Wish You Were Here

But the officer, whose name was Major Richards—and Jack had spoken to him the preceding day, as requested, on the phone—was in his early fifties and, before he’d put on his cap, Jack could see that his hair was grey and receding and that he looked, in some ways, more like a visiting doctor or some peculiarly burdened schoolmaster than an army officer.

Major Richards had stood for a moment and put his cap on very squarely, pul ed his tunic straight and, tucking the wal et under his arm, had coughed into his hand. Then he’d walked the few paces to the front door of Lookout Cottage not quite as if he were marching, but as if ceremony and dignity were not out of place and he knew he might be being watched.

Major Richards had explained, even rather insisted, on the phone that this was how the battalion did things. A personal visit, regardless of how notification had actual y been made, to express the battalion’s condolences and sympathies—and loss, and gratitude. And to explain related matters. In the circumstances, nothing less was proper, and he was the appointed visiting officer. So Jack had found himself agreeing to an imminent visitation by the army. He hadn’t consulted El ie, but he’d said after putting down the phone, and repeating Major Richards’s words almost exactly, that it was how they did things and he’d agreed to it.

So they’d had to tidy up the place—though it was not an inspection—and El ie had put on something smart and vaguely solemn—she chose her black skirt and pale-grey V-neck with her imitation pearls—to go with Jack’s black trousers and white shirt (things he was never normal y seen in), and they’d both prepared to pretend that this was how they always loafed around the cottage on a weekday morning. El ie had looked at him with a strange, appraising tenderness as they’d dressed in this unusual way. It was like the day they got married. And even as Major Richards strode towards the front door, Jack, having descended the stairs, was on the other side of it, waiting in his crisp white shirt and, in spite of himself, not quite resisting the urge—

he’d feel it again in the coming days—to stand to attention.

Major Richards had said, “Mr. Luxton?” And had asked very formal y if he might come in and, when he did, had removed his cap with a distinct and formal gesture. It had been on his head for just the few steps he’d taken from his car. He’d shaken their hands and at once, while stil on his feet, had expressed again, to them both, the battalion’s profound regrets and condolences. He’d said that Corporal Luxton was a brave and exemplary soldier who’d done his duty to the utmost, so that the army was proud of him, and that this was a great blow to everyone.

Jack had lost the immediate sensation of being under arrest or that he was about to have some order barked at him, but he’d felt that, though it was he who’d shown in their visitor and introduced him to his wife, it was more as if Major Richards was greeting them and ushering them into his world. Everything was the wrong way round.

Only when Major Richards had sat down, placing his cap very careful y on another seat close by and the leather wal et on his knees and meanwhile accepting cordial y El ie’s offer of a cup of tea, did the thing relax, if such a thing can relax. With his cap off, he didn’t seem so intimidating.

Looking at them both very attentively, his eyes making regular sweeps between them, Major Richards had reiterated the point about the battalion liking to do things this way. He apologised for the letter’s having reached them by its delayed and roundabout route. He apologised (though it wasn’t his fault) for the need for the letter at al . In most cases, the news, the sad news itself, would be communicated directly, and very quickly, in person. There were what he cal ed “army families.” Jack understood that he and El ie, if they were a family at al , were not an “army family.” In other cases, Major Richards had explained, it was only wise to avoid what might be a wasted or impractical initial journey. As to his own journey right now (since El ie had kindly enquired), it had actual y been quite short—not that shortness mattered: Wiltshire, not so far from Salisbury, to the Isle of Wight.

AND NOT SUCH an unpleasant one, Major Richards might have added, if the circumstances had been different. He might have said something complimentary about the real y remarkably pleasant situation they had here. The fine view, even on a grey day like today. As he’d parked the car he’d noticed the caravans, in their neat rows, down below.

HE’D LOOKED at Jack and El ie attentively, as if silently confirming permission to proceed, then had unzipped his leather wal et. He’d said that Corporal Luxton had been kil ed, as stated in the letter, on the fourth of November and at approximately three p.m., local time. It was not possible for him to give many details at this point—he was obviously just a home-based officer—but he could confirm that Corporal Luxton would have died instantly, on active, front-line duty, and that his record was such that he would undoubtedly have been promoted soon to sergeant. He’d been trained as a sniper—had himself been a trainer of snipers—but had been kil ed when the armoured vehicle he was in had triggered an exceptional y lethal roadside bomb. Two other members of his section had been kil ed and two wounded, one seriously. It was a very grave incident and a very great loss. These were things, nonetheless, that soldiers in Iraq risked every day.

Major Richards had left a little measured pause, though he did not actual y say, “Do you have any questions?” Then, taking out a pen and one of the documents from his wal et, but with an air of being ready to reverse or modify these simple actions if necessary, he’d said that he was sorry to have to ask for such information at such a time, but there were certain matters he needed to confirm.

That Corporal Luxton was never married.

“No,” Jack said, though he wouldn’t have known.

Had no children?

“No,” Jack said again, though he might have said, “Not that I know of.”

Or other dependants?

“No,” Jack said.

Parents?

It seemed to Jack that Major Richards had somehow delayed this question and that he might have done so in some knowing or meaningful way. That it might even be a trick question.

“Dead,” Jack had said. It was surely the correct and the quickest answer, but the word came oddly and echoingly from his lips, as if Vera and Michael might have died, too, in an armoured vehicle in Iraq.

“There are no other relatives,” Major Richards had then asked, “or persons close to Corporal Luxton whom you feel should be informed—I mean, official y informed, other than by yourself?”

“No,” Jack had said.

“You are, in fact, the only living relative?”

“Yes,” Jack said, huskily, as if this might be another trick question, an even trickier question. He felt quite clearly now that he was under suspicion, if not under interrogation or on trial. So he was surprised when Major Richards suddenly said, using words he’d used before, but looking at him directly, in a different, softer way, “Let me offer you my personal condolences.” He said it as if he, Major Richards, might have suddenly become a relative of the kind just denied, some sort of temporary father, and might have wished even to reach out and grasp Jack’s arm, so conveying that he understood that Jack was of the same stuff as the dead man being referred to, that he, Jack, and Tom were interchangeable. The Luxton brothers.

And Jack would never forget it. As he’d never forget that moment, looking from this window, when after the black saloon had stopped in the turning-space—the same turning-space that is now, beneath him, a lacework of ruffled puddles—he’d had the impossible thought that this figure in a uniform might be Tom.

Jack had felt himself starting to tremble again, under Major Richards’s gaze, as he’d done under El ie’s gaze when they’d both first read the letter, and he’d started to want Major Richards to leave.

But Major Richards, now handing Jack a number of papers from his wal et, which were Jack’s copies to keep, had begun to explain that “because of the circumstances on the ground” it was not possible to say as yet exactly when Corporal Luxton would be repatriated, but that it would be soon and that Jack would be kept closely informed. There would be a ceremony, of course, and al due assistance would subsequently be given, fol owing the coroner’s release, in whatever funeral arrangements might be decided upon. Meanwhile, Jack shouldn’t hesitate to cal at any time.

This was adding little to what had been said in the letter, and Jack was able to wonder, as Major Richards spoke, whether

the

unspecified

delay

and

the

word

“circumstances” and that strange phrase “on the ground” (where else did circumstances happen?) might al be to do with the fact that there was no body real y, or not in the usual sense of that word, or that the manner of Corporal Luxton’s death, and his comrades’, might not have been so instant after al . That the “incident”—that word had been used at some point—required the army’s own careful investigation.

No one yet had used the word “body.”

But mainly Jack was trying to control the trembling of his own body.

Perhaps Major Richards saw this. He saw anyway (and he was not unpractised in this observation) that this visit, though there were other matters stil to be dealt with, shouldn’t be extended very much further. He’d brought with him, for example, just in case, copies of recent photographs of Corporal Luxton, but he quickly calculated that this wouldn’t be the moment to produce them from his wal et. The principal purpose of his visit, that it should simply have been made, was fulfil ed. The battalion had been represented in person and in uniform. This, Major Richards knew, was, among his several duties, the most important and most symbolic, and often the most difficult.

But Major Richards was only too aware that soldiers had to do far tougher things.

IT WAS NOW VERY UNLIKELY that Major Richards, who quite frequently regretted the course of his career and the fact that he was not by now a colonel, would be cal ed upon to do those far tougher things. And, of course, demanding as it was, being the messenger was far easier than being the receiver. He made conscious efforts to remind himself of this.

On a number of occasions now—and recently these occasions had intensified—Major Richards had been required to announce the actual news in person himself. Of a death (not so often, thank goodness), of a wounding or hospitalisation. Since, with the army’s increasing tendency to merge regiments, his duties effectively operated at brigade level (though he stil thought of himself as “First Battalion”) and since he’d been deemed good at them, he was not inexperienced. There could be a wife, smal children. Or just parents, brothers, sisters. The average age of a soldier meant that his family might very often stil al be in one place. This could be both convenient and not. You might walk in on some cluttered, ordinary domestic scene.

Everyday havoc. They would always look guilty and apologise for the mess.

He’d taught himself always to look them directly in the eye. Of course, it helped you, but didn’t help them, that they invariably guessed why you were there, as soon as they saw you in your cap. They often even said the words for you: the worst words—which he might be able to correct.

Not kil ed, no. But if it was the worst, or even not (not kil ed, no, just paralysed) then the reaction could go any way, any old way at al . If, say, it was a young mother and two toddlers. They could explode straight away, or later.

Sometimes they could tel you, and it was an order you couldn’t disobey, to make a swift exit. You had to be ready and alert.

It gave Major Richards little satisfaction that he’d acquired the tactical if hardly military skil of knowing when to beat a retreat. Having sat in Lookout Cottage for barely half an hour and having drunk the statutory (but decent) cup of tea, he sensed the need to exercise this ability once again.

Major Richards had never been in Iraq or Afghanistan or indeed in any place where, at the time, actual explosions had occurred and bodies been fragmented. He’d missed the Falklands, as a junior officer—which, for a while, had rankled. Even his tours in Northern Ireland had been quiet.

But he had, in recent months, been an intimate witness to some immediate consequences of what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had, as it were, been present at several scenes of devastation, enough to know that such scenes were proliferating and increasingly pockmarking the land (though they were as nothing, he understood, to the frequency of such scenes in Iraq or Afghanistan). Enough to give him a curious sense of the country in which he dwelt and to which he owed a soldier’s al egiance.

Mostly he did what he did by a process of becoming accustomed to it, if you could ever be, and by the application of instinct. He couldn’t say, as a soldier in Iraq might say, that he was trained. Often he felt like a civilian in uniform, a pretend soldier. As to the rights and wrongs, the whys and wherefores, of the operations in the Middle East, he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t comment, even when (though it was surprisingly rare, one of the less-encountered complications) they demanded that you did.

But this case—Corporal Luxton—was real y very simple.

Just one living relative, as he’d now confirmed. That had its peculiar sadness and bleakness perhaps, but there would be no further family network (it was a sort of comfort) to trouble, no further connections running like underground wires for further domestic detonations to occur. Just one relative and a wife. And—seeing as they’d had time already to absorb the basic news—there’d been no distressing outbursts. None of the howls or moans or terrifying speechlessness he’d sometimes known.

And, as it happened, he’d never been, in al his life, to the Isle of Wight. When he’d crossed the water, a strange, light-hearted mood had gripped him. Hardly appropriate. But he thought, not for the first time that day, as he strode back to his car, cap on again, shoulders square (he knew from experience that they stil might be watching or that, once the door closed behind you and you’d straightened your back, al kinds of col apsing might be going on inside) that, had he not been in uniform, he might have taken the chance for a mooch around. A walk. A breath of sea air. His uniform was the bind. It was so mild and stil , the sea, from here, like a sheet of polished steel.

What a marvel ous spot. Lookout Cottage.

It would hardly have been right to say, on such a day, that he even felt a little envious. It certainly wasn’t typical, not typical at al , of the places he had to visit. Housing estates, military or otherwise. He wondered how someone from a farmhouse in Devon—that was the previous given address (and the man had spoken with a real Devon burr)—came to be living in a cottage in the Isle of Wight and running a caravan site. And what must that be like to do? Not bad at al , maybe. He’d looked again at those white oblongs.

No outbursts, anyway. The wife had looked pretty steady, in fact, even a little hard-eyed. Wel , it wasn’t her boy, just a brother-in-law. No children, apparently. Just them. An odd couple perhaps, something not quite as one between them in the face of this news. But you saw al sorts of things.

As for him, Jack, the only relative, wel yes, that was tough. Your only brother. Your younger brother—Major Richards had reckoned that the gap must be several years.

And he’d noticed before he left (it was even why he’d left) something going on inside Jack Luxton, something deep and contained, that might need its outburst at some time.

On the other hand he didn’t look like a man given to outbursts, or to much extravagant self-expression at al . He looked pretty hefty and—what was the word?—bovine. He looked—and judging from those photographs stil in his wal et his brother had been just the same—like a big strong man.

12

QUICKER AND BETTER at just about everything. He would swing that gun, when it was stil too big for him, swing it far too much, Jack would think, and fire as if the shot were like a rope that couldn’t help tighten on its target. Rabbit, crow, pigeon. Pigeons were the trickiest. Big, clumsy birds, sitting on the bare branches in Brinkley Wood, sitting ducks you’d think, but they knew when a gun was being pointed.

Though not, apparently, when Tom was pointing it. A sniper.

Two pigeons dangling by their necks on a string from Tom’s belt, wet with Luke’s saliva. None for himself. Three misses, in his case, al hitting the space where a pigeon had been. But he hadn’t minded. “That’s two between us,” Tom would say, and mean it.

Walking back through the wood on a grey, hard January morning. Time off, after milking, on a Sunday morning.

Time off to be just two brothers. Even Dad could recognise and concede it. Like Mum fighting for those two holidays.

After a long, unyielding silence: “Wel , off you go, then.” An hour’s shooting on a Sunday morning. Dad wouldn’t come himself, though he was a decent shot. Perhaps he knew that Tom could already outshoot him. And he’d give the permission as if he, Jack, were just a kid too, needing permission, though he was turning twenty now and the idea, the concession, was that he was supposed to be Tom’s teacher. Tom didn’t need his father watching over him. Tom was old enough to learn to shoot and Jack was old enough to be his teacher. As if Tom needed any teaching.

Coming back through the wood. The crack of twigs. Luke snuffling through the dead leaves ahead of them. Tom was only twelve, thirteen. Mum was stil alive. It wasn’t even a thought: that she might not always be. Mum had raised Luke herself, from a pup—the only one they’d kept from big old Bessie’s last litter.

Tom didn’t have his height yet and Jack would sometimes think that the difference in scale between him and Tom was like the difference in scale between Tom and Luke. But Tom had the two pigeons.

Through the trees and from al sides of the val ey would come now and then the smal , bouncy “pop-pop” of other guns. Sunday-morning shooting. The farming fraternity would cal it “going to church.” The wood, on a stil , grey morning, with the pil ars of trees, was not unlike a church.

“The farming fraternity”: that was a phrase Dad would sometimes use, keeping a straight face, though you knew he thought it was a joke of a phrase.

Along the track to the gate, then up the steepening slope of Barton Field, past the big oak, breathing hard, their throats taking in the cold air and sending it out again as steam. Jack had the gun—it was heavy, for a boy, to carry up the hil —but Tom had the pigeons. And then at some point, before the farmhouse came into view above them, beyond the rise and swel of the field, they’d stop to draw breath, and Tom would untie one of the pigeons and give it to him. True to his word. “Here, Jack.” The dead black eye of the pigeon in Jack’s hand would look at him as if to say,

“And I won’t say a word either.” Then they’d carry on up the hil , al the val ey and the far hil s opening up behind them as they climbed, they didn’t have to look behind to know it.

Pigeon pie that evening.

Pigeons. Sandcastles. And, it couldn’t be denied, girls too. Quicker and better. Too young then, at twelve.

Probably. But he was already going to Abbot’s Green School, waiting every morning by the Jebb gate for the school bus to swing round the bend and scoop him up. Half a dozen or so already inside, two or three girls among them. Kathy Hawkes from Polstowe.

Once, five or six years before, the same bus with the same driver, Bil Spurel , would have picked up Jack and, a little further down the Marleston road, El ie Merrick. But with that eight-year gap between them, Tom didn’t have any big brother around to cramp his before-and-after-school activities, and even perhaps by the time he was thirteen, by the time Mum had died, he would already have got started.

Maybe saying to himself that, given the new situation, given that Mum wasn’t around and Dad wouldn’t waste a chance to haul him out of the classroom, he’d better make the most of his opportunity. He’d better make hay, while he could, with schoolgirls. What other kind of girl was there going?

And maybe girls go for a boy who’s just lost his mum, they can’t help it. It’s a sure-fire recipe, and Tom knew it. Maybe that’s why he could crack those eggs so damn neatly.

He got through them anyhow, girls, while he could. It wasn’t for Tom like it was for him, Jack, with El ie: the feeling that this one, the one that seemed to have been put there special y in front of him, was the one he should take, for keeps if he could. And he’d better not move on and see what else might be going, because he might end up having nothing. Her being his age, too, and just across that boundary hedge. Not just an after-school thing. The two of them down in Brinkley Wood sometimes, not shooting pigeons, or going to church exactly.

He’d always thought he should stick with El ie. General y speaking, Jack was a sticker, a settler. He didn’t have the moving-on instinct, or he never real y thought he could move on. Whereas Tom, clearly, was a mover-on, in more ways than one. By the time he was eighteen, very clearly. A mover-on and leaver-behind. And no doubt as a soldier he’d have got his quota of passing female company, as soldiers do, no difficulty. And that would have suited him and was just as wel , now. No sticking, nothing for keeps.

Like pigeons.

Would he have stayed clear of El ie? She was eight years older and she was his brother’s—say no more. But would El ie have stayed clear of Tom? It might have made a change. He could almost see it from El ie’s point of view.

But he knew, now, that nothing had happened, he was sure now of that. Though it would have been a strange comfort al the same, if El ie had broken down and confessed: “Oh, Jack, there’s something I’ve never told you …” If he’d been able to put his arms round her and say,

“It doesn’t matter.” Or even: “I always had a feeling.” If it had meant that El ie could have wept too over his little lost brother, last-but-one of al the Luxtons. And if it had made her say, like she should have done, that yes, of course, she’d come with him, she’d be with him, no question, on that awful bloody journey.

Why the hel hadn’t she, anyway?

And, real y, he wouldn’t have minded, now, if she’d confessed at the time or if Tom had even given it as one of his reasons: “I’m getting out of your way, Jack, if you know what I mean. No more stepping on your territory. She’s al yours now.”

Everything would be al his.

Always the feeling, even when Tom was several jumps ahead, that he was Tom’s protector. So if Tom had taken a turn or two with El ie, it would have been like teaching him how to shoot pigeons.

. . .

WHEN TOM WAS BORN Jack was eight, and he hadn’t expected, any more than anyone else, that he’d ever have a brother. But then there was this tiny, gurgly, spluttery baby, and there was Vera, looking for a while as if she’d been pul ed through a baler. And for a short period of his life Jack had felt not so much like a brother, but—long before Tom would show the same aptitude—like a bit of a mother. And a bit of a father. There were times when, since he was only eight, he’d find himself alone with his mother and this new little pink-skinned bundle.

Up in the Big Bedroom, stowed away in a corner, was an old-fashioned wooden cradle—hardly more than two thick chunks of wood joined in a “V” and fixed to a pair of rockers. Everyone knew it was very old. Like so much else in that room, like the Big Bed itself and the old wooden chest, it was an heirloom, and there was no saying how many Luxtons had been rocked in it. Those two Luxton lads on the war memorial, surely. And Michael had been rocked in it, which was very hard to imagine. It was very hard to imagine

any

big-framed

Luxtons

ever

squeezing

themselves into a cradle.

But Jack had been cradled in it, and had been told so.

When he was stil only eight it was not so impossible to conceive of having once been in it. But now there was Tom in it anyway, fitting it perfectly.

And Jack had rocked him. Pretty often. Like a mother. In fact, few things were better and sweeter for Jack when he was eight years old than to be told by his mother that he could rock Tom for a bit, if he wanted to. It wasn’t real y a matter of permission or even of invitation, but there was a thril in receiving the prompting, and nothing was better and sweeter, Jack felt, than to be rocking Tom under his mother’s gaze, to feel and to hear the tilt and gentle rumble as the cradle, and Tom with it, swayed from side to side.

Jack rocked Tom in his cradle. Also, when he was al owed to, he would pick Tom up and carry him around.

He’d even sometimes kiss Tom on his funny little head.

He’d grip Tom under his shoulders and—standing himself at his ful eight- or nine-year-old height—lift him right up so his legs dangled. At eight or nine, Jack had possessed his window of opportunity for doing such things, before his dad had begun to frown on them.

But he’d never said, later, to Tom, even if Tom perhaps might have imagined it: “Tom, I rocked you once. In that cradle.” He’d never said, “I dangled you.” How could he ever say it? And now he never would. And he’d never know if his mother had ever said it for him. Never in Jack’s hearing anyway.

How could he have said it, or when? When they were down in the woods, shooting? Or sharing the milking? Or when Tom had come home from school, down the track from the gate, after his hand had been up Kathy Hawkes’

skirt? “Tom, I once—”

Or before Tom climbed, for the last time, up that same track, that December night? Though how could he have said it then, of al times? Though perhaps he had said it—

thought it anyhow—into his pil ow. As he’d said it to himself, a thousand times, while just watching Tom grow.

ELLIE WANTED A CHILD, children, he knew that. And he didn’t. For his own reasons, but for reasons that El ie knew perfectly wel in her way. He simply hadn’t wanted any more of himself, of his own uprooted stock, after Tom had left and then he and El ie had left too. And Dad had gone anyway.

He hadn’t wanted any passing on.

“No more Jebb, no more Luxtons, El .”

It was how he’d felt. And it was part of an unspoken pact between them, along with the caravans and the cottage and the holidays in the Caribbean. Along with the steep learning curve and the lightening up. He wasn’t conceding quite everything.

The subject had certainly hovered between them, that afternoon at Jebb in the Big Bedroom, as the word

“caravans” had hovered, as if that word itself might even have been a code for it. What better place for it to hover than in that big bed? And it had been a real enough prospect then. As real and as natural as that oak tree beyond the window. And El ie wouldn’t have so long, perhaps. Her window of opportunity. Jesus, she might have been planning something right then.

But the subject had only hovered, then flitted away. To be considered later, maybe. One thing at a time. And he had a lot to consider. Everything he was looking at, for a start, everything you could see from that window. And that letter.

Over in the corner, in the shadows, the wooden cradle would stil have been there. And El ie’s eyes, that afternoon, had been doing their roaming. She’d never seen the inside of Jebb Farmhouse at such close quarters before. She must have noticed the cradle. And she might have made some joke, as her way of broaching the subject, about him once having been in it, and look at the bloody size of him now. But she hadn’t broached the subject. So she must have seen his thinking, his position on it, already in him. Or decided to leave it til later. Enough work for one summer’s day.

But she must have noticed that cradle, and maybe her simple thought was: Wel , Jack once had his damn baby.

And that was why she’d said that thing about Tom. “Forget him, Jack.” Or she might have just thought: Time enough, time enough stil . Not yet twenty-eight and in peak condition.

Her eyes had done their roaming anyway. When he and El ie came, about a year later, to do the sel ing—separately but together, as it were—before they had al those people round (their eyes roaming too), he’d said, “And what about al the stuff? I mean the stuff inside, the furniture.” He hadn’t meant the stuff at Westcott, that was El ie’s business. So why should he have asked on his own account about Jebb, as if he needed her instruction?

“You sel it too, Jack. We sel it too.” She’d even looked a little impatient with him. “You might be surprised what you get for some of those things. I’d say you’ve got enough there to fil a whole antiques shop.”

And so, because El ie had given him the go-ahead and because anyway it was like giving her a sort of sign, he’d sold the cradle. What would they want with a cradle?

Though it had cost him a wrench, a hel of a wrench.

But he hadn’t sold the shotgun. Or the medal.

13

WHEN ELLIE HAD SHUT THE DOOR behind Major Richards—it was she who’d shown him out, she could see Jack wasn’t up to it—she’d felt, for the first time since that letter had arrived, like crying herself. This was different from the letter.

It was different when a man in a uniform turned up at your front door. You knew then it wasn’t just a piece of paper.

And it wouldn’t just blow away as pieces of paper could.

Of course she could remember Tom. Little Tom, then big Tom, just as big as his brother. Big enough, certainly, to go off and be a soldier. When Jack had told her—but only after it had happened—that this was what Tom had done and that he, Jack, had known al about it beforehand, she’d breathed, she couldn’t help it, a grateful sigh. She’d been surprised, but she’d been glad, though she’d tried not to show it. There wasn’t any reason to be cut up about it—if, so it seemed, Jack wasn’t. If it was what Tom had wanted and planned and he’d gone and done it, then good luck to him. And if Jack had been in on it and wasn’t cut up about it, then so much the better.

It was Michael Luxton who’d been cut up about it, and had taken it out on Jack. But Jack had just taken that in his turn, so it seemed, as if he were doing it for Tom’s sake, not even tel ing his dad, til he thought it was safe, where Tom had gone. Though he’d told her, one January afternoon at Westcott. “He’s joined the army, El . You don’t know that I told you this.” As if his dad might have come round and throttled it out of her.

. . .

THAT DAY , that January afternoon, had in fact been one of the better, brighter days of her life. She’d squeezed and hugged Jack’s big, familiar body with a new eagerness (had he noticed?), but also with a delicacy, as if he might have been bruised by real blows from his father. Michael Luxton, it was true, could sometimes scare her. He wasn’t scary in any obvious way, but he could sometimes frighten her. If there should be a choice of fathers with whom you’d have to live alone for the foreseeable and barely thinkable future, then she’d choose her own father, smal and nimble, not towering and looming. Smal and sly and with a regular glint of mischief in his face, which she knew was a mask (even though she could be a sucker for it), a bravado put there mainly by alcohol. Her father owned her, but he didn’t scare her. She’d choose him of the two. But then she’d chosen Jack, who could sometimes look the image of his father.

“This is just between you and me, El .”

She’d run her palms softly over his big frame as if she’d never done it before. Their situations were the same now, equal. They each had to shoulder their fathers, just their fathers. Tom was gone. A soldier. One of the better days of her life. Though she could feel, beneath the skin, beneath the imaginary bruises from his father, the wound of Tom’s departure hidden in Jack’s heavy flesh.

It was a grey, bitter January afternoon, the heater ticking in her bedroom—“their bedroom”—and somewhere out in the cold of the farm, if he was only consulting his hip flask in the Land Rover, her dad was keeping his distance, as usual, so they could have the house. It was how he kept her there—it was the deal. What a pittance of a deal. And, Jesus, they were both twenty-six.

But Tom was gone, and this was one of the better afternoons. There was more than one kind of soldiering.

Not al of it was done by soldiers, or by men. She’d shut her eyes and run her fingers over Jack’s shoulders, down his spine, as a blind person might seek to recognise the shape of something. The shape—the ache in her own flesh—of her love for him.

SOMETIMES ELLIE could think she didn’t know, she didn’t understand at al , this man she’d known, in fact, as long as she could remember. Since long before he was a man or she was a woman. That was how it was. Man and boy, girl and woman. Sometimes the thought of it, as if they’d been born together, could make her smile, sometimes it would crush her. She knew that other women might have thought: What a shame. What a shame for poor El ie Merrick that it wasn’t the other way round, that Jack wasn’t Tom. But she’d never, honestly, thought of it like that, and when she imagined those other women, shaking their heads, her blood could gather and she could feel she had claws she might fiercely use in defence of Jack Luxton. She could feel as she supposed Jack must have felt when he copped it from his dad on account of his little runaway brother.

El ie didn’t know much about the army, but she could see it was a simple, al -in solution for a man of Tom’s age, and Tom would hardly have been the first. One moment a cowshed in a gone-to-pot farm, next moment a barracks.

The main thing was he’d got out. He’d shown it could be done. Tom was not unlike her mother. And Jack might have done the same himself, as much as eight years ago, or more. But then his mother would have stil been alive, and Tom would have been barely ten.

And, anyway, if Jack had ever gone off to join or do anything, it would have meant deserting her, El ie.

She didn’t know Jack? She didn’t understand how it truly was with him and her? Oh, but yes she did.

Once upon a time, when El ie was stil a pupil, like Jack, at the tiny primary school in Marleston, jealousy had entered her life in the form of an unexpected new arrival at Jebb Farm. At first she’d supposed that this strange, nagging emotion was because she would have liked the same for herself, a little baby brother or sister. Up until then she and Jack had been equal in not having either.

But no surprise event like the one that had occurred at Jebb Farm was to occur at Westcott Farm and there was certainly fat chance of its ever occurring once, several years later, El ie’s mother had made her sudden exit. By then, so far as new arrivals went, there was a much greater chance that El ie herself, if she wasn’t careful, might get pregnant. But by then, too, El ie had grown up with her jealousy and knew that it wasn’t so much that she wanted any more a little sibling of her own, but that she was jealous of that part of Jack that belonged to his brother.

How it had once pained her, and how she’d had to hide it, when the three of them—Jack, Tom and Vera—had gone away together those two years running. Only a week, but how her jealousy had seethed. But then how her heart had soared (though she’d never said so) when she’d got that postcard from Dorset.

“We are al living in a caravan cal ed Maralin.” Jealousy wasn’t even the word, perhaps, by the time her mother had done her bunk. El ie had grown up resenting Tom Luxton, resenting him and hiding it. Hiding it to the extent sometimes of even pretending that she too, like his big brother, loved him. Wasn’t he just so lovable? They’d played games, once, she and Jack, of pretending they were Tom’s mother and father.

Wasn’t he just so adorable? Al of which acquired its complication when, many years later, Tom was old enough to be interested in girls—and vice versa. Of course she could see that Tom was the kind of boy any girl would fal for. Fal over backwards, like little Kathy Hawkes. Wel , good luck to her. And of course she could see that there was even sometimes just a touch of unease, of jealousy coming in the other direction, from Jack.

Wel , it level ed the score a little. She didn’t exactly tel him not to be so daft. But couldn’t he damn wel see?

Couldn’t Jack see? Eight years was eight years. And couldn’t anyone see by then, even if Jack couldn’t, that—

cal her stupid, cal her not choosy—she was Jack’s and Jack’s only, plain and simple. It was how it was, it was how she was. Where else did al that resentment come from?

But Jack had simply never seen, never noticed what would have been the biggest reason for his not needing to have any jealousy of his own. That she could have done without little Tom altogether. Tom himself could see it, she knew that. He had sharper eyes than his brother. But he’d just shut up about it.

It was something short of the whole hundred per cent, that part of Jack that she could cal her own, and what she did have, she only had properly, after her mother’s departure, on a couple of weekday afternoons. And that only as a pay-off from her father. Jack, too, was a slave to his father, and he was his mother’s favourite (she knew that and she didn’t blame Vera) and there was this big chunk of him anyway that belonged with his brother. How much did that leave for El ie?

But then Vera had died. Then Tom had gone away. And Jack, on the surface, didn’t seem so cut up about it, though Michael was. And, though she took care not to show it, El ie’s hopes had lifted—so far as that was possible when everything was laid low by the effects of mad-cow disease.

Because at least now she was shot of Tom.

From then on El ie had begun to do some extra wishing.

What could she do but wish? And when, not so very long after Tom disappeared from the scene, Michael Luxton, in his own way, dropped out of it too, she’d begun to feel that wishing wasn’t such a useless thing to fal back on, since it seemed it could have real effect. On the other hand, there were limits, serious limits, to wishing, even secretly. And she’d begun also to be a little afraid of her wishes. “Shot of,” it was only an expression.

But then there’d been that letter, out of the blue, from the man she chose to cal , as if she’d known him al her life, her

“Uncle” Tony. Or rather from his solicitors, Gibbs and Parker, of Newport, Isle of Wight, with their condolences and kindest regards.

In al her secret wishing and hoping, El ie had never been so foolishly wishful as to rely upon some stroke of sheer magic. True, she’d liked to tease Jack sometimes about her “mystery man.” But now that a stroke of magic had occurred—and there was, in a sense, a mystery man—she quickly enough converted it into a stroke of justice, even giddy justification. So, she hadn’t been wrong, after al , not total y to condemn her mother. Because in the end, and without knowing it, her mother had made amends.

“Caravans, Jacko.”

She’d waved the magic wand of that word over Jack’s head and fil ed in the picture for him of their combined and ful y provided-for future. Though she’d had to wait. She’d had to wait for another necessary, preliminary event to occur. Which had occurred, in fact, more quickly than she could ever have imagined, or—hand on heart—wished.

Though now that it had happened, she could see that it might seem to have happened because she’d wished it.

But in any case Jack had said, “Yes. Okay, El ie.” If he hadn’t said it quite as simply and readily as that, and if it had cost her, one way or another, a good deal of patience, trouble and heartache.

Though wasn’t that afternoon, that afternoon at Jebb, just the best ever? Wasn’t the world, at last, a good place to be in?

There was just one gap in the picture, and that was the gap that corresponded to the part of Jack that stil belonged to Tom, even though Tom had been absent now for over eighteen months and hadn’t even answered any letters.

She’d known not to push it too quickly or firmly. When so much else was going their way, and when, after al , she was stil not quite twenty-eight. Though when she did in fact push it—gently, she’d thought—the answer she’d got from Jack, pretty quickly and firmly, was that if he was going to leave Jebb, if he was going to be the last Luxton ever to farm there, then there shouldn’t be any more Luxtons at al .

As if she’d pushed him over some edge. Or as if that was his condition.

Wel , she’d thought, that was his mood of the moment. It was a big moment—they were going to sel two farms—

and a big condition. And he was stil , perhaps, in grief for his father. Grief and shock. It was a different sort of grief, Jack’s grief for his dad, from hers for her own father. It was a different sort of death. Though wasn’t it a wel -known remedy for grief: you lose one, you make another? It’s how it’s been known to happen.

Time was stil on her side, she’d thought, so far as that gap in the picture went. Time and a change of scene. But she’d been twenty-seven then, she was pushing forty now.

Years had passed. And though Jack had come out of the shel of his past long ago, even become a new kind of man (al that too had seemed the result of her wishing it), she knew that the obstacle was stil Tom, who was stil in the picture though out of it.

SO WHEN THAT LETTER had arrived, via Jebb Farmhouse, saying, with deepest regret, that Tom was dead, El ie had felt her hopes fly up once again. Though she hadn’t shown it. It wasn’t so difficult to disguise the feelings she’d always disguised. On the other hand, she wasn’t going to disguise them now to the extent of shedding false tears. Even when Jack had suddenly broken down in tears in a way she’d never seen before.

Her hopes had soared. She couldn’t help it. Tom was truly out of the picture now. Her mind had even foolishly raced ahead—even as Jack, holding that letter, had begun to tremble. She and Jack were in the clear now. Tom would never show up. And, who knows, one immediate, unstoppable effect of al this might be that she would suddenly get her long-thwarted wish. Jack might swing now completely the other way. Who knows, in just a few weeks’

time, in St. Lucia, at the Sapphire Bay, in their air-conditioned bungalow with the hot night outside, they might get down to serious work on it. If it was a boy, they might cal it Tom, if that’s what he wanted. She wouldn’t mind.

And if it was a girl (she didn’t care) they might cal it Vera. Or Marilyn.

Al this had flashed through her mind as she’d watched Jack Luxton tremble, then begin to shake, then spil over into tears. It wasn’t a familiar sight, or a pretty one. She’d put her arms round him and felt his big bones grate inside him.

And then, just as quickly, her thoughts had dropped back, sunk back into her own bones, as she’d understood a bigger truth that would only grow bigger, clearer in the hours, days, that would fol ow. That though Tom wasn’t coming back, yet he was coming back. So far as Jack was concerned, he was coming back big-time. He was coming back to bloody haunt them.

She’d seen the bit of Jack that belonged to Tom, even though he was dead, only growing bigger and the bit of Jack that was hers only growing smal er.

And then Jack had said that thing about St. Lucia.

IN ELLIE’S LIFE, and she was only thirty-nine, there’d been, up to now, only three significant written communications.

One was the letter just received by Jack. The second had been that miraculous letter from Uncle Tony’s lawyers. But the first and incomparably the most important at the time had been the postcard that had come once from Jack. She could stil see its bluer-than-blue sea and sky and curving beach and crescent of white cliffs, like someone’s broad smile. And she could stil see the face of her mother, Alice Merrick, as she stil was then, who’d handed it to her one morning with a smile.

How her heart had soared. Seethed and soared. El ie, at that time, had never seen the sea. Now here she was with Jack, living right by it. Sands End, the Sapphire Bay. One sea or another.

So when she’d shut the front door behind Major Richards, she’d felt like crying herself, having her own portion of tears. Not for poor Tom Luxton, but for al the stupid, patient, stubborn lengths a woman wil go to for a man. Al the things she wil do. Al her life long. When he wasn’t even, perhaps, when you stood back and looked, that much to speak of real y, that much to bloody write home about. Other women might say, “Him?”

But he’d been al that she had and most of the time, truly, al that she wanted to have. How her fingertips had searched his big body. If only she could have al of him. And she’d thought once that at last she even had that, and had made a whole future for both of them.

“Dear El ie, Wish you were here.”

14

WHEN HE WATCHED ELLIE close the door behind Major Richards, Jack was stil trembling inside. He felt as if he’d just been told again that Tom was dead, and this time it was real. The first time had been just a rehearsal, a sort of fire dril . But he knew he shouldn’t cry again, not in front of El ie. Once was enough and even then he’d been brief. It hadn’t helped the first time. It didn’t help anyway.

So he hadn’t, though it had cost him a struggle. He’d looked at El ie, who’d remained standing oddly by the front door, her back to it, as if there was something bad beyond it, though she’d looked, too, as if she were struggling with something inside her. It was the real shock and truth of it al , perhaps, only now getting through. But he didn’t get up to go to her. He knew that something had come between them since that letter. Al it took was a letter. But there was an invisible wal . If he walked across to her now, he’d hit it.

They’d both listened to the sounds of Major Richards starting his car, turning it and driving off down the road to Holn. El ie had stood there in that strange way by the door.

He’d thought: Is she going to cry now, is she final y going to cry for Tom, so I don’t have to? But she hadn’t cried, not then, nor at any point in the days that fol owed, and when, the next day, Major Richards had cal ed again, El ie had picked up the phone and more or less handed it straight to Jack as if it were some matter that was none of her business. “Major Richards,” she’d said as if Jack now had friends in high places.

Major Richards had told Jack he could now confirm that Corporal Luxton’s repatriation, along with that of the two soldiers who’d died with him, would take place on the fol owing Thursday. He’d given the name of an airbase that Jack had vaguely heard of, though he wouldn’t have been able to place it in Oxfordshire. Major Richards had also explained that because of the unusual delay in arranging repatriation (he didn’t explain that this delay was partly down to the delay in contacting Corporal Luxton’s next of kin) and because, meanwhile, thorough post-mortem procedures had been completed overseas, the Oxfordshire coroner, having read the MOD report and satisfied himself of the facts, would be prepared to grant an effectively immediate release. That is, an inquest would be formal y opened and at once adjourned on arrival of the repatriation flight, while the bodies could proceed directly, for their funerals, to their respective undertakers.

Major Richards pointed out that, in his experience, this was quite exceptional—for the civil authority to accept the military authority’s findings—and even suggested, in his tone, that Jack ought, real y, to be grateful. Jack, who had his own experience of coroners and inquests, didn’t feel it was exceptional. Or, rather, he felt that everything was now exceptional, so exceptionality had become the norm.

Major Richards was spared from explaining, as he normal y had to, though often hinting that it wasn’t a recommendation, that next of kin had the right to view the body while it rested in the coroner’s care. In this instance such a matter would be between Jack and his undertakers.

But Major Richards hoped it had never entered Jack’s head.

The situation, anyway, was that Jack was now free to make plans for Corporal Luxton’s funeral—in which, of course, there would be ful cooperation. In case Jack hadn’t understood these last remarks, Major Richards spelt it out that Jack would need to decide whether he wanted a private funeral or a funeral with military presence. This could be arranged. That in any case an undertaker’s hearse would need to be at the airbase to receive the coffin fol owing the ceremony and that the costs of this transportation, as wel as al the costs of Jack’s and Mrs.

Luxton’s “compassionate travel,” would be met by the army.

Jack (after a silence) had found himself saying the word Devon. The funeral would be in Devon. He’d even blurted out to Major Richards the name of an undertaker—since, limited as Jack’s dealings were in many areas, he’d had dealings in this area, too, before. Babbages in Barnstaple.

He’d had to arrange once, with Babbages, his father’s funeral. He knew the ropes in this area. On the other hand, the ropes now were rather different. Then again, his father’s ropes hadn’t been so simple.

Jack had said, “Marleston. Marleston, north Devon.” Then explained for Major Richards’s benefit that the nearest large town was Barnstaple. At the same time Jack had thought: the Isle of Wight to Oxfordshire, then to Marleston and back again. It would mean at least one night away somewhere.

Major Richards had explained that Jack and Mrs. Luxton would be sent further, ful details of the ceremony. And of course a formal invitation. To Jack, the word “invitation” didn’t seem like a word that went with the army, though in this case it didn’t seem like the right word anyway. Major Richards had said that meanwhile he’d continue to “liaise” (which seemed a real army word) by phone and even, if convenient, by a further visit, and that Jack shouldn’t hesitate if there were anything he wished to ask.

Though this last point was one Major Richards had made before, in person and with genuine kindness in his voice, Jack somehow felt that, now, it real y meant its opposite: that the decent thing was actual y to hesitate completely—

not to ask anything at al . It was as if Major Richards had become his commanding officer and had just said that any man was free, of course, to back out if he wished, but the decent thing was not to. It was like a test of soldiership.

It had always been, in any case, Jack’s basic position in life to hesitate to ask too many questions. He knew that he would never ask (though he would certainly wonder) exactly how—let alone why—his brother had died (he knew that the army would prefer him not to ask such questions). In the same way that he’d never raised with El ie the question, the peculiarity of their two fathers dying in such quick succession. Was death so infectious?

WHEN HE CAME OFF THE PHONE, Jack explained to El ie that they were bringing Tom home. He’d been given a date.

There would be a ceremony, at some airbase. And they were free to make immediate arrangements for the funeral.

So far, there hadn’t been much discussion between them about this inevitable prospect. It would have to be at Marleston, of course, Jack now said. It was his decision.

Though he wondered soon afterwards—and he wonders stil now—how different it might have been if he’d said that they should have the thing done local y. For the closeness and the convenience. At least then El ie might not have wriggled out. Though would she have liked the idea either?

In the twenty-four hours fol owing Major Richards’s visit Jack had felt that invisible wal settle only more rigidly between them—the wal , so he might have thought of it, of El ie’s failure to reach out and comfort him. Except it sometimes seemed—it was like an unjust reversal of the situation—that this might stem from some baffling failure on his part to comfort her.

As if he should have said, “I’m sorry, El . I’m truly sorry.” Without knowing what for.

A local funeral. A cremation even. So then they might have scattered the ashes—scattered Tom—over Holn Head. Or into the waves at Sands End. Stood together on the beach. Or in among the caravans. But Jack didn’t like the idea of cremation. It cal ed up bad pictures. Being a farmer, he natural y went for burial. And he had the distinct feeling that Tom might have been half-cremated already.

But, anyway, Marleston. Where else? He might have said: where al the rest of them are. Al Saints’ churchyard.

They would have to go to this—ceremony. Then they’d have to go on to the funeral in Marleston. They’d have to find somewhere to stay. Though, of course, they’d be just a mile or so from Jebb and Westcott, their former places of residence.

It was important to Jack, though it was also natural, that when he explained these things he used the word “we,” just as Major Richards had said “you and Mrs. Luxton.” In the pit of his stomach there was starting to form a tight bal of fear about this journey, this two-stage journey as it now turned out—about al the things, known and unknown, that it would entail. He hadn’t yet begun to contemplate every daunting detail. Yet it had to be done. It was, though the word was hardly good enough, a duty. And it wasn’t as if he, Jack, was being asked, like his brother, to enter a war zone, and so was entitled to this onset of fear. They’d have to go to a couple of places in England, that’s al , one of them very familiar. And El ie, Jack told himself, would be beside him.

But El ie, apparently, had other notions. El ie, when he gave this account of some of the necessary consequences of his brother’s death, took rapid and rather violent exception to his use of the word “we.”

“Who’s this ‘we’?” she suddenly demanded. “Who’s this

‘we’?” He saw her again, closing the door behind Major Richards, but remaining pressed against it and, so it seemed, trying to resist some further attempt at entry.

“Leave me out of this, Jack. I can’t come with you.” Jack was total y unprepared for this, but there was no mistaking the firmness of her position.

“I just can’t. He’s not my little brother.” He understood that she was backing out. It was a legitimate option, though he hadn’t offered it—as if he were El ie’s commanding officer. He hadn’t said he was asking for volunteers and that any man or woman was of course free to opt out. His big mistake, maybe. If he’d said, “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, El ,” then perhaps she would have come. It was how such things worked. But he hadn’t said it and she hadn’t done the decent thing anyway. She hadn’t even backed out decently.

Setting aside the fixed look on her face, Jack couldn’t be sure which of her words struck the hardest. That she wasn’t going to come? That he could no longer take the word “we,” meaning El ie and him, for granted? That Tom wasn’t her brother? That last statement was of course entirely correct, but Jack felt there was a sense, in this particular case, in which Tom was El ie’s brother, in which anyone as close to the matter as El ie was would have felt, at least for a short while: “this is my brother.” He felt another tremor of that bewildering need to comfort her.

Since Jack was a man already hit hard, he was, in one sense, numbed and immunised against these further blows El ie was now delivering. But afterwards he realised that it was the word “little” that had hurt him the most. El ie hadn’t had to say that. Yet it was the word, it seemed, she’d used with the greatest force. “Little.”

It wasn’t true of course, if it had been once. Tom was no longer little. You could say, maybe, that he was less than little now, since now he was nothing—he might not even be just one piece of nothing. And for some time now he’d been out of Jack’s life and Jack had tried, mostly, not to think of him. So in that sense, too, he’d been little, or nothing. But in the normal sense he wasn’t little at al , and hadn’t been little for years. He hadn’t been little on that night he’d left Jebb Farmhouse, though Jack had thought of him then, and sometimes since, as little. The point was that “little” was his own word, his own special word, it wasn’t El ie’s.

On the day fol owing Major Richards’s visit they’d seen something in the paper that Major Richards had warned them to expect. The names—so far withheld and for an unusual y long time—would now be released, of the three men who’d died in the incident previously reported. Along with the names there would be photographs, as wel as some words from relatives and commanding officers. Major Richards had asked Jack if, for the purpose, there were any particular words he wished to say. Then Jack had found Major Richards suggesting—composing—a statement for him. It seemed to Jack that Major Richards had already had the statement ready in his head. It was a bit like writing that postcard to El ie.

It was at this point that Major Richards might have produced the photos in his brown wal et, but since he saw by now that Jack’s whole body was trembling, decided against it and simply said that when the thing appeared in the newspapers they should be prepared for there being pictures.

The photograph of Tom—of Corporal Luxton—showed a man wearing a badged beret, moulded very familiarly to his head, and a camouflage shirt, the sleeves rol ed up neatly above his elbows. The arms were thick, so was the face.

And the expression was—expressionless. There was no hint of a smile, no hint of anything in particular. You couldn’t have said: This man could be my friend or, on the other hand, my enemy. Though you might have said this man would be good to have on your side in a fight. A word you might have used was “solid.” But the man in the photograph certainly wasn’t little.

Jack had looked at the photograph and recognised, of course, the man he was looking at. Yet at the same time it had seemed appropriate for him to ask, deep inside: Do I know this man? Can this man real y be my brother? He’d wanted the face to have some indication in it that Tom might have known, when the photo was taken, that one day his brother would look at it.

Among the many strange feelings Jack had felt since that letter had arrived was the feeling that he was the little brother now. Big as he was, he’d turned little. And it went now with that little, concentrated bal of fear in his stomach.

He felt simply smal . So when El ie had used that word, he’d felt she might as wel be using it of him.

Do I know this man? But he’d felt just the same about El ie, he realised, when she’d demanded to be counted out.

Do I know this woman? This unwavering woman. There’d been an odd touch about El ie, in fact, of the man in the photograph. You wouldn’t want to mess with that man. He might even shoot you, no questions asked. Similarly, if El ie could be so unbudging about a thing like this, then there was no saying what else she might do. Or—he’d think later

—might have done already.

The words he’d final y spoken in reply to El ie hadn’t sounded like his own words. He couldn’t have imagined himself ever saying them or ever needing to. He’d drawn a big breath first.

“I’m asking you, El ie, if you’l come with me to my brother’s funeral. If you’l be with me when I get his coffin.” He’d felt when he said these words a bit like he felt when things occasional y got out of hand down at the site and he had to step in—usual y with remarkable effectiveness—and deal with it. So why, when he said them, had he also felt smal ?

“And I’m saying,” El ie had said, “that I can’t.” They’d stared at each other for a moment.

“Okay, El ,” he’d said. “If that’s how you feel. I’l go by myself.”

15

SO, three days ago, Jack had driven off alone in the same dark-blue Cherokee that El ie has driven off in now.

It was not yet six-thirty. Stil dark. But he’d been awake since five, staring at the luminous face of his stil -primed alarm clock. Fear, among many other fears, of being late had made him decide on a perhaps excessively early start.

And he was gripped by a strange mood of secrecy. He’d slipped out quietly, carrying just a smal holdal and his black parka jacket (it was the right colour at least—and since when had Jack Luxton had use for a proper overcoat?).

El ie hadn’t come to the door to see him off. She hadn’t even stirred or muttered a word as he’d crept from the bedroom, choosing for some reason to tread softly when he might have thumped about assertively. But he hadn’t believed she was asleep. When he’d stepped outside—

she stil hadn’t appeared—and crossed to the parked car, he’d wondered if she was nonetheless listening, intently, to his every sound. Or if, in fact (though he hadn’t demeaned himself with any pathetic backward glance), she’d even got up to part the curtains and watch him leave. From this same window from which he watches for her now.

He sees himself now, as if he might be El ie watching his own departure, beginning that journey al over again. He sees himself covering every mile, every strange, bewildering stage of it again, even as he waits now for El ie’s return. He hadn’t known then, as he departed, if he would return. Or if El ie would be there if he did. That was how it had seemed.

With him, as was only natural on such a journey, had been his mobile phone. Who knows, he might have needed to cal Major Richards, to say he’d broken down. (Or to say he’d been suddenly, unaccountably, taken il .) Also, of course, he might have needed, or wanted, to communicate with El ie. Or she with him. But, just before leaving, he’d made sure it was switched off, meaning to keep it so. If she couldn’t even say goodbye to him.

It’s switched off, emphatical y, now.

THE AIR HAD BEEN FRESH and a little damp, with the hint of a quickening dawn breeze. He could barely make out, white as they were, the caravans below, but, beyond the lights of Sands End and Holn, it was just possible to discern the faint sheen of the sea—dotted anyway by the smal , almost motionless lights of distant shipping that, now and then, if only because they reminded him of the former purpose of the place where he lived, Jack would find oddly comforting.

He wore a white shirt and his only suit, which, fortunately, was a charcoal grey. Along with the strange sensation of stealth as he’d moved round his own home had gone an equal y unaccustomed demand for dignity. He’d dressed careful y. He stil hardly ever wore a suit. This was not the same suit his mother had once bought him in Barnstaple, but it reminded him of it and of being viewed by his mother when he’d emerged from the curtained cubicle in Burtons.

Her little, approving nod. So what would she think now?

He’d thought, as he dressed, of the empty hearse that must have left Barnstaple by now. Or would it have been driven up, so as to be sure, the night before? Either way, it had better be there.

He put on his black tie, arguing with himself as to whether he should do this now or at a later stage. The knot took two attempts. The smal holdal , with a change of clothes in it, was the same one that served as a carry-on bag on their winter holidays. It had been to the Caribbean and back several times.

He’d stood for a while by the front door, wondering whether to cal up to El ie—even to go up to her before he left. But he wasn’t going to cal up if she wasn’t going to cal back. And he wasn’t going to go up if El ie wasn’t going to say, “I’l be thinking of you, Jack. And I’l be thinking of Tom.” That would have been enough. But she wasn’t going to say it now if she hadn’t said it already, he knew that. And if she could say it at al , then she’d be coming with him now.

She’d be standing beside him, glancing in the mirror by the front door, dressed and a bit breathy, a touch of scent in the air. Like when they left on their winter breaks.

“Al set, Jacko? Tickets? Money? Smile?”

He’d shut the front door quietly behind him—he could have chosen to slam it—as if he might, indeed, have been intending to leave undetected. Like Tom, that night years ago. He couldn’t help but remember it. That night he’d been lying awake in bed, listening for every smal sound. The last sounds of Tom he’d ever heard.

HE STARTED THE ENGINE, but coasted almost silently, on the brakes, slowly down the twisting hil . With his lights on, the sea had disappeared, but as he pointed east the sky in that direction showed a dim, feathery mix of greys and pinks above a just-emerging horizon. He had to arrive before eleven-thirty and in good time, but, even al owing for the crossing and the traffic there might be on the other side, it hardly seemed necessary to be leaving in darkness. From Portsmouth it was some eighty miles. But (unlike El ie) he’d never lost the farmer’s habit of being up with, or before, the dawn. In the summer he’d sometimes sit outside the cottage with a mug of tea at five in the morning, wondering how long it would be before the first of those caravanners (and every unit might be occupied) would make a move.

Lazy buggers. But they were on holiday, they didn’t have to hurry, their days were their own. They were having fun—

thanks to him and El ie. There’d be just the mew of gul s and, in the quiet, as if it too had barely woken, the faint, sleepy wash of the sea.

In any case, best to be early. The Isle of Wight to Oxfordshire: it was unknown country to him. Like the Isle of Wight had once been. Never mind the bloody isle of St.

Lucia. It was al unknown country now.

16

HE TURNED LEFT AT HOLN, the patch of pinkish sky directly ahead, then turned left again a few miles later, towards Newport.

Before leaving the cottage he’d taken another, vacil ating decision, along with the decision to put on his black tie. Into the holdal , to add to the clothes and sponge bag, he’d final y slipped a smal , black, hinged box. Then as he’d stood before the mirror for a last check, he’d revised even that decision. He’d unzipped the bag, taken out the box and slid what was in it into the breast pocket of his suit, patting its smal weight against him. Then he’d returned the box to the bag. He couldn’t have explained the logic, if they had any logic, of these actions. His hand had shaken a little.

When he took off his jacket to lay it in the back of the car he transferred what was in the breast pocket to the breast pocket of his shirt, the same white shirt he’d worn for Major Richards’s visit, so that smal weight was now almost against his skin. When he stopped outside Newport to fil up with petrol, and throughout the two days of travel ing ahead of him, Jack was wearing the DCM.

HE REACHED FISHBOURNE in good time for the seven-thirty ferry. By then it was light and, beyond the inlet where the ferries docked, the sea that from the Lookout had been a mere hinted presence showed choppy and active, the combination of a briskish breeze and the rays of the just-risen sun turning the waves inky black on one side and bril iant on the other. The yachts moored in the inlet swayed and rattled.

Though Jack had lived now for some ten years in a former coastguard’s cottage and had looked every day at the sea, to be on it didn’t come natural y to him. He could point the caravanners towards several boat-bound activities, but had never developed the yen to have a boat himself, to chug around Holn Head in a dinghy with an outboard motor, maybe lowering a fishing line. The six-mile ferry ride across the Solent had been his first experience of being on a vessel and remained his only one. Similarly, until he’d flown with El ie to the Caribbean he’d never known what it was like to be in a plane. The two unfamiliar experiences were linked, since in order to drive to Gatwick Airport it had been necessary first to take the ferry, and those winter holidays were virtual y the only occasions that demanded making the crossing, so that even that experience had never become casual.

Travel ing now to an airbase, Jack could remember that first journey, by way of a ferry, to catch a plane. The whole thing—though it was a holiday and was meant to be fun and people did it, apparently, al the time—had unnerved him with its elemental audacity. Even the previously unpenetrated landscape of Sussex had seemed alien.

Even the ferry crossing had made him tense.

The truth was that he was that common enough creature, a landsman, by experience and disposition. His big body told him this. He liked his feet anchored to solid ground.

How on earth had he ever let himself be plucked into the air on a parachute pul ed by a boat? But the truth also was that Jack had become an islander. The ferry crossing was fearful in itself, but it also went, when travel ing in this direction, with a queasy distrust of the looming mainland—

that yet contained his roots and his past. He felt both fears now, knowing that when he soon drove off again onto dry land, this would in no way cure his qualms. He touched the medal against his chest, as if for his protection.

The ferry throbbed out into the gleaming water, keeping close for a while to the wooded shore and passing near the other ferry point at Ryde, then heading into the open channel known as Spithead. Other ferries and a few merchant ships moved in various directions, smal er craft scattered among them. There was the feeling of some haphazard relay race. Against the dazzling light to the east appeared the silhouettes of squat island-forts.

The shoreline on the far side remained for a time one indistinct, built-up mass, punctured by the white thorn of the Spinnaker Tower. Then Portsmouth gradual y separated itself from Gosport, and Southsea, with its beach front, from Portsmouth. Individual blocks of buildings flashed and glinted.

The ferry swung hard to make its entrance. Beyond the ramparts of the narrow harbour mouth could be seen, as if trapped among streets, the masts of the old ships, the Warrior and the Victory, and beyond them, at the water’s edge, the sharp bows of a berthed naval vessel, its grey hul and turrets bleached almost white, with an apricot blush, by the low sun.

Jack had slipped something else into his pocket before departing: his passport. Major Richards had told him he would need it, for identification, on his arrival at the airbase, along with other documents that would be sent to him. His passport showed a mugshot face not unlike that face with the beret and camouflage shirt in the newspaper photo.

Jack knew wel enough that he wouldn’t need his passport in order to disembark from an Isle of Wight ferry in Portsmouth, but he felt as if he might. He felt, in fact, as the ferry slid through the jaws of the harbour, like a man who, even with his passport on him, not to mention a distinguished-conduct medal against his breast, would, as he came ashore, immediately be arrested.

17

IT WASN’T THE COW DISEASE that had swung it for Tom. For Tom the trigger had been Luke. In more senses than one.

Michael pul ed Tom out of school when he turned sixteen, to be a prisoner with his brother on Jebb Farm. No more making hay with schoolgirls. He might have made his escape—by the same route he eventual y took—even then.

But he waited til his father wouldn’t have the power to haul him back, til he was his own free man. And perhaps, even with Vera gone and life at Jebb like a lost cause, it was stil not yet a clear thing. He bided his time. Sixteen to eighteen.

In between, there’d been an ongoing cattle disease, but also there’d been Luke.

A sort of sliding scale: that sloping line between them. As Tom got bigger, the way it was between Tom and Luke became like the way it once had been between Jack and Tom. When Tom left school to take up ful -time attendance at Jebb Farm, Luke somehow became Tom’s dog.

And Jack hadn’t minded even that. Luke had been the farm dog, the family dog (and he’d been around almost as long as Tom), but he’d been, especial y, Jack’s. Sitting there in the back of the pick-up, ears flapping, as they’d bumped over to El ie’s. But then he’d become Tom’s. It was Luke’s own choice and doing, and who could have said exactly when, or why, the crossover occurred? But it was how it was. Maybe it was that Tom had that bit of a mum about him, so Luke hung around Tom because Luke too missed Vera. Or maybe it was that Luke had worked out, just as Jack had, that Tom, though he was the younger brother, was simply superior at most things, including—and one of Luke’s functions was to be a gun dog—being a better shot.

But then Luke had got sick. He wasn’t young any more.

This was some while after the cow disease first struck, but you might have said that Luke, though he’d taken his time, had only come up with his own disease in sympathy. He got sick anyway, just slow and sluggish sick, not mad sick, but he steadily got worse and, on top of it, he seemed to be going blind. They didn’t know what to do except hope the thing would solve itself, or that he wouldn’t linger, Luke would just spare himself and die. They were al thinking stil , of course, of the last time, not so long ago, when there’d been a death pending in the house.

But it had just dragged itself out. Luke dragged himself out. It got a bit too much to take.

ONE HEAVY, sul en August morning Michael drove the pick-up into the yard, fetched a spade from the lean-to and put it in the back, then went into the house, unlocked the gun cabinet between the kitchen and the stairs and carried the shotgun out to the pick-up too. Jack and Tom were both in the yard at the time, but felt from the way their father was looking and moving that they shouldn’t speak. Then Michael went into the kitchen where Luke was by now confined to his blanket in a corner—beyond even padding his way to the door—and lifted him up and carried him out and put him in the back of the pick-up along with the spade.

He hadn’t said a word, but now he stared at Jack and Tom in a pausing-for-breath way, as if he might have had a statement prepared. But what came out was: “No, neither of you’s coming with me.” Both brothers were looking hard at their father and both had perhaps stepped forward, perhaps more to restrain him than to join him, but this is how Michael chose to interpret the situation. Then something in Tom’s eyes, or something in his own thoughts, must have made Michael change his mind, because before he got back behind the wheel he said to Tom, and not to Jack, “Okay, if you must. Fetch another spade.” Maybe that was al it was. He was thinking it would be quicker work, and not so much that by then Luke had become Tom’s dog. But if so, he might just as wel have picked Jack or told them both to go and grab spades.

And then Michael, with Tom and Luke and the shotgun and two spades, had driven off.

Later, though not al at once, Tom told Jack everything—

or everything that he wanted to tel him—but the scene itself, from which Jack was excluded, has only ever, like some other scenes from which he was absent yet which were crucial to his life, played itself out in his imagination, seeming each time to be both real and unreal.

But there’s no doubt that he heard the shot. His ears had been straining for it. And, later on, he saw the little mound of freshly patted-down earth. Luke had been too weak to raise his head above the side of the pick-up as it drove away, so that he and Jack could take a last look at each other, and Jack realised when it was too late that he hadn’t even been al owed the chance to say goodbye to him or give him a final stroke. His father had driven off fast, over-revving the engine, as if there were no time to lose or as if he were afraid of changing his mind.

Then Jack was alone in the deserted yard, with the receding sound of the pick-up jolting its way down the hil . In the muggy air, a hatch of flying ants was buzzing round him.

His mother, he knew, would have found where the nest was, then boiled the kettle. But Jack just stood, listening, in the yard.

TOM SAID they’d driven down Barton Field, his father stamping on the brake, past the big oak, to the low, flat corner by the wood where the ground, even in summer, was nearly always soft. Then they’d stopped and Dad had gone round to gather up Luke, who must by then have formed his own conclusions. Tom didn’t say if anything had been spoken on the way down or if, at this point, there’d been any argument. You don’t have a tug-of-war with a sick animal. Dad had carried Luke a few yards from the pick-up and put him on the grass. Then he’d gone back for the gun.

Tom said he hadn’t wanted to touch it himself, he hadn’t made any move in that direction.

Dad had the cartridges in his pocket and while he stood and loaded the gun—both barrels, just in case—he told Tom to get the two spades from the back. Jack asked Tom how their father had spoken, and Tom had thought for a bit and said he’d spoken like he was giving orders. This wasn’t a nice thing for either of them (or for Luke) and there was no way of speaking about it nicely. Al of which Jack could understand. Then Tom had added that his father had spoken like a complete bastard.

Tom said that while Dad loaded the gun Luke had just sat there on the grass where he’d been put. It’s true, he couldn’t move much now anyway, but he’d just sat there like a good dog sits, front legs out before him, waiting for what’s next. Of course, he was perfectly familiar with that gun.

Jack asked Tom (though he already knew the answer) if he thought that Luke knew, al along. Tom said, of course.

Of course Luke knew. Luke was half blind and he hadn’t made a move, but Tom said he was sure Luke knew, even as they’d bumped down Barton Field. And Jack knew he hadn’t needed to ask.

But Jack would never be sure about the next bit in Tom’s description. Though why should Tom have made it up? Tom might have just said that Dad had simply walked towards Luke, aimed and fired. But Tom said that, after loading the gun and snapping it shut, Dad had turned in Luke’s direction, paused for half a second, then turned again and held out the gun to him. He’d offered it—if “offer” was the right word—to Tom.

Tom said that he couldn’t tel , even after thinking about it, if his father had only just got the idea then or if he’d had it in his mind al along, and that was why he’d wanted Tom—

Tom specifical y, for some reason—to be with him. He’d got the idea, perhaps, looking at them both in the yard, and he’d singled out Tom.

Jack had thought (to be charitable) that it was possible Dad had held out the gun to Tom because he’d realised suddenly he couldn’t do it himself. But Tom had read Jack’s thought and said it wasn’t like that at al . There’d been a look in his father’s face, a tone in his voice. He’d said,

“Here. You do it.” It wasn’t an offer, it was another order.

Then Tom said, “Like an even bigger bastard.” Tom couldn’t do it, anyway. He’d just stood in front of his father and shaken his head. He couldn’t put a finger on that gun. And maybe—though Tom didn’t say this, it was one of those things Jack’s imagination had to supply—Tom was never meant to. It was just a bluff, a game, to make Tom feel like a worm, to make him wish he could disappear into the ground.

Several seconds passed anyway, Tom had said, while Luke sat there, not moving, and his father had stil held out the gun.

Then, according to Tom, Dad had said, “No? Can’t do it?

But it needs to be done.” And then he’d turned, taken a few quick strides forward and shot Luke between the eyes. One shot was enough.

And up in the yard, in that stil air, Jack had heard the shot clearly enough, like something hitting his own skul .

Tom said—it was plainly difficult for him to give these details or even to remember them precisely, and Jack would come to know how he felt—that Luke had never turned away as Dad came towards him with the gun, though at the very last moment he might have lowered his head. He just might. He couldn’t be sure either if, just a fraction before he’d fired, Dad had said, “Goodbye, Luke.” Or if it was a fraction afterwards. Or if he’d just imagined that Dad had said it. (Jack, listening to Tom, thought: Tom said it, Tom said it himself. He said it aloud or just inside, but Tom said it himself.)

But after firing the shot, Tom said, Dad had turned and even as he broke open the gun and fished out the unspent cartridge, said, clearly enough, “And I hope one day, when it’s needed, someone wil have the decency to do the same for me.”

DAD HAD WALKED BACK to the pick-up to stow the gun. Then he’d grabbed the spades lying in the grass and held one out for Tom. Tom didn’t say if he held it out in the same way as he’d held out the gun, or if he’d said anything along the lines of: “I hope you can do this.” But it seemed that from that point on there hadn’t been much conversation except for Dad saying, “Deeper.” Then again, “Deeper.” Tom said it was a good, safe grave, it wouldn’t get disturbed by some fox coming out of the wood.

Final y Dad had said, “Deep enough.” Then he’d gone to pick up Luke, or what was left of him, and, kneeling and stretching, had lowered him in. Dad had done the shooting and Dad had done the burying. But he’d said to Tom,

“Okay, now fil it in.”

Then he’d gone to the bottom gate, into Brinkley Wood, where the little ril ran through the ditch at the edge of the trees, to clean himself up. Tom said there’d been a lot of blood and stuff left on the grass. The crows and buzzards and the weather would have to take care of that. Tom said it looked like where a ewe had dumped an afterbirth.

They’d both patted down the last soil with their spades. If there was a question of a marker—a gravestone—it was never discussed. There’d be a little grown-over hump, anyway, in the corner of the field. They’d hardly forget the spot.

Then they’d driven back to the house with the gun and the spades, and with the air—Jack could see this as they pul ed into the yard—thick between them. He didn’t understand the thickness of it til Tom, and it took a little time, had given his ful account.

But the air (stil busy with flying ants that had escaped that kettle) was thick and heavy anyway, heavy with the sultry August weather, but heavy with the strange, hol ow weight of there being three of them now where once there’d been four. Just as once there’d been four of them where once there’d been five.

18

JACK DROVE OFF the ferry into the hurrying morning streets of Portsmouth. No one had detained him or regarded him with special interest, but he whipped his sunglasses from the dashboard not just against the glare of the low sun. His instinct was to hide his face. It was absurd to think of being recognised, but in his white shirt and black tie, even inside the car, he felt painful y conspicuous. He had safely got ashore, but at any point now, he felt, as he strove to navigate the currents of purposing traffic around him, he might be stopped and asked to explain his own particular purpose. And how would he do that?

I am going to meet my brother.

As the ferry docked, the bal of fear had tightened in his stomach. He told himself, for no clear reason, that the innocent have nothing to fear.

He looked frantical y for road signs—his instinct also being, on finding himself in the middle of a city, to get out of it fast. Portsmouth was not the biggest of cities, but it was more than big enough for Jack, who in al his years—save in appreciating that most of the Lookouters came from them—had rarely had to deal with cities. The word “city” itself was foreign to him, as was the word “citizen,” though that second word, he somehow appreciated too, hung, almost like its explanation, over this journey.

When, some eight years ago, in order to take a holiday in the Caribbean, Jack had acquired a passport, he’d understood that he was now a citizen. It said so. Not so long before, the very idea of possessing a passport would have seemed ridiculous. A farm was its own land, even its own law, unto itself. And as for being a “citizen”—citizens hardly lived on farms. Though, apparently, you didn’t need to live in a city to be a citizen. Or even require a passport. A passport merely confirmed something that came with you.

Even little babies—even little babies born on farms—were citizens. It was a birthright.

But it had stil seemed strange to Jack to discover that he was a citizen and that in order to pass through Gatwick Airport he had to prove it. Gatwick Airport itself had seemed like some weird, forbidding city, though he hadn’t felt like a citizen, shuffling through and showing his clean new passport. He’d felt more like a cow at milking time.

Yet he’d thought, very recently, how shaming it would have been if when Major Richards had said he should bring his passport he’d had to say: I don’t have one.

He didn’t feel like a citizen today. Though today he knew, inescapably, he was one. It felt like some imposition or even incrimination when he knew it should be the opposite: a privilege, a protection, a guarantee. The fact that he was a citizen should be dissolving that primitive bal of fear in his stomach.

If he were stopped, then he had his passport. Not only that: in his jacket pocket he had other papers (not al of which Major Richards had said he need bring with him). He had a letter from a Secretary of State, personal y signed.

Truly. He had a letter, and an invitation, from a Colonel of the Regiment. Who else in this flood of morning traffic around him was carrying better credentials, was better authorised to be going about their business?

It ought to be the case, Jack told himself, that rather than being stopped, he should be waved through, with saluting respect. Lanes should be cleared for him.

But he had to get out of this city.

. . .

HE LOOKED AT SIGNS: London, Southampton, Winchester.

He definitely didn’t want London. He briefly passed, on his left, the long, fortress-like wal s of the Dockyard. Not just a city, but a navy base. And he was travel ing to an airbase.

The funnel of the M275 seemed to find him rather than he it, feeding him onto the westbound M27. The whole length of the M27 skirted a mainly urban sprawl: Southampton was a city too. He needed to be free of this region of thick habitation. On the motorway he put his foot down, but after a few miles took it off again, realising that he had no need, or wish, to hurry and that he risked, indeed, being absurdly early. Al the same, the proximity of large populations—al of them citizens—oppressed him. On the fringes of Southampton he joined the M3 and only when, after passing Winchester, he left the motorway and was heading north across the broad downs of Hampshire did he begin to feel calmer, though this was not for long.

Big, sunlit sweeps of land now faced him, but clouds were rapidly gathering. More to the point, this open country, with its unimpeded views of the road ahead, was only drawing him inexorably and al too rapidly closer to his destination. In preparing himself for the other immensities of this journey, he had over-al owed for its simple distance.

In both miles and time his journey was already half done.

He bypassed Newbury, then at a service station just short of the M4 intersection he stopped, to empty his bladder and simply kil a little time. It was not yet ten—though the mere reflex of looking at his watch, the noting of passing minutes, made him sweat. The tightness in his stomach reasserted itself and, as if to smother and quel it, he forced himself, in the cafeteria, to consume a large, sticky Danish pastry and drink a cup of coffee.

Around him was the random sample of the nation (another word, like “citizen,” that had come in recent days to nag him) to be found in any service-station cafeteria on a weekday morning. The bland, communal atmosphere both soothed and troubled him. Jack didn’t like cities, but this wasn’t because he essential y minded people—or people removed from the context of cities. The caravanners had, unexpectedly, taught him that. The caravanners could comfort and beguile him—just as he saw it as his role to keep them contented.

He thought now of the travel ers who might stop here in the summer on their way south from cities like Birmingham or Nottingham, bound, perhaps for the first time, for the Lookout Caravan Park. Bound for a little off-shore island that, in their minds at least, was entirely set aside for the purpose of holidays. He felt a sudden tender pang for them.

But this was November. Outside the sky was now mainly grey with a hint of rain. He no longer sensed that he might be liable to sudden arrest and interrogation, but he wondered if, in his black tie, he was being scrutinised by those around him. There would be an obvious conclusion (though it would fal some way short of the actual mark) about his purpose. Who was he? What did he do, with his big frame and big hands? Was it unseemly for a man wearing a black tie to be stuffing his face with a Danish pastry?

He thought again of the hearse and of its separate journey: Devon to Oxfordshire. There were some strange tasks in the world, some strange purposes.

But around him, in fact, was a majority of solitary, preoccupied men (though none in a black tie) doing just as he was doing: pushing something sticky into their mouths and chewing on it needily, but with no particular sign of pleasure. Were they al —though none of them, surely, could be on a journey, a mission like his today—nursing, feeding their own little bal s of fear?

This was peacetime in the middle of England. But there was a war on terror.

He took out his mobile phone. It was something else these men were doing. But he merely stared at it and returned it to his pocket. The coffee or regathering fear, or simply the sensible precaution before he set off again, made him head for a second piss. In the hard white light he looked at himself, again, in the mirror. He didn’t look, he thought, like he’d looked, only hours ago, at the cottage. He should have got his hair cut, perhaps, special y. It was wispy at the neck and by his ears. He was going to meet the army. He tweaked at his tie, though it was fine already and it hardly mattered while he was driving. His heavy face, gazing straight back at him, seemed not to know him.

Did he look like a citizen, a good citizen, in his white shirt and dark suit? No, he looked like a gangster.

19

WHEN DAD AND TOM had returned from disposing of Luke, a silence hung over the farmhouse as if some explosion had occurred much bigger than the smal but significant one Jack had heard vol eying up from Barton Field. Thick hot clouds fil ed the sky, but it was one of those times when the thunder doesn’t come. Jack didn’t get Tom’s ful account til the fol owing morning. He felt, after hearing it, and trying to put himself into Tom’s shoes, that though Tom had been unable to shoot Luke (and who could blame him?) it was perfectly possible that Tom might one day raise a gun to his own father. Such a thing seemed perfectly possible on their forlorn, milksop dairy farm in the deep, green hil s.

Tom was big and tal enough by then, but Jack stil had the feeling, when it came to relations between his dad and Tom, that Dad should pick on someone his own size, and that it was up to him, Jack, to intervene accordingly. He wondered what he would have done if he’d been down there too, a witness, in Barton Field. Would he have snatched the gun Dad offered to Tom, and shot Luke himself? And would that have settled the question of how things stood at Jebb Farm for ever, of who now would rule the roost?

He wondered how it would have been if it had been just Dad and him down there, not Dad and Tom.

It was a long time—not til after Tom had left Jebb—

before Jack told El ie the ful story that Tom had told him.

He’d just told her at first that Dad had had to shoot Luke. It was tough, but necessary. No more Luke. Even when he’d told her the ful story he’d hesitated to repeat those words which he’d remembered as clearly as Tom had seemed to remember them. “And someone, some day …”

When Luke met his sudden end the cow disease and its consequences had been with them for some time. It had peaked, some said, but it stil hung in the air like those sultry clouds, and perhaps it was then, on that morning when that shot rang out in Barton Field, that the madness had real y set in.

Yet what had saved the immediate mood, restrained and sobered them al and perhaps prevented some further explosion, was the simple fact of Luke’s death. His absence. It was only a dog’s death and, when al was said, it had been a mercy, but it left a more than dog-sized gap and there was that echo—though none of them dared say it

—of the death of Vera.

Trying to put himself in his father’s shoes (and he was not so good at putting himself in anyone’s shoes), Jack felt that the way his dad had brought about Luke’s death must have had to do with the death of his wife. As if the sudden swift kil ing of an animal that was only getting sicker and sicker might have cured Michael of al the grief, anger and abandonment gnawing away inside him. But it hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked for any of them. It just caused more sickness. On top of the cow disease.

WHEN TOM AND DAD got back from Barton Field, Luke’s old basket, with the rumpled tartan blanket—stil bearing Luke’s scattered hairs, his smel and the dent of his body—

remained in its corner in the kitchen. It remained there, untouched, for days, like a judgement on them al . Michael, who’d been able to blow Luke’s brains out, seemed barely able to look at it. No one knew what to do. There was, perhaps, the shared, unspoken thought that Luke should have been buried with his blanket. It would have been the right thing to do. Or at least Luke should have been carried down in comfort to Barton Field in his basket and blanket, instead of being snatched up from them and plonked down in the pick-up like a calf for the abattoir.

But in any case, Jack had thought, Luke would have had a pretty shrewd idea. And with his blanket under him, he’d have had an even shrewder idea. Dad had done the right thing, maybe. There was no nice way of doing some things.

There’d been no nice way, when they’d final y got round to it, of carrying out a cul ing order.

And, anyway, Luke’s basket and blanket, stil sitting there, were like a buffer, blurring and softening the difference between Luke’s presence and his absence. A judgement and a comfort, like Vera’s apron.

And it was Tom, again, who final y made the move, with a suddenness, Jack thought, that was just like his father’s when he’d bundled Luke out to the pick-up. No one dared stop or chal enge Tom on this occasion either. He was stil laundry chief, and, so far as it went, the housekeeper and the mum of the family. And maybe Dad had never been able to abide it.

Tom gathered up Luke’s blanket, carried it out into the yard and shook it and slapped it. Then he proceeded to wash it, very thoroughly. There was an old zinc tub that suited the purpose. Hand-washing a dog blanket is quite a big and stinky job, but Tom did it very careful y. The stink was Luke’s stink. Only after several washings, rinsings and wringings did he hang the blanket—as he’d hang the bed sheets—on the line in the yard, where it began to dry soon enough in the August warmth. There was no odour of Luke left, just the soapy, airy smel of something that’s been wel washed.

But Tom hadn’t finished. When the blanket was stil just-damp, he unpegged it and actual y took the iron to it, a wet tea towel spread on top, to smooth out the wrinkles. Then he folded it very neatly into a smal oblong and, when it was dry, carried it upstairs on the tray of his arms to the Big Bedroom. It was in the Big Bedroom that Mum had made sure that al sorts of things were kept—like that wooden cradle—though they no longer had any use. And Dad couldn’t say, now, “I don’t want that, I don’t want that thing up there.” And he didn’t. Tom put the blanket on the top shelf of the wardrobe, with other old spare blankets, where he knew Vera would have put it.

Then he carried Luke’s basket to the bonfire that regularly smouldered near the muckheap, and set light to it.

Whatever Dad thought about Tom’s actions, he certainly never removed the blanket from the bedroom. He would even have had the option, on cold nights, of taking it from the wardrobe and spreading it over him. It was only a blanket, after al . In fact, Jack knows that there was one night, a cold, frosty one, when his father did do just this—

the only instance that Jack was aware of. But he’s never told anyone.

What would people have thought if he’d tried to point out that he’d never seen it spread on that bed before and that, real y, it was a dog’s blanket? If he’d come up with the whole dog story? Someone might even have thought he was only pointing it out because he’d put the blanket there himself. So he’d done the right thing at the time—which in most cases, in Jack’s experience, was to shut up or say very little.

IT SHOULD BE THERE RIGHT NOW, Jack thinks, on that bed behind him, under that gun. It would only be appropriate.

But it was among al the other stuff (from farm machinery to teaspoons) that El ie had “sorted out”—for auction, for sale, for ditching, for sending to charity (charity!), as part of what she cal ed her clean sweep.

“A clean sweep, Jacko, a clean sweep is what we need.” Wel , it hadn’t included that gun.

When Tom had final y let Jack in on his plan of making off from Jebb—only a few weeks before it was carried out—

he’d said that it was on the day that he’d washed and ironed Luke’s blanket that he’d real y made up his mind. It was the army for him—if he’d have to be patient for a while yet. The army could take him in. No more Jebb. By the time he told Jack, he’d long since found out al about it and got the forms that would take effect when he was eighteen. One day, a couple of months after Luke was shot—November and Remembrance Day were coming up—Dad had given him time off and a handful of grudging twenties (it was meant to square things between them perhaps) and told him to go to Barnstaple and get himself a suit. He couldn’t turn up in his school blazer any more. But Tom had actual y got the bus to Exeter, bought a suit in an Oxfam shop, kept the cash left over, and walked into a recruitment office.

So now he knew what he’d need to do.

Maybe the army likes a man who not only knows how to shoot, but who knows the value of a blanket, who takes good care of a blanket. Blankets go with the army.

Whenever Jack remembered Tom ironing that blanket and folding it up so careful y and holding it, as if it might have been Luke himself, across his arms, there was something about it he could never place. But now he can. It was as if he was handling a flag.

20

IT WASN’T LIKE GATWICK AIRPORT. It was like Gatwick Airport. It was even a little like a city—approached through its own ancil ary town.

Lodged in Jack’s mind for some days had been the almost calming notion “airfield,” suggesting something grassy and forgotten, but this place, he realised at once, was anything but peripheral. This place in the centre of England was a hub, and—clearly—seriously and constantly busy. It had, he soon saw, its own terminal, check-in areas and car-rental facilities and the air had the blast and tang about it of ceaselessly refuel ed, long-range activity. So that, though he’d never been anywhere like it before, he was reminded of nothing so much as that first passage, with El ie, through Gatwick Airport.

He felt, al over again, as if he might be about to enter for the first time that ominous opening cal ed “Departures” and then (after much nerve-wracking queuing and waiting) find himself strapped in the long, imprisoning tube of an aircraft, about to be hurled into the sky. El ie had gripped his hand with sheer, brimming excitement—it was a bit like when she’d first yanked him up the stairs at Westcott Farmhouse

—but he’d gripped hers, though trying not to show it, like some great big boy holding on to his mum. He’d been suddenly, acutely aware of the immense desirability of taking a holiday in a caravan.

But the big, obvious difference about this place was that none of its manifest and elaborate purposefulness had to do with the taking of holidays.

. . .

HE FOUND THE MAIN GATE, then found Control of Entry—this was where he had to show his passport and other documents. He was spoken to at this point, so he thought, with a marked deference and ushered on as if he might have been a VIP. At the same time he had the feeling that his own reason for being here was just one, unusual reason in a general ungentle pressing of reasons. The place hadn’t shut down because of why he was here.

Temporary arrowed signs indicated “Ceremony of Repatriation.” Among other things he’d been sent by Major Richards was a “Visitor Pack,” with a map, directions and a check list. There was also an “Order of Ceremony” and a

“Provisional List of Those in Attendance.” It had al amounted to too much to carry on his person, and he’d shoved the bulk of it in the side pocket of his holdal , thinking even then that it was not unlike the wad of stuff you take with you, along with your passport, through Departures. But, of course, his business now was the seemingly much simpler (and usual y paperwork-free) business for which, in fact, Jack had never entered an air terminal before: the business of Arrivals.

I’m here to meet my brother.

The sudden proximity of it, the realisation that he would have to do this incontestably personal thing, but in these heartlessly impersonal surroundings, hit him like some actual col ision—even as he drove at a careful five miles an hour, peering hard through the windscreen for further signs.

He found what seemed to be the appropriate car park.

Despite his fear of being early, it was now nearly a quarter past eleven. The final miles of the journey had been along the slowest roads and he’d cut it, in the end (though he wasn’t entirely sorry), a little fine. The car park was almost ful and he had to search for a space. People—some in remarkable costumes—were converging from it towards an ordinary glass-doored entrance nearby, but as if they might be approaching a cathedral. This clearly wasn’t some smal event. But of course it wasn’t.

After switching off the engine he lingered in the safety of the car, as though some desperate, final choice stil remained open to him. Then he took several deep, involuntary, labouring breaths and with each one said aloud, hoarsely, “Tom.” Then—he wasn’t sure if he said it aloud too, in a different tone, or simply thought the word:

“El ie. El ie.”

He eyed himself in the driving mirror, smoothed his hair, fingered his tie for the hundredth time. At Control of Entry he had already put on his jacket. Such documents as he thought he might stil need were in its inside pockets.

Official invitation. Order of Ceremony. Passport (you never knew). The letter from Babbages. In another pocket was his silenced mobile phone. But he was hardly going to activate it now.

From his shirt pocket he took the medal, warm to his touch, and slipped it into the empty breast pocket of his jacket. He could not have said why. So it would be closer to Tom. Then he got out of the car and locked it.

FROM THEN ON Jack was like a puppet, a lost man, somehow steering himself or letting himself be steered through what lay before him. He might have used, if it had been one of his words, the word “autopilot.” He might have had the same sense of not being himself if he had been cal ed to Buckingham Palace to be knighted by the Queen.

Beyond the glass doors (a sign said “Ceremony Reception”) he was met—and ticked off a list—with an intenser version of the courtesy he’d received at Control of Entry, but with also, he couldn’t help but detect, a faint, disguised relief.

I am Jack Luxton.

There was now ahead of him, through another wide doorway, a throng—he was somehow sucked into it—that included a great many uniforms, some of them of an astonishingly resplendent and seemingly high-ranking nature. His plain suit felt instantly shabby. There were swords, sashes, gold braid—medals—epaulettes. It was fancy dress. Some of the uniforms were so besmothered and encrusted that Jack wondered if they didn’t mark the point where they mysteriously merged with the regalia of dukes and earls. And he’d previously noted, from the List of Those in Attendance, that he would indeed be in the presence of one viscount (whatever a viscount was) and more than one lord. It hadn’t given him any sense of privilege. It had scared him.

Among the uniforms were a number of women in what seemed to Jack extravagant forms of dress and hat, as if this might be a wedding, and wearing also, in some cases, a kind of smile that wasn’t a smile at al and reminded him of zip fasteners. There were also at least two men wearing uniform but with long white lacy surplices on top.

Among it al too, though somehow distinct from it, were two clusters of civilians (that word, like “citizen,” now also forced itself upon him) who seemed to Jack not so unlike himself, either in their clothing or in their air of dazed incomprehension. He instantly knew who they were and instinctively felt it would be good, though also difficult, to be close to them. The two clusters were quite large, both consisting of more than one generation, from grandparents down to smal children. In one case there was a child so smal that it needed to be carried in its mother’s arms. The mother looked not only weighed down, but as if she were standing on ground that had given way. Al the children looked as if they were there by mistake.

This was al suddenly quite terrible: these people, these floundering women (he vaguely grasped that the ones with the hats and smiles must be there to provide some token balance), these children, among al these uniforms. The two clusters seemed both to cling to themselves and to cling, separate as they were, to each other, and Jack realised that he was a third cluster. He was the third cluster, a cluster of one. He felt both a solidarity and a dreadful, shaming isolation, that his cluster was just him.

But at the same time he’d glimpsed something else distinct from the gathering—standing at a distance from it, yet overshadowing it, overshadowing even these important human clusters. On the far side of the large room was a wal of mainly glass, such as you might find near a boarding gate in any airport building. And through the glass, beyond the jostle of heads and hats, could be seen, out on the tarmac, a single large plane. Around it was none of the usual clutter of baggage carts and service vehicles that surrounds a parked plane at an airport, and it was stationed with its nose pointing outwards so that, even from where he was, Jack could see the dark opening into its bel y, beneath the tail, and the ramp leading down.

When he’d first had to picture this event, Jack had vaguely supposed that everyone might watch the plane fly in, then unload. But of course it wouldn’t necessarily be like that. The plane had been there perhaps for some time, while preparations were made. It had landed in darkness, possibly. It had slipped over the English coast, perhaps, even as he’d slipped down Beacon Hil .

Jack had known it would be there. But seeing it like this was nonetheless a shock. It was a big plane, for three coffins. It stood there, seemingly unattended, under a dappled, grey-and-white, autumnal sky in Oxfordshire. It must have stood not so long ago on a tarmac in Iraq.

Major Richards was suddenly and merciful y at his side—

barely recognised at first, since, though Jack had only ever seen him in uniform, he too now wore a sword and a sash, as if he might recently have undergone (though he hadn’t) some promotion. Even as this contact was made—an actual, quick touch on his elbow—Jack realised that Major Richards must have been keeping an eye out for him, not just to make sure he was there, but, as it now seemed, to compensate, so far as was possible, for Jack’s being just a cluster of one. He and Major Richards, if only temporarily and for the purposes of negotiating this gathering, would form a cluster of two.

MAJOR RICHARDS ALREADY KNEW that Jack was the last of the Luxtons, the only one left. There was a whole story there perhaps, he’d thought, though it was not his business to enquire. But then, only yesterday, Jack had got in touch by phone to explain that, “as things had turned out,” he’d be coming alone. There was a whole story there too, no doubt, but Major Richards felt it would be even less appropriate to pursue the point. His own wife wasn’t here either (though why should she be? She wouldn’t want to be). He was only a major, after al .

MAJOR RICHARDS SAID, “Journey okay?” As if they might have just met for some sports fixture or were about to compare notes on the traffic on the A34. But Jack didn’t mind this at al .

“Yes.”

“Good. Good.”

After this, Jack was not always sure what Major Richards was saying or what he was saying himself (now and then he opened his mouth and words came out), but he understood that Major Richards was doing his duty, a special kind of duty. He was leading him around, introducing him briefly to people, leading him on again so that no single encounter became too much. He was being a cluster with him and getting him through this thing. And Jack realised that he, too, in spite of himself, was somehow stumblingly doing his duty, which was to be, unavoidably, introduced to people in extraordinary get-ups with extraordinary voices and have his hand shaken as if he himself had done something extraordinary, and have things said to him and over him (while he said, “Yes,” or, “Yes, I am,” or, “Yes, it is”) which were no doubt meant to make him feel good.

And Major Richards was definitely being a special cluster with him, because those other clusters surely deserved Major Richards’s attention just as much as, if not more than, he did, though perhaps they didn’t necessarily want it and anyway they had each other. The point soon came, however, when Major Richards piloted Jack towards them. It was what Jack both wanted and dreaded, since what could he possibly say to these poor stricken people which could be of any use to them? Their grief was multiple, if also shared, and they’d see before them just this big, roughish man. Perhaps they’d think: Poor him, al on his own. But what they would also see, Jack felt certain, since it would surely and damningly be glaring out of him, was that he was here to meet his brother, because he had to, though he hadn’t seen his brother for almost thirteen years, hadn’t even written to him for twelve, hadn’t known where he was, and had even tried not to think about him most of the time.

Despite this feeling of being a blatant culprit, Jack had nonetheless wanted to open up his big arms and embrace as many of these people as he could, as if he might have been some returned, lost member of their family. In his head he’d wanted to say, “It’s okay. I’m just me. It’s you lot I feel for.” But what he actual y said, over and over again, while shaking more hands and wondering what was showing in his gormless block of a face, was: “I’m Jack Luxton. Tom Luxton’s brother. I’m sorry, I’m very sorry. I’m Jack Luxton. I’m very sorry.”

THEN THE HUM of voices al around suddenly subsided and it became clear that they were now to proceed outside for the ceremony. For this, with the exception of a few uniformed ushers, the parties of relatives were given precedence and it seemed natural to Jack that he should find himself bringing up the rear. Just as it seemed natural

—and reassuring—that outside, in the designated area, he should find himself standing at the edge and at the back of the civilian group. People would have to turn round if they wanted to see him.

He also became separated at this point from Major Richards. But not before Major Richards had said to him, confidential y, “Afterwards there’l be … more.” Then paused and looked careful y at Jack and said, “But I’d just slip away, if I were you.” Jack wasn’t sure what Major Richards meant by “more,” or if Major Richards knew himself, but he felt that these words were perhaps more than Major Richards might have been required to say or even ought to have said (was he under military orders to say only certain things?). But he also felt he might have opened his arms to embrace Major Richards, too. He wondered if Tom, in his last days, in Iraq, had had such a commanding officer.

What fol owed seemed, at the time and later in Jack’s memory, to go on for an unendurable length, but also not to be nearly long enough, as if this procedure of under an hour was al there might ever be to stand for the whole life of his brother. Inside the building, despite the uniforms, the mood had been unregulated. Outside, everything ceded to military discipline. The air was cool but not cold, a little breezy, the sky overcast with only the weakest suggestion now and then of a break in the clouds. The tarmac was damp and puddled. Earlier in the morning, unlike in the Isle of Wight, there’d been rain. Perhaps it was raining now at the Lookout.

There was that reek of fuel and the sense, after that crowded room, of being on the edge of something huge and remorseless. As if, though this was Oxfordshire, war was being waged only just over the skyline. At ground level, the plane now looked vast, and, with its cavernous rear opening directed at the onlookers (though in the dul light and with the elevation of the fuselage you couldn’t quite see inside), it seemed to Jack that it might be there not to unload, but to gather everyone up. The climax of this event might be when they were al —the generals and earls, or whoever they were, the ladies in hats, the white-frocked padres and the black-clad mourning families—scooped up into the big, dark hold and taken off to Iraq.

The high-rank uniforms and their entourage had formed up separately from the relatives’ group, by a low platform which Jack guessed would be for saluting. Some of the officers detached themselves for particular duties. Jack lost sight of Major Richards. To the left of the relatives’ party, at a little distance, three hearses (this was both a relief to see and utterly distressing) were drawn up in a row facing away from the tarmac, their rear hatches raised in a manner that imitated the solitary aircraft.

His hearse—Tom’s hearse—was there. Tom’s transport was waiting. That “side of things,” Major Richards had already whispered to him, was in place, there was nothing Jack needed to do. Al the same, actual y to see the hearses was heart-stopping, and Jack felt he should at some point at least make contact with the driver. He should slip him a twenty. Would twenty be enough?

On one of his earlier phone cal s, Major Richards had delicately explained that normal y on these occasions there would be no flowers. These occasions weren’t funerals in themselves and the army didn’t deal in flowers. But Jack could see now, placed in readiness beside two of the hearses, a smal , defiant offering—a cluster’s worth—of flowers. He felt a moment’s abject misery and humiliation (and sympathy for his upstaged hearse driver). He’d have had to peer very hard indeed to see the single wreath he’d ordered (though he’d specified large) to await the coffin’s eventual arrival in Marleston.

THE PADRES in their fluttering surplices had walked out to the plane. Everyone was straining to see inside it. Though everyone knew. There was now a general barking of orders. Three detachments of six bare-headed soldiers marched out towards the plane, each led by a bare-headed officer. Other officers, with caps on, stood to attention near the ramp leading into the plane and now and then performed strange gestures with their swords. Positioned on the tarmac, in red tunics and white-and-gold helmets, was a smal -scale version of a military band.

The first party of bearers moved into the plane. Then a bugle blew as the first coffin, completely wrapped in a Union Jack, was carried off. Jack felt there was a sort of silent gasp, an invisible but detectable flinching among the relatives’ group. He’d been told, and it was in the Order of Ceremony, that Tom’s coffin would be the last. He didn’t know why, and hadn’t asked, and didn’t know if it was in any way significant or even constituted an honour, but he felt, now, that the two preceding coffins would prepare him.

The other two soldiers were cal ed Pickering and Ful er.

Before this event and throughout its duration it never quite got home to Jack that these men, having been privates, would have been in his brother’s charge. He had among the relatives a technical, proxy seniority. But he felt like the lowest of the low.

The bearers stood for a moment at the foot of the ramp, close to the padres, while the officer for the bearer party took his place behind the coffin. Then a single muffled bass drum began to beat the rhythm of the slow march, fol owed by a muted growling of brass instruments, and the coffin was carried along a careful y planned route so that it passed in front of the heavyweight uniforms on the platform

—al standing at a salute—then in front of the civilian party, before delivery to its hearse.

When the drum began, Jack felt it was being struck inside his chest, and though he was required to do nothing more than stand and look, he couldn’t prevent his arms going stiff at his sides, the thumbs pointing downwards, he couldn’t prevent himself lifting his chin and pul ing back his shoulders and coming to an instinctive, irresistible attention. This he did for al three coffins. And the fact was they were al the same. They were, al three, just Union-Jacked boxes borne on six shoulders and looked interchangeable.

This

was

both

bewildering

and

unexpectedly consoling. Each coffin received an equal and undiscriminating ful ness of attention, as if there might have been a bit of each man in each box.

But Tom’s coffin, Jack realised, had a genuine distinction in being last. There was nothing else now, in reserve, on which the onlookers might unload and exhaust their emotion. It was the final chance for everyone to focus their feelings. It was also, specifical y, why Jack was here.

The bugle sounded again, for Tom’s coffin. It was a recognisable bugle cal , though Jack couldn’t think of its name: Reveil e. When it sounded, some second person inside him, it seemed, gave a little inner cry. He hoped that none of the group in front would now turn and give him, however wel intended, sympathetic looks. None did. They were looking at Tom. They were thinking of Tom for him.

The drum was pounded again. In the minutes that fol owed, almost every remembered moment he’d spent with Tom seemed to flow through him in a way he couldn’t have predicted, wil ed or even wished. Yet he was also aware of al the time they’d not spent together. He thought of the letters he’d written to Tom, with great difficulty, and the letters he’d never written. And the letters he’d never got back. He thought of the things that had and hadn’t passed between them and that, perhaps, didn’t matter now. The things that Tom had never known and the things that he, Jack, had never known. He had gone into caravans. Tom had gone into battle.

He thought of the last time he’d stood like this—though it wasn’t like this at al —at his own father’s funeral, when Tom wasn’t there. The whole vil age saw that Tom wasn’t there.

But Tom, everyone knew by then, was in the army. He thought of how he would have to stand there again, very soon—he would have to go through it al again. He thought of those Remembrance Days. Marleston churchyard. The grey and yel ow lichen on the memorial, the rasp of leaves.

He thought of how if he was required, fol owing this ceremony, to make a speech, he would say how Tom, his little brother Tom, had always wanted to be a soldier, ever since he’d learnt about his two great-uncles who’d died in the First World War and how one of them had won the DCM. Or some such crap. He’d say it. Though thank God that he didn’t have to make a speech. How could he, Jack, ever make a speech? How could anyone ever make a speech? But he’d brought that medal with him. He couldn’t say why. He could hold it up, for effect, in his speech. He touched it now in his breast pocket.

He thought of the bar in the Crown. Jimmy Merrick in a suit. He thought, or tried to think, as he’d tried to think many times before now, of Tom’s last moments, but he couldn’t think of them, couldn’t imagine them, his mind flicked away.

He thought, as the coffin passed directly in front of him and he wanted to touch it, to be one of the six bare-headed soldiers or somehow al of them: what would his mum think

—his and Tom’s mum—to see both of them now?

When al three coffins had been transferred to their hearses a tense silence remained. This was, Jack understood, a prearranged part of the proceedings (it was like those Remembrance Days), but it was also like a natural, inevitable response. How could this thing simply end? After delivering the coffins, the parties of bearers had formed up, each in two ranks with their officers before them, beyond the hearses, at an angle to them, like some third, flanking group of onlookers. Then a separate detachment of soldiers, with rifles, had formed up in front of the hearses.

By now Jack had noticed that the three drivers of the hearses were not (of course) alone, each had—what would you cal them?—a co-driver. It was a mark of respect and standard practice. No man should be asked to drive a corpse across the country alone. Alone, as it were. But Jack had imagined Tom’s hearse having a solitary driver because he’d imagined that driver being himself. Each pair of drivers stood now, erect and stil , by the rear of each hearse. Had they been instructed to do this? Was it regular undertaker’s training?

Major Richards had explained that there would be rifle shots—it was a tradition of the regiment and had been done in the Peninsula (an old foreign war). But, even with their preparatory commands and dril , the shots came like jolts. The relatives again seemed to buckle, as if they were being fired at themselves. The noise of the shots rattled round the sky—even this big wide sky—as if it couldn’t find a way out, the echo of the last shots stil trying to flee as the next were fired.

THEN IT WAS OVER. The whole thing was, as it were, stood at ease and dismissed. The army had discharged its obligations and returned these three soldiers to their civilian claimants. Repatriation was complete.

Even now, for a moment, the civilian group seemed not to want to move. Then it began an impetuous, almost mutinous surge towards the hearses. Having seen, til this point, only the backs of heads, Jack noticed now several tear-stained, choked and ravaged faces. He saw handkerchiefs. He also noticed several cameras being fumblingly produced and held up. He thought of Major Richards’s words. If I were you. But he felt like scum for even imagining he might now simply peel away. He was caught in the general drift. And there were the hearse drivers to acknowledge.

But none of those things, Jack knew, was what impel ed him. He wanted to be near the coffin, as near as he could get. He wanted to touch it. The previously solemn and restrained gathering of relatives was now mil ing round the three hearses like visitors let into some show. The drivers stood back like mere attendants. So too did al the military personnel. It seemed that this was one part of the programme that had not been rigorously planned. The cameras flashed and clicked. The names—names and nicknames—of the other two soldiers were suddenly being cal ed, like strange animal cries. Jack felt he could not open his mouth now to say the word “Tom”—he had done the right thing, perhaps, to say it in the car in the car park—but he was saying it inside. He felt like scum, nonetheless, because al the attention was on the other two hearses, al the name-cal ing was directed at them. Because they had those tributes of flowers. Because his drivers, the pair of them, must surely be ashamed to be driving his hearse, to have got this job of the three.

He was Jack Luxton, Corporal Luxton’s brother—people knew by now—and he stuck out plainly with his height and his size, but he would surely go down in people’s memories, Jack thought later, as the mysterious man who simply came and went al by himself, the mysterious man who’d stood at the back, but had gone up afterwards to the hearse where his brother’s coffin lay, to the open rear door, and simply bent and touched the coffin—no, held it, clung to it, for several long, gluing seconds, gripped the two wooden corners nearest to him with his big thick hands as if he might never let go.

Many of those around him saw him do this. Just stand there like that, attached to the coffin. Then when they looked for him again a little later—he’d disappeared.

The two drivers, realising who he must be, had simply stepped aside. The flag had been removed. There was just the bare wood, with a brass plate (and no garlands). This was different from the other two coffins—and everyone would notice and remember this too—and was al , in fact, according to Jack’s instructions. Major Richards had explained on the phone that, in this exceptional instance (since the hearses weren’t provided by the army), the flags would be either retained or, according to the bereaved’s wishes, removed and folded by the bearers and presented to the mourning parties. Major Richards hadn’t pushed it either way, but Jack had felt again that it was as if he’d been told he was free to step down, though the done thing was not to move.

But Jack had said—it had just come out, it was one of his occasional, forceful blurtings—that he didn’t want the flag. If it was his say-so, then he was saying so. He didn’t want it left on the coffin, and he didn’t want it himself. He said—

and this had just come out too—that he wanted it given to the “battalion.” He’d used Major Richards’s word. He wanted the battalion to have it.

And what would he have done with it? Where would he have put it? They didn’t have a flagpole, he thought once again. But, anyway, he didn’t want the present of any flag.

Major Richards, down the phone, had been silent for a while, then had said (with a detectable but awkward sigh of relief), “That’s—a fine gesture, Mr. Luxton. But, if you should change your mind …”

HE WRENCHED HIS HANDS from the coffin, from its bare wood, then turned to the two drivers. He was surprised by the sudden outward authority and decisiveness he seemed now to have acquired. Had it come from the coffin? He shook the drivers’ hands. He said, “I am Tom Luxton’s brother, Jack Luxton. I am very grateful.” It seemed oddly like the reverse of the hand-shaking he’d done a little while ago inside the building. It seemed as if he were some senior, elevated dignitary acknowledging these two black-clad drivers in their great loss. He felt a sudden pity, but also an admiration, even a strange envy for these men who would have to drive his brother’s body, sitting with it behind them, for some hundred and fifty miles. He had a sudden sense too of having imposed on them outrageously and of having ducked out of what should have been his own task.

Had it been possible—had the coffin fitted—he might have offered to lower the back seats in the Cherokee and take over their job.

But they’d looked at him as if they might have saluted.

They said, “Sir,” and “Mr. Luxton.” He wanted to gather these men, too, into his arms. But, instead, he took his wal et from his back pocket, opened it and felt the edges of the notes inside. He didn’t care if this were the right thing or not. And he didn’t care that it would be forty now, for the two of them, not twenty. When would this ever happen again?

He’d had no idea what his incidental expenses might be for this extraordinary journey, but he’d drawn out a good wad of cash just in case. It was only money that would have been spent in St. Lucia.

He handed them each a twenty. They might have made some smal , token gesture of protest, but they said, “Thank you, sir … Thank you, sir,” as if he’d pinned a medal on each of them. And he had a medal too.

“Wil I—see you tomorrow?” he said.

“Al Saints’, Marleston. Ten-thirty,” one of them quickly said. “We’l be two of the bearers.”

He would be a bearer himself, he knew this, along with five undertaker’s men (Babbages had arranged it)—not having anyone else he could easily ask or choose. Wel , Jack thought now, three of the party had been shown how the thing could be done. Should he make that joke? Would they al expect another twenty tomorrow? That would be a hundred al round, on top of this forty.

“It wil be an honour, Mr. Luxton,” one of them said. It was what they always said, perhaps, what undertakers were trained to say, but it occurred suddenly to Jack that these men might actual y have volunteered for this job. They’d never done anything like it before. Nor had Jack. It seemed that both of them were a little awed by what they’d witnessed. It couldn’t surely be that they were in awe of him, Jack, for being the brother of a man who’d died in the service of his country. Couldn’t they see he felt like scum?

“I’m Dave,” one of them said. “Derek,” the other said.

One was thinnish and sandy-haired, one thick-set and dark. There was no way they could have been taken for brothers. He shook their hands again. They seemed to want it.

“I’m Jack, I’m Jack.” They already knew this, he’d already said it, but he said it again. “Cal me Jack. I’l see you tomorrow, then.”

Then he simply turned away. Walked—sloped, slunk away. He could do nothing else, was good for nothing else.

He’d kept in mind where the car was and had spotted already how he could get to it without having to go through any door. He could cut across a stretch of grass, then slip behind the corner of the building from which they’d al recently emerged.

He simply turned and walked away. He didn’t care if everyone was watching him. Didn’t mind the feeling of needles in his back, the feeling of being a deserter. Didn’t mind if there were al sorts of other things he stil should have done or was expected to do. He simply walked away.

As Tom once had simply fucking walked away.

He reached the car, ripped off his jacket, flung it, with the medal stil in the top pocket, on the back seat, and started the engine. He knew he’d already passed from people’s sight after rounding the building. He was back in the inconspicuous, unceremonial world of car parks. He reversed out and drove off along the route by which (it seemed now long ago) he’d driven in. Had barriers come down to prevent his departure, he would have put his foot down and burst through. But he passed Control of Entry without incident (was Exit also control ed?) and reached the main gate, after which he could accelerate and just drive.

He drove through the camp-like town with a distinct sense, now, of being an escaper—word would surely be put out about him—then sped into open country. He knew he had to find the M4, then just point west.

He couldn’t have given any coherent reason for his fugitive haste, which didn’t diminish even when he was free of the town, but a strange, hounding explanation came to him even as he drove. It was the hearse. He had to get away from the hearse. It would be making this same journey too—M4, M5—and though, by definition, a hearse was a slow vehicle, he was afraid of its coming up behind him, of seeing it in his mirror, bearing down on him. This was al crazy and unlikely. It wouldn’t even have left yet, and it would surely have to travel, at least at first—and no doubt in company with the others—at a solemn snail’s pace. But the thought of its somehow gaining on him, of encountering it at any point on the journey now before him, afflicted him like a nightmare.

Only moments ago he’d actual y wanted to be in the hearse. That was his rightful place. Having held that coffin and having wanted not to let go, how could he be afraid now of being fol owed by his own brother? But that was the point. He’d separated himself from his brother (and what was new about that?). He had to be in this damn Cherokee.

Therefore he had to avoid the hearse and its pursuing indignation. To put distance in between.

But he’d hardly gone five miles, and he couldn’t have said where it was—it was somewhere in the unknown heart of England—before he’d had to pul over into a lay-by while a series of great, wracking shudders made him, stopped as he was, hang on to the steering wheel as if he might wrench it off.

21

BUT IT WOULDN’T HAVE WORKED ANYWAY , would it? If he’d had to get up and make a speech and had said that Tom had always been stirred by those two Luxton boys of long ago. Because that would have been like saying that Tom had real y wanted to go off and get himself kil ed as wel . As he had done. And what kind of war, exactly, had Tom been going off to fight when he’d slipped out of Jebb Farm thirteen years ago? What kind of war, exactly, had he even been fighting now?

At least those two Luxton lads had known the score.

Maybe.

It wouldn’t have worked because it wasn’t true. But it wouldn’t have worked, anyway, because Jack Luxton could never have got up to make a speech—before lords, ladies and colonels—even to save his own damn life.

He looks now through the rain-spattered cottage window and remembers pul ing up in the car, among strange, bare fields, just to shake and weep. Tom was the traitor, my lords and ladies, Tom was the deserter, the runaway.

Running away from the war against cow disease and agricultural ruin. And against his own embattled father.

Good luck, Tom.

ONE MORNING, at milking (by then they had a sort of herd again and they could sel the milk), Tom had told him the whole story. About his trip to Exeter to buy a suit, more than a year before. About how he had it al planned now, for his eighteenth birthday. His own man. December 16th. Bugger Christmas. And bugger birthdays, if it came to it. What kind of birthday did anyone get, these days, at Jebb Farm?

The cows had twitched and steamed in the stal s. It would have been this time of year—November, not so long after Remembrance Day, when Tom would have worn that suit, only the second time for the purpose.

“This is just for your ears, Jack.”

“And the cows’,” Jack might have said if he’d had the quickness of mind.

Though Jack had needed to think quickly, and seriously, enough that morning. And one of his first thoughts was that Tom hadn’t had to say a thing. Tom might have just cleared off, according to his plan, leaving him, Jack, as surprised and left in the lurch as their father was going to be. But Tom was tel ing him now, so Jack had thought, because Tom was a brother. He’d been saving it up and it had been a matter, perhaps, of careful timing, but Jack didn’t want to go into that. Tom was tel ing him now.

And that meant that Tom was real y putting before him a whole set of alternative positions. Like the position of saying: You can’t do this, Tom, you can’t bloody do it. Or the position of simply ratting on him to his father. Or the position of thinking why hadn’t he, Jack, done something like this years ago and left Tom to Michael’s mercy? Or the future position (the not-so-distant future, it now seemed) of being left, himself, to Michael’s mercy and having to pretend he’d never known a damn thing about it.

But none of these theoretical positions had real y exercised Jack much at the time, because of the overriding position Tom was putting him in, which was the position of trust. Tom hadn’t had to say a word. But what are brothers for?

The steady hiss and clank of the machinery, the familiar parade of swol en udders and the splat of cow shit had seemed, for Jack, to say that though Tom had just announced, in effect, a division, a parting in their lives, nothing was altered, everything would stay the same. Or the same as the cow disease and the price of calves had left it.