Wish You Were Here

33

JACK DROVE MADLY ON.

On that cold, clear Remembrance Day, when Tom wasn’t there, Jack had swung the gate shut behind his father in the Land Rover, not knowing then (had his father known?) that Michael would never set foot outside Luxton territory again. He would walk that night down to the oak tree.

As he’d shouldered Tom’s coffin, Jack had felt the overwhelming urge to be not just Tom’s brother but the second, secret, cradling father he’d sometimes felt himself to be. And as he’d stood and dropped his handful of earth onto the drumming coffin lid — before he was unable to stand there any longer — he’d even wanted to be Tom’s real father, their father, who could never, except through the living breath of his older son, have the chance to say, to let the words pour repentingly from his lips: ‘My son Tom. O my poor son Tom.’

But Michael was lying now just yards from his younger son, and who knows how the dead may settle their scores? All at once Jack had remembered what Tom had said, about that other death down in Barton Field — about what Michael had said: ‘I hope some day someone will have the decency …’

He’d fled the churchyard, the only living Luxton left, then had needed to stop by that monstrous, mocking gate. Now, as he drove on, turning his back on Luxton territory, he knew why Lookout Cottage was the only place to go. It wasn’t that he thought any more that it was where he belonged. It was the gun, his father’s gun.

He had his dad’s example. He even had Tom’s example — a gun-carrying soldier, a sniper. How many had Tom killed? But Tom, who in his days as a soldier must have had to see many things, had never had to see what he, Jack, had once had to see in the darkness under that tree.

It was the gun, waiting for him now.

As he sped away from Marleston, Jack couldn’t have felt less like a man who, instead of stopping to confront a gate, might have paused to call his wife and say he was coming home. His mobile phone (with its several messages) remained switched off. Yet on this homeward journey — if that was what it was — he followed a route he’d taken once before with Ellie and, had he been in a different state of mind, he might have felt he was travelling back, in more than one sense, to her.

Ten years ago, after closing the old Jebb gate for the last time, he’d got in, beside Ellie, in the passenger seat and so technically in the position of navigator. But Ellie already knew the way. Ellie had already gone — so Jack had learned one July afternoon — to spy out their future on the Isle of Wight, seizing the chance to do so secretly when Jimmy had been admitted to hospital. And that was one reason, Jack had told himself, why she’d kept that letter from Uncle Tony to herself for so long. She couldn’t share it till she’d checked its validity — on the spot — and she couldn’t do that while her dad was around.

So Ellie had driven them both, with the memory of her first trip to guide her, but Jack hadn’t been just the passive, ignorant passenger. In the early stages of their journey he’d suddenly realised there was a coincidence of memories and of routes. The road signs had chimed with him: Honiton, Axminster, Lyme Regis … Ellie had passed along this road before, but then so had he.

‘Ellie, I’ve got an idea.’

So they’d found themselves together at Brigwell Bay. And standing on the beach there with Ellie, having taken one of the great initiatives of his life (to think they might have sailed past the turning only for the idea to have hit him miles further on), Jack had made one of the great declarations of his life. It took the form of one of his rare jokes, but it was too gallant — and too successful — to be just a joke.

‘There you are, Ell. Here you are. “Wish you were here.” Now you are.’

Then he’d blurted out, ‘And always will be.’

And just for his saying this Ellie had hugged him, almost squeezed the breath out of him, and said, ‘My hero,’ while he’d smelt the strange, forgotten smell of the sea.

Honiton, Axminster, Lyme Regis. He took the same route now, but at the turning — he knew when it was coming — he didn’t even slow. It was like another shut gate. What lay down that road? He and Ellie clasped in the embrace of their life? That wasn’t the point. What lay down that road was a six-year-old boy on a caravan holiday, legs spattered with wet sand, who’d become a soldier in Iraq. He’d sometimes felt like Tom’s father then.

He didn’t even slow down, but he let out another great, unheard howl.

He reached Portsmouth well before four. Realising that he might be even earlier, he’d stopped at a service station, outside Southampton, on the M27. These anonymous places, in which to piss, eat and kill time, seemed to draw him like a second habitat — a habitat that was no habitat at all. But he wanted nothing more. He’d booked himself, to allow for all kinds of eventualities that might follow the funeral, onto the four-thirty ferry. There’d been no eventualities, except for his swift exit, his encounter with a gate and the eating up of road.

Once he joined the queue of waiting vehicles, the long, cross-country loop of his journey was complete. There remained only the short sea-trip which, when he’d done it that first time with Ellie, had seemed momentous, like an ocean voyage. It was momentous now. He would never return to the mainland, he was sure of it, this crossing would be his last. The thing was so fixed now in his mind that he no longer paused to consider, as he’d sometimes done on his long journey, whether he was mad.

Nor did he pause to consider — since it had simply never occurred to him, and it had never been part of Vera’s story — that it might have been from here once, from the Solent, that those two Luxton brothers, on the memorial near which he’d stood just hours ago, had been shipped out, never to return. So what Jack was very soon to do, but hadn’t even thought of yet, had no premeditated link with them. It was just another of the sudden initiatives of his life.

The ferry’s ramp and yawning hold reminded him of the plane. The deafening car deck was like some state of alert. After grabbing his parka and leaving his car, he made for the open decks above, not wanting to show his face. He stood by the rail. It was getting dark. The wind that had got up during the day gusted round him. A deep Atlantic front was moving in.

Would Ellie be there? Did he want her to be? Would it be like a final sign to him if she were not, so that he could simply take out the gun? Even now he shunned his mobile phone, when to use it would have been the most natural and normal thing to do. As he’d maintained silence for so long, it might even have been a stupendous thing to do. His voice might have sounded like that of a man given up for lost. Ellie, I’m on the ferry, I’m on my way.

How had Tom died?

With a clank of its raised ramp and a churning of water, the ferry slipped its moorings. The lights of Portsmouth were on, reflected in the surface of the harbour, but night hadn’t quite fallen and the sky still glowed in the west. Beyond the shelter of the harbour mouth, the fitful wind combined with the movement of the boat into a steady, bitter blast. A few hardy souls — to appreciate the sunset or to indulge the brief sensation of being on the high seas — lingered for a while by the rails. And some of them would have noticed one of their number, a large, strongly built, even rather intimidating man, feel for something in the region of his breast pocket, then, clutching it tightly for a moment in his fist, hurl it into the sea.

Though it was small, it must have been metallic and relatively heavy, since, catching a quick, coppery gleam from the sunset, it sliced cleanly through the wind into the waves.