Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

But his dad hadn’t even looked in the direction of the Crown. His face was like a wall, a thicker wall than usual, and, after doing the other thing they always did, going to stand by Vera’s grave, they’d just driven silently back to Jebb. ‘That’s that then,’ his dad had said and had hardly needed to say even that.

Jack was the passenger, Michael drove, and there was a point somewhere along the road when Jack realised, if not quite at the time itself, that it was too late. Before that point he still might have said, ‘Stop, Dad, there’s something we haven’t done.’ And conceivably his dad was testing him, daring him — wishing him to say it. He might have said it even when they were well clear of Marleston and nearing the Jebb gate, the hedges along the road still glittering with barely melted frost. He might have just grabbed his father’s arm as he shifted a gear. What a simple thing.

But they’d passed the point, and Jack couldn’t have said exactly where it was. Though, afterwards, he was to think it was the same point where Tom, on foot and heading in the other direction, at three o’clock in the morning, almost a year before, must have known — if he’d had any doubts at all — that now he couldn’t, wouldn’t go back.

And it was the same point, perhaps, where George might have stopped with Fred.

‘Stop, Dad.’ But Jack wasn’t up to it. Though by then he’d long been the bigger of the two of them. One day, years ago, he’d woken up to discover, disturbingly, that he was taller than his father. Now, in some mysterious way, his dad was even shrinking. But he still wasn’t up to it.

And his father, Jack thinks now, might just have said, ‘We haven’t not done anything. We went and looked at her grave, didn’t we? Take your hand off my arm.’

They might simply have had a set- to right there, a blazing set-to, pulled up on the Marleston — Polstowe road, the engine of the Land Rover still running. A set- to in their suits. They might even have got out and taken a swing at each other, the swings at each other they’d been saving up for years. And his dad with a medal for bravery in his pocket.

On those previous occasions in the Crown there’d usually be someone who’d ask, as if they’d been planted there for the purpose, ‘So — do you have it with you, Michael?’ And his father, perched on his stool at the bar and looking as if he hadn’t heard or might even be quietly annoyed by the question, would sip his beer or blow smoke from his mouth and, only after you thought the matter had passed, dip his hand into his top pocket and take it out again, clenched round something. And only after more time had passed and while he still looked at the air in front of him would he open his hand, just for an instant, above the surface of the bar, and then return the medal to where it had come from. It was a performance his dad was good at and one worth its annual repetition. An unsentimental dairy farmer, but capable (though Jack could never have furnished the joke) of milking a situation.

The lights on in the Crown. He can see it now. A grey November noon. The low beams. Poppies and suits. A faint whiff of old wardrobes and moth balls. The beer seeping down, everything huddled and glinting. Then for a moment that extra glint. The glory of the Luxtons.

‘Stop, Dad. I want to buy you a drink.’ Such a simple thing, but like moving the hills.

WHAT WOULD his mum think? That has always been Jack’s inner yardstick, his deepest cry.

Vera Luxton died when Jack was twenty-one and Tom was thirteen, of ovarian cancer. Perhaps his acquaintance with cows and calves made Jack better able than most men of twenty-one to comprehend what this meant, but it was anyway an event that changed everything, like a line in history. The cow disease, which came later, was one thing and it was a killer in every sense, but the rot really set in, Jack would say, when Vera died. Michael had run the farm, but Vera had overseen it, had made it revolve in some way round herself. If they hadn’t known and acknowledged it at the time — and that included little Tom — they knew it now.

Behind that wall his dad could present to the world, Jack knew, his father was stumbling. There were some things Jack could see through — or that he simply duplicated. He had a face like a wall too, he was stumbling too. It was his fall-back position, to take what he got and stumble on, to look strong or just dumb on the outside and stumble inside. He was just like his father.

But on the other hand (and his father knew it) he’d always been closer to his mum, a lot closer than little Tom had ever been, coming along those eight years later and to everyone’s surprise.

‘Would you like a little brother, Jack?’

His mother had looked at him with a strange, stern-but-pleading look, as if she needed (though he was only seven) his serious, manly help.

‘Because I have a feeling,’ she’d said, ‘you may be going to get one.’

It had seemed to him that she was somehow floating away, might even be saying goodbye, and this was some sort of offer of compensation. And how, with that look in her eye, could he have said anything but yes?

It was only later that he drew the conclusion — or formed the theory — that Tom hadn’t been meant to happen. It was a risk. His mother had problems in that department. She’d had a bad time with him, he vaguely knew. Though he also understood that she’d thought it was worth it. She had an even worse time, as it turned out, with Tom. Between the two of them, Jack sometimes wondered, might they have given her the cancer?

But he’d been truly intended. While Tom, it seemed, had turned up by surprise and at much hazard to his mother. It made a difference, perhaps. It made him feel that Tom was never a rival — the opposite. Jack had been born at Jebb, in the Big Bedroom, with the assistance of an intrepid midwife. But Tom had been brought home one day from Barnstaple Infirmary, with a Vera who’d looked rather weaker than her baby. It made a difference.

In any case, after Tom was there, Jack’s mum had a way, from time to time, of drawing Jack aside into a sort of special, private corner — though it was usually in the kitchen or on warm days in the yard, so in no way hidden. Nonetheless his dad, and Tom when he was older, would respectfully steer clear of it, as if Vera had issued an order. When he was in this special space with his mother, Jack would mysteriously understand — even when he was only nine or ten — that he was having a grown-up conversation, something you were supposed to have in life, a sort of always-to-be-resumed conversation, which went on, in fact, right up until the time his mother fell ill and died. And he’d understand that this conversation had to do with something that seldom otherwise came into his thinking, let alone his talk: his future and its responsibilities. Or, to put it another way, his name.

Since it meant something if you were born, as he was, on a farm: the name. The generations going back and forwards, like the hills, whichever way you looked, around them. And what else had his mother borne him for than to give him and show him his birthright? Something his father, for whatever reason — and though it was his name — could never do. There’d never been such a moment.

And then the birthright, deprived of Vera’s backing and blighted by cow disease, had begun to look anyway like a poor deal.

That had always seemed to Jack to be the gist of those conversations, whatever their apparent subject: his birthright. That he shouldn’t worry about Tom, who would always be the little nipper and latecomer. That he should rise to his place and his task.

When he was older, starting to outgrow both his father and that Burtons suit, she’d make tea for just the two of them. He’d smoke a cigarette. She’d top up his mug, without his asking, when he put it down. He didn’t know then how much one day he’d miss, and he wouldn’t know how to speak of it when he did, the creases in his mother’s wrist as she held the teapot, one hand pressing down the lid, and refilled his mug, just for him.