Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

So they’d taken what was for them an epic journey, part bus, part train, to the south coast of England and (if only just) across the border into another county. And they’d stayed in a caravan, in a small, three-acre field, with hedges all around it, a little way back from the cliffs and the beach below. There were only six caravans, positioned any old how, and compared to the snazzy, lined-up giants Jack can see in the distance now, they were like rabbit hutches on wheels. But they each had a name, and theirs, both years, had been ‘Marilyn’.

Those two stays in a caravan in Brigwell Bay were, by the time Jack sat up in bed with Ellie on that July afternoon, the only two holidays he (or Tom) had ever had, and he still might have said that during each of them he’d never been happier. So much so that during the first one, finding himself suddenly so clearly and unmistakably happy, he’d wondered if he’d ever, really, been happy before.

When he sat down at the tiny pale-yellow Formica-topped table in the caravan and wrote his postcard to Ellie, it was with a mixture of honesty and guilt. Yes, he really did wish she was there. But if he really wished that, how could he be so happy in the first place? Wishing she was there was like admitting he was happy without her. It was like saying he was writing this postcard because he’d betrayed her.

And in Ellie’s case, on that July afternoon, the total number of holidays she’d ever had was nil. And ‘holidays’ was another word she’d invoke and let ring that afternoon, like the word ‘caravans’.

How strange, to have been born into a farmhouse, into a hundred and sixty acres, yet to have felt so happy, perhaps for the first time ever really happy at all, in a tin-can caravan in a little grubby field, with in one corner a standpipe with some rotting sacking around it and a dripping tap.

Yet so it was. Jack knows that, at thirteen, he might very well have taken the view that he was too old for it all, it was kids’ stuff, buckets and spades — he should have been above it. But the truth was he knew he was only getting these holidays now because of Tom. And those two years, he later realised, would have been his mother’s only realistic window of opportunity. So he owed them to Tom. And the fact that he himself had missed out when he was smaller only meant that during those weeks Jack was, most of the time, perfectly ready to regress. It wasn’t, in fact, so difficult. It was as though an unspoken agreement operated between him and Tom that while Tom should try to act as if he were thirteen, Jack should try to act as if he were five or six. Then, between them, they might be like two boys of nine.

Yet in practice it was Tom who led the way in being just a kid — who was better and quicker and more naturally equipped to excel even at that. It was Tom who found the secret route, like a tunnel, through the hedge to the clifftops, and then that other path, not the one everyone used, down through the tumbled, broken bit of cliff to the beach. It was Tom who made better sand-castles.

Why had he never minded? Even then. In the evenings, it was true, back at the caravan, it could all turn round. Something quite new could happen to Jack. It could seem that he might be twice thirteen. It could seem that he and Mum were a couple and this was their little home and, for this one week at least, he might be Tom’s dad. That was how it could seem.

And if ever he’d had the chance to learn from his mum how to crack eggs into a pan and how to put together a breakfast, that was it. But he hadn’t, and the fact was it was Tom, just a little kid, who picked up before Jack ever did on things that weren’t just for little kids. It was Tom who asked him, years later, if he’d ever noticed that each of those caravans had been named after a Hollywood film actress. There was a Betty, a Lauren, a Rita. Jack had spent a week each year, two years running, inside Marilyn Monroe, and never even known it.

Mum must have had that tough conversation with Dad, must have argued and insisted. Those two boys. And Dad must have yielded. Acted the martyr, no doubt, but finally reached in his pocket. ‘Your doing, Vee, not mine.’ It was mid-July, after the hay was in, when work on the farm was lightish. On the other hand, it was peak-rate time for renting a caravan.

And the situation for Dad while they were away was that he’d have to ‘fend for himself’. Jack could remember his mother using that phrase with a sort of edge to it, as if when they returned they should expect to find Michael looking half-starved and the farm gone to pot — which had mostly come true later when Mum was permanently absent. But this was just a week in July, although the days were long and, to Jack at least, they weren’t like ordinary, unnoticed days — they were fantastic. Yet when they returned, both times, Dad had said, in his slow, dry way, ‘Back already? Hardly seems you’ve gone.’ Or some such words. Mum had taken a careful look around while Michael had looked patient. Then he’d said, or just meant it with his eyes, ‘See, not gone to rack and ruin yet.’ And his face had finally cracked with pleasure to have them back again.

So they’d always have it to remember. Well, if that’s how she’d put it, Jack had never forgotten.

Ellie had surely picked her moment. The hot afternoon, the cool of the farmhouse, its timbers creaking, breezes wafting about it. And before that, he came to realise, she must have done her homework. Talked to those lawyers, talked to all the right people, checked it through, checked to see if it was real and not some leg-pull. She’d even made a trip out here on the sly, so it emerged, to see for herself, to see the lie of the land. But she’d saved it all up for the right moment. To drop that word first into the air, she’d known how it would chime for him. Then show him the letter.

And all, Jesus Christ, in the very bed where his own mother had breathed her last. And consummated her marriage to Michael Luxton, and even once, in the small hours of a September night, given challenging birth to a son called Jack.

Ellie had whisked him up there pretty smartly, and could he say he’d even feebly resisted? As if there was no time to lose and it couldn’t be anywhere else. As if it was her own damn bedroom.

‘What’s the matter? Afraid your dad’ll catch us? Afraid your mum’s going to see?’ She giggled. ‘Hey, lighten up, Jack.’

And if the truth be known, the sheer outrageousness of it had got to him, driven him, tipped him over. The sheer fact of it. They could do it, do as they pleased now. They were king and queen now of their (ruined) castles, of their finally united kingdoms, even if Ellie was about to spell out to him what he didn’t exactly need telling, that the only way was to sell up and leave, cash in and leave — and now they could. But with an answer all ready, up her sleeve, to the inevitable next question. If you can have an answer up your sleeve when you’re wearing nothing.

She’d had that letter with her anyway. Hidden somewhere. From ‘Uncle’ Tony, or rather from Uncle Tony’s lawyers.

Ellie’s vanished mother Alice had, so it seemed, fallen ill and died before her time — not unlike Jack’s mother (though in a nursing home in Shanklin) — without having broken her silence with her estranged daughter, or having revealed that she was now married to a man, Anthony Boyd, many years her senior. But not long afterwards Uncle Tony had fallen ill and died too. And he was the one, it seemed, who’d died with a conscience.

‘It gets better, Jacko. Listen. It gets better.’

Was there any argument, once Ellie had produced that letter? For some while Jack had been imagining that the next stage in the decline of Jebb Farm might be when the whole damn farmhouse and all its outbuildings would start to slide physically down the hill, crashing to pieces as they went.