Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift

  28

  MICHAEL LUXTON died instantly. The double cartridge-load of shot that passed through the roof of his mouth, then through the back of his head, smashing and impelling outwards everything in between, might as well have been, at that absence of range, a single solid bullet. It continued to pass, along with fragments of bark, skull and brain, some significant distance into the oak tree against which he’d been leaning. It could be said that the tree felt nothing. The tree never flinched and no more registered Michael’s death than Michael did himself. For an oak tree that big and thick and old, to have a parcel of compacted shot and other matter embedded not even deep in its flesh was of no importance. Trees endure worse mutilation.

  But the hole, some three feet or more up the trunk, remained, its aperture reduced but defined as the bark grew a ring-like scar around it. It was there when Jack, with five others, lowered his brother’s coffin into its grave. It’s there now. The surrounding stain on the bark remained too, despite that sluicing down on the day itself by PC Ireton. Unlike the stains on the ground, which soon disappeared, it weathered gradually and came to look like some indeterminate daub of the kind sometimes seen near the base of trees, or like some fungal blemish associated with that odd puncture in the trunk. What was it there for? Had someone once tried to hammer something, for some strange agricultural purpose, into the wood?

  Of course, Jack knew how it had got there, and a few other involved parties would have been able to explain, very exactly, its cause. But to any outsider or newcomer to Jebb Farm—and there would be newcomers—the hole would have been a puzzle, if not a very detaining one.

  One person who certainly knew how the hole was made was Ellie. She and Jack stood one warm July day under the tree—it was the summer after Michael’s death—and Jack watched Ellie put her finger into the hole. He didn’t stop her. He’d done it himself, though not at first. It had taken a long time, in fact, before he’d felt able to and even then he’d felt that he shouldn’t. But it was a hole that, all other considerations apart, begged to have a finger put in it, even two. An ignorant outsider, who might not have been especially bothered by the mystery of the hole, would have found it hard to resist putting a finger in it. By the time Jack returned to Marleston to bury his brother, quite a few fingers, young and old, had been idly poked into that hole.

  But Ellie’s putting her finger in it—without, as it were, even asking Jack’s permission—marked a decisive moment in the history of Jebb Farm. Her own father had died even more recently. It was an act of impudent penetration that had to do with the absence of more than one parental constraint. It was as though Ellie were saying, ‘Look, I can do this now. We can do this now. Look, I haven’t been struck down. The tree hasn’t fallen on us. We can do anything we like now.’

  And so they could. They were standing there, for a start, just the two of them, by their own choosing in Barton Field. Despite the geography of their long relationship, this was something they had never done before. With a poke of her finger Ellie was endorsing the obvious and tangible truth that Jack, even after eight months, couldn’t quite bring himself to accept or believe: that the tree was his, all his, everything around them, for what it was worth, was all his. Or, as Ellie might have put it, ‘Ours’.

  The tree didn’t mind a bit.

  And the fact was that this simple yet outrageous act of Ellie’s—she allowed her finger to probe and twist a bit—rather excited Jack. It aroused him. Ellie was wearing a dress, a flower-print dress, something he hadn’t so often seen, and he could tell that before she’d driven over (‘Something to tell you, Jacko,’ she’d said on the phone) she’d taken some trouble to look her best.

  In any case, Jack would have said that she was simply blooming. Nearly twenty-eight, but blooming. Something he would be able to confirm to himself a little later in the Big Bedroom—another first—when that dress would be draped over the back of a chair. Ellie was another summer older and her dad had recently died, but she was a better-looking woman than she’d been a year ago. She didn’t look like a farmer’s daughter (and she wasn’t, in the sense that she no longer had a father). She looked like some wide-eyed visitor to his lordly estate. That even seemed to be her knowing, teasing game. ‘Show me around, give me a tour. It’s a beautiful day. Take me for a walk down Barton Field.’ She even said (and it was an oddly appealing idea), ‘Pretend you don’t know me. Pretend I’ve never been here before.’

  A beautiful day. So it was. An afternoon in full summer, not a freezing November night. It had once seemed to Jack that he would never get the coldness of that night out of his bones, but now he felt warm to his marrow. Ellie drew her finger from the hole and beckoned. Blooming in herself—and with something, so it seemed, she still had up her (sleeveless) sleeve. A blotch of sunshine reached her through the canopy of the oak and rippled over her bare shoulder.

  ‘Come on’—she might almost have licked her lips—‘put your finger in it too.’

  He didn’t say that he’d already done so, guiltily, by himself. It anyway seemed that if he didn’t make a move, she would grab his finger and thrust it in for him. So he put his finger in the hole. Then Ellie squeezed a finger—it was a tightish fit—alongside it.

  ‘There.’

  It was like a pledge. And more. Years ago, when they were children, they might have carved their initials, though they never had, next to each other on a tree. But that seemed a bygone and dainty idea now.

  Jack had rushingly and hotly thought: they might do it right here, right this minute, up against the tree itself. To prove that they really could do anything now. The bark that had pressed against his father’s spine pressing against Ellie’s. Could they do that? Could they do such a thing? Or they might do it over there, in the July-dry grass, near poor Luke’s resting-place. There was no one to see, only some cropping cows and the big blue sky.

  But Ellie had said, ‘I think we should go back up to the house, don’t you? You could give me a tour of that too. I think we could do with a cup of tea, don’t you?’

  And later she’d said, a mug of tea cradled against her bare, bright breasts, that they should throw in Barton Field with the house, that’s what they should do. With the house and the yard, all for private development. A shared right of way on the track, maybe. No, forget that. The consortium could make their own entrance, they could use the Westcott Farm track. But Barton Field, with that view, with that oak tree—that would clinch it, that would do it.

  ‘Mark my words, Jacko. Fifty thousand on the price.’ She’d taken a sip of tea and smiled encouragingly. ‘As long as we don’t say anything about that hole.’

  Though when the Robinsons, who already owned a house in Richmond, Surrey, acquired Jebb Farm (or, rather, ‘Jebb Farmhouse’) and when he and Ellie upped sticks, having between them sold to the dairy consortium the remaining Jebb land and all of the adjacent Westcott Farm, Jack sometimes nursed the uncharacteristically devilish fantasy of phoning up one day, even dropping by, to let the Robinsons know that there was something he’d meant to tell them, about that hole—perhaps they hadn’t even noticed it—in the oak tree.

  But he could hardly have driven over from the Isle of Wight. And by the time he did make the journey, a decade later, for his brother’s funeral, the Robinsons had put their own indelible marks on Jebb Farm. After paying, at least by Jack’s reckoning, a small fortune for it and spending another small fortune on, as they sometimes put it, ‘making it habitable’, they’d effectively transformed the farmhouse and its immediate surroundings. So that Jack might have been as shocked by what he saw as the Robinsons might have been by any belated piece of information he had to bring them.

  In any case, the Robinsons wouldn’t have been in residence. It was mid-November. Their last visit had been not long ago during their children’s half-term holiday. And since they mixed with the locals no more than politeness demanded it was only to be expected that on an occasion like this they’d choose to stay away.

  Many of tho
se from Marleston who attended Tom Luxton’s funeral might have brought Jack up to date on the changes at Jebb, assuming he hadn’t learnt about them in some other way. Bob Ireton and several others might have told him—if they’d ever had the chance. If Jack hadn’t been in such an obvious and desperate haste, once the thing was over, once Tom was in the ground, to make his exit fast and not to talk to anyone. It was a rough and dramatic thing, Jack’s departure, as rough and dramatic as his arrival, screeching to a halt like that. (Who is that madman, some had thought, until they’d realised it was him.) But then he’d always been a big rough creature, even bigger than his dad (big and rough, though generally, in fact, as mild as a lamb), and that dark suit he was wearing didn’t make him look less rough. It made him look like a … ‘bodyguard’ was a word that came to mind.

  A mad dash of an exit, and in one sense you couldn’t blame the poor, distraught man. It wasn’t an ordinary sort of death (nor had it been with his dad). You couldn’t make rules for such a thing or say that the way he’d left was wrong and unpardonable, but if he’d hung around they might at least have told him that Jebb Farmhouse was empty right now. So that if, for any reason—and if he was ready for a surprise or two—he’d wanted to go and take a look around, then it probably wouldn’t have been a problem.

  Of course, it was equally possible that he might not have wanted to set eyes on the place ever again.

  But anyway he’d simply driven off in that big blue beast of a thing—that was actually like something the Robinsons might have driven—without saying his goodbyes (or, in most cases, his hellos), even looking like a man afraid of being chased. Though he’d driven off, it’s true (some noted it wasn’t the way he’d driven in), along the road that would take him past the entrance to Jebb Farm. As was.

  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.