The Sea Change (16 page)

Once we had installed ourselves, we spread
our saucepans across the loft to collect the rain and resolved to fix the holes as soon
as we could gather together the funds.

Upstairs, the damp had drawn maps – strange,
expanding continents – over the walls of the bedrooms. Mama kept telling me that we
would be able to find something better as soon as the war was over. She was talking as
if we would never be allowed back home and I told her as much. But she had no reply to
give me.

Father’s belongings stayed in their
boxes. There was no room for shelving. Mama removed one volume at a time, working her
way religiously through them in the evenings.
The Observer’s Book of British
Birds
,
Peake’s
Commentary on the Bible
, Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
– no matter how
dense the book, she would press on through it until it could be returned to its box with
a deeper crease in its spine. She’d read with such vigour that it seemed as if she
were searching for something, some clue as to why he was still gone.

I found a window-sill in our bedroom for the
bottled ship. I surrounded it with some of the shells he used to collect and display on
the window-sills of his study. Their shapes always seemed so foreign under the
landlocked parsonage windows, surrounded on every side, not by a sea, but by a vast
plain. But to Father, the Plain was a kind of ocean; it behaved in mysterious ways. He
always said he would not be surprised if it had claimed as many lives as our nearest
stretch of sea. Mama used to complain about how the shells collected dust but he was
resolute about keeping them there. I would catch him from time to time, standing by the
window with a shell pressed to his ear, listening for the breath of a wave.

We spent our first month mending the roof
with whatever money we could spare, all the while fearing that the parsonage was
gathering the very holes that we were patching up in Wilton. Civilian men were scarce in
the town and there was nobody we could ask to do the work. In the end, I took shifts in
the old carpet factory, making camouflage and tarpaulin for the troops. Whenever a sheet
of fabric was found to be faulty, I would smuggle it home at the end of the day to rig
up over one of the holes.

Pete called round on one of those
hole-patching Sundays. My mother was working on the back wall while I was up in the
loft. We had been informed by the Major that Pete had gone to work as a farmhand less
than a mile away near Coombe Bissett, parting
ways with the Archams,
who had been rehoused in Lavington. I did not know how he had come by our address. He
told us in the doorway that, as it was his day off, he had thought to bring some meat
from the farm. He had to jam his foot against the door to prevent my mother slamming it
in his face.

‘You’ve got some nerve showing
your face here.’

‘Mrs Fielding, I shan’t come in
if you don’t want to see me but please let me speak to Violet.’

I shied back up the stairs at the sound of
my name, unsure of what he might say.

My mother bristled. ‘That depends on
whether she wants to speak to you.’

I wanted to dissolve into the wall with the
damp and be gone.

‘Vi?’ He leant past my mother
and caught my eye.

‘I’m sorry. There’s a lot
of work to do,’ I replied, glancing up towards the roof.

‘Let me help,’ he offered.
‘You’ll be finished in half the time.’

I shook my head but my mother accepted his
offer, rather more quickly than I was expecting. She was so fed up with rain-soaked
carpets and damp beds that she was not about to turn down an offer of help, particularly
from a competent pair of hands like Pete’s.

‘I suppose it’s the least you
can do,’ she muttered, standing aside for him in the hall.

Pete followed me up to the loft and watched
as I tried to tack a square of tarpaulin to the back of the first hole.
‘That’s useless, that is.’ He sighed. ‘The rain will pour
straight back through. You need to get a man up onto the roof to fix the
tiles.’

‘Oh, and they’re two a penny
right now, are they?’

‘I have a friend who could
help.’

‘How kind,’ I replied, not
sounding as if I meant it.

Pete came up close and held a second piece
down while I fumbled with the tape. I had missed his smell – fields and chalk dust and
smoking fires – as much as I had missed Imber.

‘I heard you’ve found work in the
factory,’ he said.

I nodded.

‘I hope you didn’t avoid the
Land Army because of me, Vi. The girls on the farm say the factory’s tough as
anything.’

‘A girl’s entitled to a change
of scene,’ I said coldly. ‘And there would be no one around for Mama if I
chose farm work. My sister isn’t here any more, remember?’

He dropped his hands and stood back from me.
‘I wanted to talk to you about Freda.’

I reddened at her name and hoped the light
in the loft was dim enough to hide it.

‘She asked a favour of me,
that’s all. I can’t be blamed for her going to London.’

‘You knew how much it would upset
us.’

‘But – she hadn’t been herself,
not since your father … I thought it would help if she got away for a
while.’

His voice had softened. There was an
intimacy in it that alarmed me.

‘I saw you dancing with her,
Pete.’

He cocked his head, slowly grasping my
meaning.

‘At Warminster Camp. I was outside.
Looking in.’

He did not fidget, as I expected him to. He
held my gaze.

‘Mr Archam told Annie,’ I
continued. ‘So we caught a lift to Warminster to see for ourselves.’

‘A lad can dance with a girl. It
doesn’t have to mean anything,’ said Pete. ‘People set too much store
by these things.’

He took a step towards me but I backed away.
‘Nothing
happened
, Violet.’

‘You’re talking as if you owe me
an explanation and you don’t. There’s nothing … We’re not
–’

Pete raised a hand to the hole in the roof,
dropping his stare. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

‘I’m not hurt,’ I
retorted. ‘There’s nothing to be hurt about.’ My voice had wavered so
I bit my lip and paused. ‘I’m only
sorry,’ I
ventured, ‘that you felt you could tell her things that you couldn’t tell
me.’

‘Whatever Freda’s
said …’ He paused. And swallowed, Adam’s apple kneading the length of
his throat. ‘Your sister likes you to believe she has secrets. Because they make
her feel better about herself.’

Then he put down the piece of tarpaulin he
was holding and walked over to the loft ladder. ‘I’m at Welham Farm near
Coombe, if you or your mother needs help … a roofer …’ He trailed
off and stepped down through the gap in the loft floor. A minute or so later, I heard
the front door open and close. Through the holes in the roof, I could hear his steps on
the road.

One man shouts into the face of the rubble.
He puts his ear to the heap and waits. There’s no answer. He tries again. This
time, the other people on the pile begin to murmur and jostle and pick off bricks.
Someone must be underneath. I get close enough to the front to hear the trapped voice,
barely louder than the buzz of a fly. A woman digging on the opposite side of the pile
lets out a shout and we all scramble over. She has grabbed hold of some dust-caked
fingers that flex and cement their grip on her hand. I swallow back the thought of the
body at sea – fingers like clay in mine. It’s James – or at least the hope of
him.

Ravindra has lost interest in the rescue. He
is walking vaguely away across the wreckage. I shout after him, his name still not
fitting on my tongue. He doesn’t turn, even though I know he heard me, fed up – I
can tell – with being unable to make himself understood. I try again.

He calls back in Tamil, and points wearily
towards the fringe of the town. Nothing more. I nod as if I understand. But beyond that
we’ve run out of the words we never had. Pressing his hands together in an upright
prayer towards me, he says one last thing. There’s little point in a proper
goodbye. I lift my hand, vaguely, and he’s gone.

The voice under the bricks grows into a
moan. More and more debris is removed. The fingers become ecstatic, grasping at the sun
until all the veins are taut and purple. Soon, we have made a large enough hole to pull
at both arms. The crown of a head emerges, then eyelids sealed shut by the dust.
It’s a boy – barely ten or eleven years old – reborn from the rubble. His lips
are parted slightly as if he were in the midst of speaking when the
walls fell. The man who first called for help buries his head in the boy’s chest.
A woman pours water over his mouth, holding it high above him and letting it bounce and
splash off his face. He barely has enough energy to drink, mouth opening and shutting,
like the gill of a fish.

Everybody wants to be close to him and hold
him as if he were their own. Hands clutch at the warmth of his skin, and I find I am
reaching towards him too. I grasp at his heart – feeling for myself its frantic, living
beat.

The sun burns. There is no shade, only
ruins. A few buildings remain standing – frozen ghosts whose hollow windows gawp
inwards, in awe of their own survival. I tread on old doors and iron roofs and tell
myself he isn’t under them. Even the dead are in hiding. It was easier to search
for him on the beach where the wave had laid out the debris for all to see. Here, it has
been more covert, hiding its victims under slabs and beams and mountains of dust.

The paper orders from the
dosa
stall are still in my grasp. Moving from the rubble where the boy was found, I cut a
path towards the centre of the town. I need to find someone who speaks English.

In the part of the village that is furthest
from the sea, more men and women emerge, each lifting hands to heads at how little has
been left behind. One woman stops beside a pile of dust and, sinking into the silt,
starts to weep. Another man digs beside her. I want to tell him to stop: he’ll
only unearth the worst. James would know what to do if he was here. He would have begun
to peel back the town’s layers in search of survivors. If only it was him looking
for me: he’d root me out like one of his postcards and maybe we’d stand a
chance of making it, the two of us. But things fall apart in my hands.

It started a month ago in June. Near Kerman,
halfway through the overland trail. But sometimes, looking back, I
wonder if it had been going on for longer. We had picked up eight passengers in
Istanbul: two New Yorkers called Jeannie and Curt, an Australian named Rob, then David,
Clara and Sue, who were all from the Home Counties, Erik from Sweden and Marc from New
Zealand. Marc paid the least for his seat: he was on his way home and, after burning all
his cash in Europe, bargained his way into the van with smiling ruthlessness. The final
price was barely enough to cover his share of the petrol. James took an instant dislike
to him. He wore his hair short and dressed anonymously in black and navy blue, even in
the desert heat. Once on board, he was warm and affable and seemed able to sway the trip
in any direction he pleased. It was his influence – his insistence on so many detours –
that James grew to despise. James – eager to reach Kashmir – was cajoled into making a
three-hundred-kilometre diversion to Shiraz so that Marc, and the rest of the van, could
see the ruins at Persepolis. Secretly, I was grateful: there was a whole treasure trove
of drawings to be made from the slim pillars that led to nothing and the walls that held
millennia-old etchings in their stone. It was a must-see on the overland trail, as
significant as Arafat, claimed Marc.

‘We can’t keep diverting. We
have a route we’re trying to get through,’ James told him flatly. We were
driving to Kerman at the time and the Pakistani border remained open only for short
periods. The nearest town to the border, Zahedan, was nine hours away, and we were yet
to stock up on supplies. It was a desert drive, which required two days’ worth of
food and water. Up to this point, we had meandered off the route whenever the name of a
town took our fancy. Guesthouses had been easy to find in the cities and we had camped
in tents near villages in between. We’d grown a taste for spontaneity, which,
James feared, would stop us reaching Pakistan.

‘You came here for an adventure,
didn’t you? Nobody cares how long it takes,’

‘We were very open about the
itinerary. If you were so
desperate to go there you should have joined
another group.’ I had not heard James use that tone before. We had treated
everyone on board as friends so far, not as paying customers. He was usually so
laid-back.

‘Alice,’ Marc said, turning to
me. This was his first mistake – to draw me into it. ‘You want to see the ruins.
You told me so yourself. Tell James you want to go.’

James shot me a glance from the
steering-wheel. I hurried to read what was in it – anger that I liked the idea of
Persepolis, hurt that I had talked about it to Marc.