Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift

  He ate his steak and chips, drained his second pint. Before ordering a third drink he went for a leak. It was one of those places out the back along a short exterior alleyway exposed to the elements. The strip of air was like a knife. The band of sky above showed a glittering star or two. Frost tomorrow, he thought, like a farmer crossing a yard. Frost—a white dusting on the hills, on the distant heights of Dartmoor. Ten-thirty at Marleston church. It was really happening. Babbages had said, ‘Leave it with us.’ Undertakers would say that. Leave it with us.

  It was pisshouse air, but it was the undeniable air of Devon. It was like the air of a cowshed. He splashed steamily against stained stainless steel. When he returned to the bar, Tom was sitting there in his place—saving it for him, so it seemed. He got up and vanished as soon as his brother entered. Jack went to the bar and ordered a large scotch. No pudding. His belly felt full and he thought the odds of getting a second smile from that girl were against him. He wanted not to spoil the first. The beer was working. He took his scotch slowly—still remarkably engrossed by the Daily Express—then left. It was barely half-past eight, but what else could he do? At Jebb, in the winter, they were sometimes all in bed at nine.

  The streets were empty and quiet, as if under curfew. He walked pointlessly, in the cold, around a corner or two, along a street or two, then back. But it was all right now, he judged. He wasn’t thinking about anything much. The girl’s smile. Boots, Martin’s newsagents, NatWest Bank. He walked with no sense of being shadowed or accompanied, but he felt that he himself, now, had become like some gliding ghost. He found his way to the Globe again and stepped in with a strong need not to be noticed. But the reception desk was empty. He made it to the stairs. There was a murmuring along the hallway in the hotel bar, the sound of a football-match commentary. He unlocked his room, switched on the lights and the clicking heater, though the radiator seemed to be functioning now. He was sure, as he entered, that Tom must have been lying on the bed, his soldier’s boots crossed over each other, his helmet beside him. But the dent in the bedspread was his own.

  It was not yet nine. He could phone Ellie. He could flick on his mobile phone at last and see if she’d left any message. He could call her. But what should he say? I’m in Okehampton, Ellie. So’s Tom.

  I’m in Okehampton, Ellie. Why aren’t you?

  He pulled back the bed covers so that the warmth of the heater might directly reach the sheets. It would have to be a frosty night. He saw the dip of Barton Field. But he didn’t want to think of anything. He undressed. He put the medal on the bedside table. Then after getting into bed—it was perhaps only a beery whim—he took it from the table and placed it under his pillow. Within minutes, curled beneath the covers, all the lights switched off and the heater, for good measure, left on low, he’d crashed, just as planned and wished, into unknowingness.

  But at some point later—he couldn’t tell how long he’d slept—he woke up in the darkness as if some quite distinct and alarming event or perhaps some terrible but instantly forgotten dream had roused him, his pulse racing, his head throbbing, his teeth grinding like millstones.

  And clutching a medal.

  26

  JACK HAD EVERY REASON to remember that last Remembrance Day.

  November, 1994. Just him and Dad. Almost a year since Tom had gone—his name no longer being mentioned, and Jack himself no longer suffering (though he had for months) any proxy punishment for his brother’s absence. A kind of muddled realignment, as if his father might have said now of Tom, in the way he might have spoken of any reconsidered investment, any shelved bit of farm planning: Well, we did the right thing there, Jack boy, didn’t we, not to press ahead with that. As if Tom’s departure had only revived the fortunes and workability of Jebb Farm. Which it very clearly hadn’t.

  But that anniversary had been coming up—the anniversary of Tom’s departure which was also, anyway, his birthday. And before that there was Remembrance Sunday, with its tradition of dogged observance in the Luxton family. And how would they deal with that now—now that Tom had gone off to be a soldier?

  Jack had left it to his father, and wouldn’t have been surprised if Michael had said (though it would have been the first such omission, so far as Jack knew, in the annals of the household): ‘In case you’re wondering, we’ll give it a miss this year.’ And even spat.

  But his father had said: ‘I hope you’ve got your suit ready for tomorrow.’ And then had said: ‘I got these when I was up at Leke Cross.’ And had handed over one of two paper poppies with their green plastic stalks.

  None of this, on the other hand, had been done with much animation, and Jack’s assessment had been that his father couldn’t lose face in front of the village. As Luxtons, they simply couldn’t neglect their annual duty. Michael’s later, unspoken but manifest decision not to enter the Crown for the customary drink—where, of course, he might get drawn into some discussion about his younger son’s whereabouts—seemed to go along with this. He would turn up for the ceremony, but he drew the line at anything else.

  Jack didn’t have then in his vocabulary (he doesn’t really now) the word ‘hypocrisy’. It would have sounded then to him like a word a vet might use—something else cows might go down with. As for getting his suit ready, he didn’t know what that could mean other than taking it off the hanger where it had hung all year long.

  But there was a seriousness, even a strange conscientiousness, about Michael’s behaviour on that Remembrance Day. He seemed to present himself in the farmhouse that morning more painstakingly, more brushed and scrubbed about his face and hands, than he’d ever done before. He fixed the poppy in his lapel not cursorily, but with a degree of care, as if it might have been a real flower and he was going to a wedding. He’d duly produced the medal and in plain view, like a conjuror beginning some solemn trick, slipped it into his breast pocket so that Jack would note it. On the other hand, after he’d examined Jack’s turnout—rather rigorously, and that too was untypical—he’d given a weird smirking expression, as if to say, ‘Well, this is a bloody joke, isn’t it?’

  Outside, the air was clear and still and sharp, the sky a blazing blue. At ten o’clock the frost had barely melted from the fields and the hills lay powdered with white. The woods still had their yellows and browns. On the oak tree in Barton Field you could have counted every motionless, bronze-gold, soon-to-drop leaf.

  It was a day as etched and distinct as Jack’s memories of it would be, a day of which you might have said, at its brilliant start, that it was a fine day for something, whatever that thing might be. Even a Remembrance Day ceremony would do. And when this fine day changed—when Michael, after the ceremony, made his evident decision not to hang around, not to enter the Crown and buy his older son a drink and so let his younger son’s name come up in conversation, it wasn’t the simple, if unprecedented, skulking-off it seemed.

  It had been for him, Jack, to say? His father was leaving it to him? But he hadn’t said it. Not at first, when the little group round the memorial dispersed, nor after they’d stood by Vera’s grave, nor all the way back, in that sparkling sunshine. They’d halted at the top of the track. Still he might have spoken. But he’d got out to unfasten the gate, then closed it behind his father as he’d driven through, then known it was definitely too late.

  He’d pulled back the bolt. He remembers it all now. Two ridiculous men in briefly donned suits, in a worse-for-wear Land Rover, its exhaust pipe juddering and still steaming in the cold air; his father’s uncustomarily combed head not turning as he re-entered Luxton territory, then stopped, with a loud yank on the hand brake, and waited for his son.

  He’d swung shut the gate. The throbbing Land Rover was like some stray beast he’d herded back in. The decision had been all his. Maybe. But he’d also thought, his hands on the cold wooden rail and then on the even colder, rasping spring-bolt: You bastard, for leaving it to me, you bastard for not doing the decent thing yourself.

  And thought it ever since,
gone over it repeatedly in his head. It was somewhere, even, in the terrible dream out of which he surfaced, years later, in a hotel room in Okehampton. The simple opening and closing of a gate. He’d swung it back, perhaps, with extra force. And if he’d grasped that decision as he’d grasped and swung that gate—for God’s sake, if he’d just bought his father a bloody pint—how different the consequences might have been.

  That same night—this is what Jack told those he had to tell, and he had to tell it several times and never without great difficulty—Michael left his bedroom and the Luxton farmhouse at some early hour of the morning, possibly around three o’clock. It was another cold, still, frosty night, the sort of night on which no one leaves a house or even the warmth of their bed without a very good reason.

  There’s a version of it all that Jack tells only himself, an over-and-over revisited version that allows more room for detail and for speculation, but it’s essentially the same version that he gave others and that for many years he’s, thankfully, had no reason to repeat. Though one of the reasons why he sits now at the window of Lookout Cottage with a loaded gun on the bed behind him is the suddenly renewed and imminent possibility (which he hopes absolutely to avoid) of having to repeat it.

  Michael had not been drinking, though drinking is not an uncommon accompaniment to events of this kind, which were themselves, around that time, becoming not so uncommon on small and hard-pressed dairy farms in the region. Not only were the Luxtons not great drinkers, but Michael had not even had a pint or two that lunchtime, which was one of the rare occasions when it might have been expected of him.

  Nor has Jack, at his window now, been drinking. He is entirely sober. It’s not a good thing to be drunk when handling a gun, in any circumstance.

  Michael left the farmhouse on a freezing November night, long before dawn, and Jack would speculate to himself (though others would speculate too) why his father did everything that he did, not just in the cold but in the dark. It was not like when Tom slipped out that night, needing to do so by stealth. Though perhaps it was. Tom had needed only to find the track and climb up it. Dad’s path was less marked. But Dad knew every inch of the farm and every bit of that field—Barton Field—backwards. He knew it better than Tom. He knew it blindfold.

  As Jack knew it too, and still knows it. He is perfectly able, still, without having been there for over ten years, and in the darkness, as it were, of his head, to retrace his father’s movements that night as if they were his own. And right now he has a peculiar and unavoidable interest in doing so.

  In any case, it was a clear night. There was starlight and there was a good chunk of moon, almost a full one, Jack had noted, which, by the time he noted it, had come up over the far hills. The question was never how, but why. Why in the cold—on such a night, and in those coldest hours before dawn? Though perhaps the answer to that was simple. It was dark and cold anyway. Michael Luxton was dark and cold inside. It was November. Winter, with the farm in ruins, stretched before them. Jack can see now the logic. Had it been springtime, with the first touch of warmth in the air, it’s conceivable that Michael wouldn’t have done what he did. But perhaps the truth is that if you’re ready, such considerations are irrelevant. You don’t consult, or much mind, the weather.

  It’s November now, although far from frosty. A strong, wet, gusting south-westerly.

  Perhaps the crucial thing was that it was the night after Remembrance Sunday.

  Jack, usually a sound sleeper, would puzzle over what it was that woke him. The shot, of course. But then if the shot had woken him, he later thought, he wouldn’t have heard it, he would have wondered, still, what it was that woke him. In Jack’s recounting of things—understandably confused—there was always a particular confusion about this point. He had heard the shot, yet the shot had woken him—as if in fact he was already awake to hear it, had known somehow beforehand that some dreadful thing was about to happen.

  He was sure he hadn’t heard his father leave—though his father must have made some noise and would have put on a light, downstairs at least, when he got the gun from the cabinet. There was a distinctive squeak to that cabinet door.

  Then again, with the windows shut, the shot wouldn’t have been so loud, not loud enough, necessarily, to wake a heavy sleeper. It would have carried in the frosty air, it’s true, and been accentuated by the silence of the night, and it would have come from just a little nearer than the shot that had signalled Luke’s death. But Jack had heard that from outside, in the yard, and he’d been expecting it.

  Jack has always asserted that he heard the shot. It either woke him or, by some mysterious triggering inside him, he was awake to hear it. But he heard it. And he knew at once both where it had come from and what it meant. It might as well have been, as Jack has sometimes put it, in language unusually expressive for him, the loudest shot in the world.

  And he has certainly thought what it might have been like if he hadn’t heard it, if he’d slept through it. And has certainly blamed himself, of course, again and again (a point he also asserted to others that morning), that he was not awake even earlier. If he hadn’t woken at all, he would have made the discovery only gradually. His dad might have been like a block of ice. Though could that have made it any worse?

  But Jack has never wondered—at least when sharing his recollection of events—why his father chose the exact spot and position that he did. Among all the possible spots. Or why he, Jack, once awake, knew exactly where to go. He could explain this very easily by saying—though you’d have to be a Luxton to understand, you’d have to have spent your life on that farm—that if he’d ever been pushed to such a thing himself (and here, in some of Jack’s earliest statements, his listeners, who’d included policemen and coroner’s officers, had felt compelled to avert their eyes while they acknowledged a certain force of feeling) he’d probably have chosen exactly the same spot.

  That oak, Jack might have added, was reckoned to be over five hundred years old. It had been there before the farmhouse.

  Michael had put on the same clothes that he might have put on, a little later that morning, to do the tasks that had to be done about the farm: a check shirt, a thick grey jumper, corduroy trousers, long thick socks to go in Wellington boots—all of this in addition to the long-john underwear which in winter he normally slept in anyway. The suit he’d briefly worn only hours before (this was later noted) was back in the depths of the wardrobe. Then he’d put on his cap and scarf and his donkey jacket with the torn quilt lining, and the olive-green wool mittens that stopped short at the knuckles. So you might have said that he’d certainly felt the cold, given that he’d dressed so thoroughly for it. But all this was the force of habit. These clothes were like his winter hide, which he merely slipped off overnight. And, of course, he did have a task to complete. He even needed to make sure his fingers wouldn’t go numb and useless on him.

  He took the gun from the cabinet and took two number-six cartridges and either loaded them straight away, with the kitchen light on to help him, or loaded them at the last minute, in the dark and the cold. At either point it would have been an action of some finality.

  The question would arise, which Jack, since he was asleep himself, could never answer, as to how much, if at all, Michael had slept that night: how, in short, he’d arrived at his course of action and its particular timing. He could hardly have set his alarm clock. Jack discovered no note, though he didn’t tell the investigating policemen that he didn’t find this surprising, and when asked by them if he’d noticed anything strange in his father’s behaviour on the preceding day, he’d said only that they’d gone together to attend the short eleven-o’clock remembrance service beside the memorial in Marleston, as they did every year, because of the Luxtons who were on it. One of the two policemen, the local constable, Bob Ireton, would have been able to corroborate this directly, as he’d attended the ceremony himself, in his uniform, in a sort of semi-official capacity. It wasn’t, therefore, a typical Sunday
morning—they didn’t put on suits every Sunday morning—but there was nothing strange about it, as PC Ireton would have wholly understood. It would have been strange if they hadn’t gone. The only things that were strange about it, Jack had affirmed, were that Tom wasn’t there (though the whole village knew why this was) and that they hadn’t gone for the usual drink in the Crown afterwards.

  And Jack had left it at that.

  There were two other peculiarities about that (already highly peculiar) night that he might have remarked on, setting aside the peculiarity of where the act occurred—which Jack, in his fashion, suggested wasn’t peculiar at all. One was that when he’d got up that night, suddenly galvanised into wakefulness and action, having somehow heard the shot and having somehow known what it meant, he’d naturally looked, even before hastily dressing and before (torch in hand) he left the farmhouse, into his father’s bedroom—into what had always been known as the Big Bedroom. And had noticed that the bedclothes, recently pulled back, had an extra blanket—a tartan one—spread over them. There was nothing special about an extra blanket on a cold night, so in that respect it was unworthy of mention. Only Jack knew that he’d never seen that blanket spread over his father’s bed before. Only Jack knew its history.

  And Jack never mentioned either—was it relevant?—that there was a dog buried a little further down that field.

  The second peculiarity—which Jack did point out, though the police might soon have discovered it for themselves—was that when Michael had dressed that night, he’d slipped a medal into the breast pocket of his frayed-at-the-collar check shirt. It was the same medal, of course, that Jack knew had been earlier that day in the pocket of his suit.