onto his words.

  ‘You know full well he’s not coming back,’ Mama replied, as another basket inflamed the sky. ‘You don’t need me to tell you he’s dead. Did you think I would – What kind of wife do you think I am?’

  I had to bite back the urge to exit the shelter and run. Sam, for once, stayed silent.<
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  While we waited for more incendiaries to fall, I tried to turn my mind to the girls spilling through the factory door. The shelters were at least two hundred yards away. At least. The quick ones might have made it. It depended on how much time they were given. But even if they did reach them, they were far from safe: the shelters were full to bursting with rolled carpets and folded tarpaulin stacked like tapers waiting to be lit; nobody within a stone’s throw would stand a chance.

  A fire of that size, they said, would be seen as far away as Lavington. I thought of the Archams, asleep in their makeshift cottage. The sky outside their bedroom would gain an orange tint; a new sun would ink its way into the east. And Mrs Archam would sit up and wonder, without knowing for certain, whether it was morning.

  CHAPTER 17

  A man in a white lungi is the first to notice a quiver in the wreckage. By the time he gets my attention, everything around us is shifting from left to right. I crouch on my knees and ride the movements as best I can, hands pressed on the stones. There is nothing firm to hold on to. People stumble, lowering themselves to the ground, clamping hands on loose beams, running from the shade of shaking walls. I ride each sideways swing until the debris settles and breathes out powder. The dust brings to mind those frigid Wiltshire mornings where it was cold enough to watch our own breath – steam seeping from our lips, like the clouds from the cracks beneath me. I can’t quite grasp how I’ve been flung so quickly from one to the other.

  The land quietens. And I can walk again.

  There’s a tug on my shoulder. Someone points to the sea. Two women on the same patch of rubble have stood up to examine the horizon. With a shout to the crowd, they hurry in the opposite direction to the beach. The man in the lungi beside me mutters a few words, then scarpers after the women, a lick of fear on his face.

  ‘Sister. They say another wave is coming,’ says a voice to my right. It is the woman who deciphered my dosa orders.

  ‘But how do they know?’

  She holds up a hand and shakes her head. ‘No truth.’

  I stare at the tide of people leaving. Then I glance back at her; she steadies herself and placidly attends to her silt-covered dupatta, which has lost its pins and come loose. There has already been one wave. How can I rule out another? The water didn’t just come and go, after all. It arrived and kept on coming. I head for the hills, walking at first and then, as the fear takes hold and I remember how little time it gave me, I break into a run.

  Further up the hill, the wreckage thins. For the first time, I see trees whose roots have held them steady. The town shrinks into a dizzy map beneath me: the wave has left vague traces of streets and half-drawn walls but everything seems blurred and unfinished. I begin to wish I knew the place better. Perhaps then I could piece it together in my mind. Everything that was built by human hands – the huts, the streets, the temples – has vanished. Only the Vivekananda Rock remains, knuckle-stubborn, next to the shore. It was the first object in the path of the wave; it took the brunt of its punch and yet there it is, wet and glistening, as if it has received nothing more than a ritual washing.

  The climb quickens my breath and I think suddenly of Mum, dragging me up that ridge in Westbury to see the White Horse. When I was younger, I wanted to know why they had carved a horse of all creatures into the chalk of the ridge. I didn’t ask Mum; I just let the question simmer inside me, hoping she’d give away the answer one day. She never told me useful things, only that, as a girl, she used to dream that the horse had galloped away. I pictured it freeing itself from the surface of the hill, shaking the chalk from its mane and cantering to Warminster.

  ‘Dad might have liked it up here,’ I said to her, as we neared the crest of the ridge. I would do this all the time when I was younger – make up statements about him and test them on her in the hope that they were true. Mum would either let out a cooped-up laugh or nod silently. I learnt from an early age that she could talk about my dad only when we were up high – able to see everything in its context. ‘Why did he go away?’

  She stopped still, just short of the horse’s front hoof. ‘He didn’t know you when he left. You weren’t born yet.’

  ‘Would he have stayed if he did?’

  The fields knitted themselves together in a quilt beneath the haze. Mum kept quiet.

  ‘Did he like it up here?’ I tried again.

  ‘I don’t know, Alice. There are so many things I don’t know.’

  I have never searched for him. Not like I’m searching for James now. With James, I have the smell of his skin, encrypted with years of smoke, and the colour and texture of his shirt. With my father, I have nothing. No place to start except a worn-out photograph and a conversation with his sister. Like Mum, I kept the thought of him buried, afraid of what I might unearth. When I got older, my questions dried up. I stopped climbing the hill with her because I no longer wanted to know. She never lied to me but, in my own way, I had grown tired of her circumventing the truth.

  The debris beneath the hill loses detail in the distance and I wonder if I am high enough now to escape another wave. At the roadside, a woman is serving tea from a makeshift stall. She ferries pans of steaming water from the house behind her and pours the tea into whatever container she can find. All around the house, people are drinking out of pans and bowls and empty turmeric jars tinged yellow from the spice.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whisper, as she passes me a bowl with tea in it.

  ‘Where do you live? USA?’ she asks. I’m surprised to hear fluent English.

  ‘No, I’m from England. Is this your house?’

  ‘Yes, it is my husband’s house. London?’

  ‘Yes. But I’ve only just moved there.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ she says, nodding. ‘My daughter. She lives in London. And we visit. You’re staying in India only you, sister?’

  ‘I – No, I came with …’ I find myself clutching my ring, ‘But I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ She smiled, taking hold of my ringed hand from the other side of the stall. I step back. ‘Your husband is here. Outside,’ she continues, once she has caught my eye.

  ‘James?’ I ask, incredulous.

  She tips her head from right to left. ‘Come.’

  I cup a hand to my mouth, trying to stop the hope hopscotching inside me. She leads me into the garden of the house and approaches a figure stooped over a cup of tea with his back to us. He looks broader than James. But the hope won’t be quelled.

  ‘Here,’ she says, tapping him on the shoulder. ‘Your husband.’

  He turns to face us. ‘Can I help?’ he asks, in a European accent.

  I want to cry. ‘I’m sorry, there’s been a mistake.’ I turn back to the woman.

  She creases her eyes into a narrow frown, unsettled at the thought of not being able to match us up. Taking my hand again, she leads me inside the house. I’m glad of it. I can’t bear to stay and make conversation.

  We enter an echoing room with a cool, terracotta floor and I listen to the peel and clip of her flip-flops on the tiles. She stops at the centre, pulling me in towards her with a soft tug on my shirt. ‘I call my brother in London, sister, and they know nothing. They hear about the wave only yesterday,’ she murmurs.

  ‘You have a telephone?’

  She raises a finger to her lips. ‘No, but my husband – he has a booth. Very bad line, sister.’

  ‘I’ll pay you. Please. I mean, I just need to get through to home.’

  ‘For oversea telephone you have to make a booking,’ she says, ‘and the line is coming and going. But we help,’ she continues. ‘I will finish with the tea and then I will take y
ou.’ She turns towards the kitchen and bats me away gently with her hand.

  The muscles in my chest stiffen. They know about the wave back home. Mum and Tim have no idea that I’m in Kanyakumari. We told them that Delhi was the furthest south we would go. A wave came … Nothing seems adequate. We heard about it on the news, they’ll say, as if that counts as having seen it. There is no way of explaining and no one at home who will understand about James – too much to squeeze through a crackling handset.

  I wait for around an hour; the time is full-bodied and exhaustingly slow. Seeing the tea queue diminish, I make my approach, hoping the sight of me will remind her about the telephone.

  ‘Sister?’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you again. You said you could take me to the telephone booth?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ She picks up the edge of her sari, grasps my hand and slips on her sandals at the door of the house.

  We walk halfway down the hill to a line of concrete units just short of where the wave died. I follow her into a cupboard-sized room with a narrow slit of light at the top of the wall. The heat here has fermented into a furious temperature and it is difficult to breathe. I look up at the fan that lies dormant above a well-organized desk. In the corner, a telephone is drilled to the wall between two screens, which are largely redundant as the booth is in full view of the desk. A man emerges through the door – presumably her husband. She talks to him and he frowns at me.

  ‘What can you give him, sister? He won’t take rupees.’

  I look down at myself. I have nothing on me except James’s shirt, my mother’s coral skirt and my wedding ring – the last thing I have left of James.

  ‘Please, I will pay him when I am home. Whatever he wants.’

  They launch into another discussion. The husband sighs and raises his hands, his words speeding up. She interjects, taking me by the hand again and smiling at him as if to make my case. She turns back to me. ‘No problem, sister. He says he will book a call. What is the destination?’ She pulls across a blank sheet of paper from the far side of the desk and hands me a pen.