Harvest

by Celia Brayfield

  His voice was his Orpheus lute, and the first listener to be charmed by its power was always Michael himself. When he was reading a script, he lost himself. The act of speaking words occupied all of his unquiet mind. He became his voice, feeling Godlike in his Tightness. When he was speaking he knew that he had total authority, that whatever he said people would be persuaded, and he felt also that this power, whose source was not in himself, was something wholly benevolent, always for the best, never to-be defied. At a very deep level, Michael believed the truth of whatever he was saying.

  The illusion was not perfect when he spoke his own words, and so early in life Michael had acquired a habit of repeating himself. The necessity to pause and think, to focus on the meaning of what he was saying, let loose demons of doubt in his mind. Worse was the need to struggle with his emotions to know what he meant. The huge, primitive surges of his heart were uncontrollable. When he sensed their chaotic force he fell into familiar forms of words, formulaic announcements which left him with a matching inner serenity.

  ‘Well, I think we’ve cracked it, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s good.’ Devlin gave his blessing. There was a weary murmur of assent from the editor. The producer, scowling at the massacre of her own original script, said nothing. Michael patted her shoulder. ‘It was good. You did a very good job, you went into a chaotic situation, analysed it, did everything you needed to do, thought it all through, got the whole issue on the screen. And the pictures told the story; that was the best. All of you’ – he commanded the last shreds of their attention with a brief gesture – ‘I want you to remember this film, this is how it should be. All in the visuals. People understand with their eyes. Never forget that.’ Now the exhausted, humiliated woman was smiling. Michael put his arm around her shoulders. ‘It just needed a little bit more punch, that’s all Don’t hate me.’

  ‘Michael, I don’t hate you.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. Come on, I’ll buy you dinner. Everybody. Let’s eat.’ He sprawled back in his chair, folding his arms behind his head. The researcher and editor rose and began to slam drawers shut and shovel paper into waste bins. ‘Anyone for the greasy spoon?’

  ‘No thanks, Michael. I need to catch some Zs.’

  ‘Me too. Goodnight all.’

  ‘Be seeing you Sunday.’ Devlin was already out of the door.

  ‘Serena? Please. I’m hungry, I must eat something. It’s just a little Greek place around the corner that taxi-drivers use.’ He made it sound as if to refuse would be some kind of a condemnation.

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘You’re not too tired?’

  She shook her head and smoothed back her hair, suddenly beyond fatigue in a lake of cool white anticipation. Michael turned finally to the producer, who looked from him to Serena, hardened her face and muttered, ‘Sorry, Michael. Early start tomorrow.’

  Michael watched Serena rise from her chair, remarking her grace. Even now she stood up in one easy movement and all her clothes, crumpled though they were, fell into elegant folds around her body. Effects such as that seemed almost like sorcery. It fascinated him that a woman could think and talk – as he saw it – like a man, and yet have arcane instincts of attraction.

  As they left the building a new night shift was arriving, soles squeaking on the white marble floor. The awards covered one wall, the photographs of the award-winners, reporters and presenters, covered another. Michael’s picture was no larger than the others, and their order was alphabetical, beginning with Amina Bhatia, glamorous in red with gold earrings, the host of their new early evening magazine.

  NewsConnect’s studio complex was on the river in the old centre of the city, in the no-man’s-land of industrial depots and high-rises built for bankers. A striking postmodern temple faced in white and grey marble, it was in many people’s estimation the only beautiful building raised since industrial decay created space for modern architecture. Around it were few constructions on human scale, only some amputated Victorian terraces with odd grimy shops on what had once been street-corners. One of these was the café. It was blessed with a tree, a surreal spectacle in such a place, and under the branches the proprietor, bred in a kinder climate, set flimsy metal tables in the summer.

  ‘I believe,’ Michael confided, ‘that this is the only full-grown tree on this side of the river between the eastern city limit and the park. Eh? Do you think I’m right?’

  ‘You could be.’

  ‘You’re laughing at me.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I would care if you were, you know.’ There it was, the Zen-like movement so full of purpose that it had become that purpose itself. He had talked over the film again, once more anxious, once more seeking reassurance, which she had given. He had relaxed, exchanged jovial conversation with the owner about their children, told her to trust him and ordered barbecued lamb and a plate of salads, and wine, although the café supposedly had no licence. And now, without losing a step or missing a beat, while she was still drawing breath and marvelling that the god of the NewsConnect temple could be comfortable in this mortal hash-house, he reached out to seize her.

  She gave him a quick, startled look, unable to say anything. He noticed her eyes, a very light speckled green, and the lashes, fair and fine. Dryad’s eyes, delicate, modest, meant for sidelong looks and shady clearings. There was a sheen on her skin, the bloom of starlight.

  ‘I would care what you thought of me. You – don’t be insulted, I mean this as a compliment – but you remind me of my mother. A very beautiful woman, she was. Always beautifully dressed, in very plain clothes, but what she really had was beauty of the soul. She knew what was right and wrong and it always just shone out of her. She didn’t judge people, that wasn’t her way, she was too good a person ever to think herself better than anybody else. She just had this very pure, sweet look about her. I suppose all small boys adore their mothers, but when I was about eight I thought she was more lovely than any of the film stars. I’d get into fights at school over it.’ He was looking at her intently, searching for the tender softening reactions, for encouragement.

  ‘And is she still alive?’ Uneasy, Serena retreated into formality.

  He shook his head. ‘No. We lost her when I was twenty. I think that was when my life went wrong, to tell the truth.’

  ‘Wrong? There doesn’t seem to be much wrong about it to me. I’m sorry, that’s cynical…’

  He shook his head. ‘Most people would agree with you. But, after she died – I was bereft, really. It was cancer, and it happened so quickly. One week she was ill, the next she went into hospital and never came home. My father was broken by it. And soon afterwards I got married, too soon.’ Now he had dropped his eyes and was turning the cork from the wine bottle over and over between his fingers. ‘I don’t know how much you know about me.’

  ‘You could tell me anyway, if you want to.’

  ‘I want you to understand this. As much as I understand it.’ He threw the cork on the table and leaned forward, his hands now a few inches from hers. ‘My first wife had some problems … I had no idea, librarian’s son from a small town, me. I adored her, thought she was the most thrilling person I’d ever met. Swedish, but not Nordic to look at, dark. A musician, a pianist. Should have had a wonderful career, but she couldn’t take the pressures. She got depressed, used all kinds of drugs, legal and illegal. I wouldn’t say she was addicted, but she wasn’t in her right mind a lot of the time. Our life was bizarre. Ghastly, sometimes.’

  Drained of his normal humour and vitality, all the lines of his face fell into a haggard mesh. To hear, she had to lean towards him, because his voice had sunk almost to nothing. He caught the almond scent of her breath.

  ‘We had a baby, she wanted it, I thought it would settle her down, which it didn’t, then at six months old, it died. A cot death. I was happy for it to be called that, anyway.’

  ‘How terrible.’ In the soft summer night tragedy had come
down like a cold cloud, blotting out everything but the two of them and their pocket of sympathy. ‘I can’t imagine what that must be like.’

  ‘In a sense, I was relieved. It wasn’t often she was in any state to care for a child. The kind of thing I mean – we were going to take a holiday, to see her parents in Sweden. I was filming in Norway; she had to fly out with the baby and join me. Well, she left the baby at the airport. At the check-in desk.’

  Serena proffered something appropriate, words of commiseration, trying to hide her shock. Much of the emotional toll of her work arose from being compelled to use the death of children as a selling point. That was too tough, however much for the greatest good. She was aware of ripening anxiety at her own childlessness, awkwardly conscious that she had a weapon whose force she could not understand. The notion of a woman forgetting a child as if it were a duty-free luxury was obscene.

  The tender convulsion of her mouth gave Michael comfort. ‘Then she got pregnant again, and once Imogen was born she seemed better. Then one day she just left. Walked out. At first I waited, because she’d had episodes before when she’d disappeared. Then her aunt called. She had an aunt in Seattle. She’d arrived at their place, overdosed … they wanted her to stay in hospital, have treatment. I never saw her again.’

  ‘You keep in touch? I mean, she is alive?’

  ‘Oh yes, in a sort of way.’ He felt cold and weak, and he snatched at the hot, thin night air of the city, a deep breath that was almost a sigh. Every time he raked this story over, the landmarks of his emotional life seemed like a sequence of despair whose next progression would inevitably crush him. ‘And then, you see, when Jane came along, she was so normal, so straight and down-to-earth. Her people were Scottish, a plain, ordinary family. She coped with Imogen, they seemed to take to each other. I was just … grateful.’

  He fell silent, while Serena stared wondering at the ruined, helpless man who had taken the place of the all-powerful deity whose stardust was even now holding the café proprietor in respectful attendance, although it was dawn and they were his only customers. Her vibrant sympathy, fairly blazing after he had blown upon it, supplied the missing words. I thought I loved her, I was mistaken. She can’t fulfil me. I can’t help her. She weighs me down. I intimidate her. We have grown apart. I am unhappy.

  The moon was a round wafer in the sky, and the river, reflecting, was the milk-blue of spring flowers. One or two tiny birds darted through the free air. The tide was high, and the water lapped contentedly at the stone embankment. They were walking towards a bridge where Michael had promised there would be taxis, when he allowed his feelings to swell like a wave. He had the impression of being picked up and hurled towards her by the force of his obsession, which would sweep the two of them helplessly away.

  3. Saturday

  ‘The day gapes before us.’ Nick put down Grace’s coffee at her side of the bed. Bars of light through the half-open shutters announced the blazing morning outside.

  A fretful squeak, like a disturbed kitten, indicated that his wife was awake. Grace was not at her best in the morning. She stretched; his side of the mattress was cool now. He had been out of bed for some time.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, “The day gapes before us.”’

  ‘That’s what I thought you said.’ She wriggled upright and reached for her coffee.

  ‘Is it an awful thing to say, then?’

  ‘Absolutely ghastly. I ought to hate you for saying something like that at any time, let alone before breakfast.’ She shook her head and screwed up her eyes, drowsily watching him walk to and fro across the half-lit room. He had put on crumpled chinos and a fresh dark blue shirt, clothes that were kind to his large body.

  ‘But you don’t hate me.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I might if you apologized, though.’ She abandoned the cup and rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Oh, I shan’t apologize. I know my place. Do you know you look like a newborn owl when you’ve just woken up?’

  ‘No I don’t. Why did we buy this bed when it’s so uncomfortable to sit up in?’ Crossing her legs under the light quilt she pulled her spine straight, tossed her dark hair and massaged her scalp with languid movements of her long, rounded arms. The question did not expect an answer. Sitting was not the bed’s purpose; they had bought it to make love in. It was a wrought-iron four-post fantasy draped in muslin, discovered at an exhibition of student designs where they had agreed, immediately, completely and in spite of its price, that it was the perfect venue for the unfolding wonder of their erotic life.

  ‘I’m glad we bought it. It’s kept us going, hasn’t it? It’s a presence. Eight feet high.’ He looked up at the canopy, where the four posts were twirled-together into a point. ‘Ridiculous curly bits on the ends. All those times when every time we did it we were thinking is this it, are we going to make a baby tonight? We couldn’t get too brought down by it all, not in this creation.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, hurt by her own memories, immediately wary of a probing conversation and anxious to return to neutral ground. ‘Aren’t you tired? Do you realize you slept appallingly?’

  ‘Did I keep you awake? I’m not unwound yet.’

  ‘You weren’t keeping me awake.’

  ‘I must have been or you wouldn’t be able to tell me I was sleeping badly.’ Now he was pacing the far edges of the room, his hands clasped around his cup, gazing restlessly around as if expecting the day’s timetable to light up in a dark corner. The smell of the morning, grassy and spiced, trickled in through the shutters, freshening the air.

  ‘I must have slept, I was dreaming.’

  ‘Sweet dream?’

  ‘No. Frightening. But it was a classic. Something was chasing me, a bear or a pterodactyl or something.’

  ‘You didn’t get a good look at it, then.’

  ‘I was afraid to look at it. I ran away. In the end I had to jump down a well to get away from it.’ She recalled hallucinatory fragments of the night; she had been aware of him breathing violently, talking to himself and turning over again and again. His pillow was beside her, crushed into a ball.

  Every night in the city Nick lay still and heavy in their bed, conscientiously restoring his faculties for the day ahead. Here at the Alhambra he was often restless; what agitated him in the nights here was desire. Even now he was still aroused: she could tell by the nervous edge to all his movements and a glitter in his eyes. The turbulence of the night had been because he had wanted sex but held away from her, knowing she was distressed and that comfort sex was not her favourite.

  Grace fell back on her pillow, feeling her emotions stripped. She was nothing but a heap of vulnerabilities, raw to the corrosion of guilt, weak annoyance and gratitude. Below these was a monster, a ravening anxiety searching for meat. Her heartbeat felt uneven.

  She shook out his pillow. They had seen many dawns warm the walls of the bedroom from the sweaty wreck of the bed, holding each other close, trembling, tearful, half-terrified at what they had done together in the darkness. After a day or two in the warmth of the south their blood would begin to heat and the pretences and accommodations of their city life melted away. They both had huge appetites, and the rich land fed them. Sometimes, she thought that this extraordinary sex was all that held them together. Sometimes, she thought that only two profoundly connected people could create this extraordinary sex. She put the riddle to herself several times a year, but could never solve it.

  Making love ceased to be a polite city convention and became a ritual of abundance and beauty, one of the silent, eternal processes of nature. At their highest moments Grace felt herself united with all the energy of the earth and even her barrenness was only part of the pattern.

  Before they met, all their lives, Grace and Nick had been well-mannered lovers who had tempered their desires to what their previous partners had considered normal. Overwork, travel and fantasy absorbed some of the vast energies left unchannelled; some had leached out in rage; they had no
t always been faithful partners. When at last they discovered each other, they were sophisticated, confident athletes, perfectly matched. The beauty of it was shocking.

  All that was needed then was the courage to confess. They had begun together with the same old pretence of restraint, then slowly picked up the hints that here was a libido equally deep and rich, and a soul as bold in exploration. Words escaped, halting requests, startled urging; poses became rehearsed, perfected; in time they released their dreams, joined hands and set off for the subterranean inferno.

  A few years passed, and instead of the dying-away to which they had secretly resigned themselves, patterns appeared, cycles of fusion and withdrawal, craving and calm, one pursuing, the other retreating, one tempted, one accommodating. Summer at the Alhambra was one of these cycles, the season of excess.

  Grace stared at the cracks in the ceiling, trying to throw off the sickness of her spirit. She had to find peace. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Nine. We could go into town for the market.’ He sounded almost childlike in his eagerness. Nick enjoyed marketing almost as much as cooking.

  ‘We don’t need much if we’re going to the Knights tomorrow.’

  She breathed easier. So – it was time to slay the dragon. Merely making the decision had revived her strength.

  ‘We don’t have to go if it will upset you, darling…’

  ‘I feel OK about it, I really do. That was all so long ago.’

  ‘You’re sure …’

  ‘Yes. Honestly and absolutely. I want to go. Now call Jane, tell her we’ll come. Then we can go to the brocante in Castillon.’ Suddenly, she shook herself, shaking off powerlessness. Burrowing into her marriage, staying in the safety of the Alhambra, editing Michael out of her new life, negating Jane as she had always done, these were coward’s refuges. Part of the disaster of Michael was the atrophy of her will. Always his timetable, his needs, his imperatives – impossible to defend her tiny, selfish preferences against the future of world broadcasting and the happiness of his children. Even now she hardly knew what she wanted. It was time to challenge the past and free herself. ‘Go on, Nick. She’s probably going to leave for a market herself any minute.’