Wish You Were Here (30 page)

Ellie had said, that mug of tea nudging her tits, that he could do it now—they could do it now. When she spoke, the ‘he’ kept slipping into ‘they’, as if the words were almost the same thing, or as if what he alone might have hung back from ever doing was a different matter once the ‘he’ changed to ‘they’.

And now, of course, he’d seen the letter that Ellie had been waiting all that time to show him. Though it was so sudden for Jack that for a brief while he’d wondered if the letter was real, if it wasn’t some trick, if Ellie might have written it herself. The letter wasn’t just their way out, it
was ‘cream on the cake’ (Ellie’s phrase). Uncle Tony—from beyond the grave—was offering them not just a rescue plan, but a whole new future ‘on a plate’ (Ellie’s phrase again). They’d be mad not to grab it.

So there was a plate with a cake on it with cream on top. And here they were taking tea at Jebb.

If they sold up—in the way Ellie was proposing—they’d wipe out the debts and have money to spare. They might even have, courtesy of Uncle Tony, a little money to burn. Or … they could stay put and each be the proud and penniless owners of massive liabilities.

There was a third and not so far-fetched option (not nearly so far-fetched, in Jack’s mind, as the Isle of Wight), which Ellie didn’t mention and Jack didn’t mention either. If he was going to mention it, he should have mentioned it a whole lot earlier, but the time for mentioning it was past.

And of those two options starkly presented to him by Ellie, was there any choice? Couldn’t he see, she’d said, sensing his at least token resistance, his getting guilty in advance, that there was such a thing as good luck too in the world, such a thing as the wind for once blowing their way? And, Jesus, Jack, hadn’t they served their time and been patient long enough?

Through the window before them, the crown of the oak tree had stirred in the sunshine and seemed to offer consent. People would pay, Ellie had said, for a view like that. They’d pay. The dairy consortium couldn’t give a damn. They’d think of the cost of having that tree taken out.

It seemed to Jack that Ellie had certainly picked her moment—a day when all that he was now the master of
had never looked so fine—to tell him it was time to quit. She might have picked, instead, some bleak day in February. And she’d never looked so fine, like a new woman even, herself.

But Jack knew that this new (but not unrecognisable) Ellie hadn’t just sprung up, in her daisy-dotted dress, overnight, or even with the warm summer weather. She’d started to appear, to bloom even the previous year, after Michael had caused that hole in the tree and when they’d found out soon afterwards the contents of his will. Yes, for what it was worth, he was sole lord and master now.

And she’d bloomed a bit more, he thought, when later that winter and into the spring, Jimmy—tough-as-thistles Jimmy Merrick—had become ill. Slow but one-way ill, a bit like Luke. His liver and his lungs. Both things, apparently. The worse Jimmy got, in fact, the better, in some ways, Ellie looked. Then in May Jimmy had been hospitalised and—whether it was the shock of being away from the farm where he’d spent all his life or whether, seeing how things were going after the cattle disease, he’d simply been ready to give in—he’d succumbed pretty soon.

And Ellie hadn’t stopped blooming, as was now very clear. But then she’d have had cause to bloom, despite having a sick dad to nurse, if she’d had that letter up her sleeve all the while. It was dated mid-January. For six months she hadn’t breathed a word. That was all, in one sense, entirely understandable. What point in sharing that letter with anyone, so long as Jimmy, ailing as he was, was master of Westcott Farm and she was in his thrall?

Jack didn’t say anything to Ellie—though he came
very close—about the length of time she’d kept the letter to herself. He understood, anyway, that he was now in Ellie’s thrall. (But hadn’t he always been?) He felt the letter taking away from him any last argument, any last crumb of Luxton pride or delusion. Mastery? He was in Ellie’s hands now. ‘They’ not ‘he’. He knew that keeping the farm, for all its summer glory, was only a picture. Ellie had stuck her finger through it. Now she was pointing to their future.

He’d dipped his face to his mug of tea, but looked at that view.

‘Cheer up, Jacko,’ Ellie had said. ‘Lighten up. What’s there to lose?’

He might have said that everything he was looking at was what there was to lose.

Ellie stroked his arm. ‘People leave,’ she said. ‘People go their own way and take their chances.’ Then she added, ‘My mother did.’ As if she might have said: ‘And didn’t she come good?’

Then she said, in her way, the thing he should have said, in his way, first. The thing he should have got in first, and differently.

‘And so did Tom.’

He didn’t say anything to this. He was trying to work out the answer. The word ‘Tom’ was like a small thud inside the room. But Ellie got in first again. She looked at him softly.

‘If he cared, Jack, if he wanted his stake, he’d have been in touch by now, wouldn’t he? If he can’t be bothered to tell you where he is—’

‘He’s a soldier, Ell.’

‘So? He went his own way. Now we should go ours. I don’t think you even have to tell him that you’re going to sell.’

There was a silence while the house, filled with summer breezes, seemed to whisper to itself at what it had just heard.

‘Forget him, Jack. He’s probably forgotten you.’

Tom wasn’t dead then, Jack thinks now, even if neither he nor Ellie knew where he was (Tom’s Service Record would one day tell Jack that he was in Vitez, Bosnia), but it was as though at that moment, Jack thinks now, he might have been.

Then Ellie had switched the subject brightly back.

‘Anyway, have you any idea how much a house—just a house, no land—in some parts of London can cost these days?’

Jack had no idea, and he didn’t like the sudden, alarming implication that he and Ellie should buy a house in London. Hadn’t they just been talking about the Isle of Wight?

‘No. Why should I?’

Ellie had floated a figure across him that he’d thought was crazy. Then she’d said, ‘And have you any idea how much some people in London who can afford that kind of money will pay, on top, for their own away-from-it-all place in the country? Just to have that view’—she’d nodded towards the foot of the bed—‘from their window?’

Jack didn’t know how much, though in one sense it seemed to him that the view from the window, which was simply the view that went with the house, didn’t and couldn’t have any price on it at all. How could a view that didn’t really belong to anyone even be for sale? And when Ellie mentioned another figure, again he’d thought it was crazy.

Later on, when he did find out what people—specifically the Robinsons—really were prepared to pay for that view and all that came with it, he’d think it was strange that he’d lived for twenty-eight years in a place that might be so prized as an ‘away-from-it-all place’, but now he, or rather ‘they’, wanted to get away from it.

And sitting now by the window at Lookout Cottage, looking out at what, in less obscuring weather, might be thought of as another priceless view, Jack is of the firm opinion that the place known as ‘away from it all’ simply doesn’t exist. He happens to have some idea roughly how much Lookout Cottage might currently fetch. But how little he cares about that.

‘Throw in Barton Field,’ Ellie had said, ‘throw in that oak, and they’ll think it’s their own little bit of England.’

And wouldn’t it be, Jack had thought.

Before she’d produced the letter—even when they were still down in Barton Field—he’d actually believed that Ellie had come round that day in her summer dress to put forward the option that he himself hadn’t got round to broaching. It wasn’t for him, he’d foolishly
thought, but for Ellie to propose it, since she was the one who’d have to take all the steps while he wouldn’t have to budge. Yet there would have been nothing outrageous or surprising about it and it was only what, sooner or later, one of them surely had to suggest. Namely that she (they) should sell Westcott Farm and Ellie should move in with him. That might clear the two lots of debt and then they might make a go of it. Then they might become Mr and Mrs Luxton and share the Big Bedroom for the rest of their lives, as was only right and proper. Luxtons at Jebb.

His mum would surely have been glad. Even Tom would hardly have been taken by surprise. And there would always be a place for him, for Tom, if he wanted it. Jack would have wished—when the subject arose—to make that small stipulation.

When Ellie had said they should go back up to the farmhouse and when, no sooner were they there, than they were up the stairs and in that bed, he’d thought she’d only been about to announce (getting in first as usual) this proposal he’d also been nursing, but that she’d wanted to do it in style and with a bit of pre-emptive territory-claiming. But she’d clearly had other ideas. Caravans.

‘I’ve thought it through, Jack, trust me.’

He’d looked at that sunny view outside the window, which he’d never really thought of as purchasable, and felt, even then, that he was being asked to contemplate it for the last time. He wondered what his father had thought when he’d come up here, that November day, to change out of his suit, to take the medal from the pocket—only to put it later in another pocket. His last
look in full daylight (had he known it?) at that view. The oak with its leaves ablaze in the cold sunshine. What had gone through his head?

For a moment, in that warm, July bedroom, Jack had shivered.

‘Don’t sell it all as a farm. Sell the land. And sell the house—just as a house. A country house.’

A country house? But it was a farm and he’d never thought of the farmhouse as a separable entity, as anything other than the living quarters of a working farm.

‘What about the parlour? The yard, the barns?’

‘Nothing that a decent builder and an architect and landscaper couldn’t sort out.’

Architect? Landscaper? Jack supposed that Ellie must have recently been reading magazines again, something he knew she liked to do.
House and Garden, Country Homes
. He saw again the piles of worn magazines in the day room at the hospital in Barnstaple where he’d gone with Ellie—it was barely a month ago—to visit Jimmy for what was to be the last time.

The old bugger was sitting up in bed, making a show of it, holding a mug of hospital tea. He’d looked at Jack, eyes still bright as pins, and Jack had known he was looking right through him to his father. Then he’d raised the mug of tea to his lips and grimaced.

‘It’s not like Ellie’s, boy,’ he said. And winked.

Holding a mug of Ellie’s tea now, and sitting up in bed, Jack got the odd impression that, had Ellie been another woman, a rich man’s wife, she might even have been interested in buying Jebb Farmhouse and carrying out the renovations herself. She might have found the prospect exciting and absorbing.

‘But keep Barton Field,’ she said, ‘to go with the house. It never was much of a farming field anyway, was it? A big back garden, a big back lawn. Throw it in with the house and you could make a bomb.’

She put down her own mug of tea, ran the smooth of her nails down his arm and sidled up.

‘Just as long as we don’t breathe a word about that hole.’

J
ACK DROVE OUT OF
Marleston village. Who was the runaway now? There they all were, housed together again, under the same roof of churchyard turf, and, once the thing was done, he couldn’t wait to turn his back on them. He’d borne Tom’s coffin and he couldn’t bear any more. It was hardly proper, hardly decent. But who was going to stop him? No one had stopped him yesterday, and it was all suddenly again like yesterday. (Only the voice of his own mother, impossibly calling to him—‘Jack, don’t go’—could have stopped him.)

But he wasn’t quite the total fugitive. He’d taken the eastbound road, in the direction of Polstowe, and had known he couldn’t drive straight past. It was a sort of test. At a familiar gap in the hedge on the right-hand side of the road, about a mile from the village, he pulled across and stopped.

Or it was familiar only in essence. The double line of hedges, meeting the roadside hedge and marking the ascending path of the track, was still as it had been, but
the old five-bar gate was gone, along with the old, hedge-shrouded gate posts. So too was the concrete churn platform, and the wooden mail box on the latch side of the gate with the carved, weathered sign above. Instead, there was a large white thick-railed gate with a built-in mail box and the words ‘J
EBB
F
ARMHOUSE’
in bold black letters in the middle of the top rail.

Well, you couldn’t miss it.

Even more noticeable was that where there’d once been just the grassy, often muddy, roadside recess, with nettles and brambles sprouting round the churn platform—all deliberately left untrimmed (so no fool would go and park there, Michael used to say)—there was now a clean tarmac surface. On each side of the gate there was even a neat quarter-circle of low brick kerb. And, beyond the gate, it was obvious that the whole track, disappearing down the hillside, had been surfaced too. Jack could only guess what that must have cost.

But this was hardly his principal thought. He got out and stood by the gate. He left the engine running and the door open and wasn’t sure if this was because he intended opening the gate and driving through or because he might, in a matter of seconds, wish to drive off again in a hurry. The gate had no padlock. It wasn’t that sort of gate. Its boxed-in latch mechanism suggested some sophisticated, perhaps remotely controlled locking system, and set into the right-hand gate post—as thick and pillar-like as gate posts come—was a complicated metal panel that was either an entry-phone unit or key-code device, or both.

So, the damn thing could be unlocked, he thought, even opened and closed perhaps, from the house. The Robinsons, he remembered, had wanted to know quite a
lot about ‘security’. There hadn’t been much he could tell them.

He stood by the gate, slightly afraid to touch it. Though the air all around was brilliant and still, a faint, extra-cold breeze seemed to siphon its way up the shaded trackway between the hedges. There was the sound of rooks below. They would be in Brinkley Wood.