Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift

  Well, at least she was spared, Jack can say to himself now, the long road to ruin, and worse. Though it was not so long, really, after her death. How it would have appalled and shamed and simply disappointed her. How she must have flinched, again and again, in that grave of hers in Marleston churchyard. But then if she could have flinched—Jack can sometimes lose his own logic—she wouldn’t have been spared.

  He can’t decide the matter. His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed all the things that followed her death. Including all this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.

  Only yesterday Jack had been obliged to stand close to his mother’s grave. Had she known? How could she have borne it to know, under the circumstances? But if she’d known, then surely she’d have let him know, he’d have felt some tug—something even like the tug of those empty caravans—and surely she’d have cried out, somehow, when he’d left in that sudden, uncontrollable haste, ‘Jack, don’t go. Don’t rush off like that.’ And surely, if she had, he’d have stayed.

  All of them there together, for that short, agonising while, all of them under the same pressing circumstances, but him the only one left above ground.

  And all of them there (except him) right now, he thinks, right this minute, under this wind and rain. The wind plucking the browning petals from all those flowers, toppling the stacked-up bunches and wreaths, the rain rinsing the gravestones, new and old, the water seeping down through the soil.

  Jack can’t decide the matter. Do they feel it, know it all, or are they spared? He could say he’s about to find out.

  4

  WHAT WOULD his mother think (he tries not to think about it) if she could see him now?

  But what would she have thought, anyway, to see him no longer at Jebb Farm but here by the sea, tending a herd of caravans? What would she think to see him hitched up—properly and officially married—to Ellie Merrick? But that once-impossible yet inevitable thing—who else was it going to be?—would surely have been only what she’d have wished. If only she’d had the power to knock two stubborn male heads together and make it happen herself.

  But it hadn’t happened, anyway, in Marleston church. No wedding bells reaching her, six foot below in the Devon earth, making her smile. My son Jack’s getting married today. And he hadn’t felt her presence—her touch, her whispered approval—in that registry office in Newport.

  And now, look, with a gun on their marriage bed.

  And what would she have thought to see him and Ellie taking off every winter, for three weeks or a whole month sometimes, to sun themselves under coconut palms and drink tall drinks with paper parasols stuck in them? Never mind that they were here by the seaside, near a beach, in the first place. But that was what Ellie had thought they should do, they could afford it and they should do it, and why shouldn’t they have their holidays? And he, with a little coaxing at first, had gone along with it. And not a bad arrangement at all. Certainly according to the caravanners—the ‘Lookouters’. We get a week in the Isle of Wight, you get a month in the Caribbean. Not bad, Jack, for an out-of-work farmer.

  It was the regular backchat, not ill-meant, but he’d had to find a way of handling it. No one got shortchanged, no one got a bad deal at the Lookout. He couldn’t arrange the weather (any more than he could at Jebb). You’ll get as good a holiday here as you’ll get there, he’d say, in a way that, he could tell, they felt he really, mysteriously believed. He’d risen to that task: talking to the caravanners, making them feel at home and befriended. He’d been surprised at his talent for it.

  He took his holidays these days in the Caribbean. And what of it? Once he’d been tethered, all year round, to a herd of Friesians.

  Though, if the truth be known, after a few days of lying under those palm trees and sipping those drinks and smiling at Ellie and rubbing sunscreen on her, he’d sometimes start to think anxiously about his caravans. Whether they were all right. Whether they were withstanding the winter storms. Whether that security firm—Dawsons—was really any good and whether anyone was actually patrolling the place, while he was lying here where once he could never have dreamed of being. And then he’d think, because it was the thought he was really always having to bat away, like batting away one of those big bastard tropical hornet things that could come at you suddenly out of nowhere: what would his mum think?

  Well, Jack, my big old boy, it’s a far cry from Brigwell Bay. That’s what she’d think. Or from hosing down the milking parlour.

  And then he’d think of Tom.

  ‘Farmer Jack’. He never quite knew how the word had got around. Farmer Jack, milking his caravans. Here comes Farmer Jack in one of those shirts he got in Barbados. The ones that make your eyes hurt. What would they have thought if they could actually have seen him in the parlour in his faded blue boiler suit and his wellies? Being barked at by his father. What would his mum have thought if she could see him in one of those shirts?

  But never mind that. Never mind the Lookout Park, formerly the Sands, or the winter holidays in the Caribbean. What would she have thought to see how it all went at Jebb? To see it now, not a Luxton in sight, its acres all in new hands and the farmhouse no longer a farmhouse. A country home, a ‘holiday home’ (that was the phrase Ellie herself had once used) for people who already had a home. What would she have thought to see all the things that didn’t bear thinking of? (Though had she seen them anyway?) To see Tom, little Tom, but a big boy himself by then, simply slip out one cold December night and disappear?

  But Tom’s with her right now, Jack thinks, he could scarcely be closer. He was walking right back to her, that night, without knowing it.

  And what would she have thought to see those burning cattle?

  All the generations going back and forwards. It had been so for centuries. The first farmhouse on Jebb Hill had been built by a Luxton in 1614. The oak in Barton Field was perhaps old even then. And who would have thought—let alone his own mother—that he, Jack Luxton, would be the first of all the Luxtons (as he was now the last) to cut that long, thick rope on which his own hands had been hardened and sell Jebb Farmhouse and all the land and become, with Ellie, the soft-living proprietor of a caravan site?

  He could blame Ellie if he wanted to. He’d been the only man left around the place, and who else made the decisions? But Ellie would surely have known the weak spot in him she was touching (so would his mother) when she came up with her plan. And what other plan, what other solution did he happen to have?

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

  To become the proprietor of the very opposite thing to that deep-rooted farmhouse. Holiday homes, on wheels. Or ‘units’, as they’d come to refer to them. But they’d been good at it, he and Ellie, they’d made a good go of it—with a lot of help at the start, it’s true, from ‘Uncle Tony’. And they’d made more out of it than they’d ever have made out of two doomed farms. And, for God’s sake, it could even be fun. Fun being what they dealt in. ‘Fun, Jacko, don’t you think it’s time we had some?’ And every winter, on top of it all, they flew off to the Caribbean.

  But not this winter. Obviously. Or it had seemed unavoidably obvious to him. But not to Ellie, apparently. And that was the start of all this.

  He looks now at the rain-swept caravans. The tug of it, still. Lookout Cottage up here, the caravans down there, no more than little white oblongs at this distance. The joke was that he had a telescope constantly trained, he wasn’t just Farmer Jack, he was also sometimes the Commandant. Driving down or strolling down every day to see if all was well. In fine weather, dressed the part: shorts and Caribbean shirt (extra-large) and one of those baseball caps they’d had run up, free for every guest, with LOOKOUT and the lighthouse motif—gold on black—above the peak.

  Thirty-two units. All ‘top of the range’, he could truthfully say, even if the range wasn’t quite the topmost one. He could never ha
ve said that about the milking machinery at Jebb.

  The tug he’d never expected. Empty half the year, but then sometimes, strangely, as now, all the more tugging. Occupied for the other half by this shifting temporary population—migrants, vagrants, escapers in their own country.

  It was only ever an encampment down there, that was the feel of it, like the halt of some expeditionary, ragtag army. It might all be gone in the morning—any morning—leaving nothing but the tyre marks in the grass. That was the tug. Not cattle, not even caravans, but people.

  5

  ELLIE SITS IN the wind-rocked, rain-lashed Cherokee, in the lay-by on the coast road at Holn Cliffs, thinking of her mother.

  The car is pointing in the direction of Holn itself and so in what, on any day till now, she might have called the direction of home. And on a clear day it would be perfectly possible to see from where she sits not just the fine sweep of the coastline, but, on the hillside running up from the Head, the distant white speck of Lookout Cottage. It had been built there, after all, with a now-vanished lighthouse above it, because of the prominent position. And on a clear day, a fine summer’s day say, it would be equally possible to see from Lookout Cottage the distant glint and twinkle of cars—with perhaps an ice-cream van or two—lined up in the lay-by at Holn Cliffs while their occupants admired the view.

  Today there is no view. Even Holn Head is just a vague, jutting mass of darker greyness amid the general greyness, and Ellie can only squintingly imagine that at a certain point, through the murk beyond her windscreen, she can see the pin-prick gleam of the lit-up windows of the cottage.

  The wipers are on, though to little effect. Thirty yards along the lay-by, barely visible, is another parked car, a silver hatchback, doing what Ellie is apparently doing, and Ellie feels, along with an instinctive solidarity, a stab of envy. Only to be sitting out the storm.

  How could Jack have said what he said?

  Ellie hasn’t seen her mother for over twenty years—and can never see her again—so that to think of her at all is like seeing distant glimmers through a blur. Yet right now, as if time has performed some astounding, marooning loop, thoughts of her mother—and of her father—have never been so real to her.

  How could Jack have said it?

  Ellie’s mother disappeared, one fine late-September day, from Westcott Farm, Devon, abandoning her husband, Jimmy, and her only child, Ellie, when Ellie was barely sixteen, and though she would never see her again, Ellie would come to know—familiarly and gratefully—where her mother had eventually made her home. Ellie’s mother once lived in that cottage whose lights Ellie can only imagine she sees, and had she not done so, Ellie and Jack could never have made it their home as well.

  Though now Ellie wonders if it is any sort of home at all.

  The exact cause of her mother’s sudden flight all those years ago Ellie would never know, but it had to do with a figure whom Ellie, back then, would sometimes call, when in intimate conversation with Jack Luxton, her mother’s ‘mystery man’—using that phrase not so much with scorn but with a teasing fascination, as if she would quite like a mystery man of her own.

  Her father must have had some clue who the man was and even communicated indirectly with his runaway wife on the subject, if only to become an officially divorced man and get back the sole title to Westcott Farm. But his lips remained sealed and, anyway, not long before her father’s death, Ellie was to discover that her mother had replaced that original mystery man with someone else and had lived with him on the Isle of Wight.

  A few miles along the coast road behind her, in a cemetery in Shanklin, Ellie’s mother—or her ashes—lies buried, under a memorial slab placed there by her then husband, whom Ellie would one day refer to as ‘Uncle Tony’. Ellie has lived now for over ten years in her mother’s and Uncle Tony’s former home, but has never been to see her mother’s nearby resting-place, and until recently this would only have expressed her mixed feelings about her once renegade mum: blame, tempered with unexpected gratitude and—ever since that September day years ago—an odd, grudging admiration. She hadn’t quite condemned, but she hadn’t quite forgiven either, and she wasn’t going to go standing by any graves.

  And until recently this would only have expressed Ellie’s position generally. The past is the past, and the dead are the dead.

  But two mornings ago when Jack had departed, all by himself, on an extraordinary journey whose ultimate destination was a graveside, Ellie had felt rise up within her, like a counterweight, the sudden urge to pay her long-withheld respects. She’d even had the thought: As for Jack and his brother, so for me and my mum. The only trouble was that she didn’t have the car, Jack had it, and she’d baulked at the idea of getting the bus. But she has the car now—she has unilaterally commandeered it—and, only within the last desperate hour, Ellie has attempted that aborted journey once again. And failed.

  She’d driven blindly hither and thither at first, sometimes literally blindly, given the assaults of the rain, and because much of the time her eyes were swimming with tears. How could Jack have said that? But then how could she have said what she’d said, and how could she possibly, actually act upon it? Then the thought of her mother had loomed, even more powerfully, once more. Shanklin. Forget Newport. Forget Newport police station. That had just been a terrible, crazy piece of blather. Shanklin. And now, after all, might really be the time.

  Hello Mum, here I am at last, and look what a mess I’m in. Any advice? What now? What next?

  And if no answer were forthcoming, then at least she might say: Thank you, Mum, thank you anyway. I’m here at least to say that. Thank you for deserting me and Dad all those years ago. Thank you for leaving me to him, and to the cows. And the cow disease. Thank you for being a cow yourself, but for coming right in the end, even if you never knew it. Thank you for giving me and Jack—remember him, Jack Luxton?—these last ten years. Which now look like they’re coming to an end.

  And thank you, if it comes to it, for offering me your example.

  Rolled up in the back of the car is one of the oversized umbrellas they’d had made for use around the site and to sell in the shop. Yellow-gold segments alternating with black ones displaying a white lighthouse logo—meant to represent the vanished beacon—and the word LOOKOUT at the rim. The umbrellas matched the T-shirts and the baseball caps and the car stickers—all things that (like the name ‘Lookout’ itself) had been her ideas.

  It would have gone with Jack, she realised, on his journey. She suddenly hoped it hadn’t rained on him. What a fool he’d have looked putting it up at a funeral. Let alone at a military parade. But driving madly just minutes ago through the blinding rain, Ellie had seen herself clutching that same wind-tugged Lookout umbrella as she stood by her mother’s rain-soaked remains.

  Hello Mum. What a day for it, eh?

  But what a fool she’d look. And what a miserable exercise it would be. Picking her way through some wretched cemetery, through the puddles and mud. In these shoes. All to find some little, drenched square of marble, while a seaside brolly tried to yank her into the air. Jesus Christ.

  And as for that advice, that example, did she really need to stoop, cocking an ear, by her mother’s grave? It was stored up, anyway, in her memory, like an emergency formula for some future—rainy—day. She could hear her mother’s forgotten voice. Skedaddle, Ellie. Just skedaddle, like I did. Cut loose. While you’ve got the car and while you can. With just the clothes you’re in and what’s in your handbag. Now or never. Cut loose.

  Somewhere near Ventnor, with a strange little yelp at herself, she’d turned round and driven back along the coast road, into the teeth of the oncoming gale, only to find herself immobilised now, fifty yards—across a sodden verge, a wind-rippled hedge and a strip of field—from the edge of Holn Cliffs.

  Everyone has their limits, Ellie thinks, and her mother must have reached hers, for her to have left a husband and a daughter who’d only just turned sixteen—even with a mystery ma
n on hand. And her own limits must have outstretched her mother’s—but then she hadn’t had a mystery man, she had Jack—for her to have stuck it out with her dad for another twelve years. To have stuck it out with him, as it happened, to the very end. Even being with him, holding and squeezing his hand, in that hospital in Barnstaple just a few hours before he died. And she’d have been with him at the end, if she’d known and if it hadn’t been at two in the morning.

  How could Jack have said what he said?

  Everyone has their limits, and it seems to Ellie that she might have reached her limits now with Jack—or whoever that man was up there in that invisible cottage. She might be about to turn her back on him, as she’d never, in fact, turned her back on her father. Or, before now, on Jack.

  But here she sits, pulled up in this lay-by, not going anywhere, within a mile and (on any normal day) within sight of home. And it wasn’t the perilous weather that had made her stop, or even the pursuing ghost of her unvisited mother, but the sudden, clear, looming ghost of herself, driving madly once before, through the still, golden sunshine of a late-September afternoon.

  *

  Barely sixteen, but she knew how to handle a Land Rover. Even if she wasn’t allowed and was even forbidden by law to drive it on the road. Nonetheless, on the third day after her mother’s departure and while her father seemed to have taken resolutely to the bottle for the day, Ellie had gone out with the keys to the ancient vehicle in the Westcott yard, got in and driven it, for the first time in her life, right up the Westcott track to the gate and the road, and beyond. With no real intention of returning.