Our Picnics in the Sun (28 page)

Later that evening, in front of the fire, I apologize to Theo for not giving him the clothes and his own comfortable bedroom much sooner, and his smile tells me it’s all right.

O
n Sunday I’m up and dressed by six o’clock. I go out to check the sheep at first light and the world seems full of good, ordinary things, the cold little birds sitting in the sun on the roof ridge, the smell of clean earth. An overnight freeze has cast a sheeting of thin ice over the pools of groundwater around the stiles and the going is easier where the tussocks of reeds are stiff with frost, but on the lea of the hill the dead moor grass has rotted and is slippery now. When I get back, Howard comes half-dressed to the door of his bedroom. He sends me a crooked wave to let me know he’s been waiting, and his face bends into a funny attempt at a smile. I smile back, momentarily fond of him, fonder than I have been for years. I am fonder of myself, too, though for no real reason. Theo slumbers above our heads, oblivious of the necessity in a long marriage for the sharing of apologetic little smiles. I give myself over to helping Howard with his socks.

That’s when Digger turns up. It’s just gone eight o’clock so he wants to catch me in my dressing gown again, I suppose, and I am glad he hasn’t.

I make him wait in the kitchen. When I’ve got Howard dressed and ready and lead him in, Digger’s leaning in his usual place against the draining board. He watches me help Howard to his seat at the table. Not for the first time, I can tell he’s thinking about sex. I know it from a musk he gives off, from the occluded, cloudy look in his eyes, and where he allows them to travel. Or rather he’s
wondering
about sex, and probably making a number of assumptions. Such as, Howard’s incapable now. Such as, she must be desperate for it. He’s
correct about the first, the second I would deny, and he has no idea, none at all, how angry his speculations make me. Nor that, in revenge, I, too, am speculating about how—or whether—he can heave himself on to the mountainous form of his sullen wife Louise, mother of their two boys (who take after her in solidity and dullness rather than their cunning, stringy father). Smiling at my own daring, I imagine Digger and Louise’s coupling performed to the sound of hippo grunts and the slap of slack flesh, and concluded in a collapsed, silent sadness.

I say, “I thought you were going to ring before you came over, to make sure I was in.”

“Sunday morning, reckoned you would be,” he says. “Anyhow, I been up the ladder and looked at your wall. Wear and tear, that is. Tenant’s liability. You’re in breach. I could have you out.”

Howard rocks forward and manages to produce a few words of protest, but in no sensible order. I stroke his hand and shush him gently. “Surely it’s structural damage,” I say to Digger. “And I don’t think we should discuss it here.”

Digger glances at Howard and then fixes dull eyes on me. “No skin off my nose where we discuss it,” he says, lowering his voice. “Anyhow, it’s going to cost. Got to be paid for whatever way you look at it. Nothing free in this life, eh?”

“It’s structural damage,” I say, in a way that shuts out Howard, who’s struggling to speak again.

Digger snorts and swings himself forward from the draining board. “Got to cover it somehow, Missus. I do you a favor, you does one back.”

My heart is beating hard. Howard has closed his eyes.

In the same quiet voice Digger says, “You says on the phone there’s damp come through on the inside, didn’t you? Want me to take a look upstairs, do you? Whenever’s convenient.”

Theo hasn’t been around all morning and I know he will not appear while Digger’s here, even if I want him to.

“Thursday,” I say. “You can come on Thursday. In the afternoon.”

H
e watched her packing his things, trying not to show the hurry she was in. His clothes, mainly pajamas it looked like, were folded and placed neatly in his case, washbag on top; there wasn’t much. For once she was quiet; none of the babbling she was in the habit of, none of her whispery remarks into the air, or her jerky laughter. She got the zip of the case whisked round and the buckles done and had him sitting in the freezing hall hours before it was time, and when the ambulance men came they said he wouldn’t be needing his own wheelchair. They helped him out by the front door to the ambulance. Deborah followed with the case. When she climbed into the ambulance to say goodbye, it was as an afterthought.

He knew. Even though when she kissed him she didn’t keep her lips long enough against his cheek for him to reach out and stroke her face, he knew that if he were to touch her—not as an invalid reaching for support but really to
touch
her—her skin would feel alien. Its warmth would be no longer her own but would emanate, somehow, from some other source; it was the thought of someone else that put the life in her these days. She couldn’t wait to be rid of him.

I
could say it’s none of my doing, or out of my control. Or a necessity—that I have no choice but to give in to whatever brought him to me, or me to him, in the first place. I could say I didn’t look for it to happen, that I haven’t consciously brought it about in any way. But the truth is I allow it. I’m ashamed.

I could claim not to understand it, as if that would make any difference, for who’s to say there’s even anything
to
understand, that there’s a mystery to solve or some elusive truth to expose? Maybe I’d only be casting around for a hidden meaning because that’s what I do, and am always doing—looking for reasons, looking for something I need to understand, when the thing itself is enough. And surely what the thing is—pure sensation—
is
quite enough. I really shouldn’t be fretting as though the
why
matters when the
why
may not exist at all, never mind be unknowable. All that really matters is that I submit to it and that it consumes me. That each time it burns me up and leaves me with nothing. Needing and wanting nothing.

It happens like this. To begin with there has to be the
yes
, a decision of sorts: to let go, to let it happen, to concede to myself I have the desire, the will, the temerity to do this. In my son’s bedroom, his former bedroom, that is. In the daytime. Like this.

There is the arranging of myself on the bed, with a secret intake of breath as if this will make me a little lighter and less of a creaking burden on the springs. I allow some time to elapse: time enough to roam, of course only in my mind’s eye, all through the rest of the house, peering across rooms and checking behind doors, interrogating and then establishing as actually true the extraordinary notion
that Howard really is not here. Oddly, it’s only when I’ve given myself reassurance on this point, which I already know to be a physical fact, that I can leave go of all self-consciousness.

Then I breathe more easily, the mattress shifts under my weight; I spread my limbs across the covers and roll my hips, raise my pelvis. I yawn and hum and sigh, just for the sake of making sounds of heedlessness and pleasure. Outside, the wind catches this exposed corner of the house and rattles the window; the curtains move. Perhaps there’s a moment when I could—am even tempted to—return to the winter’s day and the kind of thing women like me are supposed to do on ordinary afternoons at home: read a magazine, bake a cake, watch an old film. Women like me seldom even use the word sex. We’re not supposed to think about it. I’m heavy and middle-aged and out of practice at it; even so, was it ever any easier? But although I may be out of sympathy with my body I’m slightly impressed, and no longer embarrassed by its uncomplicated readiness, by the audacity of its little cues and prompts. The very thought that I’m considered too old for all this makes me inclined—though I never give in to it—to giggle.

Instead I concentrate on the pricking of air on my skin as clothes are peeled away in this cold room, and I no longer want to laugh; there’s a seriousness now, an intent in it. The shivering and tingling as my body is exposed is like fingertips playing on the back of my neck, the draught from the window like the edge of a single nail drawn lightly down my spine. I shiver also with the awareness that the same undressing and the same stroking gesture, performed with less patience, would alarm me. This revealing of myself is never total, however—I think through modesty, although for whom should I be modest? But being entirely naked would be an ordeal, so I clutch at folds of cloth and wrap them around my breasts and press them between my thighs. At this point I don’t look at my discarded clothing, which is worn-out and ugly, or at myself. Too much of my skin is like a plucked chicken’s, pale and clammy and loose over the muscles and bones. In the hinges of my joints it crimps like glove leather and the pores are dotted red from years of washing in cold water and the abrasions of rough towels.

I don’t look at the spread of tufted, graying thatch at the base of my belly, either. I don’t need to, because recently—appalled and delighted, equally, at my own nerve—I took a hand mirror and examined the wet gash beneath and between my legs, just to see what he’d see, perhaps to understand what all the fuss is about. I still don’t understand it, really, but now lying back I can imagine it, the rose-pink envelope exuding its warm gloss and opening under his tongue. Another thing I don’t need to understand: whether this is seducing or being seduced.

What I do understand is the polished tightness of skin over fingertips, poised for the gliding in. And my own salt-sweet emulsion licked from them. This whetting of my body is a little clumsy, somewhat mechanistic, but always assiduous, and so quite soon after the excitement comes the solid ache all the way down from the neck of the womb, and the want. The change from want to need, for the hardness pushed inside me, a kind of desperation. The soft-throated groans I hear in the room sound like the sobbing of the lost, and the found. There is plenty of time and yet there is also hurry. Tendons, in one movement, pull tight and dissolve. His name slips like liquid from my mouth, but no other word is said. Afterward I realize my eyes have been closed since I lay down.

I turn on my side so I can’t see the door. My arms are empty and I need a long time to recover. My body feels scuffed and sore. But I have the whole day.

Until Howard comes back, whole days slip past me in this manner. Tasks lie undone. The telephone rings a lot but answering it is out of the question. Yes, I am ashamed. But not ashamed enough to stop it.