Philip said, “Bar-ley.”
“‘Only reapers, reaping early,’” Eve said. She tried to remember. “‘Save the reapers, reaping early –’” “Save” was what sounded best. Save the reapers.
SOPHIE AND IAN had bought corn at a roadside stand. It was for dinner. Plans had changed — they weren’t leaving till morning. And they had bought a bottle of gin and some tonic and limes. Ian made the drinks while Eve and Sophie sat husking the corn. Eve said, “Two dozen. That’s crazy.”
“Wait and see,” said Sophie. “Ian loves corn.”
Ian bowed when he presented Eve with her drink, and after she had tasted it she said, “This is most heavenly.”
Ian wasn’t much as she had remembered or pictured him. He was not tall, Teutonic, humorless. He was a slim fair-haired man of medium height, quick moving, companionable. Sophie was less assured, more tentative in all she said and did, than she had seemed since she’d been here. But happier, too.
Eve told her story. She began with the checkerboard on the beach, the vanished hotel, the drives into the country. It included her mother’s city-lady outfits, her sheer dresses and matching slips, but not the young Eve’s feelings of repugnance. Then the things they went to see — the dwarf orchard, the shelf of old dolls, the marvellous pictures made of colored glass.
“They were a little like Chagall?” Eve said.
Ian said, “Yep. Even us urban geographers know about Chagall.”
Eve said, “Sor-ry.” Both laughed.
Now the gateposts, the sudden memory, the dark lane and ruined barn and rusted machinery, the house a shambles.
“The owner was in there playing cards with his friends,” Eve said. “He didn’t know anything about it. Didn’t know or didn’t care. And my God, it could have been nearly sixty years ago I was there — think of that.”
Sophie said, “Oh, Mom. What a shame.” She was glowing with relief to see Ian and Eve getting on so well together.
“Are you sure it was even the right place?” she said.
“Maybe not,” said Eve. “Maybe not.”
She would not mention the fragment of wall she had seen beyond the bushes. Why bother, when there were so many things she thought best not to mention? First, the game that she had got Philip playing, overexciting him. And nearly everything about Harold and his companions. Everything, every single thing about the girl who had jumped into the car.
There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can’t tell such people things, it is too disruptive. Ian struck Eve as being one of those people, in spite of his present graciousness, and Sophie as being someone who thanked her lucky stars that she had found him. It used to be older people who claimed this protection from you, but now it seemed more and more to be younger people, and someone like Eve had to try not to reveal how she was stranded in between. Her whole life liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around, a radical mistake.
She could say that the house smelled vile, and that the owner and his friends looked altogether boozy and disreputable, but not that Harold was naked and never that she herself was afraid. And never what she was afraid of.
Philip was in charge of gathering up the corn husks and carrying them outside to throw them along the edge of the field. Occasionally Daisy picked up a few on her own, and took them off to be distributed around the house. Philip had added nothing to Eve’s story and had not seemed to be concerned with the telling of it. But once it was told, and Ian (interested in bringing this local anecdote into line with his professional studies) was asking Eve what she knew about the breakup of older patterns of village and rural life, about the spread of what was called agribusiness, Philip did look up from his stooping and crawling work around the adults’ feet. He looked at Eve. A flat look, a moment of conspiratorial blankness, a buried smile, that passed before there could be any need for recognition of it.
What did this mean? Only that he had begun the private work of storing and secreting, deciding on his own what should be preserved and how, and what these things were going to mean to him, in his unknown future.
IF THE GIRL CAME looking for her, they would all still be here. Then Eve’s carefulness would go for nothing.
The girl wouldn’t come. Much better offers would turn up before she’d stood ten minutes by the highway. More dangerous offers perhaps, but more interesting, likely to be more profitable.
The girl wouldn’t come. Unless she found some homeless, heartless wastrel of her own age. (I know where there’s a place we can stay, if we can get rid of the old lady.)
Not tonight but tomorrow night Eve would lie down in this hollowed-out house, its board walls like a paper shell around her, willing herself to grow light, relieved of consequence, with nothing in her head but the rustle of the deep tall corn which might have stopped growing now but still made its live noise after dark.
RUNAWAY
CARLA HEARD THE car coming before it topped the little rise in the road that around here they called a hill. It’s her, she thought. Mrs. Jamieson — Sylvia — home from her holiday in Greece. From the barn door — but far enough inside that she could not readily be seen — she watched the road Mrs. Jamieson would have to drive by on, her place being half a mile farther along the road than Clark and Carla’s.
If it was somebody getting ready to turn in at their gate it would be slowing down by now. But still Carla hoped. Let it not be her.
It was. Mrs. Jamieson turned her head once, quickly — she had all she could do maneuvering her car through the ruts and puddles the rain had made in the gravel — but she didn’t lift a hand off the wheel to wave, she didn’t spot Carla. Carla got a glimpse of a tanned arm bare to the shoulder, hair bleached a lighter color than it had been before, more white now than silver-blond, and an expression that was determined and exasperated and amused at her own exasperation — just the way Mrs. Jamieson would look negotiating such a road. When she turned her head there was something like a bright flash — of inquiry, of hopefulness — that made Carla shrink back.
So.
Maybe Clark didn’t know yet. If he was sitting at the computer he would have his back to the window and the road.
But Mrs. Jamieson might have to make another trip. Driving home from the airport, she might not have stopped for groceries — not until she’d been home and figured out what she needed. Clark might see her then. And after dark, the lights of her house would show. But this was July, and it didn’t get dark till late. She might be so tired that she wouldn’t bother with the lights, she might go to bed early.
On the other hand, she might telephone. Any time now.
THIS WAS THE summer of rain and more rain. You heard it first thing in the morning, loud on the roof of the mobile home. The trails were deep in mud, the long grass soaking, leaves overhead sending down random showers even in those moments when there was no actual downpour from the sky and the clouds looked like clearing. Carla wore a high, wide-brimmed old Australian felt hat every time she went outside, and tucked her long thick braid down her shirt.
Nobody showed up for trail rides, even though Clark and Carla had gone around posting signs in all the camping sites, in the cafes, and on the tourist office billboard and anywhere else they could think of. Only a few pupils were coming for lessons and those were regulars, not the batches of schoolchildren on vacation, the busloads from summer camps, that had kept them going through last summer. And even the regulars that they counted on were taking time off for holiday trips, or simply cancelling their lessons because of the weather being so discouraging. If they called too late, Clark charged them for the time anyway. A couple of them had complained, and quit for good.