Good luck, Tom. As if Tom was doing the escaping for both of them.

Why had he never minded, or even thought about it most of the time? That Tom was better, quicker, smarter at pretty wel everything. Including, so it seemed, deciding his own future. Eight years and, for a long time, several inches between them. And no competition. He could knock Tom down any time he liked, but he never had. Had never even wanted to.

Even that gun lying there, Tom was better at that. At twelve or thirteen he could swing it round and make the rabbit hit the shot. Good with a gun—so a soldier’s life for him. But Tom was even better, after Vera died, at taking her place, at being, for them al , a bit of a mum himself.

Was that something the army required of a man too?

Jack should have been the one, by rights, to step into her space. Eight years her only boy. And al those mugs of tea.

But it was Tom who, at thirteen, was plainly quicker and better in the cooking, washing and looking-after department too. And Jack, at twenty-one, was a big, outdoor man with mud on his boots. If he’d tried to take his mum’s place, Dad would have mocked him. So it was Tom who one day put on Vera’s stil flour-dusted, gravy- spotted apron. He and Dad simply watched him do it. It had been hanging on its hook on the corner of the dresser where no one seemed to want to touch it. But it was Tom who took it down and put it on. Like some silent declaration. It was Tom who piled eggs and bacon and triangles of bread into the pan and fil ed the kitchen with a smel and a sizzle as if someone might be stil there who wasn’t.

And not just pile. He could crack those eggs one-handed, just as Mum had. Two neat little half-shel s left in his fingers.

Jack knew, without trying, he could never have done that.

They’d have been eating eggshel for breakfast, spitting out the bits.

Mrs. Warburton, Sal y Warburton, Mum’s old pal, had come in for a while every day to “tide them over,” as she put it, and perhaps to set them al her own example in being a bit of a mum to each other. Maybe Tom got some of it from her. Maybe Tom had puppied up to her while he and Dad did al the heavy work.

And it was a pity, maybe, that Mrs. Warburton wasn’t just Sal y Warburton, or just Sal y somebody, and not Mrs.

Warburton, wife of Ken Warburton who ran the fil ing station at Leke Hil Cross. Because then she might have become the next Mrs. Luxton and they might al have got a permanent second-best mum. But she stopped coming after a while, presumably because she thought they were tided over. And then where was Michael to turn? He was fifty-two. Jack never knew what his mum might have said to his dad, even as she was dying, on this score. If she’d said anything at al . But after a certain passage of time Michael made the desperate move of advertising in the Courier for a “housekeeper,” and everyone knows, when a recently widowered farmer does that, what it real y means.

No takers. (And how could he have paid a housekeeper?)

That’s when Jack had felt his father starting to turn old. To shrink. And to turn sour-tempered, something which, for al his slowness to raise a smile, he’d never been. You’d see him kick at something, a feed trough, the corrugated iron round the muckheap, for no reason at al . Swing back his leg and kick. That’s when Jack had felt that, though Tom was no longer such a little brother, he had to be a shield for him against his father’s weather. He had to stand in between and take it. Why had he never minded?

First Mum, then Tom. In between, most of their livestock carried off for incineration. Then just him and Dad. And Dad looking at him with a look that said: And don’t you try it, don’t you even think about it. When he wasn’t wearing that other look which said: Why don’t you solve the issue, Jack boy, why don’t you do something about it? The issue of there being no Mrs. Luxton. Which was a mad look, if ever there was one, a look where Dad had himself tied up into a knot, because unless his son was supposed to go foraging (and how might that occur exactly?) it was like saying that Jack should do the very thing there was no question of his doing. The real knot being the knot that he and El ie Merrick could never formal y tie.

Jimmy Merrick and Michael Luxton should have got married themselves, Jack has sometimes thought, they should have married each other. If such a thing were possible. About as unlike as two men could be and with as little liking for each other as two men could have. But both battling with the same things: both of them wifeless, both working, on different sides of a boundary, the same sweet but tough, now disease-hit land. Both of them going to the dogs and watching each other like hawks to see who’d get eaten up first.

In Jack’s memory it was the Luxtons who’d had the upper hand (having anyway the finer-looking farmhouse and the prettier acres) especial y after Merrick’s wife, Alice, had run off and abandoned him, leaving him with a sixteen-year-old daughter as his only companion and domestic workforce.

An event as surprising (though Michael liked to say it was no surprise at al ) as the Luxtons suddenly acquiring after eight years a second son, which, though the timing might have been better, only added to the stock at Jebb Farm and so to the abasement of the Merricks.

But then Vera had died, leaving the two men, in that respect, similarly placed. Then Tom had done his own bit of running off. Meanwhile, there was a cow disease. Al of which left the two farmers, neither getting any younger, in a state of more or less equal dereliction. If anything, it was Jimmy who now had the edge, since he’d had years to get used to misfortune, while Michael, after a fair time of not doing so badly thank you, had incurred a quick succession of troubles, and anyone could see he was going down fast.

They should have got damn wel hitched themselves. Or, as would have been the more customary solution and one which had only been staring them in the face for years, Jack should have married El ie and linked their situations that way.

But that would have gone against al known history and deprived the two fathers of their fuel ing disdain for each other. It would have robbed one of a daughter or one of a son, since where were the happy couple supposed to live?

Did Michael seriously think that El ie was going to hop across the fence and settle in at Jebb, when she was so clearly needed at the side of her dear old dad?

And al of this despite the fact that the son and the daughter had been chummy with each other for as long as they—or anyone else—could remember. And not just chummy. For years now, from even before Alice Merrick’s abrupt departure, he and El ie had been pretty much behaving with each other (if only on certain weekday afternoons) as if they were married. Which was not only common knowledge in the region of Marleston, but was actual y abetted, even smiled on by the two fathers, even

Вы читаете Wish You Were Here
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату