It’s a beautiful day. Take me for a walk down Barton Field.” She even said (and it was an oddly appealing idea),
“Pretend you don’t know me. Pretend I’ve never been here before.”
A beautiful day. So it was. An afternoon in ful summer, not a freezing November night. It had once seemed to Jack that he would never get the coldness of that night out of his bones, but now he felt warm to his marrow. El ie drew her finger from the hole and beckoned. Blooming in herself—
and with something, so it seemed, she stil had up her (sleeveless) sleeve. A blotch of sunshine reached her through the canopy of the oak and rippled over her bare shoulder.
“Come on”—she might almost have licked her lips—“put your finger in it too.”
He didn’t say that he’d already done so, guiltily, by himself. It anyway seemed that if he didn’t make a move, she would grab his finger and thrust it in for him. So he put his finger in the hole. Then El ie squeezed a finger—it was a tightish fit—alongside it.
“There.”
It was like a pledge. And more. Years ago, when they were children, they might have carved their initials, though they never had, next to each other on a tree. But that seemed a bygone and dainty idea now.
Jack had rushingly and hotly thought: they might do it right here, right this minute, up against the tree itself. To prove that they real y could do anything now. The bark that had pressed against his father’s spine pressing against El ie’s.
Could they do that? Could they do such a thing? Or they might do it over there, in the July-dry grass, near poor Luke’s resting-place. There was no one to see, only some cropping cows and the big blue sky.
But El ie had said, “I think we should go back up to the house, don’t you? You could give me a tour of that too. I think we could do with a cup of tea, don’t you?” And later she’d said, a mug of tea cradled against her bare, bright breasts, that they should throw in Barton Field with the house, that’s what they should do. With the house and the yard, al for private development. A shared right of way on the track, maybe. No, forget that. The consortium could make their own entrance, they could use the Westcott Farm track. But Barton Field, with that view, with that oak tree—that would clinch it, that would do it.
“Mark my words, Jacko. Fifty thousand on the price.” She’d taken a sip of tea and smiled encouragingly. “As long as we don’t say anything about that hole.”
. . .
THOUGH WHEN THE ROBINSONS, who already owned a house in Richmond, Surrey, acquired Jebb Farm (or, rather, “Jebb Farmhouse”) and when he and El ie upped sticks, having between them sold to the dairy consortium the remaining Jebb land and al of the adjacent Westcott Farm, Jack sometimes nursed the uncharacteristical y devilish fantasy of phoning up one day, even dropping by, to let the Robinsons know that there was something he’d meant to tel them, about that hole—perhaps they hadn’t even noticed it—in the oak tree.
But he could hardly have driven over from the Isle of Wight. And by the time he did make the journey, a decade later, for his brother’s funeral, the Robinsons had put their own indelible marks on Jebb Farm. After paying, at least by Jack’s reckoning, a smal fortune for it and spending another smal fortune on, as they sometimes put it, “making it habitable,” they’d effectively transformed the farmhouse and its immediate surroundings. So that Jack might have been as shocked by what he saw as the Robinsons might have been by any belated piece of information he had to bring them.
In any case, the Robinsons wouldn’t have been in residence. It was mid-November. Their last visit had been not long ago during their children’s half-term holiday. And since they mixed with the locals no more than politeness demanded it was only to be expected that on an occasion like this they’d choose to stay away.
Many of those from Marleston who attended Tom Luxton’s funeral might have brought Jack up to date on the changes at Jebb, assuming he hadn’t learnt about them in some other way. Bob Ireton and several others might have told him—if they’d ever had the chance. If Jack hadn’t been in such an obvious and desperate haste, once the thing was over, once Tom was in the ground, to make his exit fast and not to talk to anyone. It was a rough and dramatic thing, Jack’s departure, as rough and dramatic as his arrival, screeching to a halt like that. (Who is that madman, some had thought, until they’d realised it was him.) But then he’d always been a big 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.