Our Picnics in the Sun (16 page)

S
eptember is never my favorite month. The weather turns colder before I’m ready to let go of hope for a few more summer days, and at dusk, which also comes too early, a wind particular to the change of season blows through the laurel and privet around the house and whips the trees on the moor with lonely, whining strokes. This wind comes from the west and beats the land with slanting rain that carries in it the tang of seawater. It reaches inside the house, where familiar, faintly acid drafts reveal themselves anew. I tear up old bits of cloth into strips to stuff the gaps in the window frames, and I fit wedges of folded cardboard to silence the rattling of the upstairs doors. The Rayburn starts up with puttering noises that fill the kitchen with coal smoke, and I worry that this year, once again, we can’t afford a new stove. I wear my everyday, year-round dresses as always, but with sweaters on top, and long, thick socks, most often Howard’s old outdoors ones that he doesn’t need anymore. There is nothing golden about the autumn here. Beyond the quagmire of the yard, gray oily puddles form in the mud where deer and sheep browse the trees and hedgebanks. On clear days the sky is a flat, opaque blue. The sere green of August bracken on the moor turns almost overnight to brown, and with the first frosts, to black.

I am harvesting the last of everything in the garden. The lettuces are gone to seed and leak a pungent white juice like dandelion milk when I break them off their stalks close to the ground. The leaves are as tough as cabbages and lacy from slug damage, and I wonder about making a sort of end-of-season soup with them, picturing a pale green broth in which the last of the runner beans, so dry and woody,
might also soften enough to be edible. There’s one last courgette that has swollen unseen under its own leaves and is now a marrow, torpedo-sized. I tap my knuckles on the side of it, enjoying the hollow knock against its dark green wall. It’s yellow and wormy on the bottom where it’s been sitting in wet soil, but most of it can be used. The tomatoes that haven’t rotted on the stem cling on in green clusters, and I wonder why it is that Nature lets them survive so long past the time they should have ripened. I start to pick them anyway, trying to remember a recipe for fried green tomatoes I read in a magazine at the library and knowing that no matter what they taste like Howard will make out he doesn’t care for them. Although I’m quite alone out here, as clear as a bell I hear him saying it.
American food—it all tastes of death!

He must have really said that once, years ago, for his voice to come into my head now, and so forcefully. What doesn’t come to me at all is what I replied to it. At the time, probably nothing out loud. Almost certainly I didn’t give it much thought; in those days such sentiments were throwaway assumptions among the kind of people we were. Or, I wonder, were his actual words,
Fast food—it all tastes of death!
I can hear his voice in my head saying that, too. Or maybe it was something else entirely that tasted of death (battery chickens?) and when, exactly, in the chronicle of the nigh-on thirty years I spent listening to him, did he say it? Standing here on a damp afternoon in this twenty-ninth Exmoor September, my hands sticky with clay and sap, I’m amused to find I can’t recall, and Howard’s voice in my head falls silent and suddenly I feel sad and guilty, wishing for his sake that back then I’d been a person who could have helped him laugh off that kind of thing. It has taken me all these years to understand that ideas, even Howard’s, have a lifespan. Like clothes or anything else that goes in fashions, they’re only right for a while and then they turn wrong or plain ludicrous, a lot of them, anyway. Some ideas, of course, come up again and again, like vegetables left in the ground. But nothing much I can think of holds true forever. Maybe even what Howard called his principles were only ideas that survived a bit longer than the others.

But how dare I think these things? I stretch up and gaze at the
dusky sky that’s decorated with a high, silver-edged bank of cloud and I wait for Howard’s voice to come again and fill my head with his thundering objections. But I hear nothing, as if even my imaginary, long-ago Howard is struck dumb by my heresy. I’m smiling. So minds—even mine, it would appear—may change, and the sky stays right up there where it belongs. And while it is terrible that the stroke has robbed the real, still-living Howard of speech and he is incapable of claiming or declaiming anything now, I’m relieved I no longer have to listen to the stuff he used to come out with. It’s a thrill to admit it: I’m not sorry that the death of part of Howard’s brain has silenced his ideas. The thought sends a shiver running through me. I don’t want to think about what else must have died to let me even think this way and so I concentrate hard on the picking, fingering my way through the pungent tomato foliage and feeling on the backs of my hands tiny prickles from the sharp hairs on the stalks and undersides of leaves. I strip every plant and I’m pleased with the size of the crop. Theo might like fried green tomatoes.

Yes, Theo is still here.

When we came back down from the moor on Adam’s birthday it was late and we were soaked and shivering; it had rained long before we reached home. Howard was exhausted from the walking and I was, too, from so much heavy lifting; in fact I couldn’t understand where I’d found the strength for it all. I couldn’t quite believe what had happened. But I was quite clear that now the picnic was over Theo would—and probably should—go and leave us in peace.

So I parked Howard in the kitchen and went to the scullery to find towels to dry him off and then I saw that the laundry from that morning was still in the washing machine; of course it hadn’t been emptied. In the excitement of the picnic I’d forgotten all about the soiled sheets and Howard’s stripped bed, which I hadn’t made up with clean linen yet. I wanted to cry. I was so tired, my shoulder was aching, yet I could not delay; Howard was fretting and probably getting a temperature. If Theo were just to leave now, if he left me to tackle this all on my own—if he was to enter and exit my life within the space of a single day—it would be as if I had never had him here
at all. Yet I could not very well beg him to stay. So I will always be grateful that as I bent down to open the door of the washing machine, I simply sensed him at my side, as I had first thing that morning.

With a lot of tugging, out came the heavy wet sheets into a laundry basket. “It’s still raining hard out there,” I heard Theo say. With some more effort, the sheets were hauled up onto the drying pulley that hung from the ceiling until they filled the scullery like hanging sails. “There won’t be many cars on the road. I might not get a lift,” he said. I held my breath. “So would it be all right if I stayed another night? I’ll work off whatever it costs. Whatever I owe you.”

I gathered up a couple of dry towels for Howard. “Thank you,” I said. “That’s fine with me.”

For the first few days after that I was a bit jumpy (and probably a bit short with Howard), expecting Theo to go at any moment, but he didn’t, and now I am no longer uneasy in his presence, or anticipating that he’s on the point of taking his leave. He says he’ll stay and do chores for me until he’s worked off the whole of the unpaid bill his unpleasant friend left behind. Even though I have confessed I was overcharging in the first place, he insists on it. I am touched that he wants to stay (and I sense that for him it’s not just about paying off the bill) but I have no idea how to calculate how much time he might owe me. By now it’s even possible I owe him; in any case, I don’t want to put a price on having him around the place.

It’s several days, actually, since money was mentioned. I shan’t raise the matter. Any talk of money would signal a tallying of the account that could be followed only by his departure.

A little more about him is clear now. He does look something like Adam after all, with coloring a bit like his, and of similar height and build and almost as good-looking. He’s unaware of how very pleasing his appearance is. I dug out some photos of Adam for comparison although there are none very recent. Actually there are only a few of Adam past the age of fourteen, the year he went to school in Exeter, and none at all since Howard’s stroke.

I dug out the old album, too, to show Theo; it was in a box of
junk under the bed in one of the Bed and Breakfast rooms.
The Year at Stoneyridge Farm 1981–82
. I was expecting to be rather proud of it. I wasn’t; I doubt Theo or anyone else would be interested.

In the early days I kept the camera with me and took photographs all the time—that’s another thing that fell by the wayside. I mounted them all in order with dates and excited little captions, intent on making a complete record, an album for every year; I thought I might try to get them published one day as a guide for other people like us, trying to be self-sufficient. I was taken aback, looking at it again, to see how very long ago all this was. Howard’s hair is still dark, and the one or two pictures with me in them that Howard took show me standing straight and tall, my body emanating youth and vigor. But nearly all the pictures are of Howard: Howard with a broken fence, Howard with the mended fence. Howard with the first flock of hens, with the kiln, with the beehives, Howard in various yoga positions with beads around his neck. In all of them, of course, he is Howard with hair, which was even longer in those days and sometimes tied back or in a pigtail, and he is Howard thickly bearded, like some figure from an epic. I took the pictures with the certainty I was capturing a success story, one that featured our integrity and determination and ingenuity, but looking at them again I see they’re simply vain and dull. We were so busy observing and recording ourselves we didn’t see our pioneers’ foolishness all over our own faces. Howard stares at the camera with a look of humorless infallibility. I imagine myself behind the lens, meticulously laying down an archive of my adoration of my husband as if I knew one day I should need reminding of it.

After Adam was born, the times I couldn’t be bothered to fetch the camera began to outnumber the times I could. Eventually there came a day when I saw no point in yet more pictures, not even with Howard in the foreground, of another pile of sheared fleeces, another batch of hens, or more cracked pots warm from the kiln.

So I haven’t shown the photographs of Adam, or the album, to Theo yet. Anyway, it’s an evening activity, looking over old pictures, and evenings are when he tends to take himself off, leaving me with Howard in the sitting room or, after Howard is in bed, alone there
with the television volume turned down. Out of habit, I’ll sit in front of the screen for another couple of senseless hours with the feeling of waiting for something better to happen, or just for enough time to pass until a normal person’s bedtime comes around. Now I wait for Theo, and am disappointed, because he doesn’t come into Howard’s sitting room in the evenings.

However, out here digging over the emptied vegetable garden as the afternoon light fades, I’m quite content, because most of the time I no longer feel alone. In fact, I feel very much less alone than I do when I’m with Howard. A few hours spent out here is not loneliness anymore but just a measurable interval between spells of Theo’s company. As I strip beans off the wigwam of canes, I am storing up things to say to him over a cup of tea. When I left him in the kitchen I think he was just about to fill a basin with warm water, so by the time I get back he’ll be finished with Howard’s shave. (I would be so relieved if shaving Howard were to become one of Theo’s regular jobs.) I heave the basket of pocked and blighted vegetables on to my hip and set off with it to the house. Theo rather than Howard might be at the window, and I compose my face so that as I enter the yard I am wearing an expression that nobody could possibly describe as lonely.

I swing the basket off my hip as I come in. I feel Theo take the weight of it from me and set it down, and then the kettle goes on. I tiptoe into the sitting room, just far enough to see that Howard, his face red and shining, is slumped sideways in his chair with his eyes half-closed. Light from the television screen flickers over his face. I don’t disturb him. He doesn’t look well, but that’s because this room is always dark. By September, as the day wears on it takes on an even worse, dull, orangey pall from the hessian-shaded lamps. In fact I very much dislike the evenings here, though I’ve never said so. I return to the kitchen table and suggest to Theo that we might start lighting the stove in the front sitting room in the evenings, after Howard is in bed. I don’t say that for me the foremost pleasure in this would be that Theo might stay up a little longer and sit with me. I’m delighted when his face lights up and he says he’ll bring in some logs straightaway.