On the other hand, he might have made enquiries. Not so difficult, not so unreasonable. Being next of kin, for God’s sake. And he’d known that some such message as he held now in his hand was not out of the question. Now that it was in his hand it had the eerie, mocking truth of something not entirely unanticipated. His hand shook. As if the anticipation might have forestal ed it. As if the anticipation might have caused it.
And the fact is he’d known, before, what was in it. This was the thought that, before al the others, sprang up to overwhelm him. That his heart had started banging, as if it had jumped loose in his chest, even before he’d opened the envelope.
And when he’d passed it to El ie, he’d known that she, too, knew already what was in it. There’s such a thing as body language. And that tone in his voice when he’d cal ed up to her. She looked miffed, al the same, to have been dragged from her task. He’d always had a struggle whenever he tried to get that damn duvet cover on. And when she looked at the letter he’d known at once from her face that she wasn’t going to make it any easier for him. It wasn’t easy in the first place, but she wasn’t going to make it any easier. She wasn’t going to make it any easier because one thing he could see in her face was that she thought that this made things easier anyway. It drew a neat and simple and permanent line. And the fact is, if he were honest, he’d had the same thought too, just the tiniest flash of it. But what for El ie was a thought that made things easier was for him like a trap snapping on him. The very fact that he could even think it.
People could help by dying. Yes, they could. No, they couldn’t. He could see that El ie’s position was going to be that this was his, Jack’s, business, he shouldn’t dump it on her. Next of kin, and El ie wasn’t. El ie, when al was said, and despite that marriage ceremony ten years ago in Newport, was a Merrick. He could see that El ie’s position, if he pushed her, was going to be that he had helped Tom make his departure al those years ago, had seen Tom off.
And wasn’t the last thing he’d wanted, or wanted these days anyway, was for Tom to show his face again?
Jack could see al this even as he felt himself starting to tremble inside. Even as he had the briefest but clearest picture of Tom standing right there, in the doorway of Lookout Cottage, grinning and looking bigger than he used to be. In a soldier’s uniform. Anyone at home?
The last thing he’d wanted? No.
This was al his fault, Jack had thought, this letter and al it might mean was his fault. He thought it even as El ie passed the letter back to him. It even seemed like a letter he hadn’t just opened but had been keeping in his pocket for some time and had only just decided to show her. Like that letter she’d shown him, the blue sky at the window, at Jebb. Here, read this.
He thought it even as she moved towards him, because she could see now he was actual y trembling. Not just his hand. His shoulders were shaking, his chest was heaving.
Even as El ie put her arms round him and held him—she smelt of clean cotton—and pressed her mouth to the side of his neck and said, “It’s okay, Jacko, it’s okay.” And what did that mean—just that it was okay for a grown man to cry?
Even as the hot tears came gushing out of him—they had to
—out of Jack Luxton’s eyes, that were stony-grey and, most of the time, cool and expressionless like his father’s. Wel , people weren’t fucking cattle.
10
RAIN WEEPS DOWN the window in front of him, but Jack isn’t crying now. And he’d put a stop to his tears soon enough on that grey morning. He’d gasped them back into himself and wiped a sleeve across his face even before El ie could grab a clump of tissues and hold it out for him.
It should have been like this then, he thinks. Then the weather might have made his tears seem less conspicuous or might have done his crying for him. But, outside, the morning had been merely grey and damply stil .
He couldn’t remember when he’d last cried, not counting when he was a nipper and it was al owable. Or if he’d cried at al since then. But yes he had, of course he had, and he could remember exactly when. Tears on his pil ow. But never in front of anyone. Certainly never in front of El ie. So it had been a shock to her. Perhaps even a disappointment.
Not even when his mum died. He hadn’t let his eyes wel up in front of El ie. As if El ie would have had any softness left for missing mothers. And he’d been twenty-one by then, a man’s age. And now, when he was thirty-nine, he’d felt as El ie put her arms around him just a touch of hardness in them, just the hint of a restraint in their comfort. I’m not your mother, Jack, don’t cry like a baby.
True enough. If it was al his fault, how should tears come into it? Tom had gone off to be a soldier—and he wanted to sit here and cry? He’d dried his eyes before El ie could dry them for him. But he’d known that he hadn’t cried enough, not nearly enough. That little bit of crying had only made him aware that there was a whole lot more crying left inside him, a whole tankful. He’d just put the stopper back on his tears.
As for El ie, her eyes hadn’t even gone dewy.
And that maybe settled something, final y took away, on that painful day, one foolish niggle. Namely, that he’d always wondered and never could quite put the thought aside, whether Tom and El ie had ever … Whether El ie and Tom … On a Wednesday afternoon, say. Given Tom’s general quickness off the mark.
Surely not. Though would he actual y have minded—even that? Just once in a while. If Tom, as it turned out, was going to pack himself off anyway. But the question was more whether he’d have minded to know it now. Now that Tom was packed off for ever. No, he wouldn’t have minded.
He wouldn’t have minded it even back then, if he’d known then that one day Tom would be packed off for ever. What’s mine is yours, Tom.
Surely not. But when Jack, after Tom left, had gone over to Westcott Farm to spend afternoons with El ie, Tom’s name had rarely come up between them. And Jack, with his sliver of suspicion, had supposed this was because El ie would have wanted to stay off the subject, while he didn’t want to force it either. Finished business anyway.
But even on that July afternoon at Jebb, with that other letter in the Big Bedroom, when the subject of Tom should have come up, when he should have brought it up, he’d kept warily silent. It was El ie who’d brought it up for him. “I know what you’re thinking,” she’d said, holding her mug of tea under her chin. “But he made his decision, didn’t he, and when did you last hear a peep out of him? I don’t think you have to tel him anything. Forget him, Jack.” And if she could say that, then perhaps his mind should have been settled al along. At least on that score.
. . .
HE’D WIPED AWAY his tears and El ie’s eyes had stayed dry. Then a silence had stretched between them, a silence in which the look on El ie’s face had seemed to say: Don’t make this difficult, Jack. This is tough news, don’t make it tougher. And even he could see, even then, that it might have been tougher even than this. Tom might have come back in a wheelchair. He might have come back like a big, helpless baby.