Wish You Were Here Read Online Free Page B

in Marleston churchyard. But then if she could have flinched—Jack can sometimes lose his own logic—she wouldn’t have been spared.
    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 all the things that followed her death. Including all 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, uncontrollable 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, all of them under the same pressing circumstances, but him the only one left above ground.
    And all of them there (except him) right now, he thinks, right this minute, under this wind and rain. The wind plucking the browning petals from all 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 all, or are they spared? He could say he’s about to find out.

4
    W HAT 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 officially married—to Ellie 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 bells 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 andEllie taking off every winter, for three weeks or a whole month sometimes, to sun themselves under coconut palms and drink tall 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 Ellie 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 all. 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 ill-meant, but he’d had to find a way of handling it. No one got shortchanged, no one got a bad deal at the Lookout. He couldn’t arrange the weather (any more than he could at Jebb). You’ll get as good a holiday here as you’ll get there, he’d say, in a way that, he could tell, they felt he really, 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, all 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 Ellie and rubbing sunscreen on her, he’d sometimes start to think anxiously about his caravans. Whether they were all right. Whether they were