Wish You Were Here (29 page)

But then Brookes had got up and said, among other things, that they all knew why they were here and they also all knew why Tom was here, though he hadn’t been here, some people would know, for a very long time. He’d been in other parts of the world. But he didn’t want to talk about how Tom Luxton had died and what he’d died for, because this wasn’t that sort of occasion and other people had spoken of those things and might still speak of them. But what he wanted to remember, as he was sure others here would want to remember—as some of them really
could
remember—was ‘the boy who was born in Marleston’.

That was what Brookes had said: ‘the boy who was born in Marleston’. Though he might have chosen to say (and Jack knew why he didn’t) the boy who was born at Jebb Farm. It wouldn’t have been true, of course. It wasn’t even true that Tom had been born in Marleston. Didn’t Brookes know? He’d been born in a maternity
unit in Barnstaple. And nearly killed his mother in the process. It was Jack who’d been born in Marleston, Jack who’d been born at Jebb. Jack who was really the boy—

But he’d known what Brookes had meant. He had the medal in his jacket pocket. He didn’t know any more clearly now, if he’d known at all, why he’d brought it all this way. It wasn’t Tom’s medal. It went with one of the names on the memorial outside—or you might say with two of them. But his hand went, as Brookes spoke, to the small, round solidity against his chest.

Then Brookes had stopped talking and there was a hymn and a prayer or two, and then this whole part of it was over and it was time for the thing that was the most important thing for Jack, that was really why he was here. He had to go forward now with the five men whose hands he’d shaken and be their leader, even while they, in a sense, would all carry him. Just as they would all carry Tom. He would have to walk with Ireton on the other side and Tom between, facing the congregation now, facing the whole lot of them, but it would be all right if he didn’t smile, it would be all right if he didn’t look anyone in the eye. This wasn’t a bloody wedding. It would be all right if he didn’t show anything in his face, which came quite naturally to him anyway. He would have to be both like and not like one of those six soldiers yesterday. He should have shaken their hands too. He would have to walk, a finite number of paces though he would never count them, with his cheek against the coffin, his shoulder against the coffin, these parts of him closer to Tom than they would ever be again, feeling, sharing Tom’s weight.

And so it was. They emerged through the porch into the painful brightness of the November morning. Behind
them the congregation began to file out and follow, but it was as though, Jack thought, the church might have turned into a great grey empty-bellied plane. For the first time now, since he was looking straight towards it, Jack couldn’t avoid seeing the same exact line of hills, across the valley—Dartmoor in the far distance—that could be seen from Jebb Farm.

It wasn’t difficult, as a physical task, it wasn’t so difficult. Ireton was a big man too. He felt the whole thing might be on a backward tilt, and that would be tough on the two at the back. But then the downward slope in the churchyard corrected that. And it wasn’t heavy. Though Tom had been a big man, like his brother. Was it because of the distribution of the load among six? Or because—? What was inside? He knew how his mother had died, he knew how his father had died. His brother’s death was a mystery. He suddenly wanted, needed to feel the weight of his brother. It seemed that, with his cheek and one palm pressed against the wood, he was urging Tom to let him feel his weight.

It was a matter of perhaps twenty steps now, a steadily diminishing number of steps. Jack could see the opening of the grave before him, see, close by, but didn’t want to look and so see the names, the gravestones of his parents, and, yes, he felt sure at last that he could feel, inside, through the wood, through his cheek, through his hand, on these last steps, the shifting, swaying, appreciative weight of his brother. He would be all right now, he felt sure, so long as this weight was on his shoulder. He wanted it to be there for ever. And with each last pace he said now, inside, ‘I rocked you, Tom, I rocked you.’

M
ICHAEL
L
UXTON
died instantly. The double cartridge-load of shot that passed through the roof of his mouth, then through the back of his head, smashing and impelling outwards everything in between, might as well have been, at that absence of range, a single solid bullet. It continued to pass, along with fragments of bark, skull and brain, some significant distance into the oak tree against which he’d been leaning. It could be said that the tree felt nothing. The tree never flinched and no more registered Michael’s death than Michael did himself. For an oak tree that big and thick and old, to have a parcel of compacted shot and other matter embedded not even deep in its flesh was of no importance. Trees endure worse mutilation.

But the hole, some three feet or more up the trunk, remained, its aperture reduced but defined as the bark grew a ring-like scar around it. It was there when Jack, with five others, lowered his brother’s coffin into its grave. It’s there now. The surrounding stain on the bark remained too, despite that sluicing down on the day itself by PC Ireton. Unlike the stains on the ground, which soon disappeared, it weathered gradually and came to look
like some indeterminate daub of the kind sometimes seen near the base of trees, or like some fungal blemish associated with that odd puncture in the trunk. What was it there for? Had someone once tried to hammer something, for some strange agricultural purpose, into the wood?

Of course, Jack knew how it had got there, and a few other involved parties would have been able to explain, very exactly, its cause. But to any outsider or newcomer to Jebb Farm—and there would be newcomers—the hole would have been a puzzle, if not a very detaining one.

One person who certainly knew how the hole was made was Ellie. She and Jack stood one warm July day under the tree—it was the summer after Michael’s death—and Jack watched Ellie put her finger into the hole. He didn’t stop her. He’d done it himself, though not at first. It had taken a long time, in fact, before he’d felt able to and even then he’d felt that he shouldn’t. But it was a hole that, all other considerations apart, begged to have a finger put in it, even two. An ignorant outsider, who might not have been especially bothered by the mystery of the hole, would have found it hard to resist putting a finger in it. By the time Jack returned to Marleston to bury his brother, quite a few fingers, young and old, had been idly poked into that hole.

But Ellie’s putting her finger in it—without, as it were, even asking Jack’s permission—marked a decisive moment in the history of Jebb Farm. Her own father had died even more recently. It was an act of impudent penetration that had to do with the absence of more than
one parental constraint. It was as though Ellie were saying, ‘Look, I can do this now.
We
can do this now. Look, I haven’t been struck down. The tree hasn’t fallen on us. We can do anything we like now.’

And so they could. They were standing there, for a start, just the two of them, by their own choosing in Barton Field. Despite the geography of their long relationship, this was something they had never done before. With a poke of her finger Ellie was endorsing the obvious and tangible truth that Jack, even after eight months, couldn’t quite bring himself to accept or believe: that the tree was his, all his, everything around them, for what it was worth, was all his. Or, as Ellie might have put it, ‘Ours’.

The tree didn’t mind a bit.

And the fact was that this simple yet outrageous act of Ellie’s—she allowed her finger to probe and twist a bit—rather excited Jack. It aroused him. Ellie was wearing a dress, a flower-print dress, something he hadn’t so often seen, and he could tell that before she’d driven over (‘Something to tell you, Jacko,’ she’d said on the phone) she’d taken some trouble to look her best.

In any case, Jack would have said that she was simply blooming. Nearly twenty-eight, but blooming. Something he would be able to confirm to himself a little later in the Big Bedroom—another first—when that dress would be draped over the back of a chair. Ellie was another summer older and her dad had recently died, but she was a better-looking woman than she’d been a year ago. She didn’t look like a farmer’s daughter (and she wasn’t, in the sense that she no longer had a father). She looked like some wide-eyed visitor to his lordly estate. That even seemed to
be her knowing, teasing game. ‘Show me around, give me a tour. It’s a beautiful day. Take me for a walk down Barton Field.’ She even said (and it was an oddly appealing idea), ‘Pretend you don’t know me. Pretend I’ve never been here before.’

A beautiful day. So it was. An afternoon in full summer, not a freezing November night. It had once seemed to Jack that he would never get the coldness of that night out of his bones, but now he felt warm to his marrow. Ellie drew her finger from the hole and beckoned. Blooming in herself—and with something, so it seemed, she still had up her (sleeveless) sleeve. A blotch of sunshine reached her through the canopy of the oak and rippled over her bare shoulder.

‘Come on’—she might almost have licked her lips—‘put your finger in it too.’

He didn’t say that he’d already done so, guiltily, by himself. It anyway seemed that if he didn’t make a move, she would grab his finger and thrust it in for him. So he put his finger in the hole. Then Ellie squeezed a finger—it was a tightish fit—alongside it.

‘There.’

It was like a pledge. And more. Years ago, when they were children, they might have carved their initials, though they never had, next to each other on a tree. But that seemed a bygone and dainty idea now.

Jack had rushingly and hotly thought: they might do it right here, right this minute, up against the tree itself. To prove that they really could do anything now. The bark that had pressed against his father’s spine pressing against Ellie’s. Could they do that? Could they do such a thing? Or they might do it over there, in the July-dry
grass, near poor Luke’s resting-place. There was no one to see, only some cropping cows and the big blue sky.

But Ellie had said, ‘I think we should go back up to the house, don’t you? You could give me a tour of that too. I think we could do with a cup of tea, don’t you?’

And later she’d said, a mug of tea cradled against her bare, bright breasts, that they should throw in Barton Field with the house, that’s what they should do. With the house and the yard, all for private development. A shared right of way on the track, maybe. No, forget that. The consortium could make their own entrance, they could use the Westcott Farm track. But Barton Field, with that view, with that oak tree—that would clinch it, that would do it.

‘Mark my words, Jacko. Fifty thousand on the price.’ She’d taken a sip of tea and smiled encouragingly. ‘As long as we don’t say anything about that hole.’

Though when the Robinsons, who already owned a house in Richmond, Surrey, acquired Jebb Farm (or, rather, ‘Jebb Farmhouse’) and when he and Ellie upped sticks, having between them sold to the dairy consortium the remaining Jebb land and all of the adjacent Westcott Farm, Jack sometimes nursed the uncharacteristically devilish fantasy of phoning up one day, even dropping by, to let the Robinsons know that there was something he’d meant to tell them, about that hole—perhaps they hadn’t even noticed it—in the oak tree.

But he could hardly have driven over from the Isle of Wight. And by the time he did make the journey, a decade later, for his brother’s funeral, the Robinsons had
put their own indelible marks on Jebb Farm. After paying, at least by Jack’s reckoning, a small fortune for it and spending another small fortune on, as they sometimes put it, ‘making it habitable’, they’d effectively transformed the farmhouse and its immediate surroundings. So that Jack might have been as shocked by what he saw as the Robinsons might have been by any belated piece of information he had to bring them.

In any case, the Robinsons wouldn’t have been in residence. It was mid-November. Their last visit had been not long ago during their children’s half-term holiday. And since they mixed with the locals no more than politeness demanded it was only to be expected that on an occasion like this they’d choose to stay away.

Many of those from Marleston who attended Tom Luxton’s funeral might have brought Jack up to date on the changes at Jebb, assuming he hadn’t learnt about them in some other way. Bob Ireton and several others might have told him—if they’d ever had the chance. If Jack hadn’t been in such an obvious and desperate haste, once the thing was over, once Tom was in the ground, to make his exit fast and not to talk to anyone. It was a rough and dramatic thing, Jack’s departure, as rough and dramatic as his arrival, screeching to a halt like that. (Who is that madman, some had thought, until they’d realised it was him.) But then he’d always been a big rough creature, even bigger than his dad (big and rough, though generally, in fact, as mild as a lamb), and that dark suit he was wearing didn’t make him look less rough. It made him look like a … ‘bodyguard’ was a word that came to mind.

A mad dash of an exit, and in one sense you couldn’t
blame the poor, distraught man. It wasn’t an ordinary sort of death (nor had it been with his dad). You couldn’t make rules for such a thing or say that the way he’d left was wrong and unpardonable, but if he’d hung around they might at least have told him that Jebb Farmhouse was empty right now. So that if, for any reason—and if he was ready for a surprise or two—he’d wanted to go and take a look around, then it probably wouldn’t have been a problem.

Of course, it was equally possible that he might not have wanted to set eyes on the place ever again.

But anyway he’d simply driven off in that big blue beast of a thing—that was actually like something the Robinsons might have driven—without saying his goodbyes (or, in most cases, his hellos), even looking like a man afraid of being chased. Though he’d driven off, it’s true (some noted it wasn’t the way he’d driven in), along the road that would take him past the entrance to Jebb Farm. As was.