Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page A

both battling with the same things: both of them wifeless, both working, on different sides of a boundary, the samesweet but tough, now disease-hit land. Both of them going to the dogs and watching each other like hawks to see who’d get eaten up first.
    In Jack’s memory it was the Luxtons who’d had the upper hand (having anyway the finer-looking farmhouse and the prettier acres) especially after Merrick’s wife, Alice, had run off and abandoned him, leaving him with a sixteen-year-old daughter as his only companion and domestic workforce. An event as surprising (though Michael liked to say it was no surprise at all) as the Luxtons suddenly acquiring after eight years a second son, which, though the timing might have been better, only added to the stock at Jebb Farm and so to the abasement of the Merricks.
    But then Vera had died, leaving the two men, in that respect, similarly placed. Then Tom had done his own bit of running off. Meanwhile, there was a cow disease. All of which left the two farmers, neither getting any younger, in a state of more or less equal dereliction. If anything, it was Jimmy who now had the edge, since he’d had years to get used to misfortune, while Michael, after a fair time of not doing so badly thank you, had incurred a quick succession of troubles, and anyone could see he was going down fast.
    They should have got damn well hitched themselves. Or, as would have been the more customary solution and one which had only been staring them in the face for years, Jack should have married Ellie and linked their situations that way.
    But that would have gone against all known history and deprived the two fathers of their fuelling disdain for each other. It would have robbed one of a daughter or one of a son, since where were the happy couple supposedto live? Did Michael seriously think that Ellie was going to hop across the fence and settle in at Jebb, when she was so clearly needed at the side of her dear old dad?
    And all of this despite the fact that the son and the daughter had been chummy with each other for as long as they—or anyone else—could remember. And not just chummy. For years now, from even before Alice Merrick’s abrupt departure, he and Ellie had been pretty much behaving with each other (if only on certain weekday afternoons) as if they
were
married. Which was not only common knowledge in the region of Marleston, but was actually abetted, even smiled on by the two fathers, even while it retained its clandestine trappings—on the basis, presumably, that there had to be some compensation for the fact that real marriage was impossible. At the same time (and Jack had only slowly come to recognise this) it was a concession that kept them both, the son and the daughter, firmly in their places: on their own farms (except, for Jack, on Tuesday and sometimes Thursday afternoons) and in each case a slave to it.
    In the beginning, Jack had simply driven over in the pick-up, with Luke in the back. This would be at times when, according to a cautious-seeming Ellie, old Merrick wouldn’t be around. He and Ellie would go up to her bedroom, knowing that they couldn’t take too long about it, especially if they wanted, which they always did, to sit and have a cup of tea in the kitchen afterwards—with Luke, who seemed to know when to make himself scarce, stretched out by the stove, eyeing them meaningfully. It wouldn’t have seemed right without the cup of tea, andthat had always been the pretext, or pretence: Jack had simply popped over on a neighbourly visit (though why the hell should he do that?) and stayed for a neighbourly cup of tea.
    But this had gone on for so long, without any discoveries or interruptions, that it was clear there was no real need for haste or secrecy, or to divide their time between bedroom and kitchen. Jack had begun to wonder, in fact, what it might mean if they were to have their cup of tea in bed—if Ellie might suggest it, or if he might. But he’d anyway