Wish You Were Here

36

ELLIE TURNS BY the old chapel and makes the final climb to the cottage. Never in all her life has she felt so monstrously late for anything, and so absolute is her hurry that she takes this itself to mean that the worst must be true. Why else should she be hurrying? It’s a false logic, but persuasive. On the other hand, if the worst is true, hurrying can make no difference.

No amount of hurry, however, can reverse the recent sequence of events. She simply shouldn’t have left. She shouldn’t be travelling in this direction at all. Two mornings ago it was her crime to stay, today it was her crime to leave. And she has never in any serious way walked out on Jack before. She has never even thought of it, though now it might already be her irrevocable situation: life without Jack.

Her final charge up Beacon Hill is, anyway, quite unlike the slow but deliberate approach of Major Richards last week, which could be said to be the cause of why she is careering up the same road now. Haste, in his case, would have been quite inappropriate, though so too would have been lateness, or any hint of evasion.

For a moment Ellie, who only seconds ago has thought that she is like Jack, heading down that dreadful slope of Barton Field, wishes she might be Major Richards, still making his solemn way to Lookout Cottage. That the sequence and allocation of events might be reassembled. Then all this might be undone and have a second chance to unfold. Or rather Ellie thinks, even as she races in her unmajorly way up the hill, that she would rather be Major Richards, bringing the confirmation of Tom’s death, she would rather be Major Richards with his unenviable duties as the messenger of death than be the woman she is, in the plight she is in, right now.

But it’s as she briefly shares her being with Major Richards that Ellie gets the distinct sensation that she has been preceded, even now, by a military visitation. As if during her absence, her manic driving this way and that and her sitting helplessly near the edge of a cliff, Major Richards has in fact contrived, even in this weather, to pay another, surprise call. To let them know it was all a mistake. That it wasn’t Tom, after all. A mistake of identities. Bodies, you understand. It was some other poor luckless soldier, whose family, of course, have now been informed.

‘Carry on.’ (Major Richards’s cap drips with rain water.) ‘Carry on. As you were.’

And for the first time Ellie realises that she wishes Tom not dead. Truly.

So had she wished him dead? Was that the logic? Had she? Wish you were not here? She wishes him not dead now and for a moment even wishes she might be him. Not Major Richards, but Tom. She wishes she might be Tom, in his soldier’s kit, speeding now up Beacon Hill to prove that Major Richards’s last, swift, miraculous visit, in the middle of a storm, wasn’t itself a deplorable error.

Never, in any case, since the news of Tom’s death, has Ellie felt such a tangible sense of his living presence — a big burly corporal — and to her surprise and in all her haste and terror for another man, and even as she comes to a lurching halt outside the cottage, her eyes and throat thicken and she splutters out as if she might even have been the poor dead man’s wife, lover, mother, sister: ‘O Tom! O poor, poor Tom!’

And no sooner has she done so than the feeling of Tom’s presence (that military presence was his) is gone.

She cuts the engine. The cottage, despite its lit windows, looks deserted. The rain lashes down. The very worst thing now would be to hear a shot from inside. The very best would be to see the door open. The door stays shut.

After her headlong drive, there’s no logical reason for her not to move as fast as she can to open that front door herself. But she stays stuck where she is — how long do you give such a moment? — afraid of what she will find, or longing to remain for a further instant, then a further instant, within the time before she will find it. Or simply willing that other, miraculous thing to occur: that the door will open.

Then it does open.

It is opened slowly and sheepishly, as if, she will think later, by a man emerging half-believingly from some awful place, or a man who, having sought desperate refuge, has just been told that it’s safe now, it’s perfectly safe, to come out. She opens her door too, and perhaps they both look, in looking at each other, as if they’ve seen a ghost. Jack stands in the doorway, and he grasps with both hands and points before him something long and slender which, had the light been even poorer or had she been looking from a different angle, might have made her blood run cold.

But she sees what it is. There’s an identical article in the back of this car.

He struggles to open it, fumbling with the catch. Then he does open it, and disappears for a moment behind its expanding circle. Ellie sees before her, through the pelting rain, a burst of black and yellow segments, with the word lookout, repeated several times at its rim. Then she sees Jack, stepping forward, holding the umbrella uncertainly up and out towards her, in the manner of an inexpert doorman.

‘Stay there,’ he says hoarsely.

But Ellie doesn’t stay there. She takes almost immediately the few, wet paces that will enable her to meet Jack halfway, thinking as she takes them: The things we’ll never know.

And among the things she’ll never know is how Jack had stood, for an interval he’d never be able to measure, with a gun aimed, as had never been his intention, at his protesting but unflinching brother. How so shocked was he by this situation (and so fixed had been his intention) that he couldn’t alter his posture or grasp the fact that the spectacle he was himself presenting must be no less extraordinary than the one before him. Then this second shock had hit him, as if he’d seen not Tom, but himself in a mirror.

But Tom was standing there, and Jack was pointing a gun at him.

Ellie will never know, either, how with Jack’s shock had come a small, impossible explosion of joy. Tom was here, in this cottage. How Jack’s muscles had frozen, then melted. How he’d lowered the gun, for which, he knew, the cost would be the disappearance of his brother, though it was not nearly so great a cost as the cost of not lowering it, and in lowering it he knew too (and knew that Tom knew it) that it would never be fired again.

How he’d stood, staring now only at a closed door, and how he’d shaken and gasped for air, as if he might have returned from the dead himself, and how he’d felt that though Tom had vanished he was still with him, and how he might even have groaned out loud, ‘For God’s sake help me, Tom.’

How suddenly the power to move had returned to him. How in a giddy, panting frenzy of reversing actions and in the very limited time available (though only moments before he’d felt that time was calmly slowing and stretching), he’d returned each glaring object to where it belonged. The gun, that is, to the gun cabinet, as if it had never been taken out, along with the loose cartridges in his pocket, though not before removing the two from the gun itself, his fingers burning against what might have been, in these same rushing seconds before him, the means of ending everything.

Panic had spurred him. Sweat had pricked his skin. His breath had hissed. In his haste to hide the evidence and in his all-consuming terror that Ellie might forestall him, he’d considered slipping the gun — the loaded gun — temporarily into the umbrella stand. But she’d surely notice it and how would he explain? In his haste too, he’d failed to deal with the box of cartridges lurking upstairs among his socks.

But thank God it was safely concealed up there. He’d deal with it, hours later and in less of a frenzy, while Ellie was taking a bath, and while the thought would come to him that he would simply get rid of all this weaponry, he’d get rid at last of the gun and that when he did so, Tom would finally be laid to rest. But was it Tom, still with him, who gave him this thought? Was he here? Had he gone?

Rain would still rattle at the window and he’d tremble to be alone again (but was he alone?) in the bedroom where he’d been alone before. He’d smooth the almost-forgotten dent in the bed. Could Ellie possibly have guessed?

He’d sell the gun. Or — better, quicker — there was plenty of sea all around, which had already, regrettably but permanently, swallowed a medal. He’d have to explain that too, sooner or later: the absence of the medal. He’d say that he’d taken it with him — which was true — and had thrown it in Tom’s grave. It was a lie, but it was a white lie. He’d see again, as he smoothed the duvet, that white, closed gate. Then the thought would seize him that he could really have done it — dropped the medal in the grave, it might have been the thing to do, the right place for that medal. All his useless, too-late thoughts, arriving after the event, but this one still had a use, and some thoughts were best never enacted. His hand would shake as he retrieved the box of cartridges. He’d hear the splashing of Ellie in the bath.

But all this — while he had still to open the door that his brother had guarded — was yet to come. His scramble to return the gun to the cabinet meant there was a significant delay. It was just as well Ellie had delayed too, willing the door not to stay shut, and his foolish idea about the umbrella stand had prompted a more practical course of action.

Jack walks towards Ellie, holding a seaside umbrella. Ellie walks towards Jack. Then the umbrella covers them both, the wind trying to wrest it from Jack’s battling grip, the rain beating a tattoo against it.