“I’m fine,” she repeats. Am I upset with Jayne? she wonders, but can’t remember why she might be. Perhaps it’s Emily she’s cross with.
She feels animosity but isn’t sure where it should be directed. It must have come from somewhere. She listens for Jayne’s reply, but hears nothing. Maybe Jayne said something, maybe she didn’t. Ruth’s head settles back to rest against the bathroom wall.
It comes to her. It’s Toby. He is the cause of her hostility. It’s always him.
The Lexi MacKay letter was horrifying. But there have been other, smaller, incidents she let slip but can’t ignore any longer.
Ruth thinks of a wedding she and Toby went to. They brought Alfie. He was tiny. When he soiled his nappy and Ruth went in search of somewhere to change him she saw Toby chatting to one of the young waitresses outside the marquee. They were standing very close to one another. When she called him, Toby leapt away from the girl and rushed to help with Alfie. He wasn’t usually so concerned with Alfie’s needs. It made him seem guilty.
She winces at the memory. Her problem is that she never knows if what she saw wassomething, or nothing. Is she piecing together innocent actions and catastrophizing, or is Toby fatally attracted to younger women? She doesn’t trust herself to know.
But she does know that he wouldn’t be the first professor to take advantage of his position. Are there other students, apart from Lexi MacKay, that he’s bothered?
Is Imogen one of them?
She knows what her gut is telling her and shuts her eyes, taking a bitter, defeated sort of consolation from the warmth of the tears slipping down her cheeks.
She needs to stop fighting the truth and accept it. This is what giving up feels like, she thinks. My marriage is over.
And the thought that perhaps Edie knows this about Toby, too, and has taken revenge on him doesn’t feel all that strange at all.
She doesn’t move, just sits where she is and drunkenly tries to imagine a new future, not even reacting when lightning illuminates the bathroom window and a clap of thunder rips across the valley.
John walks beside the river. In the darkness the rushing water has a solid quality, it looks like molten lava. He imagines it coming up from the earth. The noise of it fills his ears.
He’s walking his land; he knows that much. Maggie would tell him to come in, stay safe from the rain and the lightning that’s crackling and approaching from the west, but he feels exhilarated.
A dead hare lies on the riverbank. He stops to look at it and finds it beautiful and sad. The darkness makes it look as if the ground is absorbing it.
Clouds race above him so fast that he feels breathless just to turn his head up and gaze at them. He senses how vast they are, rather than sees, until the lightning reveals their immense, agitated architecture. He feels as if the rain is cleansing him.
He has no idea how long he’s been out here. But he knows where he’s going.
He wants to pay his respects at the burial chamber. To the people of this valley. His people. They roam this place, still, just as he does.
He walks doggedly uphill. Lightning electrifies the horizonwhen he reaches the edge of the bogland that put fear in him as a child, and in the brightness, he sees a figure rise ahead of him, towering above the saturated ground, dripping, and beckoning to him, but he’s not afraid. Rather, he salutes it with one hand, and after a moment he believes he can see through the darkness that it salutes him back and then it’s gone and as thunder rolls in waves across the valley he feels as if he was understood.
He wonders what he’s carrying in his other hand, this fleshy and limp thing, and why it’s dead. He recognizes that it’s an animal and it has a name, but he can’t think of it.
I know, he says, after a while. He knows what the figure in the bog was telling him.
He turns back toward the barn.
Jayne opens the front door of the barn, hoping to see Emily outside, but it’s almost pitch dark. The storm has accelerated dusk.
Light spills from behind Jayne, from the hallway, but doesn’t travel far. It creates falling shards from the raindrops and pools onto the slick paving stones just outside the entrance. She steps out and pulls the door shut behind her, fighting the wind.
Upstairs, Ruth startles at the slam, before blacking out again.
Jayne is enveloped in a cloak of darkness. Only the dimmest of outlines are visible beyond the barn, not a single star and no sign of Emily. Lightning flashes. Thunder follows, only a few seconds behind, menacingly loud.
Jayne turns on the flashlight provided by the owners of the barn. It penetrates the darkness disappointingly; its beam is dimmer than she would like, long but narrow, not much better than a laser pointer.
But she has no better option. She scans the area outside the front door with the torch. There’s a mess of footprints in the mudwhere the path ends, each indent filled with water, but it’s impossible to know if any of them are Emily’s or were made earlier.
“Emily!” she shouts, but the wind snatches her words and swallows them before they can carry any distance. The temperature has plummeted. Lightning ripples across the horizon behind her but is gone too quickly for her to see much.
Beyond the yard her torchlight picks out a small lawn of rough grass, barely tamed, a wooden fence beyond it and a pergola-type structure, partially walled, built into the fence’s corner, like a lookout post. Perhaps Emily is there, praying to the gods of cell reception. Jayne’s feet sink into the grass and below it, into watery, uneven ground.
