All Among the Barley

by Melissa Harrison

  ‘Hello, Edie. Look what Frank won for me at the hoopla!’ she said, holding out a gilt brooch in the shape of a flower set with little chips of red glass. I felt shy of her; she was only a couple of years older than me, and had been held back a year at school so that she was but one class ahead, but all dressed up she seemed like a woman: not, perhaps, as Connie was, or Mother, but certainly she was no longer a child. It was nice to have her speak kindly to me, though; she had always ignored me at school.

  ‘Oh, that’s ever so pretty, Sally. Frank, can I speak to you a moment? It’s Father; I think he might be a little – tired.’

  I found that I was trembling, and my voice came out high and unsteady; it made me realise that I was more upset than I had thought. I tried to remind myself that Sally’s family had their own shameful secret: her sister had gone away to have a baby when she was twelve, and had never come back. It was whispered in the village that she had been locked up in the county asylum ever since.

  ‘Don’t fret, Ed, John will keep an eye on him,’ Frank said.

  ‘But John’s gone home.’

  ‘Oh – of course. Is he causing bother?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps.’

  ‘Right. Let’s go and see what’s what. Sally’ – and he gave a little bow – ‘will you excuse us for a few moments? A family matter to attend to.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and smiled.

  We found Father asleep behind the refreshments tent. He was on his side, one arm flung up above his head and his hat upturned on the grass. He looked like an infant, but the queer sense of horror I felt concerning him still lingered. I just wanted everything to go back to normal again.

  ‘We’ll let him sleep it off, Ed. It’s for the best.’

  ‘But why is he like this?’

  ‘He’s – it’s the harvest.’

  ‘Isn’t it always?’

  ‘It’s worse this year, Ed. I think –’

  Just then there came the sound of a gong, for it was time for Sir Cecil to make his annual speech to the village. We assembled respectfully around him where he stood on a slightly unsteady-looking wooden chair that was being grasped firmly by a crouching manservant who was trying hard to make himself as unobtrusive as he could. Connie found us, and drew her arm through mine. ‘There you are, darling,’ she whispered, and squeezed. I leaned my head on her shoulder for a moment, and thought how utterly reassuring it was to have her there.

  Sir Cecil was as old as the century, which is to say, thirty-four. He was high-boned and handsome in the way only the gentry can be; you could never have mistaken him for a working man, even if he’d been got up in working clothes. He made almost the very same speech every year, and this was no exception. When he had finished, and had climbed down from his chair to polite applause, the Reverend Woodgate led the village in a chorus of three cheers. I nudged Connie, expecting her to roll her eyes, but she was cheering Sir Cecil even more loudly than the rest of us, her face eager and open. Her Socialist days were behind her, it seemed.

  It was the last day of my childhood, and somehow I knew it even as each moment flowed through me and fell behind. The grounds of the Hall looked briefly beautiful again, like an old aquatint, and the weather was fine; everyone said afterwards that it had been a splendid day. I wonder if the Elmbourne fetes are still held there nowadays; perhaps the world has changed, and such simple pleasures have fallen out of favour, I don’t know.

  But through it all for me ran the dark undertow of Father, and the bright, taut thread of Alf’s gaze. I knew he would find a way to be alone with me before the day was out, and it set me on edge and gave everything around me an oddly vivid cast. When I recall that day now I think of the young deer we’d nursed to health a few years before: the way it would hold itself so very still in the Pightle when any of us approached. It’s strange – stupid, really – but I sometimes feel I could weep to think of that poor creature now.

  In the end, it was easy: when at last the stallholders began to pack away, Frank was required to take Father home – much to his chagrin, for Doble was nowhere to be found. And then, when they had gone, it was just me and Alf, my heart beating high and fast in my chest.

  ‘Would you like some rock?’ he said, taking a stick of it, wrapped in pink paper, from his trouser pocket. The smell of crushed grass filled the air around us, trampled by feet.

  ‘Oh – no, I won’t, thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure? Your old man told me I should buy it; he said you had a sweet tooth.’

  ‘Honestly, I’m all right.’

  ‘Shall we go for a stroll, then, Edie?’

  I nodded, feeling the inevitability of it, the way these things happened as though following the script of a play. Was this ‘walking out’?

  At the gates of the Hall we turned not right towards the village, but left, leaving the shouts and the singing and revelry behind. It wasn’t late, and the sky was light over the cornfields, though in the distance the copses were starting to look shadowy and dim. The sun was low behind us as we walked, and after a while Alf took my hand in his and gently scratched at my damp palm with one fingernail in the particular way that he had. I tried to keep my arm and hand relaxed, so that he wouldn’t think me prissy or tense.

  ‘Yes, it’s very fetching, your dress,’ he said, as though carrying on a conversation from before. ‘You look very grown up. I said as much to Frank, I said, “Your sister looks a rare treat to-day!” There, how does that feel?’

  ‘Thank you, Alf,’ I said.

  ‘Quite the grown-up, I’d say.’

  I tried to squeeze his hand, but his grip was so strange and I didn’t really know what else to say, and then a motor-car came and we both stood to the side to let it pass. I hoped my hair was still tidy, for soon, I knew, he’d turn to look at me, and then he’d kiss me. Not yet, though; perhaps when we were a little further along the lane.

  ‘Did you enjoy the fete, Alf?’

  ‘Oh yes, it was capital. Even better than last year, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Only – I wish Father hadn’t enjoyed it quite so much, that’s all.’

  ‘Why, can a man not enjoy a drink now and again, Edie? Half the men in the village were tipsy to-day – there’s no shame in it.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right. It’s just – well, Mother will have a rare time of it this evening, that’s all.’

  ‘Let’s not think of your mother just now, shall we?’ And he stopped, just as I had known that he would, and turned me to face him there in the shadowy lane. I raised my eyes to his and he looked long at me in a way that made my breath come fast, and then he leaned down and kissed me, stale beer and peppermint on his breath, his hands gripping the tops of my arms and pressing the little buttons that trimmed the sleeves of my new dress into my skin. He began to push his tongue inside my mouth, as he always did, and I pictured how my face would look if anyone could see it, my nose squashed to one side and my mouth open; I always tried to make my tongue respond to his, but I was never quite sure what it was that he wanted me to do. I couldn't breathe properly, but breathing was less important than him thinking well of me, so I didn’t pull away. And then his hands were on the front of my dress, pushing and kneading; I realised my eyes were still open and I closed them tight and concentrated instead on the sound of a dorhawk churring from somewhere not too far away.

  ‘So pretty,’ he breathed into my mouth, his fingers pinching and bruising at my breasts. ‘So pretty.’

  I raised my hands from where they rested limply on each side of his waist and began to unbutton the front of my dress; last time it had made him more gentle to see the bare skin, and he had hurt me less.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he muttered, pulling away to watch as I fumbled at my buttons. ‘Oh, Edie, you’re so. . .’

  I reached behind me to unhook the unfamiliar brassière and immediately he pushed it up and out of the way. The evening air brought my nipples out and he put a big palm on each breast f
or a moment and just stood. I dared a look up at his face and it was strange, transfigured, as though he wasn’t there. Perhaps I looked the same.

  He took my left hand then and pulled it to the front of his trousers, where his thing was, and pressed it there so I could feel it twitch. I wondered how much he wanted from me, and how long it might take; I wondered when we could turn and walk back to the village again.

  ‘Edie,’ he said, his voice thick, and then he leaned down to kiss me again. ‘Please, Edie,’ he breathed into my mouth, and I moved my hand a little, trying to discern what it was that he wanted me to do. It didn’t feel romantic, and I moved my hand away; but he just put it back and pressed it there, hard.

  ‘See what you do to me?’ he said. ‘I just can’t help myself.’

  It was very flattering, of course, and I did feel powerful in an odd way. It was as though Alf Rose was all of a sudden helpless, as though I could make him do anything I liked. He leaned down then and began to suck on one of my breasts, and I cradled the back of his head in both hands and looked down at him there, his eyes closed, his mouth working away. I wondered if I should say ‘I love you, Alfred’ – whether that was what was happening. I thought perhaps it might sound right.

  After a few moments he stepped back and looked at me as though from very far away. ‘Come on,’ he said, taking my hand decisively; but instead of turning back towards the village he marched me further up the lane and scrambled through a gap in the hedge. I ducked and pushed my way through after him, holding my dress closed with one hand, my heart banging. I wasn’t really thinking of anything any more, only that we weren’t going back to the village yet.

  What happened next was nothing – the work of a few moments in the corner of a dim field. He told me to lie down, and I did, briefly picturing my bed at home and the ancient witch-mark that watched over me from the beam above. Weeds prickled my arms and the back of my neck as he stood over me and unbuttoned his trousers so that his pale thing poked out; it was the first time I had encountered the strange look they have when stiff: a mixture of defencelessness and horrible vigour. He worked it in his fist for a moment, staring down at me with his mouth open where I lay with the bodice of my dress undone, my arms rigid by my sides. I tried to think of a romantic story to explain what was happening, but my mind was a desperate blank; then he was kneeling and pushing my legs apart, and muttering ‘Edie, Edie’ to himself while I stared unblinking past him at the sky.

  XI

  The climax of the year was nearly upon us. In the days following the fete, John and Father inspected the corn twice daily; the wheat would be cut and stooked first, and we would then start straight in on the barley, which did not need to be left to dry but could be carted in sheaves the same day. Father said that even if the first few acres of barley had a little green in them it was better than the last being overripe and the grain shaling out of the ears.

  We would need to weed and hoe one last time. Even then, the harvest would not be as tidy as it should have been, but Father said that any remaining weeds – for we would only have time to pull the worst – would mostly be threshed out. Too much green could cause the rick to heat, while weed seeds in the threshed grain risked it fetching a lower price.

  John had already cleaned and oiled the reaper-binder and made sure our wagon was in good repair, and now he took first Malachi, and then Moses, to the smith to be shod. A feeling had come over the farm of anticipation, and when any of us came into the house from the fields we’d find Grandfather standing by his parlour chair, leaning upon his stick.

  ‘Well?’ he’d ask, his shuttered old face hungry for news.

  The first morning after the fete I remained in bed until I heard the sound of the trap’s wheels receding up the lane and the church bells slow and stop. Mother had tried to rouse me, but I’d turned away and pulled the sheet over my head; she’d sighed and laid a hand upon my hair, but at last she’d let me be.

  My little casement window was open to the summer morning; a turtle dove purred, and from somewhere drifted in the zip-zip-zip of a scythe being sharpened with a whetstone. Hopefully it was Doble, and Father hadn’t remained behind indisposed, for after his drunkenness at the fete he seemed changed to me in some way, and I didn’t want to see him yet.

  I had barely slept all night, my mind fixated for some reason on Sir Cecil’s speech. Through all the dark hours I’d been strangely gripped by the need to recall his exact words – despite the fact that I had barely listened at the time. What if there had been a message there, a message for the village, something everyone else but me had heard? Or perhaps we’d all missed something important, something concerning our future that it was imperative we should know. That final hour of the fete: I kept going back there in my imagination, compulsively assembling and reassembling all the details – the footman holding the wobbling chair, Connie squeezing my arm, Father’s hat on the grass – as though they mattered in some way. And yet the events that followed seemed almost to have been obliterated from my mind.

  I knew that I must force myself to get out of bed, for if I did not do so something in me would fail. At least growing up on a farm had given me enough backbone to overcome laziness and self-indulgence, for the hens would not let themselves out of the coop nor feed themselves, and there were always a thousand other tasks that would not wait. I got up and let yesterday’s drawers drop without looking at them, for I knew that they were foul, splashed my face with water and went gingerly down the stairs.

  Mother had left me scrambled eggs but I found that I could not eat them, so I slid them into the pig-bucket, stepped into my boots and walked out of the house in my nightdress, leaving my plate and the frying-pan unwashed. I used the privy, and found Edmund waiting for me when I came out; then after I had seen to the hens I walked up the lane with him towards Hullets, the sun hot on my arms and the back of my neck. My hip joints felt stiff, and the muscles on the inside of my thighs were painful, but it felt important to ignore the soreness and try to walk in my usual way. Beyond that I did not think for one single second about the night before. It was a perfect blank, like the high, unstable whine of a tuning fork that one simply tunes out and doesn’t hear.

  I kept to the edge of Hulver Wood and followed the margin of Crossways. The barley was tall and made the field impossible to cut across; it would have been easier to have gone by the road, but I wasn’t sure whether everyone at Rose Farm would be at church. Crows called hoarsely from the tall trees of the wood, and I shuddered a little to think of their beady black eyes watching me pass.

  When I was nearing Hullets, I pushed through the hedge to the road and crossed it to the farm buildings. I put Edmund down, and as he roused his brown-dappled feathers and began to preen I shaded my eyes and looked about. A stone roller and a mangle were rusting gently into the nettles by the house’s front wall; the north gable was almost entirely claimed by ivy, which was fingering its way into the upper windows and making its way across the roof. An ash sapling issued from one of the chimneys and had split it, sending several of the old bricks down into the thicket of elder and nettles that had sprung up where what looked like a hen-house had once been.

  Peering into one of the front windows, I called out a faint ‘Hello?’, but it seemed clear that the house was unoccupied. I felt a stab of disappointment; I’d been so curious about the family there, and now they were gone.

  The farmhouse’s oak front door was much like our own, with iron studs and a thumb-latch, warm from the sun, that felt familiar to my hand. Inside I found that the parlour and kitchen had been neatly swept and were clear of the dead leaves, rubbish and jackdaw nests that filled the other downstairs rooms. The walls were discoloured, the parlour’s paper peeling and buckled, but there was little smell of damp.

  In the parlour the hearth looked to have been recently lit, and there were some twisted paper spills beside it such as Father used to light the fire at home. Crouching, I unrolled one; it was a page from the Gazette dating back to 1929. ‘GR
UESOME DEATH’, it announced. ‘William Yhrym (44) of Corwelby did away with himself on Tuesday last by cutting his throat with a corn sickle. The Coroner was of the opinion that he would have taken about half an hour to die.’ And then an advertisement for bile beans.

  I suppose I was still hoping for a trace of the family, some kind of clue or sign, but the two rooms told me very little, for they had left nothing meaningful of themselves behind. Still, though, something lingered, if only in my imagination; the people felt more real to me now, instead of just a tale. I tried to imagine what it must be like to have nothing and to travel from place to place, always being moved on and never welcomed, but it was like trying to imagine the lives of animals: it just wasn’t something I could do. Whose fault was it that they had lost their home – were they simply idle, or was the father a dipsomaniac? Or perhaps they were of bad character, or Irish, or all of these things, I thought. For while there were in those years many indigent men tramping the roads in search of work, that was just the way of things, and I could not conceive that an ordinary family – a family like ours, for example – would ever let themselves be reduced to living in that way.

  There was a fluster at the backhouse window and I saw that Edmund had flown up onto the sill and was regarding me inquisitively. Beyond him must lie the garden and orchard, or whatever was left of it, and I decided to have a look.

  The back door, which was cheap and of a much more modern type than the front, had swollen and jammed in the frame, but with a heave it opened, dragging a half-circle across the old, dipped stone of the step. Just beyond were five rows of seedlings, neatly hoed and weeded and edged with the coppery buttons of marigolds. The young plants had been recently watered and picked clean of caterpillars, and the climbing beans were coiling more strongly up the bean-sticks even than our own. For some reason I couldn’t make sense of, the sight nearly took the heart from my chest.

  That’s when I saw them, sitting in the shade of an overgrown apple tree heavy with hard green fruit: a woman Mother’s age in a dark dress and headscarf, and a little girl no more than four years old, lying on a rush mattress with her head turned towards me and gazing at me with deep-shadowed and strangely fervent eyes. I froze in the doorway, but then I saw that the woman was sleeping, her head resting on the tree’s gnarled trunk. Letting out my breath, I looked back at the child, and although she smiled a little – I’m sure she did, I’m sure to this day that she smiled at me – she did not blink or look away.