by Morag Joss
Theo, there’s more, I say. There’s more to tell you. Other things.
But Theo’s mood won’t allow for any more confessions. He changes tack again. Really and truly, there’s no predicting him today. “So Howard made you angry. Why, because he got a few things wrong? Wasn’t perfect? Wasn’t it a bit much to ask of him in the first place, that he never make a simple mistake?”
A simple mistake? I whisper. Oh, Theo, you have no idea of the mistakes. Mine, too.
I stop the mixer. Silence. Then he says, “I’m sorry for Howard. I’m sorry for you, too. But the point is, even after all the mistakes, you have to look at what you’re left with. Each other.”
I open my eyes again, to the pricking of the harsh kitchen light. Theo’s words are like paper chains flown up to the ceiling in the beaks of magic birds, and fastened there in hanging festoons of all colors.
Do you know a lot about guns? I ask him, to change the subject.
“Not really,” he says. “Just enough to fill the pot, and keep down the pests.”
Every day at Jocelyn Lodge was packed. Howard had a timetable of exhilarating, exhausting sessions of walking and turning, going up and down stairs, sitting and rising from chairs. He kicked and stretched obediently in a pool of very warm water; he practiced doing up buttons and slicing bread and using a pencil. There were hours spent trying to tame his voice, during which he followed instructions about breathing and swallowing, repeated staccato syllables, and sang through them when they jammed themselves in his throat. After his meals—hot platefuls of stewed meat and mashed potatoes, bowls of sweet puddings with custard—he lay down and slept, pleasurably sabotaged by his full stomach. Each morning he awoke in his warm, clean bedroom with scarcely a pain in his body, his limbs heavy, but stronger. Every face he could make out smiled at him, every voice he heard was musical and cajoling. When he contemplated all this cheerfulness, all this devotion to keeping him comfortable and happy, the gratitude he felt toward every person charged with care of him, tears ran down his cheeks. Not for a single moment did he stop longing for Deborah. If only she could be treated like this, too, the strangeness and remoteness and cruelty would melt out of her, he was sure of it.
After a week in the central heating he’d forgotten all about cold; he’d forgotten about weather. He’d almost forgotten the time of year, and on the day he went home was mildly shocked to see a frost like powdered glass on the drive. They set down a pathway of rubber mats for him to walk the few yards from the door of Jocelyn Lodge to the ambulance. On the drive back he tried to brace himself to withstand the cold again. Stoneyridge was a house with the flimsiest of seals against the seasons, and winter would be reaching into the rooms already: ice on the windowpanes, his breath forming vapor clouds as he lay in bed in the early morning.
When he got back, he found that Deborah was different. How long had he been away, surely only a few days? How could that be long enough to change her, or was it he who had changed?
As he was able to study her more closely, the more she puzzled him. The more carefully she tended him, the more she receded. In her treatment of him she was less rough but no kinder, merely abstracted. Her eyes when she looked at him were distant, as if already fixed on the yard that she would suddenly say needed sweeping, or on the moor where she must go again to check the sheep. He struggled to show her that he was capable of performing little tasks to help her—he would get up and take cups in a shaking hand to the sink, and even wash them—at which she might smile disinterestedly. One afternoon when she was up on the moor late in the day, he managed to pull on boots, cross the yard, and go down the garden in the twilight to close the hen house. She came back after dark and planted a kiss on his forehead, but gave no other sign that she had noticed.
She was unfathomable. Howard would hear her talking to herself in the room next door, her tone of voice settled and conversational, even dull, but he missed too many words to make sense of what she said. And although she still roamed about the place, tidying up here or clearing out there, her routines had slipped; just as often he would come across her sitting at the kitchen table long into the morning, frowning and alert, as if absorbed in some complex mental puzzle. When she did rouse herself, the motivation for her dithery little homemaking gestures remained opaque; her way of moving, once eloquent of her state of mind, was now so self-possessed it evaded any interpretation except that perhaps she did not care to have her feelings known. She left him alone for longer and longer spells and he could not get used to it, although he was managing, more or less, to get used again to being cold and always at least a little hungry. Howard took all these changes as signs that in his absence she had developed a taste, amounting to an aptitude, for being alone.
Grateful that he seemed not to make her angry anymore, he felt nevertheless more afraid of her, for under her new calm flowed a trickle of something tense and potentially hazardous, which he could not pinpoint. He sensed it all the more acutely when she was out of sight. So he took to following her around, stumbling after the sound of her voice or the noises of vacuum-cleaning or furniture moving; it was like trying to trace a leak. Often as he roamed the house seeking a sign of her presence and finding none, it occurred to him that nowadays she frequently went out without telling him, and he wondered if she was actually giving him the slip. And sometimes he would creep upstairs and stand silently at the door of Adam’s bedroom, where, for reasons of her own, she often went to lie down in the afternoons.
She never mentioned Adam. At night in bed Howard practiced his name aloud and put together sentences about him, asking when he was coming to visit. If he managed to deliver the sentence the next day, Deborah’s answer would be huffy and inconclusive. Every day he struggled to tell her, when she next emailed him, to give Adam his love.
From: deborahstoneyridge@yahoo.com
To:
Sent on wed 23 nov 2011 at 11.45 GMT
Hello Adam, nothing to report really – D doing ok. I’m busy as always. The days are so short now. Queue of people waiting, they really need more computers in this place. Looking forward lots to seeing you!! We both are. I’ll sign off, bye for now love Mum xxx D sends love too
To: deborahstoneyridge@yahoo.com
Sent on fri 25 nov 2011 at 12.02 EST
Mum you didn’t answer any of my questions in my last email OR that I asked you on the phone on Saturday – what was the assessment in the end, after D was at Jocelyn? Don’t they give you a sort of report and work out what to do next?
Sacha’s great uncle had a stroke too and that’s what they did with him, there was this special stroke nurse. Or is that what they do with him at stroke club? It’s good he’s going to that.
So the flights are all booked and here they are, since you didn’t have a pen handy when I rang:
Thurs 22 Dec Arr Heathrow 08.35
Tues 3 Jan Dep Heathrow 19.20
Can you stand me for that long?!
I don’t want you getting anything special ready, do you hear?? I’m coming early so there’ll be time for us to do Christmas shopping together. In fact I’ve ordered a hamper with some stuff which will arrive 18th or 19th so keep an ear open for a delivery van (they should ring you the day before) you’ll have to sign for it. Mum, I really am sorry about not making it in the summer – hopefully we’ll have lots of time to catch up over Christmas.
Love A xxxx
Ps – next round of site visits coming up so on the road for next 2 weeks, will keep in touch via mob. You can still email, remember I get them on my phone.
From: deborahstoneyridge@yahoo.com
To:
Sent on wed 30 nov 2011 at 12.22 GMT
Hello Adam, still not much going on, we’re very behind today – nearly didn’t make it to stroke club!
Days very short. Digger appeared the other day with some pheasants, he said they were going spare. Some of these people w
ho come out for a day’s shooting, they don’t even take the birds. They don’t want to eat them, only kill them.
I’m not sure I’m up to the plucking and drawing any more, it’s so messy. There was a recipe I used to do once but I wouldn’t know where to find it now. The other thing is D might make a fuss, he was never very happy about it, them being shot for sport and everything. It’s hard to tell what’s going to bother him these days – maybe it was always hard! Still it’s a terrible waste if they don’t get eaten and I don’t see the harm in it – they’re bred for it aren’t they and Digger says it’s a better way for them to go than getting caught by a fox.
They’re hanging in the pig shed while I decide.
Exmoor must be overrun with pheasants this year, I hear the shots from all directions and I can just imagine them all at it, people paying a fortune to get a gun in their hands. It goes on all day.
Digger asked about you and were you visiting, and I said yes, but it’s hard for you to get away. He said we could well be in for another bad winter, all the signs are there. So we’ll have to keep an open mind about it, you won’t make it if there’s snow, as you know all the roads round here get cut off.
Lots of love Mum xxxx
Once the bread’s out of the oven I put on my boots and coat. I have to go off up the hill to check on the sheep. I’m late in going; it’s a morning job, but on these late November days I don’t get to it until the afternoon’s on the wane, because with one thing and another the morning routine’s gone to pieces. I hang on at the breakfast table talking to Theo, to begin with. Today we were late for Stroke Club so Howard only got the last half hour. They glared at me, those bloody women, Jenny and the other one, but I didn’t much care. Really, they have no idea. I told them that since Howard was struck dumb (a stroke really does strike, and do they begin to grasp what that means?) I’ve gone without the sound of another voice for such a long time, and I’m making up for it now.
They pretended to understand. Yes, keep talking to him, they said, it’s important you keep talking to him. Involve him. It’ll stimulate whatever speech he has, you must keep talking to him. They have no idea what they’re asking. Howard’s voice going on about this and that, booming about the place all those years, so loud and certain, and then suddenly there’s no sound at all but your own little bleats of desperation? Weeks, months, years of hearing only yourself, trapped in your unrelenting false brightness, and getting scarcely a sound back? You’d do anything to hear another voice raised in reply, whatever it might be saying.
Also, although dealing with Howard’s speech affliction may be a little easier since he came back from Jocelyn Lodge, every other thing that needs to be done for him takes just as long as before, possibly longer. Theo’s around to help, in theory, but I can’t say he makes a practical difference, and it wouldn’t be reasonable to complain about that. I admit there are times when I come across things left undone: Howard shivering and patient on the side of his bed waiting to be dressed when I believed him sitting content in front of the television. There are times when Howard simply gets mislaid; I might find him stranded at the end of the hall clinging to his walking frame and the overhead light left on from the night before casting the shadows of the antlers across his face. I’ll hear Theo’s voice at my ear saying he’d like to see the last of those bloody antlers and would I like that, too, to which my answer is a whispered, yes I bloody would.
Howard, meanwhile, is blinking and mumbling and about to keel over. Come on, Howard, what are you doing wandering about here? I’ll say, and then Theo sniggers over my shoulder and says something so sly I would have closed my ears to it if I’d had any warning he was about to say it.
“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.
