Our Picnics in the Sun

by Morag Joss

  Memories much more real than the day he was living through came back to solid life. Past conversations with his wife poured through his ears, with the sounds of not only their voices but their breathing and their laughter as well. He heard them both groaning with cold—it was a freezing January that year—but still laughing, on the first day they awoke in the house and their breath vaporized in the air over their heads. There were ice patterns on the inside of the windows. Later that day she slipped and fell, running across the yard to see if the hens “had had a good night’s sleep” in their newly built coop. He could smell again the aroma of clean frost in her hair when he helped her up. But he had not the slightest recollection of how he came to be an old man trapped in a wheelchair, unable to follow his young wife in her swinging walk up the field toward the moor.

  With a sob he pulled the blanket away from his knees and let it fall. Then he planted both feet on the ground and with his good arm on the armrest, pushed himself up. The wheelchair began to skid away from him but he held on, steadied himself, and slowly inched his way around, hand over hand, so that he had a grip on the handles. He couldn’t risk balancing on one foot long enough to release the brake, so he pushed and leaned forward, shoving the chair’s locked wheels along down the cinder track until he reached the stile. Carefully and gradually he set about transferring his grip from wheelchair to walking frame. When he finally let go of the chair it toppled over.

  There was no going back now.

  Sweat was breaking on his forehead and drying cold on his skin, and he was badly out of breath. He tried to lengthen his gaze across the field but could see no sign of Deborah, or of any movement at all. She would be much too far away to hear him anyway, were he to shout for her. But if he could only make out her retreating figure and call across the years she would, he felt certain, stop and turn to him, all at once transformed. The Deborah he’d brought here, whom he’d refused to notice fading and slipping away from him, would return, he was sure of it.

  He jerked the frame around and turned, and began to move along the path that led all the way back down to the corner of the Stoneyridge yard. If he got that far, once there he could lean on the wall of the old pig shed and rest, and then when he felt ready he might venture on to the brick cobbles and make it to the door and into the house. He’d be pleased to make it all the way to the house. But he felt no triumph in the prospect of undertaking the journey without help, only an aching sadness that his condition placed such an eventuality as walking with an aluminium frame as far as his own door in the category of an achievement. He kept going, pausing every few steps to calm himself and recover his breath, but could not bear to look back, even once, toward the moor.

  He made it. The door was unlocked, as always. Howard took several minutes to turn the handle. When he finally got himself into the kitchen he was trembling with tiredness, but with exhilaration, too. He had no idea what time it was, and did not care. Pushing his frame along, he got to his room and lay down on his bed, fully dressed. For several minutes he felt his head on the pillow thump with the same fast and desperate beating of his heart, and then it quieted, and he slept.

  It’s only when I’m away from Howard that I can breathe freely. This has been the state of affairs for some time but it’s only now, trudging away from him up the hill, with Theo a little way up ahead, I finally admit it—whether just to myself or aloud I’m not sure, and it doesn’t much matter, because all this, and more, Theo already knows. He can see it, and through his eyes I can see it, too. Howard chokes off my life in my throat as surely as if he clasps his hands around it and day by day squeezes a little tighter. Only in Theo’s presence can I breathe, and think, and speak. Only to Theo can I put such questions as these: What are you supposed to do when you are very angry with a person you have loved? How are you to go on when his helplessness doesn’t make your anger go away? I do not voice the questions aloud, for now; all I hear is my own uneven breathing and the sigh of grass under my feet. It is enough for the time being that the matter has been broached at all, that it is in the air.

  I spread out the blanket on the grass near the top of the ridge, and flop down, lie back, and close my eyes. Damp presses through the blanket and the wind is blustery and cold, but then sunlight splashes unexpectedly through a gap in the clouds and warms my face. I think of Howard dozing in his wheelchair down on the path, way below the brown expanse of moor, and wonder if he feels the warmth, too. This late in the year the sun shines in such unpredictable and fleeting patches, flaring across one field in a moment and extinguished by cloud shadows in the next; it can’t be trusted. Theo draws near. Even with my eyes closed I know the moment when he drops on to his knees beside me.

  Nothing is said, but I am not surprised when I feel his hand touch mine, clasped across my body. How strange it is that for a long time our hands remain like that. I smile, that’s all, and keep my eyes closed. Still I feel no surprise, but rather a kind of discreet, delighted acceptance that he chooses to place his hand upon mine and leave it there. (I do believe absolutely that, though he may have sensed something of my need of him, he has chosen.) I find myself thinking again of the walking figure on the moor that stormy July afternoon, and conclude quite calmly that of course it was not real. How could it have been? What else can gods and ghosts and angels be but apparitions, conjured from the force of our yearnings? That figure was a pathfinder, a Gabriel, coming in advance of Theo’s real presence. There is no other way to explain why Theo’s touch brings, among many sensations, the same pleasure of recognition and blessing that I felt around me that day. And now with his hand touching mine I feel again, even more intensely, the pleasure of the silence between us that I felt on the morning he stayed behind and came quietly to sit by me on the unmade bed in the room of the departed guest. So deep and still is our silence I don’t move my hand or turn to look at him for fear he may not really be there after all, or that he may melt away under the warmth of my gaze. There is no need to open my eyes, anyway. I trust him to be more than a mirage. For if he is not, I will be alone again, and that could not be borne.

  As we lie here, Theo does not ask a single question, yet I begin to tell him things. I can’t remember being in such a hurry to be heard since I met Howard, and that was only ever up until the point, quickly reached, when we both preferred to hear him talk rather than listen to me. Theo is different; his silence becomes a plea for words that brings more and more of them out of my mouth. I tell him small, silly things—for example, that since the day of my father’s funeral when Auntie Joan tried to stop my sobs by making me suck on a Fox’s Glacier Mint, I cannot abide the taste of peppermint—as well as the big things, about Howard, Adam, all of that. Theo listens as if he has renounced words himself and came here, an abstinent pilgrim, precisely so that my words may flow out and into the air and light of the moor for him to catch and make sense of, for both of us. I talk and talk. Many hours go by.

  Eventually, I tire of speaking. Theo slips his hand away gently, and moves off through the grass. Perhaps he’s gone to count the sheep. The day is wearing on and it’s long past the time I should have gone back. But we haven’t had the picnic yet. I sit up and open the basket. There are sandwiches again and another cake, of course, which I set out on a plate, and a flask of tea. Theo wanders back and stands watching and smiling.

  “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble,” he says, after cake has been eaten and tea drunk, hands clasped around the cups for warmth. It’s very cold and there’s a spit of rain in the wind now.

  “Well, of course! It’s your birthday,” I remind him.

  “And it was supposed to be Adam’s,” he says.

  “But it wasn’t,” I say, handing over the parcel from the bottom of the basket, “and it isn’t. Happy birthday, Theo.”

  There’s no need to tell him, because he already knows, that this parcel was brightly wrapped and beribboned weeks ago to give to Adam, who was not here to receive it, and that my offering it today to Theo instead makes it
a greater, not a lesser gift. The paper and ribbon tear and fall away, and the sweater inside releases the smell of new wool, clean and oily, like unused rope. It’s a practical garment for country wear, rough but warm. He is quietly pleased, lifting it to his face to feel its wiry mesh against his cheek. I fancy I can feel it against my skin, too. It will actually suit Theo rather better than it would Adam.

  “Does it fit? Try it on,” I say. Then I find myself on the point of adding that the sweater will serve well against the coming winter, which is always hard on Exmoor, and I realize we have come quite far enough for one day. Where does it spring from, my assumption that Theo will still be here when winter comes? But how could I survive another one here without him? I gather the picnic things together and stand up. I’m rigid with fear and cold, and fighting a need to cry.

  “You’re cold,” Theo says. He hands me the sweater. “Here, you put it on. It’ll keep you warm till we’re back at the house.”

  “But it’s yours. You should wear it,” I tell him, but he insists. He says he’s fine, quite warm enough, and obviously I am not. When I put the sweater on, he smiles and says the color suits me. My body softens in its instant warmth and I like feeling its prickly fibers through the dress I am wearing. But I say nothing, and set off quickly down through the mud and bracken. I’m suddenly upset that Howard is stuck in his wheelchair over a mile away; he might have choked on his lunch or tipped himself over. He’s bound to be cold, and he’s overdue for his tablets, and he hasn’t been shaved. Even as I’m muttering all these things I can’t decide who’s responsible for the lapse of routine, me or Howard. Or Theo.

  The next day, or perhaps it was the day after, brought Howard another shock. Somebody else was in the house. He heard a car—not Digger’s Land Rover—drive into the yard, and now Deborah was talking to somebody in the kitchen. From the polite tilting of her voice he was sure it wasn’t the same person he’d heard her talking to every day for weeks now, to whom her tone was both changeable and extreme, either high and excited, or low and thoughtful, sometimes secretive. No, she was speaking now to yet another person, somebody whose voice he could actually hear, somebody whose voice was familiar and a little on the loud side. He switched off the television and peered around the sitting room and found it, too, familiar; to his relief, what he could see of his surroundings was solid and unchanged. But something was wrong: the voice talking to Deborah from the kitchen did not fit here at Stoneyridge. The voice did not belong here.

  Then he heard the laugh, and knew at once who it was. He craned round in his chair toward the kitchen. Though he couldn’t see anything through the glass pane in the door he knew it was her: Stroke Club, nurse, laughing, nice, kind—Jenny. The door opened, and Jenny came in, followed by Deborah. Although he now knew who the visitor was, and knew she was in the room, he still couldn’t really make her out in the way he had once been able to. It was as if one day when his back was turned the world had reconfigured itself and was now operating in accordance with new, tricksy laws of geometry and space that broke up rooms and faces and bodies into sudden angles and jutting planes, so that now a great deal of what went on right next to him seemed to be happening off-center, or behind a partition, or in a mirror. Not only that, the world was simultaneously emptier and fuller than it used to be. Every day, sounds and movements, shapes, smells, and tastes hinted at but did not yield their meaning, reducing him to a state of almost permanent distraction. Every day wore him out with numberless inexplicable sensations and unanswered clues. But he didn’t need to explain any of this to Jenny. She knew.

  “Hullo, Howard! Thought I’d just drop in for a minute, seeing as I was passing,” she said. “We’ve been missing you at Stroke Club. Thought I’d come and see how you’re getting on.” She laughed some more, and Howard smiled broadly in the direction of the voice.

  “Hullo, Jenny,” he said. He raised his hand and felt it gently clasped and held.

  “My goodness,” he heard Deborah say. “You are honored!”

  Jenny laughed again, and Howard could smell something lovely and lemony, and then he heard her voice, now close and soft. She was sitting beside him, practically visible. “How’re you doing, Howard? Deborah tells me you’ve been getting out nearly every day. That’s progress. That’s excellent!”

  Howard knew that Jenny would wait for as long as it took him to speak, which made it worth his effort. Besides, he wanted to please her. Slowly, slowly, he made his mouth produce words. “Yes, out. I have been out. Left, out.” He squeezed Jenny’s hand, hoping she’d understand how seriously he felt about it. “Not, no—no good. Out. Left. I’m bad, left.”

  “His left side’s still bad. He still struggles,” Deborah told Jenny. To Howard she said, “But you managed it very well, Howard. Didn’t you? When you were out. You did really well. And you had your chair right there for when you needed a rest, so it was fine.”

  Jenny said, “Your hand’s a bit chilly, isn’t it? How’s your appetite, Howard, are you eating all right?”

  Howard shook his head vehemently. “No. No food. I don’t like.”

  “He’s a bit hit-and-miss with his eating at the moment,” Deborah said. “He’s quite fickle.”

  “I think we’ll just pop you on the scales next time you’re at Stroke Club, Howard, would that be all right?” Jenny said. “I think you might have dropped a bit of weight, I’m not surprised with all the exercise! Tell you what, suppose you try having a couple of milky drinks a day in place of your tea or coffee?” Howard shook his head again; she was missing the point. Even if he couldn’t be given food he actually wanted to eat, he had to be allowed enough time to force it down. Jenny’s voice faded as she turned her head to speak to Deborah, and he strained to hear the words.

  “Plain milk if he likes it, full fat preferably. Or hot chocolate made with milk, that’d be a good idea now the weather’s turned. Does he mention feeling the cold at all?”

  Howard tried to speak, and Jenny turned back to him. “I think you might be feeling the cold now you’ve lost a bit of weight, mightn’t you?”

  She spoke again to Deborah, confidentially. “If you can keep an eye on his hands and feet and pop a blanket or an extra layer on, that’ll help. And wrap him up extra warm to go out, of course. Plus hot milky drinks especially if he’s not eating much.”

  “I do my best with his food,” Deborah said. “And there’s the palaver of getting him out. And now the shaving on top. There’s a lot to do. I don’t mind, of course, but he’s difficult to please sometimes. He still gets very down.”

  “Oh, I know. I do understand. All these things, they’re so variable. It’s very frustrating for the person doing all the looking-after. Maybe you could try giving him smaller amounts at mealtimes and top up his plate a little at a time—it takes longer but it usually pays off. Anyway, very nice to see you both. Better dash, got four more visits before lunch! Ring the clinic if there’s anything else we can help with, don’t hesitate, all right? Thanks for letting me pop in.”

  Howard felt her hand tighten around his. “Bye-bye, Howard. Keep up the good work. See you at Stroke Club next time? I’ll be looking out for you!”

  She waited until he was able to say, “Goodbye, Jenny.” Then he felt her hand withdraw, and she was gone from his side.

  “No need to see me out,” she said to Deborah.

  “It’s no bother,” Deborah said. “Anyway, I’d like a word.”

  Some time later he was subjected to another new sensation; another texture, of alarm and strangeness, was brought to bear upon an already unpredictable day. Rough fingertips poking out from a scratchy, strong-smelling sleeve darted at him from nowhere and began stroking the side of his cheek.

  A voice said, “It’s all right, Howard. I’m going to shave you.” The hand—or, at any rate, the sleeve—was unfamiliar. He couldn’t join up the voice with the face it belonged to, he couldn’t see the face at all.

  “You’re all right with that, aren’t you, Howard?” the v
oice said, from behind him this time. “We’ve got to make sure we don’t do anything you’re not all right with, haven’t we, Howard? Very important. Here we go, then.”

  All at once he felt a cold, slippery cloth sliding around his face as if, despite the words, it wasn’t in the least important that he should be all right with it. As if there were already some easy fellowship between himself and the owner of the hand that presumed the granting of his consent to be shaved, which there certainly was not. He opened his mouth, found the cloth jammed between his teeth, and held on, shaking his head. The cloth was wrenched away. Howard felt a light cuff against the side of his head, and yelled out.

  “Listen, Howard,” said the voice. Warm breath wafted over his face. “Don’t. Don’t mess around with me, all right? I’m going to shave you. Then we’ll be going out for a walk. All of us.”

  The sharp-smelling, prickly sleeve scraped against his cheek, and Howard sneezed. He tried to focus his eyes but could see only the outline of a dark figure now leaning over the low table where the pink plastic shaving basin was set. Again he wanted to say he’d changed his mind about the shaving, that he wanted to grow his beard back, but the words wouldn’t come. Next, a towel was placed around his shoulders and his chin was raised. Howard gulped and closed his mouth as the fat brush pasted the soap across his lips and down over his neck. He had to stop his chin from trembling. Because if he went on trembling like that, the voice told him in a calm, private whisper in his ear, it would be his own fault if he got cut.