Since Jack was a man already hit hard, he was, in one sense, numbed and immunised against these further blows Ellie was now delivering. But afterwards he realised that it was the word ‘little’ that had hurt him the most. Ellie hadn’t had to say that. Yet it was the word, it seemed, she’d used with the greatest force. ‘Little.’
It wasn’t true of course, if it had been once. Tom was no longer little. You could say, maybe, that he was less than little now, since now he was nothing—he might not even be just one piece of nothing. And for some time now he’d been out of Jack’s life and Jack had tried, mostly, not to think of him. So in that sense, too, he’d been little, or nothing. But in the normal sense he wasn’t little at all, and hadn’t been little for years. He hadn’t been little on that night he’d left Jebb Farmhouse, though Jack had thought of him then, and sometimes since, as little. The point was that ‘little’ was his own word, his own special word, it wasn’t Ellie’s.
On the day following Major Richards’s visit they’d seen something in the paper that Major Richards had warned them to expect. The names—so far withheld and for an unusually long time—would now be released, of the three men who’d died in the incident previously reported. Along with the names there would be photographs, as well as some words from relatives and commanding officers. Major Richards had asked Jack if, for the purpose, there were any particular words he wished to say. Then Jack had found Major Richards suggesting—composing—a statement for him. It seemed to Jack that Major Richards had already had the statement ready in his head. It was a bit like writing that postcard to Ellie.
It was at this point that Major Richards might have produced the photos in his brown wallet, but since he saw by now that Jack’s whole body was trembling, decided against it and simply said that when the thing appeared in the newspapers they should be prepared for there being pictures.
The photograph of Tom—of Corporal Luxton—showed a man wearing a badged beret, moulded very familiarly to his head, and a camouflage shirt, the sleeves rolled up neatly above his elbows. The arms were thick, so was the face. And the expression was—expressionless. There was no hint of a smile, no hint of anything in particular. You couldn’t have said: This man could be my friend or, on the other hand, my enemy. Though you might have said this man would be good to have on your side in a fight. A word you might have used was ‘solid’. But the man in the photograph certainly wasn’t little.
Jack had looked at the photograph and recognised, of course, the man he was looking at. Yet at the same time it had seemed appropriate for him to ask, deep inside: Do I know this man? Can this man really be my brother? He’d wanted the face to have some indication in it that Tom might have known, when the photo was taken, that one day his brother would look at it.
Among the many strange feelings Jack had felt since that letter had arrived was the feeling that he was the little brother now. Big as he was, he’d turned little. And it went now with that little, concentrated ball of fear in his stomach. He felt simply small. So when Ellie had used that word, he’d felt she might as well be using it of him.
Do I know this man? But he’d felt just the same about Ellie, he realised, when she’d demanded to be counted out. Do I know this woman? This unwavering woman. There’d been an odd touch about Ellie, in fact, of the man in the photograph. You wouldn’t want to mess with that man. He might even shoot you, no questions asked. Similarly, if Ellie could be so unbudging about a thing like this, then there was no saying what else she might do. Or—he’d think later—might have done already.
The words he’d finally spoken in reply to Ellie hadn’t sounded like his own words. He couldn’t have imagined himself ever saying them or ever needing to. He’d drawn a big breath first.
‘I’m asking you, Ellie, if you’ll come with me to my brother’s funeral. If you’ll be with me when I get his coffin.’
He’d felt when he said these words a bit like he felt when things occasionally got out of hand down at the site and he had to step in—usually with remarkable effectiveness—and deal with it. So why, when he said them, had he also felt small?
‘And I’m saying,’ Ellie had said, ‘that I can’t.’
They’d stared at each other for a moment.
‘Okay, Ell,’ he’d said. ‘If that’s how you feel. I’ll go by myself.’
15
SO, THREE DAYS AGO, Jack had driven off alone in the same dark-blue Cherokee that Ellie has driven off in now.
It was not yet six-thirty. Still dark. But he’d been awake since five, staring at the luminous face of his still-primed alarm clock. Fear, among many other fears, of being late had made him decide on a perhaps excessively early start. And he was gripped by a strange mood of secrecy. He’d slipped out quietly, carrying just a small holdall and his black parka jacket (it was the right colour at least—and since when had Jack Luxton had use for a proper overcoat?).
Ellie hadn’t come to the door to see him off. She hadn’t even stirred or muttered a word as he’d crept from the bedroom, choosing for some reason to tread softly when he might have thumped about assertively. But he hadn’t believed she was asleep. When he’d stepped outside—she still hadn’t appeared—and crossed to the parked car, he’d wondered if she was nonetheless listening, intently, to his every sound. Or if, in fact (though he hadn’t demeaned himself with any pathetic backward glance), she’d even got up to part the curtains and watch him leave. From this same window from which he watches for her now.
He sees himself now, as if he might be Ellie watching his own departure, beginning that journey all over again. He sees himself covering every mile, every strange, bewildering stage of it again, even as he waits now for Ellie’s return. He hadn’t known then, as he departed, if he would return. Or if Ellie would be there if he did. That was how it had seemed.
With him, as was only natural on such a journey, had been his mobile phone. Who knows, he might have needed to call Major Richards, to say he’d broken down. (Or to say he’d been suddenly, unaccountably, taken ill.) Also, of course, he might have needed, or wanted, to communicate with Ellie. Or she with him. But, just before leaving, he’d made sure it was switched off, meaning to keep it so. If she couldn’t even say goodbye to him.
It’s switched off, emphatically, now.
The air had been fresh and a little damp, with the hint of a quickening dawn breeze. He could barely make out, white as they were, the caravans below, but, beyond the lights of Sands End and Holn, it was just possible to discern the faint sheen of the sea—dotted anyway by the small, almost motionless lights of distant shipping that, now and then, if only because they reminded him of the former purpose of the place where he lived, Jack would find oddly comforting.
He wore a white shirt and his only suit, which, fortunately, was a charcoal grey. Along with the strange sensation of stealth as he’d moved round his own home had gone an equally unaccustomed demand for dignity. He’d dressed carefully. He still hardly ever wore a suit. This was not the same suit his mother had once bought him in Barnstaple, but it reminded him of it and of being viewed by his mother when he’d emerged from the curtained cubicle in Burtons. Her little, approving nod. So what would she think now?
He’d thought, as he dressed, of the empty hearse that must have left Barnstaple by now. Or would it have been driven up, so as to be sure, the night before? Either way, it had better be there.
He put on his black tie, arguing with himself as to whether he should do this now or at a later stage. The knot took two attempts. The small holdall, with a change of clothes in it, was the same one that served as a carry-on bag on their winter holidays. It had been to the Caribbean and back several times.
He’d stood for a while by the front door, wondering whether to call up to Ellie—even to go up to her before he left. But he wasn’t going to call up if she wasn’t going to call back. And he wasn’t going to go up if Ellie wasn’t going to say, ‘I’ll be thinking of you, Jack. And I’ll be thinking of Tom.’ That would have been eno
ugh. But she wasn’t going to say it now if she hadn’t said it already, he knew that. And if she could say it at all, then she’d be coming with him now. She’d be standing beside him, glancing in the mirror by the front door, dressed and a bit breathy, a touch of scent in the air. Like when they left on their winter breaks.
‘All set, Jacko? Tickets? Money? Smile?’
He’d shut the front door quietly behind him—he could have chosen to slam it—as if he might, indeed, have been intending to leave undetected. Like Tom, that night years ago. He couldn’t help but remember it. That night he’d been lying awake in bed, listening for every small sound. The last sounds of Tom he’d ever heard.
He started the engine, but coasted almost silently, on the brakes, slowly down the twisting hill. With his lights on, the sea had disappeared, but as he pointed east the sky in that direction showed a dim, feathery mix of greys and pinks above a just-emerging horizon. He had to arrive before eleven-thirty and in good time, but, even allowing for the crossing and the traffic there might be on the other side, it hardly seemed necessary to be leaving in darkness. From Portsmouth it was some eighty miles. But (unlike Ellie) he’d never lost the farmer’s habit of being up with, or before, the dawn. In the summer he’d sometimes sit outside the cottage with a mug of tea at five in the morning, wondering how long it would be before the first of those caravanners (and every unit might be occupied) would make a move. Lazy buggers. But they were on holiday, they didn’t have to hurry, their days were their own. They were having fun—thanks to him and Ellie. There’d be just the mew of gulls and, in the quiet, as if it too had barely woken, the faint, sleepy wash of the sea.
In any case, best to be early. The Isle of Wight to Oxfordshire: it was unknown country to him. Like the Isle of Wight had once been. Never mind the bloody isle of St Lucia. It was all unknown country now.
16
HE TURNED LEFT at Holn, the patch of pinkish sky directly ahead, then turned left again a few miles later, towards Newport.
Before leaving the cottage he’d taken another, vacillating decision, along with the decision to put on his black tie. Into the holdall, to add to the clothes and sponge bag, he’d finally slipped a small, black, hinged box. Then as he’d stood before the mirror for a last check, he’d revised even that decision. He’d unzipped the bag, taken out the box and slid what was in it into the breast pocket of his suit, patting its small weight against him. Then he’d returned the box to the bag. He couldn’t have explained the logic, if they had any logic, of these actions. His hand had shaken a little.
When he took off his jacket to lay it in the back of the car he transferred what was in the breast pocket to the breast pocket of his shirt, the same white shirt he’d worn for Major Richards’s visit, so that small weight was now almost against his skin. When he stopped outside Newport to fill up with petrol, and throughout the two days of travelling ahead of him, Jack was wearing the DCM.
He reached Fishbourne in good time for the seven-thirty ferry. By then it was light and, beyond the inlet where the ferries docked, the sea that from the Lookout had been a mere hinted presence showed choppy and active, the combination of a briskish breeze and the rays of the just-risen sun turning the waves inky black on one side and brilliant on the other. The yachts moored in the inlet swayed and rattled.
Though Jack had lived now for some ten years in a former coastguard’s cottage and had looked every day at the sea, to be on it didn’t come naturally to him. He could point the caravanners towards several boat-bound activities, but had never developed the yen to have a boat himself, to chug around Holn Head in a dinghy with an outboard motor, maybe lowering a fishing line. The six-mile ferry ride across the Solent had been his first experience of being on a vessel and remained his only one. Similarly, until he’d flown with Ellie to the Caribbean he’d never known what it was like to be in a plane. The two unfamiliar experiences were linked, since in order to drive to Gatwick Airport it had been necessary first to take the ferry, and those winter holidays were virtually the only occasions that demanded making the crossing, so that even that experience had never become casual.
Travelling now to an airbase, Jack could remember that first journey, by way of a ferry, to catch a plane. The whole thing—though it was a holiday and was meant to be fun and people did it, apparently, all the time—had unnerved him with its elemental audacity. Even the previously unpenetrated landscape of Sussex had seemed alien. Even the ferry crossing had made him tense.
The truth was that he was that common enough creature, a landsman, by experience and disposition. His big body told him this. He liked his feet anchored to solid ground. How on earth had he ever let himself be plucked into the air on a parachute pulled by a boat? But the truth also was that Jack had become an islander. The ferry crossing was fearful in itself, but it also went, when travelling in this direction, with a queasy distrust of the looming mainland—that yet contained his roots and his past. He felt both fears now, knowing that when he soon drove off again onto dry land, this would in no way cure his qualms. He touched the medal against his chest, as if for his protection.
The ferry throbbed out into the gleaming water, keeping close for a while to the wooded shore and passing near the other ferry point at Ryde, then heading into the open channel known as Spithead. Other ferries and a few merchant ships moved in various directions, smaller craft scattered among them. There was the feeling of some haphazard relay race. Against the dazzling light to the east appeared the silhouettes of squat island-forts.
The shoreline on the far side remained for a time one indistinct, built-up mass, punctured by the white thorn of the Spinnaker Tower. Then Portsmouth gradually separated itself from Gosport, and Southsea, with its beach front, from Portsmouth. Individual blocks of buildings flashed and glinted.
The ferry swung hard to make its entrance. Beyond the ramparts of the narrow harbour mouth could be seen, as if trapped among streets, the masts of the old ships, the Warrior and the Victory, and beyond them, at the water’s edge, the sharp bows of a berthed naval vessel, its grey hull and turrets bleached almost white, with an apricot blush, by the low sun.
Jack had slipped something else into his pocket before departing: his passport. Major Richards had told him he would need it, for identification, on his arrival at the airbase, along with other documents that would be sent to him. His passport showed a mugshot face not unlike that face with the beret and camouflage shirt in the newspaper photo.
Jack knew well enough that he wouldn’t need his passport in order to disembark from an Isle of Wight ferry in Portsmouth, but he felt as if he might. He felt, in fact, as the ferry slid through the jaws of the harbour, like a man who, even with his passport on him, not to mention a distinguished-conduct medal against his breast, would, as he came ashore, immediately be arrested.
17
IT WASN’T THE cow disease that had swung it for Tom. For Tom the trigger had been Luke. In more senses than one.
Michael pulled Tom out of school when he turned sixteen, to be a prisoner with his brother on Jebb Farm. No more making hay with schoolgirls. He might have made his escape—by the same route he eventually took—even then. But he waited till his father wouldn’t have the power to haul him back, till he was his own free man. And perhaps, even with Vera gone and life at Jebb like a lost cause, it was still not yet a clear thing. He bided his time. Sixteen to eighteen. In between, there’d been an ongoing cattle disease, but also there’d been Luke.
A sort of sliding scale: that sloping line between them. As Tom got bigger, the way it was between Tom and Luke became like the way it once had been between Jack and Tom. When Tom left school to take up full-time attendance at Jebb Farm, Luke somehow became Tom’s dog.
And Jack hadn’t minded even that. Luke had been the farm dog, the family dog (and he’d been around almost as long as Tom), but he’d been, especially, Jack’s. Sitting there in the back of the pick-up, ears flapping, as they’d bumped over to Ellie’s. But then he’d become Tom’
s. It was Luke’s own choice and doing, and who could have said exactly when, or why, the crossover occurred? But it was how it was. Maybe it was that Tom had that bit of a mum about him, so Luke hung around Tom because Luke too missed Vera. Or maybe it was that Luke had worked out, just as Jack had, that Tom, though he was the younger brother, was simply superior at most things, including—and one of Luke’s functions was to be a gun dog—being a better shot.
But then Luke had got sick. He wasn’t young any more. This was some while after the cow disease first struck, but you might have said that Luke, though he’d taken his time, had only come up with his own disease in sympathy. He got sick anyway, just slow and sluggish sick, not mad sick, but he steadily got worse and, on top of it, he seemed to be going blind. They didn’t know what to do except hope the thing would solve itself, or that he wouldn’t linger, Luke would just spare himself and die. They were all thinking still, of course, of the last time, not so long ago, when there’d been a death pending in the house.
But it had just dragged itself out. Luke dragged himself out. It got a bit too much to take.
One heavy, sullen August morning Michael drove the pick-up into the yard, fetched a spade from the lean- to and put it in the back, then went into the house, unlocked the gun cabinet between the kitchen and the stairs and carried the shotgun out to the pick-up too. Jack and Tom were both in the yard at the time, but felt from the way their father was looking and moving that they shouldn’t speak. Then Michael went into the kitchen where Luke was by now confined to his blanket in a corner—beyond even padding his way to the door—and lifted him up and carried him out and put him in the back of the pick-up along with the spade.