The Sea Change (19 page)

Mama did not like to talk about the past.
And Sam learnt not to ask. As far as he was concerned, we had lived in Wilton all our
lives. He guessed what he could about my father but Mama never spoke of Imber or the
accident. Despite her guardedness, I became greedy for details about Sam – what he had
done before the war and what he would do after; what the cities in America were like and
how much he missed home. Mama loved to listen to him talk and, while she refrained from
asking him questions, she was secretly glad of mine.

After a while, she started to do her hair
differently. She bought pins and a net from town. It puzzled me for weeks – the neat bun
at the back of her head. Among Imber’s farmers, she had never fussed over her
looks for fear of being accused of having too much time on her hands: her hair had
roamed free in strands across her face and she had had no qualms about letting the sun
brown her skin. Father had liked it that way. Yet she had taken
to
wearing wide-brimmed hats of late while tending the vegetables in the garden. And,
despite the soil, her fingernails were always kept filed and clean.

I caught Sam once, removing one of the pins
from her hair. He backed away calmly when I entered the room, as if he didn’t mind
the disturbance. ‘It was giving her a headache,’ was his placid excuse. My
mother was more flustered, swivelling towards the sink and turning on the tap, as if the
sound could blot out the memory of what I had just seen.

One night in March, when the sirens wailed
across the town, I was on a night shift in the factory. The supervisors were stubborn
with their evacuation orders, ordering us out of the building only when they could see
the bellies of the planes opening above them and the baskets beginning to fall. Quotas,
it seemed, were more important than limbs. I watched Sally’s eyes widen with fear
opposite me as she restarted her sewing-machine under the whine of the sirens. We all
knew we’d go up in flames as fast as a box of kindling, were anything to land on
us.

I was about to return to my work when I
spotted Sam at the door, out of breath and arguing with the supervisor. I couldn’t
hear what he was saying: the noise of the machines stamped out their discussion. But he
caught my eye from across the factory floor.

Before he could be stopped, he strode over
to me and took my hand. ‘Martha sent me. We’ve got to get into a shelter,
they’re aiming for the factory and you’ll be done for if you stay
here!’

‘I can’t leave the girls!’
I yelled, over the hammer of the machinery, glancing across at Sally, who had stood up,
bemused.

‘Violet, I’m serious,’ he
urged. ‘We have to get you out!’

Before I could stop him, his hand had locked
itself onto one of mine and he dragged me through a door at the far end of the floor,
swearing loudly when he found himself in the supply cupboard. He pulled his jacket
sleeve over a clenched fist and
smashed through the window at the
back, lifting me up and pushing me through the gap as if he were posting a parcel. I cut
my leg on the glass and the blood trickled down the back of my calf, like the stocking
lines I’d once drawn on myself to impress Pete. Sam followed me.

We ran as fast as we could down three
blacked-out streets to my front door, the sirens still cawing dizzily over our heads.
Mama was already inside the shelter, peering out of the opening. ‘I thought
you’d never come!’ she shrilled, as we climbed down inside with her. I
assumed she was talking to Sam but it was me she pulled into her chest, so close that I
could feel the breath shuddering up from her lungs.

We couldn’t see the sky from the
shelter. We didn’t need to, though, to know when an incendiary was on its way. The
inside of the shelter would glow orange so that, for a few seconds, you could see
everyone’s face. It was as if somebody had struck a match and held it up to find
their way. The illuminations happened five or six times as each bomb fell. We watched in
shock as one landed in the garden, near to our timber-framed porch. Before Mama could
protest, Sam jumped out of the shelter and emptied rainwater from the wheelbarrow over
it, my mother all the while screaming for him to get back inside.

‘I’m not having you risk your
life over that shabby excuse for a house,’ she chastised him, in the darkness. I
listened to her words dissolve without an echo into the dirt walls and floor.

‘Don’t think they’ll find
you another, Martie, if you get hit,’ Sam warned. ‘If you’re not
careful, there won’t be a home for him to come back to.’

I could feel my mother’s horror,
hooking darkly onto his words.

‘You know full well he’s not
coming back,’ Mama replied, as another basket inflamed the sky. ‘You
don’t need me to tell you he’s dead. Did you think I would – What kind of
wife do you think I am?’

I had to bite back the urge to exit the
shelter and run. Sam, for once, stayed silent.

While we waited for more incendiaries to
fall, I tried to turn my mind to the girls spilling through the factory door. The
shelters were at least two hundred yards away. At least. The quick ones might have made
it. It depended on how much time they were given. But even if they did reach them, they
were far from safe: the shelters were full to bursting with rolled carpets and folded
tarpaulin stacked like tapers waiting to be lit; nobody within a stone’s throw
would stand a chance.

A fire of that size, they said, would be
seen as far away as Lavington. I thought of the Archams, asleep in their makeshift
cottage. The sky outside their bedroom would gain an orange tint; a new sun would ink
its way into the east. And Mrs Archam would sit up and wonder, without knowing for
certain, whether it was morning.

A man in a white
lungi
is the
first to notice a quiver in the wreckage. By the time he gets my attention, everything
around us is shifting from left to right. I crouch on my knees and ride the movements as
best I can, hands pressed on the stones. There is nothing firm to hold on to. People
stumble, lowering themselves to the ground, clamping hands on loose beams, running from
the shade of shaking walls. I ride each sideways swing until the debris settles and
breathes out powder. The dust brings to mind those frigid Wiltshire mornings where it
was cold enough to watch our own breath – steam seeping from our lips, like the clouds
from the cracks beneath me. I can’t quite grasp how I’ve been flung so
quickly from one to the other.

The land quietens. And I can walk again.

There’s a tug on my shoulder. Someone
points to the sea. Two women on the same patch of rubble have stood up to examine the
horizon. With a shout to the crowd, they hurry in the opposite direction to the beach.
The man in the
lungi
beside me mutters a few words, then scarpers after the
women, a lick of fear on his face.

‘Sister. They say another wave is
coming,’ says a voice to my right. It is the woman who deciphered my
dosa
orders.

‘But how do they know?’

She holds up a hand and shakes her head.
‘No truth.’

I stare at the tide of people leaving. Then
I glance back at her; she steadies herself and placidly attends to her silt-covered
dupatta
, which has lost its pins and come loose. There has already been one
wave. How can I rule out another? The water didn’t just come and go, after all. It
arrived and kept on coming.
I head for the hills, walking at first and
then, as the fear takes hold and I remember how little time it gave me, I break into a
run.

Further up the hill, the wreckage thins. For
the first time, I see trees whose roots have held them steady. The town shrinks into a
dizzy map beneath me: the wave has left vague traces of streets and half-drawn walls but
everything seems blurred and unfinished. I begin to wish I knew the place better.
Perhaps then I could piece it together in my mind. Everything that was built by human
hands – the huts, the streets, the temples – has vanished. Only the Vivekananda Rock
remains, knuckle-stubborn, next to the shore. It was the first object in the path of the
wave; it took the brunt of its punch and yet there it is, wet and glistening, as if it
has received nothing more than a ritual washing.

The climb quickens my breath and I think
suddenly of Mum, dragging me up that ridge in Westbury to see the White Horse. When I
was younger, I wanted to know why they had carved a horse of all creatures into the
chalk of the ridge. I didn’t ask Mum; I just let the question simmer inside me,
hoping she’d give away the answer one day. She never told me useful things, only
that, as a girl, she used to dream that the horse had galloped away. I pictured it
freeing itself from the surface of the hill, shaking the chalk from its mane and
cantering to Warminster.

‘Dad might have liked it up
here,’ I said to her, as we neared the crest of the ridge. I would do this all the
time when I was younger – make up statements about him and test them on her in the hope
that they were true. Mum would either let out a cooped-up laugh or nod silently. I
learnt from an early age that she could talk about my dad only when we were up high –
able to see everything in its context. ‘Why did he go away?’

She stopped still, just short of the
horse’s front hoof. ‘He didn’t know you when he left. You
weren’t born yet.’

‘Would he have stayed if he
did?’

The fields knitted themselves together in a
quilt beneath the haze. Mum kept quiet.

‘Did he like it up here?’ I
tried again.

‘I don’t know, Alice. There are
so many things I don’t know.’

I have never searched for him. Not like
I’m searching for James now. With James, I have the smell of his skin, encrypted
with years of smoke, and the colour and texture of his shirt. With my father, I have
nothing. No place to start except a worn-out photograph and a conversation with his
sister. Like Mum, I kept the thought of him buried, afraid of what I might unearth. When
I got older, my questions dried up. I stopped climbing the hill with her because I no
longer wanted to know. She never lied to me but, in my own way, I had grown tired of her
circumventing the truth.

The debris beneath the hill loses detail in
the distance and I wonder if I am high enough now to escape another wave. At the
roadside, a woman is serving tea from a makeshift stall. She ferries pans of steaming
water from the house behind her and pours the tea into whatever container she can find.
All around the house, people are drinking out of pans and bowls and empty turmeric jars
tinged yellow from the spice.

‘Thank you,’ I whisper, as she
passes me a bowl with tea in it.

‘Where do you live? USA?’ she
asks. I’m surprised to hear fluent English.

‘No, I’m from England. Is this
your house?’

‘Yes, it is my husband’s house.
London?’

‘Yes. But I’ve only just moved
there.’

‘Sure, sure,’ she says, nodding.
‘My daughter. She lives in London. And we visit. You’re staying in India
only you, sister?’

‘I – No, I came with …’ I
find myself clutching my ring, ‘But I don’t know where he is.’

‘Don’t worry.’ She smiled,
taking hold of my ringed hand from the other side of the stall. I step back. ‘Your
husband is here. Outside,’ she continues, once she has caught my eye.

‘James?’ I ask, incredulous.

She tips her head from right to left.
‘Come.’

I cup a hand to my mouth, trying to stop the
hope hopscotching inside me. She leads me into the garden of the house and approaches a
figure stooped over a cup of tea with his back to us. He looks broader than James. But
the hope won’t be quelled.

‘Here,’ she says, tapping him on
the shoulder. ‘Your husband.’

He turns to face us. ‘Can I
help?’ he asks, in a European accent.

I want to cry. ‘I’m sorry,
there’s been a mistake.’ I turn back to the woman.

She creases her eyes into a narrow frown,
unsettled at the thought of not being able to match us up. Taking my hand again, she
leads me inside the house. I’m glad of it. I can’t bear to stay and make
conversation.

We enter an echoing room with a cool,
terracotta floor and I listen to the peel and clip of her flip-flops on the tiles. She
stops at the centre, pulling me in towards her with a soft tug on my shirt. ‘I
call my brother in London, sister, and they know nothing. They hear about the wave only
yesterday,’ she murmurs.

‘You have a telephone?’

She raises a finger to her lips. ‘No,
but my husband – he has a booth. Very bad line, sister.’

‘I’ll pay you. Please. I mean, I
just need to get through to home.’

‘For oversea telephone you have to
make a booking,’ she says, ‘and the line is coming and going. But we
help,’ she continues. ‘I will finish with the tea and then I will take
you.’ She turns towards the kitchen and bats me away gently with her hand.

The muscles in my chest stiffen. They know
about the wave back home. Mum and Tim have no idea that I’m in Kanyakumari. We
told them that Delhi was the furthest south we would go.
A wave came …
Nothing seems adequate.
We heard about it on the news
,
they’ll say,
as if that counts as having seen it. There is no way of explaining and no one at home
who will
understand about James – too much to squeeze through a
crackling handset.