The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  ‘Don’t take it to heart,’ was Tim’s advice when she told him – not me – that if she needed anything she would get in touch. She made her own way to the station. The house moved invisibly from one kind of hollowness to another. It was all right for Tim: he wasn’t her father. He could treat her with the nonchalance she required. It was no surprise that she liked him more than she did me.

  I take a few more of her clothes down from their hangers. Suitcase zipped, I carry it downstairs to where Tim is waiting at the front door.

  ‘She asked for you, you know, when she rang … You ought to know that,’ he says, taking my bag.

  I follow him to the car. If I had stayed at home, I would not have missed her call. ‘Where did you say I was?’

  ‘I didn’t. I just said you weren’t in.’

  There’s a pause. I know what he will ask next.

  ‘Where were you, exactly?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter … Let’s just get to the airport,’ I murmur, eyes fixed on the road.

  CHAPTER 31

  I’ve got to push through seventeen hours of flying, landing and refuelling before I can search for her. On the aeroplane, I keep my fingers sealed around my passport, shielding the virginity of its blank pages. The engine heaves us into the sky above London and I watch, wide-eyed, as the streets and towers and parks shrink into map-like patterns below. Every building and tree seems suddenly intended; everything appears in its place. I’m gripping the side of my seat, aware of nothing but a growing volume of air beneath us.

  The passengers in my row seem used to the sensation. They don’t start, as I do, when the plane sinks inexplicably, before rising again.

  ‘Is it your first time flying?’ asks my neighbour. He has a burnished face whose tan matches the battered satchel under his feet. Even his hands look travelled, worn-in.

  ‘Yes. I apologize, I’m a little on edge.’

  ‘Well, you’re throwing yourself in at the deep end with Delhi, that’s for sure. What takes you to India?’ He runs his palms down the pressed lines of his linen trousers.

  The tannoy cuts in to give us an estimated time of arrival. But he looks at me expectantly, after the pilot has finished speaking.

  ‘So, Delhi.’ He raises his eyebrows.

  ‘My daughter … is in India.’

  ‘Jolly good. She isn’t with the Foreign Office by any chance?’

  ‘No.’

  He pauses, waiting for more. When I don’t speak, he shuffles through the newspaper on his lap. ‘Awful, isn’t it? About the tidal wave.’ He gestures to a picture on the second page.

  I nod, trying not to look.

  ‘It’s going to take years to sort out that mess.’ He points to a monochrome picture of the wreckage.

  Raising his eyes from the paper, he frowns at the sight of me. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you. If you don’t mind, I might fetch a glass of water.’

  ‘Just press the button,’ he says, reaching up and pushing it before I have a chance to object. ‘The air hostess will come and you can ask her to bring some.’

  I sit forward, unable to escape as I had planned. Outside the window, beneath us, is sea – the troughs and peaks of which could be mistaken at this height for valleys and mountains. The man flicks his wrists and the newspaper obeys his command with a ripple. I turn to find him still reading the same page. My eyes snag for a moment on a name, halfway down the first column. James Peak.

  James Peak, a British national, has spoken of the devastation in Kanyakumari where he was seriously injured before being hauled from the water by a fisherman. ‘Nobody knew what was happening. The tide came in faster than anything and just kept on coming.’ Peak is currently undergoing medical treatment in Trivandrum but, like many others in the hospital, will return to the wreckage as soon as he has recovered in order to search for loved ones.

  I’m being looked at. I have intruded into his space without realizing it, bending over the article and moving unsociably close.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘That’s – I think it’s someone I know.’ I place an index finger on James’s name.

  The man squints at the paragraph. ‘He did well to survive, poor chap. Do you know him well?’

  ‘He’s my daughter’s … I can’t be sure it’s him.’

  He frowns. ‘She’s not there too, is she?’

  I don’t answer. Instead I scour the article desperately for a clue as to where she might be.

  ‘Look, if there’s anything I can do …’

  I return my eyes to the window and try to work out how I can get to the hospital in Trivandrum. He’s alive, thank God. And he’ll know where to look for Alice.

  I have never met anyone travelling to India simply for the sake of it, as he and Alice did. They didn’t need to go and yet I let them. And for what? For the sake of seeing something new. But she was always like that, eager to explore, preferring to ask questions with her hands and feet rather than her mouth.

  At the school gate, the other children were always pestering their mothers with unanswerable questions. Why is the sky blue? Why don’t birds lie down to sleep? Could I survive a whole day without my hands? But Alice never asked anything as a child. She was always so assured: nothing caused her to worry or wonder why. She seemed to accept the facts of life with tranquil measure – or, at least, she did not need to learn about them from me. After a while, it began to concern me – the placid silence she cast over every new experience. But then I realized her questions were of a different kind: I saw the way she walked in pace with a river, eyes fixed on a particular body of water moving downstream; the way she pressed her hand to the trunk of a tree until the bark left a mark there. As soon as she could hold a pencil she would draw all these things – small, delicate drawings that barely took up a few centimetres on the page. It was as if she didn’t want anybody to see her explorations, least of all give them words. They were hers and hers alone.

  When she did ask questions as a child, it was always about her father. What animals did he keep on the farm? What did he smell like? Was he good at sums or spelling at school? These were the things that she was unable to discover for herself. She never asked why he had left, or where he was now – questions I knew she wanted to ask, but to which I did not have the answers.

  CHAPTER 32

  The plane hits the concrete with a thump and a bounce, giving its speed to the wind and docking, finally, in a space near the terminal. Passport still in hand, I’m hit suddenly by the heat. It presses into my cheeks, my neck – any part of me on which it can fix its grasp. By the time I reach the terminal, I have broken out in a sweat. Fans ladle the heat around the building, failing in every way to make it cooler. Airport staff produce a déjà vu of black bags and leather holdalls, all weathered with the marks of successive journeys. The bags are piled high on the floor and an official presents one bag at a time to the crowd of passengers, asking each owner to step forward. I spot my suitcase near the top of the heap; its unscuffed corners and glistening zip make it stand out from the rest. I wait for it to be handed over, then scour the concourse for the exit.

  Outside the airport, the bustle begins. There are taxis crowding the road – huge, bulky yellow-roofed things – and men with steaming trays of fried snacks weaving between the cars. I try to ask a taxi driver for a lift to the railway station and he sways his head nonchalantly, as if he may or may not know where it is.

  ‘Fifty rupees, ma’am,’ demands another.

  ‘I only have pounds.’ I take out a five-pound note and show it to him. He beckons to another driver and they talk for a momen
t, thrusting hands out for the note and holding it up to the sun. My pulse quickens at the realization that I am penniless in a country I don’t know, with no way of reaching the south. We did not have time to think about rupees before I left home.

  ‘Okay, okay, ma’am.’ He opens the door to the taxi and ushers me in with my suitcase. It is so hot that my skirt sticks to the leather seat. The car gives a guttural shudder and we hurtle into the city. The place is heady with noise – horns and engines and drum beats. Roads splinter and join illogically, then disappear into rust-coloured dust. Men in pressed shirts draw trails in the dirt with their bicycles. One carries a caged, squawking chicken; another a stack of newspapers; and another still a garland of jasmine laced over his handlebars.

  If I were asked to retrace our route to the airport, I would not be able to: Delhi is a labyrinth. And if the rest of India follows suit, I do not know how I will find Alice. Or James, for that matter.

  Before she even brought him home, I had determined not to like him. I had seen him once before – during that nightmarish weekend when Alice took herself off to the Isle of Wight. He dropped her off on the Sunday night. I was so relieved to see her that I didn’t glimpse him in the car; he didn’t come into the house. Perhaps she had warned him about me. If I had known they were an item, I would have paid more attention. When she finally did bring him home to meet us, he told us that he was a photographer.

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ Tim remarked out of politeness. ‘Weddings and christenings, that sort of thing?’

  ‘No … more art, actually. I focus on travel, culture – the journeys people take.’

  It was hard to make head or tail of him. He wore his hair long – but not so long as to cause concern. I wondered if Alice had asked him to cut it before coming to see us. It was a miracle, really, that she had brought him at all – although I did not see it in that way at the time. Even then, I could tell he adored her. As footloose as he might have been with his travels, he had the look of someone who was beyond the point of going back. I had learnt over the years the hallmarks of the ones who loved, and the ones who left.

  CHAPTER 33

  The train inches down the spine of India and pulls into the station at Trivandrum. A tussle ensues among the passengers outside for drivers and taxis. For some reason, they do not seem to be accepting rupees. Pressed at the back of the crowd with a wodge of notes I retrieved from a bank next to the station, I have nothing but money to bargain with. I spot a man on a motorbike at the end of the rank who, perhaps, I can persuade to give me a ride. I lumber towards him with my suitcase, asking for the hospital and showing him the rupees. Just then, a woman in turquoise with a baby on her hip brushes past me and climbs onto the back of the bike – his wife or sister or whoever he was waiting for. He starts up the engine as if to leave. Then he reaches over and, instead of the notes, takes hold of the water-flask protruding from my rucksack, motioning for me to climb onto the bike behind his wife and child. Four on a motorbike, with my suitcase, and no secure way of holding on? ‘Thank you! Thank you so much!’ I say, perching on what little space is left at the back of the bike and floundering around for something solid to clasp. The woman in front carries my suitcase and gestures for me to put my hand on her shoulder. She murmurs something, which I can only assume means hold on tight for, before I know where I am, we are swerving around a wandering cow and skidding off along the dust-coated road.

  Despite my attempts to explain, the motorbike deposits me in the middle of town rather than at the hospital, and it takes me a full hour in the heat to find the right street. I know now why the driver on the bike took the water instead of the rupees – already my throat feels parched.

  The man at the hospital desk asks me for James’s full name and frowns at his list of admissions.

  ‘Do you have any water?’ I ask vaguely.

  ‘There is no clean water in the town, madam. The pipes are broken from the wave. We have boiled water for the patients … Your brother’s nationality, please.’

  ‘He’s not my –’ I stop myself. ‘He’s British. He’s around twenty-six years of age and he came from Kanyakumari.’

  ‘A moment, madam.’ He disappears into a back room and I hear him slide open some sort of cabinet. He returns with a file. ‘Wave victims are Ward Three.’

  I check Ward Three, followed by two others, but he is nowhere to be found. The last ward is at the back of the building. There are so many mattresses in the corridor that it is difficult to reach the far end. The last patient I pass is curled in on themselves, seeking out a foetal privacy in the nook between their arms and knees. It is then that I see him, lying on a bed, in the middle of the last ward. A hollow stare is embedded in his face. One of his eyes is sealed shut with a bruise, and a large dressing, soaked scarlet, rests on his shoulder. Every knot of discomfort I have stored up towards him – the blame I have heaped on him for taking Alice away – starts to loosen. For a brief moment, I see the boy in him, as far away from home as Alice. James has not yet seen me. And I am suddenly fearful of what I should say.

  Like most of the patients in the room, he stares inertly at the ceiling. It is a look that distinguishes the victims from those who, like me, simply belong to the aftermath. Some of them lie in the same wave-stricken clothes they were wearing when it came. Even if they have been reclothed and bandaged and washed free of the silt, they still seem marked, set apart somehow.

  It is the same look that I saw in my father’s friends when they returned from the war. I could pick out the men who had been at the pulse of it without even knowing their name or rank.

  Wave or war, it doesn’t matter: they both leave a ghost in the eyes. It is hard to imagine Alice wearing the same shapeless expression that I see in James now, even though I know that, somehow, she too will bear it.

  Freda was right when she said that the war had altered everything. Pete’s homecoming was not what it should have been. Things didn’t click back into place; they became more fractured.

  He returned to Wilton after two months. When I opened the door to see him standing on the other side of it, I felt nothing but relief. Any desire to ask after his absence vanished with the sight of him. He had come back and sought me out and that was all that mattered.

  ‘I’ve come to collect my belongings,’ he said, fixing his stare to the doorstep. Any greeting that he did offer was empty of warmth. I led him upstairs. His pile of possessions rested now at the foot of the bed that Mama and I shared.

  ‘You kept my letters,’ I said, pointing to the shoebox, which I had set apart from the rest. He looked up for the briefest of moments and I saw in his eyes a fissure of sadness, or shock, perhaps, at my candour.

  ‘You had no right to go through my trunk.’ His manner was uncertain.

  ‘It was too heavy for Mama and me to carry … and the farmer’s wife insisted we take your belongings. She said you’d lost your job.’

  He seemed impatient suddenly, as if deciding that he had already stayed too long. ‘Where will you find work?’ I asked.

  ‘Violet, please, it’s best if you don’t – If you could help me carry everything down the stairs, I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘But where are you staying? I’ll walk there with you. You won’t be able to carry it all by yourself.’

  He fidgeted reluctantly at my suggestion but then, after a pause, relented. He was staying at the Pembroke Inn. We ferried his belongings down from the bedroom until only the box of letters remained upstairs. I turned to go back for them but he stopped me.

  ‘Keep the rest. I’ve no need …’

  I reddened and busied myself with his possessions, loading them into two old sacks which I had retrieved fro
m the larder.

  ‘Pete,’ I murmured, once we had set off towards the inn. ‘Please tell me – what’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  I stared flatly at him.

  ‘I can’t. It isn’t up to me.’

  ‘Then who is it up to?’

  He let out a frustrated sigh and faced the pavement ahead to avoid my stare.

  ‘I told Freda about the American. It was me, all right?’

  ‘But … I don’t understand.’

  ‘She can tell you the rest. She’s your sister when all’s said and done.’

  ‘No,’ I intervened. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t just you … Freda said she’d heard rumours.’

  He did not reply. I tested every excuse in my mind but was left, only, with the certainty of my sister’s accusations.

  ‘You won’t gain anything taking my side.’

  ‘Pete, it’s all right, I – She had a right to know.’

  ‘What do I have to say to get you to stop?’

  ‘Stop?’ I dropped the weight of the sack as I spoke. ‘Are you bringing this to an end?’

  ‘Bringing what to an end? There never was anything firm. There was no … I never promised anything.’

  My breath sparrowed in my throat. I couldn’t form my words. So I put down the sack and walked away from him, away from his bags of belongings, back towards his letters, upstairs in the house. I shut myself in the bedroom and sat on the floor with my back against the bed. Mama had filled the tin pail with hot water ready for a wash. I did not have long before I was disturbed. I watched the steam drift blithely up towards the beams, its whiteness dissipating somewhere between the floor and the ceiling.