Wish You Were Here

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 El ie, old Merrick wouldn’t be around. He and El ie would go up to her bedroom, knowing that they couldn’t take too long about it, especial y 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 meaningful y. 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 hel 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 El ie 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 natural y 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 general y 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 El ie 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: Wel , 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 al ?

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 El ie’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 El ie—whether old Merrick appeared over the horizon or not—had simply been some of the better moments of his life.

He stil thinks it now. Stil sees himself rol ing 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, al 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 Wel ington boot crossed over the other, one elbow cupped in one hand, ciggy on the go. The breeze riffling through the grass. And Luke, stil alive then, lol oped by his feet, ears riffled too. And Tom just a nipper. Just a baby real y.

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 actual y said it.

Though she’d sometimes said, at dul ish moments, as if to make him feel he had rivals or he was just some stopgap (had been al 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 real y meant was that this mystery man ought actual y to be him. If he would only do something.

Whatever that might be. So how about it, Jacko? It was al 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 El ie was real y waiting for was for her father to die. Not that she was actual y 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, al 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 actual y hate Jimmy (but then, did El ie?), as sometimes he could hate his own father. Jimmy, after al , had let them have al 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 al .

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

7

“WE’D BETTER CANCEL St. Lucia.”