The whole thing was careful y adhered to. Every Remembrance Sunday Michael would put on his rarely worn suit, which Jack knew had been Michael’s father’s before him, and Jack, when he was old and privileged enough, would wear the suit his mother had once bundled him off to Burtons in Barnstaple to buy him. On that last Remembrance Day it was no longer a good fit, but it was in good condition. There had been little other use for it.
Michael
was
an
unsentimental
dairy
farmer,
uncomfortable at, but grudgingly empowered by, having a hero in the family. He made a display of both feelings. He’d put on his suit with an air of unwil ingness, as if the whole performance only deprived him of time better spent, even on a Sunday morning, on the farm. He’d pin on his poppy.
Then he’d take the medal, which Vera would have polished, and slip it almost furtively into his breast pocket. His mother, Jack remembered, always put more spirit into the thing, not only buffing up the medal, but making sure to procure the poppies in advance and inspecting them in their suits as if they might have been soldiers themselves.
And she wasn’t even a real Luxton.
Al this had changed and the annual event had acquired a new meaning and a new component after Vera died. But there’d always been—and after Vera’s death it included the teenage Tom—that gesture of the pint.
They were certainly not regulars at the Crown. If they had been, it might have lessened the effect when they walked in every November with their poppies and suits. Drink, Michael would general y say, was money down the throat.
And at least he’d never taken the route, as more than one farmer did, of letting drink itself make you forget that. They drank tea at Jebb, pints of it. They cal ed it “brew.” Otherwise, except at Christmas, they were mainly dry.
OLD MAN MERRICK on the other hand, Jack had long suspected, even before El ie confirmed it, always had a hip flask on the go. Tucked somewhere about him, under those strange layers he wore. A nip here, a nip there—ever since El ie’s mother, Alice, had disappeared one day, when El ie was stil a teenager, from Westcott Farm. Just enough to keep him bright and looking—as he often did with no great reason to—like some twinkly-eyed, contented elf. Yet on al those occasions when he and Jack would meet “by accident” in the Westcott boundary field and for a few moments do what might be cal ed “passing the time of day,” leaning their backs against the pick-up—with Luke sometimes perched in it—or against Merrick’s beaten-up Land Rover, Merrick had never fished inside his wrappings and said, “There, boysy, take a slug.” Even when the wind was sharp.
Luke was the softest dog going, but he’d always growl and act fierce when Merrick was around and Jack had never known Jimmy Merrick stretch out a hand to stroke him.
Merrick, with rumpled lapels and a poppy, would regularly turn up on Remembrance Day, mainly for the drinking afterwards and for the rarity—it was worth a humble nod to Luxton glory—of having Michael Luxton buy him a pint. If he looked a strange sight in a suit (but they al did), Jimmy wasn’t a stranger to the Crown. Michael’s view was that he must have a stash of something under the floorboards at Westcott, a pot of something buried in his yard. It had to do somehow with his wife running off. But this was something El ie could never verify—and she’d certainly have wanted to know about it.
Drink was money down the gul et anyway, Michael would say. Not that he’d want to judge his neighbour. Maybe it was even the point he was making on that Remembrance Day. It wasn’t a point about Tom. Tom’s name was simply no longer mentioned. It was just that they were teetering on the edge. More so than Jack guessed. Even the twenty-odd pounds he’d need for the two pints (just the two now) plus the others he’d have to stand (you had to look proud) was more than he could muster. Jack always put a twenty, if he had one, in his own pocket so he was covered too. And he’d had a twenty, somehow, that day.
But his dad hadn’t even looked in the direction of the Crown. His face was like a wal , a thicker wal than usual, and, after doing the other thing they always did, going to stand by Vera’s grave, they’d just driven silently back to Jebb. “That’s that then,” his dad had said and had hardly needed to say even that.
Jack was the passenger, Michael drove, and there was a point somewhere along the road when Jack realised, if not quite at the time itself, that it was too late. Before that point he stil might have said, “Stop, Dad, there’s something we haven’t done.” And conceivably his dad was testing him, daring him—wishing him to say it. He might have said it even when they were wel clear of Marleston and nearing the Jebb gate, the hedges along the road stil glittering with barely melted frost. He might have just grabbed his father’s arm as he shifted a gear. What a simple thing.
But they’d passed the point, and Jack couldn’t have said exactly where it was. Though, afterwards, he was to think it was the same point where Tom, on foot and heading in the other direction, at three o’clock in the morning, almost a year before, must have known—if he’d had any doubts at al
—that now he couldn’t, wouldn’t go back.
And it was the same point, perhaps, where George might have stopped with Fred.
“STOP, DAD.” But Jack wasn’t up to it. Though by then he’d long been the bigger of the two of them. One day, years ago, he’d woken up to discover, disturbingly, that he was tal er than his father. Now, in some mysterious way, his dad was even shrinking. But he stil wasn’t up to it.
And his father, Jack thinks now, might just have said,
“We haven’t not done anything. We went and looked at her grave, didn’t we? Take your hand off my arm.” They might simply have had a set-to right there, a blazing set-to, pul ed up on the Marleston–Polstowe road, the engine of the Land Rover stil running. A set-to in their suits.
They might even have got out and taken a swing at each other, the swings at each other they’d been saving up for years. And his dad with a medal for bravery in his pocket.
On those previous occasions in the Crown there’d usual y be someone who’d ask, as if they’d been planted there for the purpose, “So—do you have it with you, Michael?” And his father, perched on his stool at the bar and looking as if he hadn’t heard or might even be quietly annoyed by the question, would sip his beer or blow smoke from his mouth and, only after you thought the matter had passed, dip his hand into his top pocket and take it out again, clenched round something. And only after more time had passed and while he stil looked at the air in front of him would he open his hand, just for an instant, above the surface of the bar, and then return the medal to where it had come from. It was a performance his dad was good at and one worth its annual repetition. An unsentimental dairy farmer, but capable (though Jack could never have furnished the joke) of milking a situation.
The lights on in the Crown. He can see it now. A grey November noon. The low beams. Poppies and suits. A faint whiff of old wardrobes and moth bal s. The beer seeping down, everything huddled and glinting. Then for a moment that extra glint. The glory of the Luxtons.
“Stop, Dad. I want to buy you a drink.” Such a simple thing, but like moving the hil s.
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