Our Picnics in the Sun Read online

  Much later, when she came in and said, “For God’s sake, Howard, what have you done? What the hell have you done?” he could not begin to speak of his gratitude for her return.

  She prised his fingers from the scissors calmly and snapped them twice in the air. With a touch that made his neck tingle she pulled the tufts of hair that were left through her fingers, drawing them out straight.

  “Oh God,” she said softly, “what a mess. You only had to wait, you know, I would have done it for you.” She sighed. “You’ve made such a hash of it, all I can do is cut the rest off. Finish the job.” She sighed again; she was considering the risks of cutting it, he knew, so close to his head. Then she began to make her way, it seemed by feel more than sight, scraping her nails gently across his temples, ruffling the clinging hair free from his damp skull, and raising the overripe smell of skin and sweat. She laid the scissor blades close, metal against scalp, and snipped. She pulled the cut fronds away with her other hand and opened her fingers. With solemn slowness, his hair fell in strands to the floor. She clipped again. Howard sat up very straight, swaying with each push of her hands, while from his mouth issued small noises he could not control. She shushed him and began to work faster, as if hurrying to outdistance a rising desire to hurt. He thought he heard a sob, and fancied that a mild trickling sensation might be not a bead of sweat but a tear dropping on the crown of his head. Nothing was said. After a while she put down the scissors and sank into the chair opposite.

  Drifts of Howard’s hair sparkled unevenly on the floor between them, where the setting sun, slanting through the window behind her, caught the copper and silver strands among the dark. With her back to the light Deborah appeared to him black and solid, a rounded, human wall between him and the burning bright outdoors. Although he could not make out her face he knew from her perfect stillness that she was gazing at him, and could not bring himself to wonder what she saw. He could feel the beat of his own blood in his fingertips, in his throat and his sore lip, as if it were her eyes fixed upon him that kept his heart pumping. He felt himself aging before her, as if time itself, with infinitesimal, delicate footstamps, were crossing the room and entering his body.

  Deborah stood up, scraping the scissor blades clean along the edge of her thumb. “Well, that’s that,” she said. “Here’s supper. You must be hungry now.” She placed the remote for the television in his hand and moved across to the tray she’d brought in. She started talking in a casual, wavery voice about the food: cheese and ham, tomatoes and mustard, what did he want?

  So this was how they were to go on. She had decided that nothing had changed. But Howard knew that something had happened, beyond a mere haircut and the removal of a beard, although not something sudden—for all that it had been accomplished in a few minutes with the scissors—but no, it was something gradual, working between them perhaps from the very beginning, out of focus but present nonetheless. Something that had been happening for years had been brought into the light, maybe at last its time had come, this shared dread—eventually a realization—that one day she would see him for what he was. Howard stroked his good hand across his forehead and back over the new stubble on his skull, and switched on the television.

  From: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  To:

  Sent on wed 27 july 2011 at 11.28 GMT

  Hello darling – nothing from you today, I suppose you are frantically busy! Or probably away again somewhere.

  Big surprise last week, Dad got hold of the scissors somehow and gave himself a shearing! Not to be outdone by the sheep, he wanted a summer haircut too. He’s absolutely shorn, beard and all.

  I did my best to tidy up his efforts at coiffure and now I must say he does look a bit cooler. Takes some getting used to, though. The beard is so “him” and would you believe I’ve never EVER seen him with short hair?! Makes his face quite different.

  Everybody used to remark on Dad’s hair. Did I ever tell you about the time years ago we were in Honiton one day and we were meant to meet up at that little gallery upstairs from the gift shop because Roderick (Dad’s old pottery teacher) had an exhibition? You were with me of course but far too young to remember. Well I was late and a bit flustered and worried I might have missed him so I said to the girl Oh I’m looking for my husband I wonder if he’s here? She said I don’t know, what does he look like and I said Oh, well, actually he looks like God. And straightaway she said Oh, yes, he’s just gone upstairs.

  I’ve never seen him like this. He looks SO different! You’ll get quite a surprise when you see it though I’m hoping it’ll have grown back a little by August!

  No other news. Veg garden gone crazy, it does creep up on you. There’s been a bit of drought so I lost the tomatoes, they don’t stand up to much and a lot of the lettuces have bolted.

  Darling you can have no idea how much I am hoping to see you.

  Lots of love M xx

  AUGUST 2011

 

  To: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  Sent on mon 1 aug 2011 at 16.45 EST

  Dear M – weird about Dad’s hair!! Way to go, sounds cool – in both senses. Tell me more when we spk, wish you could take a picture and send it as an email attachment.

  Reminds me, did you find out any more about that course you thought you could do at the library for IT beginners? I really think you should do it, you’d see how simple most of it is and make life easier for you. And me!

  Sorry no way can confirm dates yet but it’s ages yet, will let you know. More soon, take care love A xxx

  Sent from my BlackBerry

  From: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  To:

  Sent on wed 3 aug 2011 at 11.28 GMT

  Ok darling but do let me know about dates soon as poss, ok? So looking forward. Today I’ll grab my chance and get walnuts and stem ginger at the Spar, so birthday cake and cookies will be done and in the freezer. (Yep, picnic menu under control!) Seems ages since I got out on the moor to do more than count sheep. It’s been rainy since the shearing so that doesn’t help. For fresh air I only go up the track as far as the field, wouldn’t be fair to go much further, Dad would worry. He’s lost all confidence in his walking, the nurse at Stroke Club says he might well improve if he did more but it’s hard to make him. Still doesn’t seem to get much out of Stroke Club though they’ve got quite a lot on offer. Oh well. It’s hard for him. Must go he’s waiting in the van. Take care darling, keep me posted re your flights Mum xxx

  On his good days, Howard could tell what Deborah was thinking, in the old way he believed he’d been able to before the stroke. When his eyes and his mind worked together and fast enough, and if she remained still for a moment, he could, fleetingly, read her face again, and what she was thinking, he knew, was that she hated looking at him now.

  But he was determined not to let his hair and beard grow back. He’d become quickly accustomed and then addicted to the half-hour of every day she now had to spend, with slow care, shaving and trimming him. At first she’d tried to find excuses: she hadn’t time, his hair was much nicer long, his beard suited him so well. But he was having none of that. He’d gone rigid, refused to move or eat, scratched his chin and scalp raw. He did the same on the days she’d tried to skip it with a promise to do a proper job tomorrow.

  Now it was a daily ritual. There was no space to do it in his shower room, so a pink washing-up bowl from the Spar in Bridgecombe, in which were kept a plastic jug, brush, soap, towel, and a collection of disposable razors, had been given a place on a shelf in the kitchen. Every day Deborah brought it down, used the jug to fill it with warm water, placed the towel around his shoulders, and set to work at the kitchen table. She was new to it, as he was, and not very skilled, and he liked it that they shared this new undertaking in which they were both novices; it was as near as t
hey’d get to taking up a hobby together. It was delightful to him that she had to come so close that he could make out the frown on her face as she soaped and scraped and wiped. And keeping his chin and head smooth couldn’t be done in the usual snappy way she had of dispensing tablets, doing up buttons or mashing food. She was forced into slow motion, which Howard believed was good for her; the concentration and effort slowed her breathing. He was a model of co-operation, allowing her to tip his head up and down, to one side and to the other; he pulled his neck skin taut and grimaced and tried hard not to cough or swallow. He loved it that she couldn’t hurry without cutting his throat.

  She complained, of course, in her habitual manner, with continual but mild little eruptions that were no more than a kind of accompaniment—the soundtrack of her stoicism—to all that she had to get through in a day. Oh, the fetching and carrying, the paraphernalia of the soap and razors and water and towels, her own lack of skill, the risk of cuts: Howard did his best to look sorry but he enjoyed listening to her making it sound so bothersome and hazardous. Because once she took the razor in her hand and began to concentrate—and she seemed unaware of this—she stopped talking. In silence he could contemplate the sensation of her breath on his skin, her hands traveling over the folds of his cheeks, the rasp of the blade against stubble. Sometimes she sighed, and occasionally in her sighing he was aware of a slight grunt, and now and then he caught on her face a turning down of the mouth. Don’t be that way, he wanted to tell her. Willing or not, she had no choice but to perform this prolonged, daily act of tenderness, and although he knew that a performance was what it was, he hoped that in the exercise of the care necessary for the simple avoidance of bloodshed—for reasons of practical efficiency she would avoid bloodshed—she would in time acquire a trace of true tenderness. Meanwhile, until she might come to feel a little of the emotion he forced her to enact, he didn’t care that it was undignified of him to crave the measured half-hours when she was her old, gentle self.

  But afterward, time would hang heavier still. Left alone, he would haul himself up and hobble to the sitting room window overlooking the yard and the side of the property that sloped down the hill toward the road, and there he would lean, peering across at the spot where he knew the edge of the vegetable garden to be but seeing only dark shapes and patches of light. Sometimes he thought he picked up a slight movement but then would suspect he’d imagined it altogether, hoping for it too much because Deborah might have told him that the vegetable garden was where she’d be spending the next hour. Or it might have been a rabbit or a badger, or one of the hens, strayed from the run he’d built at the far end of the vegetable garden, under the shadow of the hill and out of sight from the house. He didn’t remember how many hens they had now.

  He remembered the long-ago past more vividly, how it had taken them over six weeks to clear the ground for the vegetables from the bare hillside, working by hand with mattocks and crowbars. The use of machinery for cultivation he’d regarded almost as cheating, an affectation that seemed incredible to him now. Then, he’d wanted to feel the earth between his fingers, to get dirt on his hands and mud on his boots. They’d planted spindly hawthorn cuttings for a hedge and put up a flimsy boundary fence; both were trampled within three days. They replanted and rebuilt them twice again that spring as deer, sheep, rabbits, and the wild ponies and then Exmoor’s April winds kept Stoneyridge’s small bit of land under siege. In the end they had to surround the vegetable garden with cinder blocks and barbed wire. It was hard to tell, looking at it, that the whole point of the place was harmony between Man and Nature.

  Every summer the thick-rooted ground weeds returned, sprouting up among the vegetable seedlings. He and Deborah weeded and hoed, weeded and hoed. In later years even Adam weeded and hoed in his very own patch, until the child-sized tools Howard had made for him rusted from neglect and the patch reverted to scrub; Adam wanted a bike, not a rake and spade. With a regret he was unable to express, Howard gave up trying to interest him in growing food.

  Yields were usually small; the surpluses they’d planned to barter or sell for money appeared only when there were seasonal gluts of the same tomatoes, marrows, runner beans all over the county, and then they could scarcely give them away. They cleared more ground. He stopped Deborah from growing flowers, even to sell, saying they needed all the space for food and garden flowers were phoney and suburban. Go out on the moor, he told her, if you want to look at flowers, the moor’s covered in them. One June day she picked every single one of the orange flowers on the runner bean plants and arranged them in a jug on the table, and he lost his temper. Didn’t she know the bean pods grew from the base of the dead flowers, didn’t she know she’d sabotaged the entire crop? But she had to pick them, she said, collapsing in tears. She so badly wanted some flowers for the house, just a jug of flowers on the table, she had to have them.

  Howard could no longer bring to mind what she’d been wearing that day, but if he blinked he could almost conjure out of the dark behind his eyelids a flashed imprint of the tiny ringlets of bean tendrils spiraling up among the brilliant orange blooms in the jug. He’d felt a brute. He was appalled that he’d had no idea of her need for flowers. But, determined to remain angry on account of the lost bean crop, he hadn’t said so.

  Now Howard watched from the sitting-room window and wished his eyes could distinguish genuine signs of life from imagined or reflexive blinks and flickerings, from mere tricks of the light. He wished he’d tried to understand his family better. He thought of bringing flowers to Deborah now—he’d plant her a garden full of them if he could. He’d learn a hundred things about her, he’d memorize all her small desires and strive to meet them, every one.

  Well, he couldn’t, of course. But they would go on. Days would pass, and probably he and she would appear to each other ever more oblique and pitiful; more would be asked of them both. Though it was too late to earn her forgiveness he would try to reach out and touch her when she leaned close to wipe his face with the corner of a towel; he might be able to lift his hand and stroke her arm when she was tired and when the bad shoulder under her hanging-off clothes was causing her to stoop. Which of them was the more ravaged, or if one of them were more needful of care than the other, he found it impossible to say; what was important was that for each other’s sake they garner some kindness from somewhere, amid such cruelty.

 

  To: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  Sent on sun 7 aug 2011 at 21.23 EST

  Hi Mum! might be looking good for end of month if still ok with you? hope you’re ok

  more soon

  A xxx

  Sent from my BlackBerry

  From: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  To:

  Sent on wed 10 aug 2011 at 11.03 GMT

  Adam darling

  Oh, that is great news!! Let’s have the flight details please!!! I wish I could meet you at the airport but the van doesn’t like long journeys these days (let’s face it, it never did!) In any case I probably shouldn’t be away from here that long anyway, and if I brought Dad along it’d be difficult for him and then you’d have to ride home in the back which would NOT be comfortable!

  BUT please DO be a love and let me know the details. Sorry to nag but I’ll be waiting!!! Will you be hiring a car? Don’t forget once you’re here you won’t really need it, the van’s still fine on short journeys and you can have it any time. The shop, library, prescriptions, stroke club etc on Wednesdays is all I use it for.

  Adam, you won’t get a taxi all the way from the airport will you? Whatever they’re paying you that would be terribly extravagant and if Dad got wind of it he’d have a fit.

  Come to think of it best thing would be to take a train to Taunton and I’ll pick you up there. Or even Exeter. AS LONG AS I KNOW WHEN AND WHERE!

  Dad’s dying to see you, I tell him every day you
’re coming! Adam, you mustn’t be upset if you see a change. It’s not just the beard and hair gone (yes he still insists he isn’t having them back again!). The thing is he’s speaking a bit less. After he got some speech back initially he’s gone back a bit since the last time you saw him. The stroke nurse says that can happen, and we have to remember it’s not necessarily a problem inside his brain as such, it’s the ability to communicate. I think emotions especially. Maybe it’s just too exhausting. So he might not seem thrilled to see you, it might look as if it hasn’t even registered, and there’s the added problem of this vision problem – he can only register about half his normal visual field even though his eyes still work so it’s very confusing, you can never be sure which half he sees and which he doesn’t.

  But he can be as bright as a button on his good days, he takes in everything! Though to be honest he can be naughty, he’ll just switch off when it suits him, for instance I can’t get through to him about the shaving, how it just adds to the list of things to do. I did try once or twice just not doing it but he got his message across! Not to worry.

  Main thing is FLIGHTS!!!

  Love

  Mum

  Ps please ring the house with flights as I won’t get to email again till next wed

 

  To: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  Sent on thurs 11 aug 2011 at 21.23 EST

  Mum hoping to make it but nothing’s definite yet, you know what it’s like ok?! Still working on it, but it’s pretty crazy round here! Out of office rest of week Will keep you posted. Luv xxx