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. El ie sees before her, through the pelting rain, a burst of black and yel ow segments, with the word LOOKOUT, repeated several times at its rim. Then she sees Jack, stepping forward, holding the umbrel a uncertainly up and out towards her, in the manner of an inexpert doorman.
“Stay there,” he says hoarsely.
But El ie doesn’t stay there. She takes almost immediately the few, wet paces that wil enable her to meet Jack halfway, thinking as she takes them: The things we’l never know.
And among the things she’l 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.
El ie wil never know, either, how with Jack’s shock had come a smal , 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 stil 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 al -consuming terror that El ie might forestal him, he’d considered slipping the gun—the loaded gun— temporarily into the umbrel a 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 El ie was taking a bath, and while the thought would come to him that he would simply get rid of al this weaponry, he’d get rid at last of the gun and that when he did so, Tom would final y be laid to rest. But was it Tom, stil with him, who gave him this thought? Was he here? Had he gone?
Rain would stil 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 El ie possibly have guessed?
He’d sel the gun. Or—better, quicker—there was plenty of sea al around, which had already, regrettably but permanently, swal owed 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 real y have done it—dropped the medal in the grave, it might have been the thing to do, the right place for that medal. Al his useless, too-late thoughts, arriving after the event, but this one stil 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 El ie in the bath.
But al this—while he had stil 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 wel El ie had delayed too, wil ing the door not to stay shut, and his foolish idea about the umbrel a stand had prompted a more practical course of action.
Jack walks towards El ie, holding a seaside umbrel a.
El ie walks towards Jack. Then the umbrel a covers them both, the wind trying to wrest it from Jack’s battling grip, the rain beating a tattoo against it.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he stil lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels:
He is also the author of
Wish You Were Here
By Graham Swift
Reading Group Guide
ABOUT THIS READING
GROUP GUIDE
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that fol ow are intended to enhance your reading
