Jack didn’t have then in his vocabulary (he doesn’t real y now) the word “hypocrisy.” It would have sounded then to him like a word a vet might use—something else cows might go down with. As for getting his suit ready, he didn’t know what that could mean other than taking it off the hanger where it had hung al year long.
But there was a seriousness, even a strange conscientiousness, about Michael’s behaviour on that Remembrance Day. He seemed to present himself in the farmhouse that morning more painstakingly, more brushed and scrubbed about his face and hands, than he’d ever done before. He fixed the poppy in his lapel not cursorily, but with a degree of care, as if it might have been a real flower and he was going to a wedding. He’d duly produced the medal and in plain view, like a conjuror beginning some solemn trick, slipped it into his breast pocket so that Jack would note it. On the other hand, after he’d examined Jack’s turnout—rather rigorously, and that too was untypical
—he’d given a weird smirking expression, as if to say,
“Wel , this is a bloody joke, isn’t it?”
Outside, the air was clear and stil and sharp, the sky a blazing blue. At ten o’clock the frost had barely melted from the fields and the hil s lay powdered with white. The woods stil had their yel ows and browns. On the oak tree in Barton Field you could have counted every motionless, bronze-gold, soon-to-drop leaf.
It was a day as etched and distinct as Jack’s memories of it would be, a day of which you might have said, at its bril iant start, that it was a fine day for something, whatever that thing might be. Even a Remembrance Day ceremony would do. And when this fine day changed—when Michael, after the ceremony, made his evident decision not to hang around, not to enter the Crown and buy his older son a drink and so let his younger son’s name come up in conversation, it wasn’t the simple, if unprecedented, skulking-off it seemed.
It had been for him, Jack, to say? His father was leaving it to him? But he hadn’t said it. Not at first, when the little group round the memorial dispersed, nor after they’d stood by Vera’s grave, nor al the way back, in that sparkling sunshine. They’d halted at the top of the track. Stil he might have spoken. But he’d got out to unfasten the gate, then closed it behind his father as he’d driven through, then known it was definitely too late.
He’d pul ed back the bolt. He remembers it al now. Two ridiculous men in briefly donned suits, in a worse-for-wear Land Rover, its exhaust pipe juddering and stil steaming in the cold air; his father’s uncustomarily combed head not turning as he re-entered Luxton territory, then stopped, with a loud yank on the hand brake, and waited for his son.
He’d swung shut the gate. The throbbing Land Rover was like some stray beast he’d herded back in. The decision had been al his. Maybe. But he’d also thought, his hands on the cold wooden rail and then on the even colder, rasping spring-bolt: You bastard, for leaving it to me, you bastard for not doing the decent thing yourself.
And thought it ever since, gone over it repeatedly in his head. It was somewhere, even, in the terrible dream out of which he surfaced, years later, in a hotel room in Okehampton. The simple opening and closing of a gate.
He’d swung it back, perhaps, with extra force. And if he’d grasped that decision as he’d grasped and swung that gate—for God’s sake, if he’d just bought his father a bloody pint—how different the consequences might have been.
THAT SAME NIGHT—this is what Jack told those he had to tel , and he had to tel it several times and never without great difficulty—Michael left his bedroom and the Luxton farmhouse at some early hour of the morning, possibly around three o’clock. It was another cold, stil , frosty night, the sort of night on which no one leaves a house or even the warmth of their bed without a very good reason.
There’s a version of it al that Jack tel s only himself, an over-and-over revisited version that al ows more room for detail and for speculation, but it’s essential y the same version that he gave others and that for many years he’s, thankful y, had no reason to repeat. Though one of the reasons why he sits now at the window of Lookout Cottage with a loaded gun on the bed behind him is the suddenly renewed and imminent possibility (which he hopes absolutely to avoid) of having to repeat it.
Michael had not been drinking, though drinking is not an uncommon accompaniment to events of this kind, which were themselves, around that time, becoming not so uncommon on smal and hard-pressed dairy farms in the region. Not only were the Luxtons not great drinkers, but Michael had not even had a pint or two that lunchtime, which was one of the rare occasions when it might have been expected of him.
Nor has Jack, at his window now, been drinking. He is entirely sober. It’s not a good thing to be drunk when handling a gun, in any circumstance.
Michael left the farmhouse on a freezing November night, long before dawn, and Jack would speculate to himself (though others would speculate too) why his father did everything that he did, not just in the cold but in the dark. It was not like when Tom slipped out that night, needing to do so by stealth. Though perhaps it was. Tom had needed only to find the track and climb up it. Dad’s path was less marked. But Dad knew every inch of the farm and every bit of that field—Barton Field—backwards. He knew it better than Tom. He knew it blindfolded.
As Jack knew it too, and stil knows it. He is perfectly able, stil , without having been there for over ten years, and in the darkness, as it were, of his head, to retrace his father’s movements that night as if they were his own. And right now he has a peculiar and unavoidable interest in doing so.
In any case, it was a clear night. There was starlight and there was a good chunk of moon, almost a ful one, Jack had noted, which, by the time he noted it, had come up over the far hil s. The question was never how, but why. Why in t h e cold—on such a night, and in those coldest hours before dawn? Though perhaps the answer to that was simple. It was dark and cold anyway. Michael Luxton was dark and cold inside. It was November. Winter, with the farm in ruins, stretched before them. Jack can see now the logic. Had it been springtime, with the first touch of warmth in the air, it’s conceivable that Michael wouldn’t have done what he did. But perhaps the truth is that if you’re ready, such considerations are irrelevant. You don’t consult, or much mind, the weather.
It’s November now, although far from frosty. A strong, wet, gusting south-westerly.
Perhaps the crucial thing was that it was the night after Remembrance Sunday.
JACK, usual y a sound sleeper, would puzzle over what it was that woke him. The shot, of course. But then if the shot had woken him, he later thought, he wouldn’t have heard it, he would have wondered, stil , what it was that woke him. In Jack’s recounting of things—understandably confused—
there was always a particular confusion about this point. He had heard the shot, yet the shot had woken him—as if in fact he was already awake to hear it, had known somehow beforehand that some dreadful thing was about to happen.