Harvest

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Who told you, puss?’ The animal sat still, wary and expectant, her mutilated tail tucked around her paws. Grace looked in the freezer, found milk, thawed it in the microwave and poured some into a bowl. She put the bowl on the floor and retreated to the far side of the room, and when the cat saw she was safe she ran forward and lapped up the offering at once. Pink teats showed through her belly for. ‘More kittens, huh?’

  The road was still roaring in her ears; she was too tired to be emotional now. She refilled the bowl. ‘All right, puss – how come a scabby undernourished alley cat like you can pop’em out like shelling peas?’ For a second only the cat lifted its nose and blinked at her with affection. ‘What do you know that we don’t, eh? Come on, why don’t you let me and Marie-Laure in on the big secret?’

  In the instant of awakening a drop of self-pity permeated her consciousness: I am married, I should not have to wake up by myself in the bed. Resentfully Jane curled into her own warmth, but in a few more seconds she was fully awake and reining in her imagination before it reached her husband. She was in France. Michael was at home, in theory. Checking up by telephone was for wives with no self-respect. She was alone, he probably wasn’t but thinking about him could not do her any good, so she turned her mind away; it was automatic, a habit of survival.

  Anyway, she lectured herself, you are not alone, you have your children and your friends. You’re just alone in your bed at this moment, that’s all.

  Another habit was filling the first hour of the day instantly. Jane woke up now the way cats could, fully conscious in a nano-second With one bound she leapt to her own rescue, slapping ideas and projects together to dam the flood of misery which had built up overnight. Once she imagined the picture of this unhappiness, a welling black pool, silent, evil-smelling, all kinds of debris in its filthy depths – dead branches of resentment, twigs of weakness, great logs of hatred and leaves of deceit at the bottom rotting down to an oozing mud. She was the beaver, working like crazy to keep all that vile stuff behind her dam, so that the forest could be sweet and green and sun-dappled and aromatic all day.

  Most people thought that Jane Knight’s life was wholly sun-dappled, and marvelled as to where she got the energy to be so perfect. All those children, a new book every year, the TV series, a famous husband, two homes – they saw her face on her cookbooks and were awestruck. Miraculous to achieve so much and still give dinner parties. (Of course she gave dinner parties, they had been featured in House and Garden: ‘Media Czar Michael Knight Entertains’. Her husband would do things for journalists. Her revenge had been the jellied borscht; all men hate cold soup.)

  Most people added: and she’s still such a pretty woman. Jane had the looks of a Noel Coward ingenue – small-featured and fine-boned. Her hair was the colour of ripe oats, a silver blonde, not thick but disposed to fall obediently in a bob to the base of her neck. Although her profession ensured a sturdy shape, her appearance was always delicate. Her eyes were deep-set, her skin seemed very thin and her mouth made people think of the flowers called ‘bunny mouths’ by children because of their soft, downy lips. She had been waiting since sixteen for maturity to do something with what she considered an idiotically sweet face and a nothing of a body. Goddammit, she would exclaim at the mirror, I am grown up, why can’t I look it? Then somebody would tell her she was lucky. All round, people thought she was lucky. She accepted their opinion, although it did not fit the facts as she knew them.

  I am lucky that my thoughts are so docile and my head so neatly arranged that I do not have to think about Michael if I choose not to. I am lucky that I have been able to create a life so full of interest and incident that there is always something to do to distract me when I need to distract myself. Sunday, I have the lunch. Tomorrow there will be the preparation, the caterers, the marketing. And right now at five o’clock on Friday morning, I can think about mushrooms.

  Outside the shutters she heard the faint hiss of rain. It was gentle, hardly more than a heavy dew. It would be swirling in clouds across the fields, leaving a sheen on the windward side of the roof and tiny droplets hanging along the spiders’webs. She could hear occasional drips falling from the leaves of the cherry tree outside the bedroom window. Moisture without destruction, perfect rain for mushrooms; there would be thousands of them under the oak trees. She sat up, threw back the quilt and reached for her jeans.

  The farmhouse, when it was full of sleeping people, seemed like a huge pregnant animal. She imagined it breathing, the old stone walls expanding rhythmically, the beams rising and falling like ribs. Houses had been built the same way in this region for centuries, the same features appeared in village houses that were five hundred years old and in the new ticky-tacky boxes in Saint-Victor’s industrial zone. Impossible to say how old their house might be, or guess how many lives had been lived in it before them, how many souls had flown into the roof, how many spirits watched from the walls.

  It was handsomely large for a farmhouse, but the vast sky miniaturized it and made the whole assembly of huge timbers and massive stones look as simple as a house made of baby bricks. The main building was square, sited just below the shoulder of a hill on an outcrop of limestone rock, looking westward down a shallow valley, with outbuildings in proportion scattered around it. On the level ground before the rise of hill was a generous walled courtyard, while the west wall ended in three stone arches enclosing a terrace, and below that a garden planted among the rocks led down to the pool. It had been a grand domaine in its heyday.

  The house was never full, but Jane had no feeling of isolation in it. On the ground floor she had ordered interior walls to be removed and small chambers made into bigger ones, creating rooms of baronial proportions now appropriately filled with massive French country furniture and draped with long, heavy curtains. Upstairs there were rooms which were never used, where the beds lay shrouded and cold, waiting for the guests who never came. Jane said she did not like to overwhelm the marriage with her own friends; Michael said he was never there long enough to make invitations worthwhile. People stay away from couples in trouble; they do not visit intimately or share holidays, afraid of exposing the rotting interior of the marriage.

  Her bare feet fell soundlessly on the staircase, shrinking from the cold stone. There was a light under the kitchen door.

  ‘Oh, hello. I didn’t think you would be up yet.’ The kitchen smelled of wood-smoke and coffee. At the stove stood Louisa Fields, tugging around her abundant body a grimy white towelling robe with collar and cuffs of quilted satin, patting back her thick auburn hair.

  ‘Something woke me. I thought it might have been an owl? Or one of the children?’ To Louisa, regretfully single and born to tread no further than the lush carpeted corridors of luxury city apartments, owls and children were thrilling exotica.

  ‘The owls aren’t very noisy. If something wakes me, it’s usually Emma. I was going to look in on her, but I don’t think you would have heard her upstairs.’ She loved Louisa, even if she was incapable of making coffee without strewing grounds, spoons and tin-lids over the kitchen with the viciousness of an anti-personnel mine.

  ‘Poor mite – is she a bad sleeper?’ And even if she patronized the children.

  ‘I wouldn’t call what Emma does sleep. She makes more noise asleep than some children do when they’re awake.’ Preemptive self-criticism was necessary on the score of her children. Nothing cut more deeply than the tactful silence of friends too sensitive to acknowledge that she had at least two troubled offspring. Emma was a tense, unthriving child who muttered to herself all night, shouting in her dreams, spasms of her limbs pitching covers, pillows, and toys to the floor.

  ‘I forget, which one is Emma?’

  ‘The eldest. She’s eleven.’

  ‘Of course. Coffee?’ Louisa approached the oak refectory table with the red-hot percolator and Jane slipped the spare tile she used as a trivet under it in the nick of time. ‘I used the ready-ground, I couldn’t find the beans.’ In her own k
itchen, Louisa would no more use stale ground coffee than use margarine. Like Jane, she called herself a cook, but she framed her interests far more ambitiously and wrote a column for Gourmet magazine. ‘What are you doing up at this hour?’

  ‘I was going out for mushrooms.’

  ‘Oh, good-y! I’ll get my boots, shall I?’ She set down her mug, splashing coffee over her satin cuffs, and bustled joyfully upstairs.

  While she waited, Jane scribbled a note for the children: ‘Gone mushrooming – back for breakfast.’

  ‘Do you need to do that?’ Louisa said on her return, her eyes round in wonder. ‘Surely if they wake up the nanny’ll look after them?’

  ‘She will if she wakes up. Debbie’s a better sleeper than they are.’

  ‘Won’t they just play?’

  ‘Sam will. He’ll just plug himself in. Actually I think Sam is really a new secret component genetically engineered into my womb by the Sega corporation. It’s Xanthe I’m worried about, she’s only two and Emma’s tossing and turning wakes her up.’

  ‘So why put them in a bedroom together?’

  ‘Because Emma will take care of Xanthe if she does wake her up.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Golly. The things you have to think of. What about Antony? Wouldn’t he …’

  ‘Mnuh.’ Antony, her other guest, was Louisa’s travelling companion; it was not quite fair to call him a lover, since she groused that he was seldom capable of fulfilling the role. Antony imported wine, and was a creature so urban that Jane would not have left him in charge of a mint plant. She reached for her coat, debating the question of the children. The house stood by itself in the rolling fields, several miles from any other building. It was charming by daylight but Jane knew the children found it frightening at night, with its creaks and cobwebs and unknown corners. Eliminating, the rats was a task she always soft-heartedly promised herself she would take on next year, so there were nocturnal scufflings in the wall cavities and scuttlings across the roof beams.

  If little Xanthe woke, she reassured herself, Emma could be trusted, so it was safe to leave them alone. Twelve years of motherhood meant twelve years of never leaving a house without computing the possible hazard to the children. ‘It’s so refreshing to be with you, Louisa. I need people who can just walk out of houses around.’

  ‘Does this mean you’re thinking of walking out of this one?’ Louisa halted expectantly in the act of putting on her boots.

  ‘No. no. I hate to disappoint you but – no change.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘For God’s sake don’t lecture me, Louisa. It’s too early in the morning.’

  ‘OK, OK – silly question, sorry I asked.’ Their friendship predated Jane’s marriage, the only one of its vintage she had left. They had been friends so long that offence had become very hard to take.

  Her favourite knife was in its special slot in the knife block: Jane pulled it out with a twinge of satisfaction. She liked rituals. The same tasks, the same actions done over and over, the same tools kept in the same places, gave her work a reassuring sense of archetypal correctness. She felt she belonged in the real scheme of life, that she was connected to the farm women who had used the old bread oven, and the cavewoman she imagined squatting by her hearth-stone.

  It was the best knife for mushrooms, and for most other purposes. It was small and sharp, and special because she had found it in the house, in the kitchen, it belonged to the property. It was comforting to build these primitive little superstitions into her life.

  While her own kitchen knives had gleaming triangular blades of stainless steel, the old knife was of iron, mottled with corrosion its cutting edge honed down to a curve. The wooden handle was scarred with small burns and bound with packing thread where it had split towards the end. It was a vicious, sturdy implement with a long career in the day-to-day butchery of the farm behind it. Jane decreed that the knife had to be wiped, never washed, oiled if it was to be left unused for a while and kept in the lowest hole of the knife block, where by chance it fitted exactly. She had a constant, lingering sense that her world was under siege, and observing these customs was like drilling the garrison, a ceremony which affirmed that the situation was not hopeless, that one could at least die with self-respect.

  She recalled her own advice to her readers and sharpened the knife against the carver, pleased that she could make the two blades flicker together in a fast, practised rhythm. ‘A good mushroom knife must be exquisitely sharp, to cut the fungus cleanly, without any crushing.’ Exquisitely sharp. ‘Sharp enough to cut into the ball of your finger if you press it flat against the tip.’ The sub-editor had wanted to take out that addition, being offended by the notion of drawing blood. Odd how people liked cookery to be absolutely bland, as if eating and killing were nothing to do with each other.

  Her own boots were neatly placed together beside the door. Louisa was still in her bathrobe, now worn with heavy green stockman’s boots and an Hermès scarf tying back her hair. Jane made no comment, but handed her friend a basket.

  They strolled out into the courtyard in the half-light, their destination the wood which began a hundred yards down the valley. The air was fresh and damp; in the sky the grey cloud was lifting and a streak of illumination the colour of egg yolk announced the dawn. Beyond the mown grass and cedar spires of the garden, the landscape rose and fell in patches of grey and fawn, the hedges casting no shadows. It was breadbasket country, mantled with crops as far as the eye could see curving and undulating like the body of a nubile woman stretched out in sleep. In the valley bottom, a veil of thick white mist hung motionless over the stream bed.

  ‘I won’t lecture, I promise.’ Louisa considered tough love a duty of old friendship.

  ‘Please, it’s 5 a.m., the sun’s not up. I don’t want to hear about foolish choices or loving too much or feeling the fear and doing things or getting the love you need or any more of that fuzzy-brained New Woman crap. The people who wrote that stuff couldn’t imagine a man like Michael if they did creative visualization for the rest of their lives.’

  ‘All right, all right. Let’s drop it.’ She was panting to keep up now, Jane had accelerated in her annoyance.

  They were all that moved in the early-morning landscape. The cool, humid air was still, and the tiny spiders whose cobwebs as fine as chiffon rags draped the undergrowth were invisible. The edge of the sun was above the horizon, but muffled in a ribbon of low cloud.

  Despite the rain, the ground was parched and hard on the feet, even in the depths of the wood, where soft darkness lingered under the trees. Louisa squatted to examine the forest floor, collecting dew along the hem of her robe. Jane could find the mushrooms almost by instinct after gathering them for so many years. They sprang up coyly in different places each season, their shapes beloved to her mind’s eye. The sheer abundance of them was cheering, it was hard not to be gratified by it, as if they crowded up out of the earth because they knew they were welcomed. She took care always to leave some of the finest to mature and decay, scattering spores for the next year.

  ‘Chanterelles!’ she called, pointing to a cluster of overlapping curds showing pale against the dark litter of leaves; in full daylight they would be a rich apricot colour. She crouched and began to cut them in clumps, enjoying their light, meaty resilience. Louisa joined her and held a bunch to her nose as if they were flowers.

  ‘Wonderful smell! Like sherry, don’t you think?’

  ‘Uh.’ To Jane’s nose, they smelled nothing like sherry, but she never liked to offend anyone. ‘These are the best eating. People rave on about the pieds de mouton because they’re rarer, but I think they’re tasteless.’

  ‘Mnyeah.’ This equivocal grunt was Louisa’s signal for mild disagreement. ‘Actually, I think the pieds de mouton are my favourites, so sort of thick and crusty, creamy-white, dear little spines underneath, so soft …’

  ‘I expect we’ll find some.’ Although the pieds de mouton grew only in ones or twos they were conspicuous, and
they gathered a good number.

  ‘Tickly!’ Louisa stroked her cheek with a particularly spiny specimen, then bit off a corner. ‘Myum! Try a piece.’

  Jane nibbled as bidden. ‘I can see you’re not impressed.’

  ‘I’m thinking – I’ve got to do a column next week. Another year, another August, another mushroom story …’ She shrugged and sighed.

  ‘Yeah.’ Louisa suddenly fell silent. Her own meditation on autumn mushrooms had already gone to press.

  With a fallen twig Jane explored the carpet of leaves, considering the options. There was the famous gastronomic argument, should mushrooms be cooked in oil or butter? Or both, as the nineteenth-century master August Colombie had advised? Or goose fat, as the locals did? Or served raw, dressed with oil and lemon, as modern palates preferred?

  There was a new editor, a nasty, brisk woman who scribbled ‘Readers are always asking for low-fat recipes’or ‘Remember we have many vegetarian readers’over her faxes. Low-fat and vegetarian were difficult concepts to apply to peasant cooking, in which the possibilities of the pig were central.

  ‘Do you know,’ she marvelled, half to herself, ‘there’s a Landais recipe for stewed ceps in Cahors wine with duck fat, marrow bones, pork skin and pig’s trotters?’

  ‘Do you have ceps?’ Louisa demanded, feeling she should break the silence before her friend realized she was holding back her secrets.

  ‘Do we have ceps! How could I forget – they’re usually down there …’ She led the way onwards, to a slight depression in the ground, the muddy course of a stream so small it was little more than a damp area sprouting greener, coarser grass. Here a few pine trees grew among the oaks, awkward, angular old trees with many broken branches, and it was around their roots that the ceps were most plentiful. Swelling up from the ground in glossy chestnut-brown humps they were easy to find, but insects loved them and there was no point in harvesting a handsome cap to find that the spongy yellow interior was riddled with grubs.