Our Picnics in the Sun Read online

  Sent from my BlackBerry

  From: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  To:

  Sent on wed 17 aug 2011 at 11.47 GMT

  darling do what you can!!! Freezer’s full and fridge will be groaning! I can’t believe they can’t give you a week off. Five days even, whatever you can manage. Email’s great but we haven’t actually seen you for ages! Will be tackling your room tomorrow, not that it’s all that bad – rest of house will get a once over too, the B & B rooms could do with a spit and polish. I haven’t really advertised this year so we’ve had nobody to speak of, just a handful using last year’s Staying on Exmoor leaflet – it’s really a tall order on top of everything! Do so hope you’ll make it somehow, I know you’ll do your VERY best …

  ALL fingers and toes crossed you’ll be here by 28th, – we’re expecting you! Lots of love and can’t wait Mum xxx

 

  To: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  Sent on wed 17 aug 2011 at 06.48 EST

  Out of office reply: Hi I’m out of the office right now and checking emails infrequently. If your inquiry is urgent please contact my colleague [email protected].

 

  To: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  Sent on sat 20 aug 2011 at 06.48 EST

  On all day site meeting, am checking with office asap

  Sorry, dealing with major issues here, our new demand signal model’s throwing out forecasts by over 30% and that means major knockon effect on entire process integration. Will call. A xxx

  From: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  To:

  Sent on wed 24 aug 2011 at 11.41 GMT

  Lovely to talk for a minute on Sunday, shame the signal went, I tried a few more times but you’d switched off or something. Landline still plays up here sometimes, maybe it’s the council digging up the roads or something – anyway maybe when you get back to the office they’ll let you know about the leave. Haven’t you told them you’re booked and everything?

  It sounds terrible, all the problems – hope you’re sorting everything out ok. hope you’re getting my emails!?! As we haven’t heard we’re assuming you’re still booked and arriving 27th in time for 28th?! If you CAN give rough time of arrival it helps! See you soon!!

  Lots of love Mum xxx

  We got through the day somehow, with no idea of when Adam was going to arrive. By four o’clock Howard shuffled away to lie on his bed, shaved and combed and quite cowed by all the expectation and preparedness. In the kitchen the large joint of pork was waiting, its hide slashed and salted, leaching watery pink blood into its dish. At half-past four I put it in the oven, as if doing so would somehow draw Adam here in time for dinner at around eight. I’d picked the vegetables in the morning and they were sitting in a bucket in the yard, and although it was really far too early, I brought them in and washed and peeled them and put them in cold water. I had managed to get potatoes, carrots, some leaves of chard, all a bit stunted and nibbled, so I cut everything up small. By then I was too restless to remain where everything was ready for Adam but where there was yet no Adam present. The rest of the house was so tidy I couldn’t set about doing anything else without spoiling the order and polish I’d achieved. I walked from room to room, seeing the place through Adam’s eyes, disparagingly.

  It had always been a musty house, too cool in summer and with that soft grip of damp and a sodden, mineral smell about which I had first felt when I lived here slight consternation, but finally helplessness. Howard and I didn’t use any of the other downstairs rooms now, and the Bed and Breakfast trade was too sparse to dispel the unlived-in stillness that waited behind their doors. I hadn’t cleaned the ashes from the stoves in the dining room and front sitting room since they were last lit over two years ago, so those rooms smelled sooty as well. A grainy mesh of cobwebs and wood ash and bark crumbs lay at the side of each fireplace where the logs used to be. Every year at the end of May I used to sweep everything out and stack the logs up neatly and place bowls of fir cones on the hearthstones, but nowadays I never found the time or saw the point. Whatever I did, it was a house that seemed always to be waiting for the next winter.

  The day before, I’d stacked the small Bed and Breakfast tables up at one end of the dining room and laid the large table in the middle for three. I straightened the cutlery again and polished the glasses against my sleeve. Once Adam was settled in we would probably eat in the kitchen as usual, but for his first evening, even though the formality of it wouldn’t be very comfortable, I wanted us to claim the whole house for ourselves.

  In the hall, I’d cleared away the tourist leaflets and Visitors’ Book from the sideboard and put a copper jug of dried grasses on it instead, but the place still had a look of institutional gloom, like a run-down sanatorium. Howard’s folded wheelchair stood between the fire extinguisher in its bracket on the wall and the table with the bookings diary and telephone on it.

  I couldn’t do anything about the carpet. It had been here when we moved in and wasn’t very old at the time, so we’d kept it until we could afford something we liked. It was of that dark red, drenched-looking kind you see in pubs and it had a pattern of small swirls that reminded me of mince. Now it was worn through in several places and shedding long fronds of black underlay that were always getting caught in the wheelchair, so I’d covered the worst patches with doormats and rugs, which crossed the floor like oblong stepping stones. On both sides of the hall, above the yellowish oak wainscoting, the walls were still hung with the mismatched antlers that also had come with the house. I’d never exactly liked them, but of course I’d gone along with Howard, who said they “belonged” here. Or, put another way, I liked the idea of us as respecters of our predecessors’ history, which for some reason sat quite comfortably with my zeal to supplant it with our own. In those early days we were too romantic to point out to each other that the history of Stoneyridge’s former owners was unromantically recent, or that the farmhouse wasn’t old or at all pretty, having been built in 1924 of red brick and pebbledash to the same design as hundreds of suburban villas going up at the time in Minehead and Exeter. Digger had showed us round. Although unoccupied for the five years since his grandmother had died, the house was, he said, a “rare opportunity,” available on a long lease and protected rent to tenants who’d make good the fabric of the building, and it came with two paddocks and twenty acres of grazing on the surrounding moor. I was too young to bother that Howard’s money wasn’t enough to buy us a place, or that Digger was getting his redundant farmhouse fixed up at our expense. Neither of us paid much attention when he told us that the protected agricultural tenancy was only valid while we worked the land. If we gave up our smallholding, the tenancy would be void and he’d be entitled to sell or rent out the place as a holiday home. So what, we thought; what else were we here for but to make a success of everything? I remember the surge of protectiveness I felt, seeing the look on Digger’s face as Howard, reassuring him on this point, actually used the phrase going back to the land.

  But for that lapse, Digger put on the charm. I let him entrance me with the story he spun, about the house being built for his grandmother Elsie who’d come to Stoneyridge as the twenty-year-old bride of the second Diggory Bickford (Digger himself was the fourth, he told us), a man of property nine years older than she was. He was a great catch, he said, for a butcher’s daughter from Minehead, especially one who served behind the counter. It was Elsie and Diggory’s three sons—and the notion of three sons also played nicely into my yearnings for the folkloric life we would lead here—the eldest of them Digger’s father, who started the collection of cast deer antlers they found on the moor.

  So the antlers stayed, and some years later when we were painting the hall (a pale shade of
orange that time, to stimulate optimism and sociability) and I said I really didn’t want them anymore, Howard was ready with another reason to keep them. They were naturally shed antlers, he said, as opposed to whole mounted stags’ heads, so symbolically they represented the superiority of Nature over the “outdated macho trophyism” of deer hunting. But we eat venison, I said, when there’s been a cull and it’s cheap. Howard said that wasn’t the point, although I didn’t really grasp why not. Perhaps I wasn’t listening properly. By then, things were already quite badly awry.

  Five o’clock came and went and still there was no word from Adam. I’d been maintaining an attitude of mild rebuke for his casualness about the arrangements; in my head I could hear the sharp remarks he deserved but which I must not say, for I could not have borne to see on his face a look that asked why he had bothered to come if, once he was here, all I did was complain. So I rehearsed the mock scolding I would give him that would conceal my real worry, and dialed his number. Calls to his mobile were terribly expensive but this felt like an emergency. I was close to losing hold of my good mood. He didn’t answer. Of course—he must be still on the plane. That meant he would be hours yet. He hadn’t let me know a train time so he must be hiring a car and would just turn up. I had to be patient. I wandered upstairs where there was still an air of ill-ease that wouldn’t shift.

  I made my way to his room and checked again that the bedside lamp was working. I wiped a finger along the window ledge and straightened the curtains. Since the only thing to do next would be to return to the kitchen, I stayed at the window and did nothing. Adam’s room was one of the two bow-windowed ones at the front, with a view looking down to the road; I stood and watched one or two cars go by. Even in summer very little traffic passed this way, another factor we’d overlooked when we tried to sell the weaving and pottery, and later in desperation also garden produce and afternoon teas, from the “gallery” that was only an old farm shed.

  I turned away from the window. I’d kept the room clean and aired since Adam’s last visit not long after Howard’s stroke, although it had been unchanged for much longer than that. He’d depersonalized it completely when he was fourteen, just before he went to lodge with Mrs. Dobbs and go to school in Exeter. As a boy he didn’t have much in the way of possessions; we didn’t give him big expensive toys or gadgets and he didn’t keep treasured collections or make things. But he’d taken such as he had—posters, books, dart board, a few broken homemade toys—and piled them in the yard for burning. Without a sigh, over the course of a single day he’d tried to expunge all evidence of his life here as if his presence had never been more than a temporary arrangement—and worse, as if he never intended to return. After he’d gone I brought it all inside again and fixed the room up as if he’d never left. Howard thought I’d gone mad. I hung the dartboard back inside its circle of pockmarks on the wall and remounted the posters of places Adam had never been to—Paris, Madrid, Moscow—telling myself he’d regret it one day and be grateful that I saved it all. Well, even if not exactly grateful, he hadn’t minded, or at any rate not enough to chuck the stuff out all over again.

  Fourteen years on, the room hadn’t changed except that now the wardrobe held the new clothes I gave him as birthday presents and that he kept here because they were really only suitable for the country. (I liked the idea of him stepping into clothes that were here, ready for him when he arrived.) Although he seldom slept in it, the room was still his and would remain so. Even if he only ever came back for a few days at a time, his room would be always waiting.

  I smoothed the bedspread and adjusted the angle of the towels over the back of the chair. I gave a pointless quarter-turn to the pottery dish on the chest of drawers. It was one of Howard’s pieces, neither bowl nor plate. I lifted it and considered it in my hands: its thickness, the partial, globular brown glaze that adhered like an obstinate gravy stain. Howard had only ever made stoneware, heavy and cold to the touch, like concrete, and he never deviated from a palette of dun-colored glazes, which he described as natural. What was unnatural, I used to wonder, about the green of new grass, the orange of egg yolk, the red of blood?

  I replaced the dish on the chest of drawers. That was when I had the idea of going to pick some heather to put in a vase beside it, and a thrill of excitement ran through me, because Adam was coming back. He would love the moor when he saw it again, and the heather in a vase in his bedroom would remind him we were going there for the birthday picnic. I was elated to have something to do to pass the next hour or two. I went quickly downstairs and looked in on Howard. He was lying on his back, deep asleep with his mouth open. I basted the pork joint, put it back in and lowered the oven, and left the house quietly.

  I took the bridleway that led from the side of the house and followed it to the first gate into the fields. I walked up between the hedgebanks and across more stiles until I was high on the moor, on the very top of the ridge beyond the stand of hawthorn where the sheep gathered on warm days. I paused to get my breath back.

  Far below me and away to the right, Stoneyridge looked, as ever, misplaced, towny and foursquare in its recess dug out and leveled from the squally moorland hillside. I used to come up here sometimes and look at it as if it had nothing to do with me, trying to puzzle out, from a distance, if it were a place I’d choose to live in if I didn’t already. I would get to thinking about Digger’s grandmother in 1924 coming as a twenty-year-old bride to the house just built for her. Elsie the butcher’s daughter from Minehead, how had she fared, actually? I always wondered if Minehead was where she’d really hankered for her new house to be; maybe she’d had Stoneyridge’s front garden walled and laid to lawn and planted with those bitter-leaved town shrubs, laurel and privet, with her heart yearning for suburban orderliness, for the company of women at tea in the afternoons and, beyond her garden gate, for a pavement to walk on rather than the wide moor and the steep, wooded combes where, out of sight of everybody, a person could easily stumble on thorns and rocks, break an ankle, and entrap herself. Now, as then, the house itself and the hill behind it cast Elsie’s front garden, or the remains of it, into shade; it was always chilly and unvisited, its shadows damp, its greens too dark. We’d dug beds in the lawn and tried growing cabbages there that had brought a plague of slugs, and potatoes that came up wet and hollow.

  It was on the other side of the house, at the back, where the life of the old farm had come and gone, and maybe Elsie got used to the tides of mud at the doorway, the yard shared with poultry, the pig with her endless litters in a shed a few feet away. I wondered if her spirits ever sank when one of the three boys presented her with yet another set of mite-riddled antlers that she would have to boil in brine in the washing copper and mount with the others in the hall. If ever she did come up here to get away for an hour or two, maybe she, as I did, took a little secret pleasure in flinging any antlers she might come across into the impenetrable gorse bushes. She, too, might have thought how brittle and ancient they looked no matter how freshly cast they were, and how wintery, jutting from the walls of the hall like thorns from a thicket of dead trees behind the wainscoting. Yet she’d stayed, caring for the ugly house for over fifty years until she died there at the age of seventy-two. I learned from Elsie that, at least when it came to houses, it must be possible to love the unlovely, and I set my own mind and heart to it.

  But in our time, Stoneyridge’s decay advanced roughly in step with our attempts at transformation; we never got on top of it. We underestimated many things: the cost of repairs to the house and outbuildings and drains, the labor of clearing the rooty, low-yielding land, the attrition of the spirit wrought by winter after winter of rain and fog. Set against all that were the things we overestimated: our own skill, certainly, our power to learn from our mistakes, and, ultimately, our resilience to the drudgery of it all.

  We seldom managed more than short bursts of energy or success at anything and so after a while we came to expect bad luck, and then, of course, bad luck was
what we got. A new hen came to us with bronchitis that spread and killed the whole flock (antibiotics were out of the question), and the flock after that we lost all in one night to a fox. Roof repairs one October were undone in November by the worst storm that anyone could remember. I managed to get some of my weaving into a decent craft shop in Honiton, which went bust without paying me. One year I discovered a profitable flair for making green tomato chutney that for some reason I couldn’t repeat; the two following years it turned out runny and bitter. And the one summer we managed to get enough bookings, mainly from Howard’s old London friends, to launch the Alternative Spiritual Retreat (four weeks of meditation, yoga, pottery, weaving, and whole-meal food) turned out to be also the summer Adam was teething. He roared the house down night and day. Somebody wrote “Alternative, all right, but not in the way I was looking for” in the Visitors’ Book.

  The year after the teething disaster Howard spent a lot of money on a Hindu mystic. He came from Portsmouth, which struck a false note with me from the start, and turned up with two young robed followers who also exacted a month’s bed and board from us. Only a handful of people attended the Stoneyridge Spirituality Summer School, advertised “with resident guru.” The year after that Howard introduced earth healing and crystal therapy, but bookings were down again. We had yet to turn a profit on the smallholding produce or on my weaving or Howard’s pots. After the following penniless winter we faced the necessity of opening the next year just for the holiday Bed and Breakfast trade, and although that brought us the custom, before the end of our first season I suspected that we weren’t naturally hospitable people at all. By then our mediocrity was an entrenched and settled thing, our attempts at self-sufficiency a doomed round of chores. But we went on trying, growing wormy vegetables among the encroaching gorse and ragwort, keeping and losing livestock, turning out rough cloth and pottery, and painting our rooms with murals in harsh, desperate colors. Adam grew.