Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

Outside, the air was clear and still and sharp, the sky a blazing blue. At ten o’clock the frost had barely melted from the fields and the hills lay powdered with white. The woods still had their yellows and browns. On the oak tree in Barton Field you could have counted every motionless, bronze-gold, soon-to-drop leaf.

It was a day as etched and distinct as Jack’s memories of it would be, a day of which you might have said, at its brilliant start, that it was a fine day for something, whatever that thing might be. Even a Remembrance Day ceremony would do. And when this fine day changed — when Michael, after the ceremony, made his evident decision not to hang around, not to enter the Crown and buy his older son a drink and so let his younger son’s name come up in conversation, it wasn’t the simple, if unprecedented, skulking-off it seemed.

It had been for him, Jack, to say? His father was leaving it to him? But he hadn’t said it. Not at first, when the little group round the memorial dispersed, nor after they’d stood by Vera’s grave, nor all the way back, in that sparkling sunshine. They’d halted at the top of the track. Still he might have spoken. But he’d got out to unfasten the gate, then closed it behind his father as he’d driven through, then known it was definitely too late.

He’d pulled back the bolt. He remembers it all now. Two ridiculous men in briefly donned suits, in a worse-for-wear Land Rover, its exhaust pipe juddering and still steaming in the cold air; his father’s uncustomarily combed head not turning as he re-entered Luxton territory, then stopped, with a loud yank on the hand brake, and waited for his son.

He’d swung shut the gate. The throbbing Land Rover was like some stray beast he’d herded back in. The decision had been all his. Maybe. But he’d also thought, his hands on the cold wooden rail and then on the even colder, rasping spring-bolt: You bastard, for leaving it to me, you bastard for not doing the decent thing yourself.

And thought it ever since, gone over it repeatedly in his head. It was somewhere, even, in the terrible dream out of which he surfaced, years later, in a hotel room in Okehampton. The simple opening and closing of a gate. He’d swung it back, perhaps, with extra force. And if he’d grasped that decision as he’d grasped and swung that gate — for God’s sake, if he’d just bought his father a bloody pint — how different the consequences might have been.

That same night — this is what Jack told those he had to tell, and he had to tell it several times and never without great difficulty — Michael left his bedroom and the Luxton farmhouse at some early hour of the morning, possibly around three o’clock. It was another cold, still, frosty night, the sort of night on which no one leaves a house or even the warmth of their bed without a very good reason.

There’s a version of it all that Jack tells only himself, an over-and-over revisited version that allows more room for detail and for speculation, but it’s essentially the same version that he gave others and that for many years he’s, thankfully, had no reason to repeat. Though one of the reasons why he sits now at the window of Lookout Cottage with a loaded gun on the bed behind him is the suddenly renewed and imminent possibility (which he hopes absolutely to avoid) of having to repeat it.

Michael had not been drinking, though drinking is not an uncommon accompaniment to events of this kind, which were themselves, around that time, becoming not so uncommon on small and hard-pressed dairy farms in the region. Not only were the Luxtons not great drinkers, but Michael had not even had a pint or two that lunchtime, which was one of the rare occasions when it might have been expected of him.

Nor has Jack, at his window now, been drinking. He is entirely sober. It’s not a good thing to be drunk when handling a gun, in any circumstance.

Michael left the farmhouse on a freezing November night, long before dawn, and Jack would speculate to himself (though others would speculate too) why his father did everything that he did, not just in the cold but in the dark. It was not like when Tom slipped out that night, needing to do so by stealth. Though perhaps it was. Tom had needed only to find the track and climb up it. Dad’s path was less marked. But Dad knew every inch of the farm and every bit of that field — Barton Field — backwards. He knew it better than Tom. He knew it blindfold.

As Jack knew it too, and still knows it. He is perfectly able, still, without having been there for over ten years, and in the darkness, as it were, of his head, to retrace his father’s movements that night as if they were his own. And right now he has a peculiar and unavoidable interest in doing so.

In any case, it was a clear night. There was starlight and there was a good chunk of moon, almost a full one, Jack had noted, which, by the time he noted it, had come up over the far hills. The question was never how, but why. Why in the cold —on such a night, and in those coldest hours before dawn? Though perhaps the answer to that was simple. It was dark and cold anyway . Michael Luxton was dark and cold inside. It was November. Winter, with the farm in ruins, stretched before them. Jack can see now the logic. Had it been springtime, with the first touch of warmth in the air, it’s conceivable that Michael wouldn’t have done what he did. But perhaps the truth is that if you’re ready, such considerations are irrelevant. You don’t consult, or much mind, the weather.

It’s November now, although far from frosty. A strong, wet, gusting south-westerly.

Perhaps the crucial thing was that it was the night after Remembrance Sunday.

Jack, usually a sound sleeper, would puzzle over what it was that woke him. The shot, of course. But then if the shot had woken him, he later thought, he wouldn’t have heard it, he would have wondered, still, what it was that woke him. In Jack’s recounting of things — understandably confused — there was always a particular confusion about this point. He had heard the shot, yet the shot had woken him — as if in fact he was already awake to hear it, had known somehow beforehand that some dreadful thing was about to happen.

He was sure he hadn’t heard his father leave — though his father must have made some noise and would have put on a light, downstairs at least, when he got the gun from the cabinet. There was a distinctive squeak to that cabinet door.

Then again, with the windows shut, the shot wouldn’t have been so loud, not loud enough, necessarily, to wake a heavy sleeper. It would have carried in the frosty air, it’s true, and been accentuated by the silence of the night, and it would have come from just a little nearer than the shot that had signalled Luke’s death. But Jack had heard that from outside, in the yard, and he’d been expecting it.

Jack has always asserted that he heard the shot. It either woke him or, by some mysterious triggering inside him, he was awake to hear it. But he heard it. And he knew at once both where it had come from and what it meant. It might as well have been, as Jack has sometimes put it, in language unusually expressive for him, the loudest shot in the world.

And he has certainly thought what it might have been like if he hadn’t heard it, if he’d slept through it. And has certainly blamed himself, of course, again and again (a point he also asserted to others that morning), that he was not awake even earlier. If he hadn’t woken at all, he would have made the discovery only gradually. His dad might have been like a block of ice. Though could that have made it any worse?

But Jack has never wondered — at least when sharing his recollection of events — why his father chose the exact spot and position that he did. Among all the possible spots. Or why he, Jack, once awake, knew exactly where to go. He could explain this very easily by saying — though you’d have to be a Luxton to understand, you’d have to have spent your life on that farm — that if he’d ever been pushed to such a thing himself (and here, in some of Jack’s earliest statements, his listeners, who’d included policemen and coroner’s officers, had felt compelled to avert their eyes while they acknowledged a certain force of feeling) he’d probably have chosen exactly the same spot.