Harvest

stay, women and couples, but never before a single man. It was August, lovely weather, the harvest almost done, the dust of it still in the air. Michael was an old flame. He had even proposed to her once, before she met Charlie, and perhaps he might one day have proposed to her again. She might just possibly have come to marry him – later, not then, then would have been far too soon, only sometime much later. But none of that was in her mind at the time, only that he was a good, kind, sympathetic man, and he tried hard with the boys. He drove up on the Saturday in a convertible Sunbeam and squeezed them all in and took them out for a ride, parked it outside the front door when they came back and let the boys play in it till teatime when he put up the roof. And he had brought them presents, well chosen considering he was a bachelor, Airfix models and the latest Beano. Perhaps he tried too hard. The visit was a disaster.

The Sunday was hot and beautiful. They had lunch outside where the French windows from the sitting room opened onto the lawn. Michael had brought wine from London, in a green Italian bottle wrapped with raffia. It was a treat. One didn’t drink wine much in those days. The two of them sat on after lunch and drank the last of the wine while the boys went off to play. They could hear the sound of a combine in the distance, on Jackson’s land, not theirs, on the fields closest to the village – or she heard it, perhaps Michael had not been aware of it at all. If she had married Michael then she would have sold the farm and they would have gone to live in London, she supposed, or Tunbridge Wells, some place close to London from which he could have commuted to the City, and it would have been some quite other life, and she and the boys would have left all this behind. She liked the wine, and Michael’s conversation was easy. She told him of her plans for the garden. If she had married him she would have needed a garden. So it should have been Tunbridge Wells. She told him how bare it was when she first arrived, Uncle Ralph’s hybrid teas had grown out of hand, Virginia creeper swallowing the back of the house – though there were touches that were beautiful, like the lilacs Ralph had planted, the mass of daffodils long established beneath the sycamores that made the place so glorious in the spring. She told him how she had drawn plans and planted the hedges, separating her garden from the land about, and planted the roses within it. You’ve worked wonders, he said, and they got up from the table and walked around and she told him what else she planned to plant, suddenly immersed in the moment as she so rarely was in those days. Oh, but I’m getting carried away, you don’t have a garden, do you, you can’t be interested in all of this! Michael said, But of course I am, and smiled, his eyes to hers, and she realised how close they were standing and in that instant turned away. Too soon, it was far too soon. Was it love or sympathy or loneliness that hung between them, the thread that she felt between her hand and his, so close to her even as she turned? Now where can the boys have got to? she said then. She would hide behind the boys. That had become her refuge when people began to touch her: being their mother, no more, making that a barrier between herself and the rest of the world. They were here just a moment ago, she said. They were climbing the walnut tree. There was a rope hanging from the tree that they used to climb to the first branch, where they could spy on the garden unseen behind the leaves.

I saw them run off, Michael said.

When?

Now. Only just now.

Oh. Oh well, they’ll come back soon enough.

Do you think we should look for them?

No. I’m sure they’ll be back before you leave.

The conversation had died. She didn’t know what to speak of any more. They walked to the front of the house. Perhaps the boys were playing in his car again, but they weren’t. They went inside and Michael fetched down his case, and still the boys were nowhere to be seen. She must find them to say goodbye.

It’s all right, you can say goodbye for me.

She called their names, up the stairs. Surely they could not be indoors, upstairs on a day like this?

Really, it’s fine, there’s no need to find them for me. Only I must get going. It’s a long drive.

They said goodbye, just the two of them, with a look but no kiss. And he started the car, and waited a moment. She thought that the sound of the engine might have drawn the boys, but she stood alone and watched as he drove away.

She found them in the greenhouse.

Had there been an earthquake? It looked as if there had been an earthquake.

Terracotta rubble, soil, leaves beneath their feet as if a miniature terracotta city had been destroyed. The two boys giants in the ruins.

Jonny saw her first and stood transfixed, terrified, but Richard held a hoe in his two hands and went on smashing things. The pots in which tomatoes grew, the plants torn out and thrown down and the thick scent of their crushed leaves in the air, ripening fruits squashed green and red underfoot. Other pots swept down from the shelves, ten-inch pots, eight-inch pots, four-inch pots, the towers of tiny pots in which she grew seedlings, thrown down and smashed, one after another, among the sieves and seed trays. She couldn’t speak. At last Richard saw her and held still, but shaking, the tool