Our Picnics in the Sun (21 page)

T
heo’s the perfect person to talk to. He doesn’t mind if I ramble, he may even like it. When I contradict or repeat myself he never points it out, and just by saying nothing he allows me to pause and reflect and put my story together so it makes sense to both of us. I need his patience, because I am out of practice at thinking and speaking for myself. I feel a little guilty about that, because the way I followed in the wake of Howard’s momentum through all these years can only have been a form of laziness, or dishonesty. I thought of it as my duty, but that wasn’t it; Howard may have been a little bullying in his opinions, but my torpor was all my own. It was easier to echo his convictions and philosophies than find things of my own to believe in. Perhaps also I had an inkling that if I were to question, even to myself, Howard’s right to assume my concurrence in all matters, the chaos would be limitless. Theo says I shouldn’t worry about all this. But there is much to blame myself for.

The act of retrieving my pride, let alone my opinions, from these years of deference feels like building work, or sculpture. It’s not effortless by any means, but because the material I am using—words, nothing more, nothing less—is pleasing and weightless and mine to assemble however I wish, I go to the task with energy, even excitement. All this flowing of
my
words, on every subject I care to think of, after so long! Theo brings them spilling out of me. I garble away most of the day as if making up for the lost time, fashioning sense out of what has lain for years unspoken. It’s exhilarating.

I tell him all about the bread, for instance. I haven’t made bread for years. I gave up on it not just for lack of time or energy, or even
because of the pain in my shoulder, but out of superstition, no matter that long ago I grew privately dismissive of superstition in most of the forms it took. I’d held on to an early notion of Howard’s, though, at first because I enjoyed believing in it back when I also believed I was happy, and later because it served as confirmation that I wasn’t.

This notion was that there is such a thing as the spirit of the dough. Yeast is alive, and so bread dough, according to Howard, like any living creature—hens, sheep, children—is happy only when its life force is acknowledged and respected. If you treat the dough right, it behaves right. (For a person who didn’t actually make any bread Howard was very clear about all this, although it was, he said, only in a trivial way about
bread
.) So the dough called for a nimble but not fretful hand, a hand light and gentle but also with a certain firmness. Above all, the hand must be benign, because the tiniest malevolence that I might be harboring inside myself would contaminate the energies that flowed from me, down through the heel of my hand and into the kneading. And by pressing and pushing bad energies into the spirit of the dough, I would impart sourness to the loaf and turn it heavy, and in turn the people who ate it would be sour and heavy, and they’d pass that on in all they did. What a responsibility. But I listened complacently. How could I, married to Howard, bake anything but happy bread?

I did, a number of times, but after Adam was born it got to be a bit hit-and-miss. I was rushed, harassed with everything; I tried more yeast, molasses, a pinch of soda, less salt, more salt. Nothing worked for long. So I baked only on dry days, or on rainy ones. I meditated beforehand, I played music, I sang kneading songs. For years I went on like this. Adam grew up thinking bread was never the same twice, except in its tendency to disappoint. Howard muttered soothingly about energies. It was the Rayburn’s fault, I told the Bed and Breakfast guests, who didn’t ever quite acquire the acquired taste of my fusty, beery-tasting seed breads. To hell with my energies, I seethed to myself, when instead I made toast with white sliced shop bread which the guests thought much nicer. I lost confidence, and deeper down was actually ashamed: I was too flawed a person to make a good job of bread-making. When Howard’s stroke gave me a reason
to give it up altogether, I felt I was being relieved of a task to which I’d proved myself inadequate. Besides, my bad shoulder would sometimes ache just at the thought of all the kneading.

However, with Theo to think about, that is changing, and I turn my mind to bread-making once more. And while thinking, unselfishly, that it is something I can do that might give Theo pleasure, I admit that I am, by planning his, attending to the neglected matter of my own. It’s enjoyable to conjure up my very first, early bread-making days and falsify them into silvery, soft-focus memories that are treacherously fine and good, too good, of course, ever to have been true. But it’s lovely to think of them and to long for them all the same, for October afternoon hours in a kitchen filled with new loaves and baskets of blackberries and jars of jam. I dream of a man alight with love and with autumn gold on his skin coming indoors from a blustering wind to the scent of hedgerow fruits and baking bread, and of course to me, smiling.

In a burst of desire and hope I pull out the old kneading board and all the mixing bowls and baking tins and packets of nuts and seeds. I have no yeast, and there are black specks and silver-backed mites crawling in the flour; a dab of it on my finger tastes sharp and dusty. I throw it all away and explain to Theo I will have to take the van to do a big shop at the wholefoods place just outside Taunton. It’s years since I’ve done that; we’ve been getting by on what I pick up in the village on Wednesdays. It will mean driving a long way, and I will be far from Howard for several hours, which has not happened since the day Theo came.

I’m thinking all this aloud, sitting at the kitchen table. My hopes begin to ebb, and I wonder if there is any point in even starting the shopping list. “Howard cries, you know,” I remind Theo. “If he’s left alone for any length of time he just cries, and I can’t bear it.”

Theo doesn’t think that will happen this time, because of course he’ll stay with him. “You must go,” he says. “If you want to go, why shouldn’t you? It’s not asking for much, is it? It’ll be fun. You could do with a little outing.”

Then I explain again about Howard and the spirit of the dough and why I gave up on bread-making. Theo laughs.

“For God’s sake, bread has
feelings
? You think you can make a loaf of bread happy or sad?”

“I suppose I am being silly,” I say. “And no, not happy or sad, exactly.” Theo says nothing to that, but in a way that tells me he wants me to go on. “But when the dough gets sticky and tight and won’t rise and it tastes bitter, it is sort of sad,” I say, and I pause to write a few more things on my shopping list. “And then when it’s all frothy and you get these great big air bubbles in it, it’s happy, in a way. Sort of excitable, at any rate. Do you understand what I mean?”

I carry on with the list, speaking my thoughts aloud as the washing machine sloshes away in the scullery down the passage from the kitchen. When I look up I realize Theo’s not here. I feel momentarily deserted, until I realize that he’ll be flitting to and fro seeing to the laundry, obviously thinking over what I said.

“I mean, people
do
have good or bad energies, don’t they?” I call to him. “You put either negative or positive energy into a thing. Everything’s got an energy. Including bread.” His silence makes me doubt this for the first time in at least thirty years. Where does my certainty about it—about anything—come from? What use is it to me now, what use was it ever?

Theo returns. He does not ask if I want any, but tea is made, my cup is placed on the table. He goes about it not knowing that this isn’t the small thing he may think it to be. Having my mind benignly read—my need for a cup of tea noticed and met—charms me more than I can say.

“So if you’re sad, you make sad bread?” he says. “So it’s all your fault if it goes wrong? But suppose it’s not your fault. Suppose it’s nothing to do with you at all.”

“But Howard says …”

“Howard says, Howard says?” Theo swallows some tea, then cocks his head and smiles. “He says what? I don’t hear anything.”

Howard is in his chair next door, possibly asleep. There is nothing but silence.

“You see? Howard says nothing. So why don’t you just make some bread, and enjoy it?”

“I’ll try. That’s what I want to do.”

“Get on with it, then. Go shopping. Make bread. You
are
a silly woman.”

He speaks like that in a joking way, of course. I laugh and finish my list, and then he sends me straight off before I can change my mind. He doesn’t stand at the door, he doesn’t wave. He doesn’t even let me say goodbye to Howard, though I want to. Much better this way, he says.

He’s right. The longer I’m away without Howard knowing, the shorter the time he’ll spend crying. I may be there and back before he’s any the wiser if I just get on with it. I do as I am told.

F
or maybe half an hour after the van chugged out of earshot Howard sat quietly waiting, until the silence felt safe. When the house was quite still he got up and went to his bedroom.

He had it all planned. First, he used the legs of his walking frame to bat his outdoor shoes out from under the wardrobe into position at the side of the bed. Then he sat down, eased his slippers off, and worked his feet into the shoes. It was too bad about the laces but it wouldn’t matter; the shoes would fall off only if he lifted his feet as he walked and he couldn’t do more than shuffle. All he had to do was be careful not to trip on the trailing laces. He stood up, got his balance, and set off for the kitchen.

He hadn’t in fact got it quite all planned. The cold hit him as soon as he tugged the door open. He hesitated, wondering if he should go back for another sweater, but remembered in time to save himself the effort that the last time he’d tried to open the drawer with the sweaters in it he’d fallen over. On the back of the door hung his old waxed jacket, hard and dirty with years of mud and dried-on rain and kitchen smoke. Practically invisible from years of hanging unused, it was half-hidden under a dirty towel, a bag of clothes pegs and a plastic bag stuffed with other plastic bags, and it was also too high for him to reach. He moved across the floor, stretched over to the mustard jar crammed with kitchen utensils that sat next to the Rayburn, and picked out the longest of the wooden spoons. He edged his way back and used the spoon to knock down the things draped over the jacket. The clothes-peg bag fell open and spilled its contents, littering the floor with a hundred hard, hazardous, sliding obstacles,
like dead scorpions. Howard let out a howl, which made him feel dizzy and suddenly afraid. He took several deep breaths, let the last one out slowly, and tried to get a grip on himself. If he didn’t start getting things right, there was no saying what might happen; he had a vision of just how badly he could end up, stranded here for hours with broken bones while the wind blew in through the open door.

Raising the spoon again, he brought the jacket down from the hook and caught it against his chest. He dropped the spoon, got one arm into one sleeve, and heaved it up as far as his shoulder, but he couldn’t manage the other, and used up too much energy trying. After waiting to get his breath and balance back, he slid through the rattling sea of clothes pegs and negotiated the two steps down into the yard.

Suddenly, there it was, a beautiful autumn day, a small miracle: the sun hanging like a gong in the sky and the air hitting his face and filling his mouth, wide open with concentration, with a sharp cleanliness like mint, or alcohol. Howard inhaled and shivered, felt the air slip down his throat and into his chest. The cold was suddenly lovely. It reached his arms, trembled through his legs, and prickled at his fingertips. All the solid, perpetual aches of his body, all the stiffness in his joints seemed suddenly vaporized, lifted away from him into the rich, coppery, cold sky. Even the rasping calls of the crows flickering in and out of the bare trees against the hillside sounded joyous. He looked up and started forward, feeling that the sparkling day and bird-filled sky were granting him a kind of pardon, as if the choice, obliterated by his stroke, of whether and how and where to move every part of his body, had been restored to him.

It hadn’t. He caught his toe on a cobble, the walking frame skidded on the damp stones, he grabbed it hard, gasped, and tottered. The bones in all his limbs jarred painfully. His half-on, half-off jacket slid down his arm; he shook it off and let it fall to the ground. He was going to get very cold, but at least he’d managed to stay upright. The crows above croaked and flapped; two of them landed on the ridge of the pig shed roof and gloated down at him. Across the yard, an incredible distance away, sunlight stretched in through the open door of the pottery studio. He set off.

After what seemed like hours, he reached the doorway and shuffled inside. Exhausted, he slumped against the workbench and looked around. There was no sign of the new drying lines that Deborah had been so excited about. Howard didn’t altogether believe there ever would be; one thing he’d noticed about Deborah’s excitements—so many of them, recently—was that they flared for an instant and fizzled out, like matches struck in the dark. But just in case the place was going to be gutted, hosed out, and set up for drying laundry, he had to retrieve the things he’d come for before she discovered them. Just as soon as he’d had another moment’s rest.

Slow though the journey across the yard had been, he found he was waiting, as he recovered his breath, for his feelings to catch up with him. To begin with and a little to his surprise, it came as neither consolation nor sorrow to be back here. It was simply cheering to remember how his feet had once worked the pedal that turned the wheel still on the bench, how his hands really had thrown pots. That they never would again was a sadness that, even as it swept over him, he tried to dismiss as irrelevant; that the pots had been invariably drab or flawed he wanted to overlook. But the years—the expenditure of years. Howard gazed, seeing himself engrossed in the work, his shoulders hunched over the bench and outside, the weather at the window, another day slipping by. Time he’d never get back. The numberless hours he’d spent here trying to improve, driven by the drawn-out, irreversible error of mistaking all that propulsive vanity and industriousness for talent. How to justify so much misdirected effort? His failure weighted the air with the density of grief.