Harvest by William Horwood Page B

must also take was into the Hyddenworld.
    As he continued his morning routine, he caught sight of the White Horse up on Uffington Hill and, smiling, sat down on their bed, his shirt still unbuttoned, to study the hill. They had chosen
the room and positioned the bed for just that view. She had died staring at it as he held her hand. He unconsciously reached his hand behind him now to where she had been then as he looked through
their window towards where he hoped she now was.
    ‘Riding the Horse,’ she used to say, ‘that’s what we’ll all end up doing one day, Arthur, riding the Horse.’
    Only someone who had known Margaret and the English language intimately over many years would have understood that she spoke the word ‘horse’ with the subtle emphasis of a capital
‘H’.
    As did he.
    Neither was a Christian; they believed in many gods, and the White Horse was the greatest of all.
    ‘If he is a god,’ said Arthur.
    ‘If he’s a she,’ she replied with tart ambiguity.
    Arthur Foale was seventy and a good, kind man whose loneliness was tempered by gratitude that it was she who had gone first, he who could and would find the way forward alone. When, some years
before, he had ventured into the Hyddenworld, the first human to rediscover how to do so for hundreds of years, she had suffered his absence terribly. He swore that he would never return to the
Hyddenworld while she was alive.
    Now she was gone and, though he could bear it and would survive, he already knew what his new direction was. He wanted to go back to the Hyddenworld. He wanted to understand the true meaning of
the White Horse, if it had one.
    ‘Of course it damn well does!’ he muttered.
    The phone began ringing yet again, this time within easy reach.
    ‘Bloody thing,’ he said.
    He ignored it and remained on the bed, looking at the White Horse and trying to think up a plan for the day. Until she died, his days were always full. Now she was gone, they seemed endlessly
empty.
    Margaret would not have approved of him doing nothing much for too long, certainly not all the way past midday.
    ‘Arthur,’ she would have said, ‘if you’ve nothing better to do, go and tend your tomatoes.’
    He nodded at the thought, finished dressing and went downstairs to make a pot of tea.
    August is a good month for tomatoes and this year they have done particularly well
he found himself intoning in his mind.
    ‘Sound like a gardening programme,’ he muttered.
    Gardening was something they enjoyed together but did separately. Margaret had inherited an entire walled vegetable garden for her produce. But as age had crept up on her, the area she used
became ever smaller. Age, lack of energy and declining appetites for the preserves she used to make were the causes.
    Arthur, regardless, carried on growing his tomatoes down in the nice out-of-the-way sunny spot between the tree henge at the bottom of the garden and an area they called the Chimes. Down there
he did not have to worry about being watched by the ghosts of generations of professional gardeners who went back to Elizabethan times. When he first came to the garden he found tomatoes already
growing there, planted by a child or a bird perhaps. He just carried on.
    The henge, too, seemed to have been started before he came along. He had simply cleared trees and bushes that were in the way, and planted new trees to complete the circle. Five decades on it
looked and felt as if it had been there forever, high trees all around and a wide, nearly circular area of grass in the middle, hushed even in the strongest winds, magical in its power, the place
where he learnt to journey into the Hyddenworld.
    Hushed but never silent; there was the never-ending sound of wind in the trees, however soft, and the eternal music of the nearby Chimes.
    The Chimes were slivers of glass that hung from threads in the thick shrubs, catching the inconstant breeze to make a near-constant sound, a music which he, and anyone