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

deer across his shoulders – still strong, he must have been, for all that he had shrunk – and they walked out into the fields. When they came back Richard went into the workshop to make a cross. He worked on the cross for a few days. They were quiet days because Jonny was away somewhere, staying with a school friend. Just herself and Richard in the house, and he calm and industrious. He found some pieces of oak, put them together with a joint which he had learnt in his carpentry class, not nailed but joined, and he planed and varnished it, and then he carved on it the dog’s name, and a little lower down, the year it was, 1963.

How old was Rosie, Mum?

I don’t know. You’d better check with Billy.

So he found out how old she was and then he carved the year of her birth above the year of her death. He made it quite beautifully.

There wasn’t time for Billy to get another dog.

He got ill during the next term when the boys were away at school. She didn’t tell Richard how ill Billy was. He was an old man living alone. Sometimes anyway one didn’t see him for days. Nobody in the village quite realised how ill Billy was until the ambulance came. He died just before the term ended.

You should have told me. I could have come home to see him. I wanted to see him. You never let me see things.

At least he was home for the funeral. It was astonishing how full the church was. You didn’t know Billy could have had so many friends. They came in old cars and vans and on bicycles, and some of them looked as if they had come out of the past, rural faces of a kind that you thought you didn’t see any more, scrubbed and shaved for the occasion, arriving early and shuffling in, filling the pews from the back first. When she came in with the boys there was only space at the front. She and Jonny walked on up the aisle but Richard peeled off and squeezed himself in at the back. It was the first funeral they had been to. They had been too young, she had thought at the time, to see their father buried – you didn’t want children to see that sort of thing, they thought in those days, it was all too horrid for them, too much of a shock. But the boys were older now, not children any more, looking older and stilted and unlike themselves in their school suits. The light was bright in the church that day. It was a winter’s day but the low sun was streaming in at an angle across the aisle. She looked round when they were singing. The light from the high windows fell hard on the faces of the old men in the pews behind. It struck their bald heads and their whiskers and the lines on their faces and their gnarled hands. Richard stood out among them, a public schoolboy, tall and young and straight in the black suit which she could see was already becoming too small for him, hair so golden in the light, thick and golden and sticking up on his head where it didn’t brush down, his face smooth beside all those weathered ones, pink, cheeks shining with tears. She realised how he had loved the old man. She could see his mouth mouthing the words of the hymn but she wasn’t sure if he made a sound. She could see his shining face but she couldn’t distinguish his voice from the rest. There might have been a glass wall between them, she and Jonny at the front of the church, Richard and the old boys where the cold light shafted onto their pews at the back. He looked so tall – he was very lanky just then, before he filled out – the school suit too short in the arms, his long wrists bared and his hands so large holding the red hymnal. Why had he chosen to separate himself? She had thought the three of them should have sat together. Suddenly she saw that they were apart. It only showed now. They always had been apart, even when they had seemed together. Perhaps they had been apart from the beginning, but it was only later, looking back, that memory told her that. Or perhaps memory made it so, hindsight paving the way for the present. If you were a mother you looked back again and again, attempting to explain how it was now, seeing moments when it might have been different, if you had made it different then.

Looks like we’ll be able to go at last.

Go? The word confused her. Where were they going? They were not going anywhere. It was the combine that was to be going, the beginning of harvest. Later she would think that it was also the beginning of going. The beginning of the end of being becalmed.

Looks like we’ll be able to go.

She had drawn the curtain. The day was bright. No clouds. Jonathan spoke from the bed, sitting up, yawning at the sky.

We’ll be on the move now. Thank goodness for that. I’m sorry, I’ve kept you here too long.

Last night’s dew was heavy, Richard said. We can get the combine out there but we can’t start till lunchtime. We’ll have to wait for the damp to clear.

Claire was happy at the sound of their voices as they walked out into the yard. Men’s voices, her two sons’ voices mixing with the voices of the other men, the purpose in them of the work they were about to do. This place of waiting filled all of a sudden with purpose. The sound of the machines starting up. The tractors and the combine. The combine having to be driven out to where they would begin,