Harvest

by Celia Brayfield

  He saw Jane approaching the small group gathered on the pool terrace; her voice was high with concern. There was a general air of distraction. A domestic crisis, probably a missing child. Privately, he felt that his wife had no idea what a real crisis was. People ran about like chickens with their heads cut off, manufacturing drama to spice their own lives; these mundane anxieties were nothing in comparison with the business of a newsroom.

  By coincidence, Grace came out of the house after him, also looking distracted; he saw that she had something odd in her hand, a shirt in an individual laundry box. She was obliged to pass him. Delighted to find that not all his guests had fled, Michael took her arm fondly, saying, ‘Don’t go yet – you’re not leaving too, are you? There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘I was looking for Nick,’ she said, without the interest he had anticipated.

  ‘What’s that you’re carrying?’

  ‘A clean shirt for my husband.’ She emphasized the last two words. ‘Have you seen him?’ Would he register that the shirt was needed on account of his daughter? Not a hope. He just looked her over in a benevolent, proprietorial manner, a look which assured her that he understood she would have cared for him just as well if things had worked out differently.

  Before Michael could reply she saw Nick down on the pool terrace, and an agitated group gathering around Jane. The sight of him suddenly opened a small bud of happiness in her inner turmoil. Beside Michael, she descended through the garden and went to Nick’s side, grateful for his substantial presence.

  ‘Where were you?’ he muttered, taking the shirt.

  ‘I got caught up,’ was all she could give him in explanation.

  They watched Michael assume command of a situation in which he was clearly at a loss to know what to do. ‘Now what’s this all about?’ he demanded.

  ‘We’ve lost Xanthe, or rather I’ve lost Xanthe.’ While the rest of the company stood, Louisa was still sitting on her sun-lounger. She had changed for swimming into a masterpiece of structural and chemical engineering, white in colour, Grace Kelly in inspiration. Her tone implied that only ill-mannered children got lost. ‘She was in the pool with Emma a moment ago and now she’s disappeared.’

  ‘Debbie …’

  ‘I was fetching their night things.’ The suntanned face was devoid of apology.

  ‘Ah.’ Michael’s manner implied that a woman employed in childcare had no right to delegate her responsibilities, even for a minute. ‘You’ve searched the house?’

  ‘Just downstairs so far. It takes her ages to manage the stairs.’

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened. What was she wearing?’

  The last time anyone had seen her, Xanthe had been wearing her white swimming costume printed with red ladybirds and she had been in the pool with Emma, floating happily, wearing her pink armbands.

  ‘She must have made off as soon as I left, because there weren’t even any little wet footprints. Nobody who was about saw her either.’

  A few of the staff had been clearing away the last traces of the party, but they had not seen her. Antony had staggered back to the house but he was asleep and snoring in the chair he had adopted under the honeysuckle, a suspicion of whisky in a glass beside him on the ground.

  ‘No point asking him.’ Louisa kicked one of his feet disdainfully, provoking only a grunt.

  With a superstitious dread, Jane turned on the pool lights and they peered into the water, thankful to find nothing but a dead mouse.

  With an effort, Michael brought his mind to bear on his infant daughter’s motivations. ‘What would have attracted her interest? The frogs in the wood, do you suppose?’

  ‘Or the train.’ Courteously, Louisa sucked in a yawn. The problem for her was that she found children hopelessly irritating. ‘She kept saying she wanted to see it come back. She threw a fit because nobody would take her.’

  There was a toddler gate to close the exit to the meadow from the pool terrace, but no one had shut it. Jane felt a cobweb of guilt that she had been so deeply caught up with Grace, so attracted by the notion of breaking taboos and tipping the balance of power with her husband, that she had forgotten this simple precaution.

  It was that moment in a late summer evening when the twilight seems to fall like fine rain. The birds were roosting and in the utter quietness the only noise was from the caterers’truck, driving slowly up the trampled meadow. Soft grey clouds were gathering in the western sky and below them, in a band of clear pale blue, the sun was sinking to the horizon, its light fading through layers of vapour. It was not going to be a gaudy sunset, nor one to delight shepherds. The colour had bled from the landscape, green turning to grey, yellow fading to ash. The oak wood was already nothing but a shadow in the middle distance.

  ‘Go and ask them to turn the truck round and put on the headlights.’ Michael gave orders as he strode towards the house. ‘I’ll be down there in a minute with a flashlight.’ The staff obeyed him immediately, but the four women held back in misanthropic unison. You go on dear, Jane’s face said. Land on the beaches, take the bridge too far, shoot it out at the OK Corral. We’ll just stay here and keep the world turning round.

  Nick cleared his throat, anxious that he might be intruding. ‘Could she have put herself to bed?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be typical. She made a fuss about going down last night.’ Jane sighed, recalling that first tantrum. ‘But we’d better look.’

  In the fading light they saw Michael’s dark figure stride past the terrace and away to the trees, the flashlight beam raking the grass. ‘Someone ought to go with him,’ she added, looking regretfully at Debbie, who muttered a grim ‘OK,’ and left them.

  In panicky haste, Jane set off for the children’s wing, with Grace and Nick following, united in wanting to be with her. Charming and low-roofed, this outbuilding had been the tumbledown barn used for fattening ducks. Tamara Aylesham had raved over its cottage proportions and insisted it should be restored, brushing aside Jane’s misgivings about walls which for centuries had witnessed the annual imprisonment of hundreds of birds, who would then be force-fed with cracked maize until they were too dazed to clean themselves and too bloated to stand; the barn would stink of their slimy green droppings and the grain fermenting in their stomachs. In their last days some of the birds would collapse and lie wretched and bedraggled on the pallets which kept them from the worst of the filth, choking on their precious fat livers and waiting for the knife. Another universal quirk of husbandry; poultry were the woman’s job on a farm. Jane had been happy to agree with her new editor that foie gras was too contentious a subject for a modern readership.

  Now these horrors were unimaginable. The building had little white windows wreathed in roses and fresh white walls adorned with nursery friezes.

  They went first to the room the girls shared, where Emma was desultorily applying cream to her arms. Jane was about to criticize her for not helping when she realized that the child was exhausted. Her little face was grey and puffy, more like the face of middle-age than of an eleven-year-old.

  ‘I’ll look in Sam’s room, if you two can check in here.’ Jane left them with a distracted air; slightly timid in a strange house, Grace and Nick began to look under the beds and inside the cupboards.

  ‘Maybe she found something interesting to play with.’ One arm finished, Emma carefully squeezed more cream from the tube and began on the other.

  ‘You’re sure you didn’t see her get out of the water, Emma?’

  The child shook her head.

  ‘Did you see her at all – do you think she’s with Sam?’

  ‘She won’t be. Sam gets furious if she goes in his room. She interrupts his games. He said he’d pull her head off if she ever went in there again.’

  In Sam’s room, the unearthly light of the computer screen threw shadows on the white walls; the rest of the room was dark. Jane saw her son’s rounded figure sitting motionless at the desk, his lenses reflecting the screen. ‘Turn
that off,’ he commanded when she put on the light.

  ‘You turn that off,’ she snapped back at once, pulling the plug from the socket. ‘Your sister’s disappeared. Come and help us look for her.’

  ‘Good. I hope she drowned.’ He got off the stool and tried to grab the plug from Jane’s hand.

  ‘Sam!’ To her amazement, Jane felt a flash of fear; he would soon be as tall as she was, and he was already heavier. When Michael was at home, Sam had begun to swagger about the house in imitation of his father, living in his own world and expecting to be able to move his sisters around as easily as the gibbering images on the screen. When anyone crossed him he withdrew to the games. When the games were threatened, or unavailable, a sort of panic possessed him.

  ‘Stop it, Sam. We’ve lost Xanthe – this is serious.’

  ‘Interrupting me is serious. Give me that …’ He made another grab for the plug. She checked herself; finding Xanthe was the most important thing. She could search his room without his cooperation; this little power struggle was not the immediate priority. She let the plug drop to the floor and began to open cupboards, while her son, to her relief, reconnected his machine and settled down again with nothing more hostile than an irritated remark about having lost his game points.

  ‘You’re sure you haven’t seen her?’

  ‘No.’ He was intent on the screen. Conscious of valuable time passing, Jane left him and began opening the cupboards outside. Then she noticed the bathroom door at the end of the corridor move a few inches.

  In the girls’room, Grace sat down on the nearest bed watching Emma flicking at her snarled hair with a brush. What the child had said reminded her of the curious thing people did in interviews, when they felt interrogated by their own consciences, and so answered a question which had not been put to them.

  ‘Your hair gets tangled easily, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I like it messy. It looks really wild.’

  ‘Certainly does.’ And when people held out that way they were really trying to make you probe, so they couldn’t be blamed when the truth came out.

  ‘Debbie says it’s the pool water makes it tangle. She puts conditioner on it sometimes, but I like to leave it.’ Grace found it delightful, the way the little girl had sat down to make conversation, with a prim inflection and bright eyes and legs neatly crossed at the knee.

  ‘So Xanthe might have found something interesting to play with?’ Nick was wandering around the room with a contemplative face, obviously deep in thought. He was still holding his clean shirt. ‘Darling, why don’t you just put that on?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘The shirt.’

  ‘Which you kindly fetched from the car for me. I’m so sorry, yes, I’ll do that right now. Is there …’

  ‘We have a bathroom at the end of the corridor,’ Emma graciously announced, then continued her line of thought. ‘I mean, OK, Xanthe is a pest but you can just get away from her. Sam’s always on his computer, he’s obsessed with it. Actually he’s better when Daddy’s not here. Sometimes, do you know, he gets up out of bed, after Debbie’s put the lights out, and plays with it all night sometimes?’

  ‘Did Xanthe find something to play with?’

  The girl looked at her, obviously weighing the advisability of passing on sensitive information. ‘One of those needle things,’ she said at last. ‘Like doctors have. I did ask her to give it me, but she wouldn’t.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘She went into the bathroom,’ Emma went on, obviously reassured that nobody was angry.

  They reached the door just as Jane pushed it open, and the three of them entered at the same time. The bathroom, like all the others in the house, was plain white with tiled walls. Xanthe was leaning over the edge of the bath, a syringe held firmly in one tiny fist, the needle upmost, a few inches away from her rosy face.

  ‘Darling.’ Jane made a great effort to appear calm and friendly. ‘What have you got there?’

  Xanthe said something, a happy but unintelligible reply.

  ‘Give it to me, darling. Please.’ It was not going to work. A shadow of suspicion darkened the round blue eyes and the plump little hand clutched the syringe more tightly. ‘It’s dangerous, Xanthe. You must give it to me.’ The tiny figure turned defensively away. Then the child looked at the needle and appeared to make a decision; the little arm was raised and the syringe thrown crossly into the bath. Xanthe paused for an instant, burst into tears and held up her arms, wanting to be picked up.

  ‘Thank God.’ Jane snatched her into her arms and kissed her. ‘There’s a good girl, you threw it away. Good girl. There, it’s all right now.’ The tears became sobs, then developed into a scream, then began to subside to a fussy snuffle. In a few minutes Xanthe was calm, and obviously tired, lolling in her mother’s embrace with unfocused eyes. Emma appeared with the baby’s particular blanket, which had been draped over the side of her cot.

  As Jane left the bathroom, Nick went in and retrieved the syringe. ‘Where can I put this for safety?’ he asked her. ‘They’re a menace, these things. The kitchen might be the best place, if I can find something to wrap it in. I have to give them out at the clinic, and I hate doing it, I know perfectly well that twelve hours later they’ll be lying around on a building site or a back alley …’

  ‘You don’t have to be responsible for everything your patients do,’ Grace teased him.

  ‘Yes I do,’ he replied, only half in jest. ‘I certainly ought to have been responsible for getting this found before now.’

  ‘There’s a dustbin in the kitchen, the staff will help you. Can I ask you to do one more thing for me?’ Tenderly, Jane tucked the blanket under the sleepy infant’s head. ‘Let Michael know everything’s OK now? I’m afraid he’ll be getting a search party out from Saint-Victor soon.’

  ‘Of course, of course. Right away. Right. Can I just borrow this?’ From a basket of toys, he pulled a torn sheet of a comic and carefully wrapped the syringe in it, before setting off on his mission. Grace smiled after him.

  ‘You’re so lucky,’ Jane said again. Restlessly, the baby turned her head, her eyes still wide. ‘I’m going to walk with this one for a little while, to help her drift off. Are you OK for a while, Em? We’ll just go into the orchard. I’ll come back and say goodnight.’

  Out in the soft, humid air, Jane and Grace wandered side by side, listening to Xanthe snuffle sleepily. Among the young trees the scent of apples mingled with lavender. ‘This one is my last hope, you know.’ Jane looked across her daughter’s copper curls. ‘Emma was a problem the first minute, never slept, wouldn’t feed. They keep saying the eczema will clear up as she gets older, but it isn’t happening. It’s like I’ve been found out, you know. I was pretending I was happy, and then I gave birth to all the pain I was trying to hide and there it was, screaming at me. The same with Sam; I look at him now and all he’s doing is running away, just like me. He’s got his computer and I’ve got my work.

  ‘I even wonder if I love them sometimes,’ she said with resignation. ‘I do love them, I care about them, in a dutiful sort of way, but it isn’t a feeling. I’m all out of feelings, have been for years.’

  There was a pause, and then the young man in charge of the caterers came to say a respectful goodbye, adding his personal pleasure that the little one had been found safe and sound. They went out to see the lorry away, its lights flaring on the sunflowers as it climbed the hill.

  ‘Did you envy me, when you were with Michael? I suppose you must have done.’

  ‘Yes, in the beginning. Then I felt the same, out of feelings. I’m not sure I’ve ever got them back.’

  ‘You adore Nick now, don’t you? I can see it. You just light up when he’s with you.’ It had cut her to the heart to see the two of them fly together like magnets.

  Grace was surprised, but there was no mistaking Jane’s sincerity. There was a note of genuine envy in the observation, although it had been sympathetically delivered. ‘Yes,’ she said, to be polite
. ‘I suppose I do.’ The idea sat comfortably with her.

  Where the fuck was everybody? The house was empty, there was no one on the terrace. She could hear car engines, a few people were still leaving. Shitbags, all of them. All Daddy’s so-called friends were crap. They hung about because he was powerful, no other reason, and he was such a fucking egomaniac he’d never see it.

  Far off on the ground floor there were noises of people working in the house, but a claustrophobic hush lay unbroken in the drawing room. The light through the window was fading and she didn’t like the long shadows. Everything in the room looked menacing. Fucking microdot, whatever it was. Never, never again. Forget it, it was evil.

  Daddy was really, really angry with her. In the middle of throwing up, she had caught sight of his face with that vicious, fierce compression of all his features that signified absolute rage. And by now, of course, he knew she was pregnant. That doctor had told him. That’s why he hadn’t come back; what else would you expect from the filth Michael and Jane collected round them. Where was Stephen? He always took care of her, where was he now? Michael was coming now to look for her, sending people to blow her right off the planet. He didn’t need a daughter causing scandal all the time, not in his life. He’d decided, she had to go. Time to get away, get out, fast, now.

  The white shirt would show up in the dark, make her too obvious, but at least she had bare feet, she could move around without making any noise. That was cool, no one would hear her.

  Outside the house she felt better. This was paranoia, it was the stuff. Mr T hadn’t taken care of every thing, the trip wasn’t over. There was a rich red light over the sun-flower fields, and shadows dancing under the trees. The water in the pool was a sizzling turquoise. Pop Art colours. Hyper-realism. Even at a distance she could see every seed in the flower heads, every hovering beetle. No art history tutor she’d ever heard had mentioned psychotropic drugs and colour values but it was a really important connection. They were all on something. And not just the moderns. Even Michaelangelo – it was so obvious, the whole beauty of the Sistine Chapel was that sublime sense of universal connection drugs released in your mind. Maybe that would be her thesis, her contribution. Must get it written down.