Harvest

by Celia Brayfield

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/bello

  Sign up to our newsletter to hear about new releases events and competitions:

  www.panmacmillan.com/bellonews

  Contents

  Celia Brayfield

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue: Thirteen Years Before

  1. Thursday

  2. Friday

  3. Saturday

  4. Saturday Afternoon

  5. Sunday: The Beginning

  6. Sunday Continued

  7. Clearing Away

  8. Harvest Supper

  Celia Brayfield

  Harvest

  Celia Brayfield

  Celia Brayfield is a novelist and cultural commentator. She is the author of nine novels. The latest, Wild Weekend explores the tensions in a Suffolk village in homage to Oliver Goldmsith’s She Stoops to Conquer. To explore suburban living, she created the community of Westwick and explored mid-life manners in Mr Fabulous And Friends, and the environmental implications of urbanisation in Getting Home. She has often juxtaposed historical and contemporary settings, notably eighteenth century Spain in Sunset, pre-revolutionary St Petersburg in White Ice and Malaysia in the time of World War II in Pearls. Four of her novels have been optioned by major US, UK or French producers.

  Her non-fiction titles include two standard works on the art of writing: Arts Reviews (Kamera Books, 2008) and Bestseller (Fourth Estate, 1996.) Her most recent is Deep France (Pan, 2004) a journal of a year she spent writing in south-west France.

  She has served on the management committee of The Society of Authors and judged national literary awards including the Betty Trask Award and the Macmillan Silver PEN Prize. A former media columnist, she contributes to The Times, BBC Radio 4 and other national and international media.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks are due to many friends and colleagues who were generous with their advice during the writing of this book, particularly Henrietta Green, who shared half her library with me and patiently answered innumerable questions about food and foodies. I am also grateful to Tim Hodlin and Tony Schulte for giving me the benefits of their mind-expanding experiences, and to Jonathan and Lindsay Acton Davis, David Harrison and Barry and Mary Turner, for the beautiful interludes in Gascony which were consequent on their invitations or hospitality.

  The care with which Allegra Huston edited the manuscript was a renewed inspiration. The support of Bernard Nyman and enthusiasm of Dotti Irving have been invaluable. As ever, I am more grateful than I can say to Andrew and Margaret Hewson, whose advice was peerless and whose patience and understanding extraordinary; their friendship, and that of Willow and Tony Schulte, sustained me from the events which inspired this book through to the end of the writing process. For Willow and Tony Schulte

  Prologue: Thirteen Years Before

  When was it, the moment when Grace lost her own life? She was sure that there was a moment, a turning point at which she could have made a different decision and saved herself, but when she rewound the tape of her memory and searched for the frame that held that fraction of time there was nothing. Her love for Michael had appeared instantaneously, from nowhere, and knocked her existence off its axis.

  One picture of him was crystal clear: she had been walking down a corridor towards the studio, and he approached in the opposite direction, a tall man with an aquiline stoop in his shoulders, flanked by a group of subordinates – secretary, researcher, vision mixer. They passed each other amicably. Nothing was said. He looked at her, she looked at him. She knew him; that was no surprise, the network political editor, the whole country knew him. In the centre of the group he was walking in silence, as if caught up in his own thoughts. That inner concentration drew out something from her.

  No spark passed at that moment which she would have remembered if they had never met again, but by the time she was turning the corner at the end of the corridor it had happened; they were connected. She looked back, and so did he. You. You and I. Soon.

  A sexy environment, a newsroom. All those days being seized, all the climactic deadlines, the general culture of intrepid opportunism. ‘The political editor is having a preliminary meeting to discuss the election; perhaps you’d like to come along and then you can meet Michael …’ Grace had resented the way the secretary had phrased that invitation, as if Michael were one of the world’s major must-sees, like dawn over the Pyramids. Double presumption, since the election date had not been announced and the subtext of the message was that the political staff had a leak.

  Even setting aside the magnificence of that prize, his manner was very simple. Laying the whole thing out in plain words, brushing the astonished congratulations aside, inviting cooperation in the happy task of wiping the opposition off the air, there was an honest, nonconformist modesty in all of it, although in running the meeting he was annexing the producer’s territory.

  With a young woman’s handed-down cynicism she had been more than ready to despise him, as all the production staff despised reporters, teeth and smiles, autocuties. ‘Grace, we’d like you to produce the midday bulletins.’ Guilt for that readiness made her freeze in the search-light of his enquiring stare. ‘Fine,’ was all she could manage to say. The next day she returned to earth, assessed the fearsome responsibility she had accepted and called his office. ‘If Michael can manage it before the election, I think we need a little making-acquaintance time.’

  He had a heavy schedule; it was necessary for him to come to her house on a Saturday evening, and she was glad to welcome him. There was no rigmarole of polite appreciation for her interior decoration, although nothing material in the world delighted him as much as a single woman’s kitchen, that exquisite sampler of domestic life, displaying in miniature her skill in the crafts of comfort.

  He sat familiarly on her kitchen table and said, ‘Does it worry you that we broadcast the news four times a day and all it amounts to is an incoherent menu of the world’s problems? Because I worry about that, more and more.’

  ‘Yes.’ He had voiced her own misgiving so exactly that she felt almost tricked. ‘That worries me. But it’s an incorrect thought and you’ll be sent away for re-education.’

  ‘I have other incorrect thoughts. I think it’s no job for a man, wearing a different tie every day to deliver the top three world events in not less than fifteen hackneyed phrases.’

  ‘Don’t put yourself down.’

  ‘I suppose there are enough people doing that already.’ Again, that clean, almost boyish modesty. Putting coffee on the table, she caught the light, aromatic scent of his breath.

  ‘People admire you,’ she told him, annoyed that the statement undiplomatically betrayed her own previous indifference. He was certainly the most admired broadcaster of his time, but Grace never ran with packs.

  ‘You don’t need to flatter me.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘No. No, you weren’t.’ He looked at her from the clear brown depth of his eyes. ‘You are quite addicted to truth, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve never thought of myself as addicted, I think it’s important, that’s all.’

  So he hinted at it. In time, he seemed to promise, he would present her with her true self, perfect as a flower, perfect as his own true self which app
eared so admirably uncompromised. He offered her the freedom to peel away all the accommodations she had made with her own character for the sake of the roles she had to play in life, the producer, the lover, the student, the daughter. I have the power to be just as I am, he promised, and I will give it to you.

  She had pinned to the wall a child’s portrait of herself, drawn by the son of her closest friend, a misshapen, highly coloured figure which somehow expressed her essence in square shoulders and curling dark hair. He looked at it and asked, ‘Do you want to have children?’

  ‘Very much. My friend’s son drew that, I’m passionately jealous of him.’

  Then he introduced Jane, saying, ‘My wife has doubts. She worries that having a child will restrict her life.’

  ‘Well it will, but it will be worth it, don’t you think?’

  ‘And I have a daughter from my first marriage,’ he continued, as if it was unreasonable to expect him to be content with that. ‘Imogen. She’s only four. Quite demanding. Jane thinks she needs to have us to herself for a while longer.’ There were dark rumours about his first marriage, a general recognition that it had been troubled, an idea that the child had been abandoned.

  Then he said, ‘Tell me what you think about this.’ His confidence was thrilling; he took her up to his high place and showed her the world, the brilliant ambition that would in time become NewsConnect. She would cross some deserts with him in pursuing that golden mirage.

  ‘It’s difficult for my wife,’ he said, ‘for Jane. She isn’t from our world, which in some ways is a … stabilizing thing.’ He seemed to be too loyal to say that Jane did not understand.

  He made a formal enquiry into her own status. ‘Is there someone in your life?’

  ‘Not now,’ she said, with regret but also with anticipation. ‘There was, we had been together since university, but he went abroad last year.’

  ‘Did you live here together?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must miss him.’

  ‘I do.’ Especially at weekends. Working side by side, they had been patient with each other, and affectionate, and at about this time on a Saturday taken a break from their separate heaps of paper to exchange back rubs and plates of pasta before knuckling down for the final three hours.

  They had felt too ordinary to talk about love. He had been offered a research grant to study in Mexico City, and they had patiently and affectionately agreed that neither of them was ready for a lifetime, commitment at that point. All the same, she felt bereft. Occasionally they scribbled cards to each other. Sometimes he telephoned, but the line was bad and the time difference insurmountable.

  Michael left, and there was emptiness at the heart of her home. The old pine table, on which over the years she had written essays, served meals and made love, appeared bare in spite of the litter of paper and pens, the bowl of red apples and the white lily in a vase. Her chairs seemed blatantly unoccupied, her saucepans conspicuously unused. Without him, already, she was less. She had to turn on the radio to fill his space.

  The election began, long adrenalin-crazed days and short blank nights of exhaustion, and she was astonished at the sheer depth of his memory for political facts, and his ability to retrieve them, smiling in front of a camera, fluent and authoritative and inexhaustible. Then when it was over and he had made them feel, individually and together, that they were the true victors, he took her away from the party and asked, ‘Can I come home with you?’

  There was ecstasy, in the beginning. It was more spiritual than physical; he gave her joy and a blissful optimism about their union in which she trusted, mistakenly, that the physical satisfaction would develop. After a while she realized that he felt secure while he could be cerebral, but his emotions scared him and he would not venture far into eroticism.

  She was the first to feel guilty, and he saw it and swiftly stepped in to retrieve her. ‘I believe that love is the most important thing in life. It ought to be – the centre, everything else that we do should flow from it. The best that a man can do … is love. The most precious thing we can do, we ought to live for it – I mean tend it, sacrifice whatever we have to.’ After weeks of listening to his beautiful voice and flawless delivery, it was strange to hear him stumbling over his own thoughts.

  ‘Maybe that needs another read-through,’ she said, protecting herself with cynicism. Her experience had been of not talking of love until, for her, it was too late because her own emotion was long dead of insecurity. It was alarming to be with a man who used the word freely.

  ‘I like that,’ he protested. ‘I open up the bottomless depth of my soul and all you can do is be sarcastic.’

  ‘I’m not used to people getting real on me.’

  ‘Real,’ he repeated, quite bitterly. ‘You’re the real one around here. Sometimes when I go into the washroom at the end of the day and walk past the mirror I’m surprised to see my own face, surprised I’m there at all. If I am real, it is only because that’s what you make me. I love you for you, but I need you for that.’

  It was never about sex. He was unaware of what there might be for them to explore together and afraid to make discoveries. He offered her love, and truth, and her best self. She thought he was the most honest person she had ever met; he seemed to be struggling continuously to balance on the sharpest edge of reality. It was many years before she was able to correct the picture.

  1. Thursday

  He looked well-fed, like a family man; she noticed that when he rested his elbow on the bar and his jacket gaped open there was a small mound of belly in his shirt. She encouraged him to move close, tilting her head back, flexing her throat, gazing intently beneath thick eyelashes as if their conversation concerned the deep mysteries of life, when it was really nothing more than the neutral interchanges of two people who might later wish to pretend that they had no interest in each other.

  She saw that he was looking at her, not only her face but all of her. He found her tallness was almost shocking. As the kids said she was in his face – but literally; her eyes were level with his eyes, it was disconcerting, quite a thrill. Leaning back against the bar, resting on one elbow, her limbs were so slender that the knees and elbows were their widest points. She moved around slowly, as if choosing exactly where to place her feet and hands. With her glossy black hair and soft black clothes, she made him think of a beautiful big bird from Africa, a flamingo, a crowned crane.

  ‘It’s a nice little place, this, isn’t it?’ A smile creased his cheeks. Round, smooth cheeks, he had shaved again before leaving his office. ‘I often drop in here for a drink on my way home.’

  ‘I’ve never been here before.’ You must lie, she reminded herself. Lying gives you the power. She had tried this place earlier in the week, scored well and decided to try it again. These little bars were all the same, clattery wooden floor, bizarre metal lamps, syrupy Semillon Chardonnay, the well-fed men not hurrying on their way home. ‘I used to work in a place like this. Actually they made me the manager. A very responsible job, and the money was good. But I had to give it up. Too much pressure, I was totally stressed out. No energy, nothing. My work was suffering, I couldn’t keep up with my course.’

  ‘What course is that?’ For an instant he was confused. Something about the girl announced wealth; it was not quite confidence, she seemed fragile, partly because she was so thin, but she looked around her with a muzzy expectation that her wants would be fulfilled. Spoiled rich girls did that, but they did not work in bars. Her smoky eyes were roaming his face and his doubts drifted away.

  ‘Design. I’m a student. It’s hard, you know. A lot of work. Coming up to the second year, that’s the hardest. By the end of term I was working all night. I don’t go out in the evening much …’ A cough and a vague gesture around the convivial room with her cigarette.

  ‘I thought I hadn’t seen you in here. I would have remembered you.’

  Her wide nostrils twitched. She smiled. ‘It’s busy, yeah? Is it always as busy as this?�
�

  ‘About now, yes. Happy hour, half-price drinks. It’s a good idea, people like it.’ Definitely a family man, to be so excited by saving money. He was rich enough, though, you could see from the cufflinks and the fine white shirt. Rich and mean. It’s time to pay up, sir, I’m going to give you the bill.

  ‘You work near here? Where, in an office?’

  ‘Western Oil, just across the street there.’ She leaned forward to look out under the canopy of the bar, the point of her shoulder almost touching his chest. Magnificent shoulders, she had, perfectly square, the clean lines of a young body. And all that grace expended just to see the place where he worked.

  ‘The big bronze doors?’

  ‘No, the next one along. The seventh floor.’

  Now she looked around at him, smiling again, pulling at the feathery tufts of her black hair. It had been hacked unevenly, in some places almost to the root, but he did not notice. ‘The lights are on.’

  ‘People are working late.’

  ‘That’s a pity. I was thinking that later on maybe you could have shown me around. I like your tie. Does it mean something, a club or something?’

  ‘A shooting club.’ He felt short of breath.

  ‘What do you shoot?’ Look away quickly, you’re reacting and he must not see. Prepare yourself. You must not be distracted from the purpose. After all, the worse he is, the more he deserves what’s coming.

  ‘Just targets.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I like hunting, but I can never get away, and my … I mean, people complain if I do, so …’ She made herself reach out and finger the edge of his tie. Raw fingertips, nails bitten to the quick and white, rough skin around the knuckles, but he was looking at her face. Where her hand had brushed his chest, under the shirt cotton, his skin tingled.

  Women today, they knew what they wanted and they were not afraid to ask for it. He liked that. Honest, simple, no stupid games; that’s how things ought to be between a man and a woman. When you both want the same thing, why not say so?