The Sea Change (15 page)

A month later, when we had reached Pakistan,
I came across an entire pile of postcards bound together with an elastic band in his
luggage; they were from Belgium, France, Austria, even Istanbul, always the most lurid
and hackneyed images he could find. Afterwards, I couldn’t help but notice how, in
every town we travelled through, he rifled through markets on the sly – the kind that
were stuffed with plastic knick-knacks, flip-flops and
faux
-gold jewellery.
Whenever I scarpered off to find a toilet or scout out a place to stay, I’d return
to find him in the shade of a new stall, thumbing his way through boxes of photographs
and cards. I refrained from asking him what the point of it was,
other
than to stockpile junk in a loft he was yet to own; but three months into the overland
trail, once we had reached Kashmir, I formed my own theory.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it,
how you can’t ever piece together a place once you’re away from it?’
He nosed into the Kashmiri heat with his camera lens and pressed the button. ‘It
doesn’t matter how many pictures you take.’ We were sitting on the edge of
the Dal lake, warming the backs of our calves on the boards of the houseboat, and I
murmured something about the trip being unforgettable with or without the photographs.
It was only afterwards that I thought properly about what he had said and remembered the
postcards. He liked to examine every crevice of a city, absorb its layers, without
exchanging a word about why it was made that way or how it differed from home. A visitor
couldn’t grasp what it was like to breathe the air of a place for thirty or forty
consecutive years, how it changed your understanding of the city. The postcards were
talismans, telling him of how he had only skimmed the surface and, once he had departed,
how much he would leave behind.

As time went on, I did this more and more –
created a theory about him and then bound him to it, so that it started to suit him and
then
was
him. It mattered to me immensely why he behaved as he did – I wanted
to know the origin of every habit. I was envious, I suppose, of him having a past that
existed outside my own. But now, in India, with the beachfront in ruins, I feel only
that first sting of seeing him stare at another girl’s breasts.

Ravindra is the first to leave the sea. He
shakes it from his feet and does not look back. He doesn’t stop to take in what I
see – the town pushed down flat. Instead he walks with purpose towards the ruins, not
even pausing for breath. I bend down, with my hands on my knees, and lap up the air. The
sea pushes its plunder onto the sand behind me and returns, seconds later, to reclaim
it.

There is a pool of green to my right. A
woman’s sari, half unravelled from her body, lies in a coil beside her on the
sand. A sling, empty, is still in her grasp – the kind she would have used to carry a
baby. I look around for the child. It seems important, somehow, that she should hold it
in her sling, that the two should lie together. Of all the things the wave has carried
off, this is the smallest, the most precious, no heavier than a small sack of rice. And
yet I still search, as if somehow the wave might have mustered the kindness to return
what it so coldly took away.

Ravindra looks back and sees the woman. He
points at her body and twirls his finger around as if he were stirring something in a
bowl. I know what he is asking me to do. So I approach her, quietly, not wanting to wake
her up. The sea has decked her in its ugliest perfume. I choke, burying my mouth and
nose in the damp cuff of James’s shirt. Taking hold of her sari, I unravel it. She
is not heavy to lift. I roll her slowly along the stretch of cloth until she is folded
inside, embalmed in green.

Had a Tamil woman found her, she would have
been able to dress her properly. I try to picture the sari I wore for our wedding but I
can’t settle on which shoulder I should drape the end of the cloth over. Ravindra
motions towards the left so I roll her one more time, tucking the fabric underneath her
as if closing a book.

We stand for a moment, not moving. Neither
of us lifts our eyes from the woman. There are more bodies nearby, washed up like
shells, half buried in the sand. Some are curled in on themselves limply, trying to
hide. There are so many. We can’t see to them all.

At the nape of the beach, we walk across
together to the place where the town once began. From here the wreckage continues all
the way to the foot of the hills. Hardly hills, more like raised plains. I hadn’t
noticed them before. But now my eyes latch onto any kind of high ground they can find,
making note of it – for next time.

The line of palm trees that used to break the
ocean winds has been deleted. Five clay huts at the head of the beach have been hollowed
inside – barren without their fruit and hot snacks and the women who used to sit, hands
on knees, watching the day. The third hut along is where James went to buy breakfast.
There are no bodies, no shopkeeper, no girl ladling
dosa
batter into the pan
outside the door. And no James. Shashi Kapoor’s wave-rippled face rests on a
billboard blocking the entrance. I have to duck under it to get inside. Behind the
counter is the girl who makes the
dosa
. She is lying, arms close to her sides,
her ladle a few metres away – its inner curve licked clean by the sea. There is no one
else. I search between pots and jars and tubs of near-fluorescent spices for a sign of
James: a piece of fabric, an English coin – my mind fumbles for the memory of what might
have been in his pockets.

Behind the counter is a wooden till –
drawers gaping and empty. Either the sea looted it or someone has come since the wave.
Next to it is a metal prong where the paper orders for each hot snack are impaled.
Lifting the wet mass off the spike, I try to separate the scraps from each other.
James’s breakfast order must be here somewhere. But the Tamil lettering is nothing
but a string of pictures to me. I can’t decipher it. Even if it is only a pencil
mark confirming that he was there, it’s something at least. A beginning.

Father’s name was at the top of the
evacuation letter, along with Freda’s, Mama’s and my own. Mama was angry
with the War Office for not consulting their records: they of all people should have
known that he was gone. We wrote to tell Freda of our removal to Wilton and she might
have replied, but we had no forwarding address to give her: we received word of a vacant
town house on 15 December, just two days prior to the departure deadline; there was no
time to send word.

Mama had not tampered with Father’s
belongings since he had died – no new vicar had been appointed so she had not needed to
do so. If a letter arrived for him in the post, she would continue to place it on his
study desk as if we were expecting him to return any day now to open it. She could not
bring herself to load his things into boxes so, when the evacuation order came, I was
left to dismantle his study alone. I packed all the books but kept back the ship, which
I determined to hold on my lap in the lorry.

We had been informed of the evacuation only
a week earlier. The army subsequently called a meeting in the school. Not everyone was
invited but my mother insisted on attending on my father’s behalf. The Archams had
wind of a rumour that they were going to announce the construction of a military road
through the village. But Mama returned from the meeting as white as a sheet. It was a
day before she could bring herself to tell me what had been said. I heard the news,
along with others, through Mrs Carter, the post mistress. Rumours gathered pace that
they were to use the village as a training ground for the Yanks.
To prepare the
troops for inland assaults on urban settlements
. Allies, they called them. We
were to be invaded by our own friends.

On our moving day, Annie called in to say
goodbye. Her mother and father had found accommodation in Devizes; we would be living
twenty miles apart.

‘You will write?’ she asked,
with a note of uncertainty.

‘Of course.’

‘I can’t imagine us not being
friends, Vi. I know there’s a war on but we must stay in touch.’

I told her we would arrange to meet up soon,
but we both knew it was a lie; since Father had died, Mama and I could ill afford to
travel. Annie and I hugged tightly and she scampered back to her cottage. There were so
many goodbyes to be said that we kept them brief. Everything seemed bearable when
completed with as little fuss as possible.

An ATS girl arrived with the lorry to
collect our belongings and we tried our best to load Father’s desk into the back
of the vehicle. But, between us, we could not lift it, not even with a third pair of
hands. There were few men left in the village who could offer help and those that
remained had their own homes to see to. I feared for a moment that Mama might ask me to
send for Pete. Instead, she extracted the drawers like organs from the desk. As we drove
away, she clenched her fists and tried with all her might not to look back at the oak
frame which stood, as firm as a custodian, in front of the house.

We were taken to a terraced cottage in
Wilton whose owner – a widower – had recently passed away. His relations had no need of
the house and were prepared to let it to us for a modest sum. Since they had not been to
visit the place, they could not vouch for its upkeep, but we were not about to refuse a
roof over our heads, offered on such reasonable terms.

‘There we are, Mama. It’s not so
bad,’ I remarked, as we drew up outside our new lodgings. The cottage had a
sandstone front with arched windows that looked as if they had been borrowed from a
church. ‘Quite cosy, really.’

The ATS girl helped us unload the lorry into
the front garden
but Mama insisted on sending her back to Imber
directly to assist other households who were yet to move. We were left alone to shepherd
our belongings, one box at a time, into the cottage. Mama let herself in with a key and
carried the first through the hallway. Upon entering the kitchen at the far end of the
house, I heard the box of crockery drop clean onto the tiles. I followed into the room
to find her staring up at the clouds, our teacups in fragments at her feet. The walls
had been reduced to rubble and there was little left of the roof. Surveying the damage
from the lawn, we saw that the entire back of the house had been blown open by a bomb.
The kitchen, the bedrooms and the landing were all exposed to the open air as if someone
had unhinged a doll’s house and rifled through the rooms.

The War Department’s Estate Office was
alerted to the situation but the clerk informed us that accommodation could not be found
on our behalf with so little notice. Mama appealed to the landlords in writing that same
afternoon but the letter would take two days to arrive. I doubted they would be able to
afford the repairs.

We had no other option but to leave our
belongings in the ruined cottage and seek a room at a guesthouse. An elderly lady living
at number ten directed us to the Pembroke Inn, just a street away. We entered to find it
brimming with men in uniform, some stooped over the bar in the corner, others immersed
in newspapers spread wide in the leather chairs by the fire. I tried not to think about
the warmth of the flames.

The landlady at the desk was sympathetic but
said it would not be appropriate to house two lone women in a makeshift officers’
mess, even if she did have rooms available. ‘It’s been nothing but trouble
since they took over Wilton House,’ she explained. ‘Air raids every
week.’

She arranged for a small supper of bread and
broth to be brought to us before regretfully sending us on our way. We retraced our
steps along King Street.

‘What would he do,’ Mama asked,
‘if he were with us?’

The air had sharpened with the light’s
departure and I dreaded arriving back at the cottage. ‘He’d say that things
are bound to seem better in the morning,’ I replied.

‘Warmer, yes, but I don’t know
about better.’

Inside the cottage, we retrieved as many
blankets as we could find from our luggage and pulled my parents’ mattress into
the space next to the hearth. The living room was the only part of the house with its
ceiling still intact. As we crawled into our nightgowns and hid our shivers in the
blankets, I heard Mama’s laughter filter through the cold.

‘I’m just thinking of
Freda,’ she whispered. ‘She’d be wallpapering the place in no
time.’

‘Wallpapering what?’ I smiled.
‘It’s not as if we’re spoilt for walls.’

Then, side by side in the quiet, we waited
for our laughter to melt underneath the ache of everything – his death, our departure,
this poor excuse for a home.

We spent three nights – cold and awful – in
that blitzed shell before we were offered a vacant cottage on Russell Street. Mama and I
were in no fit state to spend another night in the freezing air without a fire so we
accepted the property, regardless of its reputed disrepair. Damp and lack of electricity
were nothing to contend with compared to the near-open air of Horton Cottage, King
Street.