Harvest Georgina Harding (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📖

everything that he did. But Richard was more English than he was. Or maybe it was only the surface that made a man English or not English. Once you knew him well you didn’t see that any more.

Claire said that Richard looked like his father. Handsome and fair-haired and blue-eyed. English.

All she knew about Jonathan and Richard’s father was how he died. That was all he had become. Whoever he was, was hidden behind it. So much of him hidden, even here in this house and in his family. Maybe his death had been in him years before, when he was alive as well. Maybe Claire knew that all the time. That was why she was so careful of Richard.

How long shall we stay now? she asked Jonathan.

I don’t know, he said. As long as it takes. It depends on the weather.

And when the weather’s good, how long then?

A week or two. You don’t mind that, do you, being stuck here? You could go somewhere if you like, go up to London on your own?

No, she said. That’s fine. I like it here.

It used to be his time alone, this time of day. His mother was never an early riser. When they were boys Jonny went out before him one day and never told where he went. Now he was the one who always woke first. But the girl was awake. The days began very early now in midsummer. She woke as early as he did, and she came to the window to draw back the curtain and look out. When he saw her there the first time he had thought that it must be the jet lag, that she was on Japanese time and that was why she was up. Not any more. And she was not alone in her room any more, Jonny was with her, and still she woke early and went to the window. She must just be a morning person. He liked that thought. He was aware of her waking presence within the house as before he had been aware of her pictures on the table.

On the headland where he had walked into the field the crop was thin and still a little green but here at the heart of the field it was ripe and dense. The wheat looked good this year, this his fourth harvest and the yield would be the best, if only this rain would stop and he could get it in. The stalks were strong and the leaf blades showed no sign of discolouration. The heads were thick. He broke one off, separated the sheath to look at the grain in it, rolled the kernel out from the husk, put it to his teeth. Ready to go. Only the ground was wet, slippery underfoot. There was water lying on the tracks and on the tramlines through the crop. He did not like to see water lying this time of year.

He had checked the barometer before he went out. He did that every morning, and again at night when he came in and sometimes again when he went to bed. A habit of the house. The barometer hung in the hall where you passed it whenever you went in or out, or just when you went upstairs or into the office or the sitting room. It had hung there so long that it did not look as if it would bear to be moved. It was an antique barometer, early nineteenth century or something, the kind that was made to look like a miniature piece of furniture, of polished walnut, but pieces of veneer flaked off in places, its face stained, the tiny glass flask that held the mercury slightly askew in its metal clamps. He didn’t know why they had bothered to make it decorative when it was a functional thing, but he liked its being like that. He liked its being there. It must have been there long before his father. It would have been there for his father’s uncle Ralph. It might have been there before Ralph too, already there when Ralph came to the house, for all the farmers before him, so many men checking it before they went out, walking across the hall, tapping the barometer, turning then away from the front door to go down the passage to the kitchen, take a cap from a hook and go out at the back into the yard. So many of them, over the years, repeating the same damn pattern. Pressure low. No change from the day before. The radio forecast had said the same. Risk of showers in late morning, sometimes heavy. The sky was a uniform grey. When he first looked out its colour hadn’t told him anything. It looked the sort of sky that might have cleared by eleven or might as easily have turned to rain. But once he got outdoors he felt that expectancy in the air that told him there was a shower to come. When he came back in to breakfast he made a point of tapping the barometer again, just in case.

The girl was making Japanese tea. Jonny had brought Japanese tea for her from London. It had a different smell from any other tea.

It looks better this morning, his mother said to him.

There’ll be rain later.

Oh, I didn’t hear the forecast.

Well, we’ll see how it goes. Perhaps it won’t rain after all.

Claire put his eggs before him, toast in a toast rack beside the teapot.

He took up his knife and fork, glancing up at the girl as he began to eat. And what are you doing today?

I don’t know. Her bright morning smile. I think Jonathan has a plan to go somewhere. Ely, I think.

That’s nice.

It was raining by the time they left. The rain came suddenly, without a change in the sky. Claire told them to take an umbrella but Jonny was optimistic. Jonny never listened to him. Thanks, Mum, he said, but it’s only a shower.