Harvest

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘We didn’t know what you wanted to do about dinner? And where’s Michael? Everybody’s starving.’ Jane felt accused, but did not react; dear Louisa, last in the queue when restraint was handed out.

  ‘Well, we don’t need to wait if people are hungry. Let’s see what there is to eat.’ Jane strode to the refrigerator and pulled open both doors, confident of the bounty within. ‘Bayonne ham, cooked ham done with hay …’

  ‘Oooh!’ Emma forgot her game and came over, eager to carry dishes. ‘How do you cook ham with hay, Mummy?’

  ‘Marinated artichokes, broad beans with savory …’

  ‘Nobody does veggies as well as you, Jane.’ Miraculously, it was Imogen, speaking with her mouth full.

  ‘Pâté from Tamara’s darling savage piggies …’

  ‘Hooray!’ Louisa forgot her ill-temper. ‘I’ve been longing to try them.’

  ‘Well, everybody…’

  Jane was exhausted. On her pale face the shadows of tiredness were almost mauve; her dress had crumpled and her hair, although neat as ever, hung lifelessly against her cheeks. All the same, Grace noticed, she looked pretty and girlish in the light from the interior of the refrigerator. The heavy etching of strain had disappeared and her eyes no longer had a darkening of pain in them.

  In the eager commotion and the carrying of dishes to the table, Grace walked unnoticed across the room and, as Jane had directed, slipped the knife back into its home in the lowest hole of the block. At the sink she ran water over her fingers, then she felt hands on her hips and a kiss on the back of her neck. Of course it was Nick. ‘I missed you, you were gone for hours. Do you know it’s nearly ten? I hope you’re driving. That Pacherenc de Vic Bilh goes down a treat.’

  ‘I like that shirt on you.’ It was a dark forest green, a colour she did not remember him wearing before.

  ‘Do you realize we forgot something?’

  For a fearful second she thought that he had guessed everything, but then he showed her the present she had carefully wrapped for Jane the previous evening, the old butcher’s labels from Castillon market. ‘I found them when I took my case back to the car.’

  ‘Oh my goodness.’ She felt almost likely to hiccup with relief. ‘Shall we give them to her now? It is a good time, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course I’m sure. Much better now than when we arrived.’

  Clumsily, because Nick was still uncertain that these odd little bygones were a suitable present, he made, a little ceremony of the presentation. Grace saw Jane’s pale face colour with the first genuine pleasure in being a hostess that she had shown all day.

  ‘Oh! Absolutely divine! Look at this ridiculous chicken – wherever did you find them?’ Louisa seized the labels with rapture. Emma insisted they should decorate the dishes on the table immediately and Antony, whose mood was positively skittish, picked out ‘beautiful breast, 3 francs a kilo’and tucked it into the straining neckline of Louisa’s blouse.

  The feast commenced with enthusiasm. The cooked ham was massacred, the Bayonne ham mutilated. ‘Now you see why I’m not a surgeon,’ Nick said, dealing out shreds and corners with a generous hand.

  The entire party was inspired. Sam ate salad, at which Emma caught her mother’s astonished eye and put her finger to her lips.

  ‘I mustn’t drink.’ Grace covered her glass. ‘I’m chauffeur tonight.’

  ‘Suppose she asks us to stay over?’ Her husband was under the impression that he was whispering.

  ‘I want to go home tonight.’ He kissed her fingers; he had misunderstood her, and she was glad of it.

  The whole party was absorbed in eating. Conversation was fragmentary and punctuated with expressions of relish. Jane sat at the end of the table and smiled at the compliments, urging people to try her pickled lemon chutney and prompting the children to pass dishes, while a growing sense of detachment settled upon her. She was numb, she recognized. It was the same eerie isolation that came upon her after childbirth, a mixture of physical exhaustion and mental trauma. She experienced it always as a protected state, when the primitive survival instincts of the body kicked in and took over its hour-to-hour operation until her conscious self was fit to rule again.

  She reached for a bottle of water but missed her grasp, a failure which confirmed the theory. Her sense of distance had disappeared. One of her bitterest memories was driving home from hospital after Sam’s birth; Michael had been absent, and never thought to send her help. Her car was in the car park, she had already driven herself when her waters broke. In a fit of rebellious independence she had decided to drive home with her son in his carry-cot, and the road then, like the table now, became an interesting scheme of objects whose precise relation to each other she was unable to estimate.

  No one had asked about Michael. The household was so accustomed to his absence that it was natural to be without him. Natural and, it seemed, better; people’s natures seemed to flower more freely without his dominating presence. Even Antony, she noticed, was drinking in moderation and being an entertaining guest. He was giving an imitation of a yuppie wine snob complaining about an order which was hilarious, even to Louisa.

  ‘Mummy.’ Emma climbed on the arm of her chair and put her arms around her neck. ‘You look sad, Mummy.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Are you tired? If you are, why don’t you slip off and go to bed? Nobody will mind and we can clear up.’ Her daughter was talking to her in the same soothing voice she used herself. Jane laughed.

  ‘I’m OK, Em. I’ll be fine, don’t worry.’

  ‘But we love you and we want you to take care of yourself. Let me run you a nice bath …’

  ‘Not now, darling. It’s a very kind thought – maybe tomorrow.’

  Xanthe’s fretful voice came over the baby alarm, she was fetched and sat on Stephen’s lap while the ice cream was dispensed. A chocolate tart was remembered and as Jane was installing it at the centre of the table a huge crack of thunder shook the glass in the open windows. Rain hissed and pattered outside a few seconds later. People got up to watch the lightning. Someone threw the switches, leaving the room to the flickering candlelight. When the lightning came it was spectacular, great triple forks stabbing the horizon.

  The storm was in no hurry, and after a while the attraction of it palled and the wind began to gust, so that they had to shut the windows. Seeing the children shrieking for further excitement, Nick said; ‘Now, in our house, we have a custom on nights like this. We read to each other, like people did before television.’

  ‘When was before television?’ It seemed that Sam doubted such an era had ever existed.

  ‘Oh, a long time ago.’

  ‘Before dinosaurs?’

  ‘After dinosaurs. When my father was about your age, I should think.’

  ‘Don’t you have one, then?’

  ‘I dropped it when we brought our stuff down from Paris,’ Grace confessed. ‘And we never got around to getting another one.’

  ‘What’s your best book to read?’ Emma was looking at Nick with eyes made enormous by tiredness, as well as adoration.

  ‘My favourite is the book about the musketeers, at the beginning, where D’Artagnan sets off from just around the corner from our house to ride all the way to Paris on his father’s poor old yellow horse which everybody laughs at…’

  He got no further before Louisa whisked the book off the mantelshelf and slapped it down in front of him. It was opened, and passed around the table, and held up to the candles as they read. While Emma was stumbling through the secret recipe for Madame D’Artagnan’s special ointment which healed every wound except wounds of the heart, a new note was added to the drumming of the rain. Jane looked up at the clock. The train was on time. Grace had not heard it. She was looking at her husband with wet eyes, feeling poignantly miserable at the sight of him sitting around a long table with another woman’s children.

  A few minutes later, Nick was asking Antony about bra
ndy, and he began to hold forth on the subject, beginning cautiously by saying, ‘The taste of Armagnac is a difficult thing to describe, even for a connoisseur. The men who make it describe it as like a dancing fire followed by a velvet flame, which is extraordinary but it doesn’t say very much …’

  Jane put the bottle on the table, came around to where Grace was sitting and leaned on the back of her chair.

  ‘It is a more powerful brandy than Cognac. Like its country,’ he waved his glass to embrace the entire province, ‘and its people, it is exciting and given to excess.’ He frowned at Louisa. ‘And they say that while Cognac is like a pretty young girl in a cotton dress, Armagnac is a tempestuous older woman, who excites the blood and scandalizes your mother…’

  ‘Do you realize,’ Jane whispered, ‘what your husband has done? Years I’ve dreamed of this table like this, a whole family around it sharing a meal – not just eating in the same place, but sharing. Now he’s made it happen.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Grace was physically tired, and feeble after the high emotion of the day, but underneath that she felt oddly disconnected. Jane looked very pale. Her skin by the light of the candles was shadowy and her eyes seemed hollow and fearful.

  ‘Why, because I’m being emotional?’

  ‘No, just are you?’

  ‘No. I’m in shock, I guess. I feel I could sleep for a month.’

  ‘Me too. It’ll be a while before we can believe what’s happened today, I think.’

  They looked at each other without speaking for a few moments, feeling the strength of the bond which had formed between them so quickly and then been put to such an unthinkable test. So many secrets bound them together, secrets of Michael’s conjuring and of their own creation.

  Jane broke the silence, wanting to make it easy for Grace to do what she must; in a voice that was suddenly pleasant and social, she asked, ‘Will you be going soon?’

  ‘Yes, but…’ Surprise brightened Grace’s tired eyes.

  ‘I know you won’t be strangers. Don’t forget, I need you.’ There was a slim, cool hand on her shoulder and Grace pressed it.

  In spite of the late hour, the three children were bright and wakeful, particularly Xanthe, who began running around the table, laughing and inviting the others to chase her. Debbie persuaded them outside into the corridor to work off their energy, and in the temporary lull Louisa suddenly demanded, ‘What on earth has happened to Michael? He’s missed all the fun.’

  Jane would have liked to have said nothing, but she saw everyone except Grace looking to her for an answer. ‘Perhaps he’s sneaked away to his office,’ she suggested.

  ‘Who cares?’ Defiantly unconcerned, Imogen picked up the last crumbs of pastry from the tart. ‘If he wanted to be here with us, we would know.’

  In the face of the author of the outrage, no one cared to put forward the suggestion that Michael’s mood might have been affected by the disastrous events of the day. All the men suddenly looked embarrassed. Jane said, ‘Maybe I should go and see if he’s all right.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Louisa offered, standing up and hoisting the unfastened waistband of her skirt back into its proper position. ‘Maybe he’s not feeling well, or something.’

  From the empty office they went upstairs to the bedroom, then descended and looked around the covered terrace. The rain was still falling heavily; the terrace had no gutter and water ran off the roof tiles in streams. Louisa felt cold; shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Oh, come on. Imogen’s right, he’d be here if he wanted to be. He’s probably got out of the rain somewhere, or gone off to the bar in Saint-Victor to drown his sorrows. Let’s go back inside.’ Jane followed her without another word, curious that she felt nothing that would have been appropriate, no guilt, alarm or anxiety, only exhaustion and a persistent sense that everything was happening in another dimension.

  It was 2 a.m. by the time Grace slid behind the wheel of the MGB and negotiated the track to the main road. It was still raining heavily; visibility was hardly twenty yards. She drove slowly, finding pools of water unexpectedly at bends in the road. The gargoyles on Saint-Victor’s church spouted noisily into the street and the water drummed on the car bonnet.

  She poured all her concentration into the task of driving, relieved to have the events of the day temporarily wiped from her mind. Beside her, Nick fell asleep. In the garish light from the factories she saw the rain gusting across the road like a storm on a film set, curtains of water blown by the wind. A file of container trucks passed in the opposite direction, spraying waves of water over the low MGB, forcing splashes through the small holes in the soft top. She reached into the back of the car for a coat to protect her husband from the drips.

  Some miles further on and the rain began to fall steadily and less hard. Towards the end of the highway it eased off to a few drops, and she switched off the wind-screen wipers. The pilgrim road zigzagged across the hilltops, with cascades of water coursing down each side of it and puddles in all the potholes. The fresh light of dawn was gathering, throwing the far-off hills into silhouette. An occasional bird swooped low over the dripping crops.

  As they approached their village in the half-dark the car disturbed a field of geese and she smiled to herself to hear the ghostly white birds honking in alarm and scrambling away from the hedge. The tyres scrunched on the gravelly surface; here there had not been so much rain. The centre of the road looked completely dry, a silver-white ribbon leading up to their square church tower.

  Nick stirred beside her and asked if they were home. He sat up and rubbed his face, scratching behind his ears to wake himself up, yawned and reached over to pat her thigh. Water had splashed over her lap, and her red skirt was stained. ‘Well driven,’ he said.

  Gently, she ran the car across the empty village square and stopped in front of the Alhambra.

  In the cool kitchen the white cat was waiting reproachfully, accompanied by two black and white kittens. Grace put down two helpings of milk and they watched the tiny ones dive into the dish and withdraw in surprise, shaking their heads and licking their noses.

  For a while they trailed restlessly around their house, reassuring themselves that they were home and they were together. Grace was tired, but not ready for sleep. There was a tension between them, something new she could not identify. As she watched her husband idly picking up utensils as he reconnected with the kitchen she became aware of a peculiar dual emotion, both trust and fear; trust in his goodness, as immovable as the earth itself, and fear of her own frailty beside it.

  Outside, the sky was a faint turquoise colour. She walked out into the garden, enjoying the scents of the flowers in the damp air, watching the raindrops shivering on the rose petals. Nick made tea in the British brown teapot which all their French friends found so amusing. They went upstairs and she took a shower. He asked her to leave the water running for him.

  There were fresh white cotton sheets on the bed; some instinct had instructed her to change the linen before they left, all those extraordinary hours ago. Destiny was not a concept she enjoyed, but she felt that what had happened had all been inevitable, that to have tried to act in another way would have been to refuse her part in a natural drama.

  She began to brush out her hair. He came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and another in his hands, drying his arms. He sat on the bed beside her.

  ‘You look different.’ The blue eyes were examining her face.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You looked unhappy earlier. Now you look – I don’t know …’ She had the lucid, direct gaze of a small child, but he was reluctant to try to describe it. Words were her business.

  ‘You’ve caught the sun,’ she said, touching the soft skin by his eyes.

  ‘That was an awful day. I’m sorry we went.’

  ‘No, I think we had to do it, don’t you?’ Of course, in the deep, instinctive level of his mind, he knew everything. There had never been any secrets between them, that had only been
another illusion of her conscience. The invisible barrier which had kept them apart against their will had dissolved. She said, ‘Your breath smells of ginger,’ and reached up to kiss him.

  His skin felt new and his mouth fresh. This time their desire was directed by a mystical sense of harmony. They wanted to be simple, and affectionate; all the most ordinary acts had the dazzling glamour of new love. The touch of skin to skin was thrilling, the movement of lying down together was exquisite. All technique was forgotten. The first instant of joining their bodies passed like a flash of light. They threw themselves into their love as if into a river where they would dissolve into each other, and into a new life.

  The morning over Les Palombières brought a misty precipitation that was not quite rain. The entire sky was packed with fluffy, light grey clouds, lying in ridges like a ploughed field.

  Jane woke late to find that Emma had made coffee for her; regretfully, she sent the child away to play while she prepared herself for the day ahead. It was already ten o’clock. She had been sunk in an exhausted sleep. The first emotion of which she grew aware was a gentle satisfaction connected to Imogen. From the day Michael had entered her life his daughter had haunted them, an unquiet spirit who would not be consoled. Jane had denied the guilt, but it had never left her. Part of her blamed herself, part of her argued that in becoming Michael’s lover she had expelled Pia from her daughter’s life just as much as he had.

  Now that burden on her conscience was lighter. She had done something for Imogen at last, something of much more significance than the daily chores of parenthood. She had taken a great risk for the girl’s sake as well as her own. At the same time Imogen herself, after the worst of her vengeful outrages, had felt regret for the first time. There would be more suffering for her, but perhaps after it the time for healing would come at last.

  In her numb, automatic state, Jane slowly recalled the plan she had discussed with Grace in the bad dream of the evening. She was preparing to drive into Saints Victor to report Michael missing, and was backing the car out of the garage, when she saw another vehicle coming down the track, a police car. The mayor of Saint-Victor got out of it, followed by the young officer who this year had been stationed on the roundabout on market days.