Wish You Were Here

realising that she couldn’t demand much more of him, in his condition, than his presence. “Ask me later, El . 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 til after nine (which wasn’t like him at al ). But if she’d hoped that a good sleep would real y bring him back to her and if she’d hoped that a good breakfast—an al -day breakfast if necessary—would get them talking as they should talk, she was wrong.

He didn’t seem to want any breakfast. He stil looked like some invalid. It had al suddenly reminded her of when her dad had begun to get il , 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: wel , 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 real y crazy stuff.

“I’ve always wondered, El , how come your dad died so soon after mine? Did they have an agreement?” This wasn’t about Tom’s death at al . Or was it?

Stil he hadn’t yet said anything appal ing. 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 downhil 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, El ? 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 al 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—actual y 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—

real y 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 real y mad. Even to a man who’d come back from al that he must have been through (and she was stil 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 hal way,

“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 equal y mad, equal y 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 squal s, like a warning.

But she could hardly turn round now, just because of the weather. And, almost because of it, she drove madly on.

31

ELLIE SITS by Holn Cliffs. And Jack sits, looking towards her but not knowing it, and seeing again for a moment that white gate at Jebb, though not his now washed-away hand-prints.

Everything is mad now, everything is off its hinges. He’d gone to bury Tom, but now al the things that had once been dead and buried had come back again, and there was only one way forward, he was sure of that. Even Tom himself hadn’t been real y buried. He was with him now, in this cottage, he was sure of that too, even if he hadn’t seen him.

It was Tom’s trick, Tom’s choice, to appear or not, he knew that by now. Tom might be standing even now at his shoulder. A sniper.

If El ie had come with him, if she’d only come with him, then perhaps between the two of them they might have buried Tom properly. As they’d been trying to bury him, not properly, for years. Then none of this might be happening.

But Tom wasn’t the only one, it seemed to him now, that they’d tried to bury not properly. And he’d gone and said so.

Everything is off its hinges. But his mind is quite clear and steady and decided. As if some last forbidding gate has now been simply opened for him. Al he has to do is walk through, and shut it.

BREAKFAST WAS SPREAD over the table. It stil is. The smel of bacon reaches him even now.