Our Picnics in the Sun (19 page)

I
t was probably going to be even worse than the last time he’d been dragged up on the moor. This time the weather was colder, and she was more hurried, less friendly. But there was something familiar about her, though familiar from so long ago it was like discovering something new: it was the way she’d had, once, of being wide awake and easily delighted, ready to be surprised by new things, always on the point of bursting out laughing. But it no longer pleased him. Her mood was altogether too zesty, almost demonic. She larked and spun about, like a child in a story left outdoors too long and gone wild following the wind, turning over rocks and gulping water from streams and pools, wayward and half-possessed. In fact she was ridiculous.

Even as she pushed him toward the hill she was straining to get away from him. Now she was talking again in a distracted, breathy voice to, as far as he could make out, nobody at all; she had broken off her commentary to
him
before they’d left the house. She prattled on, making no sense. Her words were in a hurry, too, flying on past him before he could snatch at their meaning. Howard was incidental to whatever was going on, he gathered that much, sitting in his wheelchair in the lane while she hoisted armfuls of gear over the stile and dumped them in the field. He was so tired. And what was the point of it anyway, another escapade on to the moor where there was nothing to see or do? He looked up and saw Deborah standing in front of him, breathless and glaring as if he’d complained aloud. There was no appealing to her today, no getting around her.

“Howard, please try! Make a little effort, can’t you?” she said.
There was a slight screech in her voice. “I just don’t think you’re trying at all!”

He managed to shake his head, but could not ask what she meant. Trying to do what? He waved his arm and whined, “Why? Why go … up there?”

His voice angered her. “Why?” she said. Her face loomed in close to his, her teeth slightly bared. “Stop it! You love the moor!” she said. “Stop pretending you don’t understand! Today’s a
birthday
!”

She turned and looked across the stile into the field. The wind had pulled her hair loose, and he could not tell if it was lighter or darker than it used to be, only that with the years it had grown crinkled, and moved stiffly in the wind. When he thought of reaching out to touch it, a tremor started up in his hand. He began to cry, shaking his head from side to side. “No, no, no, no …” he whispered.

She turned back to him. “Oh! Oh, Howard, you’re
determined
to be difficult today,” she said. “I can see that! Well, you can just wait here.”

She rolled the wheelchair on to the side of the path until it sat, not quite level, in the shadow of the hedge and partially out of the wind. She stabbed the brake down and arranged a blanket around him. Then she pulled a filled feeding cup, a cheese roll, and two chocolate biscuits from the picnic bag and placed them in his lap. “Here! Here, Howard, take it. There you are,” she said. “A nice little lunch! Remember to take little bites, all right? Because if you choke I won’t hear you. So!” She produced a tissue and wiped his cheeks and nose. “There. You’ll be all right, won’t you! I’ll be back in time to take you back for your nap.”

Howard watched her haunches rise and wobble and turn as she swung herself up and over the stile. After she had gone he sat very still for a long time, afraid that the wheelchair might tip over. In the shade of the hedge he felt colder than ever and he clawed at the blanket to draw it closer around himself, forgetting about the food in his lap. All of it tumbled to the ground and everything except the cup disappeared beyond the periphery of his vision. The cup landed where he could just see it, on the edge of the lane. It rolled away along a stony rut, sprinkling milk as it went, and came to rest against
a tuft of couch grass, its spout still spilling gently. Howard watched the trail of white drops behind it soak away into the ground. He moaned and started out of the wheelchair, but collapsed back. His walking frame was several feet away, at the base of the stile. If he tried to stand up, here on the rutted track, he would surely fall. In the house he could move about more or less, using walls and furniture as handholds and leaning posts; out here there was nothing to help him. He gazed miserably around. It was worse than that, it was actually dangerous; a deep uneven ditch ran along the back of the grassy verge and the hedge was a prickly, swaying web of thorns. Bones would break, skin would tear. He would just have to wait.

Howard tipped his head up to the sky in an unconscious search for an idea of the time of day, but could not locate exactly the position of the sun. Anyway, Deborah would be hours. Perhaps he could sleep, if he got warm enough. Or if he just sat very, very still in his wheelchair, the time might pass quickly. He’d be all right until she came back, as long as he didn’t think about her.

But this was not possible. He found he could easily put out of his mind all thoughts of her as he had just seen her, heaving her bulk over the stile, but his head swam with glimpses of her as she’d been when he knew her first. He could not believe that the Deborah who’d clambered down into the field and disappeared was not the Deborah of thirty years ago whom he now saw clearly in his mind. He could remember only with effort a day ago, and a week was almost impossible, but now the faraway past was as vivid as if that life were all still playing out a few feet away and he’d just moved into the shadow of the hedge for a moment’s peace and quiet and a chance to think about it all.

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.

I
t’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.