Wish You Were Here

THOUGH WHEN THE ROBINSONS, who already owned a house in Richmond, Surrey, acquired Jebb Farm (or, rather, “Jebb Farmhouse”) and when he and El ie upped sticks, having between them sold to the dairy consortium the remaining Jebb land and al of the adjacent Westcott Farm, Jack sometimes nursed the uncharacteristical y devilish fantasy of phoning up one day, even dropping by, to let the Robinsons know that there was something he’d meant to tel 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 smal fortune for it and spending another smal 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 general y, 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 equal y 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 actual y like something the Robinsons might have driven—without saying his goodbyes (or, in most cases, his hel os), 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.

ELLIE HAD SAID, that mug of tea nudging her tits, that he could do it now—they could do it now. When she spoke, the

“he” kept slipping into “they,” as if the words were almost the same thing, or as if what he alone might have hung back from ever doing was a different matter once the “he” changed to “they.”

And now, of course, he’d seen the letter that El ie had been waiting al that time to show him. Though it was so sudden for Jack that for a brief while he’d wondered if the letter was real, if it wasn’t some trick, if El ie might have written it herself. The letter wasn’t just their way out, it was

“cream on the cake” (El ie’s phrase). Uncle Tony—from beyond the grave—was offering them not just a rescue plan, but a whole new future “on a plate” (El ie’s phrase again). They’d be mad not to grab it.

So there was a plate with a cake on it with cream on top.

And here they were taking tea at Jebb.

If they sold up—in the way El ie was proposing—they’d wipe out the debts and have money to spare. They might even have, courtesy of Uncle Tony, a little money to burn.

Or … they could stay put and each be the proud and penniless owners of massive liabilities.

There was a third and not so far-fetched option (not nearly so far-fetched, in Jack’s mind, as the Isle of Wight), which El ie didn’t mention and Jack didn’t mention either. If he was going to mention it, he should have mentioned it a whole lot earlier, but the time for mentioning it was past.

And of those two options starkly presented to him by El ie, was there any choice? Couldn’t he see, she’d said, sensing his at least token resistance, his getting guilty in advance, that there was such a thing as good luck too in the world, such a thing as the wind for once blowing their way?

And, Jesus, Jack, hadn’t they served their time and been patient long enough?

Through the window before them, the crown of the oak tree had stirred in the sunshine and seemed to offer consent. People would pay, El ie had said, for a view like that. They’d pay. The dairy consortium couldn’t give a damn. They’d think of the cost of having that tree taken out.

It seemed to Jack that El ie had certainly picked her moment—a day when al that he was now the master of had never looked so fine—to tel him it was time to quit. She might have picked, instead, some bleak day in February.

And she’d never looked so fine, like a new woman even, herself.

But Jack knew that this new (but not unrecognisable) El ie hadn’t just sprung up, in her daisy-dotted dress, overnight, or even with the warm summer weather. She’d started to appear, to bloom even the previous year, after Michael had caused that hole in the tree and when they’d found out soon afterwards the contents of his wil . Yes, for what it was worth, he was sole lord and master now.

And she’d bloomed a bit more, he thought, when later that winter and into the spring, Jimmy—tough-as-thistles Jimmy Merrick—had become il . Slow but one-way il , a bit like Luke. His liver and his lungs. Both things, apparently.

The worse Jimmy got, in fact, the better, in some ways, El ie looked. Then in May Jimmy had been hospitalised and

—whether it was the shock of being away from the farm where he’d spent al his life or whether, seeing how things were going after the cattle disease, he’d simply been ready to give in—he’d succumbed pretty soon.

And El ie hadn’t stopped blooming, as was now very clear. But then she’d have had cause to bloom, despite having a sick dad to nurse, if she’d had that letter up her sleeve al the while. It was dated mid-January. For six months she hadn’t breathed a word. That was al , in one sense, entirely understandable. What point in sharing that letter with anyone, so long as Jimmy, ailing as he was, was master of Westcott Farm and she was in his thral ?

Jack didn’t say anything to El ie—though he came very close—about the length of time she’d kept the letter to herself. He understood, anyway, that he was now in El ie’s thral . (But hadn’t he always been?) He felt the letter taking away from him any last argument, any last crumb of Luxton pride or delusion. Mastery? He was in El ie’s hands now.

“They” not “he.” He knew that keeping the farm, for al its summer glory, was only a picture. El ie had stuck her finger through it. Now she was pointing to their future.

He’d dipped his face to his mug of tea, but looked at that view.

“Cheer up, Jacko,” El ie had said. “Lighten up. What’s there to lose?”

He might have said that everything he was looking at was what there was to lose.

El ie stroked his arm. “People leave,” she said. “People go their own way and take their chances.” Then she added,

“My mother did.” As if she might have said: “And didn’t she come good?”

Then she said, in her way, the thing he should have said, in his way, first. The thing he should have got in first, and differently.

“And so did Tom.”

He didn’t say anything to this. He was trying to work out the answer. The word “Tom” was like a smal thud inside the room. But El ie got in first again. She looked at him softly.

“If he cared, Jack, if he wanted his stake, he’d have been in touch by now, wouldn’t he? If he can’t be bothered to tel you where he is—”

“He’s a soldier, El .”

“So? He went his own way. Now we should go ours. I don’t think you even have to tel him that you’re going to sel .”

There was a silence while the house, fil ed with summer breezes, seemed to whisper to itself at what it had just heard.

“Forget him, Jack. He’s probably forgotten you.”

. . .

TOM WASN’T DEAD THEN, Jack thinks now, even if neither he nor El ie knew where he was (Tom’s Service Record would one day tel Jack that he was in Vitez, Bosnia), but it was as though at that moment, Jack thinks now, he might have been.

THEN ELLIE HAD switched the subject brightly back.

“Anyway, have you any idea how much a house—just a house, no land—in some parts of London can cost these days?”

Jack had no idea, and he didn’t like the sudden, alarming implication that he and El ie should buy a house in London.

Hadn’t they just been talking about the Isle of Wight?

“No. Why should I?”

El ie had floated a figure across him that he’d thought was crazy. Then she’d said, “And have you any idea how much some people in London who can afford that kind of money wil pay, on top, for their own away-from-it-al place in the country? Just to have that view”—she’d nodded towards the foot of the bed—“from their window?” Jack didn’t know how much, though in one sense it seemed to him that the view from the window, which was simply the view that went with the house, didn’t and couldn’t have any price on it at al . How could a view that didn’t real y belong to anyone even be for sale? And when El ie mentioned another figure, again he’d thought it was crazy.

Later on, when he did find out what people—specifical y the Robinsons—real y were prepared to pay for that view and al that came with it, he’d think it was strange that he’d lived for twenty-eight years in a place that might be so prized as an “away-from-it-al place,” but now he, or rather

“they,” wanted to get away from it.

. . .

AND SITTING NOW by the window at Lookout Cottage, looking out at what, in less obscuring weather, might be thought of as another priceless view, Jack is of the firm opinion that the place known as “away from it al ” simply doesn’t exist. He happens to have some idea roughly how much Lookout Cottage might currently fetch. But how little he cares about that.

“THROW IN BARTON FIELD,” El ie had said, “throw in that oak, and they’l think it’s their own little bit of England.” And wouldn’t it be, Jack had thought.

Before she’d produced the letter—even when they were stil down in Barton Field—he’d actual y believed that El ie 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 El ie to propose it, since she was the one who’d have to take al 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 sel Westcott Farm and El ie 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 smal stipulation.

When El ie 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 real y 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 ful 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 sel it al as a farm. Sel the land. And sel 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 El ie 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 El ie—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 stil 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 El ie’s, boy,” he said. And winked.

Holding a mug of El ie’s tea now, and sitting up in bed, Jack got the odd impression that, had El ie 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.” 29

JACK DROVE OUT of Marleston vil age. Who was the runaway now? There they al 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 al suddenly again like yesterday. (Only the voice of his own mother, impossibly cal ing to him—“Jack, don’t go”—could have stopped him.)

BUT HE WASN’T QUITE the total fugitive. He’d taken the east-bound 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 vil age, he pul ed 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 stil 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.

Wel , 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—al 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 hil side, 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 control ed locking system, and set into the right-hand gate post—as thick and pil ar-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 tel them.

He stood by the gate, slightly afraid to touch it. Though the air al around was bril iant and stil , 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 al of driving down this weekend—would have chosen to avoid any awkward association with the property they’d bought. A funeral in the vil age. 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 al days, who would accuse him of unlawful intentions? Trespassing, intruding? On his own birthright?

And if the gate was beyond opening, there was stil the option—though he’d have to leave the car by the road like some glaring advert of his presence—of climbing over and walking down. Gates were there to be climbed over. And even if the Robinsons were, by some unlikely chance, actual y in occupation—so what? They’d get a surprise.

Would they cal the police? (The police would be Ireton.) I’m Jack Luxton. Remember me? I sold you this place. I was passing, and I thought I’d—. I’ve just buried my brother.

So there was nothing to stop him. He stood by the gate, putting his hands on it, gingerly at first. His hands just straddled the black name on the top rail. He felt again the wood of the coffin under his palms.

Tom would have climbed over the gate, Jack was sure of it, quickly dropping his backpack over first, like a thief. But on that dazzling morning, so like this one, he, the big obedient brother, had opened the gate for his father, then, before going to re-join him, had swung it shut, a great fiery rush, despite the coldness of the air, bil owing inside him.

He stood in his funeral outfit, his white shirt and black tie matching the white paint and black lettering, the medal stil in his top pocket. His mother had once told a story about the medal, which had ended at this very spot. Though it wasn’t a true story, it had never happened. It wasn’t even possible for it to happen. It was his mother’s invention.

His grip tightened on the rail. The Cherokee chugged expectantly beside him. It seemed to be begging a decision—climb over, for God’s sake! Drive away! But he could do neither, as if he might stay here, stuck for ever. At the same time, he had the growing conviction that some hurriedly organised posse of funeral attenders might be heading, even now, down the road from Marleston to round him up.

He gave the gate a sudden heaving shake, as if he might have ripped it from its hinges, then turned and got back in the car, slamming the door behind him as though slamming a gate upon himself. His hands gripped the steering wheel as fiercely as they’d gripped the rail, and perhaps half a minute passed as he remained staring at the alien black-and-white structure that had so effortlessly defeated him.

He saw in his head the old bare-wood gate. His eyes were blurred, in any case. Thus he failed to notice that he’d left behind two distinct, even identifying indications of his presence.

No traffic had passed in either direction while he’d been stopped and no traffic, pursuing or otherwise, was visible as he set off again, so no one was to know about this almost immediate interruption to his headlong flight (though a whole crowd had witnessed that). But at least until the next rain—which in a day’s time would come sweeping in on the back of south-westerly gales—anyone (including the owners of Jebb Farmhouse, had they been in occupation) might have seen two hand-prints on the top rail, one either side of the black-lettered name. They’d been made by large hands that had obviously grasped the rail with some force, and they were hands that had recently plainly been in contact, for whatever reason, with reddish-brown earth.

He flung the car back onto the road. There were already traces of the same red earth on the steering wheel and when, a little later, as he drove, he violently yanked off his black tie, he left a similar smudge on the white col ar of his shirt.

So, he’d at least confirmed one thing. The last time he’d touched and passed through that gate—not that gate but the old one—had truly been after he’d taken his last-ever look at Jebb Farm. At least El ie had been with him then.

She’d already taken her last look at Westcott, and without much difficulty, it seemed. And as they’d left Jebb together (various items that had escaped the auctioneer’s hammer

—including a shotgun and a medal in a silk-lined box—in the back) she was in the driving seat, because he’d expressly wanted to be the one to get out and open and close the Jebb gate for the last time and take a last look down the track.

El ie had been with him then. They were driving to the Isle of Wight. It had been al El ie’s doing. He’d stood beside her while her father was buried. More to the point, he’d helped carry the coffin.

Now, with a great, unearthly howl that no one heard, he drove madly on.

30

ELLIE SITS in the lay-by near Holn, not driving anywhere.

When Jack had returned in the dark last night she couldn’t help having the thought: a wounded soldier. That was how the sight of him, in the beam of light from the cottage door, had framed itself for her, as he’d slowly emerged from the car in which she sits stranded now. He’d looked shattered, exhausted. But what had she expected, after such a journey? A wounded soldier. Even so, there he was.

Or was he? For two days she’d lived with the possibility that he might not return at al , but one possibility she clearly hadn’t anticipated was that he might return, but that he wouldn’t be Jack, or not the Jack she knew. And in the eyes of the strange figure who’d blundered towards her she’d seen, she thought, his anticipation of yet another possibility: that he might return to find her gone. But how could that be?

Hadn’t he read or listened to any of those messages?

And since she was there, why hadn’t he looked pleased to see her, or at least relieved?

Even so. There he was, and so was she, standing in that doorway where she hadn’t stood, it’s true, to watch him go.

If she hadn’t been watching then, she was watching now—

had been watching and waiting, in fact, for a good half-hour.

Knowing only what he’d said before he left, that he’d booked himself on the four-thirty Friday ferry, she’d been waiting in an agony since five-thirty (which would have been pushing it, it’s true). She’d even gone up to the bedroom window so as to spot his lights as soon as they came up the hil .

And Jack, El ie thinks now, must have seen, as he passed this lay-by, the distant lights of the cottage. A pretty sure sign that someone was there and waiting for him. But had he been looking and did he care?

And what difference did it make, now, if he were never to know how anxiously she’d watched and waited? How she’d seen at last his lights—at such an hour they could only be his—take the turn for Beacon Hil , then travel, like the passage of some luminous, scurrying animal, up the first, hidden stretch of road before appearing, with a ful blaze, at the bend by the old chapel. How she’d said aloud, “Jack.

Jack,” and how she’d sprung up, to run downstairs, to be at the door, to put right, to reverse al the events of two mornings before.

A casserole was on in the kitchen. A bottle was on the table. Al the lights were on. He would surely have understood that she was there. Now he was too. And as she’d stood in the doorway she’d said again, “Jack, my Jack.” Had he even heard?

It had even seemed, as he walked towards her, that he was sorry not to find her gone.

Though what had she expected? And what, since she hadn’t gone with him, did she deserve? But he was here.

Or, say, half here. The other half she might stil have to wait for. She’d fed him and put him to bed, realising that she couldn’t demand much more of him, in his condition, than his presence. “Ask me later, El . Ask me tomorrow.” Realising also that she couldn’t expect much talk from him now, when two mornings ago he hadn’t had a single word from her.

She’d put him to bed. And he’d slept, in fact, for over twelve hours, not surfacing til after nine (which wasn’t like him at al ). But if she’d hoped that a good sleep would real y bring him back to her and if she’d hoped that a good breakfast—an al -day breakfast if necessary—would get them talking as they should talk, she was wrong.

He didn’t seem to want any breakfast. He stil looked like some invalid. It had al suddenly reminded her of when her dad had begun to get il , years ago, and she’d flitted coaxingly and motheringly around him, thinking foolishly that a good breakfast might put some life back in him. And maybe for Jack there’d been some weird equivalent of the same memory, and that was how it had begun.

“You wanted him out the way, didn’t you?”

She’d thought at first he’d meant Tom, and then thought: wel , so be it, now she had some facing up, owning up to do. Even so, she hadn’t thought that “out the way” meant any more than that.

Then he’d come up with the real y crazy stuff.

“I’ve always wondered, El , how come your dad died so soon after mine? Did they have an agreement?” This wasn’t about Tom’s death at al . Or was it?

Stil he hadn’t yet said anything appal ing. She might even have laughed at him. He’d made a sort of joke. And yes, though she’d never said anything to Jack, she had thought at the time that there was a sort of agreement. A connection. The real cause was the state of his liver and the state, on top of that, so it proved, of his lungs. He had lung cancer, the two things were racing each other.

Nonetheless, there’d been a trigger. A bad word in the circumstances. Jimmy had started to go downhil soon after Michael’s death. Hardly a cause, but a kind of kinship. It was as if, she’d thought at the time, her father had lost a brother. Or he’d won some contest of survival and had nothing left to prove.

“It was just how it was,” she said. “You know that. It was just how it happened. He had a bad lung and a bad liver.”

“And it was handy.”

“Meaning?”

“You know what I mean.”

His next words were the same—worse—as if he’d got up, leant across the table and hit her.

“You helped him along, didn’t you, El ? You put something in his tea. Or in that flask of his. Wormer, teat dip, I don’t know. Some kind of cow medicine. You put something in his breakfast.”

Strangely, her first thought before she exploded was to continue to picture her father sitting in the kitchen at Westcott, in the chair he always sat in—to think of al those breakfasts she’d cooked for him. Then her second thought was to wonder, almost calmly, whether Jack—or this man in front of her—actual y thought she’d put something in his breakfast and that was why he didn’t want any.

Then she’d exploded. She might have just laughed.

Could you laugh at such a thing? Was Jack—or this man—

real y saying this? Had he simply come home to her with a great dose of madness? So she said it.

“Are you mad, Jack? Are you mad?”

It was the wrong thing to say, perhaps, to a man who might be real y mad. Even to a man who’d come back from al that he must have been through (and she was stil to hear about). But she’d said it. And then she’d said, with a great roar of outrage, like some matron barking down a hal way,

“How dare you say such a thing to me? How dare you?” And the madness must have been catching, quickly catching, because only a little while later, after he’d said things to her by way of mad explanation, she’d said back to him, by way of retaliation, things that were equal y mad, equal y ludicrous and certainly like nothing she’d ever thought might escape her lips.

But, in any case, and almost in the same hot breath, she’d grabbed her handbag, her keys were in it, and opened the door and walked out to the car from which he’d stumbled only the night before. And had got in and screamed off. The rain was only just starting to spit, from a darkening sky, but by the time she got to the main road it was coming down in great slapping squal s, like a warning.

But she could hardly turn round now, just because of the weather. And, almost because of it, she drove madly on.

31

ELLIE SITS by Holn Cliffs. And Jack sits, looking towards her but not knowing it, and seeing again for a moment that white gate at Jebb, though not his now washed-away hand-prints.

Everything is mad now, everything is off its hinges. He’d gone to bury Tom, but now al the things that had once been dead and buried had come back again, and there was only one way forward, he was sure of that. Even Tom himself hadn’t been real y buried. He was with him now, in this cottage, he was sure of that too, even if he hadn’t seen him.

It was Tom’s trick, Tom’s choice, to appear or not, he knew that by now. Tom might be standing even now at his shoulder. A sniper.

If El ie had come with him, if she’d only come with him, then perhaps between the two of them they might have buried Tom properly. As they’d been trying to bury him, not properly, for years. Then none of this might be happening.

But Tom wasn’t the only one, it seemed to him now, that they’d tried to bury not properly. And he’d gone and said so.

Everything is off its hinges. But his mind is quite clear and steady and decided. As if some last forbidding gate has now been simply opened for him. Al he has to do is walk through, and shut it.

BREAKFAST WAS SPREAD over the table. It stil is. The smel of bacon reaches him even now.

“In his tea, El . In his breakfast. In his fucking bacon and eggs.”

He knew that he was off his rocker, right off it. But it was the only way he could get to do—calmly and cool y—what he had to do. The trouble was that El ie had been here. If she hadn’t been, he could have done it already, last night.

He could have got the gun. But El ie was here. But, stil , that was al right. It was better, even. He’d seen that it was only proper that El ie was here. It removed one important complication. He’d slept on it—beside her, though hardly aware of her, so deeply and committedly had he slept. He hadn’t had a single dream. Then he’d thought it out further, lying in bed, while he’d heard her in the kitchen below.

There had to be an explosion. An explosion before the explosion—what a policeman might cal a “domestic situation.”

He hadn’t reckoned on El ie’s doing, and doing so quickly, what often happens in such situations: storming off.

And with a threat, a further complication, on her lips.

“I’m not saying he didn’t die of what he did. I’m just saying you speeded the process up.”

“You’re off your rocker, Jack.”

But he knew that. He had to be. El ie was looking at him as she’d never looked at him before, but he supposed it must be the same the other way round.

“It’s not true, then?”

“How dare you?”

“It’s not true?”

“Jack. Jack—come back to me. Of course it’s not true.

Of course it’s not fucking true. It’s about as true as me saying you kil ed your dad.”

He hadn’t expected that. He wasn’t sure if it further complicated or only clarified the situation. If it was even the complicated or only clarified the situation. If it was even the nub of the matter.

“He shot himself, El .”

“Exactly. As true—as fucking mad—as me saying you got the gun and did it yourself.”

He stared at El ie. She thought that might settle it. Tit for tat. She thought that might end this whole situation. Al this would be a joke.

And how could he be mad, if he was so clear-headed?

“Wel , if it comes to it, how do you know I didn’t? How do you know I didn’t?”

It was a subject they stayed clear of, his father’s death.

As if to enter it might mean reliving it. But hadn’t he been doing just that recently? Wasn’t he doing it even now?

“Of course you didn’t.” El ie gave a strange, dry, quivery laugh.

“How do you know?”

“Jack—is this al to do with Tom?”

“How do you know?”

“I know. I know you.”

But she was looking at him as though she was no longer certain on that last point. And whatever El ie knew, she didn’t know and couldn’t know what had only ever been in his head.

Even Jack himself couldn’t be sure of how it real y was.

THAT IT WASN’T THE SHOT that woke him. He’d been awake, perhaps for some time, before the shot. Had he even heard his father creeping—as once he’d heard Tom creeping—

from the house? In his terrible dream in Okehampton he’d even heard the little squeak, from below, of the gun cabinet.

Was it a dream? Or the dream of a dream that he’d had that night, before, in fact, the shot had woken him? Or was it simply how it had been?

In his dream, in any case, he hadn’t heard the shot. There wasn’t yet any shot. He’d heard his father’s movements downstairs. He’d heard the kitchen door open, even the blunt scuff of Wel ington boots on the frozen mud in the yard. And before he’d dressed and gone downstairs himself, before he’d hurried down Barton Field, a torch in his hand and his heart in his throat, he’d stood on the landing and seen the left-open door of the Big Bedroom, and gone in.

He wasn’t sleep-walking, surely. He hadn’t switched on any lights, but he’d seen, even so, that extra blanket on the bed. Yes, there was a moon by then and, despite the cold, the curtains hadn’t been closed—or else they’d been only recently pul ed back. So he was able to see, with just the aid of the moon, the tartan pattern of the blanket.

But more than that. He’d gone into the room—or in his dream he had. And he’d stood by the window, where his father, perhaps, would have stood only moments before, and seen what his father would have seen: the moon, over the oak and the frost-gripped val ey. But more than that.

He’d been just in time to see—or he’d seen in his dream—

from above and behind, his father’s tal black form, his whole body first, then just his shoulders and head, disappearing as he descended the upper section of Barton Field. The moon was almost ful and its light was coming brightly off the frost. So it was even possible to see his father’s inky, night-time shadow slipping out of sight, rippling down the slope after him, and to see the footprints, like black burn holes in white cloth, that he left behind.

Even to see what he was carrying.

And Jack hadn’t moved. He’d stood there at the window

—as he’d stand, years later, at a white-painted gate—

thinking: Shal I? Shan’t I? Thinking: Wil he? Won’t he? Can I? Can’t I?

He couldn’t have said (it was like other passages of time that night) how long he’d stood there, as if hypnotised, as if in his mind—but wasn’t he dreaming anyway?—he might stil have been back in bed and asleep, not knowing that any of this was real y happening. Til the sound of the shot—

but had he even seen, from the window, the quick poke of light?—had woken him, out of al dreams, into truth.

But El ie couldn’t have known any of this.

“HOW DO YOU KNOW I didn’t, El ? How do you know I didn’t march him down that field and make it look as though he’d done it himself?”

It was no surprise, though he hadn’t reckoned on it, that at that point she’d simply got up, grabbed her handbag and fished in it quickly to make sure she had her car keys. Did she look frightened? Of him—for him? No, she looked furious. She looked a little mad herself. If he’d already got hold of the gun he might have stopped her, he might have brought this thing to an end, there and then, as intended.

But she was standing between him and the door, and how could he have got the gun and loaded it without her getting away first?

He should have got the gun to begin with. He should have crept down the stairs, as his dad had crept down the stairs, and somehow got the gun from the cabinet and loaded it (both barrels) before she’d even cal ed up that she was putting breakfast on. He should have just appeared in the doorway, in his dressing gown, with the gun. But he knew he couldn’t have done it like that, without any explosion first.

So it was good, in fact—he thought now—that it had al blown up and she’d gone.

She’d clutched her car keys. For a moment they’d stared at each other, not like two people who’d known each other al their lives, but like two nameless enemies who’d come face to face in a clearing. Jack understood that to prevent El ie leaving he’d have to use physical force, his big weight, against her. But he’d never done that, in al the time he’d known her, and couldn’t do it now. Even though, if he’d had the gun—

“Where are you going, El ?”

Outside, the clouds were thickening, but the rain hadn’t begun.

“Where am I going? Where am I going? Ha! I’m going to Newport police station. I’m going to tel them what you’ve just told me. I’m going to tel them what you are.” And she looked like she meant it. She real y did. She looked like she was going to fetch the police.

She walked out. Slammed the door. The wal seemed to shake. He heard the Cherokee snarl off. Rain started to pepper the window. He’d thought: this had caught him out, this had upset plans. Then he thought: no it hadn’t. After a little while, after hearing only the wind and the rain, after switching off the gril section of the cooker, where several rashers of bacon stil waited, warm, wel -crisped and untouched, he went to the gun cabinet. He got the gun, he got the box of cartridges. When had he last fired this gun?

There’d been every reason to get rid of it. There’d been every reason not to. The last thing his father had touched.

He went up to the bedroom and put the loaded gun on the bed. Put some cartridges from the box in his pocket.

This was actual y better, this was good. He was prepared now, he was calm. The weather had gone wild, but he was calm. And, whether she’d do or not what she’d said she’d do, El ie, he was sure of it, would soon have to come circling back. There was even a sort of justice to it. As if her journey was just a smal er, tighter version of his.

32

THE ROBINSONS HAD BOUGHT Jebb Farmhouse over ten years before Jack stood by the white gate bearing that name, and it was the Robinsons, Clare and Toby, who’d made the extensive and costly renovations, few of which Jack was to see, since he didn’t go beyond the gate, but which entailed having the drive (it had ceased to be the

“track” and become the “drive”) properly surfaced—which Jack did see—and the gate itself.

There had been the purchase, and there had been the renovations. Their investment had turned into an investment of time as wel as money. After a lengthy planning and permissions stage, the building work—including a new extension (which they cal ed the guest wing), a total overhaul of the original house, the demolition of the outbuildings, the construction of a double garage and the laying out of the gardens, turning-area and drive—took, al told, wel over two years. So that their actual period of occupancy and enjoyment had real y been only seven years, and then mostly in the summers.

Nonetheless, they spoke now of their “Jebb years,” their

“Jebb life.” Toby said, in his credit-claiming way, that it had

“paid off.” Clare, who’d always been the more effusive, felt she was justified in having imagined it from the start not just as their possession, but as a permanent legacy to be passed on through future generations of the Robinson family—their place, their “country place.” But Clare would always remember (and always keep to herself) the day—though it was little more than a moment—

when this whole vision had seemed to totter and shake, al its radiance had faded. And this had occurred, oddly, during one blissful y sunny weekend when everything in the picture was complete and just as she would have wished. It was only ever, she told herself, some weird sensation inside her. It was nothing, surely, to do with the place. But it was lingering enough in its effect for Clare to ask herself: Is there something wrong with me? Am I cracking up? And since her answer to those questions was a robust no, it must then be to do with the place. This place into which they’d put so much.

For a while Clare actual y contemplated having to tel her husband that she was very sorry, but she no longer felt—

comfortable—at Jebb. But that, of course, would suggest that there real y was something wrong with her, since no one else was having any problem. And how would Toby take it? Rich as he was, he’d spent more money than she cared to calculate on what might now become, thanks to her, a failed enterprise. And he’d doubtless choose to say that he’d real y only done it al for her—because she’d got so gooey-eyed about it in the first place.

But he might also be—she knew her husband—rather witheringly pragmatic. It was his way with anything that went wrong. The facts were that he’d blown one year’s bonus to make the purchase, another year’s on the renovations. If they had to give up on the place (if she really felt like this) then it wouldn’t have broken the bank. (He was a banker.) And, the way prices had moved, they might stil make a bit on the sale.

“No permanent damage,” he might even say—though perhaps implying that she might be the one who was permanently damaged. What was the matter with her? And permanently damaged. What was the matter with her? And such magnanimity, she knew, might only be a convenient tactic. He could afford to be agreeable. In the early stages of the building work, Clare had come to realise that he was using their expensive project as a sort of shield for his ongoing affair with Martha, his PA (though in the time it took to finish the renovations she acquired some loftier status). It deflected attention from it—it quite often meant that Clare would be down there, with the children, when he wasn’t. But it was also a sort of pay-off. How could she complain, when he lavished so much on his family?

Clare even wondered if her moment—her “shiver,” as she would think of it—hadn’t real y been to do with her suppressed recognition that the Martha thing wasn’t just a temporary toying (it had gone on and on like the building work), and that though they’d bought this solid and beautiful portion of countryside, her marriage was real y a rather flimsy, unlovely affair. She pretended and even believed, most of the time, that this wasn’t so. For the sake of the children, of course, but also because she’d been given the bribe of this handsomely refurbished farmhouse in its splendid setting.

FORTUNATELY, her “moment” was isolated enough for none of these awful showdowns—with either her husband or herself—to occur. When Jack stood by the gate, the Robinsons stil possessed Jebb Farmhouse, though they were not in residence at the time. Toby and Clare remained married (though the Martha thing stil went on). The three children—and there had only been two when the purchase was made—had now enjoyed several happy summers at Jebb. So had their parents.

Clare, masking her feelings, had been pragmatic in her way too. Before making any foolish announcements, she’d waited for a recurrence of her “shiver.” None had come, which perhaps indicated it was al a nonsense in the first place. Time had passed and, in the absence of any further symptoms, she’d almost been able, until very recently, to forget her temporary, perhaps imaginary disease.

And what she’d experienced recently wasn’t real y like that first shiver at al . It was, in the first instance, only a letter, an unopened letter, that had nothing to do with her. They’d been at Jebb during the children’s half-term break. It had coincided with Guy Fawkes’ Night and Toby had made quite a thing of the fireworks. Then a letter had arrived, which only she had noticed and which she’d quickly redirected. They received very little mail at Jebb and, by now, virtual y nothing relating to the former occupant, but the letter had borne the name Luxton and also the words

“Ministry of Defence.”

She’d wondered what the connection could possibly be with a now long-defunct farm, but she’d felt conscientiously impel ed to see that it was forwarded at once. She’d crossed out the address, written in the one they stil had for the Isle of Wight (assuming it stil applied) and, on the pretext of some other errand, driven straight up to Marleston to re-post it. Perhaps it was more a case of wanting it, for some curious reason, out of the way as soon as possible and it was almost a relief when she dropped it in the vil age box. No one else knew about it.

Then only days later, back in Richmond, she’d glanced at a newspaper and spotted a name and a face, and this time felt a true shiver. The name was Luxton again, and the face was even faintly familiar, though it plainly wasn’t the face of a farmer. For a while the cold sensation had concentrated in her hand.

She wished at once that she’d never seen the item in the paper. So often, you looked at a newspaper without noticing half of what was there, and what you don’t see can’t trouble you. But she’d seen it. And now she wondered what she should do about it. Though there was nothing, real y, that could be done about it.

But she felt distinctly disturbed. She felt that at least she should mention it to Toby. Had he noticed it—and drawn the same conclusion? But she knew that if she did mention it, he would say he hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t remembered the name, whether he actual y had or not. And she knew that if she spelt it out for him (let alone mentioned the redirected letter) he would simply shrug. So what? He might even look at her as if she were behaving pretty strangely.

THE ROBINSONS, as Jack recal ed, had been very concerned about “security” (it was one of their words), and solid evidence of their concern was that heavy white gate with its built-in electronic features. “Control of Entry,” Jack had momentarily thought. But the Robinsons had reflected that while a gate that couldn’t be opened might deter intruders in a vehicle, it was no barrier to intruders on foot.

In such an event—and assuming the intruders would trip the alarms in the house and grounds—it was important, when the Robinsons were not in residence, that the police could get through the gate and so catch the thieves red-handed.

So it was that Sergeant Ireton, as wel as the Robinsons, possessed the means to open the Jebb gate, and thus he might technical y have found himself—had Jack decided, that morning, on some impromptu intruding himself—in the position of arresting the man who, minutes before, he’d, so to speak, shared a coffin with. Though it was also possible that if Jack had actual y asked whether there was any way he might take a quick look at Jebb, Bob might have said,

“Of course. I can open the gate for you. I even know how to cut out the alarms.”

Security, in the broad sense—security of incomes, of livelihoods and even of lives—had become a real enough concern in a region afflicted first by BSE, then, years later, by foot-and-mouth. But security as the Robinsons meant it and as it might affect a local policeman was something different. Bob Ireton might have said it was something the Robinsons brought with them from London, but he might also have said that it was something that, like those cow diseases, was now just spreading through the air. The feeling that nowhere was real y immune, even quiet green places in the depths of the country. Marleston and Polstowe were not exactly incident-free, but it was only recently that Bob had begun to feel that his safe little job as a country policeman—safe in the sense that it was far more secure than the jobs of dozens of farmers—was actual y bound up, as if he might be involved in some latent war, with a larger, unlocal malaise of insecurity. And he’d felt this particularly, like a palpable burden and responsibility, when he’d offered his shoulder to help carry Jack Luxton’s poor dead brother.

When the Robinsons had asked Jack about security—as if it formed part of the sale—Jack had been inclined to say (after some puzzlement about the word itself) that they never bothered, here, with burglar alarms or even with locking vehicle doors. But El ie had already warned him not to make the Robinsons feel sil y about anything they asked.

He might equal y have said that it always helped to know—

should it come to it—that there was a gun in the house. But this might not have been wise either. So he simply said that they never had any trouble, not in this part of the world. And he’d given Toby Robinson one of his most neutral looks.

The Robinsons weren’t interested in the kind of security

—or insecurity—that had mattered to Jack, that was causing him to be sel ing his farm. They saw this as only offering them their opportunity. They—or Mr. Robinson—

saw cow disease and distress sales as possibly working to their advantage. Toby had told his wife that north Devon was off the beaten track. It was stil genuine, undiscovered countryside. Everyone went to south Devon and Cornwal , where prices were already beefed up, and—talking of beef

—this BSE business could only mean there might be some real bargains around. Toby Robinson, investment banker though he was, had in certain situations, Clare knew, the instincts of a huckster, loving nothing better than to beat down a price. It was perhaps why he’d got to where he was.

And also why the word “countryside” seemed strange on his lips.

Toby had thought Jack was an extraordinary character to have to deal with (he wouldn’t have meant this as a compliment), but he was very careful not to appear to look down on him. He didn’t want to give the impression that a sum of money that to Jack, so he guessed (and guessed right), might be eye-popping, was to him, Toby, stil almost within the bounds of pocket money. At the same time he had a sort of visceral respect for the man. Farmers went to market, didn’t they? (Or did they any more?) They couldn’t be so different from people who worked in the City.

What the Robinsons meant by security was the kind of security that might prevent the possession and enjoyment of their new property from ever being impaired or violated.

Nonetheless, what Clare Robinson might have said of the effect upon her of seeing that newspaper item—though her physical wel -being had in no way been harmed and though their possession of Jebb Farmhouse remained happily intact—was that it made her feel insecure.

HAD BOB IRETON AND JACK found themselves together, soon after the funeral, on what was now the Robinsons’

property—and whether or not Jack would have been theoretical y guilty of trespassing—they might have had a conversation about security. They might have sat in Ireton’s police car, on the new, immaculately bricked turning-area, amid al the new landscaping and terracing, but looking at the essential y unchanged view before them (less impeded now after the removal of the Smal Barn), down Barton Field. Bob might have brought Jack up to date about al the changes at Jebb—visible as they were around them—but they might have moved inevitably, even despite themselves, onto this larger subject.

Bob might have said, al uding to the Robinsons and their kind and the fears manifested by their elaborate alarm systems, that such people had a problem. They didn’t know how fortunate they were, they couldn’t just be glad of what they had, and they didn’t know the real meaning of loss, did they? Here, Bob might have looked at Jack careful y. Both men, sitting side by side, might have been feeling stil a detectable, angular pressure on one shoulder. But on the other hand, Bob might have said, the world—the world at large—certainly wasn’t getting any safer, was it? So, he might have added, with an attempt at weary humour, he’d picked the right job, hadn’t he? But would have stopped short of saying anything to the effect that some people might have concluded that Tom (though Bob knew it could hardly actual y have been his motive) had picked the right job too. Keeping the world safe. Security. That was the argument that always got used, wasn’t it? Though it could be used, couldn’t it, to justify just about anything?

Bob, though a practical policeman, had become a not unreflective man and, while keeping these thoughts to himself, might have looked soberly across the frost-whitened val ey before them.

Jack might have said, “And a sergeant now, Bob.” Remembering al the stripes and gold braid and sashes he’d seen the day before. And Bob might have kept to himself how he’d had his uniform special y dry-cleaned and pressed for the morning’s occasion, how he’d inspected himself in the mirror. Jack might have felt, al the time, the medal burning in his pocket.

Bob, looking at Jack also contemplating that frosty view and seeing his Adam’s apple rise and fal , might have begun to wish this topic of security hadn’t emerged, prompted as it was not just by the burglar alarms at Jebb, but by his local policeman’s need to give some context to the death of a once local man in a far-away country. But Jack might at last have begun to take up the theme by saying that in his current line of work security was actual y quite a factor. It wasn’t just that now and then he had to step in to deal with little episodes that could make him feel a bit like a policeman (he might have looked shyly at Bob), but there was the whole question of guarding the caravans during the off-season months. Like now. Though he probably wouldn’t have mentioned that he had a contract with a security firm (he didn’t just rely on the local police) and this was especial y necessary when they—he and El ie

—took their holidays (though not this winter) in the Caribbean.

Jack might have said that it was a funny thing, but the caravanners, on their holidays, often wanted to talk about the general state of the world, how it wasn’t getting any safer. Just like him and Bob now. And Jack might have put forward the idea that there was no such place real y as

“away from it al ,” was there? Then he might have made a stumbling effort at a joke. He might have explained that he lived these days in a place cal ed Lookout Cottage that had once been a pair of coastguards’ cottages. It had once been where two now-forgotten souls had had the task, in theory, of guarding the whole country against invasion. But now everyone had to keep a lookout, didn’t they?

Both men might have gazed out over the val ey and Bob might have picked his moment to say, “But you’re doing okay, aren’t you, Jack? Things are okay?” Or to say, “And how’s El ie? I couldn’t help noticing she wasn’t here.” But thought twice about that question and perhaps about asking any others, because he wasn’t honestly sure what might make Jack, sitting here amid al the transformations that had occurred at Jebb, suddenly burst into tears.

A silence might have passed between them, broken only by the cackling of rooks, in which they might both have stared at the crown of the oak tree. How could they say between them whatever it was that needed to be said about the death of Tom Luxton?

Jack might have looked at Bob and thought: Is he going to arrest me anyway, after al , for something much bigger and worse than being found on private property? But Ireton might have looked at his watch and said, in a shepherdly way, as if he’d simply chanced upon someone who’d got lost, “Wel , Jack, I can leave you here to carry on trespassing by yourself, or I can drive you back up to the road and see you on your way.”

LOOKING BACK, Clare Robinson could admit that her first, shadowy misgiving—even before that “shiver”—had been the foot-and-mouth. She’d been able to tolerate the long dragging-on of the building work. After al , they’d let themselves in for it. If they’d been over-ambitious, it was their own fault. On the other hand, if it al bore fruit the way they visualised, it would have been worth the waiting. Fruit was meanwhile borne anyway—and rather unexpectedly—

in the form of their third child, a girl to go with the two boys, and Clare vaguely believed that this had happened precisely because their “country place” awaited them.

Since, apart from al its other virtues, it would be a haven, a perfect paradise for the children. Another child could only justify it al the more, and sanction the scope of their intentions for it. And little Rachel simply took up their time and made the continual postponement of when they might actual y “move in” seem only practical. They’d move in when she was old enough to know about it.

They started to joke about the whole thing as their

“mil ennial plan”—would they or wouldn’t they move in before the next century?—but they became excited al over again and forgot about al the time and money consumed, when at last it neared completion and they saw what actual y splendid things had been achieved. The builders final y left and they “moved in” in the autumn of 1999, though they didn’t make their first proper use of the place til the fol owing summer.

Her husband had said that the foot-and-mouth outbreak, in the spring of the next year, wasn’t their problem and it would blow over. In any case they didn’t have to be there, that was the beauty (though Clare thought this was a rather sad argument) of its being their second place. Nor were they. It was a sacrifice, of course, and al rather gal ing.

They watched the TV pictures of vast piles of cattle being burnt from the safety of their living room in Richmond. It seemed best. It was nothing to do with them. They’d look insensitive, perhaps, if they went down there. And by the summer, anyway, it would surely have al been dealt with.

But, even at a distance, Clare hadn’t liked this thing happening so plainly and upsettingly close to their new property. She felt it as if she were down there. She didn’t like the idea of the smoke from that huge pyre being carried on the wind towards Jebb Farmhouse. Her husband’s remark about its blowing over had been unfortunate. She felt it like a contamination. And, though it wasn’t logical and Toby would have scoffed, she felt it as something they should feel responsible, even vaguely guilty for, in a way they couldn’t have felt about the BSE which had struck, as it were, before their time.

Mrs. Robinson was glad when it did, so far as it might actual y impinge on them, “blow over.” She’d perhaps been overreacting. And when, in fact, something far worse—far worse for the world at large—occurred later that year, she didn’t feel nearly as troubled as she might have done had their “country place” not now been ful y up and running. She felt that the whole exercise was now vindicated. She felt glad and relieved. When those planes hit the towers that September, everyone said that the world had changed, it would never be the same again. But she’d felt it less distressingly, if she were honest, than the foot-and-mouth and those previous clouds of TV smoke. Since now they had this retreat, this place of green safety. It had been a good decision.

One of the big issues for her and Toby had once been choosing between flying off for holidays in exotic places (something they very much liked to do) and putting al their eggs, so to speak, into this basket in Devon. It might have its limitations, not least the English weather. But then again, with the children at the age they were—even before the new with the children at the age they were—even before the new baby—going abroad had begun to have its limitations too.

Now the whole prospect of foreign travel, of having to deal with airports and people in states of crowded transit, seemed to Clare (her husband stil travel ed on business) touched by something sinister in the global atmosphere. So their purchase of Jebb Farmhouse seemed right in every respect. It seemed provident, even vaguely patriotic. How simple and comforting, just to have to drive down the M4.

By the summer of 2003 their presence at Jebb was a familiar reality. They would invite friends to join them—with their children—and the friends would be suitably impressed and envious. To cap it al , the weather that summer smiled for them. That the Martha thing seemed stil not to have blown over made little effective difference. She made a pact with herself to push it aside, if not quite to ignore it.

Everything else was too marvel ous, too precious. It wasn’t worth risking al that they now abundantly had by making an issue out of it. And surely, one day, Toby might take the same view—about his carrying on with Martha. He might put an end to it. Especial y if, she rather perversely argued to herself, she was—lenient.

It was the only blot, and when they were al at Jebb it could sometimes seem to evaporate completely. The place had a healing effect. And yet, that dazzling Sunday in early July, as if some silent, invisible explosion had occurred, it had al seemed suddenly, deeply wrong.

That weekend the Townsends and their two children were staying. One thing they liked to do with guests on Sundays, if the weather al owed, was to hold a grand picnic under the big oak tree. It was real y a case of a late and lazy breakfast on the terrace gradual y spil ing over into a late and extended lunch in the field beneath. It was absurd, in one sense, to have a picnic so close to the house, yet it seemed exactly what that field and that tree were intended for. So, while the children ran on ahead and used the field (just as once imagined) as their exclusive playground, al the components of a picnic would be carried down in stages. Everyone would enjoy the feeling of a smal -scale, rather preposterous expedition. The several trips down the steep slope and up again worked up a thirst and added to the general fun. It wouldn’t have been in the right spirit to pile everything into the Range Rover and drive down—

though the Range Rover was usual y employed to cart everything back.

That day, the picnic was almost at the point of complete assembly. She and Tessa Townsend were occupying the rugs while the men did the last lugging and puffing. The children were happily amusing themselves. The oak tree was too massive and chal enging for any climbing, but Toby had rigged up a rope swing, with a proper wooden seat, from one of the lowest branches. This was now in operation and the rugs had been placed some distance from the base of the tree, but stil within reach of its ample shade.

It was hardly a talking-point with visitors like the Townsends, but every member of the Robinson family had by now noticed that strange little hole, with the faint discoloration around it, low down in the trunk, and had wondered how it got there. Clare, sitting on the rug with Tessa, noticed it today as the children swung past it. It surely couldn’t have been formed natural y. A fixing point for tethering some mad bul had once been Toby’s theory, a scary idea that had appealed to the children—and he’d done a brief imitation of a mad bul for their benefit.

He and Hugh Townsend were now bringing the last shipment of picnic supplies down the hil . The children—or their Charlie and the Townsends’ pair—were busy with the swing. The oak tree itself was softly rustling every so often in a gentle breeze and there was a cooing of pigeons from the wood.

Then everyone’s attention had turned to Toby, who, with a loud oath, had suddenly tripped and slithered several yards on his backside down the glossy grass of the field above, dropping and scattering the contents of the box he was carrying—which had included two bottles of pink champagne, now rapidly rol ing away from him.

He hadn’t hurt himself, though for a micro-second Clare had thought: Has he broken a leg, an arm, an ankle? Was this whole, marvel ously materialising Sunday not to be, after al ? But, in fact, he’d merely provided entertainment and laughter for al , something he acknowledged, when he regained his feet, by taking a theatrical bow. It was one of those moments of potential disaster rapidly transformed into comedy which are like some extra blessing. Clare had noticed, as her husband fel and slid and his short-sleeved shirt flew up, the plump wobbliness of his paunch above the waist of his shorts and, as his straw hat flew off, the shiny, receding patch in his hair, catching the sunlight. For some reason these things—the flashes of pink, vulnerable skin—

reassured her. Yes, she knew that she loved him. She could not, would not lose him. He was even for her, at that moment, like some big fourth child.

And now, while al 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 real y acquired some fizz.

What a sweet fool he was. How had he become a banker?

This was al , 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-fil ed 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 al . 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-bul ” hole—

and Laura had decided to put her finger in it. That was al . 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 al 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 real y 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 al this simply receded, to the point where she wondered if she hadn’t real y just imagined it al .

WHEN JACK (with El ie’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 fil ing 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 sel . 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 al 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 sel 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 wal . It had even, for a while, disinclined him to proceed, but El ie 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 fundamental y 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 real y mattered—she was the one who real y 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 tel 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-bul 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 real y any business or obligation of theirs? She resolved not to let it cast a pal .

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 actual y be sure if Martha stil featured. And this was a comforting uncertainty, as if consistently not mentioning her name was gradual y 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.” 33

JACK DROVE MADLY ON.

On that cold, clear Remembrance Day, when Tom wasn’t there, Jack had swung the gate shut behind his father in the Land Rover, not knowing then (had his father known?) that Michael would never set foot outside Luxton territory again.

He would walk that night down to the oak tree.

As he’d shouldered Tom’s coffin, Jack had felt the overwhelming urge to be not just Tom’s brother but the second, secret, cradling father he’d sometimes felt himself to be. And as he’d stood and dropped his handful of earth onto the drumming coffin lid—before he was unable to stand there any longer—he’d even wanted to be Tom’s real father, their father, who could never, except through the living breath of his older son, have the chance to say, to let the words pour repentingly from his lips: “My son Tom. O

my poor son Tom.”

But Michael was lying now just yards from his younger son, and who knows how the dead may settle their scores?

Al at once Jack had remembered what Tom had said, about that other death down in Barton Field—about what Michael had said: “I hope some day someone wil have the decency …”

He’d fled the churchyard, the only living Luxton left, then had needed to stop by that monstrous, mocking gate. Now, as he drove on, turning his back on Luxton territory, he knew why Lookout Cottage was the only place to go. It wasn’t that he thought any more that it was where he belonged. It was the gun, his father’s gun.

He had his dad’s example. He even had Tom’s example

—a gun-carrying soldier, a sniper. How many had Tom kil ed? But Tom, who in his days as a soldier must have had to see many things, had never had to see what he, Jack, had once had to see in the darkness under that tree.

It was the gun, waiting for him now.

AS HE SPED AWAY from Marleston, Jack couldn’t have felt less like a man who, instead of stopping to confront a gate, might have paused to cal his wife and say he was coming home. His mobile phone (with its several messages) remained switched off. Yet on this homeward journey—if that was what it was—he fol owed a route he’d taken once before with El ie and, had he been in a different state of mind, he might have felt he was travel ing back, in more than one sense, to her.

Ten years ago, after closing the old Jebb gate for the last time, he’d got in, beside El ie, in the passenger seat and so technical y in the position of navigator. But El ie already knew the way. El ie had already gone—so Jack had learned one July afternoon—to spy out their future on the Isle of Wight, seizing the chance to do so secretly when Jimmy had been admitted to hospital. And that was one reason, Jack had told himself, why she’d kept that letter from Uncle Tony to herself for so long. She couldn’t share it til she’d checked its validity—on the spot—and she couldn’t do that while her dad was around.

So El ie had driven them both, with the memory of her first trip to guide her, but Jack hadn’t been just the passive, ignorant passenger. In the early stages of their journey he’d suddenly realised there was a coincidence of memories and of routes. The road signs had chimed with him: Honiton, Axminster, Lyme Regis … El ie had passed along this road before, but then so had he.

“El ie, I’ve got an idea.”

So they’d found themselves together at Brigwel Bay.

And standing on the beach there with El ie, having taken one of the great initiatives of his life (to think they might have sailed past the turning only for the idea to have hit him miles further on), Jack had made one of the great declarations of his life. It took the form of one of his rare jokes, but it was too gal ant—and too successful—to be just a joke.

“There you are, El . Here you are. ‘Wish you were here.’

Now you are.”

Then he’d blurted out, “And always wil be.” And just for his saying this El ie had hugged him, almost squeezed the breath out of him, and said, “My hero,” while he’d smelt the strange, forgotten smel of the sea.

HONITON, Axminster, Lyme Regis. He took the same route now, but at the turning—he knew when it was coming—he didn’t even slow. It was like another shut gate. What lay down that road? He and El ie clasped in the embrace of their life? That wasn’t the point. What lay down that road was a six-year-old boy on a caravan holiday, legs spattered with wet sand, who’d become a soldier in Iraq. He’d sometimes felt like Tom’s father then.

He didn’t even slow down, but he let out another great, unheard howl.

HE REACHED PORTSMOUTH wel before four. Realising that he might be even earlier, he’d stopped at a service station, outside Southampton, on the M27. These anonymous places, in which to piss, eat and kil time, seemed to draw him like a second habitat—a habitat that was no habitat at al . But he wanted nothing more. He’d booked himself, to al ow for al kinds of eventualities that might fol ow the funeral, onto the four-thirty ferry. There’d been no eventualities, except for his swift exit, his encounter with a gate and the eating up of road.

Once he joined the queue of waiting vehicles, the long, cross-country loop of his journey was complete. There remained only the short sea-trip which, when he’d done it that first time with El ie, had seemed momentous, like an ocean voyage. It was momentous now. He would never return to the mainland, he was sure of it, this crossing would be his last. The thing was so fixed now in his mind that he no longer paused to consider, as he’d sometimes done on his long journey, whether he was mad.

Nor did he pause to consider—since it had simply never occurred to him, and it had never been part of Vera’s story

—that it might have been from here once, from the Solent, that those two Luxton brothers, on the memorial near which he’d stood just hours ago, had been shipped out, never to return. So what Jack was very soon to do, but hadn’t even thought of yet, had no premeditated link with them. It was just another of the sudden initiatives of his life.

The ferry’s ramp and yawning hold reminded him of the plane. The deafening car deck was like some state of alert.

After grabbing his parka and leaving his car, he made for the open decks above, not wanting to show his face. He stood by the rail. It was getting dark. The wind that had got up during the day gusted round him. A deep Atlantic front was moving in.

Would El ie be there? Did he want her to be? Would it be like a final sign to him if she were not, so that he could simply take out the gun? Even now he shunned his mobile phone, when to use it would have been the most natural and normal thing to do. As he’d maintained silence for so long, it might even have been a stupendous thing to do. His voice might have sounded like that of a man given up for lost.

El ie, I’m on the ferry, I’m on my way.

How had Tom died?

With a clank of its raised ramp and a churning of water, the ferry slipped its moorings. The lights of Portsmouth were on, reflected in the surface of the harbour, but night hadn’t quite fal en and the sky stil glowed in the west.

Beyond the shelter of the harbour mouth, the fitful wind combined with the movement of the boat into a steady, bitter blast. A few hardy souls—to appreciate the sunset or to indulge the brief sensation of being on the high seas—

lingered for a while by the rails. And some of them would have noticed one of their number, a large, strongly built, even rather intimidating man, feel for something in the region of his breast pocket, then, clutching it tightly for a moment in his fist, hurl it into the sea.

Though it was smal , it must have been metal ic and relatively heavy, since, catching a quick, coppery gleam from the sunset, it sliced cleanly through the wind into the waves.

34

ELLIE SITS in the lay-by at Holn Cliffs, not admiring the view.

Even the seagul s have vanished as if swal owed by the greyness.

There is no end to this. She might sit here for ever, or she might drive on, circling the Isle of Wight for ever. Islanded, either way. Unless she were real y to cut loose. Cross the water, take the ferry (in weather like this?). Like Jack did two days ago. Though where would she go?

Or … The thought comes to her only like some idle, abstract, teasing proposition: she could cross the soggy verge to her left, burst through that shuddering hedge, and simply drive on. Cut loose that way. She’s a farmer’s daughter and she knows how to hurl a four-wheel-drive vehicle across a muddy field. But such a thing, she knows, simply wouldn’t be her.

She looks, al the same, towards the edge of the cliffs, considering the possibility like some malicious insinuation that has just been whispered in her ear. And then the other thought comes to her that isn’t idle or abstract at al , more like a kick to her heart. She’s a farmer’s daughter and once upon a time—even when she was sixteen and knew how to handle a Land Rover—she knew how to handle a gun.

The gun. That bloody gun, which he could never bring himself to get rid of. Which she could never persuade him to part with. Why had he kept it? Were they plagued with rabbits down at the site? The gun which he’d kept in that cabinet al this time, as if it might be his dad in there. And the gun which—quite absurdly, but only to answer outrage with outrage—she’d gone and suggested he might have aimed at his dad himself.

El ie’s heart bangs. She has entirely overlooked that she has left Jack alone, in these—extreme—circumstances, with a gun. If she has the means, theoretical y, less than fifty yards away, then so does he. And he has a precedent too.

A great blast of terror hits her as, in fact, the blinding buffets of weather temporarily relent. In front of her, Holn Head looms darkly but distinctly, its whole outline visible, like a ship keeping to its steady course. The clouds stil engulf Beacon Hil , but that doesn’t prevent El ie thinking she sees now in the distance, at that crucial spot in her vision, a tiny, quick flash of light.

My God. The engine of the Cherokee starts as if it’s not her doing but the direct consequence of the pounding in her chest. By a strange seeming-telepathy, the silver hatchback up ahead moves off too, as if it’s taken its hint from her, or doesn’t wish to be left alone. Or, to a neutral observer, as if they’ve both been simply prompted by the brief mercy of the weather. Are we going to sit here al day?

El ie fol ows the hatchback down the descending road into Holn—wishing it would go faster. When she has to slow at the turn for Beacon Hil (though it’s more of a skidding, rocking attempt to both slow and accelerate), she experiences a moment’s odd desolation as the silver car carries on, up the rise ahead, in the direction of Sands End.

She feels sure now it wasn’t just waiting out the storm, but confronting, too, some Saturday-morning catastrophe, the story of which she’l never know.

She tears along the straight section of steeply banked road before the hil proper, even as the rain begins its onslaught again. But she’s near enough now for the cottage to be plainly visible, if only for a few seconds before the bends of the road and the high banks obscure it, and she can see that its lights are on. Hardly surprising in this weather—they would have been on when she left. But she can see that they include the bedroom light, which she interprets first as a good sign, then as a bad sign, a terrible sign, then as a sign that need not signify anything at al .

Then remembers how she’d watched for Jack from that same window last night and how she’d seen his lights. He’d come back!

Al of this flashes through her mind, even as, frantical y, she flashes her lights, as if a watching Jack—if he’s watching—wil instantly understand their coded message:

“Jack, it’s me. I’m coming. I love you. Don’t, Jack, DON’T!” But of course her lights are hidden by the roadside banks, and he’s not perhaps looking anyway. He’s not perhaps looking at anything any more.

Her heart hammers and, as she mounts the hil proper, stil sheathed by the high banks which only give way at the bend by the old chapel, it seems she has no choice but also to go down that hil Jack once went down, alone on foot. To enter that dark but silvery, frosty tunnel that he must have gone down again and again in his mind. And, in truth, in her mind, she’s often gone down it with him, holding his hand and hoping that what was there at the bottom of the hil might not, this time, be there. Even wishing she might have gone down it with him that first time when it wasn’t in the mind but entirely, terribly real, so at least he might not have been alone, at least she could have been with him.

But how could that ever have been? And she wasn’t even with him yesterday, or the day before. And now she may have to go down that dark tunnel al by herself—Jack can’t be with her—and see what he saw at the end of it.

35

THE CARAVANS LOOM through the greyness. Jack feels an ache for them. What wil become of them? More to the point, what wil become of al their would-be occupants in the season to come? Only November, but the bookings sheets are already fil ing up with the names of regulars: the same again next year, please. What wil they think? What wil they do when they find out, via the reports that wil surely cause some noticeable blip on the national news? If they missed the other thing or failed to make the connection, then they surely won’t miss this.

“Tragedy in the Isle of Wight.” Or (who knows?) “The Siege of Lookout Cottage.”

Jack doesn’t want to disappoint any of them—the Lookouters in their scattered winter quarters al over the country. It seems for their sakes alone he might almost decide not to do what he intends. But nor, mysteriously, does he want to disappoint the caravans themselves, which he has come to see, now more than ever, as patient, dormant, hibernating creatures needing their summer influx of life. Who wil look after them now?

“The Lookout Caravan Park is closed til further notice.” Pending future ownership. But who, with such a blot upon it, wil want to take it over? A taint, a curse, and a lot more glaring than a hole in a tree.

. . .

THE RAIN BATTERS THE WINDOW. Always, of course, the gamble of the weather. No, he couldn’t guarantee it. Even farmers had never found a way of doing that. A risk you took, no money back. And it cut both ways: a wet July, a sudden spate of cancel ations. And what could you say to those who braved it? There’s always Carisbrooke Castle.

Have you been to Carisbrooke Castle? Did you know (Jack certainly hadn’t known til it became part of his rainy-day patter) that Charles I had once ruled England, or thought he did, from Carisbrooke Castle?

Always an eye on the weather. Even in August it could sweep in, just like now. No, not cal ed the Lookout for nothing. But on a good Easter, say, in good spring weather, when they started to show up in numbers, knowing they’d hit it right, it was like turning out the heifers for the first time.

They felt it, you felt it. Even the caravans felt it.

He looks at them from the window, as if he’s abandoned them and they know it. Only the rapid events of the last two hours, only the shifting and sharpening of his basic plan, mean that he’s here now and not down among them, with the gun, even in this weather. That his brains, and al that they’ve ever comprehended, aren’t already strewing one of them.

He might have done it on his return, had El ie not been at home. And he might even have done it now, in her absence. He might have damn wel walked down the hil , even in this rain, the gun under his parka, and taken the keys and chosen any one of the thirty-two. Pick a number.

And that surely would have marred for ever the prospects of the Lookout Park. No chance, then, of happy holidays to come.

But he needed El ie. He needs her now. He ful y understands it. That final, stil solvable complication. He needs her to be here. If he has gone mad, then he’s also rational. He needs her to return and, if she returns, to return alone. He’s prepared to deal with al comers, seriously prepared: a whole box of cartridges, this upstairs position.

But he thinks—he could almost place a bet—that El ie wil return, and alone, and that it won’t be long now. Delayed only by this evil weather, sent this way and that by the weather, like some desperate yacht (he’s sometimes watched such a thing from this very window) trying to make it round Holn Head.

It was al a hysterical bluff, perhaps. But he isn’t bluffing.

And he needs her.

JACK HASN’T CHANGED the wil he made soon after their arrival in the Isle of Wight. There’d be no reason—or opportunity—for doing so now, but he momentarily thinks of how he sat one day with El ie in the offices of Gibbs and Parker (the same firm who’d acted for Uncle Tony) and of how the solicitor, Gibbs, had delicately pointed out that they should include in both their wil s a standard provision for their dying at the same time or nearly so.

They’d done two things. They’d got married (his declaration at Brigwel Bay was almost a proposal) and, being man and wife and business partners, they’d made wil s. It was a flurry of wil s—Michael’s, Uncle Tony’s, Jimmy’s—that had brought them to this new life, so they were not unfamiliar with such things, and for Jack this sensible if slightly grim undertaking had even been comforting.

Simple, reciprocal wil s in favour of each other, with the provision in his case that, should he die having survived El ie and without children, everything would go to Tom.

That provision had strangely consoled him, even though it rested on the dreadful precondition of both El ie’s and his own death, and had sown in his mind the exonerating notion that Tom might one day come to own Lookout Cottage and run the Lookout Caravan Park—not a bad prospect for an ex-soldier. As Tom was eight years his junior it was not improbable that Tom might survive him. On the other hand, as Tom was a serving soldier … But when Jack’s mind turned in that (improbable) direction, it flicked away.

It was a notion he never mentioned to El ie and which he didn’t indulge so much himself, since it had its morbid aspects. But it was real y a hope, a dream, a variant of a simple, secret wish: that one day Tom might just appear.

One day he might just stick his head round the cottage door.

And it was al one now: the notion and the wish and the contents of his wil —even that gruesome addition Gibbs had advised, which, in theory, would have speeded Tom’s inheritance.

He’d sometimes embroidered the wish with fanciful details—Tom might have become an officer, with a peaked cap, or he might have quit soldiering and signed up as a gamekeeper—but the fantasies had always stopped as soon as he thought: But what might El ie feel if Tom were suddenly, actual y to show up? And they’d vanished completely whenever he reflected: And what might be El ie’s secret wish?

PEOPLE CAN HELP in al kinds of ways, Jack thinks, by dying

—death is a great solution. That doesn’t mean you should anticipate or wish it. But he’s past the point of separating wishes and reality, and, perched at this window with a gun on the bed behind him, he’s al anticipation.

But people also didn’t help by dying. Because someone had to pick up the pieces. It was a bastard thing to inflict on anyone that they should pick up the pieces, a bastard thing.

Jack knew this. He and Ireton had picked up the pieces, so to speak, yesterday, though neither of them had resented Tom for it. Tom hadn’t meant it or been a bastard about it. It wasn’t Tom’s fault. They’d put the pieces on their shoulders and Jack had wondered if Ireton had thought (but surely he would have done) about other pieces they’d once had to pick up.

And it could be said now that Jack Luxton had picked up everyone’s pieces. He knew about picking up pieces, and for that reason he wasn’t going to inflict the same thing on El ie. He’d make sure he’d never inflict such a thing on her.

He looks at the empty caravans. And what wil Ireton think, he briefly considers, when he finds out? As he surely wil . What wil he think? Jesus God, he’l think, I was with him only yesterday, I was right beside him. And what wil Ireton think (though Jack doesn’t real y believe it’s likely now) if a squad car of armed police is involved?

Could El ie real y have done it—said it? On a Saturday morning, on this filthy-wet morning, in a police station? And even have added: “I don’t like to say this—but there’s a gun in the house. He’s got a gun”?

Jack doesn’t real y think it’s likely, but he’s prepared. A whole box of cartridges, some in his pocket. And he thinks it’s likely, in any case, that El ie wil have remembered the gun.

THE RAIN STOPS BEATING against the window. It’s only a fleeting break in the storm, a parting of dark clouds to reveal paler ones behind, but Holn Head suddenly emerges in its entirety and the caravans seem to gleam for a moment almost as if the sun is shining on them.

Do caravans know things, have feelings, premonitions?

It’s a stupid thought, like wondering if the dead can know things (and Jack is trying very hard now not to think of his mother). Do caravans know when a death is going to happen?

At Jebb it was something there was always plenty of opportunity to think about—to observe and assess—if you wanted to. Did cattle know things? Did they know when trouble, death even (as it quite often could be) was on its way? Did they know the difference between madness and normality? A cow was only one notch up, perhaps, in thinking power, from a caravan. At Jebb, Jack had occasional y thought that he wasn’t that many notches up from a cow. Al the same, he knew things. Did they know things? Luke had known things, Jack had never doubted that. Luke had surely known, when Dad had bundled him out to the pick-up. He’d known.

For an instant Jack sees himself driving again the old rust-pocked pick-up, with Luke in the back, over to Westcott, over to El ie, not knowing, any more than a cow might know, that thinking of doing just what he was doing then might one day be one of his last thoughts.

And Luke not knowing then, either, that the last ever journey he’d make would be in that pick-up.

But as Jack has these thoughts about the pick-up he sees the rain-drenched Cherokee emerge from behind the old chapel building and, travel ing fast, start to mount the steep last section of the hil beneath him.

The rain has already resumed and Jack can’t see El ie herself, stil some hundred yards away, through its blur and through the wet windscreen in front of her. But there certainly aren’t any police cars. No sirens. No lights, save El ie’s own. Jack decides accordingly, if for no other reason than last-minute tidiness, to slip the box of cartridges into his sock drawer.

Then he turns from the window to pick up the gun and, as El ie drives the final yards, walks with it to the bedroom door, to the top of the stairs, then down them. No police, just El ie. The air stil reeks of bacon. He’l need to be very quick and decisive, but he feels quite calm. He’l need to appear with the gun only when she’s shut the door behind her. If she cal s out “Jack?” or “Jacko?” he’l need to ignore it. Or perhaps, as he emerges through the doorway from the foot of the stairs, he’l say, “Here I am, El . I’m here.” It’s as though something he can’t prevent is simply happening to him. Though everything is quick, there also seems ample time to do it in. He has the spare cartridges in his pocket, but he hopes it wil be as unfumbled and clean as possible. His own death he is ready for. He could have done it already. He might even have done it yesterday, if he’d busted through that gate—and if he’d had a gun with him—but that would have been inconsiderate to al concerned, including the bloody Robinsons.

And he’d needed this gun.

He can bear the thought, very easily now, of the world without him, of the world carrying on without Jack Luxton, but he can’t bear the thought of El ie having to carry on in it without him, of a world with El ie but not him in it, and of El ie having to pick up his pieces. He knows he can’t inflict it on her, it would be a crime.

Which leaves only one option. And final complication.

Also, if he deals with El ie first, he knows he won’t hesitate to deal with himself, he’l do it al the quicker. Not that in his case it wil be so mechanical y simple to do, but he’l make sure it’s done. He knows that it can be done.

Now that it’s happening it doesn’t feel mad at al , it even feels—only right. As if his death has arrived in the form of El ie and there’s no getting away from it and no other way he would wish it. And she’l understand perfectly, he knows that too, even as he lifts the gun. From the look in his face, in his wal of a face, she’l know what he’s doing. He’s sparing her. He’s sparing her from finding what he once had to find and look at. He’s simply sparing her. This was always a double thing, just him for El ie and El ie for him, and there are two barrels to this shotgun.

He hears, through the sound of the rain, the approaching car and decides—a sudden, impetuous change of plan—to come forward, raising the gun, from his position of concealment at the foot of the stairs. Only to see Tom standing with his back pressed against the inside of the front door through which El ie must enter, in a barring posture that’s vaguely familiar.

He’s in his ful soldier’s kit, head to toe, he’s in the clothes he died in, and in his face and his eyes, too, he looks like a soldier.

And this time he speaks, though it’s hardly necessary.

He says, “Shoot me first, Jack, shoot me first. Don’t be a fucking fool. Over my dead fucking body.”

36

ELLIE TURNS by the old chapel and makes the final climb to the cottage. Never in al her life has she felt so monstrously late for anything, and so absolute is her hurry that she takes this itself to mean that the worst must be true. Why else should she be hurrying? It’s a false logic, but persuasive.

On the other hand, if the worst is true, hurrying can make no difference.

No amount of hurry, however, can reverse the recent sequence of events. She simply shouldn’t have left. She shouldn’t be travel ing in this direction at al . Two mornings ago it was her crime to stay, today it was her crime to leave. And she has never in any serious way walked out on Jack before. She has never even thought of it, though now it might already be her irrevocable situation: life without Jack.

Her final charge up Beacon Hil is, anyway, quite unlike the slow but deliberate approach of Major Richards last week, which could be said to be the cause of why she is careering up the same road now. Haste, in his case, would have been quite inappropriate, though so too would have been lateness, or any hint of evasion.

For a moment El ie, who only seconds ago has thought that she is like Jack, heading down that dreadful slope of Barton Field, wishes she might be Major Richards, stil making his solemn way to Lookout Cottage. That the sequence and al ocation of events might be reassembled.

Then al this might be undone and have a second chance to unfold. Or rather El ie thinks, even as she races in her unmajorly way up the hil , that she would rather be Major Richards, bringing the confirmation of Tom’s death, she would rather be Major Richards with his unenviable duties as the messenger of death than be the woman she is, in the plight she is in, right now.

But it’s as she briefly shares her being with Major Richards that El ie gets the distinct sensation that she has been preceded, even now, by a military visitation. As if during her absence, her manic driving this way and that and her sitting helplessly near the edge of a cliff, Major Richards has in fact contrived, even in this weather, to pay another, surprise cal . To let them know it was al a mistake. That it wasn’t Tom, after al . A mistake of identities. Bodies, you understand. It was some other poor luckless soldier, whose family, of course, have now been informed.

“Carry on.” (Major Richards’s cap drips with rain water.)

“Carry on. As you were.”

And for the first time El ie realises that she wishes Tom not dead. Truly.

So had she wished him dead? Was that the logic? Had she? Wish you were not here? She wishes him not dead now and for a moment even wishes she might be him. Not Major Richards, but Tom. She wishes she might be Tom, in his soldier’s kit, speeding now up Beacon Hil to prove that Major Richards’s last, swift, miraculous visit, in the middle of a storm, wasn’t itself a deplorable error.

Never, in any case, since the news of Tom’s death, has El ie felt such a tangible sense of his living presence—a big burly corporal—and to her surprise and in al her haste and terror for another man, and even as she comes to a lurching halt outside the cottage, her eyes and throat thicken and she splutters out as if she might even have been the poor dead man’s wife, lover, mother, sister: “O Tom! O poor, poor Tom!”

And no sooner has she done so than the feeling of Tom’s presence (that military presence was his) is gone.

She cuts the engine. The cottage, despite its lit windows, looks deserted. The rain lashes down. The very worst thing now would be to hear a shot from inside. The very best would be to see the door open. The door stays shut.

After her headlong drive, there’s no logical reason for her not to move as fast as she can to open that front door herself. But she stays stuck where she is—how long do you give such a moment?—afraid of what she wil find, or longing to remain for a further instant, then a further instant, within the time before she wil find it. Or simply wil ing that other, miraculous thing to occur: that the door wil open.

Then it does open.

IT IS OPENED SLOWLY and sheepishly, as if, she wil think later, by a man emerging half-believingly from some awful place, or a man who, having sought desperate refuge, has just been told that it’s safe now, it’s perfectly safe, to come out. She opens her door too, and perhaps they both look, in looking at each other, as if they’ve seen a ghost. Jack stands in the doorway, and he grasps with both hands and points before him something long and slender which, had the light been even poorer or had she been looking from a different angle, might have made her blood run cold.

But she sees what it is. There’s an identical article in the back of this car.

He struggles to open it, fumbling with the catch. Then he does open it, and disappears for a moment behind its expanding circle. El ie sees before her, through the pelting rain, a burst of black and yel ow segments, with the word LOOKOUT, repeated several times at its rim. Then she sees Jack, stepping forward, holding the umbrel a uncertainly up and out towards her, in the manner of an inexpert doorman.

“Stay there,” he says hoarsely.

But El ie doesn’t stay there. She takes almost immediately the few, wet paces that wil enable her to meet Jack halfway, thinking as she takes them: The things we’l never know.

And among the things she’l never know is how Jack had stood, for an interval he’d never be able to measure, with a gun aimed, as had never been his intention, at his protesting but unflinching brother. How so shocked was he by this situation (and so fixed had been his intention) that he couldn’t alter his posture or grasp the fact that the spectacle he was himself presenting must be no less extraordinary than the one before him. Then this second shock had hit him, as if he’d seen not Tom, but himself in a mirror.

But Tom was standing there, and Jack was pointing a gun at him.

El ie wil never know, either, how with Jack’s shock had come a smal , impossible explosion of joy. Tom was here, in this cottage. How Jack’s muscles had frozen, then melted. How he’d lowered the gun, for which, he knew, the cost would be the disappearance of his brother, though it was not nearly so great a cost as the cost of not lowering it, and in lowering it he knew too (and knew that Tom knew it) that it would never be fired again.

How he’d stood, staring now only at a closed door, and how he’d shaken and gasped for air, as if he might have returned from the dead himself, and how he’d felt that though Tom had vanished he was stil with him, and how he might even have groaned out loud, “For God’s sake help me, Tom.”

How suddenly the power to move had returned to him.

How in a giddy, panting frenzy of reversing actions and in the very limited time available (though only moments before he’d felt that time was calmly slowing and stretching), he’d returned each glaring object to where it belonged. The gun, that is, to the gun cabinet, as if it had never been taken out, along with the loose cartridges in his pocket, though not before removing the two from the gun itself, his fingers burning against what might have been, in these same rushing seconds before him, the means of ending everything.

Panic had spurred him. Sweat had pricked his skin. His breath had hissed. In his haste to hide the evidence and in his al -consuming terror that El ie might forestal him, he’d considered slipping the gun—the loaded gun—temporarily into the umbrel a stand. But she’d surely notice it and how would he explain? In his haste too, he’d failed to deal with the box of cartridges lurking upstairs among his socks.

But thank God it was safely concealed up there. He’d deal with it, hours later and in less of a frenzy, while El ie was taking a bath, and while the thought would come to him that he would simply get rid of al this weaponry, he’d get rid at last of the gun and that when he did so, Tom would final y be laid to rest. But was it Tom, stil with him, who gave him this thought? Was he here? Had he gone?

Rain would stil rattle at the window and he’d tremble to be alone again (but was he alone?) in the bedroom where he’d been alone before. He’d smooth the almost-forgotten dent in the bed. Could El ie possibly have guessed?

He’d sel the gun. Or—better, quicker—there was plenty of sea al around, which had already, regrettably but permanently, swal owed a medal. He’d have to explain that too, sooner or later: the absence of the medal. He’d say that he’d taken it with him—which was true—and had thrown it in Tom’s grave. It was a lie, but it was a white lie.

He’d see again, as he smoothed the duvet, that white, closed gate. Then the thought would seize him that he could real y have done it—dropped the medal in the grave, it might have been the thing to do, the right place for that medal. Al his useless, too-late thoughts, arriving after the event, but this one stil had a use, and some thoughts were best never enacted. His hand would shake as he retrieved the box of cartridges. He’d hear the splashing of El ie in the bath.

But al this—while he had stil to open the door that his brother had guarded—was yet to come. His scramble to return the gun to the cabinet meant there was a significant delay. It was just as wel El ie had delayed too, wil ing the door not to stay shut, and his foolish idea about the umbrel a stand had prompted a more practical course of action.

Jack walks towards El ie, holding a seaside umbrel a.

El ie walks towards Jack. Then the umbrel a covers them both, the wind trying to wrest it from Jack’s battling grip, the rain beating a tattoo against it.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he stil lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meil eur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow.

He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a col ection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Wish You Were Here

By Graham Swift

Reading Group Guide

ABOUT THIS READING

GROUP GUIDE

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that fol ow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Wish You Were Here, Booker Prize–winning author Graham Swift’s latest novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Swift weaves a story which is as much a lament for a vanished way of life as an attack on the madness of modernity. With unmistakable echoes of Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster, he portrays a rural England that is no longer merely under threat, but has been comprehensively vanquished … Swift exercises a compel ing mastery of tone and trajectory, and Jack’s criss-crossing of southern England (reminiscent of Hardy’s Tess traversing the Dorset countryside), fol owing the route of his brother’s repatriated remains, unsure whether he is ahead of or behind them, makes for an emotional y gripping narrative … Swift portrays the struggle of the dispossessed individual with al the complex and overwhelming force of what, in Yeats’s words, ‘is past, or passing, or to come.’” — Times Literary Supplement [UK]

From the prizewinning author of the acclaimed Last Orders, The Light of Day, and Waterland, a powerful y moving new novel set in present-day England, but against the background of a global “war on terror” and about things that touch our human core.

On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton

—once a farmer, now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park—receives the news that his brother, Tom, not seen for years, has been kil ed in combat in Iraq. The news wil have far-reaching effects for Jack and his wife, El ie, and wil far-reaching effects for Jack and his wife, El ie, and wil compel Jack to make a crucial journey: to receive his brother’s remains, but also to return to the land of his past and of his most secret, troubling memories. A gripping, hauntingly intimate, and compassionate story that moves toward a fiercely suspenseful climax, Wish You Were Here translates the stuff of headlines into heartwrenching personal truth.

QUESTIONS FOR

DISCUSSION

1. “Wish you were here” is a powerful phrase in the novel. Why is it so significant?

2. Jack says, “…cattle aren’t people, that’s a fact” (this page). But in what ways in the novel are cattle like people, or vice versa?

3. What paral els can you draw between Jack and Tom and the earlier pair of Luxton brothers?

4. “To become the proprietor of the very opposite thing to that deep-rooted farmhouse. Holiday homes, on wheels.” (this page) What is Swift tel ing us through Jack’s observation?

5. What does their Caribbean holiday symbolize to El ie? To Jack?

6. Did Jack real y want to leave Devon, ten years earlier? If El ie hadn’t suggested the Isle of Wight, what do you think might have happened?

7. Before they move, Jack sel s the ancestral Luxton cradle, but keeps the shotgun and the medal. Why?

8. Madness comes up again and again—mad-cow disease, the madness of war, the possibility that Jack has gone mad. What point is Swift making?

9. Time shifts frequently over the course of the novel, hopscotching across decades. How does Swift use these shifts to expand and deepen the story?

10. Why does El ie refuse to accompany Jack back to Devon?

11. Why is putting down Luke such a pivotal act for Tom and Jack?

12. What do we learn when Swift shifts from Jack’s point of view to others’—Major Richards’s, the hearse driver’s, Bob Ireton’s? What do we learn from the brief section told from Tom’s perspective?

13. At several points, Swift writes extended hypothetical

passages—what

might

have

happened if one character had said or done something slightly different. What effect does this have? How does it help to ful y form the characters?

14. How does the Robinsons’ transformation of Jebb Farm work as a metaphor for twenty-first-century life?

15. “… anyone (including the owners of Jebb Farmhouse, had they been in occupation) might have seen two hand-prints on the top rail, one either side of the black-lettered name.” (this page) What do Jack’s hand-prints symbolize?

16. “Security” means different things to the Luxtons and the Robinsons. Which definition do you think Swift endorses?

17. What does the medal represent? What does it mean when Jack tosses it into the sea?

18. Does Tom real y believe El ie had a hand in Jimmy’s death? Why does he say it?

19. Tom’s ghost plays a major role in the novel’s final scene. What does he represent?

SUGGESTED READING

Saturday by Ian McEwan; A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks; Falling Man by Don DeLil o; The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes; The Gathering by Anne Enright; The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy.

ALSO BY GRAHAM SWIFT

Making an Elephant

Tomorrow

The Light of Day

Last Orders

Ever After

Out of This World

Waterland

Learning to Swim

Shuttlecock

The Sweet-Shop Owner

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright