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

She planted the first of the roses the following winter, not long before Richard was born. They came bare-root from the nursery early in February. Richard was due in March.

Are you sure you should be doing that?

It was awkward, digging with that big belly sticking out in front of her.

Why don’t you wait till Billy comes? He can do that for you.

She thrust the spade into the ground again but the impact of it shot through her. She stopped, straightened, put one hand to her back, handed him the spade.

Charlie dug the holes then, two spits deep, and she unwrapped the plants from their hessian and newspaper wrappings, untied the strings and loosened the tangled roots, shaking out pieces of the still-damp soil of the nursery from which they had come. He put in a little muck at the base of the hole, as recommended in Sanders’ Encyclopaedia, and then she knelt and bent over her big belly and spread the roots across the broken soil and filled back in with a trowel. Then to the next, Rosa mundi to Charles de Mills. One after another, they planted the roses all that late winter’s afternoon. The day was one of those sudden mild ones, and they had noticed how the light lasted, how spring was on its way. As the sun lowered it caught the yellow patch of aconites beside the drive and made them shine.

Are we done now?

No, there’s one more. Roseraie de l’Hay. As the sun dropped it became cold. Her fingers froze even within the leather gloves. That pain came in her back again.

Later she would think that it might have been because of the roses that Richard was born two weeks early.

But it was a good moment for Richard to be born because Charlie had time for them. Wet weather, days of incessant rain, and Charlie was in the house. He built the fires in all the rooms, and for the first week or two her mother came to stay. She had barely needed her because Richard was an easy baby. He slept and woke and fed and slept, some separateness or containment to him, behind his blue eyes that would become bluer as the weeks passed. The house seemed a sure and safe place, with them all there and the lights on and the fire burning, and the rain outside. There was a man who had visited them just the day before she went into labour, someone who knew Charlie from India in the war, and he had left suddenly in the night. When he had left she had the notion that he had taken away some danger from them, that Charlie’s heavy winter mood had lightened. But perhaps that was only the effect of the baby coming. That he was happy, for those days at least. She remembered how his hands quivered as he first took the white bundle from the midwife, though they were such big hands that he might if he was more sure have cupped a newborn in one alone.

Then her mother left, and Charlie went back to his work after the rain had stopped, and she was alone in the house with the child.

They had been married almost two years. They had been wary of having children too soon. There had been so much to do, coming to the farm when Ralph needed them, establishing themselves, learning the life. Yet she had felt from day to day as she moved about the house and he moved about the farm that there was a space about them waiting to be filled.

She had thought that a child would fill the space but now he was there it seemed to her that the space had turned to water. That distance she had known between herself and the world, which had been the dry emptiness of the rooms where she had moved each day, the flat fields, the length of the gravel drive, had become a lake, a still grey lake. Now when she moved there was that slight resistance of water, and ripples spread out across the lake, slowly widening and smoothing, almost disappearing before they touched the shore. She woke in the night and fed the baby. She fed him again in the peace of the mornings when finally he slept quiet and long. In those formless lengthening spring days after he was born she had the sense that she, he, the two of them, were floating. An island had formed about them. And Charlie, for all his love, was a visitor to the island. He was one of those others, coming across, holding out his big hands with the smell of the mainland on them. He carried something from outside to her and the child, something separate, apart, that kept him apart in the present, that might yet have been a piece of the past.

Outside, on the shore that she could see from the window, holding the baby to see through as-yet-unseeing blue eyes, the gulls followed the plough. Even when the tractor was out of sight the birds made their trail in the sky beyond the young hedge, white over the brown soil. When Charlie came in the smell he brought with him was earthy and dark. The smell within the house it seemed to her was white.

In the whiteness, the baby slept. She watched, and saw his tiny being quiver all of a sudden as if he was not quite yet of this earth, not even of the island but of the air some inches above, between land and sky. Gravity seized him, deep in his guts, and he woke and cried.

Claire was up a ladder, tying a rose. Kumiko came and stood beneath. Put out her hand to the ladder to hold it steady.

It’s all right, she called down. I do this all the time.

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