Harvest

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘No stirring, no burning, no sweat, no need for technology. I was told about – and they boasted of him – an old man who had never married, in case his wife found out the secret.’

  ‘Goll-y.’

  ‘Good heavens, how extraordinary.’

  ‘Because the men cook, among the Basques. Not just the peasants, all of them, businessmen, doctors, millionaires … They have dining clubs, men only, cooking for each other, and rather than eat their wives’food at home the men eat with each other every night, even if they have to drive miles to do it. And then the husband and wife have terrible fights …’

  ‘They are a rebellious bunch, aren’t they?’ Louisa seized the vegetables in her short, fat fingers and threw them untidily into the pan. Jane lifted the fish; the notion crossed her mind that she had somehow absorbed the fighting spirit of the mountain race with their cuisine. Her ears were straining for the telephone, waiting for Nick Nichols to call back and explain that he and his wife Grace would not after all be coming to lunch on Sunday. Her courage was failing, she was hoping to be saved from her recklessness before Michael’s anger was let loose.

  As if cued by the conversation, the salmon lady appeared in the doorway, darting anxious glances right and left, her hands thrust into her jeans pockets, boyishly uneasy. Jane dried her hands, praised the fish and went to find money.

  ‘We were talking’ – in no circumstances would Louisa display the ill-manners of excluding a newcomer from a conversation – ‘about men and women arguing about doing the cooking in your country.’

  Amusement ignited the young woman’s black eyes. ‘Not only about the cooking. And not just in my country.’ They all laughed. She held out a casual hand for the notes Jane was counting. ‘But not in my house. I promise you.’ Tucking the money into a breast pocket, she turned on her heel and returned to her old grey Renault with a spring in her strides.

  ‘Do you suppose she’s a lesbian?’ Antony, leaning against the sink, folded his thin arms and wondered if it was too early to ask for a Scotch.

  ‘I’d say she was happy,’ was Louisa’s provocative reply. Absorbed in the tranquillizing business of preparing food, Jane barely heard her.

  ‘I was wondering if it was too early for a Scotch.’

  ‘Antony, you poor man, of course not.’ Jane assembled glasses, ice, a decanter and a tempting little dish of olives and goat-cheese morsels rolled in chopped walnuts, and installed him on the terrace again. He accepted her kindness readily and reached out for his glass with movements that betrayed very long practice.

  Acceptance was what Antony did best. He accepted invitations, a constant stream of them, with perfectly-phrased notes on expensive personal stationery. He accepted food and drink and amusement and women’s compliments with a tight polite smile and a donnish inclination of his head. He accepted girlfriends, as he accepted the weather, seldom ideal but inevitable. From his family he had accepted a small private income, considerable intelligence, a superb education and an immense, influential acquaintance pledged to support him in his chosen profession of wine merchant.

  He did not quite accept his long-drawn-out failure in this business, his inability to extend his clients’vocabulary of taste, their depressing obsession with varieties of grape which were merely fashionable, the steady loss of customers, the elusiveness of big orders, the need to relocate to cheaper and cheaper premises. Antony felt no needs. He felt nothing. He could react but not act. Jane imagined – indeed, knew – that every night Antony sat down in his tiny, sour-smelling bachelor apartment to pickle lightly in whisky everything in his life which he found unacceptable in its fresh condition.

  Every two or three years, Louisa fell in love with a man like Antony. They were usually charming, clever, gifted, well groomed and dressed. Nothing much ever seemed to interest them, not business, not sport, and certainly not other people. Radiating sensual warmth, she fascinated them over dinner and issued a bulletin about her need for a committed relationship. What she meant was love, but the Antonys were so patently incapable of any emotion that it was absurd to contract a liaison on such terms.

  After six or nine months of extensive socializing and acceptable sex the more active Antonys implemented their escape plans – neglect, infidelity, perhaps an intrusive ex-wife. From the more passive Louisa would request the committed relationship; incapable of actual refusal, they would mumble, misunderstand or disappear, leaving her furiously condemning another dickhead who had wasted valuable months of her life. When Jane considered leaving Michael, as she did much more often than she admitted to anyone, the vision of a future full of Antonys deterred her.

  ‘Was this room always the kitchen?’ Louisa was checking out the batterie de cuisine displayed on hooks and shelves, keeping an eye on the poaching liquor in the fish kettle as it approached simmering point. She and Jane were in purist agreement about salmon. The ideal method was to take the pot off the stove as the liquid came to boiling point and leave the fish to cook slowly in the residual heat, then cool overnight before serving in all its moist, pink, meaty splendour.

  ‘Oh yes. All fitted out with one of those huge electric stainless steel ranges the French always have. The builders thought I was mad when I threw it out and put this old thing in.’ Jane had brought from England a castiron stove with three ovens and blue-and-white tiles, originally intended to burn coal and now skilfully adapted for bottled gas. ‘The building inspector was all ready to condemn it, but Michael had a drink with him and won him over somehow. Shall we shell the peas?’

  ‘So Michael is some use around the house.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly live like this on my own money, Louisa.’

  ‘Yes you could, you earn enough now, surely?’

  ‘Well …’ Jane paused in the act of clearing bowls from the long oak table to make space for the work ahead. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps – the television pays telephone numbers. Our accountant just sorts us out, Michael sees him every now and then. I can’t do figures, my mind goes blank.’

  ‘Why didn’t Michael make it this morning?’ Louisa tipped out a basketful of pea pods and the two women sat down on opposite sides of the table.

  ‘He was phoning from the airport, he missed the morning flight. They were editing until four. He’s getting the afternoon plane.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I’ll send Debbie to meet him.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Debbie. Our nanny, remember?’ Nothing to do with children ever registered with Louisa.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Jane picked up a pea pod, split it with her thumb, scraped the peas out into the colander, ate the smallest one, dropped the pod into a basket, reached for the next. A satisfying noise, the pop of the pea pods. Their fresh green perfume was delicious. One pod after another, the peas at first ringing and bouncing in the empty pan, then piling upon each other slowly and quietly.

  The only part of the house from which Tamara Lady Aylesham had been banned was this kitchen. Jane had ignored plans for built-in units and hand-stencilled walls, and kept the room as much as possible as it had been for generations. The shelf formed by the fireplace beam was edged with cotton lace and carried wooden candelabra, a jar of pens and a small row of books to be read by the fireside on quiet evenings. The furniture was rough and massive, made of oak and fruitwoods from the countryside.

  She thought of the kitchen feeding an army of workers at the harvest or the vendage, when all the men in the region banded together for the gruelling labour of the day, migrant workers flocked in from the countryside and the women worked at full stretch to feed them. The great hearth, under its twelve-foot beam, would be crowded with singing pots, belching aromas of sizzling fat and stewed onions. Women and children would bustle in and out, carrying loaded dishes to the long trestle tables set up in the shade of the trees near the house, boys darting around their skirts with stolen snacks, the men themselves fetching the heavy flagons of wine. In the little rooms leading off the kitchen, one of which she had made her of
fice, the abundance of the summer would be stored, fruit in jars of Armagnac, duck preserved in its own fat in the yellow-painted crocks, beans laid out to dry in the cool, dry chambre obscure.

  Jane loved these visions, and loved the house because it conjured them up so readily. Her kitchen connected her to the real life, the right life, the life of a true family in the heart of a living community. She imagined that in all the gaiety and companionable commotion of a harvest supper the necessary tasks would be shared without question and there would be no quarrelling, and no deception, and people would sit down together and eat, knowing each other entirely. If a child was miserable there would be a score of hands to soothe her; if a man had faults there would be but one opinion of him, the general opinion, and he would not be able to slip away on some excuse of international magnitude and pretend he was not what he was.

  ‘So do you believe him?’ Louisa threw the last pod into the basket.

  ‘Who, Michael?’

  ‘Yes. Editing until four this morning.’

  ‘He often has to.’ There was a lid for the saucepan of peas, and then the fiddly business of skinning baby onions. Well, fuck it, the onions were going to make her cry anyway.

  ‘But – no. No, I don’t. I can’t tell any more, I used to think I knew when he was screwing around, but it’s been so many years, so many women, so many excuses. I don’t believe anything he says at all, wouldn’t I be a fool if I did?’ She cut into the first onion, awkward with distress, and the knife slipped and gashed her finger. ‘Oh damn! Damn! This bloody knife’s too big.’ At the sink she wrapped the corner of a cloth around the cut. The blood oozed through it at once. ‘But I know all the same. I wish I didn’t, I wish I could stop myself knowing and go on living in fool’s paradise – he wants me to, I know, and by now that’s all I want. Just not to know. But I do. He gets transparent. He just isn’t there when he’s speaking to me. He’s like a ghost or a hologram or a shadow. Not there.’ She lifted up her head and Louisa saw far more tears than could be blamed on a button onion welling in her eyes.

  ‘What about this woman you invited?’

  ‘They’re coming. Her husband called earlier.’ The thought brought Jane back from the edge of weeping. ‘What have I done, Louisa? I’m so worried.’

  ‘What can he do? Come on, if he denies he had an affair with her he can’t protest that you’re stirring things up by inviting her. They worked together, didn’t they?’

  ‘You’re right. He’ll just treat her like anyone else. You’ve seen him, Louisa, you know. He acts it out, the perfect husband. That’s what makes it impossible for me. If he was a lovable redblooded rake or a hopeless philanderer, I could tolerate it …’ Louisa pursed her lips in disagreement. ‘I could. I did love him. He can make himself irresistible, he still tries. I could be the loyal little woman if I had the right encouragement. But he’s never admitted anything. So what can I do?’

  Apart from the exuberant steel-cladded design, the arrival hall at Toulouse airport was like a London cocktail party. In fact, Michael reflected as he caught fragments of conversations, the atmosphere was better; there was less posturing, more genuine amiability.

  ‘Didn’t we meet at Brian Guinness’s?’

  ‘I do believe we did.’

  ‘I heard he just got married…’

  ‘Yes, so did I. Who was it? I didn’t hear.’

  ‘The same one, I think. Nice woman.’

  Ninety per cent of the passengers seemed to know each other and they also recognized Michael instantly but, not knowing him and not wishing to commit the appalling crime of scraping acquaintance with a celebrity, they ignored him. He felt excluded, and it was awkward. In fact, it was humiliating. The same thing happened whenever he stepped outside his own territory. He was hurled back to the age of seven, a playground outcast; he knew why, even then. He was better than they were. The truth was that he had cast himself out of the company of the other kids.

  When lessons ended, it had been a lonely childhood. His mother and father were both librarians, and one would always be working an evening shift. In addition, his father was secretary of the local history society, and detained by its business several nights a week. As a couple they were sufficient company to each other, and Michael was their only child. They had a small suburban house with brown wallpaper embossed with leaves. It was deadly quiet; the ticking clocks were often the only sound. The silence echoed in his head as he grew older; by the time he left the house roared with it.

  Other children had noisy, messy homes with siblings, pets, friends and relatives, fights and arguments. Most of the time he had only his books, and his mother in the kitchen cooking without speaking. His parents seldom had a conversation, never had physical contact; they were content, but their son did not know what he was. He came into the adult world with a hunger for human connection that was unlimited, and a terror of emotional imprisonment. He also felt perpetual anxiety on the score of acting like a normal person, not a refugee from the silent suburban ghetto of the heart. In time, he formulated a good dinner-party thesis on the emotional deracination of the intellectual class.

  Now, in the alienating airport, he needed a connection to take away the discomfort and looked in vain for a telephone. They were all on the far side of the glass wall of the baggage hall. His eye fell instead upon Debbie, head and shoulders above the small crowd of people waving to friends through the glass, and more conspicuous among them because she was still and dutiful, showing no positive sign of pleasure. To gain the time to telephone, he asked her to fetch the car to the door from the short-term car park. Serena was not at home; the discovery increased his discomfort.

  The late afternoon heat was blistering. He did not drive. He had never learned, a peculiar lapse in so dominating a man, but the service of being driven pleased him too much. In the car Debbie was already playing a tape, which offended him; the noise was alien, and he knew she was playing it to avoid having to talk to him. This girl ran the household efficiently and so he tolerated her, but her attitude offended him. As soon as she crossed his threshold, before he had even made up his mind whether he found her attractive, she had silently marked him down as a sexual predator and brought into play a repertoire of evasive behaviour. This was the first occasion on which they had been alone together.

  ‘Can we kill the music?’

  ‘Sure.’ One word only. She had presumed he would try to engage her in a personal conversation, which was insulting.

  At that time of day, when the trees cast long shadows across, the fields, the drive across country from Toulouse was exquisite. Suspicious of leisure all his life, Michael was an amateur in small pleasures, but when forced he could appreciate this kind of beauty. There were two magnificent bastide towns to drive through, half-timbered and arcaded, swallows plying above the central squares. Approaching Les Palombières the drama of the landscape heightened; the hills grew steep and craggy, the patchwork of crops varied with blue flax, yellow sunflowers and late wheat gleaming in the heat.

  Close to his house they picked up the old Roman road which ran dead straight for five miles. Overlooking a melon field stood the ruin of an immense medieval watchtower, stark and rectangular, angled so that at this time the sun struck it squarely and gilded the white stones. Here and there a small turreted chateau stood behind ancient mounds of clipped box, or a long gloomy avenue of spruces indicated that where they ended lay an old manoir.

  Each time he arrived he had a moment of regret that his house was merely a farmhouse, not something more imposing. Tamara Aylesham had transformed it in all but spirit. The courtyard was expensively paved and adorned with pots gushing pink geraniums, but the atmosphere of a farmyard hung about it; four centuries of mud and chicken-shit had branded the place with humility. The great double gates had plainly been built to admit haycarts, not carriages. How would it be to arrive by helicopter, like the Belgian chemicals millionaire whose spruce avenue formed his northern skyline? Or to sweep up a semicircular drive edged with t
opiary? The fact of Jane and her career then arose, grounded in this humble old building, and he remembered that he was not the kind of man who resented his wife’s success.

  It was early in the evening when he entered through the kitchen. Debbie, under cover of parking the car, contrived to go around the back of the house to the children’s rooms. The kitchen was cool, protected by its thick walls and tiny windows from the raging heat outside, and full of pleasant smells. The table was laid for the children’s meal. Michael noted the preparations for the next day with approval. He hung his jacket on the back of the carver chair at the table head, opened the fridge, broke off a piece of ham and picked a tomato from a dish.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’ His son stood in the doorway.

  ‘Oh, hi, Sam.’ He remembered that he was the kind of father who hugged his children, bent down a little and opened his arms. The boy seemed not to notice and homed in on the fridge.

  ‘Is there any Coke in there?’ He looked expertly around the abundant interior and found none. ‘It’ll be in the drinks fridge, right?’

  ‘I don’t know where your mother keeps it.’

  ‘It’s OK. I’ll get Debbie to get me some.’ After tearing away a piece of ham in his turn, the boy walked out of the room. Michael watched his high, fat backside without pleasure.

  ‘I’m through to the fifth level, Dad. It’s brilliant.’

  ‘Oh – that’s great.’ The words said one thing, the voice another. Sam was known as a big-boy. He was technically obese, but only just. He had a big belly, a chest fleshy enough to look like breasts and fat round cheeks above red cherub lips. He was white-skinned and needed spectacles because his sight was poor. This was not Michael’s notion, of a boy. Fleetingly, he wondered what kind of child Serena might bear. Michael saw a boy romantically as the boy he had never been himself, a skinny, grubby, cheeky creature with dirty knees and holey socks, who longed to run wild and be free. Sam longed only for food, drink and uninterrupted hours with his computer. It was not too late for him to turn out to be bright, but he was taking his time about it.