It’s switched off, emphatical y, now.
THE AIR HAD BEEN FRESH and a little damp, with the hint of a quickening dawn breeze. He could barely make out, white as they were, the caravans below, but, beyond the lights of Sands End and Holn, it was just possible to discern the faint sheen of the sea—dotted anyway by the smal , almost motionless lights of distant shipping that, now and then, if only because they reminded him of the former purpose of the place where he lived, Jack would find oddly comforting.
He wore a white shirt and his only suit, which, fortunately, was a charcoal grey. Along with the strange sensation of stealth as he’d moved round his own home had gone an equal y unaccustomed demand for dignity. He’d dressed careful y. He stil hardly ever wore a suit. This was not the same suit his mother had once bought him in Barnstaple, but it reminded him of it and of being viewed by his mother when he’d emerged from the curtained cubicle in Burtons.
Her little, approving nod. So what would she think now?
He’d thought, as he dressed, of the empty hearse that must have left Barnstaple by now. Or would it have been driven up, so as to be sure, the night before? Either way, it had better be there.
He put on his black tie, arguing with himself as to whether he should do this now or at a later stage. The knot took two attempts. The smal holdal , with a change of clothes in it, was the same one that served as a carry-on bag on their winter holidays. It had been to the Caribbean and back several times.
He’d stood for a while by the front door, wondering whether to cal up to El ie—even to go up to her before he left. But he wasn’t going to cal up if she wasn’t going to cal back. And he wasn’t going to go up if El ie wasn’t going to say, “I’l be thinking of you, Jack. And I’l be thinking of Tom.” That would have been enough. But she wasn’t going to say it now if she hadn’t said it already, he knew that. And if she could say it at al , then she’d be coming with him now.
She’d be standing beside him, glancing in the mirror by the front door, dressed and a bit breathy, a touch of scent in the air. Like when they left on their winter breaks.
“Al set, Jacko? Tickets? Money? Smile?”
He’d shut the front door quietly behind him—he could have chosen to slam it—as if he might, indeed, have been intending to leave undetected. Like Tom, that night years ago. He couldn’t help but remember it. That night he’d been lying awake in bed, listening for every smal sound. The last sounds of Tom he’d ever heard.
HE STARTED THE ENGINE, but coasted almost silently, on the brakes, slowly down the twisting hil . With his lights on, the sea had disappeared, but as he pointed east the sky in that direction showed a dim, feathery mix of greys and pinks above a just-emerging horizon. He had to arrive before eleven-thirty and in good time, but, even al owing for the crossing and the traffic there might be on the other side, it hardly seemed necessary to be leaving in darkness. From Portsmouth it was some eighty miles. But (unlike El ie) he’d never lost the farmer’s habit of being up with, or before, the dawn. In the summer he’d sometimes sit outside the cottage with a mug of tea at five in the morning, wondering how long it would be before the first of those caravanners (and every unit might be occupied) would make a move.
Lazy buggers. But they were on holiday, they didn’t have to hurry, their days were their own. They were having fun—
thanks to him and El ie. There’d be just the mew of gul s and, in the quiet, as if it too had barely woken, the faint, sleepy wash of the sea.
In any case, best to be early. The Isle of Wight to Oxfordshire: it was unknown country to him. Like the Isle of Wight had once been. Never mind the bloody isle of St.
Lucia. It was al unknown country now.
16
HE TURNED LEFT AT HOLN, the patch of pinkish sky directly ahead, then turned left again a few miles later, towards Newport.
Before leaving the cottage he’d taken another, vacil ating decision, along with the decision to put on his black tie. Into the holdal , to add to the clothes and sponge bag, he’d final y slipped a smal , black, hinged box. Then as he’d stood before the mirror for a last check, he’d revised even that decision. He’d unzipped the bag, taken out the box and slid what was in it into the breast pocket of his suit, patting its smal weight against him. Then he’d returned the box to the bag. He couldn’t have explained the logic, if they had any logic, of these actions. His hand had shaken a little.
When he took off his jacket to lay it in the back of the car he transferred what was in the breast pocket to the breast pocket of his shirt, the same white shirt he’d worn for Major Richards’s visit, so that smal weight was now almost against his skin. When he stopped outside Newport to fil up with petrol, and throughout the two days of travel ing ahead of him, Jack was wearing the DCM.
HE REACHED FISHBOURNE in good time for the seven-thirty ferry. By then it was light and, beyond the inlet where the ferries docked, the sea that from the Lookout had been a mere hinted presence showed choppy and active, the combination of a briskish breeze and the rays of the just-risen sun turning the waves inky black on one side and bril iant on the other. The yachts moored in the inlet swayed and rattled.
Though Jack had lived now for some ten years in a former coastguard’s cottage and had looked every day at the sea, to be on it didn’t come natural y to him. He could point the caravanners towards several boat-bound activities, but had never developed the yen to have a boat himself, to chug around Holn Head in a dinghy with an outboard motor, maybe lowering a fishing line. The six-mile ferry ride across the Solent had been his first experience of being on a vessel and remained his only one. Similarly, until he’d flown with El ie to the Caribbean he’d never known what it was like to be in a plane. The two unfamiliar experiences were linked, since in order to drive to Gatwick Airport it had been necessary first to take the ferry, and those winter holidays were virtual y the only occasions that demanded making the crossing, so that even that experience had never become casual.
Travel ing now to an airbase, Jack could remember that first journey, by way of a ferry, to catch a plane. The whole thing—though it was a holiday and was meant to be fun and people did it, apparently, al the time—had unnerved him with its elemental audacity. Even the previously unpenetrated landscape of Sussex had seemed alien.
Even the ferry crossing had made him tense.
The truth was that he was that common enough creature, a landsman, by experience and disposition. His big body told him this. He liked his feet anchored to solid ground.
How on earth had he ever let himself be plucked into the air on a parachute pul ed by a boat? But the truth also was that Jack had become an islander. The ferry crossing was fearful in itself, but it also went, when travel ing in this direction, with a queasy distrust of the looming mainland—
that yet contained his roots and his past. He felt both fears now, knowing that when he soon drove off again onto dry land, this would in no way cure his qualms. He touched the medal against his chest, as if for his protection.
The ferry throbbed out into the gleaming water, keeping close for a while to the wooded shore and passing near the other ferry point at Ryde, then heading into the open channel known as Spithead. Other ferries and a few merchant ships moved in various directions, smal er craft scattered among them. There was the feeling of some haphazard relay race. Against the dazzling light to the east appeared the silhouettes of squat island-forts.