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

it, holds and swings it, and hurls the camera out into the mist. A black box turning, falling unseen to the lake below.

Here we are, home, Claire was saying.

They turned off the lane into the drive. There was the old iron gate wedged open. Probably the gate didn’t move. She never saw anyone try to move it. There was grass tangled about the base of it that must have grown there for years. Then they were past the gate and driving up to the house. There were the tall straight hedges like walls, and beyond them the garden itself. The garden didn’t look so beautiful as it had when she had left only two weeks before. Because of the rain, of course, but also because the roses, which she thought of as Joséphine’s roses but which were not Joséphine’s roses at all, had finished flowering.

I’ve put you both in the spare room this time. Take your things up and then come down and I’ll make you some tea.

She had gone to the fishmonger’s before she went to the railway station. They ate fish only when she had been into town, which she didn’t do often when there was just herself and Richard in the house; when it was just the two of them she tended to make do with what she could get in the village. Now that she had everyone home, she cooked with care. Fish pie. Family supper. Once the work started meals would be functional and hurried, left a long time keeping warm in the bottom of the oven or even taken out to the field. You used to make this, Mum, when we came home from school. Did I? Yes, I suppose I did. I’d make it beforehand, so I could just heat it up when we’d driven home. She had forgotten. It was one of those rituals, of coming home from school, when the things that were done filled in for all that had not been said, the missing and the separation. This was like the days when they came home from school for the summer. July weather, two boys home, the summer holidays stretching ahead. Raspberries from the garden, only now they would have lost their flavour a bit after the rain. Meringues and cream. They had always liked her meringues, and they were so easy to make, overnight in the Aga, these too ready before the holidays began. When the meal was over and they were watching television she took the dog out. The dog snuffled off into the dark and she followed. There was no moon. The night was dank, still. This stillness was no good for Richard. It was warmth and wind, drying air, that Richard needed. She walked to the border before the hedge, where there was only a thin scent from the tobacco plants. They needed warmth to bring out the scent. She had planted them for warm nights, aromatic flowers to draw moths in the dusk. She looked back on the façade, so formal and regular with the wisteria trained across it. There were lights in the sash windows all along, in the hall and in the sitting room downstairs, and on the landing above and in the bedrooms to each side.

Such a pretty façade. The setting for the illusion that was to have been her work. Here, Charlie, here we are, a happy family, two sons, my darling, one dark, one fair, like ourselves, and our fields stretching about us. Not quite all the land you can see from here, because the skies and the horizons are big. But enough. And we shall have a beautiful garden with hedges tall about it. And how they will love this place. They will be rooted here, in this piece of land which has been in the family for so long, in this place and in the past.

Jonny had not said how long his girl would stay. She had been careful not to ask. He had committed himself to working on the farm through the harvest. She supposed that Kumiko would be with them that long at least. Then they were to go away, travelling in Europe, until when she did not know. She hoped that he would bring her back after.

It was surprising, how things turned out. It occurred to her how many plants she had in the garden that came from Japan, which had crept in without her thinking where they were from. She had been coming to love things Japanese even when she had thought she disliked them. She had come to realise it only by their names: her tree peonies and cherry trees, the autumnalis that flowered so kindly through the winter; Skimmia, Pieris, Chaenomeles, evergreen shrubs that flowered in the early spring. Others, probably, that she hadn’t thought of. The wisteria itself, though she regretted sometimes that she had not put in the Chinese variety, which she now thought more elegant. A deep pink camellia. Joséphine had a Camellia japonica. There was a painting of one by Redouté in the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, Redouté who had painted the plants in Joséphine’s collections, whose paintings were almost more famous than the flowers.

He’s there in the field again.

Who?

Richard, of course.

This morning they woke in the same room, Jonathan in the spare bed beside her.

He’s always there, in the mornings, when I look out.

The talk the night before had been all about where they had been in the Lakes and what they had done, what hills they had climbed, the boat they took out on Windermere. And you, she had asked Richard, what have you been doing? Waiting, he said. Watching the weather. Watching the crop. (And now in the evening, she had thought, watching the rest of us talk.)

So there he was again in the early morning, out in the field beyond the hedge. Watching.

In Tokyo Jonathan was the Englishman. She thought at first that there was Englishness in