Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift

  One didn’t have to search far for a motive. Michael Luxton was like others. The peculiar circumstances of Remembrance Day seemed tragically to have precipitated something. Michael had either gone to bed with the not quite complete intention of acting, or he’d woken in the dead of night to form that soon-executed intention.

  Detective Sergeant Hunt gave permission for the body to be moved by the ambulance men. It was a laborious and upsetting job transporting it up the steep field. The gun and Michael’s donkey jacket and cap were taken separately as evidence, to be returned later. Likewise everything in Michael’s pockets, including the medal.

  Thus it would have been possible for the two policemen, out of curiosity as much as anything, to inspect the medal and see what was written on its reverse. It had been one of Michael’s infrequent, sombre-faced, hard to gauge jokes that the medal had been a good one to give a farmer’s boy, since what it said on the back was ‘For Distinguished Conduct in the Field’.

  DS Hunt had thought it right, for safety reasons, to examine the gun straight away. It was unlikely that there was a cartridge still in there (why should Michael have done things by halves?) and it was confirmed that both barrels had been recently (and it must have been simultaneously) discharged and that the gun was now unloaded. Sergeant Hunt also asked Bob, after the ambulance had departed, if—while he himself remained with Jack at the farmhouse—he couldn’t find a bucket or two of water and (it would be a grim chore, he knew) carry them down to the oak and give things a slooshing down. It would be a decency. This was technically interfering with evidence too, but DS Hunt felt he had seen and noted carefully all the evidence necessary, and it would be a sort of kindness. PC Ireton felt likewise.

  It was unfortunate in one sense, but fortunate in another, that Jack couldn’t help overhearing this, and so offered to drive them all down in the pick-up with a jerry can of water, buckets and even a stiff-bristled yard brush. He appeared in need of things to do, no matter how gruesome. Bob had said that no, that wouldn’t be necessary, but it might help if he could borrow the pick-up and be told where the jerry can was.

  Jack was also manifestly and increasingly worried about his livestock and about several regular morning tasks not attended to. He seemed, in fact, to have a gathering sense that the farm was about to disintegrate around him—which had only been Michael’s apparently no longer tolerable situation. But all this was duly taken care of. Both Constable Ireton and DS Hunt had the forethought to appreciate that a farm, even in extraordinary circumstances, cannot simply shut down. So there had been some necessary, discreet communications and a prevailing upon a horrified but quickly rallying community spirit. It wouldn’t have been long anyway before word spread around.

  It certainly wasn’t long before a battered Land Rover containing Jimmy and Ellie Merrick, dressed as for a hard-working day on their own farm, pulled up in the Jebb yard. This was the first time Jack had seen such a thing. But then he’d seen other things today he’d never seen before. Jimmy and Ellie had come the short way—by the route with which Jack was very familiar—across the fields, through the boundary gate and over Ridge Field, which adjoined Barton Field. The direct route would then have been along the top of Ridge Field, to enter the Jebb yard close to the Big Barn, but Jimmy hadn’t hesitated to drive along the bottom of Ridge Field and then, despite slipping wheels, slowly up by the low hedge alongside Barton Field, so getting a good view down across the dip to the oak tree. The body was still there, though about to be moved, and mostly and perhaps mercifully hidden behind the tree trunk. Jimmy and Ellie could only really make out two very still Wellington boots.

  When the Land Rover arrived in the yard it was impossible, particularly for the two policemen, to read precisely the expression on old Merrick’s face. It had a gnome-like quality that could have meant anything—triumph or shock or perhaps a recent quick but significant intake of alcohol. In any case, he’d stuck his head out of the window and explained to DS Hunt (they knew Bob Ireton) that they were neighbours, they were the Merricks, who were long and good old neighbours of the Luxtons, and they were here to help.

  Ellie, in contrast, had been silent and had looked, for a while, rather white. But she soon began to make herself useful. In fact she made her busy presence felt around Jebb Farm that day as if she herself might have owned it. It even looked at one point as though she might have been preparing to stay the night, which would have been another first. Jimmy might actually have conceded it. But just when it had begun to seem a distinct possibility, Mrs Warburton, with cardboard boxes of provisions she thought appropriate, drove over from Leke Hill Cross. She was older now, but she had her memories of Jebb Farmhouse and of when she’d been of vital assistance before. And, like some woman picking over a battlefield, she herself voiced the question that, above that still-insistent chorus of ‘You bastard’, was also tolling through Jack’s head.

  ‘My God, what would your poor mother have thought?’

  27

  JACK PULLED BACK the curtains—warily, as if expecting horrors—on the town of Okehampton. Sleep hadn’t entirely deserted him, but he’d passed a dreadful, seesawing night, uncertain of what was truth or dream. Surely, he’d fleetingly convinced himself, it was only a dream that he was lying here, in a hotel room in Okehampton, on this journey that was all some evil product of his mind. Yet he could remember (the two nights had seemed to merge together) islands of similar, wishful delirium during the terrible night he’d passed after his father’s death. Surely it could not be so. Surely it was still only the night before and his father was still asleep, across the landing in the Big Bedroom (whether under a tartan blanket or not), and he, Jack, had never heard the shot that had sent him along that nightmare alleyway of events that had never occurred.

  The clear blue sky over the rooftops mocked him with its sharp reality. It would have to be a day like that day, that Remembrance Day. Some of the roofs were grey with frost, others, where the sun had already struck, were a mottling of sparkling white and glossy black. Okehampton, like any country town at daybreak, was a huddle of re-emerging familiarities, and this was the sort of crisp, bright morning that could only make its inhabitants more confident of their world. But Jack felt like a spy behind enemy lines.

  So it was true then, it was all true. Today he had to do some things (having done some things yesterday). He had to attend a funeral—in less than three hours. Then he had to drive a hundred miles to an off-shore island where (though the idea now seemed strange to him) he had his home. That was all he had to do.

  Today he had to be in a place he hadn’t been in for over ten years—had believed he might never need to be in again. The last funeral he’d attended there had been his father’s, when Tom, because of his inflexible military duties (or so it was generally understood), had been absent. Now, and for the same reason, Tom would most certainly be present. What was left of him would be present. But once again it would be Jack who would be the only living member of the Luxton family visible, the eyes of the whole village on him, now as then—on him and boring into him, into what might be inside his head.

  Though ‘head’, back then, had not been such a good word to call to mind. And that wasn’t, quite, the last funeral he’d attended in Marleston. Since not long afterwards—how could he forget?—he’d stood by the grave of Jimmy Merrick, offering his arm (and shoulder to weep on should it be necessary) to Ellie.

  And where was Ellie Merrick, in her supportive role, today?

  When Jack had stood by his father’s grave, he’d already had the thought (partly anticipated for him by Sally Warburton) that at least his mother had never had to know how her husband had died. Though he’d also had the thought that, now the two of them were in a manner of speaking reunited again, she might get the whole story—underground, as it were—direct from the man himself.

  And now it was true, with the same possible proviso, that neither Michael nor Vera would have to know how their younger son died. Vera had never even had to know
that Tom had left the farm. Nor that Jack—even Jack—had left it too.

  When Jack needed to arrange Michael’s funeral he’d had to discuss with Malcolm Brookes, the rector (who would be officiating today), the delicate question—or the notion that had somehow got into Jack’s head—of whether, given the nature of his father’s death, his funeral would actually be allowed. In Church ground. Brookes had expressed his opinion of Jack’s quaint idea in language surprisingly graphic for a clergyman (‘This isn’t the damn Middle Ages,’ Brookes had said), but had then added with a sort of patient smile, ‘Do you think, for any reason, I’m going to keep those two apart?’

  So Brookes believed it, then? In the meeting—the re-meeting—of souls. But then, after all, Brookes would.

  Death, Jack thought, looking out at brilliant, exposing sunshine in Okehampton, was in many ways a great place of shelter. It was life and all its knowledge that was insupportable.

  He thinks the same, looking from his rain-blurred window, now.

  *

  It was a little past seven-thirty. A faint smell of frying bacon reached him even as he stood surveying the street. Breakfast was being cooked downstairs. And, even in his present state of mind, the smell caused a benign reaction in his stomach. Jack had sometimes been heard to observe—down among the caravans on those dewy August mornings when pans would be generally sizzling—that the smell of frying bacon was the best smell in the world. None of his listeners had ever disagreed. Instead of ‘best’, he might have said (consulting his memory) ‘most comforting’ or ‘most consoling’. Sally Warburton, whose boxfuls of emergency items, that awful morning, had included a fair amount of prime bacon, had been surprised, if also relieved, to see Jack wolf down several rashers. Though it was almost noon by then and the poor man had been up, apparently, since long before dawn.

  If they’d all been pig farmers, Sally had thought, if this had just been pig country, none of this would have happened.

  But the smell now entering Jack’s nostrils heartened him also by simply suggesting that he might not, after all, be the only guest in the hotel. He would not be alone, perhaps, and so under unrelieved scrutiny by the proprietor or her deputies when he appeared for breakfast. Though not being alone, being under the eyes of other guests, might have its problems too. Before the funeral, this would be the only point at which he’d have to run the risk of other people’s curiosity. Or suspicion.

  On the pavement opposite, two early-rising inhabitants of Okehampton had stopped to exchange energetic greetings, as if they might not have met for years. Their reddened, beaming faces seemed to Jack to go with the thought of bacon.

  Within half an hour, shaved and wearing a clean white shirt and the dark trousers of his suit, he’d made his way, as advised the night before, to the ‘back bar’. He could as easily have followed his nose.

  It was a sunken, low-ceilinged place, which at other times might have been poorly lit, but was now pierced by bands of blinding light from the low sun shining through a gap in the buildings across the street. The shafts caught the polished surface of the bar, where the pump handles had been draped with tea-towels, and the glinting cutlery on several laid-up tables. There was obviously a kitchen close by, since the shafts were full, along with dancing motes, of bluish swirls.

  Two of the tables, half in and half out of sunshine, were occupied by solitary men intently chomping food and studying newspapers. Jack was relieved to find that they required nothing more from him than a nod and a muttered, ‘Morning,’ and that, like him, they wore smart, open-necked shirts. They might have been three of a kind. He was in a hotel which in November catered, if it catered for anyone, for travelling reps with limited expense accounts. It seemed suddenly to Jack an innocent and honourable league to belong to, and he began to invent for himself—in case he should come to be questioned—an alias as a salesman. What might it be? Agricultural machinery? No, caravans, of course. All those sites that in winter might be considering replacements. He was travelling—in caravans.

  He was also relieved to see that the proprietor seemed to be in sole charge of the kitchen and the serving of breakfast. Hers was at least a familiar face and, so long as she was busy, he felt, an unthreatening one.

  He ordered the Devonshire Breakfast. It was no different in its basic components from a breakfast you might have had in any county, but it was, when it came, very good. The bacon in particular was very good. It was so good that for a few minutes, despite what lay before—and behind—him and despite the miserable night he’d passed, Jack’s whole being relaxed into that of a man solely given over to the consuming of breakfast. It really was extremely good. He felt amazingly restored.

  But no sooner had he finished eating than he’d looked up and seen, in the small porthole window of the swing door leading to the kitchen, not the face of the proprietor, but the face of Tom, peering in and peering directly at him. Since it was only his face, Jack couldn’t tell if he was in his combat gear again (or if, for example, he was wearing an apron), but he was looking in as a mindful chef might briefly look in to see if the customers—and one particular customer—were happy.

  It was Tom who’d made this breakfast, Tom who’d cooked his bacon.

  Tom’s face had disappeared. Then Jack, who’d scrupulously avoided the morning papers lying on the bar and had picked up instead an unhelpful brochure—‘Things to Do in North Devon’—had glanced towards the front page obscuring one of his fellow breakfasters and seen the caption ‘Heroes Return’ (it wasn’t the top story, but it was there in the corner) and had also seen the photo. He couldn’t tell which of the coffins it was. Nonetheless, he was sure.

  So everything that had happened yesterday was really and undeniably true. It was publicly the case. Though for that man sitting there at his breakfast, concealed by his newspaper, and perhaps for thousands of others doing the same, it was not even drawing his eye.

  Less than an hour later Jack drove northwards from Okehampton towards Marleston, the long shadow of the Cherokee leaping out ahead of him. His last act before leaving his hotel room had been to slip the medal into the breast pocket of his suit (his fresh white shirt had no pocket). He was quite sure by the time he settled his bill that the woman really knew who he was, but wasn’t saying. Or, at least, that when she looked later at her paper (hadn’t she looked already?) it would simply jump out at her: Luxton, I thought it rang a bell.

  The traffic was light and the road shone. He’d delayed his departure so that he could pace this short final leg comfortably, without having to stop or cruise around to kill time. He filled up with petrol just outside town.

  During these few miles Tom didn’t appear at his side again. Jack took this to mean that Tom was now entirely sure that he, Jack, would complete the journey, would keep his appointment. Nonetheless, during this last stage Jack felt constrained to say aloud a number of times, softly but purposefully, ‘I’m coming, Tom. I’m nearly there.’ He would hardly have needed to do this if he’d felt that Tom might in any sense have been his passenger.

  Ten-fifteen, he’d reckoned. Ten-fifteen for ten-thirty. He couldn’t, of course, be late, but, just as with yesterday’s ceremony, he didn’t want to be so early as to be trapped by people. He didn’t know how many there would be. A sprinkle, or—given that it was clearly national news—a multitude? He should be just sufficiently early as was decent and as would allow him to make his presence known and to get his practical bearings. Perhaps, he vaguely anticipated, he could then ask to spend a few moments somewhere safely alone.

  He was aware that being who he uniquely was might grant him excuses for behaviour that might otherwise seem clumsy, inadequate, even rude. He was relying on playing this card. He’d played it, strongly, yesterday. His principal plan—he didn’t disguise it from himself—was to get away with as little as possible: time, involvement, talk. Pain. He would do the essential thing, he wasn’t shirking that, but he wasn’t up for any extras.

  The arrangements he’d made—all b
y phone—had been minimal. He’d spoken to Babbages. He’d spoken to Brookes. And he’d spoken, of course, to Major Richards. No flag, please, the battalion could keep it. A non-military funeral, thank you. He’d been surprised at his own firmness. He’d not made a point of notifying people, let alone inviting them. He’d left that as a matter between Brookes and his parishioners. He knew that he was supposed to organise and host some gathering afterwards. But where could that be? There was only one appropriate place: Jebb Farmhouse. Impossible. The Crown? No. In any case, he knew he couldn’t go through with it. Be the living centrepiece. Make a bloody speech (having not made one yesterday). Whatever poor form it might be, he couldn’t do it. He would be present, that was the main thing.

  A simple word had come, theoretically, to his aid: ‘private’. Today’s thing was private, if yesterday’s hadn’t been. Arguably, the whole thing was immeasurably private, and Major Richards had even framed for him that statement—for public release—that ‘Corporal Luxton’s family’ (though there was only one) ‘hoped that their need for privacy and peace in this time of great sorrow would be respected’.

  But Jack could equally see that private was a thin, even treacherous word. A war memorial, for example, was not a private thing. It was a public monument, the names on it were for all to read. And how did a common soldier, serving his country in its public causes, ever get to be called a private? Fuller, Pickering. (Where were they now—and those clusters that went with them?) In any case, life in a village was never private, Jack knew that. Everyone eyed everyone else. This was one respect in which, today, he could envy the inconspicuous existence of those who lived in cities.