The Sea Change (34 page)

I’m being looked at. I have intruded
into his space without realizing it, bending over the article and moving unsociably
close.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘That’s – I think it’s
someone I know.’ I place an index finger on James’s name.

The man squints at the paragraph. ‘He
did well to survive, poor chap. Do you know him well?’

‘He’s my
daughter’s … I can’t be sure it’s him.’

He frowns. ‘She’s not there too,
is she?’

I don’t answer. Instead I scour the
article desperately for a clue as to where she might be.

‘Look, if there’s anything I can
do …’

I return my eyes to the window and try to
work out how I can get to the hospital in Trivandrum. He’s alive, thank God. And
he’ll know where to look for Alice.

I have never met anyone travelling to India
simply for the sake of it, as he and Alice did. They didn’t need to go and yet I
let them. And for what? For the sake of seeing something new. But she was always like
that, eager to explore, preferring to ask questions with her hands and feet rather than
her mouth.

At the school gate, the other children were
always pestering their mothers with unanswerable questions. Why is the sky blue? Why
don’t birds lie down to sleep? Could I survive a whole day without my hands? But
Alice never asked anything as a child. She was always so assured: nothing caused her to
worry or wonder why. She seemed to accept the facts of life with tranquil measure – or,
at least, she did not need to learn about them from me. After a while, it began to
concern me – the placid silence she cast over every new experience. But then I realized
her questions were of a different kind: I saw the way she walked in pace with a river,
eyes fixed on a particular body of water moving downstream; the way she pressed her hand
to the trunk of a tree until the bark left a mark there. As soon as she could hold a
pencil she would draw all these things – small, delicate drawings that barely took up a
few centimetres on the page. It was as if she didn’t want anybody to see her
explorations, least of all give them words. They were hers and hers alone.

When she did ask questions as a child, it
was always about her father. What animals did he keep on the farm? What did he smell
like? Was he good at sums or spelling at school? These
were the things
that she was unable to discover for herself. She never asked why he had left, or where
he was now – questions I knew she wanted to ask, but to which I did not have the
answers.

The plane hits the concrete with a thump
and a bounce, giving its speed to the wind and docking, finally, in a space near the
terminal. Passport still in hand, I’m hit suddenly by the heat. It presses into my
cheeks, my neck – any part of me on which it can fix its grasp. By the time I reach the
terminal, I have broken out in a sweat. Fans ladle the heat around the building, failing
in every way to make it cooler. Airport staff produce a
déjà vu
of black bags
and leather holdalls, all weathered with the marks of successive journeys. The bags are
piled high on the floor and an official presents one bag at a time to the crowd of
passengers, asking each owner to step forward. I spot my suitcase near the top of the
heap; its unscuffed corners and glistening zip make it stand out from the rest. I wait
for it to be handed over, then scour the concourse for the exit.

Outside the airport, the bustle begins.
There are taxis crowding the road – huge, bulky yellow-roofed things – and men with
steaming trays of fried snacks weaving between the cars. I try to ask a taxi driver for
a lift to the railway station and he sways his head nonchalantly, as if he may or may
not know where it is.

‘Fifty rupees, ma’am,’
demands another.

‘I only have pounds.’ I take out
a five-pound note and show it to him. He beckons to another driver and they talk for a
moment, thrusting hands out for the note and holding it up to the sun. My pulse quickens
at the realization that I am penniless in a country I don’t know, with no way of
reaching the south. We did not have time to think about rupees before I left home.

‘Okay, okay, ma’am.’ He
opens the door to the taxi and ushers me in with my suitcase. It is so hot that my skirt
sticks to
the leather seat. The car gives a guttural shudder and we
hurtle into the city. The place is heady with noise – horns and engines and drum beats.
Roads splinter and join illogically, then disappear into rust-coloured dust. Men in
pressed shirts draw trails in the dirt with their bicycles. One carries a caged,
squawking chicken; another a stack of newspapers; and another still a garland of jasmine
laced over his handlebars.

If I were asked to retrace our route to the
airport, I would not be able to: Delhi is a labyrinth. And if the rest of India follows
suit, I do not know how I will find Alice. Or James, for that matter.

Before she even brought him home, I had
determined not to like him. I had seen him once before – during that nightmarish weekend
when Alice took herself off to the Isle of Wight. He dropped her off on the Sunday
night. I was so relieved to see her that I didn’t glimpse him in the car; he
didn’t come into the house. Perhaps she had warned him about me. If I had known
they were an item, I would have paid more attention. When she finally did bring him home
to meet us, he told us that he was a photographer.

‘Oh, wonderful,’ Tim remarked
out of politeness. ‘Weddings and christenings, that sort of thing?’

‘No … more art, actually. I
focus on travel, culture – the journeys people take.’

It was hard to make head or tail of him. He
wore his hair long – but not so long as to cause concern. I wondered if Alice had asked
him to cut it before coming to see us. It was a miracle, really, that she had brought
him at all – although I did not see it in that way at the time. Even then, I could tell
he adored her. As footloose as he might have been with his travels, he had the look of
someone who was beyond the point of going back. I had learnt over the years the
hallmarks of the ones who loved, and the ones who left.

The train inches down the spine of India
and pulls into the station at Trivandrum. A tussle ensues among the passengers outside
for drivers and taxis. For some reason, they do not seem to be accepting rupees. Pressed
at the back of the crowd with a wodge of notes I retrieved from a bank next to the
station, I have nothing but money to bargain with. I spot a man on a motorbike at the
end of the rank who, perhaps, I can persuade to give me a ride. I lumber towards him
with my suitcase, asking for the hospital and showing him the rupees. Just then, a woman
in turquoise with a baby on her hip brushes past me and climbs onto the back of the bike
– his wife or sister or whoever he was waiting for. He starts up the engine as if to
leave. Then he reaches over and, instead of the notes, takes hold of the water-flask
protruding from my rucksack, motioning for me to climb onto the bike behind his wife and
child. Four on a motorbike, with my suitcase, and no secure way of holding on?
‘Thank you! Thank you so much!’ I say, perching on what little space is left
at the back of the bike and floundering around for something solid to clasp. The woman
in front carries my suitcase and gestures for me to put my hand on her shoulder. She
murmurs something, which I can only assume means hold on tight for, before I know where
I am, we are swerving around a wandering cow and skidding off along the dust-coated
road.

Despite my attempts to explain, the
motorbike deposits me in the middle of town rather than at the hospital, and it takes me
a full hour in the heat to find the right street. I know now why the driver on the bike
took the water instead of the rupees – already my throat feels parched.

The man at the hospital desk asks me for
James’s full name and frowns at his list of admissions.

‘Do you have any water?’ I ask
vaguely.

‘There is no clean water in the town,
madam. The pipes are broken from the wave. We have boiled water for the
patients … Your brother’s nationality, please.’

‘He’s not my –’ I stop
myself. ‘He’s British. He’s around twenty-six years of age and he came
from Kanyakumari.’

‘A moment, madam.’ He disappears
into a back room and I hear him slide open some sort of cabinet. He returns with a file.
‘Wave victims are Ward Three.’

I check Ward Three, followed by two others,
but he is nowhere to be found. The last ward is at the back of the building. There are
so many mattresses in the corridor that it is difficult to reach the far end. The last
patient I pass is curled in on themselves, seeking out a foetal privacy in the nook
between their arms and knees. It is then that I see him, lying on a bed, in the middle
of the last ward. A hollow stare is embedded in his face. One of his eyes is sealed shut
with a bruise, and a large dressing, soaked scarlet, rests on his shoulder. Every knot
of discomfort I have stored up towards him – the blame I have heaped on him for taking
Alice away – starts to loosen. For a brief moment, I see the boy in him, as far away
from home as Alice. James has not yet seen me. And I am suddenly fearful of what I
should say.

Like most of the patients in the room, he
stares inertly at the ceiling. It is a look that distinguishes the victims from those
who, like me, simply belong to the aftermath. Some of them lie in the same wave-stricken
clothes they were wearing when it came. Even if they have been reclothed and bandaged
and washed free of the silt, they still seem marked, set apart somehow.

It is the same look that I saw in my
father’s friends when they returned from the war. I could pick out the men who had
been at the pulse of it without even knowing their name or rank.

Wave or war, it doesn’t matter: they
both leave a ghost in the eyes. It is hard to imagine Alice wearing the same shapeless
expression that I see in James now, even though I know that, somehow, she too will bear
it.

Freda was right when she said that the war
had altered everything. Pete’s homecoming was not what it should have been. Things
didn’t click back into place; they became more fractured.

He returned to Wilton after two months. When
I opened the door to see him standing on the other side of it, I felt nothing but
relief. Any desire to ask after his absence vanished with the sight of him. He had come
back and sought me out and that was all that mattered.

‘I’ve come to collect my
belongings,’ he said, fixing his stare to the doorstep. Any greeting that he did
offer was empty of warmth. I led him upstairs. His pile of possessions rested now at the
foot of the bed that Mama and I shared.

‘You kept my letters,’ I said,
pointing to the shoebox, which I had set apart from the rest. He looked up for the
briefest of moments and I saw in his eyes a fissure of sadness, or shock, perhaps, at my
candour.

‘You had no right to go through my
trunk.’ His manner was uncertain.

‘It was too heavy for Mama and me to
carry … and the farmer’s wife insisted we take your belongings. She said
you’d lost your job.’

He seemed impatient suddenly, as if deciding
that he had already stayed too long. ‘Where will you find work?’ I
asked.

‘Violet, please, it’s best if
you don’t – If you could help me carry everything down the stairs, I’ll be
on my way.’

‘But where are you staying? I’ll
walk there with you. You won’t be able to carry it all by yourself.’

He fidgeted reluctantly at my suggestion but
then, after a pause, relented. He was staying at the Pembroke Inn. We ferried his
belongings down from the bedroom until only the box
of letters
remained upstairs. I turned to go back for them but he stopped me.

‘Keep the rest. I’ve no
need …’

I reddened and busied myself with his
possessions, loading them into two old sacks which I had retrieved from the larder.

‘Pete,’ I murmured, once we had
set off towards the inn. ‘Please tell me – what’s the matter?’