Coming back through the wood. The crack of twigs. Luke snuffling through the dead leaves ahead of them. Tom was only twelve, thirteen. Mum was stil alive. It wasn’t even a thought: that she might not always be. Mum had raised Luke herself, from a pup—the only one they’d kept from big old Bessie’s last litter.
Tom didn’t have his height yet and Jack would sometimes think that the difference in scale between him and Tom was like the difference in scale between Tom and Luke. But Tom had the two pigeons.
Through the trees and from al sides of the val ey would come now and then the smal , bouncy “pop-pop” of other guns. Sunday-morning shooting. The farming fraternity would cal it “going to church.” The wood, on a stil , grey morning, with the pil ars of trees, was not unlike a church.
“The farming fraternity”: that was a phrase Dad would sometimes use, keeping a straight face, though you knew he thought it was a joke of a phrase.
Along the track to the gate, then up the steepening slope of Barton Field, past the big oak, breathing hard, their throats taking in the cold air and sending it out again as steam. Jack had the gun—it was heavy, for a boy, to carry up the hil —but Tom had the pigeons. And then at some point, before the farmhouse came into view above them, beyond the rise and swel of the field, they’d stop to draw breath, and Tom would untie one of the pigeons and give it to him. True to his word. “Here, Jack.” The dead black eye of the pigeon in Jack’s hand would look at him as if to say,
“And I won’t say a word either.” Then they’d carry on up the hil , al the val ey and the far hil s opening up behind them as they climbed, they didn’t have to look behind to know it.
Pigeon pie that evening.
Pigeons. Sandcastles. And, it couldn’t be denied, girls too. Quicker and better. Too young then, at twelve.
Probably. But he was already going to Abbot’s Green School, waiting every morning by the Jebb gate for the school bus to swing round the bend and scoop him up. Half a dozen or so already inside, two or three girls among them. Kathy Hawkes from Polstowe.
Once, five or six years before, the same bus with the same driver, Bil Spurel , would have picked up Jack and, a little further down the Marleston road, El ie Merrick. But with that eight-year gap between them, Tom didn’t have any big brother around to cramp his before-and-after-school activities, and even perhaps by the time he was thirteen, by the time Mum had died, he would already have got started.
Maybe saying to himself that, given the new situation, given that Mum wasn’t around and Dad wouldn’t waste a chance to haul him out of the classroom, he’d better make the most of his opportunity. He’d better make hay, while he could, with schoolgirls. What other kind of girl was there going?
And maybe girls go for a boy who’s just lost his mum, they can’t help it. It’s a sure-fire recipe, and Tom knew it. Maybe that’s why he could crack those eggs so damn neatly.
He got through them anyhow, girls, while he could. It wasn’t for Tom like it was for him, Jack, with El ie: the feeling that this one, the one that seemed to have been put there special y in front of him, was the one he should take, for keeps if he could. And he’d better not move on and see what else might be going, because he might end up having nothing. Her being his age, too, and just across that boundary hedge. Not just an after-school thing. The two of them down in Brinkley Wood sometimes, not shooting pigeons, or going to church exactly.
He’d always thought he should stick with El ie. General y speaking, Jack was a sticker, a settler. He didn’t have the moving-on instinct, or he never real y thought he could move on. Whereas Tom, clearly, was a mover-on, in more ways than one. By the time he was eighteen, very clearly. A mover-on and leaver-behind. And no doubt as a soldier he’d have got his quota of passing female company, as soldiers do, no difficulty. And that would have suited him and was just as wel , now. No sticking, nothing for keeps.
Like pigeons.
Would he have stayed clear of El ie? She was eight years older and she was his brother’s—say no more. But would El ie have stayed clear of Tom? It might have made a change. He could almost see it from El ie’s point of view.
But he knew, now, that nothing had happened, he was sure now of that. Though it would have been a strange comfort al the same, if El ie had broken down and confessed: “Oh, Jack, there’s something I’ve never told you …” If he’d been able to put his arms round her and say,
“It doesn’t matter.” Or even: “I always had a feeling.” If it had meant that El ie could have wept too over his little lost brother, last-but-one of al the Luxtons. And if it had made her say, like she should have done, that yes, of course, she’d come with him, she’d be with him, no question, on that awful bloody journey.
Why the hel hadn’t she, anyway?
And, real y, he wouldn’t have minded, now, if she’d confessed at the time or if Tom had even given it as one of his reasons: “I’m getting out of your way, Jack, if you know what I mean. No more stepping on your territory. She’s al yours now.”
Everything would be al his.
Always the feeling, even when Tom was several jumps ahead, that he was Tom’s protector. So if Tom had taken a turn or two with El ie, it would have been like teaching him how to shoot pigeons.
. . .
WHEN TOM WAS BORN Jack was eight, and he hadn’t expected, any more than anyone else, that he’d ever have a brother. But then there was this tiny, gurgly, spluttery baby, and there was Vera, looking for a while as if she’d been pul ed through a baler. And for a short period of his life Jack had felt not so much like a brother, but—long before Tom would show the same aptitude—like a bit of a mother. And a bit of a father. There were times when, since he was only eight, he’d find himself alone with his mother and this new little pink-skinned bundle.
Up in the Big Bedroom, stowed away in a corner, was an old-fashioned wooden cradle—hardly more than two thick chunks of wood joined in a “V” and fixed to a pair of rockers. Everyone knew it was very old. Like so much else in that room, like the Big Bed itself and the old wooden chest, it was an heirloom, and there was no saying how many Luxtons had been rocked in it. Those two Luxton lads on the war memorial, surely. And Michael had been rocked in it, which was very hard to imagine. It was very hard to imagine
any
big-framed
Luxtons
ever
squeezing
themselves into a cradle.
But Jack had been cradled in it, and had been told so.
When he was stil only eight it was not so impossible to conceive of having once been in it. But now there was Tom in it anyway, fitting it perfectly.
And Jack had rocked him. Pretty often. Like a mother. In fact, few things were better and sweeter for Jack when he was eight years old than to be told by his mother that he could rock Tom for a bit, if he wanted to. It wasn’t real y a matter of permission or even of invitation, but there was a thril in receiving the prompting, and nothing was better and sweeter, Jack felt, than to be rocking Tom under his mother’s gaze, to feel and to hear the tilt and gentle rumble as the cradle, and Tom with it, swayed from side to side.