And then Ansell saw them coming up the mountain towards him. Ah, no. God, no. I can’t—do it—myself.
They came slowly up, cautiously, waiting to see what he would do. He fired at them but they didn’t fire back. They went to cover, waiting.
After a long time they started to move, but when he fired they went to cover again.
They had all the time.
Give me the gun, kid.
Ansell felt MacConnachie’s hand claw weakly at his waist. He turned round.
‘What?’
MacConnachie seemed to be reaching for the gun. Ansell smiled.
‘You’ve done your share.’
But MacConnachie went on reaching for it, a look of intense pleading in his eyes. Ansell smiled again.
‘All right.’
He took hold of MacConnachie’s battered hand and wrapped it round the gun, helping him to thread his ruined finger through the trigger guard.
‘There.’
MacConnachie relaxed a moment, closing his eyes, the picture of satisfaction; Ansell smiled to have given him such pleasure.
Then he felt the snout nuzzle against his side, for he had turned his back. He turned again to MacConnachie. Very slowly, effortfully, MacConnachie was raising the gun higher, his eyes burning with a great longing and pain.
Ansell felt that he had always known why MacConnachie wanted the gun. He turned properly so that he could face MacConnachie. He took hold of the barrel of the gun to help him, raising it to his own face.
‘Thank you, Mac,’ he said. And then,
‘Thank you.’
He put the muzzle into his mouth, closed his eyes, and gripped it tightly.
MacConnachie shut his eyes. It’s damn-all I’ve done for you, kid. But I love you, see? I love you. He pulled the trigger.
They all seemed to have gone mad. There was a pink spray. The helicopter jumped. They came running up the hill towards him. He fired and fired again. They stood around and fired into him. Ansell’s body toppled off.
Fuck you all, he said.
Fuck you all.
You should see it, kid. It’s all mountains. Far as the eye can see. Mountains!
Laugh.
We’d never have got
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barry England was born in London in 1932. He served as a subaltern in the Far East in the early 1950s, and his time spent in the Army would later have a strong influence on his literary works. England’s first novel, Figures in a Landscape (1968) was widely acclaimed on its publication in Britain and America and was shortlisted for the inaugural Booker Prize before being filmed by celebrated director Joseph Losey in 1970, in an adaptation starring Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell.
England had many talents and interests, winning acclaim with his stage plays, such as Conduct Unbecoming, which was a huge success in London and New York and was made into a film, and also working on several Warner Brothers films and earning money on the side by writing for magazines and drawing cartoons. England also attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and acted in repertory all over England, in addition to writing screenplays for television.
England’s second novel, No Man’s Land, did not appear until 1997, almost thirty years after his first. He married the actress Diane Clare, with whom he had a daughter and a son, and lived in Oxfordshire until his death in 2009.
ABOUT THE COVER
The cover reproduces the original jacket by Tom Adams (b. 1926) from the first British edition (Jonathan Cape, 1968). Adams is perhaps best known for his cover paintings for Agatha Christie paperbacks, but his paintings have also adorned the dust jackets of a number of major British novels, including John Fowles’s The Collector (1963), The Magus (1966), and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970), and David Storey’s Booker Prize winner Saville (1976). He now lives with his wife in Cornwall.
Figures in a Landscape Page 21