Our Picnics in the Sun (2 page)

The detached and euphoric part of Howard floated on, observing
the other part of himself stupefied by pain and incapable of pinpointing the nature of his agony, but quite possibly in a dialogue between himself and all Creation.

More time passed, probably. Howard drifted closer and closer toward disembodiment, ageless, weightless, and free to roam where nothing was required of him save his surrender. Then a practical, hurrying voice no less his own would wrest him away, reminding him that he had a biting pain in his head and it was necessary to go somehow and announce this trouble to Deborah. That was when, trying to get himself on all fours, he realized his left arm wasn’t working. As it folded under him he had time to register another new idea: the possibility of damage. Levering and yanking his left leg this way and that, he managed to drag his body across the floor to the wall. His eyes weren’t working properly, either. Using his good hand and the side of his face, he scraped his way along to the open doorway.

In the morning light of the yard, he sensed that the world was carrying on as usual. The day itself came back to him. It was a Monday and there was work to do; they were painting the outside of the house. He remembered that things were not going well. They were supposed to be getting the place in a fit state for the Bed and Breakfast season and were running late—Easter and the first May Bank Holiday had already been and gone—and he was also trying to appease Digger, who’d been around the place waving the lease under his nose and threatening court. The exterior painting was supposed to be done by the tenant every six years and Howard had managed it three times in twenty-seven, the last time eleven years ago, and what did Howard think the district judge would make of that?

His vision cleared a little. Across the brick-cobbled yard two ladders led up to the familiar homemade scaffolding he’d fixed against the wall. Two or three hens meandered underneath pecking in the sodden leaves that had lain all winter around the base of the down pipes. Up on the scaffolding, buckets sat along the plank that ran under the upstairs windows, and that was where Deborah was standing with her back to him, ten feet off the ground, slapping whitewash on the pebbledash. But as he opened his mouth to call out, it struck
him that the Deborah on the scaffolding was not the easy, open-hearted, adored Deborah who’d come to his mind in the pig shed. Somehow in the disorientation of his headache he’d forgotten that years had passed, and that that Deborah had gone with them. He recalled, in a way that made his heart shrivel with sadness, that the Deborah on the scaffolding was part of what was not going well. The fight they’d had first thing that morning came back to him, too, bursting with filmic exactness upon his frayed mind as another of the many for which, he also recalled, she was to blame. Through the deranging throb of the headache came an extra thud of annoyance, and he closed his mouth. His throat felt clogged; he had an idea his voice wouldn’t work. She’d been in her overalls at the kitchen sink, gazing out of the window and complaining that the whitewash was too thin. She said it wouldn’t last, it was another false economy. Then she’d gone on about the hens being all over the yard again so he’d have to fix the fencing properly this time or the fox would get them overnight. All he’d done was point out that her negativity was counterproductive and ask why couldn’t she take things more in her stride.

“
My negativity? Counterproductive?
And you spending half the day on yoga, that’s
productive
? I’m to take that in my stride as well, am I?”

“It’s not half the day, it’s an hour and a half,” he’d said. “You’re free to join me. It might calm you down.”

She’d burst into tears. “Free? That’s your idea of
free
?” she’d cried, and banged out of the kitchen.

She looked calmer now. Howard was exhausted by the journey from the yoga mat to the door of the shed, and for a few moments he did nothing except lie and watch the bending and rising of her back and the slow stroking of paint on the wall from the brush in her hand. Just as he’d been mesmerized by the swimming dust motes in the light beams and the fleshy, fringed appendages that were his hands, he felt an impersonal desire to go on watching forever. Woman. Brush. Paint. Wall. He didn’t want to get up again. Please could he not just lie forever on the ground, emptied of all belief, emptied of the need for any? But as he watched, the notion of Deborah
as
woman
detached itself and departed, and his mind filled with an even more restful contemplation of Deborah as organism, her body beneath the overalls animated by the same involuntary and more or less marvelous zoological impulses that compelled the hens beneath the scaffolding to dip at the dead leaves in the drains and the banded bodies of earthworms to wriggle in their beaks. He had never before felt so objective and curious about his wife, and so certain she had no meaning at all. Like everything else, she just
was
.

But he also needed Deborah, as wife, to come and put right the matter of this pain in his head. Concentrating hard, he instructed his lungs to produce the breath to speak. He managed to call out but the sound he made was not her name, nor a word at all. He tried again. His second attempt was no nearer to speech but it was louder. Deborah turned, saw him, and called back, but she was not speaking words either, as far as he could tell. She dropped the brush. Her feet were thumping along the plank, too fast, in the direction of the ladder. Howard summoned all his will to cry out to her to slow down, but all he could let loose were urgent, broken noises. At the sound of them Deborah turned too sharply from the top of the ladder. It shook, swung outward on one leg with the weight of her body, crashed back against the scaffolding, and began to slide. The hens scattered in a flurry of splayed wings. Howard closed his eyes and did not see Deborah fall, did not see how heavily she landed. But he heard and understood her fear and pain, even though she was using words he no longer knew.

L
ong before the stroke something had been saying to me that we couldn’t go on. I was accustomed to the way we had to live, of course, but even so I kept hearing a voice, fading but not quite drowned out, and seeing in my mind, like glimpses through a pinhole, pictures of an easier time.

Although not of a time I’d actually known, not of a time past. Our years at Stoneyridge wouldn’t have withstood even sentimental retrospective scrutiny, at least not from me; Howard would probably have pasted a false glow on it, right up to the moment he was unable to speak. Howard and his cheap paint, Howard and his tardy reparations—Howard now wordless and purblind and for all I know still in search of riches of some sort: truth, enlightenment, love.

But I’ve never been nostalgic—it would help if I were. Long before I met Howard I knew the difference between how a thing was and how you could make it seem to yourself when you looked back on it, so it’s not just Stoneyridge I don’t get romantic over. My Scottish upbringing, for instance, that Howard liked to imagine as all that mists and mountains nonsense, I’ve always held inside myself as a memory of what it actually was, seventeen years in Auchenfoot, a featureless lowland town. Even in the summer of 1979, when the one thing I was sure of was that falling in love with Howard would set me free of it all, I still didn’t recast in a softer light the childhood Sundays I spent in the chill of the tin-roofed church under the trickling of rain, whispering my prayers of dread and longing through aching, steel-braced teeth. I didn’t forget that all other concerns about life had been marginal alongside my love for God and my
minister father—a crushed and crushing love that amounted, really, to a powerlessness to tell them apart. Until, it turned out, the March of that year, when in the course of a four days’ illness as sudden as the onset of the Spring, my father and God together faded and fell away from me, the one dying of peritonitis, the other disintegrating in the shadow of that death. I was inconsolable, not just for their loss but for the certainty their invisibility brought, that neither of them continued anywhere beyond life. Their going was absolute.

My mother made the transition from minister’s wife to minister’s widow within two months. She turned publicly serene, conducting the course of her grief like another bout of arthritis, from which she also suffered. By the wan quality of her smiles people knew she felt pain but that the pain would be borne; in answer to inquiries she would acknowledge a degree of affliction but burden no one with details. I think, looking back, she derived great satisfaction from fulfilling the congregation’s expectation that she would cope. Mourning became her, by and large, and the drab, enclosing town, the rain, and the tin-roofed church wore her weeds along with her.

I, on the other hand, tried to turn invisible, in the manner of very small children who cover their eyes to convince the world around them that they’ve gone away. I stopped eating and stayed in my room. I wouldn’t go to church and after Easter refused to go back to school. In June, my father’s elder sister Auntie Joan was summoned. At the age of forty-six she had married a prosperous, older Edinburgh widower whose children (by then heading for university) she’d taught at the private school where she was Head of English. She lived her married life with a kind of brazen enjoyment that bordered on authority, acquiring a new wardrobe to match the widower’s gifts of large rings and scarves of real French silk, and taking up bridge and golf to keep him company. Perhaps because she was so stylish and worldly, in our household her opinions, at least on children, were listened to. She whisked back the curtains in my bedroom and told me it was time I got a grip on myself. To my mother she said that unless she wanted a full-blown neurotic on her hands (neurosis in sheltered only children being a well-documented tendency) she’d better let me see something of the world beyond Auchenfoot and not to
thank her, she was paying for me to spend the summer in London before I drove everybody round the bend.

I was enrolled with several other girls, mainly Americans, on a fairly frivolous course in Art History, and Howard was our longhaired, tall, theatrically handsome (and so
English
!) tutor. The girls snapped gum and flicked their hair and when one laughed they all did, with a strangely homogeneous nasal clanking like the striking of so many small, cracked gongs. I didn’t do any of those things, but I found to my surprise that I wanted to smile a lot, and by then my teeth were straight. I was dazed, not by them or any one particular thing, but by the very fact of London, simply by being there, part of its compacted, energetic life, and so far from home. And far away as that felt, it was almost inconceivable to me how far the Americans had traveled. Maybe that was what made them giddy—all that distance they’d crossed, the sheer spaciousness of the world.

I was not like them; I was becalmed by the seething streets, the crowded trains and cafés. In the late afternoons I would loiter with them in the obligatory way around the buskers at Piccadilly Circus, numbed by the thought that I was just one among billions of human dots on the planet. The thrill of liberation came later, and gradually, in knowing myself for the first time unobserved and therefore powerful; from now on, under the cloak of my own insignificance, I could do what I wanted. I was being let off some sort of hook.

In need of a new hook, I found Howard, who seemed to have been waiting for me. I was dazed by him, too, by his knowledge of Art and Life but especially, as he began to expound it to me over a bottle of brackish wine on a warm, rainy night in his bedsit off Goodge Street, about the matter of my own—as he put it—beautiful spirit. He stroked my hair and told me that I, like him, was a questing soul. Fine Art, galleries, museums, they were all very well—he’d done two years of sculpture at art school before realizing how shallow it was—but what was important was the spirit. And fulfillment of the spirit. That was what fascinated him most about me, my potential for spiritual fulfillment. It was far more fascinating to him than my body, although he was sure that it had potential for physical fulfillment, too, as he further put it, beginning to remove clothes.
How could he be wrong about any of this? As well as being much older than I was, he was so handsome. I sneaked back into the hostel past the midnight curfew and climbed into my dorm bed still dressed—I could not bear yet to see or touch my body, now forever changed. A small, secret pain still blazed where his fingers had entered, but already I felt soothed as well as excited.