Major Richards had explained that Jack and Mrs. Luxton would be sent further, ful details of the ceremony. And of course a formal invitation. To Jack, the word “invitation” didn’t seem like a word that went with the army, though in this case it didn’t seem like the right word anyway. Major Richards had said that meanwhile he’d continue to “liaise” (which seemed a real army word) by phone and even, if convenient, by a further visit, and that Jack shouldn’t hesitate if there were anything he wished to ask.
Though this last point was one Major Richards had made before, in person and with genuine kindness in his voice, Jack somehow felt that, now, it real y meant its opposite: that the decent thing was actual y to hesitate completely—
not to ask anything at al . It was as if Major Richards had become his commanding officer and had just said that any man was free, of course, to back out if he wished, but the decent thing was not to. It was like a test of soldiership.
It had always been, in any case, Jack’s basic position in life to hesitate to ask too many questions. He knew that he would never ask (though he would certainly wonder) exactly how—let alone why—his brother had died (he knew that the army would prefer him not to ask such questions). In the same way that he’d never raised with El ie the question, the peculiarity of their two fathers dying in such quick succession. Was death so infectious?
WHEN HE CAME OFF THE PHONE, Jack explained to El ie that they were bringing Tom home. He’d been given a date.
There would be a ceremony, at some airbase. And they were free to make immediate arrangements for the funeral.
So far, there hadn’t been much discussion between them about this inevitable prospect. It would have to be at Marleston, of course, Jack now said. It was his decision.
Though he wondered soon afterwards—and he wonders stil now—how different it might have been if he’d said that they should have the thing done local y. For the closeness and the convenience. At least then El ie might not have wriggled out. Though would she have liked the idea either?
In the twenty-four hours fol owing Major Richards’s visit Jack had felt that invisible wal settle only more rigidly between them—the wal , so he might have thought of it, of El ie’s failure to reach out and comfort him. Except it sometimes seemed—it was like an unjust reversal of the situation—that this might stem from some baffling failure on his part to comfort her.
As if he should have said, “I’m sorry, El . I’m truly sorry.” Without knowing what for.
A local funeral. A cremation even. So then they might have scattered the ashes—scattered Tom—over Holn Head. Or into the waves at Sands End. Stood together on the beach. Or in among the caravans. But Jack didn’t like the idea of cremation. It cal ed up bad pictures. Being a farmer, he natural y went for burial. And he had the distinct feeling that Tom might have been half-cremated already.
But, anyway, Marleston. Where else? He might have said: where al the rest of them are. Al Saints’ churchyard.
They would have to go to this—ceremony. Then they’d have to go on to the funeral in Marleston. They’d have to find somewhere to stay. Though, of course, they’d be just a mile or so from Jebb and Westcott, their former places of residence.
It was important to Jack, though it was also natural, that when he explained these things he used the word “we,” just as Major Richards had said “you and Mrs. Luxton.” In the pit of his stomach there was starting to form a tight bal of fear about this journey, this two-stage journey as it now turned out—about al the things, known and unknown, that it would entail. He hadn’t yet begun to contemplate every daunting detail. Yet it had to be done. It was, though the word was hardly good enough, a duty. And it wasn’t as if he, Jack, was being asked, like his brother, to enter a war zone, and so was entitled to this onset of fear. They’d have to go to a couple of places in England, that’s al , one of them very familiar. And El ie, Jack told himself, would be beside him.
But El ie, apparently, had other notions. El ie, when he gave this account of some of the necessary consequences of his brother’s death, took rapid and rather violent exception to his use of the word “we.”
“Who’s this ‘we’?” she suddenly demanded. “Who’s this
‘we’?” He saw her again, closing the door behind Major Richards, but remaining pressed against it and, so it seemed, trying to resist some further attempt at entry.
“Leave me out of this, Jack. I can’t come with you.” Jack was total y unprepared for this, but there was no mistaking the firmness of her position.
“I just can’t. He’s not my little brother.” He understood that she was backing out. It was a legitimate option, though he hadn’t offered it—as if he were El ie’s commanding officer. He hadn’t said he was asking for volunteers and that any man or woman was of course free to opt out. His big mistake, maybe. If he’d said, “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, El ,” then perhaps she would have come. It was how such things worked. But he hadn’t said it and she hadn’t done the decent thing anyway. She hadn’t even backed out decently.
Setting aside the fixed look on her face, Jack couldn’t be sure which of her words struck the hardest. That she wasn’t going to come? That he could no longer take the word “we,” meaning El ie and him, for granted? That Tom wasn’t her brother? That last statement was of course entirely correct, but Jack felt there was a sense, in this particular case, in which Tom
Since Jack was a man already hit hard, he was, in one sense, numbed and immunised against these further blows El ie was now delivering. But afterwards he realised that it was the word “little” that had hurt him the most. El ie hadn’t had to say that. Yet it was the word, it seemed, she’d used with the greatest force. “Little.”
It wasn’t true of course, if it had been once. Tom was no longer little. You could say, maybe, that he was less than little now, since now he was nothing—he might not even be just one piece of nothing. And for some time now he’d been out of Jack’s life and Jack had tried, mostly, not to think of him. So in that sense, too, he’d been little, or nothing. But in the normal sense he wasn’t little at al , and hadn’t been little for years. He hadn’t been little on that night he’d left Jebb Farmhouse, though Jack had thought of him then, and sometimes since, as little. The point was that “little” was his own word, his own special word, it wasn’t El ie’s.
On the day fol owing Major Richards’s visit they’d seen something in the paper that Major Richards had warned them to expect. The names—so far withheld and for an unusual y long time—would now be released, of the three men who’d died in the incident previously reported. Along with the names there would
