by Graham Swift
Yet she’d looked up at the oak tree and at once began to fear it. There was something now about it that, even on a warm July day, made her feel cold. Its leaves, stirring in the breeze, seemed to shiver with her. Its shade, which should have been only delightful on a summer’s day, seemed, momentarily, simply dark.
She hid all this, tried to dismiss it as the picnic proceeded, and, as it turned out, never said a word about it to her husband. Though the truth was that it really took most of that summer for this ‘moment’ to go away. She was on guard against its repetition. She eyed the tree as if she and it were outfacing each other. She could no longer be sure that there wasn’t something sinister rather than glorious about the way it dominated the view, its crown rearing up above the brow of the field, like the head of some giant with brooding designs on the house. She thought of it lurking at night. Then all this simply receded, to the point where she wondered if she hadn’t really just imagined it all.
When Jack (with Ellie’s advice) sold Jebb farmhouse and Barton Field to the Robinsons, nothing was said about the hole in the tree. Jack had even thought of filling it, disguising it, but had known that this was taking things too far. The hole had to stay. To anyone else it was just an insignificant hole in a tree. Nothing had been said, of course, about how Michael had died, though Jack had let it be known, in a sombre way, that his father was ‘no longer around’, and the Robinsons had expressed their sympathies and taken this to be connected with why Jack had to sell. It inclined Clare at least to a certain pity towards Jack (what a big, slow creature he seemed) and even Toby felt he shouldn’t make too much of a contest over the price, though he also felt this might have been Jack’s motive in mentioning the subject.
If the Robinsons subsequently began to suspect at all that the older Mr Luxton had committed suicide, it was not because of some understanding of how a cow disease might also reduce the human population (though they’d cut down, themselves, on eating beef) and certainly not because any of their new, seldom encountered neighbours had told them that Michael had shot himself under that tree. Their neighbours knew better than that. How would it have helped? It certainly wouldn’t have helped poor Jack negotiate his sale. Even the solicitors had kept quiet. It wasn’t exactly their direct business and it wouldn’t have advanced a transaction which had its complications, but which both sides clearly wanted to complete as soon as possible.
If the Robinsons nonetheless had their inklings, they certainly didn’t want to pursue them. They were happy not to know. Those two years and more while the building work went on acted like a curtain, and once they were in real occupation they kept themselves apart. They were not permanent residents anyway. They were effectively surrounded by a dairy consortium, and so rather conveniently ringed off from any real local inhabitants. They’d bought a centuries-old farmhouse, but they’d altered much of its ancient fabric and they were notably uninquisitive about even its recent history.
When Jack sold Jebb to the Robinsons he got the strong impression that for Toby Robinson at least, Jebb Farm was just an item, like anything else he might have chosen to buy, and perhaps even sell again later. This had at first astonished Jack: that someone might want to buy what the Luxtons had possessed for generations in the same way that they might buy a picture to hang on their wall. It had even, for a while, disinclined him to proceed, but Ellie had told him not to be a bloody idiot. Jack suspected that if Toby Robinson had found out that Michael had blown his brains out under that tree, he might simply have used it, without being fundamentally perturbed, as a pretext for getting something off the price. But at the same time he felt that Clare Robinson’s ‘investment’, in the broadest sense, in Jebb was of a different nature. To her, in some way, it really mattered—she was the one who really wanted it. So when the sale looked like going through, he hoped she would never find out about that hole. He hoped no one, at the last minute, would go and tell her.
Had Toby Robinson inadvertently learnt that Michael Luxton had committed suicide—and how—he might have simply thought: So what? So what? It would have made his mad-bull notion a bit unfortunate, but was that tree—were they?—any the worse? But Clare might have suffered some more decisive occurrence of that transitory shiver which she would keep to herself. And the upset she felt through simply glancing at a newspaper might have been more unsettling too.
‘Thomas Luxton.’ Should they go there, she’d thought, should they be there? If the poor man had grown up in ‘their’ farmhouse should they put in an appearance? She had two boys of her own, Charlie and Paul, though she hardly saw them as soldier material. But they’d just been down for half-term, and was it really any business or obligation of theirs? She resolved not to let it cast a pall. She wouldn’t mention it to Toby, if he didn’t mention it himself, and she knew he wouldn’t.
It would be like never mentioning Martha’s name, which had become a sort of rule. Clare knew that if she mentioned it, though she had every reason and right to, it might be a fatal thing to do. It might cause a catastrophe. So much time had passed, in fact, without Martha’s being mentioned, that Clare couldn’t actually be sure if Martha still featured. And this was a comforting uncertainty, as if consistently not mentioning her name was gradually making Martha not exist. Though Clare would never have said that she wished Martha dead.
So their happy possession of Jebb Farmhouse continued. Their ‘Jebb years’, their summer stays. Even their picnics with visiting guests under that wonderful oak tree. It was five centuries old, they’d once been told (by Jack Luxton), which rather put her temporary little disturbances into perspective. Clare would never have lasting cause to regret the acquisition of their country place. Or to feel she’d been overdoing it, that summer evening years ago, when, after they’d first seen Jebb, she’d intertwined fingers with her husband’s over the dinner table in an expensive hotel on the fringes of Dartmoor and said—not unmindful of everything they already possessed—that it might even be like their ‘very own little piece of England’.
33
JACK DROVE MADLY ON.
On that cold, clear Remembrance Day, when Tom wasn’t there, Jack had swung the gate shut behind his father in the Land Rover, not knowing then (had his father known?) that Michael would never set foot outside Luxton territory again. He would walk that night down to the oak tree.
As he’d shouldered Tom’s coffin, Jack had felt the overwhelming urge to be not just Tom’s brother but the second, secret, cradling father he’d sometimes felt himself to be. And as he’d stood and dropped his handful of earth onto the drumming coffin lid—before he was unable to stand there any longer—he’d even wanted to be Tom’s real father, their father, who could never, except through the living breath of his older son, have the chance to say, to let the words pour repentingly from his lips: ‘My son Tom. O my poor son Tom.’
But Michael was lying now just yards from his younger son, and who knows how the dead may settle their scores? All at once Jack had remembered what Tom had said, about that other death down in Barton Field—about what Michael had said: ‘I hope some day someone will have the decency …’
He’d fled the churchyard, the only living Luxton left, then had needed to stop by that monstrous, mocking gate. Now, as he drove on, turning his back on Luxton territory, he knew why Lookout Cottage was the only place to go. It wasn’t that he thought any more that it was where he belonged. It was the gun, his father’s gun.
He had his dad’s example. He even had Tom’s example—a gun-carrying soldier, a sniper. How many had Tom killed? But Tom, who in his days as a soldier must have had to see many things, had never had to see what he, Jack, had once had to see in the darkness under that tree.
It was the gun, waiting for him now.
As he sped away from Marleston, Jack couldn’t have felt less like a man who, instead of stopping to confront a gate, might have paused to call his wife and say he was coming home. His mobile phone (with its several messages) remained switched off. Yet on this homeward jour
ney—if that was what it was—he followed a route he’d taken once before with Ellie and, had he been in a different state of mind, he might have felt he was travelling back, in more than one sense, to her.
Ten years ago, after closing the old Jebb gate for the last time, he’d got in, beside Ellie, in the passenger seat and so technically in the position of navigator. But Ellie already knew the way. Ellie had already gone—so Jack had learned one July afternoon—to spy out their future on the Isle of Wight, seizing the chance to do so secretly when Jimmy had been admitted to hospital. And that was one reason, Jack had told himself, why she’d kept that letter from Uncle Tony to herself for so long. She couldn’t share it till she’d checked its validity—on the spot—and she couldn’t do that while her dad was around.
So Ellie had driven them both, with the memory of her first trip to guide her, but Jack hadn’t been just the passive, ignorant passenger. In the early stages of their journey he’d suddenly realised there was a coincidence of memories and of routes. The road signs had chimed with him: Honiton, Axminster, Lyme Regis … Ellie had passed along this road before, but then so had he.
‘Ellie, I’ve got an idea.’
So they’d found themselves together at Brigwell Bay. And standing on the beach there with Ellie, having taken one of the great initiatives of his life (to think they might have sailed past the turning only for the idea to have hit him miles further on), Jack had made one of the great declarations of his life. It took the form of one of his rare jokes, but it was too gallant—and too successful—to be just a joke.
‘There you are, Ell. Here you are. “Wish you were here.” Now you are.’
Then he’d blurted out, ‘And always will be.’
And just for his saying this Ellie had hugged him, almost squeezed the breath out of him, and said, ‘My hero,’ while he’d smelt the strange, forgotten smell of the sea.
Honiton, Axminster, Lyme Regis. He took the same route now, but at the turning—he knew when it was coming—he didn’t even slow. It was like another shut gate. What lay down that road? He and Ellie clasped in the embrace of their life? That wasn’t the point. What lay down that road was a six-year-old boy on a caravan holiday, legs spattered with wet sand, who’d become a soldier in Iraq. He’d sometimes felt like Tom’s father then.
He didn’t even slow down, but he let out another great, unheard howl.
He reached Portsmouth well before four. Realising that he might be even earlier, he’d stopped at a service station, outside Southampton, on the M27. These anonymous places, in which to piss, eat and kill time, seemed to draw him like a second habitat—a habitat that was no habitat at all. But he wanted nothing more. He’d booked himself, to allow for all kinds of eventualities that might follow the funeral, onto the four-thirty ferry. There’d been no eventualities, except for his swift exit, his encounter with a gate and the eating up of road.
Once he joined the queue of waiting vehicles, the long, cross-country loop of his journey was complete. There remained only the short sea-trip which, when he’d done it that first time with Ellie, had seemed momentous, like an ocean voyage. It was momentous now. He would never return to the mainland, he was sure of it, this crossing would be his last. The thing was so fixed now in his mind that he no longer paused to consider, as he’d sometimes done on his long journey, whether he was mad.
Nor did he pause to consider—since it had simply never occurred to him, and it had never been part of Vera’s story—that it might have been from here once, from the Solent, that those two Luxton brothers, on the memorial near which he’d stood just hours ago, had been shipped out, never to return. So what Jack was very soon to do, but hadn’t even thought of yet, had no premeditated link with them. It was just another of the sudden initiatives of his life.
The ferry’s ramp and yawning hold reminded him of the plane. The deafening car deck was like some state of alert. After grabbing his parka and leaving his car, he made for the open decks above, not wanting to show his face. He stood by the rail. It was getting dark. The wind that had got up during the day gusted round him. A deep Atlantic front was moving in.
Would Ellie be there? Did he want her to be? Would it be like a final sign to him if she were not, so that he could simply take out the gun? Even now he shunned his mobile phone, when to use it would have been the most natural and normal thing to do. As he’d maintained silence for so long, it might even have been a stupendous thing to do. His voice might have sounded like that of a man given up for lost. Ellie, I’m on the ferry, I’m on my way.
How had Tom died?
With a clank of its raised ramp and a churning of water, the ferry slipped its moorings. The lights of Portsmouth were on, reflected in the surface of the harbour, but night hadn’t quite fallen and the sky still glowed in the west. Beyond the shelter of the harbour mouth, the fitful wind combined with the movement of the boat into a steady, bitter blast. A few hardy souls—to appreciate the sunset or to indulge the brief sensation of being on the high seas—lingered for a while by the rails. And some of them would have noticed one of their number, a large, strongly built, even rather intimidating man, feel for something in the region of his breast pocket, then, clutching it tightly for a moment in his fist, hurl it into the sea.
Though it was small, it must have been metallic and relatively heavy, since, catching a quick, coppery gleam from the sunset, it sliced cleanly through the wind into the waves.
34
ELLIE SITS IN the lay-by at Holn Cliffs, not admiring the view. Even the seagulls have vanished as if swallowed by the greyness.
There is no end to this. She might sit here for ever, or she might drive on, circling the Isle of Wight for ever. Islanded, either way. Unless she were really to cut loose. Cross the water, take the ferry (in weather like this?). Like Jack did two days ago. Though where would she go?
Or … The thought comes to her only like some idle, abstract, teasing proposition: she could cross the soggy verge to her left, burst through that shuddering hedge, and simply drive on. Cut loose that way. She’s a farmer’s daughter and she knows how to hurl a four-wheel-drive vehicle across a muddy field. But such a thing, she knows, simply wouldn’t be her.
She looks, all the same, towards the edge of the cliffs, considering the possibility like some malicious insinuation that has just been whispered in her ear. And then the other thought comes to her that isn’t idle or abstract at all, more like a kick to her heart. She’s a farmer’s daughter and once upon a time—even when she was sixteen and knew how to handle a Land Rover—she knew how to handle a gun.
The gun. That bloody gun, which he could never bring himself to get rid of. Which she could never persuade him to part with. Why had he kept it? Were they plagued with rabbits down at the site? The gun which he’d kept in that cabinet all this time, as if it might be his dad in there. And the gun which—quite absurdly, but only to answer outrage with outrage—she’d gone and suggested he might have aimed at his dad himself.
Ellie’s heart bangs. She has entirely overlooked that she has left Jack alone, in these—extreme—circumstances, with a gun. If she has the means, theoretically, less than fifty yards away, then so does he. And he has a precedent too.
A great blast of terror hits her as, in fact, the blinding buffets of weather temporarily relent. In front of her, Holn Head looms darkly but distinctly, its whole outline visible, like a ship keeping to its steady course. The clouds still engulf Beacon Hill, but that doesn’t prevent Ellie thinking she sees now in the distance, at that crucial spot in her vision, a tiny, quick flash of light.
My God. The engine of the Cherokee starts as if it’s not her doing but the direct consequence of the pounding in her chest. By a strange seeming-telepathy, the silver hatchback up ahead moves off too, as if it’s taken its hint from her, or doesn’t wish to be left alone. Or, to a neutral observer, as if they’ve both been simply prompted by the brief mercy of the weather. Are we going to sit here all day?
Ellie follows the hatc
hback down the descending road into Holn—wishing it would go faster. When she has to slow at the turn for Beacon Hill (though it’s more of a skidding, rocking attempt to both slow and accelerate), she experiences a moment’s odd desolation as the silver car carries on, up the rise ahead, in the direction of Sands End. She feels sure now it wasn’t just waiting out the storm, but confronting, too, some Saturday-morning catastrophe, the story of which she’ll never know.
She tears along the straight section of steeply banked road before the hill proper, even as the rain begins its onslaught again. But she’s near enough now for the cottage to be plainly visible, if only for a few seconds before the bends of the road and the high banks obscure it, and she can see that its lights are on. Hardly surprising in this weather—they would have been on when she left. But she can see that they include the bedroom light, which she interprets first as a good sign, then as a bad sign, a terrible sign, then as a sign that need not signify anything at all. Then remembers how she’d watched for Jack from that same window last night and how she’d seen his lights. He’d come back!
All of this flashes through her mind, even as, frantically, she flashes her lights, as if a watching Jack—if he’s watching—will instantly understand their coded message: ‘Jack, it’s me. I’m coming. I love you. Don’t, Jack, DON’T!’
But of course her lights are hidden by the roadside banks, and he’s not perhaps looking anyway. He’s not perhaps looking at anything any more.
