“My God, what would your poor mother have thought?” 27
JACK PULLED BACK THE CURTAINS—warily, as if expecting horrors—on the town of Okehampton. Sleep hadn’t entirely deserted him, but he’d passed a dreadful, see-sawing night, uncertain of what was truth or dream. Surely, he’d fleetingly convinced himself, it was only a dream that he was lying here, in a hotel room in Okehampton, on this journey that was al some evil product of his mind. Yet he could remember (the two nights had seemed to merge together) islands of similar, wishful delirium during the terrible night he’d passed after his father’s death. Surely it could not be so. Surely it was stil only the night before and his father was stil asleep, across the landing in the Big Bedroom (whether under a tartan blanket or not), and he, Jack, had never heard the shot that had sent him along that nightmare al eyway of events that had never occurred.
The clear blue sky over the rooftops mocked him with its sharp reality. It would have to be a day like that day, that Remembrance Day. Some of the roofs were grey with frost, others, where the sun had already struck, were a mottling of sparkling white and glossy black. Okehampton, like any country town at daybreak, was a huddle of re-emerging familiarities, and this was the sort of crisp, bright morning that could only make its inhabitants more confident of their world. But Jack felt like a spy behind enemy lines.
So it was true then, it was al true. Today he had to do some things (having done some things yesterday). He had to attend a funeral—in less than three hours. Then he had to drive a hundred miles to an off-shore island where (though the idea now seemed strange to him) he had his home.
That was al he had to do.
Today he had to be in a place he hadn’t been in for over ten years—had believed he might never need to be in again. The last funeral he’d attended there had been his father’s, when Tom, because of his inflexible military duties (or so it was general y understood), had been absent. Now, and for the same reason, Tom would most certainly be present. What was left of him would be present. But once again it would be Jack who would be the only living member of the Luxton family visible, the eyes of the whole vil age on him, now as then—on him and boring into him, into what might be inside his head.
Though “head,” back then, had not been such a good word to cal to mind. And that wasn’t, quite, the last funeral he’d attended in Marleston. Since not long afterwards—
how could he forget?—he’d stood by the grave of Jimmy Merrick, offering his arm (and shoulder to weep on should it be necessary) to El ie.
And where was El ie Merrick, in her supportive role, today?
WHEN JACK HAD STOOD by his father’s grave, he’d already had the thought (partly anticipated for him by Sal y Warburton) that at least his mother had never had to know how her husband had died. Though he’d also had the thought that, now the two of them were in a manner of speaking reunited again, she might get the whole story—
underground, as it were—direct from the man himself.
And now it was true, with the same possible proviso, that neither Michael nor Vera would have to know how their younger son died. Vera had never even had to know that Tom had left the farm. Nor that Jack—even Jack—had left it too.
When Jack needed to arrange Michael’s funeral he’d had to discuss with Malcolm Brookes, the rector (who would be officiating today), the delicate question—or the notion that had somehow got into Jack’s head—of whether, given the nature of his father’s death, his funeral would actual y be al owed. In Church ground. Brookes had expressed his opinion of Jack’s quaint idea in language surprisingly graphic for a clergyman (“This isn’t the damn Middle Ages,” Brookes had said), but had then added with a sort of patient smile, “Do you think, for any reason, I’m going to keep those two apart?”
So Brookes believed it, then? In the meeting—the re-meeting—of souls. But then, after al , Brookes would.
Death, Jack thought, looking out at bril iant, exposing sunshine in Okehampton, was in many ways a great place of shelter. It was life and al its knowledge that was insupportable.
He thinks the same, looking from his rain-blurred window, now.
IT WAS A LITTLE PAST SEVEN-THIRTY . A faint smel of frying bacon reached him even as he stood surveying the street.
Breakfast was being cooked downstairs. And, even in his present state of mind, the smel caused a benign reaction in his stomach. Jack had sometimes been heard to observe—down among the caravans on those dewy August mornings when pans would be general y sizzling—that the smel of frying bacon was the best smel in the world. None of his listeners had ever disagreed. Instead of “best,” he might have said (consulting his memory) “most comforting” or “most consoling.” Sal y Warburton, whose boxfuls of emergency items, that awful morning, had included a fair amount of prime bacon, had been surprised, if also relieved, to see Jack wolf down several rashers. Though it was almost noon by then and the poor man had been up, apparently, since long before dawn.
If they’d al been pig farmers, Sal y had thought, if this had just been pig country, none of this would have happened.
But the smel now entering Jack’s nostrils heartened him also by simply suggesting that he might not, after al , be the only guest in the hotel. He would not be alone, perhaps, and so under unrelieved scrutiny by the proprietor or her deputies when he appeared for breakfast. Though not being alone, being under the eyes of other guests, might have its problems too. Before the funeral, this would be the only point at which he’d have to run the risk of other people’s curiosity. Or suspicion.
On the pavement opposite, two early-rising inhabitants of Okehampton had stopped to exchange energetic greetings, as if they might not have met for years. Their reddened, beaming faces seemed to Jack to go with the thought of bacon.
Within half an hour, shaved and wearing a clean white shirt and the dark trousers of his suit, he’d made his way, as advised the night before, to the “back bar.” He could as easily have fol owed his nose.
It was a sunken, low-ceilinged place, which at other times might have been poorly lit, but was now pierced by bands of blinding light from the low sun shining through a gap in the buildings across the street. The shafts caught the polished surface of the bar, where the pump handles had been draped with tea-towels, and the glinting cutlery on several laid-up tables. There was obviously a kitchen close by, since the shafts were ful , along with dancing motes, of bluish swirls.
Two of the tables, half in and half out of sunshine, were occupied by solitary men intently chomping food and studying newspapers. Jack was relieved to find that they required nothing more from him than a nod and a muttered,