Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

But then Vera had died. Then Tom had gone away. And Jack, on the surface, didn’t seem so cut up about it, though Michael was. And, though she took care not to show it, Ellie’s hopes had lifted — so far as that was possible when everything was laid low by the effects of mad-cow disease. Because at least now she was shot of Tom.

From then on Ellie had begun to do some extra wishing. What could she do but wish? And when, not so very long after Tom disappeared from the scene, Michael Luxton, in his own way, dropped out of it too, she’d begun to feel that wishing wasn’t such a useless thing to fall back on, since it seemed it could have real effect. On the other hand, there were limits, serious limits, to wishing, even secretly. And she’d begun also to be a little afraid of her wishes. ‘Shot of’, it was only an expression.

But then there’d been that letter, out of the blue, from the man she chose to call, as if she’d known him all her life, her ‘Uncle Tony’. Or rather from his solicitors, Gibbs and Parker, of Newport, Isle of Wight, with their condolences and kindest regards.

In all her secret wishing and hoping, Ellie had never been so foolishly wishful as to rely upon some stroke of sheer magic. True, she’d liked to tease Jack sometimes about her ‘mystery man’. But now that a stroke of magic had occurred — and there was, in a sense, a mystery man — she quickly enough converted it into a stroke of justice, even giddy justification. So, she hadn’t been wrong, after all, not totally to condemn her mother. Because in the end, and without knowing it, her mother had made amends.

‘Caravans, Jacko.’

She’d waved the magic wand of that word over Jack’s head and filled in the picture for him of their combined and fully provided-for future. Though she’d had to wait. She’d had to wait for another necessary, preliminary event to occur. Which had occurred, in fact, more quickly than she could ever have imagined, or — hand on heart — wished. Though now that it had happened, she could see that it might seem to have happened because she’d wished it.

But in any case Jack had said, ‘Yes. Okay, Ellie.’ If he hadn’t said it quite as simply and readily as that, and if it had cost her, one way or another, a good deal of patience, trouble and heartache.

Though wasn’t that afternoon, that afternoon at Jebb, just the best ever? Wasn’t the world, at last, a good place to be in?

There was just one gap in the picture, and that was the gap that corresponded to the part of Jack that still belonged to Tom, even though Tom had been absent now for over eighteen months and hadn’t even answered any letters. She’d known not to push it too quickly or firmly. When so much else was going their way, and when, after all, she was still not quite twenty-eight. Though when she did in fact push it — gently, she’d thought — the answer she’d got from Jack, pretty quickly and firmly, was that if he was going to leave Jebb, if he was going to be the last Luxton ever to farm there, then there shouldn’t be any more Luxtons at all.

As if she’d pushed him over some edge. Or as if that was his condition.

Well, she’d thought, that was his mood of the moment. It was a big moment — they were going to sell two farms — and a big condition. And he was still, perhaps, in grief for his father. Grief and shock. It was a different sort of grief, Jack’s grief for his dad, from hers for her own father. It was a different sort of death. Though wasn’t it a well-known remedy for grief: you lose one, you make another? It’s how it’s been known to happen.

Time was still on her side, she’d thought, so far as that gap in the picture went. Time and a change of scene. But she’d been twenty-seven then, she was pushing forty now. Years had passed. And though Jack had come out of the shell of his past long ago, even become a new kind of man (all that too had seemed the result of her wishing it), she knew that the obstacle was still Tom, who was still in the picture though out of it.

So when that letter had arrived, via Jebb Farmhouse, saying, with deepest regret, that Tom was dead, Ellie had felt her hopes fly up once again. Though she hadn’t shown it. It wasn’t so difficult to disguise the feelings she’d always disguised. On the other hand, she wasn’t going to disguise them now to the extent of shedding false tears. Even when Jack had suddenly broken down in tears in a way she’d never seen before.

Her hopes had soared. She couldn’t help it. Tom was truly out of the picture now. Her mind had even foolishly raced ahead — even as Jack, holding that letter, had begun to tremble. She and Jack were in the clear now. Tom would never show up. And, who knows, one immediate, unstoppable effect of all this might be that she would suddenly get her long-thwarted wish. Jack might swing now completely the other way. Who knows, in just a few weeks’ time, in St Lucia, at the Sapphire Bay, in their air-conditioned bungalow with the hot night outside, they might get down to serious work on it. If it was a boy, they might call it Tom, if that’s what he wanted. She wouldn’t mind.

And if it was a girl (she didn’t care) they might call it Vera. Or Marilyn.

All this had flashed through her mind as she’d watched Jack Luxton tremble, then begin to shake, then spill over into tears. It wasn’t a familiar sight, or a pretty one. She’d put her arms round him and felt his big bones grate inside him.

And then, just as quickly, her thoughts had dropped back, sunk back into her own bones, as she’d understood a bigger truth that would only grow bigger, clearer in the hours, days, that would follow. That though Tom wasn’t coming back, yet he was coming back. So far as Jack was concerned, he was coming back big-time. He was coming back to bloody haunt them.

She’d seen the bit of Jack that belonged to Tom, even though he was dead, only growing bigger and the bit of Jack that was hers only growing smaller.

And then Jack had said that thing about St Lucia.

In Ellie’s life, and she was only thirty-nine, there’d been, up to now, only three significant written communications. One was the letter just received by Jack. The second had been that miraculous letter from Uncle Tony’s lawyers. But the first and incomparably the most important at the time had been the postcard that had come once from Jack. She could still see its bluer-than-blue sea and sky and curving beach and crescent of white cliffs, like someone’s broad smile. And she could still see the face of her mother, Alice Merrick, as she still was then, who’d handed it to her one morning with a smile.

How her heart had soared. Seethed and soared. Ellie, at that time, had never seen the sea. Now here she was with Jack, living right by it. Sands End, the Sapphire Bay. One sea or another.

So when she’d shut the front door behind Major Richards, she’d felt like crying herself, having her own portion of tears. Not for poor Tom Luxton, but for all the stupid, patient, stubborn lengths a woman will go to for a man. All the things she will do. All her life long. When he wasn’t even, perhaps, when you stood back and looked, that much to speak of really, that much to bloody write home about. Other women might say, ‘ Him? ’

But he’d been all that she had and most of the time, truly, all that she wanted to have. How her fingertips had searched his big body. If only she could have all of him. And she’d thought once that at last she even had that, and had made a whole future for both of them.

‘Dear Ellie, Wish you were here.’

WHEN HE WATCHED Ellie close the door behind Major Richards, Jack was still trembling inside. He felt as if he’d just been told again that Tom was dead, and this time it was real. The first time had been just a rehearsal, a sort of fire drill. But he knew he shouldn’t cry again, not in front of Ellie. Once was enough and even then he’d been brief. It hadn’t helped the first time. It didn’t help anyway.