much as a kiss or a hug or even an “I’l be thinking of you”? My poor Jack, my poor one-and-only Luxton left. But how could she have said or done any of those things when, in the first place, she might simply have gone with him?
It was stil dark. She hadn’t moved. She’d even pul ed the duvet tighter up round her. There was a brief brightness at the curtains as he put on his headlights before slipping down the hil . Even as he’d left she’d wondered: would he come back? Was this the sort of journey and the sort of starting out on it from which he might never come back?
The fear had taken hold of her that he might not come back. How absurd. When she might have gone with him.
She’d left al those messages on his mobile, none of which had been answered. Wel , she’d asked for it. I’m thinking of you. I love you. Forgive me.
Strangely, in al the time he was gone, she’d hardly thought of Tom, returning, in his own way—being returned
—to where he’d come from. Or put herself in the terrible position of some mother or wife receiving back, but not receiving back, a soldier-husband, a soldier-son. She’d thought of her own mother, of going to be with her, and failed to do even that. Failed twice now. Al she’d wanted was for Jack to come back.
Wel , he had come back. And he hadn’t. And now it seemed she might sit here in this lay-by for ever.
25
JACK SWUNG THE CHEROKEE back onto the road and sped off as if from some delay not of his own making. He’d wasted valuable time getting choked up. Part of him recognised that it was the whole point of this journey, to get choked up. It was its essence. But some other part of him was now trying to outdrive this immobilising stuff inside him.
He looked in the mirror, half expecting to see the black hearse on his tail.
The road was clear, in both directions. The November day was brightening again, the grey clouds breaking, so that a whole hil side would suddenly light up while everything else seemed to darken.
He crossed the infant River Thames, back into Wiltshire, but the countryside, the passing signs to innocent- sounding vil ages, now vaguely oppressed him, unlike when he’d left the motorway to drive north in the morning. He was relieved when he joined the M4 and was sucked into its tunnel ed anonymity. He saw himself as a mere moving speck on a map—the blue line of the M4 draped like a cable across the land. The road was everything and, despite the names that loomed at junctions, might have been anywhere.
Chippenham? Malmesbury? Where the hel were they?
But for the first time he became conscious of the empty seat beside him, of the pointedness of its emptiness. What was El ie doing now? The Isle of Wight seemed already far away, as far away, almost, as Iraq. He couldn’t imagine what El ie was doing now. He couldn’t imagine that she was sitting now at the Lookout, trying to imagine what he was doing. Wishing that, after al , she was sitting next to him.
Was she packing her bags?
It seemed to him that there was now a difference, a gap, between El ie and him as plain as that strip of choppy sea he’d crossed this morning. For her, Tom’s death meant quite simply that Tom was gone now for good and was never coming back. He could see that this was a perfectly sound position. But for him it meant just as simply—though it was a position much harder to argue for—that Tom
There was even a simple test. He asked himself a question that, lurking inside him though it may have been, he hadn’t dared confront til now. Perhaps it had only become a question since he’d made his bolt for it, after the ceremony, back there. Who would he rather have right now
—right now between junctions 17 and 18—in that empty seat beside him? El ie? Tom?
It wasn’t an easy question or even a fair one. For a moment he failed to answer it. But then, for a clear second or two, and by way of an answer, Tom was there. He had a corporal, in battle gear, sitting beside him while he drove, under a brightening sky, down the M4. This was the first time this had happened on his journey, and it wouldn’t be the last. Jack wasn’t frightened or even surprised. He was even relieved. He didn’t need now to worry about the hearse, about outstripping it, because Tom was with him anyway.
It’s because he’s real y come back, he thought. It’s because I touched the coffin and held it. Like a kind of contamination, but a good one.
Then he thought: Am I going mad?
Last night (was it only last night and not last week?), when Jack had asked El ie one last time—he wasn’t going to insist or demand—if she’d come with him, she’d shaken her head and taken a deep, exasperated breath, as if she might have been going to say, “It’s him or me, Jack.” He was sure she was going to say it, that was the look in her eyes, but she hadn’t said it.
And he should never have said that thing, at the start, about St. Lucia. Then El ie would be with him now. He’d seen the same look come into her eyes then—as if, strangely, now Tom was dead, she could no longer rely on his absence. And hadn’t he just proved her right? The simple word was “ghost.”
“So what are you going to do, Jacko? Mope around here al winter?”
The word was “mourn,” he’d thought. Mourn, not “mope.” But he couldn’t say it—“Mourn, not mope, El ie.” The word had stuck in his throat. Like St. Lucia hadn’t.
And if El ie were with him now, sitting right beside him, would that mean Tom wouldn’t be, couldn’t be? That there couldn’t be any ghosts? Now al the other ghosts, it suddenly seemed to him, were waiting for him too—
sensing his approach, beyond the end of this blue, snaking motorway. Including Jimmy Merrick, with an extra, needly twinkle in his eye. “What—no El ie with you, boy?” Was he going mad?
BRISTOL, like some phantom presence—a thickening of traffic and junctions—passed somewhere on his
