The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  The following day, I found the book back inside one of the boxes. I left it there but took one of his shells when she wasn’t looking and kept it in my underwear drawer. I came home from my shift to find Mama and Sam ferrying the boxes into the cellar. Sam was whistling, oblivious, as he lugged one box after another down into the darkness. Mama avoided my stare. I wanted to stop her but the words clotted in my throat. Instead, I ran upstairs and did not come down until I was sure they had seen to the last box. Something changed that day. It was as if a part of me had been taken down to the cellar to dwell with the books in the dark and the damp. Something that I couldn’t recover. I wasn’t aware of what it was until the trip to the beach.

  Sam had use of an old army van for the week and talked of taking us to the seaside. It was against the rules but he wanted to show Mama the ‘ocean’. She told him that she had never seen the sea and I knew why she lied: I, too, had thought of our day with Father in Bournemouth. On our first night in Wilton – the night we had slept in the blitzed cottage – we laughed about that trip, the only time we had seen the sea. Father had bought Freda and me ice-creams that painted big, clown-like grins around our mouths. Mama had taken particular delight in the sand, which slithered into the space between her toes, like thick, dry water.

  I remember standing under the legs of Bournemouth pier and squealing at the arrival of each wave on my shins. I stood for a full hour, puzzled at the feeling of being tugged backwards as the waves retreated, only to be told by Father that I had in fact not moved an inch.

  Mama lied to Sam about never having seen the sea because she couldn’t let him have any share in that day: it felt perfidious. She had placed the memory of it high on a shelf, so high that she could no longer retrieve it or tamper with it or bear to see it replaced. He could not understand her reluctance to take the trip so she persuaded him that she had heard poor reports of Bournemouth. He suggested the Purbecks as an alternative and she could think of no other way out, except to suggest bringing me, which did not deter him.

  I should not have told Pete about the trip to the beach but the thought of it welled up inside me so often that I could not let it rest. I felt uneasy, as if I ought to seek out his anger before I had even committed the offence. He did not say much. Only that he would not be meeting me at the factory that day.

  When Mama and I heard the sound of the horn outside the cottage, we gathered our towels and a modest picnic we had assembled from our rations and clambered into the back of Sam’s van. I watched as the thick-set trunks of the ash and oak trees thinned into pine, fern and bracken. Wiltshire’s plains melted into Dorset’s heaths and the colours became more lucid. As I opened the window of the van, I found I no longer had to pitch my face against the wind. Rather, I basked in its sand-flecked warmth. It felt like he was taking us home with him – to somewhere across the sea.

  ‘Are we expecting an invasion?’ my mother asked, as we stepped onto the dunes at Studland.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Sam replied, casting an eye back towards the dozing soldier inside the military booth we had just passed.

  We picked our way across the reed beds and over a dune to the beach. Large concrete blocks had been placed in the gaps between the dunes to prevent tanks from journeying inland. Rings of concertina wire reared up from the sand sporadically like sculpted waves. I shut my eyes and tried not to think of what they might have done to Imber.

  ‘Who’s coming in?’ grinned Sam, pulling his shirt over his head as he spoke. Eyes glued to the shore’s new armour, I hardly registered what he was saying.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right, Sam, not today. You’ll catch your death.’ My mother laughed, lowering herself to the sand.

  ‘Vi?’ He looked across at me hopefully. I shook my head and sat down next to Mama.

  ‘What’s got into you both this morning?’ He laughed, striding towards us. He stooped and picked Mama up, tipping her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.

  ‘Put me down this instant!’ she shrieked, pulling at her skirt so that it didn’t ruck up and reveal her petticoat. I wanted to stop him, tell him to let her go. It didn’t seem right. Not amid the barbed wire and the concrete. Soon he was holding her over the shallows. She clasped his neck and begged him to let her go, but the more she protested, the deeper he waded. Eventually, she wriggled free. I expected her to come straight back out again and demand to be taken home. But, to my surprise, I heard her laughter blurting skittishly across the sands.

  I brushed the beach from my pinafore and hurried along the dunes. A bay lay just around the corner of the headland: I would be hidden from them there. All along the shoreline, patches of shells clung together in schools. I could feel them sink into the sand under my feet as I forged a path along the wet part of the beach. I bent down and picked one up. A bivalve. My father knew all the proper names. I preferred to give them my own names. ‘Helter-skelter’ for the spiral, cone-shaped ones; ‘Freda fans’ for the ones that resembled ladies’ fans; and ‘swords’ for the ones my father called scaphopods, or tusk shells.

  The shells here were as numerous as the flowers on the Plain: visitors to Imber would bring armfuls of its flora back to their lodgings to make bouquets, marvelling over the number of species that could be found in a single patch of meadow; they carried the words ‘bird’s foot trefoil’, ‘bellflower’ and ‘ox-eye daisy’ so carefully on the tongue, as if an incorrect pronunciation might cause the flowers to wilt. Locals, however, could brush past a thousand such blooms in the most perfunctory manner – as I’m sure Studland’s sailors and fishermen glossed over the shells. My father would not have been half as interested in shells had he lived near the sea: each new specimen was as fascinating to him as an unexplored island, full of foreign markings and structures and smells.

  ‘Found you!’ called Mama, as she reached the centre of the bay with Sam.

  I was holding a Freda fan. ‘Father would have liked this one, don’t you think?’ I held it out to my mother. ‘I might put it in his crate.’

  She returned my stare for a moment, the water dripping from her clothes and darkening the sand beneath her feet.

  ‘I’m sure he would have loved it,’ Sam chipped in.

  ‘How do you know?’ I turned from them and cut a stiff path across the sand. It became drier and thicker near the dunes and I couldn’t get my feet to move as fast as I wanted them to.

  ‘You go, Martie. I’ll only anger her,’ instructed Sam behind me.

  ‘Martha!’ I shouted back to them, not dropping my pace. ‘Her name is Martha.’

  I returned home from my shift the next day to find my mother, alone, in the kitchen. She was peeling potatoes in the sink – enough to feed three.

  ‘Are we expecting Sam again?’

  ‘Darling! You’re home late,’ she remarked, ignoring my question. She flicked up her wrist to check the time and turned to face me. ‘Did they make you overrun?’

  I nodded. ‘Is it all right if I talk to you about something, Mama?’

  ‘Of course, my love.’ She smiled, placing her knife on the table. Then, clocking my frown, she took a seat.

  ‘It’s about Sam, you see,’ I said quickly. I watched the minuscule muscles under her eyes tense slightly.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You’re good friends … That’s all you are, isn’t it?’

  ‘What are you asking, Violet?’ Her eyes widened with something close to fear.

  ‘Nothing. I’m not asking … only, you know how people talk.’

  ‘Vi-vi, remember what Father used to tell you about gossip?’ she began. ‘It betrays more about the individuals who indulge in it than the people it purports to be about.’ H
er voice was firm but even the most cursory mention of my father seemed to cause her face to melt. She raised the subject, not me. Putting a hand on her forehead, she stood up and turned back to the sink. ‘I can’t keep doing it, Vi.’

  ‘You don’t have to. If you choose to put an end to it, Sam will understand.’

  I crossed the kitchen and drew level with her, only to discern from the look on her face that she was not talking about Sam.

  ‘I can’t keep waiting, thinking we’ll go back to him, back home, when there’s nothing to go back to.’

  I told her not to be silly, that of course we’d go home. It was what Father would have wanted.

  ‘Am I always to live my life in this way? In the shadow of what he would have wanted?’

  I stared at her in disbelief. She hung her head over the sink, a hand planted on each side of it, gazing into its hollow.

  ‘You’re talking nonsense. Listen to yourself!’ I cried, my voice fracturing. ‘He loved us. He was prepared to go to war for us. And this is how we repay him?’ I was pointing at the cutlery on the table – the place laid for Sam at the head of it. She refused to turn and face me.

  ‘None of this would have happened if Freda was still around,’ she whispered – so quietly that I could barely make out what she was saying.

  ‘Are you saying I’m to blame?’

  ‘No, that isn’t what I said.’

  ‘How can it be my fault? I wasn’t the one bringing home the soldiers …’ I would never have dared to speak to my mother in this manner in Imber, no matter what her offence. But Father’s death – the war – had made me numb enough to say what I felt.

  Mama’s voice faltered. ‘I wouldn’t have given in so easily if you hadn’t taken to him so well. Don’t tell me you didn’t think him charming. I know you did. You still do.’

  I stood in the quiet of the kitchen and tried to blot out what I was hearing. My mother should have known that, still seventeen, I was too young to bear any share of the blame, whatever the true extent of my culpability. But she couldn’t have guessed how her words would play on me for years, decades afterwards, how they would alter us permanently – more than Sam ever could.

  I begged Mama to telephone Sam at Fugglestone and postpone dinner, but she thought it would seem impolite at such short notice. He arrived with a bunch of daisies, which my mother tried her best to coo over, fumbling around the kitchen to find a vase. It was clear to him from the start of the evening that something was amiss. I saw it in the way he quietened his voice and diminished his gestures, asking for the salt rather than reaching across me genially to take it, like he usually did.

  ‘The greens are just so, Martha.’

  Mama acknowledged him with a nod.

  ‘There’ll be carrots and other things in the garden at Wilton House in July. The cook’s growing a jungle of them out the back. I’ll ask her to keep some for you.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I intervened. ‘There’s a few on the way in our garden, aren’t there, Mama?’

  She shot me a terse smile.

  ‘I’m serious. It’d be no trouble.’

  ‘We wouldn’t want to put you out,’ she told him, seeing that he was not going to give up.

  Sam frowned.

  ‘How is your training going?’ my mother enquired, swiftly changing the subject.

  ‘Oh, swell. The boys are settling down. They miss home. But there’s a war to fight …’ He carried on in this vague manner, desperate to fill the silence that he knew we would have left had he stopped speaking. As soon as we had finished our food, he stood up to excuse himself, saying he had an exercise scheduled early tomorrow for which he needed his sleep. I attended to the dishes in the sink.

  ‘Sam, before you go, there’s something we – I … must talk to you about.’

  I dropped the plate I was washing and it sank with a gulp into the water.

  ‘Vi, will you excuse us?’ continued Mama.

  ‘I’ll see to the dishes, Mama. You go into the garden.’

  My mother seemed pleased with this suggestion: it bought her more time. Sam followed her outside. The kitchen window looked down the length of the lawn and I could just about make out their two figures by the rockery at the far end. My mother said something, taking a step back from Sam as she spoke. She put a palm to her mouth and I could tell she was crying. He moved to comfort her but she raised a hand to stop him coming any nearer. He leant in slowly and kissed her on the cheek before lumbering back to the house.

  ‘Goodbye, Violet,’ he said, as he passed the entrance to the kitchen. I couldn’t bring myself to turn from the sink. ‘I never meant you any harm.’

  I heard the front door close – softly for once – behind him. My mother was still standing at the end of the lawn, wrapped tightly in her cardigan, her eyes fixed on the rockery.

  CHAPTER 21

  May arrived. Everybody sensed that the forces were preparing for something significant. In the factory, the camouflage we produced had turned from earthy green to beige – the colour of sand. More American troops arrived; Wilton House was swarming with them.

  My mother no longer visited to serve tea. She began to bring lunch to the girls in the factory instead. There was something different in the way she carried herself these days. She had gone back to wearing her hair in a loose plait and her hands were reassuringly unkempt. She didn’t exhibit the frantic happiness she had shown with Sam. But the hidden doubt that had marked even her most heightened moments in the last few months seemed finally to be dissipating. We couldn’t know for certain whether we would ever return to be with Father in Imber but, if it came to it, we would be here waiting; Mama would be here, waiting.

  One afternoon I was walking home from my shift when a girl whose face I could not place approached me on the high street.

  ‘Violet!’ she called, crossing from the grocer’s to meet me on the other side of the road. As she approached, her saucer-shaped eyes registered in my mind.

  ‘Annie! Gosh, is that really you?’ She had grown taller, helped along by a pair of open-toe high-heeled shoes. Her face was neatly made-up – a far cry from the lipstick I had smudged over it two years ago on our way to the dance – and there was a ring on her finger, her fourth finger. ‘You’re engaged!’ I cried, grabbing her hand and staring into the opal.

  ‘Oh it’s not much.’ She giggled, keeping her hand in mine. ‘David’s promised me a proper ring once this silly war’s over.’

  ‘Annie, I’m thrilled for you! So thrilled! … And how is Devizes treating you?’

  ‘Do you know? I’m rather enjoying it, Vi. Except you’re not there, of course!’

  ‘Well, I did write!’ I laughed.

  ‘Oh, you know how pathetic I am with my letters. I could barely keep up with you when we wrote to Pete, remember? And how is Pete?’

  ‘He’s keeping well. He’s found himself some work on a farm near Coombe Bissett, not too far away.’

  ‘Do you … Are you … After that nasty business with Freda …’ She couldn’t finish her question but I knew what she wanted to ask.

  ‘Sort of …’ I said. ‘You never know with Pete.’

  ‘Good for you, Vi.’ She smiled, taking me by the arm and suggesting a place on North Street, which was rumoured to have in stock a large batch of tea. ‘I have coupons – do let’s have a cup together. It’s been too long!’

  I don’t quite know why but I told Annie about Sam. She leant over the tablecloth towards me with the same wide-eyed disbelief as when I’d told her she was beautiful all those years ago.

  ‘But, Violet, it’s not two years since … They could just be good friends.’


  ‘Yes, that’s all very well, but I couldn’t just stand and watch in the hope that she didn’t develop feelings, could I?’ I held the cup of tea to my lips and, on finding it was still too hot, blew gently at the steam.

  ‘No, you couldn’t. You did the right thing, Vi. I know it.’ She leant back in her chair and stirred a spoon vaguely through her tea, as if imagining the absent sugar. She had started crossing her legs, I noticed, sitting slightly sideways on her chair to make room for them.

  ‘I feel such a fool to have let it get this far,’ I told her. ‘Freda would be furious if she knew.’

  Annie laid a hand on mine and looked at me earnestly. ‘He’s gone, Violet. Nobody is to blame … However raw things might feel, your mother hasn’t done anything wrong.’

  Flower. Bullet. Mouth. I stayed silent, thinking only of him.

  ‘Chin up. You stepped in as soon as you could.’

  ‘Tell me about David,’ I said, after a pause, leaning in across the table to reinforce my change of subject.

  ‘Well, actually, he and you are already acquainted. Remember that night at the dance?’

  ‘The soldier on the gate! Annie, no!’

  ‘Yes! That’s him. He came all the way to Imber to find me when we were told to evacuate and arranged for our belongings to be transported to Devizes in a lorry. What a treasure!’

  ‘But … is he at war now?’ I asked hesitantly.

  Annie nodded, looking away and twirling her ring absent-mindedly round her finger. ‘He’ll be back,’ she said eventually. ‘And then we’ll be married.’

  ‘And do you see the Archams?’ I asked. ‘Are they keeping well?’

  Annie frowned. ‘Did you not hear about Mr Archam?’

  ‘No, what happened?’

  Annie met my stare over the rim of her cup.

  ‘Why didn’t Pete tell me? Surely he knows?’

  ‘Mrs Archam wrote to him to tell him about the pneumonia but he never went to visit, not until after it was too late. She seems fine on the surface, but you know her – the busier she makes herself, the more troubled she’ll be inside. You can see it in her eyes. Nobody knows what to do. It’s not as if we all live together any more. And the people in Devizes don’t give two hoots about Imber. Most of them haven’t even heard of the place.’