Our Picnics in the Sun (37 page)

T
he reason Howard is out so long is that he found all the hens dead. He comes back with his face stricken and raw with cold, tears running from his eyes. He is so upset I wonder he didn’t fall over, hurrying back to tell me that a fox has been in. He explains it clearly enough—“Fox! Hens dead, all over blood, terrible, mess”—but I put on clothes and go out to see for myself. The corpses are already freezing under a dusting of sleet so they’ve been lying there for some hours, which means the fox was hungry enough to attack in daylight. Indeed, I count only four dead birds so two are missing; he probably ate one fresh killed and carried the other in his jaws back to his lair. We heard nothing; the wind’s been in a contrary direction today and must have borne the noise of slaughter away from the house and across the moor. I find the broken wire in the mesh where he got in, and stare at it for a while. There is no way I can fool myself into thinking there’s any point in mending it. I limp back up to the house, where I left Howard negotiating the making of a cup of tea: he takes such pride in his mastery of this task I would not dream of not drinking his sometimes lukewarm, overstrong, or watery brews.

When I return, I lock the back door. Tea is waiting on the table, and together Howard and I sit down as if we were once more setting about a task we have undertaken at this table a thousand times: the offering and accepting of consolation for one or another of our disasters, the mustering of resolve to carry on. It’s been our currency of exchange for as long as I care to remember. We’re good at it.

But there can’t be any more of that. When I even think of opening my mouth on the subject of the hens, I can’t find enough air to
breathe. Their slaughter is sickening, of course, as are the deaths of all their predecessors killed the same way, or by viruses or for reasons we never did fathom, as are the deaths of the goats, sheep, and bees, as are the failures of every one of our enterprises with vegetables, pottery, weaving, and paying guests. But none of those things labored over and lost was ever the important one.

Until today I thought it was only I who knew this. I thought it was only I who walked around feigning optimism with a part of my heart dead in my chest, with the loneliness of that. I get up and go next door to Howard’s chair, delve in the cushions, and bring back the T-shirt, hat, and identity bracelet. I place them on the table and sit down again. When he sees them Howard lets out a cry.

“It’s all right, Howard. It’s all right. You kept them. I understand.”

He nods, still frightened. In fact I don’t understand, entirely, but what changes everything is the possibility that all this while Howard’s silence on the matter of our dead baby has been clamoring in his head as loudly as my own does in mine. It’s possible that through the twenty-eight years we have walked side by side, all unbeknownst, in grief. Howard looks at the things on the table and touches them sadly, and for a long time we say nothing.

Adam’s brother. He is our only true loss, the one too great to acknowledge. He determined the future, binding us to this place when otherwise, at some point before it was too late, we would have given up and left. For it was his lost life, our bungled waste of it, that made it imperative we stay. Shame of that magnitude being too great to walk away from, we tried to make it monumental; we turned it upon ourselves and persevered in the error of Howard’s beliefs and my faith in them, we redoubled our efforts because we needed our crass visions for Stoneyridge, once realized, to disprove the futility of our baby’s death. All the while, of course, we brought up Adam ignorant of his brother, but no less in his shadow for that.

Howard reaches over and pats my hand. I imagine the man our dead son would now be looking across at us, and I wonder what he makes of his parents, one deluded and frail, the other always weak-minded and suggestible, and both possibly worse than foolish. There
is little enough to admire, God knows, but yet I do not believe he would hate us. Nor is he vengeful; as we age, more and more he will let us be. As we dismantle what remains of our lives here and depart, as we surely must, he may even, watching us go, wish us peace. A calm has already descended, and suddenly I am so tired—tired in my bones—and I know I will sleep soundly.

Over the next few days my strength returns. I see off another visit from Nurse Jenny, but leave the telephone unanswered. When I’m up and about again there’s some return to routine, but no question of going down to the library to attend to emails. Howard and I are resigned and reminiscent, and little by little we go all through the house, usually hand in hand. It’s not since the very first time we came to look at Stoneyridge that we’ve stood in rooms together like this, but there’s no need to explain to each other why we do it now, reflecting sometimes aloud (but more often in silence, as if we were listening to hear the walls speak for themselves) on how we managed to stay here so long. The rooms somehow draw attention to their emptiness, and there’s a reproach in it, as if they’re still crying out for something definitive to be enacted within each one that will settle once and for all its proper purpose. We recall how excited we were that first visit, immune to the threat implicit in all the house’s “potential.” I remind Howard we used the expression
putting our own mark on the place
.

We didn’t, though. After Adam was born the configuration of the rooms remained unstable, provisional upon the result of one or other new, always inconclusive experiment in our living habits. Amid talk of color energies and light direction we were always changing our minds about which bedrooms to sleep in, which rooms to use as sitting room or dining room; innumerable times we moved ourselves half-in or half-out of this or that one, unsure where to settle. It was not chaotic, exactly—there wasn’t enough energy in our state of flux for that—but at the heart of it was a creeping lack of conviction about how to live. I used to tell myself it was creative, but it was only irresolute.

And it’s the same now. It’s as if year upon year we moved things all around this house without ever quite moving
in
, and now the
contents of rooms seem to do it by themselves; we stumble across objects in odd corners as if catching them out in little secret escape bids to other places. As rubbish goes, it’s strangely active. Roaming the house, half-trying to put it back to rights, we find doors forever open through which old echoes stray, as if the place has just been vacated by another who leaves behind shuffling currents of air and a bitter wake of sighs.

From the clutter I unearth the old albums again and we go through the photographs, speaking kindly of the people in them. We took grinning pictures of everybody: the woman who delivered the beehives, the men who installed the septic tank, the London crowd who came on the retreats for the couple of years, but we’ve forgotten their names and spend a silly amount of time trying to bring them to mind.

When we’re not doing this or that upstairs, which we call “sorting things out,” we rest together. Both of us tire easily. Side by side on Howard’s bed, or at the table or in the sitting room, we hold hands in silence. I don’t tell Howard this, but I’m reminded of couples waiting in stations for a train that only one of them will board.

One of the biggest tasks I take on, and that requires all my strength, is the removal of the antlers in the hall. Dragging the sideboard away from the wall is hard enough, but once that’s done I climb the stepladder with a chisel in my hand and I gouge out the plaster around the wooden mounts that hold the antlers. The plaster is quite rotten and gives easily; great chunks of it cascade off the wall and land on the tattered carpet. So these mounts have in effect been holding the wall up, and some of them are very loose, anyway; God knows how long we have passed to and fro in the hall in danger of being speared by falling antlers. I keep Howard well out of the way (and am careful of my own head) while I yank them off the crumbling wall. This sets off an aerial bombardment of multi-spiked missiles, falling and tumbling, stabbing the floor as they roll. Some of them break, raising a yellowish dust very like the old fallen plaster and revealing a filigree interior of rotted bone. I chuck them all into a pile by the front door. They’re useless for burning so will have to be taken out and dumped.

Despite all the sorting-out, I am perfectly aware of what time of
year this is. We dig out the boxes of Christmas decorations from under the beds in the spare rooms. This time Howard doesn’t try to call it Yule instead of Christmas, and we unwrap all the funny unpainted things he carved for the tree and we smile over them, even though there is no tree and neither of us has anything like enough strength to fell one and bring it in. Even if we had, proper snow is falling now; the pine wood where we might have got one will soon be invisible under it. We watch like children from the windows as the snow comes whirling down. It’s beautiful and exciting. I picture the moor and the poor sheep and how they will look with snow accumulating on their backs. I cannot put off the thought of the sheep much longer.

The next day I manage to pluck and draw the pheasants Digger brought and I roast them with what vegetables we have left. The decanters in the dining room hold quantities of ancient brandy and port and sherry, and I tip it all in together and bubble it up into a syrupy liquor that tastes surprisingly good. Howard’s not really allowed alcohol but I open a bottle of wine, too. It’s a strange feast but we eat until we’re sated. Adam’s hamper, which arrived some days ago, is untouched. It doesn’t seem right to open it now; it will be useful when he gets here.

The evening wears on into night. I persuade Howard to go to bed before me because tomorrow will be a big day. When he’s settled I go back out to the hall, following the path of powdery pale footprints we left yesterday as we trod through the fallen plaster and scattered bone dust. The antlers still lie in a heap by the door, casting jagged shadows up the wall. It’s too cold to linger but I sit for a while, listening. There will be no word from Theo now, of course, but I want to pause and offer a nod of thanks in his direction. But for him, this decision would not have been made. He was necessary. For a while longer I sit, thinking of all the things I must say when I pick up the telephone.

I
n the morning Howard wakes with a headache and a growling stomach. When he tests his mouth with the word
hello
it feels full of some sour mulch, rather like damp pheasant feathers, he thinks, remembering the sight of them yesterday, piling up in the sink. Deborah’s awake, and they both get up slowly, and then Deborah makes him eat porridge, which makes him feel better. Afterward he sits, feeling full and dreamy, watching the floating currents of stray feathers cross the floor as Deborah moves to and fro, opening and closing doors. All morning she is restless. She puts on boots and coat and goes outside several times, even, he thinks, going as far as the henhouse though there’s no point in doing that now; no hens to come clucking round her legs, no eggs to collect. He goes to the sink to wash up their breakfast things, as best he can with the bag of pheasant feathers in the way, and from the window watches her return and stand stock still in the yard, her head tilting upward as if listening for messages from the sky. More snow has fallen overnight and all the buildings are plumped and rounded in whiteness, transformed from dereliction into a kind of tumbledown picturesque; Deborah turns in slow circles as if studying every cleansed and beautified plane and angle. When she comes back inside she stands and strokes her hand across his shoulder and down his arm, which he takes as a little tactile thank-you for washing up. This close to her, he sees there is a bright, settled look in her eyes.

Later, when she brings him his jacket, he thinks she just wants him to go out with her to look at the snow, to make a slow circuit of the yard arm in arm or perhaps venture a little way along the track.
But she dresses him as if they’re departing on an expedition—hat, scarf, gloves, extra socks, extra sweater, and snow boots—and she brings his walking frame to the door. When she tucks the T-shirt, muslin hat, and identity band into the pockets of her coat, he knows where they are going.

But he never could have guessed how difficult it is. On her command, he plants the walking frame carefully and deep into the snow in front of him, and brings each foot forward without trying to lift it. This makes progress possible, but once they’re off the track and on to the lower reach of the moor, the snow collects in heavy suds on his boots and clings in frozen dags to his trousers, and he can take steps of no more than a few inches. Deborah’s earlier restlessness has vanished and she coaxes him along patiently. Again it sweeps over him, an absurd (given the circumstances) yet pressing sensation of delight and completeness. He is who he is. Here, now. With her. It is so difficult. But he has all day.

There is no wind, not even higher up. The sky is opaque and massive with ice, the air bright and muffled and frozen; the only sounds are the faint trickle of a tree branch shifting under its ballast of snow, a brittle, high crow call, and the secretive crump of their boots. His body is warm from the exertion of walking but his cheeks are numb; now and then Deborah stamps her feet and blows into her cupped hands. For a little while a milky sun gleams down on them, and then it fades, trailing ghostly pink streamers of cloud. They walk on. The snow in the shaded distant slopes of the moor is deepening to an icy, absorbent blue. Howard can’t distinguish anymore which parts of him are merely numb from the parts of him that are feeling pain. He tries to tell Deborah about this but she, now cheerfully heartless, pushes him on. There will be no end to it: to the cold, his freezing feet, the pain in his lungs, the breathlessness, all this weightless, stony, silent air, the expanse of white land. They really should not still be moving farther from the house this late on a winter day, but he knows better than to try to stop and turn back. They have not yet reached the place.

I
t’s much farther than I remember. Under the contour-softening snow, can I even be sure of finding the slanting stone at all? And it’s so cold. Howard is suffering; his face is mottled and his eyes are rimmed red, he grunts with every step and stoops lower over his frame. Nonetheless we press on. It’s always the last part of anything that’s hardest to do, I tell myself, and the most necessary.