“Wel , Jack,” El ie had said, stroking the back of his neck,
“did we make a good move? Or did we make a good move?”
But he’d needed to resist the strange, opposite feeling: that he should have been there, back at Jebb, in the thick of it; it was his proper place.
BSE, then foot-and-mouth. What would have been the odds? Those TV pictures had looked like scenes from hel .
Flames leaping up into the night. Even so, cattle aren’t people. Just a few months later Jack had turned on the tel y once again and cal ed to El ie to come and look, as people must have been cal ing out, al over the world, to whoever was in the next room, “Drop what you’re doing and come and look at this.”
More smoke. Not over familiar, remembered hil s, and even on the far side of the world. Though Jack’s first thought—or perhaps his second—had been the somehow entirely necessary and appropriate one: Wel , we should be al right here. Here at the bottom of the Isle of Wight. And while the TV had seemed to struggle with its own confusion and repeated again and again, as if they might not be true, the same astonishing sequences, he’d stepped outside to look down at the site, as if half expecting everything to have vanished.
Thirty-two white units. Al stil there. And among them, on the grass, a few idle and perhaps stil -ignorant human sprinkles. But inside each caravan was a television, and some of them must be switched on. The word must be spreading. In the Ship, in the Sands Cafe, it must be spreading. It was early September— late season—but the middle of a beautiful, clear, Indian-summer day, the sea a smooth, smiling blue. Until now at least, they would al have been congratulating themselves on having picked a perfect week.
He’d felt a surge of helpless responsibility, of protectiveness. He was in charge. What should he do—go down and calm them? In case they were panicking. Tel them it was al right? Tel them it was al right just to carry on their holidays, that was what they’d come for and had paid for and they shouldn’t let this spoil things, they should carry on enjoying themselves.
But his next thought—though perhaps it had real y been his first and he’d pushed it aside, and it was less a thought maybe than a cold, clammy premonition—was: What might this mean for Tom?
HE LOOKS NOW at that same view from the bedroom window of Lookout Cottage, though the weather’s neither sunny nor calm. Clouds are charging over Holn Head. A November gale is careering up the Channel. The sea, white flecks in its greyness, seems to be travel ing in a body from right to left, west to east, as if some retreat is going on.
Rain stings the glass in front of him.
El ie has been gone for over an hour—this weather yet to unleash itself when she left. She could be sitting out the storm somewhere, pul ed up in the wind-rocked Cherokee.
Reconsidering her options, perhaps. Or she could have done already exactly what she said she’d do, and be returning, having to take it slowly, headlights on in the blinding rain. Or returning—who knows?— behind a police car, with not just its headlights on, but its blue light flashing.
Reconsidering her options? But she made the move and said the words. The situation is plain to him now, and despite the blurring wind and rain, Jack’s mind is real y quite clear. She had her own set of keys, of course. Al she had to do was grab her handbag and walk out the door, but she might have remembered another set of keys that Jack certainly hasn’t forgotten. Has it occurred to her, even now?
El ie who was usual y the one who thought things through, and him the slowcoach.
“El ie,” Jack thinks. “My El ie.”
HE’S ALREADY TAKEN the shotgun from the cabinet downstairs—the keys are in the lock—and brought it up here. It’s lying, loaded, on the bed behind him, on the white duvet. For good measure he has a box of twenty-five cartridges (some already in his pocket), in case of police cars, in case of mishaps. It’s the first time, Jack thinks, that he’s ever put a gun on a bed, let alone theirs, and that, by itself, has to mean something. As he peers through the window he can feel the weight of the gun behind him, making a dent in the duvet as if it might be some smal , sleeping body.
Wel , one way or another, they’d never gone down the road of children. There isn’t, now, that complication. He’s definitely the last of the Luxtons. There’s only one final complication—it involves El ie— and he’s thought that through too, seriously and careful y.
Which is why he’s up here, at this rain-lashed window, from where he has the best view of the narrow, twisting road, Beacon Hil , which has no other purpose these days than to lead to this cottage. So he’l be alerted. So he’l be able to see, just a little sooner than from downstairs, the dark-blue roof, above the high bank, then the nose of the Cherokee as it takes the first, tight, ascending bend, past the old chapel. The Cherokee that’s done so much hard journeying in these last three days.
The road below him, running with water, seems to slither.
Of course, she might not return at al . Another option, and one she might be seriously contemplating. Though where the hel else does she have to go to?
It’s al gone mad, Jack thinks, but part of him has never felt saner. Rain blurs the window, but he looks through it at the rows of buffeted caravans in the middle distance to the right, beyond the spur of land that slopes down beneath him to the low mass of the Head. Al empty now, of course, for the winter.
“Wel , at least this has happened in the off season.” El ie’s words, and just for a shameful instant it had been his own secret flicker of a thought as wel .
HE LOOKS at the caravans and even now feels their tug, like the tug of the wind on their own thin, juddering frames.
Thirty-two trembling units. To the left, the locked site office, the laundrette, the empty shop—gril e down, window boarded. The gated entrance-way off the Sands End road, the sign above it swinging.
Even now, especial y now, he feels the tug. The Lookout Caravan Park, named after this cottage (or two knocked into one), in turn named after its former use. He feels, himself now, like some desperate coastguard. El ie had said they should change the name from the Sands. He’d said they should keep it, for the good wil and the continuity.
And so they had, for a year. But El ie was al for them making their own mark and wiping out what
