But Major Richards was only too aware that soldiers had to do far tougher things.
IT WAS NOW VERY UNLIKELY that Major Richards, who quite frequently regretted the course of his career and the fact that he was not by now a colonel, would be cal ed upon to do those far tougher things. And, of course, demanding as it was, being the messenger was far easier than being the receiver. He made conscious efforts to remind himself of this.
On a number of occasions now—and recently these occasions had intensified—Major Richards had been required to announce the actual news in person himself. Of a death (not so often, thank goodness), of a wounding or hospitalisation. Since, with the army’s increasing tendency to merge regiments, his duties effectively operated at brigade level (though he stil thought of himself as “First Battalion”) and since he’d been deemed good at them, he was not inexperienced. There could be a wife, smal children. Or just parents, brothers, sisters. The average age of a soldier meant that his family might very often stil al be in one place. This could be both convenient and not. You might walk in on some cluttered, ordinary domestic scene.
Everyday havoc. They would always look guilty and apologise for the mess.
He’d taught himself always to look them directly in the eye. Of course, it helped you, but didn’t help them, that they invariably guessed why you were there, as soon as they saw you in your cap. They often even said the words for you: the worst words—which he might be able to correct.
Not kil ed, no. But if it was the worst, or even not (not kil ed, no, just paralysed) then the reaction could go any way, any old way at al . If, say, it was a young mother and two toddlers. They could explode straight away, or later.
Sometimes they could tel you, and it was an order you couldn’t disobey, to make a swift exit. You had to be ready and alert.
It gave Major Richards little satisfaction that he’d acquired the tactical if hardly military skil of knowing when to beat a retreat. Having sat in Lookout Cottage for barely half an hour and having drunk the statutory (but decent) cup of tea, he sensed the need to exercise this ability once again.
Major Richards had never been in Iraq or Afghanistan or indeed in any place where, at the time, actual explosions had occurred and bodies been fragmented. He’d missed the Falklands, as a junior officer—which, for a while, had rankled. Even his tours in Northern Ireland had been quiet.
But he had, in recent months, been an intimate witness to some immediate consequences of what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had, as it were, been present at several scenes of devastation, enough to know that such scenes were proliferating and increasingly pockmarking the land (though they were as nothing, he understood, to the frequency of such scenes in Iraq or Afghanistan). Enough to give him a curious sense of the country in which he dwelt and to which he owed a soldier’s al egiance.
Mostly he did what he did by a process of becoming accustomed to it, if you could ever be, and by the application of instinct. He couldn’t say, as a soldier in Iraq might say, that he was trained. Often he felt like a civilian in uniform, a pretend soldier. As to the rights and wrongs, the whys and wherefores, of the operations in the Middle East, he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t comment, even when (though it was surprisingly rare, one of the less-encountered complications) they demanded that you did.
But this case—Corporal Luxton—was real y very simple.
Just one living relative, as he’d now confirmed. That had its peculiar sadness and bleakness perhaps, but there would be no further family network (it was a sort of comfort) to trouble, no further connections running like underground wires for further domestic detonations to occur. Just one relative and a wife. And—seeing as they’d had time already to absorb the basic news—there’d been no distressing outbursts. None of the howls or moans or terrifying speechlessness he’d sometimes known.
And, as it happened, he’d never been, in al his life, to the Isle of Wight. When he’d crossed the water, a strange, light-hearted mood had gripped him. Hardly appropriate. But he thought, not for the first time that day, as he strode back to his car, cap on again, shoulders square (he knew from experience that they stil might be watching or that, once the door closed behind you and you’d straightened your back, al kinds of col apsing might be going on inside) that, had he not been in uniform, he might have taken the chance for a mooch around. A walk. A breath of sea air. His uniform was the bind. It was so mild and stil , the sea, from here, like a sheet of polished steel.
What a marvel ous spot. Lookout Cottage.
It would hardly have been right to say, on such a day, that he even felt a little envious. It certainly wasn’t typical, not typical at al , of the places he had to visit. Housing estates, military or otherwise. He wondered how someone from a farmhouse in Devon—that was the previous given address (and the man had spoken with a real Devon burr)—came to be living in a cottage in the Isle of Wight and running a caravan site. And what must that be like to do? Not bad at al , maybe. He’d looked again at those white oblongs.
No outbursts, anyway. The wife had looked pretty steady, in fact, even a little hard-eyed. Wel , it wasn’t her boy, just a brother-in-law. No children, apparently. Just them. An odd couple perhaps, something not quite as one between them in the face of this news. But you saw al sorts of things.
As for him, Jack, the only relative, wel yes, that was tough. Your only brother. Your younger brother—Major Richards had reckoned that the gap must be several years.
And he’d noticed before he left (it was even why he’d left) something going on inside Jack Luxton, something deep and contained, that might need its outburst at some time.
On the other hand he didn’t look like a man given to outbursts, or to much extravagant self-expression at al . He looked pretty hefty and—what was the word?—bovine. He looked—and judging from those photographs stil in his wal et his brother had been just the same—like a big strong man.
12
QUICKER AND BETTER at just about everything. He would swing that gun, when it was stil too big for him, swing it far too much, Jack would think, and fire as if the shot were like a rope that couldn’t help tighten on its target. Rabbit, crow, pigeon. Pigeons were the trickiest. Big, clumsy birds, sitting on the bare branches in Brinkley Wood, sitting ducks you’d think, but they knew when a gun was being pointed.
Though not, apparently, when Tom was pointing it. A sniper.
Two pigeons dangling by their necks on a string from Tom’s belt, wet with Luke’s saliva. None for himself. Three misses, in his case, al hitting the space where a pigeon had been. But he hadn’t minded. “That’s two between us,” Tom would say, and mean it.
Walking back through the wood on a grey, hard January morning. Time off, after milking, on a Sunday morning.
Time off to be just two brothers. Even Dad could recognise and concede it. Like Mum fighting for those two holidays.
After a long, unyielding silence: “Wel , off you go, then.” An hour’s shooting on a Sunday morning. Dad wouldn’t come himself, though he was a decent shot. Perhaps he knew that Tom could already outshoot him. And he’d give the permission as if he, Jack, were just a kid too, needing permission, though he was turning twenty now and the idea, the concession, was that he was supposed to be Tom’s teacher. Tom didn’t need his father watching over him. Tom was old enough to learn to shoot and Jack was old enough to be his teacher. As if Tom needed any teaching.