Wish You Were Here (24 page)

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. Equally, 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 all, 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 actually 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 quelling 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, belligerent 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 alleyway 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 hills, on the distant heights of Dartmoor. Ten-thirty at Marleston church. It was really 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 belly felt full 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—still 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 all 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 all 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 hallway in the hotel bar, the sound of a football-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 Ellie. He could flick on his mobile phone at last and see if she’d left any message. He could call her. But what should he say? I’m in Okehampton, Ellie. So’s Tom.

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

He pulled 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 pillow. Within minutes, curled beneath the covers, all 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 tell 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 millstones.

And clutching a medal.

J
ACK 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: Well, 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’ll 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 village. 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 really 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 all 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, ‘Well, this is a bloody joke, isn’t it?’

Outside, the air was clear and still and sharp, the sky a blazing blue. At ten o’clock the frost had barely melted from the fields and the hills lay powdered with white. The woods still had their yellows 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 brilliant 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 all the way back, in that sparkling sunshine. They’d halted at the top of the track. Still 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 pulled back the bolt. He remembers it all now. Two ridiculous men in briefly donned suits, in a worse-for-wear
Land Rover, its exhaust pipe juddering and still 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 all 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 tell, and he had to tell 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, still, 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 all that Jack tells only himself, an over-and-over revisited version that allows more room
for detail and for speculation, but it’s essentially the same version that he gave others and that for many years he’s, thankfully, 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 small 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 blindfold.

As Jack knew it too, and still knows it. He is perfectly able, still, 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 full one, Jack had noted, which, by the time he noted it, had come up over the far hills. The question was never how, but why. Why in the
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.