The Sea Change (17 page)

‘She’s an artist.’ Marc
turned to James. ‘I’ve seen her sketches. Think of the drawings she’ll
make of the ruins.’

James kept his eyes on the road.
‘There are eight other people to consider.’

‘We all want to go,’ persisted
Marc. ‘Jeannie, Curt and Erik agree. So do the others.’

‘It does sound like an impressive
place,’ added Clara, from the second row of seats.

By the time we reached the turning to
Shiraz, James had relented and accepted the diversion. We stopped in a village for water
and Tabrizi bread, which the others coated with Spam and mayonnaise they took from the
back of the van. James pulled me to the far side of the vehicle while the others ate so
that we were out of earshot.

‘What were you playing at back
there?’

‘I – We don’t have to go to
Persepolis, not if it’s too much.’

‘We do now, thanks to you. I should
have known you’d take his side.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

He sighed and looked past me across the sand
– as bleak as a sea ahead of us.

‘James … what do you
mean?’

‘You don’t realize how important
this is – for me.’

‘That’s unfair. I want to finish
the route too. We all do. But
we always agreed it was about seeing
what there was along the way, rather than reaching the end.’

‘Sometimes I wish the van would just
break down so that they’d all leave. You, me, on a train – it would be so much
simpler …’

He put a hand on my waist and I softened.
‘I’m sorry I said what I did to Marc. You know what he’s like. It was
a way of shutting him up for a bit.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘What’s wrong, then?’

‘He said he’d seen your
drawings.’

‘He asked to see them. We had hours to
kill on the Turkish border, remember? Why does it matter, anyway? The whole van has
probably seen them by now.’

‘I’ve been trying to persuade
you to keep hold of them for months and suddenly, since the border, you’ve been
keeping them.’

‘I was always worried Mum would find
them if I kept them at home … but here, it’s different.’

‘As if it would have mattered,
Alice.’

I fell silent. Even I couldn’t explain
what I was hiding from her. ‘I know it doesn’t make sense,’ I said
eventually.

He leant back on the side of the van next to
me. We felt the heat from the enamel seep through our T-shirts.

‘Marc asked if we were an
item.’

I looked at him, saying nothing.

‘Back in Istanbul. He said you were
pretty.’

‘He’s with Clara, isn’t
he?’

‘Not like I’m with
you.’

‘I would never –’

‘I know, I know. It’s
just … It’s been on my mind, that’s all.’

I knew what I should do: I should tell him I
loved him, that he was the reason I had come away. The others were just a means to an
end – he and I together in India. But the words stalled and became trapped.

‘If I just knew where we
stood …’ he continued.

‘Then what?’ I asked, eyes on
the sand. I thought of Alexander the Great throwing his burning torch into the palace at
Persepolis: the city dying in his mind before the fire even gathered pace. James
didn’t have to hem me in like that. He should have known that I, too, had a torch
I could throw – something precious to burn.

With Kanyakumari in rubble around me, I
clench the wodge of orders from the
dosa
stall. James’s must be in there
somewhere. It won’t help me find him but at least I can trace his last movements –
where he was when the wave hit.

‘Do you speak any English?’ A
man lifts his head from the debris and doesn’t reply. I show the orders to him and
he frowns. Another man parrots,
How are you I am fine
, then drifts on his
way.

A third woman reads the first order.
‘It is food, sister,’ she explains. ‘
Dosa
.’

‘How many
dosa
?’ I ask,
holding up my fingers one by one until I reach five.

‘Sister, look.’ She casts a hand
towards the wreckage, the bangles on her wrist chiming together. ‘There is no
time.’ Then she presses the water-logged order back into my palm and, with full
eyes, walks on.

‘Please!’ I shout after her.
‘Please help me! It’s my husband – he’s gone.’

She turns and tilts her head at me, pointing
again to the flattened houses beneath her feet and joining a group of men and women who
are trying to roll a car off the top of a collapsed building. The under-carriage clasps
the concrete stubbornly. I watch as she places her palms on the silver metal above the
bumper and heaves herself forward with the rest of them. As if it will make a
difference.

I scrunch up the order in my hand. He was
always so curious,
wanting to try everything and learn everything –
fitting together the nuts and bolts of how a place worked. I would have settled for a
packet of biscuits for breakfast but James wanted to search for something authentic.

‘You’re not going to lie there
all day, are you?’ he’d asked me, half an hour before the wave came. He
stood fully clothed in the doorway of our guesthouse room, rucksack slung over his
shoulder.

I lay on the bed, not replying, even though
I was awake.

‘Come on, Alice!’ He crossed to
the mattress and planted a kiss on my forehead. Then he took hold of the sheet and
pulled it from me.

‘Let me sleep.’ I groaned,
pulling my legs up to my stomach.

‘It’s a beautiful day
outside.’

‘It’s always beautiful. And
hot,’ I mumble.

‘You’re acting like a
teenager!’

I batted him away with a hand. He’d
smelt of smoke and old banknotes before we’d arrived here. But once we reached the
coast, he went swimming so much that the sea sank into his skin and clothes so that now
he smelt of saltwater too.

‘What do you fancy for
breakfast?’

‘Whatever you’re having.’
I spoke into the pillow.

‘I’ll get us a few
dosa
. The landlord was telling me about them. Indian pancakes. South Indian.
Can you manage three? Then we can go swimming. A swim’ll wake you up.’

I sat up and stretched the night from my
arms and legs. ‘I’m sorry, nothing changes,’ I laughed, ‘not
even on the other side of the world. You go ahead. I’ll catch up.’

‘Meet you at the beach in half an
hour, then?’ And, with that unanswered question, he closed the door.

I think of him walking up to the
dosa
stall on the beachfront, ordering our breakfast and then waiting.
Maybe he stepped onto the sand, like others, to stare at the mass of grey building and
building in the distance. Perhaps he saw the sea being sucked out
and
drained, like I did from the hotel window, as if someone had pulled a plug from the
seabed. I should have known then and gone to fetch him. But instead I was pleased,
pleased
,
at not having to go for a swim. I didn’t know what it
meant. Nobody did. I saw some of the locals running out and picking up fish, huge
uncatchable things with purple markings, that had been left to flip themselves to death
in the sand.

Then the first person started to run. And
another. Maybe James stood his ground, took out his camera. Maybe he ran too.

The factory made me half deaf. It was
lonely work – impossible to raise your voice over the hammer of a hundred
sewing-machines. I knew the names of the girls on my bench but little else; conversation
was impossible. At night, I dreamt of the motions I performed during the day – the
pinning of a hem, the feel of the tarpaulin between my fingers. There was a rhythm for
everything: folding, cutting, stitching. I tried to break free from the work of the
others, do things in a different order or manner, but it did not last: soon I had fallen
into line again.

The larger equipment moved so quickly and
with such sharpness that I feared for my fingers. One girl, Lucy, lost her thumb on her
first day and couldn’t work after that. Others got pregnant – the only way you
could get out of your job. After three weeks, I was half tempted to push my hand under
one of the levers and injure myself deliberately but the blot of blood under the chair
where Lucy used to sit did away with my courage; the stain remained there as a warning
to us all.

The day was split into three shifts: six
until two, two until ten, and then the night session. Once you were allocated your
shifts for the week, there was little opportunity for manoeuvring them. My mother – who
had started work as a volunteer in the officers’ canteen at Wilton House – hardly
ever saw me. On Tuesdays, at six in the morning, we’d pass in the road, she on the
way to her work, me on the way back from mine.

I began to wish it had been me, not Freda,
who had run away to London and become a nurse. Anything but the bang, bang of metal
hitting metal, of machine talking to machine.

Sometimes, when the noise grew too tiresome,
I thought of
Imber’s winds. I pictured myself back in the
parsonage cellar, listening to the bursts and flashes, beautifully irregular and erratic
above us. But the factory noise was too harsh and fast to forget for long; even the most
militant of Imber’s storms could not have drowned it out.

I didn’t let on to Mama how difficult
the work at the factory had proved. She had been set against me taking up a job there
from the beginning, saying it was beneath me. I was still the parson’s daughter
and the factory was unbecoming. But with Father gone, I had little choice but to work.
The colourlessness in my face soon gave away my discomfort and she begged me to hand in
my notice.

‘Your father would not approve,
Violet. You know he wouldn’t. He’d much rather you were on a farm in the
fresh air than cooped up in a factory all day.’

‘If I worked on a farm, I’d have
to leave you, Mama. And I’m not prepared to do that, not while Freda is away. And,
besides, the wages –’

‘I will not have you thinking of the
roof! They pay you a pittance! They’ll wear you down until there’s not a
scrap left of you. Mark my words, they will.’

Even if Mama had persuaded me otherwise, I
didn’t want Pete to be proved right. He didn’t approve of women in the
factory any more than he did of the land girls and I wanted to show him that we, too,
could pull our weight in a war. Whenever I saw him about town, I’d pinch my cheeks
into a healthy glow and find someone to chat to, hoping he wouldn’t notice that I
was out of sorts.

In Imber, I could never track him down. He
had always been off on errands – prising lambs from fences or mending a hedge beyond the
Barrow. And he had had a knack for vanishing onto the Plain whenever I needed to find
him. But in Wilton – now that I wanted him gone – he became impossible to avoid.

I hated him for helping Freda, for putting
his hands on her
waist before I had let him near mine. I hated him for
being there when Father died, for bearing witness to the one thing I wanted to forget.
But the town kept knitting us together, as if we were a pair of terraced houses,
irrevocably joined at the wall. The only way to ensure that I never saw or heard of him
was to lock myself away in our fraying cottage. There I would stare for hours on end at
the maps drawn by the damp across the walls of my bedroom. With my feet propped against
the skirting-board, I would sit and read my makeshift atlas until its hills and valleys
took on the shape of the ones I used to call home.

Pete often came into town to pick up
supplies for the farm. I frequently saw him queuing for sugar or tea with one of the
land girls on my way back from the factory – always the same one. On the few occasions
that he caught me looking, I buried myself in an errand until it was complete. Yet the
more I came across him, the less I could channel myself into an attitude of
indifference.
He can’t have cared much for Freda if he let her run off to
London without him.
I began to concoct excuses for him, rehearsing them over
and over until they resembled the truth. Mama told me to let him be. She didn’t
trust him. But there was something in the rhythm of the factory machines that caused
thoughts to turn over in the mind. Sally used to say the place wasn’t made for
broken hearts. Her fiancé had been killed in action and the machines would not let her
forget it. I resolved to call on Pete after my Thursday-night shift.

I left the factory at sunrise and wove my
way along the shuttered row of shops that lined North Street. As I reached the fringes
of the town, the houses started to take on a different shape, the roofs slowly softening
from tile to thatch. I could feel the rhythm of the factory lagging behind me as I
walked, the whirr of the machines dissipating finally, like an ache in the head.

Only in Coombe could I be free of the
factory’s thud. It was a place with no rhythm: houses half gathered themselves
into a
hamlet yet maintained their distance from each other. It had no
valley to hem its people in, no sudden dip in which journeys could be halted and
forgotten, like in Imber. Instead, it clung loosely to the curve of a river where the
water never paused. It was a place that people passed through in order to reach
somewhere else – never a destination, always a turn in the road. If Pete were to make
anywhere his home, it would be here.