Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

“Are you going home?”

He nods. Stephen lives on the Jurassic Coast, two and a half hours away. They both did the drive so many times. And now it’s over. This route they knew so well no longer exists.

And all the landmarks are gone too, the ways she gauged the distance — the spires of towns on the Salisbury Plain, the service station where she always stopped for coffee, the sign for his town, the shapes of his neighbors’ houses. Then she was there, opening the car, her feet creaking on the gravel, and pulling her overnight bag over her shoulder, and heading for his door, with exhilaration in the beginning, and a sense of doom around the end of their engagement, and lately, in the past two years, some sensation I could never pin down.

“How’s the restaurant?”

Stephen owns a Mexican restaurant in West Bay. Even in the off-season, La Fondita does tremendous business.

“I don’t know. Fine. Tom is going to look after it for a while,” he says.

He’s so handsome. That was part of the problem. Rachel thought he was too lucky. Not anymore. After this, he would be perfect for her. A high, mangled sound leaves my throat.

“I thought your dad would come.”

“No.” I don’t tell him our dad wasn’t invited. Stephen never understood about our father. But, then, it isn’t an easy thing to understand.

Neither of us knows what to say. I think how strange it is, after how much time we’ve spent together. A few years ago, the three of us visited Lyme Regis, where the woman who found the dinosaurs lived. I remember being very sad when we went to the dinosaur museum. One of my plays had just been rejected by a competition. I wondered if the woman who discovered the dinosaurs ever found her life as absurd as I found mine.

“She didn’t find dinosaurs, Nora, she found fossils,” said Rachel. And that was the problem, wasn’t it.

Afterward, we sat in front of a pub the color of pistachio ice cream. I got shit-faced on beer, as did Rachel, companionably, and at some point I laughed so hard I fell off the bench. On the drive down the coast, I watched how the cliffs were eaten away into folds, how the grass grew right to their edge, the felt tip of the coast a green curving line. Watching them, my thoughts expanded to a grand scale, consoling me. In the front seat Rachel, also drunk, also watching the pale cliffs and thinking her own noble, magnificent thoughts, held Stephen’s hand.

“I miss Rachel.” My voice cracks open on her name, like I am yawning.

Stephen looks down the high street, and I am ashamed of saying it. It didn’t need to be said. I remember seeing them asleep on his couch. His lips pursed, chin doubled, kissing the top of her head.

“Will you tell me anything the police tell you? I keep calling the station but they won’t give me anything.”

“Of course.”

He closes the boot and comes around to the driver’s door. I try to ignore how uneasy he makes me now. The police must have confirmed his story. If he was at work all day, dozens of people saw him. He isn’t a suspect. But the police aren’t telling him anything.

Stephen takes out his keys and stands looking down at them.

“Was she seeing someone?” he asks.

“No.”

“She seemed different the last time I saw her. I wanted to visit in October, and she said she had to work.”

“She probably did.”

There is a pause, and Stephen’s expression shifts. “Did you tell her not to marry me?”

“What, two years ago?”

“Yes, and since.”

“Do you think she would have listened to me one way or the other?”

“So you did.”

“No.” I wonder if he can tell I’m lying. Rachel was restless. I said that if she was restless already, marrying him was probably not the best idea. But she had already decided by then. “I told her she would be fine either way.”

“She isn’t fine. If we’d married she would still be alive.”

“You’re right. I wish she had moved to Dorset.”

And, a few years later, divorced you. By now she would be starting over somewhere, in a new flat, happily on her own again. Unless neither of us is right, and someone has been following her, and would have found her no matter where she went.

AT NOON, I take the train to London to close my flat. Soon after I leave, a man with the cleaners calls to say they have arrived at the house. While my sister’s blood is cleaned from her walls and floor, I watch the view from the train window. Between the snow and the low white clouds are villages of houses with stained yellow roofs, fields, Roman roads.

He said they would sand the floor and then revarnish it. Part of me is relieved — there won’t be a trace left of what he did to her — but it also seems strange. Shouldn’t we leave it as it is. Or burn the place down.

The thing lodged under my ribs begins to ache. A car with smoke fuming behind it drives alongside the train. Rachel crawls up the stairs. The dog rotates from the ceiling, and blood drips from his paws.

There is a thump and then a suck of air as another train rockets by us. Sounds seem to dwindle into the vacuum between the two trains, and then it has passed and I look out at a stone house with lancet windows.

Keith Denton said that he was resting in his van at the pond during her murder.

The watcher on the ridge drank Tennent’s Light Ale and smoked Dunhills.

Rachel decided to leave Oxfordshire.

Stephen is angry she refused him.

I need to know why it happened, so I can stop it from happening. When I opened the door, her house began to shine, and Rachel in my mind began to shine. The way when soldiers go berserk, they recall the battle slowing down, and themselves entranced by it.

I should have made the trip back to London seven days ago, last Sunday night. On Saturday we would have driven into Broadwell for breakfast — lingonberry crêpes, dark coffee — and wandered through the museum. At home, she would have a glass of wine, and I would build a fire or take a bath. On Sunday we would take the dog on the aqueduct, and read, cook lunch, discuss the goats she planned to raise, then I’d head back to London and she’d go to work since she was on the night shift.

I am furious at what has been taken away from us. It is too large to consider all at once, so I focus on smaller things. I want lingonberry crêpes very badly, for example.

The train passes through a village, its steeple sliding by. I look out at the snow, the yellow-gray houses and evergreen trees, the hanging sign of the Mermaid. At the edge of the village is a church with a small graveyard. While the graveyard hovers in front of my window, I count twelve tombstones in the snow, and then the scene begins to drift from view, shaking with the train’s movement, and is gone.

I close my eyes, sickened with guilt, horrified at how much better it is to be alive than dead. I swallow, listening to the sound it makes in the back of my throat. If I had been any faster she would be alive.

Land streams by the window. Sheep arranged on the stony flank of a hill, the troubling clouds surging behind it. A firehouse with a man doing exercises in its yard. He pulls himself above a bar, lowers himself, vanishes.

Beside me Rachel is sleeping. If I lean forward, I will see her faint reflection on the window. Her chest rising and falling. The snow, the power lines, and the fences running through her body. Her dark hair pulled over one shoulder, her arms crossed above her stomach. She is wearing a camel-colored sweater. I can see its fibers on the windowpane.

We approach Heathrow. A huge jet glides in to land, its windows a series of yellow drops in the faded light. This used to be the part of the trip when I started to get excited about coming home.