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

I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Richard said.

The shower grew heavy and the long horizons closed in. They drove, quiet as the grey outside. Jonathan broke the silence. He’s right, damn it. Trust a farmer to know the weather.

Windscreen wipers, limp hedges, blurred fields. Somewhere along the way they passed a combine stopped in the wheat, only a stripe cut into the crop behind it. Some farmer had tried to get out before the rain but had been driven in when he had barely started. He drove on through the fens, long straight roads on embankments and deep dykes beside them. Sharp turns where you didn’t expect them, whose logic, he explained, was not to do with the lie of the land or the direction of the road but the system of dykes that you couldn’t see.

Ely loomed from a long way off. The town had once been an island, he said, before the fens were drained. All of this orderly farmland they were driving through had once been marshes. It had been a wild place of rebels and outlaws, but then engineers were brought from Holland to reclaim the land.

But it looks like an island now, she said. You could imagine sailing there, sailing up to it in a boat.

For a brief time the rain held off. The sky became luminous, layers of cloud tearing apart. He stopped the car and got out to take pictures. The town with its great cathedral stood out like an atoll above the shimmering grey flat.

Now I think that you are right to use black-and-white.

The gaps in the sky closed and the rain redoubled.

Ely was beautiful but the rain went on for too long. It rained off and on all of that week. If you like cathedrals, he said, we’ll see some more. So they went to Peterborough, which was not such a pretty town, and spoke about going all the way to Lincoln. They drove for miles and visited the cathedrals in the rain, and Jonathan took pictures. It was a pity, Jonathan said, that she could not see them with sunlight on them, with light inside, how the light transformed them. It was a pity for his pictures. Almost the only pictures he took were of the exteriors, where the rain some days stained the stone black and other days dissolved it into cloud. Claire came with them the day they went to Cambridge, and they saw King’s College Chapel, and there the sun came out at last so Kumiko understood what he meant about the light, how light could make stone seem so insubstantial. Richard might have come with them that day but he preferred to stay home. Why, they had said, what can you do there, it’s raining, or even if the rain were to stop and the sun come out, it would still be too wet for work. But he did not come. He had to wait for the land or the wheat, one or the other, or both – of course, she understood, he must have needed it to be both – to dry, and he stayed home for the waiting, as if nothing would dry out if he wasn’t there. It might have been superstition but he did not believe in superstition. She thought it was just that he needed to watch. He could not bear to look away.

To Claire it seemed that the day without rain had removed a pressure from the house. Or perhaps it was only that she had been outside of it, in Cambridge all day, or that they could be outside now, with the evening sky clear above the trees.

The garden was green and soft after all that rain. There were still deadheads on the roses. Some of the shrub roses didn’t drop their petals when the flowers finished, but kept them like ugly brown rags. She would get on to those tomorrow. There were others that might still be flowering if the rain had not got into the buds, though sometimes the damage was only superficial; if she gently peeled off the outer petals that had tightened on them like a brown skin she might still save the flower beneath.

Each year when it came to this time she felt the loss of June. The garden had peaked though the summer had barely begun. She started to think of the next year, how she would make it different for that one, find hot bright flowers for July – and yet she never did, or she planted them without love because they weren’t her kind of plants, and they didn’t thrive, and the disappointment came again.

Summer wasn’t hers. It was theirs, the men’s. It happened out there beyond the borders and the trees and the hedges, out in the fields.

I thought we might eat outside this evening, now it’s dry at last. It’s so nice out. What do you think? We might lay the table out here. We’re having such a simple supper anyway, as we were out all day. Some of that ham from yesterday, and these last beans. And mint, there’s mint in the herb garden.

The girl nodded but didn’t answer. Claire thought that she had spent much of her life saying these trivial kinds of things that required no answer. She had been brought up to do that, to believe that such talk had a purpose, that it was a kind of oil a woman offered to the lives of the people around her that smoothed the days. But what kind of purpose was that, when there was nothing at the end to show for it but only what hadn’t happened, the frictions and breakages that had never occurred, that might not have occurred anyway?

She took the girl with her and they picked the last of the broad beans. Sat at the garden table to shell them.

Just a few left. Enough for tonight.

It was easy, sitting there with the girl. There was the