Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online

gun—so a soldier’s life for him. But Tom was even better, after Vera died, at taking her place, at being, for them all, 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 all 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 still 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 baconand triangles of bread into the pan and filled the kitchen with a smell and a sizzle as if someone might be still there who wasn’t.
    And not just pile. He could crack those eggs one-handed, just as Mum had. Two neat little half-shells left in his fingers. Jack knew, without trying, he could never have done that. They’d have been eating eggshell for breakfast, spitting out the bits.
    Mrs Warburton, Sally 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 all 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 all the heavy work.
    And it was a pity, maybe, that Mrs Warburton wasn’t just Sally Warburton, or just Sally somebody, and not Mrs Warburton, wife of Ken Warburton who ran the filling station at Leke Hill Cross. Because then she might have become the next Mrs Luxton and they might all 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 all. 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 really means.
    No takers. (And how could he have
paid
a housekeeper?)
    That’s when Jack had felt his father starting to turn old. To shrink. And to turn sour-tempered, something which, for all his slowness to raise a smile, he’d never been. You’d see him kick at something, a feed trough, the corrugated iron round the muckheap, for no reason at all. Swing back his leg and kick. That’s when Jack had felt that, though Tom was no longer such a little brother, he had to be a shield for him against his father’s weather. He had to stand in between and take it. Why had he never minded?
    First Mum, then Tom. In between, most of their livestock carried off for incineration. Then just him and Dad. And Dad looking at him with a look that said: And don’t you try it, don’t you even think about it. When he wasn’t wearing that other look which said: Why don’t
you
solve the issue, Jack boy, why don’t you do something about it? The issue of there being no Mrs Luxton. Which was a mad look, if ever there was one, a look where Dad had himself tied up into a knot, because unless his son was supposed to go foraging (and how might that occur exactly?) it was like saying that Jack should do the very thing there was no question of his doing. The real knot being the knot that he and Ellie Merrick could never formally tie.
    Jimmy Merrick and Michael Luxton should have got married themselves, Jack has sometimes thought, they should have married each other. If such a thing were possible. About as unlike as two men could be and with as little liking for each other as two men could have. But