Wish You Were Here Read Online Free Page A

was
his
name—could never do. There’d never been such a moment.
    And then the birthright, deprived of Vera’s backing and blighted by cow disease, had begun to look anyway like a poor deal.
    That had always seemed to Jack to be the gist of those conversations, whatever their apparent subject: his birthright. That he shouldn’t worry about Tom, who would always be the little nipper and latecomer. That he should rise to his place and his task.
    When he was older, starting to outgrow both his father and that Burtons suit, she’d make tea for just the two of them. He’d smoke a cigarette. She’d top up hismug, without his asking, when he put it down. He didn’t know then how much one day he’d miss, and he wouldn’t know how to speak of it when he did, the creases in his mother’s wrist as she held the teapot, one hand pressing down the lid, and refilled his mug, just for him.
    And it was only later, when she was gone, that it occurred to him that another gist, and perhaps the real gist, of those conversations was precisely that. That she was telling him that she wouldn’t always be there. It was what she’d had in her mind perhaps—and he’d been right to have those strange feelings—even when she first told him about Tom. She’d be gone sooner than anyone might think.
    She was more of a Luxton, it could be said, than the Luxtons themselves. When she died it was as if the whole pattern was lost. Yet her name had once been Newcombe, and until she was nineteen she’d never even known life on a farm. She was the daughter of a postmaster. One day Michael Luxton had plucked her from the post office in Polstowe and carried her to Jebb Farm and, so it seemed, nothing could have better answered her hopes and her wishes.
    Something like that must have happened. Jack had never known, even from his mother’s lips, the actual story. His dealings with Ellie Merrick didn’t seem a useful guide. But he found it hard, or just vaguely trespassing of him, to imagine that his father, his father of all people, might once have carried his mother, her legs kicking, over the threshold of Jebb Farm and possibly even have carried her, without a pause, straight up to the Big Bed—where two years later he, Jack, would be born and where, twenty-one years after that, Vera Luxton would die.
    He’d sometimes daringly think that the business of birthright might work in reverse. That his mother’s birthing him, more than her taking his father’s name, had made a Luxton out of her. She’d had such a bad time with him, Jack supposed, that it had generally been accepted that she couldn’t be a mother again. So everything was pooled in him. Or, looking at it another way, it was his fault. Eight long years had proved it. Then Tom had come along and taken away the blame. Which was another reason why suddenly having a little brother around was never a problem for Jack. Quite the opposite.
    Anyway, there were those conversations. And anyway, by the time Vera lay dying in that big bed, she’d become so much a Luxton that despite the determined efforts of the health authorities to move her into hospital, she refused to be taken from Jebb Farm. As if she were putting down her final roots.
    He’d always remember—though he’s tried to forget them—her last days. How she clung, sometimes literally, to that bed as if she wanted, perhaps, to become it. Or the bed, perhaps, wanted to become her. His father, as if not to intrude on this intimate process, had slept, or rather kept terrified watch, close by in a sort of separate bivouac made out of the old wooden chest pushed up against the room’s solitary, battered armchair. The room was like some compartment of disaster.
    Well, at least she was spared, Jack can say to himself now, the long road to ruin, and worse. Though it was not so long, really, after her death. How it would have appalled and shamed and simply disappointed her. How shemust have flinched, again and again, in that grave of hers