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

He thought by the tone of her voice, what I say doesn’t matter. She’s not interested in whatever I can think of to say. Definitely, they were pretending.

There were big birds flying up from the stubble where they had been the night before. Buzzards, Richard said. They had been feeding on the dead rabbits. There were crows on the field also, but they stayed on the ground and didn’t fly up.

People didn’t like carrion birds, Richard said. People didn’t see that they had a purpose and kept the place clean.

There were skylarks overhead. Climbing in the pale air, beginning to sing. Should he talk to her about the skylarks? That would have been a nicer thing to talk about. Why was it that skylarks climbed in stages? Had he not noticed that before? Or had he always noticed it, known it, and only thought about it now because she was here with him? Because she was from outside, and made him see things differently. The spiders’ webs. The birds. Up the larks went to some level, and then they held there and sang, and then they climbed again, level by level, until they were lost to the eye. He was going to get someone out to plough the stubble next week. His mother said that he shouldn’t, because of the skylarks. She said that the skylarks needed the stubble to live in through the winter. But he had told her they seemed to do well enough.

See how blue the sky is now, Kumiko was saying.

Yes, it’ll be a fine day.

They were close to the spinney.

Come this way, come here. Let me show you something.

Perhaps they weren’t pretending any more. There used to be a house here, he said, taking her hand just so lightly and leading her in between the trees. He knew a way in that wasn’t too overgrown with nettles. He held back branches so that she could pass. Not skylarks over them now but rooks, rising, circling, cawing. There was an old chap who used to work for us, Billy, who remembered when the house was here, when he was a boy, and there was a woman still living in it. We used to think she must have been a witch. Look, this is where it was, you can just about see the foundations.

She did not say that she knew the place already. They had met him there before, on the track, but he must have forgotten that. They had been in the little wood, and when they came out Richard was driving by in the Land Rover, so handsome and casual with his elbow on the open window, and stopped and picked them up, and Richard had said that he still went shooting there, and Jonathan thought that he didn’t care. As if it was just a little wood where they shot pigeons and there once used to be a house. An innocent-enough place.

There was hardly anything left of the house, just some lines of brick and rubble in a clearing, a pit and a broken slab of slate with runnels in it that had been a draining board. It showed up better in winter when the undergrowth died back, when you might find bits of rubbish, old bottles and things, about the place. Once he had found a clay pipe. Would that be interesting to her? What should he say? What were they doing here together, pretending? It was early in the morning and they were hidden away in this little wood with only the birds and the dog to see them, and the dog had disappeared off into the undergrowth. He might say what he liked, just for this moment. As if they were only playing, only themselves to see or hear, out so early while the rest of the world slept. He didn’t dare touch her. Not yet. He talked instead. That made the moment longer. He told her how he used to come with Billy, when Billy put feed out for the pheasants. Billy liked to give the pheasants a little bit of grain, to draw them over from the shooting estates, from Jackson’s where the syndicate got young pheasants in every year for the sport. Pity Billy wasn’t around any more. She would never have known anyone like Billy. He told her about Billy, how Billy would talk. He mimicked old Billy. He used to be good at mimicking Billy, when they were boys. Now he did it again, shrinking and hunching over like Billy, pulling at the imaginary cap on his head, making her smile. She was standing where the sunlight fell on her between the trees, smiling. Her house was just here, boy, see. Old lady like a witch, we was scared of her, us youngsters. I remember coming to this door here, just here it was, and the garden, you can see where she had her garden, the pear tree there, and the well. Privy that way. Weren’t no bathroom o’ course. And when old Hannah died the house was let be. Falling apart good enough as it was. No point going and modernising an old house like that, was there, boy, out in the fields with no electric or water?

Now she was laughing. Moving between the light and the shadow. He thought of Billy taking a moment’s rest on the broken brick wall after walking out here with the bag of grain for the pheasants, his whiskery face and watery eyes. Billy in his father’s old coat. He told her how she would have liked to have met him.

Richard talked more than she had ever heard him talk before. He made her laugh. She had not seen him like that, so light-hearted, before.

More solemnly he told her how they had buried Billy’s dog. Rosie, her name was. Over there, he said. I made a cross. It’s probably still there if we look.

Then he stopped