Sleep comes to me in the marketplace. Only a thin layer but I give in to it. The lantern flickers between itself and my vision of it until I don’t know which is real. The sea unravels on the beach ahead, then rolls itself up again, inhaling whenever I inhale and breathing its rhythm into my dreams.
Just then, in the corner of the square, the darkness is disturbed by somebody else’s light. A white orb sways in time with their step, growing from a pinprick into a cat’s eye until it is the size of an apple. Closer and closer come the steps, the sea ssshing beneath their staccato.
Soon they adopt a shape and, once in range of my lantern, collect features and, finally, a face.
‘Alice?’ I test through the darkness.
‘Who’s that?’ The shadow flinches back. I bend into the glow of the lantern and the torch is dropped. It falls and rolls and draws an arc in the dirt, like a needle spinning inside a compass.
Epilogue: I Lift Up My Eyes
What is the difference between an ocean and a sea? Where does one start and the other end? If you were to find the exact point – a hairline crack in the surface of the water running all the way down between the two – would you see any contrast between them? A variation in the colour or texture or thickness, perhaps?
Alice imagines oceans as blue and seas as grey and channels as a mingling of the two. She is as full of questions today as the sea is of waves.
Can a wave circumvent the earth without hitting land? If it did, would it keep on going and going and going, without ever arriving?
Maybe they’re magnetic, I suggest, drawn to breaking in a place marked as theirs.
Was my wave meant for Kanyakumari? she asks. I tell her that is not what I meant to say. It is too big a thing not to have been meant, is her reply. My words or her wave: I do not know to which she is referring.
Alice’s fingers shrink like sea anemones into balls each time a wave breaks at our feet. She is resisting the urge to run.
‘It’ll start off as nothing more than a smudge, Mum. You won’t even notice because it keeps itself so close to the water.’ She doesn’t turn to face me but picks a point on the horizon and chisels at it with her eyes. ‘Then, up it goes and rises. And the water next to the beach empties, like some massive washbasin.’ It’s the first time she’s talked, given it words, assembled it into a story. ‘And all the time you think you can outrun it because it doesn’t look as if it will ever come. Do you know what I mean?’
I nod, not knowing.
The Indian Ocean is making inroads towards our feet. She recoils again. I stay still this time, letting the sea invade my shoes; Alice draws a breath. ‘I didn’t quite mean to marry James,’ she confesses, the words seeping out of her as if she had been trying to say them for some time. ‘But the wave. It binds things.’ She pauses, turning to me. ‘I’m not making sense.’
‘A lot of things aren’t meant,’ I say, taking her hand. She does not lift her eyes from the water. I ask her about the letters I posted and she says that she has read them, that she understands.
I tell her that I was with her mother when she died. When they cut Alice out of Freda, the wound wouldn’t heal. The infection invaded her blood. One night, after the doctor had implied there was nothing more he could do, she broke free of the house in Wilton and limped as far as the allotments. We found her an hour later – her face wet and shimmering in the grass. My mother had to carry her back to the house, she was so weak. I realized, then, where she was bent on going. I took her hand in mine and felt the hold leave each of her fingers. She parted her lips to let out a word but instead let go of her breath. The last flood of it pushed through her throat and divorced itself from her, the blink in her eyes fleeing quickly afterwards, then the heat from her hand. Pete wasn’t there that night: they had separated before he even got to Yorkshire.
My daughter – my sister’s daughter – is standing next to me on the beach, her feet within touching distance of the sea. She understands what it took for me to love her; she understands the cost. She has not kept secrets, as I have, but has left things unsaid. She tells me about Pete’s sister, her visit to the house and how she had thought Alice was mine. He must have wanted it to be true, Alice says, to make his own sister believe such a thing. But I fear she is being too kind.
The waves break again over our feet. She knows. And has known for some time. What the water took away. And what it gave.
When I took her to the hospital to see James, she stood blinking, as I had done, at the opposite side of the ward. It didn’t seem real – the sight of him there on the bed. He stayed sleeping, even as she lay down on the mattress beside him – her eyes level with his. For days after my Delhi train ride, I had dreamt I was still moving each time I closed my eyes. I pictured all the miles they had covered together – how every period of sleep must have felt like another journey. But afterwards, once the miles were complete, there was the comfort of waking, as James did now, to find her there, unmoving, beside him.
It is my turn, now, to settle my stare on the horizon. I think of the waves pulsing under its lip. There is one stored there whose magnet, I imagine, can draw it to my shore. I see it building, pouring itself upwards until it has grown as tall as the Downs. It is ready to break now, to crash into England’s coast. To muscle into Wiltshire. To erase the chalk horse from Westbury. To baptize the Plain. To fill the valley, like an overflowing jar, and burst open Imber’s ruins. To lift the absent bells from their tower and plant them again in shards. Not here. But in somebody else’s field.
Acknowledgements
Novels are more than solitary creations; they are the fruit of many conversations. This book belongs to lots of people. In particular, I would like to thank Juliet Annan and Sophie Missing, at Fig Tree, for their astute and sensitive editing; Cathryn Summerhayes and Becky Thomas, who represent me at WME; Commander Ed Brown, for his assistance in researching the Salisbury Plain military range; Rex Sawyer, for his insight into Imber’s history; Mark and Ruth Devaraj, for their help with Tamil translation; Mrs Sen, for her memories of 1970s India; Ashley and Lin Rowlands, for their stories and photographs of the hippie trail; author Jennifer Potter, for her encouragement and wisdom throughout the writing of the novel; the London Library, for its endless supply of off-beat books and the quietness in which to write this one; the students and staff on the 2010/11 Warwick Writing MA; Becky Jones, Cat Rashid, Sarah Ritchie and Kath Wade, who are not only dear friends but my first readers; my wonderful family – Bill, Dad, Mum and Ian; and my maker, who, through every sea change, always stays the same.
For those interested in reading more about Imber and its evacuation, the following books were invaluable in helping me bring the village to life in the novel:
Henry Buckton, The Lost Villages: In Search of Britain’s Vanished Communities (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008).
Peter Daniels and Rex Sawyer, Images of England: Salisbury Plain (Stroud, 1996).
Rex Sawyer, Little Imber on the Down: Salisbury Plain’s Ghost Village (Salisbury: The Hobnob Press, 2001).
Extract from The World My Wilderness by Rose Macaulay reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Rose Macaulay.
Extract from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd on behalf of the Estate of T. S. Eliot.
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First published 2013
Copyright © Joanna Rossiter, 2013
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ISBN: 978-0-241-96416-3
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