Wish You Were Here

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 well as money. After a lengthy planning and permissions stage, the building work — including a new extension (which they called 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, all told, well over two years. So that their actual period of occupancy and enjoyment had really 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, all its radiance had faded. And this had occurred, oddly, during one blissfully 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 actually contemplated having to tell her husband that she was very sorry, but she no longer felt — comfortable — at Jebb. But that, of course, would suggest that there really 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 really only done it all 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 still 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 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 really 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 really 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 still possessed Jebb Farmhouse, though they were not in residence at the time. Toby and Clare remained married (though the Martha thing still 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 all 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 really like that first shiver at all. 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, virtually 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 impelled to see that it was forwarded at once. She’d crossed out the address, written in the one they still had for the Isle of Wight (assuming it still 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 village 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, really, 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 actually 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 recalled, 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 well as the Robinsons, possessed the means to open the Jebb gate, and thus he might technically 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 actually 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 really 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 actually 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 Ellie had already warned him not to make the Robinsons feel silly about anything they asked. He might equally 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 selling 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 still genuine, undiscovered countryside. Everyone went to south Devon and Cornwall 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, still 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 well-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 theoretically 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 all the new landscaping and terracing, but looking at the essentially unchanged view before them (less impeded now after the removal of the Small Barn), down Barton Field. Bob might have brought Jack up to date about all 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, alluding 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 carefully. Both men, sitting side by side, might have been feeling still 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 actually 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 valley before them.

Jack might have said, ‘And a sergeant now, Bob.’ Remembering all 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 specially dry-cleaned and pressed for the morning’s occasion, how he’d inspected himself in the mirror. Jack might have felt, all 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 fall, 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 actually 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 especially necessary when they — he and Ellie — 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 really as ‘away from it all’, 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 called 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 valley 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 Ellie? 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 all 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 all, 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, ‘Well, 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 all, they’d let themselves in for it. If they’d been over-ambitious, it was their own fault. On the other hand, if it all 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 all its other virtues, it would be a haven, a perfect paradise for the children. Another child could only justify it all 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 actually ‘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 ‘millennial plan’—would they or wouldn’t they move in before the next century? — but they became excited all over again and forgot about all the time and money consumed, when at last it neared completion and they saw what actually splendid things had been achieved. The builders finally left and they ‘moved in’ in the autumn of 1999, though they didn’t make their first proper use of the place till the following 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 all rather galling. 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 all 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 actually impinge on them, ‘blow over’. She’d perhaps been over-reacting. 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 fully 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 all 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 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 still travelled 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 all, the weather that summer smiled for them. That the Martha thing seemed still 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 marvellous, too precious. It wasn’t worth risking all 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. Especially if, she rather perversely argued to herself, she was — lenient.

It was the only blot, and when they were all 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 all 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 allowed, was to hold a grand picnic under the big oak tree. It was really a case of a late and lazy breakfast on the terrace gradually spilling 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, all the components of a picnic would be carried down in stages. Everyone would enjoy the feeling of a small-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 usually 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 challenging 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 still 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 naturally. A fixing point for tethering some mad bull 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 bull for their benefit.

He and Hugh Townsend were now bringing the last shipment of picnic supplies down the hill. 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 rolling 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, marvellously materialising Sunday not to be, after all? But, in fact, he’d merely provided entertainment and laughter for all, 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 fell 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 all the actual children seemed to be in stitches, he was making a show, like some hired clown, of gathering up everything he’d spilt and pointing out that the champagne would now have really acquired some fizz. What a sweet fool he was. How had he become a banker? This was all, she realised, her heart strangely brimming, the perfect moment, the perfect scene. But it was only minutes later that she’d looked up at the broad, sun-filled canopy of the oak as if to see in it some approval of her joy (this wonderful oak tree — they owned an oak tree!) and felt that something was very wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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