Wish You Were Here Read Free Page A

remembers that Remembrance Day because it was the last one he attended with his father and because his father, on this occasion, didn’t offer to buy him, as was the regular ritual too, a pint in the Crown afterwards. It was the only day of the year on which Michael would buy his son a drink, doing so with a rather stagy insistence,as if the long-ago deaths of those two lads somehow rested on his conscience. Or perhaps it was more that on this day, with its hallowed meaning for the Luxton family, he liked to make a show in front of the village.
    The whole thing was carefully adhered to. Every Remembrance Sunday Michael would put on his rarely worn suit, which Jack knew had been Michael’s father’s before him, and Jack, when he was old and privileged enough, would wear the suit his mother had once bundled him off to Burtons in Barnstaple to buy him. On that last Remembrance Day it was no longer a good fit, but it was in good condition. There had been little other use for it.
    Michael was an unsentimental dairy farmer, uncomfortable at, but grudgingly empowered by, having a hero in the family. He made a display of both feelings. He’d put on his suit with an air of unwillingness, as if the whole performance only deprived him of time better spent, even on a Sunday morning, on the farm. He’d pin on his poppy. Then he’d take the medal, which Vera would have polished, and slip it almost furtively into his breast pocket. His mother, Jack remembered, always put more spirit into the thing, not only buffing up the medal, but making sure to procure the poppies in advance and inspecting them in their suits as if they might have been soldiers themselves. And she wasn’t even a real Luxton.
    All this had changed and the annual event had acquired a new meaning and a new component after Vera died. But there’d always been—and after Vera’s death it included the teenage Tom—that gesture of the pint.
    They were certainly not regulars at the Crown. If they had been, it might have lessened the effect when they walked in every November with their poppies and suits.Drink, Michael would generally say, was money down the throat. And at least he’d never taken the route, as more than one farmer did, of letting drink itself make you forget that. They drank tea at Jebb, pints of it. They called it ‘brew’. Otherwise, except at Christmas, they were mainly dry.
    Old man Merrick on the other hand, Jack had long suspected, even before Ellie confirmed it, always had a hip flask on the go. Tucked somewhere about him, under those strange layers he wore. A nip here, a nip there—ever since Ellie’s mother, Alice, had disappeared one day, when Ellie was still a teenager, from Westcott Farm. Just enough to keep him bright and looking—as he often did with no great reason to—like some twinkly-eyed, contented elf. Yet on all those occasions when he and Jack would meet ‘by accident’ in the Westcott boundary field and for a few moments do what might be called ‘passing the time of day’, leaning their backs against the pick-up—with Luke sometimes perched in it—or against Merrick’s beaten-up Land Rover, Merrick had never fished inside his wrappings and said, ‘There, boysy, take a slug.’ Even when the wind was sharp.
    Luke was the softest dog going, but he’d always growl and act fierce when Merrick was around and Jack had never known Jimmy Merrick stretch out a hand to stroke him.
    Merrick, with rumpled lapels and a poppy, would regularly turn up on Remembrance Day, mainly for the drinking afterwards and for the rarity—it was worth a humble nod to Luxton glory—of having Michael Luxtonbuy him a pint. If he looked a strange sight in a suit (but they all did), Jimmy wasn’t a stranger to the Crown. Michael’s view was that he must have a stash of something under the floorboards at Westcott, a pot of something buried in his yard. It had to do somehow with his wife running off. But this was something Ellie could never