Our Picnics in the Sun (33 page)

H
e awoke suddenly in his chair, aware of the back door opening and commotion spilling through. He got up and went to look from the doorway into the kitchen. With the stirring of air came an exchange of smells, between the musty whiff of coal smoke and burning bread from the kitchen and the earthy frost vapors blowing in from the hillside. There were noises, unintelligible but human, and troubled: the sounds of stumbling and pain and shock. Howard turned his head this way and that, trying to make his banded stripes of vision coalesce into a coherent image. It was her, of course, or the shape of her, that came within his sight at last, solidifying out of an impression of movement in the room that to begin with was not quite convincingly
her
. The words to explain this, even to himself, swilled around his head, defying order.

She crossed the room and collapsed jerkily on to a chair, the noises of distress following her in a haphazard wake. She didn’t seem to see him. She slumped over the table with her head on her arms, and the room’s stillness returned. But Howard began to shake, and he struggled for a moment with the idea that he had to get moving or the shaking would never stop. He shuffled back to his chair in the sitting room and got both hands on his frame, and walked back to the kitchen.

When he got over the threshold and peered round again, he saw at once that the black, freezing rectangle on the opposite wall was the back door, wide open to the night. As he caught hold of it and pushed it shut against the wind with his good arm, he was aware he
was moving faster than usual. At the sound, Deborah lifted her head and gazed at him without speaking. A further thought, sparkling and lucid, came to him. He was the man of the house. He needed to lock up. The key was in the door. Turning it was difficult, but he managed it, finally.

She was trying to get out of her wet oilskin, and had begun to cry. The weight of one arm was pulling her shoulder down, and she couldn’t lift it to get rid of the sleeve. With one hand on his frame, Howard used the other to ease the oilskin off the shoulder, and pulled at the collar until it came free of the other shoulder. Then he sat down and reached for her boots. One came off easily, the other took a lot longer and she wouldn’t let him help her. She was in pain; there was something wrong with the ankle.

Howard moved over to the fridge, stooped down to the icebox, and brought out a bag of frozen peas. As he was trying to rise and turn around, it slipped from his hand. He let out a howl; the small green marbles rattled over the floor. Deborah pulled herself up, hobbled across, and scooped up the spilling-out bag, took her seat again, and sat hunched over, holding it against her ankle. Then Howard had another good idea. He found his shoebox of drugs on the kitchen worktop, brought it to the table, and tipped its contents out. He couldn’t read any of the names on the dozens of blister packets, but he waved a hand over them and managed to say, “Here. Take … something. Tablet. Take tablets, for pain.” Deborah nodded and began raking through them. He managed to fetch her a mug of water and she chose what he supposed was the right thing, and swallowed them.

After that she just went on sitting, as if she didn’t know what to do. She must be hungry, he thought. He found the bread knife in a drawer and with a surge of Jocelyn Lodge confidence cut clumsy wedges from the loaf she’d baked that day. He remembered something particular about this kind of bread, how sour it tasted when he’d last eaten some of it a few hours ago, but even so his mouth flooded with saliva. There was honey somewhere, he remembered. Did she like honey? He got it down, and carried plates, knives, and
their food, one thing at a time, to the table. They ate together, smiling at the first burst of honey sweetness on the tongue, coughing on the crumbs, until the loaf was finished and the honey jar empty.

Afterward, he stood up, took one of her hands, then the other, and helped her to take hold of his walking frame. She didn’t need him to direct her; neither of them had to point out she wouldn’t be able to manage the stairs. She leaned forward on the frame and edged toward the door, keeping the weight off her bad foot. She wasn’t as skilled as he was and once nearly fell over, but Howard knew that a bit of practice would deal with that. He could show her a few tricks. The thought made him happy. She followed him across to his bedroom. He always slept at the side near the door and next to the bathroom, and again without any words being necessary she made her way to the far side. Howard closed the door behind them and pushed one of his pillows across to her. Still dressed, she lay down stiffly on top of the covers and closed her eyes, as if allowing herself to rest for only a moment before rising to deal with her next round of tasks. Howard ached to help her. Moving silently, he came and stood at the end of the bed. Her feet poking out from her baggy men’s trousers looked impossibly naked, white and cold with blotched sore patches; the toes were knobbly and squashed. The bad ankle was puffy and beginning to bruise. She lay quite still; he wondered if she could feel it throbbing and could not bear to move at all, or if she could possibly be already asleep. He wondered if he could bandage it or replace the bag of frozen peas without disturbing her. Probably not. Gently, he pulled at the rug that was folded across the end of the bed and managed to arrange it over her body. It was more important that she rest, he decided, liking the strangeness of his being called upon to make any decision, even the smallest one, about what was best for her.

He shuffled round, got himself out of his slippers and into bed, and lay down. His mind ran over the evening routine, as far as he could remember it: his nightly dosage of pills that he would never get right by himself, a wash, the brushing of teeth, pajamas, bed. Well, a little slippage wouldn’t hurt.

A horizontal bar of light at the bottom of the door shone across
the carpet; he had not thought of switching off the lights or the soundless television. An odd picture came into his head, simultaneously reassuring and alarming, of someone else in the house still up and about, perhaps stepping in from the dark after one last check on the henhouse, clearing dishes in the kitchen, wiping over the surfaces and yawning, someone who might later turn the door handle in the dark and come in to look at them both lying in bed half-covered, asleep at a strange angle. But his mind was too tired to accommodate the idea seriously, and he let go of it, and his thoughts swam toward sleep. With one last effort he turned and drew the blankets across so they covered Deborah, who didn’t stir.

He lay back, feeling dizzy. When he closed his eyes he felt as though he were falling, spinning and spinning away into darkness. But he could not fall or escape; he was caught and pinned down, staked to the mattress by his exhausted, invalid body, scarcely less by his wildering mind. His heart raced, his breathing was shallow; he should have emptied his bladder. Yet, he wanted to be who he was. He was happy to be himself, this man Howard Morgan—now—here—lying next to his wife. He wanted there to be no end to it; even his remorse he would bear willingly forever more, if he could just be allowed to go on living in the knowledge of this moment. In the dark he raised his hand and placed it on Deborah’s head, and let his fingers rest lightly on her hair.

I
n the morning she was up early and already hobbling around in the kitchen when he came in. The scattered peas, now thawed, had been swept into a soggy green heap, but she hadn’t been able to get them off the floor. Her throat hurt when she swallowed, she was saying, opening her gaze to the room and speaking in a thickened, muted voice as if he might, or might not be, present. And all her joints hurt, and her shoulder. Howard studied her as she limped from table to sink with last night’s plates in her hands. She looked lost and tremulous, feverish.

“Ankle?” he asked.

She lifted her straggling hair with her good arm.

“Not so bad. A sprain.” She sighed and turned to the sink.

“Sit down,” he said.

The table was still littered with his medicines. She sat down and began collecting them together; she popped the ones he was due to take out of their foil packets and set them in a line. Howard stood in the middle of the kitchen and thought. Tea, breakfast. He filled the kettle, switched it on, and paused. They’d made him practice all this stuff at Jocelyn Lodge. What else? He went slowly to and fro, fetching what was needed. When tea was made and their two cups were sitting on the table, he saw that she was too ill to notice what he’d achieved. She was too ill to be out of bed.

She drank less than half of her tea, then let him lead her back to his bedroom. There was a pile of clean laundry on the chest of drawers, from which he drew a pair of his pajamas. When she saw them in his hands she said nothing, simply sat down on the edge of the bed
and raised her arms like a child. He pulled off her sweater, taking care not to catch her hair, then helped her out of the other clothes. It was years since he had seen her even partly naked, and the heavy, soft, downward-sloping roundness of her amazed him; a visceral, involuntary memory of being inside her brought a spring of life to his groin. She got the pajamas on by herself, with her eyes closed. When her head was on the pillow, Howard drew the covers up and left the room quietly.

Five days went by when he watched over her, doing what he could, bringing glasses of water to the bedside when her temperature soared, changing the pillowcases (he couldn’t manage the sheets), finding her more clean pajamas. He worked out which analgesics she had taken and kept her supplied; he inspected the ankle as it turned a vivid plum and laid cold cloths on it until the swelling began to go down. He tried stirring honey into hot water (he couldn’t find a lemon) for her to sip when her sore throat developed into a cough. He managed more than once to make porridge, of which they both ate a surprising amount. Most days she got herself in and out of the shower but she had no strength left to help him, so he set about doing it for himself. The first few times he flooded the floor and the effort of it left him helpless with fatigue for half the day, and he never mastered the washing of his feet, but he was pleased to be getting by, more or less. There were things he couldn’t manage: he stopped trying to answer the ringing telephone because he never could get to it in time. He had to feed the Rayburn with handfuls of coal all day long because he could not lift the hod to stoke it right up, but at least it didn’t go out. Once a day he mustered what scraps he thought could be spared and made his laborious way on the walking frame, with the bucket swinging from the handle, down to the end of the vegetable garden to feed the hens. He did not dare venture alone on to the moor.

Deborah slept for much of the time. He would leave the bedroom door slightly ajar so that from where he sat in front of the television (kept at low volume so as not to wake her) he could see her rounded bulk and the spread of her hair on the pillow. He could not explain to himself the pleasure he took in seeing her at rest.

Snow fell on the high ground above Stoneyridge. Around the house the ground froze hard and frost landed on frost, making his journeys across the yard even more perilous. He worried constantly that the next task, or the one after that, would be the one to go horribly wrong and leave him flat on his face with bones broken, or stranded or scalded or poisoned in some other undignified, self-made trap from which there would be no escape. His fear was not for himself. For what would happen to her if he had an accident, now that she was relying on him for everything?

One day Digger appeared with a brace of pheasants, which he held out to Howard from the back door. “Enjoy them last ones, did you?” he said. “Thought you could use two more. Left to rot, otherwise. Missus about, is she? I want a word about that flock of hers.”

Howard remembered nothing about being given any other pheasants, and was not sure he could take the weight of these in his arms. Nor did he have a clue where to put them. He shook his head, took a breath, and got his mouth working.