Our Picnics in the Sun (31 page)

“Maybe we’d get a dog, then?” Theo says, ignoring what I just told him about bringing strange animals into the yard.

I don’t like dogs.

Theo goes on as if I haven’t said a word. “A dog trained up, that’d be useful. I could shoot rabbits, easy, with a dog. You need a dog, the right sort of dog that’ll fetch them off the moor in his mouth and drop them at your feet, not a tooth mark on them, just a clean hole through the head.”

I hate dogs. And Howard hates guns, I tell him. He won’t allow a gun on the place.

“Oh, won’t he, indeed?”

Digger gave an old shotgun to Adam once and Howard took it away from him, and Adam ran away. He went to Exeter. I was so angry with Howard I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say anything to him for weeks. Months.

My eyes fill with tears, remembering. This could be the first time I’ve said this aloud. I stop the mixer and lift the dough hook. I scrape the bowl’s contents into the loaf tins, spoon in the next batch of flour, add the yeast and water. There’s a long silence now, as if Theo is taking in what I’ve said and weighing it for truth.

Howard told me to return the gun to Digger but I didn’t, I kept it. I went behind Howard’s back. I thought it might bring Adam home.
I hid it upstairs and I got Digger to show me how to keep it clean and oiled, just in case. I wrote to Adam that if he came back, somehow I’d talk his father into letting him keep it.

“Then what happened?”

I lower the dough hook and switch the mixer on again.

I needn’t have bothered. It wasn’t really about the gun, you see. Adam wanted to go to school. He wanted to get away from us. He never really came back here to live.

I let all these disclosures float and flow around me as the food mixer churns. It amazes me that such dangerous words can come up out of nowhere, proving they were sayable, after all, and fill up the place with not just sound but, if I close my eyes, with restless lines of light or movement. I find myself thinking of Howard’s half-world blindness and wonder if he sees them, too, these freshly agitated, peripheral little specters of so many awkward truths and unburied grievances.

Theo, there’s more, I say. There’s more to tell you. Other things.

But Theo’s mood won’t allow for any more confessions. He changes tack again. Really and truly, there’s no predicting him today. “So Howard made you angry. Why, because he got a few things wrong? Wasn’t perfect? Wasn’t it a bit much to ask of him in the first place, that he never make a simple mistake?”

A simple mistake? I whisper. Oh, Theo, you have no idea of the mistakes. Mine, too.

I stop the mixer. Silence. Then he says, “I’m sorry for Howard. I’m sorry for you, too. But the point is, even after all the mistakes, you have to look at what you’re left with. Each other.”

I open my eyes again, to the pricking of the harsh kitchen light. Theo’s words are like paper chains flown up to the ceiling in the beaks of magic birds, and fastened there in hanging festoons of all colors.

Do you know a lot about guns? I ask him, to change the subject.

“Not really,” he says. “Just enough to fill the pot, and keep down the pests.”

E
very day at Jocelyn Lodge was packed. Howard had a timetable of exhilarating, exhausting sessions of walking and turning, going up and down stairs, sitting and rising from chairs. He kicked and stretched obediently in a pool of very warm water; he practiced doing up buttons and slicing bread and using a pencil. There were hours spent trying to tame his voice, during which he followed instructions about breathing and swallowing, repeated staccato syllables, and sang through them when they jammed themselves in his throat. After his meals—hot platefuls of stewed meat and mashed potatoes, bowls of sweet puddings with custard—he lay down and slept, pleasurably sabotaged by his full stomach. Each morning he awoke in his warm, clean bedroom with scarcely a pain in his body, his limbs heavy, but stronger. Every face he could make out smiled at him, every voice he heard was musical and cajoling. When he contemplated all this cheerfulness, all this devotion to keeping him comfortable and happy, the gratitude he felt toward every person charged with care of him, tears ran down his cheeks. Not for a single moment did he stop longing for Deborah. If only she could be treated like this, too, the strangeness and remoteness and cruelty would melt out of her, he was sure of it.

After a week in the central heating he’d forgotten all about cold; he’d forgotten about weather. He’d almost forgotten the time of year, and on the day he went home was mildly shocked to see a frost like powdered glass on the drive. They set down a pathway of rubber mats for him to walk the few yards from the door of Jocelyn Lodge to the ambulance. On the drive back he tried to brace himself to
withstand the cold again. Stoneyridge was a house with the flimsiest of seals against the seasons, and winter would be reaching into the rooms already: ice on the windowpanes, his breath forming vapor clouds as he lay in bed in the early morning.

When he got back, he found that Deborah was different. How long had he been away, surely only a few days? How could that be long enough to change her, or was it he who had changed?

As he was able to study her more closely, the more she puzzled him. The more carefully she tended him, the more she receded. In her treatment of him she was less rough but no kinder, merely abstracted. Her eyes when she looked at him were distant, as if already fixed on the yard that she would suddenly say needed sweeping, or on the moor where she must go again to check the sheep. He struggled to show her that he was capable of performing little tasks to help her—he would get up and take cups in a shaking hand to the sink, and even wash them—at which she might smile disinterestedly. One afternoon when she was up on the moor late in the day, he managed to pull on boots, cross the yard, and go down the garden in the twilight to close the hen house. She came back after dark and planted a kiss on his forehead, but gave no other sign that she had noticed.

She was unfathomable. Howard would hear her talking to herself in the room next door, her tone of voice settled and conversational, even dull, but he missed too many words to make sense of what she said. And although she still roamed about the place, tidying up here or clearing out there, her routines had slipped; just as often he would come across her sitting at the kitchen table long into the morning, frowning and alert, as if absorbed in some complex mental puzzle. When she did rouse herself, the motivation for her dithery little homemaking gestures remained opaque; her way of moving, once eloquent of her state of mind, was now so self-possessed it evaded any interpretation except that perhaps she did not care to have her feelings known. She left him alone for longer and longer spells and he could not get used to it, although he was managing, more or less, to get used again to being cold and always at least a little hungry. Howard took all these changes as signs that in his absence she had developed a taste, amounting to an aptitude, for being alone.

Grateful that he seemed not to make her angry anymore, he felt nevertheless more afraid of her, for under her new calm flowed a trickle of something tense and potentially hazardous, which he could not pinpoint. He sensed it all the more acutely when she was out of sight. So he took to following her around, stumbling after the sound of her voice or the noises of vacuum-cleaning or furniture moving; it was like trying to trace a leak. Often as he roamed the house seeking a sign of her presence and finding none, it occurred to him that nowadays she frequently went out without telling him, and he wondered if she was actually giving him the slip. And sometimes he would creep upstairs and stand silently at the door of Adam’s bedroom, where, for reasons of her own, she often went to lie down in the afternoons.

She never mentioned Adam. At night in bed Howard practiced his name aloud and put together sentences about him, asking when he was coming to visit. If he managed to deliver the sentence the next day, Deborah’s answer would be huffy and inconclusive. Every day he struggled to tell her, when she next emailed him, to give Adam his love.

O
nce the bread’s out of the oven I put on my boots and coat. I have to go off up the hill to check on the sheep. I’m late in going; it’s a morning job, but on these late November days I don’t get to it until the afternoon’s on the wane, because with one thing and another the morning routine’s gone to pieces. I hang on at the breakfast table talking to Theo, to begin with. Today we were late for Stroke Club so Howard only got the last half hour. They glared at me, those bloody women, Jenny and the other one, but I didn’t much care. Really, they have no idea. I told them that since Howard was struck dumb (a stroke really does
strike
, and do they begin to grasp what that means?) I’ve gone without the sound of another voice for such a long time, and I’m making up for it now.

They pretended to understand. Yes, keep talking to him, they said, it’s important you keep talking to him. Involve him. It’ll stimulate whatever speech he has, you must keep talking to him. They have no idea what they’re asking. Howard’s voice going on about this and that, booming about the place all those years, so loud and certain, and then suddenly there’s no sound at all but your own little bleats of desperation? Weeks, months, years of hearing only yourself, trapped in your unrelenting false brightness, and getting scarcely a sound back? You’d do anything to hear another voice raised in reply, whatever it might be saying.

Also, although dealing with Howard’s speech affliction may be a little easier since he came back from Jocelyn Lodge, every other thing that needs to be done for him takes just as long as before, possibly longer. Theo’s around to help, in theory, but I can’t say he makes a
practical difference, and it wouldn’t be reasonable to complain about that. I admit there are times when I come across things left undone: Howard shivering and patient on the side of his bed waiting to be dressed when I believed him sitting content in front of the television. There are times when Howard simply gets mislaid; I might find him stranded at the end of the hall clinging to his walking frame and the overhead light left on from the night before casting the shadows of the antlers across his face. I’ll hear Theo’s voice at my ear saying he’d like to see the last of those bloody antlers and would I like that, too, to which my answer is a whispered, yes I bloody would.

Howard, meanwhile, is blinking and mumbling and about to keel over. Come on, Howard, what are you doing wandering about here? I’ll say, and then Theo sniggers over my shoulder and says something so sly I would have closed my ears to it if I’d had any warning he was about to say it.