The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  The trees became taller and thicker in the centre of the wood. Their trunks towered on past us without a thought for who we were or the war we were in; they were all-knowing, oblivious. Perhaps, from up there, they could see an end coming – the end we were all wishing for. In the middle of the wood there was a large crater where a bomb must have landed. There were no trees within twenty yards of the hole, only charred stumps and ash. The pit itself was filled with a cacophony of objects – broken chairs, old car parts and farm equipment.

  ‘Follow me.’ He beckoned, stepping onto the pile and picking his way into the centre. He crossed a wooden door with a number three on it and took hold of a rusted metal plough in front of him.

  ‘Wait!’ I called, teetering on the edge of the pit.

  ‘Hurry up, then!’

  ‘I’m afraid I might tear the dress.’ With a blush, I smoothed down Annie’s turquoise pleats with my hands as if to prove how delicate it was.

  ‘What are you dressed up all fancy for anyway? I told you we’d be walking!’

  ‘I’m just tired of my uniform,’ I lied. ‘I thought I’d start to make an effort after work.’

  ‘Don’t tell me that you’re going to spoil our fun because of some dress. You’ll jolly well start climbing. Come on.’

  Reluctantly, I tried to follow the path he had taken. Pete took hold of my hand once I had reached him and went on, stopping finally at a lump of metal that rested on its side as if it were sleeping.

  ‘There!’ He brought his hands down to rest on the bronze. Its colours stood out from the rust in the rest of the pit – blue and green patches mingling like oceans and continents on a globe. I frowned.

  ‘Don’t you recognize it?’ Pete asked.

  I studied it again – this time the shape striking me as more familiar. ‘How do you know?’ I murmured, drawing nearer. ‘How do you know it’s from …’

  ‘The crack – look – it’s in exactly the same place as the bell in the church tower. The one with the lowest tone. We used to ring it on its own when there was a death.’

  Imber’s bell – if, indeed, that was what it was – sat redundant on the heap. It had neither the air nor the space to let out its toll. And what good would it have been anyway when it was not a single man but a whole village that had died?

  ‘It’s not the same bell.’

  ‘Well, yes, perhaps the crack is a bit bigger but, then again, maybe it fell.’

  ‘It’s not the same one,’ I repeated.

  ‘It is, Vi, I know it is! Jim from the farm is going to bring a cart round so we can take it to Wilton. You can have it in your garden. A little piece of home!’

  I thought of Imber’s fractured cottages and of rifle fire making inroads into the parsonage roof. He meant well. I knew he meant well.

  ‘Go on, touch it,’ he said. But I did not need to reach out a hand to feel its coldness. I stood back, not wanting to disturb its rest.

  It took an entire hour to hoist the bell out of the crater and onto the back of Jim’s cart. I couldn’t bear the sight of it sealed tight against the wooden boards. It wasn’t supposed to be kept like that – I wanted to suspend it in the tower again so that we could stare up into its hollow and watch it rock.

  I was relieved, though, that Pete had brought me here to retrieve it rather than placing it as a surprise in the garden. I could not imagine anything worse than waking up to it unawares, and finding it, inert as a corpse, on the lawn. Every time I washed the inside of a cup in the sink, I would be reminded of its interior – its overturned U a mirror of our valley – harbouring nothing but stale air and starved grass.

  As we carted the bell home, I shut my eyes and tried to picture it as he saw it. To him it was a project – a way of buying us days in the garden together, repairing it, polishing it, filling in the crack. It was his way of retrieving time – Imber’s time – and giving us a reason to spend a piece of it together.

  My mother did not speak when we brought the bell through the back gate. She did not even enquire about where we had found it. She accepted its presence as one accepts an unwanted heirloom, issuing instructions about where exactly we should place it as if she had always known that it would one day arrive at her door.

  ‘Don’t tip it over just yet,’ I told Pete, as he prepared to clamp it into place on the lawn below the apple tree. I crouched and sat in its hollow, staring back at the house. Pete knelt on the grass opposite me.

  ‘Remember Mrs Bexham who used to teach us bell-ringing?’ he said. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I heard she was housed in Lavington, with the Archams.’

  Pete stared into the space between his knees at my mention of the Archams and picked at the lip of the bell under my feet with his finger. ‘You broke the stay once, remember? And she had to grab your feet to stop you flying off up into the tower.’

  ‘I was always so terrible at it.’ I blushed. ‘Too enthusiastic, that was my problem.’ I pulled my dress over my knees and brought my chin to rest on them.

  ‘That dress suits you more than Annie,’ remarked Pete.

  My heart knocked around my chest, like a trapped fly. ‘How do you know it’s Annie’s?’ I asked, ignoring his other concession.

  ‘She told me,’ he said, brushing away my curiosity with his hand. I wondered what else she had told him but did not have to wait long to find out. He stood up so that his face was obscured from me by the upper lip of the bell. ‘I wanted to do something to show you I care for you, Violet …’ he paused, unsure how or whether to continue ‘… because, well, the truth is … I can’t marry you.’

  I fell still.

  ‘Not yet … at least.’

  ‘What makes you think –’

  He raised a hand. ‘I know what you were expecting. Annie let it slip, by accident.’ He crouched down to my level and I turned my head to face the inside of the bell. The thought of him and Annie colluding like that, laughing at me, even, made me want to pull at the rim and seal myself inside it for ever. Not yet. I tried to stop myself snatching at the only slice of hope he had given me.

  ‘How can you really care for me if you don’t want to marry me?’ It sounded too simple to be a proper quandary.

  ‘We’re still young, Vi, and there’s a war on. I don’t know where I’ll be in a year. I’m eighteen. If things stay the way they are, I’ll have to enlist.’

  ‘Well, bully for you,’ I quipped. He had been itching to go to war ever since it first broke out – anything to escape to somewhere new.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that. I don’t want to go. Not even the toughest of men looks forward to war.’

  ‘You wouldn’t survive without it, Pete,’ I cried. ‘What would you do? Stay here with me? Make a home, have a family? Return to Imber, even?’

  I watched his face tighten.

  ‘The war suits you and you’ll be nothing but glad when it comes your way.’

  ‘Violet –’

  ‘Would it have been different,’ I interrupted, ‘if we had stayed?’

  Pete kept quiet. I listened to the creak of the tree, aching with its burden of apples above us.

  ‘Thought not,’ I whispered. Then I stood up from the bell and pulled at its crown so that it clamped down onto the grass with a single, echoless knock.

  CHAPTER 24

  I deserved to be left on the platform at Delhi, to lose him for ever. But my mother’s letter – while destroying so much – fused us together inexorably. He took me onto the train with him because I was too distraught to be left behind. And we began the journey that he had intended to make alone. I did not ask again for his forgiveness but, as Delhi faded and t
he stations flashed by, he gradually surrendered it. It took time: fists of words and glass-sharp silences; hours and hours alone together in the carriage. Not the easy bud of a flower. But the pearl-hard grind of something costly.

  Mum would say that we were mad to swing so quickly from these fractures into marriage. But it was all or nothing – I had to find a way of showing him I would never be so foolish again.

  With his discarded rucksack on my back, I walk from the marketplace to our ruined guesthouse – the only other place that I can think of to look. The bottom half of the building has been stripped completely of glass and doors. Cracks forge valleys down the walls. It seems on the verge of collapse. Rescue workers have left a ladder leaning on the back of the building; they must have used it to reach the guests on the roof.

  The door to our room on the first floor is jammed shut – warped against its frame by the water. I shoulder into it until it springs open. A groan heaves from deep within the fabric of the house. I freeze, but it falls silent. Every piece of furniture inside the room – from the bed to the chairs to the wardrobe – has amassed against the right-hand wall. It is as if someone entered in a rage and, with a single movement, swept it across the floor. The french windows have disappeared completely, leaving nothing but air between me and the bare sea. We paid a few extra rupees for a sea view; now I would do anything to shut it out.

  Two of James’s shirts and one of my kaftans are draped over the blades of the ceiling fan. Their colours are barely discernible under the silt. I find another shirt and a wave-beaten copy of Moby-Dick under the upturned bed. James confessed to me once that he had been trying to finish it for years. Every time he made an indent in its spine, he’d put it down for a month and forget his place. I’m surprised the wave hasn’t washed its pages clean of words. Instead the sentences have thickened and mingled into a deep bruise of ink. Half his bags were taken up with cigarettes and books; he left little room for clothes. Unlike his No. 6s, whose fumes he inhaled religiously, he could never settle on a single book but dipped in and out of several, depending on the time of day. I was not much help. Whenever he started reading at a border or in the van, I’d find a reason to wrestle his attention away from the page. We could share the world outside the window but the one in the book was his and his alone. I didn’t like it. I wanted his eyes, his thoughts, his words. Even if I didn’t give him mine.

  I bend down to the wardrobe and place my hands on its side. It is difficult to lift but eventually I manage to roll it over so that I can flip the doors open. The sari I’d bought for our wedding fills the inner space, looped over the rail and threaded through the clothes hangers. Silt has greyed the silk and the gold borders are inlaid with mud, like the crest on James’s passport.

  ‘White is for funerals,’ the tailor in the shop had told me. ‘It is inauspicious, sister, to wear this on your wedding day.’

  ‘I don’t mind. White is what I would wear at home.’

  He shook his head at me as he handed me the bag across the counter. The next day, he sent Mala, his daughter, across to the hotel to dress me for the ceremony. I did not know how to put on a sari myself. Before she began, she handed me a pile of pleated red material.

  ‘A wedding sari, sister. Gift from my father.’

  I take the silted, unworn sari from the wardrobe now and lift the silk to my face. The red one is nowhere to be seen. I imagine it being drawn out to sea, like I was, weaving its way through the waters like a new breed of python. Perhaps somebody is bending over it on the beach, wondering where the bride has gone.

  On the morning of our wedding, the scarlet sari looked so rich in Mala’s hands. I forgot about home, about the white I had always had in my head when I thought of marriage. And I wore red – fire red. James grinned when I met him at the beach. He should have known that I would do something different. But for every mould you break, you are filling one elsewhere. As Mala and her father stood watching, I could see in their faces the pleasure at having guided me into a custom – not my own, but a tradition nonetheless.

  I unravel the sari from the rail. Taking his rucksack from my back, I put it inside. This and the ring are the only proof that we were ever married.

  There are more clothes under the bed – a Genesis T-shirt, which he is too old to wear, and a pair of brown shorts. Inside the pocket, there’s a piece of card. A photo – wave-beaten and faded. It’s of us at the bottom of his parents’ garden in Kew. It was one of those evenings that takes you by surprise in England, making all the muscles in your body relax with its warmth. James’s mother was putting on an open-air concert. She always wears the most beautiful clothes – fresh off the peg from Liberty. She hosts high tea for a hundred as if it were as simple as combing out her elbow-length hair. James gets his poise from her; he can befriend anyone.

  It seems ridiculous now, the idea of sipping wine next to a clematis-clad summer-house, wishing I could exchange my family for his. If I were to whisper to the girl in the photograph exactly what she would come to feel – the ache of home, the need to bind herself fast to something – she would only laugh and take another sip.

  I feel it before I hear it: a slow crack spreading its capillaries through the core of the building. I run to the landing to see the stairs give way, falling with the wall into the lobby. There’s no way down. I bundle our things into James’s holdall and make for a window.

  ‘Get out!’ shouts a passer-by from below. ‘The whole place is about to go!’ I throw the bag down to him. It’s the American whose room was on the same floor as ours. He grabs the ladder from the other side of the building and props it up against my window. I clamber down, hands slipping on the bamboo.

  ‘What the hell were you doing up there?’ he yells, taking my arm and pulling me away from the building. ‘You’ll get yourself killed.’

  ‘Wait! The bag!’ I break free of his grip and run back to grab it. The house quietens. There are no more groans, only widened cracks.

  ‘What’s in there anyway?’ He points at the holdall. I frown and pull it close to my chest. ‘Your husband … I’m sorry, I don’t know his name. Have you found him?’

  I tell him no.

  ‘Have you tried the hospital?’

  The hospital seems so obvious. Why did I not think of it?

  ‘It’s on the far west side of the town. They’re taking everyone there who they find alive.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I murmur. I turn to go and then pause, remembering that he wasn’t travelling alone. ‘What happened to your …?’

  ‘She’s in the hills. Safe. Thank God. I came back down to see if I could help with the rescue operation.’

  I look at him, incredulous. If I found James alive and in one piece, I wouldn’t leave his side again.

  I leave the American by the guesthouse and follow the stretchers being carried out of the town. After a mile or so, the hospital – a concrete oblong with impossibly high windows – becomes visible at the end of the road. Inside, the central corridor is clogged with victims on trolleys. I check every one for James. Then I push my way through the crowd into the ward. Sunlight falls in shafts through the glass, spotlighting particular mattresses. The rest of the room sits in clammy darkness. Beds are separated into sections by threadbare curtains, which have been hauled back and pinned to the wall to make room for more patients. The nurses have given up trying to keep the aisles clear, instead filling the room with as many mattresses as possible. I pick my way through the maze of furniture, scouring the beds for a sign of him. Nurses weave through the hall and stop indiscriminately to wrap steam-white bandages over darkening wounds.

  I ask a nurse carrying a clipboard if she has a list of patient
s. ‘His name is James. James Peak.’

  She flicks through her papers and runs down the length of the margin with the lid of her pen but I’m told there is no record of him. A fly dizzies itself on the ceiling above me. I want to sit down but there is no room. I have noticed that the doctors stay out of sight.

  A woman with a thick Tamil accent, sitting on a nearby bed, starts telling me of a snake, ten feet long, which pulled her through the water with her children. It took them to the edge of the wave and deposited them in the shallows where they could scramble, bedraggled, onto higher ground; her daughter could not have swum without it, her leg ensnared as it was in a ball of barbed wire. I ask her if maybe it was a rope they held and she laughs and says, no, it was not a rope, it was a snake, and why would I not believe her? Just days ago, nobody believed in waves the size of houses. Today anything goes. It was a snake, she repeats; she has never been more sure. I ask where her children are and she points to the next bed. Two sisters lie head to toe, eyes wide open, incapable of sleep. The second girl tries not to look down at her leg, which has yet to be freed from the wire.

  It is the dead, not the living, who garner the most attention from the staff. As soon as the life leaves a person, the nurses pounce, carrying them off to the courtyard at the back of the hospital where the body joins a line and, if fortunate, is covered. I check the corpses outside but he’s not among them.

  A man comes into the courtyard to speak with a nearby nurse.