THE HARVEST HOLIDAY went back a long way. Centuries. When wheat and oats and barley plumped and hung their heads, schools and businesses closed. Weavers and wives and itinerants and children flocked to the fields. Pale clerks and awkward teachers went to blister their hands on pitchforks, to gather in and glean. At harvesttime, Edmund Mortimer delighted in the presence of half-forgotten members of his community in his fields. The coarse lunches and murmured courtships in the purple shade of his hedges. The tang of horse sweat, the swirls of chaff against the reddening sky.

He could not summon enough people to the harvest of 1942, so he telephoned the army camp at Northrepps. By luck, the captain he spoke to was himself from a farming family. The following day, a three-ton army lorry jolted down the track to the first of Mortimer’s nine fields of barley. The ten volunteers in it were under the command of a sergeant of the Royal Engineers, who was awaiting a posting. His name was Ackroyd. Hedge, the steward, greeted them skeptically.

The soldiers were all townies and clueless. But they were also cheerful and cocky and excited by this relief from routine. Within an hour, they were loudly competing at the work, pushing one another aside to lift sheaves from the binders. Their language was a horror, but their daft energy lifted the day. By noon the hazy cloud had dissipated, and Ackroyd’s men, ignorant of country niceties, had stripped to their waists, and the local girls were rolling their eyes at one another. When Hedge blew his whistle to signal the lunch break, Ackroyd and another man went to the truck and lifted out a crate of India Pale Ale. They went between the narrow shades of carts and trees, insistently distributing bottles. A sweaty young clown from the Royal Fusiliers tried to pour beer into the horses’ mouths.

Late in the afternoon, when the teams of horses were being changed, George Ackroyd went to relieve his bladder behind the three-tonner and lingered in its shade to smoke a cigarette. He looked up into the huge and faultless sky in which crescent-winged birds circled and swooped. He blinked away memories of other birds, in another country, picking human meat from the husks of burned machines.

A black car, a long Riley saloon, pulled up alongside the gateway to his left. Three people got out. The driver was a somber man with thinning hair who, despite the heat, wore a brown suit and a stiff collar and a striped tie. He opened the rear door and held it while a smiling older man in a blue collarless shirt emerged. The other passenger was a young woman who was wearing a belted floral-print dress. George observed the fullness of her figure and her long flame-red hair. He parked his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and sauntered after them into the field, watching the shift of her hips as she carefully placed her feet in the rutted earth.

Hedge bustled toward them, saying heartily, “Mr. Mortimer!”

“Herbert,” the older man said. “How goes the day?”

“Very good, sir. Very good.” Hedge turned to the somber man. “We’re expectun a good yield, Mr. Lark, all things considered.”

Lark sniffed, nodding.

Mortimer surveyed the glowing field. The cut portion of it was stitched with stooks of grain aligned with military precision.

“And how are our gallant volunteers getting on, Herbert?”

Hedge looked blank. George trod his smoke out and stepped forward.

“The lads’ve enjoyed themselves, sir. They’re not trained for this sort of thing, but I hope they’ve made themselves useful.”

Mortimer smiled at him. “So you’d be Sergeant Ackroyd, I presume?”

“Sir,” George said, and made as if to salute, but Mortimer stuck out his hand, and after a tiny hesitation, George shook it.

Ruth, standing a pace or two from the men, studied Sergeant Ackroyd in stolen sideways glances. His braces hung loose at his sides, and his pale khaki shirt was unbuttoned. She had not seen a man’s torso since a bank holiday trip to the seaside in 1938. Ackroyd’s was lean; you could see how the muscles worked. His face was narrow, unusually symmetrical, and, like his throat and forearms, deeply tanned by something fiercer than an English sun. His black hair was cut short at the sides but fell in a sweaty tumble onto his right eyebrow. Ruth had heard north-country accents only on the wireless: comedians doing jokes and songs that made her mother scowl. Perhaps for this reason, she thought there was cheek in the way Ackroyd spoke. Mockery. He had a narrow mustache, like a movie star. She wondered for the first time what it would be like to be kissed on the mouth by a man with a mustache. As she was thinking about it, Ackroyd looked directly at her and winked. Winked! Ruth looked away, feeling her whole body blush.

Two days later, Ruth left the office at five fifteen, and there he was, right outside, sitting on a brown-painted motorcycle, smoking. She was shocked to a standstill. He was wearing the same light fatigues, but this time, thank God, his shirt was buttoned. She could see that he’d come from Mortimer’s fields; there were sweat stains at his armpits and chaff on his boots.

“Ayup, lass,” he said. “Fancy a ride home?”

He’d bundled a jacket or something into a rough cushion and strapped it to the metal pillion.

Ruth’s eyes skittered around the square. People were looking. Of course they bloody were!

“Dunt be so soft,” she managed at last to say. “I ent gettun on that thing. Anyhow, I’re got my bike round the corner.”

Ackroyd regarded her, considering.

“Suit yourself,” he said, and flicked his cigarette away. He eased the motorcycle backwards off its prop and kicked it into life.

She turned left at Black Cat corner onto the lane to Bratton Morley. After a minute, he drew level with her, throttling the engine back until its beat matched the chug of her heart.

“Go away!”

He laughed. She saw his white teeth. He reached over and put his hand on the small of her back and accelerated, propelling her forward at a speed too great for her feet to stay on the pedals. She cried out in thrilled alarm, and after fifty yards he relented, releasing her. She braked and came to an unsteady halt. She stood with her feet on either side of the bike, feeling hot and inelegant and angry and fearfully excited. Ahead of her, he turned the motorcycle around, maneuvering with some difficulty in the narrow lane, and pulled up alongside her. They were in the deep shadow of a big elm tree; everything outside it was too bright to be visible. When he killed the engine, the silence overwhelmed her.

“Sorry,” George said. “You liked it well enough, though, eh?”

“I could’re come off,” Ruth said. “You mad sod.”

“You should report me, then. I’ll bring you the form.”

From somewhere close by, a pheasant uttered a raucous laugh.

“How’d you know where I work, anyhow?”

George tapped the side of his nose with a forefinger. “Military Intelligence.”

“What?”

He looked around cautiously. “MI6. Spies.”

Ruth looked around, too, anxiously. “What?”

“I’m pulling your leg. How many knockout redheads work for a man called Lark in Borstead, d’you reckon?”

(There are phrases, casually spoken, that worm through time. Fifty-three years later Ruth would surface, briefly, from her coma and mumble the words “knockout redhead.” And Clem, sitting by her hospital bed, would hear them as “Got out of bed yet?” Reliably, he misunderstood her to the very end.)

George Ackroyd pursued Ruth Little for two weeks. In the stifling nights, she dreamed about, or imagined, a clumsy red deer harried by a lean and lupine shadow.

She forbade him to come anywhere near her work. As in all country towns, Borstead’s pulse was gossip. So he waited in the shade of the elm. She dreaded these encounters yet came to yearn for them. The utterly familiar lane became strange and perilous; she was terrified of being seen with him. Willy and her mother did not come home this way — he took the main Cromer road and turned off at Bratton Cross — but her neighbors often did.

Half a mile beyond the elm, the lane cut through Skeyton Woods. And eventually, fearfully, she led him into the trees.

And then he was gone. For two afternoons, Ruth pedaled slowly beneath the spread of the elm, then waited by the rotting five-bar gate that opened into the wood. On the first of these afternoons, when it became clear to her that he was not going to come, she felt something that might have been relief. On the second, she filled with hurt and was astonished to find herself, for the first time since early childhood, crying.

The following Tuesday morning, she found an envelope on her desk. It was addressed to MISS R. LITTLE, C/O CUBITT AND LARK, THE SQUARE, BORSTEAD, NORFOLK.

She looked at it, alarmed, as though it were something ominous or sinister: a spider on a slice of cake, perhaps. She had never in her life received a letter. When she found the courage to pick it up, it felt fragile. The paper was thin; she could almost read the writing through the envelope. (She worried that somebody might already have done so.)

The handwriting was fussy and tilted, almost italic.

Dear Ruth,

I expect youll be wondering where I got to. I hope so anyway! Well I got a posting with only 10 hrs notice. I hoped to see you but I could not get away. I can not tell you where I’m going for obvious reasons. (EG I would get shot!) I will think about you Ruth and I think you know what I mean (!) As you know I am a city boy born and bred but from now on I will think of trees and country side etc in a new way.

I dont know when I’ll be back but I will be back. We have not known each other long Ruth but if your so inclined I ask you to wait for me. When I come back I will come down there and ask you a very serious question. I think you know what that question is.

I will think of you Ruth as I say. I hope you will think of me too.

Go careful on that bike!

Yours sincerely,

George (Ackroyd)