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

The trip to the station and back took an hour at least. She spent the morning waiting for one or other of her sons to come home. She made soup for lunch and laid the table for the three of them. When Jonny came in he saw the table and asked if Richard was back. No, she said, but I thought I heard him coming into the yard. I laid for the two of you.

He slammed the door of the Land Rover, went in the back door, down the little corridor to the kitchen. They were sitting at the table having lunch like on any ordinary day, the two of them sipping soup and a place at the end of the table laid for the girl perhaps – or perhaps it was laid for him, as if he had just been out on the farm and was coming in a little bit late. There would be a bowl warm on the Aga, soup kept warm for whichever one of them it was. Such an everyday scene, except for the fact that one place was missing, and you did not know which of them it was who was meant to have been there. The two of them looking at him, spoons raised. Sunlight coming in the window over the sink, where a flypaper ugly with trapped flies dangled and shuddered in the draught.

His mother started to get up to bring him some soup. No, don’t do that, I’m not eating. He walked out and on to the office. He took the key from the central drawer of his desk and opened the metal gun case in a cubbyhole to the side of the room. He took out a shotgun and a couple of cartridges and went out again, by the front door this time so that he did not have to pass them.

I’ll go after him, Jonny said, running to the front door.

No. She pictured horror. No. Not you. You can’t. She caught him back. If anyone goes, it has to be me.

They tussled on the step there for a moment and then he saw that she was right, and let her go, and she ran out down the drive, hectic, apron flapping. She was still wearing the blue apron she had been wearing to cook, that she had been too distracted to take off before lunch. But already Richard had disappeared from view, down the drive, past the hedges. He might have turned in any direction after that. The hedges hid everything beyond.

Come back in, he said. It’ll be all right. She was walking back so slowly, taking off the apron as she walked, smoothing her hair, closing her eyes and opening them as if to dispel a dream. Come inside and sit down, I’ll make some coffee. He’ll be all right, you know Richard. He’ll settle down. He always does. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.

The kitchen was quiet. A fly buzzing on the fly paper. The kettle coming to the boil. They heard a single shot in the distance. Claire stood. Jonny turned to her. The shot – if it had indeed been a shot, and not just some sudden bang, or bird-scarer (but what bird-scarer could there have been this time of year?) or backfire – was not repeated. The fly buzzed. He took the boiling kettle off the heat.

We have to go, she said. Both of us.

Yes. Only when they moved it seemed they moved so slowly.

They saw him coming back up the drive. Upright, striding, the gun under his arm, a tall blond man like a hunter coming home. He looked to them where they stood at the door of the house.

That scared you, didn’t it?

They looked shocked, the two of them, Claire and Jonny, the two of them always alike and most alike now, with that same expression on their two scared faces. He knew what shocked them. They were seeing a ghost. He knew them so well, and this narrow little world that they lived in. He placed the gun down inside the door and walked into the kitchen. They followed him, not speaking. There were the two soup bowls on the table, the third place that they had laid, and a fourth chair unused, with no place before it, that might have been laid for someone else, if someone else had been there. For the Japanese girl, but the Japanese girl for some reason was nowhere to be seen. Then for his father. That was who it should have been for. And he wasn’t there either. He was gone too. And now he knew how he was gone, and he knew that he was a different father than the one he had been before. Because his father was only his death. That was the thing about his father that mattered more than anything else, that had made them what they were. They were cowards, all of them, shutting themselves away here in this house, closed away with the wide flat land around them.

Fire

She didn’t see Jonathan in London. She couldn’t telephone to the house because she was afraid who would answer. She wrote to him instead, and then she waited a number of days but he sent only a brief note, that he would not come. Maybe one day, he said. Not yet. Maybe better in Japan, not here. She knew what he meant by that. She did not expect him. So she left on the first flight she could get. It was with a Scandinavian airline, flying north to Helsinki and then across the Arctic. (Funny, she thought, it was not such a great distance as people might expect, that way, to get from England to Japan; the earth was round, after all. So maybe he wouldn’t be so far away as it seemed, not always, not for ever.) The plane left from Heathrow and