Wish You Were Here

4

WHAT WOULD his mother think (he tries not to think about it) if she could see him now?

But what would she have thought, anyway, to see him no longer at Jebb Farm but here by the sea, tending a herd of caravans? What would she think to see him hitched up — properly and officially married — to Ellie Merrick? But that once-impossible yet inevitable thing — who else was it going to be? — would surely have been only what she’d have wished. If only she’d had the power to knock two stubborn male heads together and make it happen herself.

But it hadn’t happened, anyway, in Marleston church. No wedding bells reaching her, six foot below in the Devon earth, making her smile. My son Jack’s getting married today. And he hadn’t felt her presence — her touch, her whispered approval — in that registry office in Newport.

And now, look, with a gun on their marriage bed.

And what would she have thought to see him and Ellie taking off every winter, for three weeks or a whole month sometimes, to sun themselves under coconut palms and drink tall drinks with paper parasols stuck in them? Never mind that they were here by the seaside, near a beach, in the first place. But that was what Ellie had thought they should do, they could afford it and they should do it, and why shouldn’t they have their holidays? And he, with a little coaxing at first, had gone along with it. And not a bad arrangement at all. Certainly according to the caravanners — the ‘Lookouters’. We get a week in the Isle of Wight, you get a month in the Caribbean. Not bad, Jack, for an out-of-work farmer.

It was the regular backchat, not ill-meant, but he’d had to find a way of handling it. No one got shortchanged, no one got a bad deal at the Lookout. He couldn’t arrange the weather (any more than he could at Jebb). You’ll get as good a holiday here as you’ll get there, he’d say, in a way that, he could tell, they felt he really, mysteriously believed. He’d risen to that task: talking to the caravanners, making them feel at home and befriended. He’d been surprised at his talent for it.

He took his holidays these days in the Caribbean. And what of it? Once he’d been tethered, all year round, to a herd of Friesians.

Though, if the truth be known, after a few days of lying under those palm trees and sipping those drinks and smiling at Ellie and rubbing sunscreen on her, he’d sometimes start to think anxiously about his caravans. Whether they were all right. Whether they were withstanding the winter storms. Whether that security firm — Dawsons — was really any good and whether anyone was actually patrolling the place, while he was lying here where once he could never have dreamed of being. And then he’d think, because it was the thought he was really always having to bat away, like batting away one of those big bastard tropical hornet things that could come at you suddenly out of nowhere: what would his mum think?

Well, Jack, my big old boy, it’s a far cry from Brigwell Bay. That’s what she’d think. Or from hosing down the milking parlour.

And then he’d think of Tom.

‘Farmer Jack’. He never quite knew how the word had got around. Farmer Jack, milking his caravans. Here comes Farmer Jack in one of those shirts he got in Barbados. The ones that make your eyes hurt. What would they have thought if they could actually have seen him in the parlour in his faded blue boiler suit and his wellies? Being barked at by his father. What would his mum have thought if she could see him in one of those shirts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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