‘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.
And among the things she’ll 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.
Ellie will never know, either, how with Jack’s shock had come a small, 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 still 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 all-consuming terror that Ellie might forestall him, he’d considered slipping the gun—the loaded gun—temporarily into the umbrella 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 Ellie was taking a bath, and while the thought would come to him that he would simply get rid of all this weaponry, he’d get rid at last of the gun and that when he did so, Tom would finally be laid to rest. But was it Tom, still with him, who gave him this thought? Was he here? Had he gone?
Rain would still 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 Ellie possibly have guessed?
He’d sell the gun. Or—better, quicker—there was plenty of sea all around, which had already, regrettably but permanently, swallowed 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 really have done it—dropped the medal in the grave, it might have been the thing to do, the right place for that medal. All his useless, too-late thoughts, arriving after the event, but this one still 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 Ellie in the bath.
But all this—while he had still 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 well Ellie had delayed too, willing the door not to stay shut, and his foolish idea about the umbrella stand had prompted a more practical course of action.
Jack walks towards Ellie, holding a seaside umbrella. Ellie walks towards Jack. Then the umbrella covers them both, the wind trying to wrest it from Jack’s battling grip, the rain beating a tattoo against it.
NOTE
This is a work of fiction that does not aim to give a documentary account of the repatriation process of dead British servicemen and any specific similarities to any such actual repatriation are unintended and coincidental.
GRAHAM SWIFT lives in London and is the author of eight other novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and Tomorrow. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant: Writing from Within. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here
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