Losing Nelson Page 33

  I understood everything now. Mrs. White and the girl were in it too, they had led me here. The men with white coats, the hand signals, the laughter … They had anticipated everything. There was no time to lose. I jumped over the low hedge that bordered the pavement, ran back across the car park and into the shrubbery. There was great power and freedom in this running at first. I ran in a wide circle, crashed through another low hedge, climbed a wooden fence, and found myself behind the house on ground that led upwards through a straggle of bushes and bare earth and patches of burned-out grass.

  That sense of freedom did not last. I was breathing hoarsely, open-mouthed, lungs straining as I climbed higher. A thin screen of trees, cluttered with ivy. I pushed through them and half scrambled, half fell down a bank on the other side into a deep-sided cutting, broad and flat enough at the bottom to walk along—it looked as if there might once have been a single rail track here. There were grassed-over mounds of stones at intervals along the way.

  Down here the night had begun to take over, there was an advance of darkness between the banks. After a while I stopped and listened, but there was no sound of pursuit. When I judged the distance to be safe, I climbed up the bank on the farther side. I had to get up on hands and knees and I was torn by brambles and thorny scrub. But when I reached the top of the bank, I forgot my hurts. I was looking down over the distant lights of streets and houses and the vanishing gleams of traffic, looking beyond this to the glimmering radiance of the bay. The sun had gone, but the sea still held the last of the light in a luminous solution of silver.

  This was what you climbed up to as a boy, climbing from the sheltered glebeland, from the riverside meadows where the parsonage lay, mounting the bridle path towards the high ground above the village, high above, between the shoulders of the downs, from where we could look down over sand and saltmarsh, strands of gold and strips of shallow pool and at the verge the real sea, the mass of it, seamed white or silvered over. Behind us great rafts of bright cloud and the soft gleam of the sun on wet sand ripples and mudflats and the glitter of dried pebbles and shingle up the beach. Curlews whistling above the marshes, the terns with their wild cries and plunging flight.

  How often we had seen it together. But now I was alone and the light was fading and I knew I had been brought here only for this, brought here alone to see the line of the sea as you saw it that evening in March when you were twelve years old, the evening before you left. It was the only point in all the countryside around from which to get a view of the sea. You came here in the fading light and looked at the sea and you walked away to spend your life with the sea and when you did that you took my life with you.

  What I would have done, how long I would have stayed there, I don’t know. I thought everything was at an end. But then the miracle happened, the boy appeared. For some moments I could not believe it. Only a dark shape at first, surmounted by the pale glimmer of the face. There below me, in the last of the light he came walking. Between the crest of the cutting where I crouched and the lights of the houses below, neither fast nor slow—it was a path well known to him. On his back a sort of bump, which I made out to be a small rucksack. Of course, his provisions would be there, his provisions for the journey. He was not going home to the parsonage, he was leaving, he was going away to spend his life with the sea, he was taking my life with him.

  Down the slope again, through the thorns and scrub. I found a stone big enough, not too big. Panting now with the fear of being too late, I kept along the cutting out of hearing, out of sight. When I clawed myself up again, he was still there below me, a diminutive figure, walking at the same pace, looking ahead of him. And now, when I had to get behind him, he started singing!

  Incomprehensible words in a child’s treble—your voice had not broken yet. A blunder of the first order, preventing you from hearing me as I drew closer behind you, my step uncertain in this difficult light. Perhaps at the last moment you heard or sensed something. But then it was too late, too late to turn on me the terror of your eyes. I struck downward at the small head, once, twice. The figure sank to its knees, half turning towards me, raising an arm. A sound came from it, not very loud, like sobbing but more liquid—as though there were some liquid in the throat. I struck again and he fell forward. I heard the crash of his fall.

  Then I walked away, continuing the boy’s path, keeping the lights below me. There was no need to hurry now. I had nothing to fear. I had done it, I had broken the line. Dark and bright angels meet at twilight, it is the only time. And when they meet they join. We can never lose each other now.

  BARRY UNSWORTH, who won the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, was a Booker finalist for Pascali’s Island and Morality Play and was long-listed for the Booker Prize for The Ruby in Her Navel. His other works include After Hannibal, Losing Nelson, The Songs of the Kings, Land of Marvels, and The Quality of Mercy. He lives in Italy.

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  BARRY UNSWORTH

  “Unsworth is one of the best historical novelists on either side of the Atlantic…his vast knowledge of 18th-century social and material conditions creates a rich and strange rendering of daily life that’s utterly persuasive.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Told with bite and freshness…Unsworth gives his figures glittering definition, and then leaves them open and undefined.” —The Boston Globe

  “[Unsworth’s] sentences recall the sharp detail, moral sensitivity and ready wit of Charles Dickens. But his sense of the lumbering, uneven gait of social progress is more sophisticated, more tempered, one might say, by history.” —The Washington Post