I have to think when we should get out and finish that field, he said. With all this dew it’ll take the longer to dry. Though it’ll hardly be worth the effort.
Why’s that? she said.
Because of the ergot.
Oh yes. It was clear that she had forgotten the ergot.
He thought by the tone of her voice, what I say doesn’t matter. She’s not interested in whatever I can think of to say. Definitely, they were pretending.
There were big birds flying up from the stubble where they had been the night before. Buzzards, Richard said. They had been feeding on the dead rabbits. There were crows on the field also, but they stayed on the ground and didn’t fly up.
People didn’t like carrion birds, Richard said. People didn’t see that they had a purpose and kept the place clean.
There were skylarks overhead. Climbing in the pale air, beginning to sing. Should he talk to her about the skylarks? That would have been a nicer thing to talk about. Why was it that skylarks climbed in stages? Had he not noticed that before? Or had he always noticed it, known it, and only thought about it now because she was here with him? Because she was from outside, and made him see things differently. The spiders’ webs. The birds. Up the larks went to some level, and then they held there and sang, and then they climbed again, level by level, until they were lost to the eye. He was going to get someone out to plough the stubble next week. His mother said that he shouldn’t, because of the skylarks. She said that the skylarks needed the stubble to live in through the winter. But he had told her they seemed to do well enough.
See how blue the sky is now, Kumiko was saying.
Yes, it’ll be a fine day.
They were close to the spinney.
Come this way, come here. Let me show you something.
Perhaps they weren’t pretending any more. There used to be a house here, he said, taking her hand just so lightly and leading her in between the trees. He knew a way in that wasn’t too overgrown with nettles. He held back branches so that she could pass. Not skylarks over them now but rooks, rising, circling, cawing. There was an old chap who used to work for us, Billy, who remembered when the house was here, when he was a boy, and there was a woman still living in it. We used to think she must have been a witch. Look, this is where it was, you can just about see the foundations.
She did not say that she knew the place already. They had met him there before, on the track, but he must have forgotten that. They had been in the little wood, and when they came out Richard was driving by in the Land Rover, so handsome and casual with his elbow on the open window, and stopped and picked them up, and Richard had said that he still went shooting there, and Jonathan thought that he didn’t care. As if it was just a little wood where they shot pigeons and there once used to be a house. An innocent-enough place.
There was hardly anything left of the house, just some lines of brick and rubble in a clearing, a pit and a broken slab of slate with runnels in it that had been a draining board. It showed up better in winter when the undergrowth died back, when you might find bits of rubbish, old bottles and things, about the place. Once he had found a clay pipe. Would that be interesting to her? What should he say? What were they doing here together, pretending? It was early in the morning and they were hidden away in this little wood with only the birds and the dog to see them, and the dog had disappeared off into the undergrowth. He might say what he liked, just for this moment. As if they were only playing, only themselves to see or hear, out so early while the rest of the world slept. He didn’t dare touch her. Not yet. He talked instead. That made the moment longer. He told her how he used to come with Billy, when Billy put feed out for the pheasants. Billy liked to give the pheasants a little bit of grain, to draw them over from the shooting estates, from Jackson’s where the syndicate got young pheasants in every year for the sport. Pity Billy wasn’t around any more. She would never have known anyone like Billy. He told her about Billy, how Billy would talk. He mimicked old Billy. He used to be good at mimicking Billy, when they were boys. Now he did it again, shrinking and hunching over like Billy, pulling at the imaginary cap on his head, making her smile. She was standing where the sunlight fell on her between the trees, smiling. Her house was just here, boy, see. Old lady like a witch, we was scared of her, us youngsters. I remember coming to this door here, just here it was, and the garden, you can see where she had her garden, the pear tree there, and the well. Privy that way. Weren’t no bathroom o’ course. And when old Hannah died the house was let be. Falling apart good enough as it was. No point going and modernising an old house like that, was there, boy, out in the fields with no electric or water?
Now she was laughing. Moving between the light and the shadow. He thought of Billy taking a moment’s rest on the broken brick wall after walking out here with the bag of grain for the pheasants, his whiskery face and watery eyes. Billy in his father’s old coat. He told her how she would have liked to have met him.
Richard talked more than she had ever heard him talk before. He made her laugh. She had not seen him like that, so light-hearted, before.
More solemnly he told her how they had buried Billy’s dog. Rosie, her name was. Over there, he said. I made a cross. It’s probably still there if we look.
Then he stopped talking. As if he couldn’t think of any more to say. The rooks were loud overhead. His hands hung very still at his sides.
Something in your hair. A twig. There, it’s gone.
Her hair was heavy and black, falling away, the knot already unravelled.
His hand was more delicate than she would have thought such a hand could be, a hand that dealt with big rough things, with machines, but so light just then that she wasn’t even sure it touched her. She put up her own hand to his. She might have just moved it away, gently, tactfully, just put it away, so that he had taken whatever it was that was caught in her hair and it would have been gone, and all of that moment might have been delicately put away.
Her hand small in his. Her touch soft, and dry. Holding, stalling, his. Movement stalled.
She might have slipped away, out from the trees and into the fields. And when they were outside of that wood, where almost no one ever went anyway, where they would never have needed to go again, then the moment might have been left behind there in the tangle. They would have been out in the clear fields and the daylight where things like that were not allowed to happen. Only she did not slip away. He did what he should not have done. And she did what she should not have done. Because Richard had been somehow at the heart of all that summer, since she saw him that first morning out there in the wheat when it was still green. They were standing under the tree. He reached to her hair and she put up her hand to move his away, and he caught her hand in his. She had her back to the trunk of the great tree. He held one of her hands in his, and put his other hand to the tree beside her. He was the summer. He, they, the two of them, were destroying the summer. She spoke too late.
This is crazy. We cannot do this. I should not be here. Why did I come here?
She spoke softly, her hand twisting in his, but holding it all the same. She could have gone. She could so easily have gone, twisted away, but she did not move. She only spoke, in that soft voice of hers. We can’t. Can’t what? Whispered words. A racket of rooks overhead. But she had begun it. She had come out to find him, hadn’t she?
Can’t. Can’t. The rooks had all the words, over their heads. Nature is hard, he had said. The bark of the tree hard on her back. Rooks black in the morning sky. His eyes open and blue. No shadow in them. Like sky. Why no shadow? Can’t. And not there. Not with what had happened there in the past.
Something bad had happened there in the past, but something bad was happening in the present. She saw that she was the one who was doing it. She was suddenly aware, and angry. His eyes looking into hers. So blue. No shadow in them. Did she want to see shadow in them, before she could move? Or was it only that she could not pull herself away?
No, she
whispered. The rooks were loud above them. No, Richard, we can’t do this.
How could you do this? she said. And here, why here? How could you bring me here, of all places?
She could feel the confusion beginning in him, his body stiffening, eyes looking about as if there was something that he should have seen.
You know, don’t you? Here. It was just here. Right here on the ground where we’re standing. Jonathan knows. Jonathan saw. Jonathan told me.
She was talking out loud now. When she had started to speak it had been only a whisper. She did not move. She did not pull herself away. She went on, aloud, becoming cruel. Driving the point home. Wanting him at the same time. It was a kind of violence.
But you must have known, Jonathan always knew, everyone knew, only they didn’t say, because you people don’t talk about that sort of thing.
What, what thing? he was asking.
Again he asked. He was beginning to understand. He was letting go of her, drawing back, turning away to look about him at the place where it had happened. But he had to have her make it plain. So it was all clear. So that he knew what Jonathan knew. No more secrets. So that was what she did.
And then you buried that dog here. What made you do that? Don’t you see what that meant?
Putting up the rooks
Suddenly she was sorry. She put those neat little hands up before her mouth. Like a doll surprised.
There was no way she could take it back. She had said what she had said, and everything fell into a new place.
It all made sense.
He dropped his arm from the tree. Nothing could happen here any more. Something had happened here once in the past and now there was no present to be had here. Only the past. He let her go, without a word, hands held to her face but in shame now, careless of the nettles that brushed against her jeans and her bare elbows as she went. Even she had known.
He used to come with his father and shoot, just here. Not when it was green like now, with the leaves and the nettles, but in winter when it was all brown, the ground and the trees. Shhh, Richard, his father would say, and he would stand beside him, still as the dog knew to be still, not right under the oak where Kumiko had pointed but at the edge of its cover where there was a view out onto open fields and sky and the pigeons coming in to roost. He had stood in this spot beside his father until he had grown cold, and his mind drifted so that the pigeons always surprised him when they came. But not his father. His father raised the gun and fired, one, two barrels. When a bird fell the pleasure of it warmed them.
One barrel only, it must have been. Here. Somewhere about here. The pigeons flying up, and the small birds out of the bushes, and the rooks from their colony high in the trees. Had the birds flown up in astonishment, at a man who shot at himself?
He could not understand why he had not thought it before. (Or no, he might have thought it but dismissed the thought. Who wants to dismiss a truth they have believed since the age of ten? Or a lie, rather.) The story as she told it fitted together. It was so much more likely, when you thought about it, than any accident. Here, it had happened; planned, executed, not any accidental incompetent cocked-gun tripping over some fence. A man out in the early morning, come for the purpose, dying here.
He shouted then. It was neither a word nor a scream but only a twisted cry. Damn. Damn that girl, damn them all. Was she too far off to hear it? The sound stretched and melded with that of the hundred rooks that he had set rising and cawing over the trees.
He looked up where the black birds whirled under the sky. Light up there. Sunlight, seeping down. The nettles a bright green where the light struck through them. He stumbled out where the girl had gone, not following, only going out into the light, away from this place.
The house was plain to see. He wasn’t going into the house. The Land Rover was in the yard. The keys hung on a hook in the barn. He got into it and drove. He drove past his fields, bare stubble open to that sky, out from the farm to the village, and through the village, and on, until he was on some road that he did not know – or perhaps he knew it but no longer recognised it because so much in him had changed – driving through land that was strange to him though the look of it was the same as the land he had left: wide flat land, acres of stubble interspersed with fields of glossy green beet. It was other men’s land, and it meant nothing to him. On some farms they were so far ahead that they were already burning the straw. On one he saw a tractor beginning to plough. There were others – and these were more – where there was still wheat left standing, or where the rain had hit particularly hard, harder than at home, and swathes of crop had been flattened to the ground. He thought these things automatically, and the thoughts dulled him. The Land Rover was slow, heavy to drive, its interior bare, nothing to muffle the noise of the diesel engine. It smelled of diesel. He wound down the window and rested his elbow on the edge of it as he drove. A low green car passed him, too fast and dangerously on the narrow road. A Sprite, but he barely noticed it. He wanted a cigarette. He didn’t have any cigarettes on him or money to buy them. Then he saw that the tank was low. If there was no money for cigarettes then there was no money for diesel. He stopped in a lay-by, scrabbled about the vehicle, amongst the clutter in the shelf beside the dashboard, on the floor and between the seats, for loose notes and coins, and found what amounted to a couple of pounds. The next petrol station he came to, he put in a meagre gallon, watching the dial. That’s all I’ve got, he said to the girl on the forecourt, counting the change out into her hand. He had held back enough for a packet of fags. He didn’t pass any shops after that, not until he got to the village. He stopped outside the post office and bought a packet of ten. Then he broke it open and sat in the stationary vehicle and smoked, looking down the street at the houses, the Green, the church beyond it, the few cars passing.
So everyone knew, did they? Jonathan knew. His mother knew. That girl had known, and she was no one, a stranger over the other side of the world. Perhaps he had always been aware that there was something that Jonny had seen that he wouldn’t tell. But that was Jonny’s way. Jonny always had that way of looking like he knew something you didn’t. Jonny hid things from you and sometimes he told you stories, and you knew you wouldn’t be able to tell when a thing was true and when it wasn’t.
He wasn’t like Jonny. He didn’t have anything hidden. He saw what he saw, a plain world, and that was what he knew, and if he didn’t see for himself then he believed what his mother said, even if he didn’t believe what Jonny said. Even when it was a lie.
They would be there at home waiting for him. What would the girl have told them? Most likely she hadn’t told them anything. They might think something had happened between him and the girl, but if they thought that then what they thought would be wrong – mostly at least. Sooner or later he would have to face them. He put the cigarette almost finished to his lips and held it there as he started the engine. Took a last hard drag and threw it out the window. No, he might stop at the churchyard first, just up there beyond the Green. Park before it, go in the wooden gate to where the grass had been freshly mown about the graves. See his father’s name there on the stone.
He didn’t know what difference it made. He already knew that a steady man was not steady. He had known that since he was a boy. A big steady man could disappear in a puff of smoke. Ever since he’d known that, his father’s death had been more important than his father’s life, than whoever, whatever, his father had been. So, if the manner of his death was different, what had changed? If the past changed, did that change the present? There was the smell of mown grass, a path between dark yews that stood like raised hands against the sky. The name on the stone was the same name. He thought there was a rule in the church that suicides might not be buried on consecrated ground. Then there had been a lie here also – or a kind blind eye.
He remembered how they had come to the door, Billy with the dog, the policeman, the other men. They knew because they had found him. There was old Billy’s gr
ave, over in the corner. He had come to Billy’s funeral if not his father’s. He remembered Billy’s pals all around him, old men with weathered faces standing there beside him singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’. Did they all know? He thought they did. They must have known. And Billy was buried here in the churchyard, and his father was. Rosie they buried in the spinney where his father might have been buried, in the leaf mould where the nettles grew up, so green when the leaves caught the sunlight. That had been his idea, to bury Rosie there, not Billy’s. Perhaps he had sensed there was some meaning in the place, and Billy went along with it, knowing what the meaning was. Yes, boy, that’ll be a good spot for her, she’ll like that, you know we used to go shooting there, when your father was alive, it was a good spot, your father was fond of that spot, you’ll remember that. To Billy it might have made some kind of memorial.
He thought of that first time Billy took him out shooting. How he shot the hare – so great it had been to get a hare his first time out with Billy – and how Billy did not congratulate him but only said, That’s it, boy, now carry it home and you’ll see what hares are made of. He carried the hare all the way from Hewitt’s Field, and learned how heavy it was, the dead weight of it that he could feel again, pulling down his arms.
At last he turned away and drove the mile back to the farm. He went up the drive and parked the Land Rover in the yard. They would all be having lunch by now. They would be waiting for him. When he came in they would see him and, whatever they thought had gone on this morning – unless the girl had told all of it, and he thought that surely she could not have said it all – they would think they knew who he was. They would be sure of him as he had been sure of the memory of his father. Only he couldn’t be sure of any of them any more, of his mother, or Jonny, or old Billy whom he had trusted so completely. Good shot, boy, you’ll be growing up like your father, you will. You’ll be running that there farm in no time.
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