He didn’t even slow down, but he let out another great, unheard howl.
HE REACHED PORTSMOUTH wel 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 kil time, seemed to draw him like a second habitat—a habitat that was no habitat at al . But he wanted nothing more. He’d booked himself, to al ow for al kinds of eventualities that might fol ow 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 El ie, 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 El ie 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.
El ie, 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 fal en and the sky stil 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 smal , it must have been metal ic and relatively heavy, since, catching a quick, coppery gleam from the sunset, it sliced cleanly through the wind into the waves.
34
ELLIE SITS in the lay-by at Holn Cliffs, not admiring the view.
Even the seagul s have vanished as if swal owed 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 real y 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, al 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 al , 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 al 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.
El ie’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, theoretical y, 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 stil engulf Beacon Hil , but that doesn’t prevent El ie 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 al day?
El ie fol ows the hatchback down the descending road into Holn—wishing it would go faster. When she has to slow at the turn for Beacon Hil (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’l never know.
She tears along the straight section of steeply banked road before the hil 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 al .
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!
Al of this flashes through her mind, even as, frantical y, she flashes her lights, as if a watching Jack—if he’s watching—wil instantly understand their coded message: