Wish You Were Here

12

QUICKER AND BETTER at just about everything. He would swing that gun, when it was still too big for him, swing it far too much, Jack would think, and fire as if the shot were like a rope that couldn’t help tighten on its target. Rabbit, crow, pigeon. Pigeons were the trickiest. Big, clumsy birds, sitting on the bare branches in Brinkley Wood, sitting ducks you’d think, but they knew when a gun was being pointed. Though not, apparently, when Tom was pointing it. A sniper. Two pigeons dangling by their necks on a string from Tom’s belt, wet with Luke’s saliva. None for himself. Three misses, in his case, all hitting the space where a pigeon had been. But he hadn’t minded. ‘That’s two between us,’ Tom would say, and mean it.

Walking back through the wood on a grey, hard January morning. Time off, after milking, on a Sunday morning. Time off to be just two brothers. Even Dad could recognise and concede it. Like Mum fighting for those two holidays. After a long, unyielding silence: ‘Well, off you go, then.’ An hour’s shooting on a Sunday morning. Dad wouldn’t come himself, though he was a decent shot. Perhaps he knew that Tom could already outshoot him. And he’d give the permission as if he, Jack, were just a kid too, needing permission, though he was turning twenty now and the idea, the concession, was that he was supposed to be Tom’s teacher. Tom didn’t need his father watching over him. Tom was old enough to learn to shoot and Jack was old enough to be his teacher. As if Tom needed any teaching.

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

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

Through the trees and from all sides of the valley would come now and then the small, bouncy ‘pop-pop’ of other guns. Sunday-morning shooting. The farming fraternity would call it ‘going to church’. The wood, on a still, grey morning, with the pillars of trees, was not unlike a church. ‘The farming fraternity’: that was a phrase Dad would sometimes use, keeping a straight face, though you knew he thought it was a joke of a phrase.

Along the track to the gate, then up the steepening slope of Barton Field, past the big oak, breathing hard, their throats taking in the cold air and sending it out again as steam. Jack had the gun — it was heavy, for a boy, to carry up the hill — but Tom had the pigeons. And then at some point, before the farmhouse came into view above them, beyond the rise and swell of the field, they’d stop to draw breath, and Tom would untie one of the pigeons and give it to him. True to his word. ‘Here, Jack.’ The dead black eye of the pigeon in Jack’s hand would look at him as if to say, ‘And I won’t say a word either.’ Then they’d carry on up the hill, all the valley and the far hills opening up behind them as they climbed, they didn’t have to look behind to know it.

Pigeon pie that evening.

Pigeons. Sandcastles. And, it couldn’t be denied, girls too. Quicker and better. Too young then, at twelve. Probably. But he was already going to Abbot’s Green School, waiting every morning by the Jebb gate for the school bus to swing round the bend and scoop him up. Half a dozen or so already inside, two or three girls among them. Kathy Hawkes from Polstowe.

Once, five or six years before, the same bus with the same driver, Bill Spurell, would have picked up Jack and, a little further down the Marleston road, Ellie Merrick. But with that eight-year gap between them, Tom didn’t have any big brother around to cramp his before-and-after-school activities, and even perhaps by the time he was thirteen, by the time Mum had died, he would already have got started. Maybe saying to himself that, given the new situation, given that Mum wasn’t around and Dad wouldn’t waste a chance to haul him out of the classroom, he’d better make the most of his opportunity. He’d better make hay, while he could, with schoolgirls. What other kind of girl was there going? And maybe girls go for a boy who’s just lost his mum, they can’t help it. It’s a sure-fire recipe, and Tom knew it. Maybe that’s why he could crack those eggs so damn neatly.

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

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

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

But he knew, now, that nothing had happened, he was sure now of that. Though it would have been a strange comfort all the same, if Ellie had broken down and confessed: ‘Oh, Jack, there’s something I’ve never told you …’ If he’d been able to put his arms round her and say, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Or even: ‘I always had a feeling.’ If it had meant that Ellie could have wept too over his little lost brother, last-but-one of all the Luxtons. And if it had made her say, like she should have done, that yes, of course, she’d come with him, she’d be with him, no question, on that awful bloody journey.

Why the hell hadn’t she, anyway?

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

Everything would be all his.

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

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

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

But Jack had been cradled in it, and had been told so. When he was still only eight it was not so impossible to conceive of having once been in it. But now there was Tom in it anyway, fitting it perfectly.

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

Jack rocked Tom in his cradle. Also, when he was allowed to, he would pick Tom up and carry him around. He’d even sometimes kiss Tom on his funny little head. He’d grip Tom under his shoulders and — standing himself at his full eight- or nine-year-old height — lift him right up so his legs dangled. At eight or nine, Jack had possessed his window of opportunity for doing such things, before his dad had begun to frown on them.

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

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

Or before Tom climbed, for the last time, up that same track, that December night? Though how could he have said it then, of all times? Though perhaps he had said it — thought it anyhow — into his pillow. As he’d said it to himself, a thousand times, while just watching Tom grow.

Ellie wanted a child, children, he knew that. And he didn’t. For his own reasons, but for reasons that Ellie knew perfectly well in her way. He simply hadn’t wanted any more of himself, of his own uprooted stock, after Tom had left and then he and Ellie had left too. And Dad had gone anyway. He hadn’t wanted any passing on.

‘No more Jebb, no more Luxtons, Ell.’

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

The subject had certainly hovered between them, that afternoon at Jebb in the Big Bedroom, as the word ‘caravans’ had hovered, as if that word itself might even have been a code for it. What better place for it to hover than in that big bed? And it had been a real enough prospect then. As real and as natural as that oak tree beyond the window. And Ellie wouldn’t have so long, perhaps. Her window of opportunity. Jesus, she might have been planning something right then.

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

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

But she must have noticed that cradle, and maybe her simple thought was: Well, Jack once had his damn baby. And that was why she’d said that thing about Tom. ‘Forget him, Jack.’ Or she might have just thought: Time enough, time enough still. Not yet twenty-eight and in peak condition.

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

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

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

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