Our Picnics in the Sun

by Morag Joss

  My mother made the transition from minister’s wife to minister’s widow within two months. She turned publicly serene, conducting the course of her grief like another bout of arthritis, from which she also suffered. By the wan quality of her smiles people knew she felt pain but that the pain would be borne; in answer to inquiries she would acknowledge a degree of affliction but burden no one with details. I think, looking back, she derived great satisfaction from fulfilling the congregation’s expectation that she would cope. Mourning became her, by and large, and the drab, enclosing town, the rain, and the tin-roofed church wore her weeds along with her.

  I, on the other hand, tried to turn invisible, in the manner of very small children who cover their eyes to convince the world around them that they’ve gone away. I stopped eating and stayed in my room. I wouldn’t go to church and after Easter refused to go back to school. In June, my father’s elder sister Auntie Joan was summoned. At the age of forty-six she had married a prosperous, older Edinburgh widower whose children (by then heading for university) she’d taught at the private school where she was Head of English. She lived her married life with a kind of brazen enjoyment that bordered on authority, acquiring a new wardrobe to match the widower’s gifts of large rings and scarves of real French silk, and taking up bridge and golf to keep him company. Perhaps because she was so stylish and worldly, in our household her opinions, at least on children, were listened to. She whisked back the curtains in my bedroom and told me it was time I got a grip on myself. To my mother she said that unless she wanted a full-blown neurotic on her hands (neurosis in sheltered only children being a well-documented tendency) she’d better let me see something of the world beyond Auchenfoot and not to thank her, she was paying for me to spend the summer in London before I drove everybody round the bend.

  I was enrolled with several other girls, mainly Americans, on a fairly frivolous course in Art History, and Howard was our longhaired, tall, theatrically handsome (and so English!) tutor. The girls snapped gum and flicked their hair and when one laughed they all did, with a strangely homogeneous nasal clanking like the striking of so many small, cracked gongs. I didn’t do any of those things, but I found to my surprise that I wanted to smile a lot, and by then my teeth were straight. I was dazed, not by them or any one particular thing, but by the very fact of London, simply by being there, part of its compacted, energetic life, and so far from home. And far away as that felt, it was almost inconceivable to me how far the Americans had traveled. Maybe that was what made them giddy—all that distance they’d crossed, the sheer spaciousness of the world.

  I was not like them; I was becalmed by the seething streets, the crowded trains and cafés. In the late afternoons I would loiter with them in the obligatory way around the buskers at Piccadilly Circus, numbed by the thought that I was just one among billions of human dots on the planet. The thrill of liberation came later, and gradually, in knowing myself for the first time unobserved and therefore powerful; from now on, under the cloak of my own insignificance, I could do what I wanted. I was being let off some sort of hook.

  In need of a new hook, I found Howard, who seemed to have been waiting for me. I was dazed by him, too, by his knowledge of Art and Life but especially, as he began to expound it to me over a bottle of brackish wine on a warm, rainy night in his bedsit off Goodge Street, about the matter of my own—as he put it—beautiful spirit. He stroked my hair and told me that I, like him, was a questing soul. Fine Art, galleries, museums, they were all very well—he’d done two years of sculpture at art school before realizing how shallow it was—but what was important was the spirit. And fulfillment of the spirit. That was what fascinated him most about me, my potential for spiritual fulfillment. It was far more fascinating to him than my body, although he was sure that it had potential for physical fulfillment, too, as he further put it, beginning to remove clothes. How could he be wrong about any of this? As well as being much older than I was, he was so handsome. I sneaked back into the hostel past the midnight curfew and climbed into my dorm bed still dressed—I could not bear yet to see or touch my body, now forever changed. A small, secret pain still blazed where his fingers had entered, but already I felt soothed as well as excited.

  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

  The 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 alread
y 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.

  Then I saw that time does one of two things. Either it rushes by, collapsing the years between Howard as he was that first shearing season and what he has since become into no more than a space between two days. Or it stops altogether, making an eternity of a humid July day spent sitting alone in the moor grass, worn down by decades and listening to a voice whispering that it can’t go on. The other sheep were swaying hock-deep in the heather. A thundery wind presaging the rain parted the wool on their backs and bent the tall grass and reeds around the dead ewe this way and that, surrounding her with faint clicking and shirring sounds like a kind of offhand funeral music. I knew I should move myself and return to the house, but I didn’t want to. I lay back and closed my eyes.