Cider and Light Between Hops

The drive out to Willow Creek took longer than the sat nav promised, mostly because the last two miles were single track with hedges scraping both mirrors. I parked next to a red tractor and sat for a minute with the engine off, listening to what sounded like a very large fan running somewhere behind the buildings.

I am fifty-three years old and I had dressed up for a dinner. That seemed stupid the moment I got out of the car and saw the mud on my shoes.

The big barn doors were open, and a man came out wiping his hands on a rag. Charlie. I would have known him anywhere, though I had not seen him properly in three years. He was fifty-five now and his hair had gone fully grey, which suited him better than the half-grey had.

"Sian," he said, and smiled. "You found us. Most people give up and go home."

"Barely. I think the hedge won on that last corner."

He laughed and came over to shake my hand, then seemed to decide that was too formal and gave me a quick hug instead. He smelled of green things and machine oil. "Come inside. Bad news first, I'm afraid."

The bad news was a folder of paperwork he showed me in the office at the side of the barn. The reunion dinner, the one our old group had been planning for months, was booked for tomorrow night. Someone, and Charlie would not say who, had written the wrong date on the form.

"Everyone else knew," he said. "They rang round this morning and moved it. You were already on the road, I gather."

"Nobody rang me."

"Well. That sounds like Bo all over." He folded the folder shut. "I'm sorry. You drove two hours for a dinner that is happening tomorrow."

I looked at my phone. There were two texts from friends saying sorry, see you tomorrow, and one photo of somebody's starter. "So I drove two hours and I have a B and B booked for two nights anyway," I said. "It's not a disaster. It's just annoying."

"Do you want the tour instead?" he asked. "I know it's not a meal, but I've got an hour before I lock up, and nobody ever sees this place empty. It's better empty."

I said yes, mostly because the alternative was sitting in the B and B watching television four hours early.

* * *

The drying barn is enormous. That was my first thought and it stayed my thought the whole time we were in there. The ceiling goes up maybe forty feet, and hanging from the top are racks, floors of them, stacked one above another, all of them loaded with hop cones. Green-gold, thousands of them, and warm air moving through the whole structure so the whole barn breathed this dusty, grassy, almost floral smell.

"Kiln," Charlie said, when I stopped walking and just looked up. "We dry them down to about ten percent moisture. The racks tilt and the cones fall through into the press below. Right now this lot's nearly done."

"How long have you worked here?"

"Twenty-one years. I started as the assistant and now I'm the land agent, which means I do everything nobody else wants to do." He walked me along the walkway between the racks and pointed out the varieties. This one for bittering, that one for aroma. He knew every field on the farm and probably every plant in it.

I had met Charlie at parties over the years, always with other people around. He had been a friend of my husband's circle, back when my husband was alive, and after that he was just someone I saw at gatherings now and then. There had been one moment, a long time ago, when we were both thirty-something and single and a bit drunk at someone's bonfire night, where we kissed. Once. Nothing came of it and we never mentioned it again. I had thought about it more times than I would admit to anyone.

He was good company. That was what I had forgotten. He talked the way my husband used to talk, happy to fill silence but not afraid of it either.

" There's one more thing," he said, as we came down the stairs out of the kiln. "It's a bit self-indulgent. I keep a darkroom. For photographing the hop varieties close up. Catalogue work, mostly, but I do it myself with film."

"A darkroom? An actual darkroom?"

"An actual darkroom. Red light and trays of chemicals, the whole thing. Do you want to see?"

"Obviously I want to see," I said.

* * *

It was a small room off the end of the packing shed, maybe eight feet by ten, with a heavy curtain over the door and a bench running along one wall. Charlie clicked the main light off and a red bulb came on, and suddenly everything went soft and orange and close.

"Watch your step, there's a stool," he said, and his hand came out to steady my elbow in the dark, briefly. The room really was small. Two people in it meant our shoulders were almost touching when we both stood at the bench.

He picked through a stack of prints in a drawer and laid them out under the red light. Hop cones, huge on the page, each one lit from the side so you could see the papery bracts overlapping like scales. They looked like artichokes, like pinecones, like something you would want to touch.

"You took these?"

"With an old Mamiya. It's slow work but I like slow work." He held one up closer to the lamp. "This one's the variety we're most proud of. Grown about four hundred yards from where we're standing."

"They're beautiful. I mean that. I expected photographs of fields and this is something else."

"It's the light," he said. "Morning light through the strung hops, if you can get it. You have to be out there by six."

I picked up a print and he reached past me to straighten the edge of another one, and his hand brushed across the back of mine. Just knuckles, just a second. In the red light I could not see his face properly and he could not see mine, which I think helped both of us, because I did not pull my hand away and neither did he.

My heart picked up, which at my age is a thing you notice and slightly resent. Fifty-three years old, standing in a darkroom that smelled of vinegar and fixer, and my body carrying on like I was thirty again. Well. Maybe not thirty. But carrying on.

"Sorry," he said, but he did not sound very sorry and he did not move his hand.

"Don't be," I said. My voice came out lower than I meant it to. "It's rather close in here, isn't it."

"It is," he said. "That's partly why I like it. You can't hurry anything in a darkroom. Everything takes the time it takes."

The prints sat in their row under the lamp, all those green-gold cones turned to silver and shadow. I could hear the big kiln fan through the wall, a steady hush, and nothing else. His hand was still resting against mine on the bench, warm, not pushing, just there.

"Charlie," I said.

"Yes?"

I did not have the next sentence ready. I looked at where our hands were touching instead, which under red light was not much to look at, two pale shapes side by side. "I've thought about that kiss," I said. "The one at