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Authors: Morag Joss

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BOOK: Our Picnics in the Sun
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After that there were many nights when we lay in the glow of candles placed on the floor around the bed, while Howard talked about Art and Life and further explained me to myself. Once I’d filled in the basics, he made my saying much about Scotland or my father unnecessary, and anyway I preferred to listen to him mulling things over for me. It was comforting to have my overwrought teenage self dismantled and reassembled, to be told not just who I was but who I was to become. It was good to have my grieving overlooked. At the end of three weeks, it was good when physical fulfillment was accomplished, again without too much being asked of me. That’s the truth of it. Howard promised me heaven on earth and delivered me from my unhappiness, and I was desperate to be molded into any shape that pleased my new savior.

Our feelings stood up well enough against my criteria—assembled from chat with the benignly envious Americans, magazine articles with titles such as “How Do You Know If It’s the Real Thing?” plus the vestiges of my abandoned God-fervor—to qualify as falling in love, and so I called it that. Enthralled, I wrote my mother a long letter all about him (except physical fulfillment, of course) and the miraculous change in my life, seven pages filled with love and praise.

And Howard? He became playful—almost daily I was taken aback by some small, impulsive kindness or other: my lunch apple polished on his sleeve to an absurd gloss, an old silver sixpence that turned up in my change pierced through and threaded on a leather bootlace for me to wear around my neck for good luck, when neither of us had a notion we’d ever need any. In the evenings we talked and read poetry aloud, holding hands; we laughed over the strange cheap meals we cooked together on the single gas ring, we brushed each other’s long hair. At times I caught him looking at me with an expression
on his face so unguarded and adoring I resolved to keep secret from him forever how ordinary I was.

He was delighted, I think, by my determination not to return home after the course finished, for although my role as follower to his leader was established by then, I did rather put my foot down about staying with him. But he was in love, too. As he told me one evening in the airless bedsit, what he realized now was that he’d been more or less permanently in love, meaning in the abstract, in search of an object for it, living all this time in a heightened state of being on a quest for meaning and ecstasy, and now he had me. He was completely sincere. I needed no more than that, but when he went on to inform me that we would get married (a proposal requiring my consent could not have been further from our minds), then truly my cup ran over.

My mother’s arthritis prevented her from traveling down to reason with me and Auntie Joan thought that since I had no alternative plans for a career I might as well make a go of it. When I turned eighteen the following June, Howard and I got married in a registry office in Finchley. It wasn’t a proper wedding, of course; we downplayed the whole thing as if some higher truth about marriage lay in a refusal to celebrate it with the usual trappings. I wore an Indian print dress in green and white, and a few beads in my hair, and afterward we picnicked on Hampstead Heath with some friends of Howard’s who brought guitars and marijuana. We didn’t invite anybody and my mother couldn’t have attended anyway, but relieved we were no longer living in sin, she sent us her blessing.

Auntie Joan sent a check with instructions to spend it on learning something useful. I knew she meant shorthand and typing, but I enrolled in a course in textile crafts and spent the mornings spinning and weaving. I waitressed in the afternoons and evenings, while Howard got a job in a crammer tutoring people for exam re-sits. The following year his mother died and left him a little money, and still—or again—in search of meaning and ecstasy, he decided we had to get out of London. The idea of spiritual and creative renewal through self-sufficiency on an Exmoor smallholding he got from
somebody else or from a magazine, I don’t remember exactly, but he made it sound like his own, and of course I was happy to follow. It seemed to me that too many things of an almost unbearable nature had occurred in a short while, and I wanted a life where much less was going to happen.

That was almost thirty years ago, and for those thirty I have been loyal and resigned. I carried on as usual after Adam was born, as far as anyone could tell, and even after he left home. I didn’t hold out any particular hope for a change in our circumstances, nor did I have greater gifts of imagination than those that most lonely women are surprised to find in themselves, eventually. I was just keeping hold of something, an obstinate splinter of knowledge, that it couldn’t go on. It was a disaffection too quiet to be mutinous, it was more like a faith—if faith is what argues the case for invisible truths—that I would not always have to feel this sadness about living. I had a proven capacity for faith, after all.

That wasn’t the same as knowing that the afternoon before the shearing was the first day of the end of it.

 


To: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

Sent on sun 3 july 2011 at 01.52 EST

Hi mum

Loads going on here, hope your both ok You’ll get this on wed as usual I
suppose, assuming you’ll get to Bridgecombe with dad as usual and logging on at library? He
is still going to the stroke club isn’t he? You said he didn’t enjoy it or something.
What you should ask him is would he rather be just sitting at home in front of the tv, I bet he
can’t honestly say he would. Also he has to understand you need to get out and do shopping
and stuff and you can’t unless he goes? You maybe need to be tougher with him on that, the
trouble is he doesn’t push himself.

So I was out on the latest monitoring round all last week and there’s loads
more coming up, everything’s been changed so now we’ve got this crap new system
whereby every location gets visited every other quarter and it’s a rolling program so
basically about twice the workload and still just five of us meant to cope with it, it’s
manic – we need at least two more people below my grade for admin and follow-up or basically
it just won’t get done. I’m giving way more presentations in the next three months
than I did the whole of last year and they’re keeping me on the same grade at least till end
of Q3 which I’m not too happy about. Anyway Sacha could tell I wasn’t
happy – I am SO not happy! – so she said she’d speak to HR and I’m
seeing them tomorrow about an Additional Hours Uplift that would make it more worth my while,
fingers crossed. Sacha’s ok as a boss, but she hasn’t been here a year yet and she
might be getting transferred
.

Better go, take care. Love to dad

A xxx

From: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

To:

Sent on wed 6 july 2011 at 11.57 GMT

Dear Adam Well here I amagain! The library’s busy this morning, have had
to wait to get to the keyboard! Dad went to stroke club without too much fuss, I can’t say I
blame him for not liking it, they are mostly a lot older. I think he finds it depressing. Especially
as he’s not finding talking any easier and walking is the usual struggle. He gets v tired and
that depresses him too. It’s not easy but we’re fine, don’t worry about us, we
cope on the whole pretty well.

The weathers chopping and changing, hot one day then humid, then downpours, then
hot again, typical English summer! Typical Exmoor summer more like. Am doing what I can in garden.
Still holding out for Digger to come and do the sheep. It’s urgent now, the poor things must
be so hot and when it rains they have a ton of weight to carry on their backs, I feel sorry for
them! I’m waiting to hear from him, he said he’d do it but not when, I may have to
nag. I go up twice a day just to see they’re all right.

Oh dear I have to go – somebody else wants on here, they’ve been
hovering.

So, darling and no I’m not nagging! But what about your birthday
this year? It would be SO lovely to see you. Can you let me know? It would give D a
lift not to mention me – now that really is NOT nagging just a fact. See what you can do,
you’ve surely earned some time off!? More next week take care don’t let them overwork
you! Lots of love xxxxxx M

 

T
he shearing was overdue. Weeks had gone by when I should have put it in hand and didn’t; I don’t really know why. I’d had some Bed and Breakfast guests to attend to in June, but only an elderly couple for a weekend and a cyclist who rang on the day to book two nights but in the end stayed one, so that didn’t explain it. I’d just gone past wanting to think about our wretched handful of sheep on the hill, I think that was it. There were only the nine old ewes left, more or less pets except I was no longer fond of them. I’d wanted to get rid of the lot after Howard’s stroke but they were worthless—I couldn’t have given them away—and there was the problem of our tenancy, which was protected only as long as we worked the land. Grazing a few sheep still counted as working the land, or so we would claim if it came to it. Anyway, I couldn’t have afforded the vet or abbatoir fees to have them destroyed. So they hung on, grazing the far side of the moor ridge among the alders and gorse on the edges of the combe. They didn’t need much looking after because I wasn’t interested in them for wool or for meat.

I guess I’d also delayed the shearing because I was reluctant to ask the favor again of Digger, that’s to say nervous of the ways he might find of calling in the favor. I hadn’t seen him for weeks; I didn’t mind acknowledging Kevin and Kyle at waving distance for the sake of their old childhood friendship with Adam, but I avoided going up on the moor when their father would be on his land, in case he started bullying me again about the outside painting or picked some other fight about the state of our place. A lot of it was bluff, but I didn’t know how much. So when I got around to calling him to ask if he’d
be good enough to do this year’s shearing for me and could he once again accept the fleeces in lieu of payment, I must have come across as if I thought our sorry circumstances were his fault, not mine. I’d forgotten to sound humble, or so grateful in advance of whatever he replied that he wouldn’t be able to refuse. He turned surly, wouldn’t give me a proper answer, said he’d see to it by and by when he could spare the time, and only for the sake of the godforsaken beasts; it was them he’d have on his conscience, not us.

By the middle of July the sheep were heavy and itchy and I was still waiting. I thought they could hold on. I went out on the moor to check on them two and three times a day and I’d hauled up a couple of bits of old picket fencing and banged them in the ground as scratching posts, but one day, after a morning of torrential rain, I found one off her legs. I couldn’t tell how long she’d been on her back but she’d worked herself into a split in the turf so she was in a state, struggling and panting and bleating, half-buried in a trough of broken bracken and bramble. At first I thought she’d just gone down under the sodden weight of her fleece.

It was much worse than that. Her back end was caked and filthy, of course, but I didn’t need to get close enough to lift the dags—I couldn’t get close enough, for the smell—to see that underneath she was dripping with maggots. They were heaving through her wool, burrowing into the sloughed skin, and dropping off bloated and squirming into the ground around her. I’d been checking the flock from too great a distance, just counting them and making sure none had fallen. I hadn’t really looked at them properly. I hadn’t seen this one maddened by flystrike, rubbing and biting herself as she must have been doing, shivering with pain and being eaten alive.

I stared at the repulsive, writhing havoc of it. I broke out in a sweat and retched and turned away. Even if I could have brought myself to touch her, I had no strength in my bad shoulder and couldn’t have got her up on my own. I ran all the way back to the house and managed to get in and call Digger without waking Howard from his nap. There was no reply. All I could do was leave a message.

When I got back to the ewe over an hour later, she was dead. Flies
were already clustered on her face, feasting on the tongue and spinning inside the nostrils. The crows had had her eyes. I covered her head and sat with her for a long time, and I wept for shame. And long after I couldn’t cry any more, I went on sitting there, supposedly waiting for Digger, in truth just waiting. I wondered about Howard, who would be waking up dry-mouthed, trying to unfold his fingers, wanting tea, and I thought about his wrecked lips chewing on the words of complaint if, later, he were able to grasp that he’d been alone at the house all afternoon because I chose to stay on the hill with a dead sheep. Then I let myself remember Howard’s mouth as I’d first seen it, forming all those mesmerizing words about essence and spirituality and going back to the land, how I would sometimes put a stop to the talking by placing a finger on his lips and kissing him deep with my tongue, a gesture unimaginably bold for me that never failed to delight him. It came to me again that so great a change in two people must be impossible, that the sadness of it could not be borne forever. Yet there it was. Another soft, dark wall of cloud was descending over the moor, and foolishly I still didn’t move. I welcomed the soaking, rainy fog that would come soon, and went on waiting.

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