The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

‘But he’s a man, Mama, and you’re a woman!’

  ‘I know I’ve been blind to how others might have interpreted the situation. But for your part, Freda, will you not see that I meant no harm by it and I put an end to it as soon as I grasped what it might become?’ Mama extended a hand towards her.

  Freda wavered. A few seconds later, she was on her feet and moving towards the door. ‘How are we to go on after this?’ she asked. ‘What would he think?’

  Then I let slip what my sister had been baiting us to admit: ‘Father’s dead, Freda. It wasn’t … it wasn’t wrong … because Father is dead.’ I was crying. ‘Soon we’ll go back to Imber. That way, we’ll be near him.’

  Freda dropped her voice to a murmur, her eyes stone cold. ‘Do you honestly think that all this can be magicked away just by going home? Nothing will ever be the same again.’ Then she left the room, taking Sam’s note with her. We listened to her steps, bullet-like, on the stairs.

  I waited a while in silence with my mother. Then I readied myself to go and fetch her. ‘Be kind, Violet,’ my mother murmured, as I stood up. ‘Be kind to her.’

  I crossed the landing to find our bedroom empty. Sam’s note had been shredded and discarded in the fireplace. There was no sign of Freda. I should have burnt the note before she had a chance to find it.

  I collected up the paper from the grate and put it in my pocket. I would have held a match to it there and then, but the fireplace in our bedroom did not work: the chimney had long since caved in and the chute was full of bird nests. A single glance out of the window told me where Freda had gone. She was sitting with her back against the bell in the garden, knees pressed up against her chest, crying like a little girl. I could hear her sobs from the window. Downstairs, I padded across the lawn past the bomb shelter and over to the apple tree.

  ‘Freda, please come inside,’ I said softly.

  ‘It’s ruined everything. Everything,’ she cried. ‘We haven’t a home, we haven’t a father – we haven’t even a proper mother any more. And I’ve … It’s my –’

  I waited. But she didn’t finish. I knew what I should do: I should stoop down and touch her, let her know that, for her part, she was forgiven. But I remained standing.

  CHAPTER 28

  ‘It was auspicious, sister. All my family live in the hills. There are no fishermen in my family. Only shopkeeper. None was taken, sister, none. They are all alive,’ explains Suganthi, the woman from the hill. ‘So I help you. I will help find your husband.’

  Her husband had sent for her after I had telephoned the deputy high commission from his booth. I was inconsolable, and I could tell he didn’t know what else to do. I’m grateful she’s with me. She speaks Tamil, for one thing, and can ask the nurses at the hospital about James. Yet I can’t understand how she can muster up such kindness towards a stranger when her town – the place she has lived all her married life – has been swallowed whole by the sea. I think of the letter Mum sent me. Such selflessness would have left me aghast.

  ‘My mother lost her home once,’ I say, as we cut a path towards the hospital.

  ‘How, sister, in a fire?’

  ‘No, it was taken from her by the army. But she only had to move to the next town.’

  ‘A home is a home, sister. When I left my family to live with my husband, I cried for days in secret. And they live only one mile! But my daughter goes to live in London. So far away. I visited two years. My first visit. She didn’t say it on the telephone, sister, but in London, every day is monsoon day. Rain, rain, rain. They live in a small, small house, with fifteen family. There is no space for her children. Where will she put them? In the cupboards? She wanted to find us work there. But I tell her, no. It is a bad plan. I see life is good for me here – auspicious, sister.’ She clasps her hands together as if to thank God. ‘Your mother, did she ever go back to her home?’

  ‘No, never.’

  Suganthi frowns at me.

  ‘She can’t settle in her new home. She thinks her old home would have been better.’

  ‘Ah, but if she stay in her old home, she could not have such a beautiful daughter.’ She stops me in my tracks and cups a hand around my cheek with a wide smile.

  She is what I would have given you, had I been a better man. I keep quiet, thinking only of the letter.

  Suganthi turns to face down the hill, breathless from our walk. ‘Alice, the wave brings bad things,’ she spreads a hand across the view of the debris sprawled beneath us, ‘but your Amma, she cares for you. You go home and see. The water, it comes and goes and everything changes.’

  If I am to stand any chance of reaching the deputy high commission before my flight, I must leave Kanyakumari today, travelling first to Madras and then to Delhi. There was still no sign of James in the hospital. I telephone the deputy high commission again to see if they have received any further news. But the call yields nothing, only a repeat of the information I heard yesterday.

  ‘I did take the liberty of calling the airport to confirm your flight,’ says the man at the end of the line. ‘If you do intend to travel home, we can make arrangements for your journey from Madras to Delhi airport. You can telephone your family once you arrive here to let them know your plans.’

  I avoid an affirmative answer and hang up. There are very few buses travelling between here and Trivandrum. They are still clearing the roads. I don’t even know if the trains are running.

  Suganthi arranges for a driver to take me to the station in exchange for a handful of rupees – worthless since the wave – and a packet of Ceylon tea from her kitchen. I don’t even know if I’m set on going yet but I climb into the car with the holdall full of James’s things and head for the station all the same. Tree after tree has been felled and laid to rest along the road. We frequently have to turn off the tarmac and drive through the dirt to avoid them. This place used to be so green, as if it did nothing but rain. But any foliage that has survived has lost its colour to the mud and silt and travelling sand. The entire landscape looks sick – like something that should have long since been buried.

  The station is packed with people trying to get away. There are guards blocking the entrance to each platform. Whole families sit perched on the contents of their houses. People have loaded their remaining belongings into vegetable crates and flour sacks – any container they can lay their hands on. The luggage has a watery look – suitcases misshapen by the sea, then cemented in the sun; salvaged papers and photographs, all carrying the trace of the wave in the ripple of their skin. A couple of people stand with nothing but the clothes on their back in the ticket queue, casting an eye at the belongings other people have brought and realizing they have nothing to barter with. One man offers his watch, miraculously still ticking on his wrist, and is given a ticket. A murmur jostles through the queue and people root around for similar objects. The next woman can hand over only a twenty-rupee note, its ink half erased. She is turned away. A husband approaches the window offering the gold from his wife’s ears. James said an Indian wife carries her gold everywhere except to her grave, her family’s inheritance judged safest when fashioned into jewellery and pressed against the warmth of her skin. The man behind the desk nods and holds out his palm. The wife nurses each of her earrings from her lobes and drops them, with hesitation, into the outstretched hand. In exchange, they are given two paper tickets.

  I wait my turn in the queue and pull out my ticket to Madras from my pocket once I am beckoned forward to the window. I have been told it requires a stamp from the ticket office before I can board the train. The sight of the ticket elicits a muttering from the crowd. But the man behind the counter remains stern.

  ‘No gift,
no stamp,’ he tells me.

  ‘You’ve got to be joking!’ I cry. ‘I already have my ticket.’

  ‘Okay, okay, madam, that is fine, you will not be travelling. Move aside, please.’

  ‘No. Wait.’ I unzip the suitcase and fumble around inside for something to give him. My fingers pause over the cover of James’s passport, feeling its permanence.

  ‘Madam, if you please, there is long queue here.’ He is pointing not at the passport but at my wedding ring and motioning for me to hand it over to him. James bought it just before the ceremony from a man whose shop sign claimed with much bombast that he was the best goldsmith in Tamil Nadu. Every surface in his beachside cabin was drenched with jewellery. The walls shimmered so vehemently that they looked wet. The shopkeeper had strung up a strip light along the length of the ceiling and the brightness of the gold inside had made our eyes ache with delight. This was what it had felt like, marrying James: the smallest of acts stuffed full of the shiniest treasures.

  ‘I can’t. My husband gave me this,’ I tell the ticket officer.

  ‘Then move aside, please … Madam?’

  I slip it off my finger, dropping it onto the map of my open palm. It is only four days old. You can’t form an attachment to something in four days. It’s just a cheap piece of metal. I hold it out towards the counter. I try to let go. The clock in the station stutters into its fifth hour. The queue throbs behind me. It is only a matter of unclenching my fist.

  CHAPTER 29

  Imber’s parsonage, which used to house our every hour, now gives birth to egg-yolk yellows, ether blues and bulging greens: a greenhouse that breeds verdant rooms – great webs of ivy that string themselves up over the ghosts of old walls to form inner chambers of their own. I touch the remains of the doorframe. The brickwork on either side of it has buckled and crumbled to reveal haggard cracks out of which nobody looks and into which nobody stares. I shouldn’t be here. Somebody should have stopped me entering. Had I known how easy it would be to reach this place, how little effort I would need to exert, would I have come back sooner?

  Inside the house, the bottom half of the staircase is missing, leaving steps that lead up to the sky. I cannot reach my bedroom, in ruins, upstairs. The glass that remains in the windows downstairs has splintered into muddied blades, and ivy twists across their vistas. A knit of goose grass has prised its way through the fireplace in the drawing room and milkwort cleaves to the cracks in the hearth. Everything conspires to pull the house down into the earth for burial. After all my fears of shells and bullets, it is Nature, not war, who has had her way. And I find that I am pleased for her.

  In the centre of the drawing room, gangling stalks of hoary plantain tower up towards the ceiling. Their lamps of eerie violet bend whenever there is a gust of wind, surrendering their wisped petals, like strands of ageing hair. The entire house reminds me of an old face whose skin, no matter how thin, will not surrender its secrets – will not give a name to the little tremors that carved each wrinkle and deepened each crack.

  The flowers cluster into a space no bigger than an armchair in the far corner of the room. They are fed by a pure bath of sunlight. If I stand among them, I can see right up through the first floor above and the roof: an ellipse of sky has emerged eye-like among the rafters, light flooding through the gap onto my upturned face. The rest of the room sits in darkness.

  In the kitchen I find a rusted can of pears, teeming with ants searching for an opening. I remember my mother leaving a host of food in the larder – a seal of her ownership, perhaps, or of her will to return.

  With difficulty, I cross the field opposite the parsonage, stamping down great swathes of grass to forge a path back to the car. To my right is the empty casket of the church – as weathered by the passing years as my own body. Despite everything I witnessed there, it is the only building in Imber to harbour a soul in its ruined frame. It still quietens me when I pass. The bells in the tower are long gone – looted, melted down and sold, maybe. Or rusting in my mother’s old garden.

  I didn’t take the bell when I moved out of my mother’s house. Once all hope of going home had been extinguished, she grew quite attached to it. I could not ask her to give it up. And Tim would not have understood. He knew about Imber. But he did not ask questions. He was not the kind to pry: he had a past of his own – women I did not care to know about – that he preferred to keep to himself. It felt strange, at first, to share a life with someone whose ways were so different from my own. I had not witnessed his ageing; his face was creased with unfamiliar folds – singular experiences had ploughed each line. I knew when I married him that a part of us would always remain a stranger – sharing houses and beds and weekends but remaining mute about the past. It was what we both wanted. The unknown part of him reminded me of something I had known before: I liked how he kept things back, how we agreed, silently, to keep secrets. We married a year after meeting, in 1965. He loved Alice as his own and that, for me, was enough. Now I only envy him the way she warms to him, tells him the things that I wish she would tell me. It seemed so effortless: she took to him so quickly. It made me wonder how, after so many years of trying, I could have failed to win her over.

  I am on my way out of the village now, retracing my steps past Seagram’s Farm and finding my way back to the car. He will be expecting me.

  The door is opened; I climb inside, steadying myself on the steering-wheel and not looking back. My hands are ageing by the day, the skin on the backs coming away loosely from the bone, veins mapping an ever-starker path to my wrist. I’m still wearing Freda’s band. Then there’s my wedding band and my engagement ring and my mother’s wedding ring, which I wear on my other hand.

  ‘You’ve got no hope of floating with that lot on!’ Tim cried, when we went swimming in Bournemouth with Alice one summer and I refused to take them off. He’s right: it can’t be good for you, carrying a whole life, unlived, in circles around your fingers.

  I start the ignition and pull away. The road lifts me up to the lip of the valley and over the top of West Lavington Down. I pass the military booth that seals their land like a letter. It is still empty.

  As soon as I have passed it I want to turn back and open the place up again, leaf through its pages and linger indefinitely on its last word. The car has carried me away with such fluidity that my coming and going seems as easy as sleep. Last time I came back, there was no car to hush me down the road or cover over the fissures in my nerves. Instead, we had had to walk across the Downs behind Bratton before dawn and come in from the north. The only way to reach the village undetected during the war was by foot; and that was not permitted. A week before he disappeared, Pete and I set off for the Plain in the early hours. Had I known where he was taking me, I would not have agreed to go. It was only once we passed the well near Wadman’s Coppice that I realized we were on military territory – that he was trying to take me home.

  ‘Let’s go back, please,’ I begged.

  ‘Come on, you’ll enjoy it.’

  ‘Enjoy it? Do you have any idea what they’ll have done to the place?’

  ‘Nothing much will have changed, Vi, don’t you worry.’ He pressed on ahead of me towards the base of the valley.

  ‘What if there are soldiers around?’ I asked, as he joined the chalk track that led into the village.

  ‘There won’t be,’ he replied. ‘It’s not even dawn yet.’

  A dense mist had descended, shrouding the Downs and the tracks so that I couldn’t see Pete if he wandered more than a few yards ahead of me. The fog ebbed and flowed in front of us like a giant tide and I began to notice the ways in which the army had laid claim to the land. Battered tanks pierced the
haze like aged rocks; signs denoting ‘unexploded military debris’ confronted us suddenly from inside the fog’s folds. Pete wavered off the path for a moment to examine an overturned tank, sullen and rusting among the dewed grass. He threw a kick at it and the sound bounced from Down to Down. If it wasn’t for the echo, I wouldn’t have known that the hills were there.

  As we joined the neck of the valley, a new body of fog enveloped us. Murmurs of light had entered the sky by now, purifying the mist into a receding veil of white.

  The first building that we came to was the Bell Inn, its faded sign fanning the mist on its hinges. The inside was little more than a carcass – a series of hollow caverns stripped bare of their bottles and glasses, tables and chairs, harbouring instead darkened air and gun cartridges. Holes blossomed like moles in the brickwork, letting in the moonlight in pencil-straight shafts. Pete bent down and picked up a cartridge from where the bar would have been; it lay as rigid as a dead finger in his open palm.

  ‘Would you look at that, Vi! It’s the cartridges they use in their Number Fours!’

  He uttered these last words with such vibrancy that I had to turn away. I couldn’t fathom how he could stare at the rifled fragments of his old home with the same indifference that he afforded to dead cattle or a storm-ravaged barn.

  I followed him onwards into the village. They had built a metal blockade around Imber Court, so tall that we had to clamber onto a stack of barrels to see inside the grounds. I wanted to vomit. The house had been boarded up with copper-green shutters and a matching roof so that it resembled a face whose features had been gouged out and bandaged. The front lawn was now asphyxiated under a thick layer of concrete and a sign had been stitched to the side of the house: Nothing of value is kept inside this building. Only remembrances perhaps, and a life still-born. I could think of nothing but our parsonage and the church and how it would be better for a bomb to have fallen on them than for them to suffer the same slow rape as Imber Court.