Final Witness. Simon Tolkien

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СКАЧАТЬ had slept. Where her father had died looking up at the portrait of his wife on the wall. Where Thomas had often slept himself, driven by the Suffolk storms to find comfort beside his mother in the small hours. Life and love and death going on through the generations of the Sackvilles, until Greta came.

      Hardly anyone had been in the room since Anne’s death. Sir Peter never came, and it was only Jane Martin who went in there once a week to dust, and she didn’t stay long. She had not yet been able to face the task of disposing of her employer’s clothes. The dresses still hung in the closets just as they had before their owner’s death, as if nothing had happened.

      Thomas kept his distance. He had been determined from the outset to remain in the House of the Four Winds. He was his mother’s heir. To leave would have meant defeat, and he honoured her by remaining, but at a cost. Everywhere he went reminded him of her. He tried to help himself by avoiding the front stairs and his mother’s bedroom, but he often found himself standing outside his own bedroom as he was now, gazing down the corridor to the closed door at the end, remembering his failure.

      Over and over again he’d replayed it in his mind. He’d had to shake her so hard to get her to wake up, and there’d been no time. He could hear the men downstairs. Perhaps if he’d been quicker or made her go in front, then she’d have got inside the hiding place and the man with the scar would never have seen her, never have shot her, never have taken her away. Put her in a black, wet hole in Flyte churchyard.

      Suddenly Thomas felt violently sick. His legs went weak and he was barely able to make it into the bathroom before he threw up, kneeling on the tiles with his arms hugging the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl. He retched again and again until he had nothing left.

      Back in his bedroom, Thomas tried to think of something good. The trouble was that the past was his mother and her death destroyed it all. Made it unbearable. He looked out of the window again and tried to reclaim the north lawn for his own. It was across the lawn to the north gate that he would go with Barton at his side almost every morning of the holidays for as long as he could remember. Walking barefoot with the Labrador padding after him, making a path through the glistening dew on their way to the beach. There Thomas would break off a piece of driftwood and throw it high and far and the dog would rush headlong across the sand and into the sea, grasping it miraculously from the clutch of the waves before bringing back the prize to his master.

      At night there was a ritual. The word ‘bedtime’ said by Thomas’s mother, even in the softest voice, would transform Barton into a wolf. He would growl menacingly and push Thomas up the back stairs toward his room. Protests were useless. The growls would redouble in volume and even turn into snarls until Thomas reached his door, whereupon the dog would spring on to the bed and curl up in contentment.

      Thomas loved the Labrador passionately, and Barton loved him. The two were almost inseparable. When Thomas wrote stories about being marooned on a desert island, he never imagined himself alone. Barton was there to keep him company, protecting him from the wild animals that tried to attack their camp after the sun went down. If Thomas was a Knight of the Round Table dressed in the helmet and breastplate that Jane Martin had given him for his tenth birthday, then Barton would be his black charger dressed up for the tournament in one of Lady Robinson’s most beautiful silk handkerchiefs.

      Time passed and Barton grew older. He could no longer always catch the sticks that Thomas threw out into the waves. The dog would stand at the water’s edge looking puzzled as the tide took his prize away, and his sleek black tail that had always crashed from side to side with the joy of being alive now hung still. Thomas put his arm around Barton’s warm neck and went to tell his mother.

      The vet in Flyte listened to Barton’s heart and shook his head a fraction.

      ‘There’s a murmur. Give him these tablets and don’t let him strain himself. He’s an old boy now, Thomas. Nearly ninety in our years.’

      Nearly ninety? Barton wasn’t ninety. He was three years younger than Thomas. ‘But dogs don’t live that long, darling,’ said Anne in the car on the way home. ‘We must enjoy them while we can.’

      Two months later Barton could not get up the stairs. Thomas picked up the old dog and carried him up to his room. He slept on the bed all night but toward dawn he began to whimper and Thomas fetched his mother.

      In the morning Barton was no better, and they called the vet.

      ‘It’s not fair to Barton to make him carry on,’ said Anne to her son. ‘He’s hurting inside, Tom. You can see that.’

      ‘But I don’t want him to die,’ cried Thomas with his pyjama-clad arm wrapped around the old dog’s neck.

      Barton looked up at his master and tried to get to his feet, but the effort was too much and he laid his head down on the floor again.

      ‘He’s trusting us. Trusting us to help him. You have to understand that, Tom.’ And Thomas did. Love worked both ways.

      He kissed the dog and held his paw while the vet prepared the injection. And then it was all over in an instant. It was something that Thomas never forgot: the thinness of the line between life and death.

      He and his mother buried Barton in the garden under the old elm tree that stood by the north gate so that Thomas could see the grave from his bedroom window. They held hands and said a prayer thanking God for Barton’s life, and the next day Thomas made a wooden cross with Barton’s name and dates and dug it deep into the soil.

      Anne had thought of buying a puppy before Barton died so that Thomas would have another dog already there when Barton was gone. However, she ended up not doing so. It wouldn’t have been fair to the old dog to see a puppy rushing about as he lost his strength and couldn’t compete for Thomas’s attention.

      Anne took care also to allow her son enough time to properly mourn his friend. Thomas and she would pick the wildflowers that grew on the edges of the marsh and bring them back to lay on Barton’s grave, but Anne soon came to realize that these walks were only making things worse. Thomas would forget what had happened and look up expecting to see Barton bounding towards him across the dunes, only to realize that the Labrador was gone for good and nothing would bring him back.

      After two weeks, Anne decided that it was time to act. Breakfast was over, and Thomas was sitting on the front step watching the early sun make patterns on the hall carpet as it shone down through the yew trees. A paperback copy of Robinson Crusoe lay face up beside him, but in truth he hadn’t read anything since Barton’s death. The sea was quiet, and as Thomas looked down over the lawn to the front gate and the houses beyond the road, he felt an enormous desolation settling over the world. There seemed to be nowhere to go and nothing to do.

      The voice of his mother calling to him from the top of the stairs startled him out of his lethargy.

      ‘Come on, Tom, we need to get packed.’

      ‘Packed. Why?’

      ‘Because we’re going to London. This afternoon. Everything’s arranged.’

      ‘London. Why are we going to London?’

      ‘For a holiday, Tom. For a change of scenery. To put some colour in your cheeks so you stop walking around looking like the Carmouth Ghost.’

      ‘I don’t look like the Carmouth Ghost. She was a woman who killed her husband with a steak knife, and I’m a—’

      ‘You’re a fourteen-year-old who’s been having a terrible time and doesn’t СКАЧАТЬ