Wish You Were Here

2

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

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

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

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

But the two Luxton boys were now equally dead anyway. So he had opted for George (it was the more patriotic name), intending to corroborate the matter the next morning, if he had the chance, before his dispatch was sent. There had been much else to concern him that night. But he never did have the chance, since by seven a.m. (another radiant summer’s day, with larks), not long after blowing his whistle yet again, and only obeying a futile order that elsewhere along the line had already been cancelled, Captain Hayes too was dead.

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

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

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

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

The extraordinary thing was that his mother had told Jack this extra, imaginary bit long before Tom was around — long before, in fact, anyone thought that there would ever be, or could be, a Tom. Jack was Vera’s one and only son. The extraordinary thing also was that you couldn’t break a medal in two. Jack knew this well enough. Jack had held the medal, then, in whatever size hand he’d had at the time. He has also held it, much more recently, in his much bigger hand. And what was true years ago was as true now. You couldn’t break it in two. It was made of silver. You couldn’t break it in two even if you took a pair of the strongest pliers to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael was an unsentimental dairy farmer, uncomfortable at, but grudgingly empowered by, having a hero in the family. He made a display of both feelings. He’d put on his suit with an air of unwillingness, as if the whole performance only deprived him of time better spent, even on a Sunday morning, on the farm. He’d pin on his poppy. Then he’d take the medal, which Vera would have polished, and slip it almost furtively into his breast pocket. His mother, Jack remembered, always put more spirit into the thing, not only buffing up the medal, but making sure to procure the poppies in advance and inspecting them in their suits as if they might have been soldiers themselves. And she wasn’t even a real Luxton.

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

They were certainly not regulars at the Crown. If they had been, it might have lessened the effect when they walked in every November with their poppies and suits. Drink, Michael would generally say, was money down the throat. And at least he’d never taken the route, as more than one farmer did, of letting drink itself make you forget that. They drank tea at Jebb, pints of it. They called it ‘brew’. Otherwise, except at Christmas, they were mainly dry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Stop, Dad.’ But Jack wasn’t up to it. Though by then he’d long been the bigger of the two of them. One day, years ago, he’d woken up to discover, disturbingly, that he was taller than his father. Now, in some mysterious way, his dad was even shrinking. But he still wasn’t up to it.

And his father, Jack thinks now, might just have said, ‘We haven’t not done anything. We went and looked at her grave, didn’t we? Take your hand off my arm.’

They might simply have had a set- to right there, a blazing set-to, pulled up on the Marleston — Polstowe road, the engine of the Land Rover still running. A set- to in their suits. They might even have got out and taken a swing at each other, the swings at each other they’d been saving up for years. And his dad with a medal for bravery in his pocket.

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

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

‘Stop, Dad. I want to buy you a drink.’ Such a simple thing, but like moving the hills.