Free Shroud by John Banville

is very vain of his accentless English. The waiter was watching him sullenly. He handed a glass to me and tipped his own in salute. "Hard to believe that we have lured you here at last," he said, with a sharp little twinkle. "We have invited you every year for the past seven years – I checked our records, yes – but always in vain." He was like a boxer, outclassed and outweighed, dodging and feinting, looking for an opening through which to jab an insult at me. I hardly attended him. I was remembering, with sudden, hallucinatory intensity, the summers of my boyhood at my grandfather's farm. A city child, I always registered first and most acutely the smells of the place, of flowers, fruits, and plants, and of their decay, the hot smell of horse dung, the smell of earth and excrement in the little wooden privy in the garden under the heavily scented elder tree, the exquisite perfume of the wild strawberries I hunted for in the hedgerows, the smell of mushrooms, the smell of hens and of their blood, the smell of the cat and the dogs, the smell of chaff, of oil, of spurts of boiling water, of animal and human sweat, of my grandfather's tobacco, the pungent smell of wine, and worn cloth, the smell of sawdust, the smell of my own sweat. I liked best the time of harvest, when the wheat and oats and rye were brought in from the fields to the threshing shed. It was, or seemed to me to be, a vast building, big as a church, big as a cathedral, with a lofty, arched ceiling and high-set windows through which thick beams of sunlight streamed down. The air was dense with swirling chaff, and the workmen coughed and spat and swore, shouting to make themselves heard above the constant din. The threshing machine was an enormous, complicated wooden structure, like a giant insect, the moving parts of which kept up a deafening clickety-clacking. It was driven by a steam engine attached to it by a long leather belt that terrified me as it shuddered and slapped like a thing in agony. In the shed it was always a luminous dusk, and the men moved about like ghosts, with cloths tied over their mouths. Low down at one end of the machine the golden grain flowed through an open funnel into the sacks, while, high above, the stripped and broken straw was shucked out in ceaseless, wild and somehow comic eruptions. I stood beside my grandfather, who above the noise attempted to explain to me how the parts of the machine worked. What a sense of splendour and communion I felt, before this scene of labour and its rewards! And then at midday all work stopped and an extraordinary, ringing silence descended, and we all marched off together to the cavernous stone kitchen of the farm where my grandmother served up a meal of beer and bread and eggs and thick-sliced sausage. At rest as at work the men treated each other as if they were a band of brothers, slapping each other on the back, shouting at each other across the length of the room, laughing, swearing, calling out ribald insults. I wandered freely among these men who were exhausted yet elated, too. No one paid me any particular attention; it was as if I were one of them. Then, with the help of the beer, the first artless murmurings of a song would be heard, halting at first, seeming to go wrong and lose its way, only to break out at last in an exultant cacophony that caught me up in its sweep and made my chest constrict and my throat swell with emotion. In a pause in the singing I was made to take a drink of beer, and although I hated the sour taste, which reminded me of the pigsty, I smiled and smacked my lips and held out my cup for more, and was applauded, and then the singing welled up again, and from the far end of the long table my grandfather smiled at me… All this I remembered, even though it had never happened. Certainly, there was a threshing machine, but I only ever glimpsed it at work, from outside the shed, which I was forbidden to enter because of my supposed weak constitution; I was kept away