Wish You Were Here (20 page)

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 all done as quickly and as quietly as possible. If Tom had been a soldier, specially trained for such a night-time operation, you could say he’d done it well.

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 still 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 small bravery of not using it, not needing or using any light—till 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 all 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 pillow 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 pillow? Or ever felt his pillow 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 ballistic, 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. Till something he’d really known all 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.

M
AJOR
R
ICHARDS
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 willing 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 allowed in a civilian under the sway of great distress what you would never allow in a soldier facing possible imminent death. What you would never have allowed in any of these lads lying here in their shiny black hearses.

When Jack reached the safety of the building, Major Richards felt a small 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. Well, 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 totally 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 Phillips 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 follow. 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 tell 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 equally 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. All the children were still so small—still 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 stopgap. 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 call-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 actually 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 usually 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 occasionally 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 chill 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 full 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 automatically standing upright and still. 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. All 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—signalling 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 essentially 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 follow. As broad, rolling vistas opened up before them, as they crossed from Oxfordshire into Wiltshire, clouds breaking over the hills 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 normally could, what they had in the back. It had come out of that plane, it had been flown all 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 eventually 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.