At Hawthorn Time (15 page)

As weeks and then months passed she’d found that her attraction to Richard only grew. She tried to dismiss it – she had fallen in love with Howard, after all, so she knew better than to trust her feelings. Not that they had been wrong, exactly; she had wanted Howard’s irresponsibility and his sociable nature back then. But it took a long time to find out what people were really like, so what was going on with Richard was infatuation pure and simple. She barely knew him, not really; she only got to see his best side, so the magic didn’t diminish; and more than that, she was free to invest him with all sorts of qualities, safe in the knowledge that she would never know him well enough to discover whether he had feet of clay.

But despite all her level-headedness it slowly came to feel as though their drinks in out-of-the-way pubs and snatched afternoons in hotels were becoming her ‘real’ life, while her marriage became a kind of anteroom, a place she slowly, imperceptibly, stopped inhabiting. And yet for months she continued to believe that she could do it; that she could somehow have both lives.

‘Do you feel guilty?’ he’d asked her once. They were in a dingy pub in Ruislip, sitting next to each other in a booth, rather than facing, so that he could put his hand on her thigh under the table.

‘It’s funny, I don’t. I must be a terrible person. Anyway, I’m sure Howard has secrets of his own.’

‘You think he’s had affairs?’

‘Of course he has. He’s out drinking practically every night, for one thing, he comes in at all hours. Why wouldn’t he?’

‘Does it bother you?’

She frowned. ‘I’ve given up that right, haven’t I?’ She looked away then, and Richard had turned her face back to his and kissed her, slowly, carefully, in a way that Howard never had.

It couldn’t last, of course. One day she’d found out she was pregnant again. The baby was Howard’s; she wasn’t stupid enough to get caught out like that. She’d finished it with Richard then; she’d had to, although it had felt to her like the end of her real life; her true self, so newly discovered, put away again in a box out of sight.

For two weeks she had cried gaspingly, messily in the shower, and silently in bed while Howard slept. She’d planned to blame it on hormones, but Howard never even asked her if anything was wrong. And when Jenny was born the whole thing began to feel as though it belonged to a different life, so that with the passing of years it was almost as though she’d got away with it scot-free.

Almost, but not quite. Even at the affair’s dizziest heights she’d known there would be a price to pay, and she was right: the bill had simply been deferred. The damage to her marriage turned out to be to its founding story: that of she and Howard and why they were together. It was the creation myth every couple produces, and she had written a new one with someone else, an act of heresy that made a lie of the first one and could never be undone. And ever since the affair, when she had needed to call on that story, to remind herself of the reasons why she was married to Howard – in the difficult months after Jenny was born, and later, when his drinking was at it worst – she had found that it was no longer there.

But she had stuck it out. They had given the kids a decent start in life; for the most part, Howard had turned out to be a good father to the two of them, loving and kind. Admittedly he irritated her, but that was just marriage, wasn’t it? It wasn’t all passion and gazing into each other’s eyes, not for the long haul; she knew that. So why, twenty years on, was she thinking about Richard again?

Perhaps the doctor had unsettled her. After years of Howard’s endless minor complaints she’d become a bit cavalier about her own health, and hadn’t thought much about the appointment other than as a way of putting her fall in the field out of her mind. So when he’d said he was referring her to a neurologist it had come as a shock; back in the car she’d sat for several minutes staring ahead, her mind a blank. It had made her think of something Howard had said, when he retired: ‘This is it, then. The last act of my life starts here.’ She’d dismissed it; he had a melodramatic streak, he always had. But sitting motionless at the wheel, the keys swinging gently in the ignition, she’d experienced something similar: a sudden glimpse, perhaps, of the finishing line. And it had made her think about her life and about the choices she’d made.

The camera shop was in one of Connorville’s retail parks; it was always hard to remember which block of units to pull into, and she kept an eye out for its logo on the big banks of roadside signs. There seemed to be more and more of them every day, and new estates springing up, named after the places the developers had destroyed: The Pasture, Tupp’s Wood, The Millrace. Along with the empty new bypass and the huge, clapboard Church of Latter-Day Saints that squatted at one of the roundabouts you could have been in America – or anywhere else, in fact.

In the overheated shop with its air as dry as static Kitty did more than just replace the old camera, upgrading instead to a far better model than the one she had lost in the ditch. After all, what else were they supposed to do with their money but spend it? Howard had done well out of the business, and they had sold the Finchley house at the right time; they’d given Chris a deposit for his first flat, and would do the same for Jenny when she finally moved back to the UK for good, but other than that they could do what they liked, something about which she felt intermittently guilty, but for the most part enjoyed.

Kitty often thought about travelling, but deep down she knew that the
entente
between her and Howard would not survive such enforced intimacy. She would have liked to have gone somewhere by herself – the Norwegian fjords, perhaps, or Finland, somewhere wild and remote – but to ask for such a thing would have changed the landscape of their marriage irretrievably, and after a lifetime together that idea came with a sense of vertigo that might not have been proof of her feelings for Howard, but was real enough.

Outside the shop the breeze was tacking to the west, and as Kitty emerged with her plastic bags the first fat drops of rain were flung across the car park as though flicked from a brush. She drove back with the windscreen wipers on as the sky darkened and the wind picked up. By the time she got home the weather had set in.

15

Borage, self-heal, first wild clematis flowers (old man’s beard, traveller’s joy)

All over the country the oilseed rape was in flower, turning fields into bright yellow squares and rectangles. Near Crowmere two farmers had planted some for biofuel and as a break crop, and as far away as Lodeshill the streets and back gardens were filled with its pungent aroma.

Some of the bees that were working the yellow fields came from farm hives, some were Crowmere bees, and some had travelled all the way from Bill Drew’s back garden in Lodeshill.

‘It’s a bugger,’ he told Jean after breakfast, looking at the hive with his hands on his hips. ‘I do wish they wouldn’t. You can’t spin the honey out when they’ve been at the rape, I don’t know why.’

‘Well, you can hardly stop them from going, can you, love?’ she said. ‘Anyway, I like it. Makes the fields look pretty.’

‘Never used to see it, though, did you? Rape. I don’t know.’

‘Things change, love. Even here.’

Walking to his first shift at Woodwater Farm Jack frowned at the brash yellow escapees that had sprung up by the side of the road. He liked to see wilding apples and damsons; why was this any different? Plants moved around all the time, and quite right too. Maybe it was just the name he didn’t like.

He was looking forward to getting out into the fields. Nothing felt truer than a day’s work out in the open air: the well-earned sense of tiredness, and the knowledge that you’d helped things grow, or survive, or be harvested. As he walked he wondered about the other pickers, what they’d be like. He hoped he wouldn’t have to speak to them too much; these days he was unused to conversation, its hidden rules and subtleties, and mostly found it a strain.

When he got to Woodwater he could see from the gate that a few pickers were already out on the beds. He went to the pack house to find Joanne, the sky flat and white overhead, the air close and still.

‘Morning, Jack,’ she said, handing him an asparagus knife. ‘Take three rows on the top field – you’ll see which ones. Mihail over there will come after with a crate and pick up.  Then when we’ve finished I’ll want you in the pack house until about four. That OK?’

‘Thanks.’

Leaving the yard Jack passed through a gate, then began walking uphill towards the asparagus beds. They looked, from a distance, completely bare: the field brown and gently humped as though from years of ridge and furrow.

Woodwater’s sixteen acres of asparagus had originally been Mrs Gaster’s idea: something to occupy her once their two boys started at school, and perhaps bring in a few quid. At first they’d just had one two-acre field which she’d cut more or less by herself, selling the bundles at the farm gate for a pound each. But since then the market had taken off; TV chefs had gone all-out for seasonal produce, and asparagus really flew the flag for that kind of thing. So they had converted the old foxhound kennels into a pack house, and while they still sold some locally most of it went to a wholesaler. Now, Nigel wanted to put in even more beds and maybe invest in some harvesting buggies, but Joanne was reluctant: what came into fashion could go out of fashion, she reasoned, and there was a risk in turning over more land to it: once you’d prepared the soil, bought in new crowns from Holland and hired the equipment to plant them it still took each bed a few years to come into production. ‘It keeps us ticking over, Nige,’ she’d say to him. ‘Let’s just be thankful for that.’

Jack reached the top bed and looked down its length. Even from fairly close it was hard, at first, to see the asparagus shoots. Once you got your eye in, though, the fierce green spears were everywhere. He slung the bag over one shoulder and bent to the first shoot, slicing it at ground level with the knife in his right hand while the other held the bag open for it, his eyes already moving ahead for the next stalk. As soon as he began his muscles remembered the movement and his feet the pace. It was the same with scything: once you had learned it your body would always know the motion. It was nothing to do with thinking; it was deeper than that.

The shoots were breaking ground with astonishing energy. You could almost see them growing on a warm day like this: pulling the goodness out of the soil and driving upwards into the light. Jack felt the sun warm on the back of his neck, felt his knees and back begin to complain. ‘Ah, give over,’ he grumbled to himself happily, and worked on.

Jamie had spent the morning tinkering with the trail bike. The rear suspension had gone, suddenly and with no warning; it was rideable, but only just, and probably not for long – not without a trip to the scrapyard for a new shock.

Then, when he arrived for his shift at Mytton Park, he was told he was being moved to a different hangar.

‘How come?’

‘Don’t worry, you’re not the only one,’ said Megan, handing him his lanyard. ‘Lee’s going too. Not Dave, though.’

‘Why?’

‘They’ve already got a transport clerk. You’ll get training, don’t worry.’

‘No, I mean, why are we being moved?’

‘Just what happens. You work for the Park, not the client; they can put you in any shed they like. People are always being moved around. Just hasn’t happened to you yet.’

Jamie felt uneasy; it was like the first day of school or something, a new building, new people. And he hadn’t been expecting it, he’d just turned up for a normal shift. He wasn’t ready for a big change.

‘Is it because they lost a contract?’

‘Yeah, but it’ll probably pick up. You’re on a catalogue company now, 14B. Come on, I’ll show you.’

It was nice of Megan, Jamie thought as they left the site office and made their way around the outside of the huge, grey sheds, following coloured arrows set on short, neat posts by the walkways. He wondered what she was really like – when she was with her friends. He wondered what she thought of him. She probably thought he was thick, doing this job, and maybe she was right; she probably laughed at him when he wasn’t around. At least she didn’t call him Dicko, like the others did – although he couldn’t remember her calling him Jamie, either. He wondered what his hair was doing; sometimes it got a dent all the way around from his bike helmet. He felt the nape of his neck surreptitiously as they walked.