Free Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift Page A

resisted? As if there was no time to lose and it couldn’t be anywhere else. As if it was her own damn bedroom.
    ‘What’s the matter? Afraid your dad’ll catch us? Afraid your
mum’s
going to see?’ She giggled. ‘Hey, lighten up, Jack.’
    And if the truth be known, the sheer outrageousness of it had got to him, driven him, tipped him over. The sheer fact of it. They could do it, do as they pleased now. They were king and queen now of their (ruined) castles, of their finally united kingdoms, even if Ellie was about to spell out to him what he didn’t exactly need telling, that the only way was to sell up and leave, cash in and leave—and now they could. But with an answer all ready, up her sleeve, to the inevitable next question. If you can have an answer up your sleeve when you’re wearing nothing.
    She’d had that letter with her anyway. Hidden somewhere. From ‘Uncle’ Tony, or rather from Uncle Tony’s lawyers.
    Ellie’s vanished mother Alice had, so it seemed, fallen ill and died before her time—not unlike Jack’s mother (though in a nursing home in Shanklin)—without having broken her silence with her estranged daughter, or havingrevealed that she was now married to a man, Anthony Boyd, many years her senior. But not long afterwards Uncle Tony had fallen ill and died too. And he was the one, it seemed, who’d died with a conscience.
    ‘It gets better, Jacko. Listen. It gets better.’
    Was there any argument, once Ellie had produced that letter? For some while Jack had been imagining that the next stage in the decline of Jebb Farm might be when the whole damn farmhouse and all its outbuildings would start to slide physically down the hill, crashing to pieces as they went.
    Yet, just for a moment, as they’d sat there with their tea, he’d let himself slide into the opposite picture, and almost believe it. That this was their place now. Here they were at last, where they should be. He’d felt that, even as he’d felt the other thing: that they were like two ransacking burglars who’d burst into a place that wasn’t theirs at all.
    ‘Still sleeping in your little cubby-hole, Jack? But you’ve got the run now. This is the
master
bedroom.’
    He’d never used that expression. He vaguely knew it was an expression used by estate agents. It was the Big Bedroom. For years now Dad had slept in this bedroom, in this same big bed, all alone, till one night he couldn’t bear to any longer.
    And he
had
still been sleeping in his own little cubby-hole. Ellie saw everything.
    ‘Well,’ she’d said, a little later, ‘at least you can’t say we never gave it a whirl.’
    She’d sat up with her back against the bedhead, not minding that her tits were on display. He’d pulled himself up against the bedhead too. Like a shameless king andqueen, yes, surveying their realm. Through the window before them, across the drop of the land, you could see the far side of the valley, the line of the hills. A blue sky, a puff or two of cloud, the speck of a buzzard wheeling. In between was the green, stirring crown of the oak tree.
    ‘Now,’ Ellie had said, ‘you stay here and I’ll go and make us a pot of tea.’
    And she’d gone down, in her bare arse, to the kitchen, Ellie Merrick, in her bare arse in the Jebb kitchen, in Jebb Farmhouse. And he’d thought, it wasn’t a bad arse (nor all the rest), if it wasn’t the baby arse he’d first clapped hands on fifteen years or more ago. How long had he known Ellie? Long enough to have forgotten how long. Long enough for it to have been at times an on-and-off thing. Long enough to have watched her change and change back again, to come in and out of her best. He must have done the same himself, even if he’d never noticed. Always feeling anyway like the same old lump.
    He couldn’t say, by any stretch, that he was a connoisseur of women, but he was a connoisseur of Ellie. And, judging by Ellie, it was strange the way time could work on women, and not always