Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

And now, while all the actual children seemed to be in stitches, he was making a show, like some hired clown, of gathering up everything he’d spilt and pointing out that the champagne would now have really acquired some fizz. What a sweet fool he was. How had he become a banker? This was all, she realised, her heart strangely brimming, the perfect moment, the perfect scene. But it was only minutes later that she’d looked up at the broad, sun-filled canopy of the oak as if to see in it some approval of her joy (this wonderful oak tree — they owned an oak tree!) and felt that something was very wrong.

What was going on? A picnic was about to begin, that was all. A happy picnic heralded by rounds of laughter and, now, by the loud pop of a champagne cork. Everything was in place, but, as so often, once the thing was ready and though there’d been expressions of impatience, the children were being slow to come and get it. But that hardly mattered. What was happening? Charlie had pointed out to Laura Townsend the hole in the tree, the ‘mad-bull’ hole — and Laura had decided to put her finger in it. That was all. It was something Clare had never done herself — she’d felt, for some reason, there might be something in the hole she wouldn’t like to touch. Though what was so awful, right now, about that little, natural, childish act of sticking a finger in a hole?

Yet she’d looked up at the oak tree and at once began to fear it. There was something now about it that, even on a warm July day, made her feel cold. Its leaves, stirring in the breeze, seemed to shiver with her. Its shade, which should have been only delightful on a summer’s day, seemed, momentarily, simply dark.

She hid all this, tried to dismiss it as the picnic proceeded, and, as it turned out, never said a word about it to her husband. Though the truth was that it really took most of that summer for this ‘moment’ to go away. She was on guard against its repetition. She eyed the tree as if she and it were outfacing each other. She could no longer be sure that there wasn’t something sinister rather than glorious about the way it dominated the view, its crown rearing up above the brow of the field, like the head of some giant with brooding designs on the house. She thought of it lurking at night. Then all this simply receded, to the point where she wondered if she hadn’t really just imagined it all.

When Jack (with Ellie’s advice) sold Jebb farmhouse and Barton Field to the Robinsons, nothing was said about the hole in the tree. Jack had even thought of filling it, disguising it, but had known that this was taking things too far. The hole had to stay. To anyone else it was just an insignificant hole in a tree. Nothing had been said, of course, about how Michael had died, though Jack had let it be known, in a sombre way, that his father was ‘no longer around’, and the Robinsons had expressed their sympathies and taken this to be connected with why Jack had to sell. It inclined Clare at least to a certain pity towards Jack (what a big, slow creature he seemed) and even Toby felt he shouldn’t make too much of a contest over the price, though he also felt this might have been Jack’s motive in mentioning the subject.

If the Robinsons subsequently began to suspect at all that the older Mr Luxton had committed suicide, it was not because of some understanding of how a cow disease might also reduce the human population (though they’d cut down, themselves, on eating beef) and certainly not because any of their new, seldom encountered neighbours had told them that Michael had shot himself under that tree. Their neighbours knew better than that. How would it have helped? It certainly wouldn’t have helped poor Jack negotiate his sale. Even the solicitors had kept quiet. It wasn’t exactly their direct business and it wouldn’t have advanced a transaction which had its complications, but which both sides clearly wanted to complete as soon as possible.

If the Robinsons nonetheless had their inklings, they certainly didn’t want to pursue them. They were happy not to know. Those two years and more while the building work went on acted like a curtain, and once they were in real occupation they kept themselves apart. They were not permanent residents anyway. They were effectively surrounded by a dairy consortium, and so rather conveniently ringed off from any real local inhabitants. They’d bought a centuries-old farmhouse, but they’d altered much of its ancient fabric and they were notably uninquisitive about even its recent history.

When Jack sold Jebb to the Robinsons he got the strong impression that for Toby Robinson at least, Jebb Farm was just an item, like anything else he might have chosen to buy, and perhaps even sell again later. This had at first astonished Jack: that someone might want to buy what the Luxtons had possessed for generations in the same way that they might buy a picture to hang on their wall. It had even, for a while, disinclined him to proceed, but Ellie had told him not to be a bloody idiot. Jack suspected that if Toby Robinson had found out that Michael had blown his brains out under that tree, he might simply have used it, without being fundamentally perturbed, as a pretext for getting something off the price. But at the same time he felt that Clare Robinson’s ‘investment’, in the broadest sense, in Jebb was of a different nature. To her, in some way, it really mattered — she was the one who really wanted it. So when the sale looked like going through, he hoped she would never find out about that hole. He hoped no one, at the last minute, would go and tell her.

Had Toby Robinson inadvertently learnt that Michael Luxton had committed suicide — and how — he might have simply thought: So what? So what? It would have made his mad-bull notion a bit unfortunate, but was that tree — were they? — any the worse? But Clare might have suffered some more decisive occurrence of that transitory shiver which she would keep to herself. And the upset she felt through simply glancing at a newspaper might have been more unsettling too.

‘Thomas Luxton.’ Should they go there, she’d thought, should they be there? If the poor man had grown up in ‘their’ farmhouse should they put in an appearance? She had two boys of her own, Charlie and Paul, though she hardly saw them as soldier material. But they’d just been down for half-term, and was it really any business or obligation of theirs? She resolved not to let it cast a pall. She wouldn’t mention it to Toby, if he didn’t mention it himself, and she knew he wouldn’t.

It would be like never mentioning Martha’s name, which had become a sort of rule. Clare knew that if she mentioned it, though she had every reason and right to, it might be a fatal thing to do. It might cause a catastrophe. So much time had passed, in fact, without Martha’s being mentioned, that Clare couldn’t actually be sure if Martha still featured. And this was a comforting uncertainty, as if consistently not mentioning her name was gradually making Martha not exist. Though Clare would never have said that she wished Martha dead.

So their happy possession of Jebb Farmhouse continued. Their ‘Jebb years’, their summer stays. Even their picnics with visiting guests under that wonderful oak tree. It was five centuries old, they’d once been told (by Jack Luxton), which rather put her temporary little disturbances into perspective. Clare would never have lasting cause to regret the acquisition of their country place. Or to feel she’d been overdoing it, that summer evening years ago, when, after they’d first seen Jebb, she’d intertwined fingers with her husband’s over the dinner table in an expensive hotel on the fringes of Dartmoor and said — not unmindful of everything they already possessed — that it might even be like their ‘very own little piece of England’.