Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

And wouldn’t it be, Jack had thought.

Before she’d produced the letter — even when they were still down in Barton Field — he’d actually believed that Ellie had come round that day in her summer dress to put forward the option that he himself hadn’t got round to broaching. It wasn’t for him, he’d foolishly thought, but for Ellie to propose it, since she was the one who’d have to take all the steps while he wouldn’t have to budge. Yet there would have been nothing outrageous or surprising about it and it was only what, sooner or later, one of them surely had to suggest. Namely that she (they) should sell Westcott Farm and Ellie should move in with him. That might clear the two lots of debt and then they might make a go of it. Then they might become Mr and Mrs Luxton and share the Big Bedroom for the rest of their lives, as was only right and proper. Luxtons at Jebb.

His mum would surely have been glad. Even Tom would hardly have been taken by surprise. And there would always be a place for him, for Tom, if he wanted it. Jack would have wished — when the subject arose — to make that small stipulation.

When Ellie had said they should go back up to the farmhouse and when, no sooner were they there, than they were up the stairs and in that bed, he’d thought she’d only been about to announce (getting in first as usual) this proposal he’d also been nursing, but that she’d wanted to do it in style and with a bit of pre-emptive territory-claiming. But she’d clearly had other ideas. Caravans.

‘I’ve thought it through, Jack, trust me.’

He’d looked at that sunny view outside the window, which he’d never really thought of as purchasable, and felt, even then, that he was being asked to contemplate it for the last time. He wondered what his father had thought when he’d come up here, that November day, to change out of his suit, to take the medal from the pocket — only to put it later in another pocket. His last look in full daylight (had he known it?) at that view. The oak with its leaves ablaze in the cold sunshine. What had gone through his head?

For a moment, in that warm, July bedroom, Jack had shivered.

‘Don’t sell it all as a farm. Sell the land. And sell the house — just as a house. A country house.’

A country house? But it was a farm and he’d never thought of the farmhouse as a separable entity, as anything other than the living quarters of a working farm.

‘What about the parlour? The yard, the barns?’

‘Nothing that a decent builder and an architect and landscaper couldn’t sort out.’

Architect? Landscaper? Jack supposed that Ellie must have recently been reading magazines again, something he knew she liked to do. House and Garden, Country Homes . He saw again the piles of worn magazines in the day room at the hospital in Barnstaple where he’d gone with Ellie — it was barely a month ago — to visit Jimmy for what was to be the last time.

The old bugger was sitting up in bed, making a show of it, holding a mug of hospital tea. He’d looked at Jack, eyes still bright as pins, and Jack had known he was looking right through him to his father. Then he’d raised the mug of tea to his lips and grimaced.

‘It’s not like Ellie’s, boy,’ he said. And winked.

Holding a mug of Ellie’s tea now, and sitting up in bed, Jack got the odd impression that, had Ellie been another woman, a rich man’s wife, she might even have been interested in buying Jebb Farmhouse and carrying out the renovations herself. She might have found the prospect exciting and absorbing.

‘But keep Barton Field,’ she said, ‘to go with the house. It never was much of a farming field anyway, was it? A big back garden, a big back lawn. Throw it in with the house and you could make a bomb.’

She put down her own mug of tea, ran the smooth of her nails down his arm and sidled up.

‘Just as long as we don’t breathe a word about that hole.’

JACK DROVE OUT OF Marleston village. Who was the runaway now? There they all were, housed together again, under the same roof of churchyard turf, and, once the thing was done, he couldn’t wait to turn his back on them. He’d borne Tom’s coffin and he couldn’t bear any more. It was hardly proper, hardly decent. But who was going to stop him? No one had stopped him yesterday, and it was all suddenly again like yesterday. (Only the voice of his own mother, impossibly calling to him—‘Jack, don’t go’—could have stopped him.)

But he wasn’t quite the total fugitive. He’d taken the eastbound road, in the direction of Polstowe, and had known he couldn’t drive straight past. It was a sort of test. At a familiar gap in the hedge on the right-hand side of the road, about a mile from the village, he pulled across and stopped.

Or it was familiar only in essence. The double line of hedges, meeting the roadside hedge and marking the ascending path of the track, was still as it had been, but the old five-bar gate was gone, along with the old, hedge-shrouded gate posts. So too was the concrete churn platform, and the wooden mail box on the latch side of the gate with the carved, weathered sign above. Instead, there was a large white thick-railed gate with a built-in mail box and the words ‘JEBB FARMHOUSE’ in bold black letters in the middle of the top rail.

Well, you couldn’t miss it.

Even more noticeable was that where there’d once been just the grassy, often muddy, roadside recess, with nettles and brambles sprouting round the churn platform — all deliberately left untrimmed (so no fool would go and park there, Michael used to say) — there was now a clean tarmac surface. On each side of the gate there was even a neat quarter-circle of low brick kerb. And, beyond the gate, it was obvious that the whole track, disappearing down the hillside, had been surfaced too. Jack could only guess what that must have cost.

But this was hardly his principal thought. He got out and stood by the gate. He left the engine running and the door open and wasn’t sure if this was because he intended opening the gate and driving through or because he might, in a matter of seconds, wish to drive off again in a hurry. The gate had no padlock. It wasn’t that sort of gate. Its boxed-in latch mechanism suggested some sophisticated, perhaps remotely controlled locking system, and set into the right-hand gate post — as thick and pillar-like as gate posts come — was a complicated metal panel that was either an entry-phone unit or key-code device, or both.

So, the damn thing could be unlocked, he thought, even opened and closed perhaps, from the house. The Robinsons, he remembered, had wanted to know quite a lot about ‘security’. There hadn’t been much he could tell them.

He stood by the gate, slightly afraid to touch it. Though the air all around was brilliant and still, a faint, extra-cold breeze seemed to siphon its way up the shaded trackway between the hedges. There was the sound of rooks below. They would be in Brinkley Wood.

The Robinsons, he supposed, weren’t around. This was their summer place. It was November. Or their weekend place, and it was a Friday morning. In any case, he imagined they wouldn’t be here, not now. Definitely not now. They would have read their newspapers, put two and two together and — if they’d had any notion at all of driving down this weekend — would have chosen to avoid any awkward association with the property they’d bought. A funeral in the village. Not their affair.

They wouldn’t be here. They’d be safe in their other house, their main house, in Richmond (it had sounded to Jack like a place where rich people lived and had stuck in his mind).

So there was nothing, in theory, to stop him from opening the gate and driving down. Except the wired-up booby trap of the gate itself. Except, even if he got past that, a possible minefield of burglar alarms further down the track. But who would blame him, on this of all days, who would accuse him of unlawful intentions? Trespassing, intruding? On his own birthright?