Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

But Ellie’s putting her finger in it — without, as it were, even asking Jack’s permission — marked a decisive moment in the history of Jebb Farm. Her own father had died even more recently. It was an act of impudent penetration that had to do with the absence of more than one parental constraint. It was as though Ellie were saying, ‘Look, I can do this now. We can do this now. Look, I haven’t been struck down. The tree hasn’t fallen on us. We can do anything we like now.’

And so they could. They were standing there, for a start, just the two of them, by their own choosing in Barton Field. Despite the geography of their long relationship, this was something they had never done before. With a poke of her finger Ellie was endorsing the obvious and tangible truth that Jack, even after eight months, couldn’t quite bring himself to accept or believe: that the tree was his, all his, everything around them, for what it was worth, was all his. Or, as Ellie might have put it, ‘Ours’.

The tree didn’t mind a bit.

And the fact was that this simple yet outrageous act of Ellie’s — she allowed her finger to probe and twist a bit — rather excited Jack. It aroused him. Ellie was wearing a dress, a flower-print dress, something he hadn’t so often seen, and he could tell that before she’d driven over (‘Something to tell you, Jacko,’ she’d said on the phone) she’d taken some trouble to look her best.

In any case, Jack would have said that she was simply blooming. Nearly twenty-eight, but blooming. Something he would be able to confirm to himself a little later in the Big Bedroom — another first — when that dress would be draped over the back of a chair. Ellie was another summer older and her dad had recently died, but she was a better-looking woman than she’d been a year ago. She didn’t look like a farmer’s daughter (and she wasn’t, in the sense that she no longer had a father). She looked like some wide-eyed visitor to his lordly estate. That even seemed to be her knowing, teasing game. ‘Show me around, give me a tour. It’s a beautiful day. Take me for a walk down Barton Field.’ She even said (and it was an oddly appealing idea), ‘Pretend you don’t know me. Pretend I’ve never been here before.’

A beautiful day. So it was. An afternoon in full summer, not a freezing November night. It had once seemed to Jack that he would never get the coldness of that night out of his bones, but now he felt warm to his marrow. Ellie drew her finger from the hole and beckoned. Blooming in herself — and with something, so it seemed, she still had up her (sleeveless) sleeve. A blotch of sunshine reached her through the canopy of the oak and rippled over her bare shoulder.

‘Come on’—she might almost have licked her lips—‘put your finger in it too.’

He didn’t say that he’d already done so, guiltily, by himself. It anyway seemed that if he didn’t make a move, she would grab his finger and thrust it in for him. So he put his finger in the hole. Then Ellie squeezed a finger — it was a tightish fit — alongside it.

‘There.’

It was like a pledge. And more. Years ago, when they were children, they might have carved their initials, though they never had, next to each other on a tree. But that seemed a bygone and dainty idea now.

Jack had rushingly and hotly thought: they might do it right here, right this minute, up against the tree itself. To prove that they really could do anything now. The bark that had pressed against his father’s spine pressing against Ellie’s. Could they do that? Could they do such a thing? Or they might do it over there, in the July-dry grass, near poor Luke’s resting-place. There was no one to see, only some cropping cows and the big blue sky.

But Ellie had said, ‘I think we should go back up to the house, don’t you? You could give me a tour of that too. I think we could do with a cup of tea, don’t you?’

And later she’d said, a mug of tea cradled against her bare, bright breasts, that they should throw in Barton Field with the house, that’s what they should do. With the house and the yard, all for private development. A shared right of way on the track, maybe. No, forget that. The consortium could make their own entrance, they could use the Westcott Farm track. But Barton Field, with that view, with that oak tree — that would clinch it, that would do it.

‘Mark my words, Jacko. Fifty thousand on the price.’ She’d taken a sip of tea and smiled encouragingly. ‘As long as we don’t say anything about that hole.’

Though when the Robinsons, who already owned a house in Richmond, Surrey, acquired Jebb Farm (or, rather, ‘Jebb Farmhouse’) and when he and Ellie upped sticks, having between them sold to the dairy consortium the remaining Jebb land and all of the adjacent Westcott Farm, Jack sometimes nursed the uncharacteristically devilish fantasy of phoning up one day, even dropping by, to let the Robinsons know that there was something he’d meant to tell them, about that hole — perhaps they hadn’t even noticed it — in the oak tree.

But he could hardly have driven over from the Isle of Wight. And by the time he did make the journey, a decade later, for his brother’s funeral, the Robinsons had put their own indelible marks on Jebb Farm. After paying, at least by Jack’s reckoning, a small fortune for it and spending another small fortune on, as they sometimes put it, ‘making it habitable’, they’d effectively transformed the farmhouse and its immediate surroundings. So that Jack might have been as shocked by what he saw as the Robinsons might have been by any belated piece of information he had to bring them.

In any case, the Robinsons wouldn’t have been in residence. It was mid-November. Their last visit had been not long ago during their children’s half-term holiday. And since they mixed with the locals no more than politeness demanded it was only to be expected that on an occasion like this they’d choose to stay away.

Many of those from Marleston who attended Tom Luxton’s funeral might have brought Jack up to date on the changes at Jebb, assuming he hadn’t learnt about them in some other way. Bob Ireton and several others might have told him — if they’d ever had the chance. If Jack hadn’t been in such an obvious and desperate haste, once the thing was over, once Tom was in the ground, to make his exit fast and not to talk to anyone. It was a rough and dramatic thing, Jack’s departure, as rough and dramatic as his arrival, screeching to a halt like that. (Who is that madman, some had thought, until they’d realised it was him.) But then he’d always been a big rough creature, even bigger than his dad (big and rough, though generally, in fact, as mild as a lamb), and that dark suit he was wearing didn’t make him look less rough. It made him look like a … ‘bodyguard’ was a word that came to mind.

A mad dash of an exit, and in one sense you couldn’t blame the poor, distraught man. It wasn’t an ordinary sort of death (nor had it been with his dad). You couldn’t make rules for such a thing or say that the way he’d left was wrong and unpardonable, but if he’d hung around they might at least have told him that Jebb Farmhouse was empty right now. So that if, for any reason — and if he was ready for a surprise or two — he’d wanted to go and take a look around, then it probably wouldn’t have been a problem.

Of course, it was equally possible that he might not have wanted to set eyes on the place ever again.

But anyway he’d simply driven off in that big blue beast of a thing — that was actually like something the Robinsons might have driven — without saying his goodbyes (or, in most cases, his hellos), even looking like a man afraid of being chased. Though he’d driven off, it’s true (some noted it wasn’t the way he’d driven in), along the road that would take him past the entrance to Jebb Farm. As was.