There’s nobody in the shelter, just a barbecue cowering beneath its flapping cover and some sturdy wooden furniture. “Emily!” Jayne bellows but the wind ensures that the word only churns in the air around her, traveling nowhere, before it’s obliterated by another clap of thunder.
Jayne knows she should find lower, open ground, or get inside. The storm will be over them, soon. But suspicion that Emily might really have tried to return to the farmhouse is reluctantly growing in her mind. She’s afraid for Emily and upset with her. People think they’re bombproof, fireproof, getting-lost proof. Death proof. Until it happens. And it can happen in an instant. She has watched it happen, multiple times.
If Emily’s on the lane now, she’s surely very afraid. Jayne makes her way to the front of the barn and approaches the thicket that marks the start of the lane.
“Emily!” she calls again.
Across the valley, the gibbous moon, a pocked yellow stone, emerges briefly, beautifully, between storm clouds that roil its edges. Seconds later, they close around it and it’s gone. The end of a brief act. As if in answer, lightning ripples again.
She pauses at the top of the lane. It’s even darker than its surroundings, a black tunnel. Even she feels nervous.
Emily must be very scared for Paul if she’s run off down here. It’s extreme. It makes Jayne wonder whether Emily’s right to be worried about him.
What she does know is that Paul’s not the straight arrow Emily seems to think he is. Not by a long stretch. He wears the uniform of success: expensive shirts, collars stiff and proud, striped cotton straining over his belly and parting sharply at the neck releasing an unruly triangle of chest hair. A pair of black jeans. Brogues. The latest phone. A fat watch and wedding band. Cufflinks. His laugh is loud enough to turn heads. The same when he barks an order. The impression is of a man blandly enjoying success, and life, whose arms and wallet are open to those he loves.
But if a bead of sweat springs out on his brow, he doesn’t leave it there, a new shirt is pulled from his office drawer if so much as a hint of perspiration darkens his armpits.
Jayne suspects that the grip Paul has on his business affairs is made of steel. When the Dovecote investment failed it was the thought of telling Paul that frightened Mark the most. He came home shaken afterward. And yet when they next saw Paul, he was open arms and the waft of aftershave, bonhomie, and tales and promises of the best this and the best that and taking a call, just a min, I’ll be right back. His company is a train you ride on. You don’t remember boarding, but you feel it when you’re standing alone again.
And what about Toby? The image that springs to mind for him is a shaft of dusty light, illuminating a bookshelf, dust motes turning in it. Mr. Professor. He’s earnest. A talker. Too many words tumble from him at once. You can struggle to follow them. His mind is a Catherine wheel, the sparks it throws out ideas, some so serious you want to take them away and consider them, you feel as if theymight pierce your own confusion about life, others so frivolous, so downright silly and self-effacing, it takes you a moment to process them and, in the meantime, you’ve already laughed with him.
Lightning flares again and in the flash of light, Jayne sees that the lane is barely passable.
Emily is just foolish, she thinks. Anyone going down here, tonight, needs their head screwed on and I mustn’t get sucked into her paranoia, or Ruth’s. Edie hasn’t killed anyone.
Jayne walks a little way down the lane, torch beam aimed at the ground, so she doesn’t slip. It’s dangerously slick underfoot.
“Emily!” she shouts.
She turns back to face the barn. It looks so simple in outline, like something a child would draw, an uneven little cube punctuated by glowing windows, a rim of light around the door.
Lightning strikes again, closer now. Powerful. Briefly, it makes lacework of the foliage above her. Jayne’s chest tightens.
“Emily!” she calls again at the top of her voice.
Her answer is a roll of thunder.
Emily runs down the lane. Her phone torch guides her, its beam shrouding the space in front of her in a mist of light, bouncing off what’s close and pulling it into focus. Her pink rubber boots, the boisterous green of the crowding foliage, occasional flashes of color in the monochrome. The rest is darkness. Shadows on shadows.
Except for when there’s lightning, which feels as if it’s above her. The thunder scares her just as much, so loud that Emily imagines it’s shaking the valley, rearranging the landscape around her to cut off all routes down to safety.
Even so, there’s no way she’s going back up now. She needs to find open ground. She needs to keep going.
Between bursts of thunder and lightning she can hear thewind, rustling, pulling, pushing. The wet slap of her boots. Her breathing is rasping, staccato.
She swerves to avoid a low-hanging branch, and a foot lands too heavily in a deep rut, jarring her knee. She has to contort herself awkwardly to regain her balance.
She stops once, to check her phone for a signal. Because if she can talk to Paul while she’s going down this will be easier. She’s almost forgotten the letter and her anger at him over his lie. She just wants to hear his voice, wants him to talk her back to safety.
But there’s no signal.
She carries on, slower now. The path is degrading. Her heart is thumping. Another round of thunder and lightning stops her in her tracks.
When it’s over she starts to move once again, but even more cautiously. Trees close in tighter. The ruts beneath her feet become deeper and flow with rainwater. She recalls the precarious tilting of the Land Rover as they drove up here, the engine alternately gunning and groaning.
She takes to the edge of the lane and must walk now, her balance precarious, but she keeps herself going by imagining emerging from the trees to see the farmhouse lit up and welcoming. Her determination swells, driving her faster and, as if in punishment, her foot slips into another rut submerging her boot in muddy water.
Emily tries to pull it out, too late feeling the suction grip of mud hanging on to the sole and her foot pops out of the boot, sock dangling. She wobbles. There’s nothing to grab on to.
