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

up there? The tree was old now, the lower branches gone, no good for climbing any more.

Why don’t you pick us some raspberries, instead of just sitting watching others work?

When the girl had filled the barrow she went with Jonny. Claire didn’t mind. She was used to working alone. When she worked alone her thoughts disappeared into the work for whole stretches of time in which there was only the touch and the smell of the leaves and the soil, the sensations of the here and now and nothing before – or of all the time that had gone before held in the here and now.

The two of them looked happy together, so far as she could see. Was that a good thing or not? Would it mean that this girl would take him away? And how would it be, for whichever one of them it was, to live one’s life elsewhere, with someone from elsewhere? What would they say to one other as time went on, day to day, in a marriage? In a marriage, did people understand one another more or less as time went on?

The swifts arced across the lawn. She knew they were there by their screaming calls, even if she did not look up to see them. There were not so many other birds to hear this late in the year, apart from the pigeons. The pigeons persisted all through the day in the trees about the garden, their cooing passing from one tree to another. Even in August the flutter of their mating persisted in the foliage of the wisteria where they had their nests, hatched halves of white eggs to be found on the grass below all through the summer and into the autumn if the autumn was mild. The sound of the pigeons seemed to her like a drug, repeating as if time did not exist, from when daylight began until it ended. Almost, she felt as she worked, that the sound was inside her. It had been so all these years she had lived here. She had lived every summer against the sound of the pigeons. Lulled year on year. Looking down to the plants, to her hands on the soil. Not looking up but knowing the creak of their wings as they flew overhead.

When she went indoors to make lunch she experienced the silence there as a sudden loss. It seemed strange to her, that all this had been here, all of the day. That all this was really so. This old dim house. The sitting room whose open door she passed, lit green from the leaves of the wisteria that hung down over the windows. These rooms, this table, these chairs. These cups by the sink.

In the corner of her eye she saw Richard coming back across the yard. Even now there were times that she mistook him for another man – or if not mistook, then remembered the other man in him. He was so like him in his walk, and much the same age that he had been when they came here and took on the farm. Dogged like him, or maybe it was the work that made them that. It was such material work, this dealing with soil and machines, with plain intractable things, the results of it all there before the eyes. All so tangible. (And yet she remembered that Charlie had a dream in him once, or was it just his youth? She did not know if Richard ever had a dream.)

It had been at this time of the year that she had first realised that she was pregnant with him and yet even the having of a child had seemed only a possibility – not tangible, only a flimsy idea, herself flimsy beside the solid fact of the farm, so that for days she had moved about with the secret gathering weight inside her, moving as she did now, slow, weeding to the sound of the pigeons, moving in and out of the house, sleeping under the weight in the afternoons, not telling until the harvest was almost done, as if she inhabited a world less real than Charlie’s. The harvest was much further on that year, the fields around them already stubble. They were walking in the evening across the stubble when she told him, the sound of some other combine still going on a neighbouring farm and the cloud of it in the distance. I think I’m pregnant, she had said, reaching for his hand, and he took her in his dusty arms, his shirt smelling of sweat and grain. (And even then was his own possibility there in him, his own secret withheld, the dark embryo of what was to come?) And now here was she, and her two sons, and Charlie long gone, and wheat out there once more waiting to be cut. Putting the thoughts away, living day to day. No pain. Only the present task.

So many raspberries, the two of them had picked. They wouldn’t last. They would go mouldy too soon with the moisture. She would have to pack some for the freezer if she wanted to save them.

By the time they sat down to lunch the clouds were closing in. It looked like it would rain again.

Did you hear the forecast today?

No.

It’s almost one, time for the news. I’ll put the radio on.

The forecast came before the news. Scattered showers, sometimes heavy.

Well, we might have told them that.

She spooned the raspberries from a bowl. Summer there in the glass bowl, and a spatter of rain on the window.

What shall I do now, one or other of the boys would say on days like this. When it was wet outside and when the holidays were long. Or at the beginning, when they first came home, when there was the sense of the days stretching empty before them and they had been so busy at school. The emptiness must have hit them when they came home. They