Wish You Were Here Read Free Page B

verify—and she’d certainly have wanted to know about it.
    Drink was money down the gullet anyway, Michael would say. Not that he’d want to judge his neighbour. Maybe it was even the point he was making on that Remembrance Day. It wasn’t a point about Tom. Tom’s name was simply no longer mentioned. It was just that they were teetering on the edge. More so than Jack guessed. Even the twenty-odd pounds he’d need for the two pints (just the two now) plus the others he’d have to stand (you had to look proud) was more than he could muster. Jack always put a twenty, if he had one, in his own pocket so he was covered too. And he’d had a twenty, somehow, that day.
    But his dad hadn’t even looked in the direction of the Crown. His face was like a wall, a thicker wall than usual, and, after doing the other thing they always did, going to stand by Vera’s grave, they’d just driven silently back to Jebb. ‘That’s that then,’ his dad had said and had hardly needed to say even that.
    Jack was the passenger, Michael drove, and there was a point somewhere along the road when Jack realised, if not quite at the time itself, that it was too late. Before that point he still might have said, ‘Stop, Dad, there’s something we haven’t done.’ And conceivably his dad was testing him, daring him—wishing him to say it. He might have said it even when they were well clear of Marlestonand nearing the Jebb gate, the hedges along the road still glittering with barely melted frost. He might have just grabbed his father’s arm as he shifted a gear. What a simple thing.
    But they’d passed the point, and Jack couldn’t have said exactly where it was. Though, afterwards, he was to think it was the same point where Tom, on foot and heading in the other direction, at three o’clock in the morning, almost a year before, must have known—if he’d had any doubts at all—that now he couldn’t, wouldn’t go back.
    And it was the same point, perhaps, where George might have stopped with Fred.
    ‘Stop, Dad.’ But Jack wasn’t up to it. Though by then he’d long been the bigger of the two of them. One day, years ago, he’d woken up to discover, disturbingly, that he was taller than his father. Now, in some mysterious way, his dad was even shrinking. But he still wasn’t up to it.
    And his father, Jack thinks now, might just have said, ‘We haven’t not done anything. We went and looked at her grave, didn’t we? Take your hand off my arm.’
    They might simply have had a set- to right there, a blazing set-to, pulled up on the Marleston–Polstowe road, the engine of the Land Rover still running. A set- to in their suits. They might even have got out and taken a swing at each other, the swings at each other they’d been saving up for years. And his dad with a medal for bravery in his pocket.
    On those previous occasions in the Crown there’dusually be someone who’d ask, as if they’d been planted there for the purpose, ‘So—do you have it with you, Michael?’ And his father, perched on his stool at the bar and looking as if he hadn’t heard or might even be quietly annoyed by the question, would sip his beer or blow smoke from his mouth and, only after you thought the matter had passed, dip his hand into his top pocket and take it out again, clenched round something. And only after more time had passed and while he still looked at the air in front of him would he open his hand, just for an instant, above the surface of the bar, and then return the medal to where it had come from. It was a performance his dad was good at and one worth its annual repetition. An unsentimental dairy farmer, but capable (though Jack could never have furnished the joke) of milking a situation.
    The lights on in the Crown. He can see it now. A grey November noon. The low beams. Poppies and suits. A faint whiff of old wardrobes and moth balls. The beer seeping down, everything huddled and glinting. Then for a moment that extra glint.