and by sticking her head now out of the window and yel ing,
“Come on, Jacko! Now or never. Quick! Jump in!”
. . .
BUT SHE DOESN’T go through the Jebb gate. She doesn’t even stop by it. And Jack wil never know that he was once part of that never-enacted scene. She thinks of her dad who, even now, in his sozzled state, is perhaps unaware of her flight. How can she do it? Ensure that in the course of three days the only two women in his life wil have deserted him, and stolen his Land Rover. She thinks of her abandoned dad who, when he hears her driving back down the Westcott track, wil surely think, in his half-stupor, that it must be his wife coming home. Coming back! Al ie and El ie and Jimmy, al together at Westcott again.
She drives along the Marleston road. There’s a straight, clear stretch after the Jebb bend, but she’s lost now al the thril of speed. In any case, she slows for the Westcott gate.
She can see the square tower of Marleston church poking up ahead. She gives a strange, pained cry (she gave the same cry again, exactly the same, today) and runs a forearm over her slippery face. She stops, gets out to close the gate dutiful y behind her—having left it defiantly open on her way out. She hears its familiar clang.
The twin hedges take her in their grasp, the golden sunshine mocks her. She drives on down, along the dry ruts, to her father, who, indeed, since he’s been seeking oblivion anyway, wil never know, any more than Jack wil , what El ie has done today. The things we never know. She drives back into Westcott Farm, to her mother’s absence, to her sleeping father (who when she wakes him with a mug of tea, doesn’t want to be woken) and to the mooing, snorting, pissing, shitting fact of cows to be milked.
6
IT WAS DEEP, steep, difficult but good-looking land, with smal patchy fields that funnel ed or bulged down to the woods in the val ey. They had one field up on the ridge where they grew occasional wheat and autumn feed, otherwise it was down to grass and like almost every farm for miles around: sheep or dairy, and they’d always been dairy—beef calves for sale, and dairy. It was hard work for the softest, mildest thing in the world. It was al about turning the land into good white gal ons, as many as possible. And it was al about men being slaves to the female of the species, so Michael Luxton had liked to say, with a sideways crack of his face, when Vera had stil been around, especial y in her hearing. They were al bloody milksops real y.
Each one of those carcasses that were carted off after the cow disease came was a potential hand-out from the Ministry. But that didn’t al ow for the slowness or downright shiftiness of the bureaucracy, or for the simple fact that there was nothing much to bridge the gap. Not a single one of their herd had ever been confirmed. The words were
“suspect” and “contiguous risk.” They just couldn’t be moved, that’s al , though they had to be fed. Nor, at first, could their milk be moved, though they had to be milked.
And then they’d nearly al (except for the new calves) been moved anyway—as carcasses. The farm like a ghost farm, the loss of al that penned-up company strangely bereaving.
No milk flow, no cash flow, and precious little in the bank.
He and Tom got the impression, from their dad’s silences, that the precious little wasn’t even theirs. Meanwhile, when were they supposed to start restocking again and know it wouldn’t be cost and effort for nothing?
Tom hadn’t waited for the final reckoning. Though you couldn’t say it was a sudden move either. He waited til his eighteenth birthday—til he’d be his own man. And you couldn’t say it was a bad move. He’d seen the way the wind was blowing.
And why hadn’t he, Jack, thought of it first? Just to clear off out of it. But it had never occurred to him. And why hadn’t he minded when Tom said that it had been occurring to him al right, for more than a year? “This is just for your ears, Jack.” As if then it became a pact that they’d both entered into, and it was down to Jack, while Tom made the actual move, to cover up for him. And to take it, of course, from Dad afterwards, take al the stick for it, but not say anything for weeks, months, feigning dumb ignorance, buttoning his lip, like some good soldier himself, and only speaking, final y, because he thought his dad must surely have guessed anyway—what else does a boy do?—and because there was no real chance of his father’s getting Tom back.
No, he didn’t know where Tom was. Which was only the truth. Because Tom was in the army and who could say where the army was? Catterick? Salisbury Plain?
Good luck, Tom. As if Tom was doing the escaping for both of them.
Why had he never minded, or even thought about it most of the time? That Tom was better, quicker, smarter at pretty wel everything. Including, so it seemed, deciding his own future. Eight years and, for a long time, several inches between them. And no competition. He could knock Tom down any time he liked, but he never had. Had never even wanted to.
Even that gun lying there, Tom was better at that. At twelve or thirteen he could swing it round and make the rabbit hit the shot. Good with a gun—so a soldier’s life for him. But Tom was even better, after Vera died, at taking her place, at being, for them al , a bit of a mum himself.
Was that something the army required of a man too?
Jack should have been the one, by rights, to step into her space. Eight years her only boy. And al those mugs of tea.
But it was Tom who, at thirteen, was plainly quicker and better in the cooking, washing and looking-after department too. And Jack, at twenty-one, was a big, outdoor man with mud on his boots. If he’d tried to take his mum’s place, Dad would have mocked him. So it was Tom who one day put on Vera’s stil flour-dusted, gravy-spotted apron. He and Dad simply watched him do it. It had been hanging on its hook on the corner of the dresser where no one seemed to want to touch it. But it was Tom who took it down and put it on. Like some silent declaration. It was Tom who piled eggs and bacon and triangles of bread into the pan and fil ed the kitchen with a smel and a sizzle as if someone might be stil there who wasn’t.
And not just pile. He could crack those eggs one-handed, just as Mum had. Two neat little half-shel s left in his fingers.
Jack knew, without trying, he could never have done that.
They’d have been eating eggshel for breakfast, spitting out the bits.
Mrs. Warburton, Sal y Warburton, Mum’s old pal, had come in for a while every day to “tide them over,” as she put it, and perhaps to set them al her own example in being a bit of a mum to each other. Maybe Tom got some of it from her. Maybe Tom had puppied up to her while he and Dad did al the heavy work.
And it was a pity, maybe, that Mrs. Warburton wasn’t just Sal y Warburton, or just Sal y somebody, and not Mrs.
Warburton, wife of Ken Warburton who ran the fil ing station at Leke Hil Cross. Because then she might have become the next Mrs. Luxton and they might al have got a permanent second-best mum. But she stopped coming after a while, presumably because she thought they were tided over. And then where was Michael to turn? He was fifty-two. Jack never knew what his mum might have said to his dad, even as she was dying, on this score. If she’d said anything at al . But after a certain passage of time Michael made the desperate move of advertising in the Courier for a “housekeeper,” and everyone knows, when a recently widowered farmer does that, what it real y means.