The Treasures by Harriet Evans

Author:Harriet Evans [Evans, Harriet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2025-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

20

For two weeks, as September gave way to the beginning of autumn, they sat in the garden, losing each other in the high grass, breaking mildewed deckchairs pulled from the summer barn halfway down the lawn towards the pond, choked with weeds. A rambling custard-yellow rose covered the side of the house, and Jenny deadheaded so many faded blooms and hips that in one or two places the roses began to flower again, small yellow buds that smothered the lean-to. Hollyhocks fell like falling trees. And everywhere the sound of apples dropping on to the ground, whereupon Edward would shout ‘Apple!’ and Tom would leap up, scramble in the wilderness and come back holding aloft the apple in question.

Every morning the sun rose above the horizon, shedding golden September light into every nook and cranny; and every evening rays of ochre flooded the back of the house as the ravens called loudly, and flew back to their eyries with food. Sometimes rotten apples, sometimes berries, sometimes wiggling, tiny mammals – Tom, squinting, once saw a mouse, its tail clamped in a raven’s vast beak, wiggling in panic before they vanished into the trees.

Tom ate more apples in that fortnight than in his life to date: forever more they were linked for him to that time, when he lost so much but found his father. In the early evening they would walk out to pick blackberries, which they brought back and cooked or ate fresh with cream, and then Edward lit the fire, as the nights were suddenly cold, and Tom and Jenny played Scrabble, and his father smoked his pipe, and the ravens circled overhead, calling furiously to one another in the tall, dark pine trees behind the house, building their nests, like mythic eyries.

There was a stream at the bottom of the garden where he and his father fished for trout and where they cooked it over a special outside grill, the juices spitting on the coals; and they scattered it with the rosemary that grew in vast throngs along the paths below the green gate.

There was the pheasant that wandered into the garden along the banks of the stream one evening, wild-eyed and waving its luxuriant plumage, and his father killed it with the shotgun, and they had pheasant for supper the following evening and Jenny made bread sauce and Tom remembered things he had forgotten: the winter his father skinned and butchered the frozen sheep; how he drowned rats and broke chickens’ necks, and, once, in front of Tom, stamped on a tawny owl with a broken wing. How he was brutal, and tough, to survive, because he had to be, and how far it was from Tom’s life now, where he lived on tins mostly, tins of beans and Spam and mulligatawny soup.

The pheasant was delicious, and so was the bread sauce. He would try to make some of the latter when he was back in London. He would try to make everything different. For he knew then that this was a magic time, never to be repeated.

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