by Graham Swift
Then the hum of voices all around suddenly subsided and it became clear that they were now to proceed outside for the ceremony. For this, with the exception of a few uniformed ushers, the parties of relatives were given precedence and it seemed natural to Jack that he should find himself bringing up the rear. Just as it seemed natural—and reassuring—that outside, in the designated area, he should find himself standing at the edge and at the back of the civilian group. People would have to turn round if they wanted to see him.
He also became separated at this point from Major Richards. But not before Major Richards had said to him, confidentially, ‘Afterwards there’ll be … more.’ Then paused and looked carefully at Jack and said, ‘But I’d just slip away, if I were you.’ Jack wasn’t sure what Major Richards meant by ‘more’, or if Major Richards knew himself, but he felt that these words were perhaps more than Major Richards might have been required to say or even ought to have said (was he under military orders to say only certain things?). But he also felt he might have opened his arms to embrace Major Richards, too. He wondered if Tom, in his last days, in Iraq, had had such a commanding officer.
What followed seemed, at the time and later in Jack’s memory, to go on for an unendurable length, but also not to be nearly long enough, as if this procedure of under an hour was all there might ever be to stand for the whole life of his brother. Inside the building, despite the uniforms, the mood had been unregulated. Outside, everything ceded to military discipline. The air was cool but not cold, a little breezy, the sky overcast with only the weakest suggestion now and then of a break in the clouds. The tarmac was damp and puddled. Earlier in the morning, unlike in the Isle of Wight, there’d been rain. Perhaps it was raining now at the Lookout.
There was that reek of fuel and the sense, after that crowded room, of being on the edge of something huge and remorseless. As if, though this was Oxfordshire, war was being waged only just over the skyline. At ground level, the plane now looked vast, and, with its cavernous rear opening directed at the onlookers (though in the dull light and with the elevation of the fuselage you couldn’t quite see inside), it seemed to Jack that it might be there not to unload, but to gather everyone up. The climax of this event might be when they were all—the generals and earls, or whoever they were, the ladies in hats, the white-frocked padres and the black-clad mourning families—scooped up into the big, dark hold and taken off to Iraq.
The high-rank uniforms and their entourage had formed up separately from the relatives’ group, by a low platform which Jack guessed would be for saluting. Some of the officers detached themselves for particular duties. Jack lost sight of Major Richards. To the left of the relatives’ party, at a little distance, three hearses (this was both a relief to see and utterly distressing) were drawn up in a row facing away from the tarmac, their rear hatches raised in a manner that imitated the solitary aircraft.
His hearse—Tom’s hearse—was there. Tom’s transport was waiting. That ‘side of things’, Major Richards had already whispered to him, was in place, there was nothing Jack needed to do. All the same, actually to see the hearses was heart-stopping, and Jack felt he should at some point at least make contact with the driver. He should slip him a twenty. Would twenty be enough?
On one of his earlier phone calls, Major Richards had delicately explained that normally on these occasions there would be no flowers. These occasions weren’t funerals in themselves and the army didn’t deal in flowers. But Jack could see now, placed in readiness beside two of the hearses, a small, defiant offering—a cluster’s worth—of flowers. He felt a moment’s abject misery and humiliation (and sympathy for his upstaged hearse driver). He’d have had to peer very hard indeed to see the single wreath he’d ordered (though he’d specified large) to await the coffin’s eventual arrival in Marleston.
The padres in their fluttering surplices had walked out to the plane. Everyone was straining to see inside it. Though everyone knew. There was now a general barking of orders. Three detachments of six bare-headed soldiers marched out towards the plane, each led by a bare-headed officer. Other officers, with caps on, stood to attention near the ramp leading into the plane and now and then performed strange gestures with their swords. Positioned on the tarmac, in red tunics and white-and-gold helmets, was a small-scale version of a military band.
The first party of bearers moved into the plane. Then a bugle blew as the first coffin, completely wrapped in a Union Jack, was carried off. Jack felt there was a sort of silent gasp, an invisible but detectable flinching among the relatives’ group. He’d been told, and it was in the Order of Ceremony, that Tom’s coffin would be the last. He didn’t know why, and hadn’t asked, and didn’t know if it was in any way significant or even constituted an honour, but he felt, now, that the two preceding coffins would prepare him.
The other two soldiers were called Pickering and Fuller. Before this event and throughout its duration it never quite got home to Jack that these men, having been privates, would have been in his brother’s charge. He had among the relatives a technical, proxy seniority. But he felt like the lowest of the low.
The bearers stood for a moment at the foot of the ramp, close to the padres, while the officer for the bearer party took his place behind the coffin. Then a single muffled bass drum began to beat the rhythm of the slow march, followed by a muted growling of brass instruments, and the coffin was carried along a carefully planned route so that it passed in front of the heavyweight uniforms on the platform—all standing at a salute—then in front of the civilian party, before delivery to its hearse.
When the drum began, Jack felt it was being struck inside his chest, and though he was required to do nothing more than stand and look, he couldn’t prevent his arms going stiff at his sides, the thumbs pointing downwards, he couldn’t prevent himself lifting his chin and pulling back his shoulders and coming to an instinctive, irresistible attention. This he did for all three coffins. And the fact was they were all the same. They were, all three, just Union-Jacked boxes borne on six shoulders and looked interchangeable. This was both bewildering and unexpectedly consoling. Each coffin received an equal and undiscriminating fullness of attention, as if there might have been a bit of each man in each box.
But Tom’s coffin, Jack realised, had a genuine distinction in being last. There was nothing else now, in reserve, on which the onlookers might unload and exhaust their emotion. It was the final chance for everyone to focus their feelings. It was also, specifically, why Jack was here.
The bugle sounded again, for Tom’s coffin. It was a recognisable bugle call, though Jack couldn’t think of its name: Reveille. When it sounded, some second person inside him, it seemed, gave a little inner cry. He hoped that none of the group in front would now turn and give him, however well intended, sympathetic looks. None did. They were looking at Tom. They were thinking of Tom for him.
The drum was pounded again. In the minutes that followed, almost every remembered moment he’d spent with Tom seemed to flow through him in a way he couldn’t have predicted, willed or even wished. Yet he was also aware of all the time they’d not spent together. He thought of the letters he’d written to Tom, with great difficulty, and the letters he’d never written. And the letters he’d never got back. He thought of the things that had and hadn’t passed between them and that, perhaps, didn’t matter now. The things that Tom had never known and the things that he, Jack, had never known. He had gone into caravans. Tom had gone into battle.
He thought of the last time he’d stood like this—though it wasn’t like this at all—at his own father’s funeral, when Tom wasn’t there. The whole village saw that Tom wasn’t there. But Tom, everyone knew by then, was in the army. He thought of how he would have to stand there again, very soon—he would have to go through it all again. He thought of those Remembrance Days. Marleston churchyard. The grey and yellow lichen on the memorial, the rasp of leaves. He thought of how if he was required, following this ceremony, to make a speech, he would s
ay how Tom, his little brother Tom, had always wanted to be a soldier, ever since he’d learnt about his two great-uncles who’d died in the First World War and how one of them had won the DCM. Or some such crap. He’d say it. Though thank God that he didn’t have to make a speech. How could he, Jack, ever make a speech? How could anyone ever make a speech? But he’d brought that medal with him. He couldn’t say why. He could hold it up, for effect, in his speech. He touched it now in his breast pocket.
He thought of the bar in the Crown. Jimmy Merrick in a suit. He thought, or tried to think, as he’d tried to think many times before now, of Tom’s last moments, but he couldn’t think of them, couldn’t imagine them, his mind flicked away. He thought, as the coffin passed directly in front of him and he wanted to touch it, to be one of the six bare-headed soldiers or somehow all of them: what would his mum think—his and Tom’s mum—to see both of them now?
When all three coffins had been transferred to their hearses a tense silence remained. This was, Jack understood, a pre-arranged part of the proceedings (it was like those Remembrance Days), but it was also like a natural, inevitable response. How could this thing simply end? After delivering the coffins, the parties of bearers had formed up, each in two ranks with their officers before them, beyond the hearses, at an angle to them, like some third, flanking group of onlookers. Then a separate detachment of soldiers, with rifles, had formed up in front of the hearses.
By now Jack had noticed that the three drivers of the hearses were not (of course) alone, each had—what would you call them?—a co-driver. It was a mark of respect and standard practice. No man should be asked to drive a corpse across the country alone. Alone, as it were. But Jack had imagined Tom’s hearse having a solitary driver because he’d imagined that driver being himself. Each pair of drivers stood now, erect and still, by the rear of each hearse. Had they been instructed to do this? Was it regular undertaker’s training?
Major Richards had explained that there would be rifle shots—it was a tradition of the regiment and had been done in the Peninsula (an old foreign war). But, even with their preparatory commands and drill, the shots came like jolts. The relatives again seemed to buckle, as if they were being fired at themselves. The noise of the shots rattled round the sky—even this big wide sky—as if it couldn’t find a way out, the echo of the last shots still trying to flee as the next were fired.
Then it was over. The whole thing was, as it were, stood at ease and dismissed. The army had discharged its obligations and returned these three soldiers to their civilian claimants. Repatriation was complete.
Even now, for a moment, the civilian group seemed not to want to move. Then it began an impetuous, almost mutinous surge towards the hearses. Having seen, till this point, only the backs of heads, Jack noticed now several tear-stained, choked and ravaged faces. He saw handkerchiefs. He also noticed several cameras being fumblingly produced and held up. He thought of Major Richards’s words. If I were you. But he felt like scum for even imagining he might now simply peel away. He was caught in the general drift. And there were the hearse drivers to acknowledge.
But none of those things, Jack knew, was what impelled him. He wanted to be near the coffin, as near as he could get. He wanted to touch it. The previously solemn and restrained gathering of relatives was now milling round the three hearses like visitors let into some show. The drivers stood back like mere attendants. So too did all the military personnel. It seemed that this was one part of the programme that had not been rigorously planned. The cameras flashed and clicked. The names—names and nicknames—of the other two soldiers were suddenly being called, like strange animal cries. Jack felt he could not open his mouth now to say the word ‘Tom’—he had done the right thing, perhaps, to say it in the car in the car park—but he was saying it inside. He felt like scum, nonetheless, because all the attention was on the other two hearses, all the name-calling was directed at them. Because they had those tributes of flowers. Because his drivers, the pair of them, must surely be ashamed to be driving his hearse, to have got this job of the three.
He was Jack Luxton, Corporal Luxton’s brother—people knew by now—and he stuck out plainly with his height and his size, but he would surely go down in people’s memories, Jack thought later, as the mysterious man who simply came and went all by himself, the mysterious man who’d stood at the back, but had gone up afterwards to the hearse where his brother’s coffin lay, to the open rear door, and simply bent and touched the coffin—no, held it, clung to it, for several long, gluing seconds, gripped the two wooden corners nearest to him with his big thick hands as if he might never let go.
Many of those around him saw him do this. Just stand there like that, attached to the coffin. Then when they looked for him again a little later—he’d disappeared.
The two drivers, realising who he must be, had simply stepped aside. The flag had been removed. There was just the bare wood, with a brass plate (and no garlands). This was different from the other two coffins—and everyone would notice and remember this too—and was all, in fact, according to Jack’s instructions. Major Richards had explained on the phone that, in this exceptional instance (since the hearses weren’t provided by the army), the flags would be either retained or, according to the bereaved’s wishes, removed and folded by the bearers and presented to the mourning parties. Major Richards hadn’t pushed it either way, but Jack had felt again that it was as if he’d been told he was free to step down, though the done thing was not to move.
But Jack had said—it had just come out, it was one of his occasional, forceful blurtings—that he didn’t want the flag. If it was his say-so, then he was saying so. He didn’t want it left on the coffin, and he didn’t want it himself. He said—and this had just come out too—that he wanted it given to the ‘battalion’. He’d used Major Richards’s word. He wanted the battalion to have it.
And what would he have done with it? Where would he have put it? They didn’t have a flagpole, he thought once again. But, anyway, he didn’t want the present of any flag. Major Richards, down the phone, had been silent for a while, then had said (with a detectable but awkward sigh of relief), ‘That’s—a fine gesture, Mr Luxton. But, if you should change your mind …’
He wrenched his hands from the coffin, from its bare wood, then turned to the two drivers. He was surprised by the sudden outward authority and decisiveness he seemed now to have acquired. Had it come from the coffin? He shook the drivers’ hands. He said, ‘I am Tom Luxton’s brother, Jack Luxton. I am very grateful.’ It seemed oddly like the reverse of the hand-shaking he’d done a little while ago inside the building. It seemed as if he were some senior, elevated dignitary acknowledging these two black-clad drivers in their great loss. He felt a sudden pity, but also an admiration, even a strange envy for these men who would have to drive his brother’s body, sitting with it behind them, for some hundred and fifty miles. He had a sudden sense too of having imposed on them outrageously and of having ducked out of what should have been his own task. Had it been possible—had the coffin fitted—he might have offered to lower the back seats in the Cherokee and take over their job.
But they’d looked at him as if they might have saluted. They said, ‘Sir,’ and ‘Mr Luxton.’ He wanted to gather these men, too, into his arms. But, instead, he took his wallet from his back pocket, opened it and felt the edges of the notes inside. He didn’t care if this were the right thing or not. And he didn’t care that it would be forty now, for the two of them, not twenty. When would this ever happen again? He’d had no idea what his incidental expenses might be for this extraordinary journey, but he’d drawn out a good wad of cash just in case. It was only money that would have been spent in St Lucia.
He handed them each a twenty. They might have made some small, token gesture of protest, but they said, ‘Thank you, sir … Thank you, sir,’ as if he’d pinned a medal on each of them. And he had a medal too.
‘Will I—see you tomorrow?’ he said.
‘All Sain
ts’, Marleston. Ten-thirty,’ one of them quickly said. ‘We’ll be two of the bearers.’
He would be a bearer himself, he knew this, along with five undertaker’s men (Babbages had arranged it)—not having anyone else he could easily ask or choose. Well, Jack thought now, three of the party had been shown how the thing could be done. Should he make that joke? Would they all expect another twenty tomorrow? That would be a hundred all round, on top of this forty.
‘It will be an honour, Mr Luxton,’ one of them said. It was what they always said, perhaps, what undertakers were trained to say, but it occurred suddenly to Jack that these men might actually have volunteered for this job. They’d never done anything like it before. Nor had Jack. It seemed that both of them were a little awed by what they’d witnessed. It couldn’t surely be that they were in awe of him, Jack, for being the brother of a man who’d died in the service of his country. Couldn’t they see he felt like scum?
‘I’m Dave,’ one of them said. ‘Derek,’ the other said.
One was thinnish and sandy-haired, one thick-set and dark. There was no way they could have been taken for brothers. He shook their hands again. They seemed to want it.
‘I’m Jack, I’m Jack.’ They already knew this, he’d already said it, but he said it again. ‘Call me Jack. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’
Then he simply turned away. Walked—sloped, slunk away. He could do nothing else, was good for nothing else. He’d kept in mind where the car was and had spotted already how he could get to it without having to go through any door. He could cut across a stretch of grass, then slip behind the corner of the building from which they’d all recently emerged.
