Wish You Were Here

6

IT WAS DEEP, steep, difficult but good-looking land, with small patchy fields that funnelled or bulged down to the woods in the valley. They had one field up on the ridge where they grew occasional wheat and autumn feed, otherwise it was down to grass and like almost every farm for miles around: sheep or dairy, and they’d always been dairy — beef calves for sale, and dairy. It was hard work for the softest, mildest thing in the world. It was all about turning the land into good white gallons, as many as possible. And it was all about men being slaves to the female of the species, so Michael Luxton had liked to say, with a sideways crack of his face, when Vera had still been around, especially in her hearing. They were all bloody milksops really.

Each one of those carcasses that were carted off after the cow disease came was a potential hand-out from the Ministry. But that didn’t allow for the slowness or downright shiftiness of the bureaucracy, or for the simple fact that there was nothing much to bridge the gap. Not a single one of their herd had ever been confirmed. The words were ‘suspect’ and ‘contiguous risk’. They just couldn’t be moved, that’s all, though they had to be fed. Nor, at first, could their milk be moved, though they had to be milked. And then they’d nearly all (except for the new calves) been moved anyway — as carcasses. The farm like a ghost farm, the loss of all that penned-up company strangely bereaving. No milk flow, no cash flow, and precious little in the bank. He and Tom got the impression, from their dad’s silences, that the precious little wasn’t even theirs. Meanwhile, when were they supposed to start restocking again and know it wouldn’t be cost and effort for nothing?

Tom hadn’t waited for the final reckoning. Though you couldn’t say it was a sudden move either. He waited till his eighteenth birthday — till he’d be his own man. And you couldn’t say it was a bad move. He’d seen the way the wind was blowing.

And why hadn’t he, Jack, thought of it first? Just to clear off out of it. But it had never occurred to him. And why hadn’t he minded when Tom said that it had been occurring to him all right, for more than a year? ‘This is just for your ears, Jack.’ As if then it became a pact that they’d both entered into, and it was down to Jack, while Tom made the actual move, to cover up for him. And to take it, of course, from Dad afterwards, take all the stick for it, but not say anything for weeks, months, feigning dumb ignorance, buttoning his lip, like some good soldier himself, and only speaking, finally, because he thought his dad must surely have guessed anyway — what else does a boy do? — and because there was no real chance of his father’s getting Tom back.

No, he didn’t know where Tom was. Which was only the truth. Because Tom was in the army and who could say where the army was? Catterick? Salisbury Plain?

Good luck, Tom. As if Tom was doing the escaping for both of them.

Why had he never minded, or even thought about it most of the time? That Tom was better, quicker, smarter at pretty well everything. Including, so it seemed, deciding his own future. Eight years and, for a long time, several inches between them. And no competition. He could knock Tom down any time he liked, but he never had. Had never even wanted to.

Even that gun lying there, Tom was better at that. At twelve or thirteen he could swing it round and make the rabbit hit the shot. Good with a gun — so a soldier’s life for him. But Tom was even better, after Vera died, at taking her place, at being, for them all, a bit of a mum himself. Was that something the army required of a man too?

Jack should have been the one, by rights, to step into her space. Eight years her only boy. And all those mugs of tea. But it was Tom who, at thirteen, was plainly quicker and better in the cooking, washing and looking-after department too. And Jack, at twenty-one, was a big, outdoor man with mud on his boots. If he’d tried to take his mum’s place, Dad would have mocked him. So it was Tom who one day put on Vera’s still flour-dusted, gravy-spotted apron. He and Dad simply watched him do it. It had been hanging on its hook on the corner of the dresser where no one seemed to want to touch it. But it was Tom who took it down and put it on. Like some silent declaration. It was Tom who piled eggs and bacon and triangles of bread into the pan and filled the kitchen with a smell and a sizzle as if someone might be still there who wasn’t.

And not just pile. He could crack those eggs one-handed, just as Mum had. Two neat little half-shells left in his fingers. Jack knew, without trying, he could never have done that. They’d have been eating eggshell for breakfast, spitting out the bits.

Mrs Warburton, Sally Warburton, Mum’s old pal, had come in for a while every day to ‘tide them over’, as she put it, and perhaps to set them all her own example in being a bit of a mum to each other. Maybe Tom got some of it from her. Maybe Tom had puppied up to her while he and Dad did all the heavy work.

And it was a pity, maybe, that Mrs Warburton wasn’t just Sally Warburton, or just Sally somebody, and not Mrs Warburton, wife of Ken Warburton who ran the filling station at Leke Hill Cross. Because then she might have become the next Mrs Luxton and they might all have got a permanent second-best mum. But she stopped coming after a while, presumably because she thought they were tided over. And then where was Michael to turn? He was fifty-two. Jack never knew what his mum might have said to his dad, even as she was dying, on this score. If she’d said anything at all. But after a certain passage of time Michael made the desperate move of advertising in the Courier for a ‘housekeeper’, and everyone knows, when a recently widowered farmer does that, what it really means.

No takers. (And how could he have paid a housekeeper?)

That’s when Jack had felt his father starting to turn old. To shrink. And to turn sour-tempered, something which, for all his slowness to raise a smile, he’d never been. You’d see him kick at something, a feed trough, the corrugated iron round the muckheap, for no reason at all. Swing back his leg and kick. That’s when Jack had felt that, though Tom was no longer such a little brother, he had to be a shield for him against his father’s weather. He had to stand in between and take it. Why had he never minded?

First Mum, then Tom. In between, most of their livestock carried off for incineration. Then just him and Dad. And Dad looking at him with a look that said: And don’t you try it, don’t you even think about it. When he wasn’t wearing that other look which said: Why don’t you solve the issue, Jack boy, why don’t you do something about it? The issue of there being no Mrs Luxton. Which was a mad look, if ever there was one, a look where Dad had himself tied up into a knot, because unless his son was supposed to go foraging (and how might that occur exactly?) it was like saying that Jack should do the very thing there was no question of his doing. The real knot being the knot that he and Ellie Merrick could never formally tie.

Jimmy Merrick and Michael Luxton should have got married themselves, Jack has sometimes thought, they should have married each other. If such a thing were possible. About as unlike as two men could be and with as little liking for each other as two men could have. But both battling with the same things: both of them wifeless, both working, on different sides of a boundary, the same sweet but tough, now disease-hit land. Both of them going to the dogs and watching each other like hawks to see who’d get eaten up first.

In Jack’s memory it was the Luxtons who’d had the upper hand (having anyway the finer-looking farmhouse and the prettier acres) especially after Merrick’s wife, Alice, had run off and abandoned him, leaving him with a sixteen-year-old daughter as his only companion and domestic workforce. An event as surprising (though Michael liked to say it was no surprise at all) as the Luxtons suddenly acquiring after eight years a second son, which, though the timing might have been better, only added to the stock at Jebb Farm and so to the abasement of the Merricks.

But then Vera had died, leaving the two men, in that respect, similarly placed. Then Tom had done his own bit of running off. Meanwhile, there was a cow disease. All of which left the two farmers, neither getting any younger, in a state of more or less equal dereliction. If anything, it was Jimmy who now had the edge, since he’d had years to get used to misfortune, while Michael, after a fair time of not doing so badly thank you, had incurred a quick succession of troubles, and anyone could see he was going down fast.

They should have got damn well hitched themselves. Or, as would have been the more customary solution and one which had only been staring them in the face for years, Jack should have married Ellie and linked their situations that way.

But that would have gone against all known history and deprived the two fathers of their fuelling disdain for each other. It would have robbed one of a daughter or one of a son, since where were the happy couple supposed to live? Did Michael seriously think that Ellie was going to hop across the fence and settle in at Jebb, when she was so clearly needed at the side of her dear old dad?

And all of this despite the fact that the son and the daughter had been chummy with each other for as long as they — or anyone else — could remember. And not just chummy. For years now, from even before Alice Merrick’s abrupt departure, he and Ellie had been pretty much behaving with each other (if only on certain weekday afternoons) as if they were married. Which was not only common knowledge in the region of Marleston, but was actually abetted, even smiled on by the two fathers, even while it retained its clandestine trappings — on the basis, presumably, that there had to be some compensation for the fact that real marriage was impossible. At the same time (and Jack had only slowly come to recognise this) it was a concession that kept them both, the son and the daughter, firmly in their places: on their own farms (except, for Jack, on Tuesday and sometimes Thursday afternoons) and in each case a slave to it.

In the beginning, Jack had simply driven over in the pick-up, with Luke in the back. This would be at times when, according to a cautious-seeming Ellie, old Merrick wouldn’t be around. He and Ellie would go up to her bedroom, knowing that they couldn’t take too long about it, especially if they wanted, which they always did, to sit and have a cup of tea in the kitchen afterwards — with Luke, who seemed to know when to make himself scarce, stretched out by the stove, eyeing them meaningfully. It wouldn’t have seemed right without the cup of tea, and that had always been the pretext, or pretence: Jack had simply popped over on a neighbourly visit (though why the hell should he do that?) and stayed for a neighbourly cup of tea.

But this had gone on for so long, without any discoveries or interruptions, that it was clear there was no real need for haste or secrecy, or to divide their time between bedroom and kitchen. Jack had begun to wonder, in fact, what it might mean if they were to have their cup of tea in bed — if Ellie might suggest it, or if he might. But he’d anyway long forgotten when he’d first twigged that Merrick might be staying away on purpose on these afternoons. Or when the idea of Jimmy’s coming back and catching them at it had become just an idea, a game, that added a little spice to proceedings. Nor did he need to have Luke sitting outside, to sound the alert if necessary. He just took Luke for the company. And Luke knew that too.

And then there was no Luke anyway.

But they’d kept up their pattern: first the bedroom, quickish, then the kitchen. Which naturally began to wane in excitement, even sometimes in satisfaction. There was a period during the cattle disease when it acquired a new adventurousness by the banning of even human movement between farms — something that generally shouldn’t have troubled the Merricks and Luxtons. Jack had let it pass for a week or two, and then thought, Hang it, and made the traditional journey (would there be government helicopters spying on him?), and found that he was greeted with some of the old fervour from the days when they could at least kid themselves they were doing something forbidden. One good effect of the cow disease.

But mostly Jack had begun to feel that these visits, though he couldn’t do without them (what else did he have?), had become just a little humiliating. Maybe Ellie felt the same. Though she’d never said, ‘Don’t bother, Jack.’ (What else did she have?) Jack even felt that his inexorable traipsings over to Westcott Farm represented the final triumph, so far as it went and after so many years of its being the other way round, of the Merricks over the Luxtons. It might be his dad who was going down the harder now, but didn’t his son’s situation only clinch it?

When old Merrick contrived to bump into him, in that supposedly unplanned way, on his returns to Jebb, there’d be an extra gleam, Jack thought, in the old bugger’s eye. Or it was an extra nip, perhaps, of whatever it was he took. And the gleam seemed to be saying: Well, boy, your dad might be suffering, and so am I, and those cows might have been up against it too, but who’s got the shortest straw, boysyboy, of all?

They wouldn’t linger now when they met each other like that. Jimmy would just stop, stick his head through the window of the Land Rover, pucker up his face and say a few words, or just twinkle under the brambly eyebrows, and lurch off.

For some reason, if only because Jimmy was Ellie’s father, Jack couldn’t help liking the little pixy-faced bastard. And, once upon a time, those interludes when he’d trundle back after seeing Ellie — whether old Merrick appeared over the horizon or not — had simply been some of the better moments of his life.

He still thinks it now. Still sees himself rolling a cigarette, with just one finger crooked round the wheel of the jolting pick-up, as if it would know anyway how to steer him home. Sometimes, even if old Merrick didn’t appear, he’d stop, all the same, on the Luxton side of the boundary, just to take in the view. Something he never did otherwise. To breathe the air. He’d get out and stand with his back against the pick-up, one Wellington boot crossed over the other, one elbow cupped in one hand, ciggy on the go. The breeze riffling through the grass. And Luke, still alive then, lolloped by his feet, ears riffled too. And Tom just a nipper. Just a baby really.

A sense, for a moment, of simply commanding everything he saw, of not needing to be anywhere else.

‘I wouldn’t bother, Jack.’ She’d never actually said it. Though she’d sometimes said, at dullish moments, as if to make him feel he had rivals or he was just some stopgap (had been all those years?) that what she was doing was waiting for her ‘mystery man’ to turn up, her mystery man who’d also in some way be her real man, like the mystery man who’d been real enough once for her mum to be persuaded to run off with him. That wasn’t ‘Uncle Tony’, that was someone before. Even his name seemed a mystery.

Jack never knew if she was just joking or saying it to niggle him, or if what she really meant was that this mystery man ought actually to be him. If he would only do something. Whatever that might be. So how about it, Jacko? It was all right somehow when she said it when they were only seventeen, but when she said it again when they were past twenty, when she said it after those cattle had been bolt-gunned down on both their farms, it was different, it was troubling.

At some point he’d started having the thought that what Ellie was really waiting for was for her father to die. Not that she was actually hoping he would have one of the several forms of fatal accident open to farmers, but it might be her only ticket out. And it might be a long wait. Merrick was as tough as a thistle, all twinkle and wire. And it seemed that people couldn’t catch the cow disease, or not in a hurry anyway.

And then again, not having to live with him round the clock, Jack couldn’t actually hate Jimmy (but then, did Ellie?), as sometimes he could hate his own father. Jimmy, after all, had let them have all those afternoons. And God knows when Jimmy would have last had intimate female company of his own. But clearly that didn’t of itself cause a man to waste away and die. Or God help us all.

But, as it happened, Jimmy did start to waste away. And die. And not so long after Michael died.