Then suddenly moving towards him—to meet him but also, it seemed, to rescue him—there was Brookes, in a white surplice that reminded him of those army padres, and with him, like some little unit under his command, a group of men who included Derek and Dave, the hearse drivers (how strangely good it was to see them), and Ireton. Yes, Ireton, in a smart-looking uniform with three stripes on it, Ireton who’d once sluiced down his father’s gore from the bark of an oak tree.
They al looked at him with the relieved and now activated looks of men who’d been waiting, perhaps with mounting anxiety, for nothing other than his arrival, and Jack realised, even as he also seemed to be floating absently and powerlessly, that he was the one who was here to make this thing click and function and cohere. He might have snapped his fingers and given orders if he’d been so disposed.
Derek and Dave greeted him like old friends. Their faces seemed to say, “You didn’t think we’d miss it, did you?” Then Ireton said, deferential y but quickly, like a man not wanting to waste valuable time, “I’l be your other shoulder, Jack, if that’s okay with you.” Your other shoulder? Then Jack understood. And, though he’d not given any previous thought to who might occupy this position, felt now he could have put his arms round both of Ireton’s dark-blue shoulders and wondered why he’d ever supposed that Bob
—Sergeant Ireton—might be here to clap him in handcuffs.
Six men, Ireton rapidly explained: the two of them in front and, behind, four men from Babbages, including Derek and Dave who would take the rear positions. “Unless—” Ireton had hesitated and his head had done a strange swivel towards the crowd (perhaps it real y could be cal ed a crowd) standing at a discreet distance though seeming to have the church surrounded. “Unless there’s anyone else?
Unless you’d like some other arrangement?” It seemed that everyone was ready to defer to him. He was like a king. At the foot of the church wal , he’d glimpsed, along the whole grey, weathered flank, stacks of resting flowers. Bunches, wreaths, two and three deep.
No, Jack said to Ireton, it was fine. The other two men from Babbages had introduced themselves and he’d shaken their hands and said, “Thank you,” and shaken everyone’s hand and said, “Thank you,” and this had seemed suddenly the most important and exclusively detaining thing, the names and the gripping, knuckly hands of these men.
But Brookes now intervened, pul ing up a sleeve of his white robe to look at his watch. “It’s just gone twenty past, Jack. Everything’s ready, but we haven’t let anyone in yet.” He coughed. “If you’d like a moment first, just to be alone, the church is al yours. Let us know when you’re ready. Take your time.”
And then there he was, alone but not alone, in the stony hush of the church, with the coffin and the single circle of heavy-smel ing white flowers that he’d ordered through Babbages now resting on it. It was the first time it had been like this, just the two of them, and it would never be like it again. He felt for a moment that he was in some box himself. He seemed to need to break through the wal of air that surrounded the coffin before he could put his hands on it (again), then his cheek to it, then his forehead, then his lips. These were actions that he hadn’t planned or foreseen, but was simply commanded by his body to do.
He said, “I’m here, Tom. I’m here with you.” Then he said, as if he’d not made something clear, “We’re both here.” The coffin was plain oak. Was it English oak? He felt its smoothness, examined the grain in the wood, breathed the scent of the flowers. It was suddenly like some inextricable riddle Brookes had set him, to be alone like this with the coffin, a dilemma beyond solving. “Take your time.” How could any time be long enough? Yet it had to be limited—
outside were al those people. On the other hand, Jack couldn’t find the words, the thoughts or whatever it was, beyond his physical presence, that might have properly fil ed this unrepeatable interval.
It was extraordinary that while Tom had appeared to him clearly several times in the last twenty-four hours, he was now nowhere to be seen. Was he hiding somewhere else, behind a pil ar, in this church? No, Tom was with him, here in this box. Al there was of Tom was here. He felt, though he couldn’t see Tom, couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see the signal ing flickers in his face, that they were like two people waiting for something together, for the next thing to happen, and neither of them was sure who should make the first move, though it was foolish perhaps to delay. You decide.
No, you. A sort of game. So he final y lowered his lips again to the coffin—he had never kissed any piece of wood like this, he had never kissed Tom like this when he was alive, except when he was very smal and wouldn’t ever have known about it. Then Jack said, “Wel , shal we get on with it?”
. . .
FOR A WHILE , after that, it was like nothing so much as a wedding. He had to sit right at the front near the aisle, near the coffin, like a waiting groom. Eyes were on his back, he didn’t know how many eyes, but he felt it was al right that he didn’t turn, it was al right, it was even the correct thing, to keep his eyes to the front. Were the eyes behind him thinking he was like a bridegroom too? Were some of them thinking: Where’s El ie?
It seemed now impossible that the coffin before him was the same coffin that he’d watched yesterday being carried off a plane and that had been flown al the way from Iraq.
That it had come al that way and by such a remarkable chain of events and arrangements, to stand now quietly here. There seemed no connection. There was no sign of the connection (he hadn’t noticed—in his not-looking—any Union Jacks) and no one so far had made any mention of it, so that it seemed there might be some silent communal effort around him to make it not exist. As if Tom had died, at a tragical y early age, just a little distance away. A tractor accident, perhaps.
But then Brookes had got up and said, among other things, that they al knew why they were here and they also al knew why Tom was here, though he hadn’t been here, some people would know, for a very long time. He’d been in other parts of the world. But he didn’t want to talk about how Tom Luxton had died and what he’d died for, because this wasn’t that sort of occasion and other people had spoken of those things and might stil speak of them. But what he wanted to remember, as he was sure others here would want to remember—as some of them real y could remember—was “the boy who was born in Marleston.” That was what Brookes had said: “the boy who was born in Marleston.” Though he might have chosen to say (and Jack knew why he didn’t) the boy who was born at Jebb Farm. It wouldn’t have been true, of course. It wasn’t even true that Tom had been born in Marleston. Didn’t Brookes know? He’d been born in a maternity unit in Barnstaple.
And nearly kil ed his mother in the process. It was Jack who’d been born in Marleston, Jack who’d been born at Jebb. Jack who was real y the boy—