Harvest

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Let’s go and find Nick, he’s only in the drawing room, he’ll take care of you.’ Grace was surprised at her own optimism, but it was justified. Stephen was with him; evidently it was the hour for confidential conversations. They had started a fire, and the cheerful light of the flames flickered over their faces and the white walls.

  Seeing Stephen, Imogen collected herself for a final effort of crossing the room and falling into his arms. Tenderly he installed her beside him on the sofa.

  ‘Vitamin C,’ Nick recommended. ‘Orange juice or the stuff you give people for colds.’ He was still running on high energy, his face redder than ever from the day’s sun. ‘And best not leave her until we’re sure it’s over.’

  ‘You poor man – what on earth must you think of us? You’re practically running a hospital here and I invited you as a guest to have a lovely day and taste the Adour salmon.’ To disguise her discomfort, Jane went over to the window and closed the curtain.

  ‘And a marvellous experience it was. Imogen’s no trouble, don’t think that. She’ll be OK.’ She smiled pathetically at him and sank further into Stephen’s embrace.

  ‘Will she remember her – experiences?’ The subject was so emotionally charged for her that Jane found it difficult to talk about drugs in a normal voice.

  ‘The trip? Some people remember everything …’ He looked enquiringly at Stephen.

  ‘Imi doesn’t usually remember much.’

  ‘I don’t wanna remember this one, that’s for sure.’ Imogen gave a weak laugh, burying her face, in her hands. When she took her arms away, Jane noticed that the stains on her shirt front were spreading; at the edges they were raspberry red.

  ‘I hardly dare ask, but …’ Jane set about turning on lamps and plumping cushions, trying to evade her dark unease. ‘I don’t know how to deal with this. Nick, will you stay a while longer? Stay for supper.’

  Nick looked at his wife, who apart from her misgivings about this particular house had always said there was nothing worse in the world than being trapped in a house party which had turned sour, but she nodded quickly. ‘Of course,’ he said amiably. ‘Delighted. Imogen will be fine, though.’

  But will I? Jane wondered. Grace said, ‘Let me help you,’ and they went back to the kitchen.

  ‘Shall we open a nice bottle of Pacherenc for them?’ Jane disappeared into a side room and returned with a bottle, then looked abstractedly for glasses. ‘Isn’t it pathetic – I actually feel bad about talking to you about Michael. He surrounds himself with …’ She paused, groping for the right words.

  ‘I’d call it a climate of confidentiality.’ A pompous piece of journalese when actually spoken, but Grace had used the term in her own mind often.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is he? Nick said he was following them when he came back to the house.’

  ‘Imogen said something about him, didn’t she?’ Jane was busying herself with a tray, reluctant to acknowledge that they were sharing a growing misgiving. ‘He’s probably upstairs. I’ll take a look.’

  ‘Could he have gone for a walk?’

  ‘No. He doesn’t do walks, much. He’s probably found some work to get on with.’

  She took the tray with wine and glasses into the sitting room, then looked into Michael’s office, and their bedroom, which were empty. In the children’s wing, she found Emma and Sam watching a video with Debbie, but no Michael.

  ‘I’m wondering if something has happened.’ Grace was waiting for her in the kitchen; she raised her eyebrows at the words chosen. ‘All right, I’m sure something’s wrong. Those spots on her shirt looked like blood.’

  ‘How did she get so muddy? It looks as if it hasn’t rained much for days round here, the ground is bone dry.’

  ‘Ah, but there’s one place on our land that’s always muddy, there’s a tiny spring in the wood. Tiny in the summer, anyway. It’s a bog in winter. But when it’s bone dry everywhere, there’s always mud there.’

  ‘Do you want to go and have a look?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They tramped across the grass without speaking for a while. Jane took a flashlight, but did not use it; a huge brilliant moon had risen above the gathering clouds. Preparing for the deep night, the land was cool and quiet, except for the rustling of dry crops in a fitful breeze.

  ‘I don’t have a good feeling about this,’ Jane said at last. ‘It’s nothing rational, it’s just…’

  ‘It’s not like Michael, somehow. A charmed life, he’s got.’

  Later Grace asked, ‘Is that a full moon?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t worry, Gascony is not noted for its werewolves.’

  They were not really in the mood for humour. Jane led the way confidently into the trees, retracing her route on the mushroom hunt. There was a bright patch of moonlight by the spring, and the ground had been thoroughly trampled, but there was no evidence of Michael.

  ‘I feel stupid,’ Jane said at last. ‘I don’t know what ridiculous idea I had … Imogen’s always blamed him for everything. Especially her mother. I couldn’t make her out when she was tiny, maybe it’s having children of my own that’s helped me to understand. She’s just been in a fury with him all the time I’ve known her, but because she’s a powerless child she never has been able to hurt him, except by spending his money or letting him down somehow, or hurting herself.’

  Aimlessly, they walked on, with the vague objective of reaching the railway line before they turned back. Apart from the surreal two-dimensional planes of moonlight, it was almost as bright as day towards the edge of the wood. The long dark shape on the bank was clearly visible.

  Afterwards, they admitted that they had known immediately, by instinct, that Michael was dead. At the time, they nerved themselves to go sensibly forward, kneel down by the body, touch it, search for a pulse in a wrist and then in the neck, and systematically verify that his limbs were utterly cold, he was not breathing, there was no pulse and no reaction from his half-open eyes.

  Afterwards, they admitted that in this process they had both recalled touching his body in the early ardour of love, and felt a piercing visceral regret for a joy long lost but still treasured, and not completely despaired of, even in the coldest agony of their hatred.

  To keep their courage up, they talked as they knelt beside him, their legs getting lacerated by the butcher’s broom. While her reason told her that Michael was dead, Jane could not comprehend it; the struggle against this man’s monstrous intelligence was her whole life.

  ‘Do you think – did he have … a heart attack? Could Imogen – what happened?’ Grace felt herself shiver.

  ‘He never took care of his health.’ Jane turned on the flashlight and used the beam to probe the deep shadows around the body. She raked the litter of dead leaves with her fingers to see if by any chance there was a stone big enough to fracture a skull buried underneath. The flashlight which he had carried was still gripped in one hand.

  ‘What’s that?’ Hesitantly, Grace touched something half in shadow at the base of the neck. In full light, it was a wooden handle bound with twine, sticking out of the hollow of the collarbone. The shirt around it was bloody.

  ‘I know what that is. It’s the knife I use for mushrooms. I’ve been looking for it in the kitchen all weekend.’

  Grace said, before she could stop herself: ‘He’s been killed then.’

  ‘It looks like it. I know – natural causes would have been nice.’ That was it, the instant of conspiracy from which everything they did afterwards flowed inevitably. A fatal accident, was ideal, that was the verdict of them both. Then they thought of Imogen.

  ‘I can’t believe she did this.’ Jane regained her feet and walked away from the body, wanting to be away from it and keep her mind under control. ‘Look at the position of it, too. This is the most awkward place to reach if they were both standing – she’s not taller than he is, after all?’

  ‘He can’t have fallen on it. And she will be the prime suspect.’


  ‘Yes. Poor wretched child. All she needs.’ There was suddenly no breath in her lungs; she gulped the air. ‘Let’s go where it’s light and think about this.’

  On the shoulder of the railway embankment the moon was clear and bright. Feeling the approach of an extraordinary moment, they sat down on the ground and Grace asked, ‘So where was the knife the last time you saw it?’

  ‘So much has happened today. And yesterday. Let me think back. It wasn’t there when the salmon came. I can remember having it when I went out with Louisa for the mushrooms a couple of days ago.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Why are we so calm?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Grace could have answered the question. They were calm because they had been chosen for it; Michael’s women did not panic. For what they had to endure, good nerves were essential.

  Jane ran through the now distant memory of Friday morning until the episode of the wallowing deer.

  ‘Ah! That’s it! Louisa had the knife – she dropped it when she fell over, and in all the drama, while she was carrying on the way she does, I forgot it and left it out here. In the same place, where the stream is.’

  ‘It was just lying around and Imi found it?’

  ‘She must have done.’

  ‘But to have actually killed him…’

  ‘I know.’ An idea was forming in front of Jane’s eyes, a perfect idea, pleading for her attention, so thrilling that she had flinched from acknowledging it, feeling that as soon as she admitted it into her mind it would compel and control her.

  Grace looked vacantly across the track to the bank opposite, her eye temporarily fascinated by the gleam of the moonlight on the rails and the white clinker below them. ‘It feels like we made it happen. We were sitting there in the kitchen talking about him, getting out all the things we’d suffered and at exactly that moment … exactly …’

  She stretched out her bare legs and observed the marble sheen of her skin under the moon, while her mind turned over the options they had. None of them had anything approaching the majestic sense of justice aroused by Michael’s death. A macabre peace was settling over her, against her will; she wanted to feel disturbed, at the least, but could not.

  ‘I didn’t finish what I was saying.’ Should she trust this woman now? All that sisterly intimacy, that comradeship of suffering, it could be nothing, an emotional illusion born of wishing for comfort. Forcefully, instinct prompted Jane to speak. ‘I was going to say I hated him. I’d put it off a long time, facing that. But I do. Or I did. I hate him. Don’t you?’

  In her new state of calm, Grace examined her heart. ‘No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t standing over my life the way he was over yours. Objectively, yes, I think he was – evil. But it’s not a feeling, just an opinion.’

  ‘Well, for me right now, I’d say it was a passion. Do you know what I can’t forgive him? It’s not just that he betrayed you and me. It’s everything he said about, love. He talked about it being so important to him, but really … he was just using the word. It didn’t mean anything to him.’ She turned towards Grace, her voice low and rough, her pale hai in the surreal light seeming incandescent. ‘I thought we believed the same thing about it: love is everything to me. It’s what life’s for, it’s how life’s made, it is life. And he trashed it. He pissed on it. I hate him, and I’m glad he’s dead.’ She sat back upright, looking down at her hands. ‘The question is, what are we going to do? Because if he’s found like this, Imogen will go to jail for killing him.’

  ‘In a place like this they won’t be able to pin it on a wandering psycho. These sleepy little villages, people know every blade of grass.’ They were silent, listening to the gathering wind stirring the tree branches, then Grace asked, ‘Did you ever meet his first wife?’

  ‘Pia? You mean that story he tells – told – about her cracking up. It’s a lie, it was all lies, of course it was. He took care we never met. Stephen and Imi went all the way up to Seattle last year and stayed a few days. She’s perfectly fine, normal. She just couldn’t take it. Can you blame her?’

  ‘I used to wonder if that was how it was.’

  ‘And he frightened her off for years, gave her propaganda about it being best for Imi to stay away. I trust Stephen, he tells the truth and he cares for Imi. I should have done it, because I’d figured the whole thing out years ago. I never did enough for Imogen. I failed her. The least I ought to have done was fought Michael harder for her.’

  She leaned over and covered one of Grace’s hands with her own. ‘Look, I can’t let her suffer for this. She can’t have known what she was doing. There is one way though. Will you trust me?’

  Astonished at her own self-possession, Grace said, ‘Probably. Tell me what you want to do.’

  ‘We can make it look like an accident. It’s really simple and we can do it, there’ll be no evidence.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘In a few hours the train will be thundering along this track pulling ten tons of wheat behind it. If he’s on the line, it will look like an accident. He will be crushed.’ When it came to the last word, Jane could not quite say it.

  Then Grace felt the irresistible perfection of it, and it took hold of her imagination as it had possessed Jane. She said nothing, thinking through every angle, while Jane continued in an urgent tone: ‘No one will ever know. When the train comes through here it’s been running downhill in the cutting for half a mile already. I promise you, I’ve watched it with the children. It’ll be going too fast for anyone to see anything, much too fast to stop.’

  Deliberately, neither of them spoke of the train driver. This was no time to be undone again by their own decency and compassion. They set about the task quietly, not liking to discuss any more than necessary in case their courage failed. There was an impression of flying above everything, looking down on themselves. Michael’s body was large and heavy and awkward and they were ill-matched in strength, but as soon as they lifted it that definite sense that it was not him, only a discarded husk, gave them the power they needed to carry it down the breakneck slope and across the rough clinker.

  In silent, careful unison, like two craftsmen who have long toiled side by side, they laid him with his neck on the rail to be certain that the wound itself would be obliterated. No memories rose in their minds to undermine their resolve. Jane took the knife by the handle, sensed its lie and pulled it out in one clean movement.

  By the time they left the wood the moon was disappearing behind a hard-edged black cloud. They returned by the side of the house. ‘Tell me what to expect now,’ Jane asked, suddenly beginning to feel her fear. ‘What’s the legal procedure for something like this?’

  Calming herself as well as the other woman, Grace related her experience of French inquests. ‘You will never tell,’ Jane asked suddenly. ‘Even after I’m dead, if one of the children …’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked…’

  ‘Or you, you won’t…’

  ‘Never. Of course not.’ They made for the building standing some yards off the courtyard gate, which had been the pigsties and was now garages. There was a tap in the wall with a hose connected to it, and towels drying on the washing line. They took off their shoes and washed the mud and dust from their legs, and the small smear of blood from the knife, prudently letting the water run a while to flush the drain through. Then they waited by the gates until they felt calm enough to go inside the house.

  ‘We must do everything as normally as we can.’ Grace was dealing with an awkward, unexpected emotion. ‘So we’ll be away soon, but … Jane, I will be around. If you need me. Not just – what we’ve done – you … well, today was a sort of setting free for me.’

  ‘And for me. I will need you. Don’t you think we’ll need each other?’

  Someone had reached up to the shelf over the fireplace and taken down the two wooden candelabra. They had lit candles and placed them down the centre of the table; the electric
lights were still on and the scene was richly illuminated. As Jane opened the door, she thought of a Victorian genre painting, a picture sentimentally gilded with virtue. The scene in the kitchen was close to her cherished imaginings of an abundant family celebration around the hearth.

  Needing to get a better grip on their emotions, the two women waited unnoticed in the doorway, Sam, in his night-clothes, was passing knives and forks to Debbie, who was laying places at the table. Stephen occupied the carver chair at the far end and Antony leaned over his shoulder, filling his glass with red wine. At his elbow, on the corner of the table, was a checkerboard; Emma, with a wicked expression suggesting she had won at least the last game, was setting out the counters. At the work table Imogen was in the process of cutting a loaf and was stealing a mouthful of the soft, fragrant centre. The distant, in-turned look which she had worn all day was gone, and her face was clear and open.

  Beside her, Louisa and Nick were arguing about salad dressing. She had about her the flouncing animation which Jane recognized as an indication that for once she had enjoyed a satisfactory erotic experience; a second glance at Antony detected a certain cat-like satisfaction on his face.

  ‘Garlic crushed in salt is always sweeter,’ Louisa was saying. She was clutching a wooden salad bowl protectively in her arms. ‘The salt takes off that eye-watering edge.’

  ‘But I like the eye-watering edge,’ and he closed the crusher defiantly over the bowl. Louisa pouted in annoyance. Grace wanted to kiss him. It must be true what Jane had said, at the sight of him she had felt herself illuminated. But first, she had a final responsibility.

  ‘Crushed garlic turns bitter in cooking.’

  ‘But we aren’t cooking it.’ How could anyone be annoyed with the dear man?

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Louisa gave him the bowl. In sashaying away from her disobedient new apprentice, she was the first to see them. ‘There you are. We’ve been wondering about you two…’

  ‘We went for a walk.’ The power of lying. It was sinister, but Jane felt it. Grace followed her into the room, her hands in her pockets, concealing the knife. There was such an atmosphere of harmony in the kitchen that her fear was melting away. She could see the knife block on the work table; it was quite natural to walk towards it.