Wish You Were Here

Chapter 36

A Note About the Author

Other Books by This Author

1

THERE IS NO END TO MADNESS, Jack thinks, once it takes hold. Hadn’t those experts said it could take years before it flared up in human beings? So, it had flared up now in him and El ie.

Sixty-five head of healthy-seeming cattle that final y succumbed to the rushed-through cul ing order, leaving a silence and emptiness as hol ow as the morning Mum died, and the smal angry wisp of a thought floating in it: Wel , they’d better be right, those experts, it had better damn wel flare up some day or this wil have been a whole load of grief for nothing.

So then.

Healthy cattle. Sound of limb and udder and hoof—and mind. “Not one of them mad as far as I ever saw,” Dad had said, as if it was the start of one of his rare jokes and his face would crack into a smile to prove it. But his face had looked like simply cracking anyway and staying cracked, and the words he might have said, by way of a punchline, never left his lips, though Jack thinks now that he heard them. Or it was his own silent joke to himself. Or it’s the joke he’s only arrived at now: “We must be the mad ones.” And if ever there was a time when Jack’s dad might have put his two arms round his two sons, that was it. His arms were certainly long enough, even for his sons’ big shoulders

—both brothers out of the same large Luxton mould, though with al of eight years between them. Tom would have been fifteen then, but growing fast. And Jack, though it was a fact he sometimes wished to hide, even to reverse, already had a clear inch over his father.

The three of them had stood there, like the only life left, in the yard at Jebb Farm.

But Michael Luxton hadn’t put his arms round his two sons. He’d done what he’d begun to do, occasional y, only after his wife’s death. He’d looked hard at his feet, at the ground he was standing on, and spat.

AND JACK, who long ago took his last look at that yard, looks now from an upstairs window at a grey sea, at a sky ful of wind-driven rain, but sees for a moment only smoke and fire.

SIXTY-FIVE HEAD OF CATTLE . Or, to reckon it another way (and never mind the promised compensation): ruin. Ruin, at some point in the not-so-distant future, the ruin that had been creeping up on them anyway since Vera Luxton had died.

Cattle going mad al over England. Or being shoved by the hundred into incinerators for the fear and the risk of it.

Who would have imagined it? Who would have dreamed it?

But cattle aren’t people, that’s a fact. And when trouble comes your way, at least you might think, though it’s smal comfort and precious little help: Wel , we’ve had our turn now, our share.

But years later, right here in this seaside cottage, Jack had switched on the TV and said, “El ie, come and look at this. Come and look, quick.” It was the big pyre at Roak Moor, back in Devon. Thousands of stacked-up cattle, thousands more lying rotting in fields. The thing was burning day and night. The smoke would surely have been visible, over the far hil s, from Jebb. Not to mention the smel being carried on the wind. And someone on the TV—another of those experts—was saying that burning these cattle might stil release into the air significant amounts of the undetected agent of BSE. Though it was ten years on, and this time the burnings were for foot-and-mouth. Which people weren’t known to get. Yet.

“Wel , Jack,” El ie had said, stroking the back of his neck,

“did we make a good move? Or did we make a good move?”

But he’d needed to resist the strange, opposite feeling: that he should have been there, back at Jebb, in the thick of it; it was his proper place.

BSE, then foot-and-mouth. What would have been the odds? Those TV pictures had looked like scenes from hel .

Flames leaping up into the night. Even so, cattle aren’t people. Just a few months later Jack had turned on the tel y once again and cal ed to El ie to come and look, as people must have been cal ing out, al over the world, to whoever was in the next room, “Drop what you’re doing and come and look at this.”

More smoke. Not over familiar, remembered hil s, and even on the far side of the world. Though Jack’s first thought—or perhaps his second—had been the somehow entirely necessary and appropriate one: Wel , we should be al right here. Here at the bottom of the Isle of Wight. And while the TV had seemed to struggle with its own confusion and repeated again and again, as if they might not be true, the same astonishing sequences, he’d stepped outside to look down at the site, as if half expecting everything to have vanished.

Thirty-two white units. Al stil there. And among them, on the grass, a few idle and perhaps stil -ignorant human sprinkles. But inside each caravan was a television, and some of them must be switched on. The word must be spreading. In the Ship, in the Sands Cafe, it must be spreading. It was early September—late season—but the middle of a beautiful, clear, Indian-summer day, the sea a smooth, smiling blue. Until now at least, they would al have been congratulating themselves on having picked a perfect week.

He’d felt a surge of helpless responsibility, of protectiveness. He was in charge. What should he do—go down and calm them? In case they were panicking. Tel them it was al right? Tel them it was al right just to carry on their holidays, that was what they’d come for and had paid for and they shouldn’t let this spoil things, they should carry on enjoying themselves.

But his next thought—though perhaps it had real y been his first and he’d pushed it aside, and it was less a thought maybe than a cold, clammy premonition—was: What might this mean for Tom?

HE LOOKS NOW at that same view from the bedroom window of Lookout Cottage, though the weather’s neither sunny nor calm. Clouds are charging over Holn Head. A November gale is careering up the Channel. The sea, white flecks in its greyness, seems to be travel ing in a body from right to left, west to east, as if some retreat is going on.

Rain stings the glass in front of him.

El ie has been gone for over an hour—this weather yet to unleash itself when she left. She could be sitting out the storm somewhere, pul ed up in the wind-rocked Cherokee.

Reconsidering her options, perhaps. Or she could have done already exactly what she said she’d do, and be returning, having to take it slowly, headlights on in the blinding rain. Or returning—who knows?—behind a police car, with not just its headlights on, but its blue light flashing.

Reconsidering her options? But she made the move and said the words. The situation is plain to him now, and despite the blurring wind and rain, Jack’s mind is real y quite clear. She had her own set of keys, of course. Al she had to do was grab her handbag and walk out the door, but she might have remembered another set of keys that Jack certainly hasn’t forgotten. Has it occurred to her, even now?

El ie who was usual y the one who thought things through, and him the slowcoach.

“El ie,” Jack thinks. “My El ie.”

HE’S ALREADY TAKEN the shotgun from the cabinet downstairs—the keys are in the lock—and brought it up here. It’s lying, loaded, on the bed behind him, on the white duvet. For good measure he has a box of twenty-five cartridges (some already in his pocket), in case of police cars, in case of mishaps. It’s the first time, Jack thinks, that he’s ever put a gun on a bed, let alone theirs, and that, by itself, has to mean something. As he peers through the window he can feel the weight of the gun behind him, making a dent in the duvet as if it might be some smal , sleeping body.

Wel , one way or another, they’d never gone down the road of children. There isn’t, now, that complication. He’s definitely the last of the Luxtons. There’s only one final complication—it involves El ie—and he’s thought that through too, seriously and careful y.

Which is why he’s up here, at this rain-lashed window, from where he has the best view of the narrow, twisting road, Beacon Hil , which has no other purpose these days than to lead to this cottage. So he’l be alerted. So he’l be able to see, just a little sooner than from downstairs, the dark-blue roof, above the high bank, then the nose of the Cherokee as it takes the first, tight, ascending bend, past the old chapel. The Cherokee that’s done so much hard journeying in these last three days.

The road below him, running with water, seems to slither.

Of course, she might not return at al . Another option, and one she might be seriously contemplating. Though where the hel else does she have to go to?

It’s al gone mad, Jack thinks, but part of him has never felt saner. Rain blurs the window, but he looks through it at the rows of buffeted caravans in the middle distance to the right, beyond the spur of land that slopes down beneath him to the low mass of the Head. Al empty now, of course, for the winter.

“Wel , at least this has happened in the off season.” El ie’s words, and just for a shameful instant it had been his own secret flicker of a thought as wel .

HE LOOKS at the caravans and even now feels their tug, like the tug of the wind on their own thin, juddering frames.

Thirty-two trembling units. To the left, the locked site office, the laundrette, the empty shop—gril e down, window boarded. The gated entrance-way off the Sands End road, the sign above it swinging.

Even now, especial y now, he feels the tug. The Lookout Caravan Park, named after this cottage (or two knocked into one), in turn named after its former use. He feels, himself now, like some desperate coastguard. El ie had said they should change the name from the Sands. He’d said they should keep it, for the good wil and the continuity.

And so they had, for a year. But El ie was al for them making their own mark and wiping out what was past.

There must be no end of caravan sites cal ed the Sands, she’d said, but the Lookout would stand out.

It could work two ways, he’d said, “Lookout”—attempting another of those solemn-faced jokes of the kind his father once made.

El ie had shrugged. So, didn’t he like the name of the cottage? It wasn’t the name they’d given it, after al . Lookout Cottage (usual y known as just “The Lookout”). They could always change the name of the cottage. El ie was al for change. She was his wife now. She’d laughed—she’d changed her name to Luxton.

But they hadn’t. Perhaps they should have done. And before the new season began, for the sake of uniformity but also novelty, and because El ie thought it sounded better than the Sands, the site had become, on the letterhead and the brochure and on the sign over the gate, as wel as in plain fact, the Lookout Park.

And it was lookout time now al right.

2

MY ELLIE. She’d changed her name (at long last) to Luxton, just as, once, his mother had done. And “Luxton,” so his mother had always said, was a name to be proud of. It was even a name that had its glory.

BOTH JACK AND TOM had grown up with the story, though, because of the eight years between them, not at the same time. But after Tom was born it acquired the double force of being a story about two brothers. It was Vera who mainly had the job of tel ing it, shaping it as she thought fit—though there wasn’t so much to go on—for the ears of growing boys. Their father may have known more, but the truth was that, though the story had become, quite literal y, engraved, no one had ever completely possessed the facts.

There was a medal kept at Jebb Farmhouse, up in what was known as the Big Bedroom: a silver king’s head with a red-and-blue ribbon. Once a year, in November, it would be taken out and polished (by Vera, until she died). Jack and Tom had each been given, and again by Vera, their separate, private, initiatory viewings. It was anyway for al to see that among the seven names, under 1914–18, on the memorial cross outside Al Saints’ church in Marleston vil age there were two Luxtons: “F.C. Luxton” and “G.W.

Luxton,” and after “G.W. Luxton” were the letters “DCM.”

. . .

ONCE, most of a century ago, when wild flowers were blooming and insects buzzing in the tal grass in the meadows along the val ey of the River Somme, two Luxton brothers had died on the same July day. In the process, though he would never know it, one of them was to earn a medal for conspicuous gal antry, while the other was merely ripped apart by bul ets. Their commanding officer, Captain Hayes, who had witnessed the act of valour himself, had been eager, that night, to write the matter up, with his recommendation, in the hope that something good—if that was a fair way of putting it—might come of the day’s unspeakabilities. But though he knew he had two Luxtons under his command, George and Fred, he had never known precisely which was which. In their ful kit and helmets they looked like identical twins. They all looked, he sometimes thought, like identical twins.

But the two Luxton boys were now equal y dead anyway.

So he had opted for George (it was the more patriotic name), intending to corroborate the matter the next morning, if he had the chance, before his dispatch was sent. There had been much else to concern him that night.

But he never did have the chance, since by seven a.m.

(another radiant summer’s day, with larks), not long after blowing his whistle yet again, and only obeying a futile order that elsewhere along the line had already been cancel ed, Captain Hayes too was dead.

So it was George, not Fred, who got a DCM—which was only one medal down (Vera liked to make this point) from a VC—and neither brother would ever dispute it.

No then-surviving or subsequent member of the Luxton family ever had cause to chal enge what was set down in the citation and carved in stone. No one else had contested it, though no one had suggested, either, that Fred was any sort of slouch. They were both heroes who’d volunteered and died for their country. It was the general, unspoken view of the slowly diminishing group who gathered every November round the Marleston war memorial that al those seven names on it were the names of heroes. Many not on it had been heroes too. There was perhaps a certain communal awkwardness about the local family names that were represented (only the Luxtons featured twice), perhaps even a particular awkwardness about George’s DCM—as if it had been merely attention-seeking of him to capture single-handedly an enemy machine-gun and hold it under impossible odds (so Captain Hayes had written) til he was cut down by crossfire. On the other hand, it would have been in the shabbiest spirit not to honour a thing for what it was. George Luxton and his DCM were in fact the reason why—even long after another world war—many residents of Marleston vil age and its vicinity turned up in November with their poppies when otherwise they might not have done. The Luxtons themselves, of course, were always there. George Luxton (which was not to forget Fred) was the vil age hero and no one (not even Jimmy Merrick of neighbouring Westcott Farm) could deny that he was the Luxtons’ claim to fame.

Only Jack knows, now, how Vera told the story. He never confirmed it expressly with Tom. On the other hand, he had no reason to suppose that Tom didn’t get exactly the same rendition. His mother had given Jack the plain—proud, il ustrious—facts, a man’s story coming from a woman’s lips. And al the better for it, Jack would later think. His dad would have made a mumbling hash of it. At the same time, like some diligent curator, she’d placed the medal itself before him. Jack couldn’t remember how old he’d been, but he’d been too young to recognise that he was going through a rite of passage arranged exclusively for him. It was probably early one November, around the time of Guy Fawkes’ Night, when they’d light a bonfire at the top of Barton Field, his dad (it was stil just the three of them) having splashed it first with paraffin. So in Jack’s mind Remembrance Day was always linked with flames and fireworks.

Whenever it was, his mother hadn’t played up the soldier-boy side of things, nor had she played it down. But when she’d finished, or when Jack had thought she’d finished, she’d added something that, much later, he realised was entirely her own. That was the story of George and Fred, his mother had said, that’s how it was: George won a medal, but they were both brave men. And if, his mother had gone on, those two boys (she’d made the point that they weren’t much more than boys) had made it home together after the war, one with a medal and one not, what would have happened, she felt sure, would have been this. They’d have stopped at the gate up on the Marleston road before walking down the track and George, who had the medal, would have pul ed it from his pocket and would have broken it in two. Then he’d have said, “Before we go any further, Fred, this is for you.” And given his brother half the medal.

“What’s mine is yours,” he’d have said. Then they’d have walked on down the track.

The extraordinary thing was that his mother had told Jack this extra, imaginary bit long before Tom was around—long before, in fact, anyone thought that there would ever be, or could be, a Tom. Jack was Vera’s one and only son. The extraordinary thing also was that you couldn’t break a medal in two. Jack knew this wel enough. Jack had held the medal, then, in whatever size hand he’d had at the time.

He has also held it, much more recently, in his much bigger hand. And what was true years ago was as true now. You couldn’t break it in two. It was made of silver. You couldn’t break it in two even if you took a pair of the strongest pliers to it.

But his mother had said that what might be true for a bar of chocolate could also be true for a medal.

THE LAST TIME Jack stood, wearing a poppy, by that memorial cross in Marleston was in November 1994, and he has every reason to remember it, setting aside that it was Remembrance Day anyway. His father was there with him—or it was more the other way round—but Tom wasn’t there, the first such occasion he’d missed. Tom, who would have been nineteen in just a few weeks’ time, wasn’t around at al , for the simple but, on such a day, highly complicated reason that he was in the army.

It made the inescapable annual attendance at the remembrance service awkward, to say the least, but it was far from being the only burden of that sorry day.

Vera wasn’t there either. She’d been dead by then for some five years. Her grave was in the churchyard close by, and it had become part of the Luxton Remembrance Day ritual that after the service they’d go and stand by it for a moment, wearing their poppies, as if she too might have been mown down on the Somme. That had been duly done

—just Jack and his dad—that day.

Over the others gathered by the memorial there hung, too, an awkwardness or an extra sombreness (though it was a sparkling crisp morning) that owed something to Tom’s absence, but just as much to the devastations that had visited the region’s farms in recent years—to the war stil rumbling on, though the thing had passed its peak, with the cow disease. In many respects, the after-effects were as bad as the outbreak itself. While officials blathered about recovery and “declining incidence,” the human tol was mounting. Perhaps everyone did their best, as every year, to picture for a moment the indescribable battlefields on which those Luxton brothers and others had died, but what came more readily to mind were the cul ings and slaughterings of recent times and the grief and hardship they were stil causing.

You couldn’t real y blame Tom Luxton, in fact, for seeking his future in the army.

Jack remembers that Remembrance Day because it was the last one he attended with his father and because his father, on this occasion, didn’t offer to buy him, as was the regular ritual too, a pint in the Crown afterwards. It was the only day of the year on which Michael would buy his son a drink, doing so with a rather stagy insistence, as if the long-ago deaths of those two lads somehow rested on his conscience. Or perhaps it was more that on this day, with its hal owed meaning for the Luxton family, he liked to make a show in front of the vil age.

The whole thing was careful y adhered to. Every Remembrance Sunday Michael would put on his rarely worn suit, which Jack knew had been Michael’s father’s before him, and Jack, when he was old and privileged enough, would wear the suit his mother had once bundled him off to Burtons in Barnstaple to buy him. On that last Remembrance Day it was no longer a good fit, but it was in good condition. There had been little other use for it.

Michael

was

an

unsentimental

dairy

farmer,

uncomfortable at, but grudgingly empowered by, having a hero in the family. He made a display of both feelings. He’d put on his suit with an air of unwil ingness, as if the whole performance only deprived him of time better spent, even on a Sunday morning, on the farm. He’d pin on his poppy.

Then he’d take the medal, which Vera would have polished, and slip it almost furtively into his breast pocket. His mother, Jack remembered, always put more spirit into the thing, not only buffing up the medal, but making sure to procure the poppies in advance and inspecting them in their suits as if they might have been soldiers themselves.

And she wasn’t even a real Luxton.

Al this had changed and the annual event had acquired a new meaning and a new component after Vera died. But there’d always been—and after Vera’s death it included the teenage Tom—that gesture of the pint.

They were certainly not regulars at the Crown. If they had been, it might have lessened the effect when they walked in every November with their poppies and suits. Drink, Michael would general y say, was money down the throat.

And at least he’d never taken the route, as more than one farmer did, of letting drink itself make you forget that. They drank tea at Jebb, pints of it. They cal ed it “brew.” Otherwise, except at Christmas, they were mainly dry.

OLD MAN MERRICK on the other hand, Jack had long suspected, even before El ie confirmed it, always had a hip flask on the go. Tucked somewhere about him, under those strange layers he wore. A nip here, a nip there—ever since El ie’s mother, Alice, had disappeared one day, when El ie was stil a teenager, from Westcott Farm. Just enough to keep him bright and looking—as he often did with no great reason to—like some twinkly-eyed, contented elf. Yet on al those occasions when he and Jack would meet “by accident” in the Westcott boundary field and for a few moments do what might be cal ed “passing the time of day,” leaning their backs against the pick-up—with Luke sometimes perched in it—or against Merrick’s beaten-up Land Rover, Merrick had never fished inside his wrappings and said, “There, boysy, take a slug.” Even when the wind was sharp.

Luke was the softest dog going, but he’d always growl and act fierce when Merrick was around and Jack had never known Jimmy Merrick stretch out a hand to stroke him.

Merrick, with rumpled lapels and a poppy, would regularly turn up on Remembrance Day, mainly for the drinking afterwards and for the rarity—it was worth a humble nod to Luxton glory—of having Michael Luxton buy him a pint. If he looked a strange sight in a suit (but they al did), Jimmy wasn’t a stranger to the Crown. Michael’s view was that he must have a stash of something under the floorboards at Westcott, a pot of something buried in his yard. It had to do somehow with his wife running off. But this was something El ie could never verify—and she’d certainly have wanted to know about it.

Drink was money down the gul et anyway, Michael would say. Not that he’d want to judge his neighbour. Maybe it was even the point he was making on that Remembrance Day. It wasn’t a point about Tom. Tom’s name was simply no longer mentioned. It was just that they were teetering on the edge. More so than Jack guessed. Even the twenty-odd pounds he’d need for the two pints (just the two now) plus the others he’d have to stand (you had to look proud) was more than he could muster. Jack always put a twenty, if he had one, in his own pocket so he was covered too. And he’d had a twenty, somehow, that day.

But his dad hadn’t even looked in the direction of the Crown. His face was like a wal , a thicker wal than usual, and, after doing the other thing they always did, going to stand by Vera’s grave, they’d just driven silently back to Jebb. “That’s that then,” his dad had said and had hardly needed to say even that.

Jack was the passenger, Michael drove, and there was a point somewhere along the road when Jack realised, if not quite at the time itself, that it was too late. Before that point he stil might have said, “Stop, Dad, there’s something we haven’t done.” And conceivably his dad was testing him, daring him—wishing him to say it. He might have said it even when they were wel clear of Marleston and nearing the Jebb gate, the hedges along the road stil glittering with barely melted frost. He might have just grabbed his father’s arm as he shifted a gear. What a simple thing.

But they’d passed the point, and Jack couldn’t have said exactly where it was. Though, afterwards, he was to think it was the same point where Tom, on foot and heading in the other direction, at three o’clock in the morning, almost a year before, must have known—if he’d had any doubts at al

—that now he couldn’t, wouldn’t go back.

And it was the same point, perhaps, where George might have stopped with Fred.

“STOP, DAD.” But Jack wasn’t up to it. Though by then he’d long been the bigger of the two of them. One day, years ago, he’d woken up to discover, disturbingly, that he was tal er than his father. Now, in some mysterious way, his dad was even shrinking. But he stil wasn’t up to it.

And his father, Jack thinks now, might just have said,

“We haven’t not done anything. We went and looked at her grave, didn’t we? Take your hand off my arm.” They might simply have had a set-to right there, a blazing set-to, pul ed up on the Marleston–Polstowe road, the engine of the Land Rover stil running. A set-to in their suits.

They might even have got out and taken a swing at each other, the swings at each other they’d been saving up for years. And his dad with a medal for bravery in his pocket.

On those previous occasions in the Crown there’d usual y be someone who’d ask, as if they’d been planted there for the purpose, “So—do you have it with you, Michael?” And his father, perched on his stool at the bar and looking as if he hadn’t heard or might even be quietly annoyed by the question, would sip his beer or blow smoke from his mouth and, only after you thought the matter had passed, dip his hand into his top pocket and take it out again, clenched round something. And only after more time had passed and while he stil looked at the air in front of him would he open his hand, just for an instant, above the surface of the bar, and then return the medal to where it had come from. It was a performance his dad was good at and one worth its annual repetition. An unsentimental dairy farmer, but capable (though Jack could never have furnished the joke) of milking a situation.

The lights on in the Crown. He can see it now. A grey November noon. The low beams. Poppies and suits. A faint whiff of old wardrobes and moth bal s. The beer seeping down, everything huddled and glinting. Then for a moment that extra glint. The glory of the Luxtons.

“Stop, Dad. I want to buy you a drink.” Such a simple thing, but like moving the hil s.

3

WHAT WOULD HIS MUM THINK? That has always been Jack’s inner yardstick, his deepest cry.

Vera Luxton died when Jack was twenty-one and Tom was thirteen, of ovarian cancer. Perhaps his acquaintance with cows and calves made Jack better able than most men of twenty-one to comprehend what this meant, but it was anyway an event that changed everything, like a line in history. The cow disease, which came later, was one thing and it was a kil er in every sense, but the rot real y set in, Jack would say, when Vera died. Michael had run the farm, but Vera had overseen it, had made it revolve in some way round herself. If they hadn’t known and acknowledged it at the time—and that included little Tom—they knew it now.

Behind that wal his dad could present to the world, Jack knew, his father was stumbling. There were some things Jack could see through—or that he simply duplicated. He had a face like a wal too, he was stumbling too. It was his fal -back position, to take what he got and stumble on, to look strong or just dumb on the outside and stumble inside.

He was just like his father.

But on the other hand (and his father knew it) he’d always been closer to his mum, a lot closer than little Tom had ever been, coming along those eight years later and to everyone’s surprise.

“Would you like a little brother, Jack?”

His mother had looked at him with a strange, stern-but-pleading look, as if she needed (though he was only seven) his serious, manly help.

“Because I have a feeling,” she’d said, “you may be going to get one.”

It had seemed to him that she was somehow floating away, might even be saying goodbye, and this was some sort of offer of compensation. And how, with that look in her eye, could he have said anything but yes?

It was only later that he drew the conclusion—or formed the theory—that Tom hadn’t been meant to happen. It was a risk. His mother had problems in that department. She’d had a bad time with him, he vaguely knew. Though he also understood that she’d thought it was worth it. She had an even worse time, as it turned out, with Tom. Between the two of them, Jack sometimes wondered, might they have given her the cancer?

But he’d been truly intended. While Tom, it seemed, had turned up by surprise and at much hazard to his mother. It made a difference, perhaps. It made him feel that Tom was never a rival—the opposite. Jack had been born at Jebb, in the Big Bedroom, with the assistance of an intrepid midwife. But Tom had been brought home one day from Barnstaple Infirmary, with a Vera who’d looked rather weaker than her baby. It made a difference.

In any case, after Tom was there, Jack’s mum had a way, from time to time, of drawing Jack aside into a sort of special, private corner—though it was usual y in the kitchen or on warm days in the yard, so in no way hidden.

Nonetheless his dad, and Tom when he was older, would respectful y steer clear of it, as if Vera had issued an order.

When he was in this special space with his mother, Jack would mysteriously understand—even when he was only nine or ten—that he was having a grown-up conversation, something you were supposed to have in life, a sort of always-to-be-resumed conversation, which went on, in fact, right up until the time his mother fel il and died. And he’d understand that this conversation had to do with something that seldom otherwise came into his thinking, let alone his talk: his future and its responsibilities. Or, to put it another way, his name.

Since it meant something if you were born, as he was, on a farm: the name. The generations going back and forwards, like the hil s, whichever way you looked, around them. And what else had his mother borne him for than to give him and show him his birthright? Something his father, for whatever reason—and though it was his name—could never do. There’d never been such a moment.

And then the birthright, deprived of Vera’s backing and blighted by cow disease, had begun to look anyway like a poor deal.

That had always seemed to Jack to be the gist of those conversations, whatever their apparent subject: his birthright. That he shouldn’t worry about Tom, who would always be the little nipper and latecomer. That he should rise to his place and his task.

When he was older, starting to outgrow both his father and that Burtons suit, she’d make tea for just the two of them. He’d smoke a cigarette. She’d top up his mug, without his asking, when he put it down. He didn’t know then how much one day he’d miss, and he wouldn’t know how to speak of it when he did, the creases in his mother’s wrist as she held the teapot, one hand pressing down the lid, and refil ed his mug, just for him.

And it was only later, when she was gone, that it occurred to him that another gist, and perhaps the real gist, of those conversations was precisely that. That she was tel ing him that she wouldn’t always be there. It was what she’d had in her mind perhaps—and he’d been right to have those strange feelings—even when she first told him about Tom.

She’d be gone sooner than anyone might think.

She was more of a Luxton, it could be said, than the Luxtons themselves. When she died it was as if the whole pattern was lost. Yet her name had once been Newcombe, and until she was nineteen she’d never even known life on a farm. She was the daughter of a postmaster. One day Michael Luxton had plucked her from the post office in Polstowe and carried her to Jebb Farm and, so it seemed, nothing could have better answered her hopes and her wishes.

Something like that must have happened. Jack had never known, even from his mother’s lips, the actual story.

His dealings with El ie Merrick didn’t seem a useful guide.

But he found it hard, or just vaguely trespassing of him, to imagine that his father, his father of al people, might once have carried his mother, her legs kicking, over the threshold of Jebb Farm and possibly even have carried her, without a pause, straight up to the Big Bed—where two years later he, Jack, would be born and where, twenty-one years after that, Vera Luxton would die.

He’d sometimes daringly think that the business of birthright might work in reverse. That his mother’s birthing him, more than her taking his father’s name, had made a Luxton out of her. She’d had such a bad time with him, Jack supposed, that it had general y been accepted that she couldn’t be a mother again. So everything was pooled in him. Or, looking at it another way, it was his fault. Eight long years had proved it. Then Tom had come along and taken away the blame. Which was another reason why suddenly having a little brother around was never a problem for Jack.

Quite the opposite.

Anyway, there were those conversations. And anyway, by the time Vera lay dying in that big bed, she’d become so much a Luxton that despite the determined efforts of the health authorities to move her into hospital, she refused to be taken from Jebb Farm. As if she were putting down her final roots.

He’d always remember—though he’s tried to forget them

—her last days. How she clung, sometimes literal y, to that bed as if she wanted, perhaps, to become it. Or the bed, perhaps, wanted to become her. His father, as if not to intrude on this intimate process, had slept, or rather kept terrified watch, close by in a sort of separate bivouac made out of the old wooden chest pushed up against the room’s solitary, battered armchair. The room was like some compartment of disaster.

WELL, at least she was spared, Jack can say to himself now, the long road to ruin, and worse. Though it was not so long, real y, after her death. How it would have appal ed and shamed and simply disappointed her. How she must have flinched, again and again, in that grave of hers in Marleston churchyard. But then if she could have flinched—Jack can sometimes lose his own logic—she wouldn’t have been spared.

He can’t decide the matter. His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed al the things that fol owed her death. Including al this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.

Only yesterday Jack had been obliged to stand close to his mother’s grave. Had she known? How could she have borne it to know, under the circumstances? But if she’d known, then surely she’d have let him know, he’d have felt some tug—something even like the tug of those empty caravans—and surely she’d have cried out, somehow, when he’d left in that sudden, uncontrol able haste, “Jack, don’t go. Don’t rush off like that.” And surely, if she had, he’d have stayed.

All of them there together, for that short, agonising while, al of them under the same pressing circumstances, but him the only one left above ground.

And al of them there (except him) right now, he thinks, right this minute, under this wind and rain. The wind plucking the browning petals from al those flowers, toppling the stacked-up bunches and wreaths, the rain rinsing the gravestones, new and old, the water seeping down through the soil.

Jack can’t decide the matter. Do they feel it, know it al , or are they spared? He could say he’s about to find out.

4

WHAT WOULD HIS MOTHER THINK (he tries not to think about it) if she could see him now?

BUT WHAT WOULD SHE have thought, anyway, to see him no longer at Jebb Farm but here by the sea, tending a herd of caravans? What would she think to see him hitched up—

properly and official y married—to El ie Merrick? But that once-impossible yet inevitable thing—who else was it going to be?—would surely have been only what she’d have wished. If only she’d had the power to knock two stubborn male heads together and make it happen herself.

But it hadn’t happened, anyway, in Marleston church. No wedding bel s reaching her, six foot below in the Devon earth, making her smile. My son Jack’s getting married today. And he hadn’t felt her presence—her touch, her whispered approval—in that registry office in Newport.

And now, look, with a gun on their marriage bed.

And what would she have thought to see him and El ie taking off every winter, for three weeks or a whole month sometimes, to sun themselves under coconut palms and drink tal drinks with paper parasols stuck in them? Never mind that they were here by the seaside, near a beach, in the first place. But that was what El ie had thought they should do, they could afford it and they should do it, and why shouldn’t they have their holidays? And he, with a little coaxing at first, had gone along with it. And not a bad arrangement at al . Certainly according to the caravanners

—the “Lookouters.” We get a week in the Isle of Wight, you get a month in the Caribbean. Not bad, Jack, for an out-of-work farmer.

It was the regular backchat, not il -meant, but he’d had to find a way of handling it. No one got short-changed, no one got a bad deal at the Lookout. He couldn’t arrange the weather (any more than he could at Jebb). You’l get as good a holiday here as you’l get there, he’d say, in a way that, he could tel , they felt he real y, mysteriously believed.

He’d risen to that task: talking to the caravanners, making them feel at home and befriended. He’d been surprised at his talent for it.

He took his holidays these days in the Caribbean. And what of it? Once he’d been tethered, al year round, to a herd of Friesians.

Though, if the truth be known, after a few days of lying under those palm trees and sipping those drinks and smiling at El ie and rubbing sunscreen on her, he’d sometimes start to think anxiously about his caravans.

Whether they were al right. Whether they were withstanding the winter storms. Whether that security firm—Dawsons—

was real y any good and whether anyone was actual y patrol ing the place, while he was lying here where once he could never have dreamed of being. And then he’d think, because it was the thought he was real y always having to bat away, like batting away one of those big bastard tropical hornet things that could come at you suddenly out of nowhere: What would his mum think?

Wel , Jack, my big old boy, it’s a far cry from Brigwel Bay. That’s what she’d think. Or from hosing down the milking parlour.

And then he’d think of Tom.

. . .

“FARMER JACK.” He never quite knew how the word had got around. Farmer Jack, milking his caravans. Here comes Farmer Jack in one of those shirts he got in Barbados. The ones that make your eyes hurt. What would they have thought if they could actual y have seen him in the parlour in his faded blue boiler suit and his wel ies? Being barked at by his father. What would his mum have thought if she could see him in one of those shirts?

But never mind that. Never mind the Lookout Park, formerly the Sands, or the winter holidays in the Caribbean.

What would she have thought to see how it al went at Jebb? To see it now, not a Luxton in sight, its acres al in new hands and the farmhouse no longer a farmhouse. A country home, a “holiday home” (that was the phrase El ie herself had once used) for people who already had a home.

What would she have thought to see al the things that didn’t bear thinking of? (Though had she seen them anyway?) To see Tom, little Tom, but a big boy himself by then, simply slip out one cold December night and disappear?

But Tom’s with her right now, Jack thinks, he could scarcely be closer. He was walking right back to her, that night, without knowing it.

And what would she have thought to see those burning cattle?

Al the generations going back and forwards. It had been so for centuries. The first farmhouse on Jebb Hil had been built by a Luxton in 1614. The oak in Barton Field was perhaps old even then. And who would have thought—let alone his own mother—that he, Jack Luxton, would be the first of al the Luxtons (as he was now the last) to cut that long, thick rope on which his own hands had been hardened and sel Jebb Farmhouse and al the land and become, with El ie, the soft-living proprietor of a caravan site?

He could blame El ie if he wanted to. He’d been the only man left around the place, and who else made the decisions? But El ie would surely have known the weak spot in him she was touching (so would his mother) when she came up with her plan. And what other plan, what other solution did he happen to have?

“I’ve thought it through, Jack, trust me.” To become the proprietor of the very opposite thing to that deep-rooted farmhouse. Holiday homes, on wheels. Or

“units,” as they’d come to refer to them. But they’d been good at it, he and El ie, they’d made a good go of it—with a lot of help at the start, it’s true, from “Uncle Tony.” And they’d made more out of it than they’d ever have made out of two doomed farms. And, for God’s sake, it could even be fun. Fun being what they dealt in. “Fun, Jacko, don’t you think it’s time we had some?” And every winter, on top of it al , they flew off to the Caribbean.

But not this winter. Obviously. Or it had seemed unavoidably obvious to him. But not to El ie, apparently.

And that was the start of al this.

HE LOOKS NOW at the rain-swept caravans. The tug of it, stil . Lookout Cottage up here, the caravans down there, no more than little white oblongs at this distance. The joke was that he had a telescope constantly trained, he wasn’t just Farmer Jack, he was also sometimes the commandant.

Driving down or strol ing down every day to see if al was wel . In fine weather, dressed the part: shorts and Caribbean shirt (extra-large) and one of those basebal caps they’d had run up, free for every guest, with LOOKOUT

and the lighthouse motif—gold on black—above the peak.

Thirty-two units. Al “top of the range,” he could truthful y say, even if the range wasn’t quite the topmost one. He could never have said that about the milking machinery at Jebb.

The tug he’d never expected. Empty half the year, but then sometimes, strangely, as now, al the more tugging.

Occupied for the other half by this shifting temporary population—migrants, vagrants, escapers in their own country.

It was only ever an encampment down there, that was the feel of it, like the halt of some expeditionary, ragtag army. It might al be gone in the morning—any morning—leaving nothing but the tyre marks in the grass. That was the tug.

Not cattle, not even caravans, but people.

5

ELLIE SITS in the wind-rocked, rain-lashed Cherokee, in the lay-by on the coast road at Holn Cliffs, thinking of her mother.

The car is pointing in the direction of Holn itself and so in what, on any day til now, she might have cal ed the direction of home. And on a clear day it would be perfectly possible to see from where she sits not just the fine sweep of the coastline, but, on the hil side running up from the Head, the distant white speck of Lookout Cottage. It had been built there, after al , with a now-vanished lighthouse above it, because of the prominent position. And on a clear day, a fine summer’s day say, it would be equal y possible to see from Lookout Cottage the distant glint and twinkle of cars—with perhaps an ice-cream van or two—lined up in the lay-by at Holn Cliffs while their occupants admired the view.

Today there is no view. Even Holn Head is just a vague, jutting mass of darker greyness amid the general greyness, and El ie can only squintingly imagine that at a certain point, through the murk beyond her windscreen, she can see the pinprick gleam of the lit-up windows of the cottage.

The wipers are on, though to little effect. Thirty yards along the lay-by, barely visible, is another parked car, a silver hatchback, doing what El ie is apparently doing, and El ie feels, along with an instinctive solidarity, a stab of envy. Only to be sitting out the storm.

How could Jack have said what he said?

El ie hasn’t seen her mother for over twenty years—and can never see her again—so that to think of her at al is like seeing distant glimmers through a blur. Yet right now, as if time has performed some astounding, marooning loop, thoughts of her mother—and of her father—have never been so real to her.

How could Jack have said it?

ELLIE’S MOTHER DISAPPEARED, one fine late-September day, from Westcott Farm, Devon, abandoning her husband, Jimmy, and her only child, El ie, when El ie was barely sixteen, and though she would never see her again, El ie would come to know—familiarly and grateful y—where her mother had eventual y made her home. El ie’s mother once lived in that cottage whose lights El ie can only imagine she sees, and had she not done so, El ie and Jack could never have made it their home as wel .

Though now El ie wonders if it is any sort of home at al .

The exact cause of her mother’s sudden flight al those years ago El ie would never know, but it had to do with a figure whom El ie, back then, would sometimes cal , when in intimate conversation with Jack Luxton, her mother’s

“mystery man”—using that phrase not so much with scorn but with a teasing fascination, as if she would quite like a mystery man of her own.

Her father must have had some clue who the man was and even communicated indirectly with his runaway wife on the subject, if only to become an official y divorced man and get back the sole title to Westcott Farm. But his lips remained sealed and, anyway, not long before her father’s death, El ie was to discover that her mother had replaced that original mystery man with someone else and had lived with him on the Isle of Wight.

A few miles along the coast road behind her, in a cemetery in Shanklin, El ie’s mother—or her ashes—lies buried, under a memorial slab placed there by her then husband, whom El ie would one day refer to as “Uncle Tony.” El ie has lived now for over ten years in her mother’s and Uncle Tony’s former home, but has never been to see her mother’s nearby resting-place, and until recently this would only have expressed her mixed feelings about her once renegade mum: blame, tempered with unexpected gratitude and—ever since that September day years ago—

an odd, grudging admiration. She hadn’t quite condemned, but she hadn’t quite forgiven either, and she wasn’t going to go standing by any graves.

And until recently this would only have expressed El ie’s position general y. The past is the past, and the dead are the dead.

But two mornings ago when Jack had departed, al by himself, on an extraordinary journey whose ultimate destination was a graveside, El ie had felt rise up within her, like a counterweight, the sudden urge to pay her long-withheld respects. She’d even had the thought: As for Jack and his brother, so for me and my mum. The only trouble was that she didn’t have the car, Jack had it, and she’d baulked at the idea of getting the bus. But she has the car now—she has unilateral y commandeered it—and, only within the last desperate hour, El ie has attempted that aborted journey once again. And failed.

SHE’D DRIVEN BLINDLY hither and thither at first, sometimes literal y blindly, given the assaults of the rain, and because much of the time her eyes were swimming with tears. How could Jack have said that? But then how could she have said what she’d said, and how could she possibly, actual y act upon it? Then the thought of her mother had loomed, even more powerful y, once more. Shanklin. Forget Newport. Forget Newport police station. That had just been a terrible, crazy piece of blather. Shanklin. And now, after al , might real y be the time.

Hel o Mum, here I am at last, and look what a mess I’m in.

Any advice? What now? What next?

And if no answer were forthcoming, then at least she might say: Thank you, Mum, thank you anyway. I’m here at least to say that. Thank you for deserting me and Dad al those years ago. Thank you for leaving me to him, and to the cows. And the cow disease. Thank you for being a cow yourself, but for coming right in the end, even if you never knew it. Thank you for giving me and Jack—remember him, Jack Luxton?—these last ten years. Which now look like they’re coming to an end.

And thank you, if it comes to it, for offering me your example.

Rol ed up in the back of the car is one of the oversized umbrel as they’d had made for use around the site and to sel in the shop. Yel ow-gold segments alternating with black ones displaying a white lighthouse logo—meant to represent the vanished beacon—and the word LOOKOUT at the rim. The umbrel as matched the T-shirts and the basebal caps and the car stickers—al things that (like the name “Lookout” itself) had been her ideas.

It would have gone with Jack, she realised, on his journey. She suddenly hoped it hadn’t rained on him. What a fool he’d have looked putting it up at a funeral. Let alone at a military parade. But driving madly just minutes ago through the blinding rain, El ie had seen herself clutching that same wind-tugged Lookout umbrel a as she stood by her mother’s rain-soaked remains.

Hel o Mum. What a day for it, eh?

But what a fool she’d look. And what a miserable exercise it would be. Picking her way through some wretched cemetery, through the puddles and mud. In these shoes. Al to find some little, drenched square of marble, while a seaside brol y tried to yank her into the air. Jesus Christ.

And as for that advice, that example, did she real y need to stoop, cocking an ear, by her mother’s grave? It was stored up, anyway, in her memory, like an emergency formula for some future—rainy—day. She could hear her mother’s forgotten voice. Skedaddle, El ie. Just skedaddle, like I did. Cut loose. While you’ve got the car and while you can. With just the clothes you’re in and what’s in your handbag. Now or never. Cut loose.

Somewhere near Ventnor, with a strange little yelp at herself, she’d turned round and driven back along the coast road, into the teeth of the oncoming gale, only to find herself immobilised now, fifty yards—across a sodden verge, a wind-rippled hedge and a strip of field—from the edge of Holn Cliffs.

Everyone has their limits, El ie thinks, and her mother must have reached hers, for her to have left a husband and a daughter who’d only just turned sixteen—even with a mystery man on hand. And her own limits must have outstretched her mother’s—but then she hadn’t had a mystery man, she had Jack—for her to have stuck it out with her dad for another twelve years. To have stuck it out with him, as it happened, to the very end. Even being with him, holding and squeezing his hand, in that hospital in Barnstaple just a few hours before he died. And she’d have been with him at the end, if she’d known and if it hadn’t been at two in the morning.

How could Jack have said what he said?

Everyone has their limits, and it seems to El ie that she might have reached her limits now with Jack—or whoever that man was up there in that invisible cottage. She might be about to turn her back on him, as she’d never, in fact, turned her back on her father. Or, before now, on Jack.

But here she sits, pul ed up in this lay-by, not going anywhere, within a mile and (on any normal day) within sight of home. And it wasn’t the perilous weather that had made her stop, or even the pursuing ghost of her unvisited mother, but the sudden, clear, looming ghost of herself, driving madly once before, through the stil , golden sunshine of a late-September afternoon.

BARELY SIXTEEN, but she knew how to handle a Land Rover. Even if she wasn’t al owed and was even forbidden by law to drive it on the road. Nonetheless, on the third day after her mother’s departure and while her father seemed to have taken resolutely to the bottle for the day, El ie had gone out with the keys to the ancient vehicle in the Westcott yard, got in and driven it, for the first time in her life, right up the Westcott track to the gate and the road, and beyond.

With no real intention of returning.

It wasn’t a planned escape. She’d taken nothing with her, but it had evolved, in the very fact of motion, in the familiar quirks of the gear stick beside her and the mud-plastered pedals beneath her, into a frantic bid for freedom. In any case, there was the sudden sheer, wild glee of taking the thing out onto the road and seeing what it could do.

Swerving to miss traffic, taking arbitrary turns and, in the narrow lanes, finding out that she was entirely adept, even aggressive, in dealing with an oncoming vehicle in that one-to-one situation when either they or you have to find the passing-spot. If she could manage this Land Rover in a muddy field, do natty reverse-work in the yard or buck along a rutted track, she could do al this on a solid road now.

The early-autumn sun had fil ed the air and drenched the berried hedges. The window was down, her hair flew. There was petrol in the tank. El ie can see, now, her bare teenage knees as she pumped the pedals, her little smoky-blue, thick-corduroy skirt, no more than a band of ribbed fabric—

this was 1983.

She began to laugh, to sing—selections from Duran Duran. Was her face also shiny with tears? Had this old Land Rover ever been given such a ride? As she drove, a sort of plan, a purpose had come to her. Wherever she was going (if she was going anywhere) she couldn’t go there alone. Or she couldn’t leave her mates behind without letting them at least know she was on the run and offering them the option too. There was room in the back.

She thought of going to get Linda Fairchild and Susie Mitchelmore in Marleston itself, Jackie White in Polstowe and Michel e Hannaford at Leke Hil . Liberating them al . A skidding halt, a loud blast on the horn. Quick! It’s me, El ie!

Come on! She thought of going to that bus shelter near Abbot’s Green, where much was thought of and discussed and giggled over but not so much done, and scrawling a last, filthy, farewel message on its wal . She thought of scooping up the whole Abbot’s Green School bunch and saying, “Right! Here we go!” The chances of a police car round here were a hundred to one. And, to hel with it, she could even go and pick up Bob Ireton’s mopy sister Gil ian

—Bob who was set on becoming a cop.

Al this was like some glorious net—a freeing net—flung out from her racing mind. She’d scoop up anyone who was game for it. Boys too, yes, any boys. But at some point in the great rush of her thoughts—she was actual y swooping down Polstowe Hil —she calmed down (relatively) and knew what she had to do.

Could it real y be anything else? And it wouldn’t be just an act of liberation. It would be a test. A test of herself. Could she? Would she? She stopped and reversed, swiftly, with a pleasing belch of exhaust smoke, at a farm gate. Al the farm gates, al the bloody farm gates. Someone blared a horn at her. She blared back. She raced again through Polstowe. People couldn’t have helped noticing by now.

This was at least the third time. That was Jimmy Merrick’s Land Rover, wasn’t it? But that wasn’t Jimmy, surely, at the wheel.

She sped back towards Marleston. Could she real y do it? She certainly saw herself doing it. She sees herself doing it now, as if there’s stil somehow a need. She sees herself stopping by the Jebb gate and opening it. Sees herself driving through and not bothering to do any closing.

My God, this is a first. She sees herself roaring into the Jebb yard and lurching to a halt, hand slammed on the horn.

No guessing where Jack might be on the farm at this time of day, but in the scene in her head Jack is somewhere conveniently near the yard. And he’s heard this meteor coming down the track.

She sees the family turning out to confront her amazing arrival. Michael. Vera. There’s a difficulty there, she knows it—to tear Jack from his mum. And standing beside Vera is little Tom, aged seven. A difficulty there too—and there always wil be. There’s a difficulty now. But it’s only Jack she cares about. My Jack.

And there he is. She looks at him and he looks at her, astonishment denting his not often dentable face. A test for her. A test for him. But she’s already passed hers, by being there—it was always like this, her making the first move—

and by sticking her head now out of the window and yel ing,

“Come on, Jacko! Now or never. Quick! Jump in!”

. . .

BUT SHE DOESN’T go through the Jebb gate. She doesn’t even stop by it. And Jack wil never know that he was once part of that never-enacted scene. She thinks of her dad who, even now, in his sozzled state, is perhaps unaware of her flight. How can she do it? Ensure that in the course of three days the only two women in his life wil have deserted him, and stolen his Land Rover. She thinks of her abandoned dad who, when he hears her driving back down the Westcott track, wil surely think, in his half-stupor, that it must be his wife coming home. Coming back! Al ie and El ie and Jimmy, al together at Westcott again.

She drives along the Marleston road. There’s a straight, clear stretch after the Jebb bend, but she’s lost now al the thril of speed. In any case, she slows for the Westcott gate.

She can see the square tower of Marleston church poking up ahead. She gives a strange, pained cry (she gave the same cry again, exactly the same, today) and runs a forearm over her slippery face. She stops, gets out to close the gate dutiful y behind her—having left it defiantly open on her way out. She hears its familiar clang.

The twin hedges take her in their grasp, the golden sunshine mocks her. She drives on down, along the dry ruts, to her father, who, indeed, since he’s been seeking oblivion anyway, wil never know, any more than Jack wil , what El ie has done today. The things we never know. She drives back into Westcott Farm, to her mother’s absence, to her sleeping father (who when she wakes him with a mug of tea, doesn’t want to be woken) and to the mooing, snorting, pissing, shitting fact of cows to be milked.

6

IT WAS DEEP, steep, difficult but good-looking land, with smal patchy fields that funnel ed or bulged down to the woods in the val ey. They had one field up on the ridge where they grew occasional wheat and autumn feed, otherwise it was down to grass and like almost every farm for miles around: sheep or dairy, and they’d always been dairy—beef calves for sale, and dairy. It was hard work for the softest, mildest thing in the world. It was al about turning the land into good white gal ons, as many as possible. And it was al about men being slaves to the female of the species, so Michael Luxton had liked to say, with a sideways crack of his face, when Vera had stil been around, especial y in her hearing. They were al bloody milksops real y.

Each one of those carcasses that were carted off after the cow disease came was a potential hand-out from the Ministry. But that didn’t al ow for the slowness or downright shiftiness of the bureaucracy, or for the simple fact that there was nothing much to bridge the gap. Not a single one of their herd had ever been confirmed. The words were

“suspect” and “contiguous risk.” They just couldn’t be moved, that’s al , though they had to be fed. Nor, at first, could their milk be moved, though they had to be milked.

And then they’d nearly al (except for the new calves) been moved anyway—as carcasses. The farm like a ghost farm, the loss of al that penned-up company strangely bereaving.

No milk flow, no cash flow, and precious little in the bank.

He and Tom got the impression, from their dad’s silences, that the precious little wasn’t even theirs. Meanwhile, when were they supposed to start restocking again and know it wouldn’t be cost and effort for nothing?

Tom hadn’t waited for the final reckoning. Though you couldn’t say it was a sudden move either. He waited til his eighteenth birthday—til he’d be his own man. And you couldn’t say it was a bad move. He’d seen the way the wind was blowing.

And why hadn’t he, Jack, thought of it first? Just to clear off out of it. But it had never occurred to him. And why hadn’t he minded when Tom said that it had been occurring to him al right, for more than a year? “This is just for your ears, Jack.” As if then it became a pact that they’d both entered into, and it was down to Jack, while Tom made the actual move, to cover up for him. And to take it, of course, from Dad afterwards, take al the stick for it, but not say anything for weeks, months, feigning dumb ignorance, buttoning his lip, like some good soldier himself, and only speaking, final y, because he thought his dad must surely have guessed anyway—what else does a boy do?—and because there was no real chance of his father’s getting Tom back.

No, he didn’t know where Tom was. Which was only the truth. Because Tom was in the army and who could say where the army was? Catterick? Salisbury Plain?

Good luck, Tom. As if Tom was doing the escaping for both of them.

Why had he never minded, or even thought about it most of the time? That Tom was better, quicker, smarter at pretty wel everything. Including, so it seemed, deciding his own future. Eight years and, for a long time, several inches between them. And no competition. He could knock Tom down any time he liked, but he never had. Had never even wanted to.

Even that gun lying there, Tom was better at that. At twelve or thirteen he could swing it round and make the rabbit hit the shot. Good with a gun—so a soldier’s life for him. But Tom was even better, after Vera died, at taking her place, at being, for them al , a bit of a mum himself.

Was that something the army required of a man too?

Jack should have been the one, by rights, to step into her space. Eight years her only boy. And al those mugs of tea.

But it was Tom who, at thirteen, was plainly quicker and better in the cooking, washing and looking-after department too. And Jack, at twenty-one, was a big, outdoor man with mud on his boots. If he’d tried to take his mum’s place, Dad would have mocked him. So it was Tom who one day put on Vera’s stil flour-dusted, gravy-spotted apron. He and Dad simply watched him do it. It had been hanging on its hook on the corner of the dresser where no one seemed to want to touch it. But it was Tom who took it down and put it on. Like some silent declaration. It was Tom who piled eggs and bacon and triangles of bread into the pan and fil ed the kitchen with a smel and a sizzle as if someone might be stil there who wasn’t.

And not just pile. He could crack those eggs one-handed, just as Mum had. Two neat little half-shel s left in his fingers.

Jack knew, without trying, he could never have done that.

They’d have been eating eggshel for breakfast, spitting out the bits.

Mrs. Warburton, Sal y Warburton, Mum’s old pal, had come in for a while every day to “tide them over,” as she put it, and perhaps to set them al her own example in being a bit of a mum to each other. Maybe Tom got some of it from her. Maybe Tom had puppied up to her while he and Dad did al the heavy work.

And it was a pity, maybe, that Mrs. Warburton wasn’t just Sal y Warburton, or just Sal y somebody, and not Mrs.

Warburton, wife of Ken Warburton who ran the fil ing station at Leke Hil Cross. Because then she might have become the next Mrs. Luxton and they might al have got a permanent second-best mum. But she stopped coming after a while, presumably because she thought they were tided over. And then where was Michael to turn? He was fifty-two. Jack never knew what his mum might have said to his dad, even as she was dying, on this score. If she’d said anything at al . But after a certain passage of time Michael made the desperate move of advertising in the Courier for a “housekeeper,” and everyone knows, when a recently widowered farmer does that, what it real y means.

No takers. (And how could he have paid a housekeeper?)

That’s when Jack had felt his father starting to turn old. To shrink. And to turn sour-tempered, something which, for al his slowness to raise a smile, he’d never been. You’d see him kick at something, a feed trough, the corrugated iron round the muckheap, for no reason at al . Swing back his leg and kick. That’s when Jack had felt that, though Tom was no longer such a little brother, he had to be a shield for him against his father’s weather. He had to stand in between and take it. Why had he never minded?

First Mum, then Tom. In between, most of their livestock carried off for incineration. Then just him and Dad. And Dad looking at him with a look that said: And don’t you try it, don’t you even think about it. When he wasn’t wearing that other look which said: Why don’t you solve the issue, Jack boy, why don’t you do something about it? The issue of there being no Mrs. Luxton. Which was a mad look, if ever there was one, a look where Dad had himself tied up into a knot, because unless his son was supposed to go foraging (and how might that occur exactly?) it was like saying that Jack should do the very thing there was no question of his doing. The real knot being the knot that he and El ie Merrick could never formal y tie.

Jimmy Merrick and Michael Luxton should have got married themselves, Jack has sometimes thought, they should have married each other. If such a thing were possible. About as unlike as two men could be and with as little liking for each other as two men could have. But both battling with the same things: both of them wifeless, both working, on different sides of a boundary, the same sweet but tough, now disease-hit land. Both of them going to the dogs and watching each other like hawks to see who’d get eaten up first.

In Jack’s memory it was the Luxtons who’d had the upper hand (having anyway the finer-looking farmhouse and the prettier acres) especial y after Merrick’s wife, Alice, had run off and abandoned him, leaving him with a sixteen-year-old daughter as his only companion and domestic workforce.

An event as surprising (though Michael liked to say it was no surprise at al ) as the Luxtons suddenly acquiring after eight years a second son, which, though the timing might have been better, only added to the stock at Jebb Farm and so to the abasement of the Merricks.

But then Vera had died, leaving the two men, in that respect, similarly placed. Then Tom had done his own bit of running off. Meanwhile, there was a cow disease. Al of which left the two farmers, neither getting any younger, in a state of more or less equal dereliction. If anything, it was Jimmy who now had the edge, since he’d had years to get used to misfortune, while Michael, after a fair time of not doing so badly thank you, had incurred a quick succession of troubles, and anyone could see he was going down fast.

They should have got damn wel hitched themselves. Or, as would have been the more customary solution and one which had only been staring them in the face for years, Jack should have married El ie and linked their situations that way.

But that would have gone against al known history and deprived the two fathers of their fuel ing disdain for each other. It would have robbed one of a daughter or one of a son, since where were the happy couple supposed to live?

Did Michael seriously think that El ie was going to hop across the fence and settle in at Jebb, when she was so clearly needed at the side of her dear old dad?

And al of this despite the fact that the son and the daughter had been chummy with each other for as long as they—or anyone else—could remember. And not just chummy. For years now, from even before Alice Merrick’s abrupt departure, he and El ie had been pretty much behaving with each other (if only on certain weekday afternoons) as if they were married. Which was not only common knowledge in the region of Marleston, but was actual y abetted, even smiled on by the two fathers, even while it retained its clandestine trappings—on the basis, presumably, that there had to be some compensation for the fact that real marriage was impossible. At the same time (and Jack had only slowly come to recognise this) it was a concession that kept them both, the son and the daughter, firmly in their places: on their own farms (except, for Jack, on Tuesday and sometimes Thursday afternoons) and in each case a slave to it.

IN THE BEGINNING, Jack had simply driven over in the pick-up, with Luke in the back. This would be at times when, according to a cautious-seeming El ie, old Merrick wouldn’t be around. He and El ie would go up to her bedroom, knowing that they couldn’t take too long about it, especial y if they wanted, which they always did, to sit and have a cup of tea in the kitchen afterwards—with Luke, who seemed to know when to make himself scarce, stretched out by the stove, eyeing them meaningful y. It wouldn’t have seemed right without the cup of tea, and that had always been the pretext, or pretence: Jack had simply popped over on a neighbourly visit (though why the hel should he do that?) and stayed for a neighbourly cup of tea.

But this had gone on for so long, without any discoveries or interruptions, that it was clear there was no real need for haste or secrecy, or to divide their time between bedroom and kitchen. Jack had begun to wonder, in fact, what it might mean if they were to have their cup of tea in bed—if El ie might suggest it, or if he might. But he’d anyway long forgotten when he’d first twigged that Merrick might be staying away on purpose on these afternoons. Or when the idea of Jimmy’s coming back and catching them at it had become just an idea, a game, that added a little spice to proceedings. Nor did he need to have Luke sitting outside, to sound the alert if necessary. He just took Luke for the company. And Luke knew that too.

And then there was no Luke anyway.

But they’d kept up their pattern: first the bedroom, quickish, then the kitchen. Which natural y began to wane in excitement, even sometimes in satisfaction. There was a period during the cattle disease when it acquired a new adventurousness by the banning of even human movement between farms—something that general y shouldn’t have troubled the Merricks and Luxtons. Jack had let it pass for a week or two, and then thought, Hang it, and made the traditional journey (would there be government helicopters spying on him?), and found that he was greeted with some of the old fervour from the days when they could at least kid themselves they were doing something forbidden. One good effect of the cow disease.

But mostly Jack had begun to feel that these visits, though he couldn’t do without them (what else did he have?), had become just a little humiliating. Maybe El ie felt the same. Though she’d never said, “Don’t bother, Jack.” (What else did she have?) Jack even felt that his inexorable traipsings over to Westcott Farm represented the final triumph, so far as it went and after so many years of its being the other way round, of the Merricks over the Luxtons.

It might be his dad who was going down the harder now, but didn’t his son’s situation only clinch it?

When old Merrick contrived to bump into him, in that supposedly unplanned way, on his returns to Jebb, there’d be an extra gleam, Jack thought, in the old bugger’s eye. Or it was an extra nip, perhaps, of whatever it was he took.

And the gleam seemed to be saying: Wel , boy, your dad might be suffering, and so am I, and those cows might have been up against it too, but who’s got the shortest straw, boysyboy, of al ?

They wouldn’t linger now when they met each other like that. Jimmy would just stop, stick his head through the window of the Land Rover, pucker up his face and say a few words, or just twinkle under the brambly eyebrows, and lurch off.

For some reason, if only because Jimmy was El ie’s father, Jack couldn’t help liking the little pixy-faced bastard.

And, once upon a time, those interludes when he’d trundle back after seeing El ie—whether old Merrick appeared over the horizon or not—had simply been some of the better moments of his life.

He stil thinks it now. Stil sees himself rol ing a cigarette, with just one finger crooked round the wheel of the jolting pick-up, as if it would know anyway how to steer him home.

Sometimes, even if old Merrick didn’t appear, he’d stop, al the same, on the Luxton side of the boundary, just to take in the view. Something he never did otherwise. To breathe the air. He’d get out and stand with his back against the pick-up, one Wel ington boot crossed over the other, one elbow cupped in one hand, ciggy on the go. The breeze riffling through the grass. And Luke, stil alive then, lol oped by his feet, ears riffled too. And Tom just a nipper. Just a baby real y.

A sense, for a moment, of simply commanding everything he saw, of not needing to be anywhere else.

“I wouldn’t bother, Jack.” She’d never actual y said it.

Though she’d sometimes said, at dul ish moments, as if to make him feel he had rivals or he was just some stopgap (had been al those years?) that what she was doing was waiting for her “mystery man” to turn up, her mystery man who’d also in some way be her real man, like the mystery man who’d been real enough once for her mum to be persuaded to run off with him. That wasn’t “Uncle Tony,” that was someone before. Even his name seemed a mystery.

Jack never knew if she was just joking or saying it to niggle him, or if what she real y meant was that this mystery man ought actual y to be him. If he would only do something.

Whatever that might be. So how about it, Jacko? It was al right somehow when she said it when they were only seventeen, but when she said it again when they were past twenty, when she said it after those cattle had been bolt-gunned down on both their farms, it was different, it was troubling.

At some point he’d started having the thought that what El ie was real y waiting for was for her father to die. Not that she was actual y hoping he would have one of the several forms of fatal accident open to farmers, but it might be her only ticket out. And it might be a long wait. Merrick was as tough as a thistle, al twinkle and wire. And it seemed that people couldn’t catch the cow disease, or not in a hurry anyway.

And then again, not having to live with him round the clock, Jack couldn’t actual y hate Jimmy (but then, did El ie?), as sometimes he could hate his own father. Jimmy, after al , had let them have al those afternoons. And God knows when Jimmy would have last had intimate female company of his own. But clearly that didn’t of itself cause a man to waste away and die. Or God help us al .

But, as it happened, Jimmy did start to waste away. And die. And not so long after Michael died.

7

“WE’D BETTER CANCEL St. Lucia.”

El ie had looked at him and he’d known he shouldn’t have said it, or not then. He should have waited for the right moment. It was a secondary consideration—and it went, surely, without saying.

But he’d blurted it out straight away, like some clumsy gesture of reparation. And El ie had looked at him and he’d known even then, with the letter back in his hands again after she’d read it, that this thing that had arrived out of the blue would drive a wedge—he could hear the blows of the hammer striking it—between them.

There was a separate mail box at the site and Jack would go down most mornings to check it, except during those midwinter weeks when they’d be away and would arrange for their post to be held back (and suppose this letter had come then). Not much mail came directly to the cottage.

But that morning, a dank, grey early-November morning nine days ago, a red post-office van had swung up the narrow winding road he looks at now, to bring the private mail, including one very private letter, though the envelope bore the words “Ministry of Defence.” And it must have been redirected by someone with a long memory since it also bore the original, now lapsed address “Jebb Farm, Marleston.”

And Jack had known, before he’d opened it.

Once he had opened it and truly did know, there was no way he could prove that he’d known beforehand, and it didn’t matter. Yet he’d known, even as he held the unopened envelope. His mind was no longer the usual slow mechanism. It was quick as a switch, it had turned electric.

His big, heavy body, on the other hand, seemed to be draining through the floor and leaving him powerless. The roof of his mouth went dry. In the same bright flash of knowing, he thought, absurdly, of his long-dead mother, raised in a post office.

Even before he’d opened the envelope he’d cal ed out,

“El ie! El ! Where are you? Come here.”

She’d been up here, in this bedroom, changing that duvet cover. By the time she was with him, he stil hadn’t opened the letter.

And now that it lay opened between them and he’d said what he’d said and El ie had given him that uncooperative look, he thought, seeing it al again, of the last time a letter, seeming to change everything, had lain between them. A letter to El ie that time, and she’d been waiting—she’d certainly picked her moment—to show it to him. They’d both been stark naked at the time and he’d wondered where the hel she’d been hiding it.

He saw again El ie’s tits sway as she handed him a letter. The July sky at the window. They were in the Big Bedroom.

Out of the blue? But this wasn’t out of the blue—setting aside that it was a gloomy grey morning. This had always been a cloud, a possible cloud, lurking over the horizon.

Yet he’d thought, al the same, of blue summer skies.

Skies with smoke, perhaps, rising somewhere in them.

He’d thought of barbecues. They were al owed down at the site (though every unit, of course, had its kitchenette), but only by permission and with approved equipment.

Sometimes, of an August evening, the whole place smelt of charring burgers.

Blue, burning skies. They’d have to cancel St. Lucia.

Though that wasn’t til after Christmas. This was stil early November. El ie, he could see from that look—his super-fast brain could see it—was already calculating that this thing (was there some proper word to give it?) would have blown over by then. In a month or so it would be behind them. The air would be clear and blue again, even bluer.

That cloud, having arrived and shed its burden, would no longer be there. El ie was actual y thinking, even then, that if this thing had been going to happen, it had been wel timed.

Al the more reason for taking a holiday. A problem behind them.

Whereas he’d thought, how could you take a holiday after this? How could you just fly off into the blue?

So he shouldn’t have said it. And perhaps, if he hadn’t, El ie would have been with him, at his side, three days ago.

She’d have been with him in the car as he drove al those long, solitary miles. And he wouldn’t be sitting at this window, a gun at his back. None of this would be happening.

Had he even had the thought, even then, the letter between them, that this thing that he’d always feared, which was the worst of worst possibilities, was real y, perhaps, the thing El ie might have wished? Her best possibility.

“Wel , thank God, Jack, at least this has come in the off season.”

She should never have said that. And even from a practical point of view—surely El ie saw this, she being the one who always saw things so sharply—that gap of almost two months ahead might not be so roomy after al . There was no date given in the letter. That is, the letter itself was dated and there was a date, very clearly, uncannily, given in it. Jack had tried to remember what he’d been doing on that date (it was a Saturday), whether at any point he’d felt anything turn over mysteriously inside him. But there was no future date. And there was thus a question, which he thought he’d quickly answered, of two flights. There was the flight about which the letter said he’d be kept closely informed. And there was the flight, which wasn’t going to happen, to St. Lucia.

Though the letter hadn’t used the word “flight.” It had used a word which Jack had never encountered before but which would lie now in his head like some piece of mental territory: repatriation.

ONCE UPON A TIME , and it would have been the same too for Tom, the notion of being anywhere other than England would have seemed total y crazy to Jack and quite beyond any circumstance that might include him. Though he knew that the world contained people who went, who flew, regularly, to other places. He knew that the world included other places. He’d done some geography at school. He’d once learnt, if he couldn’t remember them now, the capitals of Argentina and Peru. But, for al practical purposes, even England had meant only what the eye could see from Jebb Farmhouse—or what lay within a ten-mile journey in the Land Rover or pick-up.

There’d been a few day-trips to Exeter or Barnstaple.

Two stays, once, in another county: Dorset. Even the Isle of Wight, once, would have seemed like going abroad.

If you’d have said to Jack that one day he’d find himself in St. Lucia—and, before that, twice in Antigua and three times in Barbados—he’d have said you were barking.

(And, anyway, where were those places?) It stil seems to him, even now that he’s done it several times, like something impossible, a trick, even somehow wrong: that you could get into an aeroplane, then get out again a few hours later and there’d be—this completely different world.

It was El ie who, a bit to his surprise, had been seriously up for it. Not just what she wanted, but, so she’d said, what they deserved, what they should definitely do. It was their world too. Everyone else did it.

“So how about it, Jacko?” She’d ruffled his hair. “Live a little.”

If he’d known, on those afternoons when he leant against the pick-up, rol ing a cigarette, looking around him. If he’d only had an inkling.

And had Tom had any inkling? Or was it, in his case, even something that had pushed him? Up that track. The world. And he’d seen it, apparently. Lived a little. Basra.

Palm trees there too.

Later, Jack would receive a thing cal ed his Service Record.

ON THAT GREY MORNING Jack hadn’t just seen in his mind’s eye blue, hot, summer skies, he’d seen himself floating, flying in them.

It had been during their last time in St. Lucia, in one of those periods of sweaty, anxious restlessness that could sometimes come over him. He’d wanted to shake off the mood. He’d wanted to say to himself, “Hey, lighten up, you’re on holiday.” “Lighten up” was a phrase of El ie’s, often used by her in the days when they’d been about to move to the Isle of Wight, like a motto for their future

—“Lighten up, Jacko”—and now he’d use it, from time to time, like a reminder, on himself.

He’d wanted even to demonstrate to El ie that he had indeed become a new, lighter, gladder, luckier man, and it was thanks not just to luck but to El ie’s real y rather amazing sticking by him. He’d anyway final y done something that El ie had been urging him to do, daring him to do—as a joke, it seemed, because he was never real y going to. On the other hand, she’d placed a bet on it, which she hadn’t withdrawn: a bottle of champagne at dinner, which in this place would cost a smal fortune. And it was something that could be done at pretty wel any time of the day. You spent a lot of time, in fact, watching other people do it.

He’d gone down to the beach and the little spindly jetty, where there were some grinning boys in caps and T-shirts, and a couple of motor boats in their charge—who’d strap you into this harness with a long rope running to the back of one of the boats and, attached to your shoulders, though it had yet to open, a big, curved, striped, oblong parachute.

Like a giant version of one of El ie’s plastic hairgrips. And they’d rev the motor and power off, and you couldn’t help but be lifted off and up, way up high, above the water.

He’d said, “Okay, El , moment’s come. Ready to stump up?” And he’d just walked down there, in his shorts and shades. He’d had the sense not to wear his cap (and it was a Lookout cap too). He’d just walked down, trying to do it at the easiest saunter.

And then, moments later, to his surprise, he real y was up there, just dangling—being pul ed along, but somehow just floating too—with this great taut tugging thing above him, trying to drag him stil higher, and the boat below and in front of him, with its white wake and the boys waving at him, like some little separate toy that had nothing, perhaps, to do with him. And al the people dotted on the beach and under the palms and sun umbrel as and round the blue-lagoon pools looking as if someone had just sprinkled them there. And El ie somewhere among them, on her lounger, no doubt waving at him too, but it seemed sil y, somehow, to try and spot her and wave back.

He hadn’t felt frightened and, strangely, he hadn’t even felt very excited—or triumphant, given that he’d won the bet now, he’d actual y done it. When he walked up later from the beach, El ie had said, “My hero.” Had he felt like a hero? No. He’d just hung there, Jack Luxton, like some big baby being dandled, or rather—with that thing above—like some big baby being delivered by a stork. Thinking, if he was thinking anything: I’m Jack Luxton, but I can do this.

Sixteen stone and six foot one, size-eleven feet, but light as a feather real y, light as air.

As he’d been carried up he could see inland, beyond the resort’s perimeter. He could see that the resort, with its bright greens and blues, was like an island on the edge of an island. Somewhere in the distance there were slants of smoke. They were burning crop waste maybe.

And al the time he would have been floating up there and al the time he and El ie would have been lying there in the hot sun at the Sapphire Bay, thinking of chil ed champagne for heroes at dinner, Tom would have been in the hot sun, in Iraq.

SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE SAID that thing about the off season.

But suppose this had come in August. In ful swing. What would they have done? Carried on? Carried on, but hung a flag at half-mast at the site? They didn’t have a flag. They didn’t have a flagpole. He was sometimes known as the commandant and the site office was sometimes known as the guardhouse, but they didn’t have a flagpole. Maybe they should have thought of it, as a feature, along with al the other stuff, a Lookout flag fluttering in the breeze, gold on black, like the basebal caps.

Carried on, but explained? Carried on and faced the questions, sympathy, puzzlement—when it became not just their private news but an item, with names and photos, in the papers? The papers available in the site shop. We never knew Jack had a brother, he never said. A brother in the army. Jesus.

Would it have clouded their holiday mood? Could they have fired up those barbecues in quite the same way?

But it had come in November, and by the spring it would al be history. And if the regular Lookouters, meanwhile, had noticed it at al , seen the name in the papers and made the link, then he and El ie might have dealt with the questions, such as they might be, faced any music, without being stil in the immediate shock.

Though, now, Jack thinks, they won’t have to face any music at al .

HE LOOKS DOWN at the site. It was what they’d done, with a lot of help from “Uncle” Tony, whom neither of them had met, since he was dead, but who’d lived here once, so it had emerged, with El ie’s mum (her third husband and with this one, it seemed, she’d landed squarely on her feet), and run the Sands, as it was then.

People could help by dying, by dying at the right time.

Had that always been El ie’s position? Even with this?

And perhaps those regular Lookouters, scattered now in their homes round the country, wouldn’t have noticed.

Though they’l notice now, Jack thinks, they’l notice this story. That other story, it wasn’t such a big one, not even necessarily headlines these days, though Luxton wasn’t such a common name.

There was a war going on, that was the story. Though who would know, or want to know, down here at Sands End? A war on terror, that was the general story. Jack knew that terror was a thing you felt inside, so what could a war on terror be, in the end, but a war against yourself? Tom would have known terror, perhaps, quite a few times. He’d have known it, very probably, al too recently. It was saying nothing, perhaps, to say that he’d also have been trained to meet it.

Does Jack feel terror right now, with a loaded gun behind him? Oddly, no. Terror isn’t the word for what he feels. Has he ever known terror? Yes.

What they meant, of course, was a war on terrorism. But then it became a matter of who and where, of geography.

Was it conceivable that terrorists—Islamic extremists—

might want to operate out of a holiday facility on the Isle of Wight? Or, on the other hand, want to crash a plane into it?

Target a caravan site? He didn’t think so.

Yet it was sometimes, nonetheless, a subject among the Lookouters. It was surprising how often, in fact, people who were here to have fun, to get away from it al , to have a holiday, could drift, of an August evening, with their sun-reddened faces, into conversations about the dire state of the world and how, one way or another, there was no hope for it. Jack would try, which wasn’t so difficult, not to get too involved. It was simply part of his obliging, humouring proprietor’s role, to go with the flow. So he’d nod and smile and now and then throw in some meaningless remark.

But once, down at the Ship—he couldn’t remember if it had been the war on terror then or some other global emergency—it had al got too much for him and he’d blurted out suddenly (the Lookouters present would remember it): “Wel , I wouldn’t worry, any of you. In a few years’ time, if what they say is true, we’l al have gone down anyway with mad-cow disease.”

8

“CARAVANS,” El ie had said, as if it were a magic word, the secret of the universe she’d been saving up to tel him. And she must have known how it would have touched something in him and made him prick up his ears and listen and not just think it was a damn stupid answer to anything.

“Caravans, Jacko.”

There they were, sitting up in the Big Bed at Jebb on a July afternoon, and he’d realised later that she must have planned it that way. Not that he’d resisted. And anyway for him the word did have a kind of magic.

ELLIE WOULD HAVE REMEMBERED—though she hadn’t been there—those weeks in Brigwel Bay. One week in July, two years running. She’d have remembered him talking about them afterwards, talking at a gabble, perhaps, that wasn’t like Jack’s normal way with speech. He was thirteen, fourteen, so was El ie. Not so long before her mum made her run for it.

El ie hadn’t been there. “Send me a postcard, Jack.” And he had. Greetings from Brigwel Bay. “Miss Eleanor Merrick, Westcott Farm, Marleston …” God knows if she’d kept it. Or kept them, since she’d got another one too, the second year.

Maybe they were here right now, those postcards, in the Lookout, in some secret stash of hers. Maybe they were at the back of a drawer, right here in this bedroom. They might have been the first postcards El ie had ever received. They were certainly the first Jack had ever written. And the first of the two would have been a serious struggle for him, if his mother hadn’t helped him and, after a little thought, suggested he write, “Wish you were here.” And he had. He hadn’t known it was the most uninventive of messages.

He’d written it. And he’d wished it. He’d even thought sometimes, there at Brigwel Bay with Mum and Tom: suppose it was just him and El ie, just him and her in the caravan. It was a sort of burning thought. But on the other hand, sometimes he was having such a whale of a time that he forgot altogether about El ie.

And then again, perhaps those unoriginal words on the back of a postcard might have touched a tender, even burning spot inside El ie, such that she would have wished to send an answer back (though it was only a week), “Me too, Jack.” But she hadn’t sent an answer or even, later, expressed the wish. And after he’d come back and spouted on about the good time he’d had, she hadn’t even given him much of a thank-you for that postcard or seemed to want to pursue the subject. By which Jack understood, at least by the second time around, that she was jealous.

And then her mum had skedaddled.

So Jack had been careful, ever since, out of respect for El ie, not to mention those visits to Brigwel Bay or the postcards he’d sent each time. As if, even for him, after a while, those two trips hadn’t real y meant so much or remained so special in his memory. Whereas the truth was they were fantastic. They were the best times of his life up to that time. Maybe even, he sometimes thought, the best ever.

How could he have said that to El ie, “They were the best times of my life,” when she wasn’t even there, without inflaming her jealousy? Girls. But how many girls did he know? He only knew El ie. How could he have said it by the time they were having those private sessions at Westcott Farmhouse, without getting into even hotter trouble. What, not these times, Jacko?

Let alone say it when they were sitting up like that, each cradling a mug of tea, stark naked, in the Big Bedroom.

So he’d shut up and pretended it was al forgotten and had never been so important to him. For El ie’s sake. He could be good to El ie.

But El ie would have known he was only covering. He had a wal of a face, he was born with it, but El ie was trained in seeing through it. And she’d have known, that afternoon, what a tender spot she was stil touching in him and how it couldn’t fail to put a seal on things when she said that word.

Caravans. As if it was the password and the key to their future.

And the truth stil was: those weeks had been fantastic.

WHEN JACK WAS THIRTEEN and Tom was not yet six Vera had taken them both for the first of two holidays at Brigwel Bay, Dorset, not far from Lyme Regis. And what had made them particularly fantastic was that they’d stayed in a caravan.

They’d gone on their mother’s instigation and insistence.

She must have said to Michael, with perhaps more than her usual firmness with him, that she was going to give those two boys a holiday, a seaside holiday that when they’d grown up they’d always have to remember. They weren’t going to go without that. And Michael must have relented—

for two years running—though Jack would have counted then, even at thirteen and fourteen, as ful -time summer labour on the farm.

So they’d taken what was for them an epic journey, part bus, part train, to the south coast of England and (if only just) across the border into another county. And they’d stayed in a caravan, in a smal , three-acre field, with hedges al around it, a little way back from the cliffs and the beach below. There were only six caravans, positioned any old how, and compared to the snazzy, lined-up giants Jack can see in the distance now, they were like rabbit hutches on wheels. But they each had a name, and theirs, both years, had been “Marilyn.”

Those two stays in a caravan in Brigwel Bay were, by the time Jack sat up in bed with El ie on that July afternoon, the only two holidays he (or Tom) had ever had, and he stil might have said that during each of them he’d never been happier. So much so that during the first one, finding himself suddenly so clearly and unmistakably happy, he’d wondered if he’d ever, real y, been happy before.

When he sat down at the tiny pale-yel ow Formica-topped table in the caravan and wrote his postcard to El ie, it was with a mixture of honesty and guilt. Yes, he real y did wish she was there. But if he real y wished that, how could he be so happy in the first place? Wishing she was there was like admitting he was happy without her. It was like saying he was writing this postcard because he’d betrayed her.

And in El ie’s case, on that July afternoon, the total number of holidays she’d ever had was nil. And “holidays” was another word she’d invoke and let ring that afternoon, like the word “caravans.”

HOW STRANGE, to have been born into a farmhouse, into a hundred and sixty acres, yet to have felt so happy, perhaps for the first time ever real y happy at al , in a tin-can caravan in a little grubby field, with in one corner a standpipe with some rotting sacking around it and a dripping tap.

Yet so it was. Jack knows that, at thirteen, he might very wel have taken the view that he was too old for it al , it was kids’ stuff, buckets and spades—he should have been above it. But the truth was he knew he was only getting these holidays now because of Tom. And those two years, he later realised, would have been his mother’s only realistic window of opportunity. So he owed them to Tom.

And the fact that he himself had missed out when he was smal er only meant that during those weeks Jack was, most of the time, perfectly ready to regress. It wasn’t, in fact, so difficult. It was as though an unspoken agreement operated between him and Tom that while Tom should try to act as if he were thirteen, Jack should try to act as if he were five or six. Then, between them, they might be like two boys of nine.

Yet in practice it was Tom who led the way in being just a kid—who was better and quicker and more natural y equipped to excel even at that. It was Tom who found the secret route, like a tunnel, through the hedge to the clifftops, and then that other path, not the one everyone used, down through the tumbled, broken bit of cliff to the beach. It was Tom who made better sandcastles.

Why had he never minded? Even then. In the evenings, it was true, back at the caravan, it could al turn round.

Something quite new could happen to Jack. It could seem that he might be twice thirteen. It could seem that he and Mum were a couple and this was their little home and, for this one week at least, he might be Tom’s dad. That was how it could seem.

And if ever he’d had the chance to learn from his mum how to crack eggs into a pan and how to put together a breakfast, that was it. But he hadn’t, and the fact was it was Tom, just a little kid, who picked up before Jack ever did on things that weren’t just for little kids. It was Tom who asked him, years later, if he’d ever noticed that each of those caravans had been named after a Hol ywood film actress.

There was a Betty, a Lauren, a Rita. Jack had spent a week each year, two years running, inside Marilyn Monroe, and never even known it.

Mum must have had that tough conversation with Dad, must have argued and insisted. Those two boys. And Dad must have yielded. Acted the martyr, no doubt, but final y reached in his pocket. “Your doing, Vee, not mine.” It was mid-July, after the hay was in, when work on the farm was lightish. On the other hand, it was peak-rate time for renting a caravan.

And the situation for Dad while they were away was that he’d have to “fend for himself.” Jack could remember his mother using that phrase with a sort of edge to it, as if when they returned they should expect to find Michael looking half-starved and the farm gone to pot—which had mostly come true later when Mum was permanently absent. But this was just a week in July, although the days were long and, to Jack at least, they weren’t like ordinary, unnoticed days—they were fantastic. Yet when they returned, both times, Dad had said, in his slow, dry way, “Back already?

Hardly seems you’ve gone.” Or some such words. Mum had taken a careful look around while Michael had looked patient. Then he’d said, or just meant it with his eyes, “See, not gone to rack and ruin yet.” And his face had final y cracked with pleasure to have them back again.

So they’d always have it to remember. Wel , if that’s how she’d put it, Jack had never forgotten.

ELLIE HAD SURELY picked her moment. The hot afternoon, the cool of the farmhouse, its timbers creaking, breezes wafting about it. And before that, he came to realise, she must have done her homework. Talked to those lawyers, talked to al the right people, checked it through, checked to see if it was real and not some leg-pul . She’d even made a trip out here on the sly, so it emerged, to see for herself, to see the lie of the land. But she’d saved it al up for the right moment. To drop that word first into the air, she’d known how it would chime for him. Then show him the letter.

And al , Jesus Christ, in the very bed where his own mother had breathed her last. And consummated her marriage to Michael Luxton, and even once, in the smal hours of a September night, given chal enging birth to a son cal ed Jack.

El ie had whisked him up there pretty smartly, and could he say he’d even feebly resisted? As if there was no time to lose and it couldn’t be anywhere else. As if it was her own damn bedroom.

“What’s the matter? Afraid your dad’l catch us? Afraid your mum’s going to see?” She giggled. “Hey, lighten up, Jack.”

And if the truth be known, the sheer outrageousness of it had got to him, driven him, tipped him over. The sheer fact of it. They could do it, do as they pleased now. They were king and queen now of their (ruined) castles, of their final y united kingdoms, even if El ie was about to spel out to him what he didn’t exactly need tel ing, that the only way was to sel up and leave, cash in and leave—and now they could.

But with an answer al ready, up her sleeve, to the inevitable next question. If you can have an answer up your sleeve when you’re wearing nothing.

She’d had that letter with her anyway. Hidden somewhere. From “Uncle” Tony, or rather from Uncle Tony’s lawyers.

El ie’s vanished mother, Alice, had, so it seemed, fal en il and died before her time—not unlike Jack’s mother (though in a nursing home in Shanklin)—without having broken her silence with her estranged daughter, or having revealed that she was now married to a man, Anthony Boyd, many years her senior. But not long afterwards Uncle Tony had fal en il and died too. And he was the one, it seemed, who’d died with a conscience.

“It gets better, Jacko. Listen. It gets better.” Was there any argument, once El ie had produced that letter? For some while Jack had been imagining that the next stage in the decline of Jebb Farm might be when the whole damn farmhouse and al its outbuildings would start to slide physical y down the hil , crashing to pieces as they went.

Yet, just for a moment, as they’d sat there with their tea, he’d let himself slide into the opposite picture, and almost believe it. That this was their place now. Here they were at last, where they should be. He’d felt that, even as he’d felt the other thing: that they were like two ransacking burglars who’d burst into a place that wasn’t theirs at al .

“Stil sleeping in your little cubby-hole, Jack? But you’ve got the run now. This is the master bedroom.” He’d never used that expression. He vaguely knew it was an expression used by estate agents. It was the Big Bedroom. For years now Dad had slept in this bedroom, in this same big bed, al alone, til one night he couldn’t bear to any longer.

And he had stil been sleeping in his own little cubby-hole. El ie saw everything.

“Wel ,” she’d said, a little later, “at least you can’t say we never gave it a whirl.”

never gave it a whirl.”

She’d sat up with her back against the bedhead, not minding that her tits were on display. He’d pul ed himself up against the bedhead too. Like a shameless king and queen, yes, surveying their realm. Through the window before them, across the drop of the land, you could see the far side of the val ey, the line of the hil s. A blue sky, a puff or two of cloud, the speck of a buzzard wheeling. In between was the green, stirring crown of the oak tree.

“Now,” El ie had said, “you stay here and I’l go and make us a pot of tea.”

And she’d gone down, in her bare arse, to the kitchen, El ie Merrick, in her bare arse in the Jebb kitchen, in Jebb Farmhouse. And he’d thought, it wasn’t a bad arse (nor al the rest), if it wasn’t the baby arse he’d first clapped hands on fifteen years or more ago. How long had he known El ie?

Long enough to have forgotten how long. Long enough for it to have been at times an on-and-off thing. Long enough to have watched her change and change back again, to come in and out of her best. He must have done the same himself, even if he’d never noticed. Always feeling anyway like the same old lump.

He couldn’t say, by any stretch, that he was a connoisseur of women, but he was a connoisseur of El ie.

And, judging by El ie, it was strange the way time could work on women, and not always against them. There was no saying when suddenly they might hit peak condition.

She’d gone down and come back with a tray with the tea on it. But on the tray too, of course, though he hadn’t noticed when she’d put it down on the floor on her side of the bed, must have been that letter, taken from her bag in the kitchen.

“Caravans, Jacko.”

He couldn’t help seeing—as she let that word hang for a while and took a long sip of tea—Tom, aged six, hopping ahead of him down that path. Or seeing the wiggly letters by the door, with its two steps up: “Marilyn.” Or smel ing salt between his fingers. Or smel ing the smel al over that field, in the morning, of frying bacon. And when just a little later he was looking, himself, at that letter, he couldn’t help seeing that little yel ow tabletop and that first postcard, with its blue sea and white band of cliffs, that he’d written to El ie.

So just when he’d been thinking that this was his bed now and El ie belonged in it, he was suddenly also thinking he was real y al hers now, he belonged to her. She knew the places in him, she had him.

He’d said, as if at least he must put up some token opposition, “But no one takes their holidays in a caravan any more.”

But apparently they did. Or they did at the Lookout, formerly known as the Sands. The caravans weren’t like the ones Jack remembered from Brigwel Bay (and how much had that farmer charged for a week?). Nor were the caravanners. They were al sorts. With thirty-two units, when they were al on the go, you got al sorts. There were die-hard old couples who’d been coming for years and weren’t so sure about that change of name, but liked the fact that the place had “stayed in the family” (how sad, about Alice and Tony). They seemed to know more about El ie’s mum than El ie did—or even wanted to. There were big burly families, al tattoos and noise, who in the course of a week became gentler, sweeter. There were two- or three-unit gangs of young people with windsurfing gear who, when they weren’t wearing wetsuits, wore hardly anything most of the time and liked to party al night.

Al this had fascinated Jack. It had brought something out in him. You never knew what might be going on in any one of those units at any given time. It was certainly a form of livestock. You never knew what might be arriving next.

Caravans. It would make him think, sometimes, of a circus, and it could sometimes be like a circus. Entertaining, raucous, a touch of danger. You had to be a bit of a policeman sometimes. You had to be their smiling host in a joke of a shirt, but there were times when you had to show them who was in charge. Jack had found he was surprisingly good at this. At both things: the smiling and the policing. Perhaps his big, lumbering weight was on his side. Or maybe it was that he’d just sometimes let slip, with his straight, blank, unreadable face, that if there was any real trouble, he kept a shotgun handy, up in the cottage, having been a farmer once, and he knew how to use it.

As for the caravanners, the Lookouters, they general y took the view that El ie and Jack were okay. They ran a good site, they looked after you. It was al right for some, of course—sitting up there al summer long, then winging off to the Caribbean. But, at the same time, there was something a bit misfit and oddbal about the two of them. There didn’t seem to be any little Luxtons, you couldn’t even be sure if they were real y married. Something just a bit hil bil y. But that was okay, that was fine. There was something just a bit wacky and hil bil y about taking a holiday in a caravan anyway. And when you were on holiday you wanted colour, you didn’t want dul and ordinary. You didn’t get it, either, with those shirts of his.

FARMER JACK. It’s wel over ten years now since they sat up with their tea in that bed at Jebb and El ie uttered that word.

And he’d never said then, if there had to be some token, or more than token, opposition: “There’s Tom, El ie. There’s Tom.”

A steep learning curve (El ie’s expression) at the beginning. But the main thing was, it paid. Thirty-two units.

He was stil good at sums, in a farmer’s way. At Jebb it hadn’t been the arithmetic but the numbers themselves that were wrong. Compared to anything they’d known before, they were in thick clover now. What with the capital from the sale of two farms, even at knock-down prices, even with debts to pay off.

Ten years. And something more than a learning curve. A release, a relaxation curve, a lightening up. He saw it in the way she smiled at him and he saw, from her smile, that, even with his great brick of a face, he must be smiling too.

But he can see it, now: the steep drop away from the farmhouse, the ful -summer crown of the oak tree. The hil s beyond. The exact lines of hedgerows and of tracks running between the gates in them. White dots of sheep, brown and black-and-white dots of cattle. For a moment, though for over ten years now Jack has breathed sea air, which some people find so desirable, he can even smel the land, the breath of the land. The thick, sweaty smel of a hayfield. The dry, baked smel of cooling stubble on an August evening.

Smel s he never smelt at the time. The smel of cow dung mingling with earth, the cheapest, lowliest of smel s, but the best. Who wouldn’t wish for that as their birthright and their last living breath?

9

THEY’D GOT THE LETTER nine days ago, though, strictly speaking, there was no “they” about it, the operative phrase being “next of kin.” Tom must either have put down his brother’s name from the very beginning, or made the substitution when necessary.

On that question Jack could never be sure, seeing as Tom had never answered any of his letters. There’d been precious few of them, it was true, but they’d included the letter that had cost Jack an agony to write, about the death and funeral arrangements of Michael Luxton. It had cost him several long hours and several torn-up sheets of paper, of which there was never a big supply at Jebb, though even as he’d written it he’d wondered how much pain in it there would real y be for Tom. Why should Tom care? He’d finished with his father nearly a year before, and it was vice-versa now, their father had finished with everything, al fixed and concluded.

“I hope,” Michael had once said, according to Tom (and why should Tom have made up such words?), “someone some day wil do the same for me.”

So where was the agony in it for Jack, knowing there might be none in it, real y, for Tom? Unless that itself was the agony, that there wasn’t any. Over such a thing. Or maybe it was that for Jack writing any letter of a personal nature—any letter at al —was agony. “Send me a postcard,” El ie had told him, with a little sad pout, as if he might have been going off to war himself (so you’d think she might have been more pleased when she got one).

And he’d agonised, in his way, over that.

WELL, he wouldn’t be writing any damn last letters right now. One thing off his mind. And El ie wouldn’t be reading any.

But Jack couldn’t ever be sure about that question of next of kin, seeing as Tom had never written back, or otherwise got in touch. Seeing as Tom wasn’t there when they’d lowered Dad down beside Mum in Marleston churchyard.

He’d thought: What was she saying to him, what kind of greeting was he getting? This is a fine way to be coming back to me, Michael.

Jack couldn’t be sure if Tom had just decided not to be there and not even say he wouldn’t be there (though Jack knew there was a thing cal ed compassionate leave) or if Tom wasn’t there because he’d never in the first place received that letter that had cost so much to write. Maybe sending a letter to just a name and a number in the army was like sending a letter to the North Pole.

There was no doubt, in any case, when Jack read that official letter, addressed to him from the MOD, that he was Tom’s next of kin. There wasn’t any other. But he wanted to believe—stil wants to believe even now—that Tom would have put down his brother’s name as next of kin from the very first point of the army’s requiring it. Hadn’t it, in a way, been understood between them?

Good luck, Tom.

It was almost his first thought as he’d read that letter, that the next-of-kin thing would have applied. That was why this piece of paper was in his hand. As he’d stared at it and tried to make it not be real, he’d thought: and now there wasn’t any next of kin, not for him, not in the true meaning, even though he’d married El ie. There wasn’t any next.

And that was a touchy point.

Or perhaps his very first thought had been that, though this letter came from the army, from the Ministry of Defence, it came, in a sense, from Jebb, bearing that crossed-out address. It was like several letters that had reached them for a while. It was an arrangement you made—or El ie had made it, and the same for Westcott—with the Post Office.

But those letters had petered out years ago, which was just as wel , since each time (even if it wasn’t someone demanding money) it couldn’t help but hurt and accuse him to see those words—“Jebb Farm”—on the envelope.

Now, with this letter, they were like a stab.

Since Tom had never known that. Whether or not he’d ever received any of those other letters or cared, if he had, what was in them. Jack had never written with that bit of information. It had been his decision. Since Tom had never appeared at the funeral, or ever replied. Since he didn’t even know any more where Tom was.

Or El ie’s decision. Lots of his decisions were real y hers.

Maybe most. Though he could have said it, nonetheless, been the first to raise the subject, that afternoon, “There’s Tom, El . What about Tom?”

AND NOW IT DIDN’T matter anyway. Because there wasn’t any Tom. Because that letter that had been a little delayed in reaching him, having been addressed to Jebb Farm, informed him that Corporal Thomas Luxton, along with two others of his unit, had been kil ed “on active duty” in Iraq, in the Basra region of operations, on 4th November 2006. It informed him that, failing other attempts to contact him directly, this news was being communicated by letter with the deepest regret, and that every effort would have been made prior to his receipt and acknowledgement of this notification to have kept Corporal Luxton’s name from public disclosure. It very respectful y asked that Mr. Jack Luxton make himself known as soon as possible—a special direct-line telephone number, as wel as other numbers and addresses, was given—so that arrangements could be made for Corporal Luxton’s (and his comrades’) repatriation, which, for operational reasons, would in any case be pending clearance by the in-situ military authorities.

It was a grey, murky autumn morning, the sort of day on which it can be good to know that a holiday under hot, rustling palms is in the offing. Palm trees, for some reason, had flashed through Jack’s mind and had made him blurt out that stupid thing about cancel ing the Caribbean.

Perhaps it occurred to him as he stared at that letter that he might already have read, without knowing it, as an item in a newspaper—though he was not a great scourer of newspapers—the anonymous announcement of his own brother’s death. Public disclosure. But no, he couldn’t remember any moment when his insides had turned mysteriously cold. And though, by now, such items of news weren’t so rare, he’d always told himself that Tom might be anywhere.

On the other hand, he might have made enquiries. Not so difficult, not so unreasonable. Being next of kin, for God’s sake. And he’d known that some such message as he held now in his hand was not out of the question. Now that it was in his hand it had the eerie, mocking truth of something not entirely unanticipated. His hand shook. As if the anticipation might have forestal ed it. As if the anticipation might have caused it.

And the fact is he’d known, before, what was in it. This was the thought that, before al the others, sprang up to overwhelm him. That his heart had started banging, as if it had jumped loose in his chest, even before he’d opened the envelope.

And when he’d passed it to El ie, he’d known that she, too, knew already what was in it. There’s such a thing as body language. And that tone in his voice when he’d cal ed up to her. She looked miffed, al the same, to have been dragged from her task. He’d always had a struggle whenever he tried to get that damn duvet cover on. And when she looked at the letter he’d known at once from her face that she wasn’t going to make it any easier for him. It wasn’t easy in the first place, but she wasn’t going to make it any easier. She wasn’t going to make it any easier because one thing he could see in her face was that she thought that this made things easier anyway. It drew a neat and simple and permanent line. And the fact is, if he were honest, he’d had the same thought too, just the tiniest flash of it. But what for El ie was a thought that made things easier was for him like a trap snapping on him. The very fact that he could even think it.

People could help by dying. Yes, they could. No, they couldn’t. He could see that El ie’s position was going to be that this was his, Jack’s, business, he shouldn’t dump it on her. Next of kin, and El ie wasn’t. El ie, when al was said, and despite that marriage ceremony ten years ago in Newport, was a Merrick. He could see that El ie’s position, if he pushed her, was going to be that he had helped Tom make his departure al those years ago, had seen Tom off.

And wasn’t the last thing he’d wanted, or wanted these days anyway, was for Tom to show his face again?

Jack could see al this even as he felt himself starting to tremble inside. Even as he had the briefest but clearest picture of Tom standing right there, in the doorway of Lookout Cottage, grinning and looking bigger than he used to be. In a soldier’s uniform. Anyone at home?

The last thing he’d wanted? No.

This was al his fault, Jack had thought, this letter and al it might mean was his fault. He thought it even as El ie passed the letter back to him. It even seemed like a letter he hadn’t just opened but had been keeping in his pocket for some time and had only just decided to show her. Like that letter she’d shown him, the blue sky at the window, at Jebb. Here, read this.

He thought it even as she moved towards him, because she could see now he was actual y trembling. Not just his hand. His shoulders were shaking, his chest was heaving.

Even as El ie put her arms round him and held him—she smelt of clean cotton—and pressed her mouth to the side of his neck and said, “It’s okay, Jacko, it’s okay.” And what did that mean—just that it was okay for a grown man to cry?

Even as the hot tears came gushing out of him—they had to

—out of Jack Luxton’s eyes, that were stony-grey and, most of the time, cool and expressionless like his father’s. Wel , people weren’t fucking cattle.

10

RAIN WEEPS DOWN the window in front of him, but Jack isn’t crying now. And he’d put a stop to his tears soon enough on that grey morning. He’d gasped them back into himself and wiped a sleeve across his face even before El ie could grab a clump of tissues and hold it out for him.

It should have been like this then, he thinks. Then the weather might have made his tears seem less conspicuous or might have done his crying for him. But, outside, the morning had been merely grey and damply stil .

He couldn’t remember when he’d last cried, not counting when he was a nipper and it was al owable. Or if he’d cried at al since then. But yes he had, of course he had, and he could remember exactly when. Tears on his pil ow. But never in front of anyone. Certainly never in front of El ie. So it had been a shock to her. Perhaps even a disappointment.

Not even when his mum died. He hadn’t let his eyes wel up in front of El ie. As if El ie would have had any softness left for missing mothers. And he’d been twenty-one by then, a man’s age. And now, when he was thirty-nine, he’d felt as El ie put her arms around him just a touch of hardness in them, just the hint of a restraint in their comfort. I’m not your mother, Jack, don’t cry like a baby.

True enough. If it was al his fault, how should tears come into it? Tom had gone off to be a soldier—and he wanted to sit here and cry? He’d dried his eyes before El ie could dry them for him. But he’d known that he hadn’t cried enough, not nearly enough. That little bit of crying had only made him aware that there was a whole lot more crying left inside him, a whole tankful. He’d just put the stopper back on his tears.

As for El ie, her eyes hadn’t even gone dewy.

And that maybe settled something, final y took away, on that painful day, one foolish niggle. Namely, that he’d always wondered and never could quite put the thought aside, whether Tom and El ie had ever … Whether El ie and Tom … On a Wednesday afternoon, say. Given Tom’s general quickness off the mark.

Surely not. Though would he actual y have minded—even that? Just once in a while. If Tom, as it turned out, was going to pack himself off anyway. But the question was more whether he’d have minded to know it now. Now that Tom was packed off for ever. No, he wouldn’t have minded.

He wouldn’t have minded it even back then, if he’d known then that one day Tom would be packed off for ever. What’s mine is yours, Tom.

Surely not. But when Jack, after Tom left, had gone over to Westcott Farm to spend afternoons with El ie, Tom’s name had rarely come up between them. And Jack, with his sliver of suspicion, had supposed this was because El ie would have wanted to stay off the subject, while he didn’t want to force it either. Finished business anyway.

But even on that July afternoon at Jebb, with that other letter in the Big Bedroom, when the subject of Tom should have come up, when he should have brought it up, he’d kept warily silent. It was El ie who’d brought it up for him. “I know what you’re thinking,” she’d said, holding her mug of tea under her chin. “But he made his decision, didn’t he, and when did you last hear a peep out of him? I don’t think you have to tel him anything. Forget him, Jack.” And if she could say that, then perhaps his mind should have been settled al along. At least on that score.

. . .

HE’D WIPED AWAY his tears and El ie’s eyes had stayed dry. Then a silence had stretched between them, a silence in which the look on El ie’s face had seemed to say: Don’t make this difficult, Jack. This is tough news, don’t make it tougher. And even he could see, even then, that it might have been tougher even than this. Tom might have come back in a wheelchair. He might have come back like a big, helpless baby.

Then El ie had gone to fil the kettle. Certain moments in life, it seemed, required the fil ing of a kettle. Kettles got fil ed every day, without a thought, several times over.

Nonetheless, there were certain moments.

He heard the gush of water in the kitchen. It would have been a good inducement and a good moment to shed a few more tears while El ie wasn’t looking. And an opportunity—if that’s how it was—for El ie to do a bit of private gushing herself. But he didn’t think so. He only imagined how her hand might be grasping the tap a bit more tightly and for longer than was necessary.

How many kettles had El ie fil ed? That had been the first ever kettle she’d fil ed at Jebb. And she’d done it stark naked. But she’d fil ed enough kettles for him before that, over the years, at Westcott. And she’d have fil ed enough, anyway, for old man Merrick. He felt, with a letter lying in front of him that weighed, of itself, next to nothing, the weight and strain in her arms of al those kettles El ie would have fil ed for Jimmy Merrick. What had she thought that day when her mum had disappeared? And it was a big old farmhouse-kitchen kettle too, it wasn’t like the natty plug-in thing they had here at the Lookout.

When she came back with the tea he knew it was up to him (if it was al his fault) to break the silence, to say something appropriate to the occasion. He might have said any number of things, poor as he was with words. He might have just said, in fact, “Poor Tom. Poor Tom.” But he felt he might already have said that, during his short burst of tears.

Though the words, if they were there, had got so mixed up with the tears that he wasn’t sure if they’d come out like any sort of words that El ie would recognise. It was just a general choking.

He might have said, “I wonder how, exactly.” Or, “I hope it was quick.” He might have said, looking at El ie, “I hope it was damn wel quick.” He might have said, “Why him?” On the other hand, he might have said, “We always knew it was a possibility, didn’t we, El , something like this?” And added, “But we blanked it out, didn’t we?” He’d thought: this is like the cow disease. It was a strange thought to have, but he’d had it. This was like when the cow disease and its real meaning had hit, and he and Tom had waited for Dad to say something, to gather them round the kitchen table, a proper farmhouse meeting, and give them his word. So what now? So what next?

But Dad had never gathered them round, and his strongest course of action had been to stand in the yard alone and spit.

AND THE TRUTH WAS that while that kettle had boiled and even as these useless thoughts had besieged him, a whole series of practical considerations and estimations had also run through Jack’s head, which had added up to the unavoidable certainty of a journey. A journey that he—he and El ie—would have to make. The certainty of one journey. And the impossibility, under the circumstances, of another.

So, of al the things he might have said, he’d said that stupid thing. Though he’d said it, he remembered, as if he was truly sorry and as if he was breaking now, to El ie, a piece of terrible news.

“I think we’d better cancel St. Lucia.”

And El ie had looked at him as if it might, indeed, have been the worst thing he could possibly have said. And he’d thought again: Al those kettles.

11

LATER THAT MORNING Jack had cal ed the special direct-line number in the letter. How could he not? But he’d had to brace himself to do it and he’d felt, as he spoke, like a man cal ing a police station to turn himself in.

“I am Jack Luxton,” he’d said, like the start of a confession.

AND ONLY THE NEXT MORNING, which was also grey, damp and stil , a smart black saloon had driven up the winding road from Holn, which Jack surveys now, and after making the climb in a slow, unfamiliarised fashion, had pul ed up in the turning-space opposite the cottage. Jack had watched it, from this very window. On a stil day any car ascending the hil —it was a rare enough event—would announce its approach, even if you weren’t already waiting. Then he’d watched an army officer get out, reaching as he did so for his peaked cap on the passenger seat and for a brown leather document wal et beneath it.

Jack had been informed of this visit and the timing was spot-on, it was eleven-thirty almost exactly. But when he saw the officer emerge from the car, Jack, who thinks now that El ie might return in convoy with a squad car, was for a moment in no doubt that the officer had come to arrest him, to take him prisoner or to do whatever army officers were empowered to do. To have him shot, possibly. Yet at the same time, when he’d seen the khaki uniform, he’d had the distinct thought: Tom might have done this. Tom might have driven up one day, out of the blue. He might have turned out, who knows, to have become an officer.