Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

But never mind that. Never mind the Lookout Park, formerly the Sands, or the winter holidays in the Caribbean. What would she have thought to see how it all went at Jebb? To see it now, not a Luxton in sight, its acres all in new hands and the farmhouse no longer a farmhouse. A country home, a ‘holiday home’ (that was the phrase Ellie herself had once used) for people who already had a home. What would she have thought to see all the things that didn’t bear thinking of? (Though had she seen them anyway?) To see Tom, little Tom, but a big boy himself by then, simply slip out one cold December night and disappear?

But Tom’s with her right now, Jack thinks, he could scarcely be closer. He was walking right back to her, that night, without knowing it.

And what would she have thought to see those burning cattle?

All the generations going back and forwards. It had been so for centuries. The first farmhouse on Jebb Hill had been built by a Luxton in 1614. The oak in Barton Field was perhaps old even then. And who would have thought — let alone his own mother — that he, Jack Luxton, would be the first of all the Luxtons (as he was now the last) to cut that long, thick rope on which his own hands had been hardened and sell Jebb Farmhouse and all the land and become, with Ellie, the soft-living proprietor of a caravan site?

He could blame Ellie if he wanted to. He’d been the only man left around the place, and who else made the decisions? But Ellie would surely have known the weak spot in him she was touching (so would his mother) when she came up with her plan. And what other plan, what other solution did he happen to have?

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

To become the proprietor of the very opposite thing to that deep-rooted farmhouse. Holiday homes, on wheels. Or ‘units’, as they’d come to refer to them. But they’d been good at it, he and Ellie, they’d made a good go of it — with a lot of help at the start, it’s true, from ‘Uncle Tony’. And they’d made more out of it than they’d ever have made out of two doomed farms. And, for God’s sake, it could even be fun. Fun being what they dealt in. ‘Fun, Jacko, don’t you think it’s time we had some?’ And every winter, on top of it all, they flew off to the Caribbean.

But not this winter. Obviously. Or it had seemed unavoidably obvious to him. But not to Ellie, apparently. And that was the start of all this.

He looks now at the rain-swept caravans. The tug of it, still. Lookout Cottage up here, the caravans down there, no more than little white oblongs at this distance. The joke was that he had a telescope constantly trained, he wasn’t just Farmer Jack, he was also sometimes the Commandant. Driving down or strolling down every day to see if all was well. In fine weather, dressed the part: shorts and Caribbean shirt (extra-large) and one of those baseball caps they’d had run up, free for every guest, with LOOKOUT and the lighthouse motif — gold on black — above the peak.

Thirty-two units. All ‘top of the range’, he could truthfully say, even if the range wasn’t quite the topmost one. He could never have said that about the milking machinery at Jebb.

The tug he’d never expected. Empty half the year, but then sometimes, strangely, as now, all the more tugging. Occupied for the other half by this shifting temporary population — migrants, vagrants, escapers in their own country.

It was only ever an encampment down there, that was the feel of it, like the halt of some expeditionary, ragtag army. It might all be gone in the morning — any morning — leaving nothing but the tyre marks in the grass. That was the tug. Not cattle, not even caravans, but people.

ELLIE SITS IN the wind-rocked, rain-lashed Cherokee, in the lay-by on the coast road at Holn Cliffs, thinking of her mother.

The car is pointing in the direction of Holn itself and so in what, on any day till now, she might have called the direction of home. And on a clear day it would be perfectly possible to see from where she sits not just the fine sweep of the coastline, but, on the hillside running up from the Head, the distant white speck of Lookout Cottage. It had been built there, after all, with a now-vanished lighthouse above it, because of the prominent position. And on a clear day, a fine summer’s day say, it would be equally possible to see from Lookout Cottage the distant glint and twinkle of cars — with perhaps an ice-cream van or two — lined up in the lay-by at Holn Cliffs while their occupants admired the view.

Today there is no view. Even Holn Head is just a vague, jutting mass of darker greyness amid the general greyness, and Ellie can only squintingly imagine that at a certain point, through the murk beyond her windscreen, she can see the pin-prick gleam of the lit-up windows of the cottage.

The wipers are on, though to little effect. Thirty yards along the lay-by, barely visible, is another parked car, a silver hatchback, doing what Ellie is apparently doing, and Ellie feels, along with an instinctive solidarity, a stab of envy. Only to be sitting out the storm.

How could Jack have said what he said?

Ellie hasn’t seen her mother for over twenty years — and can never see her again — so that to think of her at all is like seeing distant glimmers through a blur. Yet right now, as if time has performed some astounding, marooning loop, thoughts of her mother — and of her father — have never been so real to her.

How could Jack have said it?

Ellie’s mother disappeared, one fine late-September day, from Westcott Farm, Devon, abandoning her husband, Jimmy, and her only child, Ellie, when Ellie was barely sixteen, and though she would never see her again, Ellie would come to know — familiarly and gratefully — where her mother had eventually made her home. Ellie’s mother once lived in that cottage whose lights Ellie can only imagine she sees, and had she not done so, Ellie and Jack could never have made it their home as well.

Though now Ellie wonders if it is any sort of home at all.

The exact cause of her mother’s sudden flight all those years ago Ellie would never know, but it had to do with a figure whom Ellie, back then, would sometimes call, when in intimate conversation with Jack Luxton, her mother’s ‘mystery man’—using that phrase not so much with scorn but with a teasing fascination, as if she would quite like a mystery man of her own.

Her father must have had some clue who the man was and even communicated indirectly with his runaway wife on the subject, if only to become an officially divorced man and get back the sole title to Westcott Farm. But his lips remained sealed and, anyway, not long before her father’s death, Ellie was to discover that her mother had replaced that original mystery man with someone else and had lived with him on the Isle of Wight.

A few miles along the coast road behind her, in a cemetery in Shanklin, Ellie’s mother — or her ashes — lies buried, under a memorial slab placed there by her then husband, whom Ellie would one day refer to as ‘Uncle Tony’. Ellie has lived now for over ten years in her mother’s and Uncle Tony’s former home, but has never been to see her mother’s nearby resting-place, and until recently this would only have expressed her mixed feelings about her once renegade mum: blame, tempered with unexpected gratitude and — ever since that September day years ago — an odd, grudging admiration. She hadn’t quite condemned, but she hadn’t quite forgiven either, and she wasn’t going to go standing by any graves.

And until recently this would only have expressed Ellie’s position generally. The past is the past, and the dead are the dead.

But two mornings ago when Jack had departed, all by himself, on an extraordinary journey whose ultimate destination was a graveside, Ellie had felt rise up within her, like a counterweight, the sudden urge to pay her long-withheld respects. She’d even had the thought: As for Jack and his brother, so for me and my mum. The only trouble was that she didn’t have the car, Jack had it, and she’d baulked at the idea of getting the bus. But she has the car now — she has unilaterally commandeered it — and, only within the last desperate hour, Ellie has attempted that aborted journey once again. And failed.