Wish You Were Here Read Online Free PDF

guest, with L OOKOUT and the lighthouse motif—gold on black—above the peak.
    Thirty-two units. All ‘top of the range’, he could truthfully say, even if the range wasn’t quite the topmost one. He could never have said that about the milking machinery at Jebb.
    The tug he’d never expected. Empty half the year, but then sometimes, strangely, as now, all the more tugging. Occupied for the other half by this shifting temporary population—migrants, vagrants, escapers in their own country.
    It was only ever an encampment down there, that was the feel of it, like the halt of some expeditionary, ragtag army. It might all be gone in the morning—any morning—leaving nothing but the tyre marks in the grass. That was the tug. Not cattle, not even caravans, but people.

5
    E LLIE SITS IN the wind-rocked, rain-lashed Cherokee, in the lay-by on the coast road at Holn Cliffs, thinking of her mother.
    The car is pointing in the direction of Holn itself and so in what, on any day till now, she might have called the direction of home. And on a clear day it would be perfectly possible to see from where she sits not just the fine sweep of the coastline, but, on the hillside running up from the Head, the distant white speck of Lookout Cottage. It had been built there, after all, with a now-vanished lighthouse above it, because of the prominent position. And on a clear day, a fine summer’s day say, it would be equally possible to see from Lookout Cottage the distant glint and twinkle of cars—with perhaps an ice-cream van or two—lined up in the lay-by at Holn Cliffs while their occupants admired the view.
    Today there is no view. Even Holn Head is just a vague, jutting mass of darker greyness amid the general greyness, and Ellie can only squintingly imagine that at a certain point, through the murk beyond her windscreen,she can see the pin-prick gleam of the lit-up windows of the cottage.
    The wipers are on, though to little effect. Thirty yards along the lay-by, barely visible, is another parked car, a silver hatchback, doing what Ellie is apparently doing, and Ellie feels, along with an instinctive solidarity, a stab of envy.
Only
to be sitting out the storm.
    How could Jack have said what he said?
    Ellie hasn’t seen her mother for over twenty years—and can never see her again—so that to think of her at all is like seeing distant glimmers through a blur. Yet right now, as if time has performed some astounding, marooning loop, thoughts of her mother—and of her father—have never been so real to her.
    How could Jack have said it?
    Ellie’s mother disappeared, one fine late-September day, from Westcott Farm, Devon, abandoning her husband, Jimmy, and her only child, Ellie, when Ellie was barely sixteen, and though she would never see her again, Ellie would come to know—familiarly and gratefully—where her mother had eventually made her home. Ellie’s mother once lived in that cottage whose lights Ellie can only imagine she sees, and had she not done so, Ellie and Jack could never have made it their home as well.
    Though now Ellie wonders if it is any sort of home at all.
    The exact cause of her mother’s sudden flight all those years ago Ellie would never know, but it had to do with a figure whom Ellie, back then, would sometimes call, when in intimate conversation with Jack Luxton, her mother’s‘mystery man’—using that phrase not so much with scorn but with a teasing fascination, as if she would quite like a mystery man of her own.
    Her father must have had some clue who the man was and even communicated indirectly with his runaway wife on the subject, if only to become an officially divorced man and get back the sole title to Westcott Farm. But his lips remained sealed and, anyway, not long before her father’s death, Ellie was to discover that her mother had replaced that original mystery man with someone else and had lived with him on the Isle of Wight.
    A few miles along the coast road behind her, in a