Then she said, in her way, the thing he should have said, in his way, first. The thing he should have got in first, and differently.
“And so did Tom.”
He didn’t say anything to this. He was trying to work out the answer. The word “Tom” was like a smal thud inside the room. But El ie got in first again. She looked at him softly.
“If he cared, Jack, if he wanted his stake, he’d have been in touch by now, wouldn’t he? If he can’t be bothered to tel you where he is—”
“He’s a soldier, El .”
“So? He went his own way. Now we should go ours. I don’t think you even have to tel him that you’re going to sel .”
There was a silence while the house, fil ed with summer breezes, seemed to whisper to itself at what it had just heard.
“Forget him, Jack. He’s probably forgotten you.”
. . .
TOM WASN’T DEAD THEN, Jack thinks now, even if neither he nor El ie knew where he was (Tom’s Service Record would one day tel Jack that he was in Vitez, Bosnia), but it was as though at that moment, Jack thinks now, he might have been.
THEN ELLIE HAD switched the subject brightly back.
“Anyway, have you any idea how much a house—just a house, no land—in some parts of London can cost these days?”
Jack had no idea, and he didn’t like the sudden, alarming implication that he and El ie should buy a house in London.
Hadn’t they just been talking about the Isle of Wight?
“No. Why should I?”
El ie had floated a figure across him that he’d thought was crazy. Then she’d said, “And have you any idea how much some people in London who can afford that kind of money wil pay, on top, for their own away-from-it-al place in the country? Just to have that view”—she’d nodded towards the foot of the bed —“from their window?” Jack didn’t know how much, though in one sense it seemed to him that the view from the window, which was simply the view that went with the house, didn’t and couldn’t have any price on it at al . How could a view that didn’t real y belong to anyone even be for sale? And when El ie mentioned another figure, again he’d thought it was crazy.
Later on, when he did find out what people—specifical y the Robinsons—real y were prepared to pay for that view and al that came with it, he’d think it was strange that he’d lived for twenty-eight years in a place that might be so prized as an “away-from-it-al place,” but now he, or rather
“they,” wanted to get away from it.
. . .
AND SITTING NOW by the window at Lookout Cottage, looking out at what, in less obscuring weather, might be thought of as another priceless view, Jack is of the firm opinion that the place known as “away from it al ” simply doesn’t exist. He happens to have some idea roughly how much Lookout Cottage might currently fetch. But how little he cares about that.
“THROW IN BARTON FIELD,” El ie had said, “throw in that oak, and they’l think it’s their own little bit of England.” And wouldn’t it be, Jack had thought.
Before she’d produced the letter—even when they were stil down in Barton Field—he’d actual y believed that El ie had come round that day in her summer dress to put forward the option that he himself hadn’t got round to broaching. It wasn’t for him, he’d foolishly thought, but for El ie to propose it, since she was the one who’d have to take al the steps while he wouldn’t have to budge. Yet there would have been nothing outrageous or surprising about it and it was only what, sooner or later, one of them surely had to suggest. Namely that she (they) should sel Westcott Farm and El ie should move in with him. That might clear the two lots of debt and then they might make a go of it.
Then they might become Mr. and Mrs. Luxton and share the Big Bedroom for the rest of their lives, as was only right and proper. Luxtons at Jebb.
His mum would surely have been glad. Even Tom would hardly have been taken by surprise. And there would always be a place for him, for Tom, if he wanted it. Jack would have wished—when the subject arose—to make that smal stipulation.
When El ie had said they should go back up to the farmhouse and when, no sooner were they there, than they were up the stairs and in that bed, he’d thought she’d only been about to announce (getting in first as usual) this proposal he’d also been nursing, but that she’d wanted to do it in style and with a bit of pre-emptive territory-claiming.
But she’d clearly had other ideas. Caravans.
“I’ve thought it through, Jack, trust me.” He’d looked at that sunny view outside the window, which he’d never real y thought of as purchasable, and felt, even then, that he was being asked to contemplate it for the last time. He wondered what his father had thought when he’d come up here, that November day, to change out of his suit, to take the medal from the pocket—only to put it later in another pocket. His last look in ful daylight (had he known it?) at that view. The oak with its leaves ablaze in the cold sunshine. What had gone through his head?
For a moment, in that warm July bedroom, Jack had shivered.
“Don’t sel it al as a farm. Sel the land. And sel the house—just as a house. A country house.”
A country house? But it was a farm and he’d never thought of the farmhouse as a separable entity, as anything other than the living quarters of a working farm.
“What about the parlour? The yard, the barns?”
“Nothing that a decent builder and an architect and landscaper couldn’t sort out.”
