Our Picnics in the Sun (7 page)

O
n his good days, Howard could tell what Deborah was thinking, in the old way he believed he’d been able to before the stroke. When his eyes and his mind worked together and fast enough, and if she remained still for a moment, he could, fleetingly, read her face again, and what she was thinking, he knew, was that she hated looking at him now.

But he was determined not to let his hair and beard grow back. He’d become quickly accustomed and then addicted to the half-hour of every day she now had to spend, with slow care, shaving and trimming him. At first she’d tried to find excuses: she hadn’t time, his hair was much nicer long, his beard suited him so well. But he was having none of that. He’d gone rigid, refused to move or eat, scratched his chin and scalp raw. He did the same on the days she’d tried to skip it with a promise to do a proper job tomorrow.

Now it was a daily ritual. There was no space to do it in his shower room, so a pink washing-up bowl from the Spar in Bridgecombe, in which were kept a plastic jug, brush, soap, towel, and a collection of disposable razors, had been given a place on a shelf in the kitchen. Every day Deborah brought it down, used the jug to fill it with warm water, placed the towel around his shoulders, and set to work at the kitchen table. She was new to it, as he was, and not very skilled, and he liked it that they shared this new undertaking in which they were both novices; it was as near as they’d get to taking up a hobby together. It was delightful to him that she had to come so close that he could make out the frown on her face as she soaped and scraped and wiped. And keeping his chin and head smooth couldn’t
be done in the usual snappy way she had of dispensing tablets, doing up buttons or mashing food. She was forced into slow motion, which Howard believed was good for her; the concentration and effort slowed her breathing. He was a model of co-operation, allowing her to tip his head up and down, to one side and to the other; he pulled his neck skin taut and grimaced and tried hard not to cough or swallow. He loved it that she couldn’t hurry without cutting his throat.

She complained, of course, in her habitual manner, with continual but mild little eruptions that were no more than a kind of accompaniment—the soundtrack of her stoicism—to all that she had to get through in a day. Oh, the fetching and carrying, the paraphernalia of the soap and razors and water and towels, her own lack of skill, the risk of cuts: Howard did his best to look sorry but he enjoyed listening to her making it sound so bothersome and hazardous. Because once she took the razor in her hand and began to concentrate—and she seemed unaware of this—she stopped talking. In silence he could contemplate the sensation of her breath on his skin, her hands traveling over the folds of his cheeks, the rasp of the blade against stubble. Sometimes she sighed, and occasionally in her sighing he was aware of a slight grunt, and now and then he caught on her face a turning down of the mouth. Don’t be that way, he wanted to tell her. Willing or not, she had no choice but to perform this prolonged, daily act of tenderness, and although he knew that a performance was what it was, he hoped that in the exercise of the care necessary for the simple avoidance of bloodshed—for reasons of practical efficiency she would avoid bloodshed—she would in time acquire a trace of true tenderness. Meanwhile, until she might come to feel a little of the emotion he forced her to enact, he didn’t care that it was undignified of him to crave the measured half-hours when she was her old, gentle self.

But afterward, time would hang heavier still. Left alone, he would haul himself up and hobble to the sitting room window overlooking the yard and the side of the property that sloped down the hill toward the road, and there he would lean, peering across at the spot where he knew the edge of the vegetable garden to be but seeing only dark shapes and patches of light. Sometimes he thought he picked up
a slight movement but then would suspect he’d imagined it altogether, hoping for it too much because Deborah might have told him that the vegetable garden was where she’d be spending the next hour. Or it might have been a rabbit or a badger, or one of the hens, strayed from the run he’d built at the far end of the vegetable garden, under the shadow of the hill and out of sight from the house. He didn’t remember how many hens they had now.

He remembered the long-ago past more vividly, how it had taken them over six weeks to clear the ground for the vegetables from the bare hillside, working by hand with mattocks and crowbars. The use of machinery for cultivation he’d regarded almost as cheating, an affectation that seemed incredible to him now. Then, he’d wanted to feel the earth between his fingers, to get dirt on his hands and mud on his boots. They’d planted spindly hawthorn cuttings for a hedge and put up a flimsy boundary fence; both were trampled within three days. They replanted and rebuilt them twice again that spring as deer, sheep, rabbits, and the wild ponies and then Exmoor’s April winds kept Stoneyridge’s small bit of land under siege. In the end they had to surround the vegetable garden with cinder blocks and barbed wire. It was hard to tell, looking at it, that the whole point of the place was harmony between Man and Nature.

Every summer the thick-rooted ground weeds returned, sprouting up among the vegetable seedlings. He and Deborah weeded and hoed, weeded and hoed. In later years even Adam weeded and hoed in his very own patch, until the child-sized tools Howard had made for him rusted from neglect and the patch reverted to scrub; Adam wanted a bike, not a rake and spade. With a regret he was unable to express, Howard gave up trying to interest him in growing food.

Yields were usually small; the surpluses they’d planned to barter or sell for money appeared only when there were seasonal gluts of the same tomatoes, marrows, runner beans all over the county, and then they could scarcely give them away. They cleared more ground. He stopped Deborah from growing flowers, even to sell, saying they needed all the space for food and garden flowers were phoney and suburban. Go out on the moor, he told her, if you want to look at flowers, the moor’s covered in them. One June day she picked every
single one of the orange flowers on the runner bean plants and arranged them in a jug on the table, and he lost his temper. Didn’t she know the bean pods grew from the base of the dead flowers, didn’t she know she’d sabotaged the entire crop? But she had to pick them, she said, collapsing in tears. She so badly wanted some flowers for the house, just a jug of flowers on the table, she
had
to have them.

Howard could no longer bring to mind what she’d been wearing that day, but if he blinked he could almost conjure out of the dark behind his eyelids a flashed imprint of the tiny ringlets of bean tendrils spiraling up among the brilliant orange blooms in the jug. He’d felt a brute. He was appalled that he’d had no idea of her need for flowers. But, determined to remain angry on account of the lost bean crop, he hadn’t said so.

Now Howard watched from the sitting-room window and wished his eyes could distinguish genuine signs of life from imagined or reflexive blinks and flickerings, from mere tricks of the light. He wished he’d tried to understand his family better. He thought of bringing flowers to Deborah now—he’d plant her a garden full of them if he could. He’d learn a hundred things about her, he’d memorize all her small desires and strive to meet them, every one.

Well, he couldn’t, of course. But they would go on. Days would pass, and probably he and she would appear to each other ever more oblique and pitiful; more would be asked of them both. Though it was too late to earn her forgiveness he would try to reach out and touch her when she leaned close to wipe his face with the corner of a towel; he might be able to lift his hand and stroke her arm when she was tired and when the bad shoulder under her hanging-off clothes was causing her to stoop. Which of them was the more ravaged, or if one of them were more needful of care than the other, he found it impossible to say; what was important was that for each other’s sake they garner some kindness from somewhere, amid such cruelty.