The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  I left the wall and walked towards them. Pete must have felt the silence frost up between Freda and myself because he made his excuses and arranged to call round the following day. Like Pete, I found my eyes jarring on the purple knoll of flesh that had puffed up above Freda’s eye. I, too, wanted to reach out and nurse it, cover it, undo it.

  ‘Is Pete living in Wilton?’ she asked, watching him make his way down the road.

  ‘Are you all right, Freda?’ I reached towards her temple but she raised an arm to stop me.

  ‘I’m catching the early train back to London tomorrow. I shan’t bother you and Mama any longer.’

  We walked in silence back to the house. As we reached the front door, she turned to me and said, ‘Pete comes to see you at the factory quite often, doesn’t he?’

  I nodded.

  ‘A boy doesn’t do a thing like that unless he likes a girl. You should know that.’

  She left for London without saying goodbye to Mama. She would not let me accompany her to the station. But when I went to strip the bed and wash the sheets, I found that the book under her pillow had gone, along with the key to the locked cellar. If his books were to be consigned to a slow, damp death, then the least she could do was allow them to rest in peace.

  CHAPTER 26

  Terse waves nudge the shore. The sun suspends its bulb at the apex of the sky and lights the sea in a coral blue. If it weren’t for the debris, you would be forgiven for thinking that the waves were harmless – a watchful mother singing to sleep the bodies on the shore.

  Here, on the beach, I can see the spot where James and I deposited our bags on the sand and sunbathed the day away. Having been boxed together in the train for two days, we stretched out our limbs in the breeze and absorbed the sky. Getting married in the morning. Even I was dizzy with the thought of it. He asked whether he should telephone my mum to ask her permission. I ignored the question. But he rolled over on the sand and repeated it.

  ‘It’s traditional to ask the father, isn’t it?’ I sighed.

  ‘I think she would appreciate it.’

  ‘We don’t owe it to her, though.’ I sat up. ‘Not after …’ The movement covered him in a thin shower of sand.

  ‘She still cares for you.’

  ‘I’ve told you how paranoid she gets. It’s not worth the bother.’

  ‘True. She might panic …’ He propped himself up on his elbow and dusted the sand from his shirt. ‘What about your father? Do you have any way of contacting him?’

  ‘He could be dead for all I know.’

  ‘She must miss him, in spite of everything.’

  ‘Yeah, well. What’s done is done.’

  ‘Have you ever thought about looking for him?’

  I pulled my legs up to my chest and rested my forehead on my hands, nursing my eyes in the shade of my own limbs.

  ‘You must have thought about it …’

  ‘I used to.’

  ‘What’s changed?’

  ‘He wouldn’t want me to find him.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Yes, but … I kind of do. Someone once showed me this photograph of him …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I don’t know … I guess, just seeing him older … it made me realize that he’d survived without me all this time. I realized he actually existed. Before that, I could sort of get away with treating him as if he was imaginary, or something.’

  ‘Who showed it to you?’

  ‘I was only twelve. I can’t remember,’ I lied. I leant back and dug my elbows into the sand. ‘It doesn’t matter now, does it? Not really.’

  ‘Did your mum see it too?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I have you now.’ I reached for his hand and laid my head on his shoulder.

  I thought of James’s family, of the bustle around their kitchen table in London, the meals, the holidays and the bare-faced arguments about things as small as who borrowed whose socks. Mum and I must strike him as an offbeat pair – my mother as fixed as a limpet and me as absent as my missing dad. We don’t fit together like a family, the pair of us – even with Tim around to masquerade as a father. I couldn’t bring myself to tell James that the meagre facts I’d been given about my dad had been frayed by his sister’s visit. How, when I was older, I’d dug out the telephone number she had given me when I was twelve and asked everything that I was burning to ask.

  I should have told Mum but it would have made her worse. If I gave her another layer, another knot to set about untying … she’d crack. And I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I didn’t understand then that it was she who had the bigger secrets.

  At the foot of the beach, the sea heaves itself onto the shore and unloads more water onto the sand. It has been three days since the wave came and still new debris washes up. I do not sit down to watch. I stay on my feet so that, if the water keeps coming, I can turn. And run.

  It didn’t take much to convince my father’s sister to tell me what she knew. I was nineteen when I called her. I had hoped that my curiosity about him would vanish with age. But, like the debris, my questions seemed to keep arriving.

  Another wave breaks. It nudges at a girder on the sand. Spills over it. And then retreats.

  She had told me that my father was given away when he was born. She’d said it would have been better for ‘Peter’ if his mother had never tried to contact him again. Mum was a complicated woman, Alice. Complex. A complicated character. She kept repeating it down the phone, as if she herself needed reminding.

  The sea lets go of its breath for a second time. It sifts through the contents of the beach, drenching my feet and departing again, in seconds.

  Even as a boy, Dad had tried to remove himself to places that his mother’s letters couldn’t reach, marooning himself in Imber in the hope that she might leave him alone. But she kept on burdening him with her regrets, sending him note after note but never once visiting. The child in him couldn’t quell the thought that she might one day come to fetch him.

  This time, the water brings more debris with it – a net, a wooden beam and a saucepan that it fills and empties, fills and empties.

  My father, she told me, left Wiltshire the moment his mother asked to see him in London. He was a grown boy. The war was ending. And she thought he deserved the truth.

  Water gathers. And pauses. The sand glistens like a mirror.

  Pete traced the address she had given him and found her in a flat near Clissold Park.

  The wave breaks. Expires. Shrinks.

  Inside his mother’s flat, living with her all this time, was a daughter she had kept and loved and reared. And Pete, whom she had left to roam, could not be consoled – least of all by a family he had never known.

  The sea leaves. Empty. I have no pity left to give him – this strange, misshapen shadow, who gave me breath and left me, as if I were simply another piece of debris.

  I continue down the beach to search for James. If only I could find him we could start something new. Something fresh and simple, with no ties to before. But there’s always the sea. Always the wake. With its washing up of things that we can’t forget.

  ‘Check the lost-and-found board,’ a rescue worker tells me at the neck of the beach. ‘They will not have dealt with his body unless it has been named. And if he’s alive, it might be listed there.’

  The board is already thick with hand-scrawled notes: newspaper, book covers, fragments of posters have all been reclaimed from the debris and written on with whatever pen the rescue workers provide. Each note details people who have been found alive or dead or others who are missing. People are dividing them into two sections: missing and fou
nd. The missing board is five or six layers thick with paper. But the found board is all but empty; the lines of bodies in front of the boards need no note.

  One of the rescue workers holds back a crowd clamouring to get closer. Arms outstretched, she lets two or three through her grasp at a time. Once at the board, they rifle through the paper, lifting each scrap, like the lid of a box, to peer at the note underneath.

  I tear a page from James’s Moby-Dick paperback and, taking a pen from the woman in front, scrawl down the bare facts – bones without flesh. He has sandy hair, I write. He is British. Tall. Last seen in a blue-and-green-striped shirt. It has become harder and harder to picture him alive and well in front of me so I resort to listing anonymous colours. I am not the only one. Most of the notes are written in a giddy mesh of Tamil. But there are three I can understand:

  Natasha Farrant. Blonde hair, tight short curls, British, 24 years of age. Brown eyes. Has a one-inch scar on her left ankle. If found, please bring to the hospital.

  Francois Dupont: Il a les cheveux maron et il portait une chemise verte le matin du vague. Nationalité: français.

  And underneath the note in French, I read:

  Alice Peak (née Fielding), wife of James Peak, disappeared from the Saravo guesthouse on the morning of the wave. British. Red hair. Pale complexion. Please contact the British Deputy High Commission in Madras if found. Telephone 42192251.

  I snatch the paper from the board. Somebody knows I’m here. It’s not James’s handwriting but they mention him by name. They’re calling me his wife. He must have spoken to them. Is he in Madras? I don’t even know how to get to Madras from here. Telephone 42192251. My heart sinks. All the lines are down: surely they know that? My only hope is the woman at the tea stall. I push through the crowd and make for the hill. I’m not running from the wave this time but towards the thought of him living and breathing in another, untouched, city.

  ‘Please, I’m begging you, you’ve got to let me use the telephone again,’ I plead with the man at the office. His wife isn’t with him. He reads the note in my hand, squinting at the telephone number. Then he beckons me inside.

  Back in the phone booth, I hold the receiver to my ear and dial the numbers from the note.

  ‘British Deputy High Commission in Madras.’

  It is the first composed voice I have heard in days.

  ‘I – Hello, it’s – I’m – My name is Alice Peak. I’m calling from Kanyakumari –’

  ‘Mrs Peak. Hold the line, please.’

  There’s a click. A clouded silence shifts for minutes down the line.

  Then a voice cuts in: ‘Mrs Peak?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hello there, my name is Derek Wright. I gather you’re in Kanyakumari.’

  ‘Have you heard from my husband? His name’s James. James Peak.’

  ‘Let me check for you.’ His words are clipped and precise, like the folds of an origami swan. ‘One moment.’

  There is a pause. I can hear other phones ringing in his office and the swift flick of fingers running through a paper file.

  ‘Mrs Peak?’

  ‘Yes, I’m still here.’

  ‘A rescue worker called on behalf of Mr Peak yesterday from the hospital.’

  ‘He’s alive?’

  ‘I’m afraid we have no more information. I’m sorry but I can’t be sure.’

  ‘But I checked the hospital and he’s not there.’

  ‘As I said, Mrs Peak, our records show that we received a call from the hospital but that is all the information we can give you.’

  Stop repeating that name. I’m not used to it and I just think of James. ‘Can you send someone to help me find him? Please.’ My voice starts to falter.

  ‘We’ve been in close contact with our rescue team at Kanyakumari, who are doing their best to ascertain the whereabouts of each missing person. I will inform them about your husband. We will make travel arrangements to Madras for every British citizen. You will need to contact us for a passport – I’m assuming that, like others, you lost yours in the tsunami. Are you injured in any way? We’ve dispatched a medical corps to the marketplace should you need any assistance.’

  ‘Tsunami …’

  ‘The wave, Mrs Peak.’

  ‘I’ve – If the rescue worker or James … if they call again, please, I’m begging you, tell them I rang and that I’m searching, and that I’m all right, will you?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll make sure I add it to the file. When are you due to fly home?’

  ‘He wasn’t in the hospital …’

  ‘Mrs Peak, your flight?’

  ‘I – I’m sorry, I don’t even know what day is.’

  ‘It’s the eighteenth of August … 1971.’

  ‘I know the year,’ I say abruptly. ‘Our flight is on the twenty-third – from Delhi. We moved it. We weren’t even going to come down here …’

  ‘Then you’ll need to get to Madras before then. We will arrange your onward travel to Delhi once an emergency passport has been processed for you.’

  ‘I’m not leaving without James.’

  ‘We will be of assistance where we can, Mrs Peak, and I understand how distressing the last days will have been … but I would recommend travelling to Madras at your earliest convenience … We will be able to help you with your search at the very least. And with your onward travel.’ He pauses. ‘Is that all, Mrs Peak?’

  I don’t reply.

  ‘All right, then. Please call this number again when you reach Madras … and we will try to gain some clarity on the whereabouts of your husband before you arrive.’

  The line resumes its hum and I lower the receiver.

  CHAPTER 27

  We heard about the end of the war in the same way as we heard of its beginning: on the wireless. It should have been momentous – the dancing, the embracing of strangers – but by the time VE Day came, Pete had been missing for two weeks.

  Mama rushed into the house to say that someone outside the Pembroke Inn had told her to tune into the news and quick. We sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the old box to settle on the right station, Mama peering into the speakers periodically as if trying to speed it up. We caught the tail end of the announcement – enough to hear what had happened. I expected to feel relief. To think suddenly of going home. But I could only fix my eyes on the empty chairs – the places where Freda and Pete should have been – and remember Father, left behind in Imber. We would be going home to nothing more than vacant rooms.

  We tried to telephone Freda from the box at the end of the street, but nobody answered. It had been nearly a year since she had last been with us and I wondered if, even now the war was over, she would ever return to us. After one more failed attempt at the telephone, Mama took me by the hand and tugged me out of the box towards the Pembroke Inn. All along the street, people were coming out of their houses and looking this way and that, as if to taste the air for any sign of change. Inside the inn, the landlady balanced a gramophone on the bar and set a Charleston tune playing. Boys in clean uniforms – yet to be sullied by fighting – knocked together glasses, toasting their luck. And the entire place was filled with bright noise, brighter than I had heard in months.

  ‘Cheer up!’ A soldier took a seat on the stool next to mine. ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’ He placed his cap on the oak bar and kept a hand on it out of habit. I wanted to tell him that he could let go now, that there would be no ticking off from the sergeant if he lost or damaged it. But instead I let him hold it: it seemed easier to carry on as we were. He smiled expectantly, waiting for me to answer. I couldn’t quite reconcile t
he youth in his features with the moustache on his upper lip: the two did not fit comfortably together.

  ‘It won’t really be over until we’re home,’ I murmured in reply. It was a foolish thing to say: places can die, just like people. The air can leave them and they grow cold.

  ‘You’re not from these parts, then?’

  ‘No, not quite.’

  ‘I know the feeling. My mother and father are in York and my brother is already at war. Wouldn’t it be perfect if they were all here with us now?’

  I scraped together a weak smile.

  ‘To loved ones,’ he said, holding up his glass.

  ‘To loved ones,’ I echoed, letting the lip of mine kiss his. A soldier in the far corner dragged an ATS girl into the middle of the room and they began to dance, feet picking out the rhythm of the Charleston. My companion at the bar held out his hand. I glanced towards Mama, who was laughing with Mrs Hunt, the landlady, and before I knew what I was doing, I had placed my hand in the soldier’s. It was the end of the war; perhaps if I danced, if I marked it in some way, it might feel more real.

  I followed the soldier through the other dancing couples to the centre of the room and thought of Freda practising her steps in the parsonage: she used to put on high-heeled shoes and dance on the parlour floor with the mop. Yet when it came to the dances themselves, she acted as if she couldn’t care less. I remembered how, in the hall at Warminster Camp, the steps seemed so natural to her, as effortless as sleeping.

  I bobbed along as best I could in the middle of the inn with the soldier. I kept my head bowed over my feet, which Freda had told me was an awful habit. I was supposed to look upwards and into my partner’s eyes, but I was too embarrassed to meet his stare and I feared I would lose concentration.