When they came back from their holiday there would be pictures. He could imagine how they would be. The girl on hilltops blown by the wind, her smile in the sunshine, her black hair across her face, her hand reaching to pull the hair back. Or perhaps there would be only rain. It was the Lakes they were going to, after all.
She was the only Japanese he had ever met. He had never known anything much about the Japanese apart from the war. Most of what he had come to know he had learnt from Jonny, from what he had said and from his photographs. When Jonny first came back from his travels there were so many photographs. It had been amazing to think that his brother had been making a living as a photographer. There were masses of prints, and then rolls and rolls of film that he had developed, and he had laid them out on the dining-room table. It was like the National Geographic spread there, so many places he’d been. All they’d seen at home till then were the war pictures that had made it to the papers; but Jonny had put those away somewhere, there weren’t any of soldiers or fighting. There were others of Vietnam that made it look quite a nice place. Jonny said that Saigon was a much nicer place than you’d think. Old houses with balconies, wrinkled old ladies on the balconies smiling down, pretty girls – pretty as, prettier than, Kumiko. Of course there were the pictures of Kumiko. Jonny didn’t say who she was at first. She was just this one Japanese girl smiling, in the city, on the beach, under the trees. He worked it out easily enough. Richard went in now and then when Jonny was sorting them. Jonny let him look at the prints and the contact prints and the slides, gave him a glass that he held unfamiliarly in his hand as he looked at the slides on the light box.
Who’s the girl?
That’s Kumiko.
She looks nice.
She is nice.
She had this big smile and she wore bright colours, appearing again and again here and there in the sunshine.
Maybe she’ll come here in the summer. Then you and Mum can meet her.
He had envied his brother this girl, the apparent ease she felt with him in the pictures – or maybe that was what made him a good photographer, that he was a quiet sort of bloke who made people feel easy around him. Richard didn’t know anything about photography but he thought that the pictures were good. Objectively, not just for himself. For himself, they were compelling. It meant something just knowing that they were there, present in the house, behind the dining-room door. All those places, the people, the girl; these pieces of his brother’s life. When Jonny was gone to London for a few days, and his mother was in town shopping after taking him to the train, he went in and looked through the photos alone. Lucky little Jonny. There were other pictures he hadn’t shown, pictures taken close, in black-and-white. Black-and-white showed contour and shadow, intimacy. He liked this girl in black-and-white. He looked for a long while. When he came out from the room his mother was home. He hadn’t heard her coming in.
What were you doing? she said.
Just looking, he said, as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
That wasn’t the only time. He went in again after that. Early in the morning when no one else was up, he’d just walk into the room and see that the images were there. Jonny wasn’t hiding them, after all. They were out there on the big mahogany table for anyone to see. Sometimes the door wasn’t even closed.
What was the point of all these pictures? Was this work? This, Jonny’s work? So many images, that was all they were; they had no purpose. There was the girl; she was nice. There were the war photos; he had seen the point of those, though Jonny said he wasn’t going to take war photos any more. The rest of it didn’t seem to be work but only life. The streets he passed through. The people who passed by. Tokyo. He didn’t like the look of Tokyo. It was so crowded, so full of Japanese. Everyone said the Japs did terrible things in the war. They said his father had had a terrible time because of the Japs, though they never got round to explaining precisely what that meant. But the Japanese looked so neat in Jonny’s pictures, in their business suits in front of shiny buildings, and the girl had this big smile.
So when the girl came he knew her already but he didn’t know her at all.
She was small and poised and neat in her movements. A lightness to her that seemed very feminine. That made him feel heavy. Many of the pictures he had seen of her showed a house, a Japanese-style house, not one of those shiny modern ones. Was it her house, or Jonny’s, or maybe some other place they went to, where Jonny took the pictures? It was a house made of wood with paper windows and sliding screens inside like paper walls. It was different from any house he knew. He felt that he would be clumsy in such a house. Must he bend his head to go through the doors? Would it shake to the tread of his feet or his touch?
Her voice was like that too. Soft, with a simplicity in it, but that might have been just the way she spoke English. When they went out in the Land Rover it had been difficult to hear what she said over the sound of the engine. He had to get her to repeat herself a couple of times. So he stopped, and shut off the engine, and then it was his voice that had seemed too loud, when they got out and he showed her everything. It had been nice to be showing her things. She asked if he had learnt his farming at college but he told her how he had just seemed to know some of it, from the beginning, how he must have learnt as a child when he used to go round the farm with his father, sitting where she did, sometimes getting out, sometimes just sitting and watching out of the passenger window, learning like that. Oh that’s nice, she said, I think that Jonathan doesn’t remember his father very much. Of course he remembered, he said. He was bound to remember, wasn’t he? Because he was older. That was what he said to her, taking the opportunity to set himself apart from his younger brother who had brought this girl here. But there was no more than a vague figure in his mind as he spoke, the memory of a man’s big hands lifting from the steering wheel, pulling the handbrake, opening the door, of a tall man in a cap and a blue shirt or a worn tweed coat walking out away from him into the field. There would be a decision for a boy then, whether to watch or whether to run after, fitting his running steps to the man’s slow strides. If you wanted to see how a crop was growing you didn’t look only at the edge, on the headlands, but you walked in towards the centre of the field. You walked in and then about, this way and that, and stopped at different points. You looked where you knew the soil was light, and where it was heavier and where the water stayed. And the man did that, silent ahead of the boy – if the boy had followed and not only watched – always moving on ahead so that the boy would see his back and his hands more vividly than his face. Then he was back in the Land Rover, and if the boy had got out then the boy climbed in too while he waited, and there was that hand on the brake, on the gear, and the smell of the outside, and a little of the smell of the cigarettes that he smoked, which clung to his clothing, brought back into the cab. Of course, he told the girl. Yes, I remember him well. And so they got back in, where the doors on each side had been left open, and he put his own hand to the gear and the brake, and they drove on.
People said he was like him. He didn’t know about that. Physically he was like him; anyone could see that from family photos. Jonny didn’t resemble him at all. But Jonny was the one who had gone looking while he kept to the farm. Jonny had gone to Asia and to war, like their father. He had stayed at home and worked the farm like their father. There was no telling which one of them had come closest.
His mother was home. They had an everyday lunch like they usually did when it was only themselves at home. Bread and cheese. Not much to say. The radio, the news, the weather forecast. Dry in Norfolk; rain in the north-east. It didn’t sound good for the Lakes.
Did they say when they’d be back?
They weren’t sure.
Better that they didn’t come back, not for some time at least. Perhaps the weather would clear, in a day or two. When there was rain in the Lakes the cloud came down and there was nothing to see. He imagined them walking in cloud across the Lakeland hills, s
eeing nothing, the girl’s red coat showing at a distance, Jonny opaque beside her, the path fading into the mist before them. After lunch, he would go out where it was flat and bright. His mother would take her gloves, her secateurs and her trug, and go to the garden. Everything would be normal, as it had always been, or as it had been these last few years, since he had been working the farm and since Jonny went away. It was the start of July. It was a day like the days when they first came home from school for the summer holiday. When he went away to school he had wanted to come home to a place where nothing changed. That was how he had liked it. That was still how he liked it. Fixed. He remembered how it was when he came home from school. The place had to be the same place that he had remembered each day when he was away. He would come back from school and look at the room where he and his brother slept, or, later when they slept in separate rooms, his room alone, and then go downstairs and outside, walk the bounds of the place and check that everything was still there and nothing had been moved, and no one had come and meddled in it. He would go to the garden where his mother came out with her trug and her secateurs, or where she knelt weeding, and climb the walnut tree from which he and his brother could see everything at once, all around: their mother, the garden, the hedge around the garden, the house, the drive, the fields, the church, the village, other fields and woods, and the sky over it all.
Those first holidays when they came home from school the two brothers were close, though at school they had been apart, divided by age and dormitories and forms. They came home a pair and changed out of their uniforms and left them on the floor for their mother to pick up, and wore their home clothes, and often Jonny’s clothes were clothes that used to be his but that didn’t matter because they were anybody’s clothes, the clothes of a boy at home. Jonny walked behind him as he made his tour of the place. Jonny climbed the tree with him. A rope hung from the lowest branch of the tree so that they could climb. It had hung there all through the term untouched, and now they climbed it. Their father had put the rope there, and tied knots in it, one big one at the base and two others on the way up to make the climb easy. Jonny could climb the rope as easily as Richard could. They climbed onto the branch and along to where it joined the trunk and sometimes up onto one of the adjoining branches and watched. They spent hours in those first few days that they were home in the tree watching their world, astride the branch or with their backs to the trunk, watching their mother gardening, watching who came and went. They were home, but the walnut was home within the home. Like the place you called home when you played It. Where you could be seen but not be caught. Where all three of them could be seen. Because they each of them knew that any day any one of them might walk out of the house and disappear.
The leaves of the walnut were long and oval and green. They had a strong dark smell. The smell was there in the tree even when the leaves were green. It would be stronger when they fell and blackened and grew greasy in the autumn and Billy swept them up. In the tree it was as if you could smell that blackening already though it was summer. Perhaps it was the sun shining through the leaves that made the smell come out. It you looked up through the tree the leaves were a bright apple-like green despite their odour, and the branches between them were elephant grey but smooth, smoother than elephant skin would be, if you were to touch and climb an elephant. If he stood on one of the lower branches he could put two hands to the one above and pull himself up, rest his tummy on the branch, lift a leg astride it while Jonny stayed below as he wasn’t tall enough to reach. From that point the branches were more closely spaced so he could go higher. Don’t go any higher, Jonny said, from his safe branch below. It makes the tree move when you go higher, I can see the top of the tree moving, it’s scary, you’ll fall. It’s fine, he said, finding a place to put his foot, lifting himself up one last branch.
I can see everything from here.
The top of the tree swayed just so little beneath his weight. He could see clear in every direction. He was like a hawk on a telegraph pole, looking down. Sharp as a hawk, watching for movement below. There was his mother talking to Billy who was getting the lawnmower out. There was Mrs T coming on her bicycle up the drive. There was Jackson’s little grey tractor out in their fields where he was topping the field edges before harvest. The fields were still their fields though Jackson worked them. Now Billy was pulling at the cord of the mower. The mower was starting with a puff of blue smoke. His mother was walking towards the tree across the lawn. Mum. Look, Mum. See where I am. She didn’t hear him over the sound of the mower.
Later he took his father’s old binoculars and put a string on them and climbed up there again, on his own this time, and tied the binoculars to a small branch so that they would be there whenever he went to his perch.
I’m like a hawk, he said to his mother. I climb high up the tree.
She didn’t know how high he meant.
I see everything. I watch you from high up. I see Billy. I see Jackson. I see Jackson’s men. I see the people who come to visit. I see you talking to them, wherever you are.
He thought a lot about hawks. There were sparrowhawks along the roads and kestrels, and sometimes bigger birds, buzzards, and once he saw what he thought was a harrier off the marshes, identifying it later from a book. He watched them through the binoculars. He saw how still they could be, holding as still sometimes in the sky as on a pole. How quickly they swooped when they saw whatever it was they saw moving on the ground. How ruthless they were.
When Jackson’s men brought the combine out, he swooped down.
Mum, can we go and see?
Yes, if the men’ll have you.
But sometimes still he did not like to see Jackson on the fields. And nothing that Jackson did went on without his seeing, at least when he was home. Once he came home and saw that Jackson had changed the fields. He did not like it when Jackson did such things.
It was in the autumn and the winter that that sort of thing happened, when the fields were bare. It must have been when they came home for one autumn half-term or the Christmas holiday. The first thing that went wrong was that Billy had removed the rope. He found Billy working in the shed. He shouted at Billy. Billy, you shouldn’t have done that. An eleven- or maybe twelve-year-old scolding a man in his sixties; he would be in trouble for that later. Billy said that the rope was rotten, he took it away because it was dangerous. But you can’t do that, Billy. Daddy put it there.
He could climb the tree now anyway because he had grown tall and strong enough to jump up and grab the first branch and swing himself up. And he could get Jonny up first by letting him stand on his shoulders. They could get up without any rope. Jonny had got bigger too, and bolder, so they both climbed up high to where the tree swayed. There was the garden below, empty since Billy was in the shed and his mother was indoors, no one about to see them, though they were so high and though most of the leaves had gone from the tree. The only people to be seen were Jackson’s men, and the fields looked different. Crikey, no, they can’t do that! He held the binoculars to his eyes. What is it? Jonny said. Let me see. But already he had let the binoculars drop on their string and was heading down, swooping, branch to branch, even as Jonny took them up to see for himself.
Wait for me.
Jonny was behind, and slow. He was already down on the ground.
Wait. It’s too high. I can’t get down.
Jonny was scared. He had not climbed so high in the tree before.
Yes you can.
He was running, out from the gate and into the fields, across the stubble. Jackson’s men had a digger there to dig up the hedges, a huge digger of a kind he had never seen before, with caterpillar tracks. The digger was so big and noisy that they didn’t hear him shouting. They didn’t even see him until he picked up a stone and threw it. It was a sharp broken flint and he threw it hard. He was aiming at the machine not at the men but one of the men was hit. The man put up his hand to his head and there was blood. He turned and ran for home.
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br /> How could you let him do it? he shouted at his mother. She was in the kitchen as usual, and Jonny was in there, sitting at the table with a glass of milk. Jonny had got down almost OK, only when he got to the bottom branch he jumped wrong and landed badly, twisting his ankle. He was probably going too fast, panicking, that was like Jonny. Maybe it hurt a lot. Maybe it wasn’t really so bad. Maybe he would have pulled himself together and come after, if there had been any hope of catching up. Or maybe he didn’t want to be implicated. He could see Jonny had been crying. He didn’t cry. He was only angry. Angry and hard and sharp and dry-eyed like a hawk. Angry at Jackson and angry at his mother for letting Jackson do what he had done to their land, his father’s land. How could you let that happen?
It’s how things are, his mother said. He’s just a farmer doing his job. That’s what farmers do nowadays. Later she drove him over to Jackson’s to apologise. He did what she said. He got out of the car and stood at Jackson’s front door and said the words but he kept his fists clenched and his eyes dry.
After that Jackson wouldn’t have him out on the farm, or not for a year or two, until he was old enough to show that he was sensible and could do a job of work as a barn boy. Billy got a new rope and put it up on the tree, and he got some planks and made a lookout platform, but Richard hardly ever used it. Jonny took to going there with a book to read. It was his place after that, a place for little boys and not for hawks.
Of course, his mother was correct. Jackson was only doing what everyone was doing then. A farmer could not afford to be sentimental about land. He learnt that as he learnt to farm. Eventually he would come to grub out more hedges, cut down more trees and fill more ponds than Jackson had, to work every fertile square yard of his soil. It was like she said, it was what a farmer did. He’d been to college and it was what they taught, and it was what you learnt when you bought the machinery that was bigger than the machinery had been before, so that you could work with fewer men and bigger fields. And if you didn’t, well, you couldn’t be competitive, could you? You wouldn’t survive.
Harvest Page 10
