Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

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.