The Sea Change (27 page)

‘But he doesn’t even
realize,’ I murmur.

‘He knows,’ says the woman saved
by the python. ‘He knows.’

Freda sent word that she had been granted
leave and was to come home for two weeks. My mother fussed terribly about the house,
sweeping and dusting for days before my sister’s train was due to arrive. She kept
pulling me over to fret about holes or patches of damp, which I knew had always been
there but to her seemed new. No amount of scrubbing or shifting of furniture would hide
them.

On the afternoon of her arrival, Mama
buttoned herself into her best dress. She painted her face and saw to her nails. But the
more immaculate she made herself, the more it seemed as if we had something to hide. The
dress I had borrowed from Annie for my trip to the tip with Pete was still hanging in
the wardrobe. I decided Mama would look even more out of place if I did not put it
on.

We arrived at the station almost an hour
before my sister’s train was due, just in case she came early. At twenty-nine
minutes past five, a flurry of air pushed itself along the tracks. We took each
other’s hands and Mama held her breath. I wanted to tell her that she did not need
to worry that I would talk to Freda about Sam. Yet I was not entirely sure of what it
was that I was vowing, however silently, to keep secret.

Mama, I knew, would change the subject
instantly if I reassured her about it directly; she would simply have denied that we had
anything to hide. So I stayed silent, hoping that she would deduce where my loyalties
lay from the affection that I had stowed in a fresh batch of tea, chopped firewood and a
swept hearth. And it was just a visit – Freda had made that clear in her letter. How
hard could it be to keep a secret for two
weeks? She had no intention
of returning to us for good and, besides, there was no home to return to.

Father’s death had sent my sister off
kilter in a way nobody could have imagined. I tried to reassure myself that, had she
stayed, she too would have taken to Sam; she would have acted exactly as I had done. I
kept scanning the house for any remnant of his presence; my mother, I discovered, had
already seen to his note, hiding it under the lining of her chest of drawers. She could
have found a better place for it or even taken a match to it; a simple search of the
house had yielded it easily into my hands and I was worried that, should her suspicions
be aroused, Freda might be rewarded equally readily. I took it from the drawer and hid
it under the mattress.

I checked myself. She had no reason to
suspect that anything was amiss. She was too wrapped up in London, I surmised, to spare
a thought for the changes that might have occurred in Wilton.

Not a word passed between us as the train
approached, only a tightening of the hands.

‘I’m so happy she’s coming
home,’ Mama whispered, her voice conveying a different message from her muscles,
which flexed and tensed, shifted and stiffened. It took us a while to pick out Freda
from the other passengers, the steam and the porters’ bronze trolleys.

‘Mama! Vi!’ We heard a shout
from the other end of the platform. There she was, still in her nurse’s uniform,
walking towards us, bag in hand. She embraced us tightly and planted a kiss on my cheek
as if no time had passed at all.

‘Oh, I have missed you both!’
she cried, taking my mother’s arm and handing me her bag when I offered to carry
it for her.

‘Wait, Freda, we must see to the rest
of your luggage.’ My mother cast an eye around the platform for a suitcase.

‘Don’t you worry, Mama. A
weekend bag is all I need. I can’t
stay long, you see.
There’s so much to tell you about. I hardly know where to start!’

I glanced at Mama, who looked away.

Freda barely stopped to take a breath on the
bus from the station. She told us about the dinner dances she had been to and the
soldiers that she had treated on the ward – how brave they were, and charming. I thought
of the jar of pickled onions she had devoured before leaving. She described the bomb
scares and how everyone took shelter together in the Underground and what an atmosphere
there was down there. She told us how dear the other nurses in the hospital were to her.
She had made the best of friends – so many people to choose from in the city. ‘Not
like Imber!’ I could almost hear her say.

‘And how is Wilton?’ she asked,
after a while, the pace of her chatter slowing for a moment. I waited for my mother to
answer but she stayed quiet.

‘It’s perfectly adequate. We
have all that we need here, don’t we, Mama?’

We stepped off the bus on North Street and
completed the short walk back to the cottage. On the doorstep, Mama fished in her
handbag for the front-door key. I watched as Freda glanced to the end of the street
where some soldiers were making their way into the Pembroke Inn.

‘What are troops doing in
Wilton?’ She frowned. ‘I thought you’d be out of the way
here.’

‘Wilton House is the army’s
Southern Command,’ explained my mother. ‘Although nobody is supposed to
know, of course.’

‘And we make equipment for the troops
in the factory,’ I added, ‘tarpaulin and camouflage mainly.’

Freda tutted. ‘Mama, that kind of work
is for labourers’ daughters, not for girls like Vi. How could you let her do it?
She should have come to London and become a nurse with me.’

‘Not all of us have the privilege of
waltzing off to the capital at the first sniff of a war,’ responded my mother.
Freda fell silent.

Having found the key, Mama fumbled with the
lock. She frowned at the door as if it were new to her and we were just moving in.
Sensing Freda’s eyes on her, she could not steady her fingers enough to match the
key to the lock. When the door finally swung back to reveal the damp on the walls and
the cracks in the ceiling, Freda could only offer a sharp intake of breath. We showed
her upstairs and deposited her bag in the one watertight bedroom, where my mother and I
usually slept.

‘You’ll have to share the bed
with Violet, I’m afraid. Unless you want to wake up with rain on your
face.’

‘Or worse.’ I laughed.
‘There are pigeons in the roof.’

My sister did not look amused. ‘But
where will you sleep, Mama?’ she asked, running a hand over the flaking paint on
the doorframe.

‘Don’t worry about me. I sleep
lightly these days as it is. I’ll be comfortable enough in the living
room.’

Mama made potato floddies for dinner. Freda
was full of questions about the evacuation and the factory and, worse, my mother’s
work at Wilton House. I scraped my fork around my plate to try to cover up our lack of
answers. By the time we reached pudding – stewed apple – she had given up.

‘Whatever became of that Pete
fellow?’ she asked, in an attempt to make one of us talk. It was a poor choice of
subject. I felt my face whiten.

‘He’s working on a farm near
Coombe,’ replied my mother – resolute in volunteering no more information than was
required of her.

‘Do you see much of him?’ Freda
directed this question towards Mama but I knew for whom it was meant.

‘Violet and he go walking
sometimes …’

I felt exposed suddenly, and wished Mama had
not spoken.

Freda let out a sigh. ‘You can do far
better than a farm boy, Vi. You’re eighteen, you have a good figure. You should be
out and about with an officer.’

‘I don’t –’

‘They aren’t exactly in short
supply here.’

‘That’s quite enough,’
exclaimed my mother. ‘Not at the dinner table. Anyone would think you’d left
your manners behind in London, Freda.’

‘I shan’t waste niceties on
Violet, Mama. She needs to be told. Otherwise she’ll end up old and
alone.’

‘Better old and alone than a
good-for-nothing busybody,’ I muttered.

‘I’m going to fetch some
firewood from the shed,’ Mama began, ignoring this last exchange and picking up
her empty bowl. ‘When you two have grown up enough to join me in the living room,
I would welcome the company.’ Then she scraped her chair across the tiles,
deposited her cutlery in the sink and left the kitchen.

‘Don’t tell me you
actually
care for him?’ Freda leant across the table.

I looked up from my bowl. ‘As a matter
of fact, I do. I cared for him as far back as that daft dance you made him take you to.
And I care for him now. More than ever.’

I watched as Freda’s features became
unsettled. She rearranged them, seconds later, into a picture of calm.

‘You’re not still upset about
all that, are you? It was years ago, Violet!’

‘I didn’t say I was
upset.’

‘Look, Imber was such a small place. I
wasn’t exactly spoilt for choice back then. London has taught me to be
more … what’s the word? Discerning.’

‘Listen to yourself! What would Father
think?’

Her gaze flitted away from mine and found it
had nowhere to go. Eventually it settled on the kitchen floor. ‘He’d warn
you not to repeat your sister’s mistakes, that’s what he’d do,’
she said quietly. ‘To keep your heart safe for someone worthy of it.’

‘He wouldn’t mind who I loved,
Freda, you know that. As
long as they had a good character. He
wouldn’t care if they were a Whistler or an Archam, landed or
penniless.’

She frowned into her bowl. ‘You do
know he’ll never marry you.’

‘You can’t be sure of
that.’

‘He’s a drifter,’
continued Freda. My hand tensed around the handle of my spoon. ‘You knew that from
the start. He won’t settle, Vi, least of all with you – you belong back in
Imber.’

‘How do you know? You haven’t
the foggiest idea what it’s been like. You’ve been away.’ I could feel
myself reddening and, in spite of my resolve, my eyes filled. She crossed to the other
side of the table and slipped her arms around my neck. I tried to push her away but she
leant into my ear and made the same ssshing sound she used to make to her dolls when
putting them to bed in the parsonage.

‘I wish I’d been here,’
she mused. ‘But I can’t very well undo it now, can I?’

Later, in bed, she rolled over and
whispered, ‘The parsonage, Vi-vi. What’s become of it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I
muttered, keeping my back to her. ‘Don’t pretend to care. You didn’t
even write.’

‘That doesn’t mean I don’t
miss it.’

I pulled the eiderdown further over my
shoulders.

‘I’m sure they’ll keep
everything in order, Violet. The Major wouldn’t let anything happen.’

‘The Whistlers left too. Everybody
did.’

‘But what about Imber
Court?’

‘They boarded it up.’

Freda’s breath became weightier.

‘We’re not allowed on the Plain
any more,’ I continued, ‘but I went to one of the beaches they’ve
taken in Dorset. You should have seen it. It was all cut up with wire and cartridges and
concrete. I hate to think what they’ve done to the valley.’

‘Oh, don’t.’ She sighed.
‘How awful.’ I felt myself getting angry at this outburst of concern for a
place she had been so ready to discard. ‘And to think Father’s buried
there.’ She paused. ‘Where are his things, Violet? They weren’t
downstairs when I looked.’

Throat tightening, I turned away and feigned
tiredness.

‘They must be
somewhere …’

‘It’s late – you’re
exhausted from your journey.’

‘Violet, you didn’t leave them
behind, did you?’

‘No … Never.’

‘Then where are they?’

‘Mama put them in the
cellar … for safe-keeping.’ I gripped the edge of the quilt.

‘The cellar?’ she exclaimed,
sitting bolt upright. ‘Haven’t you seen the damp?’ She clambered out
of bed and pulled on a dressing-gown. Taking a candle from the chest of drawers, she
swept towards the stairs. I had no choice but to follow.

‘How could you let her?’ she
cried, as she descended the cellar steps and held her light over the boxes of books.
Thrusting the flame at me, she bent down and tore open the cardboard, picking up a slim
volume of Gerard Manley Hopkins from the top layer. Its blue cover had been defaced by a
watermark that ran like a wave from corner to corner and darkened the binding of the
spine. The pages inside rippled up from their neighbours instead of lying flat –
backbones crooked from the constant cycle of damp and dry air.

I couldn’t answer her. Instead I
turned and left the cellar for bed. Upon reaching the landing, I felt the inside of me
sink down towards the boxes. It was worse than I had feared; the absence of light. In
bed, I shut my eyes but did not sleep; I thought only of Mama and Sam, lifting the boxes
and carting them down the cellar steps – with me, a shadow, watching in the hallway,
unable to say a word.

Freda did not come back to bed that night. I
awoke to find her
side of the mattress empty. I dressed quickly and
went downstairs to make the tea, hoping that I would find her in the kitchen. As I
descended the stairs, my hand came to rest not on the banister but on a book: its cover
and spine were splayed like a seesaw across the wooden rail. There were more following
it. Downstairs, the window-sills, the crown of the grandfather clock, the sofas and the
backs of the chairs were all covered with open books. It felt as if a bomb had been
detonated in the cellar, causing the contents of the boxes to sparrow up into the body
of the house and come to rest on every spare surface they could find. A fire had been
lit, although it was only eight o’clock in the morning, and the books basked in
the heat.