cal her stupid, cal her not choosy—she was Jack’s and Jack’s only, plain and simple. It was how it was, it was how she was. Where else did al that resentment come from?
But Jack had simply never seen, never noticed what would have been the biggest reason for his not needing to have any jealousy of his own. That she could have done without little Tom altogether. Tom himself could see it, she knew that. He had sharper eyes than his brother. But he’d just shut up about it.
It was something short of the whole hundred per cent, that part of Jack that she could cal her own, and what she did have, she only had properly, after her mother’s departure, on a couple of weekday afternoons. And that only as a pay-off from her father. Jack, too, was a slave to his father, and he was his mother’s favourite (she knew that and she didn’t blame Vera) and there was this big chunk of him anyway that belonged with his brother. How much did that leave for El ie?
But then Vera had died. Then Tom had gone away. And Jack, on the surface, didn’t seem so cut up about it, though Michael was. And, though she took care not to show it, El ie’s hopes had lifted—so far as that was possible when everything was laid low by the effects of mad-cow disease.
Because at least now she was shot of Tom.
From then on El ie had begun to do some extra wishing.
What could she do but wish? And when, not so very long after Tom disappeared from the scene, Michael Luxton, in his own way, dropped out of it too, she’d begun to feel that wishing wasn’t such a useless thing to fal back on, since it seemed it could have real effect. On the other hand, there were limits, serious limits, to wishing, even secretly. And she’d begun also to be a little afraid of her wishes. “Shot of,” it was only an expression.
But then there’d been that letter, out of the blue, from the man she chose to cal , as if she’d known him al her life, her
“Uncle” Tony. Or rather from his solicitors, Gibbs and Parker, of Newport, Isle of Wight, with their condolences and kindest regards.
In al her secret wishing and hoping, El ie had never been so foolishly wishful as to rely upon some stroke of sheer magic. True, she’d liked to tease Jack sometimes about her “mystery man.” But now that a stroke of magic had occurred—and there was, in a sense, a mystery man—she quickly enough converted it into a stroke of justice, even giddy justification. So, she hadn’t been wrong, after al , not total y to condemn her mother. Because in the end, and without knowing it, her mother had made amends.
“Caravans, Jacko.”
She’d waved the magic wand of that word over Jack’s head and fil ed in the picture for him of their combined and ful y provided-for future. Though she’d had to wait. She’d had to wait for another necessary, preliminary event to occur. Which had occurred, in fact, more quickly than she could ever have imagined, or—hand on heart—wished.
Though now that it had happened, she could see that it might seem to have happened because she’d wished it.
But in any case Jack had said, “Yes. Okay, El ie.” If he hadn’t said it quite as simply and readily as that, and if it had cost her, one way or another, a good deal of patience, trouble and heartache.
Though wasn’t that afternoon, that afternoon at Jebb, just the best ever? Wasn’t the world, at last, a good place to be in?
There was just one gap in the picture, and that was the gap that corresponded to the part of Jack that stil belonged to Tom, even though Tom had been absent now for over eighteen months and hadn’t even answered any letters.
She’d known not to push it too quickly or firmly. When so much else was going their way, and when, after al , she was stil not quite twenty-eight. Though when she did in fact push it—gently, she’d thought—the answer she’d got from Jack, pretty quickly and firmly, was that if he was going to leave Jebb, if he was going to be the last Luxton ever to farm there, then there shouldn’t be any more Luxtons at al .
As if she’d pushed him over some edge. Or as if that was his condition.
Wel , she’d thought, that was his mood of the moment. It was a big moment—they were going to sel two farms—
and a big condition. And he was stil , perhaps, in grief for his father. Grief and shock. It was a different sort of grief, Jack’s grief for his dad, from hers for her own father. It was a different sort of death. Though wasn’t it a wel -known remedy for grief: you lose one, you make another? It’s how it’s been known to happen.
Time was stil on her side, she’d thought, so far as that gap in the picture went. Time and a change of scene. But she’d been twenty-seven then, she was pushing forty now.
Years had passed. And though Jack had come out of the shel of his past long ago, even become a new kind of man (al that too had seemed the result of her wishing it), she knew that the obstacle was stil Tom, who was stil in the picture though out of it.
SO WHEN THAT LETTER had arrived, via Jebb Farmhouse, saying, with deepest regret, that Tom was dead, El ie had felt her hopes fly up once again. Though she hadn’t shown it. It wasn’t so difficult to disguise the feelings she’d always disguised. On the other hand, she wasn’t going to disguise them now to the extent of shedding false tears. Even when Jack had suddenly broken down in tears in a way she’d never seen before.
Her hopes had soared. She couldn’t help it. Tom was truly out of the picture now. Her mind had even foolishly raced ahead—even as Jack, holding that letter, had begun to tremble. She and Jack were in the clear now. Tom would never show up. And, who knows, one immediate, unstoppable effect of al this might be that she would suddenly get her long-thwarted wish. Jack might swing now completely the other way. Who knows, in just a few weeks’
time, in St. Lucia, at the Sapphire Bay, in their air-conditioned bungalow with the hot night outside, they might get down to serious work on it. If it was a boy, they might cal it Tom, if that’s what he wanted. She wouldn’t mind.
And if it was a girl (she didn’t care) they might cal it Vera. Or Marilyn.
