Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

Jack could see all this even as he felt himself starting to tremble inside. Even as he had the briefest but clearest picture of Tom standing right there, in the doorway of Lookout Cottage, grinning and looking bigger than he used to be. In a soldier’s uniform. Anyone at home?

The last thing he’d wanted? No.

This was all his fault, Jack had thought, this letter and all it might mean was his fault. He thought it even as Ellie passed the letter back to him. It even seemed like a letter he hadn’t just opened but had been keeping in his pocket for some time and had only just decided to show her. Like that letter she’d shown him, the blue sky at the window, at Jebb. Here, read this.

He thought it even as she moved towards him, because she could see now he was actually trembling. Not just his hand. His shoulders were shaking, his chest was heaving. Even as Ellie put her arms round him and held him — she smelt of clean cotton — and pressed her mouth to the side of his neck and said, ‘It’s okay, Jacko, it’s okay.’ And what did that mean — just that it was okay for a grown man to cry? Even as the hot tears came gushing out of him — they had to — out of Jack Luxton’s eyes, that were stony-grey and, most of the time, cool and expressionless like his father’s. Well, people weren’t fucking cattle.

RAIN WEEPS DOWN the window in front of him, but Jack isn’t crying now. And he’d put a stop to his tears soon enough on that grey morning. He’d gasped them back into himself and wiped a sleeve across his face even before Ellie could grab a clump of tissues and hold it out for him.

It should have been like this then, he thinks. Then the weather might have made his tears seem less conspicuous or might have done his crying for him. But, outside, the morning had been merely grey and damply still.

He couldn’t remember when he’d last cried, not counting when he was a nipper and it was allowable. Or if he’d cried at all since then. But yes he had, of course he had, and he could remember exactly when. Tears on his pillow. But never in front of anyone. Certainly never in front of Ellie. So it had been a shock to her. Perhaps even a disappointment.

Not even when his mum died. He hadn’t let his eyes well up in front of Ellie. As if Ellie would have had any softness left for missing mothers. And he’d been twenty-one by then, a man’s age. And now, when he was thirty-nine, he’d felt as Ellie put her arms around him just a touch of hardness in them, just the hint of a restraint in their comfort. I’m not your mother, Jack, don’t cry like a baby.

True enough. If it was all his fault, how should tears come into it? Tom had gone off to be a soldier — and he wanted to sit here and cry? He’d dried his eyes before Ellie could dry them for him. But he’d known that he hadn’t cried enough, not nearly enough. That little bit of crying had only made him aware that there was a whole lot more crying left inside him, a whole tankful. He’d just put the stopper back on his tears. As for Ellie, her eyes hadn’t even gone dewy.

And that maybe settled something, finally took away, on that painful day, one foolish niggle. Namely, that he’d always wondered and never could quite put the thought aside, whether Tom and Ellie had ever … Whether Ellie and Tom … On a Wednesday afternoon, say. Given Tom’s general quickness off the mark.

Surely not. Though would he actually have minded — even that? Just once in a while. If Tom, as it turned out, was going to pack himself off anyway. But the question was more whether he’d have minded to know it now. Now that Tom was packed off for ever. No, he wouldn’t have minded. He wouldn’t have minded it even back then, if he’d known then that one day Tom would be packed off for ever. What’s mine is yours, Tom.

Surely not. But when Jack, after Tom left, had gone over to Westcott Farm to spend afternoons with Ellie, Tom’s name had rarely come up between them. And Jack, with his sliver of suspicion, had supposed this was because Ellie would have wanted to stay off the subject, while he didn’t want to force it either. Finished business anyway.

But even on that July afternoon at Jebb, with that other letter in the Big Bedroom, when the subject of Tom should have come up, when he should have brought it up, he’d kept warily silent. It was Ellie who’d brought it up for him. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she’d said, holding her mug of tea under her chin. ‘But he made his decision, didn’t he, and when did you last hear a peep out of him? I don’t think you have to tell him anything. Forget him, Jack.’ And if she could say that, then perhaps his mind should have been settled all along. At least on that score.

He’d wiped away his tears and Ellie’s eyes had stayed dry. Then a silence had stretched between them, a silence in which the look on Ellie’s face had seemed to say: Don’t make this difficult, Jack. This is tough news, don’t make it tougher. And even he could see, even then, that it might have been tougher even than this. Tom might have come back in a wheelchair. He might have come back like a big, helpless baby.

Then Ellie had gone to fill the kettle. Certain moments in life, it seemed, required the filling of a kettle. Kettles got filled every day, without a thought, several times over. Nonetheless, there were certain moments.

He heard the gush of water in the kitchen. It would have been a good inducement and a good moment to shed a few more tears while Ellie wasn’t looking. And an opportunity — if that’s how it was — for Ellie to do a bit of private gushing herself. But he didn’t think so. He only imagined how her hand might be grasping the tap a bit more tightly and for longer than was necessary.

How many kettles had Ellie filled? That had been the first ever kettle she’d filled at Jebb. And she’d done it stark naked. But she’d filled enough kettles for him before that, over the years, at Westcott. And she’d have filled enough, anyway, for old man Merrick. He felt, with a letter lying in front of him that weighed, of itself, next to nothing, the weight and strain in her arms of all those kettles Ellie would have filled for Jimmy Merrick. What had she thought that day when her mum had disappeared? And it was a big old farmhouse-kitchen kettle too, it wasn’t like the natty plug-in thing they had here at the Lookout.

When she came back with the tea he knew it was up to him (if it was all his fault) to break the silence, to say something appropriate to the occasion. He might have said any number of things, poor as he was with words. He might have just said, in fact, ‘Poor Tom. Poor Tom.’ But he felt he might already have said that, during his short burst of tears. Though the words, if they were there, had got so mixed up with the tears that he wasn’t sure if they’d come out like any sort of words that Ellie would recognise. It was just a general choking.

He might have said, ‘I wonder how, exactly.’ Or, ‘I hope it was quick.’ He might have said, looking at Ellie, ‘I hope it was damn well quick.’ He might have said, ‘Why him?’ On the other hand, he might have said, ‘We always knew it was a possibility, didn’t we, Ell, something like this?’ And added, ‘But we blanked it out, didn’t we?’

He’d thought: this is like the cow disease. It was a strange thought to have, but he’d had it. This was like when the cow disease and its real meaning had hit, and he and Tom had waited for Dad to say something, to gather them round the kitchen table, a proper farmhouse meeting, and give them his word. So what now? So what next?

But Dad had never gathered them round, and his strongest course of action had been to stand in the yard alone and spit.

And the truth was that while that kettle had boiled and even as these useless thoughts had besieged him, a whole series of practical considerations and estimations had also run through Jack’s head, which had added up to the unavoidable certainty of a journey. A journey that he — he and Ellie — would have to make. The certainty of one journey. And the impossibility, under the circumstances, of another.