He would sleep long and wake late. It would be later than he was used to waking, the day bright outside, a fully formed summer’s day, the others up before him, breakfast cooked, bacon waiting in the oven. Jonathan would already have been in the yard, and the girl out there with him, and the men; the concrete swept and the grain in the store piled high. Time to service the combine for the next day’s work. Wait again for the dew to lift.
For a week the harvest went well, then the weather turned against him. A single day of heavy showers meant that it was too wet to work for some days afterwards. Morning and evening, Richard went out to walk the fields that hadn’t yet been cut. On the third day he went out alone and got the combine started, in the field where he had left off, just to see how it was, but he had not gone far before he felt the weight of the machine begin to sink into the wet ground. Once more he stopped, and left it out there. He hoped that it would not sink deeper before he could get it going again.
All it took was another day of showers for the pattern of waiting to be repeated.
The swallows flew ever lower over the lawn as if the air pressed them down in the arc of their flight. There must have been swarms of insects there in the humid band of air close to the ground where the birds swooped to feast. Claire heard them close overhead as she moved about her plants. The soil was almost too wet to work now. And besides, the growing season was almost over. There was really no need to weed any more in August, except for tidiness. The look of things.
When she was done with weeding she stood and stretched her back. The sky was grey but she thought it had infinitesimally lifted. The insects must have risen. The birds were flying higher.
Jonathan and Kumiko had walked to the village and were making their way back. They too watched the swallows, skimming low above the standing crop. Some of the birds seemed to fly no more than a wing’s breadth above the heads of grain. But others were gathering on the telegraph wires ready for the summer to end. Jonathan had thought they would themselves be finished and gone long before the swallows. Now he wondered if the swallows would be gone first. This was something he could not bear about farming, being the captive of the weather and the place. He was not steady like his brother. He could not have had his pragmatism.
Another two days of waiting and then Richard thought they might try again. The combine was stuck and they needed the two tractors to pull it out. It was a waste of precious dry time. They pulled it out, and got going, and had just managed to finish the field they were on and set up on the next one before a fine rain came spitting down from the sky, at first no more than pinpricks of cool out of the sultry air. They went for the headland, trusting to their luck. Once the headland was done, the field cut all around its circumference, there would at least be room for the wind to enter and dry out the heart of the crop. They worked without pause. They could see that it was worse for others. In the sky to the south they could see the darker grey spill of a heavy shower elsewhere. They kept going as long as they could, until the rain was measurable and the stalks too damp. The next day they held off, and the next one they went out again, and it continued on like that through towards the end of August. They worked in snatches, going for what crop they could take. What was left in the fields flattened further with each storm and grew dark with the wet.
They were in the kitchen having breakfast when Richard came in.
Here, look at this. Richard placed a head of wheat in her hand. Among the grains was what appeared to be another grain, only black and elongated and misshapen, like a dried mouse dropping but attached to the stalk.
What is it?
It’s ergot.
It looks evil, she said.
Nothing evil. Just a fungus.
What does it mean?
It means, I’ll have trouble selling the wheat. It’s a bugger, that’s all.
Let me see, said Jonathan.
This, too, he could not bear about farming, the way that a problem could strike, quite out of your control. His brother had come in and made the air in the kitchen heavy with this problem that was in no way of his own making.
Can you do anything about it? he asked.
Stupid question. Richard just threw him a look.
All the same, even at a time like this, there was something he envied. There was something so solid, real, about Richard and his work. Where Richard was concerned, when things went wrong his failures took material form, even when they were so small as an infected grain.
What was a photograph beside that? Only a notion. A stain on light-sensitive paper. Give it too much light and it disappears. And a photographer, making a living as some artsy photographer; that seemed fantasy. Childish, in this world of men.
Even his brother’s physical presence seemed more real and purposeful than his own, his tall figure that dominated the room and made the women look at him. If he were to take a photograph of that, it would show: the domestic scene, the big handsome man entering from the outside, in motion, his fair hair caught in the shaft of light into which he walked, the seated women looking up; a second man, smaller, dark, seated away towards the edge of the frame, no more than an observer.
Richard pulled back a chair and took up the mug of tea his mother offered. He wasn’t going to waste words. He had told them all that it was necessary to tell. The frustration of this moment and of all this harvest was there in his face and in the scrape of the chair. Kumiko examined the infected grain a moment more and then put the head of wheat down, fastidiously, on the cloth beside her plate.
He felt a sudden regret that he had brought her here, into his past, perhaps that he had come back at all. You would have thought that some years away would have changed things; that their relative positions would have altered when he returned. But here he was again, holding back, watching. Not their fault, but his own. No one had made him sit in this particular chair but he was sitting in the same chair where he had always sat, on the far side of the table, closest to the window. So often he had turned the chair just a little when he sat here, leant his elbow on the table and looked out through the window instead of into the room.
And he was doing that now, looking out at the familiar view, the cobbles, a portion of the yard beyond which the new barns weren’t visible, the old stables, the cars parked there – it was the cars that changed more than anything, that would have fixed the date to any picture or memory of that view – hearing his mother saying with a touch of brightness, Just sit down a minute, exactly as he must have heard her say it a thousand times before. I’m sure it’s not all lost. I’m sure it won’t be that bad, just wait, sit down, I’ll pour you a cup of tea.
His mother knew as well as he did that if Richard was angry, he had to act. Do something. Take the anger and use it to fuel some other action. That was what he had always done. Don’t think about it any more, just do something. Go outside. Get on your bike. Climb a tree. Throw a stone. Break pots. Smash your mother’s greenhouse. They did that once when something was wrong. Richard’s idea – not that it was ever spoken, but only done. Richard had led him there and begun it. He didn’t even know if Richard had thought the thought before the first pot hit the ground. And he had followed because he did. Because he too understood what was wrong and because smashing things seemed to right it, the sound, the shattering terracotta, the spilled black soil.
This problem was nothing compared with that other one. This was a material problem from Richard’s material world. And not so very terrible, when it came down to it. Action was simple. You scraped the chair back and sat down and drank your tea, then slammed the mug on the table and pushed the chair back again, and went out to the barn and checked again the grain that you had already brought in, to reassure yourself that that grain at least, that you had brought in earlier from other fields, was all right, free of the fungus, that that grain would sell all right, get a good price; and your brother went with you because really, despite the differences, he wanted to help. So they did that. Then they went out later in the day and cut
the headland of that last field, even though there was probably too much moisture in it. There was no point in doing any more. They packed up after that and went in, and because he still couldn’t rest, Richard suggested that after supper they might go out lamping.
What’s lamping? Kumiko said.
I’m not sure it’s your sort of thing, Jonathan said. He wasn’t sure it was his either, not any more. So why did he say he’d go? Old times’ sake. Richard’s momentum. Because rabbits were a pest and this was the best moment to get them. Because they were brothers and lamping was fun.
Going with them felt like a dare. She liked the feeling of going with the brothers, doing what they did, being the third, the girl in the men’s world. They waited until it was dark and then they went out. It was very black outside, no moon or stars. The farm was very quiet, out all alone in the countryside. It was one of those nights when the rest of the world didn’t seem to exist.
The night was dark, the cloud cover making it unusually warm. The scent of the tobacco plants drifted across the lawn. They were flowers for the blind, that you saw all the better when you closed your eyes. Claire heard the shots from the field. They must be getting a lot of rabbits. In all the time she had lived with them, husband and sons, she hadn’t come to understand why men so liked to kill things.
A strap tied over the roof of the Land Rover, through the open windows on either side. First Jonathan driving, then they would change places. His brother sitting on the roof held by the strap and shooting. The field naked, the rabbits exposed, which had lived and bred all summer hidden within the crop. Where the rabbits showed, like rocks strewn on the bare land, the Land Rover drove fast and directly towards them. The rocks moved. They moved fast but the Land Rover was fast, bumping over the stubble, skidding on the turns because of the slipperiness of the cut straw. They ran from its lights but at the same time they were caught in them. They kept to the beams as if the beams were tunnels from which they could not escape, and only now and then did one by sense or accident veer off out of the beam and into the safety of the darkness alongside it. The gun fired, reloaded, fired again. The rabbits fell. Some of them fell directly, simply folding or rolling over in the beam. Others were wounded, and the Land Rover slowed or diverged then from its path to follow the erratic animal for the gun to finish it off. Why had he said he would do this? It was Richard’s game, not his. So often he had found himself playing Richard’s game.
A slug of whisky from the hip flask they had brought out with them. A switching of roles. The man on the roof rapped on it when he was ready, and the driver drove. They shouted to one another through the window over the noise of the engine. Left. Straight ahead. Go for it. Left, left. Hold on tight while I turn. Yeah, that’s great. Get that one. Good shot. Jonathan shot well. Perhaps he shot better than Richard that night, or perhaps that was because Richard drove better, more evenly and matching his speed to that of the rabbits. They told Kumiko to count but she lost count after twenty. She seemed to enjoy it, shouting out too, holding on to the door beside her and to the metal frame of the cab, as the Land Rover lurched across the fields. They must have shot dozens of rabbits. A good night’s work. Passing the hip flask. Driving back, all three of them in the cab now, Kumiko in the middle seat and the brothers on either side. All three elated. But Richard driving slowly now, all settling back into their separate grown-up selves.
When they got to the yard the clouds had opened up and let through a slip of moonlight. Kumiko stayed out alone. She wanted to feel the night. Calm herself. See some stars. She had never done any kind of hunting before.
As the clouds broke further apart and moved away, she thought how they would begin to show, the bodies on the ground.
Richard was beside her. She didn’t know where he came from. I was just going to lock up, he said, then I saw you. I nearly locked you out.
Will you go and pick up the bodies tomorrow?
No, Richard said. Something will scavenge them. They’ll be gone soon enough.
She said she didn’t like thinking that.
It’s how things are, he said. Nature is hard. We used to have a word for things like that, Jonathan and me, ‘maumau’.
I know, she said. He told me once. (Only Jonathan had been talking about more than nature. He had been talking about men, what men do to men, what he himself had seen, what he could not erase.) But it’s funny, she said. We have a word in Japanese that sounds almost the same, ‘mā mā’, but it means something very ordinary, sort of OK. Nothing bad at all.
He was standing close so that she could feel him beside her.
The nature I know is not so hard, she said.
No, he said. That’s what I like about you.
She turned. She felt the pull of him and she turned. Kissed him then in the dark when they could not see one another. Like they were nameless. Not themselves.
Then they drew apart. She could not have said who moved first. There was only the darkness then. Nothing spoken.
She left him without a word and went into the house. Undressed and got into the bed beside Jonathan. She thought that he was asleep, but he wasn’t. Or he had been asleep, and woke when she came in. He stirred and reached for her, put an exploring hand between her legs. Often they used to make love like that, so easily, before they slept. But you’re already wet, he murmured, with a kind of surprise. With a half-asleep chuckle in his voice that she wouldn’t forget. Ready for me, he said. And slipped into her in an instant.
Then he was asleep again, and she lay awake for hours. She heard the clock in the church across the fields, pictured the rabbits lying there on the ground. It was not right, not ordinary, not OK at all.
She slept very little that night. Soon after it got light she went out. She crept downstairs as silently as she could and unbolted the door, and the dog woke and came out with her.
It was where the summer led, she told herself later. Something that they had been waiting for, in all those sultry days in the countryside, that was growing in them when they had thought they had been waiting only for the harvest. Like the fungus, growing in those conditions and fastening on the head of wheat. She had learned a bit about ergot since then. It caused hallucinations. There had been times in history when ergot had got into the harvest and into the flour, and when the flour was baked into bread its effect was so powerful that whole villages went crazy. There was a theory that it happened in a place called Salem when there was a witch fever. Women became hysterical, and others saw strange things and blamed the women who they said were witches. And then the women were burnt at the stake. She didn’t know where Salem was, when she first read that. She imagined it must be some village on its own in the marshes, like the villages she passed through with Jonathan when they drove to Ely, but it wasn’t anywhere like that. It was in America.
Or maybe it was something in the spinney. The old witch Richard said lived there once. She might have left some evil behind her.
But no. It was something much simpler.
She got up and went out because she simply could not be in that room any more, with Jonathan’s breath on her shoulder; shifting carefully so that she did not wake him, going to the window, drawing back the curtain just so much so that there was light in the room to dress by, looking out and seeing no one. It was early. Too early even for Richard to be up. She felt better once she was out in the morning air. There was the sound of the pigeons. The dog for company. There was a heavy dew, almost a mist, spiders’ webs made visible on the grass and on the stubble where they were coated with the dew. Untouched.
He saw the dog first. Someone had opened the door and let her out. Then he saw Kumiko. He ran to catch up.
You’re out early.
You know that I always wake early.
All these mornings he had seen her but had not spoken of it. But you don’t come outside, he said, panting, slowing his pace to hers. Away from them, in the house behind the tall hedge, the curtains on the spare-room window were only half drawn.
This morning I thought I would.
It’s almost September. Almost autumn.
There was a milky sheen of dew over the ground. That was why when he had seen her in the distance she had seemed to be walking so smoothly. As if she was floating. The air above was clear. Even where they breathed it, the air was clear. It was going to be a fine day, finer and bluer than any just passed.
It’s good to be out so early, she said.
But she looked sleepy, as if she hadn’t slept well and needed to go back and sleep some more. She looked like she had just thrown on her jeans and T-shirt and hadn’t brushed her hair. Not so neat as usual. As he looked at her and thought that, she put her fingers through her hair to smooth it out, put up both hands to twist it into a knot. But what are you doing here, she said. She raised her head so that the knot slipped a little.
What I usually do, he said. Thinking what should be done. Her hair was heavy, he thought. He could imagine the dark weight of it in his fingers. No, not imagine. He had felt it the night before. Were they pretending the night before hadn’t happened?
Look at the spiders’ webs, she said.
The webs made all the surface of the field glisten. There were bales piled here and there, rectangular bales in regular square towers. Where the combine had most recently cut, the straw still lay loose in its rows, where it had not been baled before the rain and must be left to dry for some days after. In the far field before the spinney most of the crop was still standing.
Harvest Page 15