Wish You Were Here

30

ELLIE SITS IN the lay-by near Holn, not driving anywhere.

When Jack had returned in the dark last night she couldn’t help having the thought: a wounded soldier. That was how the sight of him, in the beam of light from the cottage door, had framed itself for her, as he’d slowly emerged from the car in which she sits stranded now. He’d looked shattered, exhausted. But what had she expected, after such a journey? A wounded soldier. Even so, there he was.

Or was he? For two days she’d lived with the possibility that he might not return at all, but one possibility she clearly hadn’t anticipated was that he might return, but that he wouldn’t be Jack, or not the Jack she knew. And in the eyes of the strange figure who’d blundered towards her she’d seen, she thought, his anticipation of yet another possibility: that he might return to find her gone. But how could that be? Hadn’t he read or listened to any of those messages?

And since she was there, why hadn’t he looked pleased to see her, or at least relieved?

Even so. There he was, and so was she, standing in that doorway where she hadn’t stood, it’s true, to watch him go. If she hadn’t been watching then, she was watching now — had been watching and waiting, in fact, for a good half-hour. Knowing only what he’d said before he left, that he’d booked himself on the four-thirty Friday ferry, she’d been waiting in an agony since five-thirty (which would have been pushing it, it’s true). She’d even gone up to the bedroom window so as to spot his lights as soon as they came up the hill.

And Jack, Ellie thinks now, must have seen, as he passed this lay-by, the distant lights of the cottage. A pretty sure sign that someone was there and waiting for him. But had he been looking and did he care?

And what difference did it make, now, if he were never to know how anxiously she’d watched and waited? How she’d seen at last his lights — at such an hour they could only be his — take the turn for Beacon Hill, then travel, like the passage of some luminous, scurrying animal, up the first, hidden stretch of road before appearing, with a full blaze, at the bend by the old chapel. How she’d said aloud, ‘Jack. Jack,’ and how she’d sprung up, to run downstairs, to be at the door, to put right, to reverse all the events of two mornings before.

A casserole was on in the kitchen. A bottle was on the table. All the lights were on. He would surely have understood that she was there. Now he was too. And as she’d stood in the doorway she’d said again, ‘Jack, my Jack.’ Had he even heard?

It had even seemed, as he walked towards her, that he was sorry not to find her gone.

Though what had she expected? And what, since she hadn’t gone with him, did she deserve? But he was here. Or, say, half here. The other half she might still have to wait for. She’d fed him and put him to bed, realising that she couldn’t demand much more of him, in his condition, than his presence. ‘Ask me later, Ell. Ask me tomorrow.’ Realising also that she couldn’t expect much talk from him now, when two mornings ago he hadn’t had a single word from her.

She’d put him to bed. And he’d slept, in fact, for over twelve hours, not surfacing till after nine (which wasn’t like him at all). But if she’d hoped that a good sleep would really bring him back to her and if she’d hoped that a good breakfast — an all-day breakfast if necessary — would get them talking as they should talk, she was wrong.

He didn’t seem to want any breakfast. He still looked like some invalid. It had all suddenly reminded her of when her dad had begun to get ill, years ago, and she’d flitted coaxingly and motheringly around him, thinking foolishly that a good breakfast might put some life back in him. And maybe for Jack there’d been some weird equivalent of the same memory, and that was how it had begun.

‘You wanted him out the way, didn’t you?’

She’d thought at first he’d meant Tom, and then thought: well, so be it, now she had some facing up, owning up to do. Even so, she hadn’t thought that ‘out the way’ meant any more than that.

Then he’d come up with the really crazy stuff.

‘I’ve always wondered, Ell, how come your dad died so soon after mine? Did they have an agreement?’

This wasn’t about Tom’s death at all. Or was it?

Still he hadn’t yet said anything appalling. She might even have laughed at him. He’d made a sort of joke. And yes, though she’d never said anything to Jack, she had thought at the time that there was a sort of agreement. A connection. The real cause was the state of his liver and the state, on top of that, so it proved, of his lungs. He had lung cancer, the two things were racing each other. Nonetheless, there’d been a trigger. A bad word in the circumstances. Jimmy had started to go downhill soon after Michael’s death. Hardly a cause, but a kind of kinship. It was as if, she’d thought at the time, her father had lost a brother. Or he’d won some contest of survival and had nothing left to prove.

‘It was just how it was,’ she said. ‘You know that. It was just how it happened. He had a bad lung and a bad liver.’

‘And it was handy.’

‘Meaning?’

‘You know what I mean.’

His next words were the same — worse — as if he’d got up, leant across the table and hit her.

‘You helped him along, didn’t you, Ell? You put something in his tea. Or in that flask of his. Wormer, teat dip, I don’t know. Some kind of cow medicine. You put something in his breakfast.’

Strangely, her first thought before she exploded was to continue to picture her father sitting in the kitchen at Westcott, in the chair he always sat in — to think of all those breakfasts she’d cooked for him. Then her second thought was to wonder, almost calmly, whether Jack — or this man in front of her — actually thought she’d put something in his breakfast and that was why he didn’t want any.

Then she’d exploded. She might have just laughed. Could you laugh at such a thing? Was Jack — or this man — really saying this? Had he simply come home to her with a great dose of madness? So she said it.

‘Are you mad, Jack? Are you mad?’

It was the wrong thing to say, perhaps, to a man who might be really mad. Even to a man who’d come back from all that he must have been through (and she was still to hear about). But she’d said it. And then she’d said, with a great roar of outrage, like some matron barking down a hallway, ‘How dare you say such a thing to me? How dare you?’

And the madness must have been catching, quickly catching, because only a little while later, after he’d said things to her by way of mad explanation, she’d said back to him, by way of retaliation, things that were equally mad, equally ludicrous and certainly like nothing she’d ever thought might escape her lips.

But, in any case, and almost in the same hot breath, she’d grabbed her handbag, her keys were in it, and opened the door and walked out to the car from which he’d stumbled only the night before. And had got in and screamed off. The rain was only just starting to spit, from a darkening sky, but by the time she got to the main road it was coming down in great slapping squalls, like a warning. But she could hardly turn round now, just because of the weather. And, almost because of it, she drove madly on.