The woman came close to Milton, smiling at him with her eyes and parted lips. He asked her what she wanted; he asked her what she was doing in the orchard, but she didn’t reply. In spite of her benign expression he thought for a moment she was mad and intended to attack him. Instead, the smile on her lips increased and she raised her arms as if inviting him to step into her embrace. When Milton did not do so the woman came closer still. Her hands were slender, her fingers as frail as twigs. She kissed him and then turned and walked away.
Afterwards Milton recalled very thin calves beneath the hem of her dark coat, and narrow shoulders, and the luxuriant black hair that seemed more than ever not to belong. When she’d kissed him her lips hadn’t been moist like his mother’s. ‘They’d been dry as a bone, the touch of them so light he had scarcely felt it.
‘Well ?’ Mr. Leeson enquired that evening in the farmhouse kitchen.
Milton shook his head. In the upper orchard the Cox’s were always the first to ripen. Nobody expected them to be ready as soon as this, but just occasionally, after a sunny summer, the first of the crop could catch you out. Due to his encounter with the stranger, he had forgotten to see if an apple came off easily when he twisted it on the branch. But he had noticed that not many had fallen, and guessed he was safe in intimating that the crop was better left for a while yet. Shyness prevented him from reporting that there’d been a woman in the orchard; if she hadn’t come close to him, if she hadn’t touched his lips with hers, it would have been different.
Milton was not yet sixteen. He was chunky, like his father and his brothers, one of them much older, the other still a child. The good looks of the family had gone into the two girls, which Mrs. Leeson privately gave thanks for, believing that otherwise neither would have married well.
‘They look laden from the lane,’ Mr. Leeson said, smearing butter on half a slice of bread cut from the loaf. Mr. Leeson had small eyes and a square face that gave an impression of determination. Sparse grey hair relieved the tanned dome of his head, more abundant in a closely cropped growth around his ears and the back of his neck.
‘They’re laden all right,’ Milton said.
The Leesons’ kitchen was low-ceilinged, with a flagged floor and pale blue walls. It was a rambling, rectangular room, an illusion of greater spaciousness created by the removal of the doors from two wall-cupboards on either side of a recess that for almost fifty years had held the same badly stained Esse cooker. Sink and draining-boards, with further cupboards, lined the wall opposite, beneath narrow windows. An oak table, matching the proportions of the room, dominated its centre. There was a television set on a corner shelf, to the right of the Esse. Beside the door that led to the yard a wooden settee with cushions on it, and a high-backed chair, were placed to take advantage of the heat from the Esse while viewing the television screen. Five unpainted chairs were arranged around the table, four of them now occupied by the Leesons.
Generations of the family had sat in this kitchen, ever since 1809, when a Leeson had married into a household without sons. The house, four-square and slated, with a porch that added little to its appeal, had been rebuilt in 1931, when its walls were discovered to be defective. The services of a reputable local builder being considered adequate for the modifications, no architect had been employed. Nearly sixty years later, with a ragged front garden separating it from a lane that was used mainly by the Leesons, the house still stood white and slated, no tendrils of creeper softening its spare usefulness. At the back, farm buildings with red corrugated roofs and breeze-block walls were clustered around a concrete yard; fields and orchards were on either side of the lane. For three-quarters of a mile in any direction this was Leeson territory, a tiny fraction of County Armagh. The yard was well kept, the land well tended, both reflecting the hard-working Protestant family the Leesons were.
‘There’s more, Milton.’
His mother offered him salad and another slice of cold bacon. She had fried the remains of the champ they’d had in the middle of the day: potatoes mashed with butter and spring onions now had a crispy brown crust. She dolloped a spoonful on to Milton’s plate beside the bacon and passed the plate back to him.
‘Thanks,’ Milton said, for gratitude was always expressed around this table. He watched his mother cutting up a slice of bacon for his younger brother, Stewart, who was the only other child of the family still at home. Milton’s sister Addy had married the Reverend Herbert Cutcheon a year ago; his other sister was in Leicester, married also. His brother Garfield was a butcher’s assistant in Belfast.
‘Finish it up.’ Mrs. Leeson scooped the remains of the champ and spooned it on to her husband’s plate. She was a small, delicately made woman with sharp blue eyes and naturally wavy hair that retained in places the reddish-brown of her girlhood. The good looks of her daughters had once been hers also and were not yet entirely dispelled.
Having paused while the others were served - that, too, being a tradition in the family - Milton began to eat again. He liked the champ best when it was fried. You could warm it in the oven or in a saucepan, but it wasn’t the same. He liked crispness in his food - fingers of a soda farl fried, the spicy skin of a milk pudding, fried champ. His mother always remembered that. Milton sometimes thought his mother knew everything about him, and he didn’t mind: it made him fond of her that she bothered. He felt affection for her when she sat by the Esse on winter’s evenings or by the open back door in summer, sewing and darning. She never read the paper and only glanced up at the television occasionally. His father read the paper from cover to cover and never missed the television News. When Milton was younger he’d been afraid of his father, although he’d since realized that you knew where you were with him, which came from the experience of working with him in the fields and the orchards. ‘He’s fair,’ Mrs. Leeson used to repeat when Milton was younger. ‘Always remember that.’
Milton was the family’s hope, now that Garfield had gone to Belfast. Questioned by his father three years ago, Garfield had revealed that if he inherited the farm and the orchards he would sell them. Garfield was urban by inclination; his ambition during his growing-up was to find his feet in Belfast and to remain there. Stewart was a mongol.
‘We’ll fix a day for the upper orchard,’ his father said. ‘I’ll fix with Gladdy about the boxes.’
That night Milton dreamed it was Esme Dunshea who had come to the upper orchard. Slowly she took off her dark coat, and then a green dress. She stood beneath an apple tree, skimpy underclothes revealing skin as white as flour. Once he and Billie Carew had followed his sisters and Esme Dunshea when they went to bathe in the stream that ran along the bottom of the orchards. In his dream Esme Dunshea turned and walked away, but to Milton’s disappointment she was fully dressed again.
The next morning that dream quickly faded to nothing, but the encounter with the stranger remained with Milton, and was as vivid as the reality had been. Every detail of the woman’s appearance clung tightly to some part of his consciousness — the black hair, the frail fingers outstretched, her coat and her scarf.
On the evening of that day, during the meal at the kitchen table, Milton’s father asked him to cut the bramble patch in the upper orchard. He meant the next morning, but Milton went at once. He stood among the trees in the twilight, knowing he was not there at his father’s behest but because he knew the woman would arrive. She entered the upper orchard by the gate that led to the lane and called down to where he was. He could hear her perfectly, although her voice was no more than a whisper.