Pete jumped down from the barrels and broke into a whistle, carrying on past me towards the church. I stayed where I was. The rest of Imber was hidden from my view by the thickened copse flanking the right side of the Court. ‘I can’t carry on. I’m sorry,’ I called across to him, unable to inject enough strength into my voice for him to hear me. ‘I’ll see you back at Bratton.’
I turned, but was stopped in my tracks by the sound of air being released from a bottle, only louder and more pressured. A red flare inked through the mist’s capillaries and spread like blood through the fog. It drifted towards me, dissipating into flesh pink. They were here.
‘Pete!’ I called, in a thick whisper. ‘Pete!’
Swallowing my fear, I ran back to the village, skirting the edge of the copse in case I needed to hide. I couldn’t find him in the fog. Perhaps he hadn’t seen the flare. The sun inched further up into the sky and gained strength. The mist thinned. Soon our cover would be gone. I could see the church tower now, the air around it still tinged scarlet from the flare. Then the gunfire started: it barked its way from one side of the valley to the other, producing so many echoes that it was impossible to distinguish the original sounds from their offspring. A sudden flash lit the mist. I heard the shuffle of feet and buried myself in the trees.
There was a break in the firing. A slow droning sound seeped from somewhere beyond the church, like a tractor, only deeper. The growl carved into the silence, stalking the Plain like an injured beast.
‘Violet! Psst!’
I slipped from the wood to see Pete scurrying down the track towards me.
‘They’ve got three Shermans and about fifty men – that’s just the ones I can see! Come and look!’
‘Pete!’ I cried. ‘Please take me back!’
‘But it’s too good to miss!’
‘Good?’ I echoed. ‘What do you know about good?’
He took hold of my hand and bolted towards the church. I resisted, but the strength of his grip forced me into following. Pulling me into a bush, he caught his breath and then peered eagerly out at the Plain. The fog began to part. I thought of the rising folds of a theatre curtain – the pattern made by a receding wave.
Then it began. In full. Boots thudded on chalk. Gunfire rebounded between walls. A shell was fired in the direction of the parsonage. Smoke billowed. Soldiers ran. A boy – no older than twenty – snared his leg in wire outside the school. I imagined him bleating, a flailing lamb caught on a fence. There was a smashing sound. I looked up as a soldier put his elbow through the glass of Mrs Mitchell’s upstairs window and aimed his gun downwind. I thought of the laundry press – her pride and joy – broken and in pieces on the floor.
Before he’d left, Sam had told me there were ghosts here, hidden in the hearth of every house. He said the Yanks drew lots to decide who would keep guard and sent the others to sleep rough on the Plain, so perturbed were they by the voices they heard in the cottages. He talked of words – chalk-white – that appeared on the ruined walls in the morning, words listing the purpose of each room – ‘Pantry’, ‘Larder’, ‘Bedroom’, ‘Hall’ – as if staking a claim to them again. He did not know that the ghosts he believed in were of the living, breathing kind.
‘I can’t watch,’ I cried to Pete, leaving him in the bush and stumbling away in the first direction I could think of. I ran as fast as I could to the track that led to Coombe Hill. He didn’t come after me. But I could feel his eyes on my back. I didn’t know it at the time but things would never be the same between us, just as Imber would never take on the same shape in my mind. Unknown to me, it was the last time I could fool myself into thinking that this place – and that boy – were mine.
Perhaps it would have been different if I had gone there with Mama, or even Freda. Pete was too enamoured of the guns and shells and bullet holes to see what had been taken from us. To him it was just broken stone.
I kept thinking of Father, of how his grave had witnessed these assaults day in day out, how he had watched as stray shells embedded themselves in the thatch and bit through wall after wall. Even if we were allowed to return, there would be nothing left to inhabit. We had lulled ourselves into thinking we could mend things. But it wasn’t merely a case of damp and rain, floods and storms. Now there was the damage of an entire army to contend with.
And there were other ruins – gifts of the war – that had different shapes. A daughter, a husband, a marriage, a home: there was nothing the war couldn’t invade or appropriate as its own.
The White Horse tattooed into the chalk skin of Westbury Hill met me as I emerged at Bratton. Gunfire continued to stutter across the Downs. I curled up in the nook of the horse’s hoof and felt the dawn roll in behind me, sleep arriving just as the sun began to whiten the horse and bleach its mane. The light brought rest and, with it, the thinnest of dreams. The horse gained breath and a kick in its feet and galloped away without me. Its flat shadow skimmed like a travelling cloud across the length of Salisbury Plain. And, with a shake of its mane, it quilted the ruins of Imber in an ashen layer of dust.
Years later, when I took her up the hill to that same horse, she complained about the walk. The view at the top silenced her, as I’d known it would. We sat in its eye and she said she could see all of England. The berries we picked from the bushes on the way up darkened our fingertips; we licked them so that they turned from dusk black to dawn purple. She asked about her father. And for once I managed to meet her eye and tell her what I could. I was happy. I felt brave for having brushed against the truth. There is something about seeing England from a height – years of buying and selling, growing and reaping mapped across the fields – that makes the past easier to understand. I told her I’d loved him and that he’d left of his own accord. There was nothing else I could say. She could not know, at that age, that her mother was as much to blame.
CHAPTER 30
The village sinks back into the valley. In the rear-view mirror, I can just make out the spire of the church, submerged under the brow of the hills. The Cortina completes the curves and dips of the firing range, passing through the unmanned military barrier as if it were perfectly permissible for me to be there. With Imber behind me, I thread my way back to the suburbs.
Lines of houses with matching doors and windows duplicate themselves along streets named after flowers. Ours has always been difficult to distinguish from the others, even after several years of living there. It is newly built with thin, oblong windows and a garage that juts out at one end. Tim bought it for practical reasons – the space, the neighbourhood, the short commute. Returning to it evokes no sense of homecoming. I used to worry about this inertness until it dissolved into habit and I no longer gave it thought. Alice’s room is at the front of the house, although I don’t know why I still refer to it as that. All that is left of her is a couple of boxes of records set down next to the player, a few clothes she no longer wears hung in the wardrobe and a bed made up with fresh sheets for when she needs it. On the back of the door is a jaded newspaper cut-out of Joni Mitchell sitting cross-legged with a guitar, which she has forgotten to take down. We moved into the house when she was nineteen and she never properly unpacked. Once, when she was in Salisbury with friends, I discovered a drawing under her bed that she had made. She was always artistic as a child but I thought she had long since given it up. I tacked it to the wall, thinking it would make her feel at home. The drawing was of Westminster Abbey – full of thin, spindly pencil marks: frightening in their precision. As I looked more closely, I saw that the Abbey was ruined: roofless and crumbling with an invasion of creepers scaling the walls. The structure was so convincing, it was as if she had witnessed its destruction. Starin
g at it on the wall, I felt something inside me unravel uncontrollably: for a moment, it was as if she and I shared the same fears. The pictures were almost spectral – her pencil ghosting the paper with lines that were sometimes barely visible. It frightened me, yet I did not want to tear my eyes away from it.
There was another drawing under the bed that I did not pin to the wall; instead, resisting the urge to screw it up, I folded it into four and placed it back where I had found it. It was of our house, with its insubstantial walls and doors, its modern fittings and close-cut lawn: the windows were glassless and a thickly scrawled darkness reigned in the inner rooms. Here her pencil had pressed hard into the paper. No ivy, no wild flowers bloomed from the foundations. The lawn in front of the house was clipped and in order. The roof in the picture remained in place, as did the bricks, but everything else was vulnerable and hollow. There was no life inside the walls – just a dark absence.
Her drawing of our house coloured my view of it irrevocably – so much so that when I approach the drive now I can no longer discern whether the drawing caused my ill-feeling towards it or simply brought to the surface something that was already there. I reverse the car onto the drive, turn off the engine and breathe out. Tim is coming out of the front door. He’s running. He never runs.
‘Get out,’ he mouths, through the glass, pulling at the locked car door with one hand. He’s sweating. ‘It’s Alice.’ He takes my arm as I step out and guides me towards the front door. ‘It’s Alice. She’s in trouble.’
We’re inside the house now. I try to ask what he means but the words won’t arrange themselves in the right order. ‘She’s in Kanyakumari, Vi. Tamil Nadu.’ He pushes the name out as if I should know it.
‘Kanyakumari …’ I scramble around for a recollection of the word. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The tidal wave on the news. It hit India,’ Tim answers, ‘and Alice is there.’
‘But …’ I think of the television report – how we had heard about the vanishing of a whole town, without a thought for our daughter.
‘She telephoned just before you got here. Thank God she’s okay but we need to get her out. She’s refusing to leave until she’s found James.’
‘James?’
‘James, her boyfriend. You met him, remember?’ He points to the home-sweet-home heart that hangs above the sink.
‘Of – of course.’ I frown. ‘Her boyfriend.’
‘What do we do?’
I want him to be quiet with his questions. She’s halfway across the world and she hasn’t spoken to me in more than six months. I can’t even think of where to begin.
‘But we’ve no way of contacting her. No number, no nothing.’ It is as if he’s objecting to a suggestion I have made. I keep silent.
‘There must be a flight we can book for her …’
I tell him that she won’t get on a flight if James is still missing, that we need to go and fetch her.
He mutters under his breath. She could be anywhere.
‘You stay. I’ll go,’ I say.
‘Are you sure that’s wise given – Maybe we should go together, darling.’
‘One of us has to stay. In case she tries to get in touch again.’ I’m insistent now, my voice stiffening.
‘Yes, but –’
‘I can do it, Tim. I have to. I’ll be okay, I promise.’
He says he’ll call to see when the next flight is and tells me to start packing. We clasp each other tautly for a moment, but there isn’t enough time. He doesn’t even know where I’ve been today. But I can hardly explain now. He reaches for the phone and dials Directory Enquiries. I leave the kitchen and climb the stairs two at a time, fumbling under the bed for a suitcase and filling it with whatever comes to mind. In all my life, I’ve gone no further than London. The only time that I have packed a full suitcase is to move a few miles away – from Imber to Wilton, then out of my mother’s house and into Tim’s. And now, instead of unstitching myself slowly from this place, I am leaving with one swift rip. Tim must think I’m mad; he’s stayed tethered to me all this time, travelling the country with his job, making sure everybody can still turn their lights on. And I, all the while, have folded myself away into my own peculiar shade of darkness.
How do I even begin to fill a suitcase? And what will she need? Not me; she doesn’t need me.
Inside her bedroom, the walls are bare. The drawing of Westminster Abbey is long gone: when she came back to find the picture on the wall, she was furious with me. She kept her drawings hidden after that; I never saw them again. The room became gradually sparser – as if, out of spite, she were removing herself a fragment at a time.
There is a box of records by her bed, some in their sleeves, others propped up, scratched and naked, next to the player. Inside the wardrobe, I push past a sun-bleached gypsy skirt and retrieve a few T-shirts and a pair of bell bottoms; the sensible trousers that I insisted on buying her are nowhere to be seen. In spite of the tidal wave, I’ll probably have picked the wrong things. I can picture us now, in the wake of the wave, arguing about the outfit I have packed. When she was born, I couldn’t help myself, she was the most delicate thing I had ever held. But as she grew, she became more and more like her father, flitting from place to place, person to person, never quite able to settle. She told me I spoilt everything, pulled her back, tied her down; if her father was around, she said, he wouldn’t put up with it; he wouldn’t put up with me. She was all I had left of him. It was no wonder I held on too tightly.
A few weeks ago, in a moment of rashness, I had bundled his letters into a parcel and posted them to her in Delhi. It left me swollen – letting go of secrets that I had stored still-born inside me all these years. And yet I had acted out of cowardice. I did not have the courage to tell her to her face.
His last letter – which I had placed at the top of the box – contained everything she needed to know. Rereading it for the first time in years, I had felt its bite as if it were written yesterday. I wonder, now, whether she has felt it too – whether she has understood why I acted in the manner that I did. To her, he’s just a ghost. And it took everything in me to give flesh and bones to what he had done. I don’t know if she has received any of my letters along the way – the ones I sent to Istanbul, Tehran and Lahore; she could have passed through Delhi oblivious to it all. She and James were due home soon and I had wondered for a while if they had received my parcel. It was always my fear that in sharing this clot, this marker, of things I couldn’t undo, I would lose her for ever:
Dear Violet,
I learnt of Freda’s death yesterday. Mrs Archam sent word. There is nothing I can say to comfort you. To tell you I’m grieving would only break your heart and to say that I am sorry for your loss falls short of what you must feel.
Mrs Archam has told me of all you intend to do. Had I never known you, such selflessness would have left me aghast. But I have come to expect nothing less.
I will not waste ink over an apology that I know you will rebuff as untruthful. I can’t recover what I ruined any more than you can rebuild Imber. But you must know that I did care for you. I ask you to raise her as your own. She is what I would have given you, had I been a better man.
Your Pete
He had penned the letter himself – I was familiar with the handwriting. Yet the unfamiliar script on the front of the envelope and the turn of phrase in his sentences had made me suspect that he had written it under duress; that somebody else had posted it on his behalf. No doubt his major – or some other discerning officer to whom he had confessed his past – had insisted upon him writing to me directly.
I
received it a week after my sister’s funeral. Mama was not there when I opened it but Alice was. She was bawling and bawling because, unlike Freda’s, my chest was milkless and we had only condensed milk with which to feed her. When the post arrived, I put her in her cot and opened the letter in the hall. I hadn’t recognized the hand on the envelope so Pete’s words came as a shock. I had to steady myself on the banister and sit for a moment on the bottom stair. We had long since given up hope of hearing from him and this was hardly the letter we would have wished for. We would have welcomed any pledge of support, however small and detached: anything to make us believe that he intended to do his duty. He had a military salary now and, although humble, it was more than Mama and I could ever muster. But to Pete – the boy so keen to shed Imber – we were still the family of a parson; he was under no obligation to provide for those whose status and standing he perceived to be above his own.
But you must know that I did care for you. She cried in her cot while I sat blankly on the stair; her tears were not enough for the two of us.
Mama came home to find me still perched there. She took the letter from me and, after reading it once, put it away in a drawer. Unlike me, she thought better of returning to it.
By the time Alice was older, Mama and I had boxed up all of our wounds, thinking it better not to burden each other with the scars that we believed we should have long since overcome. A war never leaves you, my mother would say; only I knew it was not the war that she was talking about. And even if we had wanted to talk, it was not as if Alice would have been the one to listen. She cared nothing for the past, only the day that lay before her. Mama understood her better than I did: ‘Give her a little air,’ she warned, ‘a fraction more air.’
I wasn’t going to let her go to India. But I knew it was what my mother would have wanted. So I sat Alice down and gave her my permission, pretending I had a say in the matter. I know now that she would have left no matter what authority I claimed to have.
The Sea Change Page 24