“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 hil proper, stil 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 hil 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 hil 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 al by herself—Jack can’t be with her—and see what he saw at the end of it.
35
THE CARAVANS LOOM through the greyness. Jack feels an ache for them. What wil become of them? More to the point, what wil become of al their would-be occupants in the season to come? Only November, but the bookings sheets are already fil ing up with the names of regulars: the same again next year, please. What wil they think? What wil they do when they find out, via the reports that wil 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 al 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 wil look after them now?
“The Lookout Caravan Park is closed til further notice.” Pending future ownership. But who, with such a blot upon it, wil 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 cancel ations. 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 til 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 cal ed 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 al that they’ve ever comprehended, aren’t already strewing one of them.
He might have done it on his return, had El ie not been at home. And he might even have done it now, in her absence. He might have damn wel walked down the hil , 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 El ie. He needs her now. He ful y understands it. That final, stil 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 al comers, seriously prepared: a whole box of cartridges, this upstairs position.
But he thinks—he could almost place a bet—that El ie wil 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 al a hysterical bluff, perhaps. But he isn’t bluffing.
And he needs her.
JACK HASN’T CHANGED the wil 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 El ie 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 wil s a standard provision for their dying at the same time or nearly so.
They’d done two things. They’d got married (his declaration at Brigwel Bay was almost a proposal) and, being man and wife and business partners, they’d made wil s. It was a flurry of wil s—Michael’s, Uncle Tony’s, Jimmy’s—that had brought them to this new life, so they were not unfamiliar with such things, and for Jack this sensible if slightly grim undertaking had even been comforting.
Simple, reciprocal wil s in favour of each other, with the provision in his case that, should he die having survived El ie and without children, everything would go to Tom.
That provision had strangely consoled him, even though it rested on the dreadful precondition of both El ie’s and his own death, and had sown in his mind the exonerating notion that Tom might one day come to own Lookout Cottage and run the Lookout Caravan Park—not a bad prospect for an ex-soldier. As Tom was eight years his junior it was not improbable that Tom might survive him. On the other hand, as Tom was a serving soldier … But when Jack’s mind turned in that (improbable) direction, it flicked away.
It was a notion he never mentioned to El ie and which he didn’t indulge so much himself, since it had its morbid aspects. But it was real y a hope, a dream, a variant of a simple, secret wish: that one day Tom might just appear.
One day he might just stick his head round the cottage door.
And it was al one now: the notion and the wish and the contents of his wil —even that gruesome addition Gibbs had advised, which, in theory, would have speeded Tom’s inheritance.
He’d sometimes embroidered the wish with fanciful details—Tom might have become an officer, with a peaked cap, or he might have quit soldiering and signed up as a gamekeeper—but the fantasies had always stopped as soon as he thought: But what might El ie feel if Tom were suddenly, actual y to show up? And they’d vanished completely whenever he reflected: And what might be El ie’s secret wish?
PEOPLE CAN HELP in al kinds of ways, Jack thinks, by dying