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

was standing close so that she could feel him beside her.

The nature I know is not so hard, she said.

No, he said. That’s what I like about you.

She turned. She felt the pull of him and she turned. Kissed him then in the dark when they could not see one another. Like they were nameless. Not themselves.

Then they drew apart. She could not have said who moved first. There was only the darkness then. Nothing spoken.

She left him without a word and went into the house. Undressed and got into the bed beside Jonathan. She thought that he was asleep, but he wasn’t. Or he had been asleep, and woke when she came in. He stirred and reached for her, put an exploring hand between her legs. Often they used to make love like that, so easily, before they slept. But you’re already wet, he murmured, with a kind of surprise. With a half-asleep chuckle in his voice that she wouldn’t forget. Ready for me, he said. And slipped into her in an instant.

Then he was asleep again, and she lay awake for hours. She heard the clock in the church across the fields, pictured the rabbits lying there on the ground. It was not right, not ordinary, not OK at all.

She slept very little that night. Soon after it got light she went out. She crept downstairs as silently as she could and unbolted the door, and the dog woke and came out with her.

It was where the summer led, she told herself later. Something that they had been waiting for, in all those sultry days in the countryside, that was growing in them when they had thought they had been waiting only for the harvest. Like the fungus, growing in those conditions and fastening on the head of wheat. She had learned a bit about ergot since then. It caused hallucinations. There had been times in history when ergot had got into the harvest and into the flour, and when the flour was baked into bread its effect was so powerful that whole villages went crazy. There was a theory that it happened in a place called Salem when there was a witch fever. Women became hysterical, and others saw strange things and blamed the women who they said were witches. And then the women were burnt at the stake. She didn’t know where Salem was, when she first read that. She imagined it must be some village on its own in the marshes, like the villages she passed through with Jonathan when they drove to Ely, but it wasn’t anywhere like that. It was in America.

Or maybe it was something in the spinney. The old witch Richard said lived there once. She might have left some evil behind her.

But no. It was something much simpler.

She got up and went out because she simply could not be in that room any more, with Jonathan’s breath on her shoulder; shifting carefully so that she did not wake him, going to the window, drawing back the curtain just so much so that there was light in the room to dress by, looking out and seeing no one. It was early. Too early even for Richard to be up. She felt better once she was out in the morning air. There was the sound of the pigeons. The dog for company. There was a heavy dew, almost a mist, spiders’ webs made visible on the grass and on the stubble where they were coated with the dew. Untouched.

He saw the dog first. Someone had opened the door and let her out. Then he saw Kumiko. He ran to catch up.

You’re out early.

You know that I always wake early.

All these mornings he had seen her but had not spoken of it. But you don’t come outside, he said, panting, slowing his pace to hers. Away from them, in the house behind the tall hedge, the curtains on the spare-room window were only half drawn.

This morning I thought I would.

It’s almost September. Almost autumn.

There was a milky sheen of dew over the ground. That was why when he had seen her in the distance she had seemed to be walking so smoothly. As if she was floating. The air above was clear. Even where they breathed it, the air was clear. It was going to be a fine day, finer and bluer than any just passed.

It’s good to be out so early, she said.

But she looked sleepy, as if she hadn’t slept well and needed to go back and sleep some more. She looked like she had just thrown on her jeans and T-shirt and hadn’t brushed her hair. Not so neat as usual. As he looked at her and thought that, she put her fingers through her hair to smooth it out, put up both hands to twist it into a knot. But what are you doing here, she said. She raised her head so that the knot slipped a little.

What I usually do, he said. Thinking what should be done. Her hair was heavy, he thought. He could imagine the dark weight of it in his fingers. No, not imagine. He had felt it the night before. Were they pretending the night before hadn’t happened?

Look at the spiders’ webs, she said.

The webs made all the surface of the field glisten. There were bales piled here and there, rectangular bales in regular square towers. Where the combine had most recently cut, the straw still lay loose in its rows, where it had not been baled before the rain and must be left to dry for some days after. In the far field before the spinney most of the crop was still standing.

I have to think when we should get out and finish that field, he said. With all this dew it’ll take the longer to dry. Though it’ll hardly be worth the effort.

Why’s that? she said.

Because of the ergot.

Oh yes. It was