Standing up feels like a feat almost too challenging to achieve but she needs perspective on where she is. It doesn’t help. Fog blankets the area she’s in, thick and impenetrable. All she knows is that she’s in a field, but she can’t see further than a few feet.
She hears her name again and replies again, but her voice still sounds weak, and she knows it hasn’t traveled. Breathe, she thinks, gather some strength from somewhere.
And then she thinks, how stupid I am. She’s drunk, lost, herclothes are so wet she’s not even sure if she’s soiled herself, or not, though she fears she might have and what she’s been most afraid of in all in the months since Alfie was born has come to pass: her loss of control is so complete that all the threads connecting her to her sanity have been severed.
She tries to reason, though she’s trembling so much it’s hard to do anything.
Gunshot. It must be from somewhere on the farm. They’re hunting. But that’s so dangerous, in the fog. Is she safe here from stray bullets?
She remembers something. Jayne’s weapon. Is that what she just heard?
In a rush she recalls how she found Jayne’s gun, but not of what happened after that, only of the feeling of being terribly frightened by Jayne.
What the hell has happened?
She leans against the wall, desperate to be somewhere safe. She’s afraid of seeing Jayne, or anyone else, coming out of the mist toward her but also afraid to leave this corner, remembering the warnings from the Elliotts about the treacherous landscape.
Why is she out here? There must be a good reason. She would never have endangered her own life, surely, for nothing, even if she did drink too much. Because what kind of mother does that?
Her clothes give her few clues as to what her intentions were, other than to suggest that she left the barn in a hurry. She is wearing a coat, which has probably saved her from exposure, but it’s not done up. Her shoes are inappropriate, her trousers the ones she left the city in yesterday. The hems are clammy with wet mud.
She has never felt so cold, so unwell, so hollow, so scared, so alone. She shifts position and steps on something solid and very hard.
A gun.
It triggers a muddled, partial memory. She reaches down topick it up, cautiously. It feels familiar. She’s held it before, thinks it was in her hand last night. It must be Jayne’s gun.
She wonders, as she stares at it dangling from her fingertips, as the fog around her seems to lighten a touch, threatening to expose her, as her heart rate ticks up: Who am I hiding from?
William approaches his father’s body. Birdie lies against John. She whimpers. William rests a hand on the dog’s flank and tries to find his father’s pulse but can’t.
The bullet hole in John’s forehead is neat. Blood and brain matter cover the side of one of the small standing stones that mark the entrance to the chamber. His father must have sat here, against the stone and fallen onto his side after shooting himself. His handgun lies beside him. It’s not a weapon John uses much. He occasionally has to dispatch livestock with it. William can’t imagine why he brought it up here with him. Some misguided notion of protection? Or did he know he was going to take his own life?
It’s impossible to be sure, and he acknowledges that there’s no point in trying to find sense in anything his father has done lately.
This hiatus of calm where William’s training tells him to try to assess the scene objectively only lasts a moment before he feels the full force of his emotional loss, the first hefty blow that grief will land on him, and he drops to his knees beside his father and presses his own cheek against John’s. His dad’s skin is warm and damp. You could, if the evidence wasn’t so brutally clear, almost imagine he was still alive.
But William knows he’s not.
Up here, above the fog, is the highest point of the Elliott land. The view stretches to the horizon in every direction and William is happy to know that this is the last thing John saw before he died.He understands why John chose this site for this act. His father revered this place.
He looks down the hill, into the whiteness.
“Mum!” he shouts.
It doesn’t occur to him to spare her this. She would never forgive him if he moved his father’s body without her.
Things have gone wrong. John’s mind betrayed him, and he knew it had and knew it wasn’t going to get better. William wonders if he could have helped them more, could have avoided this. But he also knows the alternative was never going to be pretty.
Questions will have to be asked, but in this moment John’s suicide both profoundly shocks and doesn’t surprise William at all.
What he hopes, sincerely, desperately, is that his father has not done something in the past twelve hours that will taint the legacy of a beautiful man.
He calls for his mother again, hoping his voice will reach her, or that she will have followed the sound of the gunshot, as he did.
Maggie will want to hold John one last time, in this place that meant so much to his father, to both of them. She’ll want to end her marriage how it started. Just them, together, in love.
Imogen bolts across the back garden, ducks beneath the hedge, and scrambles up an embankment. The old railway line behind the house has been abandoned for decades, but the tracks and sleepers remain, framing weeds and rubble.
