So you know what crops he’s growing.
I can tell the difference now between wheat and barley.
Barley’s more beautiful, I always think. He didn’t think that Richard would see a thing like that – or would he? Perhaps he would, perhaps Richard saw beauty where he did.
Richard says he wants it to rain.
Oh does he?
He says the fields could do with a little more rain before harvest.
It had become very muggy. A drop of rain fell cool on his face.
I felt rain, she said. Did you feel rain? Richard will be happy that his rain is coming.
He looked at the sky. I’m not so sure, I think this might pass. I think it might not rain at all.
The sky out there, seen from the fields, was so open and wide. Wide horizons in every direction. Cloud all across but high, he thought, too high for rain.
They were walking in the fields. She thought that it was about to rain. Jonathan was moody. He was moody at home in a way that she had not seen him moody before. She felt drops of rain on her face and hands, isolated drops like the beginning of a shower. She wanted it to rain. Then they would laugh and get wet and run in the rain. Or they might shelter under a tree. Let’s go in here, she said, when they came to a little wood. There was a wood at the edge of the barley field, the sort of little wood he called a spinney. She was glad that she was wearing jeans for once because there were thick clumps of nettles they had to walk through at the edge of it, though under the trees the ground was clear. There was one great tree, an oak, with wide branches, and a dense canopy that would have held off the rain, if it had rained. They might have stood beneath that tree and stayed dry for quite a time, even if it rained hard. She said what a fine tree it was, and put out a hand to touch it. Do you see, Jonathan said, how old this tree must be? It must have grown big before the other trees grew around it, you can see that by the spread of its branches. When those branches formed it was growing out in the open, with light all around it.
He did not believe it was going to rain. He had not meant to go into the spinney but she ran ahead of him and he followed. He had not gone to the spinney since his father died. At first he had consciously avoided the spot, the scene of the first maumau, but so integral it was to the landscape, the little group of trees on a slight rise, visible from the house and from all across the farm, that in time it had become just a forbidden no-go place, as if it was an island of land that wasn’t their land at all but someone else’s, fenced off from him, and he would have been trespassing if he’d gone there. It must have changed, in all those years. It didn’t feel changed. Except for the rooks. He did not think there had been rooks before, at least not in these numbers, loud overhead, their nests high in the ash trees – though of course the trees themselves must be higher or more broken than they had been then, some fallen and others grown. He didn’t remember any rooks before. The trees were in leaf now in the summer, no sky to be seen above. Before, there would have been sky, or mist at least, not this close green light, this dappling over the ground, over the nettles, over her face. They came to the old oak. It was still a magnificent tree though it had recently lost a limb, a huge branch broken off on the ground and a tear still raw in the trunk above. She put her hands to the bark, tender as if she might heal it.
How many hundred years old do you think it is?
I don’t know, he said, looking about him, looking at the ground where he had not looked for so long. He was here with Kumiko now. He wasn’t that boy from before.
Could be three or four hundred years, he said. There used to be another big oak like this, he said, in the field, but it fell in a storm and when his father had it cut up they counted the rings in the stump and it was three hundred and fifty years old. So, it was all right to be here, with her. After so many years. Then, enough time had passed. He remembered how huge that other tree was on the ground, fallen in an autumn storm with still its weight of leaves on it that must have caught the wind; the excitement of climbing over and under and through a jungle of branches that had once stood high above them; the vastness of the exhumed roots and the fear of looking into the pit they had torn out of the ground; how deep it was, how it had already begun to fill with thick clayey water. The boys were told to stand back when their father went out with the men to clear the tree, cutting and pulling the branches that were heavy and green with leaf and like trees in themselves, trimming and stacking the big ones and piling the rest for burning, the trunk so wide that he had to bring other men with a saw powered by a tractor to slice it through. They found a fragment of lead wedged deep in the wood, he told her, so close to the heart of the tree that his father thought that it dated from the time of the Civil War. He had felt a kind of awe at that, as a seven-year-old, that there might have been a battle here. He tried to explain this, hearing himself as he spoke, speaking so calmly here in this place about these other things, at the same time hearing his father’s voice in his mind, seeing his father’s fingers, the roughened hand of a farmer, tracing the rings on the stump. There was fighting here, in the Civil War, his father had said, telling them about Roundheads and Cavaliers, he following Richard’s lead and favouring the Cavaliers though he learnt when he was older that the Roundheads were meant to be better.
It didn’t rain in the end. Or it hardly rained at all. Not so that they would have got wet. They might just have taken their walk, and not got wet, and got back home, and everything would have been fine. But she thought that it was going to rain and she made him come with her under the trees. The clouds grew dark, the spinney darker, and then there were big drops of rain falling on the leaves, and sometimes single drops that touched them, a sound like rain beginning, and just the beginning of that smell that the ground has when the rain touches it, but the shower stopped almost as soon as it began, and instead there was the smell of nettles crushed, a peppery salady smell, and she saw that he had picked up a stick and was thrashing at a clump of nettles, by where the branch had fallen, bashing them all down. Then he was kneeling in the nettles.
What’s that?
It looks like a cross.
Why? Was someone buried here?
No. Not buried.
He saw just the tip of it at first. As if there was a grave there, two pieces of smooth wood neatly joined and set upright in the ground. So they had marked it, he thought. How strange, that someone had marked it.
If only it had rained, she would think, afterwards. If it had rained, they would have stood close, and sheltered. And when enough rain had fallen they would have got wet even there beneath the tree, or running out from the trees, and noticed nothing but their wet selves with the rain falling about them.
This was where they had used to come. Where he had stood beside his father, with the dog. With Richard too, waiting for the birds to come in. Late on a winter’s afternoon. His fingers chilling in woollen mittens. Getting cold, wanting to go in, but Richard was not going in, Richard was staying, and he had to do whatever Richard did, he would not have come out if Richard had not come out and now he had to stay and watch as Richard did, although he was so much younger and not ready to learn to shoot himself for some years yet; he stood still and chill beside his brother and his father and the dog, and felt the cold seep into him until it hurt and yet he didn’t move an inch. And at last his father would raise the gun at the oncoming birds. Or on himself. Hard to believe, in this little wood, so very green and humming, with the rooks overhead, how bare it had been that day he saw him lying there. It was all covered over now, so many years’ leaves fallen beneath the tree, layer upon layer, and grass, nettles impinging, spreading, tall, reaching for the light. There should have been no sign of what had occurred. No evidence. Any chance-scattered shot from that day also long covered over within the tree, so many rings deep.
That’s not right, he said. It says ‘Rosie’. That’s not right.
Who’s Rosie?
It’s not right.
What’s not right?
Rosie was a dog, he said. Rosie was Billy’s dog.
His hands and knees stung as he knelt to push aside the last of the nettles. Stung almost to numbness. He traced the letters that were amateurishly carved into the wood.
What could Billy have been thinking, to do that? Billy, the one who found him, that day. It was Billy who had brought the news home. Billy had come with the news, and their dog Jess, and Rosie too, he must have had Rosie with him, only Jess on the lead he had to put her on to bring her away. He had trusted Billy. Of all of them he had trusted Billy the most. So how could Billy have buried the dog here? And his mother, too? How could they do something so very – he looked for the word, holding himself back, holding emotion in check, choosing the plainest, the least expressive word that came to him – so puzzling, so very – inappropriate?
There had been no nettles then, in November. The nettles at that time of year had died back to ghostly stalks and the ground was brown with fallen leaves. Grey sky above the bare trees. Fog low across the fields.
This is where he was, you see. My father, I told you about my father. Well, this is where it happened.
They stood so still that sounds were loud, the birds, big black birds, cawing above them, then the sound of the Land Rover somewhere in the fields. Jonathan turned to find a way out of the trees. As if he had said nothing. As if nothing of importance had been said. And she had said nothing in response. And then when they came out into the sunshine, there was Richard driving along the track. He stopped and waved them over. Richard, looking so physical and sure, the sun on him, on his hair and his tanned arms with their rolled-up sleeves. He reached across to open the door. She got in while Jonathan let the spaniel jump up into the back. All so normal except she thought that they should have walked on, the two of them. It would have been better if they had walked.
He looked out of the open window as Richard drove, the track ahead, the spinney receding. The wide sky. Wide land. When he spoke his voice was flat, commonplace.
That old oak’s still there.
It’s lost a few branches these last years.
There’s a grave underneath it.
Rosie’s grave. Billy’s dog, remember?
Yes, I remember Rosie.
Their words were hollow of meaning as if they needed translation.
I hadn’t been there in years.
I go and shoot there sometimes. It’s always been a good spot for pigeons. Dad used to go there, remember?
Yes I remember that too.
She sat in the centre seat of the Land Rover crushed between them, her knees to Jonathan’s knees, Richard’s hand against her knees as he reached to the gear stick.
There’s a big rookery there now.
What was a rookery? She didn’t know. They spoke across her as if she was not there.
It was so big, the sky. Empty. He felt the huge emptiness weighing on them as if the longer they remained the less they would move, like Richard and his mother, held here on the flat. That was how it had always been. And now here was Kumiko beside him, and he could only make empty talk.
Later, when they were alone again, Jonathan said they had stayed at the farm long enough.
Let’s go away somewhere, he said.
Where, she said, Paris?
He was thinking of the Lake District.
That’s still England.
It’s a different kind of England. And I always promised I’d take you there.
Because I read Wordsworth in my English lessons at school.
For other reasons too. Because it’s wild and romantic. Because I don’t have enough money for Paris until I’m paid for harvest. And when it rains in the Lakes it really rains.
Later, she would think that he was trying to save them. Whether from the past or the present she didn’t know. She didn’t think that he knew either. Only that they should go away from there for a time.
Out after dawn
Richard had noticed his wet boots. Probably there was wet on his face too, and in his hair. Richard was bigger than him, dark against the light, blocking his way to the light of the kitchen, or even upstairs, to safety, where he might have run into his room and held the door shut. The only place left for him to run to was his father’s study, and that way he would not go.
Where were you?
When?
This morning, I looked in your room. Where were you?
Nowhere. I wasn’t anywhere.
His brother had been still asleep when he went out. His mother must still have been asleep. He had heard his father go down the stairs to the kitchen, like on every morning, though this seemed earlier than every morning. Maybe that was only because there was so little light outside. It was November and the days were slow to start, and besides, there was fog. He had heard his father go out, the soft thud of the back door closing, seen through his bedroom window, which looked out at the back onto the yard, his father go out across the yard carrying his gun. The house was all asleep, though he had seen his father go out. He had taken off his pyjamas and thrown on yesterday’s clothes which lay on the chair by his bed, thrown them on any-old-how, and his coat and his gumboots from the passage downstairs, and run out after him. No gloves. His fingers would be cold. No hat either. He had left behind the stillness of the house and run into the cold and stillness of the fields where his father had disappeared. The fog covered everything, caught and stilled it. Coated his skin and his hair with cold dew. He might have gone no further if he hadn’t heard the shot.
You went out, Richard said. Where were you? He held his arm up tight behind his back until the pain stabbed through. Your boots are muddy. I’ve seen them, down there in the passage where you took them off. The mud’s wet.
There was a time later when Richard would say, You saw. It was almost a statement by then and not a question, but even then Richard did not know what it was that he had seen. A year later, Richard was still asking him to tell, hating him for his secret, and he couldn’t tell him because his secret didn’t have any words to it, it was only the thing that he had seen. This time Richard didn’t touch him. He looked. His look was so hard that it hurt. But he couldn’t look away. He just stared back, and he didn’t give in. He didn’t speak a word, only let the tears make their way down to his clenched lips. He knew that it mattered. It mattered all the more because Richard thought their father was his, more his than Jonathan’s, because everyone said that he looked like him, was the spitting image of him, because he was older and did everything first, was trusted with a gun and would be a farmer after him. Richard’s father, not Jonathan’s father. Yet Jonathan knew what he didn’t.
Richard was right. He saw. What did he see? The fog, the plough, the spinney, the tree, his father’s body. The leaves beneath him. The consequence of the shot. The dog. Then his mother’s face as they sat on the sofa. Her lie. He tripped and fell, she said. He was climbing a fence in a field, and he must have tripped, and the gun went off. That made a different picture. He could see that picture, and he could see the other one, which was true, though nobody said it was true, he could only see it and not speak it. He had been seeing such things ever since: things that were and weren’t true, the appearance of things and what was said to be the appearance of things and what was missing from the appearances. How the appearance could be empty. How what was present could show what was absent. That knowledge had become a part of him and all that he did. It went into his relationships with people and the world. It went into his photographs. Perhaps it was what made his photographs good, when they were good: not only what they call ‘eye’ or composition or technique, but his understanding of what was beneath, behind, not there. Where the shadows went and where shadows didn’t fall.
There was this difference between himself and Capa. Capa had photographed the moment of death. The shot. A Republican soldier thrown back by the impact of the bullet, arms outstretched, rifle just let go. The most famous photo he ever took. (If the photograph was true, of course, if Capa, who somewhat invented himsel
f anyway, who invented his name and the life that went with his name, if Capa had not somehow set up the shot which was so like a Goya, which might have been composed by Goya.) Jonathan saw the scene after the shot, but it was only the aftermath; the image imprinted on him but never exposed to the world.
Go-aan, you up there
Now Jonny was taking her off to the Lakes. He saw his mother drive them away then he walked across the yards to the barns; out of the back door, across the cobbles there and past the empty stables and the mounting block, past the old flint barn and through to the wide concrete yard and the new barns where the machinery was kept.
He had one of the lads working with him and they were servicing the combine. The combine came out once a year, and once it was out you didn’t want to lose a minute of its working time. You wanted it to run without a fault twelve hours a day, if you could go that long, intensively over just a couple of weeks. You brought it out from the barn. You washed it down, vacuumed the drum, checked sieves, straw runners, knives, belts; tightened and oiled and replaced. You put your hand to a spanner, wrenched at a too-tight nut. Hammered out a bent piece of metal. The work was purposeful, physical, absorbing in its way. The sound of it clattered between all the hard surfaces of the yard. In an hour or so – longer depending on how much shopping she decided to do – she would be home from dropping them off.
Harvest Page 9
