He heard Tom creep along the passage and down the stairs. Tom would know, even in the dark, where to put his feet, which steps would creak and which wouldn’t. Those steps were part of him. Jack heard the sounds in the kitchen and then the sounds—this was tricky for Tom because the hinges were far from noiseless—of the door into the yard being opened and closed again. It was al done as quickly and as quietly as possible. If Tom had been a soldier, special y trained for such a night-time operation, you could say he’d done it wel .
Jack thought he heard a few faint scuffs of footsteps as Tom crossed the yard and again as he slipped in and out of the barn. But it wasn’t a case of hearing, so much as of imagining and seeing in his head. It wasn’t difficult to do.
For Jack in his head, as for Tom on his feet, the walk up the track would be like going to get the school bus when it was stil dark in winter. How many times had both of them done that—always separately, because of those years between them? In the dark, but knowing every step and, because you knew every step, not using a torch, though you had one with you. The smal bravery of not using it, not needing or using any light—til the blazing headlights of the school bus, rounding the bend, caught you, like the eyes of some snorting monster, and you’d be gathered up.
Tom would be thinking perhaps of al that now. Jack couldn’t hear or see Tom’s footsteps, but he could picture them, count them, every one, as if they were his own. He could see as if he were holding, even if it wasn’t needed, a torch for Tom, every thick, ropey rut, hard with frost, and the splays of ice in between. The high, hedged banks on either side, stars peeping through the thorns. The bend where, on the way down, you’d catch your first glimpse of the farmhouse, just its roof and chimney. Or where, on the way up, you’d pause to look back. Would Tom look back? But everything would be in darkness. Or if a moon was up, there’d be the glimmer, maybe, of the roof slates under which he, Jack, was lying.
One hundred, two hundred paces. Three hundred ascending, lung-rasping paces—to freedom. If that’s what it was. Was the army freedom? Tom must think it was. It wasn’t Jebb Farm. Three hundred paces, his heart thumping, breath smoking. Then the gate.
Good luck, Tom. He’d said it into his pil ow as he counted him up the track and pictured him swinging quickly over the gate—there’d be no opening it. Dropping his pack over first. Then the road towards Marleston. If there was a moon, it would light up the pot-holed surface. In twenty minutes or so he’d pass the churchyard and the war memorial, and his mother’s grave. Would he pause?
Good luck, Tom. Since when had he, Jack, a grown man, ever whispered into his pil ow? Or ever felt his pil ow damp beneath his cheek?
Good luck, Tom.
He’d said it inside himself the next day, as if for his own preservation, when Dad had gone bal istic, after ripping up that card. And he’d said it many times, over and over, in the weeks, months and even years to come, as if to make something true that wasn’t. Til something he’d real y known al along had sunk in on him. That Tom had simply gone, gone his own way. He would never hear Tom’s voice or see his face again.
22
MAJOR RICHARDS WATCHED JACK walk away across the grass and disappear behind the corner of the building, and blamed himself. “I’d slip away if I were you …” But that hadn’t meant the man should simply turn tail and make a beeline. “Slip away” implied some tact.
Major Richards felt vaguely disappointed. Nonetheless, as he watched Jack walk away, he found himself oddly wil ing him on. He was walking in an intent, obstinate way, like some big child clinging to the absurd hope that he might be invisible. As a soldier might walk, Major Richards thought—though he’d never been in a position to see such a thing—from a battle.
And there was no question of stopping him. You al owed in a civilian under the sway of great distress what you would never al ow in a soldier facing possible imminent death.
What you would never have al owed in any of these lads lying here in their shiny black hearses.
When Jack reached the safety of the building, Major Richards felt a smal flutter of relief, even of something like envy.
DEREK PAGE AND DAVE SPRINGER, the undertaker’s men from Babbages, also watched Jack turn and walk off across the grass, like a man, it seemed to them, who’d just remembered some other appointment. Then they looked at each other. Wel , that was a bit sudden. But it was the privilege of the bereaved to act how they liked (Derek and Dave had seen some examples). They could laugh their heads off if they liked and be excused for it. And he’d done the decent thing, made contact, when that wasn’t in the rule book either, and they’d pocketed twenty each.
And he’d certainly made contact with that coffin.
The look they gave each other registered many things, but it included certain physical assessments. Had they been total y free to speak, one of them might have said to the other, “Big bugger, wasn’t he?” They were, themselves, of similar, slightly below-average height. Not that this affected their current task, but so far as tomorrow went, it could only mean, if the other bearers included Andy Phil ips and Jason Young, also from Babbages, that they’d be at the back with the thing sloping down in their direction.
They’d be taking most of the weight. What they didn’t know yet was that the few yards they’d have to tread from the church porch to the grave were also on a downward slope, which would correct, even slightly reverse the imbalance.
And it would be a short journey anyway, nothing like these soldier boys had just had to do—down the ramp of that plane and then across a hundred yards or more of tarmac.
A hard act to fol ow. They’d already had the thought.
But having now met Jack Luxton—the older brother—
they both gave renewed consideration to what those six soldiers had carried and now lay in their own charge. In this case, of course, you couldn’t exactly be sure if Jack Luxton’s bulk was any sort of guide. You didn’t know quite what was in there. They hadn’t had to deal—a mercy maybe—with the body. It might be light as a child’s. They’d find out, perhaps, when they started the hearse. A sensitive foot on the accelerator, when you had to go slow, would tel you pretty quickly if any extra gas was needed to cope with the load.
But the thing weighed upon them anyway, quite apart from these gaugings of physical weight. It weighed upon them in a way that their work seldom did, since they were used to it by now. But they’d never done anything like this.
“Big bugger,” had they spoken it, wouldn’t have excluded the sentiment “poor bugger.” In fact, the first phrase could almost have stood for the second, and “poor bugger,” had it been used of Jack, would have equal y stood for the occupant of their hearse. Poor buggers both.
Derek and Dave were twenty-nine and thirty respectively.
Neither had a brother. Dave had a younger sister. Derek was an only child. Each was married. Derek had two kids, Dave just the one. Al the children were stil so smal —stil learning to walk in one case—that it wasn’t yet an issue how they would be told what their daddies did for a living.