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.
Al this had flashed through her mind as she’d watched Jack Luxton tremble, then begin to shake, then spil over into tears. It wasn’t a familiar sight, or a pretty one. She’d put her arms round him and felt his big bones grate inside him.
And then, just as quickly, her thoughts had dropped back, sunk back into her own bones, as she’d understood a bigger truth that would only grow bigger, clearer in the hours, days, that would fol ow. That though Tom wasn’t coming back, yet he was coming back. So far as Jack was concerned, he was coming back big-time. He was coming back to bloody haunt them.
She’d seen the bit of Jack that belonged to Tom, even though he was dead, only growing bigger and the bit of Jack that was hers only growing smal er.
And then Jack had said that thing about St. Lucia.
IN ELLIE’S LIFE, and she was only thirty-nine, there’d been, up to now, only three significant written communications.
One was the letter just received by Jack. The second had been that miraculous letter from Uncle Tony’s lawyers. But the first and incomparably the most important at the time had been the postcard that had come once from Jack. She could stil see its bluer-than-blue sea and sky and curving beach and crescent of white cliffs, like someone’s broad smile. And she could stil see the face of her mother, Alice Merrick, as she stil was then, who’d handed it to her one morning with a smile.
How her heart had soared. Seethed and soared. El ie, at that time, had never seen the sea. Now here she was with Jack, living right by it. Sands End, the Sapphire Bay. One sea or another.
So when she’d shut the front door behind Major Richards, she’d felt like crying herself, having her own portion of tears. Not for poor Tom Luxton, but for al the stupid, patient, stubborn lengths a woman wil go to for a man. Al the things she wil do. Al her life long. When he wasn’t even, perhaps, when you stood back and looked, that much to speak of real y, that much to bloody write home about. Other women might say, “Him?”
But he’d been al that she had and most of the time, truly, al that she wanted to have. How her fingertips had searched his big body. If only she could have al of him. And she’d thought once that at last she even had that, and had made a whole future for both of them.
“Dear El ie, Wish you were here.”
14
WHEN HE WATCHED ELLIE close the door behind Major Richards, Jack was stil trembling inside. He felt as if he’d just been told again that Tom was dead, and this time it was real. The first time had been just a rehearsal, a sort of fire dril . But he knew he shouldn’t cry again, not in front of El ie. Once was enough and even then he’d been brief. It hadn’t helped the first time. It didn’t help anyway.
So he hadn’t, though it had cost him a struggle. He’d looked at El ie, who’d remained standing oddly by the front door, her back to it, as if there was something bad beyond it, though she’d looked, too, as if she were struggling with something inside her. It was the real shock and truth of it al , perhaps, only now getting through. But he didn’t get up to go to her. He knew that something had come between them since that letter. Al it took was a letter. But there was an invisible wal . If he walked across to her now, he’d hit it.
They’d both listened to the sounds of Major Richards starting his car, turning it and driving off down the road to Holn. El ie had stood there in that strange way by the door.
He’d thought: Is she going to cry now, is she final y going to cry for Tom, so I don’t have to? But she hadn’t cried, not then, nor at any point in the days that fol owed, and when, the next day, Major Richards had cal ed again, El ie had picked up the phone and more or less handed it straight to Jack as if it were some matter that was none of her business. “Major Richards,” she’d said as if Jack now had friends in high places.
Major Richards had told Jack he could now confirm that Corporal Luxton’s repatriation, along with that of the two soldiers who’d died with him, would take place on the fol owing Thursday. He’d given the name of an airbase that Jack had vaguely heard of, though he wouldn’t have been able to place it in Oxfordshire. Major Richards had also explained that because of the unusual delay in arranging repatriation (he didn’t explain that this delay was partly down to the delay in contacting Corporal Luxton’s next of kin) and because, meanwhile, thorough post-mortem procedures had been completed overseas, the Oxfordshire coroner, having read the MOD report and satisfied himself of the facts, would be prepared to grant an effectively immediate release. That is, an inquest would be formal y opened and at once adjourned on arrival of the repatriation flight, while the bodies could proceed directly, for their funerals, to their respective undertakers.