rough creature, even bigger than his dad (big and rough, though general y, in fact, as mild as a lamb), and that dark suit he was wearing didn’t make him look less rough. It made him look like a … “bodyguard” was a word that came to mind.
A mad dash of an exit, and in one sense you couldn’t blame the poor, distraught man. It wasn’t an ordinary sort of death (nor had it been with his dad). You couldn’t make rules for such a thing or say that the way he’d left was wrong and unpardonable, but if he’d hung around they might at least have told him that Jebb Farmhouse was empty right now. So that if, for any reason—and if he was ready for a surprise or two—he’d wanted to go and take a look around, then it probably wouldn’t have been a problem.
Of course, it was equal y possible that he might not have wanted to set eyes on the place ever again.
But anyway he’d simply driven off in that big blue beast of a thing—that was actual y like something the Robinsons might have driven—without saying his goodbyes (or, in most cases, his hel os), even looking like a man afraid of being chased. Though he’d driven off, it’s true (some noted it wasn’t the way he’d driven in), along the road that would take him past the entrance to Jebb Farm. As was.
ELLIE HAD SAID, that mug of tea nudging her tits, that he could do it now—they could do it now. When she spoke, the
“he” kept slipping into “they,” as if the words were almost the same thing, or as if what he alone might have hung back from ever doing was a different matter once the “he” changed to “they.”
And now, of course, he’d seen the letter that El ie had been waiting al that time to show him. Though it was so sudden for Jack that for a brief while he’d wondered if the letter was real, if it wasn’t some trick, if El ie might have written it herself. The letter wasn’t just their way out, it was
“cream on the cake” (El ie’s phrase). Uncle Tony—from beyond the grave—was offering them not just a rescue plan, but a whole new future “on a plate” (El ie’s phrase again). They’d be mad not to grab it.
So there was a plate with a cake on it with cream on top.
And here they were taking tea at Jebb.
If they sold up—in the way El ie was proposing—they’d wipe out the debts and have money to spare. They might even have, courtesy of Uncle Tony, a little money to burn.
Or … they could stay put and each be the proud and penniless owners of massive liabilities.
There was a third and not so far-fetched option (not nearly so far-fetched, in Jack’s mind, as the Isle of Wight), which El ie didn’t mention and Jack didn’t mention either. If he was going to mention it, he should have mentioned it a whole lot earlier, but the time for mentioning it was past.
And of those two options starkly presented to him by El ie, was there any choice? Couldn’t he see, she’d said, sensing his at least token resistance, his getting guilty in advance, that there was such a thing as good luck too in the world, such a thing as the wind for once blowing their way?
And, Jesus, Jack, hadn’t they served their time and been patient long enough?
Through the window before them, the crown of the oak tree had stirred in the sunshine and seemed to offer consent. People would pay, El ie had said, for a view like that. They’d pay. The dairy consortium couldn’t give a damn. They’d think of the cost of having that tree taken out.
It seemed to Jack that El ie had certainly picked her moment—a day when al that he was now the master of had never looked so fine—to tel him it was time to quit. She might have picked, instead, some bleak day in February.
And she’d never looked so fine, like a new woman even, herself.
But Jack knew that this new (but not unrecognisable) El ie hadn’t just sprung up, in her daisy-dotted dress, overnight, or even with the warm summer weather. She’d started to appear, to bloom even the previous year, after Michael had caused that hole in the tree and when they’d found out soon afterwards the contents of his wil . Yes, for what it was worth, he was sole lord and master now.
And she’d bloomed a bit more, he thought, when later that winter and into the spring, Jimmy— tough-as-thistles Jimmy Merrick—had become il . Slow but one-way il , a bit like Luke. His liver and his lungs. Both things, apparently.
The worse Jimmy got, in fact, the better, in some ways, El ie looked. Then in May Jimmy had been hospitalised and
—whether it was the shock of being away from the farm where he’d spent al his life or whether, seeing how things were going after the cattle disease, he’d simply been ready to give in—he’d succumbed pretty soon.
And El ie hadn’t stopped blooming, as was now very clear. But then she’d have had cause to bloom, despite having a sick dad to nurse, if she’d had that letter up her sleeve al the while. It was dated mid-January. For six months she hadn’t breathed a word. That was al , in one sense, entirely understandable. What point in sharing that letter with anyone, so long as Jimmy, ailing as he was, was master of Westcott Farm and she was in his thral ?
Jack didn’t say anything to El ie—though he came very close—about the length of time she’d kept the letter to herself. He understood, anyway, that he was now in El ie’s thral . (But hadn’t he always been?) He felt the letter taking away from him any last argument, any last crumb of Luxton pride or delusion. Mastery? He was in El ie’s hands now.
“They” not “he.” He knew that keeping the farm, for al its summer glory, was only a picture. El ie had stuck her finger through it. Now she was pointing to their future.
He’d dipped his face to his mug of tea, but looked at that view.
“Cheer up, Jacko,” El ie had said. “Lighten up. What’s there to lose?”
He might have said that everything he was looking at was what there was to lose.
El ie stroked his arm. “People leave,” she said. “People go their own way and take their chances.” Then she added,
“My mother did.” As if she might have said: “And didn’t she come good?”
