Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift

  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 Jeb
b. ‘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.

  3

  WHAT WOULD his mum think? That has always been Jack’s inner yardstick, his deepest cry.

  Vera Luxton died when Jack was twenty-one and Tom was thirteen, of ovarian cancer. Perhaps his acquaintance with cows and calves made Jack better able than most men of twenty-one to comprehend what this meant, but it was anyway an event that changed everything, like a line in history. The cow disease, which came later, was one thing and it was a killer in every sense, but the rot really set in, Jack would say, when Vera died. Michael had run the farm, but Vera had overseen it, had made it revolve in some way round herself. If they hadn’t known and acknowledged it at the time—and that included little Tom—they knew it now.

  Behind that wall his dad could present to the world, Jack knew, his father was stumbling. There were some things Jack could see through—or that he simply duplicated. He had a face like a wall too, he was stumbling too. It was his fall-back position, to take what he got and stumble on, to look strong or just dumb on the outside and stumble inside. He was just like his father.

  But on the other hand (and his father knew it) he’d always been closer to his mum, a lot closer than little Tom had ever been, coming along those eight years later and to everyone’s surprise.

  ‘Would you like a little brother, Jack?’

  His mother had looked at him with a strange, stern-but-pleading look, as if she needed (though he was only seven) his serious, manly help.

  ‘Because I have a feeling,’ she’d said, ‘you may be going to get one.’

  It had seemed to him that she was somehow floating away, might even be saying goodbye, and this was some sort of offer of compensation. And how, with that look in her eye, could he have said anything but yes?

  It was only later that he drew the conclusion—or formed the theory—that Tom hadn’t been meant to happen. It was a risk. His mother had problems in that department. She’d had a bad time with him, he vaguely knew. Though he also understood that she’d thought it was worth it. She had an even worse time, as it turned out, with Tom. Between the two of them, Jack sometimes wondered, might they have given her the cancer?

  But he’d been truly intended. While Tom, it seemed, had turned up by surprise and at much hazard to his mother. It made a difference, perhaps. It made him feel that Tom was never a rival—the opposite. Jack had been born at Jebb, in the Big Bedroom, with the assistance of an intrepid midwife. But Tom had been brought home one day from Barnstaple Infirmary, with a Vera who’d looked rather weaker than her baby. It made a difference.

  In any case, after Tom was there, Jack’s mum had a way, from time to time, of drawing Jack aside into a sort of special, private corner—though it was usually in the kitchen or on warm days in the yard, so in no way hidden. Nonetheless his dad, and Tom when he was older, would respectfully steer clear of it, as if Vera had issued an order. When he was in this special space with his mother, Jack would mysteriously understand—even when he was only nine or ten—that he was having a grown-up conversation, something you were supposed to have in life, a sort of always-to-be-resumed conversation, which went on, in fact, right up until the time his mother fell ill and died. And he’d understand that this conversation had to do with something that seldom otherwise came into his thinking, let alone his talk: his future and its responsibilities. Or, to put it another way, his name.

  Since it meant something if you were born, as he was, on a farm: the name. The generations going back and forwards, like the hills, whichever way you looked, around them. And what else had his mother borne him for than to give him and show him his birthright? Something his father, for whatever reason—and though it was his name—could never do. There’d never been such a moment.

  And then the birthright, deprived of Vera’s backing and blighted by cow disease, had begun to look anyway like a poor deal.

  That had always seemed to Jack to be the gist of those conversations, whatever their apparent subject: his birthright. That he shouldn’t worry about Tom, who would always be the little nipper and latecomer. That he should rise to his place and his task.

  When he was older, starting to outgrow both his father and that Burtons suit, she’d make tea for just the two of them. He’d smoke a cigarette. She’d top up his mug, without his asking, when he put it down. He didn’t know then how much one day he’d miss, and he wouldn’t know how to speak of it when he did, the creases in his mother’s wrist as she held the teapot, one hand pressing down the lid, and refilled his mug, just for him.

  And it was only later, when she was gone, that it occurred to him that another gist, and perhaps the real gist, of those conversations was precisely that. That she was telling him that she wouldn’t always be there. It was what she’d had in her mind perhaps—and he’d been right to have those strange feelings—even when she first told him about Tom. She’d be gone sooner than anyone might think.

  She was more of a Luxton, it could be said, than the Luxtons themselves. When she died it was as if the whole pattern was lost. Yet her name had
once been Newcombe, and until she was nineteen she’d never even known life on a farm. She was the daughter of a postmaster. One day Michael Luxton had plucked her from the post office in Polstowe and carried her to Jebb Farm and, so it seemed, nothing could have better answered her hopes and her wishes.

  Something like that must have happened. Jack had never known, even from his mother’s lips, the actual story. His dealings with Ellie Merrick didn’t seem a useful guide. But he found it hard, or just vaguely trespassing of him, to imagine that his father, his father of all people, might once have carried his mother, her legs kicking, over the threshold of Jebb Farm and possibly even have carried her, without a pause, straight up to the Big Bed—where two years later he, Jack, would be born and where, twenty-one years after that, Vera Luxton would die.

  He’d sometimes daringly think that the business of birthright might work in reverse. That his mother’s birthing him, more than her taking his father’s name, had made a Luxton out of her. She’d had such a bad time with him, Jack supposed, that it had generally been accepted that she couldn’t be a mother again. So everything was pooled in him. Or, looking at it another way, it was his fault. Eight long years had proved it. Then Tom had come along and taken away the blame. Which was another reason why suddenly having a little brother around was never a problem for Jack. Quite the opposite.

  Anyway, there were those conversations. And anyway, by the time Vera lay dying in that big bed, she’d become so much a Luxton that despite the determined efforts of the health authorities to move her into hospital, she refused to be taken from Jebb Farm. As if she were putting down her final roots.

  He’d always remember—though he’s tried to forget them—her last days. How she clung, sometimes literally, to that bed as if she wanted, perhaps, to become it. Or the bed, perhaps, wanted to become her. His father, as if not to intrude on this intimate process, had slept, or rather kept terrified watch, close by in a sort of separate bivouac made out of the old wooden chest pushed up against the room’s solitary, battered armchair. The room was like some compartment of disaster.