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.
And that was a touchy point.
Or perhaps his very first thought had been that, though this letter came from the army, from the Ministry of Defence, it came, in a sense, from Jebb, bearing that crossed-out address. It was like several letters that had reached them for a while. It was an arrangement you made—or El ie had made it, and the same for Westcott—with the Post Office.
But those letters had petered out years ago, which was just as wel , since each time (even if it wasn’t someone demanding money) it couldn’t help but hurt and accuse him to see those words—“Jebb Farm”—on the envelope.
Now, with this letter, they were like a stab.
Since Tom had never known that. Whether or not he’d ever received any of those other letters or cared, if he had, what was in them. Jack had never written with that bit of information. It had been his decision. Since Tom had never appeared at the funeral, or ever replied. Since he didn’t even know any more where Tom was.
Or El ie’s decision. Lots of his decisions were real y hers.
Maybe most. Though he could have said it, nonetheless, been the first to raise the subject, that afternoon, “There’s Tom, El . What about Tom?”
AND NOW IT DIDN’T matter anyway. Because there wasn’t any Tom. Because that letter that had been a little delayed in reaching him, having been addressed to Jebb Farm, informed him that Corporal Thomas Luxton, along with two others of his unit, had been kil ed “on active duty” in Iraq, in the Basra region of operations, on 4th November 2006. It informed him that, failing other attempts to contact him directly, this news was being communicated by letter with the deepest regret, and that every effort would have been made prior to his receipt and acknowledgement of this notification to have kept Corporal Luxton’s name from public disclosure. It very respectful y asked that Mr. Jack Luxton make himself known as soon as possible—a special direct-line telephone number, as wel as other numbers and addresses, was given—so that arrangements could be made for Corporal Luxton’s (and his comrades’) repatriation, which, for operational reasons, would in any case be pending clearance by the in-situ military authorities.
It was a grey, murky autumn morning, the sort of day on which it can be good to know that a holiday under hot, rustling palms is in the offing. Palm trees, for some reason, had flashed through Jack’s mind and had made him blurt out that stupid thing about cancel ing the Caribbean.
Perhaps it occurred to him as he stared at that letter that he might already have read, without knowing it, as an item in a newspaper—though he was not a great scourer of newspapers—the anonymous announcement of his own brother’s death. Public disclosure. But no, he couldn’t remember any moment when his insides had turned mysteriously cold. And though, by now, such items of news weren’t so rare, he’d always told himself that Tom might be anywhere.