Wish You Were Here

El ie had looked at him and he’d known he shouldn’t have said it, or not then. He should have waited for the right moment. It was a secondary consideration—and it went, surely, without saying.

But he’d blurted it out straight away, like some clumsy gesture of reparation. And El ie had looked at him and he’d known even then, with the letter back in his hands again after she’d read it, that this thing that had arrived out of the blue would drive a wedge—he could hear the blows of the hammer striking it—between them.

There was a separate mail box at the site and Jack would go down most mornings to check it, except during those midwinter weeks when they’d be away and would arrange for their post to be held back (and suppose this letter had come then). Not much mail came directly to the cottage.

But that morning, a dank, grey early-November morning nine days ago, a red post-office van had swung up the narrow winding road he looks at now, to bring the private mail, including one very private letter, though the envelope bore the words “Ministry of Defence.” And it must have been redirected by someone with a long memory since it also bore the original, now lapsed address “Jebb Farm, Marleston.”

And Jack had known, before he’d opened it.

Once he had opened it and truly did know, there was no way he could prove that he’d known beforehand, and it didn’t matter. Yet he’d known, even as he held the unopened envelope. His mind was no longer the usual slow mechanism. It was quick as a switch, it had turned electric.

His big, heavy body, on the other hand, seemed to be draining through the floor and leaving him powerless. The roof of his mouth went dry. In the same bright flash of knowing, he thought, absurdly, of his long-dead mother, raised in a post office.

Even before he’d opened the envelope he’d cal ed out,

“El ie! El ! Where are you? Come here.”

She’d been up here, in this bedroom, changing that duvet cover. By the time she was with him, he stil hadn’t opened the letter.

And now that it lay opened between them and he’d said what he’d said and El ie had given him that uncooperative look, he thought, seeing it al again, of the last time a letter, seeming to change everything, had lain between them. A letter to El ie that time, and she’d been waiting—she’d certainly picked her moment—to show it to him. They’d both been stark naked at the time and he’d wondered where the hel she’d been hiding it.

He saw again El ie’s tits sway as she handed him a letter. The July sky at the window. They were in the Big Bedroom.

Out of the blue? But this wasn’t out of the blue—setting aside that it was a gloomy grey morning. This had always been a cloud, a possible cloud, lurking over the horizon.

Yet he’d thought, al the same, of blue summer skies.

Skies with smoke, perhaps, rising somewhere in them.

He’d thought of barbecues. They were al owed down at the site (though every unit, of course, had its kitchenette), but only by permission and with approved equipment.

Sometimes, of an August evening, the whole place smelt of charring burgers.

Blue, burning skies. They’d have to cancel St. Lucia.

Though that wasn’t til after Christmas. This was stil early November. El ie, he could see from that look— his super-fast brain could see it—was already calculating that this thing (was there some proper word to give it?) would have blown over by then. In a month or so it would be behind them. The air would be clear and blue again, even bluer.

That cloud, having arrived and shed its burden, would no longer be there. El ie was actual y thinking, even then, that if this thing had been going to happen, it had been wel timed.

Al the more reason for taking a holiday. A problem behind them.

Whereas he’d thought, how could you take a holiday after this? How could you just fly off into the blue?

So he shouldn’t have said it. And perhaps, if he hadn’t, El ie would have been with him, at his side, three days ago.

She’d have been with him in the car as he drove al those long, solitary miles. And he wouldn’t be sitting at this window, a gun at his back. None of this would be happening.

Had he even had the thought, even then, the letter between them, that this thing that he’d always feared, which was the worst of worst possibilities, was real y, perhaps, the thing El ie might have wished? Her best possibility.

“Wel , thank God, Jack, at least this has come in the off season.”

She should never have said that. And even from a practical point of view— surely El ie saw this, she being the one who always saw things so sharply—that gap of almost two months ahead might not be so roomy after al . There was no date given in the letter. That is, the letter itself was dated and there was a date, very clearly, uncannily, given in it. Jack had tried to remember what he’d been doing on that date (it was a Saturday), whether at any point he’d felt anything turn over mysteriously inside him. But there was no future date. And there was thus a question, which he thought he’d quickly answered, of two flights. There was the flight about which the letter said he’d be kept closely informed. And there was the flight, which wasn’t going to happen, to St. Lucia.

Though the letter hadn’t used the word “flight.” It had used a word which Jack had never encountered before but which would lie now in his head like some piece of mental territory: repatriation.

ONCE UPON A TIME , and it would have been the same too for Tom, the notion of being anywhere other than England would have seemed total y crazy to Jack and quite beyond any circumstance that might include him. Though he knew that the world contained people who went, who flew, regularly, to other places. He knew that the world included other places. He’d done some geography at school. He’d once learnt, if he couldn’t remember them now, the capitals of Argentina and Peru. But, for al practical purposes, even England had meant only what the eye could see from Jebb Farmhouse—or what lay within a ten-mile journey in the Land Rover or pick-