When he watched Ellie close the door behind Major Richards, Jack was still trembling inside. He felt as if he’d just been told again that Tom was dead, and this time it was real. The first time had been just a rehearsal, a sort of fire drill. But he knew he shouldn’t cry again, not in front of Ellie. Once was enough and even then he’d been brief. It hadn’t helped the first time. It didn’t help anyway.
So he hadn’t, though it had cost him a struggle. He’d looked at Ellie, who’d remained standing oddly by the front door, her back to it, as if there was something bad beyond it, though she’d looked, too, as if she were struggling with something inside her. It was the real shock and truth of it all, perhaps, only now getting through. But he didn’t get up to go to her. He knew that something had come between them since that letter. All it took was a letter. But there was an invisible wall. If he walked across to her now, he’d hit it.
They’d both listened to the sounds of Major Richards starting his car, turning it and driving off down the road to Holn. Ellie had stood there in that strange way by the door. He’d thought: Is she going to cry now, is she finally going to cry for Tom, so I don’t have to? But she hadn’t cried, not then, nor at any point in the days that followed, and when, the next day, Major Richards had called again, Ellie had picked up the phone and more or less handed it straight to Jack as if it were some matter that was none of her business. ‘Major Richards,’ she’d said as if Jack now had friends in high places.
Major Richards had told Jack he could now confirm that Corporal Luxton’s repatriation, along with that of the two soldiers who’d died with him, would take place on the following Thursday. He’d given the name of an airbase that Jack had vaguely heard of, though he wouldn’t have been able to place it in Oxfordshire. Major Richards had also explained that because of the unusual delay in arranging repatriation (he didn’t explain that this delay was partly down to the delay in contacting Corporal Luxton’s next of kin) and because, meanwhile, thorough post-mortem procedures had been completed overseas, the Oxfordshire coroner, having read the MOD report and satisfied himself of the facts, would be prepared to grant an effectively immediate release. That is, an inquest would be formally opened and at once adjourned on arrival of the repatriation flight, while the bodies could proceed directly, for their funerals, to their respective undertakers.
Major Richards pointed out that, in his experience, this was quite exceptional—for the civil authority to accept the military authority’s findings—and even suggested, in his tone, that Jack ought, really, to be grateful. Jack, who had his own experience of coroners and inquests, didn’t feel it was exceptional. Or, rather, he felt that everything was now exceptional, so exceptionality had become the norm.
Major Richards was spared from explaining, as he normally had to, though often hinting that it wasn’t a recommendation, that next of kin had the right to view the body while it rested in the coroner’s care. In this instance such a matter would be between Jack and his undertakers. But Major Richards hoped it had never entered Jack’s head.
The situation, anyway, was that Jack was now free to make plans for Corporal Luxton’s funeral—in which, of course, there would be full cooperation. In case Jack hadn’t understood these last remarks, Major Richards spelt it out that Jack would need to decide whether he wanted a private funeral or a funeral with military presence. This could be arranged. That in any case an undertaker’s hearse would need to be at the airbase to receive the coffin following the ceremony and that the costs of this transportation, as well as all the costs of Jack’s and Mrs Luxton’s ‘compassionate travel’, would be met by the army.
Jack (after a silence) had found himself saying the word Devon. The funeral would be in Devon. He’d even blurted out to Major Richards the name of an undertaker—since, limited as Jack’s dealings were in many areas, he’d had dealings in this area, too, before. Babbages in Barnstaple. He’d had to arrange once, with Babbages, his father’s funeral. He knew the ropes in this area. On the other hand, the ropes now were rather different. Then again, his father’s ropes hadn’t been so simple.
Jack had said, ‘Marleston. Marleston, north Devon.’ Then explained for Major Richards’s benefit that the nearest large town was Barnstaple. At the same time Jack had thought: the Isle of Wight to Oxfordshire, then to Marleston and back again. It would mean at least one night away somewhere.
Major Richards had explained that Jack and Mrs Luxton would be sent further, full details of the ceremony. And of course a formal invitation. To Jack, the word ‘invitation’ didn’t seem like a word that went with the army, though in this case it didn’t seem like the right word anyway. Major Richards had said that meanwhile he’d continue to ‘liaise’ (which seemed a real army word) by phone and even, if convenient, by a further visit, and that Jack shouldn’t hesitate if there were anything he wished to ask.
Though this last point was one Major Richards had made before, in person and with genuine kindness in his voice, Jack somehow felt that, now, it really meant its opposite: that the decent thing was actually to hesitate completely—not to ask anything at all. It was as if Major Richards had become his commanding officer and had just said that any man was free, of course, to back out if he wished, but the decent thing was not to. It was like a test of soldiership.
It had always been, in any case, Jack’s basic position in life to hesitate to ask too many questions. He knew that he would never ask (though he would certainly wonder) exactly how—let alone why—his brother had died (he knew that the army would prefer him not to ask such questions). In the same way that he’d never raised with Ellie the question, the peculiarity of their two fathers dying in such quick succession. Was death so infectious?
When he came off the phone, Jack explained to Ellie that they were bringing Tom home. He’d been given a date. There would be a ceremony, at some airbase. And they were free to make immediate arrangements for the funeral.
So far, there hadn’t been much discussion between them about this inevitable prospect. It would have to be at Marleston, of course, Jack now said. It was his decision. Though he wondered soon afterwards—and he wonders still now—how different it might have been if he’d said that they should have the thing done locally. For the closeness and the convenience. At least then Ellie might not have wriggled out. Though would she have liked the idea either?
In the twenty-four hours following Major Richards’s visit Jack had felt that invisible wall settle only more rigidly between them—the wall, so he might have thought of it, of Ellie’s failure to reach out and comfort him. Except it sometimes seemed—it was like an unjust reversal of the situation—that this might stem from some baffling failure on his part to comfort her.
As if he should have said, ‘I’m sorry, Ell. I’m truly sorry.’ Without knowing what for.
A local funeral. A cremation even. So then they might have scattered the ashes—scattered Tom—over Holn Head. Or into the waves at Sands End. Stood together on the beach. Or in among the caravans. But Jack didn’t like the idea of cremation. It called up bad pictures. Being a farmer, he naturally went for burial. And he had the distinct feeling that Tom might have been half-cremated already.
But, anyway, Marleston. Where else? He might have said: where all the rest of them are. All Saints’ churchyard.
They would have to go to this—ceremony. Then they’d have to go on to the funeral in Marleston. They’d have to find somewhere to stay. Though, of course, they’d be just a mile or so from Jebb and Westcott, their former places of residence.
It was important to Jack, though it was also natural, that when he explained these things he used the word ‘we’, just as Major Richards had said ‘you and Mrs Luxton’. In the pit of his stomach there was starting to form a tight ball of fear about this journey, this two-stage journey as it now turned out—about all the things, known and unknown, that it would entail. He hadn’t yet begun to contemplate every daunting detail. Yet it had to be done. It was, though the word was hardly good enough, a duty. And it wasn’t as if he, Jack, was being asked, like his brother, to enter a war zone, and so was entitled to this onset of fear. They’d have to go to a couple of places in England, that’s all, one of them very familiar. And Ellie, Jack told himself, would be beside him.
But Ellie, apparently, had other notions. Ellie, when he gave this account of some of the necessary consequences of his brother’s death, took rapid and rather violent exception to his use of the word ‘we’.
‘Who’s this “we”?’ she suddenly demanded. ‘Who’s this “we”?’ He saw her again, closing the door behind Major Richards, but remaining pressed against it and, so it seemed, trying to resist some further attempt at entry.
‘Leave me out of this, Jack. I can’t come with you.’
Jack was totally unprepared for this, but there was no mistaking the firmness of her position.
‘I just can’t. He’s not my little brother.’
He understood that she was backing out. It was a legitimate option, though he hadn’t offered it—as if he were Ellie’s commanding officer. He hadn’t said he was asking for volunteers and that any man or woman was of course free to opt out. His big mistake, maybe. If he’d said, ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, Ell,’ then perhaps she would have come. It was how such things worked. But he hadn’t said it and she hadn’t done the decent thing anyway. She hadn’t even backed out decently.
Setting aside the fixed look on her face, Jack couldn’t be sure which of her words struck the hardest. That she wasn’t going to come? That he could no longer take the word ‘we’, meaning Ellie and him, for granted? That Tom wasn’t her brother? That last statement was of course entirely correct, but Jack felt there was a sense, in this particular case, in which Tom was Ellie’s brother, in which anyone as close to the matter as Ellie was would have felt, at least for a short while: ‘this is my brother.’ He felt another tremor of that bewildering need to comfort her.
Since Jack was a man already hit hard, he was, in one sense, numbed and immunised against these further blows Ellie was now delivering. But afterwards he realised that it was the word ‘little’ that had hurt him the most. Ellie hadn’t had to say that. Yet it was the word, it seemed, she’d used with the greatest force. ‘Little.’
It wasn’t true of course, if it had been once. Tom was no longer little. You could say, maybe, that he was less than little now, since now he was nothing—he might not even be just one piece of nothing. And for some time now he’d been out of Jack’s life and Jack had tried, mostly, not to think of him. So in that sense, too, he’d been little, or nothing. But in the normal sense he wasn’t little at all, and hadn’t been little for years. He hadn’t been little on that night he’d left Jebb Farmhouse, though Jack had thought of him then, and sometimes since, as little. The point was that ‘little’ was his own word, his own special word, it wasn’t Ellie’s.
On the day following Major Richards’s visit they’d seen something in the paper that Major Richards had warned them to expect. The names—so far withheld and for an unusually long time—would now be released, of the three men who’d died in the incident previously reported. Along with the names there would be photographs, as well as some words from relatives and commanding officers. Major Richards had asked Jack if, for the purpose, there were any particular words he wished to say. Then Jack had found Major Richards suggesting—composing—a statement for him. It seemed to Jack that Major Richards had already had the statement ready in his head. It was a bit like writing that postcard to Ellie.
It was at this point that Major Richards might have produced the photos in his brown wallet, but since he saw by now that Jack’s whole body was trembling, decided against it and simply said that when the thing appeared in the newspapers they should be prepared for there being pictures.
The photograph of Tom—of Corporal Luxton—showed a man wearing a badged beret, moulded very familiarly to his head, and a camouflage shirt, the sleeves rolled up neatly above his elbows. The arms were thick, so was the face. And the expression was—expressionless. There was no hint of a smile, no hint of anything in particular. You couldn’t have said: This man could be my friend or, on the other hand, my enemy. Though you might have said this man would be good to have on your side in a fight. A word you might have used was ‘solid’. But the man in the photograph certainly wasn’t little.
Jack had looked at the photograph and recognised, of course, the man he was looking at. Yet at the same time it had seemed appropriate for him to ask, deep inside: Do I know this man? Can this man really be my brother? He’d wanted the face to have some indication in it that Tom might have known, when the photo was taken, that one day his brother would look at it.
Among the many strange feelings Jack had felt since that letter had arrived was the feeling that he was the little brother now. Big as he was, he’d turned little. And it went now with that little, concentrated ball of fear in his stomach. He felt simply small. So when Ellie had used that word, he’d felt she might as well be using it of him.
Do I know this man? But he’d felt just the same about Ellie, he realised, when she’d demanded to be counted out. Do I know this woman? This unwavering woman. There’d been an odd touch about Ellie, in fact, of the man in the photograph. You wouldn’t want to mess with that man. He might even shoot you, no questions asked. Similarly, if Ellie could be so unbudging about a thing like this, then there was no saying what else she might do. Or—he’d think later—might have done already.
The words he’d finally spoken in reply to Ellie hadn’t sounded like his own words. He couldn’t have imagined himself ever saying them or ever needing to. He’d drawn a big breath first.
‘I’m asking you, Ellie, if you’ll come with me to my brother’s funeral. If you’ll be with me when I get his coffin.’
He’d felt when he said these words a bit like he felt when things occasionally got out of hand down at the site and he had to step in—usually with remarkable effectiveness—and deal with it. So why, when he said them, had he also felt small?
‘And I’m saying,’ Ellie had said, ‘that I can’t.’
They’d stared at each other for a moment.
‘Okay, Ell,’ he’d said. ‘If that’s how you feel. I’ll go by myself.’