He’d felt a surge of helpless responsibility, of protectiveness. He was in charge. What should he do—go down and calm them? In case they were panicking. Tel them it was al right? Tel them it was al right just to carry on their holidays, that was what they’d come for and had paid for and they shouldn’t let this spoil things, they should carry on enjoying themselves.
But his next thought—though perhaps it had real y been his first and he’d pushed it aside, and it was less a thought maybe than a cold, clammy premonition—was: What might this mean for Tom?
HE LOOKS NOW at that same view from the bedroom window of Lookout Cottage, though the weather’s neither sunny nor calm. Clouds are charging over Holn Head. A November gale is careering up the Channel. The sea, white flecks in its greyness, seems to be travel ing in a body from right to left, west to east, as if some retreat is going on.
Rain stings the glass in front of him.
El ie has been gone for over an hour—this weather yet to unleash itself when she left. She could be sitting out the storm somewhere, pul ed up in the wind-rocked Cherokee.
Reconsidering her options, perhaps. Or she could have done already exactly what she said she’d do, and be returning, having to take it slowly, headlights on in the blinding rain. Or returning—who knows?—behind a police car, with not just its headlights on, but its blue light flashing.
Reconsidering her options? But she made the move and said the words. The situation is plain to him now, and despite the blurring wind and rain, Jack’s mind is real y quite clear. She had her own set of keys, of course. Al she had to do was grab her handbag and walk out the door, but she might have remembered another set of keys that Jack certainly hasn’t forgotten. Has it occurred to her, even now?
El ie who was usual y the one who thought things through, and him the slowcoach.
“El ie,” Jack thinks. “My El ie.”
HE’S ALREADY TAKEN the shotgun from the cabinet downstairs—the keys are in the lock—and brought it up here. It’s lying, loaded, on the bed behind him, on the white duvet. For good measure he has a box of twenty-five cartridges (some already in his pocket), in case of police cars, in case of mishaps. It’s the first time, Jack thinks, that he’s ever put a gun on a bed, let alone theirs, and that, by itself, has to mean something. As he peers through the window he can feel the weight of the gun behind him, making a dent in the duvet as if it might be some smal , sleeping body.
Wel , one way or another, they’d never gone down the road of children. There isn’t, now, that complication. He’s definitely the last of the Luxtons. There’s only one final complication—it involves El ie—and he’s thought that through too, seriously and careful y.
Which is why he’s up here, at this rain-lashed window, from where he has the best view of the narrow, twisting road, Beacon Hil , which has no other purpose these days than to lead to this cottage. So he’l be alerted. So he’l be able to see, just a little sooner than from downstairs, the dark-blue roof, above the high bank, then the nose of the Cherokee as it takes the first, tight, ascending bend, past the old chapel. The Cherokee that’s done so much hard journeying in these last three days.
The road below him, running with water, seems to slither.
Of course, she might not return at al . Another option, and one she might be seriously contemplating. Though where the hel else does she have to go to?
It’s al gone mad, Jack thinks, but part of him has never felt saner. Rain blurs the window, but he looks through it at the rows of buffeted caravans in the middle distance to the right, beyond the spur of land that slopes down beneath him to the low mass of the Head. Al empty now, of course, for the winter.
“Wel , at least this has happened in the off season.” El ie’s words, and just for a shameful instant it had been his own secret flicker of a thought as wel .
HE LOOKS at the caravans and even now feels their tug, like the tug of the wind on their own thin, juddering frames.
Thirty-two trembling units. To the left, the locked site office, the laundrette, the empty shop—gril e down, window boarded. The gated entrance-way off the Sands End road, the sign above it swinging.
Even now, especial y now, he feels the tug. The Lookout Caravan Park, named after this cottage (or two knocked into one), in turn named after its former use. He feels, himself now, like some desperate coastguard. El ie had said they should change the name from the Sands. He’d said they should keep it, for the good wil and the continuity.
And so they had, for a year. But El ie was al for them making their own mark and wiping out what was past.
There must be no end of caravan sites cal ed the Sands, she’d said, but the Lookout would stand out.
It could work two ways, he’d said, “Lookout”—attempting another of those solemn-faced jokes of the kind his father once made.
El ie had shrugged. So, didn’t he like the name of the cottage? It wasn’t the name they’d given it, after al . Lookout Cottage (usual y known as just “The Lookout”). They could always change the name of the cottage. El ie was al for change. She was his wife now. She’d laughed—she’d changed her name to Luxton.
But they hadn’t. Perhaps they should have done. And before the new season began, for the sake of uniformity but also novelty, and because El ie thought it sounded better than the Sands, the site had become, on the letterhead and the brochure and on the sign over the gate, as wel as in plain fact, the Lookout Park.
And it was lookout time now al right.
2
MY ELLIE. She’d changed her name (at long last) to Luxton, just as, once, his mother had done. And “Luxton,” so his mother had always said, was a name to be proud of. It was even a name that had its glory.
BOTH JACK AND TOM had grown up with the story, though, because of the eight years between them, not at the same time. But after Tom was born it acquired the double force of being a story about two brothers. It was Vera who mainly had the job of tel ing it, shaping it as she thought fit—though there wasn’t so much to go on—for the ears of growing boys. Their father may have known more, but the truth was that, though the story had become, quite literal y, engraved, no one had ever completely possessed the facts.
There was a medal kept at Jebb Farmhouse, up in what was known as the Big Bedroom: a silver king’s head with a red-and-blue ribbon. Once a year, in November, it would be taken out and polished (by Vera, until she died). Jack and Tom had each been given, and again by Vera, their separate, private, initiatory viewings. It was anyway for al to see that among the seven names, under 1914–18, on the memorial cross outside Al Saints’ church in Marleston vil age there were two Luxtons: “F.C. Luxton” and “G.W.
Luxton,” and after “G.W. Luxton” were the letters “DCM.”
. . .
ONCE, most of a century ago, when wild flowers were blooming and insects buzzing in the tal grass in the meadows along the val ey of the River Somme, two Luxton brothers had died on the same July day. In the process, though he would never know it, one of them was to earn a medal for conspicuous gal antry, while the other was merely ripped apart by bul ets. Their commanding officer, Captain Hayes, who had witnessed the act of valour himself, had been eager, that night, to write the matter up, with his recommendation, in the hope that something good—if that was a fair way of putting it—might come of the day’s unspeakabilities. But though he knew he had two Luxtons under his command, George and Fred, he had never known precisely which was which. In their ful kit and helmets they looked like identical twins. They all looked, he sometimes thought, like identical twins.