Enduring Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

his obsession.
    I unclasped Clarissa’s arms from my waist and turned. It didn’t occur to me that she was trying to hold me steady. “Let’s go down,” I said quietly. “There may be something we can do.” I heard my softening of tone, the artful lowering of volume. I was in a soap opera.
Now he’s talking to his woman
. It was intimacy, a tight two-shot.
    Clarissa put her hand on my shoulder. She told me later that it crossed her mind to slap my face. “Joe,” she whispered. “You’ve got to slow down.”
    “What’s up?” I said in a louder voice. A man lay dying in a field and no one was stirring. Clarissa looked at me, and though her mouth looked set to frame the words, she wouldn’t tell me why I should slow down. I turned away and called to the others, who stood about on thegrass waiting for me, so I thought, to tell them what to do. “I’m going down to him. Is anyone coming?” I didn’t wait for an answer but set off down the hill, conscious of the watery looseness in my knees and taking short steps. Twenty seconds later I glanced back. No one had moved.
    As I carried on down, the mania began to subside and I felt trapped and lonely in my decision. Also there was the fear, not quite in me but there in the field, spread like a mist, and denser at the core. I was walking into it without choice now, because they were watching me, and to turn back would have meant climbing up the hill, a double humiliation. As the euphoria lifted, so the fear seeped in. The dead man I did not want to meet was waiting for me in the middle of the field. Even worse would be finding him alive and dying. Then I’d have to face him alone with my first aid techniques, like so many silly party tricks. He wouldn’t be taken in. He would go ahead and die anyway, and his death would be in and on my hands. I wanted to turn and shout for Clarissa, but they were watching me, I knew, and I had blustered so much up there I was ashamed. This long descent was my punishment.
    I reached the line of pollarded willows at the bottom of the hill, crossed a dry ditch, and climbed through a barbed wire fence. By now I was out of their sight and I wanted to be sick. Instead, I urinated against a tree trunk. My hand was trembling badly. Afterward I stood still, delaying the moment when I would have to set out across the field. Being out of view was a physical relief, like being shaded from a desert sun. I was conscious of Logan’s position, but even at this distance I didn’t care to look.
    The sheep that had barely glanced up at the impact stared and backed away into faltering runs as I strode among them. I was feeling slightly better. I kept Logan at the periphery of vision, but even so, Iknew he was not flat on the ground. Something protruded at the center of the field, some stumpy antenna of his present or previous self. Not until I was twenty yards away did I permit myself to see him. He was sitting upright, his back to me, as though meditating, or gazing in the direction in which the balloon and Harry had drifted. There was calmness in his posture. I went closer, instinctively troubled to be approaching him unseen from behind but glad I could not yet see his face. I still clung to the possibility that there was a technique, a physical law or process of which I knew nothing, that would permit him to survive. That he should sit there so quietly in the field, as though he were collecting himself after his terrible experience, gave me hope and made me clear my throat stupidly and say, knowing that no one else could hear me, “Do you need help?” It was not so ridiculous at the time. I could see his hair curling over his shirt collar and sunburned skin along the tops of his ears. His tweed jacket was unmarked, though it drooped strangely, for his shoulders were narrower than they should have been. They were narrower than any adult’s could be. From the base of the neck there was no lateral spread. The skeletal structure had collapsed