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

one another, but only almost see the pattern of arcs they made that broke the sodden air, and hear the high whistling calls. There was a field of winter barley close by the house. In places it had been flattened by the rain but the combine should be able to pick up most of that. The ripe heads had brackled some time before, bent back against the stems, darkening and drooping now with the damp in them. If they were left much longer and if the rain continued there would be new green here as a second germination set in, the grains sprouting even as the crop stood. He walked on to inspect the wheat in the next field. That too was ready, dense even at the headland. The yield on this field would be good, the price good, if only he could take it now. And get it dry.

The twenty-seventh of July, a full day of rain. The twenty-eighth, the same. The twenty-ninth, only a shower, and so on till the end of the month. The first few days of August began dull and threatened rain but kept dry and brightened towards the afternoons. Four dry days, but the following night it rained. He thought he heard the rain in the night and when he woke in the morning he went straight away to the window. The sky was cloudless but the ground looked wet. The ground mattered as much as the sky. He tapped the barometer on the way downstairs. Went to measure the rainfall in the gauge in the yard. Enough to hold them back a day or two further.

How many days before it’s dry enough to start? Jonny asked.

Depends, he said. Two or three. If we don’t get another shower.

And then, to get the crop in? Jonny should have known enough about the vagaries of farming to know that you could never predict a thing like that, but he was asking anyway.

Why? You doing something? Need to fix a date or something?

I talked to Jackson this morning in the village. He thought they might get the combine out tomorrow, get going then.

Jackson’s always a bit quick off the mark. I don’t expect anybody else’ll be going yet.

The girl was dressed for sunshine. She had on a little red-and-white skirt and long earrings, with her hair pulled back. He didn’t know why she had to dress up so when she was out here in the country.

It’s beautiful now, your English August, she said. Now that the rain has stopped.

The sun was shining now, the sky quite blue.

August in Japan is just too too hot and humid, she said. You don’t want to do anything or go anywhere.

Then you won’t catch me in Japan, he said. He had no interest in Japan, except as this girl made him aware of it.

He could not have had Richard’s patience. Even though it was a heavy, reluctant kind of patience, made of dragging the days through, precisely recording each morning the previous day’s rainfall. When do we start, he had asked. He knew before he asked the question that it was one that Richard couldn’t be expected to answer. But time suddenly mattered to him. In the weeks until then, time had not seemed to matter. Now it did, seeing her wake, dress, go outside, as if with each day that went by something might be lost.

Did she care that the weather was holding them there? That days were passing in which they might have gone somewhere else. Alone, just them, being themselves. If she was unhappy she did not show it.

Such a perfect morning, she said, putting on her sunglasses and hitching up her skirt, which was short enough anyway, to stretch out her legs in the sun.

Let’s go straight to Paris, he said. When the harvest is over. You said you wanted to go to Paris. He sat down in the chair beside her, put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes to feel the warmth. Then we can think where to go next.

Can we go to that garden your mother talked about? Is it still there, that garden, where Joséphine planted her roses?

I don’t know. I don’t know where it is, I’ll ask her. But the roses will be finished there too, won’t they, if they’re finished here.

And if it’s rained there like it’s rained here, and if any of the flowers are left, they’ll be ruined by now. Perhaps we shall go somewhere else.

He opened his eyes and looked about. His mother was gardening. She complained how the weeds grew in the wet. The weeds hadn’t stopped growing all summer. He saw her bent double over the flower beds, throwing weeds to the back of her on the lawn. Then standing, putting a hand to her stiffened back, but she looked happy because she had work to do, satisfied at the fresh heap of green. All of his life she had been doing that, gardening, standing, putting her hand to her back just in that way. As if she would go on like that for ever. So much tougher than she looked.

Shall I go and help her, do you think? Will she like me to help?

Why not? Though you’re not exactly dressed for it.

She took up the rake and raked all the weeds and took them in her arms and lifted them into the barrow. It made her feel a part of the place, doing that. Just for that time, no longer. Because she was always outside of it. And them.

Claire had a song in her head while she worked that was the song of the pigeons in the trees. A slow summer song that came back and was constant in all the summers that passed. That made all the summers one single summer in this place. From his deckchair Jonny was watching. He used to watch from the walnut tree – or was that Richard, who used to watch