Our Picnics in the Sun (10 page)

Before I could take it from him his companion grabbed it, filled his glass fast, and thumped the bottle back on the table. He took three or four hard gulps.

“There you are,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I’m taking some interest.”

I didn’t dare look at either of them. I hated them both; what were they doing here at all? I carried the new bottle to the sideboard and took the empty one back to the kitchen.

I opened a tin of sardines and a jar of cockles in brine, and sliced a couple of tomatoes, then arranged everything on two plates with some lettuce and slices of lemon. I sprinkled on some dried marjoram; there were chives and a woody bit of parsley in the garden but I hadn’t time to go picking herbs. I couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes over it, but when I took the plates to the dining room the bottle from the sideboard was on the table and had been started.
Both men were slumped back in their chairs, but at least they weren’t arguing.

“Marine medley,” I said, setting down the plates. Neither of them spoke. Just as I reached the door, the older man called, “Oh, bread! May we have some bread?”

But when I went back to the kitchen, Howard was on his feet. He needed to pee and wouldn’t go by himself, so I had to attend to him first. When I got back to the dining room with the bread, the second bottle was nearly empty. The food had barely been touched.

By now Howard was getting confused and restless. Usually I fed him around six o’clock, in front of the television, and he had got up again and was trying with one hand to pull his tray table across in front of his chair. I tried to reassure him that Adam would be here soon; I told him that he’d have to be patient a little longer, that I was busy with some last minute B & B guests, but he just shrugged my hand off his shoulder and refused to let me help him settle back in his chair. He lurched and lowered himself into it and sat glaring. I put our potatoes in the oven to roast and made him a banana sandwich to keep him going. He flicked it around on the plate and looked at me as if I were trying to poison him.

I’d been going through in my mind what on earth I could produce for the guests’ dinner. It was a long time since we’d had much passing trade and I didn’t keep big stocks of food. There was plenty of pork, but it was out of the question that I should give them that and so present Adam with the joint already carved into, in less than its full splendor. I defrosted some chicken joints in boiling water and put some rice on. I found peas in the freezer, too, so I cooked those while I sautéed the chicken in a frying pan with a shake of Worcestershire sauce, for color. There was a can of condensed mushroom soup that would do for sauce, with a knob of butter. When it was ready I served it all up as nicely as I could and told them it was chicken fricassee. There had been a long wait, but most of the marine medley was still on their plates. The room reeked of alcohol; one of them had knocked over a glass and their twisted napkins lay sodden in a pool of wine where the paper cloth had disintegrated. I didn’t comment, nor did they. For dessert I sliced two bananas and stirred them
into custard out of a tin, and sprinkled some crushed biscuits over the top. When I took it in, they were still sitting in front of their plates of chicken, so I set it on the sideboard. It was a quarter to nine and I didn’t have time to waste attending to them any longer. Just as I was telling them to help themselves to dessert when they were ready, the telephone rang. It would be Adam, needing a lift from Taunton station. I rushed out to the hall and picked up.

Adam was in Barcelona.

“Mum, I just got your email. Look, I’m really sorry. You obviously took it the wrong way about me getting the time off, it doesn’t work like that. I’ve got no choice in the matter. I’m sorry but I thought you knew the score.”

I couldn’t speak, except to say, “Barcelona?
Barcelona?
”

Oh, hadn’t he said he might go? He was sure he had, maybe some time ago. It was never really on the cards he’d get a whole week off, he certainly had told me that. They would only give him four days in the end, he went on, so he’d grabbed the chance and gone off to Barcelona with a couple of guys from the Marseilles office. They were staying at this cool place just off the Ramblas. One of them knew someone with a yacht.

“Barcelona’s amazing. You ever been? You really should go,” he said.

“Adam, we’re expecting you here. I thought you’d be ringing from the station. We’ve been waiting all day. Everything’s ready.”

“Oh God, Mum, look, I’m sorry! I really am. But I don’t understand how you got the idea it was ever definite.”

“You never said it
wasn’t
definite.”

“Sorry, Mum, but yes I did. I did say I wasn’t sure I could make it.”

I didn’t reply.

“Mum, I’ve had site meetings back to back for three weeks, I’m going from one place to the other, I’m on five planes every three days, I couldn’t ring before, okay? Plus the backlog in the office is worse now, they very nearly didn’t even give me the four days. Four days isn’t worth the hassle of getting to the UK, is it?”

“Isn’t it?”

“You know it isn’t. It’s practically another whole day just to get to you from Heathrow. Look, I
am
sorry, really I am. It would’ve been great to catch up with you guys. I worry about you, you know. I worry a lot. But I never promised, I
couldn’t
promise. Maybe later in the year, okay?”

“I hope so, dear. I do hope so. Maybe Christmas?”

“Yes! Yeah, Christmas might be
very
possible. I’ll try and swing it, I’ll really try. Mum, I’m truly sorry, okay? I’ll ring you tomorrow. Love to Dad. Take care now, okay? Talk soon. Bye!”

It was after nine o’clock by the time I was able to go back and clear the dishes. The third wine bottle was empty and the older man was slumped forward at the table, too drunk to care about pretending not to be. I think the younger man might have been crying; he turned his face away from me as I came in. The unfinished chicken lay on the plates cut open to the bone, the flesh pink and injured-looking. The bananas and custard were untouched on the sideboard. I didn’t offer them coffee or wish them goodnight. Back in the kitchen I gave Howard a slice of the pork and some roast potatoes, cut up so he could manage with a spoon, but he didn’t eat much. When I told him Adam wasn’t coming he behaved as if he hadn’t heard. I got him to bed without either of us speaking again, and went up to my own room.

A
DAM
’
S
B
IRTHDAY
2004

O
n the morning of his twenty-first birthday Adam stayed in bed, intending to shorten the day by avoiding his parents for as long as possible but unsure if the effect wasn’t actually to lengthen it. For ages he’d lain wide awake but now was tired again. He yawned, pulling the cool of the room into his mouth and catching a web of mucus in his throat that made him cough in a way that reminded him of his father. His teeth were furry. It was after eleven o’clock and he hoped he’d lingered long enough to undo his mother’s hopes of a birthday breakfast; he didn’t do breakfast, at least not here and least of all the birthday kind. He remembered other birthday breakfasts, being expected to smile before he was properly awake, eating through gritted teeth the porridge made “special” in some awful way, mixed with nuts or rhubarb or something, and never being able to show he thought his presents “special” enough to see the worry clear from his mother’s face. Hardest of all was pretending not to notice how uncomfortable everyone was with the whole idea of “special.” He couldn’t face any of that today. He’d only been here two days and already he’d run out of energy for play-acting the prodigal son. But he ought to get up.

From downstairs he heard his mother treading through the hall from the kitchen, then a click as the front sitting room door opened. In a moment he would hear triple clunks as (one) she dropped the vacuum cleaner, (two) plugged it in, and (three) switched it on, followed
by the rising drone as she went scraping along the carpet. In advance, his heart sank with the predictability of it, this series of familiar, comfortless sounds from childhood that meant B & B guests were booked in that night. The extra work for his mother always made Adam feel unreasonably guilty, as if the general atmosphere of reluctance that hung around the very idea of B & B guests came only from him. He yawned again. Just then his father’s voice rolled through the hall, calling out to her. Something about the pottery kiln, something not good judging by the peeved, high pitch of his voice. Probably another complaint about Digger, most likely over the logs for the firing he was supposed to be doing today. His mother’s answer sounded breathy and clipped as if she were talking to a child with the last remnant of her patience, and although the problems with the firing weren’t Adam’s fault either, her sad, even voice made him feel guiltier still. The vacuum cleaner started. Downstairs, the conversation seemed to be over. He ought to get up.

Instead he tried to turn his mind to Melanie and interest his penis in the attentions of his right hand, but the sounds that had intruded into the room intensified the idea of his parents, and threatened to bring an image of them—each alone, not together—almost before his eyes. He worked his hand harder. Then, as if from a distance, he saw a picture of himself—a young man sprawled on a heap of bedclothes with his eyes closed, trying to induce a forlorn, masturbatory oblivion that would postpone for a few moments longer the dismay of his twenty-first birthday. Instantly, he went limp. He rolled over and swore, hating the way he could ambush himself like this, by simply holding up an imaginary mirror that confronted him with his own lonely, overwhelmingly pathetic reflection. All at once he seemed even more lonely and pathetic than his parents, and his cock, flopping in his hand, even more lonely and pathetic than the rest of him. Melanie vanished from his thoughts, at least the carnal ones; they’d broken up weeks ago, anyway. She wasn’t really the point. If he was being honest, for the first two months they’d been together he’d been a bit bored except when he was in bed with her, and for the final two he’d been bored there as well. And guilty for the entire four, because she was a genuinely nice person and deserved better. Beyond the four
months, he’d gone on feeling guilty because he’d been too busy working for his finals to miss her all that much, and by the time they were done with, too tired.

Now feeling self-conscious and a little disgusted, Adam withdrew his hand and cupped the back of his head on the flattened pillow. Could he go back to sleep? He closed his eyes and exhaled. But he heard the vacuum cleaner stop and the clump of his mother’s footsteps, and could not help seeing in his mind her leathery bare feet as she trudged in her clogs back to the kitchen and set about another of the jobs she would have liked him to be helping her with. He ought to get up.

As well as the clogs, she’d probably be wearing the same mottled brown skirt as yesterday. He hated the skirt, which she’d sewn from a bit of her home-woven fabric that she said was “naturally slubbed.” It looked like sackcloth dotted with rabbit droppings. The weave was so uneven and loose it bagged at the back where her buttocks strained and rubbed it to a brown sheen, and in front it made a sling for the crescent-shaped pillow of her stomach and dropped like a curtain over her knees. He wondered why he could imagine her in expensive, beautiful clothes when he’d never seen her in any, and why the thought made him feel like crying.

Now he could hear a van straining up the track, probably Digger’s pickup with the logs in the back. Adam yawned again. He should go and put in an appearance in the yard and back his father up when, as almost certainly it would, some spat started, about the price of the logs, the late delivery, whatever. Or he should go and feign some interest in the firing, at least; he hadn’t even asked Howard last night what he had ready for the kiln because the firings were so hit-and-miss it was better not to get any hopes up. Adam had heard enough about the fickle variables of clay and mineral quality and ambient temperature to last a lifetime, and as for his father’s experimental modifications to the loading, fueling, timing, and cooling of the kiln, never mind his specific errors—the blistered glazes, the vessels exploding because he’d trapped a bubble of air inside—well, it wasn’t unknown for those to cost him every single piece in the firing. Adam had found that the less he heard about the technicalities
the easier it was to commiserate with genuine sympathy for all the wasted effort.

Now Digger’s dog started barking and Adam heard the rumble of the logs sliding from the pickup into the yard. The van coughed and revved, turned, and chugged back down the track. After that, silence. Adam knew that from his room at the front he would not hear the soft thuds as Howard lobbed logs into the wheelbarrow, nor the squeak of the wheel as he trundled it round to the outbuilding behind the studio that housed the kiln, nor the returning squeak, and more thuds. It took one person two hours to shift enough wood for a firing. Adam got up.

His parents came in and drank coffee while he opened his birthday present, a thick check shirt from the outdoor shop in Exeter where his mother bought him the clothes and boots that he only ever wore when he visited and that stayed in the house when he left. Didn’t she ever notice that his own clothes were completely different, that he was never going to feel comfortable in the things she gave him to wear? No, she really didn’t, he thought, listening as she told him she’d spent forever choosing the color and was wondering if the dark green was right, she could change it if he wanted. She never did seem to realize the effect of what she was doing, that it so often produced the opposite outcome to the one she hoped for.

“No, I really like it,” he said. “Thank you
very
much.”

She smiled, and poured him more coffee. The trickle from the pot drew too much attention to the sudden silence among them.

“Oh, Adam, twenty-one!” she said wildly. “Where’s the time gone? Flown by! All grown up! I can’t believe it. Howard, can you believe it?” Howard, as if he’d been a bystander at the past twenty-one years, shook his head.