by Graham Swift
Why, later, the medal was in the pocket of his shirt was anyone’s guess, but it would have meant—though Jack didn’t go into this in his statement—that he must have been conscious of it during the intervening hours, and perhaps never returned it to its silk-lined box. He might have put it, for example, on his bedside table when he went to bed and before he slept, if he did sleep, that night. Perhaps—though this was a thought that would not crystallise in Jack’s mind till many years later—he might even have clutched it in his hand.
These were considerations that Jack felt the police and, later, the coroner need not be interested in. Any more than they need be interested in the fact that Vera had died (and hers wasn’t a quick death) in that same big bed with a tartan blanket now lying on it. Or that he himself had been born and, in all probability, conceived in it.
But the fact was that Michael had died wearing, so to speak, the DCM.
When the police had asked Jack how he’d discovered this so soon—after all, his father had been wearing two layers of thick clothing over his shirt, and anyway Jack was having to confront much else—Jack had said that he’d slipped his hand inside his father’s jacket to feel if his heart was still beating. The policemen had looked at Jack. They might have said, if they’d had no regard for his feelings, something like: ‘He’d just shot his brains out.’ Jack had nonetheless insisted, with a certain dazed defiance, that he’d wanted to feel his father’s heart, he’d wanted to put his hand over it. That had been his reaction. He didn’t say that he’d wanted to feel not so much a beating heart—which would have been highly unlikely—but just if there was any last living warmth left on that cold night, beneath the old grey jumper, in his father’s body.
But he said that he’d felt something hard there. Those were his actual words: he’d felt ‘something hard there’.
When Jack said these things the two policemen—Ireton and a Detective Sergeant Hunt—had looked away. Jack was clearly in a state of great distress and shock. God knows what state he would have been in when he actually came upon the body. Bob Ireton knew Jack Luxton to be a pretty impervious, slow-tempered sort. He was looking now, for Jack, not a little wild-eyed. Bob had been at the same primary and secondary schools as Jack. He’d known, from its beginning, about Jack and Ellie Merrick—but then so did the whole village. Save for Ellie and his recently absconded brother (and Tom, as Bob would later observe, was not to reappear for the funeral), Jack was pretty much alone now in the world.
Bob Ireton was basically anxious—he couldn’t speak for his plainclothes superior—to get this whole dreadful mess cleared up as quickly as possible and spare its solitary survivor any further needless torture. Poor man. Poor men. Both. Bob’s view of the matter—again, he couldn’t speak for his colleague—was as straightforward as it was considerate. Michael Luxton had killed himself with a shotgun. His son had discovered the fact and duly reported it to the authorities. In a little while from now, though there’d be a delay for an inquest, poor Jack would have to stand again in that suit he rarely wore, but had worn, as it happened, only the day before the death, beside his father’s grave.
This was not the first time, in fact, that Constable Ireton had been required to attend the scene after the suicide of a farmer. Following the cattle disease, there had been this gradual, much smaller yet even more dismaying epidemic. One or two hanged themselves from a beam in a barn (sometimes watched by munching cattle), others chose a shotgun. A shotgun was marginally more upsetting. Bob frankly didn’t attach much weight to the odd circumstantial details that sometimes went with a suicide, the strange things that might precede it, the strange things that might (it was not a good word) trigger it. It was a pretty extreme bit of behaviour anyway. Who could say what you (but that was not a good line of thinking and anyway not professional) might do?
But, sadly, he was not unused to the thing itself, no longer even surprised by it. The underlying causes were fairly obvious—look around. He was both glad and a little guilty to be a policeman, drawing his steady policeman’s pay, while farmers all around him were going under. He should really have been like some odd man out within the community—though a policeman, a sort of outlaw—a stay-at-home version of Tom Luxton joining the army. Yet now his services were peculiarly called upon. He’d known that the Luxton farm, especially after Tom had withdrawn his labour, was near the limit. None of it was surprising, and the best thing was to clear it up as tidily as possible.
Had he been told when he became a policeman that he’d one day be officiating over all the wretched consequences of a so-called mad-cow disease, he’d have said that such an idea was itself mad. He hadn’t supposed—though he hadn’t sought a quiet life and there was such a thing as rural crime—that he’d become one day a sort of superintendent of misery. He’d never be (nor would DS Hunt, he reckoned) any other sort of superintendent.
And all this was years before the foot-and-mouth (by which time he was, at least, a sergeant). More dead cattle —great crackling heaps of them. And a few more deaths among the ‘farming fraternity’. Was it Jack Luxton who’d once passed on to him that phrase?
Poor men. Poor beasts. Both.
Michael crossed the yard and, skirting the Small Barn where the pick-up and the Land Rover and the spreader were housed, entered Barton Field by the top gate. Barton Field, only six acres and a roughly shaped strip of land, buckling and widening as it descended, was the nearest field to the farmhouse, its upper, narrow end meeting the shelf in the hillside where the farm buildings stood. Its challenging contours made it the least manageable field at Jebb, but it was the ‘home’ field of the farm and formed its immediate prospect. At the top, at its steepest, it bulged prominently, turning, further down, into a gentler scoop, so that its flat lower end was hidden from even the upper windows of the farmhouse. But this only enhanced the view. From the house you looked, over the fall of the land, to the woods in the valley and to the hills beyond, but principally took in—perfectly placed between foreground and background—the broad top third or so of the big single oak that stood near the middle of the field where its slope levelled off. The oak’s massive trunk could not be seen, nor the immense, spreading roots which had risen above the surrounding soil. But between these roots, where the grass had given up, were small hollows of that reddish earth that Jack would notice on the last stages of a strange, westbound journey. The roots themselves were thick and ridged enough to form little ledges or seats, for a sheep or a man.
The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture—its only value to provide shade for the livestock—but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as well as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor—especially if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer’s day—could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic.
None of these thoughts had particularly occurred to Michael or to Jack (or, when he was there, to Tom). They were so used to the tree straddling their view that they could, for most of the time, not really notice it. Nonetheless, it was straight to this tree that Michael walked on an icy November night, carrying a gun. Or as straight as the steep slope allowed.
Exact evidence of his path was left by the tracks in the frost that Jack, only a little later, picked up by the light of his torch. At one spot it was clear that his father had slipped and slid for a yard or more on his arse. It was very strange for Jack to think of this minor mishap at such a moment—of his father perhaps swearing under his breath at it and suffering its jolting indignity. As it was strange to think that this slip might not have been a simple slip at all, given that his father was carrying at the time a possibly already loaded and clo
sed gun. There might have been a much nastier accident.
Had the frost not begun to melt—unlike the previous morning—even before daybreak, it would have left a very clear record of the activity in Barton Field that night: Michael’s tracks, with that slip, going in one direction, and Jack’s going, separately, in both directions (and, despite the great agitation he was in, without a single slip). But all of them converging on the oak tree.
In his statements Jack had voluntarily made the point that when he’d spotted his father’s tracks he’d both followed and avoided them, even carefully skirting round the broad mark where the slip had occurred. He had instinctively not walked through them, not out of forensic considerations, but because, as he failed really to convey clearly but as his listeners may have grasped, they were the last footsteps his father had taken.
Of course, this meant that the descending pair of tracks might have given the appearance that the two men had walked down together. There was certainly only one set of ascending tracks. But all this was neither here nor there, since by dawn and even by the time Jack made his phone call—he’d delayed the call because of the state he was in, but also because he knew not much could practicably be done while it was still dark—a change in the weather occurred. A breeze got up, bringing in cloud cover, and the air warmed appreciably.
By the time the two policemen arrived and descended the field with Jack—who was clearly dreading what he would have to see in daylight—the sharp night had turned into a grey, gusty morning. The top branches of the oak tree made a continual whirring above them, and dislodged leaves spun down. The frost had gone. There was even a touch of drizzle. So the policemen perhaps wondered why Jack had needed to speak about the tracks he’d seen by torchlight that were no longer there—unless, of course, it was simply because he couldn’t help reliving, and reliving again, every detail. Both officers were not unused to this. It was strange how the silent ones could suddenly become the gushers, while the regular gabblers could lose their voices.
But what both officers had mostly thought was: What must it have been like, to shine a torch on that?
The frost was there, anyway, when Jack first walked down, and would have sufficiently reflected the moonlight to make the torch barely necessary. The dark mass of the oak tree, against the ghostly silver of the field and the woods beyond, would have been visible of itself, Jack knew, to his father, who’d carried no torch. Perhaps his father had calculated even this, had waited for the moon to rise and light him. He would have been able to take a final look around. He would have been able, when it came to things closer to hand, to make out the roots under the tree and the gun he was holding: its dull metal glint and his own fingers on it.
Michael sat down at the foot of the oak. There was a sort of bowl in one of the thickest roots, close up to the trunk, which was ideal for this. He took his donkey jacket off first, despite the cold, the better perhaps to manipulate the gun, but also to spread under him before he sat. This precaution was as strange as it was natural: he’d wanted to spare his arse, already damp maybe, from any chilly hardness. It was like that extra blanket on the bed, though Jack didn’t say this. Nor did Jack express to anyone his private view that his father would have removed his jacket so as to be better able to feel, through his remaining layers, the wrinkled bark and supporting, towering, centuries-old solidity of the tree against his back.
Michael had removed his cap as well, as if out of respect for something. He would have pressed the back of his head, too, against the trunk and its slight inward slope. This might have been mechanically necessary, but Jack had no doubt either, though he didn’t say it (wasn’t it plain—why had Michael gone to this spot at all?), that this was out of the same dominant motive. His father had simply wanted to press his head, his skull and his back hard against that oak tree and feel it pushing back. Spine against spine.
Jack knew—he knew it from climbing up the track in winter to get the school bus—that when you shine a torch at night it lights your way but makes the surrounding darkness several times darker. When he arrived beneath the tree he partly wished he hadn’t brought a torch. It made the scene look like something horribly staged just to be lit up and it made everything else, despite the moonlight, pitch-black. Though Jack was technically prepared for what he would find, this had not made the discovery any less shocking, and how to describe what he’d felt at this moment was beyond him. Though he’d walked downhill—perhaps it was more of a scramble—he was panting for breath and his heart was banging inside him. Perhaps it was because of this that he’d reached out to feel for his father’s heart, as if while one heart was beating so violently another could surely not be lifeless. To touch his father’s breast certainly made more sense, in any case, than to touch any part of what was left of his head.
Thus he’d felt the small, hard object in his father’s shirt pocket and known exactly what it was. He didn’t dare remove it. Why should he have removed it? He was overcome by conflicting instincts, to touch and not to touch. In its recoil, the gun had jumped from between his father’s lips and from his fingers so that its double barrel lay now aimed at his waist. Even before stooping to feel his father’s chest, Jack had automatically removed the gun, as if Michael was still in danger.
This was all wrong perhaps, he should have touched nothing, but it was what he did. He hadn’t known if his father had loaded—or used—both barrels or if there was still a cartridge in place. He didn’t know if he should have broken open the gun to check. Or indeed if he should have carried the gun back with him to the safety (though that was a strange idea) of the farmhouse. Normal procedure had been suspended. You didn’t ordinarily leave a gun, especially one that might still be loaded, in the middle of a field, even if it was the small hours of the night. You didn’t normally leave your father in a similar position. In any case, he moved the gun from where it had fallen and placed it to one side in a cleft between the roots. Then, after feeling his father’s inert and medalled chest, he just stood—he couldn’t have said for how long—over the body.
He couldn’t have described his feelings at this time, but anger must have been part of them—a very large part of them—since, though this had no place at all in his subsequent relation of events, what he began to say, aloud and more than once in the middle of a dark field to his dead father, was: ‘You bastard. You bastard.’ Even as he shone a torch on his father’s shattered features: ‘You bastard.’ He would never remember how many times he said it, he wasn’t counting, but he couldn’t stop saying it. ‘You bastard. You bastard.’
It was the wrong word, perhaps, since it’s not a word you use of your father or of any father, it’s a word that works in the other direction, but he kept saying it, and the more he said it, the more it seemed not just an angry word but a useful, even encouraging word in the circumstances—the sort of word you might use to someone who wasn’t dead but just in a precarious situation, to help them pull through it. ‘You bastard.’ It kept coming to his mouth like a chant or some regular convulsion, like the only word he might ever say again.
He was saying it when, after standing for however long it was, he actually sat down beside his father, his own back against the tree—it was easily broad enough—and wondered if he shouldn’t stay there with him, freezing as it was, at least until dawn, or if he should take the donkey jacket from under him and wrap it round him, or—since that would have its problems—if he shouldn’t take off his own jacket and wrap it round him. ‘You bastard. You bastard.’ He was saying it when he wondered whether to pick up the gun or leave it where it was. He was saying it, at intervals, when after deciding to leave the gun—it seemed to belong there—he made the climb back up the steepening field to the farmhouse, his breath coming like the strokes of a saw through his chest: ‘You bastard.’ He was saying it as the farmhouse and the lights he’d left on rose monstrously over the hump of the field above him, and as he passed by the Small Barn into the yard. By now it had become like some hoarsely uttered password
. ‘You bastard.’
He continued to say it during the period between regaining the farmhouse and making the call he knew he would have to make, when he had no clear sense of the passage of time and when he continually wavered between the thought of making the call, which would make things final and definite, and the thought that he should go back down to the oak tree, because what had happened perhaps might not really have happened at all. Or because he should just be there with his father. Up here, in the farmhouse, he’d already deserted him. ‘You bastard.’
He said it as he wondered whether he should wash off the muck that had got on his hands or whether he should leave it there for all of time to erase or ingrain. ‘You bastard.’ And he’d got so rhythmically used to saying it, that when he finally made the call and was able to get out that other word, ‘Police’, it’s not inconceivable that he might have said, ‘You bastard,’ too, into the phone.
He didn’t mention his repeated utterance of this phrase to Bob Ireton and his senior companion (or to anyone else), nor did he mention that during the preceding day and evening, following the Remembrance Day gathering, he had also uttered the phrase, if not aloud, but inside himself or perhaps under his breath. But the fact that he’d vented it, one way or the other, so much beforehand somehow enabled Jack to regain a degree of composure—it was his strange way, even, of haranguing himself—and to give the detailed and relatively focussed account of events that he gave. All of which, together with the actual evidence lying there in Barton Field, added up to the overwhelming conclusion, to be endorsed by the inquest, that Michael Luxton had taken his own life.
Neither policeman felt it was his place to comment on the strangenesses, so far as they knew them, of Jack’s behaviour—who wouldn’t behave strangely?—or on his technically inappropriate actions. He shouldn’t have touched the body or even have moved the gun. But this was his own father lying there. Jack was hardly some meddling third party. The poor man had done what he did and could—when, quite possibly, he might have slept through the whole incident. And he was plainly mortified by the fact that, had he been awake just a little earlier, he might have prevented all of it from happening.
