Wish You Were Here Read Online Free

The glory of the Luxtons.
    ‘Stop, Dad. I want to buy you a drink.’ Such a simple thing, but like moving the hills.

3
    W HAT WOULD his mum think? That has always been Jack’s inner yardstick, his deepest cry.
    Vera Luxton died when Jack was twenty-one and Tom was thirteen, of ovarian cancer. Perhaps his acquaintance with cows and calves made Jack better able than most men of twenty-one to comprehend what this meant, but it was anyway an event that changed everything, like a line in history. The cow disease, which came later, was one thing and it was a killer in every sense, but the rot really set in, Jack would say, when Vera died. Michael had run the farm, but Vera had overseen it, had made it revolve in some way round herself. If they hadn’t known and acknowledged it at the time—and that included little Tom—they knew it now.
    Behind that wall his dad could present to the world, Jack knew, his father was stumbling. There were some things Jack could see through—or that he simply duplicated. He had a face like a wall too, he was stumbling too. It was his fall-back position, to take what he got and stumble on, to look strong or just dumb on the outside and stumble inside. He was just like his father.
    But on the other hand (and his father knew it) he’d always been closer to his mum, a lot closer than little Tom had ever been, coming along those eight years later and to everyone’s surprise.
    ‘Would you like a little brother, Jack?’
    His mother had looked at him with a strange, stern-but-pleading look, as if she needed (though he was only seven) his serious, manly help.
    ‘Because I have a feeling,’ she’d said, ‘you may be going to get one.’
    It had seemed to him that she was somehow floating away, might even be saying goodbye, and this was some sort of offer of compensation. And how, with that look in her eye, could he have said anything but yes?
    It was only later that he drew the conclusion—or formed the theory—that Tom hadn’t been meant to happen. It was a risk. His mother had problems in that department. She’d had a bad time with him, he vaguely knew. Though he also understood that she’d thought it was worth it. She had an even worse time, as it turned out, with Tom. Between the two of them, Jack sometimes wondered, might they have given her the cancer?
    But he’d been truly intended. While Tom, it seemed, had turned up by surprise and at much hazard to his mother. It made a difference, perhaps. It made him feel that Tom was never a rival—the opposite. Jack had been born at Jebb, in the Big Bedroom, with the assistance of an intrepid midwife. But Tom had been brought home one day from Barnstaple Infirmary, with a Vera who’d looked rather weaker than her baby. It made a difference.
    In any case, after Tom was there, Jack’s mum had a way, from time to time, of drawing Jack aside into a sortof special, private corner—though it was usually in the kitchen or on warm days in the yard, so in no way hidden. Nonetheless his dad, and Tom when he was older, would respectfully steer clear of it, as if Vera had issued an order. When he was in this special space with his mother, Jack would mysteriously understand—even when he was only nine or ten—that he was having a grown-up conversation, something you were supposed to have in life, a sort of always-to-be-resumed conversation, which went on, in fact, right up until the time his mother fell ill and died. And he’d understand that this conversation had to do with something that seldom otherwise came into his thinking, let alone his talk: his future and its responsibilities. Or, to put it another way, his name.
    Since it meant something if you were born, as he was, on a farm: the name. The generations going back and forwards, like the hills, whichever way you looked, around them. And what else had his mother borne him for than to give him and show him his birthright? Something his father, for whatever reason—and though it