Harvest

by Celia Brayfield

  He took a year out of education, half to earn money and the rest to spend it travelling, intending to study the vernacular building of primitive cultures. Imi went down to the school bakery with a bag of grass and tipped it into the mixer processing the dough for the muesli loaves, thus succeeding in her long-held ambition to be expelled. He was surprised that Michael allowed her to accompany him, and astonished that his sole provision for the trip was an American Express card. No advice, no friendly telephone numbers, no state-of-the-art backpack or manual on travelling for ten dollars a day, just unlimited credit.

  They travelled northwards, up the American continent, from Patagonia to Rio de Janeiro, across to Peru and up to Mexico, looking at cave-dwellings, slum shacks, turf huts, shelters of palm thatch and villages of mud brick, filling up his notebooks while she filled her head with wonders. ‘Why can’t we live like this forever?’ she asked him, several times a day. Her white skin acquired a smoky, yellowish tan, her hair became long and tangled; she took on a gipsy look. She sang songs on the bus and people smiled at them.

  From Mexico they went to Texas, left behind the trains, buses and boats, and needed to hire a car. ‘I think we should get whatever’s most expensive,’ she told him as they looked around the airport for the Hertz desk, ‘because we’ve only got a month more and my father won’t get the bill until we get back, so we can spend whatever we want, can’t we?’ Her tone was ridiculously conspiratorial. He had the impression that now they were in familiar surroundings, the months of being away from her father, and therefore unable to raise his anger, had suddenly become uncomfortable.

  ‘But I don’t want more than what we need,’ he argued.

  ‘Yes but I do. And I’ve got the card. And I have to sign it.’

  ‘Your father will think I’m exploiting you.’

  ‘He won’t. He’ll think I’m exploiting him and he’ll be dead right. So what?’ She left him and stalked towards the desk alone, littering tattered documents from her purse as she searched for her licence.

  She went on a spending spree. After the car she insisted on good hotels. She bought new clothes, and some good meals with wine which, after their diet of street food and fruit, made her bilious. Fretfully, she insisted on flying to their next destination, and bought them a month’s pass ticket because it cost more.

  Concern for her, curiosity and shame at participating in this aggressive extravagance all combined to motivate him. He began to plant the idea in her mind. ‘This is an amazing ticket, you know. We could travel anywhere we wanted on it.’ Then a few days later, ‘All these plains tribes are pretty much the same. I’d love to see how coastal Indians lived – how they coped with the climate up north.’

  She asked him where the study centres were and he mentioned a reservation outside Seattle. ‘Well, why don’t we go? It’s only four hours. Then we can get a direct flight to New York or something.’

  When they were airborne over the city she looked out into the impenetrable grey cloud for a long time. Then, in the same sly tone as she used to propose charging up luxuries on the card, she said, ‘My mother must be down there somewhere. Why don’t we get her number and just drop in? Wouldn’t that be something?’

  ‘Suppose your father found out?’

  ‘Well, suppose he did? Haven’t you ever thought it was strange that he never fixed for us to meet or anything? In seventeen years? He was pretty pissed off with her for leaving, that’s for sure. I mean, nobody’s supposed to leave my father, are they?’

  Her courage failed later and Stephen had to make the calls. Pia Franklin was her name, and the address was East Point. A man answered, a light, resonant, friendly voice. ‘My wife is teaching right now. Can I have her call you?’ The colossal significance of the conversation made them all, even Imogen, excessively calm and polite.

  Within a few hours it was arranged. In steady rain they took a ferry across the green-grey water of the Sound, a journey of an hour or so. At the dock a man in denims and worn-down boots, young with long light brown hair, came towards them with an open smile, and drove them into the forest. Huge conifers stood straight and uniform like columns, the downpour dripping from their spines. The car needed lights at midday, so little light reached the ferny floor under the trees, yet even in the gloom the green was brilliant. They breathed in the resinous scent, mingled with wet earth and decaying wood.

  She was almost as tall as her daughter, finer-featured and very lined, with round blue eyes which gave her face a childlike cast. As a young woman she must have been a dazzling beauty and now, Stephen felt with astonishment, she was the most purely seductive woman he had ever encountered. Her manner was gentle and nervous, but it was impossible to feel awkward with her she had a way of drawing back which lured you forward. Within minutes she was talking quite naturally of how she had left her daughter.

  ‘I was a mess, quite frankly. Every morning I woke up and I thought I was going to kill myself. You know, don’t you, you would have had a sister, but the first child I had with Michael just died and when I look back I can see now I was going through terrible grief. My mother was desperate for me to come to her. Somehow I convinced myself you didn’t deserve to suffer because of my suffering, and so when at last I went to my family I left you with Michael. And then of course when I was better and I sent for you he fought me.’

  ‘Yeah, he would do that.’ Imogen went through the whole thing as if it was another trip, extremely withdrawn. She had never really spoken of her feelings.

  Michael’s wrath, when they returned, was based on the Amex bill. He was lofty, eloquent, contemptuous and, Stephen thought, delighted to have a legitimate focus for his feelings. The bill was certainly huge, but, as Imogen coolly pointed out, a speck compared to NewsConnect’s profits and his own salary.

  In private, Michael turned different weapons on Stephen. ‘Do you realize you have done that girl irreparable emotional damage? Have you any idea what a trauma it is for her to even think about her mother, let alone have contact with her? Don’t you see that always, in the back of her mind, she carries the stigma of what her mother is, and the fear that she will be the same? Taking her out there – and let’s talk like men, shall we? I doubt very much that it was her idea – that was the most destructive action I have ever seen one person take against another. Whatever happens now, I shall hold you responsible. You have undone everything I’ve ever done for Imogen.’

  Stephen took it all in silence, saying only, ‘I thought it was a successful visit. They were good together.’

  He rose in Imogen’s estimation for making her father so profoundly angry. She was beginning a new mode, in which she would turn her violence in on herself, but in its early stages it looked promising to both men. There was a sense of purpose about her, and within a few weeks she advanced a proposal to study in Paris, supported by a letter of acceptance from a private college issued on the strength of her portfolio and the recommendation of her former teacher.

  Beside her sleeping husband, Grace thought about Jane Knight. What was she planning? What did she know? They had danced together for eight years. Jane stepped forward, Grace stepped back, then Grace stepped forward, and Jane stepped back, blindly, neither wanting to see the other or know the other, intimately separated by Michael.

  First came the idyllic era, before Jane was pregnant, when Michael had talked about their marriage as an error of judgement which he would soon correct, regrettable, forgivable, a reaction to the trauma of his first marriage. ‘I thought it was the right thing to do for Imogen, I thought she needed a woman’s care as well as mine. It’s hard to explain to a tiny child that her mother has just – well, run off and dumped her. She was showing signs … she was difficult. Still is.’ And he sighed, holding back from accusing Jane.

  Soaked, saturated, macerated in the wonder of their love, Grace asked no questions. She had felt no jealousy. She evaluated her lover’s wife as a nice, intelligent woman, a touch overcontrolled perhaps, but supremely pretty, sure to be remar
ried immediately Michael left her.

  Then Jane got pregnant, and Michael, having made much of how his wife had no sympathy for his yearning for more children, particularly a son, announced the fact by complaining of it to Grace, over the studio internal telephone. ‘I can’t come over today, Jane’s pregnant which apparently means she can’t deal with the architect this evening.’

  After a dumbstruck minute, which Michael did not register because the studio director was talking to him, Grace managed to say, ‘Do you know what you’ve just told me, Michael?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re having to extend the house for the baby. It’s a real drag, I was looking forward to seeing you …’ Irritation, of quite a high order; almost on the scale of getting a car clamped.

  ‘Michael.’ She remembered shivering, trying to pull the cuffs of her jacket over her hands because they were suddenly cold.

  ‘What? Is something the matter?’ Now moving into contrition. A man’s place is in the wrong. Whatever I’ve done I’m sorry, now can we get on with the real business of things?

  ‘What did you say about Jane?’

  ‘Oh. Of course. Of course. Listen, stay there, I’m coming over, I must see you …’

  To avoid him, she left the building, got in her car and set off for home. Her house was five minutes away from the studios, and somewhere on the journey she lost consciousness. The car had hit a brick wall, mercifully not a well-built one. Grace joked afterwards that she owed her life to the decline of craftsmanship. The wall collapsed, but Grace was in hospital for a month with a fractured skull. Flowers arrived from Michael, and he visited every day, sometimes twice; curious that he had more time when sex was not involved. He looked tortured, and strangely, powerfully fascinated by her in a new way. The injury he had done her seemed to open more paths between them. Her scars welded them together.

  Soon it became apparent that he was boiling with resentment that Jane had taken an initiative and tied him to her, at least for the next few years. When she gave up her job and spent the summer in France, both these actions angered him further. ‘I don’t know what she wants of me,’ he said repeatedly. ‘She’s unhappy but she won’t talk to me. She just folds everything inside herself and goes away.’

  Grace spent the summer at Jane and Michael’s house, at Michael’s insistence. ‘It’s my home,’ he said, ‘I want you in my home.’ When the baby was born, Grace could hardly breathe for jealousy. She took action, gave up news, gave up producing and took a researcher’s job with a Boston-based company making religious documentaries. There was a lot of travelling. By chance, she met Jane in a restaurant. ‘Michael is always saying how he misses you,’ Jane had told her, girlish and timid beside the famous chef. ‘His new producer panics, he always says how calm you were.’ What do you say to your lover’s wife when she tells you he misses you. ‘How kind of him.’ Out in Nepal, Grace began an affair with the director.

  Jane wrote a book, and it was a hit. Grace, who had nothing but a journalist’s apprenticeship on a suburban newspaper behind her, had felt personally disappointed. A woman with a first in philosophy ought to be above the domestic arts; the woman whose intellect Michael always said he respected ought not to become a professional housewife.

  Michael founded NewsConnect, ceased to be a sleek television star and became a desperate, needy creature who had to talk over every decision eight times a day with Grace and begged her not to desert him. He generated a storm of emotion which blew away her attachment to the director like dust. She listened, advised, soothed, complimented, despaired and began to resent Jane because she was not taking care of Michael.

  Jane had another baby, a son. Michael was enraged, moved into Grace’s house for two days, then took a business trip to New York and returned to Jane. ‘You were here, Michael,’ Grace insisted.

  ‘I know I was. I can always come and see you when I have to go to the airport.’

  ‘No, you’d left home, that was why.’

  ‘Jane’s got her hands full with the new baby. I shouldn’t stay away longer than necessary, love.’ That horrible, clipped way of speaking, meaning I must get off the phone, I haven’t time for these guilt-trip conversations.

  ‘No, listen to me. Michael, listen. You had left, you said you had left, you said you were angry, that it was all a trick, that you couldn’t bear to be there …’

  ‘Yes, I know. But you see I can’t leave her, don’t you? I need you, Grace, I love you, you must believe that. But I have to stick this out. Be patient.’ She grew to hate the telephone, it was impossible to understand anything over it. Because she forced herself, Grace had another affair, this time in the Solomon Islands. When she got home, Jane had made a television series, Farmhouse Kitchen, and Michael had taken up all the tape on her answering machine. There were postcards from all over America. NewsConnect business had taken him to New York, Chicago, St Louis, Los Angeles. He called half an hour after she walked into the house, so hesitant, so humble that she was actually overwhelmed with guilt, until he came to her house and made love to her in a completely different way. He called her ‘honey’ and ‘baby’. Grace now felt superior to Jane, because at least she herself knew the truth, and because she was, as she considered it, cheating on Michael.

  Her own pregnancy was unintentional, despite the advice of friends, and on a low-dose pill. If it had been a boy she would have had to abort him for risk of feminization. She did not know until the morning of her thirty-second birthday, when she woke up in pain in a clammy, sticky, blood-soaked bed. Very difficult to know whose child it would have been. She was shocked at that; that was for illiterate alcoholic underclass mothers, not a professional woman like herself with a shining career path and extra pages in her passport. Jane Knight’s face was on the cover of a magazine at the doctor’s surgery. Recipes for autumn fruits.

  Round and round each other their lives had twined. Now clearly Michael denied each to the other, interpreted their feelings and reworked their actions according to his own imperatives. A minuet in a haunted ballroom.

  She had lost many friends. The affair had been impossible to discuss. He was too much of an icon, too admired, too envied, too publicly married, and the glamour of his achievements overcame judgement. If ever she opened the subject, people reacted to Michael’s status, not to her emotions. Even her mother had been dazzled.

  Irina was Polish, a teacher of arithmetic to small children during the week. On Saturday she taught the language to the community’s children at the Polish Centre, and on Sunday she taught Sunday school at St Michael’s church hall. Plump and lazy, never inclined to any kind of grooming, she viewed Grace as a vexing, incomprehensible girl sent to test her faith. Her home was a flat with a winding dark corridor where smells lingered, two cheerful mongrel dogs sleeping in warm corners and a dusty crucifix over every door. When Michael first telephoned Grace at her mother’s home, twenty-seven years of moral authority evaporated.

  ‘Gracie-john, it is Michael Knight on the telephone. Your Michael Knight.’ She gave a little giggle, black-rimmed eyes round with wonder, hips rolling as she weaved between the cluttering kitchen chairs. ‘Gracie-john’ was because Irina added the name of her husband to the names of her children and dogs, although he had abandoned them all before Grace’s memory began, to go to Canada and die by falling drunk off a railway bridge.

  Grace had wanted her mother to protect her from Michael, to fly into a rage, scream about sin and damnation, accuse him of ruining her daughter, but instead she was announcing the call with almost servile pleasure. ‘Hurry, hurry, don’t keep the man waiting for you! Leave washing the dishes, I do it, go! go!’ Grace had felt utterly abandoned at that moment.

  Michael’s women did not fare well. By the end of the affair, Grace knew most of her predecessors, and the rivals who had accounted for the odd lacunae in their love. Most of these women had barely crawled from the wreckage. Some had found sanctuaries; one was more or less an alcoholic, another espoused Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism.
They withered quickly, getting the same hard look around their eyes that went so ill with their gentle natures. None was married. Grace became thirty-two. She had propelled her career into a backwater and it had halted. Finally the opportunity in Paris had appeared; a change of medium, but by now the entire establishment of television was tainted and she left it gladly. Grace heard of the job the day after the miscarriage; made reckless, she had actually telephoned the editor and sold herself to him in five minutes, followed by a lunch.

  ‘Good,’ Michael steeled himself to say when she told him. ‘It’s just the sort of challenge you’ll enjoy.’ She remembered the wounded look in his eyes, the almost hysterical regret in his voice.

  ‘I’m not doing this to book myself off your conscience,’ she said tartly. ‘This is the end for me, Michael. I shan’t come back. I don’t like to say goodbye on the …’

  ‘Say au revoir, then.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  ‘I see.’ Very sober, his last words to her, but incorrect. She knew he could not understand. If he had known how he was destroying her, he would never have begun the process.

  When Grace ran away to Paris she immediately understood that she had entered a refugee camp. They were charming people, her new colleagues, working for the international news media, and they were also fleeing disaster. They had left behind in the past the results of their defects of character – their stalled careers, failed marriages and debts – and decamped to the forgiving arena of foreign assignments where they could offer the special lure of the exotic as a rationale for their choice. For a while, they were the true companions of her despair.

  Their society comforted her. Here were others who had suffered and kept their own secrets. At the end of each day, when their deadlines had passed and their telephones were quiet, they met up in cafés and told each other how much they adored France, how terrible things were back home. No stigma attached to loneliness, for they were all alone and deracinated, and so there was an automatic bond between them, and a warm convention of companionship which took care of birthdays, illness and New Year’s Eve. She had been happy to adopt their company, drink too much for a while and let her wounds close.