Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift Page A

him a letter. The July sky at the window. They were in the Big Bedroom.
    Out of the blue? But
this
wasn’t out of the blue—setting aside that it was a gloomy grey morning. This had always been a cloud, a possible cloud, lurking over the horizon.
    Yet he’d thought, all the same, of blue summer skies. Skies with smoke, perhaps, rising somewhere in them. He’d thought of barbecues. They were allowed down at the site (though every unit, of course, had its kitchenette), but only by permission and with approved equipment. Sometimes, of an August evening, the whole place smelt of charring burgers.
    Blue, burning skies. They’d have to cancel St Lucia.
    Though that wasn’t till after Christmas. This was still early November. Ellie, he could see from that look—his super-fast brain could see it—was already calculating that this thing (was there some proper word to give it?) would have blown over by then. In a month or so it would be behind them. The air would be clear and blue again, even bluer. That cloud, having arrived and shed its burden, would no longer be there. Ellie was actually thinking, even then, that if this thing had been going to happen, it had been well timed. All the more reason for taking a holiday. A problem behind them.
    Whereas he’d thought, how could you take a holiday after this? How could you just fly off into the blue?
    So he shouldn’t have said it. And perhaps, if he hadn’t, Ellie would have been with him, at his side, three days ago. She’d have been with him in the car as he drove all those long, solitary miles. And he wouldn’t be sitting at this window, a gun at his back. None of this would be happening.
    Had he even had the thought, even then, the letter between them, that this thing that he’d always feared, whichwas the worst of worst possibilities, was really, perhaps, the thing Ellie might have wished? Her best possibility.
    ‘Well, thank God, Jack, at least this has come in the off season.’
    She should never have said
that
. And even from a practical point of view—surely Ellie saw this, she being the one who always saw things so sharply—that gap of almost two months ahead might not be so roomy after all. There was no date given in the letter. That is, the letter itself was dated and there
was
a date, very clearly, uncannily, given in it. Jack had tried to remember what he’d been doing on that date (it was a Saturday), whether at any point he’d felt anything turn over mysteriously inside him. But there was no
future
date. And there was thus a question, which he thought he’d quickly answered, of two flights. There was the flight about which the letter said he’d be kept closely informed. And there was the flight, which wasn’t going to happen, to St Lucia.
    Though the letter hadn’t used the word flight. It had used a word which Jack had never encountered before but which would lie now in his head like some piece of mental territory: repatriation.
    Once upon a time, and it would have been the same too for Tom, the notion of being anywhere other than England would have seemed totally crazy to Jack and quite beyond any circumstance that might include him. Though he knew that the world contained people who went, who flew, regularly, to other places. He knew that the world included other places. He’d done some geography at school. He’d once learnt, if he couldn’t remember themnow, the capitals of Argentina and Peru. But, for all practical purposes, even England had meant only what the eye could see from Jebb Farmhouse—or what lay within a ten-mile journey in the Land Rover or pick-up.
    There’d been a few day-trips to Exeter or Barnstaple. Two stays, once, in another
county:
Dorset. Even the Isle of Wight, once, would have seemed like going abroad.
    If you’d have said to Jack that one day he’d find himself in St Lucia—and, before that, twice in Antigua and three times in Barbados—he’d have said you were barking. (And, anyway, where
were
those places?)