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

companionship and the clean smell of the beans, the satisfaction of breaking them open, slipping her thumb down the cool velvet linings.

Only a simple supper, I put the potatoes to bake half an hour ago.

Richard came out and sat himself down at the table. He was dirty, straight off the farm. His hands were oily from some machine he must have been fixing.

The rain stopped, Kumiko said. And the sun came out. You should have come with us.

He had come straight off the farm, dirty, his hair ruffled, his sleeves rolled up. What did you do all day? Kumiko said. Were you only watching your wheat? She spoke lightly as if it were a joke, what he did. I found something to do, he said. Didn’t she know, there was always something to do on a farm? He asked how the fields had looked on their drive. Were other farmers’ fields as wet and beaten as his? Had it rained as much around Cambridge? Were there any harvesters out? Just one, Kumiko said, but it was stopped in the field. Or maybe that wasn’t today. Maybe it was on some other day they saw the stranded combine, she suddenly wasn’t quite sure, all these days and drives had become so much the same. But yes, she said, it had been just as wet there as here. Ah well, that’s something, he said. And then he went in.

They had the beans almost done now. Claire held the colander to the edge of the table and with the side of her hand pushed into it the torn green remnants of the pods.

Richard had never been much of a talker. She had thought that was a part of his being so practical. Even as a small boy, when he talked it was always about practical things. His questions were plain – what’s that called, or how does it go, not why – and once he had the name of the thing he could store the name and there was no need to say more, was there, because a thing that was named was fixed if not understood? He didn’t tell stories. He left the stories to his brother. He just saw, with his clear blue eyes, and named. And he played at making things. It was his little brother who played with words. She hadn’t noticed the silence until later, when he came home from school. But that was standard, wasn’t it? It was a stage, one thought. Boys went into a silence and then grew out of it. Only Richard’s silence came back now and then, heavy and awkward at times as his hands. She had seen his hands there, dirty, awkward before the girl, how he had reached to pick up a bean but dropped it as if suddenly aware of the dirt on them.

Her own fingers were black from the aphids that had infested the plants. It was always the last beans that got the blackfly. Too late now for them to do much harm.

Do you know, she said to the girl, I sometimes used to think that I should have taken us all away, after Charlie died. We might have gone to London, or anywhere. But then they got older, and we were here, and in the summer their friends came. They filled the house with friends, Jonny particularly had lots of friends. I’d come into the garden at night, sit where we’re sitting now, and look back at the lit windows with the lights on, knowing they were inside, and think that it was all right. I don’t know if it was. If I had done that, it might have been better for us all.

Then there would have been no farm for Richard, the girl said.

No, there wouldn’t, would there?

She did not know what it was about this girl that made one tell her such things. She had some quality that affected them all. Sometimes one almost forgot that she was Japanese.

Nothing to be done until there was a bit of wind. Or there were things to be done, on a farm there were always things to be done, but not the things that most needed to be done. After heavy rain, suitable drying conditions were required. Sun. A breeze at least. Not these doldrums. When there was warmth without wind the humidity just hung in the crop. Wind was what he needed, to move the moisture from the soil and from stalks and from the air. It was almost August. They should have been going by now. In past years they had the winter barley in by now. Some years they were well on with the wheat. One year they were all done by the fifteenth. The men’s voices echoed in the new barn. They had it all clean and ready, bins cleaned, all swept out. They had never had the place so ready, or so empty. The structure was an industrial one, none of the beauty to it of the old cart barn that had been there before, breeze blocks and steel, roof of asbestos sheets. A hard grey space, doors open, waiting to be filled. The concrete floor of the yard outside it swept almost as clean as the inside. The combine had been ready to go for two weeks now. The tractor stood alongside, the washed grain cart at the back of it. All his machines in order.

The land lay sullen. The green of the trees had deepened as the summer had progressed, heavy now, dead to his eye, even the gold of the fields heavy beneath a drab sky. No light, no movement there, not a hair of the barley twitching, but only the swallows skimming above the crop. There were dozens of them, swallows and swifts, you could not tell how many because your eye could not follow any individual long enough as they swooped and rose and turned and swooped back across