The Sea Change (28 page)

I tried to gather them together quickly from
their drying places but already I could hear movement above me. Mama’s footsteps
sounded on the landing.

‘Violet?’ She put a hand on the
banister to steady herself, knocking two books from their perch. ‘What in the name
of –’

‘I’m drying them,’ Freda
interrupted curtly, from the kitchen doorway. ‘You’re fortunate. Most of
them can be salvaged.’

‘Put them away this instant!’
shouted Mama. ‘Do you hear me?’

‘But they’re Father’s
–’

‘I said put them away!’ she
cried, tears journeying down her cheeks.

Freda stooped in practised obedience towards
one of the books on the hall floor. Then she paused. ‘No.’ She retracted her
arm. ‘They’re not going back in the cellar. Not on my watch.’ She
stood up again, empty-handed, and shot me a glance.

‘You insolent girl!’ shrieked
Mama. I had never seen her in such a state. My mother picked up the book nearest to her
– a slim French dictionary that had fallen from the banister onto the stairs – and
hurled it towards Freda. She tried to duck but it struck her clean on the temple. She
put a hand to her head and stared up at Mama with incredulity. Mama sank onto the step
beneath her and let her head drop into her hands. As I hurried to
the stairs to comfort her, I heard the front door open and close with the smallest of
clicks.

‘I’m sorry,’ breathed
Mama. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I
whispered. ‘I’ll see to the books.’

I spent the rest of the morning ferrying
armfuls of my father’s library down to the cellar again, savouring the feel of
their fire-warm covers on my fingers. The heat they had gained from the house quickly
dissipated in the cool of the cellar and it took several journeys before the final pile
of books was laid to rest. I kept back
The Secret Garden
, which Freda had read
over and over as a girl. I put it under her pillow, like Mary’s key behind its
brick.

Later that day, Freda came to meet me at the
end of my shift. I emerged from the factory to see her standing next to the gate. Even
from a distance, she did not look herself. Her shoulders were hunched and her head
drooped. She had always been lanky, but the years had taught her to wear her height well
and with grace. Today it seemed that her limbs had grown too cumbersome and heavy for
her; she held herself in a way that suggested she wanted, just for an hour, to consume
less space.

As I began my approach, I saw Pete rounding
the corner of the road outside. I thought about carrying on. Of meeting them there – of
suffering his awkwardness and her disdain. And afterwards I thought about what might
have happened had I joined them sooner. But, feeling my face burn at the sight of them,
I slipped behind a wall and watched him draw near to the gate.

He stopped short of Freda and nodded a stiff
greeting. When she looked up, something strange happened. All her fancy ways vanished
for a moment and she seemed lost, suddenly, like a child. Pete drew closer. He raised a
hand to her temple – the place where the book had struck. I flinched against the wall,
heart knocking at my ribs, as if asking to be let out. When I
stole
another look at the gate, they were talking normally again – an indifferent distance
installed once more between them. I wondered for a moment whether I had imagined his
touch.

I left the wall and walked towards them.
Pete must have felt the silence frost up between Freda and myself because he made his
excuses and arranged to call round the following day. Like Pete, I found my eyes jarring
on the purple knoll of flesh that had puffed up above Freda’s eye. I, too, wanted
to reach out and nurse it, cover it, undo it.

‘Is Pete living in Wilton?’ she
asked, watching him make his way down the road.

‘Are you all right, Freda?’ I
reached towards her temple but she raised an arm to stop me.

‘I’m catching the early train
back to London tomorrow. I shan’t bother you and Mama any longer.’

We walked in silence back to the house. As
we reached the front door, she turned to me and said, ‘Pete comes to see you at
the factory quite often, doesn’t he?’

I nodded.

‘A boy doesn’t do a thing like
that unless he likes a girl. You should know that.’

She left for London without saying goodbye
to Mama. She would not let me accompany her to the station. But when I went to strip the
bed and wash the sheets, I found that the book under her pillow had gone, along with the
key to the locked cellar. If his books were to be consigned to a slow, damp death, then
the least she could do was allow them to rest in peace.

Terse waves nudge the shore. The sun
suspends its bulb at the apex of the sky and lights the sea in a coral blue. If it
weren’t for the debris, you would be forgiven for thinking that the waves were
harmless – a watchful mother singing to sleep the bodies on the shore.

Here, on the beach, I can see the spot where
James and I deposited our bags on the sand and sunbathed the day away. Having been boxed
together in the train for two days, we stretched out our limbs in the breeze and
absorbed the sky.
Getting married in the morning
. Even I was dizzy with the
thought of it. He asked whether he should telephone my mum to ask her permission. I
ignored the question. But he rolled over on the sand and repeated it.

‘It’s traditional to ask the
father, isn’t it?’ I sighed.

‘I think she would appreciate
it.’

‘We don’t owe it to her,
though.’ I sat up. ‘Not after …’ The movement covered him in a
thin shower of sand.

‘She still cares for you.’

‘I’ve told you how paranoid she
gets. It’s not worth the bother.’

‘True. She might panic …’
He propped himself up on his elbow and dusted the sand from his shirt. ‘What about
your father? Do you have any way of contacting him?’

‘He could be dead for all I
know.’

‘She must miss him, in spite of
everything.’

‘Yeah, well. What’s done is
done.’

‘Have you ever thought about looking
for him?’

I pulled my legs up to my chest and rested
my forehead on my hands, nursing my eyes in the shade of my own limbs.

‘You must have thought about
it …’

‘I used to.’

‘What’s changed?’

‘He wouldn’t want me to find
him.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Yes, but … I kind of do.
Someone once showed me this photograph of him …’

‘And?’

‘I don’t know … I
guess, just seeing him older … it made me realize that he’d survived
without me all this time. I realized he actually existed. Before that, I could sort of
get away with treating him as if he was imaginary, or something.’

‘Who showed it to you?’

‘I was only twelve. I can’t
remember,’ I lied. I leant back and dug my elbows into the sand. ‘It
doesn’t matter now, does it? Not really.’

‘Did your mum see it too?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I have you
now.’ I reached for his hand and laid my head on his shoulder.

I thought of James’s family, of the
bustle around their kitchen table in London, the meals, the holidays and the bare-faced
arguments about things as small as who borrowed whose socks. Mum and I must strike him
as an offbeat pair – my mother as fixed as a limpet and me as absent as my missing dad.
We don’t fit together like a family, the pair of us – even with Tim around to
masquerade as a father. I couldn’t bring myself to tell James that the meagre
facts I’d been given about my dad had been frayed by his sister’s visit.
How, when I was older, I’d dug out the telephone number she had given me when I
was twelve and asked everything that I was burning to ask.

I should have told Mum but it would have
made her worse. If I gave her another layer, another knot to set about
untying … she’d crack. And I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I
didn’t understand then that it was she who had the bigger secrets.

At the foot of the beach, the sea heaves
itself onto the shore and unloads more water onto the sand. It has been three days since
the wave came and still new debris washes up. I do not sit down to watch. I stay on my
feet so that, if the water keeps coming, I can turn. And run.

It didn’t take much to convince my
father’s sister to tell me what she knew. I was nineteen when I called her. I had
hoped that my curiosity about him would vanish with age. But, like the debris, my
questions seemed to keep arriving.

Another wave breaks. It nudges at a girder
on the sand. Spills over it. And then retreats.

She had told me that my father was given
away when he was born. She’d said it would have been better for
‘Peter’ if his mother had never tried to contact him again.
Mum was a
complicated woman, Alice
. Complex. A complicated character. She kept repeating
it down the phone, as if she herself needed reminding.

The sea lets go of its breath for a second
time. It sifts through the contents of the beach, drenching my feet and departing again,
in seconds.

Even as a boy, Dad had tried to remove
himself to places that his mother’s letters couldn’t reach, marooning
himself in Imber in the hope that she might leave him alone. But she kept on burdening
him with her regrets, sending him note after note but never once visiting. The child in
him couldn’t quell the thought that she might one day come to fetch him.

This time, the water brings more debris with
it – a net, a wooden beam and a saucepan that it fills and empties, fills and
empties.

My father, she told me, left Wiltshire the
moment his mother asked to see him in London. He was a grown boy. The war was ending.
And she thought he deserved the truth.

Water gathers. And pauses. The sand glistens
like a mirror.

Pete traced the address she had given him
and found her in a flat near Clissold Park.

The wave breaks. Expires. Shrinks.

Inside his mother’s flat, living with
her all this time, was a daughter she had kept and loved and reared. And Pete, whom she
had left to roam, could not be consoled – least of all by a family he had never
known.

The sea leaves. Empty. I have no pity left
to give him – this strange, misshapen shadow, who gave me breath and left me, as if I
were simply another piece of debris.

I continue down the beach to search for
James. If only I could find him we could start something new. Something fresh and
simple, with no ties to before. But there’s always the sea. Always the wake. With
its washing up of things that we can’t forget.

‘Check the lost-and-found
board,’ a rescue worker tells me at the neck of the beach. ‘They will not
have dealt with his body unless it has been named. And if he’s alive, it might be
listed there.’

The board is already thick with
hand-scrawled notes: newspaper, book covers, fragments of posters have all been
reclaimed from the debris and written on with whatever pen the rescue workers provide.
Each note details people who have been found alive or dead or others who are missing.
People are dividing them into two sections: missing and found. The missing board is five
or six layers thick with paper. But the found board is all but empty; the lines of
bodies in front of the boards need no note.

One of the rescue workers holds back a crowd
clamouring to get closer. Arms outstretched, she lets two or three through her grasp at
a time. Once at the board, they rifle through the paper, lifting each scrap, like the
lid of a box, to peer at the note underneath.

I tear a page from James’s
Moby-Dick
paperback and, taking a pen from the woman in front, scrawl down
the bare facts – bones without flesh. He has sandy hair, I write. He is British. Tall.
Last seen in a blue-and-green-striped shirt. It has become harder and harder to picture
him alive and well in front of me so
I resort to listing anonymous
colours. I am not the only one. Most of the notes are written in a giddy mesh of Tamil.
But there are three I can understand:

Natasha Farrant. Blonde hair, tight short curls, British, 24 years of age. Brown
eyes. Has a one-inch scar on her left ankle. If found, please bring to the
hospital.

Francois Dupont: Il a les cheveux maron et il portait une chemise verte le matin
du vague. Nationalité: français.

And underneath the note in French, I
read:

Alice Peak (née Fielding), wife of James Peak, disappeared from the Saravo
guesthouse on the morning of the wave. British. Red hair. Pale complexion.
Please contact the British Deputy High Commission in Madras if found. Telephone
42192251.

I snatch the paper from the board. Somebody
knows I’m here. It’s not James’s handwriting but they mention him by
name. They’re calling me his wife. He must have spoken to them. Is he in Madras? I
don’t even know how to get to Madras from here.
Telephone 42192251.
My
heart sinks. All the lines are down: surely they know that? My only hope is the woman at
the tea stall. I push through the crowd and make for the hill. I’m not running
from the wave this time but towards the thought of him living and breathing in another,
untouched, city.