But Tom was gone, and this was one of the better afternoons. There was more than one kind of soldiering.
Not al of it was done by soldiers, or by men. She’d shut her eyes and run her fingers over Jack’s shoulders, down his spine, as a blind person might seek to recognise the shape of something. The shape—the ache in her own flesh—of her love for him.
SOMETIMES ELLIE could think she didn’t know, she didn’t understand at al , this man she’d known, in fact, as long as she could remember. Since long before he was a man or she was a woman. That was how it was. Man and boy, girl and woman. Sometimes the thought of it, as if they’d been born together, could make her smile, sometimes it would crush her. She knew that other women might have thought: What a shame. What a shame for poor El ie Merrick that it wasn’t the other way round, that Jack wasn’t Tom. But she’d never, honestly, thought of it like that, and when she imagined those other women, shaking their heads, her blood could gather and she could feel she had claws she might fiercely use in defence of Jack Luxton. She could feel as she supposed Jack must have felt when he copped it from his dad on account of his little runaway brother.
El ie didn’t know much about the army, but she could see it was a simple, al -in solution for a man of Tom’s age, and Tom would hardly have been the first. One moment a cowshed in a gone-to-pot farm, next moment a barracks.
The main thing was he’d got out. He’d shown it could be done. Tom was not unlike her mother. And Jack might have done the same himself, as much as eight years ago, or more. But then his mother would have stil been alive, and Tom would have been barely ten.
And, anyway, if Jack had ever gone off to join or do anything, it would have meant deserting her, El ie.
She didn’t know Jack? She didn’t understand how it truly was with him and her? Oh, but yes she did.
Once upon a time, when El ie was stil a pupil, like Jack, at the tiny primary school in Marleston, jealousy had entered her life in the form of an unexpected new arrival at Jebb Farm. At first she’d supposed that this strange, nagging emotion was because she would have liked the same for herself, a little baby brother or sister. Up until then she and Jack had been equal in not having either.
But no surprise event like the one that had occurred at Jebb Farm was to occur at Westcott Farm and there was certainly fat chance of its ever occurring once, several years later, El ie’s mother had made her sudden exit. By then, so far as new arrivals went, there was a much greater chance that El ie herself, if she wasn’t careful, might get pregnant. But by then, too, El ie had grown up with her jealousy and knew that it wasn’t so much that she wanted any more a little sibling of her own, but that she was jealous of that part of Jack that belonged to his brother.
How it had once pained her, and how she’d had to hide it, when the three of them—Jack, Tom and Vera—had gone away together those two years running. Only a week, but how her jealousy had seethed. But then how her heart had soared (though she’d never said so) when she’d got that postcard from Dorset.
“We are al living in a caravan cal ed Maralin.” Jealousy wasn’t even the word, perhaps, by the time her mother had done her bunk. El ie had grown up resenting Tom Luxton, resenting him and hiding it. Hiding it to the extent sometimes of even pretending that she too, like his big brother, loved him. Wasn’t he just so lovable? They’d played games, once, she and Jack, of pretending they were Tom’s mother and father.
Wasn’t he just so adorable? Al of which acquired its complication when, many years later, Tom was old enough to be interested in girls—and vice versa. Of course she could see that Tom was the kind of boy any girl would fal for. Fal over backwards, like little Kathy Hawkes. Wel , good luck to her. And of course she could see that there was even sometimes just a touch of unease, of jealousy coming in the other direction, from Jack.
Wel , it level ed the score a little. She didn’t exactly tel him not to be so daft. But couldn’t he damn wel see?
Couldn’t Jack see? Eight years was eight years. And couldn’t anyone see by then, even if Jack couldn’t, that—
cal her stupid, cal her not choosy—she was Jack’s and Jack’s only, plain and simple. It was how it was, it was how she was. Where else did al that resentment come from?
But Jack had simply never seen, never noticed what would have been the biggest reason for his not needing to have any jealousy of his own. That she could have done without little Tom altogether. Tom himself could see it, she knew that. He had sharper eyes than his brother. But he’d just shut up about it.
It was something short of the whole hundred per cent, that part of Jack that she could cal her own, and what she did have, she only had properly, after her mother’s departure, on a couple of weekday afternoons. And that only as a pay-off from her father. Jack, too, was a slave to his father, and he was his mother’s favourite (she knew that and she didn’t blame Vera) and there was this big chunk of him anyway that belonged with his brother. How much did that leave for El ie?
But then Vera had died. Then Tom had gone away. And Jack, on the surface, didn’t seem so cut up about it, though Michael was. And, though she took care not to show it, El ie’s hopes had lifted—so far as that was possible when everything was laid low by the effects of mad-cow disease.
Because at least now she was shot of Tom.
From then on El ie had begun to do some extra wishing.
What could she do but wish? And when, not so very long after Tom disappeared from the scene, Michael Luxton, in his own way, dropped out of it too, she’d begun to feel that wishing wasn’t such a useless thing to fal back on, since it seemed it could have real effect. On the other hand, there were limits, serious limits, to wishing, even secretly. And she’d begun also to be a little afraid of her wishes. “Shot of,” it was only an expression.
But then there’d been that letter, out of the blue, from the man she chose to cal , as if she’d known him al her life, her
“Uncle” Tony. Or rather from his solicitors, Gibbs and Parker, of Newport, Isle of Wight, with their condolences and kindest regards.
In al her secret wishing and hoping, El ie had never been so foolishly wishful as to rely upon some stroke of sheer magic. True, she’d liked to tease Jack sometimes about her “mystery man.” But now that a stroke of magic had occurred—and there was, in a sense, a mystery man—she quickly enough converted it into a stroke of justice, even giddy justification. So, she hadn’t been wrong, after al , not total y to condemn her mother. Because in the end, and without knowing it, her mother had made amends.
“Caravans, Jacko.”
She’d waved the magic wand of that word over Jack’s head and fil ed in the picture for him of their combined and ful y provided-for future. Though she’d had to wait. She’d had to wait for another necessary, preliminary event to occur. Which had occurred, in fact, more quickly than she could ever have imagined, or—hand on heart—wished.