The Sea Change (38 page)

Alice imagines oceans as blue and seas as
grey and channels as a mingling of the two. She is as full of questions today as the sea
is of waves.

Can a wave circumvent the earth without
hitting land? If it did, would it keep on going and going and going, without ever
arriving?

Maybe they’re magnetic, I suggest,
drawn to breaking in a place marked as theirs.

Was my wave meant for Kanyakumari? she asks.
I tell her that is not what I meant to say. It is too big a thing not to have been
meant, is her reply. My words or her wave: I do not know to which she is referring.

Alice’s fingers shrink like sea
anemones into balls each time a wave breaks at our feet. She is resisting the urge to
run.

‘It’ll start off as nothing more
than a smudge, Mum. You won’t even notice because it keeps itself so close to the
water.’ She doesn’t turn to face me but picks a point on the horizon and
chisels at it with her eyes. ‘Then, up it goes and rises. And the water next to
the beach empties, like some massive washbasin.’ It’s the first time
she’s talked, given it words, assembled it into a story. ‘And all the time
you think you can outrun it because it doesn’t look as if it will ever come. Do
you know what I mean?’

I nod, not knowing.

The Indian Ocean is making inroads towards our
feet. She recoils again. I stay still this time, letting the sea invade my shoes; Alice
draws a breath. ‘I didn’t quite mean to marry James,’ she confesses,
the words seeping out of her as if she had been trying to say them for some time.
‘But the wave. It binds things.’ She pauses, turning to me. ‘I’m
not making sense.’

‘A lot of things aren’t
meant,’ I say, taking her hand. She does not lift her eyes from the water. I ask
her about the letters I posted and she says that she has read them, that she
understands.

I tell her that I was with her mother when
she died. When they cut Alice out of Freda, the wound wouldn’t heal. The infection
invaded her blood. One night, after the doctor had implied there was nothing more he
could do, she broke free of the house in Wilton and limped as far as the allotments. We
found her an hour later – her face wet and shimmering in the grass. My mother had to
carry her back to the house, she was so weak. I realized, then, where she was bent on
going. I took her hand in mine and felt the hold leave each of her fingers. She parted
her lips to let out a word but instead let go of her breath. The last flood of it pushed
through her throat and divorced itself from her, the blink in her eyes fleeing quickly
afterwards, then the heat from her hand. Pete wasn’t there that night: they had
separated before he even got to Yorkshire.

My daughter – my sister’s daughter –
is standing next to me on the beach, her feet within touching distance of the sea. She
understands what it took for me to love her; she understands the cost. She has not kept
secrets, as I have, but has left things unsaid. She tells me about Pete’s sister,
her visit to the house and how she had thought Alice was mine. He must have wanted it to
be true, Alice says, to make his own sister believe such a thing. But I fear she is
being too kind.

The waves break again over our feet. She
knows. And has known for some time. What the water took away. And what it gave.

When I took her to the hospital to see James,
she stood blinking, as I had done, at the opposite side of the ward. It didn’t
seem real – the sight of him there on the bed. He stayed sleeping, even as she lay down
on the mattress beside him – her eyes level with his. For days after my Delhi train
ride, I had dreamt I was still moving each time I closed my eyes. I pictured all the
miles they had covered together – how every period of sleep must have felt like another
journey. But afterwards, once the miles were complete, there was the comfort of waking,
as James did now, to find her there, unmoving, beside him.

It is my turn, now, to settle my stare on
the horizon. I think of the waves pulsing under its lip. There is one stored there whose
magnet, I imagine, can draw it to my shore. I see it building, pouring itself upwards
until it has grown as tall as the Downs. It is ready to break now, to crash into
England’s coast. To muscle into Wiltshire. To erase the chalk horse from Westbury.
To baptize the Plain. To fill the valley, like an overflowing jar, and burst open
Imber’s ruins. To lift the absent bells from their tower and plant them again in
shards. Not here. But in somebody else’s field.

Acknowledgements

Novels are more than solitary creations;
they are the fruit of many conversations. This book belongs to lots of people. In
particular, I would like to thank Juliet Annan and Sophie Missing, at Fig Tree, for
their astute and sensitive editing; Cathryn Summerhayes and Becky Thomas, who represent
me at WME; Commander Ed Brown, for his assistance in researching the Salisbury Plain
military range; Rex Sawyer, for his insight into Imber’s history; Mark and Ruth
Devaraj, for their help with Tamil translation; Mrs Sen, for her memories of 1970s
India; Ashley and Lin Rowlands, for their stories and photographs of the hippie trail;
author Jennifer Potter, for her encouragement and wisdom throughout the writing of the
novel; the London Library, for its endless supply of off-beat books and the quietness in
which to write this one; the students and staff on the 2010/11 Warwick Writing MA; Becky
Jones, Cat Rashid, Sarah Ritchie and Kath Wade, who are not only dear friends but my
first readers; my wonderful family – Bill, Dad, Mum and Ian; and my maker, who, through
every sea change, always stays the same.

For those interested in reading more about
Imber and its evacuation, the following books were invaluable in helping me bring the
village to life in the novel:

Henry Buckton,
The Lost Villages: In
Search of Britain’s Vanished Communities
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2008).

Peter Daniels and Rex Sawyer,
Images of
England: Salisbury Plain
(Stroud, 1996).

Rex Sawyer,
Little Imber on the Down:
Salisbury Plain’s Ghost Village
(Salisbury: The Hobnob Press, 2001).

Extract from
The World My Wilderness
by Rose Macaulay reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (
www.petersfraserdunlop.com
) on behalf
of the Estate of Rose Macaulay.

Extract from
Four Quartets
by T. S.
Eliot reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd on behalf of the Estate of T. S.
Eliot.

THE BEGINNING

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