Our Picnics in the Sun (23 page)

“Oh, they’re both fine, thanks. Vince is a bit tired, looking forward to the end of term. Flora’s in great form—she’s still teaching in Gambia, goes traveling when she can, she’s in Cape Town at the moment. Home for Christmas. Gosh, look, you’ve bought half the shop! Are you about to hibernate? What about Adam, is he getting back for Christmas?”

We finish the unloading and I have to turn and face her. She isn’t wearing her dog-collar and her hair is springier than ever, but she hasn’t changed. She still thrusts her goodwill at you like a yapping puppy she thinks you want to hold and have lick you. She still has those gleaming eyes like gray-flecked whirlpools that pull you in and make you tell her things.

“Adam? Oh, yes. He wouldn’t miss Christmas at home.”

“You’ll be looking forward to that. You must miss him. How’s Howard? Are things still okay, all by yourselves up there? There’s a caregivers club in Taunton now, did you know?”

“Actually, we’re not by ourselves anymore.” I don’t in the least mean to tell her this, but I have to put an end to her patronizing. “I have someone to help now.”

“Oh? That’s great! That’s
really
good to hear. So, do you have a, is this … what, someone in the family, a nurse, or —”

“He’s a volunteer, sort of. Theo. He’s marvelous, just like family. He’s Adam’s age, so it’s a bit like having Adam around all the time, that’s what I tell him, anyway! He’s so willing and practical.”

“Gosh! He sounds amazing. How wonderful!”

There’s a note in her voice I don’t care for. “Yes, it is wonderful, especially for Howard. He seems ten years younger.”

Then Pat says the coffee at the whole food café isn’t bad (and is, of course, also Fair Trade) and it’s her day off so she isn’t in a hurry as she usually is, so would I like to have coffee with her. I smile, and she keeps on smiling. She has no idea how the thought of being detained long enough to drink a cup of coffee with her appalls me. I don’t need her sympathy about coping with Howard and I don’t want to waste time listening to her reminisce about Adam’s schooldays and how well things have worked out for everybody—she has a way of refusing to take any credit for it that somehow causes all of it to attach to her. I don’t want to observe her tact as she skirts around any precise mention of how and why Adam came to fetch up in her vestry and get taken under her bloody wing, and did so well in his A levels he got into his first choice of university. More than anything, I don’t want to be reminded of the way Pat still wants to belong to us in some way, or us to her.

“I can’t, sorry,” I say. “Theo’s expecting me back. It’s not fair to him if I’m not back when I said I’d be.”

Pat tips her head to one side. “Not even a quick one? I’d love to catch up properly. Use my phone if you like, ring and say you’ll be a bit late.”

Use her phone? How little she knows.

“No, there’s no point, he won’t hear the phone if … if he’s out, taking Howard for a walk. We can’t really use mobiles at Stoneyridge.”

“Oh, variable signal? We get that, too. Well, that’s a shame. But it’s good to see you again, Deborah. Hang on, let me give you the club details. If ever you can make it you’d be really welcome. It’s every second Wednesday. I’ve got a pen somewhere.”

“Thanks very much, Pat, but I never come to Taunton. There’s no need now I’ve got Theo.”

“Oh. Are you sure? It’s great fun if ever you do fancy it. Just give me a ring, all right? Great news about Theo. He sounds great. Just what you need.”

I get myself into the driver’s seat but she keeps a hold of the door and stops me from shutting it.

“It would be good to catch up properly sometime. I’d love to see
Howard. I do pass your way from time to time, maybe I could drop in.”

I’m trying to turn the ignition so I pretend not to hear this. The van starts on the third try. “Well, take care, then, Pat. Bye, now. Happy Christmas!”

Pat straightens up and lets go of the door. I slam it shut and drive off without looking back, knowing she will be standing waving.

I am now in a great hurry to get home and tell Theo about bumping into Pat, how it has brought rushing into my mind that long-ago time when Adam was a teenager. I haven’t spoken of it before now and I’m nervous; I’m pretty certain I’m not up to the test of courage it will be to dwell at any length on those two awful days when he went missing. I need to try the story out on myself first, to check that the words it requires won’t solidify into dumb, unsayable blocks in my brain. As I’m driving along and sifting these thoughts around, I almost hear Theo telling me to take my time, to find the words and the courage little by little. I can skip any bits I wish, he’s saying, I can come back to them later or leave them out altogether. I don’t even have to start at the beginning.

So I decide I will start at the end: that nowadays Adam does a job I don’t understand in a terribly complicated business I don’t see any need for, called supply chain management, and he got this job because he is very good at mathematics and logic and very interested in how big businesses work and make money. As I’m saying all this aloud, as if Theo is with me in the van, I’m listening out for the customary note of awe in my voice as I explain that Adam is much cleverer than I am and, I go on to say, I’m afraid that consequently my mothering has always been a little nervous and possibly overloaded with respect. I sense Theo nodding and waiting to hear more, and I drive on, now in silence, thinking.

I am forcing myself to recall Pat’s breezy way of telling me her news of Flora; she gave no hint that she’s in any way impressed by her daughter’s brave, bold doings in Africa. By comparison, I speak of my son as if my feelings for him verge on the idolatrous. I imagine Theo weighing the possibility that, as I put it to him, it’s as though Adam’s being born to me was a gift I didn’t earn and that therefore
demanded, as propitiation, that I fasten upon him a meek, even obsequious kind of love. For his part, Adam probably considers my being his mother a handicap. Even when he was very little, if I scanned his face for signs of a child’s affection I observed something more like fatigue, or at best a composed, possibly intellectual fondness. I wipe away the tears that are beginning to fall; I won’t be able to drive if I can’t see properly. Go on, Theo’s voice urges softly. “There’s more.”

What is not in doubt is that Adam is qualified to do his inexplicably complex job because, when he was fourteen, Pat and Vince arranged for him to lodge on weekdays with Vince’s recently widowed mother and go to a school in Exeter, where he was immediately picked out as an academic high flier. None of that, nor his determination to go to university, nor his ambition to make a lot of money—and least of all his fascination with supply chain management—has anything to do with his parents. Except, perhaps, that he set out to realize an ambition to become as unlike us as possible in every way.

Then you needn’t feel guilty about not liking Pat, Theo would reply to that. It’s no wonder. Even if she is a genuinely good person.

This is the beauty of talking with Theo. He understands everything I say and also what I don’t say. I wasn’t talking about not liking Pat. I did not even know I was in need of reassurance on the matter of not liking her. In the juddering van I say “Thank you,” and shove my foot down on the accelerator. The engine strains. I pump my foot up and down; Theo’s patience may be infinite, but mine isn’t. I can’t wait to get back and tell him the rest of the story. I have a strong feeling he’s going to encourage me to conclude—although I am resisting it, even now—that Adam hasn’t always been a very good son.

A
DAM
’
S
B
IRTHDAY
1997

A
dam flung his backpack on to the shoulder where the track from Stoneyridge met the road, and crouched down opposite the log slice sign on which his father had burned the words
FOR SALE POTTERY WEAVING TEAS BED & BREAKFAST
. Another board propped against it read
EGGS FOR SALE
. His backside sank against a wet, frondy nest of couch grass and the rain came down harder, rolling through his scalp and dripping on to his shoulders, drenching his back. Getting soaked was part of all this, he supposed. It kind of fit with the rest of the crap.

It was the ninth day of rain, his fourteenth birthday, and the first day of his freedom. Around him, through his half-closed eyes, the green landscape glittered. Past the bend in the road and in the distance the fields and the moor were misty, the sky over them gray and sodden. He wondered if, supposing a rabbit ran across that field right now, he’d stand a chance of getting it with the shotgun. He raised a hand, closed one eye, and scanned the width of the field, squinting down the barrel of his forefinger. Probably. He was a pretty good shot—not as good as Kevin but way better than Kyle. If he got the chance to practice he’d be excellent, probably he’d end up being able to shoot just about anything, if he got the practice. It was a skill, you’d think Dad would
want
him to get a skill like that. It was unbelievable—what was his
problem
? What was wrong with getting a shotgun for your birthday when it was only for rabbits and pigeons?

It wasn’t like he was going to shoot
people
, it wasn’t like he was going off and joining the fucking army. Kevin and Kyle and their dad knew there was nothing wrong with it, that was why Kevin and Kyle gave him the gun today for his birthday, an old one reconditioned but practically the same as theirs and they’d had theirs for years and Kyle was still only thirteen.
You’re best learning young to use a gun properly, you country lads
—that’s what their dad said. Then you grow up respecting it, that’s the way you stay safe. Adam pushed his fingers into his scalp and tugged, ready to tear his hair out. His dad couldn’t be like that, oh no. His dad had to wait until they’d gone and then take the gun off him. Just like before, taking stuff off him.
No, Adam. There will be no guns in this house. That’s final
. The only stuff he ever got that he really wanted, his dad took it off him, and he had no
right
.

Adam filled his cheeks with air, held his breath, and shot his plug of gum hard across the tarmac. It came to rest in a puddle bubbling with rain. He put two more sticks of gum in his mouth and chewed fast. Once the flavor went he’d shape them into another ball against his teeth and shoot that out, too, see if he could get it farther than the first one, maybe across the white line. Or maybe he’d wait for a car to come snaking along the road and he’d stick his thumb out, and if it didn’t stop for him he’d time it so either the gum hit a wheel as it fizzed past or shot right underneath and bounced out on the far side. Hunkered on the shoulder, he smiled and looked up and down, hoping for a caravan—he might actually get the gum to stick on the side of a caravan—although he knew the road was too narrow and hilly for many of those. Not even that many cars came.