The Sea Change (14 page)

I ran across the landing to find my mother,
still in her bed, with one arm cast protectively over the pond of space where my father
would have slept.

‘Mama, it’s Freda,’ I
mouthed, almost inaudibly. She didn’t stir. ‘Mama, please, wake
up.’

She opened her eyes and, seeing me at the
door, sat up and whispered, ‘Come in, my darling.’

‘No, Mama, listen, it’s
Freda … She’s … Her things are gone.’

‘Violet –’

‘Her town shoes are missing, and her
coat, her hairbrush and toothbrush. I think she’s run away.’

‘But … She’s probably
just gone out for a stroll, darling.’

‘No, I went into her room, you see, to
take her some tea. If you don’t believe me, go and look for yourself.’

Mama rose from her bed and, sliding on a
loose dressing-gown, glided across the landing to Freda’s room. She emerged again
a
minute or so later, her dressing-gown pulled more tightly around her
ribs. She hastened down the stairs and I followed.

‘Get your boots on,’ she ordered
sharply, rummaging around on the coat stand. ‘I’m going to the Court to see
if Mrs Whistler will lend us a car. And don’t you go anywhere without me, Violet.
One daughter’s enough to be worrying about.’ The door slammed behind her and
I was left alone in the hallway, Father’s old boots next to mine.

It wasn’t long before I heard the rasp
of a car outside. I pulled on my shoes and an overcoat and opened the door onto the
dawn. Mist moved in barrels along the lawn. I stowed myself in the back of the car; Mama
was at the wheel. Noting that I had left the front seat empty, she turned her head for a
moment towards the space where Father might have sat. Then, with one swift press of her
foot on the pedal, we sped away.

‘Blast this mist,’ she gasped,
as she pulled out onto the road. ‘Where do we even start?’

‘Pete,’ I whispered. ‘We
start with Pete.’

At the end of Dog Kennel Lane, the mist
began to lift. The birch trees outside the Archams’ farmyard glimmered like
ornaments; palm-sized cobwebs crocheted the spaces between the branches and caught the
dew in beads.

‘I don’t understand. Why are we
looking for her here?’ my mother protested, as we switched off the engine and
entered the yard on foot.

‘Pete might know something. It’s
just a … I’ll explain afterwards.’

Mrs Archam looked up from inside the
farmhouse kitchen, her face filling with the same clash of dread and pity that met us
everywhere we went in the village, these days.

‘You know what he’s like, Miss
Violet,’ she told me, when I asked to see him at the door, ‘always
disappearing off here, there and everywhere.’

‘You mean he’s not here?’ I
asked.

‘We’ve not seen him since dinner
yesterday.’

‘He’s with her,’ I
muttered to Mama. ‘You have to trust me.’

Mama only frowned.

‘He did say something about meeting a
friend at the station,’ continued Mrs Archam. ‘When I pressed him, that is.
I didn’t like to trouble him too much – it upsets him when I interfere.’

I thanked her and took my mother’s
arm. We strode over the yard back to Mrs Whistler’s old Crossley. The journey to
the station began in silence. There was something about the fog – the way it deleted the
folds and creases and divides of the Plain – that insisted on no noise. I felt that if I
were to speak my words would be swallowed instantly and reduced to a mere shape on my
lips. The whites of Mama’s knuckles became more and more pronounced the closer we
got to the edge of the Plain, forming a line of moons as she tightened her grip on the
steering-wheel.

‘Vi, I know you know something,’
she asserted, once we had crossed the Plain.

I faltered at first. But, inch by inch, the
explanation came to me. I told her about the dance, how I had seen Freda with him, how I
didn’t know whether they had gone together or simply met there, but that it had
been clear he felt something for her.

‘They’ve
eloped
?’
she asked, aghast.

‘I don’t know, Mama. I’ve
given up trying to make sense of it.’ My voice did not lose its steadiness, as my
mother’s had, but instead slipped into flat resignation. Father’s death had
eclipsed everything. Any recollection of the hurt my sister had inflicted elicited
nothing from me but guilt – regret at having spent my worry on something so slight.

‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me
about what you saw at the dance? I could have put a stop to it! Your father – he – your
father would …’

Mama’s resolve seemed to fold in on
itself at the mention of
him. I shrank into the back seat as the car
picked up speed. The road dipped and rose beneath us with a haste to which I was not
accustomed. I held my stomach and thought of them, tucked away in the corner of a
carriage, her head on his shoulder, city-bound. Flower. Bullet. Mouth. That was why I
hadn’t told her.

We arrived at the station to find the
platform deserted. I stared down the tracks, willing a train to arrive and carry me
towards them. I made compromises in my head. If only they would both come back, I could
live. I wouldn’t care that they were together: it would be enough just to have
them here. I thought of the bombs – as common as rain – in the cities. They needed to
come home, the pair of them. It was no use losing them as well as Father. I turned round
to see my mother opening the door to the waiting room and walking up to a bundle
stretched along one of the benches. A pair of shoes coated in chalk dust was pressed
together on the floor below and I recognized them instantly as Pete’s. There was a
time, before the accident, when I would have cried at the sight of him still there and
not far away on a train with my sister. Mama shook his shoulder and woke him.

‘Pete,’ she began coldly, before
he had had a chance to rub the sleep from his eyes. ‘For Heaven’s sake, wake
up.’

He sat up, momentarily unsure of his
whereabouts.

‘Where’s Freda?’

He fumbled around for his hat, stood up and
placed it on his head. Why he felt the need to put his hat on, I do not know. Perhaps he
was buying time. He locked his hands behind his back. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs
Fielding …’

‘An apology is not going to achieve
anything, young man. Where is my daughter?’ Her tone hardened.

‘In London. She’s gone to
London.’

‘Why didn’t you go with
her?’ I blurted. Pete frowned at me briefly before returning his gaze to the
floor.

‘I was never going to take the train
myself,’ he replied. ‘She
asked for help. Said she
couldn’t make it to the station on her own.’ He rubbed at the patch of skin
under his nose and looked past us towards the door.

‘And to think we counted you as a
neighbour, Pete – all of us,’ exclaimed my mother.

‘You wouldn’t have behaved so
despicably had my father been around,’ I added.

‘If a person’s fed up with a
place, you should let them go,’ Pete retorted. ‘There’s no point
trying to keep them when they don’t want to be kept … Mrs
Fielding.’ He added my mother’s name as an afterthought, all the while
glaring at me.

‘She’s lived here all her life,
Pete,’ I cried. ‘She wouldn’t just pack up and leave without a good
reason. Father’s gone and she doesn’t know what to do.’

‘Look here,’ my mother
intervened. ‘This isn’t solving anything. You must tell us which train she
caught – it’s the very least you can do.’

‘The last one to London yesterday. It
left at midnight.’

‘And what will she …? Where will
she stay?’ I asked.

‘I swear to you, Mrs Fielding,’
he said, ignoring my questions, ‘I’ve told you everything I know.’

Mama checked her watch, turned her back on
him and took me by the arm. ‘Listen here, Violet. We can make enquiries from
Imber. I’ll telephone Aunt Dorothy in Battersea. But there’s little point in
trying to fetch her back ourselves. She’ll only dig her heels in. Once we’re
sure that she’s safe, we must let her be. Do you understand?’

I nodded and followed her out of the waiting
room back towards the car. To my disgust, Mama paused, turned back to Pete and said,
‘You’d better come with us in the Crossley. I don’t see how else
you’re going to get home.’

By the time we reached the Imber road, the
mist on the Plain had dissipated into a mute sky. I kept my eyes on the window the whole
way into the village, only releasing them when Pete
had been deposited
at the Archams’. Like me, Mama did not see fit to shed tears. We had nothing left
to give Freda but wide-eyed fright.

In the days that followed, evidence of my
sister’s getaway began to surface. Mrs Taylor was the first to call on the evening
after our drive to the station. My mother bowed her head over the kettle, bleary-eyed,
as her visitor began to speak.

‘I did wonder why the girl wanted so
much laundry done at once. I was cross with her, you see. We’re overrun with all
the uniforms as it is, and I told her she’d have to wait her turn.’

‘Oh, Kathy, why did you not think to
tell me? I should have known straight away what she was up to.’ Mama put her head
into her hands and sighed.

‘Fancy running away without leaving so
much as a note! She was brought up better than that, Martha, don’t blame
yourself,’ our guest responded. Mama raised her head again and Mrs Taylor, whose
fingers were so creased from the wash-house that they had started to resemble a
wrung-out cloth, put a palm on my mother’s shoulder and took my hand in hers.

‘Do you think she’s gone for
good?’ I murmured.

She telephoned from London a week later,
leaving a number with Mrs Carter and a time at which we could ring. Mama wasted no time
in arranging for a trunk call at the post office but we were forced to wait several days
before the call could be made. When the moment finally arrived, and Mrs Carter held out
the earpiece, Mama’s courage failed and she gestured for me to take it instead.
Mrs Carter thrust it into my hand before I could refuse; the call had already connected.
Mama came near to the earpiece so that she could hear. But it wasn’t my sister who
answered.

‘May I speak to Freda Fielding,
please?’ I put on my best telephone voice, elongating my vowels and clipping my
consonants.

‘What’s the name?’

‘Oh, um, Violet. I’m her
sister.’

‘Sister? She ain’t mentioned a
sister.’

‘Sorry, no, of course … I
have papers?’

‘Whatcha gonna do? Read them to me?
We’re on the bloody telephone, darling!’

My mother, who was straining to hear the
other half of the conversation, took the receiver from me.

‘Look here, this is Freda’s
mother. Please fetch my daughter this instant. I’m telephoning on urgent
business.’

‘Urgent business, eh? All right,
missus. I’ll call her down.’

There was a pause. The line muttered softly
to itself.

‘Hello?’

‘Freda! Thank God!’ cried
Mama.

‘Hello, Mama,’ she replied
matter-of-factly.

‘Freda! Are you all right?’ I
interrupted.

‘I’m perfectly fine.’

‘We were worried sick!’ my
mother exclaimed, the weight of her voice landing on the last word.

‘And you left no note!’ I chimed
in.

‘What were we to think, my darling?
Anything could have happened.’

‘Well, I’m fine. I’ve
enlisted. As a nurse.’

‘Darling, why didn’t you tell
me? I could have telephoned Aunt Dorothy, made arrangements.’

‘I want to do this my own way, Mama.
No one else’s.’ The muffled sound of a siren began to sing in the
background.

‘What’s that? Freda?
What’s going on?’ Mama’s voice started to fray.

‘I’ve got to go, Mama.
I’ll write and explain.’

‘Write?’ The word came out of
Mama’s mouth as high as opera while the siren grew louder at the other end of the
line. The noise went blank, suddenly, and my mother dropped the earpiece. I said
nothing, watching it pirouette on its cord.

Three nights. That was all we’d spent
in Kanyakumari before the wave came. But I find that I’m hunting around for
surviving buildings – fragments of places that he took me to. We never had a home
together and neither did we plan to make one; instead we littered the East with pieces
of ourselves – a row in Zahedan, a kiss in Quetta. We’d plant minuscule roots
without realizing it. And yet there was so much more to discover.

‘What did you buy that for?’ I
said to him in a Frankfurt flea market, when the giddiness of our first months together
had begun to wane. He had picked up a postcard of a seafront, the colours of the houses
almost neon against the cliff. A blonde girl posed in a bikini on the front, her curves
superimposed on the coastline with
‘
Ich denke an dir
’
scrawled across her breasts. ‘You’re not thinking of sending it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he
quipped. ‘I thought your mum might appreciate the thought.’ I laughed and
watched him slip it, when he thought I wasn’t looking, into his camera bag.