Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift

  Yesterday’s event should have trained him up, perhaps, for exposure. This little affair in a country churchyard ought to be a doddle in comparison. But Jack knew—seeing now the line of frost-speckled hills that he hadn’t seen for over ten years—that it wasn’t so.

  Brookes and Babbages had been good to deal with. He’d been both pleased and troubled that it was still Brookes, since the rector’s voice, even on the phone, took him straight back to the burial of his father (and of Jimmy). Brookes had said, ‘I don’t know what to say, Jack. The last time we spoke was when … And now this.’ It was reassuring somehow to know that a man of the Church didn’t know what to say. But Jack didn’t like that linkage across twelve years—first that, now this—as if the two things were actually connected and the later one would unearth the other. Perhaps Brookes, who’d been so solid that first time, might be stretched past his limits now. A suicide—now this?

  Brookes had asked Jack, among other things, if at the service he might want to say a few words of his own. Jack had said no, he couldn’t face it, which was only honest, and Brookes hadn’t pressed the point and had said, ‘Fair enough.’ Then Brookes had asked Jack if he wanted him, in his own address, to say anything in particular—possibly something about those two Luxton brothers on the memorial outside? Jack had thought for a while and said no, he didn’t want that, and Brookes had also seemed to think for a while and had said again, ‘Fair enough.’ By then Jack was getting the comforting impression that Brookes understood that what he wanted was really only what he’d wanted that first time, twelve years ago, when they’d spoken face to face. As little and as simple as possible.

  Brookes, indeed, was well aware by now (he’d been rector for over twenty-five years) that it was what most people really craved at such events, even when there were no extraordinary circumstances to acknowledge, as little and as simple as possible being really the essence of the thing, the bare bones, so to speak. So: a simple service, just the one address, and he would have to find some way—but he’d somehow done it before—of referring to the exceptional (and violent) manner of the death. He’d have to give it some thought and come up with something. The coffin would lie in the church overnight and, after the service, be carried out to the churchyard—Jack as principal bearer (this was the bit, Brookes noted, that seemed to matter most to the man)—for a simple burial. Hardly more, as Brookes knew very well, than eighty paces.

  These thoughts had gathered in his mind even as he’d spoken to Jack on the phone. ‘So,’ he’d said, sensing that Jack didn’t want to prolong the conversation, ‘he’ll be next to his mum and dad again.’ And had heard a silence down the line. He’d added, ‘It’ll have been a long journey.’ Then, hearing only more silence, he’d asked (he’d known he’d have to ask it and this was the only chance) whether there would be a flag, a Union Jack, over the coffin? And if not, would he like them—the parish—to organise one? Or anything else along those lines? Never having presided over an event of this kind before, Brookes was not at all sure how things worked. But Jack had finally spoken again to say no, he didn’t want a flag. There wouldn’t be a flag. And Brookes, after a pause, had said, ‘Fair enough.’

  Brookes would be there, Jack thought, looking older. Who else? Sally and Ken Warburton? How might Sally shake her head this time? Bob Ireton? Still the local bobby? The whole damn village would be there—remembered or half-forgotten faces leaping out at him like flash bulbs—but, given that the thing was on the front pages, Jack thought, so might the whole bloody world.

  As well as speaking to Brookes, to Babbages, to Major Richards and to some other necessarily connected parties, Jack had in recent days been obliged to speak—or had avoided speaking—to quite a few people who wanted to speak to him. Most of whom had wanted to know, above all, how he felt, what his feelings were at this particular time, and had given the impression that they thought he might be only too grateful to be asked to share them. Jack had used the supposedly exempting word ‘private’ with these people, but it hadn’t often worked, and he’d opted instead for a basic policy of evasion which, on the other hand, had felt shaming and—evasive. At yesterday’s event he’d successfully given the reporters (he’d noticed their presence, like a different kind of cluster) the slip. He’d given everyone the slip. But now, as he approached his ultimate destination, he had the feeling he’d had before of being liable to arrest.

  Ireton, yes, Ireton would be there. With a set of handcuffs. After the burial, and all its due allowances, he might say, ‘Now, Jack, come with me.’

  As he drew nearer, he was in fact already and very intently planning his escape. Right now, with his mobile still firmly switched off, no one knew exactly where he was, or if he’d even appear. Let alone how he felt. Ten-fifteen. And away—by when? If he was not under the immunity of privacy, then he was surely under the protection, the alibi of grief.

  While he couldn’t have feared more the clutching actualities of the occasion before him, Jack was hoping that he might pass through them like some shadow—both there and not there. Who could come near his situation? His compounded situation. First that, now this. He would be untouchable. He would be, in effect—and what could be more appropriate and more purely expressive of his situation?—like the corpse he would nonetheless have to bear on his shoulder. This was how he felt.

  And perhaps because he wished it enough or perhaps because, in the event, he was so simply and helplessly dazed and stunned by the whole process, this was how it was.

  He turned onto a narrow minor road (there was still the same ivy-shrouded tree stump on the corner), and the matter felt out of his hands. It seemed impossible that the familiar sights now thickening round him could still be here, or else impossible that he’d been away. He surrendered to their ambush. That strange word ‘repatriation’ came again into his head. He said again, softly but firmly, ‘I’m coming, Tom. I’m nearly there.’

  And very soon he was. After some more turnings the narrow lanes became the deep single-track trenches he remembered. In summer grass would sprout in the middle. He’d chosen a route that avoided approaching Marleston from the east—past the entrance to Jebb—but, coming to a brow, he spotted through a gateway the church tower, across the valley that included both Westcott and Jebb. Then, having not encountered any other delays since turning off the main road, he immediately came up behind not one, but two, three, four—perhaps more—cars all heading in the same direction, and grasped at once where they must be going, as well as something of the actual numbers at this strictly private event.

  He became now part of a general, creeping congestion, as if he were no more than some frustrated minor attender at the occasion ahead. This turned all his other misgivings into a wild exasperation that was outwardly just the self-important rage of someone stuck in traffic. In all his journey so far, even in Portsmouth, there’d been no significant jams. Now here he was, less than a mile from Marleston and crawling. But what could he do? Press his horn? Flash his lights? This was Devon, where both sides of a vehicle almost touched the hedges. Let me through. Let me pass. I’m a brother.

  Such was his panic that he wouldn’t clearly recall later precisely how he arrived—how he parked or how he got himself from his car to the church. But he would remember having to say more than once, to clear a path, ‘I’m Jack Luxton, I’m Tom Luxton’s brother.’ Though wasn’t it blazingly obvious? Who else did people think he was?

  He would remember noticing that the Crown and the war memorial were still there, still uncannily in place, though he didn’t want to look straight at them, and the same applied to all the milling people—you couldn’t quite call it a crowd, but it certainly wasn’t a handful. Something like a lock in his neck kept his gaze fixed on the gate to the churchyard and, beyond it, the church porch, so that even if he’d wanted to seek out and acknowledge familiar faces, he couldn’t have done so. He was in a tunnel. Pressing on into the churchyard, he registered, at the edge of his vision, the gravestones of his mother and
father and, close to them, a specially prepared area with some vivid green carpeting spread over the turf, but he didn’t want to look directly at these things in case they might somehow render him unable to walk.

  Then suddenly moving towards him—to meet him but also, it seemed, to rescue him—there was Brookes, in a white surplice that reminded him of those army padres, and with him, like some little unit under his command, a group of men who included Derek and Dave, the hearse drivers (how strangely good it was to see them), and Ireton. Yes, Ireton, in a smart-looking uniform with three stripes on it, Ireton who’d once sluiced down his father’s gore from the bark of an oak tree.

  They all looked at him with the relieved and now activated looks of men who’d been waiting, perhaps with mounting anxiety, for nothing other than his arrival, and Jack realised, even as he also seemed to be floating absently and powerlessly, that he was the one who was here to make this thing click and function and cohere. He might have snapped his fingers and given orders if he’d been so disposed.

  Derek and Dave greeted him like old friends. Their faces seemed to say, ‘You didn’t think we’d miss it, did you?’ Then Ireton said, deferentially but quickly, like a man not wanting to waste valuable time, ‘I’ll be your other shoulder, Jack, if that’s okay with you.’ Your other shoulder? Then Jack understood. And, though he’d not given any previous thought to who might occupy this position, felt now he could have put his arms round both of Ireton’s dark-blue shoulders and wondered why he’d ever supposed that Bob—Sergeant Ireton—might be here to clap him in handcuffs.

  Six men, Ireton rapidly explained: the two of them in front and, behind, four men from Babbages, including Derek and Dave who would take the rear positions. ‘Unless—’ Ireton had hesitated and his head had done a strange swivel towards the crowd (perhaps it really could be called a crowd) standing at a discreet distance though seeming to have the church surrounded. ‘Unless there’s anyone else? Unless you’d like some other arrangement?’

  It seemed that everyone was ready to defer to him. He was like a king. At the foot of the church wall, he’d glimpsed, along the whole grey, weathered flank, stacks of resting flowers. Bunches, wreaths, two and three deep.

  No, Jack said to Ireton, it was fine. The other two men from Babbages had introduced themselves and he’d shaken their hands and said, ‘Thank you,’ and shaken everyone’s hand and said, ‘Thank you,’ and this had seemed suddenly the most important and exclusively detaining thing, the names and the gripping, knuckly hands of these men.

  But Brookes now intervened, pulling up a sleeve of his white robe to look at his watch. ‘It’s just gone twenty past, Jack. Everything’s ready, but we haven’t let anyone in yet.’ He coughed. ‘If you’d like a moment first, just to be alone, the church is all yours. Let us know when you’re ready. Take your time.’

  And then there he was, alone but not alone, in the stony hush of the church, with the coffin and the single circle of heavy-smelling white flowers that he’d ordered through Babbages now resting on it. It was the first time it had been like this, just the two of them, and it would never be like it again. He felt for a moment that he was in some box himself. He seemed to need to break through the wall of air that surrounded the coffin before he could put his hands on it (again), then his cheek to it, then his forehead, then his lips. These were actions that he hadn’t planned or foreseen, but was simply commanded by his body to do. He said, ‘I’m here, Tom. I’m here with you.’ Then he said, as if he’d not made something clear, ‘We’re both here.’

  The coffin was plain oak. Was it English oak? He felt its smoothness, examined the grain in the wood, breathed the scent of the flowers. It was suddenly like some inextricable riddle Brookes had set him, to be alone like this with the coffin, a dilemma beyond solving. ‘Take your time.’ How could any time be long enough? Yet it had to be limited—outside were all those people. On the other hand, Jack couldn’t find the words, the thoughts or whatever it was, beyond his physical presence, that might have properly filled this unrepeatable interval.

  It was extraordinary that while Tom had appeared to him clearly several times in the last twenty-four hours, he was now nowhere to be seen. Was he hiding somewhere else, behind a pillar, in this church? No, Tom was with him, here in this box. All there was of Tom was here. He felt, though he couldn’t see Tom, couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see the signalling flickers in his face, that they were like two people waiting for something together, for the next thing to happen, and neither of them was sure who should make the first move, though it was foolish perhaps to delay. You decide. No, you. A sort of game. So he finally lowered his lips again to the coffin—he had never kissed any piece of wood like this, he had never kissed Tom like this when he was alive, except when he was very small and wouldn’t ever have known about it. Then Jack said, ‘Well, shall we get on with it?’

  For a while, after that, it was like nothing so much as a wedding. He had to sit right at the front near the aisle, near the coffin, like a waiting groom. Eyes were on his back, he didn’t know how many eyes, but he felt it was all right that he didn’t turn, it was all right, it was even the correct thing, to keep his eyes to the front. Were the eyes behind him thinking he was like a bridegroom too? Were some of them thinking: Where’s Ellie?

  It seemed now impossible that the coffin before him was the same coffin that he’d watched yesterday being carried off a plane and that had been flown all the way from Iraq. That it had come all that way and by such a remarkable chain of events and arrangements, to stand now quietly here. There seemed no connection. There was no sign of the connection (he hadn’t noticed—in his not-looking—any Union Jacks) and no one so far had made any mention of it, so that it seemed there might be some silent communal effort around him to make it not exist. As if Tom had died, at a tragically early age, just a little distance away. A tractor accident, perhaps.

  But then Brookes had got up and said, among other things, that they all knew why they were here and they also all knew why Tom was here, though he hadn’t been here, some people would know, for a very long time. He’d been in other parts of the world. But he didn’t want to talk about how Tom Luxton had died and what he’d died for, because this wasn’t that sort of occasion and other people had spoken of those things and might still speak of them. But what he wanted to remember, as he was sure others here would want to remember—as some of them really could remember—was ‘the boy who was born in Marleston’.

  That was what Brookes had said: ‘the boy who was born in Marleston’. Though he might have chosen to say (and Jack knew why he didn’t) the boy who was born at Jebb Farm. It wouldn’t have been true, of course. It wasn’t even true that Tom had been born in Marleston. Didn’t Brookes know? He’d been born in a maternity unit in Barnstaple. And nearly killed his mother in the process. It was Jack who’d been born in Marleston, Jack who’d been born at Jebb. Jack who was really the boy—

  But he’d known what Brookes had meant. He had the medal in his jacket pocket. He didn’t know any more clearly now, if he’d known at all, why he’d brought it all this way. It wasn’t Tom’s medal. It went with one of the names on the memorial outside—or you might say with two of them. But his hand went, as Brookes spoke, to the small, round solidity against his chest.

  Then Brookes had stopped talking and there was a hymn and a prayer or two, and then this whole part of it was over and it was time for the thing that was the most important thing for Jack, that was really why he was here. He had to go forward now with the five men whose hands he’d shaken and be their leader, even while they, in a sense, would all carry him. Just as they would all carry Tom. He would have to walk with Ireton on the other side and Tom between, facing the congregation now, facing the whole lot of them, but it would be all right if he didn’t smile, it would be all right if he didn’t look anyone in the eye. This wasn’t a bloody wedding. It would be all right if he didn’t show anything in his face, which came quite naturally to him anyway. He would have to be
both like and not like one of those six soldiers yesterday. He should have shaken their hands too. He would have to walk, a finite number of paces though he would never count them, with his cheek against the coffin, his shoulder against the coffin, these parts of him closer to Tom than they would ever be again, feeling, sharing Tom’s weight.

  And so it was. They emerged through the porch into the painful brightness of the November morning. Behind them the congregation began to file out and follow, but it was as though, Jack thought, the church might have turned into a great grey empty-bellied plane. For the first time now, since he was looking straight towards it, Jack couldn’t avoid seeing the same exact line of hills, across the valley—Dartmoor in the far distance—that could be seen from Jebb Farm.

  It wasn’t difficult, as a physical task, it wasn’t so difficult. Ireton was a big man too. He felt the whole thing might be on a backward tilt, and that would be tough on the two at the back. But then the downward slope in the churchyard corrected that. And it wasn’t heavy. Though Tom had been a big man, like his brother. Was it because of the distribution of the load among six? Or because—? What was inside? He knew how his mother had died, he knew how his father had died. His brother’s death was a mystery. He suddenly wanted, needed to feel the weight of his brother. It seemed that, with his cheek and one palm pressed against the wood, he was urging Tom to let him feel his weight.

  It was a matter of perhaps twenty steps now, a steadily diminishing number of steps. Jack could see the opening of the grave before him, see, close by, but didn’t want to look and so see the names, the gravestones of his parents, and, yes, he felt sure at last that he could feel, inside, through the wood, through his cheek, through his hand, on these last steps, the shifting, swaying, appreciative weight of his brother. He would be all right now, he felt sure, so long as this weight was on his shoulder. He wanted it to be there for ever. And with each last pace he said now, inside, ‘I rocked you, Tom, I rocked you.’