Jim Crace - Harvest

Only Master Jordan is standing. He is a tall, big-boned, round-shouldered man, dressed in a long doublet so hard-quilted that it stiffens him. He swings a casting bottle of rosewater in his hand, protection I suppose against the stench of this untended gallery. The once white-tempered mortar on the upper walls has dappled. The room is damp and smells of hair and moldy laths. The other three are sitting neatly on a bench like courtiers, hands on knees, their heads lifted, listening. Edmund Jordan says, “Of course, that’s natural for you, I see,” to some remark that Mr. Quill has made. It is clear he considers the Chart-Maker a fool, a grinning and beribboned fool, with barley straw still in his beard. Even the word “natural” is delivered with a sting. It is as if he’s labeled Mr. Quill the Village Natural — the local idiot who might be less annoying if he could stop airing his own opinions and only listen.

I am not a local idiot. I listen for a good part of the afternoon.

SLEEP TONIGHT IN WIDOW GOSSE’S BED. Once in a while of late I creep up like a midnight cat to brush my face against her door and call her name through the ajar as quietly as I can, so as not to be heard by anyone. Excepting her. Sometimes I’m not even heard by her and, in the silence of her no reply, there is a chance for me to come back to my senses and creep away again, unsatisfied and angry with myself. At other times — though less commonly, because her cottage sits back from the lane and so is less overheard and, thereby, better suited than mine to, well, our cries — she turns up at my door on a similar errand. I am touched and reassured by that. It is a sign that we are equal parties in our sin. This is not a case of fox and hare. Her pretense, her subterfuge, to use a stylish word I’ve heard this afternoon, is that she’s come to borrow a length of candle or a little grease, but I’m not sure if she intends to make a pun.

Once or twice, I have affected not to hear her tapping on the door or, indeed, not to be in my bed at all, but on a nighttime mission somewhere else. Down at Turd and Turf, quite possibly, and achieving a release of quite a different kind. At such moments I am reluctant to call out “Kitty, Kitty, come inside,” because this is the bed where Cecily, my little thrush of a wife, has slept with me. The marriage bed. Though I’m not fool enough to think she’s still watching over me, there’s no denying that a woman leaves her mark, especially a woman who has shared your life for over eleven years and one for whom your feelings are not merely physical. Indeed, sometimes when I am in a melancholy mood, deep in the trenches of the night, perhaps, I slide my hand across the rough mattressing and find comfort in the hollows where my Cecily has slept (and died), where her shoulders and her hips have left their body ghosts.

My feelings for the widow Gosse are only physical, I have to say. I’m not even sure if she and I are friends. I think we hold each other in a low contempt. She finds me inexplicable — my self-absorption, my neglect of the small garden at the cottage back, my great abundance of uncommon words — and counts me as a town owl that’s all hoot and no talons. She blames me for my cautiousness. I’ve been too schooled, she says dismissively. I find her limited and, except in matters of the field, dull-witted. But in bed when we are making love she’s certainly no fool. Unlike my Cecily she has a lusty appetite. At night, her hand with her fingers spreading downward is always on my abdomen, rather than lying more tenderly across my chest, as was my wife’s. She has been a startling discovery. Possibly it is the intensity of our coupling that causes me so much shame to be her bedtime partner. We are, I think, like beasts, no better than a pair of forest beasts, unable to resist the physical and barbarous. It is not that she is beautiful or ever was. She must be very nearly fifty years of age. And since her husband died she has not taken much care of herself. Her clothes would benefit from mending — and from scrubbing, possibly. She has the usual warts and lumps of living hard and long. Her hair has grayed, despite the local patch of asphodels which other women use to keep their tresses stubbornly blond. And it’s difficult to tell, even when she’s naked at my side, if Kitty Gosse is fat or thin. She’s narrow-faced and narrow-hipped but large and softly comfortable about her waist and stomach. She calls it widow’s spread and is not the least concerned — the opposite — when, lying on her back with me on top, her creamy stomach sways and frowns like a shaken posset.

But then I have to ask myself, What does the widow see in me? As I imagine it, I am still a scrawny fellow, thin-armed and pale but with a bouncy head of hair, unfashionably brown for hereabouts. I’m handsome even, I would say. Indeed, I have been told that I look pleasing, especially in a hat or cap. Certainly, that is how I last appeared in a looking glass. But I have not had ready access to a looking glass for some years now. Once in a while, when Mistress Kent was still alive and I had reason to be in the manor house alone, I risked the two steps to her dressing room and stood in front of her tall glass to take stock of myself. I stared upon the one face in the village that I seldom saw but was available to everybody else. Her mirror darkened me and frayed my edges where the reflecting magic crystals in the glass had made a dry black mold, a kind of glittered lichen which seemed determined to encroach the clarity. But still, the body there was mine. I raised my hand and so did it. It replied to every smile. And when on more than one occasion I reached across to Mistress Kent’s day couch, where she threw her clothes, lifted free one of her heavy, decorated gowns and — wondering, just wondering; doing nothing worse than wondering — held it up against myself, that ashened, haunted woman in the looking glass was no one else but me.

For a year at least I have not even glimpsed my face. The duckweed in the ponds will not allow me to. The manor house has shuttered windows and no glass. The silver spoon the master gave us on our wedding day is tarnished and no longer repays any light. The worked copper on the brewing kettle picks up my shadow when I go close to it but the reflection is so tooled and beaten that my face is too pockmarked to be recognizable. In fact, I cannot think there is a looking glass in the parish, though no doubt there are some wives who have a secret sliver with which to horrify themselves and which they wisely do not seek to share. No, as far as I’m aware, our nearest likeness is two days’ distant. The master, as is the husband’s custom hereabouts among the gentlemen, sharded his wife’s long looking glass and buried the pieces with her, for fear of being haunted by her trace. So, unlike the town from where I came, where everyone who stepped out in the street would first have turned themselves this way and that in front of mirrors and could not have stepped twenty paces more before reflecting on themselves in window glass, we in this village walk around in blinded ignorance. We close an eye and see no more than a side of the nose, or possibly some facial hair, the outer regions of a beard. We know our hands and knees but not our eyes and teeth. So truly I can only guess what widow Gosse can see in me. And I suppose it is the same for her. Perhaps, without a husband to be her informant, she doesn’t even know how lined she is. That is the state of widowhood. We’ve no idea; we must hope for the best.

When I first started calling at her cottage, Kitty Gosse and I would hardly look each other in the eye. I was thinking of my Cecily — though Cecily was never this unbridled in my arms — and she, I must suppose, imagined herself unwidowed and back beneath the gouty, puffing Fowler Gosse, who died it’s said between these very legs. Hugged to death, with hair in his teeth, some wag has claimed. But over time I’ve ventured to study every part of her and have found great pleasure in her enthusiastic limbs. Tonight, though, I leave neither of us satisfied. I am too anxious and too hurried. My purpose in coming here, in tapping on her cottage door, is not so much to spend myself in her and have her disburse herself with me, so that we might deserve a full night’s sleep in company, but more to make myself forget or at least to banish from my mind for tonight the prospects I have overheard in Master Kent’s dark gallery.