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

looped about over London, and then took a course north and east over the countryside until it reached the sea. It might have flown over Norfolk. Over the farm, for all she knew. She watched from her window at the edge of the wing. She understood now the patterns of the fields. Green pasture. Golden stubble. Brown plough. Fields where stubble was being burned off: a flickering line of orange flame, thick smoke spilling away, spilling out flat and white across shiny, newly blackened land. She saw that there must have been wind down there, driving the fire. Richard had spoken about the danger in that, how a single burning straw might carry fire from one field to another. How a farmer must look to the wind before burning the stubble, to take care that the hedges would not catch; that to be safe he must first plough a firebreak of bare soil around the circumference of the field. She hoped that the hedges were not burning.

There was something Jonathan had told her, when they were still in Tokyo, that he said he had to tell her before he left. She had thought that he was telling her something she should know before she could go to see him in England, if she was to go and see him in England. That was where he went wrong, she thought. It wasn’t her he needed to tell. Not she who should have been the one to know.

It was the last weekend before he left Tokyo. He was doing his packing, in his two-room apartment in Inokashira. He had packed in a big case all his envelopes and yellow boxes of photographs, and put beside it the black metal boxes of equipment. His camera was still out, and his few clothes, which he could stuff into a rucksack later. There really weren’t many clothes, she was always trying to take him shopping to buy him more – just a few T-shirts and jeans, and two pairs of shoes, one to wear and one to pack. His nice leather jacket, that he had bought when he first came to Japan, he would wear. Come and see me in England. Please say that you’ll come soon. Come in the spring. But she had said that she couldn’t get a holiday in the spring, not long enough to go to England. In the summer I’ll try, she said. She had been thinking only of a holiday then, not thinking then that she might quit her job and go for longer. And then he told her. He’d never told anyone else, he said, but he needed to tell her. He needed to speak the words. For himself.

He said that his father had killed himself. That no one said that, openly. It was said that it was a shooting accident. Except it wasn’t easy to accidentally shoot yourself dead with a shotgun. And in England it was a crime then. Suicide was a crime in those days, a shame, unspeakable. Maybe that was why people didn’t say, or maybe they didn’t say out of kindness, but they did say things about how his father was moody, how he had never been quite the same since he had come back from the war, though the war had been a long time earlier. They didn’t say it, but he knew what they thought.

How do you know it wasn’t an accident?

I know because I saw.

You saw him do it?

I was there just after. Where he was. I woke up early and saw him go out with his gun. And I thought I’d go out too, and I found him.

When he said that she couldn’t touch him. He was standing across the room, just looking and not seeing her, as if he was in a different place. And then he turned round, mechanically as if he had switched himself on again, and slid back the doors of the high cupboard behind him, reaching in to get something out of the back of it. She loved him very much just then. She wanted to go across and touch him but she couldn’t. He was so determinedly looking away. That was how he was. When he was in pain no one could touch him.

His voice was very clear, as if he was speaking a poem or something, not speaking to her, a girl across a room, or as if he was speaking out loud to himself because inside he was deaf. When my mother told us, she said something different. I knew that what she said was wrong because she said he was in a different place. She just made up a story. To protect us, I guess. And the story is still there. We all go along with it.

Later, in bed, in the dark, with whatever wasn’t yet packed scattered on the floor around them, and the two of them sleepless, she had asked him, Why did you tell me that?

I think I just wanted to tell someone, before I could go home.

So you’ve done it. You can go now.

Yes, he said, I can. And you must come and see me there.

But he had said what he said for himself and not for her. And what he said next made her a little afraid to go. I think my mother blames it on the war, he said, like people do. That he had a terrible time in the war.

Well, people did, didn’t they?

What?

Have a terrible time.

Yes.

And they brought it home with them.

Yes.

I don’t think it was only the war, he said then. I think it was more complicated than that. But it’s easiest to say, isn’t it? And turning to her, his head close, his hands about her hair. My mum might find it strange that you’re Japanese. Don’t worry though, she’s all right, my mum, she’ll like you, you’ll see.

And your brother?

He’ll like you too.

Perhaps they all three liked her for coming from outside.

She slept on the plane, and woke and