Wish You Were Here

29

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

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

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

Well, you couldn’t miss it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And if the gate was beyond opening, there was still 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, actually in occupation — so what? They’d get a surprise. Would they call 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, billowing inside him.

He stood in his funeral outfit, his white shirt and black tie matching the white paint and black lettering, the medal still 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 collar 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 Ellie 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.

Ellie had been with him then. They were driving to the Isle of Wight. It had been all Ellie’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.