Had Toby Robinson inadvertently learnt that Michael Luxton had committed suicide—and how—he might have simply thought: So what? So what? It would have made his mad-bul notion a bit unfortunate, but was that tree—were they?—any the worse? But Clare might have suffered some more decisive occurrence of that transitory shiver which she would keep to herself. And the upset she felt through simply glancing at a newspaper might have been more unsettling too.
“Thomas Luxton.” Should they go there, she’d thought, should they be there? If the poor man had grown up in
“their” farmhouse should they put in an appearance? She had two boys of her own, Charlie and Paul, though she hardly saw them as soldier material. But they’d just been down for half-term, and was it real y any business or obligation of theirs? She resolved not to let it cast a pal .
She wouldn’t mention it to Toby, if he didn’t mention it himself, and she knew he wouldn’t.
It would be like never mentioning Martha’s name, which had become a sort of rule. Clare knew that if she mentioned it, though she had every reason and right to, it might be a fatal thing to do. It might cause a catastrophe.
So much time had passed, in fact, without Martha’s being mentioned, that Clare couldn’t actual y be sure if Martha stil featured. And this was a comforting uncertainty, as if consistently not mentioning her name was gradual y making Martha not exist. Though Clare would never have said that she wished Martha dead.
So their happy possession of Jebb Farmhouse continued. Their “Jebb years,” their summer stays. Even their picnics with visiting guests under that wonderful oak tree. It was five centuries old, they’d once been told (by Jack Luxton), which rather put her temporary little disturbances into perspective. Clare would never have lasting cause to regret the acquisition of their country place.
Or to feel she’d been overdoing it, that summer evening years ago, when, after they’d first seen Jebb, she’d intertwined fingers with her husband’s over the dinner table in an expensive hotel on the fringes of Dartmoor and said—
not unmindful of everything they already possessed—that it might even be like their “very own little piece of England.” 33
JACK DROVE MADLY ON.
On that cold, clear Remembrance Day, when Tom wasn’t there, Jack had swung the gate shut behind his father in the Land Rover, not knowing then (had his father known?) that Michael would never set foot outside Luxton territory again.
He would walk that night down to the oak tree.
As he’d shouldered Tom’s coffin, Jack had felt the overwhelming urge to be not just Tom’s brother but the second, secret, cradling father he’d sometimes felt himself to be. And as he’d stood and dropped his handful of earth onto the drumming coffin lid—before he was unable to stand there any longer—he’d even wanted to be Tom’s real father, their father, who could never, except through the living breath of his older son, have the chance to say, to let the words pour repentingly from his lips: “My son Tom. O
my poor son Tom.”
But Michael was lying now just yards from his younger son, and who knows how the dead may settle their scores?
Al at once Jack had remembered what Tom had said, about that other death down in Barton Field—about what Michael had said: “I hope some day someone wil have the decency …”
He’d fled the churchyard, the only living Luxton left, then had needed to stop by that monstrous, mocking gate. Now, as he drove on, turning his back on Luxton territory, he knew why Lookout Cottage was the only place to go. It wasn’t that he thought any more that it was where he belonged. It was the gun, his father’s gun.
He had his dad’s example. He even had Tom’s example
—a gun-carrying soldier, a sniper. How many had Tom kil ed? But Tom, who in his days as a soldier must have had to see many things, had never had to see what he, Jack, had once had to see in the darkness under that tree.
It was the gun, waiting for him now.
AS HE SPED AWAY from Marleston, Jack couldn’t have felt less like a man who, instead of stopping to confront a gate, might have paused to cal his wife and say he was coming home. His mobile phone (with its several messages) remained switched off. Yet on this homeward journey—if that was what it was—he fol owed a route he’d taken once before with El ie and, had he been in a different state of mind, he might have felt he was travel ing back, in more than one sense, to her.
Ten years ago, after closing the old Jebb gate for the last time, he’d got in, beside El ie, in the passenger seat and so technical y in the position of navigator. But El ie already knew the way. El ie had already gone—so Jack had learned one July afternoon—to spy out their future on the Isle of Wight, seizing the chance to do so secretly when Jimmy had been admitted to hospital. And that was one reason, Jack had told himself, why she’d kept that letter from Uncle Tony to herself for so long. She couldn’t share it til she’d checked its validity—on the spot—and she couldn’t do that while her dad was around.
So El ie had driven them both, with the memory of her first trip to guide her, but Jack hadn’t been just the passive, ignorant passenger. In the early stages of their journey he’d suddenly realised there was a coincidence of memories and of routes. The road signs had chimed with him: Honiton, Axminster, Lyme Regis … El ie had passed along this road before, but then so had he.
“El ie, I’ve got an idea.”
So they’d found themselves together at Brigwel Bay.
And standing on the beach there with El ie, having taken one of the great initiatives of his life (to think they might have sailed past the turning only for the idea to have hit him miles further on), Jack had made one of the great declarations of his life. It took the form of one of his rare jokes, but it was too gal ant—and too successful—to be just a joke.
“There you are, El . Here you are. ‘Wish you were here.’
Now you are.”
Then he’d blurted out, “And always wil be.” And just for his saying this El ie had hugged him, almost squeezed the breath out of him, and said, “My hero,” while he’d smelt the strange, forgotten smel of the sea.
HONITON, Axminster, Lyme Regis. He took the same route now, but at the turning—he knew when it was coming—he didn’t even slow. It was like another shut gate. What lay down that road? He and El ie clasped in the embrace of their life? That wasn’t the point. What lay down that road was a six-year-old boy on a caravan holiday, legs spattered with wet sand, who’d become a soldier in Iraq. He’d sometimes felt like Tom’s father then.