Our Picnics in the Sun (34 page)

“She’s … resting,” he said. “Bed. Not well.”

“Oh, right you are. Here you go, then.” Digger pushed past him over the threshold and dumped the pheasants on the draining board. Howard tried to follow with his eyes and focus on the birds, exotic and richly colored as they were, but as far as he could see they covered the draining board like two raggedy lumps of Turkish carpet.

“Poorly, is she?” Digger went on. “Well, you better tell her from me—”

Deborah’s voice came from the door to the sitting room. “You can tell me yourself,” she said. “I’m fine.”

She stood in the doorway, wrapped squaw-fashion in a checked blanket, leaning on the doorpost. Only her head and bare feet were visible. Her eyes looked bright and naked and bewildered, as if the force of the influenza had given her a terrible shock.

Digger said, “I been out to your flock this morning. Seen to mine, then I went over and took a look at yours. They need feeding this weather. Can’t get enough grass through the snow, see? You ought to know that. I left a couple of hay bales up there, in the old ring feeder.”

“Thank you,” Deborah said. “I’ll get up there and take a look later.”

“Ring feeder’s broken,” Digger said. “Lose half the hay, you will, if you don’t get that fixed.”

“Fixed,”
Howard said, a little explosively, anxious to be part of the conversation. “Thank you. Pay you. For the hay,” he said.

Digger grunted. “Few quid’s neither here nor there,” he said. “Point is, that flock’s not fit. Way too thin. Couple of ’em’s lame, could be foot rot. Ain’t right.”

“I’ll see to them,” Deborah said. Her voice was rising. “They’re thinner because they’re old, they can’t graze like young sheep. They’ve got teeth missing.”

Digger shook his head. “They ain’t getting looked after. You want me to, I’ll go up there for you, get ’em in the holding pen and see ’em on their way. One shot and none the wiser. Do it as a favor. I don’t like to see ’em suffer.”

Howard clenched and released his fists, fighting to find words.

“It’s all right, Howard,” Deborah said, in the old, tired, pacifying voice she hadn’t used for days.

“I’ll even bury ’em for you,” Digger said. “ ’Cause you won’t be wanting the meat. Beasts that age, the meat’s rank.”

“Of course we don’t want you to kill them. Was there anything else?”

“Up to you. Just have to say the word, I’ll see to ’em. Kindest thing to do.” Digger moved to the door. “ ’Cause you wouldn’t want to go getting reported for cruelty, now, would you?”

Howard let out a bellow. As he stepped outside, Digger nodded at the hens’ bucket on the floor. “They getting any grain on top of that? You got to give hens grain, come winter.” He laughed. “I’ll slit their throats an’ all for you, if you like. No charge.”

Deborah had turned away. Howard closed the door behind Digger and followed her out of the kitchen, and sat on the edge of the bed while she got in and settled back. She closed her eyes.

“At least now they’ve got some hay to be going on with,” she said, “and maybe there’ll be a thaw. Anyway, I’m much better. When I’ve had a little sleep I’ll get up and go and see they’re all right.”

“All right,” Howard echoed, referring to the sheep, not her plan to get up. She wasn’t nearly well enough to do that. She mustn’t go out on the moor alone again, ever. He would have to stop her, or go with her, if necessary.

But it wasn’t necessary. Her fever grew worse again and it was another four days before it broke. She refused to call the doctor. On the second day Howard sneaked out to the hall to do it himself, but couldn’t read the numbers well enough to dial. He tried to keep her face cool with flannels, and he made her sip water and sugar. He fed her rice pudding from a tin when she could be persuaded to eat, and he sat with her while she slept. When the fever was at its worst he crooned sounds of comfort and held on to her hand. Once he was woken in the night by an urgent, whispered stream of babble coming from her lips and he leaned in close to catch the words, in case she was telling him something important; she sounded angry. But she quieted before he could understand what she was saying, and besides, he realized, she hadn’t been talking to him. At least, he thought, she couldn’t be worrying about the sheep, for she didn’t mention them again.

I
am more ill than I have been for years, since long before Howard’s stroke. I’m robbed of any choice in what to do about it because I can’t do anything except lie and wonder how bad I might get, in a way that reminds me of being young and small and powerless against most things that happen. For a number of days I move only from bed to bathroom and back again. It’s banal, yet absorbing: I’m entirely in the grip of it, the fever and aching joints and headache and cough and breathlessness. On top of that, I take a curatorial interest in the progress of the bruising on my ankle. When I’m awake I lie and think of nothing, or only of myself. Then I feel guilty for being so selfish, and I rouse my thoughts and fret that nobody is looking after Howard. I worry that he’s missing Stroke Club and I’m sure the emails from Adam will be piling up at the library. Adam is another worry. I must try to have a few words with him but it’s too cold to stand in the hall for long. I must try to get Howard to say I’ll ring him when I’m a little better. I think of Theo, of course, but he’s away. Just when I need him the most, he’s nowhere to be seen.

It’s Howard who is a constant presence. If I open my eyes there he will be, and when I close them I sense him still, watching me and never going far. Now he lets me out of bed for a while each day. He places me tenderly in what has until now been his special chair and arranges a stool with a cushion on it for my ankle. I’ve been watching television again. Some of the programs are quite marvelous.

Sometimes Howard will take the other chair and sit with me, at other times he’s up seeing to this or that, but he’s always around. It was some time before I understood that he doesn’t hover because
he
needs
me
—to give him food or tablets or explain something or staunch one of his weeping fits. No, it is for my sake that he stands in waiting. He is looking after me. I lie and ponder the words
looking after me
, and decide—though this may be just my fey and fevered mind—there is hidden poetry in them. It’s strange that the phrase—
looking after me
—should evoke Howard’s now dim and unreliable eyes, those same, once piercing eyes in whose sight a part of myself has been invisible since the day Adam was born. It may hint also at the idea that I am detaching from Howard and drifting away, leaving him to watch the distance between us grow until he loses sight of me altogether. But where and to what would I go?

I think these things looking out from the kitchen window as flurries of snow borne on the wind from the moor top swirl around the yard and collect as an icy silt in the corners. I’m watching for Howard—in fact, I’m
looking after
him. I was dozing in his big chair and heard the back door close almost half an hour ago, and the walking frame and the bucket aren’t here so he must have gone to feed the hens. I wait. From upstairs I hear a dull scrape and click as the latch of the landing window frets its metal pin on the sill; it’s been loose for years. I know the sounds of all the outstanding jobs in the house; the cold tap drips with a somber
tonk
into the deep iron bath, the door from the kitchen to the hall squeals. When a winter wind like this one blows, the whole house twitches. Little gasps of sound escape as if they’ve been hiding upstairs; they stray out from faraway rooms through doors, along corridors. To my ears there’s a note of reproach in it; this place is too big and drafty, these sighs and echoes say, too many rooms meander one into another, and stairs and landings and half-landings lead off at confusing angles to more bedrooms than anyone needs. Someone must be up here, for the simple reason that so much emptiness couldn’t be borne.

If Howard’s not back within the next five minutes I shall put on warm clothes, take an umbrella or something I can use as a walking stick, and go and look for him.

I voice this intention aloud, and to my surprise it’s Theo who answers. Where has he sprung from all of a sudden?

“Yes, go. But are you really ready for what you might find? Maybe
he’s fallen and hurt himself.” His words swarm around my head and I try to bat them away, and nearly lose my balance. I move away from the window. “Maybe he’s had another stroke. What then?”

I have to shut him up. Shouting at him won’t work, but if I can get myself back to the chair and switch the television on, I might be able to ignore him. I’ll concentrate on some loud, pointless noise until he goes back upstairs. And if I do that, by and by Howard will return and everything will be all right. But there is no let-up.

“Suppose Howard died out there. Just laid himself down and died, the way animals do. It would be very sad, of course. But wouldn’t it be a kind of relief, in the end? For him, too. You could leave this place. Come on, Deborah. You know you’ve thought about it.”

I try to picture again the shy, sad, sweet young fellow who came here at the end of last summer with that horrible patronizing man who left without paying. From the front bedroom window, very early in the morning, I watched the silver car drive away down the track. Adam should have been here, and he wasn’t. I didn’t want to be left alone again. I could not allow it. I didn’t choose that Theo would stay, but now I can’t choose that he should go.

I make it back to the chair, but he follows. I needed a companion around the place, that was all. “My name’s Theo.” What have I allowed him to become? “What have you turned me into?”

I must have noise, other people’s voices, I must drown him out. The remote control for the television is not where it should be. I get up again and hobble around; I lift cushions, push my hand into a heap of newspapers on the low table, scan the floor. I look everywhere but can’t find it. I collapse back in the chair, gritting my teeth against Theo’s voice. “All this is your own doing.” I sink both hands into the slit between the seat and the side cushions and rummage deep. “Are you afraid of what’s inside your own head? I didn’t put the thought there. Don’t blame me.”

There’s no remote control lost down between the cushions. Instead I pull out a rolled-up wad of cloth. It unfurls. It’s stained with faint, brownish marks, like an old bandage. But it’s a T-shirt with “Love Life” printed on it—Howard’s. Out of its folds fall other
things: a scrunched-up cloth hat and a hospital identity band. I pick them up and study them, scarcely able to believe that they can be what they seem: the relics of a disaster that, no matter that so much time has passed, opens up like a wound newly cut. Fresh sorrow lunges at me; it stops my throat. I haven’t the breath to weep. Several minutes pass, while the hat and bracelet, turned over and over in my hands, grow as familiar as the room around me, and my hands grow strange. They’re old now, more grandmotherly than motherly. I have lived longer on this side of the tragedy—since that single day of demarcation that sliced my life in two—as I lived on the other, impossibly carefree side I inhabited before that day. How have I survived so long, with the grief of it lodged in my bones?

That can’t be answered. Prosaically, I prefer to wonder what the things are doing here, shoved down the side of Howard’s chair. Only he could have put them there, of course, but why? When? We only got the chair after he’d come home after the stroke. Why has he kept them at all? No answer comes. A bandage is what his stained T-shirt became that day, and a winding sheet. The cap and name bracelet are coffin clothes. But my mind is quiet, full of a stillness that’s deep and absolute, like sudden nightfall.

Theo has gone.

A
DAM
’
S
B
IRTHDAY
1983

H
oward is angry again. The day is steely bright and a warm rushing wind is stirring the trees on the ridge and banging doors shut in the yard. It puts him on edge. It’ll be pulling over our bean canes and clanking our field gates, which are only held with twine. He’s always mending our gates. And now he is angry with a couple who ventured up the track to look at the pottery, because they want to see how his teapots pour before they buy one. He’s got five on the shelves at the moment (because he likes doing spouts). I hear all this from the kitchen where I’m working—or rather, trying to work in between long pauses to press both hands into my aching back—with the door propped open by a wheelbarrow full of rocks that we lifted from a patch of ground we’re trying to clear for winter cabbages. It’s hard work making bread in this weather; the wind drives down the Rayburn flue and fills the kitchen with a sharp, sooty heat that smells of coal. Once or twice I’ve almost heaved and not been quite able to get my breath.