Harvest

and that. How things were in England nowadays. How lovely the garden was beyond the open window. After lunch, she said, I’ll take you round, if you like, if there’s time before your train. They talked plants. He said that he grew many of the same things in Kenya; had done in India too, in fact. You could grow all sorts of things up in the hills. Roses he thought grew better in Kenya than almost anywhere else. Ah, she said, with a kind of disappointment. She had thought Africa was all exotics, flame trees and jacarandas. Yes, we have flame trees, but no, it’s not all like that, then he paused and said, I’m sure it’s not like you think, and his faded blue eyes met hers and he wasn’t speaking of gardens any more. There was one thing she wanted to ask, which she thought that he, perhaps, of all Charlie’s friends and acquaintances, might have been most able to answer. She didn’t have to ask it.

It wasn’t the Japs, he said, putting the green sherry glass down on the side table before they went to the dining room to eat. Charlie didn’t have a hard time with the Japs.

She thought of Charlie as he had been in those November days the year before, seemingly absorbed in the work of cultivation, the scent on him of soil and diesel, no sign in him that she could see of any other purpose or preoccupation. And yet …

No, of course, I suppose I knew that, she said; though that wasn’t quite true, perhaps in truth she had allowed herself, almost as a platitude, a commonplace, to blame it on the Japs. I know, she said, it wasn’t as if he was a prisoner or on the railway or anything. Yet somehow she had blamed the Japs. It was easy just to think what others thought, to hear the weight and cruelty in the word as others spoke it in those days, and let its implications carry. To leave it at that, in a simple monosyllable. No need to think further, deeper, for all the decade and more they had lived together.

He had nightmares, you know. He used to wake in the night.

Other women she knew spoke of that, that too something of a commonplace. It was what happened to so many of the men when they came home. So many of the men about them, recovering from the war.

A stalled moment then, before she called the boys and they went to eat. The glasses down on the table, they standing before they moved to the door. Things she wanted to ask but perhaps they were things that couldn’t have been told.

I was never in action, Hussey said. Though I saw quite a bit of the consequences. Some men took it hard. But really, none of it is quite what one thinks.

He stood back to let her through the door first.

There was something else, though, wasn’t there? She might have asked and he might perhaps have told her, but what would she have asked and what did she want to know? It was history now, all history, the war over, he gone, the two of them here, the place where he had been, India, gone too, in a way, no longer that place where he had been, that he had seemed to hold in him.

There was something else, wasn’t there? Out there where you were? That was what she wanted to ask. All she said was, Come again, as she drove him back to the station. The boys had to come in the car with them as there was no one at home to mind them. You must come and see us again, next time you’re in England.

He said that he didn’t have much connection with England any more.

At least the boys weren’t fighting. So often they fought in the back of the car. She took a look behind her. They had the windows wide open and were leaning out, each on his own side, feeling the wind and the land passing. It was so green this moment of the year. Was it as green, she wondered, where Jack Hussey lived? If he could grow those plants then she supposed it must be, though the Africa she imagined was quite other, vast and brown and open to a blue horizon. She drove on, came to a crossroads, waited for another car to pass. There was so much that she had not asked this man, that she sensed he might have said, if she had asked, and now he was leaving.

So you’ll stay in Kenya?

For the foreseeable future.

But is it safe? I read these awful things in the papers. She had read of an uprising, atrocities, white farmers killed in their beds. It’s frightening, she said, what’s going on.

It’s not what you think, he said. Again, he was saying to her, it’s not what you think. He spoke forgetful of the boys in the back of the car. She supposed that he wasn’t used to being with children, didn’t know how much they picked up in adults’ talk. I know what they say here at home, he said. But it’s not us they’re killing, it’s each other. Blacks being killed, horribly, and blacks killing blacks, not whites. And there’s worse. There are terrible things going on, that don’t get into your papers at home.

Terrible things, he said, looking out of the window at the green land passing. Things you see that you never forget.

Then they were drawing into the station and he was buying his ticket and his copy of The Times, and since they were early they were all of them going onto the platform to say goodbye, as if he was some favourite long-loved great-uncle. She thought how they had spent more time talking of gardens than of what mattered. The other thing. Not only the horror. That she thought she could perhaps imagine. But something else. Whatever it