He can’t decide the matter. His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed al the things that fol owed her death. Including al this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.
Only yesterday Jack had been obliged to stand close to his mother’s grave. Had she known? How could she have borne it to know, under the circumstances? But if she’d known, then surely she’d have let him know, he’d have felt some tug—something even like the tug of those empty caravans—and surely she’d have cried out, somehow, when he’d left in that sudden, uncontrol able haste, “Jack, don’t go. Don’t rush off like that.” And surely, if she had, he’d have stayed.
All of them there together, for that short, agonising while, al of them under the same pressing circumstances, but him the only one left above ground.
And al of them there (except him) right now, he thinks, right this minute, under this wind and rain. The wind plucking the browning petals from al those flowers, toppling the stacked-up bunches and wreaths, the rain rinsing the gravestones, new and old, the water seeping down through the soil.
Jack can’t decide the matter. Do they feel it, know it al , or are they spared? He could say he’s about to find out.
4
WHAT WOULD HIS MOTHER THINK (he tries not to think about it) if she could see him now?
BUT WHAT WOULD SHE have thought, anyway, to see him no longer at Jebb Farm but here by the sea, tending a herd of caravans? What would she think to see him hitched up—
properly and official y married—to El ie Merrick? But that once-impossible yet inevitable thing—who else was it going to be?—would surely have been only what she’d have wished. If only she’d had the power to knock two stubborn male heads together and make it happen herself.
But it hadn’t happened, anyway, in Marleston church. No wedding bel s reaching her, six foot below in the Devon earth, making her smile. My son Jack’s getting married today. And he hadn’t felt her presence—her touch, her whispered approval—in that registry office in Newport.
And now, look, with a gun on their marriage bed.
And what would she have thought to see him and El ie taking off every winter, for three weeks or a whole month sometimes, to sun themselves under coconut palms and drink tal drinks with paper parasols stuck in them? Never mind that they were here by the seaside, near a beach, in the first place. But that was what El ie had thought they should do, they could afford it and they should do it, and why shouldn’t they have their holidays? And he, with a little coaxing at first, had gone along with it. And not a bad arrangement at al . Certainly according to the caravanners
—the “Lookouters.” We get a week in the Isle of Wight, you get a month in the Caribbean. Not bad, Jack, for an out-of-work farmer.
It was the regular backchat, not il -meant, but he’d had to find a way of handling it. No one got short-changed, no one got a bad deal at the Lookout. He couldn’t arrange the weather (any more than he could at Jebb). You’l get as good a holiday here as you’l get there, he’d say, in a way that, he could tel , they felt he real y, mysteriously believed.
He’d risen to that task: talking to the caravanners, making them feel at home and befriended. He’d been surprised at his talent for it.
He took his holidays these days in the Caribbean. And what of it? Once he’d been tethered, al year round, to a herd of Friesians.
Though, if the truth be known, after a few days of lying under those palm trees and sipping those drinks and smiling at El ie and rubbing sunscreen on her, he’d sometimes start to think anxiously about his caravans.
Whether they were al right. Whether they were withstanding the winter storms. Whether that security firm—Dawsons—
was real y any good and whether anyone was actual y patrol ing the place, while he was lying here where once he could never have dreamed of being. And then he’d think, because it was the thought he was real y always having to bat away, like batting away one of those big bastard tropical hornet things that could come at you suddenly out of nowhere: What would his mum think?
Wel , Jack, my big old boy, it’s a far cry from Brigwel Bay. That’s what she’d think. Or from hosing down the milking parlour.
And then he’d think of Tom.
. . .
“FARMER JACK.” He never quite knew how the word had got around. Farmer Jack, milking his caravans. Here comes Farmer Jack in one of those shirts he got in Barbados. The ones that make your eyes hurt. What would they have thought if they could actual y have seen him in the parlour in his faded blue boiler suit and his wel ies? Being barked at by his father. What would his mum have thought if she could see him in one of those shirts?
But never mind that. Never mind the Lookout Park, formerly the Sands, or the winter holidays in the Caribbean.
What would she have thought to see how it al went at Jebb? To see it now, not a Luxton in sight, its acres al in new hands and the farmhouse no longer a farmhouse. A country home, a “holiday home” (that was the phrase El ie herself had once used) for people who already had a home.
What would she have thought to see al the things that didn’t bear thinking of? (Though had she seen them anyway?) To see Tom, little Tom, but a big boy himself by then, simply slip out one cold December night and disappear?
But Tom’s with her right now, Jack thinks, he could scarcely be closer. He was walking right back to her, that night, without knowing it.
And what would she have thought to see those burning cattle?
Al the generations going back and forwards. It had been so for centuries. The first farmhouse on Jebb Hil had been built by a Luxton in 1614. The oak in Barton Field was perhaps old even then. And who would have thought—let alone his own mother—that he, Jack Luxton, would be the first of al the Luxtons (as he was now the last) to cut that long, thick rope on which his own hands had been hardened and sel Jebb Farmhouse and al the land and become, with El ie, the soft-living proprietor of a caravan site?
He could blame El ie if he wanted to. He’d been the only man left around the place, and who else made the decisions? But El ie would surely have known the weak spot in him she was touching (so would his mother) when she came up with her plan. And what other plan, what other solution did he happen to have?
“I’ve thought it through, Jack, trust me.” To become the proprietor of the very opposite thing to that deep-rooted farmhouse. Holiday homes, on wheels. Or
“units,” as they’d come to refer to them. But they’d been good at it, he and El ie, they’d made a good go of it—with a lot of help at the start, it’s true, from “Uncle Tony.” And they’d made more out of it than they’d ever have made out of two doomed farms. And, for God’s sake, it could even be fun. Fun being what they dealt in. “Fun, Jacko, don’t you think it’s time we had some?” And every winter, on top of it al , they flew off to the Caribbean.