Wish You Were Here

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, vacillating decision, along with the decision to put on his black tie. Into the holdall, to add to the clothes and sponge bag, he’d finally slipped a small, 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 small 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 small weight was now almost against his skin. When he stopped outside Newport to fill up with petrol, and throughout the two days of travelling 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 brilliant 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 naturally 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 Ellie 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 virtually the only occasions that demanded making the crossing, so that even that experience had never become casual.

Travelling 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, all 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 pulled 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 travelling 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, smaller 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.

The shoreline on the far side remained for a time one indistinct, built-up mass, punctured by the white thorn of the Spinnaker Tower. Then Portsmouth gradually separated itself from Gosport, and Southsea, with its beach front, from Portsmouth. Individual blocks of buildings flashed and glinted.

The ferry swung hard to make its entrance. Beyond the ramparts of the narrow harbour mouth could be seen, as if trapped among streets, the masts of the old ships, the Warrior and the Victory, and beyond them, at the water’s edge, the sharp bows of a berthed naval vessel, its grey hull and turrets bleached almost white, with an apricot blush, by the low sun.

Jack had slipped something else into his pocket before departing: his passport. Major Richards had told him he would need it, for identification, on his arrival at the airbase, along with other documents that would be sent to him. His passport showed a mugshot face not unlike that face with the beret and camouflage shirt in the newspaper photo.

Jack knew well enough that he wouldn’t need his passport in order to disembark from an Isle of Wight ferry in Portsmouth, but he felt as if he might. He felt, in fact, as the ferry slid through the jaws of the harbour, like a man who, even with his passport on him, not to mention a distinguished-conduct medal against his breast, would, as he came ashore, immediately be arrested.