Wish You Were Here

to slow at the turn for Beacon Hil (though it’s more of a skidding, rocking attempt to both slow and accelerate), she experiences a moment’s odd desolation as the silver car carries on, up the rise ahead, in the direction of Sands End.

She feels sure now it wasn’t just waiting out the storm, but confronting, too, some Saturday-morning catastrophe, the story of which she’l never know.

She tears along the straight section of steeply banked road before the hil proper, even as the rain begins its onslaught again. But she’s near enough now for the cottage to be plainly visible, if only for a few seconds before the bends of the road and the high banks obscure it, and she can see that its lights are on. Hardly surprising in this weather—they would have been on when she left. But she can see that they include the bedroom light, which she interprets first as a good sign, then as a bad sign, a terrible sign, then as a sign that need not signify anything at al .

Then remembers how she’d watched for Jack from that same window last night and how she’d seen his lights. He’d come back!

Al of this flashes through her mind, even as, frantical y, she flashes her lights, as if a watching Jack—if he’s watching—wil instantly understand their coded message:

“Jack, it’s me. I’m coming. I love you. Don’t, Jack, DON’T!” But of course her lights are hidden by the roadside banks, and he’s not perhaps looking anyway. He’s not perhaps looking at anything any more.

Her heart hammers and, as she mounts the hil proper, stil sheathed by the high banks which only give way at the bend by the old chapel, it seems she has no choice but also to go down that hil Jack once went down, alone on foot. To enter that dark but silvery, frosty tunnel that he must have gone down again and again in his mind. And, in truth, in her mind, she’s often gone down it with him, holding his hand and hoping that what was there at the bottom of the hil might not, this time, be there. Even wishing she might have gone down it with him that first time when it wasn’t in the mind but entirely, terribly real, so at least he might not have been alone, at least she could have been with him.

But how could that ever have been? And she wasn’t even with him yesterday, or the day before. And now she may have to go down that dark tunnel al by herself—Jack can’t be with her—and see what he saw at the end of it.

35

THE CARAVANS LOOM through the greyness. Jack feels an ache for them. What wil become of them? More to the point, what wil become of al their would-be occupants in the season to come? Only November, but the bookings sheets are already fil ing up with the names of regulars: the same again next year, please. What wil they think? What wil they do when they find out, via the reports that wil surely cause some noticeable blip on the national news? If they missed the other thing or failed to make the connection, then they surely won’t miss this.

“Tragedy in the Isle of Wight.” Or (who knows?) “The Siege of Lookout Cottage.”

Jack doesn’t want to disappoint any of them—the Lookouters in their scattered winter quarters al over the country. It seems for their sakes alone he might almost decide not to do what he intends. But nor, mysteriously, does he want to disappoint the caravans themselves, which he has come to see, now more than ever, as patient, dormant, hibernating creatures needing their summer influx of life. Who wil look after them now?

“The Lookout Caravan Park is closed til further notice.” Pending future ownership. But who, with such a blot upon it, wil want to take it over? A taint, a curse, and a lot more glaring than a hole in a tree.

. . .

THE RAIN BATTERS THE WINDOW. Always, of course, the gamble of the weather. No, he couldn’t guarantee it. Even farmers had never found a way of doing that. A risk you took, no money back. And it cut both ways: a wet July, a sudden spate of cancel ations. And what could you say to those who braved it? There’s always Carisbrooke Castle.

Have you been to Carisbrooke Castle? Did you know (Jack certainly hadn’t known til it became part of his rainy-day patter) that Charles I had once ruled England, or thought he did, from Carisbrooke Castle?

Always an eye on the weather. Even in August it could sweep in, just like now. No, not cal ed the Lookout for nothing. But on a good Easter, say, in good spring weather, when they started to show up in numbers, knowing they’d hit it right, it was like turning out the heifers for the first time.

They felt it, you felt it. Even the caravans felt it.

He looks at them from the window, as if he’s abandoned them and they know it. Only the rapid events of the last two hours, only the shifting and sharpening of his basic plan, mean that he’s here now and not down among them, with the gun, even in this weather. That his brains, and al that they’ve ever comprehended, aren’t already strewing one of them.

He might have done it on his return, had El ie not been at home. And he might even have done it now, in her absence. He might have damn wel walked down the hil , even in this rain, the gun under his parka, and taken the keys and chosen any one of the thirty-two. Pick a number.

And that surely would have marred for ever the prospects of the Lookout Park. No chance, then, of happy holidays to come.

But he needed El ie. He needs her now. He ful y understands it. That final, stil solvable complication. He needs her to be here. If he has gone mad, then he’s also rational. He needs her to return and, if she returns, to return alone. He’s prepared to deal with al comers, seriously prepared: a whole box of cartridges, this upstairs position.

But he thinks—he could almost place a bet—that El ie wil return, and alone, and that it won’t be long now. Delayed only by this evil weather, sent this way and that by the weather, like some desperate yacht (he’s sometimes watched such a thing from this very window) trying to make it round Holn Head.

It was al a hysterical bluff, perhaps. But he isn’t bluffing.

And he needs her.

JACK HASN’T CHANGED the wil he made soon after their arrival in the Isle of Wight. There’d be no reason—or opportunity—for doing so now, but he momentarily thinks of how he sat one day with El ie in the offices of Gibbs and Parker (the same firm who’d acted for Uncle Tony) and of how the solicitor, Gibbs, had delicately pointed out that they should include in both their wil s a standard provision for their dying at the same time or nearly so.