Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift

  So it was that Sergeant Ireton, as well as the Robinsons, possessed the means to open the Jebb gate, and thus he might technically have found himself—had Jack decided, that morning, on some impromptu intruding himself—in the position of arresting the man who, minutes before, he’d, so to speak, shared a coffin with. Though it was also possible that if Jack had actually asked whether there was any way he might take a quick look at Jebb, Bob might have said, ‘Of course. I can open the gate for you. I even know how to cut out the alarms.’

  Security, in the broad sense—security of incomes, of livelihoods and even of lives—had become a real enough concern in a region afflicted first by BSE, then, years later, by foot-and-mouth. But security as the Robinsons meant it and as it might affect a local policeman was something different. Bob Ireton might have said it was something the Robinsons brought with them from London, but he might also have said that it was something that, like those cow diseases, was now just spreading through the air. The feeling that nowhere was really immune, even quiet green places in the depths of the country. Marleston and Polstowe were not exactly incident-free, but it was only recently that Bob had begun to feel that his safe little job as a country policeman—safe in the sense that it was far more secure than the jobs of dozens of farmers—was actually bound up, as if he might be involved in some latent war, with a larger, unlocal malaise of insecurity. And he’d felt this particularly, like a palpable burden and responsibility, when he’d offered his shoulder to help carry Jack Luxton’s poor dead brother.

  When the Robinsons had asked Jack about security—as if it formed part of the sale—Jack had been inclined to say (after some puzzlement about the word itself) that they never bothered, here, with burglar alarms or even with locking vehicle doors. But Ellie had already warned him not to make the Robinsons feel silly about anything they asked. He might equally have said that it always helped to know—should it come to it—that there was a gun in the house. But this might not have been wise either. So he simply said that they never had any trouble, not in this part of the world. And he’d given Toby Robinson one of his most neutral looks.

  The Robinsons weren’t interested in the kind of security—or insecurity—that had mattered to Jack, that was causing him to be selling his farm. They saw this as only offering them their opportunity. They—or Mr Robinson—saw cow disease and distress sales as possibly working to their advantage. Toby had told his wife that north Devon was off the beaten track. It was still genuine, undiscovered countryside. Everyone went to south Devon and Cornwall where prices were already beefed up, and—talking of beef—this BSE business could only mean there might be some real bargains around. Toby Robinson, investment banker though he was, had in certain situations, Clare knew, the instincts of a huckster, loving nothing better than to beat down a price. It was perhaps why he’d got to where he was. And also why the word ‘countryside’ seemed strange on his lips.

  Toby had thought Jack was an extraordinary character to have to deal with (he wouldn’t have meant this as a compliment), but he was very careful not to appear to look down on him. He didn’t want to give the impression that a sum of money that to Jack, so he guessed (and guessed right), might be eye-popping, was to him, Toby, still almost within the bounds of pocket money. At the same time he had a sort of visceral respect for the man. Farmers went to market, didn’t they? (Or did they any more?) They couldn’t be so different from people who worked in the City.

  What the Robinsons meant by security was the kind of security that might prevent the possession and enjoyment of their new property from ever being impaired or violated. Nonetheless, what Clare Robinson might have said of the effect upon her of seeing that newspaper item—though her physical well-being had in no way been harmed and though their possession of Jebb Farmhouse remained happily intact—was that it made her feel insecure.

  Had Bob Ireton and Jack found themselves together, soon after the funeral, on what was now the Robinsons’ property—and whether or not Jack would have been theoretically guilty of trespassing—they might have had a conversation about security. They might have sat in Ireton’s police car, on the new, immaculately bricked turning-area, amid all the new landscaping and terracing, but looking at the essentially unchanged view before them (less impeded now after the removal of the Small Barn), down Barton Field. Bob might have brought Jack up to date about all the changes at Jebb—visible as they were around them—but they might have moved inevitably, even despite themselves, onto this larger subject.

  Bob might have said, alluding to the Robinsons and their kind and the fears manifested by their elaborate alarm systems, that such people had a problem. They didn’t know how fortunate they were, they couldn’t just be glad of what they had, and they didn’t know the real meaning of loss, did they? Here, Bob might have looked at Jack carefully. Both men, sitting side by side, might have been feeling still a detectable, angular pressure on one shoulder. But on the other hand, Bob might have said, the world—the world at large—certainly wasn’t getting any safer, was it? So, he might have added, with an attempt at weary humour, he’d picked the right job, hadn’t he? But would have stopped short of saying anything to the effect that some people might have concluded that Tom (though Bob knew it could hardly actually have been his motive) had picked the right job too. Keeping the world safe. Security. That was the argument that always got used, wasn’t it? Though it could be used, couldn’t it, to justify just about anything?

  Bob, though a practical policeman, had become a not unreflective man and, while keeping these thoughts to himself, might have looked soberly across the frost-whitened valley before them.

  Jack might have said, ‘And a sergeant now, Bob.’ Remembering all the stripes and gold braid and sashes he’d seen the day before. And Bob might have kept to himself how he’d had his uniform specially dry-cleaned and pressed for the morning’s occasion, how he’d inspected himself in the mirror. Jack might have felt, all the time, the medal burning in his pocket.

  Bob, looking at Jack also contemplating that frosty view and seeing his Adam’s apple rise and fall, might have begun to wish this topic of security hadn’t emerged, prompted as it was not just by the burglar alarms at Jebb, but by his local policeman’s need to give some context to the death of a once local man in a far-away country. But Jack might at last have begun to take up the theme by saying that in his current line of work security was actually quite a factor. It wasn’t just that now and then he had to step in to deal with little episodes that could make him feel a bit like a policeman (he might have looked shyly at Bob), but there was the whole question of guarding the caravans during the off-season months. Like now. Though he probably wouldn’t have mentioned that he had a contract with a security firm (he didn’t just rely on the local police) and this was especially necessary when they—he and Ellie—took their holidays (though not this winter) in the Caribbean.

  Jack might have said that it was a funny thing, but the caravanners, on their holidays, often wanted to talk about the general state of the world, how it wasn’t getting any safer. Just like him and Bob now. And Jack might have put forward the idea that there was no such place really as ‘away from it all’, was there? Then he might have made a stumbling effort at a joke. He might have explained that he lived these days in a place called Lookout Cottage that had once been a pair of coastguards’ cottages. It had once been where two now-forgotten souls had had the task, in theory, of guarding the whole country against invasion. But now everyone had to keep a lookout, didn’t they?

  Both men might have gazed out over the valley and Bob might have picked his moment to say, ‘But you’re doing okay, aren’t you, Jack? Things are okay?’ Or to say, ‘And how’s Ellie? I couldn’t help noticing she wasn’t here.’ But thought twice about that question and perhaps about asking any others, because he wasn’t honestly sure what might make Jack, sitting here amid all the transformations that had occurred at Jebb, suddenly burst into tears.

  A silence might have passed between t
hem, broken only by the cackling of rooks, in which they might both have stared at the crown of the oak tree. How could they say between them whatever it was that needed to be said about the death of Tom Luxton?

  Jack might have looked at Bob and thought: Is he going to arrest me anyway, after all, for something much bigger and worse than being found on private property? But Ireton might have looked at his watch and said, in a shepherdly way, as if he’d simply chanced upon someone who’d got lost, ‘Well, Jack, I can leave you here to carry on trespassing by yourself, or I can drive you back up to the road and see you on your way.’

  Looking back, Clare Robinson could admit that her first, shadowy misgiving—even before that ‘shiver’—had been the foot-and-mouth. She’d been able to tolerate the long dragging-on of the building work. After all, they’d let themselves in for it. If they’d been over-ambitious, it was their own fault. On the other hand, if it all bore fruit the way they visualised, it would have been worth the waiting. Fruit was meanwhile borne anyway—and rather unexpectedly—in the form of their third child, a girl to go with the two boys, and Clare vaguely believed that this had happened precisely because their ‘country place’ awaited them. Since, apart from all its other virtues, it would be a haven, a perfect paradise for the children. Another child could only justify it all the more, and sanction the scope of their intentions for it. And little Rachel simply took up their time and made the continual postponement of when they might actually ‘move in’ seem only practical. They’d move in when she was old enough to know about it.

  They started to joke about the whole thing as their ‘millennial plan’—would they or wouldn’t they move in before the next century?—but they became excited all over again and forgot about all the time and money consumed, when at last it neared completion and they saw what actually splendid things had been achieved. The builders finally left and they ‘moved in’ in the autumn of 1999, though they didn’t make their first proper use of the place till the following summer.

  Her husband had said that the foot-and-mouth outbreak, in the spring of the next year, wasn’t their problem and it would blow over. In any case they didn’t have to be there, that was the beauty (though Clare thought this was a rather sad argument) of its being their second place. Nor were they. It was a sacrifice, of course, and all rather galling. They watched the TV pictures of vast piles of cattle being burnt from the safety of their living room in Richmond. It seemed best. It was nothing to do with them. They’d look insensitive, perhaps, if they went down there. And by the summer, anyway, it would surely have all been dealt with.

  But, even at a distance, Clare hadn’t liked this thing happening so plainly and upsettingly close to their new property. She felt it as if she were down there. She didn’t like the idea of the smoke from that huge pyre being carried on the wind towards Jebb Farmhouse. Her husband’s remark about its blowing over had been unfortunate. She felt it like a contamination. And, though it wasn’t logical and Toby would have scoffed, she felt it as something they should feel responsible, even vaguely guilty for, in a way they couldn’t have felt about the BSE which had struck, as it were, before their time.

  Mrs Robinson was glad when it did, so far as it might actually impinge on them, ‘blow over’. She’d perhaps been over-reacting. And when, in fact, something far worse—far worse for the world at large—occurred later that year, she didn’t feel nearly as troubled as she might have done had their ‘country place’ not now been fully up and running. She felt that the whole exercise was now vindicated. She felt glad and relieved. When those planes hit the towers that September, everyone said that the world had changed, it would never be the same again. But she’d felt it less distressingly, if she were honest, than the foot-and-mouth and those previous clouds of TV smoke. Since now they had this retreat, this place of green safety. It had been a good decision.

  One of the big issues for her and Toby had once been choosing between flying off for holidays in exotic places (something they very much liked to do) and putting all their eggs, so to speak, into this basket in Devon. It might have its limitations, not least the English weather. But then again, with the children at the age they were—even before the new baby—going abroad had begun to have its limitations too.

  Now the whole prospect of foreign travel, of having to deal with airports and people in states of crowded transit, seemed to Clare (her husband still travelled on business) touched by something sinister in the global atmosphere. So their purchase of Jebb Farmhouse seemed right in every respect. It seemed provident, even vaguely patriotic. How simple and comforting, just to have to drive down the M4.

  By the summer of 2003 their presence at Jebb was a familiar reality. They would invite friends to join them—with their children—and the friends would be suitably impressed and envious. To cap it all, the weather that summer smiled for them. That the Martha thing seemed still not to have blown over made little effective difference. She made a pact with herself to push it aside, if not quite to ignore it. Everything else was too marvellous, too precious. It wasn’t worth risking all that they now abundantly had by making an issue out of it. And surely, one day, Toby might take the same view—about his carrying on with Martha. He might put an end to it. Especially if, she rather perversely argued to herself, she was—lenient.

  It was the only blot, and when they were all at Jebb it could sometimes seem to evaporate completely. The place had a healing effect. And yet, that dazzling Sunday in early July, as if some silent, invisible explosion had occurred, it had all seemed suddenly, deeply wrong.

  That weekend the Townsends and their two children were staying. One thing they liked to do with guests on Sundays, if the weather allowed, was to hold a grand picnic under the big oak tree. It was really a case of a late and lazy breakfast on the terrace gradually spilling over into a late and extended lunch in the field beneath. It was absurd, in one sense, to have a picnic so close to the house, yet it seemed exactly what that field and that tree were intended for. So, while the children ran on ahead and used the field (just as once imagined) as their exclusive playground, all the components of a picnic would be carried down in stages. Everyone would enjoy the feeling of a small-scale, rather preposterous expedition. The several trips down the steep slope and up again worked up a thirst and added to the general fun. It wouldn’t have been in the right spirit to pile everything into the Range Rover and drive down—though the Range Rover was usually employed to cart everything back.

  That day, the picnic was almost at the point of complete assembly. She and Tessa Townsend were occupying the rugs while the men did the last lugging and puffing. The children were happily amusing themselves. The oak tree was too massive and challenging for any climbing, but Toby had rigged up a rope swing, with a proper wooden seat, from one of the lowest branches. This was now in operation and the rugs had been placed some distance from the base of the tree, but still within reach of its ample shade.

  It was hardly a talking-point with visitors like the Townsends, but every member of the Robinson family had by now noticed that strange little hole, with the faint discoloration around it, low down in the trunk, and had wondered how it got there. Clare, sitting on the rug with Tessa, noticed it today as the children swung past it. It surely couldn’t have been formed naturally. A fixing point for tethering some mad bull had once been Toby’s theory, a scary idea that had appealed to the children—and he’d done a brief imitation of a mad bull for their benefit.

  He and Hugh Townsend were now bringing the last shipment of picnic supplies down the hill. The children—or their Charlie and the Townsends’ pair—were busy with the swing. The oak tree itself was softly rustling every so often in a gentle breeze and there was a cooing of pigeons from the wood.

  Then everyone’s attention had turned to Toby, who, with a loud oath, had suddenly tripped and slithered several yards on his backside down the glossy grass of the field above, dropping and scattering the contents of the box he was carrying—which had included two bottles o
f pink champagne, now rapidly rolling away from him.

  He hadn’t hurt himself, though for a micro-second Clare had thought: Has he broken a leg, an arm, an ankle? Was this whole, marvellously materialising Sunday not to be, after all? But, in fact, he’d merely provided entertainment and laughter for all, something he acknowledged, when he regained his feet, by taking a theatrical bow. It was one of those moments of potential disaster rapidly transformed into comedy which are like some extra blessing. Clare had noticed, as her husband fell and slid and his short-sleeved shirt flew up, the plump wobbliness of his paunch above the waist of his shorts and, as his straw hat flew off, the shiny, receding patch in his hair, catching the sunlight. For some reason these things—the flashes of pink, vulnerable skin—reassured her. Yes, she knew that she loved him. She could not, would not lose him. He was even for her, at that moment, like some big fourth child.

  And now, while all the actual children seemed to be in stitches, he was making a show, like some hired clown, of gathering up everything he’d spilt and pointing out that the champagne would now have really acquired some fizz. What a sweet fool he was. How had he become a banker? This was all, she realised, her heart strangely brimming, the perfect moment, the perfect scene. But it was only minutes later that she’d looked up at the broad, sun-filled canopy of the oak as if to see in it some approval of her joy (this wonderful oak tree—they owned an oak tree!) and felt that something was very wrong.

  What was going on? A picnic was about to begin, that was all. A happy picnic heralded by rounds of laughter and, now, by the loud pop of a champagne cork. Everything was in place, but, as so often, once the thing was ready and though there’d been expressions of impatience, the children were being slow to come and get it. But that hardly mattered. What was happening? Charlie had pointed out to Laura Townsend the hole in the tree, the ‘mad-bull’ hole—and Laura had decided to put her finger in it. That was all. It was something Clare had never done herself—she’d felt, for some reason, there might be something in the hole she wouldn’t like to touch. Though what was so awful, right now, about that little, natural, childish act of sticking a finger in a hole?