Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift

  Yet what had saved the immediate mood, restrained and sobered them all and perhaps prevented some further explosion, was the simple fact of Luke’s death. His absence. It was only a dog’s death and, when all was said, it had been a mercy, but it left a more than dog-sized gap and there was that echo—though none of them dared say it—of the death of Vera.

  Trying to put himself in his father’s shoes (and he was not so good at putting himself in anyone’s shoes), Jack felt that the way his dad had brought about Luke’s death must have had to do with the death of his wife. As if the sudden swift killing of an animal that was only getting sicker and sicker might have cured Michael of all the grief, anger and abandonment gnawing away inside him. But it hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked for any of them. It just caused more sickness. On top of the cow disease.

  When Tom and Dad got back from Barton Field, Luke’s old basket, with the rumpled tartan blanket—still bearing Luke’s scattered hairs, his smell and the dent of his body—remained in its corner in the kitchen. It remained there, untouched, for days, like a judgement on them all. Michael, who’d been able to blow Luke’s brains out, seemed barely able to look at it. No one knew what to do. There was, perhaps, the shared, unspoken thought that Luke should have been buried with his blanket. It would have been the right thing to do. Or at least Luke should have been carried down in comfort to Barton Field in his basket and blanket, instead of being snatched up from them and plonked down in the pick-up like a calf for the abattoir.

  But in any case, Jack had thought, Luke would have had a pretty shrewd idea. And with his blanket under him, he’d have had an even shrewder idea. Dad had done the right thing, maybe. There was no nice way of doing some things. There’d been no nice way, when they’d finally got round to it, of carrying out a culling order.

  And, anyway, Luke’s basket and blanket, still sitting there, were like a buffer, blurring and softening the difference between Luke’s presence and his absence. A judgement and a comfort, like Vera’s apron.

  And it was Tom, again, who finally made the move, with a suddenness, Jack thought, that was just like his father’s when he’d bundled Luke out to the pick-up. No one dared stop or challenge Tom on this occasion either. He was still laundry chief, and, so far as it went, the housekeeper and the mum of the family. And maybe Dad had never been able to abide it.

  Tom gathered up Luke’s blanket, carried it out into the yard and shook it and slapped it. Then he proceeded to wash it, very thoroughly. There was an old zinc tub that suited the purpose. Hand-washing a dog blanket is quite a big and stinky job, but Tom did it very carefully. The stink was Luke’s stink. Only after several washings, rinsings and wringings did he hang the blanket—as he’d hang the bed sheets—on the line in the yard, where it began to dry soon enough in the August warmth. There was no odour of Luke left, just the soapy, airy smell of something that’s been well washed.

  But Tom hadn’t finished. When the blanket was still just-damp, he unpegged it and actually took the iron to it, a wet tea towel spread on top, to smooth out the wrinkles. Then he folded it very neatly into a small oblong and, when it was dry, carried it upstairs on the tray of his arms to the Big Bedroom. It was in the Big Bedroom that Mum had made sure that all sorts of things were kept—like that wooden cradle—though they no longer had any use. And Dad couldn’t say, now, ‘I don’t want that, I don’t want that thing up there.’ And he didn’t. Tom put the blanket on the top shelf of the wardrobe, with other old spare blankets, where he knew Vera would have put it.

  Then he carried Luke’s basket to the bonfire that regularly smouldered near the muckheap, and set light to it.

  Whatever Dad thought about Tom’s actions, he certainly never removed the blanket from the bedroom. He would even have had the option, on cold nights, of taking it from the wardrobe and spreading it over him. It was only a blanket, after all. In fact, Jack knows that there was one night, a cold, frosty one, when his father did do just this—the only instance that Jack was aware of. But he’s never told anyone.

  What would people have thought if he’d tried to point out that he’d never seen it spread on that bed before and that, really, it was a dog’s blanket? If he’d come up with the whole dog story? Someone might even have thought he was only pointing it out because he’d put the blanket there himself. So he’d done the right thing at the time—which in most cases, in Jack’s experience, was to shut up or say very little.

  It should be there right now, Jack thinks, on that bed behind him, under that gun. It would only be appropriate. But it was among all the other stuff (from farm machinery to teaspoons) that Ellie had ‘sorted out’—for auction, for sale, for ditching, for sending to charity (charity!), as part of what she called her clean sweep.

  ‘A clean sweep, Jacko, a clean sweep is what we need.’

  Well, it hadn’t included that gun.

  When Tom had finally let Jack in on his plan of making off from Jebb—only a few weeks before it was carried out—he’d said that it was on the day that he’d washed and ironed Luke’s blanket that he’d really made up his mind. It was the army for him—if he’d have to be patient for a while yet. The army could take him in. No more Jebb. By the time he told Jack, he’d long since found out all about it and got the forms that would take effect when he was eighteen. One day, a couple of months after Luke was shot—November and Remembrance Day were coming up—Dad had given him time off and a handful of grudging twenties (it was meant to square things between them perhaps) and told him to go to Barnstaple and get himself a suit. He couldn’t turn up in his school blazer any more. But Tom had actually got the bus to Exeter, bought a suit in an Oxfam shop, kept the cash left over, and walked into a recruitment office.

  So now he knew what he’d need to do.

  Maybe the army likes a man who not only knows how to shoot, but who knows the value of a blanket, who takes good care of a blanket. Blankets go with the army. Whenever Jack remembered Tom ironing that blanket and folding it up so carefully and holding it, as if it might have been Luke himself, across his arms, there was something about it he could never place. But now he can. It was as if he was handling a flag.

  20

  IT WASN’T LIKE Gatwick Airport. It was like Gatwick Airport. It was even a little like a city—approached through its own ancillary town.

  Lodged in Jack’s mind for some days had been the almost calming notion ‘airfield’, suggesting something grassy and forgotten, but this place, he realised at once, was anything but peripheral. This place in the centre of England was a hub, and—clearly—seriously and constantly busy. It had, he soon saw, its own terminal, check-in areas and car-rental facilities and the air had the blast and tang about it of ceaselessly refuelled, long-range activity. So that, though he’d never been anywhere like it before, he was reminded of nothing so much as that first passage, with Ellie, through Gatwick Airport.

  He felt, all over again, as if he might be about to enter for the first time that ominous opening called ‘Departures’ and then (after much nerve-wracking queuing and waiting) find himself strapped in the long, imprisoning tube of an aircraft, about to be hurled into the sky. Ellie had gripped his hand with sheer, brimming excitement—it was a bit like when she’d first yanked him up the stairs at Westcott Farmhouse—but he’d gripped hers, though trying not to show it, like some great big boy holding on to his mum. He’d been suddenly, acutely aware of the immense desirability of taking a holiday in a caravan.

  But the big, obvious difference about this place was that none of its manifest and elaborate purposefulness had to do with the taking of holidays.

  He found the Main Gate, then found Control of Entry—this was where he had to show his passport and other documents. He was spoken to at this point, so he thought, with a marked deference and ushered on as if he might have been a VIP. At the same time he had the feeling that his own reason for being here was just one, unusual reason in a general ungentle pressing of reasons. The place hadn’t shut down because of why he
was here.

  Temporary arrowed signs indicated ‘Ceremony of Repatriation’. Among other things he’d been sent by Major Richards was a ‘Visitor Pack’, with a map, directions and a check list. There was also an ‘Order of Ceremony’ and a ‘Provisional List of Those in Attendance’. It had all amounted to too much to carry on his person, and he’d shoved the bulk of it in the side pocket of his holdall, thinking even then that it was not unlike the wad of stuff you take with you, along with your passport, through Departures. But, of course, his business now was the seemingly much simpler (and usually paperwork-free) business for which, in fact, Jack had never entered an air terminal before: the business of Arrivals.

  I’m here to meet my brother.

  The sudden proximity of it, the realisation that he would have to do this incontestably personal thing, but in these heartlessly impersonal surroundings, hit him like some actual collision—even as he drove at a careful five miles an hour, peering hard through the windscreen for further signs.

  He found what seemed to be the appropriate car park. Despite his fear of being early, it was now nearly a quarter past eleven. The final miles of the journey had been along the slowest roads and he’d cut it, in the end (though he wasn’t entirely sorry), a little fine. The car park was almost full and he had to search for a space. People—some in remarkable costumes—were converging from it towards an ordinary glass-doored entrance nearby, but as if they might be approaching a cathedral. This clearly wasn’t some small event. But of course it wasn’t.

  After switching off the engine he lingered in the safety of the car, as though some desperate, final choice still remained open to him. Then he took several deep, involuntary, labouring breaths and with each one said aloud, hoarsely, ‘Tom.’ Then—he wasn’t sure if he said it aloud too, in a different tone, or simply thought the word: ‘Ellie. Ellie.’

  He eyed himself in the driving mirror, smoothed his hair, fingered his tie for the hundredth time. At Control of Entry he had already put on his jacket. Such documents as he thought he might still need were in its inside pockets. Official invitation. Order of Ceremony. Passport (you never knew). The letter from Babbages. In another pocket was his silenced mobile phone. But he was hardly going to activate it now.

  From his shirt pocket he took the medal, warm to his touch, and slipped it into the empty breast pocket of his jacket. He could not have said why. So it would be closer to Tom. Then he got out of the car and locked it.

  From then on Jack was like a puppet, a lost man, somehow steering himself or letting himself be steered through what lay before him. He might have used, if it had been one of his words, the word ‘autopilot’. He might have had the same sense of not being himself if he had been called to Buckingham Palace to be knighted by the Queen.

  Beyond the glass doors (a sign said ‘Ceremony Reception’) he was met—and ticked off a list—with an intenser version of the courtesy he’d received at Control of Entry, but with also, he couldn’t help but detect, a faint, disguised relief.

  I am Jack Luxton.

  There was now ahead of him, through another wide doorway, a throng—he was somehow sucked into it—that included a great many uniforms, some of them of an astonishingly resplendent and seemingly high-ranking nature. His plain suit felt instantly shabby. There were swords, sashes, gold braid—medals—epaulettes. It was fancy dress. Some of the uniforms were so besmothered and encrusted that Jack wondered if they didn’t mark the point where they mysteriously merged with the regalia of dukes and earls. And he’d previously noted, from the List of Those in Attendance, that he would indeed be in the presence of one viscount (whatever a viscount was) and more than one lord. It hadn’t given him any sense of privilege. It had scared him.

  Among the uniforms were a number of women in what seemed to Jack extravagant forms of dress and hat, as if this might be a wedding, and wearing also, in some cases, a kind of smile that wasn’t a smile at all and reminded him of zip fasteners. There were also at least two men wearing uniform but with long white lacy surplices on top.

  Among it all too, though somehow distinct from it, were two clusters of civilians (that word, like ‘citizen’, now also forced itself upon him) who seemed to Jack not so unlike himself, either in their clothing or in their air of dazed incomprehension. He instantly knew who they were and instinctively felt it would be good, though also difficult, to be close to them. The two clusters were quite large, both consisting of more than one generation, from grandparents down to small children. In one case there was a child so small that it needed to be carried in its mother’s arms. The mother looked not only weighed down, but as if she were standing on ground that had given way. All the children looked as if they were there by mistake.

  This was all suddenly quite terrible: these people, these floundering women (he vaguely grasped that the ones with the hats and smiles must be there to provide some token balance), these children, among all these uniforms. The two clusters seemed both to cling to themselves and to cling, separate as they were, to each other, and Jack realised that he was a third cluster. He was the third cluster, a cluster of one. He felt both a solidarity and a dreadful, shaming isolation, that his cluster was just him.

  But at the same time he’d glimpsed something else distinct from the gathering—standing at a distance from it, yet overshadowing it, overshadowing even these important human clusters. On the far side of the large room was a wall of mainly glass, such as you might find near a boarding gate in any airport building. And through the glass, beyond the jostle of heads and hats, could be seen, out on the tarmac, a single large plane. Around it was none of the usual clutter of baggage carts and service vehicles that surrounds a parked plane at an airport, and it was stationed with its nose pointing outwards so that, even from where he was, Jack could see the dark opening into its belly, beneath the tail, and the ramp leading down.

  When he’d first had to picture this event, Jack had vaguely supposed that everyone might watch the plane fly in, then unload. But of course it wouldn’t necessarily be like that. The plane had been there perhaps for some time, while preparations were made. It had landed in darkness, possibly. It had slipped over the English coast, perhaps, even as he’d slipped down Beacon Hill.

  Jack had known it would be there. But seeing it like this was nonetheless a shock. It was a big plane, for three coffins. It stood there, seemingly unattended, under a dappled, grey-and-white, autumnal sky in Oxfordshire. It must have stood not so long ago on a tarmac in Iraq.

  Major Richards was suddenly and mercifully at his side—barely recognised at first, since, though Jack had only ever seen him in uniform, he too now wore a sword and a sash, as if he might recently have undergone (though he hadn’t) some promotion. Even as this contact was made—an actual, quick touch on his elbow—Jack realised that Major Richards must have been keeping an eye out for him, not just to make sure he was there, but, as it now seemed, to compensate, so far as was possible, for Jack’s being just a cluster of one. He and Major Richards, if only temporarily and for the purposes of negotiating this gathering, would form a cluster of two.

  Major Richards already knew that Jack was the last of the Luxtons, the only one left. There was a whole story there perhaps, he’d thought, though it was not his business to enquire. But then, only yesterday, Jack had got in touch by phone to explain that, ‘as things had turned out’, he’d be coming alone. There was a whole story there too, no doubt, but Major Richards felt it would be even less appropriate to pursue the point. His own wife wasn’t here either (though why should she be? She wouldn’t want to be). He was only a major, after all.

  Major Richards said, ‘Journey okay?’ As if they might have just met for some sports fixture or were about to compare notes on the traffic on the A34. But Jack didn’t mind this at all.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  After this, Jack was not always sure what Major Richards was saying or what he was saying himself (now and then he opened his mouth and words came out),
but he understood that Major Richards was doing his duty, a special kind of duty. He was leading him around, introducing him briefly to people, leading him on again so that no single encounter became too much. He was being a cluster with him and getting him through this thing. And Jack realised that he, too, in spite of himself, was somehow stumblingly doing his duty, which was to be, unavoidably, introduced to people in extraordinary get-ups with extraordinary voices and have his hand shaken as if he himself had done something extraordinary, and have things said to him and over him (while he said, ‘Yes,’ or, ‘Yes, I am,’ or, ‘Yes, it is’) which were no doubt meant to make him feel good.

  And Major Richards was definitely being a special cluster with him, because those other clusters surely deserved Major Richards’s attention just as much as, if not more than, he did, though perhaps they didn’t necessarily want it and anyway they had each other. The point soon came, however, when Major Richards piloted Jack towards them. It was what Jack both wanted and dreaded, since what could he possibly say to these poor stricken people which could be of any use to them? Their grief was multiple, if also shared, and they’d see before them just this big, roughish man. Perhaps they’d think: Poor him, all on his own. But what they would also see, Jack felt certain, since it would surely and damningly be glaring out of him, was that he was here to meet his brother, because he had to, though he hadn’t seen his brother for almost thirteen years, hadn’t even written to him for twelve, hadn’t known where he was, and had even tried not to think about him most of the time.

  Despite this feeling of being a blatant culprit, Jack had nonetheless wanted to open up his big arms and embrace as many of these people as he could, as if he might have been some returned, lost member of their family. In his head he’d wanted to say, ‘It’s okay. I’m just me. It’s you lot I feel for.’ But what he actually said, over and over again, while shaking more hands and wondering what was showing in his gormless block of a face, was: ‘I’m Jack Luxton. Tom Luxton’s brother. I’m sorry, I’m very sorry. I’m Jack Luxton. I’m very sorry.’