Our Picnics in the Sun (32 page)

“Useless eyesore,” he says, after I’ve watched poor Howard turn from me and shuffle away. Of course he means the antlers. He’s heard my views on the antlers. “Any more useless eyesores you’d like to get rid of?”

Then I’ll smile, thinking of Howard’s earnest philosophy about the antlers and what they stand for, and I’ll make out I didn’t hear what Theo said. He has no right to be expressing such thoughts in a house where he is, after all, a guest, I wish to remind him. Or if I’ve really had enough, I’ll tell him to leave me alone.

The pity of it is that when he does leave me alone, when it’s just me and Howard in all this great echoey prison of a house, it’s unbearable.

When Theo is nowhere to be found, my faith in him falters, and I curse this way he has of vanishing. But wherever it is he goes, whether it’s into outbuildings or his own room or the attic or up on the moor, I imagine him curled up asleep and hidden under a heap of sacks or behind a wardrobe or in the branches of a tree, like a boy in a nursery rhyme. Then my heart melts. For Theo did arrive here an orphan and runaway, and is no more to be scolded for being a little bit in disgrace than is Tom the Piper’s Son or Little Boy Blue, whose faces in a nursery rhyme book from the library Adam, when he was four
years old, obliterated with a black crayon because, he said, they were naughty. And, after all, Theo is here, and Adam is not. I think of Theo as a lost boy who happened by chance upon my life here, and I remind myself that he does not have to stay.

So I forbid myself to mention how he tends to go absent when I most need him, and I’ll get busy rescuing Howard from this or that small predicament, and in due course Theo reappears. If I then confess to him whatever little lapse of care I discovered, he gives me a mild ticking-off and says I have to accept that I’m growing forgetful as well as slow. I say nothing, for beyond the mild unfairness, there’s a blessing in it all. While Theo speaks I see his eyes settle on me and then, however dark the world around me, I stand in the light. I don’t fret as much, and nor does Howard. Howard doesn’t object at all.

That’s not to say I want Theo around all the time. When, as he does increasingly, he oversteps the mark with one of his crueler observations, I want to get away from him, too. I think up new and especially difficult chores as a way of getting a rest from him, because, after all, chores are chores and have to be done. (For example, the pottery workshop did get a hosing-down. The water forced out some loose panes of glass so these days frost forms inside on the workbench that runs under the window and the old wheels have all rusted up.) Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I leave going out to check the sheep until so late in the afternoon.

It’s a squally day and I wear my oilskin that’s permanently damp and so stiff with age it’s like wearing a piece of old tarp. I also put on a tweed hat of Howard’s that’s gray and waxy with dirt but at least keeps the rain off and doesn’t blow away in a high wind. Nobody in her right mind would go out on a day like this but I can’t put it off because I skipped checking the sheep yesterday. Now that the mornings fly by, I tend to go only every other day. This isn’t how it should be, but when Howard was away I felt terribly tired and went to bed in the afternoons. Once I went to lie down forgetting that I hadn’t checked the flock, and when I got up again it was too dark to go up on the moor. The next day when I saw the sheep they were perfectly all right, so it hadn’t mattered. Now I have a nap nearly every afternoon. That’s another thing. I suppose I need a little sleep in the daytime
because conversations with Theo can go on long, long into the night.

I’m used to my nap now, and come three o’clock or thereabouts, I crave the curtained dark and thick bedclothes. Today under the cold oilskin coat my flesh is full of its own, heavy warmth and feels too soft for the work of walking up the moor. It’s after half-past three and the sky is gray with rain clouds and the coming dusk, and I would do anything to stay in and light the fire and sit by it as the day fades outside. But I drag myself out and trudge up the muddy track. Theo, as I expected, has disappeared. I climb the stiles between the fields and carry on up through the bracken and heather. I’m too tired to walk fast, although I ought to hurry as there isn’t much daylight left. Lighted windows in the farms over on the far side of the moor make me feel excluded and rather feckless; my distant neighbors have attended to their outside work at the proper time and are now indoors. I tramp knee-high in the wet bracken and over clumps of reeds and brambles. Up on the moor top the grass shivers all around me and the wind bullies me along, shoving at me sideways, slapping my raised collar against my face. The rain rattles into the hard folds of my coat; it tastes metallic. I move in close under the line of rowan and alder that straggles across the crest to try to get out of the wind but it’s too boggy here where animals have huddled for shelter, and the rain drips thicker and colder on my shoulders from the bare, waterlogged trees. I move out again, into the open. All around me I hear the reedy sighs of dead grass, and tatters of fog, paler than the sky, are uncurling across the moor.

Not a sheep in sight. When the weather’s this bad they tend to cluster over on the other side, in the lee of the slope. They’ll be standing close in by the combe, one of the deep stony gullies formed by ancient landslides of rocks and torrents of meltwater that runs down the hill from the moor top, where the ground is always boggy and treacherous. It’s as well the gorse there grows too densely even for sheep to break through to the fissure in the hillside, where they would stumble and hurt themselves on the boulders and slide down the scree of prehistoric rubble. I hear them through the noise of the weather; their small, dry bleats rise and break in turning gusts of
wind. It’s too dark to count them from here; I can’t make out their shapes from the scattered boulders against the hawthorn scrub and thickets of gorse. I have to get nearer to them, close to the combe, and hope they won’t scatter. I jam my hands hard in my pockets, sink my head deeper into my collar, and set off going crosswise from the moor top.

Maybe it’s the change of direction that does it. The ground beneath me seems to tip under my feet. It loosens, shifts, my front foot slides along a hank of wet grass, the ankle wobbles then bends like a hinge and tips me over. There is enough time for me to know I’m falling and also enough to know that I didn’t know it fast enough to get my hands out of my pockets. There’s time to know I’m going to land hard and get hurt. I crash over on my left side and I feel grazing and stinging and I hear my voice sending a ludicrous “Ooh-ooh-
oh-oh
!” into empty air. I scrape and bump down the hillside and when I come to a stop, again comes a strange expansion of time. Much more time than I feel I need is now available to me, in which I come to understand, slowly, that I’m flat on the ground and winded, and my upper body and face are trapped in a cage of biting bramble strands. I resist an urge to try to thrash my way out; I get one hand free and unpick the thorns from my skin and hair and clothes, and I manage to sit up. I’m scratched and punctured in several places, pain is starting to throb in my neck and shoulder, and my hands are shaking. I’m wet through and I’ve lost the hat. My left side landed hardest and I can’t use that arm to push myself up. The left leg feels useless. My mouth is warm to the touch and there’s a tinny taste on my tongue. I don’t know how long I spend taking note of these things, but eventually I’m aware that time has speeded up and is running along again as normal, and with it has come rain that is dropping like pebbles on my oilskin shoulders. My head pounds. There’s a panicky, animal command shouting in my brain, telling me to move. It is not all right to remain here. I must get up from the ground. Here, down on the ground, is where hurt creatures lie until they die. I must free myself from the damp pull of the earth and
get up. Move
.

I don’t move. My face stings with rain and tears. Although there is no point or sense in it, I lift my head and roar, “Help! Is anyone
there?! Helloo?! Help!” and the wind whips the sound away and the air soaks it straight up so that even if there were someone within a mile, they wouldn’t hear. Anyway, I know there isn’t. The effort of shouting makes my head swim. I can’t help thinking about Howard dozing in his chair or lying on his bed in the dark back bedroom, and the mayhem there will be if I’m not back soon to look after him. I’m not so far gone as to imagine Theo’s attentions are any sort of substitute for my care. Or to think it’s not up to me alone to get myself out of this mess. I’m on my own. I think wildly that if I had a phone, or if I had a gun I could fire to raise the alarm, or a dog who’d run back barking to Stoneyridge—but what use would any of those be when there’s no guarantee they’d bring anyone to the rescue? And the sheep, the bloody sheep. I still haven’t counted the sheep. And I cannot move.

I lift my bad leg in both hands and try to make a circle with my foot, inside the boot. The ankle turns in a gritty, muffled sort of way that tells me worse pain is lying in wait, but it does move, so it can’t be broken. I haul myself around and get on to all fours and then upright, taking my weight on the right leg. I hobble a short way, dragging the left foot. It feels cased in lead. After about twenty steps I collapse against a low boulder. I’m breathless and my heart is thudding in my throat. The light is almost gone; I can see, but in an adaptive, nocturnal kind of way. I make out another boulder, and a little way off is a long, flat stone rising out of the ground at a shallow angle. It’s not familiar at first, but then I know it. This is the place. I’m back.

On some summer afternoon Howard sat on the grass here and whittled sticks and I lay back on that stone and pretended to be asleep. Now and again I opened my eyes and looked up at soaring birds, and I stroked my pregnant belly and I longed for poems, that would make everything clear, to suggest themselves. I waited for words to descend. I wanted to catch them and rearrange them and write down what they would surely say: that there could be heaven on this earth. That believing in Howard as I did, there was nothing impossible in the idea, nor anything childish in wanting it, as long as I accepted it had to be earned. Motherhood would be only the beginning.
I wasn’t impatient; in fact I took it as a measure of my maturity—I never really enjoyed being young—that the last thing I wanted was that the perfect life should be easy to accomplish. I was prepared to wait for Howard to bring to fruition, with my help, all that he promised.

I can’t start thinking about that now. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am back here in pouring rain slumped at an awkward angle against a rock on a wintery evening nearly thirty years later, that I’ve fallen on my bad shoulder and injured my ankle. The pain has lessened, though, but this may be because the night air is stealing all heat and sensation from my body. Only my face burns, under the cold rain, from the lacerations and the effort of getting this far. I realize I’m desperate for some water to drink; I lick the rain off my hands and hold out my palms to catch more. I start to shiver. Deep in the stone of the boulder that’s pressing into my back through the oilskin there’s a presentiment of ice. I think about lying down and waiting patiently, as if I’m still here on a summer afternoon. All I need do is wait and that single cloud will pass across and clear the sun, and perfect light will shine down on me once more. I close my eyes, willing the scene into life and myself into the center of it. Howard yawns and stretches and is murmuring something to me; I’m watching skylarks while baby limbs bump gently under my ribs. I’m here with Howard and everything’s fine. There’s no hurry to go back. It’s fine for me to lie here and simply wait for the next thing to happen.

Nonsense. There is sleet in the wind now, and I open my eyes. It’s Theo’s voice. Nonsense. Who do you think you’re fooling, all this stuff about Howard yawning and stretching, all that “all’s well with the world”? Face it. That’s not how it was. That’s not what happened.

Theo is not even
here
. I shout at him through the rain to be quiet, but he goes on. No, and Howard’s not here, either, he says, and the way you think of him, he never was. Your perfect sunny day, all the perfect sunny picnic days, they never were like that. I tell Theo again to shut up and I berate him for his uselessness in practical matters, most of all for his languid way of coming and going, that is no help to me now.

And he does shut up. In the silence I hear the wind again, and I am left considering his face, and the expression in his eyes that, gentle as it may be, requires me to use every grain of strength I possess to get myself up from the ground and back home to Howard.

In the end, every grain of strength is required. I stumble and crawl my way down, stopping many times to rest. But the rain and wind prove a blessing; for a while all I can think about is how cold I am, and later I am too numbed by it to feel much pain in my ankle and shoulder. By the time I reach the back door and get inside, my left side is useless. The kitchen is empty. Howard will be asleep in the sitting room in front of the television; I make out the flickering of the screen through the glass pane in the door. I manage to get myself into a chair at the kitchen table and for a few moments all I can do is rest my head on my arms. I can’t stop shivering, and my face is hot. Sensation, in the form of pain, begins to return.