Private Universe

All Through the Night

Charlotte’s room was large, but squashed with the mattresses strewn around the floor. She and Jack left the others to sort themselves out and went to the study.

The shotguns, Jack knew instinctively, were expensive and excellent. They were in two obvious pairs.

Charlotte demonstrated how to break one open, load and eject cartridges and, with an empty gun, how to hold, aim and fire.

‘I’m not used to loading by myself. Normally, I’d have a loader who’d do that while I shoot. I suspect I’m not going to be as fast with this as I could be tomorrow.’

Jack looked at her. ‘I don’t think so. I’ll go down tomorrow, lead them away from the house and shoot them. It could be dangerous. I couldn’t take you into that.’

Charlotte gave him back a look with centuries of authority behind it.

‘My house, my guns, my problem. I’ll take you with me tomorrow as you’re the best choice from the lot of us, but only if you show you can handle that shotgun and won’t get in my way.’ She raised a finger to the objection he was about to bring out. ‘Do you know what the Glorious 12th is Jack? It’s the day when I go with others of my kind to shoot grouse. Small birds that fly fast. I do it with astonishing accuracy, so I think I can hit those things in the head without much trouble. I’m not sure you can say the same.’

Jack thought it through, nodded and set himself to master loading and ejecting cartridges as smoothly and quickly as he could. Taking them from the cartridge box was too slow, picking them up from a pile on the table unrealistic – he couldn’t see himself having a table to rest them on. He looked at Charlotte.

‘Do you have some kind of bag that I can dump the shells in?’

‘Not here. The loader would have that.’

‘A jacket with big pockets then? I think reloading quickly could be Important.’ She was shaking her head when Jack’s eye fell on the wastepaper basket by the side of the desk. ‘Got it. Do we have string to make a belt?’

Jack tied the basket so that it hung at his hip, tipped in two boxes of shells and then ran through loading the gun, raising it to his shoulder, tapping his finger twice against the barrel to indicate firing, ejecting the shells and reloading. When he’d used all of the shells in the basket, he tipped them back in and did the whole thing again, going for his best speed without fumbling.

Charlotte watched him as he went through the process a third time; oblivious, it seemed, to her presence. A soldier’s boy rising to the occasion, she thought. Single minded, disciplined, if he was worried about the prospect of facing the dead things, he was hiding it splendidly. If only she could feel as composed. Her initial resolve had faded and she wanted something to take her mind off her situation. Why am I facing this with only a 16-year-old boy to help? Percival should be here. I have demons invading my house and a husband off fighting other men in a war of infinite stupidity. This is really…

‘Enough, Jack. How will we get down and where will we go tomorrow?’

His face closed in that expression of concentration.  ‘Depends on where they are in the morning. If we can see out of the other side of the building and it’s clear, we could go down through the house, get ourselves into an open space, get them to come to us and take them out as they come. They don’t move fast, so if there are a lot, we might want to shift position. Fall back, regroup, repeat until we’ve finished them.’

‘You have this quality, Jack’ she said, unfastening the basket from his waist, ‘Of concentrating utterly on whatever you are doing. I’ve noticed it while talking to you. Watched you doing it with others.’ And while giving massage. ‘How can you do that at a time like this?’