Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

It’s as though something he can’t prevent is simply happening to him. Though everything is quick, there also seems ample time to do it in. He has the spare cartridges in his pocket, but he hopes it will be as unfumbled and clean as possible. His own death he is ready for. He could have done it already. He might even have done it yesterday, if he’d busted through that gate — and if he’d had a gun with him — but that would have been inconsiderate to all concerned, including the bloody Robinsons.

And he’d needed this gun.

He can bear the thought, very easily now, of the world without him, of the world carrying on without Jack Luxton, but he can’t bear the thought of Ellie having to carry on in it without him, of a world with Ellie but not him in it, and of Ellie having to pick up his pieces. He knows he can’t inflict it on her, it would be a crime.

Which leaves only one option. And final complication. Also, if he deals with Ellie first, he knows he won’t hesitate to deal with himself, he’ll do it all the quicker. Not that in his case it will be so mechanically simple to do, but he’ll make sure it’s done. He knows that it can be done.

Now that it’s happening it doesn’t feel mad at all, it even feels — only right. As if his death has arrived in the form of Ellie and there’s no getting away from it and no other way he would wish it. And she’ll understand perfectly, he knows that too, even as he lifts the gun. From the look in his face, in his wall of a face, she’ll know what he’s doing. He’s sparing her. He’s sparing her from finding what he once had to find and look at. He’s simply sparing her. This was always a double thing, just him for Ellie and Ellie for him, and there are two barrels to this shotgun.

He hears, through the sound of the rain, the approaching car and decides — a sudden, impetuous change of plan — to come forward, raising the gun, from his position of concealment at the foot of the stairs. Only to see Tom standing with his back pressed against the inside of the front door through which Ellie must enter, in a barring posture that’s vaguely familiar.

He’s in his full soldier’s kit, head to toe, he’s in the clothes he died in, and in his face and his eyes, too, he looks like a soldier.

And this time he speaks, though it’s hardly necessary.

He says, ‘Shoot me first, Jack, shoot me first. Don’t be a fucking fool. Over my dead fucking body.’

ELLIE TURNS BY the old chapel and makes the final climb to the cottage. Never in all her life has she felt so monstrously late for anything, and so absolute is her hurry that she takes this itself to mean that the worst must be true. Why else should she be hurrying? It’s a false logic, but persuasive. On the other hand, if the worst is true, hurrying can make no difference.

No amount of hurry, however, can reverse the recent sequence of events. She simply shouldn’t have left. She shouldn’t be travelling in this direction at all. Two mornings ago it was her crime to stay, today it was her crime to leave. And she has never in any serious way walked out on Jack before. She has never even thought of it, though now it might already be her irrevocable situation: life without Jack.

Her final charge up Beacon Hill is, anyway, quite unlike the slow but deliberate approach of Major Richards last week, which could be said to be the cause of why she is careering up the same road now. Haste, in his case, would have been quite inappropriate, though so too would have been lateness, or any hint of evasion.

For a moment Ellie, who only seconds ago has thought that she is like Jack, heading down that dreadful slope of Barton Field, wishes she might be Major Richards, still making his solemn way to Lookout Cottage. That the sequence and allocation of events might be reassembled. Then all this might be undone and have a second chance to unfold. Or rather Ellie thinks, even as she races in her unmajorly way up the hill, that she would rather be Major Richards, bringing the confirmation of Tom’s death, she would rather be Major Richards with his unenviable duties as the messenger of death than be the woman she is, in the plight she is in, right now.

But it’s as she briefly shares her being with Major Richards that Ellie gets the distinct sensation that she has been preceded, even now, by a military visitation. As if during her absence, her manic driving this way and that and her sitting helplessly near the edge of a cliff, Major Richards has in fact contrived, even in this weather, to pay another, surprise call. To let them know it was all a mistake. That it wasn’t Tom, after all. A mistake of identities. Bodies, you understand. It was some other poor luckless soldier, whose family, of course, have now been informed.

‘Carry on.’ (Major Richards’s cap drips with rain water.) ‘Carry on. As you were.’

And for the first time Ellie realises that she wishes Tom not dead. Truly.

So had she wished him dead? Was that the logic? Had she? Wish you were not here? She wishes him not dead now and for a moment even wishes she might be him. Not Major Richards, but Tom. She wishes she might be Tom, in his soldier’s kit, speeding now up Beacon Hill to prove that Major Richards’s last, swift, miraculous visit, in the middle of a storm, wasn’t itself a deplorable error.

Never, in any case, since the news of Tom’s death, has Ellie felt such a tangible sense of his living presence — a big burly corporal — and to her surprise and in all her haste and terror for another man, and even as she comes to a lurching halt outside the cottage, her eyes and throat thicken and she splutters out as if she might even have been the poor dead man’s wife, lover, mother, sister: ‘O Tom! O poor, poor Tom!’

And no sooner has she done so than the feeling of Tom’s presence (that military presence was his) is gone.

She cuts the engine. The cottage, despite its lit windows, looks deserted. The rain lashes down. The very worst thing now would be to hear a shot from inside. The very best would be to see the door open. The door stays shut.

After her headlong drive, there’s no logical reason for her not to move as fast as she can to open that front door herself. But she stays stuck where she is — how long do you give such a moment? — afraid of what she will find, or longing to remain for a further instant, then a further instant, within the time before she will find it. Or simply willing that other, miraculous thing to occur: that the door will open.

Then it does open.

It is opened slowly and sheepishly, as if, she will think later, by a man emerging half-believingly from some awful place, or a man who, having sought desperate refuge, has just been told that it’s safe now, it’s perfectly safe, to come out. She opens her door too, and perhaps they both look, in looking at each other, as if 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. Ellie sees before her, through the pelting rain, a burst of black and yellow segments, with the word lookout, repeated several times at its rim. Then she sees Jack, stepping forward, holding the umbrella uncertainly up and out towards her, in the manner of an inexpert doorman.

‘Stay there,’ he says hoarsely.

But Ellie doesn’t stay there. She takes almost immediately the few, wet paces that will enable her to meet Jack halfway, thinking as she takes them: The things we’ll never know.