Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

Thus it would have been possible for the two policemen, out of curiosity as much as anything, to inspect the medal and see what was written on its reverse. It had been one of Michael’s infrequent, sombre-faced, hard to gauge jokes that the medal had been a good one to give a farmer’s boy, since what it said on the back was ‘For Distinguished Conduct in the Field’.

DS Hunt had thought it right, for safety reasons, to examine the gun straight away. It was unlikely that there was a cartridge still in there (why should Michael have done things by halves?) and it was confirmed that both barrels had been recently (and it must have been simultaneously) discharged and that the gun was now unloaded. Sergeant Hunt also asked Bob, after the ambulance had departed, if — while he himself remained with Jack at the farmhouse — he couldn’t find a bucket or two of water and (it would be a grim chore, he knew) carry them down to the oak and give things a slooshing down. It would be a decency. This was technically interfering with evidence too, but DS Hunt felt he had seen and noted carefully all the evidence necessary, and it would be a sort of kindness. PC Ireton felt likewise.

It was unfortunate in one sense, but fortunate in another, that Jack couldn’t help overhearing this, and so offered to drive them all down in the pick-up with a jerry can of water, buckets and even a stiff-bristled yard brush. He appeared in need of things to do, no matter how gruesome. Bob had said that no, that wouldn’t be necessary, but it might help if he could borrow the pick-up and be told where the jerry can was.

Jack was also manifestly and increasingly worried about his livestock and about several regular morning tasks not attended to. He seemed, in fact, to have a gathering sense that the farm was about to disintegrate around him — which had only been Michael’s apparently no longer tolerable situation. But all this was duly taken care of. Both Constable Ireton and DS Hunt had the forethought to appreciate that a farm, even in extraordinary circumstances, cannot simply shut down. So there had been some necessary, discreet communications and a prevailing upon a horrified but quickly rallying community spirit. It wouldn’t have been long anyway before word spread around.

It certainly wasn’t long before a battered Land Rover containing Jimmy and Ellie Merrick, dressed as for a hard-working day on their own farm, pulled up in the Jebb yard. This was the first time Jack had seen such a thing. But then he’d seen other things today he’d never seen before. Jimmy and Ellie had come the short way — by the route with which Jack was very familiar — across the fields, through the boundary gate and over Ridge Field, which adjoined Barton Field. The direct route would then have been along the top of Ridge Field, to enter the Jebb yard close to the Big Barn, but Jimmy hadn’t hesitated to drive along the bottom of Ridge Field and then, despite slipping wheels, slowly up by the low hedge alongside Barton Field, so getting a good view down across the dip to the oak tree. The body was still there, though about to be moved, and mostly and perhaps mercifully hidden behind the tree trunk. Jimmy and Ellie could only really make out two very still Wellington boots.

When the Land Rover arrived in the yard it was impossible, particularly for the two policemen, to read precisely the expression on old Merrick’s face. It had a gnome-like quality that could have meant anything — triumph or shock or perhaps a recent quick but significant intake of alcohol. In any case, he’d stuck his head out of the window and explained to DS Hunt (they knew Bob Ireton) that they were neighbours, they were the Merricks, who were long and good old neighbours of the Luxtons, and they were here to help.

Ellie, in contrast, had been silent and had looked, for a while, rather white. But she soon began to make herself useful. In fact she made her busy presence felt around Jebb Farm that day as if she herself might have owned it. It even looked at one point as though she might have been preparing to stay the night, which would have been another first. Jimmy might actually have conceded it. But just when it had begun to seem a distinct possibility, Mrs Warburton, with cardboard boxes of provisions she thought appropriate, drove over from Leke Hill Cross. She was older now, but she had her memories of Jebb Farmhouse and of when she’d been of vital assistance before. And, like some woman picking over a battlefield, she herself voiced the question that, above that still-insistent chorus of ‘You bastard’, was also tolling through Jack’s head.

‘My God, what would your poor mother have thought?’

JACK PULLED BACK the curtains — warily, as if expecting horrors — on the town of Okehampton. Sleep hadn’t entirely deserted him, but he’d passed a dreadful, seesawing night, uncertain of what was truth or dream. Surely, he’d fleetingly convinced himself, it was only a dream that he was lying here, in a hotel room in Okehampton, on this journey that was all some evil product of his mind. Yet he could remember (the two nights had seemed to merge together) islands of similar, wishful delirium during the terrible night he’d passed after his father’s death. Surely it could not be so. Surely it was still only the night before and his father was still asleep, across the landing in the Big Bedroom (whether under a tartan blanket or not), and he, Jack, had never heard the shot that had sent him along that nightmare alleyway of events that had never occurred.

The clear blue sky over the rooftops mocked him with its sharp reality. It would have to be a day like that day, that Remembrance Day. Some of the roofs were grey with frost, others, where the sun had already struck, were a mottling of sparkling white and glossy black. Okehampton, like any country town at daybreak, was a huddle of re-emerging familiarities, and this was the sort of crisp, bright morning that could only make its inhabitants more confident of their world. But Jack felt like a spy behind enemy lines.

So it was true then, it was all true. Today he had to do some things (having done some things yesterday). He had to attend a funeral — in less than three hours. Then he had to drive a hundred miles to an off-shore island where (though the idea now seemed strange to him) he had his home. That was all he had to do.

Today he had to be in a place he hadn’t been in for over ten years — had believed he might never need to be in again. The last funeral he’d attended there had been his father’s, when Tom, because of his inflexible military duties (or so it was generally understood), had been absent. Now, and for the same reason, Tom would most certainly be present. What was left of him would be present. But once again it would be Jack who would be the only living member of the Luxton family visible, the eyes of the whole village on him, now as then — on him and boring into him, into what might be inside his head.

Though ‘head’, back then, had not been such a good word to call to mind. And that wasn’t, quite, the last funeral he’d attended in Marleston. Since not long afterwards — how could he forget? — he’d stood by the grave of Jimmy Merrick, offering his arm (and shoulder to weep on should it be necessary) to Ellie.

And where was Ellie Merrick, in her supportive role, today?

When Jack had stood by his father’s grave, he’d already had the thought (partly anticipated for him by Sally Warburton) that at least his mother had never had to know how her husband had died. Though he’d also had the thought that, now the two of them were in a manner of speaking reunited again, she might get the whole story — underground, as it were — direct from the man himself.

And now it was true, with the same possible proviso, that neither Michael nor Vera would have to know how their younger son died. Vera had never even had to know that Tom had left the farm. Nor that Jack — even Jack — had left it too.