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?”
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.