Wish You Were Here (6 page)

They should have got damn well hitched themselves. Or, as would have been the more customary solution and one which had only been staring them in the face for years, Jack should have married Ellie and linked their situations that way.

But that would have gone against all known history and deprived the two fathers of their fuelling disdain for each other. It would have robbed one of a daughter or one of a son, since where were the happy couple supposed
to live? Did Michael seriously think that Ellie was going to hop across the fence and settle in at Jebb, when she was so clearly needed at the side of her dear old dad?

And all of this despite the fact that the son and the daughter had been chummy with each other for as long as they—or anyone else—could remember. And not just chummy. For years now, from even before Alice Merrick’s abrupt departure, he and Ellie had been pretty much behaving with each other (if only on certain weekday afternoons) as if they
were
married. Which was not only common knowledge in the region of Marleston, but was actually abetted, even smiled on by the two fathers, even while it retained its clandestine trappings—on the basis, presumably, that there had to be some compensation for the fact that real marriage was impossible. At the same time (and Jack had only slowly come to recognise this) it was a concession that kept them both, the son and the daughter, firmly in their places: on their own farms (except, for Jack, on Tuesday and sometimes Thursday afternoons) and in each case a slave to it.

In the beginning, Jack had simply driven over in the pick-up, with Luke in the back. This would be at times when, according to a cautious-seeming Ellie, old Merrick wouldn’t be around. He and Ellie would go up to her bedroom, knowing that they couldn’t take too long about it, especially if they wanted, which they always did, to sit and have a cup of tea in the kitchen afterwards—with Luke, who seemed to know when to make himself scarce, stretched out by the stove, eyeing them meaningfully. It wouldn’t have seemed right without the cup of tea, and
that had always been the pretext, or pretence: Jack had simply popped over on a neighbourly visit (though why the hell should he do that?) and stayed for a neighbourly cup of tea.

But this had gone on for so long, without any discoveries or interruptions, that it was clear there was no real need for haste or secrecy, or to divide their time between bedroom and kitchen. Jack had begun to wonder, in fact, what it might mean if they were to have their cup of tea in bed—if Ellie might suggest it, or if he might. But he’d anyway long forgotten when he’d first twigged that Merrick might be staying away on purpose on these afternoons. Or when the idea of Jimmy’s coming back and catching them at it had become just an idea, a game, that added a little spice to proceedings. Nor did he need to have Luke sitting outside, to sound the alert if necessary. He just took Luke for the company. And Luke knew that too.

And then there was no Luke anyway.

But they’d kept up their pattern: first the bedroom, quickish, then the kitchen. Which naturally began to wane in excitement, even sometimes in satisfaction. There was a period during the cattle disease when it acquired a new adventurousness by the banning of even human movement between farms—something that generally shouldn’t have troubled the Merricks and Luxtons. Jack had let it pass for a week or two, and then thought, Hang it, and made the traditional journey (would there be government helicopters spying on him?), and found that he was greeted with some of the old fervour from the days when they could at least kid themselves they were doing something forbidden. One good effect of the cow disease.

But mostly Jack had begun to feel that these visits, though he couldn’t do without them (what else did he have?), had become just a little humiliating. Maybe Ellie felt the same. Though she’d never said, ‘Don’t bother, Jack.’ (What else did
she
have?) Jack even felt that his inexorable traipsings over to Westcott Farm represented the final triumph, so far as it went and after so many years of its being the other way round, of the Merricks over the Luxtons. It might be his dad who was going down the harder now, but didn’t his son’s situation only clinch it?

When old Merrick contrived to bump into him, in that supposedly unplanned way, on his returns to Jebb, there’d be an extra gleam, Jack thought, in the old bugger’s eye. Or it was an extra nip, perhaps, of whatever it was he took. And the gleam seemed to be saying: Well, boy, your dad might be suffering, and so am I, and those cows might have been up against it too, but who’s got the shortest straw, boysyboy, of all?

They wouldn’t linger now when they met each other like that. Jimmy would just stop, stick his head through the window of the Land Rover, pucker up his face and say a few words, or just twinkle under the brambly eyebrows, and lurch off.

For some reason, if only because Jimmy was Ellie’s father, Jack couldn’t help liking the little pixy-faced bastard. And, once upon a time, those interludes when he’d trundle back after seeing Ellie—whether old Merrick appeared over the horizon or not—had simply been some of the better moments of his life.

He still thinks it now. Still sees himself rolling a cigarette, with just one finger crooked round the wheel of the jolting pick-up, as if it would know anyway how to
steer him home. Sometimes, even if old Merrick didn’t appear, he’d stop, all the same, on the Luxton side of the boundary, just to take in the view. Something he never did otherwise. To breathe the air. He’d get out and stand with his back against the pick-up, one Wellington boot crossed over the other, one elbow cupped in one hand, ciggy on the go. The breeze riffling through the grass. And Luke, still alive then, lolloped by his feet, ears riffled too. And Tom just a nipper. Just a baby really.

A sense, for a moment, of simply commanding everything he saw, of not needing to be anywhere else.

‘I wouldn’t bother, Jack.’ She’d never actually said it. Though she’d sometimes said, at dullish moments, as if to make him feel he had rivals or he was just some stopgap (had been all those years?) that what she was doing was waiting for her ‘mystery man’ to turn up, her mystery man who’d also in some way be her real man, like the mystery man who’d been real enough once for her mum to be persuaded to run off with him. That wasn’t ‘Uncle Tony’, that was someone before. Even his name seemed a mystery.

Jack never knew if she was just joking or saying it to niggle him, or if what she really meant was that this mystery man ought actually to be him. If he would only
do
something. Whatever that might be. So how about it, Jacko? It was all right somehow when she said it when they were only seventeen, but when she said it again when they were past twenty, when she said it after those cattle had been bolt-gunned down on both their farms, it was different, it was troubling.

At some point he’d started having the thought that what Ellie was really waiting for was for her father to die.
Not that she was actually hoping he would have one of the several forms of fatal accident open to farmers, but it might be her only ticket out. And it might be a long wait. Merrick was as tough as a thistle, all twinkle and wire. And it seemed that people couldn’t catch the cow disease, or not in a hurry anyway.

And then again, not having to live with him round the clock, Jack couldn’t actually hate Jimmy (but then, did Ellie?), as sometimes he could hate his own father. Jimmy, after all, had let them have all those afternoons. And God knows when Jimmy would have last had intimate female company of his own. But clearly that didn’t of itself cause a man to waste away and die. Or God help us all.

But, as it happened, Jimmy did start to waste away. And die. And not so long after Michael died.

‘WE’D BETTER
cancel St Lucia.’

Ellie had looked at him and he’d known he shouldn’t have said it, or not then. He should have waited for the right moment. It was a secondary consideration—and it went, surely, without saying.

But he’d blurted it out straight away, like some clumsy gesture of reparation. And Ellie had looked at him and he’d known even then, with the letter back in his hands again after she’d read it, that this thing that had arrived out of the blue would drive a wedge—he could hear the blows of the hammer striking it—between them.

There was a separate mail box at the site and Jack would go down most mornings to check it, except during those mid-winter weeks when they’d be away and would arrange for their post to be held back (and suppose this letter had come then). Not much mail came directly to the cottage.

But that morning, a dank, grey early-November morning nine days ago, a red post-office van had swung up the narrow winding road he looks at now, to bring the private mail, including one very private letter, though the envelope
bore the words ‘Ministry of Defence’. And it must have been redirected by someone with a long memory since it also bore the original, now lapsed address ‘Jebb Farm, Marleston’.

And Jack had known, before he’d opened it.

Once he
had
opened it and truly did know, there was no way he could prove that he’d known beforehand, and it didn’t matter. Yet he’d known, even as he held the unopened envelope. His mind was no longer the usual slow mechanism. It was quick as a switch, it had turned electric. His big, heavy body, on the other hand, seemed to be draining through the floor and leaving him powerless. The roof of his mouth went dry. In the same bright flash of knowing, he thought, absurdly, of his long-dead mother, raised in a post office.

Even before he’d opened the envelope he’d called out, ‘Ellie! Ell! Where are you? Come here.’

She’d been up here, in this bedroom, changing that duvet cover. By the time she was with him, he still hadn’t opened the letter.

And now that it lay opened between them and he’d said what he’d said and Ellie had given him that uncooperative look, he thought, seeing it all again, of the last time a letter, seeming to change everything, had lain between them. A letter to Ellie that time, and she’d been waiting—she’d certainly picked her moment—to show it to him. They’d both been stark naked at the time and he’d wondered where the hell she’d been hiding it.

He saw again Ellie’s tits sway as she handed him a letter. The July sky at the window. They were in the Big Bedroom.

Out of the blue? But
this
wasn’t out of the blue—
setting aside that it was a gloomy grey morning. This had always been a cloud, a possible cloud, lurking over the horizon.

Yet he’d thought, all the same, of blue summer skies. Skies with smoke, perhaps, rising somewhere in them. He’d thought of barbecues. They were allowed down at the site (though every unit, of course, had its kitchenette), but only by permission and with approved equipment. Sometimes, of an August evening, the whole place smelt of charring burgers.

Blue, burning skies. They’d have to cancel St Lucia.

Though that wasn’t till after Christmas. This was still early November. Ellie, he could see from that look—his super-fast brain could see it—was already calculating that this thing (was there some proper word to give it?) would have blown over by then. In a month or so it would be behind them. The air would be clear and blue again, even bluer. That cloud, having arrived and shed its burden, would no longer be there. Ellie was actually thinking, even then, that if this thing had been going to happen, it had been well timed. All the more reason for taking a holiday. A problem behind them.

Whereas he’d thought, how could you take a holiday after this? How could you just fly off into the blue?

So he shouldn’t have said it. And perhaps, if he hadn’t, Ellie would have been with him, at his side, three days ago. She’d have been with him in the car as he drove all those long, solitary miles. And he wouldn’t be sitting at this window, a gun at his back. None of this would be happening.

Had he even had the thought, even then, the letter between them, that this thing that he’d always feared, which
was the worst of worst possibilities, was really, perhaps, the thing Ellie might have wished? Her best possibility.

‘Well, thank God, Jack, at least this has come in the off season.’

She should never have said
that
. And even from a practical point of view—surely Ellie saw this, she being the one who always saw things so sharply—that gap of almost two months ahead might not be so roomy after all. There was no date given in the letter. That is, the letter itself was dated and there
was
a date, very clearly, uncannily, given in it. Jack had tried to remember what he’d been doing on that date (it was a Saturday), whether at any point he’d felt anything turn over mysteriously inside him. But there was no
future
date. And there was thus a question, which he thought he’d quickly answered, of two flights. There was the flight about which the letter said he’d be kept closely informed. And there was the flight, which wasn’t going to happen, to St Lucia.

Though the letter hadn’t used the word flight. It had used a word which Jack had never encountered before but which would lie now in his head like some piece of mental territory: repatriation.

Once upon a time, and it would have been the same too for Tom, the notion of being anywhere other than England would have seemed totally crazy to Jack and quite beyond any circumstance that might include him. Though he knew that the world contained people who went, who flew, regularly, to other places. He knew that the world included other places. He’d done some geography at school. He’d once learnt, if he couldn’t remember them
now, the capitals of Argentina and Peru. But, for all practical purposes, even England had meant only what the eye could see from Jebb Farmhouse—or what lay within a ten-mile journey in the Land Rover or pick-up.

There’d been a few day-trips to Exeter or Barnstaple. Two stays, once, in another
county:
Dorset. Even the Isle of Wight, once, would have seemed like going abroad.

If you’d have said to Jack that one day he’d find himself in St Lucia—and, before that, twice in Antigua and three times in Barbados—he’d have said you were barking. (And, anyway, where
were
those places?) It still seems to him, even now that he’s done it several times, like something impossible, a trick, even somehow wrong: that you could get into an aeroplane, then get out again a few hours later and there’d be—this completely different world.