Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

But Ellie, apparently, had other notions. Ellie, when he gave this account of some of the necessary consequences of his brother’s death, took rapid and rather violent exception to his use of the word ‘we’.

‘Who’s this “we”?’ she suddenly demanded. ‘Who’s this “we”?’ He saw her again, closing the door behind Major Richards, but remaining pressed against it and, so it seemed, trying to resist some further attempt at entry.

‘Leave me out of this, Jack. I can’t come with you.’

Jack was totally unprepared for this, but there was no mistaking the firmness of her position.

‘I just can’t. He’s not my little brother.’

He understood that she was backing out. It was a legitimate option, though he hadn’t offered it — as if he were Ellie’s commanding officer. He hadn’t said he was asking for volunteers and that any man or woman was of course free to opt out. His big mistake, maybe. If he’d said, ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, Ell,’ then perhaps she would have come. It was how such things worked. But he hadn’t said it and she hadn’t done the decent thing anyway. She hadn’t even backed out decently.

Setting aside the fixed look on her face, Jack couldn’t be sure which of her words struck the hardest. That she wasn’t going to come? That he could no longer take the word ‘we’, meaning Ellie and him, for granted? That Tom wasn’t her brother? That last statement was of course entirely correct, but Jack felt there was a sense, in this particular case, in which Tom was Ellie’s brother, in which anyone as close to the matter as Ellie was would have felt, at least for a short while: ‘this is my brother.’ He felt another tremor of that bewildering need to comfort her.

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.’

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.