The Sea Change (4 page)

‘You might as well, Vi! They’re
your words, after all.’

If it was going to have my name on it and he
was going to be reading it, it had to be perfect. The very idea of his eyes scanning the
paper made my stomach swell and my head giddy. I gave in on the condition that we wrote
the entire letter again.

‘But we’ve just spent all
afternoon writing the first one!’ she exclaimed.

I took out a fresh sheet of paper and tried
to quell a blush.

‘You like him too, don’t
you?’ She giggled. ‘I don’t blame you. You’re the last girl in
the village to give way.’

Pete showed no sign of having received the
letters at first. But then, after we had written three or four, he began to write
replies.

‘The Parsonage?’ Annie lamented,
as she read the address on the front of his first envelope. ‘But it was my idea to
write to him.’

I kept quiet.

‘Look,’ she said, running a
finger over his first line. ‘Dear
Violet
and Annie. Why’s your name
first?’

‘I’m certain he didn’t
mean anything by it,’ I murmured.

‘Yes, but your name’s first and
that means he
thought
of you first.’

‘That’s daft,’ I told her,
wishing it wasn’t.

‘It’s your hair, Vi.’ She
sighed. ‘You’ve always had the most beautiful golden hair.’

Annie was by far the prettier of the two of
us, a fact that I kept to myself. I secretly envied her saucer eyes – greener and
curvier than the pond at Steeple Langford. The pink in her cheeks rested in just the
right place whereas I tended to flush even on the coldest of days. She was elfish and
mysterious-looking – the kind of
girl whom shepherds and farmers stood
back from, afraid to touch. My principal advantage was not my hair, which, contrary to
Annie’s belief, was never anything other than a half-hearted brown: it was my
breasts, crude and huge. I hated them. And I despised the kind of stares they attracted,
despite my efforts to cover them up. Boys, and even girls at times, struggled to look me
in the eye, as if my face were buried somewhere in my chest. Annie was never jealous,
not in a scheming way at least. She just talked about how unfair it was, pinning her
chin down over her neck to see how hers were getting on.

Anyone would think the girl had grown up
without a mirror. And the not-knowing made her all the prettier. In the beginning,
before the letters, Pete liked her more than he did me. I’m sure of it. But she
did such a good job of acting aloof around him that I was the one he thought he could
have. I was sure that he mistook the letters for my idea, not hers, and that was why he
had addressed them to me. It had been fickle of me to agree to write them in the first
place. But the memory of my name at the top of his page kept returning. I tried in vain
to swallow my curiosity. He didn’t mean anything by it. Of course he didn’t.
It would be foolish to get carried away.

Words didn’t come easily to Pete. Or
perhaps he was deliberately sparse with what he said; I couldn’t determine which.
His letters were short and frequently borrowed sentences from other people. Sometimes he
would find a poem to copy out for us in the library at Imber Court. The lines from Keats
were my favourite.
Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art.
Annie and I
would dissect his quotes, pulling each other’s hair out over who was the bright
star, basking in the myth that there was an art to the poems he chose. In truth, he was
just as inclined to copy out a verse about a heroic battle as he was a stanza on a
forlorn lover.

Besides, they never told me what I really
wanted to know. What did he think about when he was up on Salisbury Plain for
nights on end, watching the sheep? Did he think of me? Did he ever
spare a thought for his mother and father?

He had appeared one day, at twelve years of
age, with nothing in his pocket but a bus ticket bought in Hammersmith and the clothes
on his back. He had offered himself as a labourer to any family who would give him food
and lodging. Mr and Mrs Archam as good as adopted him. They had lost a son to pneumonia
two years earlier and Pete was a gift – a welcome pair of extra hands and a face to fill
the empty chair at their dinner table. Rumours of a new arrival spread quickly through
the village and I wasted no time in running down Dog Kennel Lane with Annie to see if he
was worth making friends with.

We found him alone in the Archams’
farmyard, scuffing his shoes across patches of dried mud, hands in pockets, head crooked
over his shoulders. He was scanning the ground for something, although I could not
decipher what. Every now and then, he would bend down to pick up a stone and then throw
it away again after a quick examination of its feel and shape. Finally, he stood up
straight, eyes fixed on one particular piece of flint in his hand. Then he marked a
circle in the mud around his feet, his arm arcing like a rudder through water.

‘Maybe it’s a game that children
in London play,’ whispered Annie, from our hiding place behind the cattle
shed.

‘Perhaps he’s not from
London … He could be a spy for all we know!’

‘I say!’ Annie shouted over to
him, with no warning. ‘Are you a German?’

‘Sssh!’ I hissed, pulling her
further behind the shed. We watched as Pete flinched and glanced towards our hiding
place. Looking around in vain for an escape route, we emerged sheepishly from our hiding
place.

‘I’m Violet,’ I said,
offering a hand.

‘Pete,’ he replied, not taking
it. He clipped the
t
in his name
so that it came off his
tongue as hard and impenetrable as the stone in his palm.

‘Where are you from?’ asked
Annie, folding her arms. ‘Because nobody around here seems to know.’

I tugged at her pinafore. ‘Come on,
we’d best be back before dinner. Pete here will need to unpack his
things.’

‘Unpack?’ he scoffed. I felt
myself redden.

‘Oh, of course,’ bleated Annie,
‘we heard you arrived without a scrap. But don’t worry, Violet and I can
find you a toothbrush and a blanket, if the Archams don’t have anything for you.
Isn’t that right, Vi?’

I nodded, looking awkwardly at the space
beyond his head. The feel of his eyes on me made me want to leave the yard.

‘I’ll make do,’ he
muttered.

‘What’s it like in
London?’ asked Annie, unabashed.

‘Annie, let’s go,’ I
pleaded, tugging at her sleeve, then turning away in the hope that she’d follow.
Despite my best efforts, Annie stayed put, leaving me to flounder between the
conversation and the yard gate.

‘I bet there are crowds of men with
umbrellas and canes.’

‘Beats me. I’m not from
London.’

‘Then how come your clothes are all
sooty?’ she protested. ‘You’re not a farmer – farmers don’t have
that sort of dirt.’

‘All right, Sherlock,’ said
Pete, with a smirk. ‘If you must know, I’m from Bermuda.’

‘Ber
muuu
da?’ parroted
Annie. ‘Never heard of it.’

‘No surprises there, then.
You’ve probably never left this village.’

‘Actually, there’s a bus that
goes to Warminster every week and Violet’s father has even lived in
Oxfordshire
, hasn’t he, Vi? He’s the parson, you
see.’

I seized my chance and retraced my steps
back towards them. ‘Come on, it’s late, Annie. Leave him alone. Who cares
where it is?’

‘I’ll bet you sixpence you
haven’t heard of Bermuda, Miss Violet.’ The sound of my name caused my chest
to tighten.

‘Oh, don’t be so sure of
yourself!’ blurted Annie, before I could squeeze her hand to stop her.
‘Violet’s ever so good at geography. Mrs Williams says she’s the best.
She’s even better than Freda!’

‘All right, then, let’s hear
it.’ He discarded the flint he was holding and clapped his palms together.

‘You aren’t from Bermuda,’
I said flatly.

‘Looks like I’ll be keeping my
sixpence then.’ He smiled. Annie looked crestfallen. I could tell she had been
envisaging the jar of sherbet lemons on the grocer’s shelf at the back of the Bell
Inn.

‘That’s not to say I don’t
know where it is,’ I added. Annie’s eyes lit up. ‘It’s in the
Atlantic. Father says they have the most awful storms there – whole towns have vanished
overnight in the wind.’

Annie narrowed her eyes at Pete. ‘Is
it true?’ I did not know whether she was referring to the storms or to
Pete’s dubious claim.

‘If I were you, girls, I
wouldn’t indulge him any further,’ said a voice from the entrance to the
yard. I turned to see my sister in a tea-dress and wellington boots, leaning
nonchalantly on the gatepost. ‘You’re late for dinner. Father sent me to
fetch you. You as well, Annie – your mother will be wondering where you are.’

Annie scuttled over to my sister as if she
were her mother.

Freda, you’re such a
show-off
,
I wanted to shout. My sister had a way of waltzing into situations
and putting her stamp on them with seemingly no effort at all. I disliked her keenly for
it. Even when we were older – and I had plenty of reasons to think her foolish – I never
escaped the feeling that she had the better answers, and the better secrets.

I braved one last look at Pete. He was
staring past me towards
the gate to where my sister and Annie stood.
The light left with the three of us, and as we made our way back down the track, I
turned to find the yard empty: Pete had gone, leaving only his circle, which rested like
an uncracked code in the dirt.

Already, I sensed that he wasn’t one
to be pinned down – not an easy lad to love. As soon as we were evacuated, he parted
ways with the Archams and went to work as a farmhand in Coombe Down. Mr Archam never
recovered. Annie told me the doctor’s notes had stated that he had died of a
broken heart. But stories like that always did have a way of swelling on her tongue.
Whatever caused Mr Archam’s passing, it would have been a lonely death without
Pete by his side.

Something cuffs itself to my wrists,
hoisting me out of the water and giving me my air back. Rasps and rasps of it. I
can’t take it in properly – each breath a stammer. There’s something sharp
scraping across my belly. My shirt is rucking up. I’m being dragged out of the
sea.

‘Help’ is my first word, frail,
half formed. I don’t understand the reply I’m given. Tamil or Malayalam,
maybe. It’s a man’s voice. There’s a rough, rusting surface beneath me
that feels powdery and metallic on my fingers. It fits unevenly under my shoulders, the
metal arching into sharp peaks and troughs. But we’re floating. And that’s
all that counts.

The voice is shouting now but I still
don’t understand. The saltwater dissipates in stinging blinks; I begin to make out
the man’s shape. He’s soaked to the skin, like me, in a checked
lungi
and plain shirt, hair wired with grey. His face, creased with years,
is washed into blankness at the sight of me and everything that’s gone before
us.

‘
Vana-kkam
,’ I reply.
One of the few words I know in Tamil.
Good morning
. I must sound ridiculous.
He’s smiling. At least that’s something.

‘
Ongelal payse
 …’
I don’t catch the rest. And even if I did it would be useless.

‘I don’t understand. I’m
so sorry.’

He tips his head from left to right and back
again. Then his hands rise and leap into action, eyes widening as he gestures towards
the shore. He mimics the wave coming in as he speaks, then knocks the metal underneath
him with his knuckles, drawing out the shape of a square in the air with his two index
fingers. He points to his chest and bangs the metal again, rattling
out his sentences at such speed that I’m sure I wouldn’t catch everything
even if we did speak the same language.

‘Your house? This is your
house?’ I watch him draw the shape in the air again and point down at the sheet of
metal.

‘House!’ He nods, rapping on the
metal for a third time. I force myself to sit up and look down at our makeshift raft. It
is nothing more than a sheet of corrugated iron – a roof. Something catches his eye and
he grabs me by the wrist, like he did when he rescued me. He points to my ring, then
down at the house and then back at the shore, face stiffening.

I catch only one word from what he is
saying:
Manaavi
. James and I learnt it yesterday – our wedding day. He said he
preferred the sound of it to ‘wife’. I meet his stare, which is taut,
unblinking. Raising my hand, I point to my ring and then to the shore, just as he did.
‘
Kanavar
,’ I whisper, ‘my husband.’

I talk in English, telling him about James
and our wedding – how not even my parents know what we have done. How I don’t know
where he is – that I need to go and look for him. He speaks Tamil back to me,
accompanying his words with broad, bold hand movements, which I watch, eager to
interpret what he is saying. I try to discern the verbs and nouns from his tones,
holding each sound in my head and attempting to dissect it. In the end, I have to let
his sentences go – they don’t yield their logic easily and the words blur
together. He turns away from me after a while, frustrated at not being understood. We
resume our gaze at the sea.