by Graham Swift
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.’
29
JACK 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 ‘JEBB FARMHOUSE’ 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.
The Robinsons, he supposed, weren’t around. This was their summer place. It was November. Or their weekend place, and it was a Friday morning. In any case, he imagined they wouldn’t be here, not now. Definitely not now. They would have read their newspapers, put two and two together and—if they’d had any notion at all of driving down this weekend—would have chosen to avoid any awkward association with the property they’d bought. A funeral in the village. Not their affair.
They wouldn’t be here. They’d be safe in their other house, their main house, in Richmond (it had sounded to Jack like a place where rich people lived and had stuck in his mind).
So there was nothing, in theory, to stop him from opening the gate and driving down. Except the wired-up booby trap of the gate itself. Except, even if he got past that, a possible minefield of burglar alarms further down the track. But who would blame him, on this of all days, who would accuse him of unlawful intentions? Trespassing, intruding? On his own birthright?
And if the gate was beyond opening, there was still the option—though he’d have to leave the car by the road like some glaring advert of his presence—of climbing over and walking down. Gates were there to be climbed over. And even if the Robinsons were, by some unlikely chance, actually in occupation—so what? They’d get a surprise. Would they call the police? (The police would be Ireton.) I’m Jack Luxton. Remember me? I sold you this place. I was passing, and I thought I’d—. I’ve just buried my brother.
So there was nothing to stop him. He stood by the gate, putting his hands on it, gingerly at first. His hands just straddled the black name on the top rail. He felt again the wood of the coffin under his palms.
Tom would have climbed over the gate, Jack was sure of it, quickly dropping his backpack over first, like a thief. But on that dazzling morning, so like this one, he, the big obedient brother, had opened the gate for his father, then, before going to re-join him, had swung it shut, a great fiery rush, despite the coldness of the air, billowing inside him.
He stood in his funeral outfit, his white shirt and black tie matching the white paint and black lettering, the medal still in his
top pocket. His mother had once told a story about the medal, which had ended at this very spot. Though it wasn’t a true story, it had never happened. It wasn’t even possible for it to happen. It was his mother’s invention.
His grip tightened on the rail. The Cherokee chugged expectantly beside him. It seemed to be begging a decision—climb over, for God’s sake! Drive away! But he could do neither, as if he might stay here, stuck for ever. At the same time, he had the growing conviction that some hurriedly organised posse of funeral attenders might be heading, even now, down the road from Marleston to round him up.
He gave the gate a sudden heaving shake, as if he might have ripped it from its hinges, then turned and got back in the car, slamming the door behind him as though slamming a gate upon himself. His hands gripped the steering wheel as fiercely as they’d gripped the rail, and perhaps half a minute passed as he remained staring at the alien black-and-white structure that had so effortlessly defeated him.
He saw in his head the old bare-wood gate. His eyes were blurred, in any case. Thus he failed to notice that he’d left behind two distinct, even identifying indications of his presence.
No traffic had passed in either direction while he’d been stopped and no traffic, pursuing or otherwise, was visible as he set off again, so no one was to know about this almost immediate interruption to his headlong flight (though a whole crowd had witnessed that). But at least until the next rain—which in a day’s time would come sweeping in on the back of south-westerly gales—anyone (including the owners of Jebb Farmhouse, had they been in occupation) might have seen two hand-prints on the top rail, one either side of the black-lettered name. They’d been made by large hands that had obviously grasped the rail with some force, and they were hands that had recently plainly been in contact, for whatever reason, with reddish-brown earth.
He flung the car back onto the road. There were already traces of the same red earth on the steering wheel and when, a little later, as he drove, he violently yanked off his black tie, he left a similar smudge on the white collar of his shirt.
So, he’d at least confirmed one thing. The last time he’d touched and passed through that gate—not that gate but the old one—had truly been after he’d taken his last-ever look at Jebb Farm. At least Ellie had been with him then. She’d already taken her last look at Westcott, and without much difficulty, it seemed. And as they’d left Jebb together (various items that had escaped the auctioneer’s hammer—including a shotgun and a medal in a silk-lined box—in the back) she was in the driving seat, because he’d expressly wanted to be the one to get out and open and close the Jebb gate for the last time and take a last look down the track.
Ellie had been with him then. They were driving to the Isle of Wight. It had been all Ellie’s doing. He’d stood beside her while her father was buried. More to the point, he’d helped carry the coffin.
Now, with a great, unearthly howl that no one heard, he drove madly on.
30
ELLIE SITS IN the lay-by near Holn, not driving anywhere.
When Jack had returned in the dark last night she couldn’t help having the thought: a wounded soldier. That was how the sight of him, in the beam of light from the cottage door, had framed itself for her, as he’d slowly emerged from the car in which she sits stranded now. He’d looked shattered, exhausted. But what had she expected, after such a journey? A wounded soldier. Even so, there he was.
Or was he? For two days she’d lived with the possibility that he might not return at all, but one possibility she clearly hadn’t anticipated was that he might return, but that he wouldn’t be Jack, or not the Jack she knew. And in the eyes of the strange figure who’d blundered towards her she’d seen, she thought, his anticipation of yet another possibility: that he might return to find her gone. But how could that be? Hadn’t he read or listened to any of those messages?
And since she was there, why hadn’t he looked pleased to see her, or at least relieved?
Even so. There he was, and so was she, standing in that doorway where she hadn’t stood, it’s true, to watch him go. If she hadn’t been watching then, she was watching now—had been watching and waiting, in fact, for a good half-hour. Knowing only what he’d said before he left, that he’d booked himself on the four-thirty Friday ferry, she’d been waiting in an agony since five-thirty (which would have been pushing it, it’s true). She’d even gone up to the bedroom window so as to spot his lights as soon as they came up the hill.
And Jack, Ellie thinks now, must have seen, as he passed this lay-by, the distant lights of the cottage. A pretty sure sign that someone was there and waiting for him. But had he been looking and did he care?
And what difference did it make, now, if he were never to know how anxiously she’d watched and waited? How she’d seen at last his lights—at such an hour they could only be his—take the turn for Beacon Hill, then travel, like the passage of some luminous, scurrying animal, up the first, hidden stretch of road before appearing, with a full blaze, at the bend by the old chapel. How she’d said aloud, ‘Jack. Jack,’ and how she’d sprung up, to run downstairs, to be at the door, to put right, to reverse all the events of two mornings before.
A casserole was on in the kitchen. A bottle was on the table. All the lights were on. He would surely have understood that she was there. Now he was too. And as she’d stood in the doorway she’d said again, ‘Jack, my Jack.’ Had he even heard?
It had even seemed, as he walked towards her, that he was sorry not to find her gone.
Though what had she expected? And what, since she hadn’t gone with him, did she deserve? But he was here. Or, say, half here. The other half she might still have to wait for. She’d fed him and put him to bed, realising that she couldn’t demand much more of him, in his condition, than his presence. ‘Ask me later, Ell. Ask me tomorrow.’ Realising also that she couldn’t expect much talk from him now, when two mornings ago he hadn’t had a single word from her.
She’d put him to bed. And he’d slept, in fact, for over twelve hours, not surfacing till after nine (which wasn’t like him at all). But if she’d hoped that a good sleep would really bring him back to her and if she’d hoped that a good breakfast—an all-day breakfast if necessary—would get them talking as they should talk, she was wrong.
He didn’t seem to want any breakfast. He still looked like some invalid. It had all suddenly reminded her of when her dad had begun to get ill, years ago, and she’d flitted coaxingly and motheringly around him, thinking foolishly that a good breakfast might put some life back in him. And maybe for Jack there’d been some weird equivalent of the same memory, and that was how it had begun.
‘You wanted him out the way, didn’t you?’
She’d thought at first he’d meant Tom, and then thought: well, so be it, now she had some facing up, owning up to do. Even so, she hadn’t thought that ‘out the way’ meant any more than that.
Then he’d come up with the really crazy stuff.
‘I’ve always wondered, Ell, how come your dad died so soon after mine? Did they have an agreement?’
This wasn’t about Tom’s death at all. Or was it?
Still he hadn’t yet said anything appalling. She might even have laughed at him. He’d made a sort of joke. And yes, though she’d never said anything to Jack, she had thought at the time that there was a sort of agreement. A connection. The real cause was the state of his liver and the state, on top of that, so it proved, of his lungs. He had lung cancer, the two things were racing each other. Nonetheless, there’d been a trigger. A bad word in the circumstances. Jimmy had started to go downhill soon after Michael’s death. Hardly a cause, but a kind of kinship. It was as if, she’d thought at the time, her father had lost a brother. Or he’d won some contest of survival and had nothing left to prove.
‘It was just how it was,’ she said. ‘You know that. It was just how it happened. He had a bad lung and a bad liver.’
‘And it was handy.’
‘Meaning?’
>
‘You know what I mean.’
His next words were the same—worse—as if he’d got up, leant across the table and hit her.
‘You helped him along, didn’t you, Ell? You put something in his tea. Or in that flask of his. Wormer, teat dip, I don’t know. Some kind of cow medicine. You put something in his breakfast.’
Strangely, her first thought before she exploded was to continue to picture her father sitting in the kitchen at Westcott, in the chair he always sat in—to think of all those breakfasts she’d cooked for him. Then her second thought was to wonder, almost calmly, whether Jack—or this man in front of her—actually thought she’d put something in his breakfast and that was why he didn’t want any.
Then she’d exploded. She might have just laughed. Could you laugh at such a thing? Was Jack—or this man—really saying this? Had he simply come home to her with a great dose of madness? So she said it.
‘Are you mad, Jack? Are you mad?’
It was the wrong thing to say, perhaps, to a man who might be really mad. Even to a man who’d come back from all that he must have been through (and she was still to hear about). But she’d said it. And then she’d said, with a great roar of outrage, like some matron barking down a hallway, ‘How dare you say such a thing to me? How dare you?’
And the madness must have been catching, quickly catching, because only a little while later, after he’d said things to her by way of mad explanation, she’d said back to him, by way of retaliation, things that were equally mad, equally ludicrous and certainly like nothing she’d ever thought might escape her lips.
