Now I think that you are right to use black-and-white.
The gaps in the sky closed and the rain redoubled.
Ely was beautiful but the rain went on for too long. It rained off and on all of that week. If you like cathedrals, he said, we’ll see some more. So they went to Peterborough, which was not such a pretty town, and spoke about going all the way to Lincoln. They drove for miles and visited the cathedrals in the rain, and Jonathan took pictures. It was a pity, Jonathan said, that she could not see them with sunlight on them, with light inside, how the light transformed them. It was a pity for his pictures. Almost the only pictures he took were of the exteriors, where the rain some days stained the stone black and other days dissolved it into cloud. Claire came with them the day they went to Cambridge, and they saw King’s College Chapel, and there the sun came out at last so Kumiko understood what he meant about the light, how light could make stone seem so insubstantial. Richard might have come with them that day but he preferred to stay home. Why, they had said, what can you do there, it’s raining, or even if the rain were to stop and the sun come out, it would still be too wet for work. But he did not come. He had to wait for the land or the wheat, one or the other, or both – of course, she understood, he must have needed it to be both – to dry, and he stayed home for the waiting, as if nothing would dry out if he wasn’t there. It might have been superstition but he did not believe in superstition. She thought it was just that he needed to watch. He could not bear to look away.
To Claire it seemed that the day without rain had removed a pressure from the house. Or perhaps it was only that she had been outside of it, in Cambridge all day, or that they could be outside now, with the evening sky clear above the trees.
The garden was green and soft after all that rain. There were still deadheads on the roses. Some of the shrub roses didn’t drop their petals when the flowers finished, but kept them like ugly brown rags. She would get on to those tomorrow. There were others that might still be flowering if the rain had not got into the buds, though sometimes the damage was only superficial; if she gently peeled off the outer petals that had tightened on them like a brown skin she might still save the flower beneath.
Each year when it came to this time she felt the loss of June. The garden had peaked though the summer had barely begun. She started to think of the next year, how she would make it different for that one, find hot bright flowers for July – and yet she never did, or she planted them without love because they weren’t her kind of plants, and they didn’t thrive, and the disappointment came again.
Summer wasn’t hers. It was theirs, the men’s. It happened out there beyond the borders and the trees and the hedges, out in the fields.
I thought we might eat outside this evening, now it’s dry at last. It’s so nice out. What do you think? We might lay the table out here. We’re having such a simple supper anyway, as we were out all day. Some of that ham from yesterday, and these last beans. And mint, there’s mint in the herb garden.
The girl nodded but didn’t answer. Claire thought that she had spent much of her life saying these trivial kinds of things that required no answer. She had been brought up to do that, to believe that such talk had a purpose, that it was a kind of oil a woman offered to the lives of the people around her that smoothed the days. But what kind of purpose was that, when there was nothing at the end to show for it but only what hadn’t happened, the frictions and breakages that had never occurred, that might not have occurred anyway?
She took the girl with her and they picked the last of the broad beans. Sat at the garden table to shell them.
Just a few left. Enough for tonight.
It was easy, sitting there with the girl. There was the companionship and the clean smell of the beans, the satisfaction of breaking them open, slipping her thumb down the cool velvet linings.
Only a simple supper, I put the potatoes to bake half an hour ago.
Richard came out and sat himself down at the table. He was dirty, straight off the farm. His hands were oily from some machine he must have been fixing.
The rain stopped, Kumiko said. And the sun came out. You should have come with us.
He had come straight off the farm, dirty, his hair ruffled, his sleeves rolled up. What did you do all day? Kumiko said. Were you only watching your wheat? She spoke lightly as if it were a joke, what he did. I found something to do, he said. Didn’t she know, there was always something to do on a farm? He asked how the fields had looked on their drive. Were other farmers’ fields as wet and beaten as his? Had it rained as much around Cambridge? Were there any harvesters out? Just one, Kumiko said, but it was stopped in the field. Or maybe that wasn’t today. Maybe it was on some other day they saw the stranded combine, she suddenly wasn’t quite sure, all these days and drives had become so much the same. But yes, she said, it had been just as wet there as here. Ah well, that’s something, he said. And then he went in.
They had the beans almost done now. Claire held the colander to the edge of the table and with the side of her hand pushed into it the torn green remnants of the pods.
Richard had never been much of a talker. She had thought that was a part of his being so practical. Even as a small boy, when he talked it was always about practical things. His questions were plain – what’s that called, or how does it go, not why – and once he had the name of the thing he could store the name and there was no need to say more, was there, because a thing that was named was fixed if not understood? He didn’t tell stories. He left the stories to his brother. He just saw, with his clear blue eyes, and named. And he played at making things. It was his little brother who played with words. She hadn’t noticed the silence until later, when he came home from school. But that was standard, wasn’t it? It was a stage, one thought. Boys went into a silence and then grew out of it. Only Richard’s silence came back now and then, heavy and awkward at times as his hands. She had seen his hands there, dirty, awkward before the girl, how he had reached to pick up a bean but dropped it as if suddenly aware of the dirt on them.
Her own fingers were black from the aphids that had infested the plants. It was always the last beans that got the blackfly. Too late now for them to do much harm.
Do you know, she said to the girl, I sometimes used to think that I should have taken us all away, after Charlie died. We might have gone to London, or anywhere. But then they got older, and we were here, and in the summer their friends came. They filled the house with friends, Jonny particularly had lots of friends. I’d come into the garden at night, sit where we’re sitting now, and look back at the lit windows with the lights on, knowing they were inside, and think that it was all right. I don’t know if it was. If I had done that, it might have been better for us all.
Then there would have been no farm for Richard, the girl said.
No, there wouldn’t, would there?
She did not know what it was about this girl that made one tell her such things. She had some quality that affected them all. Sometimes one almost forgot that she was Japanese.
Nothing to be done until there was a bit of wind. Or there were things to be done, on a farm there were always things to be done, but not the things that most needed to be done. After heavy rain, suitable drying conditions were required. Sun. A breeze at least. Not these doldrums. When there was warmth without wind the humidity just hung in the crop. Wind was what he needed, to move the moisture from the soil and from stalks and from the air. It was almost August. They should have been going by now. In past years they had the winter barley in by now. Some years they were well on with the wheat. One year they were all done by the fifteenth. The men’s voices echoed in the new barn. They had it all clean and ready, bins cleaned, all swept out. They had never had the place so ready, or so empty. The structure was an industrial one, none of the beauty to it of the old cart barn that had been there before, breeze blocks and steel, roof of asbestos sheets. A hard grey space, doors open, waiting to be filled. The concrete floor of the yard outside
it swept almost as clean as the inside. The combine had been ready to go for two weeks now. The tractor stood alongside, the washed grain cart at the back of it. All his machines in order.
The land lay sullen. The green of the trees had deepened as the summer had progressed, heavy now, dead to his eye, even the gold of the fields heavy beneath a drab sky. No light, no movement there, not a hair of the barley twitching, but only the swallows skimming above the crop. There were dozens of them, swallows and swifts, you could not tell how many because your eye could not follow any individual long enough as they swooped and rose and turned and swooped back across one another, but only almost see the pattern of arcs they made that broke the sodden air, and hear the high whistling calls. There was a field of winter barley close by the house. In places it had been flattened by the rain but the combine should be able to pick up most of that. The ripe heads had brackled some time before, bent back against the stems, darkening and drooping now with the damp in them. If they were left much longer and if the rain continued there would be new green here as a second germination set in, the grains sprouting even as the crop stood. He walked on to inspect the wheat in the next field. That too was ready, dense even at the headland. The yield on this field would be good, the price good, if only he could take it now. And get it dry.
The twenty-seventh of July, a full day of rain. The twenty-eighth, the same. The twenty-ninth, only a shower, and so on till the end of the month. The first few days of August began dull and threatened rain but kept dry and brightened towards the afternoons. Four dry days, but the following night it rained. He thought he heard the rain in the night and when he woke in the morning he went straight away to the window. The sky was cloudless but the ground looked wet. The ground mattered as much as the sky. He tapped the barometer on the way downstairs. Went to measure the rainfall in the gauge in the yard. Enough to hold them back a day or two further.
How many days before it’s dry enough to start? Jonny asked.
Depends, he said. Two or three. If we don’t get another shower.
And then, to get the crop in? Jonny should have known enough about the vagaries of farming to know that you could never predict a thing like that, but he was asking anyway.
Why? You doing something? Need to fix a date or something?
I talked to Jackson this morning in the village. He thought they might get the combine out tomorrow, get going then.
Jackson’s always a bit quick off the mark. I don’t expect anybody else’ll be going yet.
The girl was dressed for sunshine. She had on a little red-and-white skirt and long earrings, with her hair pulled back. He didn’t know why she had to dress up so when she was out here in the country.
It’s beautiful now, your English August, she said. Now that the rain has stopped.
The sun was shining now, the sky quite blue.
August in Japan is just too too hot and humid, she said. You don’t want to do anything or go anywhere.
Then you won’t catch me in Japan, he said. He had no interest in Japan, except as this girl made him aware of it.
He could not have had Richard’s patience. Even though it was a heavy, reluctant kind of patience, made of dragging the days through, precisely recording each morning the previous day’s rainfall. When do we start, he had asked. He knew before he asked the question that it was one that Richard couldn’t be expected to answer. But time suddenly mattered to him. In the weeks until then, time had not seemed to matter. Now it did, seeing her wake, dress, go outside, as if with each day that went by something might be lost.
Did she care that the weather was holding them there? That days were passing in which they might have gone somewhere else. Alone, just them, being themselves. If she was unhappy she did not show it.
Such a perfect morning, she said, putting on her sunglasses and hitching up her skirt, which was short enough anyway, to stretch out her legs in the sun.
Let’s go straight to Paris, he said. When the harvest is over. You said you wanted to go to Paris. He sat down in the chair beside her, put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes to feel the warmth. Then we can think where to go next.
Can we go to that garden your mother talked about? Is it still there, that garden, where Joséphine planted her roses?
I don’t know. I don’t know where it is, I’ll ask her. But the roses will be finished there too, won’t they, if they’re finished here.
And if it’s rained there like it’s rained here, and if any of the flowers are left, they’ll be ruined by now. Perhaps we shall go somewhere else.
He opened his eyes and looked about. His mother was gardening. She complained how the weeds grew in the wet. The weeds hadn’t stopped growing all summer. He saw her bent double over the flower beds, throwing weeds to the back of her on the lawn. Then standing, putting a hand to her stiffened back, but she looked happy because she had work to do, satisfied at the fresh heap of green. All of his life she had been doing that, gardening, standing, putting her hand to her back just in that way. As if she would go on like that for ever. So much tougher than she looked.
Shall I go and help her, do you think? Will she like me to help?
Why not? Though you’re not exactly dressed for it.
She took up the rake and raked all the weeds and took them in her arms and lifted them into the barrow. It made her feel a part of the place, doing that. Just for that time, no longer. Because she was always outside of it. And them.
Claire had a song in her head while she worked that was the song of the pigeons in the trees. A slow summer song that came back and was constant in all the summers that passed. That made all the summers one single summer in this place. From his deckchair Jonny was watching. He used to watch from the walnut tree – or was that Richard, who used to watch up there? The tree was old now, the lower branches gone, no good for climbing any more.
Why don’t you pick us some raspberries, instead of just sitting watching others work?
When the girl had filled the barrow she went with Jonny. Claire didn’t mind. She was used to working alone. When she worked alone her thoughts disappeared into the work for whole stretches of time in which there was only the touch and the smell of the leaves and the soil, the sensations of the here and now and nothing before – or of all the time that had gone before held in the here and now.
The two of them looked happy together, so far as she could see. Was that a good thing or not? Would it mean that this girl would take him away? And how would it be, for whichever one of them it was, to live one’s life elsewhere, with someone from elsewhere? What would they say to one other as time went on, day to day, in a marriage? In a marriage, did people understand one another more or less as time went on?
The swifts arced across the lawn. She knew they were there by their screaming calls, even if she did not look up to see them. There were not so many other birds to hear this late in the year, apart from the pigeons. The pigeons persisted all through the day in the trees about the garden, their cooing passing from one tree to another. Even in August the flutter of their mating persisted in the foliage of the wisteria where they had their nests, hatched halves of white eggs to be found on the grass below all through the summer and into the autumn if the autumn was mild. The sound of the pigeons seemed to her like a drug, repeating as if time did not exist, from when daylight began until it ended. Almost, she felt as she worked, that the sound was inside her. It had been so all these years she had lived here. She had lived every summer against the sound of the pigeons. Lulled year on year. Looking down to the plants, to her hands on the soil. Not looking up but knowing the creak of their wings as they flew overhead.
When she went indoors to make lunch she experienced the silence there as a sudden loss. It seemed strange to her, that all this had been here, all of the day. That all this was really so. This old dim house. The sitting room whose open door she passed, lit green from the leaves of the wisteria that hung down over the windows. These rooms, this table, these chairs. These
cups by the sink.
In the corner of her eye she saw Richard coming back across the yard. Even now there were times that she mistook him for another man – or if not mistook, then remembered the other man in him. He was so like him in his walk, and much the same age that he had been when they came here and took on the farm. Dogged like him, or maybe it was the work that made them that. It was such material work, this dealing with soil and machines, with plain intractable things, the results of it all there before the eyes. All so tangible. (And yet she remembered that Charlie had a dream in him once, or was it just his youth? She did not know if Richard ever had a dream.)
It had been at this time of the year that she had first realised that she was pregnant with him and yet even the having of a child had seemed only a possibility – not tangible, only a flimsy idea, herself flimsy beside the solid fact of the farm, so that for days she had moved about with the secret gathering weight inside her, moving as she did now, slow, weeding to the sound of the pigeons, moving in and out of the house, sleeping under the weight in the afternoons, not telling until the harvest was almost done, as if she inhabited a world less real than Charlie’s. The harvest was much further on that year, the fields around them already stubble. They were walking in the evening across the stubble when she told him, the sound of some other combine still going on a neighbouring farm and the cloud of it in the distance. I think I’m pregnant, she had said, reaching for his hand, and he took her in his dusty arms, his shirt smelling of sweat and grain. (And even then was his own possibility there in him, his own secret withheld, the dark embryo of what was to come?) And now here was she, and her two sons, and Charlie long gone, and wheat out there once more waiting to be cut. Putting the thoughts away, living day to day. No pain. Only the present task.
So many raspberries, the two of them had picked. They wouldn’t last. They would go mouldy too soon with the moisture. She would have to pack some for the freezer if she wanted to save them.
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