by Graham Swift
A steep learning curve (Ellie’s expression) at the beginning. But the main thing was, it paid. Thirty-two units. He was still good at sums, in a farmer’s way. At Jebb it hadn’t been the arithmetic but the numbers themselves that were wrong. Compared to anything they’d known before, they were in thick clover now. What with the capital from the sale of two farms, even at knock-down prices, even with debts to pay off.
Ten years. And something more than a learning curve. A release, a relaxation curve, a lightening up. He saw it in the way she smiled at him and he saw, from her smile, that, even with his great brick of a face, he must be smiling too.
But he can see it, now: the steep drop away from the farmhouse, the full-summer crown of the oak tree. The hills beyond. The exact lines of hedgerows and of tracks running between the gates in them. White dots of sheep, brown and black-and-white dots of cattle. For a moment, though for over ten years now Jack has breathed sea air, which some people find so desirable, he can even smell the land, the breath of the land. The thick, sweaty smell of a hayfield. The dry, baked smell of cooling stubble on an August evening. Smells he never smelt at the time. The smell of cow dung mingling with earth, the cheapest, lowliest of smells, but the best. Who wouldn’t wish for that as their birthright and their last living breath?
9
THEY’D GOT the letter nine days ago, though, strictly speaking, there was no ‘they’ about it, the operative phrase being ‘next of kin’. Tom must either have put down his brother’s name from the very beginning, or made the substitution when necessary.
On that question Jack could never be sure, seeing as Tom had never answered any of his letters. There’d been precious few of them, it was true, but they’d included the letter that had cost Jack an agony to write, about the death and funeral arrangements of Michael Luxton. It had cost him several long hours and several torn-up sheets of paper, of which there was never a big supply at Jebb, though even as he’d written it he’d wondered how much pain in it there would really be for Tom. Why should Tom care? He’d finished with his father nearly a year before, and it was vice-versa now, their father had finished with everything, all fixed and concluded.
‘I hope,’ Michael had once said, according to Tom (and why should Tom have made up such words?), ‘someone some day will do the same for me.’
So where was the agony in it for Jack, knowing there might be none in it, really, for Tom? Unless that itself was the agony, that there wasn’t any. Over such a thing. Or maybe it was that for Jack writing any letter of a personal nature—any letter at all—was agony. ‘Send me a postcard,’ Ellie had told him, with a little sad pout, as if he might have been going off to war himself (so you’d think she might have been more pleased when she got one). And he’d agonised, in his way, over that.
Well, he wouldn’t be writing any damn last letters right now. One thing off his mind. And Ellie wouldn’t be reading any.
But Jack couldn’t ever be sure about that question of next of kin, seeing as Tom had never written back, or otherwise got in touch. Seeing as Tom wasn’t there when they’d lowered Dad down beside Mum in Marleston churchyard. He’d thought: what was she saying to him, what kind of greeting was he getting? This is a fine way to be coming back to me, Michael.
Jack couldn’t be sure if Tom had just decided not to be there and not even say he wouldn’t be there (though Jack knew there was a thing called compassionate leave) or if Tom wasn’t there because he’d never in the first place received that letter that had cost so much to write. Maybe sending a letter to just a name and a number in the army was like sending a letter to the North Pole.
There was no doubt, in any case, when Jack read that official letter, addressed to him from the MOD, that he was Tom’s next of kin. There wasn’t any other. But he wanted to believe—still wants to believe even now—that Tom would have put down his brother’s name as next of kin from the very first point of the army’s requiring it. Hadn’t it, in a way, been understood between them?
Good luck, Tom.
It was almost his first thought as he’d read that letter, that the next-of-kin thing would have applied. That was why this piece of paper was in his hand. As he’d stared at it and tried to make it not be real, he’d thought: and now there wasn’t any next of kin, not for him, not in the true meaning, even though he’d married Ellie. There wasn’t any next.
And that was a touchy point.
Or perhaps his very first thought had been that, though this letter came from the army, from the Ministry of Defence, it came, in a sense, from Jebb, bearing that crossed-out address. It was like several letters that had reached them for a while. It was an arrangement you made—or Ellie had made it, and the same for Westcott—with the Post Office. But those letters had petered out years ago, which was just as well, since each time (even if it wasn’t someone demanding money) it couldn’t help but hurt and accuse him to see those words—‘Jebb Farm’—on the envelope.
Now, with this letter, they were like a stab.
Since Tom had never known that. Whether or not he’d ever received any of those other letters or cared, if he had, what was in them. Jack had never written with that bit of information. It had been his decision. Since Tom had never appeared at the funeral, or ever replied. Since he didn’t even know any more where Tom was.
Or Ellie’s decision. Lots of his decisions were really hers. Maybe most. Though he could have said it, nonetheless, been the first to raise the subject, that afternoon, ‘There’s Tom, Ell. What about Tom?’
And now it didn’t matter anyway. Because there wasn’t any Tom. Because that letter that had been a little delayed in reaching him, having been addressed to Jebb Farm, informed him that Corporal Thomas Luxton, along with two others of his unit, had been killed ‘on active duty’ in Iraq, in the Basra region of operations, on 4th November 2006. It informed him that, failing other attempts to contact him directly, this news was being communicated by letter with the deepest regret, and that every effort would have been made prior to his receipt and acknowledgement of this notification to have kept Corporal Luxton’s name from public disclosure. It very respectfully asked that Mr Jack Luxton make himself known as soon as possible—a special direct-line telephone number, as well as other numbers and addresses, was given—so that arrangements could be made for Corporal Luxton’s (and his comrades’) repatriation, which, for operational reasons, would in any case be pending clearance by the in-situ military authorities.
It was a grey, murky autumn morning, the sort of day on which it can be good to know that a holiday under hot, rustling palms is in the offing. Palm trees, for some reason, had flashed through Jack’s mind and had made him blurt out that stupid thing about cancelling the Caribbean.
Perhaps it occurred to him as he stared at that letter that he might already have read, without knowing it, as an item in a newspaper—though he was not a great scourer of newspapers—the anonymous announcement of his own brother’s death. Public disclosure. But no, he couldn’t remember any moment when his insides had turned mysteriously cold. And though, by now, such items of news weren’t so rare, he’d always told himself that Tom might be anywhere.
On the other hand, he might have made enquiries. Not so difficult, not so unreasonable. Being next of kin, for God’s sake. And he’d known that some such message as he held now in his hand was not out of the question. Now that it was in his hand it had the eerie, mocking truth of something not entirely unanticipated. His hand shook. As if the anticipation might have forestalled it. As if the anticipation might have caused it.
And the fact is he’d known, before, what was in it. This was the thought that, before all the others, sprang up to overwhelm him. That his heart had started banging, as if it had jumped loose in his chest, even before he’d opened the envelope.
And when he’d passed it to Ellie, he’d known that she, too, knew already what was in it. There’s such a thing as body language. And that tone in his voice when he’d called up to her. She looked miffed, all the sam
e, to have been dragged from her task. He’d always had a struggle whenever he tried to get that damn duvet cover on. And when she looked at the letter he’d known at once from her face that she wasn’t going to make it any easier for him. It wasn’t easy in the first place, but she wasn’t going to make it any easier. She wasn’t going to make it any easier because one thing he could see in her face was that she thought that this made things easier anyway. It drew a neat and simple and permanent line. And the fact is, if he were honest, he’d had the same thought too, just the tiniest flash of it. But what for Ellie was a thought that made things easier was for him like a trap snapping on him. The very fact that he could even think it.
People could help by dying. Yes, they could. No, they couldn’t. He could see that Ellie’s position was going to be that this was his, Jack’s, business, he shouldn’t dump it on her. Next of kin, and Ellie wasn’t. Ellie, when all was said, and despite that marriage ceremony ten years ago in Newport, was a Merrick. He could see that Ellie’s position, if he pushed her, was going to be that he had helped Tom make his departure all those years ago, had seen Tom off. And wasn’t the last thing he’d wanted, or wanted these days anyway, was for Tom to show his face again?
Jack could see all this even as he felt himself starting to tremble inside. Even as he had the briefest but clearest picture of Tom standing right there, in the doorway of Lookout Cottage, grinning and looking bigger than he used to be. In a soldier’s uniform. Anyone at home?
The last thing he’d wanted? No.
This was all his fault, Jack had thought, this letter and all it might mean was his fault. He thought it even as Ellie passed the letter back to him. It even seemed like a letter he hadn’t just opened but had been keeping in his pocket for some time and had only just decided to show her. Like that letter she’d shown him, the blue sky at the window, at Jebb. Here, read this.
He thought it even as she moved towards him, because she could see now he was actually trembling. Not just his hand. His shoulders were shaking, his chest was heaving. Even as Ellie put her arms round him and held him—she smelt of clean cotton—and pressed her mouth to the side of his neck and said, ‘It’s okay, Jacko, it’s okay.’ And what did that mean—just that it was okay for a grown man to cry? Even as the hot tears came gushing out of him—they had to—out of Jack Luxton’s eyes, that were stony-grey and, most of the time, cool and expressionless like his father’s. Well, people weren’t fucking cattle.
10
RAIN WEEPS DOWN the window in front of him, but Jack isn’t crying now. And he’d put a stop to his tears soon enough on that grey morning. He’d gasped them back into himself and wiped a sleeve across his face even before Ellie could grab a clump of tissues and hold it out for him.
It should have been like this then, he thinks. Then the weather might have made his tears seem less conspicuous or might have done his crying for him. But, outside, the morning had been merely grey and damply still.
He couldn’t remember when he’d last cried, not counting when he was a nipper and it was allowable. Or if he’d cried at all since then. But yes he had, of course he had, and he could remember exactly when. Tears on his pillow. But never in front of anyone. Certainly never in front of Ellie. So it had been a shock to her. Perhaps even a disappointment.
Not even when his mum died. He hadn’t let his eyes well up in front of Ellie. As if Ellie would have had any softness left for missing mothers. And he’d been twenty-one by then, a man’s age. And now, when he was thirty-nine, he’d felt as Ellie put her arms around him just a touch of hardness in them, just the hint of a restraint in their comfort. I’m not your mother, Jack, don’t cry like a baby.
True enough. If it was all his fault, how should tears come into it? Tom had gone off to be a soldier—and he wanted to sit here and cry? He’d dried his eyes before Ellie could dry them for him. But he’d known that he hadn’t cried enough, not nearly enough. That little bit of crying had only made him aware that there was a whole lot more crying left inside him, a whole tankful. He’d just put the stopper back on his tears. As for Ellie, her eyes hadn’t even gone dewy.
And that maybe settled something, finally took away, on that painful day, one foolish niggle. Namely, that he’d always wondered and never could quite put the thought aside, whether Tom and Ellie had ever … Whether Ellie and Tom … On a Wednesday afternoon, say. Given Tom’s general quickness off the mark.
Surely not. Though would he actually have minded—even that? Just once in a while. If Tom, as it turned out, was going to pack himself off anyway. But the question was more whether he’d have minded to know it now. Now that Tom was packed off for ever. No, he wouldn’t have minded. He wouldn’t have minded it even back then, if he’d known then that one day Tom would be packed off for ever. What’s mine is yours, Tom.
Surely not. But when Jack, after Tom left, had gone over to Westcott Farm to spend afternoons with Ellie, Tom’s name had rarely come up between them. And Jack, with his sliver of suspicion, had supposed this was because Ellie would have wanted to stay off the subject, while he didn’t want to force it either. Finished business anyway.
But even on that July afternoon at Jebb, with that other letter in the Big Bedroom, when the subject of Tom should have come up, when he should have brought it up, he’d kept warily silent. It was Ellie who’d brought it up for him. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she’d said, holding her mug of tea under her chin. ‘But he made his decision, didn’t he, and when did you last hear a peep out of him? I don’t think you have to tell him anything. Forget him, Jack.’ And if she could say that, then perhaps his mind should have been settled all along. At least on that score.
He’d wiped away his tears and Ellie’s eyes had stayed dry. Then a silence had stretched between them, a silence in which the look on Ellie’s face had seemed to say: Don’t make this difficult, Jack. This is tough news, don’t make it tougher. And even he could see, even then, that it might have been tougher even than this. Tom might have come back in a wheelchair. He might have come back like a big, helpless baby.
Then Ellie had gone to fill the kettle. Certain moments in life, it seemed, required the filling of a kettle. Kettles got filled every day, without a thought, several times over. Nonetheless, there were certain moments.
He heard the gush of water in the kitchen. It would have been a good inducement and a good moment to shed a few more tears while Ellie wasn’t looking. And an opportunity—if that’s how it was—for Ellie to do a bit of private gushing herself. But he didn’t think so. He only imagined how her hand might be grasping the tap a bit more tightly and for longer than was necessary.
How many kettles had Ellie filled? That had been the first ever kettle she’d filled at Jebb. And she’d done it stark naked. But she’d filled enough kettles for him before that, over the years, at Westcott. And she’d have filled enough, anyway, for old man Merrick. He felt, with a letter lying in front of him that weighed, of itself, next to nothing, the weight and strain in her arms of all those kettles Ellie would have filled for Jimmy Merrick. What had she thought that day when her mum had disappeared? And it was a big old farmhouse-kitchen kettle too, it wasn’t like the natty plug-in thing they had here at the Lookout.
When she came back with the tea he knew it was up to him (if it was all his fault) to break the silence, to say something appropriate to the occasion. He might have said any number of things, poor as he was with words. He might have just said, in fact, ‘Poor Tom. Poor Tom.’ But he felt he might already have said that, during his short burst of tears. Though the words, if they were there, had got so mixed up with the tears that he wasn’t sure if they’d come out like any sort of words that Ellie would recognise. It was just a general choking.
He might have said, ‘I wonder how, exactly.’ Or, ‘I hope it was quick.’ He might have said, looking at Ellie, ‘I hope it was damn well quick.’ He might have said, ‘Why him?’ On the other hand, he might have said, ‘We always knew it was a possibility, didn’t w
e, Ell, something like this?’ And added, ‘But we blanked it out, didn’t we?’
He’d thought: this is like the cow disease. It was a strange thought to have, but he’d had it. This was like when the cow disease and its real meaning had hit, and he and Tom had waited for Dad to say something, to gather them round the kitchen table, a proper farmhouse meeting, and give them his word. So what now? So what next?
But Dad had never gathered them round, and his strongest course of action had been to stand in the yard alone and spit.
And the truth was that while that kettle had boiled and even as these useless thoughts had besieged him, a whole series of practical considerations and estimations had also run through Jack’s head, which had added up to the unavoidable certainty of a journey. A journey that he—he and Ellie—would have to make. The certainty of one journey. And the impossibility, under the circumstances, of another.
So, of all the things he might have said, he’d said that stupid thing. Though he’d said it, he remembered, as if he was truly sorry and as if he was breaking now, to Ellie, a piece of terrible news.
‘I think we’d better cancel St Lucia.’
And Ellie had looked at him as if it might, indeed, have been the worst thing he could possibly have said. And he’d thought again: All those kettles.
11
LATER THAT MORNING Jack had called the special direct-line number in the letter. How could he not? But he’d had to brace himself to do it and he’d felt, as he spoke, like a man calling a police station to turn himself in.
‘I am Jack Luxton,’ he’d said, like the start of a confession.