The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  CHAPTER 35

  The rebuilding has begun: it is time to plant what the wave uprooted. Stones are gathered; timber arrives; walls gain roofs and roofs gain walls. And out of the debris, the stirrings of a city are born.

  The activity around me has shifted from an exodus to a homecoming. For the first time in days, people are not running but resettling. They scan each other’s faces for something familiar – something solid that is not brick or stone to which they can cling. I look for Alice among them. But she isn’t there.

  There was a brief time when a return to Imber had seemed as possible and daunting as rebuilding this town. Imber’s villagers had started to gather again, and word spread that if we could prove the existence of a military pledge before the war, we would be permitted to return home. For years I had lived for our homecoming. But to return to it in ruins, when I carried with me so many ruins of my own, seemed impossible.

  Freda and Pete did not talk of their marriage in front of me. I learnt from Annie that they intended to marry in Wiltshire before leaving for Leconfield. Annie had married her fiancé only a few weeks before and was due to move north soon. Freda had asked her for advice on ceremonies and Annie had sent a telegram to warn me of their plans.

  As for Pete, he avoided the house as much as he could; we had not spoken since Freda announced their engagement. But I could do little to avoid our encounter one morning in September when I was struck down with a headache and could not go into town with Mama as planned. Thinking I would be out, Freda brought Pete back to the house with her. I heard them open and close the front door and seat themselves in the living room just as I was boiling water to make tea. Neither of them realized that I was in the kitchen. Through the door, I could just see Pete, pulling Freda onto his knee in the armchair. This closeness took the breath out of my lungs. They were due to be married; they were allowed to touch. And yet I had convinced myself it was for entirely practical reasons: the pregnancy, the raising of their child. I watched his hand on her hip, his fingers taking hold of some of the material in her skirt. I heard her laughing. And I saw, with a slow intake of breath, how easily they had taken to each other. Freda might not have wanted a baby, but she had wanted Pete – and a feeling that was once momentary was now rooting. I could see it in her movements – the way she fitted easily onto his lap, and stayed there.

  I tried to busy myself noiselessly in the kitchen but it was with hesitancy that I began to catch fragments of their conversation.

  ‘Yes, but the letter from the War Office implies that we are to be allowed back after the war. That must count for something.’

  ‘I’m telling you not to put too much weight on it.’ Pete sighed. ‘It certainly isn’t going to happen overnight.’

  ‘Mr Madigan as good as confirmed what I’d been thinking all along,’ Freda said, ‘that a verbal pledge, backed up indirectly by the evacuation letter, was made to us at the time of the eviction. The War Office must stand by their promise, and I’ll be sure to hold them to it. They’ll let us use the church, you mark my words. And then, later, Violet and Mama can move home.’

  ‘Freda. Please.’ Pete looked to check the door to the hall was shut. He failed to see me in the kitchen. ‘The church is in a bad way. And if Violet ever found out …’

  The sound of my name on his lips, which used to stir me, now felt alarming. My heart raced.

  ‘You’re forgetting it was my home too. Our home,’ Freda interjected.

  ‘I only thought – we’ve hurt her enough already.’

  Freda went quiet. Or, at least, I did not hear her response. I moved closer to the kitchen door.

  ‘Neither of us wanted this.’ She laid a hand on her stomach and stood up from his lap. ‘Ever since the accident, I knew I’d come back after the war and marry in Imber … with Father there. Violet knows it’s what he would have wanted. Nothing has worked out the way we planned. The very least I can do is give my father the wedding he always hoped he’d see. At home. In St Giles’s.’

  ‘You haven’t seen …’ Pete ventured, his voice trailing off. I bent into the door. ‘The place is in ruins … and what will we do for a vicar?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to the vicar at Bratton. He was a colleague of Father’s.’

  Just then the water boiled. I had completely forgotten about it. I saw Pete look up and, afraid he had heard something, I rushed to quell the sound. I turned – kettle in hand – to see him staring at me from the kitchen door, Freda just behind him.

  ‘I want to be there,’ I murmured, before I even realized what I was saying. ‘I want to come to the wedding.’

  I looked up at Pete, whose eyes seemed to fidget under my gaze, not knowing where to direct themselves.

  ‘Violet … what are you doing in here?’ asked my sister.

  ‘I – I don’t know. I had a headache.’

  ‘Violet,’ began Pete, ‘I don’t know how much you heard –’

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘It’s highly unlikely that they’ll let us marry there …’

  ‘If they do,’ I began, ‘I would like to be there, if you’ll have me. Freda’s right.’ I paused, waiting for my voice to regain its steadiness. ‘Father always said he wanted to see at least one of us married in Imber.’

  ‘Don’t do this to yourself, Vi,’ said Pete. ‘We’ll go somewhere else. Somewhere north where you don’t have to know about it.’

  ‘You’ll need witnesses, and it’ll be a chance for me to say goodbye,’ I explained, with increasing resolve.

  ‘To Imber?’ intervened Pete. He seemed afraid of what I might be implying.

  ‘To lots of things, my sister for one.’ I glanced at Freda. ‘I won’t be seeing much of either of you once you’re settled in Yorkshire, after all.’

  Freda pursed her lips. She seemed on the edge of tears.

  ‘What do you say, Freda?’ Pete muttered, over his shoulder. She nodded her assent at the hallway floor.

  CHAPTER 36

  ‘You cannot be serious, Violet!’ exclaimed Mama.

  ‘They’ve tried everything – letters to the War Office, pleas to the council. Their only option is to break in at night.’

  ‘But I can’t believe you’d want to subject yourself to such a thing –’

  ‘Will you come with me?’

  ‘Certainly not. I know how you feel about that place – it was you who talked of getting married there, not Freda.’

  ‘Please, Mama, I’m not asking you to come for my sake. Father wouldn’t have wanted us to carry on like this.’

  Before Mama knew how to put a stop to it, a plan had been forged. We were to drive cross-country from Chitterne to avoid the military barriers, then join the track on Fore Down, which led into Imber. The Reverend Mr Dalton, from Bratton, was to meet us at the church at just gone ten o’clock at night, and we had arranged to borrow a car from the landlady at the Pembroke Inn.

  Freda put on her wedding clothes before we left. We did not have any money for a dress and Mama’s had been destroyed by the damp. Before the war, Freda would have made a fuss about not wearing her own but she had no grounds for complaint in the circumstances. I asked Annie, who had recently worn her mother’s dress to marry her officer in Devizes, if she would lend her wedding clothes to Freda. She refused at first, saying she was not going to play a part in helping my sister break my heart. But eventually my persistence paid off.

  By now, Freda’s stomach had begun to swell and the dress was not an easy fit. Mama kept silent on the subject but she must have guessed about the baby. On the night of the wedding, she threw Pete’s coat over Freda to keep out the cold, eyes lingering on her waist. I pinned up my hair and m
asked my face in powder. Mama wore a hat and a frown.

  As the car sidled across the Plain, the sky over Bowls Barrow stuttered like a chessboard between white and black; the army were firing thunder flashes again. Gunfire could be heard cackling across the Downs. I began to worry that they might be training in Imber but Pete had received word from one of the wardens that a practice was taking place on another part of the Plain. Each hill spoke the gunfire back to its neighbour, like a game of Chinese whispers. These sounds had become as common as gales during the war, embedding themselves in the fabric of our valley so that they were as inevitable to us as the wind.

  It was difficult terrain – the tracks from Chitterne were not suited to vehicles and Mama refused to turn on the headlights for fear of being spotted; we could see barely more than a few feet ahead of us. Shortly before joining the track at Fore Down, the engine choked and brought us to a halt.

  ‘Darn!’ whispered Mama, leaping out of the driver’s seat to turn the crank handle. She tried several times but to no avail. Pete took over but the car remained taciturn.

  ‘What did I tell you? I knew it would struggle off the road,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll walk,’ said Pete. ‘The church can’t be more than a mile away.’

  ‘A mile?’ Freda protested. ‘What about my dress?’

  We climbed out of the Hillman Minx and I carried the back of Freda’s dress to prevent it dragging in the mud. Approaching the village was different from how it had been on my dawn visit with Pete. Having confronted the ruins once before, I felt drawn back to them, like a moth to a flame, preferring to arrive and be burnt than turn and be forever cold. The grass beneath our feet – sodden with a full day’s rain – inked into our boots and hems. I lifted Freda’s dress higher off the ground.

  Every now and then, the landscape lit up, lightning white, and we would have half a second to locate the church tower and alter our direction. Finally Pete stumbled across the fence encircling the church – barbed wire concertinaed around the rim. He hooked his fingers on to it and rattled it, the vibrations ricocheting across the Plain.

  ‘There’s no need,’ Mama muttered fiercely, ‘for a fence.’

  ‘I suppose they wanted to protect it,’ Freda bleated.

  ‘There’s a hole,’ whispered Pete. ‘I made it last time we were here.’ He nodded in my direction. Mama transferred her glare from Pete to me, then back again, but refrained from asking how and why we had returned. Freda frowned at me before smoothing the pleats in her dress. ‘Follow me,’ Pete murmured.

  Locating the hole in the fence, he held open the gap in the wire with one hand. ‘After you,’ he instructed Freda, guiding her through. I watched their touch, the way his eyes followed her to the other side. Once I had made my way through the fence, I saw Mama’s gaze wander across the grass towards the parsonage. Despite the darkness, I could just make out the shape of our old home – as barren as a skull – on the other side of the field. Once she became aware that I was looking at her, she quickly turned her attention back to the fence.

  The church stood shipwrecked in the graveyard. It was shrouded in moss and ivy, its windows as hollow as the craters on the Plain. We scrambled between the graves, now enveloped in grass and knapweed. Father’s was on the far side of the church.

  Mama took out the key to the vestry from the pocket of her dress and slotted it into the lock. Then Pete put a shoulder to the oak so that it groaned open in baritone. My sister started suddenly at a rattle of the fence behind us but it was only the vicar arriving from Bratton.

  The church had always been dark, even in daylight. But the ivy had since blocked out the little light that was left; it had lowered itself over the windows like the slow blink of an eyelid. The lead frames were so high up on the walls that the sunlight used to enter the nave in shafts, missing the pews and illuminating instead the paint on the opposite wall. My father would wonder why they had not built the church on the height of the Plain so that it could enjoy the sunlight. For a building surrounded by undulating Downs, it was strange that its architect had shut out the view. And yet a small part of him, he used to say – the part he carried with him from his childhood – knew why it had been built that way. Sitting in this small space for hours with the four walls cocooning him, it seemed more possible to meet the God of the landscape outside. When eventually his eyes became hungry for the light, for the feel of the chalked wind on his skin, he would emerge from the church, surprised at how the land exceeded the image he’d had of it in his mind – at how its creator could sit with him for a moment, like a companion, in a house built by human hands.

  There was no separation between outside and inside any more. The old patterns of movement and stillness, weekdays and Sundays, of morning communion and evensong, had ceased to exist; the church stood timeless – an ancient cliff rebutting the drum of the sea. All that was left was a vast expanse of time – charted only by the growth of the creepers up the walls. I took a step towards the altar and disturbed a bird in the roof. It shook like a black rag through the gaping window and Mama turned to face me from the other end of the aisle. She was calm, not distraught as I had expected her to be. Maybe she sensed, like I did, that the bricks and stones were not everything.

  Mama saw to Freda’s outfit in the roofless vestry, smoothing the creases that the fabric had acquired during the walk. She straightened my sister’s veil and whispered something to her that I could not hear. Freda seemed to tense. I wondered whether Mama had told her it was not too late to call it off.

  She did not leave. She did not remove her veil. Instead, she stood before the altar and made her pledge, as erring as the ivy that moved from pew to pew. I listened with wonder as she took his hand and said that she would keep him for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death parted them. For his sake, I willed it to be true. Pete’s features were full of the stone that I had seen in them when I’d first met him. The affection that he had shown by the hole in the fence had vanished: the cold reality of his duty – a mother and her child – stood, immovable, before him. I knew then that, for them both, it was not a case of love but of nearly, nearly loving.

  Once the vows were complete, Pete approached the one remaining bell in the tower and I had to call after him to stop him ringing it. I could not have borne the sound of that solitary knell, its dirge echoing across the Plain.

  Freda lost her veil on the way out of the church – the wind ripping it clean from her head. We watched it snake over the barbed wire at the end of the churchyard. Nobody tried to stop it. Not even Pete.

  Mama took Freda’s flowers and put them on my father’s grave. ‘He would have liked to know that his daughter’s wedding was in Imber,’ she murmured, tugging at the weeds around his headstone.

  ‘There’s no such place,’ I replied.

  CHAPTER 37

  Dusk comes. The sun slips, like a coin from a pocket, out of the sky and into someone else’s morning. It is unfathomably dark. Somebody rigs up a lantern by the lost-and-found board where it bores a hole through the blackness. Crowds disperse and people in search of sleep crawl under scraps of metal or overturned cars, or scuttle away up the hill.

  I pick up my suitcase, full of Alice’s things, and plant it next to the lantern. Sitting just outside its glow, I watch the filament lure in finger-length dragon flies and other fist-sized bugs. They tether themselves to its yellow stain and butt blithely against the glass, always an inch away from settling into its impossible scorch.

  At last I am free of the heat, and the cool of the evening settles on my skin. How many more nights will I spend like this, in the open air with no shelter, waiting for my daughter to come
back to me? Right now, I could spend a million, anything to be away from the day with its sun and crowds and corpses. The dead are still here, lining the square. But, hidden as they are in the darkness, I can forget about them. They are not my own after all; and here, you must blot from your memory anything that is not your own.

  I think of Freda, as unburied as those bodies, despite the grave we gave her. Mama wanted her to be laid to rest in Imber. But I could not bring myself to place her in another’s tomb. So much had died there. We hardly needed to add to its toll.

  I should have known that, like Imber, there would be no easy way of forgetting her – that Alice would grow into her likeness, not my own. I wish, for Alice’s sake, that Freda had been happier with Pete. Perhaps then I would have passed on the truth to their daughter more easily. Wars begin and end. Things clash. And there are a thousand other beginnings and endings in between – things that, perhaps, would never have come into being, or simply would have carried on existing, untouched. Maybe, if Alice had come later when love had been given the chance to take root, events might have unfurled differently. But Pete knew from the onset that he had never had Freda’s heart, just as I knew I lacked his. When his mother sent for him again in London, telling him she was sick and in need of his care, he deserted my sister – it was no life for her, with her fancy things and her unborn baby. He took his mother and her daughter to live with him in Leconfield and left Freda behind. She might have gone with him, if he had asked, but he didn’t. He chose his mother over her – a single, barren act of loyalty.

  After she died, I raised Alice as my own, as he had told me to do in his letter. But I knew I would have done the same, regardless of whether or not he had written. So many mistakes had come together to form her, and yet, when I held her, it was as if they could all be undone.