Our Picnics in the Sun Read online

  When I next sat up and looked around, my eyes were still blurry from crying, and maybe from sleep. But in the far distance on the ridge of the moor I thought I saw a walking figure, hardly touching the ground, a shimmering, dreamy silhouette against the warm, watery air. It moved without resistance toward me, yet did not draw near. It could only be Digger, and yet it couldn’t; Digger was the least spectral person I could imagine. There was nothing of Digger’s short-legged trudge in the liquefaction of the figure’s effortless, slow stride under the rain-laden sky.

  As I watched, what little I remembered of Howard’s stuff about land spirits and earth deities came to mind, the kind of stuff I’d gone along with once, a long way; how did it go? The ancient Greeks deified the soil. They worshipped the female earthbound by her fertility, they revered the cycle of birth to grave and to rebirth, and so they cast living sacrifices into pits in the ground. The time when I had watched Howard’s mouth form the very words seemed hardly more recent. I hadn’t objected, then, to the female’s hapless servility in this scheme of things, I didn’t even see it. But the Celts—or was it the Druids—worshipped the male, and built altars open to the sky and burned animals on them, offering flames and smoke upwards to aerial spirits, in pursuit of eternity. Well, so much for all of that. I didn’t believe in Howard’s spirits anymore and his phallistic theories just made me feel cranky. All his theories had tired me out, in the end; there had been too many of them as failures and afflictions accrued, requiring excuses.

  Yet how else to describe this figure, as I watched it, other than as a spirit, or at least a presence, holy or otherwise? And whether sacrificially invoked or not by a sheep lying dead in a sunken chamber of earth, as I went on watching, this presence charged every breath I took with a mysterious gladness and yearning, a kind of pushing and pulling at my heart, as if both those feelings were part of the same emotion. I stared, willing him to cross the ground between us, longing for him to draw near and bring me fully inside the circle of his benediction. But he came no closer. I grew impatient; it was nothing but a bending of the light through cloud shadow, it was myopia. It was stupid. I shook my head to clear my mind of the absurdity of it.

  But then the no less impossible idea came to me that the figure was Howard, straight and strong and tall again and coming toward me across the thirty years. At once that was followed by the thought that that, too, was ridiculous (the facts being what they were), and it could only be Adam, who was built so like his father and walked as Howard once had. That, of course, was also impossible. Adam wasn’t here; he hardly ever came to Stoneyridge now. At that moment he’d most likely be on a flight to somewhere or at least in an airport; his emails were full of how they were always sending him places though he seldom said which places. I swear that the other impossibility, that it was Adam’s twin somehow alive and grown like Adam to be a man of twenty-seven, did not cross my mind.

  The clouds had descended and were low and gray over the moor, shifting horizontally like fire smoke. Large raindrops began to fall, and into the air rose the smell of dust and damp earth. From not so far away came the first groan of thunder. A sudden brushing noise started behind me, and two rabbits skeetered out of a hole; the startled sheep took off at a tottery run on their brittle, overloaded legs. I got up and went among them until they settled, and when I next looked back down the hill, I caught a movement close to the trees. It was Digger, after all, tramping along under the weight of ropes and a tarp sheet and carrying his gun, in case it was needed.

  The afternoon turned ordinary and difficult again.

  “Too late, am I?” he said. “Look at that. She’s suffered, she has, lying there.”

  “I didn’t know how to help her. I didn’t know what to do,” I said.

  “Shot her, that’s what you should’ve done. Kinder, a clean hole through the head.”

  He knew we didn’t use guns; it was a way of saying he despised us for it. He checked the rest of the flock and told me he’d be back with his dog in the morning to drive the sheep down and we’d shear them in the evening when they’d dried off and their stomachs had settled. Then he hauled the carcass up, wrapped it in the tarp, and hoisted it on his shoulder. I followed him down off the moor.

  On the day of the shearing, if she’d bothered to ask him how he’d slept, Howard would have tried to tell her very badly, because all night he’d been too hot and in the wrong pajamas. He’d tried to take them off but the left sleeve got stuck on his elbow and the trousers twisted themselves around his groin and squeezed his balls until they hurt. He hated wearing pajamas—any pajamas—and she knew it, so he was angry with her even before she hadn’t bothered to ask.

  He’d woken up in pajamas in the hospital. She said the nurses had told her he had to wear something and they’d sent her into Taunton to get some. After three weeks the pajamas went with him to Rehabilitation, for another four. When they were leaving there to return to Stoneyridge he’d watched her fold and pack the pajamas in the determined way she now went about everything she had to do for him. For their previous twenty-eight years together he’d slept naked but back at home she made him go on wearing them, even after he objected. It was more practical, easier on the sheets, she said. He’d been too embarrassed to go on objecting.

  As the months passed, she made, avoiding any mention of them, other significant operational changes in his life: spoons for every meal, clothing without buttons or zips. She also avoided putting the word your in front of stroke. It was always the stroke. She disliked, perhaps, ascribing ownership of it to him alone when its ravages demanded from her a hundred daily, bitter sharings of his incapacity. When she did have to say them, she used the words with reluctance, as if it was wrong to allude matter-of-factly to an event so transformative and dreadful, in the same way that he, sitting day after day at Stoneyridge surrounded by the dilapidated walls within which he’d been left to go on living, loathed the compulsion in himself to make trivial little pictures out of ominous cracks in the plaster.

  Also without discussion, she decided on separate bedrooms. The stairs were too much for him, she said, in her changed, slightly hectic voice. She was going to divide the old back parlor off the kitchen to make a smaller sitting room and a bedroom. She’d applied to the council and got a grant; he’d even be getting his own little shower room. It would be easier for him on the ground floor: for the bathroom, the meals, the nurse’s visits, the naps in the afternoons. She would continue to sleep upstairs.

  Howard wasn’t fooled. It would be easier for her, by keeping his useless bulk out of her bed at night, to spare herself the sight of him. He tried to say as much, and also that he didn’t blame her, but by then she seemed to have tired of trying to understand him and even of pretending to try. Her attention would wander, and she was always doing something else anyway, while she affected to listen: thumping pillows, clearing a tray, counting out tablets. If ever she could find an excuse to leave the room, she did.

  He knew that was why, also without consulting him, she’d got the television, a thing they’d done without on principle their entire lives. He had an idea it was Adam who’d paid for it, there being no money anywhere else for such a purchase, but Deborah had gone vague about that and told him just to be grateful. He could see why she was. With the television on, she could disappear more often and for longer because, to her mind, she was leaving him less alone. The trouble with his objection to that, both on the principle of its being there at all and her practice of abandoning him to its fatuous babblings, was that he loved the television. He bloody loved it. She was right; he was less alone. The old black-and-white films—his favorite viewing—filled the afternoons with companions, reconjuring his boyhood (more imagined than accurately recalled) and a world heroic, sentimental, and just. If, as often happened, he lost the thread of a film, there was always something else: horse racing or somebody making pancakes or people being arrested; the novelty of flicking channels and playing with the volume never quite wore off. The television was
a friend with a hundred different moods, of which fatuousness was only one, and a hundred different stories that he could silence or interrupt at will, a friend in front of whom he could cry or fall asleep.

  Rendered mute himself, Howard thought about speech a great deal: his earlier waste of it, the words he’d squandered talking about God knows what, and all the words of Deborah’s he’d missed because he’d been so busy listening to himself. And saying what, exactly? He couldn’t for the life of him articulate the reasons why, for example, he’d forbidden them a television. It was too late for amends, he knew, but now he tried as never before to hear Deborah, brooding over every nuance of timbre and vocabulary and striving to form a sound, even if sometimes only an echo, to send back to her. He recalled conversations from the past and yearned to conduct them again, to do them better. There were times when he caught her speaking softly not to him but to herself, or as if she were addressing another person present who was capable, as he was not, of answering. And then he grieved for her. In the silence of his head he composed long, phantom strings of oratory to her, in apologia, that he knew she would never hear.

  There were worse days than those, when language disintegrated altogether before him, when he couldn’t recall the sound of his own voice and couldn’t understand Deborah’s at all; on such days it was as though not words but random letters of the alphabet came swooping out of her mouth and crackled around him like incomprehensible swarms of black insects, and he had to squeeze his eyes shut and flap them away with his good hand. But on the morning of the shearing she was speaking in her habitual way, in statements and instructions. Her voice was too loud, as if she was talking over a disturbance from the room next door, or maybe just in the back of her own mind.

  Adam will be here for his birthday this year.

  There, take your toothbrush. Try, Howard.

  Stand up, Howard. Here’s your frame.

  I know it’s early but I’ve got to see to the sheep today.

  It’ll have to be toast and banana, I haven’t time to do anything else.

  Howard worked his jaws and jerked his limbs; his stomach churned. I shouldn’t blame you, he wanted to say, but I do. He blamed her for thinking that he wanted her to pretend things were all right. Why did she want him to believe it wasn’t important that she was struggling, that the place was falling down around them? That their son hardly ever visited? That he hadn’t touched her for years?

  Come on, you like toast and banana. Here, take it.

  I have to go and get dressed. Digger will be here soon.

  Howard, don’t cry.

 

  To: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  Sent on sat 9 july 2011 at 16.45 EST

  Hi

  Mum I thought you were getting rid of the sheep anyway, you were saying you’re going to? I’m amazed they’re still there, they are a total waste of space! Honestly, do you really still need them at this point in your life??? Did you ever? ;-)

  Sorry, you’ve heard all that before … but at least you don’t have to worry about the fleeces any more, it’s one less pressure if you’re not trying to keep up with all the spinning and weaving stuff.

  Sorry to sound negative but there is zero demand for all the hairy brown scarves etc etc no matter they’re handmade and nice and unique, which they are. It’s just not viable. I mean as a hobby fine if you enjoy it but it’s never going to wash its face as a viable business. Yeah-yeah, I’m a cracked record, I know I know! I worry about you though.

  Am at the conference here at HQ and staying over the w/end and after that will be at the new Europe office for a while, on and off. Thank god for air con, it’s really hot! The presentation went well, glad to say – the guys here are bright, but demand-driven supply chain management is like breaking news to them. Inside I’m like, what century are you in? but I don’t say that to them obviously. I think they took a lot of it in anyway. I’m going out to this place tonight with a couple of them, really nice guys, apparently the beer’s amazing. Regards to dad, take care A x

  PS forgot, re birthday – of course I’ll try but see above, pretty busy.

  The next day I tried to get Howard up and dressed early and in his chair for breakfast so I’d be ready to start as soon as Digger arrived. I hadn’t told him about the dead ewe or that he was going to miss Stroke Club because the shearing happened to be falling on a Wednesday. He didn’t care about the days of the week and didn’t usually want to go to Stroke Club anyway, but he picked up on something and wouldn’t be hurried. The rain and thunder of the day before hadn’t cleared the air and his room was hot and stuffy; he’d woken badly with a greasy face and his eyes crusted and sore. He wouldn’t take a piece of toast and banana in the good hand and try to eat, just locked his fingers into a claw and let both hands flop in his lap, as bad as each other. When I lifted the good hand and tried to push the toast inside his fist he turned his head and gazed past me with that milky look in his eyes I used to think he couldn’t help. Then he moaned and dribbled a bit so I knew he wanted to speak, probably just to tell me he wanted cereal on the one day I didn’t have time to spoon it into him. On any other day I’d have made a joke of it and brought him round, but this time I admit I got impatient. Then he began to cry.

  I took the toast and wiped his hand clean. I stroked his head and said I was sorry. His shoulders shuddered for a while and after a time were rigid and still, and then they softened under my hands. His hair was still damp from the shower, and I finger-combed its thin snakes of white through the rest of it, still a lion’s mane, abundant and long and backward-sweeping, though the dark gold color was faded. Oh, Howard’s hair, and his bronze, curling beard—he was more than handsome, he inspired confidence. It didn’t cross my mind that his flamboyant looks might not signify a character of far greater dimension and dynamism than mine. My conviction that he was infallible seemed established in those pale green eyes, set deep under his brow, so hawklike it was some time before I saw gentleness in the light they cast upon me.

  “You need a trim,” I said, pulling his hair out along his shoulders. I drew my fingers down through his beard. “You’ll be a bit cooler after a trim. I’ll do it for you later.” I leaned over and kissed the top of his head, and he managed to lift and place his hand on my breast, round and loose under my dressing gown. He made his fingertips perform a fluttery, circular caress, and then he dropped the exhausted arm. He tipped his head and looked up at me, his lids half-closed. That day the veins in the whites of his eyes were a tracery of tiny pink tributaries under the gluey surface, and I knew he could barely see me. “I have to get dressed,” I said, and moved gently away.

  Just then Digger’s pickup came into the yard, the dog barking in the back. There was no time to disappear upstairs. Digger jumped down and came straight into the kitchen with the dog at his heels, and even though it was early they brought more of the day’s heat in with them, trapped in Digger’s rank sweat and the yellow light on his skin, and in the baked, wiry hair and meaty tongue of his dog. They stood there, both restless; the dog’s saliva dripped on the floor. It hung in the air unsaid that I was annoyed he hadn’t left the dog outside, where all working dogs belonged, and that Digger knew it and couldn’t care less. I was also furious that my dressing gown was so old. I bought from charity shops so everything I owned was old, even before it became mine.

  Digger sat down and winked at Howard. “How-do,” he said. “Lie-in, did we? Had a lie-in, then? All right for some!”

  “He’s just having his breakfast,” I said.

  Digger picked up the piece of toast and waggled it close to Howard’s mouth. “Here you are, then,” he said. “Here.”

  Howard glared and turned his head away. But he let Digger place the toast in his good hand, and he lifted it to his mouth and began to chew.

  “He’s fine,” I said. “Aren’t you, Howard? He can manage fine. I’ll be back down in a minute. I have to get dressed.” />
  “Shame. Looking good as you are,” Digger said, winking again. “Eh, looking good, isn’t she, eh?”

  Howard thumped his good arm in his lap and reared back in his chair, coughing, and spat out his mouthful of toast. He hadn’t the strength to send it far enough to hit Digger, and most of it got stuck in his beard. Digger yelped. “Oy, stop that now! Don’t you give me none of your old cud!”

  I got the sink cloth and wiped Howard’s beard clean. He was rocking back and forth, his mouth bubbling with saliva and mashed toast, a varnish of tears over his eyes. “It’s all right, Howard,” I said. “It’s all right. No need to fuss. He didn’t mean any offense.”

  I turned to go, but Howard snarled again. “Digger’s here to help,” I told him. “He’s here to do the shearing.”

  “Not before time, neither,” Digger said. “In a right old state, they are, this weather. Should’ve got me sooner.”

  I didn’t rise to that. I’d pestered him as much as I could and I didn’t want him to say anything in front of Howard about the dead ewe.

  “Adam’s due back for a visit soon,” I said. “That’s probably why Howard’s a bit restless. We’re waiting to hear when he’s arriving.”

  “That right? I’ll tell Kevin and Kyle. They ain’t seen ’im for a while. ’E don’t keep in touch much.”

  “Oh, he keeps in touch with us, of course! His visits are always last minute. That’s just the way it is, his office keeps him dangling,” I said. “Never knows where they’re sending him next. But he should know any day. Probably he’ll be here for his birthday. The twenty-eighth.”