Harvest

spaniels were, but that might have been only her youth. She was pretty much trained but he took a lead with him because she didn’t know him so well. When finally they left the house they walked out with no clear direction, down the drive and onto the track and then around the edges of the fields. He meant to take a long walk out and beyond the farm and back through the village, perhaps have a drink in the pub before they got home; they were so late that it might be open by the time they got there. They would be able to sit outside on the bench with the dog at their feet. Yet the walk seemed dull. On such a flat day the land seemed flatter than ever, the distances longer. I suppose you came all through here this morning, he said, and she said yes, she had, though of course everything looked different when you were driving.

So you know what crops he’s growing.

I can tell the difference now between wheat and barley.

Barley’s more beautiful, I always think. He didn’t think that Richard would see a thing like that – or would he? Perhaps he would, perhaps Richard saw beauty where he did.

Richard says he wants it to rain.

Oh does he?

He says the fields could do with a little more rain before harvest.

It had become very muggy. A drop of rain fell cool on his face.

I felt rain, she said. Did you feel rain? Richard will be happy that his rain is coming.

He looked at the sky. I’m not so sure, I think this might pass. I think it might not rain at all.

The sky out there, seen from the fields, was so open and wide. Wide horizons in every direction. Cloud all across but high, he thought, too high for rain.

They were walking in the fields. She thought that it was about to rain. Jonathan was moody. He was moody at home in a way that she had not seen him moody before. She felt drops of rain on her face and hands, isolated drops like the beginning of a shower. She wanted it to rain. Then they would laugh and get wet and run in the rain. Or they might shelter under a tree. Let’s go in here, she said, when they came to a little wood. There was a wood at the edge of the barley field, the sort of little wood he called a spinney. She was glad that she was wearing jeans for once because there were thick clumps of nettles they had to walk through at the edge of it, though under the trees the ground was clear. There was one great tree, an oak, with wide branches, and a dense canopy that would have held off the rain, if it had rained. They might have stood beneath that tree and stayed dry for quite a time, even if it rained hard. She said what a fine tree it was, and put out a hand to touch it. Do you see, Jonathan said, how old this tree must be? It must have grown big before the other trees grew around it, you can see that by the spread of its branches. When those branches formed it was growing out in the open, with light all around it.

He did not believe it was going to rain. He had not meant to go into the spinney but she ran ahead of him and he followed. He had not gone to the spinney since his father died. At first he had consciously avoided the spot, the scene of the first maumau, but so integral it was to the landscape, the little group of trees on a slight rise, visible from the house and from all across the farm, that in time it had become just a forbidden no-go place, as if it was an island of land that wasn’t their land at all but someone else’s, fenced off from him, and he would have been trespassing if he’d gone there. It must have changed, in all those years. It didn’t feel changed. Except for the rooks. He did not think there had been rooks before, at least not in these numbers, loud overhead, their nests high in the ash trees – though of course the trees themselves must be higher or more broken than they had been then, some fallen and others grown. He didn’t remember any rooks before. The trees were in leaf now in the summer, no sky to be seen above. Before, there would have been sky, or mist at least, not this close green light, this dappling over the ground, over the nettles, over her face. They came to the old oak. It was still a magnificent tree though it had recently lost a limb, a huge branch broken off on the ground and a tear still raw in the trunk above. She put her hands to the bark, tender as if she might heal it.

How many hundred years old do you think it is?

I don’t know, he said, looking about him, looking at the ground where he had not looked for so long. He was here with Kumiko now. He wasn’t that boy from before.

Could be three or four hundred years, he said. There used to be another big oak like this, he said, in the field, but it fell in a storm and when his father had it cut up they counted the rings in the stump and it was three hundred and fifty years old. So, it was all right to be here, with her. After so many years. Then, enough time had passed. He remembered how huge that other tree was on the ground, fallen in an autumn storm with still its weight of leaves on it that must have caught the wind; the excitement of climbing over and under and through a jungle of branches that had once stood high above them;