Harvest by Georgina Harding (inspirational books for women TXT) 📕

the south also when they went back to the farm. In the south rain was different, Kumiko saw, not a force any more, only rain. Claire said that it had been fine most of the time they had been gone. It had started to rain just a day or two before. Grey rain. The fields a dull matt gold because of the wet. More rain waiting in the sky in darker bands of cloud. Colour flat, shapes flat, lines horizontal. Like somebody’s painting she had seen once, only she couldn’t think whose.

So good to have you back, Claire was saying. Was it lovely there? Did you have good weather? She had picked them up at the station. She had not known until she saw them how happy she would be to have them back. They were driving home through the lanes. She drove a little carelessly, looking across to Kumiko sitting in the front, glancing back to Jonny behind, chattering because they were quiet, hoping to see from their faces that they had had a happy time together. Like when Jonny was a boy and she used to pick him up from somewhere, hoping things had gone well.

It’s been beautiful here till now, she said. Just till this last couple of days. Richard’s fretting of course. This weather’s not good for him. He was all ready to get the combine out before this rain.

There were puddles along the road, the hedges sagging, the nettles on the verges limp with the moisture. She had to brake suddenly at a bend when they met a car coming too fast from the other direction, stop and reverse to where there was width in the road to let the other car pass. Yet she went on talking, feeling the need to talk.

Do you know, we came off the road just there once, Charlie and I?

She remembered how happy two people could be, but how unhappy also.

Just here, into a snowdrift. That was in the dreadful winter of 1947. You can’t imagine how high the drifts were, looking at it all now. We had to leave the car and walk home.

You never told us that before, Mum.

Didn’t I?

He was looking out at the rain. All day on the train they had been looking out at rain. There had been so many homecomings, so many times that they had been this way. His parents before he was born, walking in the snow. Or a boy riding in the grain cart, on that same sharp bend. Two boys, one bigger than the other, laughing. The cart swinging round the bend and the surface of the heap shifting, the smaller boy sinking down open-mouthed into a golden quicksand of wheat, feet, legs, body, fear of drowning, grain in his mouth, gripping hard to the hard sides of the cart, coming home with his eyes red and running. Hay fever, his mother would say. From all the dust.

All the times we’ve driven this road, you never told us.

I’m sure I must have. You’ve just forgotten.

Perhaps she had told him, he couldn’t be sure.

This year he had offered to drive for Richard. He didn’t think they would let a boy ride in the cart nowadays. He would have to take care on the bend all the same, take it slowly so that the grain didn’t spill.

Well, it was a long time ago, she was saying. They were close to the house. Through breaks in the hedge on each side of the road came glimpses of Richard’s sodden wheat.

The accident had been her fault, even if Charlie was driving. They had walked home cold in the snow and the dark, huddled by the Aga when they got in, not speaking, each of them separate and alone. They had had a row. It was because of something she had said that Charlie had put his foot down too hard and come off the road. Always it seemed to have been a question of what she was saying and what Charlie was not saying, though it was what Charlie did not say that mattered more than anything she could put into words. She had said what she had said because of Charlie, because of whatever it was in him which was constantly with them and made her afraid. That was before family. Family had been meant to warm them. To fill the silences. Children to bring happiness, to make a way to the future. She was glad that there would be family now, this summer at least, her boys together, this nice girl here, Jonny helping out for these few weeks.

She recognised the trees that marked the site of the farm from a distance. Then the house came into view, with the barns around it, looking square in the centre of its land. She remembered which painter it was. It was Mondrian, when he painted landscapes before he painted abstracts. She and Jonathan had seen an exhibition of his paintings in Tokyo. It seemed an age ago that they did that. It made her sad, that it seemed so long ago. She thought, Mondrian was from Holland and Holland was flat; maybe you felt like painting abstracts if you lived in flat landscape like this.

She had thought the paintings were cold. Jonathan had liked them for their form and restraint. She closed her eyes. It had been a long journey. She sat beside Claire in the front, Jonathan in the seat behind her where she could not see him. Wait for me, she might have said, running after him up there on the mountain. Wait, I don’t want to lose you here. Now let me have a turn, she would say. Let me take a picture now. And he takes the camera from about his neck. And she takes it, hard and black and smooth in her cold wet hands. She holds it by the strap. She does not put the strap safe over her head, but only holds