“What’s the matter? Afraid your dad’l catch us? Afraid your mum’s going to see?” She giggled. “Hey, lighten up, Jack.”
And if the truth be known, the sheer outrageousness of it had got to him, driven him, tipped him over. The sheer fact of it. They could do it, do as they pleased now. They were king and queen now of their (ruined) castles, of their final y united kingdoms, even if El ie was about to spel out to him what he didn’t exactly need tel ing, that the only way was to sel up and leave, cash in and leave—and now they could.
But with an answer al ready, up her sleeve, to the inevitable next question. If you can have an answer up your sleeve when you’re wearing nothing.
She’d had that letter with her anyway. Hidden somewhere. From “Uncle” Tony, or rather from Uncle Tony’s lawyers.
El ie’s vanished mother, Alice, had, so it seemed, fal en il and died before her time—not unlike Jack’s mother (though in a nursing home in Shanklin)—without having broken her silence with her estranged daughter, or having revealed that she was now married to a man, Anthony Boyd, many years her senior. But not long afterwards Uncle Tony had fal en il and died too. And he was the one, it seemed, who’d died with a conscience.
“It gets better, Jacko. Listen. It gets better.” Was there any argument, once El ie had produced that letter? For some while Jack had been imagining that the next stage in the decline of Jebb Farm might be when the whole damn farmhouse and al its outbuildings would start to slide physical y down the hil , crashing to pieces as they went.
Yet, just for a moment, as they’d sat there with their tea, he’d let himself slide into the opposite picture, and almost believe it. That this was their place now. Here they were at last, where they should be. He’d felt that, even as he’d felt the other thing: that they were like two ransacking burglars who’d burst into a place that wasn’t theirs at al .
“Stil sleeping in your little cubby-hole, Jack? But you’ve got the run now. This is the master bedroom.” He’d never used that expression. He vaguely knew it was an expression used by estate agents. It was the Big Bedroom. For years now Dad had slept in this bedroom, in this same big bed, al alone, til one night he couldn’t bear to any longer.
And he had stil been sleeping in his own little cubby-hole. El ie saw everything.
“Wel ,” she’d said, a little later, “at least you can’t say we never gave it a whirl.”
never gave it a whirl.”
She’d sat up with her back against the bedhead, not minding that her tits were on display. He’d pul ed himself up against the bedhead too. Like a shameless king and queen, yes, surveying their realm. Through the window before them, across the drop of the land, you could see the far side of the val ey, the line of the hil s. A blue sky, a puff or two of cloud, the speck of a buzzard wheeling. In between was the green, stirring crown of the oak tree.
“Now,” El ie had said, “you stay here and I’l go and make us a pot of tea.”
And she’d gone down, in her bare arse, to the kitchen, El ie Merrick, in her bare arse in the Jebb kitchen, in Jebb Farmhouse. And he’d thought, it wasn’t a bad arse (nor al the rest), if it wasn’t the baby arse he’d first clapped hands on fifteen years or more ago. How long had he known El ie?
Long enough to have forgotten how long. Long enough for it to have been at times an on-and-off thing. Long enough to have watched her change and change back again, to come in and out of her best. He must have done the same himself, even if he’d never noticed. Always feeling anyway like the same old lump.
He couldn’t say, by any stretch, that he was a connoisseur of women, but he was a connoisseur of El ie.
And, judging by El ie, it was strange the way time could work on women, and not always against them. There was no saying when suddenly they might hit peak condition.
She’d gone down and come back with a tray with the tea on it. But on the tray too, of course, though he hadn’t noticed when she’d put it down on the floor on her side of the bed, must have been that letter, taken from her bag in the kitchen.
“Caravans, Jacko.”
He couldn’t help seeing—as she let that word hang for a while and took a long sip of tea—Tom, aged six, hopping ahead of him down that path. Or seeing the wiggly letters by the door, with its two steps up: “Marilyn.” Or smel ing salt between his fingers. Or smel ing the smel al over that field, in the morning, of frying bacon. And when just a little later he was looking, himself, at that letter, he couldn’t help seeing that little yel ow tabletop and that first postcard, with its blue sea and white band of cliffs, that he’d written to El ie.
So just when he’d been thinking that this was his bed now and El ie belonged in it, he was suddenly also thinking he was real y al hers now, he belonged to her. She knew the places in him, she had him.
He’d said, as if at least he must put up some token opposition, “But no one takes their holidays in a caravan any more.”
But apparently they did. Or they did at the Lookout, formerly known as the Sands. The caravans weren’t like the ones Jack remembered from Brigwel Bay (and how much had that farmer charged for a week?). Nor were the caravanners. They were al sorts. With thirty-two units, when they were al on the go, you got al sorts. There were die-hard old couples who’d been coming for years and weren’t so sure about that change of name, but liked the fact that the place had “stayed in the family” (how sad, about Alice and Tony). They seemed to know more about El ie’s mum than El ie did—or even wanted to. There were big burly families, al tattoos and noise, who in the course of a week became gentler, sweeter. There were two- or three-unit gangs of young people with windsurfing gear who, when they weren’t wearing wetsuits, wore hardly anything most of the time and liked to party al night.
Al this had fascinated Jack. It had brought something out in him. You never knew what might be going on in any one of those units at any given time. It was certainly a form of livestock. You never knew what might be arriving next.
Caravans. It would make him think, sometimes, of a circus, and it could sometimes be like a circus. Entertaining, raucous, a touch of danger. You had to be a bit of a policeman sometimes. You had to be their smiling host in a joke of a shirt, but there were times when you had to show them who was in charge. Jack had found he was surprisingly good at this. At both things: the smiling and the policing. Perhaps his big, lumbering weight was on his side. Or maybe it was that he’d just sometimes let slip, with his straight, blank, unreadable face, that if there was any real trouble, he kept a shotgun handy, up in the cottage, having been a farmer once, and he knew how to use it.
As for the caravanners, the Lookouters, they general y took the view that El ie and Jack were okay. They ran a good site, they looked after you. It was al right for some, of course—sitting up there al summer long, then winging off to the Caribbean. But, at the same time, there was something a bit misfit and oddbal about the two of them. There didn’t seem to be any little Luxtons, you couldn’t even be sure if they were real y married. Something just a bit hil bil y. But that was okay, that was fine. There was something just a bit wacky and hil bil y about taking a holiday in a caravan anyway. And when you were on holiday you wanted colour, you didn’t want dul and ordinary. You didn’t get it, either, with those shirts of his.