The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

‘I’m jolly glad to see that neither of us are dancers!’ he called over the music. I blushed and tried harder. How elegant Freda would have looked if she were here. Everyone in the room would have wanted to be her partner. She was probably dancing somewhere in London at this very minute – under Big Ben or along the Mall.

  ‘I hear they’re showing a picture in the theatre in Salisbury this evening.’ The soldier spoke into my ear, hand still on my waist. ‘Would you like to go?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I called, over the sound of the gramophone, pretending not to hear.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d like to see a picture with me.’

  I tried to smile gratefully. ‘I’d love to but … there’s a boy, you see. And we’re –’ I didn’t know what we were. Or if he would even come home again. He had been gone for a fortnight. In town I’d managed to corner one of the land girls, who’d said he had not been at the farm since a week last Tuesday.

  ‘I see,’ said the soldier, rubbing the back of his head awkwardly. ‘Well, he’s the lucky one.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, stepping away. ‘Thank you so much for asking.’

  I returned to the bar to find Mama, who had been watching me dance.

  ‘He seemed like a nice boy, Violet,’ she began.

  ‘Can we go and ask after Pete at the farm?’

  She sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘Violet … the war has just ended. What are you doing thinking of Pete? I’ve no doubt he’ll be back before too long. Especially now the fighting is over.’

  ‘But, Mama, it’s been two weeks. And he never mentioned going away. What if something’s happened?’

  ‘Darling, nothing’s happened. He’s his own man, that’s all. But if it will put your mind at rest, I’ll come to the farm. Just as long as you promise to forget about it after that.’

  ‘I can’t promise. You know I can’t.’

  She held my gaze for a moment, then looked with dismay at the soldier I had been dancing with, who had found another partner on the other side of the room.

  In order to reach Pete’s farm, Mama and I passed through Fugglestone where Sam and his American troops had been billeted in the run-up to the Normandy attacks. The barracks, once temporary, had not been removed since the departure of the Americans but fortified with bricks and tiles. It seemed that the military were planning on moving in for good, despite the war being over. It made me fear for Imber and I wanted to tell my mother as much. But she remained taciturn, marching as quickly as she could past the entrance without turning to look inside.

  We followed the river and passed under the railway line, which shuddered with the weight of an approaching train.

  ‘You shouldn’t worry for him, Violet. He’ll turn up. He’s a grown man.’ She put out an arm to still me and we waited for the train to arrive.

  ‘I know. But I appreciate you coming with me.’

  The carriages rattled over the bridge and steam poured down towards us in voluptuous plumes before rising up again towards the churning breath of the engine. For a moment, we were enveloped completely in its cloud – just Mama and I and whiteness. I inhaled its metallic perfume. It was the only scent I had taken to heart here in the town. All the others – petrol, wet cobbles, chimney smoke – were pollutants to the hay and wool and yarrow that I remembered from home.

  Upon arriving at the main farmyard, we were met sternly by the farmer’s wife who, at the first mention of Pete, promptly enquired after his whereabouts. ‘The boy knows he can’t leave without serving his notice,’ she barked.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t know where he is either. We assumed you might be able to help,’ I ventured.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t be asking you if I knew where he was, would I?’

  ‘We’re sorry to have bothered you,’ Mama apologized. ‘Violet was only concerned for his well-being. That was all.’

  ‘Listen here. If he dares show his face in Wilton again, you tell him that he’s to look for employment elsewhere. I’ve plenty o’ lads who’ll take on his chores – lads who are reliable and don’t take off at half a second’s notice.’

  ‘Has he done it before, then, Mrs Hooper?’ I asked. Mama squeezed my arm, afraid I might aggravate her further.

  ‘You bet he has. And his favour’s worn too thin this time.’

  ‘Thank you. We’ll be on our way –’ began my mother.

  ‘You might as well take his things,’ she interrupted, as we turned to leave the yard. ‘I shan’t be wanting him back.’

  My mother and I exchanged a glance. ‘If you would be so kind as to show us …’

  ‘He’s pushed his luck too far this time,’ she muttered, bristling past us and waddling with force across the yard. I assumed she wanted us to follow her so we set out after her. She stopped at a stable block with a ladder leading up to the top floor.

  ‘Up there.’ She pointed. ‘I’ll be leaving you to it, then.’

  I was not familiar with his accommodation at this farm. He had kept quiet on the subject, saying only that he did not plan to stay for long. As we pushed back the door at the top of the ladder, I was appalled to find there was no fire or heating or any bed to sleep on – only a single, straw-filled mattress resting on cold, bare boards.

  ‘Imagine doing a hard day’s work in the weather we’ve had, then coming back and sleeping in here,’ said Mama. ‘It’s a wonder he’s still walking.’

  ‘Where are his clothes?’ I asked, scanning the room foolishly for a cupboard.

  ‘There’s a box over there.’ My mother pointed towards a trunk in the far corner. I walked across the room and pushed back the lid. Inside were all his belongings – three shirts, two pairs of cords and an officer’s coat he had picked up from Wilton House after the Americans had left. I was familiar with the cut and weave of each item. And yet I had never considered how small the sum of his possessions would be once they were assembled – how they barely filled even half of a single trunk.

  I delved further inside. My fingers stumbled on what felt like a stack of papers beneath a layer of clothes. Freeing them from a tangle of shirts, I tried not to attract Mama’s attention. They were letters: my letters, from Imber.

  ‘That can’t be all of it!’ my mother exclaimed, coming over to my side of the room and bending to inspect the contents of the trunk.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, pulling a shirt over the letters to hide them.

  ‘Nothing … no, of course.’ She collected herself. ‘I shouldn’t have been so surprised. For all we know, he could be an orphan, God bless him.’

  She paused, pressing her lips together as if deciding whether to go on. ‘You’re not still thinking of … marriage, are you, Violet?’

  ‘If he’ll have me,’ I whispered. ‘I’d be miserable without him.’

  ‘You’ll be miserable with him, my darling. Just look.’

  She gestured towards the trunk but all I could see were my letters, grouped carefully in chronological order, each one filed in its correct envelope.

  As his trunk was too heavy to carry, we took his belongings in sacks back to the house. I made neat piles of his things and stored them under our bed. Remembering Sam’s note, I removed it from under the mattress, where it had torn slightly, and kept it with Pete’s letter in my drawer.

  Another week passed and I was still hopeful of Pete’s return. He had probably gone to scout out work at a nearby farm: it was not difficult to imagine him tiring of Mrs Hooper’s briskness in Coombe. Two more weeks went by and I started to worry. I feared that he had left for good and wondered what I had done to deter him from calling to say goodbye. I took to sitting by the bell, running my hand th
rough the thin skin of dew that was deposited on it each morning. It had become so embedded in the surroundings of the garden that it now stirred in me only the faintest memories of Imber. Moss had begun to attach itself to the rim and spread across the surface like a knitted garment. At first I had scraped it off dutifully every couple of weeks, washing the bronze with a sponge until I could see its green and umber markings once more. But I had given up of late, letting Nature have its way. As the moss thickened, so the separation grew between the mute bell in the garden and the ones in my memory – strung up high and full of song.

  One night in June, when Pete had been gone six weeks, there was a knock on the door. Mama did not rouse so I crept down on my own in the hope that it might be Pete.

  At the door, I could just make out a nurse’s cape through the flap of the letterbox.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hurry up and open the door!’ Freda hissed at me. ‘I’ve been out here for ages.’

  I lifted the latch and she pushed past me, depositing her suitcase on the hallway floor.

  ‘Freda, what are you doing here? Are you home for good –’

  ‘Where’s Mama?’ she interrupted coolly.

  ‘It’s past midnight. She’s asleep upstairs.’

  My sister let out a frustrated sigh and paced the hallway. Then she turned towards me and grasped my arm, her hand cold from the night air outside. ‘Violet, please tell me you didn’t know.’

  ‘I don’t underst–’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.’

  ‘I –’

  ‘I’ve heard talk, Violet, in town, about an American officer.’

  My ribs tensed.

  ‘An American officer with whom Mama … became acquainted.’

  ‘I never heard …’

  ‘Will you swear to me that you don’t know anything about it?’

  ‘It’s just aimless chatter, Freda. You know what people in Wilton are like. Everything has to be taken with a pinch of salt around here.’

  ‘Except I didn’t hear it from anyone in Wilton.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘Never you mind.’

  She did not drop her eyes from my face, not even when I looked into the living room towards the hearth, which was in need of sweeping.

  ‘There’s nowhere for you to sleep,’ I mumbled weakly.

  ‘I’ll make do with Father’s chesterfield.’

  Her words made me colour. I walked up the hall under the pretence of fetching a blanket and pillow. Then I climbed the stairs with dread in my stomach that I felt certain would only be compounded in the morning.

  Freda could stay for two whole days. After relating the severity of her family’s situation to her matron, she had been granted emergency leave for the weekend. For the entirety of Saturday and Sunday, my mother and sister became like figures in a weather house – Mama appearing only when she was sure that Freda was out of sight. She seemed to sense instinctively that Freda had heard something.

  I expected her to intervene and pre-empt a confrontation but instead she hid herself away guiltily. She kept disappearing to run errands around the town, anything that kept her away from the house. For her part, Freda became increasingly frosty towards me. Now that the war was over, my shift at the factory had ended, and I could hardly avoid her in the way that Mama did: it would only make us seem more culpable. Mealtimes were the worst – a million and one silences passing across the table as one of us conveyed the salt to another, poured water or enquired hesitantly after a second helping.

  Our stalemate finally fell apart on Sunday. I had stayed on to attend to the flowers at church and, through an unlucky lapse on the part of my mother, she and Freda had been present in the house without me for over an hour. If either of them was hoping that my return would relieve the tension between them, I was to be a disappointment. We sat down to eat in silence, the pressure rising like the damp on the walls with every conversation that refused to start. It was left to me to break the silence.

  ‘How wonderful that the war is over, Freda, and that you can be with us for Sunday lunch,’ I said. Mama looked up and smiled tensely at me. My sister said nothing. ‘I imagine London was quite the place to be. Was there much celebrating?’

  Instead of launching into the merits of London, I was surprised to see my sister whitening and staring down at her plate. ‘I suppose so … I wouldn’t really know. I was on a shift … I had work to do.’ I sensed I had upset her but couldn’t, at the time, work out why.

  ‘But there must have been some celebrations on the ward. With the other nurses?’

  Freda shook her head. ‘The sick still need tending, regardless of whether there’s a war on or not. There’s always work to do.’

  ‘Oh, but I was reading in the newspaper that everybody went out on the streets. I saw a picture of a nurse in her cap dancing with a soldier on the Mall. It made me think of you,’ I pressed. ‘I was certain you’d be joining in with all the dancing. You love to dance.’

  Freda set down her cutlery a little too vehemently. ‘I told you I was working … I don’t have the time to swan off and go dancing in the street.’

  ‘Nonsense, Freda! Since when have you been such a prude?’

  ‘I’ll tell you since when. Since I discovered that, while the rest of us were doing our best for the war effort, my mother had taken up with a Yank.’

  I didn’t know what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t that harsh assertion of the facts. They seemed all the more horrible, the way she had set them before us. And yet she hadn’t been here. She hadn’t been here to stop it. Mama stared at her plate intently, refusing to look at Freda. I tried to think of a change of subject for her sake but there seemed nowhere to go. I waited for my sister to speak again.

  ‘I was in town yesterday, Mama, and I came across a Mrs Grey. Do you know of her? I’m sure you do. She worked at Wilton House with you – as a cook.’ She clipped the consonants in the word as if it bore a world of significance and leant back in her chair, waiting for my mother’s response.

  ‘Yes, I do. A very generous woman, always passing on spare carrots and potatoes from the garden at the house.’ She held onto her composure so well that I started to doubt whether she had anticipated the direction in which Freda intended to take the conversation. Then she shot me a frightened look from across the table, which quashed the doubt.

  ‘It’s just hearsay,’ blurted Mama, before settling herself as much as she could. ‘Whatever you’ve heard, it’s just talk.’

  ‘What is hearsay?’ Freda looked at our mother, her eyes wide with contrived innocence.

  My mother tightened her grip on her knife and fork. ‘I don’t think you can be in any doubt as to what I’m referring.’ She put down her cutlery as she spoke, pushed her plate to one side and leant into the space across the table. ‘Whatever they have said at the house, it is not what it seems. Violet will tell you.’

  I stiffened, glancing at Mama, who avoided my eyes, abashed at having to bring me into the debate.

  ‘Oh, yes! Of course.’ Freda turned in her chair towards me so there was no escaping her glare. ‘There you were, Violet, looking genially on as Father was betrayed in broad daylight and Mama made herself the talk of the town.’ Her eyes bored into me until they had extracted a deep blush from my cheeks. I wanted to hide my face from her, run upstairs and bury it in a pillow. But I knew what it would mean for Mama if I looked away. Freda had only heard gossip: she had no proof and nor would she find any.

  ‘It isn’t just gossip,’ she continued, her voice becoming angular. ‘Everybody here knows. I have it from a reliable source.’

  Mam
a turned rigid.

  ‘Why do you care, Freda? You left us!’ I cried, standing up and moving round to our mother’s side of the table.

  ‘Oh, that’s just perfect, isn’t it?’ she snapped, jabbing a finger in my direction. ‘How can I be responsible for an affair that happened entirely in my absence?’

  ‘Don’t use that word,’ my mother retorted. ‘There was no such thing.’

  ‘That is not what the town is saying, Mama!’ my sister exclaimed.

  ‘The town?’ Mama repeated with alarm. ‘We’re decent people, Freda. Nothing untoward happened.’

  ‘Would you have any old Tom, Dick or Harry read this, then?’ She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and cast it onto the table. It came to rest by my mother’s plate. I looked down at Sam’s note and knew the game was up.

  Mama picked it up. ‘Where did you find this? You had no right to rummage through my belongings.’

  ‘Ask Violet. It was in her drawer.’

  Mama stared at me, forlorn. She took a breath. ‘Freda, you must realize … how hard it was for Violet and me after the evacuation, without your father …’

  Freda’s eyes narrowed. ‘Forgive me, Mother, but I don’t see the other widows pouring out their grief to any willing soldier who might happen to drop by.’

  ‘How can you be so unfeeling? He was a friend! He was a good friend to both of us.’

  ‘Oh, please!’

  Mama’s voice was wavering now, her eyes rabbit-wide. ‘There might have been more to it had it been allowed to grow … But I dealt with the matter swiftly as soon as I realized the extent of my feelings.’ She nodded in my direction, as if remembering my words to her in the kitchen on the day she had brought it to an end.

  ‘So you did love him.’

  ‘That is not what I –’

  ‘But he said in the note that he cared for you.’

  ‘Did he not also say that he cared for Violet?’

  ‘That is not –’

  ‘And do you not care for me as a daughter? It’s the same, is it not?’