Wish You Were Here Read Online Free PDF Page A

withstanding the winter storms. Whether that security firm—Dawsons—was really any good and whether anyone was actually patrolling the place, while he was lying here whereonce he could never have dreamed of being. And then he’d think, because it was the thought he was really 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?
    Well, Jack, my big old boy, it’s a far cry from Brigwell 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 actually have seen him in the parlour in his faded blue boiler suit and his wellies? 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 all went at Jebb? To see it now, not a Luxton in sight, its acres all in new hands and the farmhouse no longer a farmhouse. A country home, a ‘holiday home’ (that was the phrase Ellie herself had once used) for people who already had a home. What would she have thought to see all 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 couldscarcely 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?
    All the generations going back and forwards. It had been so for centuries. The first farmhouse on Jebb Hill 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 all the Luxtons (as he was now the last) to cut that long, thick rope on which his own hands had been hardened and sell Jebb Farmhouse and all the land and become, with Ellie, the soft-living proprietor of a caravan site?
    He could blame Ellie if he wanted to. He’d been the only man left around the place, and who else made the decisions? But Ellie 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 Ellie, 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 all, they flew off to the Caribbean.
    But not this winter. Obviously. Or it had seemedunavoidably obvious to him. But not to Ellie, apparently. And that was the start of all this.
    He looks now at the rain-swept caravans. The tug of it, still. Lookout Cottage up here, the caravans down there, no more than little white oblongs at this distance. The joke was that he had a telescope constantly trained, he wasn’t just Farmer Jack, he was also sometimes the Commandant. Driving down or strolling down every day to see if all was well. In fine weather, dressed the part: shorts and Caribbean shirt (extra-large) and one of those baseball caps they’d had run up, free for every