Harvest by William Horwood Page A

of Joseph Heller. He preferred archaeological journals to novels. ‘Catch 22’ might
be to do with fishing, as far as he was concerned.
    It was not the second time that morning that the phone had rung, but the third. Each time it seemed to do so with more irritating insistence and for a longer time.
    This time, when it finally ended and the last echo had fled, Arthur sighed, frowned, and, urging himself to move, he turned and retraced his own wet footsteps to the bathroom.
    ‘Bloody silly,’ he murmured as he dried himself.
    Then, ‘Must make some tea.’
    Then, ‘. . . Must mow damn lawns.’
    Then, apparently irrelevantly since it was August, but it had been his wife who managed the house and she knew to buy early and save money, ‘Must order coal.’
    Adding, moments later, ‘Don’t know the supplier’s name. Bugger.’
    Finally, dry now but still mumbling to himself, he padded back to their room to dress, stood still and said, ‘She never could iron shirts, so she never did, quite right. Stupid thought.
Must iron another, this one’s creased.’
    Arthur was in mourning for Margaret; he felt grief, he was sad, but in no way was he depressed. He missed her hugely but when death came she had wanted it and he had the great compensation that
they had lived a full, rich love. More so, in some ways, than they had had the right to expect. In fact, the most potent and persistent part of the grief was not for Margaret at all, but for three
other people who had dominated their lives that summer, before she died, and who were now all gone too.
    Arthur Foale, former Professor of Astral Archaeology at Cambridge, was the adoptive father of Katherine and, unofficially, of Jack. The way they had come into the lives of Margaret and himself,
who were childless, was a miracle in his view. Katherine was six at the time. Her father was killed in the same car crash that left her mother Clare chronically injured and in which, by
circumstances strange and somehow inexplicable, the six-year-old Jack had been travelling too.
    The father got his wife out but died in the attempt to free his daughter. It was Jack, always exceptionally strong, who rescued her unharmed, though he sustained appalling third-degree burns to
his back and neck.
    Arthur and Margaret took Clare and Katherine into their home; Jack reappeared ten years later in the year Clare died. The two youngsters, as Arthur thought of them, were old enough to fall in
love, which they did.
    Arthur had already found a way to explore the Hyddenworld using the tree henge at the bottom of his garden as a portal. He was unsurprised to discover that Jack was something special, a
giant-born from Germany. When Katherine was abducted into the Hyddenworld by the Fyrd, the Imperial army of its Emperor Slaeke Sinistral, Jack was able to invoke the hydden part of himself and use
the same portal to follow her into the Hyddenworld.
    It was the beginning of a long-prophesied quest for the gems of the sixth-century CraftLord Beornamund.
    Later, Katherine gave birth to their child in the henge in Woolstone, and that marked the return of the couple – and Judith – to the human world and the summer just past with Arthur
and the ailing Margaret. It was a happy and extraordinary time in which Arthur had forged a close grandfather-like relationship with Judith, a child in pain and like no other, who grew to adulthood
in three months before she mounted the White Horse and was gone, as were her parents on a different path, all back into the Hyddenworld.
    No wonder Arthur suffered their loss so keenly.
    They had, in different ways, given meaning to his life. So really he had suffered the loss of four people, not one. It was hardly surprising that, now Margaret was gone and he was free of his
pact never to show interest in such things as the Chimes, or latterly, in the Hyddenworld, he should now begin to do so.
    It was inevitable perhaps that he was beginning to think that the direction he