Wish You Were Here

Or the same for him at least, Jack. Since he wasn’t going anywhere.

His own man.

He’d said, not stopping in his work, “I understand, Tom. I understand what you’re tel ing me.” In the middle of milking you can’t pause, sit back and say, “Let’s talk this over properly.” Maybe Tom had reckoned on that.

They’d both had to raise their voices through the sound of the machinery. That noisy old machinery. It was like speaking in whispers while shouting. Then after some moments, when the last udders were being relieved of their burdens, he’d said, “Okay, Tom. You can rely on me. Your secret’s safe with me.”

“And with the cows,” he might have said, if he’d had the wit for it.

JACK COULD NEVER have got up to make a speech if he’d tried. But Jack had thought he could never write the letters he’d had to write, more or less a year later, to Tom, not even knowing then where they would find him (or, now, if they’d reached him at al ). About the death of Michael Luxton. Which had required an inquest. How did you write to your brother about such a thing? But not only that. About the fact that Michael had made a wil , as farmers do, and in his wil , according to its latest revision, he’d left everything (such as it now was) to his first-born. No mention of his second.

“Al yours, Jack.”

Tom had never actual y said those words. Or said, in some other form, that it was the deal between them—if he was to go and Jack was to stay. But Tom had never written back to him, or shown up for the funeral, for whatever reasons,

perhaps

simply

practical

or

perhaps—

uncompassionate. There’d been two letters to write to Tom.

One about the death and the inquest. One to tel him the verdict (though was there any doubt?) and to tel him, consequently, the details of the funeral. And of the wil .

Babbages, Barnstaple. November 1994. The month, so it seemed, of funerals. And El ie had been there—had helped him, steered him through it al , been at his side then.

But no Tom, for whatever reason, perhaps merely military.

And no word from him. And hadn’t that settled the matter?

Wasn’t that even Tom’s way of saying it again—what he’d never actual y said in the first place? Al yours, Jack—and you’re welcome to it.

And El ie had said, said it more than once: “Forget him.” Tom was the deserter, the traitor? But if so, Jack was a traitor too, for covering for him. Or Jack was doubly loyal.

To Tom, for not betraying him, and to Dad, or to the farm, for staying put himself.

ONE LATE DECEMBER AFTERNOON—it was the eve of Tom’s eighteenth birthday—Tom and Jack had spoken to each other, knowing that this was the moment for their saying goodbye. Tom was to slip out at three the next morning (Michael could sometimes stir at four, even in December) and Jack was to pretend that he’d been sleeping, as he usual y did til his dad’s stirrings roused him, like a log.

They were once again in the milking parlour, making sure they were out of their father’s earshot. Jack at this point had asked Tom to write to him and let him know where he was.

Tom had said of course he would. And so he had, using the non-interceptible method of sending the letter to Jack care of the tiny and soon to be closed sub-post office in Polstowe (where their mother had once been a girl), and letting him know the postal particulars by which he, Jack, could write to him in future. But that was al Jack ever heard from Tom after he left.

Tom said he would just take the clothes he’d be in—

several layers, for the cold—and a backpack with extra stuff. It would soon be the army’s job to clothe, feed and house him. He’d hoof it through the night, then get the first bus to Exeter. He’d already, by the time they’d spoken, hidden a pack of sandwiches and a thermos inside the Big Barn at the far side of the yard. It was like the usual rations he might have taken with him to do some job on the far side of the farm. He’d breakfast on the march.

Jack had said that thing about writing, and had remembered that first card to El ie (seeing again the little fold-down table), but there was another written message that had gone with that moment in the parlour. It was almost Tom’s eighteenth birthday. It was true what Tom had said: no one bothered about birthdays these days at Jebb, they hadn’t since Vera had died. But Jack had found a moment, al the same, to go into the Warburtons’ store at Leke Hil Cross. Would they have any cards, even one for eighteen?

Yes, they had. Inside the card it said: “You’re Eighteen!

Now the World is Yours!”

Jack had desperately hoped when he’d entered the store that neither Sal y nor Ken Warburton would be behind the til , so there’d have to be some conversation about Tom being eighteen now. Though he was prepared to pretend to either of them—since he was prepared to pretend to his father. But he was in luck. The shop and the whole forecourt, it seemed, was being minded by a girl who looked hardly out of school, though Jack vaguely knew her name was Hazel and she must be Tom’s age, give or take, and, while he glanced at her black-sweatered breasts (and she looked at him as if he were an old man), wondered if Tom had been there.

Jack had added some words of his own to the card and given it, sealed in its envelope, to Tom that afternoon and said, “Happy birthday.” Tom had looked at Jack and after a short, questioning pause had said he wouldn’t open it yet, since it wasn’t yet the day, was it? He’d open it in the morning. And Jack had said, “Okay.”

Then Tom had said, “Wel , I suppose this is when …” And Jack had said, “I know.” Then he’d said, “Good luck, Tom. I’l be thinking of you.” Which was a foolish thing perhaps to have said, because it was exactly what he’d written in the card.

AND IT WAS A FOOLISH THING perhaps to have given Tom that card at al . Since it turned out, the next morning, that Dad had actual y got Tom a card too. It went against al recent custom but, as Dad himself put it, “It was his bloody eighteenth.” But by this time it was apparent, anyway, that Tom had disappeared. So Michael had been able to make a big demonstration of the card he’d special y bought for Tom: by ripping it up in front of Jack. What’s more, it was the same card, the same card with a gold, embossed “18” on it and the same message inside, that Jack had bought, and that Dad, too, must have dropped into the store at Leke Hil Cross to buy. Had that girl noticed?

Jack, of course, hadn’t said and couldn’t say anything about his own card. But this had only meant that his father was able to round on him and demand: and where was his card then? If he’d known nothing about al this, where the hel was the card that Jack had got for Tom? And Jack could only answer that, wel , he’d forgotten it was Tom’s birthday.

TOM, holding the unopened envelope in the milking parlour, had said, “I’l be okay. I’l be thinking of you too.” And he’d looked at Jack with a look, Jack thought, that wasn’t just a brother’s look but perhaps a sort of son-and-father look too.

Then he’d said, “Thanks, Jack. Thanks for everything. I won’t forget you.” And Jack had never ceased to wonder about that remark.

Then they’d hugged. Jack couldn’t remember who’d put their arms out first and perhaps it didn’t matter. The last time they’d hugged each other was when Vera had just died.

“Three o’clock,” Tom had said.

“Three o’clock,” Jack had said.

Jack hadn’t had to repeat it, like some pre-agreed appointment, but he knew why he was doing so, though he didn’t actual y say the words: “I’l be awake, Tom.” And so he was. He’d stayed awake pretty wel al through the night—which was rare for him—just to be sure. He was awake at three o’clock to hear Tom’s stealthy departing movements, while he himself remained motionless and as if asleep.

He heard Tom creep along the passage and down the stairs. Tom would know, even in the dark, where to put his feet, which steps would creak and which wouldn’t. Those steps were part of him. Jack heard the sounds in the kitchen and then the sounds—this was tricky for Tom because the hinges were far from noiseless—of the door into the yard being opened and closed again. It was al done as quickly and as quietly as possible. If Tom had been a soldier, special y trained for such a night-time operation, you could say he’d done it wel .

Jack thought he heard a few faint scuffs of footsteps as Tom crossed the yard and again as he slipped in and out of the barn. But it wasn’t a case of hearing, so much as of imagining and seeing in his head. It wasn’t difficult to do.

For Jack in his head, as for Tom on his feet, the walk up the track would be like going to get the school bus when it was stil dark in winter. How many times had both of them done that—always separately, because of those years between them? In the dark, but knowing every step and, because you knew every step, not using a torch, though you had one with you. The smal bravery of not using it, not needing or using any light—til the blazing headlights of the school bus, rounding the bend, caught you, like the eyes of some snorting monster, and you’d be gathered up.

Tom would be thinking perhaps of al that now. Jack couldn’t hear or see Tom’s footsteps, but he could picture them, count them, every one, as if they were his own. He could see as if he were holding, even if it wasn’t needed, a torch for Tom, every thick, ropey rut, hard with frost, and the splays of ice in between. The high, hedged banks on either side, stars peeping through the thorns. The bend where, on the way down, you’d catch your first glimpse of the farmhouse, just its roof and chimney. Or where, on the way up, you’d pause to look back. Would Tom look back? But everything would be in darkness. Or if a moon was up, there’d be the glimmer, maybe, of the roof slates under which he, Jack, was lying.

One hundred, two hundred paces. Three hundred ascending, lung-rasping paces—to freedom. If that’s what it was. Was the army freedom? Tom must think it was. It wasn’t Jebb Farm. Three hundred paces, his heart thumping, breath smoking. Then the gate.

Good luck, Tom. He’d said it into his pil ow as he counted him up the track and pictured him swinging quickly over the gate—there’d be no opening it. Dropping his pack over first. Then the road towards Marleston. If there was a moon, it would light up the pot-holed surface. In twenty minutes or so he’d pass the churchyard and the war memorial, and his mother’s grave. Would he pause?

Good luck, Tom. Since when had he, Jack, a grown man, ever whispered into his pil ow? Or ever felt his pil ow damp beneath his cheek?

Good luck, Tom.

He’d said it inside himself the next day, as if for his own preservation, when Dad had gone bal istic, after ripping up that card. And he’d said it many times, over and over, in the weeks, months and even years to come, as if to make something true that wasn’t. Til something he’d real y known al along had sunk in on him. That Tom had simply gone, gone his own way. He would never hear Tom’s voice or see his face again.

22

MAJOR RICHARDS WATCHED JACK walk away across the grass and disappear behind the corner of the building, and blamed himself. “I’d slip away if I were you …” But that hadn’t meant the man should simply turn tail and make a beeline. “Slip away” implied some tact.

Major Richards felt vaguely disappointed. Nonetheless, as he watched Jack walk away, he found himself oddly wil ing him on. He was walking in an intent, obstinate way, like some big child clinging to the absurd hope that he might be invisible. As a soldier might walk, Major Richards thought—though he’d never been in a position to see such a thing—from a battle.

And there was no question of stopping him. You al owed in a civilian under the sway of great distress what you would never al ow in a soldier facing possible imminent death.

What you would never have al owed in any of these lads lying here in their shiny black hearses.

When Jack reached the safety of the building, Major Richards felt a smal flutter of relief, even of something like envy.

DEREK PAGE AND DAVE SPRINGER, the undertaker’s men from Babbages, also watched Jack turn and walk off across the grass, like a man, it seemed to them, who’d just remembered some other appointment. Then they looked at each other. Wel , that was a bit sudden. But it was the privilege of the bereaved to act how they liked (Derek and Dave had seen some examples). They could laugh their heads off if they liked and be excused for it. And he’d done the decent thing, made contact, when that wasn’t in the rule book either, and they’d pocketed twenty each.

And he’d certainly made contact with that coffin.

The look they gave each other registered many things, but it included certain physical assessments. Had they been total y free to speak, one of them might have said to the other, “Big bugger, wasn’t he?” They were, themselves, of similar, slightly below-average height. Not that this affected their current task, but so far as tomorrow went, it could only mean, if the other bearers included Andy Phil ips and Jason Young, also from Babbages, that they’d be at the back with the thing sloping down in their direction.

They’d be taking most of the weight. What they didn’t know yet was that the few yards they’d have to tread from the church porch to the grave were also on a downward slope, which would correct, even slightly reverse the imbalance.

And it would be a short journey anyway, nothing like these soldier boys had just had to do—down the ramp of that plane and then across a hundred yards or more of tarmac.

A hard act to fol ow. They’d already had the thought.

But having now met Jack Luxton—the older brother—

they both gave renewed consideration to what those six soldiers had carried and now lay in their own charge. In this case, of course, you couldn’t exactly be sure if Jack Luxton’s bulk was any sort of guide. You didn’t know quite what was in there. They hadn’t had to deal—a mercy maybe—with the body. It might be light as a child’s. They’d find out, perhaps, when they started the hearse. A sensitive foot on the accelerator, when you had to go slow, would tel you pretty quickly if any extra gas was needed to cope with the load.

But the thing weighed upon them anyway, quite apart from these gaugings of physical weight. It weighed upon them in a way that their work seldom did, since they were used to it by now. But they’d never done anything like this.

“Big bugger,” had they spoken it, wouldn’t have excluded the sentiment “poor bugger.” In fact, the first phrase could almost have stood for the second, and “poor bugger,” had it been used of Jack, would have equal y stood for the occupant of their hearse. Poor buggers both.

Derek and Dave were twenty-nine and thirty respectively.

Neither had a brother. Dave had a younger sister. Derek was an only child. Each was married. Derek had two kids, Dave just the one. Al the children were stil so smal —stil learning to walk in one case—that it wasn’t yet an issue how they would be told what their daddies did for a living.

They’d both drifted into the trade for the same simple reason: it was available work, which not everyone wanted, and they’d both thought of it as a stop-gap. Now they’d both become stuck, at assistant level, in a business that they knew very often ran in families, and both wondered exactly what the future held. They’d worked together often now.

They were mates. It was not beyond them to think, in this case: suppose it was your brother. Nor beyond them to think that they might have been out there, in Iraq. There was no cal -up, of course, and they’d opted years ago for this other, though now it seemed not entirely unconnected, form of employment. Corporal Luxton had been not quite thirty-one.

Being undertaker’s men, they were not unfamiliar with ceremony, but they’d never been at anything like this before, and the chances that they might ever again were thin. You couldn’t deny it was a privilege and an honour, it was certainly something special—to pick up the body of a soldier who’d actual y died, in action, for his country. But both Dave’s and Derek’s thoughts when they went in this direction tended to get a little lost. He’d been carried off that plane, anyway, here in Oxfordshire, wrapped in a bloody great Union Jack. Which had then been whisked smartly off the coffin by those same six soldiers who’d done the bearing, like some precious tablecloth that had to be put away in a drawer. Which had presumably been at the request of the bereaved—that man who’d just stomped off.

So they might have been a little miffed. The two of them had just been denied the opportunity of driving a coffin, draped in a Union Jack, halfway across England. Which would certainly have turned heads. More than a hearse usual y does.

And, when you thought about it, to anyone turning their head, it could only have meant one thing.

But now that they’d met Jack and seen him clutch the coffin like that and then each shaken his big hand, they weren’t so sure if they felt cheated or in fact glad at not having the flag. They weren’t sure either, from what they’d occasional y seen on the ten-o’clock news, if even words like “in action” were quite the right words to be thinking of.

They had to be thinking of making their departure, anyway. A sudden chil breeze swirled through the crowd round the hearses, fluttering skirts, lifting ties from jackets, making hands go to hats. The weather was changing. They had to show respect, of course, to these other two lots. The original plan, so they’d understood, was for a slow initial procession, the three hearses one behind the other, through the main gate and through the town. They’d been looking forward to that. But how would that look now: two coffins with flags and one without? And, again, there was no book of rules. They had to take some initiative—a little like Jack.

But too quick an exit wouldn’t do either. It wasn’t so often you got to be in the presence of three deceaseds, and neither Derek nor Dave was sure of the strange, clinging mood around them. Their hearse, with its unadorned coffin

—and now without its principal attending mourner—made them feel like poor relations at a wedding. On the other hand, they drew a vague sense of precedence from the fact that their coffin was a corporal’s, as against two privates’.

They had the rank. And from the evident fact that even the army, in ful parade splendour, seemed to have handed over command now to a few men in plain black. The decision was theirs and they felt strangely stirred by the possibility of unilateral action.

They looked at each other, then at their watches, like skippers judging the tide. It had already been agreed that Derek would do the first shift of driving. As, with appropriate, unhurried dignity, they got into their seats and started the engine, they were briefly the centre of a re-solemnised attention, everyone automatical y standing upright and stil . And no doubt of puzzlement too, but they couldn’t help that. They were in charge of Tom Luxton.

They moved off and crept back along their route of entry.

It was not as anticipated. Al the same, people going about other random business stopped and stood, a little nonplussed, as they passed, those in uniform saluting promptly enough, despite the absence of the flag. It was like being temporary, absconding royalty. They reached the main gate, then continued to creep—a touch more right foot perhaps—through the strange semi-military town, where again, on either side of them, there was some half-surprised but guessing observance, even scattered saluting. As if their one vehicle were a whole procession.

Only with the town behind them did they begin to pick up speed. Nothing crazy, of course. In their calculations as to when to leave, they’d given due attention to Jack’s prior departure. Abrupt as it had been, it was in a way a good thing—signal ing that they too, if they wished and dared, were free to go. But they had to give him a head start. It was unlikely—it would be like the tortoise catching the hare

—that they’d catch him up. But they didn’t want to find themselves (though they had no idea what car he was driving) coming up behind him. He would be making essential y the same journey and there was only one real route. Get past Swindon, then M4, M5.

Why they felt there shouldn’t be this mutual sighting they couldn’t have explained, but they felt it. Why shouldn’t two brothers, in these circumstances, have kept as close to each other as possible? If you could put it like that. If Jack Luxton had insisted on driving in convoy with them (in front or behind), they’d have had to respect it. Though it would have been awkward.

As it was, they knew they had to press on, being as discreet and minimal as possible about their swap-overs and comfort breaks. You couldn’t drive a hearse for a hundred and fifty miles just any old how. Though neither of them had in fact driven a hearse nearly this far before.

As they gained the open road, an unaccustomed taciturnity clung to them, which didn’t just have to do with what was behind their backs. They were used to that and used, whenever there was a chance and no one was looking—as now on a country road—to breaking the rules of decorum. To having a chat about this or that.

But this was different. A hard act to fol ow. As broad, rol ing vistas opened up before them, as they crossed from Oxfordshire into Wiltshire, clouds breaking over the hil s to let through beams of sunshine, they both withdrew into themselves, became thoughtful, even grave.

The truth was they’d both been affected by what they’d seen. It was not possible to disregard, as they normal y could, what they had in the back. It had come out of that plane, it had been flown al the way from Iraq. It? Now it was nudging, as it were, at their shoulders. They didn’t have the Union Jack and that meant that anyone seeing them would have the usual thoughts that people have when they see a hearse with a coffin inside. They wouldn’t imagine or guess.

So only they would know, just the two of them, exactly what they were carrying halfway across the land.

The thought was a sobering one, as was the actual length of the journey in prospect—in such special company.

Though they would never talk about it and though they eventual y broke this meditative hush, both Derek and Dave would feel that in this journey they formed a definite bond with their cargo. It didn’t happen on the usual short trips, quite the opposite. But this was like having a third person along for the ride, there were definitely three of them. The conversation, or concatenation of unspoken thoughts, was somehow three-way.

It was—wel , memorable. But more than that. The word was real y (though neither of them said it) haunting. When they final y reached their destination, Marleston church, back in Devon, where the coffin would rest overnight, they felt relieved, but also vaguely sorry, even deprived.

By then the sky had cleared and the November afternoon had turned stil and chil y. The air in the churchyard smelt smoky and raw. They’d phoned ahead and the rector, Brookes, and some local men were on hand to help with the final carrying into the church. In the fading light it felt like an act of stealth.

They were certainly exhausted. They’d need a drink or two, in the Spread Eagle, once they’d garaged the empty hearse in Barnstaple. Tired as they were, they didn’t wish this long mission to be over. They weren’t at al resentful that they’d have to go back to the church in the morning, to make contact again with Jack Luxton (who hadn’t been sighted en route, so far as they could tel ) and to finish the job.

The sky to the west, as they drove the last few miles to Barnstaple, had reddened while the hil s had darkened.

They’d seen a lot of hil s today, a lot of land. Even that seemed haunting now, or haunted. This was Corporal Luxton’s land, his country, as much as theirs. He’d been returned to it—with a little help from them. One of those ready phrases that had sprung into their heads earlier now seemed as shadowy as the nightfal . Corporal Luxton, who’d ridden with them, must have been a pretty good soldier, especial y if he was as big as his brother. But to say, as is said of soldiers, that he’d died for his country—

no, that wouldn’t be exactly true, would it?

23

CORPORAL LUXTON, Tom Luxton, then a lance-corporal and between tours, had seen those shots of burning cattle, huge roaring piles, on the TV in a West London pub—tanking up before a night of it—but had simply sniffed, swal owed more beer and said nothing to his mates. Roak Moor, Devon. Foot-and-mouth this time. Wel , there were worse sights in the world (Hounslow Barracks, for example). And now he could feel sure—as if he hadn’t known al along—

that he’d made the right decision.

But he kept the TV picture of those burning cattle in his head as if it was a real and actual memory, and it was a useful memory to have, somehow, whenever he saw a belch of black smoke, after the explosion, rise up above the flat rooftops, over the palm trees—which was getting to be most days now, sometimes you’d see two, three or more pal s of dark smoke. It was a good guide and reference point to have, whenever you had to think of or sometimes look at what those clouds of smoke meant. Burning cattle, slaughtered cattle. Like the ones he’d seen carried off from Jebb Farm because they might be mad. Not were, but might be. They might have been going to catch or spread the madness.

It was a good guide. Tom could remember another news clip, on the tel y at Jebb, when the mad-cow thing was just starting, but in some other part of the country and they hadn’t the slightest idea it was actual y going to hit them.

It was a clip of a cow, in a pen somewhere, that had got the disease. It was fal ing down and getting up, then fal ing down again, its legs skidding sideways. It didn’t know what it was doing, it was going round in circles. It wasn’t a good picture for him and Jack and Dad to be looking at, even if it was only a picture on the tel y, and they were al thinking it couldn’t possibly come their way.

And it was pretty much the same when Wil is got shot, their first serious casualty. Everyone was dreading carnage, major detonations, someone with a nasty parcel under their shirt. But it was a single bul et, a sniper. No one even seemed to have heard the shot. They just saw Wil is acting funny, not being Wil is any more, moving around like a big, jerky puppet with some of its strings missing, no one understanding why. A bul et that just nicked his spine, but it was enough. Enough to stop Wil is being Wil is any more, for the rest of his life maybe. The first of theirs to be shipped home.

And because he was Corporal Luxton now and had to make sure they got that picture out of their heads pretty fast, he’d had to act for them like someone who’d seen this sort of thing before, maybe a dozen times, and knew how to hack it. And the only thing that had helped was that cow on the tel y—the memory of sitting round at Jebb and thinking: surely not.

It had flashed through his brain, while God knows what was flashing through Ricky Wil is’s brain. That and the fact that he himself was a sniper. Or had been. More of a regular corporal these days, only a part-time sniper. If you were going to shoot a man, then do it cleanly, so he’d never even know about it. It made him angry, that poor bit of snipering. From then on (it was already there, but Wil is helped to sharpen it) there was a general feeling that if it was going to be your turn and if it wasn’t going to be something nice, like just a foot or an elbow, then let it be something you’d never know about, not some crap like Wil is got.

He’d had the thought, later, that the army ought to have its own equivalent of a squad of MAFF slaughtermen to come as quickly as possible and finish off cases like Wil is. It would be a mercy, it would save a lot of trouble. It would only be doing what any soldier might sign up for. If you’d do it for an animal.

He’d got the picture of Wil is out of his head by remembering that cow. Strange, that it was just a cow on the tel y. But then they, B Company, were just pictures on the tel y for most people back home, though they didn’t get the pictures like they got of Wil is. And that picture on the tel y at Jebb wasn’t funny. There were real cows across the yard. It wasn’t just a picture, even if they didn’t know the thing was coming smack in their direction. You might have said they’d been served notice.

Or he had. Though he hadn’t yet made up his mind. He’d make up his mind down in Barton Field. What you’d do for an animal. The cow disease, when it came, was like some not quite final warning. A disease had already been eating away at Michael Luxton and was starting to eat away at him, Tom, too. He’d got it from his dad. Jack was made of tougher stuff, maybe, better stuff than he was. A good brother, a better brother. And a better father, sometimes, than his father.

But after that morning with Dad and Luke in Barton Field he wasn’t going to stick around any longer than he needed, with bad thoughts in his head that he might just one day put into action. Let the cow disease seem like his reason.

What should he have said? Why don’t we both do it, Jack, you and me together, why don’t we both just hop it? But he’d looked hard into Jack’s eyes and seen, first, that what he did actual y say would be safe with Jack, safe as blank ammunition, and, second, that Jack had never even dreamed of it himself.

Wel then, Jack could keep it. Keep what he was leaving.

Let that be the deal. He’d never break it or ask for his share back. If that took away the weight of guilt that settled inside him as soon as Jack said, there in the parlour, “You can rely on me, Tom.” If it made Jack the good brother and him the bad one, so be it. If it made Jack the fool and him the smart one, so be it. He’d slipped out of the farmhouse, like a fox from a henhouse, at three a.m. on his eighteenth birthday.

His mum had told him once that he’d been born at three a.m., but that had nothing to do with it, it was just a coincidence. And Jack had told him that “born” wasn’t quite the word for it anyway. Jack had said, “That’s when you final y came out.”

He had a backpack and he was wearing al those layers

—less to carry—against the cold. He had rations (he’d better get used to that word) hidden in the Big Barn. And he had Jack’s birthday card, which weighed next to nothing but was like an extra load of blame to carry with him. A big gold

“18” and a big “Good Luck, Tom” inside. He’d kept it for a long while, hidden in his locker. Signing up on your birthday wasn’t exactly like a birthday. If he’d wanted punishment, to go with his guilt, then he’d get it in the army.

But he certainly no longer had the card by the time he was sitting in that pub, watching those cows burning on the tel y. Though maybe the “Good Luck” stil applied, now as then. It had stopped him, so far, from being like Wil is.

Apart from the card, only three other written messages had ever come his way from Jack. Which wasn’t a complaint, since he, Tom, had never written back—or only the once, and briefly. He’d very quickly found out that he just wanted to be out of communication in this world he’d chosen, this world of strangely unresented punishment, his whereabouts unknown.

Now the World is Yours.

The first letter from Jack had been after two weeks or so, and was just a line hoping he was okay and saying that everything at Jebb was fine—which was surely Jack being a wel -meaning liar. And then, since he hadn’t replied to that, there was a long, long gap. It looked like that was that.

They’d real y said goodbye to each other and known it, that December afternoon in the milking parlour. Meanwhile, he’d been moved around a bit anyway.

Then those two letters had come, soon after each other, the first looking like Jack might have spent a whole week writing it and torn up several versions along the way. But the main item was perfectly clear. That Jack was al by himself now, not counting El ie (assuming El ie was stil a feature, and how might she not be?). The old man had cleared off too, so it seemed, in a manner of speaking. And then the second letter had come soon afterwards, about the funeral, since that had to be delayed. And that had included that other item of news: that Michael had left the whole farm—

though Jack had seemed to want to emphasise that there was a whole heap of debt to go with it—to Jack and Jack only. Wel that was no surprise. That had even been the deal.

And he hadn’t replied to either letter. He hadn’t got on the phone to Jebb Farm. He hadn’t done a single thing about either letter, though he’d stared at them both long and hard enough. Those letters reached him, as it happened, in Germany. Before Bosnia. It would have been difficult, but, with that delay for the funeral, not impossible. And there was such a thing as compassionate leave. And he’d felt compassion, definitely. For his brother.

But he hadn’t done a thing. He hadn’t applied to the CO.

He imagined the CO’s face. My old man has shot himself.

He hadn’t lifted a finger. It was a bastard thing to do to Jack, but then, maybe, it had been a bastard thing he’d done in the first place, that night in December.

Al yours, Jack. Now it real y was, and El ie’s too, if Jack had any sense. And good luck to them. But it wasn’t his ticket or what he was made for, he knew that too now.

He was a private in B Company, earmarked for the sniper section, currently stationed in Germany, occasional y on active duty with a Helga from Hanover, when he might have been the owner of fifty per cent of Jebb Farm, of a hundred and sixty acres of England. So be it. He couldn’t go back on the deal, and he couldn’t go back anyway to the place itself, compassionately or otherwise. Couldn’t have gone back to that churchyard to stand by the grave, even for his brother’s sake, and look down and think: it was a fine line, it was a fine bloody line. And Jack maybe thinking it too. And maybe if he didn’t show up and didn’t even send a message it would be like a clear enough last signal. Al yours, Jack. Forget about me.

He’d stared at each letter in turn. So his father had done what no one else, now, would have to have the decency to do for him. He’d done the decent thing himself. He’d stared at both letters together. Reading them was a little like reading Jack’s face, but he’d never have to do that any more. He put the letters away, and he never did speak to the CO. Later, he found an opportunity privately to burn them. The barrack room had an old-style stove with a lid.

Simple. A smal fire, compared with piles of cattle going up in flames. And a smal matter, he’d come to think, compared with some of the things that come a soldier’s way. Bosnia. He’d watched those cattle burning on the tel y six years later, in the spring of 2001. And it wasn’t so long afterwards that a couple of planes had flown into a couple of big towers—another TV picture to remember—giving a whole new meaning to the act of suicide and having a range of consequences, including ones for British soldiers, which would make a spot of cow disease seem piddling.

AND ALL HE’D WANTED was the get-out, the complete alternative package. No finer reasons. He’d never once said to anyone that he’d had a great-uncle who’d got the DCM. (Posthumous.) When he’d walked, that icy night, with his backpack, past the war memorial, he’d never turned his head. He hadn’t felt brave, or even that he was doing something that real y took so much initiative.

He’d started life as a soldier by running away. Which was a common enough story. It was what half of B Company had done in their different ways. What were the alternatives? They’d handed over the problem to the army.

Take me in, please, sort me out please, the whole package. With some of them you could see, clearly enough, that if it hadn’t been that, it might have been prison eventual y, one way or another. You could picture their faces sometimes (and now he was a corporal, he’d sometimes tel them) behind bars.

And that might have been his case too, and it might not have been petty crime either. But that was al taken care of now. He stared at those letters.

BUT HE’D STILL THINK about cattle. They haunted him and helped him, gave him a sort of measure. If he wanted, now, to get bad stuff out of his head, bad human pictures, it helped to replace them with cattle. He could stil remember the wet jostle of the milking parlour, the smel of iodine and udder. He could stil remember that daily treadmil of extracting milk from cows, and the thought that would sometimes come to him while doing it, that it was only the same essential process (so hardly a man’s job) by which human babies were nursed and eased into the world, by which he himself had once been nursed and eased—late and (apparently) tough arrival though he was. And it was a wonder how the grown-up world stil needed, by the churn-load, by the tanker-load, this white, soft, pappy baby-juice.

He’d had that thought, especial y, after Vera died, and wondered if Jack, in the next stal , was having it too. Their mum had died, but these damn cows stil had to calve and be milked. But, at that time, the milking parlour was the best place to be.

What kind of thoughts were they for a future soldier?

What kind of training was milking? But it was a cattle-existence often enough, a cowshed existence. They were mostly hard-nut townie boys and liked to think of him as a softie country boy, a bumpkin. But there were those who were hard outside and al mush inside, you could do without them. And there were those who might look soft on the outside (though not so much of that these days) but were hard underneath, and he knew now he was the second kind. Now and then they’d get a glimpse of it, too, and knew they shouldn’t argue—one reason he’d made corporal, and would make sergeant pretty soon.

By the time they were out here, most of them had that hard and soft stuff sorted out. They knew they didn’t have their mums around any more. They’d better be their own mums to themselves, and that wasn’t a joke. He could do that too. Set them an example. Sew on a button for them just like his own mum had done. Bite off the cotton. “There you are, Pickering. Now say thank you.” Another reason he’d make sergeant. But he could also shoot people dead cleanly. Not like that useless cunt who’d shot Wil is.

Another big advantage of being the country boy. Crows, pigeons, bunny rabbits. He’d been put on the sniper’s course and passed, flying colours. He had a skil to bring to the army.

Though no one had noticed that what he’d brought with him too was his anger. Sniping was supposed to be icy-cool, precise and careful, it was the opposite of blazing away. Yet it was anger that had driven him, that cold night, up that frozen track. Two years’ worth of simmering anger and of keeping a lid on it. He might have just done a bunk after he left school. He might have just legged it—and nearly had—that night after Luke got buried. Would Dad real y have got him back? This is my boy and he belongs on my farm, he doesn’t belong in the army. Or would he have spat and said, “Good riddance”? Either way, he wanted it to be certain and clear. So he’d arrived on the army’s doorstep with at least two years’ worth of anger.

And was that, too, so unusual? The army welcomed anger. Was happy to channel and redirect it, even, maybe, cure it. If you were lucky and patient, it might even find you a real enemy to take it out on. And Tom didn’t mind who that was. A war on terror? That sounded like an open day for enemies, that sounded like a perfect opportunity for firing off lots of cool, disciplined, single rounds of anger. The first time he’d fired for real and seen his man drop, he’d felt anger fly out of him, he’d felt a great whoosh of sanity and calmness. Now he’d done it. He’d even thought he might never need to do it again, but of course it was required of him, it was what he was there for. As for the man he’d popped, he didn’t think about him. And he’d never known about it. It was clean kil ing. Not every soldier could do it, or wanted to.

But he was a corporal now and less of a sniper. He’d been credited with that other skil the army needed: leadership. And he liked it. Sniping was a solo business and he was a sniper these days only by occasional solo detachment. Otherwise, he had eight men to look after—

seven, after Wil is. When he’d been made corporal he’d felt for the first time like a big brother. Now he had some little brothers. And he no longer felt angry. He’d sniped it away, maybe.

Eight—seven—men. Al townies, and him the only bumpkin, the one in charge. It was the accent of course that did it, the broad buttery burr he couldn’t get rid of, any more than he could get rid of the memory of milking. But no milksops among them now, especial y after Wil is. They were okay and would be okay, if he had anything to do with it. Some of them even found his voice soothing now, when he wasn’t barking at them. It wasn’t the obvious voice of a corporal, it was the voice of a cowman. It made them think of green English fields, perhaps, out here in the dust and crap. Wel , they’d better forget al that. He could tel them about green English fields.

More the leader, less the sniper, but he stil had the same, secret equal-vote of a wish they al had: that if his moment had to come (and if they had to do without him) it would just be clean and he wouldn’t know about it. Death by sniper would do, and in his case might even be cal ed fair.

But not, please, like Wil is. Wheelchair Wil is.

So when the IED—and it must have been a whopping IED—blew up under them, the whole section riding home, dog-tired, to beddy-byes, he thought it was unfair, but there was nothing he could do about it. He could see that Pickering and Ful er were out of it and he didn’t know who else might be okay or not, behind. He couldn’t move to look. It was al madness, but he was clear and calm and strangely comforted, not by his own burry voice, which didn’t seem to be working, but by the fact that he couldn’t hear anything. There must be a lot of racket, screaming, yel ing, gunfire even, but he couldn’t hear any of it and he had no sense, either, of how much time was passing, if time was passing at al . He could smel fuel. He knew he was trapped under mangled metal, by his legs, but he couldn’t feel or move his legs, couldn’t move anything, even a hand, even, it seemed, his lips. Wel , it would be al down to Lance-Corporal Meeks now, Dodger Meeks, if Meeks was stil up and dodging.

Was this terror? The thing they were fighting? He saw the bal of flame bloom out, and he knew he wasn’t going to die by nice clean sniper fire, but was going to be burnt to death, but there was nothing he could do about it, and it seemed he had plenty of time to think about other things and the peace and quiet to do it in. He could think about not being in a blown-up armoured vehicle in Iraq, but being in the back of the school bus with Kathy Hawkes. He could move his hand then, al right, every fingertip. And he could think about being in a caravan, a caravan with just Jack and Mum. He could even think about Marilyn Monroe. He knew now that he should have written to Jack, at least answered one of those letters that he’d dropped in a stove in Germany. He could see the red, round opening of that stove. He’d write now, if he had a piece of paper and a pen and could move his hand. He’d explain that when Dad had thrust the gun at him he hadn’t taken it, for the simple reason that he’d known he’d have used it on Dad first, then on Luke. Or on Luke first, then on Dad. A tricky question, but same difference. There were two barrels. And he’d known, from the look in his eyes, that Dad was half expecting it, even wanting it, and that’s why he’d said that thing about decency. He’d known, anyway, when Dad had turned away with the gun, that he, Tom Luxton, had the kil er instinct in him. And he’d have to put a lid on it.

So I joined the army, Jack. Now here I am in sunny Basra. Wish you were here. No, not real y. Remember me to El ie.

But he wasn’t here either. He was there. He was back there in Barton Field. There was the big oak, its leaves brushing a big blue sky. But there was no Dad, no Luke, no gun. And no Jack. But he was lying in Barton Field more or less where Luke had been shot and had known al along it was coming. It was summer, it was warm and the grass was ful of buzzing insects. And then he could hear something else, getting closer. He hadn’t heard that sound for a long time now, but he knew straight away what it was, and if he could lift his head he might just be able to see them.

It

was

the

unmistakable,

steady

“tchch … tchch … tchch” of browsing cattle, the slow, soft rip-rip of cows’ mouths tearing up grass. It was the most soothing sound in the world and it was utterly indifferent.

24

ELLIE SITS by Holn Cliffs, looking at the vanished postcard view. The occasional white, whizzing missile of a wind-hurled seagul is almost the only sign that there’s anything out there.

Their seaside life, vanished too now, toppled over a cliff.

Their Isle of Wight life. She’d come here once, al alone, to see for herself, when it was stil her secret, her gift in store, like some unborn child. Twenty-seven years old. Fine spring weather. The view had been glorious then. Her dad was in a hospital bed, knowing no more about this excursion of hers than he’d known about that spin she’d taken when she was sixteen. And thank God it wasn’t the same Land Rover. She’d taken the ferry to Fishbourne, gone up on the sun deck, as if she were on a pleasure cruise.

Their Isle of Wight life. The beauty of it: a whole separate land, with only a short sea to cross, but happily cut off from the land of their past. Not exactly their “isle of joy.” It wasn’t Tahiti. Look at it now. Or St. Lucia (that would come later).

But nonetheless it was a fact, and it had become their purpose, that they were in the business of pleasure. And it had become theirs, not just “The Lookout,” but “El ie’s and Jack’s.” Once it had been Alice’s and Tony’s—Al ie-and-Tony’s. Now it was El ie-and-Jack’s.

She’d stood beside him, in a straw-coloured dress, in that registry office in Newport and not minded at al that she was changing her name. It seemed a good name.

Luckston. Later, outside their front door—it was a mild October afternoon and the caravans below even looked like something spread out for a wedding—she’d said, “Wel , come on, you won’t get another chance.” And he’d done it as if he’d been planning it al along. My God, he’d scooped her up as if she’d been as light as straw herself.

He’d come out of his mourning for Jebb, and not so slowly, and actual y started to look happy. Farmer Jack.

She’d even thought she might settle for there not being any other kind of birth, for the sake of this remarkable rebirth in him. And hadn’t she caused it to happen? And, anyway, was it so out of the question that there stil might be both kinds of birth?

So was it any wonder that she’d been both flattened and glad—glad—when that letter came?

“LEAVE ME OUT OF THIS, Jack.”

She should have gone with him, back into the wretched past. For a moment she sees before her not the November rain of the Isle of Wight but the soft flaps and veils of midsummer rain over the Devon hil s as she drove into Barnstaple the morning after her father had died. She’d cal ed Jack from a pay-phone in the hospital to give him the news without any tearfulness and with hardly a tremble in her voice. She’d wanted to convey to him that she was being practical and steady—and he was stil in the grip of his own father’s death. It was over, it had been expected (and, yes, al those years, since she was sixteen, were over too). In a little while they might start to think of their own lives.

“No, it’s okay, I don’t need you with me.” And he’d done two lots of milking.

And he’d needed her with him two days ago.

She should have gone too, been at his side, even wept a little. She was weeping now. But she just couldn’t do it.

Stand on some grim piece of tarmac, while it al came back, in a flag-wrapped parcel, by way of Iraq, their old, left-behind life. Then stand, again, in that churchyard. By Tom’s grave. By her father’s.

She just couldn’t do it—any more, apparently, than she could go and stand by her mother’s. She just couldn’t do it, even if Jack had to. She could see there was no way round it for him.

She’d listened to him leave, two mornings ago. It seems already like two weeks. Heard him moving downstairs in the kitchen, heard the front door, his feet on the road outside. The car starting. She’d actual y thought: Poor man, poor man, to have to be going on such a journey. None of his noises had sounded angry, there was no slamming. It was almost as if he’d been trying not to wake her.

How could she have let him do it without even seeing him off, without standing in the doorway, without so much as a kiss or a hug or even an “I’l be thinking of you”? My poor Jack, my poor one-and-only Luxton left. But how could she have said or done any of those things when, in the first place, she might simply have gone with him?

It was stil dark. She hadn’t moved. She’d even pul ed the duvet tighter up round her. There was a brief brightness at the curtains as he put on his headlights before slipping down the hil . Even as he’d left she’d wondered: would he come back? Was this the sort of journey and the sort of starting out on it from which he might never come back?

The fear had taken hold of her that he might not come back. How absurd. When she might have gone with him.

She’d left al those messages on his mobile, none of which had been answered. Wel , she’d asked for it. I’m thinking of you. I love you. Forgive me.

Strangely, in al the time he was gone, she’d hardly thought of Tom, returning, in his own way—being returned

—to where he’d come from. Or put herself in the terrible position of some mother or wife receiving back, but not receiving back, a soldier-husband, a soldier-son. She’d thought of her own mother, of going to be with her, and failed to do even that. Failed twice now. Al she’d wanted was for Jack to come back.

Wel , he had come back. And he hadn’t. And now it seemed she might sit here in this lay-by for ever.

25

JACK SWUNG THE CHEROKEE back onto the road and sped off as if from some delay not of his own making. He’d wasted valuable time getting choked up. Part of him recognised that it was the whole point of this journey, to get choked up. It was its essence. But some other part of him was now trying to outdrive this immobilising stuff inside him.

He looked in the mirror, half expecting to see the black hearse on his tail.

The road was clear, in both directions. The November day was brightening again, the grey clouds breaking, so that a whole hil side would suddenly light up while everything else seemed to darken.

He crossed the infant River Thames, back into Wiltshire, but the countryside, the passing signs to innocent-sounding vil ages, now vaguely oppressed him, unlike when he’d left the motorway to drive north in the morning. He was relieved when he joined the M4 and was sucked into its tunnel ed anonymity. He saw himself as a mere moving speck on a map—the blue line of the M4 draped like a cable across the land. The road was everything and, despite the names that loomed at junctions, might have been anywhere.

Chippenham? Malmesbury? Where the hel were they?

But for the first time he became conscious of the empty seat beside him, of the pointedness of its emptiness. What was El ie doing now? The Isle of Wight seemed already far away, as far away, almost, as Iraq. He couldn’t imagine what El ie was doing now. He couldn’t imagine that she was sitting now at the Lookout, trying to imagine what he was doing. Wishing that, after al , she was sitting next to him.

Was she packing her bags?

It seemed to him that there was now a difference, a gap, between El ie and him as plain as that strip of choppy sea he’d crossed this morning. For her, Tom’s death meant quite simply that Tom was gone now for good and was never coming back. He could see that this was a perfectly sound position. But for him it meant just as simply—though it was a position much harder to argue for—that Tom had come back. He understood it truly now. He’d come back as surely as if that letter announcing his death had real y been Tom himself knocking on the door. Can I come in? It was as if Tom, whom he’d lived without for thirteen years, could no longer, now he was dead, be lived without. He’d been trying to drive away from this nonsensical, pursuing fact, and yet it was true.

There was even a simple test. He asked himself a question that, lurking inside him though it may have been, he hadn’t dared confront til now. Perhaps it had only become a question since he’d made his bolt for it, after the ceremony, back there. Who would he rather have right now

—right now between junctions 17 and 18—in that empty seat beside him? El ie? Tom?

It wasn’t an easy question or even a fair one. For a moment he failed to answer it. But then, for a clear second or two, and by way of an answer, Tom was there. He had a corporal, in battle gear, sitting beside him while he drove, under a brightening sky, down the M4. This was the first time this had happened on his journey, and it wouldn’t be the last. Jack wasn’t frightened or even surprised. He was even relieved. He didn’t need now to worry about the hearse, about outstripping it, because Tom was with him anyway.

It’s because he’s real y come back, he thought. It’s because I touched the coffin and held it. Like a kind of contamination, but a good one.

Then he thought: Am I going mad?

Last night (was it only last night and not last week?), when Jack had asked El ie one last time—he wasn’t going to insist or demand—if she’d come with him, she’d shaken her head and taken a deep, exasperated breath, as if she might have been going to say, “It’s him or me, Jack.” He was sure she was going to say it, that was the look in her eyes, but she hadn’t said it.

And he should never have said that thing, at the start, about St. Lucia. Then El ie would be with him now. He’d seen the same look come into her eyes then—as if, strangely, now Tom was dead, she could no longer rely on his absence. And hadn’t he just proved her right? The simple word was “ghost.”

“So what are you going to do, Jacko? Mope around here al winter?”

The word was “mourn,” he’d thought. Mourn, not “mope.” But he couldn’t say it—“Mourn, not mope, El ie.” The word had stuck in his throat. Like St. Lucia hadn’t.

And if El ie were with him now, sitting right beside him, would that mean Tom wouldn’t be, couldn’t be? That there couldn’t be any ghosts? Now al the other ghosts, it suddenly seemed to him, were waiting for him too—

sensing his approach, beyond the end of this blue, snaking motorway. Including Jimmy Merrick, with an extra, needly twinkle in his eye. “What—no El ie with you, boy?” Was he going mad?

BRISTOL, like some phantom presence—a thickening of traffic and junctions—passed somewhere on his left. He filtered off the M4 onto the M5, confused by the lanes.

Bristol, Avon-mouth, Portishead. The sea could not be far away. A different sea from the one he’d seen and crossed this morning. The Bristol Channel. The map of England wheeled in his head. Portsmouth, Southampton, Bristol. He was on an island. And he was in Somerset now, a sign told him. The West Country. Clevedon, Weston-super-Mare.

He’d never been to Weston-super-Mare, but the name smacked of caravans.

Beyond Taunton—most of his motorway driving was behind him now—he pul ed into a service station, needing to piss and eat. It was more that he was empty than hungry.

He needed to fil himself as he might have needed to fil the car. He needed to drain himself, though he felt already drained. In the Gents he could have sworn that, again, for just a moment, he’d seen Tom, three urinals along. Desert camouflage, slung rifle. Had he simply imagined it this time?

He walked back out towards the cafeteria, past a row of busy, brightly coloured miniature cars on stands, each occupied by an eager child who could only just have been released from a real car. He was stil feeling, himself, though he was on his feet, the sway and thrum of being on the road. The cafeteria was a near-replica of the one he’d sat in, near Newbury, this morning, but now he wondered how many of those around him—or how many of those who would pass through here today—would have some link, no matter how remote (a cousin, a brother-in-law) with someone in Iraq. There ought to be a badge, perhaps, a means of recognition. No there shouldn’t. If there was a war on terror, that would be a stupid idea. Could bombs go off in motorway service stations?

That place in Oxfordshire, he thought, had been like a great big bloody service station—for the services.

It was not quite three o’clock, but the day was waning.

The light outside seemed fragile and taut, already preparing to depart. He’d made good time and there was now no particular need to rush, but he had an odd fear of having to drive in the dark. Though he wasn’t afraid of seeing Tom again. It had happened twice now, so the possibility was strong. He was no longer afraid of the hearse—which, even while he sat here, might whizz sneakily past. Perhaps, in some quite feasible and arguable way, Tom was no longer in the hearse. He stared at the empty chair beside him, which stayed empty.

It was clearly something Tom had control over, not him.

He pushed aside his plate, got up and walked back to where he’d parked. It was distinctly cold now. The sky was virtual y clear and the edges of things had sharpened. His thin shadow, like a pointer on a dial, went before him across the car park. He stil wore the black tie, not even loosened. His suit, which he’d have to wear tomorrow, would now be hopelessly creased. He laid the jacket again on the back seat. The medal went back into his shirt pocket.

Only a few minutes and a few miles further on, he crossed into Devon. “Welcome to Devon.” Did he feel he’d come home? Did he feel he’d crossed a special line?

Within half an hour, on the outskirts of Exeter, he turned off the end of the motorway onto the westbound A30. The possibility had certainly occurred to him of exiting at an earlier point and taking a route along slower country roads that would eventual y have led him into landscapes that he knew. But he instinctively wanted to stave off til tomorrow—

and even then, perhaps, to keep it as brief as possible—

encountering any views that were familiar. This wasn’t memory lane. The dual carriageway of the A30, as wel as being fast, had the numbing virtue of being like any busy trunk road anywhere.

But even as he sped along it, he began to see, on his right, a certain kind of bulging hil , a certain kind of hunched, bunched geography that he intimately recognised, and ploughed and scooped out of it, here and there, were areas of bare earth with a familiar ruddy hue. In the late-afternoon light it even seemed to glow. These sights brought an unexpected tightness to his throat. “Earth with dried blood in it,” Michael Luxton had once moodily said.

The sky was darkening, with a reddish tinge to match the scours among the hil s. He switched on his side lights. On the left, Dartmoor loomed. Its distant, cloud-hung outline had once been the regular sight at Jebb. So, he couldn’t deny it, he was back now. On the other hand, he had never been to Dartmoor, and he was about as close to it now as he’d ever been. Though it had been constantly there once, on the horizon, it might as wel have been the Isle of Wight.

And he’d understood that it was a tourist place, where holidaymakers went in the summer. Also a place, he’d understood, where there were signs saying, “Army: Keep Out.”

BEFORE DAY HAD QUITE given up to night, he turned off the A30 and descended into the nestling town of Okehampton.

He was now in a place he knew, though not wel . Even Okehampton—like Barnstaple or Exeter—had been a rare excursion. He had dim memories of being taken there to see his mother’s Aunt Maggie. A bus ride, shops, a cream tea in a cafe with rickety chairs. But hotels didn’t feature in his memories. There’d been no reason for them to. In al his life—and despite being himself in the business of providing accommodation—Jack had only ever stayed in three different hotels, and al of them had been in the Caribbean.

Now he was to stay in a hotel less than twenty miles from where he was born.

He’d chosen the Globe Inn from a website, back at the Lookout. Since El ie wasn’t coming, he wasn’t interested in anywhere smart, just a place for the night. He’d almost self-denyingly gone down-market. Should he sleep in luxury while his brother slept in a coffin? He’d chosen Okehampton because it was about the right distance from Marleston. It might have been Barnstaple, which was nearer, but he’d plumped for Okehampton. He was definitely not going to stay anywhere in the direct vicinity, certainly not in the Crown (if they had such a thing as a room). Technical y, there would stil be people around who, in the circumstances, might have put him up. But that thought—he was Jack Luxton who’d cleared off over ten years ago—horrified him.

He knew now in any case, as he entered Okehampton, that he might as wel have made no booking and taken pot luck. Okehampton in mid-November was not exactly in demand. The streets were scarcely busy, despite some glittery gestures in shop windows to a Christmas stil weeks away. And when he found the Globe Inn, parked in its yard of a car park, and entered through its rattling front door, he was glad, at least in one sense, that El ie wasn’t with him.

Her tastes and requirements had been raised considerably in recent years. So had his, it was true, to keep up with hers. But now his had rapidly dropped away, though with no real sense of indignity, as if he felt that he deserved something only just above the lowest.

This was Tom’s homecoming and he’d gone for cheapness. But it wasn’t Tom who’d be staying here.

The Globe was little more than a pub, but its lack of any style was vaguely comforting and as he entered, there, briefly, was Tom again, behind the cubicle-like reception desk. As if his brother was there to welcome him (though with a chin-strapped helmet on). He was standing with his hands resting on the wooden counter. Then he was gone.

Jack pressed the bel on the counter—though without supposing this would resummon his brother—and a woman waddled into view and smiled. This also comforted Jack and made him put aside his feeling of foolishness at having booked in advance.

He gave his name and heard it being drawled back to him. “Lu-uxton.” He had a momentary terror of being found out. She’d surely have read the name in the local paper, where it must have been a story. But the voice (which had something in common with his own) had no particular meaning in it. She took a key from the rack behind her and smiled again. “Breakfast in the back bar—that way—seven to half-past nine.” He wondered if he were the only guest.

The room was better than he’d expected, much better than the mere cel he felt was his due. There was a large window, beneath it a radiator that was barely warm. He found a plug-in heater that made ticking noises, and drew the curtains. Then he lay sprawled for several moments on his back on the bed, closing his eyes. The bed seemed to tremble and rock under him as if he were stil travel ing. He saw the plane parked out on the tarmac.

He got up again quickly, as if to rest was fatal. His watch showed it had just gone five. In his bag he had a change of clothes, for this one evening, so that he could preserve his suit, with a fresh white shirt for the morning. The medal had been in his top pocket when he entered the hotel. He put it now on the bedside table. He undressed and hung up his suit. In the bathroom his nakedness, in a strange mirror, among strange angles and surfaces, suddenly perplexed and alarmed him. Would that hearse have arrived yet?

Should he have been there for it, waiting in the twilight? He wouldn’t have liked to drive a big hearse through the high, narrow lanes around Marleston, let alone with darkness coming on. He saw its headlights rippling along the rooty banks.

What was in that coffin? He ran the tap. And those other two coffins—with their flags stil wrapping them—where were they now? Pickering, Ful er. He’d scarcely given them a thought.

He lay in the bath, his knees raised so it could contain his length. The water had gushed and was hot. How had Tom died? The bath was better, safer than the swaying bed. He felt like a man on the run. He felt a great desire not to know who he was.

IT WAS BARELY SEVEN when he went out. There was no waddling woman, though there was chatter from along the hal way and the noise of a TV. So he hung on to his key.

He’d picked up the medal again and put it in the zip-up pocket of his parka jacket. He didn’t dare not have it about his person. It was like carrying a key. He had only one plan.

To find a pub—definitely not the Globe itself—a pub that did food. To drink as much as it took, then to get back and crash into bed with as little as possible stil stirring in his brain.

He was lucky with the pub. It was cal ed the Fox and Hounds and was barely three minutes from his hotel. It had, at this early-evening hour, just the right number of customers, so that he wouldn’t stand out nor, on the other hand, be swamped. Furthermore, one of the other customers, he almost casual y observed now, was Tom.

Stil in his battle kit, but leaning against the bar like some regular, one hand plunged into one of many pockets as if he might have been jingling loose change, or perhaps a hand grenade. He’d looked round as his brother came in, as if to say, “Jack! What’l you have?” Then, as before, he was gone.

Jack ordered a pint and saw that there were plastic menus on the tables. He didn’t care: any food. He took a table by the wal . The wal had fake black beams running down it and in between were framed pictures of hunting scenes that were standard issue for pubs in country towns.

He drank the first pint fairly quickly, then, when he went to the bar for a second, ordered the steak and chips. Fox and hounds, steak and chips. From the feel of the beer inside him, he reckoned another pint after this, or a large scotch, should be sufficient. He general y knew his limits. As many of the Lookouters who went to the Ship at Sands End could vouch, Jack wasn’t a big drinker—two pints sipped slowly.

His big body seemed to contain them easily, but not to need any more. But now he was drinking to a purpose.

Someone had left a convenient copy of the Daily Express on one of the other tables, to give him something to do. He looked at it, rather than read it. Fortunately, it was yesterday’s news. He didn’t want to look at any local paper.

He didn’t want to look at the television when he got back to his room. There was no television—it was something he’d consciously checked—in this bar. He wanted to be disconnected. Yet the voices around him were like voices he’d once known and he had the feeling again that he might suddenly be recognised. Equal y, he had the thought that he was sitting—quite unnoticeably, in fact—in an ordinary pub in Okehampton when only seven or eight hours ago he’d been mingling with lords and ladies and generals and God knows who. He’d been where drums had been beaten, bugles blown and swords had flashed.

Guess where I’ve been today?

Was it the beer starting to work? In the wrong direction?

While he waited for his food and looked at the Daily Express—though as if the newsprint might have been mere gauze—it seemed suddenly to Jack that he was perfectly capable of becoming one of those strange men in pubs who can rear up suddenly and accost others with their uninvited stories, their riddles or their sheer, frothing rage.

That sort of thing could happen, after al , at the Lookout (it could happen in the Ship, but then it was not his business).

The furies that a fortnight’s holiday could sometimes, oddly, release. The pressure-cooker of a caravan under three days of rain. It seemed strange to Jack that he could actual y exert a calming influence in such situations—or maybe just look like a man no one would want to take on. A gangster even, apparently. He’d entered that hardly intimidating hotel like a mouse.

He was better at stopping fights, perhaps, than picking them, better at quel ing anger than venting it. Yet now he felt he could almost go up to the bar and thump it and be one of those desperate, bel igerent men. He might get out the medal, unlock it from his clenched and brandished fist.

“See this? See this, everyone? See what I’ve got here?” A girl appeared from nowhere, bearing his steak and some cutlery wrapped in a paper napkin. Black skirt and white blouse. Her brief attentiveness (though she would never know it) entirely defused him. She gave him, as she put down his plate, a quick, direct smile. He couldn’t see why he deserved it or why it should have come just as his thoughts had begun to boil. Did he look as if he needed soothing? That was two warm female smiles he’d had in the last two hours. Did he look as if he needed mothering?

He ate his steak and chips, drained his second pint.

Before ordering a third drink he went for a leak. It was one of those places out the back along a short exterior al eyway exposed to the elements. The strip of air was like a knife.

The band of sky above showed a glittering star or two.

Frost tomorrow, he thought, like a farmer crossing a yard.

Frost—a white dusting on the hil s, on the distant heights of Dartmoor. Ten-thirty at Marleston church. It was real y happening. Babbages had said, “Leave it with us.” Undertakers would say that. Leave it with us.

It was pisshouse air, but it was the undeniable air of Devon. It was like the air of a cowshed. He splashed steamily against stained stainless steel. When he returned to the bar, Tom was sitting there in his place—saving it for him, so it seemed. He got up and vanished as soon as his brother entered. Jack went to the bar and ordered a large scotch. No pudding. His bel y felt ful and he thought the odds of getting a second smile from that girl were against him. He wanted not to spoil the first. The beer was working.

He took his scotch slowly—stil remarkably engrossed by the Daily Express—then left. It was barely half-past eight, but what else could he do? At Jebb, in the winter, they were sometimes al in bed at nine.

The streets were empty and quiet, as if under curfew. He walked pointlessly, in the cold, around a corner or two, along a street or two, then back. But it was al right now, he judged. He wasn’t thinking about anything much. The girl’s smile. Boots, Martin’s newsagents, NatWest Bank. He walked with no sense of being shadowed or accompanied, but he felt that he himself, now, had become like some gliding ghost. He found his way to the Globe again and stepped in with a strong need not to be noticed. But the reception desk was empty. He made it to the stairs. There was a murmuring along the hal way in the hotel bar, the sound of a footbal -match commentary. He unlocked his room, switched on the lights and the clicking heater, though the radiator seemed to be functioning now. He was sure, as he entered, that Tom must have been lying on the bed, his soldier’s boots crossed over each other, his helmet beside him. But the dent in the bedspread was his own.

It was not yet nine. He could phone El ie. He could flick on his mobile phone at last and see if she’d left any message.

He could cal her. But what should he say? I’m in Okehampton, El ie. So’s Tom.

I’m in Okehampton, El ie. Why aren’t you?

He pul ed back the bed covers so that the warmth of the heater might directly reach the sheets. It would have to be a frosty night. He saw the dip of Barton Field. But he didn’t want to think of anything. He undressed. He put the medal on the bedside table. Then after getting into bed—it was perhaps only a beery whim—he took it from the table and placed it under his pil ow. Within minutes, curled beneath the covers, al the lights switched off and the heater, for good measure, left on low, he’d crashed, just as planned and wished, into unknowingness.

But at some point later—he couldn’t tel how long he’d slept—he woke up in the darkness as if some quite distinct and alarming event or perhaps some terrible but instantly forgotten dream had roused him, his pulse racing, his head throbbing, his teeth grinding like mil stones.

And clutching a medal.

26

JACK HAD EVERY REASON to remember that last Remembrance Day.

November 1994. Just him and Dad. Almost a year since Tom had gone—his name no longer being mentioned, and Jack himself no longer suffering (though he had for months) any proxy punishment for his brother’s absence. A kind of muddled realignment, as if his father might have said now of Tom, in the way he might have spoken of any reconsidered investment, any shelved bit of farm planning: Wel , we did the right thing there, Jack boy, didn’t we, not to press ahead with that. As if Tom’s departure had only revived the fortunes and workability of Jebb Farm. Which it very clearly hadn’t.

But that anniversary had been coming up—the anniversary of Tom’s departure which was also, anyway, his birthday. And before that there was Remembrance Sunday, with its tradition of dogged observance in the Luxton family. And how would they deal with that now—now that Tom had gone off to be a soldier?

Jack had left it to his father, and wouldn’t have been surprised if Michael had said (though it would have been the first such omission, so far as Jack knew, in the annals of the household): “In case you’re wondering, we’l give it a miss this year.” And even spat.

But his father had said: “I hope you’ve got your suit ready for tomorrow.” And then had said: “I got these when I was up at Leke Cross.” And had handed over one of two paper poppies with their green plastic stalks.

None of this, on the other hand, had been done with much animation, and Jack’s assessment had been that his father couldn’t lose face in front of the vil age. As Luxtons, they simply couldn’t neglect their annual duty. Michael’s later, unspoken but manifest decision not to enter the Crown for the customary drink—where, of course, he might get drawn into some discussion about his younger son’s whereabouts—seemed to go along with this. He would turn up for the ceremony, but he drew the line at anything else.

Jack didn’t have then in his vocabulary (he doesn’t real y now) the word “hypocrisy.” It would have sounded then to him like a word a vet might use—something else cows might go down with. As for getting his suit ready, he didn’t know what that could mean other than taking it off the hanger where it had hung al year long.

But there was a seriousness, even a strange conscientiousness, about Michael’s behaviour on that Remembrance Day. He seemed to present himself in the farmhouse that morning more painstakingly, more brushed and scrubbed about his face and hands, than he’d ever done before. He fixed the poppy in his lapel not cursorily, but with a degree of care, as if it might have been a real flower and he was going to a wedding. He’d duly produced the medal and in plain view, like a conjuror beginning some solemn trick, slipped it into his breast pocket so that Jack would note it. On the other hand, after he’d examined Jack’s turnout—rather rigorously, and that too was untypical

—he’d given a weird smirking expression, as if to say,

“Wel , this is a bloody joke, isn’t it?”

Outside, the air was clear and stil and sharp, the sky a blazing blue. At ten o’clock the frost had barely melted from the fields and the hil s lay powdered with white. The woods stil had their yel ows and browns. On the oak tree in Barton Field you could have counted every motionless, bronze-gold, soon-to-drop leaf.

It was a day as etched and distinct as Jack’s memories of it would be, a day of which you might have said, at its bril iant start, that it was a fine day for something, whatever that thing might be. Even a Remembrance Day ceremony would do. And when this fine day changed—when Michael, after the ceremony, made his evident decision not to hang around, not to enter the Crown and buy his older son a drink and so let his younger son’s name come up in conversation, it wasn’t the simple, if unprecedented, skulking-off it seemed.

It had been for him, Jack, to say? His father was leaving it to him? But he hadn’t said it. Not at first, when the little group round the memorial dispersed, nor after they’d stood by Vera’s grave, nor al the way back, in that sparkling sunshine. They’d halted at the top of the track. Stil he might have spoken. But he’d got out to unfasten the gate, then closed it behind his father as he’d driven through, then known it was definitely too late.

He’d pul ed back the bolt. He remembers it al now. Two ridiculous men in briefly donned suits, in a worse-for-wear Land Rover, its exhaust pipe juddering and stil steaming in the cold air; his father’s uncustomarily combed head not turning as he re-entered Luxton territory, then stopped, with a loud yank on the hand brake, and waited for his son.

He’d swung shut the gate. The throbbing Land Rover was like some stray beast he’d herded back in. The decision had been al his. Maybe. But he’d also thought, his hands on the cold wooden rail and then on the even colder, rasping spring-bolt: You bastard, for leaving it to me, you bastard for not doing the decent thing yourself.

And thought it ever since, gone over it repeatedly in his head. It was somewhere, even, in the terrible dream out of which he surfaced, years later, in a hotel room in Okehampton. The simple opening and closing of a gate.

He’d swung it back, perhaps, with extra force. And if he’d grasped that decision as he’d grasped and swung that gate—for God’s sake, if he’d just bought his father a bloody pint—how different the consequences might have been.

THAT SAME NIGHT—this is what Jack told those he had to tel , and he had to tel it several times and never without great difficulty—Michael left his bedroom and the Luxton farmhouse at some early hour of the morning, possibly around three o’clock. It was another cold, stil , frosty night, the sort of night on which no one leaves a house or even the warmth of their bed without a very good reason.

There’s a version of it al that Jack tel s only himself, an over-and-over revisited version that al ows more room for detail and for speculation, but it’s essential y the same version that he gave others and that for many years he’s, thankful y, had no reason to repeat. Though one of the reasons why he sits now at the window of Lookout Cottage with a loaded gun on the bed behind him is the suddenly renewed and imminent possibility (which he hopes absolutely to avoid) of having to repeat it.

Michael had not been drinking, though drinking is not an uncommon accompaniment to events of this kind, which were themselves, around that time, becoming not so uncommon on smal and hard-pressed dairy farms in the region. Not only were the Luxtons not great drinkers, but Michael had not even had a pint or two that lunchtime, which was one of the rare occasions when it might have been expected of him.

Nor has Jack, at his window now, been drinking. He is entirely sober. It’s not a good thing to be drunk when handling a gun, in any circumstance.

Michael left the farmhouse on a freezing November night, long before dawn, and Jack would speculate to himself (though others would speculate too) why his father did everything that he did, not just in the cold but in the dark. It was not like when Tom slipped out that night, needing to do so by stealth. Though perhaps it was. Tom had needed only to find the track and climb up it. Dad’s path was less marked. But Dad knew every inch of the farm and every bit of that field—Barton Field—backwards. He knew it better than Tom. He knew it blindfolded.

As Jack knew it too, and stil knows it. He is perfectly able, stil , without having been there for over ten years, and in the darkness, as it were, of his head, to retrace his father’s movements that night as if they were his own. And right now he has a peculiar and unavoidable interest in doing so.

In any case, it was a clear night. There was starlight and there was a good chunk of moon, almost a ful one, Jack had noted, which, by the time he noted it, had come up over the far hil s. The question was never how, but why. Why in t h e cold—on such a night, and in those coldest hours before dawn? Though perhaps the answer to that was simple. It was dark and cold anyway. Michael Luxton was dark and cold inside. It was November. Winter, with the farm in ruins, stretched before them. Jack can see now the logic. Had it been springtime, with the first touch of warmth in the air, it’s conceivable that Michael wouldn’t have done what he did. But perhaps the truth is that if you’re ready, such considerations are irrelevant. You don’t consult, or much mind, the weather.

It’s November now, although far from frosty. A strong, wet, gusting south-westerly.

Perhaps the crucial thing was that it was the night after Remembrance Sunday.

JACK, usual y a sound sleeper, would puzzle over what it was that woke him. The shot, of course. But then if the shot had woken him, he later thought, he wouldn’t have heard it, he would have wondered, stil , what it was that woke him. In Jack’s recounting of things—understandably confused—

there was always a particular confusion about this point. He had heard the shot, yet the shot had woken him—as if in fact he was already awake to hear it, had known somehow beforehand that some dreadful thing was about to happen.

He was sure he hadn’t heard his father leave—though his father must have made some noise and would have put on a light, downstairs at least, when he got the gun from the cabinet. There was a distinctive squeak to that cabinet door.

Then again, with the windows shut, the shot wouldn’t have been so loud, not loud enough, necessarily, to wake a heavy sleeper. It would have carried in the frosty air, it’s true, and been accentuated by the silence of the night, and it would have come from just a little nearer than the shot that had signal ed Luke’s death. But Jack had heard that from outside, in the yard, and he’d been expecting it.

Jack has always asserted that he heard the shot. It either woke him or, by some mysterious triggering inside him, he was awake to hear it. But he heard it. And he knew at once both where it had come from and what it meant. It might as wel have been, as Jack has sometimes put it, in language unusual y expressive for him, the loudest shot in the world.

And he has certainly thought what it might have been like if he hadn’t heard it, if he’d slept through it. And has certainly blamed himself, of course, again and again (a point he also asserted to others that morning), that he was not awake even earlier. If he hadn’t woken at al , he would have made the discovery only gradual y. His dad might have been like a block of ice. Though could that have made it any worse?

But Jack has never wondered—at least when sharing his recol ection of events—why his father chose the exact spot and position that he did. Among al the possible spots. Or why he, Jack, once awake, knew exactly where to go. He could explain this very easily by saying—though you’d have to be a Luxton to understand, you’d have to have spent your life on that farm—that if he’d ever been pushed to such a thing himself (and here, in some of Jack’s earliest statements, his listeners, who’d included policemen and coroner’s officers, had felt compel ed to avert their eyes while they acknowledged a certain force of feeling) he’d probably have chosen exactly the same spot.

That oak, Jack might have added, was reckoned to be over five hundred years old. It had been there before the farmhouse.

MICHAEL HAD PUT ON the same clothes that he might have put on, a little later that morning, to do the tasks that had to be done about the farm: a check shirt, a thick grey jumper, corduroy trousers, long thick socks to go in Wel ington boots—al of this in addition to the long-john underwear which in winter he normal y slept in anyway. The suit he’d briefly worn only hours before (this was later noted) was back in the depths of the wardrobe. Then he’d put on his cap and scarf and his donkey jacket with the torn quilt lining, and the olive-green wool mittens that stopped short at the knuckles. So you might have said that he’d certainly felt the cold, given that he’d dressed so thoroughly for it. But al this was the force of habit. These clothes were like his winter hide, which he merely slipped off overnight. And, of course, he did have a task to complete. He even needed to make sure his fingers wouldn’t go numb and useless on him.

He took the gun from the cabinet and took two number-six cartridges and either loaded them straight away, with the kitchen light on to help him, or loaded them at the last minute, in the dark and the cold. At either point it would have been an action of some finality.

The question would arise, which Jack, since he was asleep himself, could never answer, as to how much, if at al , Michael had slept that night: how, in short, he’d arrived at his course of action and its particular timing. He could hardly have set his alarm clock. Jack discovered no note, though he didn’t tel the investigating policemen that he didn’t find this surprising, and when asked by them if he’d noticed anything strange in his father’s behaviour on the preceding day, he’d said only that they’d gone together to attend the short eleven-o’clock remembrance service beside the memorial in Marleston, as they did every year, because of the Luxtons who were on it. One of the two policemen, the local constable, Bob Ireton, would have been able to corroborate this directly, as he’d attended the ceremony himself, in his uniform, in a sort of semi-official capacity. It wasn’t, therefore, a typical Sunday morning—

they didn’t put on suits every Sunday morning—but there was nothing strange about it, as PC Ireton would have whol y understood. It would have been strange if they hadn’t gone. The only things that were strange about it, Jack had affirmed, were that Tom wasn’t there (though the whole vil age knew why this was) and that they hadn’t gone for the usual drink in the Crown afterwards.

And Jack had left it at that.

There were two other peculiarities about that (already highly peculiar) night that he might have remarked on, setting aside the peculiarity of where the act occurred—

which Jack, in his fashion, suggested wasn’t peculiar at al .

One was that when he’d got up that night, suddenly galvanised into wakefulness and action, having somehow heard the shot and having somehow known what it meant, he’d natural y looked, even before hastily dressing and before (torch in hand) he left the farmhouse, into his father’s bedroom—into what had always been known as the Big Bedroom. And had noticed that the bedclothes, recently pul ed back, had an extra blanket—a tartan one—spread over them. There was nothing special about an extra blanket on a cold night, so in that respect it was unworthy of mention. Only Jack knew that he’d never seen that blanket spread over his father’s bed before. Only Jack knew its history.

And Jack never mentioned either—was it relevant?—that there was a dog buried a little further down that field.

The second peculiarity—which Jack did point out, though the police might soon have discovered it for themselves—

was that when Michael had dressed that night, he’d slipped a medal into the breast pocket of his frayed-at-the-col ar check shirt. It was the same medal, of course, that Jack knew had been earlier that day in the pocket of his suit.

Why, later, the medal was in the pocket of his shirt was anyone’s guess, but it would have meant—though Jack didn’t go into this in his statement—that he must have been conscious of it during the intervening hours, and perhaps never returned it to its silk-lined box. He might have put it, for example, on his bedside table when he went to bed and before he slept, if he did sleep, that night. Perhaps—though this was a thought that would not crystal ise in Jack’s mind til many years later—he might even have clutched it in his hand.

These were considerations that Jack felt the police and, later, the coroner need not be interested in. Any more than they need be interested in the fact that Vera had died (and hers wasn’t a quick death) in that same big bed with a tartan blanket now lying on it. Or that he himself had been born and, in al probability, conceived in it.

But the fact was that Michael had died wearing, so to speak, the DCM.

When the police had asked Jack how he’d discovered this so soon—after al , his father had been wearing two layers of thick clothing over his shirt, and anyway Jack was having to confront much else—Jack had said that he’d slipped his hand inside his father’s jacket to feel if his heart was stil beating. The policemen had looked at Jack. They might have said, if they’d had no regard for his feelings, something like: “He’d just shot his brains out.” Jack had nonetheless insisted, with a certain dazed defiance, that he’d wanted to feel his father’s heart, he’d wanted to put his hand over it. That had been his reaction. He didn’t say that he’d wanted to feel not so much a beating heart—which would have been highly unlikely—but just if there was any last living warmth left on that cold night, beneath the old grey jumper, in his father’s body.

But he said that he’d felt something hard there. Those were his actual words: he’d felt “something hard there.” When Jack said these things the two policemen—Ireton and a Detective Sergeant Hunt—had looked away. Jack was clearly in a state of great distress and shock. God knows what state he would have been in when he actual y came upon the body. Bob Ireton knew Jack Luxton to be a pretty impervious, slow-tempered sort. He was looking now, for Jack, not a little wild-eyed. Bob had been at the same primary and secondary schools as Jack. He’d known, from its beginning, about Jack and El ie Merrick—

but then so did the whole vil age. Save for El ie and his recently absconded brother (and Tom, as Bob would later observe, was not to reappear for the funeral), Jack was pretty much alone now in the world.

Bob Ireton was basical y anxious—he couldn’t speak for his plainclothes superior—to get this whole dreadful mess cleared up as quickly as possible and spare its solitary survivor any further needless torture. Poor man. Poor men.

Both. Bob’s view of the matter—again, he couldn’t speak for his col eague—was as straightforward as it was considerate. Michael Luxton had kil ed himself with a shotgun. His son had discovered the fact and duly reported it to the authorities. In a little while from now, though there’d be a delay for an inquest, poor Jack would have to stand again in that suit he rarely wore, but had worn, as it happened, only the day before the death, beside his father’s grave.

THIS WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME, in fact, that Constable Ireton had been required to attend the scene after the suicide of a farmer. Fol owing the cattle disease, there had been this gradual, much smal er yet even more dismaying epidemic.

One or two hanged themselves from a beam in a barn (sometimes watched by munching cattle), others chose a shotgun. A shotgun was marginal y more upsetting. Bob frankly didn’t attach much weight to the odd circumstantial details that sometimes went with a suicide, the strange things that might precede it, the strange things that might (it was not a good word) trigger it. It was a pretty extreme bit of behaviour anyway. Who could say what you (but that was not a good line of thinking and anyway not professional) might do?

But, sadly, he was not unused to the thing itself, no longer even surprised by it. The underlying causes were fairly obvious—look around. He was both glad and a little guilty to be a policeman, drawing his steady policeman’s pay, while farmers al around him were going under. He should real y have been like some odd man out within the community—though a policeman, a sort of outlaw—a stay-at-home version of Tom Luxton joining the army. Yet now his services were peculiarly cal ed upon. He’d known that the Luxton farm, especial y after Tom had withdrawn his labour, was near the limit. None of it was surprising, and the best thing was to clear it up as tidily as possible.

Had he been told when he became a policeman that he’d one day be officiating over al the wretched consequences of a so-cal ed mad-cow disease, he’d have said that such an idea was itself mad. He hadn’t supposed—though he hadn’t sought a quiet life and there was such a thing as rural crime—that he’d become one day a sort of superintendent of misery. He’d never be (nor would DS

Hunt, he reckoned) any other sort of superintendent.

And al this was years before the foot-and-mouth (by which time he was, at least, a sergeant). More dead cattle

—great crackling heaps of them. And a few more deaths among the “farming fraternity.” Was it Jack Luxton who’d once passed on to him that phrase?

Poor men. Poor beasts. Both.

MICHAEL CROSSED THE YARD and, skirting the Smal Barn where the pick-up and the Land Rover and the spreader were housed, entered Barton Field by the top gate. Barton Field, only six acres and a roughly shaped strip of land, buckling and widening as it descended, was the nearest field to the farmhouse, its upper, narrow end meeting the shelf in the hil side where the farm buildings stood. Its chal enging contours made it the least manageable field at Jebb, but it was the “home” field of the farm and formed its immediate prospect. At the top, at its steepest, it bulged prominently, turning, further down, into a gentler scoop, so that its flat lower end was hidden from even the upper windows of the farmhouse. But this only enhanced the view.

From the house you looked, over the fal of the land, to the woods in the val ey and to the hil s beyond, but principal y took in—perfectly placed between foreground and background—the broad top third or so of the big single oak that stood near the middle of the field where its slope level ed off. The oak’s massive trunk could not be seen, nor the immense, spreading roots which had risen above the surrounding soil. But between these roots, where the grass had given up, were smal hol ows of that reddish earth that Jack would notice on the last stages of a strange, westbound journey. The roots themselves were thick and ridged enough to form little ledges or seats, for a sheep or a man.

The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture—its only value to provide shade for the livestock—but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as wel as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor

—especial y if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer’s day—could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic.

None of these thoughts had particularly occurred to Michael or to Jack (or, when he was there, to Tom). They were so used to the tree straddling their view that they could, for most of the time, not real y notice it. Nonetheless, it was straight to this tree that Michael walked on an icy November night, carrying a gun. Or as straight as the steep slope al owed.

Exact evidence of his path was left by the tracks in the frost that Jack, only a little later, picked up by the light of his torch. At one spot it was clear that his father had slipped and slid for a yard or more on his arse. It was very strange for Jack to think of this minor mishap at such a moment—of his father perhaps swearing under his breath at it and suffering its jolting indignity. As it was strange to think that this slip might not have been a simple slip at al , given that his father was carrying at the time a possibly already loaded and closed gun. There might have been a much nastier accident.

Had the frost not begun to melt—unlike the previous morning—even before daybreak, it would have left a very clear record of the activity in Barton Field that night: Michael’s tracks, with that slip, going in one direction, and Jack’s going, separately, in both directions (and, despite the great agitation he was in, without a single slip). But al of them converging on the oak tree.

In his statements Jack had voluntarily made the point that when he’d spotted his father’s tracks he’d both fol owed and avoided them, even careful y skirting round the broad mark where the slip had occurred. He had instinctively not walked through them, not out of forensic considerations, but because, as he failed real y to convey clearly but as his listeners may have grasped, they were the last footsteps his father had taken.

Of course, this meant that the descending pair of tracks might have given the appearance that the two men had walked down together. There was certainly only one set of ascending tracks. But al this was neither here nor there, since by dawn and even by the time Jack made his phone cal —he’d delayed the cal because of the state he was in, but also because he knew not much could practicably be done while it was stil dark—a change in the weather occurred. A breeze got up, bringing in cloud cover, and the air warmed appreciably.

By the time the two policemen arrived and descended the field with Jack—who was clearly dreading what he would have to see in daylight—the sharp night had turned into a grey, gusty morning. The top branches of the oak tree made a continual whirring above them, and dislodged leaves spun down. The frost had gone. There was even a touch of drizzle. So the policemen perhaps wondered why Jack had needed to speak about the tracks he’d seen by torchlight that were no longer there—unless, of course, it was simply because he couldn’t help reliving, and reliving again, every detail. Both officers were not unused to this. It was strange how the silent ones could suddenly become the gushers, while the regular gabblers could lose their voices.

But what both officers had mostly thought was: What must it have been like, to shine a torch on that?

The frost was there, anyway, when Jack first walked down, and would have sufficiently reflected the moonlight to make the torch barely necessary. The dark mass of the oak tree, against the ghostly silver of the field and the woods beyond, would have been visible of itself, Jack knew, to his father, who’d carried no torch. Perhaps his father had calculated even this, had waited for the moon to rise and light him. He would have been able to take a final look around. He would have been able, when it came to things closer to hand, to make out the roots under the tree and the gun he was holding: its dul metal glint and his own fingers on it.

Michael sat down at the foot of the oak. There was a sort of bowl in one of the thickest roots, close up to the trunk, which was ideal for this. He took his donkey jacket off first, despite the cold, the better perhaps to manipulate the gun, but also to spread under him before he sat. This precaution was as strange as it was natural: he’d wanted to spare his arse, already damp maybe, from any chil y hardness. It was like that extra blanket on the bed, though Jack didn’t say this. Nor did Jack express to anyone his private view that his father would have removed his jacket so as to be better able to feel, through his remaining layers, the wrinkled bark and supporting, towering, centuries-old solidity of the tree against his back.

Michael had removed his cap as wel , as if out of respect for something. He would have pressed the back of his head, too, against the trunk and its slight inward slope. This might have been mechanical y necessary, but Jack had no doubt either, though he didn’t say it (wasn’t it plain—why had Michael gone to this spot at al ?), that this was out of the same dominant motive. His father had simply wanted to press his head, his skul and his back hard against that oak tree and feel it pushing back. Spine against spine.

Jack knew—he knew it from climbing up the track in winter to get the school bus—that when you shine a torch at night it lights your way but makes the surrounding darkness several times darker. When he arrived beneath the tree he partly wished he hadn’t brought a torch. It made the scene look like something horribly staged just to be lit up and it made everything else, despite the moonlight, pitch-black.

Though Jack was technical y prepared for what he would find, this had not made the discovery any less shocking, and how to describe what he’d felt at this moment was beyond him. Though he’d walked downhil —perhaps it was more of a scramble—he was panting for breath and his heart was banging inside him. Perhaps it was because of this that he’d reached out to feel for his father’s heart, as if while one heart was beating so violently another could surely not be lifeless. To touch his father’s breast certainly made more sense, in any case, than to touch any part of what was left of his head.

Thus he’d felt the smal , hard object in his father’s shirt pocket and known exactly what it was. He didn’t dare remove it. Why should he have removed it? He was overcome by conflicting instincts, to touch and not to touch.

In its recoil, the gun had jumped from between his father’s lips and from his fingers so that its double barrel lay now aimed at his waist. Even before stooping to feel his father’s chest, Jack had automatical y removed the gun, as if Michael was stil in danger.

This was al wrong perhaps, he should have touched nothing, but it was what he did. He hadn’t known if his father had loaded—or used—both barrels or if there was stil a cartridge in place. He didn’t know if he should have broken open the gun to check. Or indeed if he should have carried the gun back with him to the safety (though that was a strange idea) of the farmhouse. Normal procedure had been suspended. You didn’t ordinarily leave a gun, especial y one that might stil be loaded, in the middle of a field, even if it was the smal hours of the night. You didn’t normal y leave your father in a similar position. In any case, he moved the gun from where it had fal en and placed it to one side in a cleft between the roots. Then, after feeling his father’s inert and medal ed chest, he just stood—he couldn’t have said for how long—over the body.

He couldn’t have described his feelings at this time, but anger must have been part of them—a very large part of them—since, though this had no place at al in his subsequent relation of events, what he began to say, aloud and more than once in the middle of a dark field to his dead father, was: “You bastard. You bastard.” Even as he shone a torch on his father’s shattered features: “You bastard.” He would never remember how many times he said it, he wasn’t counting, but he couldn’t stop saying it. “You bastard.

You bastard.”

It was the wrong word, perhaps, since it’s not a word you use of your father or of any father, it’s a word that works in the other direction, but he kept saying it, and the more he said it, the more it seemed not just an angry word but a useful, even encouraging word in the circumstances—the sort of word you might use to someone who wasn’t dead but just in a precarious situation, to help them pul through it.

“You bastard.” It kept coming to his mouth like a chant or some regular convulsion, like the only word he might ever say again.

He was saying it when, after standing for however long it was, he actual y sat down beside his father, his own back against the tree—it was easily broad enough—and wondered if he shouldn’t stay there with him, freezing as it was, at least until dawn, or if he should take the donkey jacket from under him and wrap it round him, or—since that would have its problems—if he shouldn’t take off his own jacket and wrap it round him. “You bastard. You bastard.” He was saying it when he wondered whether to pick up the gun or leave it where it was. He was saying it, at intervals, when after deciding to leave the gun—it seemed to belong there—he made the climb back up the steepening field to the farmhouse, his breath coming like the strokes of a saw through his chest: “You bastard.” He was saying it as the farmhouse and the lights he’d left on rose monstrously over the hump of the field above him, and as he passed by the Smal Barn into the yard. By now it had become like some hoarsely uttered password. “You bastard.”

He continued to say it during the period between regaining the farmhouse and making the cal he knew he would have to make, when he had no clear sense of the passage of time and when he continual y wavered between the thought of making the cal , which would make things final and definite, and the thought that he should go back down to the oak tree, because what had happened perhaps might not real y have happened at al . Or because he should just be there with his father. Up here, in the farmhouse, he’d already deserted him. “You bastard.” He said it as he wondered whether he should wash off the muck that had got on his hands or whether he should leave it there for al of time to erase or ingrain. “You bastard.” And he’d got so rhythmical y used to saying it, that when he final y made the cal and was able to get out that other word, “Police,” it’s not inconceivable that he might have said, “You bastard,” too, into the phone.

He didn’t mention his repeated utterance of this phrase to Bob Ireton and his senior companion (or to anyone else), nor did he mention that during the preceding day and evening, fol owing the Remembrance Day gathering, he had also uttered the phrase, if not aloud, but inside himself or perhaps under his breath. But the fact that he’d vented it, one way or the other, so much beforehand somehow enabled Jack to regain a degree of composure—it was his strange way, even, of haranguing himself—and to give the detailed and relatively focussed account of events that he gave. Al of which, together with the actual evidence lying there in Barton Field, added up to the overwhelming conclusion, to be endorsed by the inquest, that Michael Luxton had taken his own life.

Neither policeman felt it was his place to comment on the strangenesses, so far as they knew them, of Jack’s behaviour—who wouldn’t behave strangely?—or on his technical y inappropriate actions. He shouldn’t have touched the body or even have moved the gun. But this was his own father lying there. Jack was hardly some meddling third party. The poor man had done what he did and could

—when, quite possibly, he might have slept through the whole incident. And he was plainly mortified by the fact that, had he been awake just a little earlier, he might have prevented al of it from happening.

One didn’t have to search far for a motive. Michael Luxton was like others. The peculiar circumstances of Remembrance Day seemed tragical y to have precipitated something. Michael had either gone to bed with the not quite complete intention of acting, or he’d woken in the dead of night to form that soon-executed intention.

Detective Sergeant Hunt gave permission for the body to be moved by the ambulance men. It was a laborious and upsetting job transporting it up the steep field. The gun and Michael’s donkey jacket and cap were taken separately as evidence, to be returned later. Likewise everything in Michael’s pockets, including the medal.

Thus it would have been possible for the two policemen, out of curiosity as much as anything, to inspect the medal and see what was written on its reverse. It had been one of Michael’s infrequent, sombre-faced, hard-to-gauge jokes that the medal had been a good one to give a farmer’s boy, since what it said on the back was “For Distinguished Conduct in the Field.”

DS Hunt had thought it right, for safety reasons, to examine the gun straight away. It was unlikely that there was a cartridge stil in there (why should Michael have done things by halves?) and it was confirmed that both barrels had been recently (and it must have been simultaneously) discharged and that the gun was now unloaded. Sergeant Hunt also asked Bob, after the ambulance had departed, if

—while he himself remained with Jack at the farmhouse—

he couldn’t find a bucket or two of water and (it would be a grim chore, he knew) carry them down to the oak and give things a slooshing down. It would be a decency. This was technical y interfering with evidence too, but DS Hunt felt he had seen and noted careful y al the evidence necessary, and it would be a sort of kindness. PC Ireton felt likewise.

It was unfortunate in one sense, but fortunate in another, that Jack couldn’t help overhearing this, and so offered to drive them al down in the pick-up with a jerry can of water, buckets and even a stiff-bristled yard brush. He appeared in need of things to do, no matter how gruesome. Bob had said that no, that wouldn’t be necessary, but it might help if he could borrow the pick-up and be told where the jerry can was.

Jack was also manifestly and increasingly worried about his livestock and about several regular morning tasks not attended to. He seemed, in fact, to have a gathering sense that the farm was about to disintegrate around him—which had only been Michael’s apparently no longer tolerable situation. But al this was duly taken care of. Both Constable Ireton and DS Hunt had the forethought to appreciate that a farm, even in extraordinary circumstances, cannot simply shut down. So there had been some necessary, discreet communications and a prevailing upon a horrified but quickly ral ying community spirit. It wouldn’t have been long anyway before word spread around.

It certainly wasn’t long before a battered Land Rover containing Jimmy and El ie Merrick, dressed as for a hard-working day on their own farm, pul ed up in the Jebb yard.

This was the first time Jack had seen such a thing. But then he’d seen other things today he’d never seen before.

Jimmy and El ie had come the short way—by the route with which Jack was very familiar—across the fields, through the boundary gate and over Ridge Field, which adjoined Barton Field. The direct route would then have been along the top of Ridge Field, to enter the Jebb yard close to the Big Barn, but Jimmy hadn’t hesitated to drive along the bottom of Ridge Field and then, despite slipping wheels, slowly up by the low hedge alongside Barton Field, so getting a good view down across the dip to the oak tree.

The body was stil there, though about to be moved, and mostly and perhaps merciful y hidden behind the tree trunk.

Jimmy and El ie could only real y make out two very stil Wel ington boots.

When the Land Rover arrived in the yard it was impossible, particularly for the two policemen, to read precisely the expression on old Merrick’s face. It had a gnome-like quality that could have meant anything—triumph or shock or perhaps a recent quick but significant intake of alcohol. In any case, he’d stuck his head out of the window and explained to DS Hunt (they knew Bob Ireton) that they were neighbours, they were the Merricks, who were long and good old neighbours of the Luxtons, and they were here to help.

El ie, in contrast, had been silent and had looked, for a while, rather white. But she soon began to make herself useful. In fact she made her busy presence felt around Jebb Farm that day as if she herself might have owned it. It even looked at one point as though she might have been preparing to stay the night, which would have been another first. Jimmy might actual y have conceded it. But just when it had begun to seem a distinct possibility, Mrs. Warburton, with cardboard boxes of provisions she thought appropriate, drove over from Leke Hil Cross. She was older now, but she had her memories of Jebb Farmhouse and of when she’d been of vital assistance before. And, like some woman picking over a battlefield, she herself voiced the question that, above that stil -insistent chorus of “You bastard,” was also tol ing through Jack’s head.

“My God, what would your poor mother have thought?” 27

JACK PULLED BACK THE CURTAINS—warily, as if expecting horrors—on the town of Okehampton. Sleep hadn’t entirely deserted him, but he’d passed a dreadful, see-sawing night, uncertain of what was truth or dream. Surely, he’d fleetingly convinced himself, it was only a dream that he was lying here, in a hotel room in Okehampton, on this journey that was al some evil product of his mind. Yet he could remember (the two nights had seemed to merge together) islands of similar, wishful delirium during the terrible night he’d passed after his father’s death. Surely it could not be so. Surely it was stil only the night before and his father was stil asleep, across the landing in the Big Bedroom (whether under a tartan blanket or not), and he, Jack, had never heard the shot that had sent him along that nightmare al eyway of events that had never occurred.

The clear blue sky over the rooftops mocked him with its sharp reality. It would have to be a day like that day, that Remembrance Day. Some of the roofs were grey with frost, others, where the sun had already struck, were a mottling of sparkling white and glossy black. Okehampton, like any country town at daybreak, was a huddle of re-emerging familiarities, and this was the sort of crisp, bright morning that could only make its inhabitants more confident of their world. But Jack felt like a spy behind enemy lines.

So it was true then, it was al true. Today he had to do some things (having done some things yesterday). He had to attend a funeral—in less than three hours. Then he had to drive a hundred miles to an off-shore island where (though the idea now seemed strange to him) he had his home.

That was al he had to do.

Today he had to be in a place he hadn’t been in for over ten years—had believed he might never need to be in again. The last funeral he’d attended there had been his father’s, when Tom, because of his inflexible military duties (or so it was general y understood), had been absent. Now, and for the same reason, Tom would most certainly be present. What was left of him would be present. But once again it would be Jack who would be the only living member of the Luxton family visible, the eyes of the whole vil age on him, now as then—on him and boring into him, into what might be inside his head.

Though “head,” back then, had not been such a good word to cal to mind. And that wasn’t, quite, the last funeral he’d attended in Marleston. Since not long afterwards—

how could he forget?—he’d stood by the grave of Jimmy Merrick, offering his arm (and shoulder to weep on should it be necessary) to El ie.

And where was El ie Merrick, in her supportive role, today?

WHEN JACK HAD STOOD by his father’s grave, he’d already had the thought (partly anticipated for him by Sal y Warburton) that at least his mother had never had to know how her husband had died. Though he’d also had the thought that, now the two of them were in a manner of speaking reunited again, she might get the whole story—

underground, as it were—direct from the man himself.

And now it was true, with the same possible proviso, that neither Michael nor Vera would have to know how their younger son died. Vera had never even had to know that Tom had left the farm. Nor that Jack—even Jack—had left it too.

When Jack needed to arrange Michael’s funeral he’d had to discuss with Malcolm Brookes, the rector (who would be officiating today), the delicate question—or the notion that had somehow got into Jack’s head—of whether, given the nature of his father’s death, his funeral would actual y be al owed. In Church ground. Brookes had expressed his opinion of Jack’s quaint idea in language surprisingly graphic for a clergyman (“This isn’t the damn Middle Ages,” Brookes had said), but had then added with a sort of patient smile, “Do you think, for any reason, I’m going to keep those two apart?”

So Brookes believed it, then? In the meeting—the re-meeting—of souls. But then, after al , Brookes would.

Death, Jack thought, looking out at bril iant, exposing sunshine in Okehampton, was in many ways a great place of shelter. It was life and al its knowledge that was insupportable.

He thinks the same, looking from his rain-blurred window, now.

IT WAS A LITTLE PAST SEVEN-THIRTY . A faint smel of frying bacon reached him even as he stood surveying the street.

Breakfast was being cooked downstairs. And, even in his present state of mind, the smel caused a benign reaction in his stomach. Jack had sometimes been heard to observe—down among the caravans on those dewy August mornings when pans would be general y sizzling—that the smel of frying bacon was the best smel in the world. None of his listeners had ever disagreed. Instead of “best,” he might have said (consulting his memory) “most comforting” or “most consoling.” Sal y Warburton, whose boxfuls of emergency items, that awful morning, had included a fair amount of prime bacon, had been surprised, if also relieved, to see Jack wolf down several rashers. Though it was almost noon by then and the poor man had been up, apparently, since long before dawn.

If they’d al been pig farmers, Sal y had thought, if this had just been pig country, none of this would have happened.

But the smel now entering Jack’s nostrils heartened him also by simply suggesting that he might not, after al , be the only guest in the hotel. He would not be alone, perhaps, and so under unrelieved scrutiny by the proprietor or her deputies when he appeared for breakfast. Though not being alone, being under the eyes of other guests, might have its problems too. Before the funeral, this would be the only point at which he’d have to run the risk of other people’s curiosity. Or suspicion.

On the pavement opposite, two early-rising inhabitants of Okehampton had stopped to exchange energetic greetings, as if they might not have met for years. Their reddened, beaming faces seemed to Jack to go with the thought of bacon.

Within half an hour, shaved and wearing a clean white shirt and the dark trousers of his suit, he’d made his way, as advised the night before, to the “back bar.” He could as easily have fol owed his nose.

It was a sunken, low-ceilinged place, which at other times might have been poorly lit, but was now pierced by bands of blinding light from the low sun shining through a gap in the buildings across the street. The shafts caught the polished surface of the bar, where the pump handles had been draped with tea-towels, and the glinting cutlery on several laid-up tables. There was obviously a kitchen close by, since the shafts were ful , along with dancing motes, of bluish swirls.

Two of the tables, half in and half out of sunshine, were occupied by solitary men intently chomping food and studying newspapers. Jack was relieved to find that they required nothing more from him than a nod and a muttered,

“Morning,” and that, like him, they wore smart, open-necked shirts. They might have been three of a kind. He was in a hotel which in November catered, if it catered for anyone, for travel ing reps with limited expense accounts. It seemed suddenly to Jack an innocent and honourable league to belong to, and he began to invent for himself—in case he should come to be questioned—an alias as a salesman.

What might it be? Agricultural machinery? No, caravans, of course. Al those sites that in winter might be considering replacements. He was travel ing—in caravans.

He was also relieved to see that the proprietor seemed to be in sole charge of the kitchen and the serving of breakfast. Hers was at least a familiar face and, so long as she was busy, he felt, an unthreatening one.

He ordered the Devonshire Breakfast. It was no different in its basic components from a breakfast you might have had in any county, but it was, when it came, very good. The bacon in particular was very good. It was so good that for a few minutes, despite what lay before—and behind—him and despite the miserable night he’d passed, Jack’s whole being relaxed into that of a man solely given over to the consuming of breakfast. It real y was extremely good. He felt amazingly restored.

But no sooner had he finished eating than he’d looked up and seen, in the smal porthole window of the swing door leading to the kitchen, not the face of the proprietor, but the face of Tom, peering in and peering directly at him. Since it was only his face, Jack couldn’t tel if he was in his combat gear again (or if, for example, he was wearing an apron), but he was looking in as a mindful chef might briefly look in to see if the customers—and one particular customer—

were happy.

It was Tom who’d made this breakfast, Tom who’d cooked his bacon.

Tom’s face had disappeared. Then Jack, who’d scrupulously avoided the morning papers lying on the bar and had picked up instead an unhelpful brochure—“Things to Do in North Devon”—had glanced towards the front page obscuring one of his fel ow breakfasters and seen the caption “Heroes Return” (it wasn’t the top story, but it was there in the corner) and had also seen the photo. He couldn’t tel which of the coffins it was. Nonetheless, he was sure.

So everything that had happened yesterday was real y and undeniably true. It was publicly the case. Though for that man sitting there at his breakfast, concealed by his newspaper, and perhaps for thousands of others doing the same, it was not even drawing his eye.

LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER Jack drove northwards from Okehampton towards Marleston, the long shadow of the Cherokee leaping out ahead of him. His last act before leaving his hotel room had been to slip the medal into the breast pocket of his suit (his fresh white shirt had no pocket). He was quite sure by the time he settled his bil that the woman real y knew who he was, but wasn’t saying.

Or, at least, that when she looked later at her paper (hadn’t she looked already?) it would simply jump out at her: Luxton, I thought it rang a bel .

The traffic was light and the road shone. He’d delayed his departure so that he could pace this short final leg comfortably, without having to stop or cruise around to kil time. He fil ed up with petrol just outside town.

During these few miles Tom didn’t appear at his side again. Jack took this to mean that Tom was now entirely sure that he, Jack, would complete the journey, would keep his appointment. Nonetheless, during this last stage Jack felt constrained to say aloud a number of times, softly but purposeful y, “I’m coming, Tom. I’m nearly there.” He would hardly have needed to do this if he’d felt that Tom might in any sense have been his passenger.

Ten-fifteen, he’d reckoned. Ten-fifteen or ten-thirty. He couldn’t, of course, be late, but, just as with yesterday’s ceremony, he didn’t want to be so early as to be trapped by people. He didn’t know how many there would be. A sprinkle, or—given that it was clearly national news—a multitude? He should be just sufficiently early as was decent and as would al ow him to make his presence known and to get his practical bearings. Perhaps, he vaguely anticipated, he could then ask to spend a few moments somewhere safely alone.

He was aware that being who he uniquely was might grant him excuses for behaviour that might otherwise seem clumsy, inadequate, even rude. He was relying on playing this card. He’d played it, strongly, yesterday. His principal plan—he didn’t disguise it from himself—was to get away with as little as possible: time, involvement, talk. Pain. He would do the essential thing, he wasn’t shirking that, but he wasn’t up for any extras.

The arrangements he’d made—al by phone—had been minimal. He’d spoken to Babbages. He’d spoken to Brookes. And he’d spoken, of course, to Major Richards.

No flag, please, the battalion could keep it. A non-military funeral, thank you. He’d been surprised at his own firmness.

He’d not made a point of notifying people, let alone inviting them. He’d left that as a matter between Brookes and his parishioners. He knew that he was supposed to organise and host some gathering afterwards. But where could that be? There was only one appropriate place: Jebb Farmhouse. Impossible. The Crown? No. In any case, he knew he couldn’t go through with it. Be the living centrepiece. Make a bloody speech (having not made one yesterday). Whatever poor form it might be, he couldn’t do it. He would be present, that was the main thing.

A simple word had come, theoretical y, to his aid:

“private.” Today’s thing was private, if yesterday’s hadn’t been. Arguably, the whole thing was immeasurably private, and Major Richards had even framed for him that statement

—for public release—that “Corporal Luxton’s family” (though there was only one) “hoped that their need for privacy and peace in this time of great sorrow would be respected.”

But Jack could equal y see that private was a thin, even treacherous word. A war memorial, for example, was not a private thing. It was a public monument, the names on it were for al to read. And how did a common soldier, serving his country in its public causes, ever get to be cal ed a private? Ful er, Pickering. (Where were they now—and those clusters that went with them?) In any case, life in a vil age was never private, Jack knew that. Everyone eyed everyone else. This was one respect in which, today, he could envy the inconspicuous existence of those who lived in cities.

Yesterday’s event should have trained him up, perhaps, for exposure. This little affair in a country churchyard ought to be a doddle in comparison. But Jack knew—seeing now the line of frost-speckled hil s that he hadn’t seen for over ten years—that it wasn’t so.

Brookes and Babbages had been good to deal with.

He’d been both pleased and troubled that it was stil Brookes, since the rector’s voice, even on the phone, took him straight back to the burial of his father (and of Jimmy).

Brookes had said, “I don’t know what to say, Jack. The last time we spoke was when … And now this.” It was reassuring somehow to know that a man of the Church didn’t know what to say. But Jack didn’t like that linkage across twelve years—first that, now this—as if the two things were actual y connected and the later one would unearth the other. Perhaps Brookes, who’d been so solid that first time, might be stretched past his limits now. A suicide—now this?

Brookes had asked Jack, among other things, if at the service he might want to say a few words of his own. Jack had said no, he couldn’t face it, which was only honest, and Brookes hadn’t pressed the point and had said, “Fair enough.” Then Brookes had asked Jack if he wanted him, in his own address, to say anything in particular—possibly something about those two Luxton brothers on the memorial outside? Jack had thought for a while and said no, he didn’t want that, and Brookes had also seemed to think for a while and had said again, “Fair enough.” By then Jack was getting the comforting impression that Brookes understood that what he wanted was real y only what he’d wanted that first time, twelve years ago, when they’d spoken face to face. As little and as simple as possible.

BROOKES, indeed, was wel aware by now (he’d been rector for over twenty-five years) that it was what most people real y craved at such events, even when there were no extraordinary circumstances to acknowledge, as little and as simple as possible being real y the essence of the thing, the bare bones, so to speak. So: a simple service, just the one address, and he would have to find some way

—but he’d somehow done it before—of referring to the exceptional (and violent) manner of the death. He’d have to give it some thought and come up with something. The coffin would lie in the church overnight and, after the service, be carried out to the churchyard—Jack as principal bearer (this was the bit, Brookes noted, that seemed to matter most to the man)—for a simple burial. Hardly more, as Brookes knew very wel , than eighty paces.

These thoughts had gathered in his mind even as he’d spoken to Jack on the phone. “So,” he’d said, sensing that Jack didn’t want to prolong the conversation, “he’l be next to his mum and dad again.” And had heard a silence down the line. He’d added, “It’l have been a long journey.” Then, hearing only more silence, he’d asked (he’d known he’d have to ask it and this was the only chance) whether there would be a flag, a Union Jack, over the coffin? And if not, would he like them—the parish—to organise one? Or anything else along those lines? Never having presided over an event of this kind before, Brookes was not at al sure how things worked. But Jack had final y spoken again to say no, he didn’t want a flag. There wouldn’t be a flag.

And Brookes, after a pause, had said, “Fair enough.” BROOKES WOULD BE THERE, Jack thought, looking older.

Who else? Sal y and Ken Warburton? How might Sal y shake her head this time? Bob Ireton? Stil the local bobby?

The whole damn vil age would be there—remembered or half-forgotten faces leaping out at him like flash bulbs—but, given that the thing was on the front pages, Jack thought, so might the whole bloody world.

As wel as speaking to Brookes, to Babbages, to Major Richards and to some other necessarily connected parties, Jack had in recent days been obliged to speak—or had avoided speaking—to quite a few people who wanted to speak to him. Most of whom had wanted to know, above al , how he felt, what his feelings were at this particular time, and had given the impression that they thought he might be only too grateful to be asked to share them. Jack had used the supposedly exempting word “private” with these people, but it hadn’t often worked, and he’d opted instead for a basic policy of evasion which, on the other hand, had felt shaming and—evasive. At yesterday’s event he’d successful y given the reporters (he’d noticed their presence, like a different kind of cluster) the slip. He’d given everyone the slip. But now, as he approached his ultimate destination, he had the feeling he’d had before of being liable to arrest.

Ireton, yes, Ireton would be there. With a set of handcuffs.

After the burial, and al its due al owances, he might say,

“Now, Jack, come with me.”

As he drew nearer, he was in fact already and very intently planning his escape. Right now, with his mobile stil firmly switched off, no one knew exactly where he was, or if he’d even appear. Let alone how he felt. Ten-fifteen. And away—by when? If he was not under the immunity of privacy, then he was surely under the protection, the alibi of grief.

While he couldn’t have feared more the clutching actualities of the occasion before him, Jack was hoping that he might pass through them like some shadow—both there and not there. Who could come near his situation?

His compounded situation. First that, now this. He would be untouchable. He would be, in effect—and what could be more appropriate and more purely expressive of his situation?—like the corpse he would nonetheless have to bear on his shoulder. This was how he felt.

And perhaps because he wished it enough or perhaps because, in the event, he was so simply and helplessly dazed and stunned by the whole process, this was how it was.

HE TURNED onto a narrow minor road (there was stil the same ivy-shrouded tree stump on the corner), and the matter felt out of his hands. It seemed impossible that the familiar sights now thickening round him could stil be here, or else impossible that he’d been away. He surrendered to their ambush. That strange word “repatriation” came again into his head. He said again, softly but firmly, “I’m coming, Tom. I’m nearly there.”

And very soon he was. After some more turnings the narrow lanes became the deep single-track trenches he remembered. In summer grass would sprout in the middle.

He’d chosen a route that avoided approaching Marleston from the east—past the entrance to Jebb—but, coming to a brow, he spotted through a gateway the church tower, across the val ey that included both Westcott and Jebb.

Then, having not encountered any other delays since turning off the main road, he immediately came up behind not one, but two, three, four—perhaps more—cars al heading in the same direction, and grasped at once where they must be going, as wel as something of the actual numbers at this strictly private event.

He became now part of a general, creeping congestion, as if he were no more than some frustrated minor attender at the occasion ahead. This turned al his other misgivings into a wild exasperation that was outwardly just the self-important rage of someone stuck in traffic. In al his journey so far, even in Portsmouth, there’d been no significant jams. Now here he was, less than a mile from Marleston and crawling. But what could he do? Press his horn? Flash his lights? This was Devon, where both sides of a vehicle almost touched the hedges. Let me through. Let me pass.

I’m a brother.

Such was his panic that he wouldn’t clearly recal later precisely how he arrived—how he parked or how he got himself from his car to the church. But he would remember having to say more than once, to clear a path, “I’m Jack Luxton. I’m Tom Luxton’s brother.” Though wasn’t it blazingly obvious? Who else did people think he was?

He would remember noticing that the Crown and the war memorial were stil there, stil uncannily in place, though he didn’t want to look straight at them, and the same applied to al the mil ing people—you couldn’t quite cal it a crowd, but it certainly wasn’t a handful. Something like a lock in his neck kept his gaze fixed on the gate to the churchyard and, beyond it, the church porch, so that even if he’d wanted to seek out and acknowledge familiar faces, he couldn’t have done so. He was in a tunnel. Pressing on into the churchyard, he registered, at the edge of his vision, the gravestones of his mother and father and, close to them, a special y prepared area with some vivid green carpeting spread over the turf, but he didn’t want to look directly at these things in case they might somehow render him unable to walk.

Then suddenly moving towards him—to meet him but also, it seemed, to rescue him—there was Brookes, in a white surplice that reminded him of those army padres, and with him, like some little unit under his command, a group of men who included Derek and Dave, the hearse drivers (how strangely good it was to see them), and Ireton. Yes, Ireton, in a smart-looking uniform with three stripes on it, Ireton who’d once sluiced down his father’s gore from the bark of an oak tree.

They al looked at him with the relieved and now activated looks of men who’d been waiting, perhaps with mounting anxiety, for nothing other than his arrival, and Jack realised, even as he also seemed to be floating absently and powerlessly, that he was the one who was here to make this thing click and function and cohere. He might have snapped his fingers and given orders if he’d been so disposed.

Derek and Dave greeted him like old friends. Their faces seemed to say, “You didn’t think we’d miss it, did you?” Then Ireton said, deferential y but quickly, like a man not wanting to waste valuable time, “I’l be your other shoulder, Jack, if that’s okay with you.” Your other shoulder? Then Jack understood. And, though he’d not given any previous thought to who might occupy this position, felt now he could have put his arms round both of Ireton’s dark-blue shoulders and wondered why he’d ever supposed that Bob

—Sergeant Ireton—might be here to clap him in handcuffs.

Six men, Ireton rapidly explained: the two of them in front and, behind, four men from Babbages, including Derek and Dave who would take the rear positions. “Unless—” Ireton had hesitated and his head had done a strange swivel towards the crowd (perhaps it real y could be cal ed a crowd) standing at a discreet distance though seeming to have the church surrounded. “Unless there’s anyone else?

Unless you’d like some other arrangement?” It seemed that everyone was ready to defer to him. He was like a king. At the foot of the church wal , he’d glimpsed, along the whole grey, weathered flank, stacks of resting flowers. Bunches, wreaths, two and three deep.

No, Jack said to Ireton, it was fine. The other two men from Babbages had introduced themselves and he’d shaken their hands and said, “Thank you,” and shaken everyone’s hand and said, “Thank you,” and this had seemed suddenly the most important and exclusively detaining thing, the names and the gripping, knuckly hands of these men.

But Brookes now intervened, pul ing up a sleeve of his white robe to look at his watch. “It’s just gone twenty past, Jack. Everything’s ready, but we haven’t let anyone in yet.” He coughed. “If you’d like a moment first, just to be alone, the church is al yours. Let us know when you’re ready. Take your time.”

And then there he was, alone but not alone, in the stony hush of the church, with the coffin and the single circle of heavy-smel ing white flowers that he’d ordered through Babbages now resting on it. It was the first time it had been like this, just the two of them, and it would never be like it again. He felt for a moment that he was in some box himself. He seemed to need to break through the wal of air that surrounded the coffin before he could put his hands on it (again), then his cheek to it, then his forehead, then his lips. These were actions that he hadn’t planned or foreseen, but was simply commanded by his body to do.

He said, “I’m here, Tom. I’m here with you.” Then he said, as if he’d not made something clear, “We’re both here.” The coffin was plain oak. Was it English oak? He felt its smoothness, examined the grain in the wood, breathed the scent of the flowers. It was suddenly like some inextricable riddle Brookes had set him, to be alone like this with the coffin, a dilemma beyond solving. “Take your time.” How could any time be long enough? Yet it had to be limited—

outside were al those people. On the other hand, Jack couldn’t find the words, the thoughts or whatever it was, beyond his physical presence, that might have properly fil ed this unrepeatable interval.

It was extraordinary that while Tom had appeared to him clearly several times in the last twenty-four hours, he was now nowhere to be seen. Was he hiding somewhere else, behind a pil ar, in this church? No, Tom was with him, here in this box. Al there was of Tom was here. He felt, though he couldn’t see Tom, couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see the signal ing flickers in his face, that they were like two people waiting for something together, for the next thing to happen, and neither of them was sure who should make the first move, though it was foolish perhaps to delay. You decide.

No, you. A sort of game. So he final y lowered his lips again to the coffin—he had never kissed any piece of wood like this, he had never kissed Tom like this when he was alive, except when he was very smal and wouldn’t ever have known about it. Then Jack said, “Wel , shal we get on with it?”

. . .

FOR A WHILE , after that, it was like nothing so much as a wedding. He had to sit right at the front near the aisle, near the coffin, like a waiting groom. Eyes were on his back, he didn’t know how many eyes, but he felt it was al right that he didn’t turn, it was al right, it was even the correct thing, to keep his eyes to the front. Were the eyes behind him thinking he was like a bridegroom too? Were some of them thinking: Where’s El ie?

It seemed now impossible that the coffin before him was the same coffin that he’d watched yesterday being carried off a plane and that had been flown al the way from Iraq.

That it had come al that way and by such a remarkable chain of events and arrangements, to stand now quietly here. There seemed no connection. There was no sign of the connection (he hadn’t noticed—in his not-looking—any Union Jacks) and no one so far had made any mention of it, so that it seemed there might be some silent communal effort around him to make it not exist. As if Tom had died, at a tragical y early age, just a little distance away. A tractor accident, perhaps.

But then Brookes had got up and said, among other things, that they al knew why they were here and they also al knew why Tom was here, though he hadn’t been here, some people would know, for a very long time. He’d been in other parts of the world. But he didn’t want to talk about how Tom Luxton had died and what he’d died for, because this wasn’t that sort of occasion and other people had spoken of those things and might stil speak of them. But what he wanted to remember, as he was sure others here would want to remember—as some of them real y could remember—was “the boy who was born in Marleston.” That was what Brookes had said: “the boy who was born in Marleston.” Though he might have chosen to say (and Jack knew why he didn’t) the boy who was born at Jebb Farm. It wouldn’t have been true, of course. It wasn’t even true that Tom had been born in Marleston. Didn’t Brookes know? He’d been born in a maternity unit in Barnstaple.

And nearly kil ed his mother in the process. It was Jack who’d been born in Marleston, Jack who’d been born at Jebb. Jack who was real y the boy—

But he’d known what Brookes had meant. He had the medal in his jacket pocket. He didn’t know any more clearly now, if he’d known at al , why he’d brought it al this way. It wasn’t Tom’s medal. It went with one of the names on the memorial outside—or you might say with two of them. But his hand went, as Brookes spoke, to the smal , round solidity against his chest.

Then Brookes had stopped talking and there was a hymn and a prayer or two, and then this whole part of it was over and it was time for the thing that was the most important thing for Jack, that was real y why he was here. He had to go forward now with the five men whose hands he’d shaken and be their leader, even while they, in a sense, would al carry him. Just as they would al carry Tom. He would have to walk with Ireton on the other side and Tom between, facing the congregation now, facing the whole lot of them, but it would be al right if he didn’t smile, it would be al right if he didn’t look anyone in the eye. This wasn’t a bloody wedding. It would be al right if he didn’t show anything in his face, which came quite natural y to him anyway. He would have to be both like and not like one of those six soldiers yesterday. He should have shaken their hands too.

He would have to walk, a finite number of paces though he would never count them, with his cheek against the coffin, his shoulder against the coffin, these parts of him closer to Tom than they would ever be again, feeling, sharing Tom’s weight.

And so it was. They emerged through the porch into the painful brightness of the November morning. Behind them the congregation began to file out and fol ow, but it was as though, Jack thought, the church might have turned into a great grey empty-bel ied plane. For the first time now, since he was looking straight towards it, Jack couldn’t avoid seeing the same exact line of hil s, across the val ey—

Dartmoor in the far distance—that could be seen from Jebb Farm.

It wasn’t difficult, as a physical task, it wasn’t so difficult.

Ireton was a big man too. He felt the whole thing might be on a backward tilt, and that would be tough on the two at the back. But then the downward slope in the churchyard corrected that. And it wasn’t heavy. Though Tom had been a big man, like his brother. Was it because of the distribution of the load among six? Or because—? What was inside? He knew how his mother had died, he knew how his father had died. His brother’s death was a mystery.

He suddenly wanted, needed to feel the weight of his brother. It seemed that, with his cheek and one palm pressed against the wood, he was urging Tom to let him feel his weight.

It was a matter of perhaps twenty steps now, a steadily diminishing number of steps. Jack could see the opening of the grave before him, see, close by, but didn’t want to look and so see the names, the gravestones of his parents, and, yes, he felt sure at last that he could feel, inside, through the wood, through his cheek, through his hand, on these last steps, the shifting, swaying, appreciative weight of his brother. He would be al right now, he felt sure, so long as this weight was on his shoulder. He wanted it to be there for ever. And with each last pace he said now, inside, “I rocked you, Tom. I rocked you.”

28

MICHAEL LUXTON DIED INSTANTLY. The double cartridge-load of shot that passed through the roof of his mouth, then through the back of his head, smashing and impel ing outwards everything in between, might as wel have been, at that absence of range, a single solid bul et. It continued to pass, along with fragments of bark, skul and brain, some significant distance into the oak tree against which he’d been leaning. It could be said that the tree felt nothing. The tree never flinched and no more registered Michael’s death than Michael did himself. For an oak tree that big and thick and old, to have a parcel of compacted shot and other matter embedded not even deep in its flesh was of no importance. Trees endure worse mutilation.

But the hole, some three feet or more up the trunk, remained, its aperture reduced but defined as the bark grew a ring-like scar around it. It was there when Jack, with five others, lowered his brother’s coffin into its grave. It’s there now. The surrounding stain on the bark remained too, despite that sluicing down on the day itself by PC Ireton.

Unlike the stains on the ground, which soon disappeared, it weathered gradual y and came to look like some indeterminate daub of the kind sometimes seen near the base of trees, or like some fungal blemish associated with that odd puncture in the trunk. What was it there for? Had someone once tried to hammer something, for some strange agricultural purpose, into the wood?

Of course, Jack knew how it had got there, and a few other involved parties would have been able to explain, very exactly, its cause. But to any outsider or newcomer to Jebb Farm—and there would be newcomers—the hole would have been a puzzle, if not a very detaining one.

ONE PERSON WHO CERTAINLY KNEW how the hole was made was El ie. She and Jack stood one warm July day under the tree—it was the summer after Michael’s death—

and Jack watched El ie put her finger into the hole. He didn’t stop her. He’d done it himself, though not at first. It had taken a long time, in fact, before he’d felt able to and even then he’d felt that he shouldn’t. But it was a hole that, al other considerations apart, begged to have a finger put in it, even two. An ignorant outsider, who might not have been especial y bothered by the mystery of the hole, would have found it hard to resist putting a finger in it. By the time Jack returned to Marleston to bury his brother, quite a few fingers, young and old, had been idly poked into that hole.

But El ie’s putting her finger in it—without, as it were, even asking Jack’s permission—marked a decisive moment in the history of Jebb Farm. Her own father had died even more recently. It was an act of impudent penetration that had to do with the absence of more than one parental constraint. It was as though El ie were saying,

“Look, I can do this now. We can do this now. Look, I haven’t been struck down. The tree hasn’t fal en on us. We can do anything we like now.”

And so they could. They were standing there, for a start, just the two of them, by their own choosing in Barton Field.

Despite the geography of their long relationship, this was something they had never done before. With a poke of her finger El ie was endorsing the obvious and tangible truth that Jack, even after eight months, couldn’t quite bring himself to accept or believe: that the tree was his, al his, everything around them, for what it was worth, was al his.

Or, as El ie might have put it, “Ours.” The tree didn’t mind a bit.

And the fact was that this simple yet outrageous act of El ie’s—she al owed her finger to probe and twist a bit—

rather excited Jack. It aroused him. El ie was wearing a dress, a flower-print dress, something he hadn’t so often seen, and he could tel that before she’d driven over (“Something to tel you, Jacko,” she’d said on the phone) she’d taken some trouble to look her best.

In any case, Jack would have said that she was simply blooming. Nearly twenty-eight, but blooming. Something he would be able to confirm to himself a little later in the Big Bedroom—another first—when that dress would be draped over the back of a chair. El ie was another summer older and her dad had recently died, but she was a better-looking woman than she’d been a year ago. She didn’t look like a farmer’s daughter (and she wasn’t, in the sense that she no longer had a father). She looked like some wide-eyed visitor to his lordly estate. That even seemed to be her knowing, teasing game. “Show me around, give me a tour.

It’s a beautiful day. Take me for a walk down Barton Field.” She even said (and it was an oddly appealing idea),

“Pretend you don’t know me. Pretend I’ve never been here before.”

A beautiful day. So it was. An afternoon in ful summer, not a freezing November night. It had once seemed to Jack that he would never get the coldness of that night out of his bones, but now he felt warm to his marrow. El ie drew her finger from the hole and beckoned. Blooming in herself—

and with something, so it seemed, she stil had up her (sleeveless) sleeve. A blotch of sunshine reached her through the canopy of the oak and rippled over her bare shoulder.

“Come on”—she might almost have licked her lips—“put your finger in it too.”

He didn’t say that he’d already done so, guiltily, by himself. It anyway seemed that if he didn’t make a move, she would grab his finger and thrust it in for him. So he put his finger in the hole. Then El ie squeezed a finger—it was a tightish fit—alongside it.

“There.”

It was like a pledge. And more. Years ago, when they were children, they might have carved their initials, though they never had, next to each other on a tree. But that seemed a bygone and dainty idea now.

Jack had rushingly and hotly thought: they might do it right here, right this minute, up against the tree itself. To prove that they real y could do anything now. The bark that had pressed against his father’s spine pressing against El ie’s.

Could they do that? Could they do such a thing? Or they might do it over there, in the July-dry grass, near poor Luke’s resting-place. There was no one to see, only some cropping cows and the big blue sky.

But El ie had said, “I think we should go back up to the house, don’t you? You could give me a tour of that too. I think we could do with a cup of tea, don’t you?” And later she’d said, a mug of tea cradled against her bare, bright breasts, that they should throw in Barton Field with the house, that’s what they should do. With the house and the yard, al for private development. A shared right of way on the track, maybe. No, forget that. The consortium could make their own entrance, they could use the Westcott Farm track. But Barton Field, with that view, with that oak tree—that would clinch it, that would do it.

“Mark my words, Jacko. Fifty thousand on the price.” She’d taken a sip of tea and smiled encouragingly. “As long as we don’t say anything about that hole.”

. . .