Wish You Were Here (35 page)

Ten years ago, after closing the old Jebb gate for the last time, he’d got in, beside Ellie, in the passenger seat and so technically in the position of navigator. But Ellie already knew the way. Ellie had already gone—so Jack had learned one July afternoon—to spy out their future on the Isle of Wight, seizing the chance to do so secretly
when Jimmy had been admitted to hospital. And that was one reason, Jack had told himself, why she’d kept that letter from Uncle Tony to herself for so long. She couldn’t share it till she’d checked its validity—on the spot—and she couldn’t do that while her dad was around.

So Ellie had driven them both, with the memory of her first trip to guide her, but Jack hadn’t been just the passive, ignorant passenger. In the early stages of their journey he’d suddenly realised there was a coincidence of memories and of routes. The road signs had chimed with him: Honiton, Axminster, Lyme Regis … Ellie had passed along this road before, but then so had he.

‘Ellie, I’ve got an idea.’

So they’d found themselves together at Brigwell Bay. And standing on the beach there with Ellie, having taken one of the great initiatives of his life (to think they might have sailed past the turning only for the idea to have hit him miles further on), Jack had made one of the great declarations of his life. It took the form of one of his rare jokes, but it was too gallant—and too successful—to be just a joke.

‘There you are, Ell. Here you are. “Wish you were here.” Now you are.’

Then he’d blurted out, ‘And always will be.’

And just for his saying this Ellie had hugged him, almost squeezed the breath out of him, and said, ‘My hero,’ while he’d smelt the strange, forgotten smell of the sea.

Honiton, Axminster, Lyme Regis. He took the same route now, but at the turning—he knew when it was coming—
he didn’t even slow. It was like another shut gate. What lay down that road? He and Ellie clasped in the embrace of their life? That wasn’t the point. What lay down that road was a six-year-old boy on a caravan holiday, legs spattered with wet sand, who’d become a soldier in Iraq. He’d sometimes felt like Tom’s father then.

He didn’t even slow down, but he let out another great, unheard howl.

He reached Portsmouth well before four. Realising that he might be even earlier, he’d stopped at a service station, outside Southampton, on the M27. These anonymous places, in which to piss, eat and kill time, seemed to draw him like a second habitat—a habitat that was no habitat at all. But he wanted nothing more. He’d booked himself, to allow for all kinds of eventualities that might follow the funeral, onto the four-thirty ferry. There’d been no eventualities, except for his swift exit, his encounter with a gate and the eating up of road.

Once he joined the queue of waiting vehicles, the long, cross-country loop of his journey was complete. There remained only the short sea-trip which, when he’d done it that first time with Ellie, had seemed momentous, like an ocean voyage. It was momentous now. He would never return to the mainland, he was sure of it, this crossing would be his last. The thing was so fixed now in his mind that he no longer paused to consider, as he’d sometimes done on his long journey, whether he was mad.

Nor did he pause to consider—since it had simply never occurred to him, and it had never been part of Vera’s story—that it might have been from here once,
from the Solent, that those two Luxton brothers, on the memorial near which he’d stood just hours ago, had been shipped out, never to return. So what Jack was very soon to do, but hadn’t even thought of yet, had no premeditated link with them. It was just another of the sudden initiatives of his life.

The ferry’s ramp and yawning hold reminded him of the plane. The deafening car deck was like some state of alert. After grabbing his parka and leaving his car, he made for the open decks above, not wanting to show his face. He stood by the rail. It was getting dark. The wind that had got up during the day gusted round him. A deep Atlantic front was moving in.

Would Ellie be there? Did he want her to be? Would it be like a final sign to him if she were not, so that he could simply take out the gun? Even now he shunned his mobile phone, when to use it would have been the most natural and normal thing to do. As he’d maintained silence for so long, it might even have been a stupendous thing to do. His voice might have sounded like that of a man given up for lost. Ellie, I’m on the ferry, I’m on my way.

How had Tom died?

With a clank of its raised ramp and a churning of water, the ferry slipped its moorings. The lights of Portsmouth were on, reflected in the surface of the harbour, but night hadn’t quite fallen and the sky still glowed in the west. Beyond the shelter of the harbour mouth, the fitful wind combined with the movement of the boat into a steady, bitter blast. A few hardy souls—to appreciate the sunset or to indulge the brief sensation of being on the high seas—lingered for a while by the rails. And some of
them would have noticed one of their number, a large, strongly built, even rather intimidating man, feel for something in the region of his breast pocket, then, clutching it tightly for a moment in his fist, hurl it into the sea.

Though it was small, it must have been metallic and relatively heavy, since, catching a quick, coppery gleam from the sunset, it sliced cleanly through the wind into the waves.

E
LLIE SITS IN
the lay-by at Holn Cliffs, not admiring the view. Even the seagulls have vanished as if swallowed by the greyness.

There is no end to this. She might sit here for ever, or she might drive on, circling the Isle of Wight for ever. Islanded, either way. Unless she were really to cut loose. Cross the water, take the ferry (in weather like this?). Like Jack did two days ago. Though where would she go?

Or … The thought comes to her only like some idle, abstract, teasing proposition: she could cross the soggy verge to her left, burst through that shuddering hedge, and simply drive on. Cut loose that way. She’s a farmer’s daughter and she knows how to hurl a four-wheel-drive vehicle across a muddy field. But such a thing, she knows, simply wouldn’t be her.

She looks, all the same, towards the edge of the cliffs, considering the possibility like some malicious insinuation that has just been whispered in her ear. And then the other thought comes to her that isn’t idle or abstract at all, more like a kick to her heart. She’s a farmer’s daughter and once upon a time—even when she was sixteen and
knew how to handle a Land Rover—she knew how to handle a gun.

The gun. That bloody gun, which he could never bring himself to get rid of. Which she could never persuade him to part with. Why had he kept it? Were they plagued with rabbits down at the site? The gun which he’d kept in that cabinet all this time, as if it might be his dad in there. And the gun which—quite absurdly, but only to answer outrage with outrage—she’d gone and suggested he might have aimed at his dad himself.

Ellie’s heart bangs. She has entirely overlooked that she has left Jack alone, in these—extreme—circumstances, with a gun. If she has the means, theoretically, less than fifty yards away, then so does he. And he has a precedent too.

A great blast of terror hits her as, in fact, the blinding buffets of weather temporarily relent. In front of her, Holn Head looms darkly but distinctly, its whole outline visible, like a ship keeping to its steady course. The clouds still engulf Beacon Hill, but that doesn’t prevent Ellie thinking she sees now in the distance, at that crucial spot in her vision, a tiny, quick flash of light.

My God. The engine of the Cherokee starts as if it’s not her doing but the direct consequence of the pounding in her chest. By a strange seeming-telepathy, the silver hatchback up ahead moves off too, as if it’s taken its hint from her, or doesn’t wish to be left alone. Or, to a neutral observer, as if they’ve both been simply prompted by the brief mercy of the weather. Are we going to sit here all day?

Ellie follows the hatchback down the descending road into Holn—wishing it would go faster. When she has to
slow at the turn for Beacon Hill (though it’s more of a skidding, rocking attempt to both slow and accelerate), she experiences a moment’s odd desolation as the silver car carries on, up the rise ahead, in the direction of Sands End. She feels sure now it wasn’t just waiting out the storm, but confronting, too, some Saturday-morning catastrophe, the story of which she’ll never know.

She tears along the straight section of steeply banked road before the hill proper, even as the rain begins its onslaught again. But she’s near enough now for the cottage to be plainly visible, if only for a few seconds before the bends of the road and the high banks obscure it, and she can see that its lights are on. Hardly surprising in this weather—they would have been on when she left. But she can see that they include the bedroom light, which she interprets first as a good sign, then as a bad sign, a terrible sign, then as a sign that need not signify anything at all. Then remembers how she’d watched for Jack from that same window last night and how she’d seen his lights. He’d come back!

All of this flashes through her mind, even as, frantically, she flashes her lights, as if a watching Jack—if he’s watching—will instantly understand their coded message: ‘Jack, it’s me. I’m coming. I love you. Don’t, Jack, DON’T!’

But of course her lights are hidden by the roadside banks, and he’s not perhaps looking anyway. He’s not perhaps looking at anything any more.

Her heart hammers and, as she mounts the hill proper, still sheathed by the high banks which only give way at the bend by the old chapel, it seems she has no choice but also to go down that hill Jack once went down, alone on
foot. To enter that dark but silvery, frosty tunnel that he must have gone down again and again in his mind. And, in truth, in her mind, she’s often gone down it with him, holding his hand and hoping that what was there at the bottom of the hill might not, this time, be there. Even wishing she might have gone down it with him that first time when it wasn’t in the mind but entirely, terribly real, so at least he might not have been alone, at least she could have been with him.

But how could that ever have been? And she wasn’t even with him yesterday, or the day before. And now she may have to go down that dark tunnel all by herself—Jack can’t be with her—and see what he saw at the end of it.

T
HE CARAVANS
loom through the greyness. Jack feels an ache for them. What will become of them? More to the point, what will become of all their would-be occupants in the season to come? Only November, but the bookings sheets are already filling up with the names of regulars: the same again next year, please. What will they think? What will they do when they find out, via the reports that will surely cause some noticeable blip on the national news? If they missed the other thing or failed to make the connection, then they surely won’t miss
this
.

‘Tragedy in the Isle of Wight’. Or (who knows?) ‘The Siege of Lookout Cottage’.

Jack doesn’t want to disappoint any of them—the Lookouters in their scattered winter quarters all over the country. It seems for their sakes alone he might almost decide not to do what he intends. But nor, mysteriously, does he want to disappoint the caravans themselves, which he has come to see, now more than ever, as patient, dormant, hibernating creatures needing their summer influx of life. Who will look after them now?

‘The Lookout Caravan Park is closed till further
notice.’ Pending future ownership. But who, with such a blot upon it, will want to take it over? A taint, a curse, and a lot more glaring than a hole in a tree.

The rain batters the window. Always, of course, the gamble of the weather. No, he couldn’t guarantee it. Even farmers had never found a way of doing that. A risk you took, no money back. And it cut both ways: a wet July, a sudden spate of cancellations. And what could you say to those who braved it? There’s always Carisbrooke Castle. Have you been to Carisbrooke Castle? Did you know (Jack certainly hadn’t known till it became part of his rainy-day patter) that Charles I had once ruled England, or thought he did, from Carisbrooke Castle?

Always an eye on the weather. Even in August it could sweep in, just like now. No, not called the Lookout for nothing. But on a good Easter, say, in good spring weather, when they started to show up in numbers, knowing they’d hit it right, it was like turning out the heifers for the first time. They felt it, you felt it. Even the caravans felt it.

He looks at them from the window, as if he’s abandoned them and they know it. Only the rapid events of the last two hours, only the shifting and sharpening of his basic plan, mean that he’s here now and not down among them, with the gun, even in this weather. That his brains, and all that they’ve ever comprehended, aren’t already strewing one of them.

He might have done it on his return, had Ellie not been at home. And he might even have done it now, in her absence. He might have damn well walked down the
hill, even in this rain, the gun under his parka, and taken the keys and chosen any one of the thirty-two. Pick a number. And
that
surely would have marred for ever the prospects of the Lookout Park. No chance, then, of happy holidays to come.

But he needed Ellie. He needs her now. He fully understands it. That final, still solvable complication. He needs her to be here. If he has gone mad, then he’s also rational. He needs her to return and, if she returns, to return alone. He’s prepared to deal with all comers, seriously prepared: a whole box of cartridges, this upstairs position.

But he thinks—he could almost place a bet—that Ellie will return, and alone, and that it won’t be long now. Delayed only by this evil weather, sent this way and that by the weather, like some desperate yacht (he’s sometimes watched such a thing from this very window) trying to make it round Holn Head.

It was all a hysterical bluff, perhaps. But he isn’t bluffing. And he needs her.

Jack hasn’t changed the will he made soon after their arrival in the Isle of Wight. There’d be no reason—or opportunity—for doing so now, but he momentarily thinks of how he sat one day with Ellie in the offices of Gibbs and Parker (the same firm who’d acted for Uncle Tony) and of how the solicitor, Gibbs, had delicately pointed out that they should include in both their wills a standard provision for their dying at the same time or nearly so.