All Among the Barley

by Melissa Harrison

  I had been sure that I would sleep that night, as Connie had said, but again I lay awake, hot beneath my sheet despite the open window. I was tired, but it was as though I had somehow lost the knack of letting go; instead I kept seeing sheaves, and stooks, and hearing in my head Connie saying ‘an English Arcadia’, over and over again.

  At last I turned onto my front with one knee up and put my hand to myself, and I thought this time of Connie, her long white body and its frankness, the triangle of damp hair I had seen between her legs. I let my hand move slowly, and imagined lying down with her by the water and kissing her lips and her breasts; I pictured touching her between her legs as I was touching myself, and her letting me, liking it, smiling and telling me she loved me. I put off the spasm of pleasure by stilling my hand, and whispered ‘I love you, Edie, oh I love you’ into my pillow so that I might hear it, and it feel real. At last, though, I let sensation overtake me, and afterwards I did at last drop from the world into sleep.

  It was sometime near midnight when I awoke with the sense of something vast and obscure having fallen into place. I had slept enough, I knew straight away; and I also knew that I must go to the horse-pond in Greenleaze. Connie had not gone into the water – I had stopped her – but now I must, for the sake of the farm. It seemed in that moment very simple, and I felt relieved, for I had not known what to do; but now I understood that each thing would become clear when I came to it, and that all I had to do was trust. I got up and pulled a cardigan that had once been Frank’s over my nightdress, crept down the creaking stairs and put on my boots.

  The yard was quiet, its cobbles, the barn and dung-heap lit by a bright, full moon. The parish lantern, Grandfather sometimes called her, while Granfer and Grandma said her name was Phoebe. I was glad of her now.

  On each stable door hung a holed stone on a loop of wire and a rusty iron nail, and now I took one down and gently eased the nail from the wood, hoping that the horses wouldn’t startle and wake John. Then I took the nail, raised my nightdress and traced a witch-mark gently with the point of it on my belly’s pale, fine skin. I drew no blood, for I didn’t need it to last more than an hour or two.

  One of the horses blew and stamped as I eased the old nail back into the wood, making my heart thump and sweat prickle under my arms. But above the stable, John did not stir. Only a couple of the farm cats saw me cross the moonlit yard and walk into the darkness under the elms.

  Father had scythed the margins of Greenleaze, and late in the afternoon, before she went to sit with Doble, Mother had sheaved and stooked the corn he had cut. In the moonlight it looked a little like the painting Miss Carter had shown us at school, and I wondered if perhaps she had meant it as a sign for me, one I was only now beginning to understand. There was a deep significance to everything I saw around me now – the black trees, the moon, the fields – and it was almost overwhelming. I knew I must learn to decipher its messages or everything might be lost.

  I knew that Father would have had to walk through standing wheat to cut around the horse-pond, so I looked for his line and followed it. The crop around me was full of little movements, and I imagined all the harvest mice and hares that were doubtless watching me walk through its tall stalks and wondering why I had come. Ahead lay the black clump of alders that huddled around the water, the inky night sky, strewn with bright stars, beyond it and above.

  At the edge of the trees I called softly for Edmund, and he came immediately, appearing quietly at my feet. I picked him up and cradled him against my chest for a moment, and I couldn’t help the tears from starting to my eyes, because I knew by his attendance on me there that everything I had suspected was all true – all true. I felt like a child all of a sudden, I felt so small and desolate – which was strange, as surely I should have felt at my most powerful then. I pressed my wet face into the bird’s soft feathers and felt his heart beating in my palm and I made myself think of the farm, and of Mother and Grandma; of all that I loved, and that might yet be lost.

  ‘I’m ready now, Edmund,’ I whispered at last, and set him down in the stubble, where he roused his feathers briefly and began to preen. And then I took off Frank’s cardigan, folded it up neatly, and ducked under the alders to the weeds and flag irises at the margin of the pond.

  The water was chill at first, but by the time it was around my thighs it felt blood-warm; the pond might have been shady, but the weather had been hot for weeks. With each step my unlaced boots sank into the depthless mud beneath me and at last I flung out my arms for balance, water arcing from them, so that I wouldn’t fall. I had expected ducks or moorhens to explode from the margins, as they would have had I gone into the pond by the house, but it seemed that no wildfowl made this pond their home.

  When the dark water was at my shoulders I stopped and pushed my palely billowing nightdress down into the water, and waited for the ripples to subside. I felt so clean all of a sudden; cleaner than I had since the fete. And it was worth it just for that.

  I felt my breathing slow with the fading ripples and let my awareness of the cornfield around me, and the night sky, return. At last, I breathed out all the air I could from my lungs, took two tip-toeing steps forward, closed my eyes – and let go.

  I don’t know how far down I sank, or whether I truly reached the bottom, though I felt roots and other black, invisible things touching my hands and grazing my buttocks and knees. I felt as though I descended a long, long way, the water growing colder and more silent as I fell until it was as though the world above winked out – and was lost. It seemed like hours I was under the water, but I know that can’t have been the case.

  At last I bobbed back up to the surface as I had known that I would, gasping for air and with the taste of iron in my mouth. I trod water, then struck out for the place where I had got in, clutching at the flag irises and streaming pond-water, my body casting a moon-shadow across the sucking black mud at the bank.

  ‘Edie – Edie – oh, my Edie,’ I heard Mother cry.

  XIV

  It must have been mid-morning when I woke, for the sun was high and I could hear no sounds of breakfasting from below. I lay naked, my much-darned sheet kicked away and tangled at my feet, listening to the distant whirr of the Albion and a wood-pigeon cooing contentedly on the roof. The skin of my belly was pale and unmarked, and my limbs were full of a luxurious torpor. Everything felt right.

  Despite the brackish water streaming from me, Mother and I had embraced fiercely by the black pond and I had comforted her, rubbing her back until her sobs died down. I was euphoric, utterly transported – but it was private and inward, not something yet that anyone else could see.

  ‘Sit down with me a moment, Edie,’ she’d said at last.

  I was shivering a little, although the night was warm, and I found Frank’s cardigan among the thistles and willow-herb and put it on. We sat side by side and I used Mother’s shawl to rub some of the water from my hair and my legs. My feet were cold in my wet boots, and I couldn’t help smiling, but the starry sky seemed unchanged from when I had stood on the bank alone, as though indifferent to everything I had done. I looked for Edmund, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Edie –’

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘Your grandfather heard you leave the house – you know how sharp his ears are. He called up the stairs and woke me up.’

  ‘Does Father know?’

  ‘No, he was snoring; he drank to the harvest after supper last night. I didn’t think there was anything in the house, but by his breath it seems he’s been hiding a bottle of whisky away somewhere. You’re lucky, child.’

  I didn’t reply, and after a while I felt her gather herself.

  ‘Talk to me, Edie.’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Tell me – tell me what’s happening. Why did you go into the horse-pond?’

  ‘Because I had to.’

  Her voice was pleading. ‘But why? Were you trying to – to do away wit
h yourself?’

  ‘Mother, of course not! You should know that. It was – a swim.’

  ‘You went for a swim in the middle of the night? Edie, I don’t understand. And everything’s so – I mean there’s Doble, your father –’ Her voice was rising in pitch and sounding almost panicked now.

  ‘Doble will be all right. You’ll make him well again.’

  ‘And the harvest – there’s too much barley – I told him – you know what a risk it is – oh Edie, I don’t pretend to understand what’s wrong, I just want you to be well, I need you to be well now.’

  ‘But I am well! And the harvest will be good this year, I swear it. And all manner of thing shall be well.’

  She looked at me strangely. ‘Edie –’

  ‘Don’t you ever get angry, Mother?’

  ‘Angry? With who? With you?’

  ‘No, with – with all of it.’

  She sighed. ‘There’s no sense in women getting angry, child. It changes nothing, or it changes everything. And neither’s any good.’

  I felt her hand find and grasp mine in the dark. ‘Edie, the sign you made when we visited your grandparents. We must – we must talk properly about that.’

  ‘You recognised it, Mother. I know you did.’

  ‘Course I did. I know what the sign is –’

  So she admitted it. I smiled in relief, and stood up, but she remained sitting, the yellow moon low on the horizon now behind.

  ‘Tell me why you made it,’ she said again. ‘Tell me!’

  There was no reason for her to fret about me, of course, but I could see how much she wanted me to reassure her that I knew what I was doing, and that I would make everything right. And I didn’t want her to think I wished ill on her or Mary or Grandma and Granfer, for nothing could be further from the truth.

  ‘It was a silly mistake, I know that now,’ I said soothingly. ‘I’m sorry – honestly, Mother. It won’t happen again.’

  I helped her up, and in single file we began to walk away from the shrouded pond through the tall corn.

  ‘And you’re sure you’re all right?’ she asked from behind me. ‘You’d tell me if there was . . . anything else? Anything worrying you?’

  ‘Of course I would,’ I lied.

  I had lingered in bed far too long, I knew. At last I got up, put on a dress and brushed my tangled and still-damp hair, looking out of my little window at the familiar view. There was a clarity and a calmness to my thoughts now, the confusion and fear of the last few days held in abeyance. I felt as though I had been chosen, as though I understood everything – the whole of creation, perhaps – although I couldn’t have put any of it into words.

  Grandfather was in the kitchen when I went down. The breakfast things had been cleared away, but he remained sitting at his usual place.

  ‘Well, child?’

  ‘Good morning, Grandfather.’

  ‘Edith.’ And he thumped his stick hard on the brick floor.

  I sat down. He turned his face towards me, his eye sockets sunken and blank.

  ‘I was hot. I went to the pond to cool off.’

  ‘That’s a lie, girl.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘It is a damned lie, and you and me both know it! Now, be you going to tell us what went on?’

  I stared out of the window. I could see Meg grazing in Horse Leasow; she had an easy time of it at harvest, while the draught horses were out in the fields.

  ‘Are we in debt, Grandfather?’

  He seemed almost to recoil. ‘Now, whatever d’you want to know a thing like that for, girl?’

  ‘Is it a lot – do you even know how much? Does Father tell you?’

  ‘Never you mind.’

  ‘Well, never you mind, then, either!’

  And with that I got up and walked from the room.

  Out in the yard I called for Edmund, but he didn’t come. The weather had changed, I realised; the sky was white and the air felt dabbly and close, as though threatening rain. I saw that John had salvaged what he could of his flower-garden after Father’s drunken rampage: the rose bushes had had their broken stems bound and were carefully staked, and the little plot was once again neatly edged with stones, but the orange wallflowers were gone and there were gaps among the sweet williams that hadn’t been there before.

  I walked to Great Ley, where the hen-huts were, but someone had already fed them and let them out of their coops. Where was everyone? John would be on the reaper-binder, of course, but who was stooking – Frank and Mother? Perhaps she was over at Doble’s cottage, in which case Father would be doing it, something I knew he did not like.

  It went without saying that I would go and help in the fields as soon as I got up during harvest, but now that I had done my part I felt sure that our corn would come in well; in fact I even knew that it wouldn’t rain. Instead I decided to visit Mary, to find out whether she was truly with me or against me, for I knew that I would perceive it immediately if I could only speak to her properly, alone. It was a couple of hours’ walk to Monks Tye, but I didn’t mind.

  I cut under the trees by the rick-yard, as I had the night before, passed the Pightle, then took the field path that ran north between Great Ley and Home Field, humming a little to myself under my breath. The path brought me out by the steep bank between the houses at Back Lane, and then I crossed the Stound to The Street and turned right towards the church. Sparrows chattered from the village roofs and gutters, and around the chimneys of the Bell & Hare jackdaws jinked and quacked.

  I hadn’t been to church since the Sunday before the fete, and as I passed St Anne’s I paused and looked up at the squat flint tower with its brick parapet and the homely tiled roof of the nave. It was so familiar, so comforting somehow, but I felt sure in that moment that I would never go back inside. That was all right, I thought; I didn’t mind it. Yet a little further along the lane I found that for the third time in recent days my cheeks were wet with tears.

  Connie and I had come this way on our bicycles a couple of weeks before, and I found myself thinking about the conversation we’d had. I’d questioned her about why she went to church when she had told us that she didn’t believe in God. Wasn’t it hypocritical, or, worse, a sin?

  ‘Darling, it’s about fitting in,’ she’d replied.

  ‘But I thought you didn’t care about that!’

  ‘I don’t – in a way. I don’t mind if people think I’m eccentric or different, because compared to village folk, Edie, I am. But it wouldn’t do to scorn the things that people believe in. And in any case, I have a lot of respect for the church’s work when it comes to out-of-the-way places like this.’

  I’d pondered what she said about not minding being different, and it had occurred to me that for all my conception of myself as a bookworm I had always really wanted to be like everyone else; in fact at school I would have traded my cleverness in a heart-beat for the chance to have made even one proper friend.

  ‘How do you do it, Connie – how do you make people like you so much?’

  I’d blushed as I said it, for it might have sounded rude; but not to her, for she wasn’t in the habit of seeking out slights.

  ‘I suppose . . . I suppose it’s because I don’t need anything from people, and so they can relax.’

  ‘Yet you do nothing but ask people questions!’ I protested.

  ‘Well, that’s very true, darling,’ she laughed; and then we spoke of other things. But I knew I hadn’t understood her, and I wondered now if I ever would.

  After I had been walking for an hour or so I began to tire, and I realised that I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since supper the previous night. Where were the crows that had yesterday been sent to watch me? I hadn’t seen a single one, although there should have been several about.

  The road to Monks Tye was quiet, for most people were harvesting; I only saw a baker’s van and a couple of farm wagons on the road. But around me in every direction the golden acres were busy with tractors and horses,
and here and there a field lay razed to raw stubble and dotted with stooks.

  At last a smart blue motor-car drew up beside me, its side-window lowered.

  ‘Hullo, miss; would you like a lift?’

  I peered in; it was a young man of about Sid Rose’s age, or perhaps a little older. His hair was neatly combed and he was wearing drill shorts and a shirt with the sleeves turned up. He picked up a canvas pack from the seat beside him and slung it into the back, and then leant over and released the door catch. Clearly he had been sent to help me.

  ‘Hop in. How far are you going?’ he said.

  I got in, smoothed my skirt over my knees and smiled at him. ‘Monks Tye. Do you know it? I’m Edith, by the way.’

  He grinned back. ‘I’m Neil. I don’t, but you can tell me where to stop. Is it far?’

  ‘Only a couple more miles. Where are you going?’

  ‘Well, I’m trying to get to Blaxford; I’m meeting some friends there for lunch. I say, I should probably call it dinner in these parts, shouldn’t I?’

  I laughed. The car began to bounce along at quite a pace, the sound of its engine cheering, somehow. ‘You’re not from around here, then.’

  ‘Well spotted! Whereas I can tell from your voice that you’re a native – am I right?’

  I nodded. Did I have an accent? I hadn’t thought so – certainly not like the threshing team, or my grandparents, if it came to that. Connie had never mentioned it.

  ‘Well, lucky you! It’s a beautiful part of the world.’

  ‘So everyone says.’

  ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Oh – I’m just used to it, I suppose. Are you here for a holiday?’

  ‘You’re a regular sleuth, Edith. Yes, we’re going hiking; we plan to follow the course of the Stound all the way to the sea. Tom and Gladys and I – we’re students, you see, and it’s the Long Vac. Tom’s always reading out bits from In Search of England – you know, that Morton chap from the Express. It’s been driving us potty. Do you know it?’

  I shook my head. ‘Are you at Cambridge?’