The Sea Change (23 page)

I should not have told Pete about the trip
to the beach but the thought of it welled up inside me so often that I could not let it
rest. I felt uneasy, as if I ought to seek out his anger before I had even committed the
offence. He did not say much. Only that he would not be meeting me at the factory that
day.

When Mama and I heard the sound of the horn
outside the cottage, we gathered our towels and a modest picnic we had assembled from
our rations and clambered into the back of Sam’s van. I watched as the thick-set
trunks of the ash and oak trees thinned into pine, fern and bracken. Wiltshire’s
plains melted into Dorset’s heaths and the colours became more lucid. As I opened
the window of the van, I found I no longer had to pitch my face against the wind.
Rather, I basked in its sand-flecked warmth. It felt like he was taking us home with him
– to somewhere across the sea.

‘Are we expecting an invasion?’
my mother asked, as we stepped onto the dunes at Studland.

‘Not exactly,’ Sam replied,
casting an eye back towards the dozing soldier inside the military booth we had just
passed.

We picked our way across the reed beds and
over a dune to the beach. Large concrete blocks had been placed in the gaps between the
dunes to prevent tanks from journeying inland. Rings of concertina wire reared up from
the sand sporadically like sculpted waves. I shut my eyes and tried not to think of what
they might have done to Imber.

‘Who’s coming in?’ grinned
Sam, pulling his shirt over his head as he spoke. Eyes glued to the shore’s new
armour, I hardly registered what he was saying.

‘Oh, I’m all right, Sam, not
today. You’ll catch your death.’ My mother laughed, lowering herself to the
sand.

‘Vi?’ He looked across at me
hopefully. I shook my head and sat down next to Mama.

‘What’s got into you both this
morning?’ He laughed, striding towards us. He stooped and picked Mama up, tipping
her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.

‘Put me down this instant!’ she
shrieked, pulling at her skirt so that it didn’t ruck up and reveal her petticoat.
I wanted to stop him, tell him to let her go. It didn’t seem right. Not amid the
barbed wire and the concrete. Soon he was holding her over the shallows. She clasped his
neck and begged him to let her go, but the more she protested, the deeper he waded.
Eventually, she wriggled free. I expected her to come straight back out again and demand
to be taken home. But, to my surprise, I heard her laughter blurting skittishly across
the sands.

I brushed the beach from my pinafore and
hurried along the dunes. A bay lay just around the corner of the headland: I would be
hidden from them there. All along the shoreline, patches of shells clung together in
schools. I could feel them sink into the sand under my feet as I forged a path along the
wet part of the beach. I bent down and picked one up. A bivalve. My father knew all the
proper names. I preferred to give them my own names. ‘Helter-skelter’ for
the spiral, cone-shaped ones; ‘Freda fans’ for the ones that resembled
ladies’ fans; and ‘swords’ for the ones my father called scaphopods,
or tusk shells.

The shells here were as numerous as the
flowers on the Plain: visitors to Imber would bring armfuls of its flora back to their
lodgings to make bouquets, marvelling over the number of species that could be found in
a single patch of meadow; they carried the words ‘bird’s foot
trefoil’, ‘bellflower’ and ‘ox-eye daisy’ so carefully on
the tongue, as if an incorrect pronunciation might cause the flowers to wilt. Locals,
however, could brush past a thousand such blooms in the most perfunctory manner – as
I’m sure Studland’s sailors and fishermen glossed
over the
shells. My father would not have been half as interested in shells had he lived near the
sea: each new specimen was as fascinating to him as an unexplored island, full of
foreign markings and structures and smells.

‘Found you!’ called Mama, as she
reached the centre of the bay with Sam.

I was holding a Freda fan. ‘Father
would have liked this one, don’t you think?’ I held it out to my mother.
‘I might put it in his crate.’

She returned my stare for a moment, the
water dripping from her clothes and darkening the sand beneath her feet.

‘I’m sure he would have loved
it,’ Sam chipped in.

‘How do you know?’ I turned from
them and cut a stiff path across the sand. It became drier and thicker near the dunes
and I couldn’t get my feet to move as fast as I wanted them to.

‘You go, Martie. I’ll only anger
her,’ instructed Sam behind me.

‘Martha!’ I shouted back to
them, not dropping my pace. ‘Her name is Martha.’

I returned home from my shift the next day
to find my mother, alone, in the kitchen. She was peeling potatoes in the sink – enough
to feed three.

‘Are we expecting Sam
again?’

‘Darling! You’re home
late,’ she remarked, ignoring my question. She flicked up her wrist to check the
time and turned to face me. ‘Did they make you overrun?’

I nodded. ‘Is it all right if I talk
to you about something, Mama?’

‘Of course, my love.’ She
smiled, placing her knife on the table. Then, clocking my frown, she took a seat.

‘It’s about Sam, you see,’
I said quickly. I watched the minuscule muscles under her eyes tense slightly.

‘What about him?’

‘You’re good
friends … That’s all you are, isn’t it?’

‘What are you asking, Violet?’ Her
eyes widened with something close to fear.

‘Nothing. I’m not
asking … only, you know how people talk.’

‘Vi-vi, remember what Father used to
tell you about gossip?’ she began. ‘It betrays more about the individuals
who indulge in it than the people it purports to be about.’ Her voice was firm but
even the most cursory mention of my father seemed to cause her face to melt.
She
raised the subject, not me
. Putting a hand on her forehead, she stood up and
turned back to the sink. ‘I can’t keep doing it, Vi.’

‘You don’t have to. If you
choose to put an end to it, Sam will understand.’

I crossed the kitchen and drew level with
her, only to discern from the look on her face that she was not talking about Sam.

‘I can’t keep waiting, thinking
we’ll go back to him, back home, when there’s nothing to go back
to.’

I told her not to be silly, that of course
we’d go home. It was what Father would have wanted.

‘Am I always to live my life in this
way? In the shadow of what he would have wanted?’

I stared at her in disbelief. She hung her
head over the sink, a hand planted on each side of it, gazing into its hollow.

‘You’re talking nonsense. Listen
to yourself!’ I cried, my voice fracturing. ‘He loved us. He was prepared to
go to war for us. And this is how we repay him?’ I was pointing at the cutlery on
the table – the place laid for Sam at the head of it. She refused to turn and face
me.

‘None of this would have happened if
Freda was still around,’ she whispered – so quietly that I could barely make out
what she was saying.

‘Are you saying I’m to
blame?’

‘No, that isn’t what I
said.’

‘How can it be my fault? I
wasn’t the one bringing home the
soldiers …’ I would
never have dared to speak to my mother in this manner in Imber, no matter what her
offence. But Father’s death – the war – had made me numb enough to say what I
felt.

Mama’s voice faltered. ‘I
wouldn’t have given in so easily if you hadn’t taken to him so well.
Don’t tell me you didn’t think him charming. I know you did. You still
do.’

I stood in the quiet of the kitchen and
tried to blot out what I was hearing. My mother should have known that, still seventeen,
I was too young to bear any share of the blame, whatever the true extent of my
culpability. But she couldn’t have guessed how her words would play on me for
years, decades afterwards, how they would alter us permanently – more than Sam ever
could.

I begged Mama to telephone Sam at
Fugglestone and postpone dinner, but she thought it would seem impolite at such short
notice. He arrived with a bunch of daisies, which my mother tried her best to coo over,
fumbling around the kitchen to find a vase. It was clear to him from the start of the
evening that something was amiss. I saw it in the way he quietened his voice and
diminished his gestures, asking for the salt rather than reaching across me genially to
take it, like he usually did.

‘The greens are just so,
Martha.’

Mama acknowledged him with a nod.

‘There’ll be carrots and other
things in the garden at Wilton House in July. The cook’s growing a jungle of them
out the back. I’ll ask her to keep some for you.’

‘It’s all right,’ I
intervened. ‘There’s a few on the way in our garden, aren’t there,
Mama?’

She shot me a terse smile.

‘I’m serious. It’d be no
trouble.’

‘We wouldn’t want to put you
out,’ she told him, seeing that he was not going to give up.

Sam frowned.

‘How is your training going?’ my
mother enquired, swiftly changing the subject.

‘Oh, swell. The boys are settling
down. They miss home. But there’s a war to fight …’ He carried on in
this vague manner, desperate to fill the silence that he knew we would have left had he
stopped speaking. As soon as we had finished our food, he stood up to excuse himself,
saying he had an exercise scheduled early tomorrow for which he needed his sleep. I
attended to the dishes in the sink.

‘Sam, before you go, there’s
something we – I … must talk to you about.’

I dropped the plate I was washing and it
sank with a gulp into the water.

‘Vi, will you excuse us?’
continued Mama.

‘I’ll see to the dishes, Mama.
You go into the garden.’

My mother seemed pleased with this
suggestion: it bought her more time. Sam followed her outside. The kitchen window looked
down the length of the lawn and I could just about make out their two figures by the
rockery at the far end. My mother said something, taking a step back from Sam as she
spoke. She put a palm to her mouth and I could tell she was crying. He moved to comfort
her but she raised a hand to stop him coming any nearer. He leant in slowly and kissed
her on the cheek before lumbering back to the house.

‘Goodbye, Violet,’ he said, as
he passed the entrance to the kitchen. I couldn’t bring myself to turn from the
sink. ‘I never meant you any harm.’

I heard the front door close – softly for
once – behind him. My mother was still standing at the end of the lawn, wrapped tightly
in her cardigan, her eyes fixed on the rockery.

May arrived. Everybody sensed that the
forces were preparing for something significant. In the factory, the camouflage we
produced had turned from earthy green to beige – the colour of sand. More American
troops arrived; Wilton House was swarming with them.

My mother no longer visited to serve tea.
She began to bring lunch to the girls in the factory instead. There was something
different in the way she carried herself these days. She had gone back to wearing her
hair in a loose plait and her hands were reassuringly unkempt. She didn’t exhibit
the frantic happiness she had shown with Sam. But the hidden doubt that had marked even
her most heightened moments in the last few months seemed finally to be dissipating. We
couldn’t know for certain whether we would ever return to be with Father in Imber
but, if it came to it, we would be here waiting; Mama would be here, waiting.

One afternoon I was walking home from my
shift when a girl whose face I could not place approached me on the high street.

‘Violet!’ she called, crossing
from the grocer’s to meet me on the other side of the road. As she approached, her
saucer-shaped eyes registered in my mind.

‘Annie! Gosh, is that really
you?’ She had grown taller, helped along by a pair of open-toe high-heeled shoes.
Her face was neatly made-up – a far cry from the lipstick I had smudged over it two
years ago on our way to the dance – and there was a ring on her finger, her fourth
finger. ‘You’re engaged!’ I cried, grabbing her hand and staring into
the opal.

‘Oh it’s not much.’ She
giggled, keeping her hand in mine. ‘David’s promised me a proper ring once
this silly war’s over.’

‘Annie, I’m thrilled for you! So
thrilled! … And how is Devizes treating you?’

‘Do you know? I’m rather
enjoying it, Vi. Except you’re not there, of course!’

‘Well, I did write!’ I
laughed.

‘Oh, you know how pathetic I am with
my letters. I could barely keep up with you when we wrote to Pete, remember? And how is
Pete?’

‘He’s keeping well. He’s
found himself some work on a farm near Coombe Bissett, not too far away.’

‘Do you … Are
you … After that nasty business with Freda …’ She couldn’t
finish her question but I knew what she wanted to ask.