Harvest

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Three years now. Two years with, one family, then I decided to stay on and take some temporary jobs and travel around Europe a bit.’

  ‘Do you think she’s feeling …’

  ‘I can’t speak for Jane, Mr Knight. I don’t really like to get mixed up in a family’s personal affairs, if you don’t mind my saying so.’ She was stretching out her arms and legs, yawning. To his inflamed reason, it was an invitation. Then suddenly she was standing. He stood up at once beside her. They were of equal height; had it been daytime, he would have been looking directly into her eyes.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t always tie your hair back.’ There was a thick lock of it which had fallen forward and lay dark against her white shirt, curling around one of her breasts. He had to touch it. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  Planted firmly on her feet, the girl stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans and said, ‘You know what people used to believe the moon was made of? My grandfather told me this. They used to believe that everything which was useless on earth was precious on the moon, so it was just crammed full of everything totally worthless: things like wasted time and stupid ideas and broken promises.’

  He was reaching for her face when she knocked his hand away. ‘Let’s not make the moon any bigger, eh?’

  ‘Debbie, please …’

  ‘You’ve had a fair bit to drink, Mr Knight. Why don’t you go inside now?’ His silhouette was swaying in the darkness, his head weaving from side to side. She tried to assess how drunk he was and what the chances were that he’d fall in the pool if she left him.

  ‘Oh, don’t say things like that. Don’t be so cynical, you’re too young. Come here …’ In the darkness he stumbled over the empty drink can, lost his balance, lunged for her and fell with his whole body weight, dragging her to the ground with him. Something ripped, he heard it, but he had hold of one of her arms and could grab for the other. They were struggling and then all he knew was a fierce pain in his leg. She had kicked him under the kneecap and the pain screamed down the nerve all the way to his ankle.

  Debbie was back on her feet standing over him, breathing hard. ‘If you really want to know, you struck me as a sleaze right off. Don’t try anything like this again or I’m out of here.’

  He was writhing on the ground, clutching his leg like a histrionic soccer star. Brushing herself down as she walked back to the house, she found one of the pockets was hanging off her jeans and tore it away. The lights were still on in the hall, and the door was open, and in the doorway stood Jane in her white nightshirt, holding a bottle of mineral water.

  ‘Debbie – I’m so sorry … are you all right?’

  ‘Shit, why should you be sorry? It wasn’t what I guess it must have looked like. He’s had too much to drink, that’s all.’

  ‘No he hasn’t. Don’t make excuses for him. Michael could drink Brendan Behan under the table with one hand tied behind his back. He always knows what he’s doing. We had a row earlier and he was taking it out on you.’

  ‘Still, nothing for you to be sorry about. I’m good, don’t worry about me. That was nothing. I’ve had much worse happen travelling.’

  Together they went in and without thinking closed the door on Michael. At the foot of the stairs they stopped and Debbie said, ‘You look like a sleepwalker in that shirt.’

  ‘I feel like a sleepwalker. I can’t get in contact with anything tonight.’ Jane had one foot on the lowest stair.

  ‘I’m sleeping in with the girls tonight. Would you like me to make up one of the guest rooms for you?’ It was said with no shadow of emotion on the open face; the plainness of the offer made Jane hesitate, and the simple morality which it implied gave her confidence. She said, ‘That’s very kind of you, Debbie, but,’ then she remembered that there was a room in the children’s wing already prepared for Imogen, ‘I’ll take Imogen’s room, shall I?’

  The bed was comforting in its narrowness. Lying awake, she heard Michael go upstairs slowly a few minutes later. The curtain was pulled back and she watched the moon through the window, still red as blood and low in the vaporous sky.

  5. Sunday: The Beginning

  ‘This is hooking, isn’t it? I’m the hooker and you’re my driver, and Jane’s a hooker and the john is my dear father. And his sicko thing is being the great family man, and he’s paying us to act out this fantasy for him. He can’t get it on without a whole fucking crew of us in fetish suits running around acting out his weird little scenario for hours. What do you think of my daughter outfit, Stephen?’ She picked contemptuously at the skirt of her yellow flowered dress. ‘It’ll do things for him, you’ll see. And the hat, eh?’ Her hat was a steeple of straw, the colour of orange sherbet, fantastic in shape and proportion, a Mad Hatter creation that toppled crazily over one eye; she put it on and posed for herself, using the train window as a mirror.

  ‘I love it,’ he said. ‘I love you for wearing things like that.’

  ‘They’ll hate it, though. And after the old man’s tortured us all day he’ll have his pathetic little orgasm, feel like King Kong, hand over the wedge and tell us all to fuck off. Until he gets the urge again.’

  ‘Do you want some of my Snickers?’

  ‘No.’ She took off the hat and scowled out of the train window.

  Without concern, Stephen unwrapped the bar and began to eat it. ‘D’you think there’s a buffet on this train? I wish we’d got to the station in time for coffee.’ They had hardly slept. After he had made dinner, and her rage at Michael had died down to a lethargic sulk, she had started talking and smoking, telling him about her life in Paris, her work and her new friends, showing a new personality, socialized and amusing. The conversation had been too good to stop for sleep. After a couple of hours of fitful dozing he had somehow got them both to the Gare Montparnasse.

  The train passed a crossing, the distorted clanging of the automatic bell sounding faintly through the sealed window. Outside, the sun was bright but low clouds were moving fast over the earth, their shadows racing after them over the parched fields. Where the wheat was still standing the ears were bronze and ripe; here and there summer storms had punched holes in the crops.

  Imi suddenly turned back to him and smiled. ‘Oh, well, if you insist.’ She held out her hand and he gave her the rest of the bar; she chewed it thoughtfully, her mouth too full. One of the easiest ways to get her to eat was to eat yourself and ignore her. Feline manipulation, he called it. Ask the animal to do anything and she wouldn’t; pretend you didn’t care what she did and she chose to do exactly what you wanted.

  ‘This country isn’t real, is it?’ She sat back and pointed out of the window. Close to Paris the land was flat and the perspectives deceitful. It was a child’s painting, with straight roads, tiny houses and round-headed single trees like lollipops. ‘Eurodinky, that’s where we are. Look – there are the plastic cows. What do you think it does to people’s heads living in a picture like that?’

  ‘The trees are taller than the houses.’

  ‘Yeah.’ For some time she was content to sit gazing out of the window, licking the last of the chocolate from her lips and furtively, awkwardly picking her teeth with the one fingernail she had left unchewed, on the little finger of her left hand.

  He waited for her to speak. Her elliptical thought patterns were familiar to him, he knew there was a subject which was working its way to the surface. Last night’s social conversation had been a smokescreen; she had raised the subject of her mother earlier and would return to it again. Stephen kept in the back of his mind an agenda of things to do to make Imi better; to make her talk about her mother was the top item. In a year she had said nothing about their visit until, in the café, she had made that passing allusion to the rain. There was no need to prompt. The journey took more than three hours and she would be a captive for that time.

  ‘So we are going,’ she said at last. ‘I wasn’t going to go, was I? But somehow Daddy got you to get me to do it, and here we are. But we’re not staying
, are we?’

  ‘Come on, Imi – we agreed to stay the night. It’s a long way to go just for the day.’

  ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got our little bag, haven’t we? You’re looking forward to that, aren’t you? Don’t lie to me, you like all Jane’s lovely food and clean white beds. Beats sitting on my skanky old floor all night, you’re thinking.’

  ‘I hate being there because it upsets you. But, I mean, Jane has made it into a beautiful house … what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a waste of life, nothing wrong with it.’ The judgement was handed down in an ominously gracious tone. ‘It always seems to me like it’s a film set not a home, and Jane’s in front of the camera playing Superwife, you know? She’s acting all the time, Jane. My mother would never have been able to cope with all that, would she? Can you imagine my mother in a show like that?’

  Stephen shook his head, trying to hide his satisfaction. She looked at him sharply and said nothing more.

  ‘How do you think …’ he prompted.

  ‘It’s no use, I don’t want to Talk About Her, I haven’t anything to Say About Her, OK?’

  ‘I didn’t …’

  ‘You don’t have to, I know, Stephen. I can see you coming ten miles down the road. Why don’t you just give up on me?’

  She turned back to the window again. The land was so dry, fucked out at the end of summer. The hay was all cut, shaved down to the root, elephant toilet rolls everywhere, made by one machine and waiting to be loaded on to another. Some of the fields were stubble, some of them were already ploughed. There was a haze of yellow over the woodlands. The vineyards were beginning, acres of tame, trimmed vines stretched out on wires swelling up their grapes on schedule. Her throat was dry; it was the chocolate.

  Fuck Stephen, he was too clever sometimes. The thought was in her head now and the memories were coming up fast. Her mother was saying, ‘It’s green all year round up here, you get tired of everything always being green sometimes.’ It rained so much; the rain dripped through the great forest trees, and the trees were so massive and so close together that the water was always dripping underneath them, whether it was raining or not. You couldn’t tell one kind of wet from another, rain or dew or clouds or fog, the trees made them all come to the same thing. It was a rainforest, not the media cliché sort old rock’n’roll singers droned on about saving, but the cold North Pacific rainforest where the natives fought off the loggers by themselves.

  She saw her mother with water all around her, so many different kinds and forms and colours of water. They had to take a boat to get there, an hour on the still grey water of the Sound; misty rain and the little green pines coming down to the water’s edge. Even in the house you could hear the water all the time, trickling through the ferns, oozing into the spongy floor of the forest. They went to a lake, where the water was an unbelievable turquoise because it came from melted glaciers. Sometimes when the sun shone above the forest and light struck through the canopy, the rays got lost in the wet air and broke up into rainbow mist.

  The trees were called hemlocks, but they were not what the poison was made from, that was another plant. Her mother had a husband who was much younger than her but not as tall, with blond hair in a hideous footballer’s haircut, and he was right into the forest. When Jane told people things about nature she had this awful Miss Jean Brodie way of doing it, but with him it was more that he assumed everyone was interested and mumbling on about the trees was only polite. The frogs started in the evening and he tried to make her hear the difference between the tree frogs and the others but they all sounded the same, exactly like cartoon frogs: gribbit, gribbit. They had been there a day and a night, a green dream.

  She could hardly remember anything that had been said, except when the husband caught a salamander for her, and some worms to feed to it. Wonderful animal, a little dragon with a crest, paddling angrily around in a plastic bucket. It had savage jaws to chomp the worms and when you picked it up its flesh felt solid, as if it had been boiled.

  Fucking chocolate: her throat felt as if the sides were sticking together. Stephen was asleep. What’s the betting if I go looking for a bar he’ll wake up and freak out because I’m gone. So he’s going to have to wake up now, either way. She kicked his feet and his eyes reluctantly opened.

  ‘Are you going to let me die of thirst here or what?’

  ‘You want a drink?’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  Scrubbing his eyes and tousling his hair, he got to his feet slowly. She tugged at the corner of his shirt.

  ‘I tell you what about my mother …’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘My mother. You were asking, weren’t you? I was thinking. She couldn’t run a beautiful house and maybe she couldn’t cook gourmet lunch for fifty people either, but I think she’s a normal person. That’s what I think about her, since you want to know. I mean, she was teaching music, teaching tiny children. They wouldn’t have given her the job if she was mad, would they? Didn’t you think that?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought. It must have been quite a trip for her, you showing up just like that, but she handled it OK, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t think she was mad, like he always said. I mean, living with my father would drive anyone mad, anyone normal.’

  ‘I thought she’d had a tough life, you could see that. She looked older than I expected.’

  ‘I didn’t think she was so into drugs, either. Or him, her husband.’ Actually, that had annoyed her. Since her first joint she had been telling herself that wanting to do drugs must be something she got from her mother.

  ‘There wasn’t anything in the house.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I looked.’ He was still half-asleep, for a few seconds not thinking of how she would react. All of a sudden, she was enraged. Her face had actually turned red, she was so angry.

  ‘You went through my mother’s house looking for drugs?’

  ‘I did it so they wouldn’t know. I just woke up early in the morning, nobody else was up, and … don’t look so disgusted. I only wanted to know. After what your father always says about her.’

  ‘You’re disgusting. Go and get me a drink, I don’t want to have another row with you.’

  Disgusting lingered in her mind after he had swayed away out of the carriage and out of sight. It’s me that’s disgusting; Stephen’s just a great soft bear. I kick shit out of him and he gets softer and bearier and thinks all I need is love. Going to find my mother was his idea, although he did this great elaborate dance around me to put it in my head. Because I’d said we could get married one day. He shouldn’t be pissing away his cleverness trying to get me to impersonate a human being.

  Something came back, a fragment of conversation, just her mother and herself in the kitchen. She had been so shy about it. ‘It seems like you’ve had problems, Imogen. I wish I’d known. If I could have done anything – you know – to help, I would have.’ And Imi had groped around for one of her special tough, nasty little answers and instead come out with a plain one, ‘I never thought to tell you.’ And she’d said, ‘We didn’t have much money or anything, not like Michael. He used to just write and tell me you’d changed schools or something.’

  That was it, all that came back.

  She thought about makeup and rummaged in her bag. The train was swaying too much to do more than slap on some foundation. The rest could be done in the station. In the bottom of her cosmetics purse was the tiny plastic envelope with the square of strawbs and her present – she had forgotten about it.

  Licking her finger to make it stick, she pulled Marc’s free sample out to look at it: very ordinary-looking, a grey dot like a full stop, which meant nothing. Wacky-looking stuff on coloured card with silly faces could turn out to be a complete waste of time. It was reassuring to know she had something for emergencies. Her intention was to be straight today, but if things got too heavy she could just leave the party. And she had the temazepam to bring h
er down if necessary, she’d popped it in while Stephen wasn’t looking. Here he was, bringing the drinks.

  Good smile, her mother had. Flat lips like women got when they were older, and her front teeth were not quite straight, but it was a good smile. Imi smiled at herself in the train window, wondering if when she was older and her lips flattened out she would be able to smile the same way. You probably needed crooked teeth for that sort of smile. She had rich kid’s teeth, perfect white tombstones, although one of the lower ones seemed to be loose.

  ‘Look,’ she said to Stephen, rocking the tooth in its socket like a child.

  He flinched. ‘Don’t do that, it looks horrible.’ So she did it again.

  The caterers arrived in two trucks at 8 a. m. and Jane was up to meet them. Waking early was a habit with her now; it had begun with Emma and her sleepless nights, and continued with the accumulating anxieties of her life. Businesslike in shirt and slacks, trying not to think about Michael or to feel her tiredness, she distributed copies of the final plan for the day. Always, at this moment, it seemed absolutely impossible that everything would be ready in time.

  In the fresh morning air the work began. The skylark was up, relentlessly pouring song down on the scene from the cloudless turquoise heavens. Deep shadows still etched the shape of every clod and tussock, bringing the whole landscape into high relief.

  This year there were so many guests that Jane had decided on two tables, and since the weather was obviously set fair she ordered them to be set up under the young oak trees. The first truck carrying canopies, flooring, tables and linen drove slowly down to the edge of the wood. Men set off to mark out the field behind the caretakers’ cottage as a car park. The cooks, two young men and a woman, took over the kitchen. Thus scattered, the army kept in touch by portable telephone.

  Michael also woke early; on his uneasy mind lay the long shadow of the chairman of Altmark, Alan Stern. Talking fluently, even glibly, to the media ownership committee had been a simple intellectual exercise; their concerns about the merger were so far from his own. At the moment when NewsConnect joined the Altmark group he would more than double his personal wealth but at the same time lose his autonomy. Ten years ago – he could only now admit it to himself – taking his destiny in his own hands had been terrifying. Without Grace to anchor him he would never have made the transition; he remembered calling her constantly, just to reassure himself that in a world which had suddenly become huge and alien there was one person by his side.