Wish You Were Here

more about El ie’s mum than El ie did—or even wanted to. There were big burly families, al tattoos and noise, who in the course of a week became gentler, sweeter. There were two- or three-unit gangs of young people with windsurfing gear who, when they weren’t wearing wetsuits, wore hardly anything most of the time and liked to party al night.

Al this had fascinated Jack. It had brought something out in him. You never knew what might be going on in any one of those units at any given time. It was certainly a form of livestock. You never knew what might be arriving next.

Caravans. It would make him think, sometimes, of a circus, and it could sometimes be like a circus. Entertaining, raucous, a touch of danger. You had to be a bit of a policeman sometimes. You had to be their smiling host in a joke of a shirt, but there were times when you had to show them who was in charge. Jack had found he was surprisingly good at this. At both things: the smiling and the policing. Perhaps his big, lumbering weight was on his side. Or maybe it was that he’d just sometimes let slip, with his straight, blank, unreadable face, that if there was any real trouble, he kept a shotgun handy, up in the cottage, having been a farmer once, and he knew how to use it.

As for the caravanners, the Lookouters, they general y took the view that El ie and Jack were okay. They ran a good site, they looked after you. It was al right for some, of course—sitting up there al summer long, then winging off to the Caribbean. But, at the same time, there was something a bit misfit and oddbal about the two of them. There didn’t seem to be any little Luxtons, you couldn’t even be sure if they were real y married. Something just a bit hil bil y. But that was okay, that was fine. There was something just a bit wacky and hil bil y about taking a holiday in a caravan anyway. And when you were on holiday you wanted colour, you didn’t want dul and ordinary. You didn’t get it, either, with those shirts of his.

FARMER JACK. It’s wel over ten years now since they sat up with their tea in that bed at Jebb and El ie uttered that word.

And he’d never said then, if there had to be some token, or more than token, opposition: “There’s Tom, El ie. There’s Tom.”

A steep learning curve (El ie’s expression) at the beginning. But the main thing was, it paid. Thirty-two units.

He was stil good at sums, in a farmer’s way. At Jebb it hadn’t been the arithmetic but the numbers themselves that were wrong. Compared to anything they’d known before, they were in thick clover now. What with the capital from the sale of two farms, even at knock-down prices, even with debts to pay off.

Ten years. And something more than a learning curve. A release, a relaxation curve, a lightening up. He saw it in the way she smiled at him and he saw, from her smile, that, even with his great brick of a face, he must be smiling too.

But he can see it, now: the steep drop away from the farmhouse, the ful -summer crown of the oak tree. The hil s beyond. The exact lines of hedgerows and of tracks running between the gates in them. White dots of sheep, brown and black-and-white dots of cattle. For a moment, though for over ten years now Jack has breathed sea air, which some people find so desirable, he can even smel the land, the breath of the land. The thick, sweaty smel of a hayfield. The dry, baked smel of cooling stubble on an August evening.

Smel s he never smelt at the time. The smel of cow dung mingling with earth, the cheapest, lowliest of smel s, but the best. Who wouldn’t wish for that as their birthright and their last living breath?

9

THEY’D GOT THE LETTER nine days ago, though, strictly speaking, there was no “they” about it, the operative phrase being “next of kin.” Tom must either have put down his brother’s name from the very beginning, or made the substitution when necessary.

On that question Jack could never be sure, seeing as Tom had never answered any of his letters. There’d been precious few of them, it was true, but they’d included the letter that had cost Jack an agony to write, about the death and funeral arrangements of Michael Luxton. It had cost him several long hours and several torn-up sheets of paper, of which there was never a big supply at Jebb, though even as he’d written it he’d wondered how much pain in it there would real y be for Tom. Why should Tom care? He’d finished with his father nearly a year before, and it was vice-versa now, their father had finished with everything, al fixed and concluded.

“I hope,” Michael had once said, according to Tom (and why should Tom have made up such words?), “someone some day wil do the same for me.”

So where was the agony in it for Jack, knowing there might be none in it, real y, for Tom? Unless that itself was the agony, that there wasn’t any. Over such a thing. Or maybe it was that for Jack writing any letter of a personal nature—any letter at al —was agony. “Send me a postcard,” El ie had told him, with a little sad pout, as if he might have been going off to war himself (so you’d think she might have been more pleased when she got one).

And he’d agonised, in his way, over that.

WELL, he wouldn’t be writing any damn last letters right now. One thing off his mind. And El ie wouldn’t be reading any.

But Jack couldn’t ever be sure about that question of next of kin, seeing as Tom had never written back, or otherwise got in touch. Seeing as Tom wasn’t there when they’d lowered Dad down beside Mum in Marleston churchyard.

He’d thought: What was she saying to him, what kind of greeting was he getting? This is a fine way to be coming back to me, Michael.

Jack couldn’t be sure if Tom had just decided not to be there and not even say he wouldn’t be there (though Jack knew there was a thing cal ed compassionate leave) or if Tom wasn’t there because he’d never in the first place received that letter that had cost so much to write. Maybe sending a letter to just a name and a number in the army was like sending a letter to the North Pole.

There was no doubt, in any case, when Jack read that official letter, addressed to him from the MOD, that he was Tom’s next of kin. There wasn’t any other. But he wanted to believe—stil wants to believe even now—that Tom would have put down his brother’s name as next of kin from the very first point of the army’s requiring it. Hadn’t it, in a way, been understood between them?

Good luck, Tom.

It was almost his first thought as he’d read that letter, that the next-of-kin thing would have applied. That was why this piece of paper was in his hand. As he’d stared at it and tried to make it not be real, he’d thought: and now there wasn’t any next of kin, not for him, not in the true meaning, even though he’d married El ie. There wasn’t any next.