Our Picnics in the Sun

by Morag Joss

  He’s still shouting as he reaches me. Get that fire out! Get it out now—are you out of your bloody mind? You’ll have the whole of bloody Exmoor alight!

  He strides into the circle of light and starts kicking earth into the fire. He’s concentrating so hard that he doesn’t look at me until it’s almost stamped out.

  Digger, I try to say, Howard built the fire. It was quite safe. It was to keep us warm. But my voice is shaking. Digger, the baby … look, my baby. My baby’s born. He came early. Look!

  Digger peers at me through the gloom but can’t make sense of the bundle in my arms. Then the baby stirs and utters a small cry.

  What the—? Digger comes forward and drops to his knees. I draw the rug away from the baby’s face and show him; I’m smiling so hard I can’t speak. Digger gasps, and to my astonishment, tears fill his eyes and start to roll down his face. My God, the babby! His voice drops to a whisper. My God, so he’s come, you’ve got your babby now, oh, would you look at him? My God, look at him, isn’t he fine, that’s fine work you’ve done there. Up here all on your own? My God.

  He laughs and wipes his eyes fiercely, but he doesn’t stop smiling, either. For the first time I believe everything will be all right.

  Howard was with me. He went down to get an ambulance, I tell him. Please, I’ve got to get down to the house.

  Digger’s working out what to do. I’ve given myself up to whatever he decides that is to be; I’m ready to be told. Aye, aye right enough, aye now, let’s see. Can’t have you lying there. Getting dark now.

  There are few words said after that. He holds out his arms for the baby with such perfect, natural tenderness that I barely hesitate to hand him over. Digger places him inside his jacket and then helps me to my feet, averting his eyes from my body. It’s almost too dark to see the bloodstains on my clothes, anyway. He hands me back my baby, still wrapped up, then rearranges the rug to give both of us some cover. Then he removes his jacket and places that around my shoulders, too. My face is burning hot but I’m beginning to shiver, and I cannot stand upright; a weighty, empty ache in my belly makes me stoop and bend.

  Rightoh, m’lady, he says, drawing his arm over my shoulder. Steady now. Let’s be getting the both of you safe down. Take it gentle.

  I’m aware—and it’s both funny and comforting—that this will be exactly the voice and language he uses to a newly delivered cow.

  And he takes me, with infinite care and gentleness, across the darkening moor, holding me up when I stumble, never once letting go, keeping his arm around me even when I have to stop to rest. If he could carry us both, he would. My legs will hardly hold me up, but I don’t complain about the pain or exhaustion; I don’t need to. He understands it all. I’m a clumsy, bewildered, tender-fleshed, torn animal, and he leads me softly and kindly all the way, as he would a beast from one of his flocks or herds. Sometimes, silently, he takes the baby from me and cradles him himself, and also silently, when I have rested my arms, he hands him back.

  We’re within half an hour of the house when I see torchlight dancing on the ground a couple of fields below us. Digger shouts and sends his dog ahead, and soon three paramedics, carrying a stretcher, find us in the dark. Their urgency makes me suddenly feel shocked and frightened, and it’s only then I collapse. The baby is taken from me; I’m strapped on to the stretcher and we are borne away down the hill to an ambulance before I have time to notice that Digger has melted away.

  All the way to the hospital my questions go unanswered. I am told only that Howard and the second baby went ahead and are being looked after there already; they sidetrack me by asking about this baby and have I thought of a name, and I tell them, without really thinking, that he’s going to be called Adam. It’s only after we arrive and I’ve been medically stabilized and soothed and he is warm, fed, and asleep in a cot at my bedside that they—different people—come to tell me what Howard already knows, that Adam’s twin brother is dead. They are incredibly kind. They think I should hold the dead baby and name him, that this will make it easier to bear. They leave us alone.

  Howard begins to plead. It was not meant to be. He was so tiny. It couldn’t be helped. He didn’t suffer. It’s Nature’s way.

  He’s struggling to speak with certainty. All that Pentecostal, transformative faith—it’s vanished. His voice trembles as he tells me that at least we have one child, a son, a beautiful son.

  So I see now that Howard thinks death comes in different sizes, and the death of this baby—only a very little baby, after all—is to be regarded as one of the smaller ones. The baby’s gone, but he was never really with us, was he? Without quite saying so, Howard reveals his determination that grief for a child no sooner born than lost will not cut as deep as that for a child I might have had time to know. Especially as I’ve got another one. I’m overwhelmed by the impossibility of explaining—and by dismay that I should have to explain—that it’s not like that at all.

  For a long time I cannot speak a word, and I can see that frightens him. It frightens me, too; I do not know where this boulder of silence about my dead son comes from, only that it is unutterably heavy and at the same time hollow, that it rolled in and crushed flat all the words inside me and lodged somehow, and is in me now, and is immovable.

  Howard starts on again, in the same vein; it’s unbearable. Howard, stop, I say. Shut up. Stop talking. He looks at me stricken, awaiting judgment. Am I going to strip away his version of the truth, and destroy his suddenly frail charisma? Am I about to say what we both know: that if he’d helped me get to the hospital this baby would not be dead? Will I allow our life together to continue, or will I throw away all my belief in it, and denounce him? As I look at him I wonder if it matters either way. Everything is changed forever, anyway.

  In my head I shall name the lost child. Alone in my head I’ll open his closed eyes, I’ll study his face and wonder whose smile he has. I’ll talk to him; I’ll explain the world as if he were in it and must heed its dangers, even as my own world is turning inward. Maybe I’ll hear his voice, and learn what he feels, what delights and what frightens him. That way, I’ll keep him by me while his brother, no less adored, grows, and grows eventually, as he will, away. Howard takes my hand and draws in a long, careful breath. One look from me prevents him from saying whatever he was about to say.

  We will never, ever speak of this again, I tell him.

  To: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  Sent on tues 20 dec 2011 at 12.45 EST

  Mum – WHAT IS GOING ON?? Is everything all right? I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all day, I want to speak to you urgently!!

  I just got a Christmas card from Pat today – she put a note in with it and says she saw you a few weeks back – she said she thought you looked tired but were “so brave.” And she also says it’s great that you’ve got Theo to help you now and since Stoneyridge is so isolated it must really help having someone else LIVING THERE. What is she talking about? Who’s Theo?

  Mum, is she off her head? Has she got it all wrong because she sounded very definite. Is there somebody there with you? WHO THE HELL IS THEO??!!

  You haven’t said a word about anybody being there helping you – I rang the clinic and they don’t know anything either, so if you’re getting any help it hasn’t come through them. Assuming Pat’s not off her head, who is this guy and where did he come from and why haven’t you said anything? When I get there on Thursday evening I suppose he’ll be there, will he?

  If he’s really a help that’s great. I think maybe things have got harder for you than you let on. Plus I should’ve been there this summer, I still feel bad about that. But you’ve never even mentioned him. Plus, how are you paying him? I could help with the money, I WANT to help. Anyway we can talk about it all when I’m there. I really, really wish you’d told me though.

  Thurs 22 Dec Arr Heathrow 08.35

  Tues 3 Jan Dep Heathrow 19.20

  If flight’s on time I reckon I’ll be with you between
three and four. But I’ll be keeping you posted anyway. You can call me any time, remember, my phone’s always on, ditto email, lots of love A xxxx

  The reason Howard is out so long is that he found all the hens dead. He comes back with his face stricken and raw with cold, tears running from his eyes. He is so upset I wonder he didn’t fall over, hurrying back to tell me that a fox has been in. He explains it clearly enough—“Fox! Hens dead, all over blood, terrible, mess”—but I put on clothes and go out to see for myself. The corpses are already freezing under a dusting of sleet so they’ve been lying there for some hours, which means the fox was hungry enough to attack in daylight. Indeed, I count only four dead birds so two are missing; he probably ate one fresh killed and carried the other in his jaws back to his lair. We heard nothing; the wind’s been in a contrary direction today and must have borne the noise of slaughter away from the house and across the moor. I find the broken wire in the mesh where he got in, and stare at it for a while. There is no way I can fool myself into thinking there’s any point in mending it. I limp back up to the house, where I left Howard negotiating the making of a cup of tea: he takes such pride in his mastery of this task I would not dream of not drinking his sometimes lukewarm, overstrong, or watery brews.

  When I return, I lock the back door. Tea is waiting on the table, and together Howard and I sit down as if we were once more setting about a task we have undertaken at this table a thousand times: the offering and accepting of consolation for one or another of our disasters, the mustering of resolve to carry on. It’s been our currency of exchange for as long as I care to remember. We’re good at it.

  But there can’t be any more of that. When I even think of opening my mouth on the subject of the hens, I can’t find enough air to breathe. Their slaughter is sickening, of course, as are the deaths of all their predecessors killed the same way, or by viruses or for reasons we never did fathom, as are the deaths of the goats, sheep, and bees, as are the failures of every one of our enterprises with vegetables, pottery, weaving, and paying guests. But none of those things labored over and lost was ever the important one.

  Until today I thought it was only I who knew this. I thought it was only I who walked around feigning optimism with a part of my heart dead in my chest, with the loneliness of that. I get up and go next door to Howard’s chair, delve in the cushions, and bring back the T-shirt, hat, and identity bracelet. I place them on the table and sit down again. When he sees them Howard lets out a cry.

  “It’s all right, Howard. It’s all right. You kept them. I understand.”

  He nods, still frightened. In fact I don’t understand, entirely, but what changes everything is the possibility that all this while Howard’s silence on the matter of our dead baby has been clamoring in his head as loudly as my own does in mine. It’s possible that through the twenty-eight years we have walked side by side, all unbeknownst, in grief. Howard looks at the things on the table and touches them sadly, and for a long time we say nothing.

  Adam’s brother. He is our only true loss, the one too great to acknowledge. He determined the future, binding us to this place when otherwise, at some point before it was too late, we would have given up and left. For it was his lost life, our bungled waste of it, that made it imperative we stay. Shame of that magnitude being too great to walk away from, we tried to make it monumental; we turned it upon ourselves and persevered in the error of Howard’s beliefs and my faith in them, we redoubled our efforts because we needed our crass visions for Stoneyridge, once realized, to disprove the futility of our baby’s death. All the while, of course, we brought up Adam ignorant of his brother, but no less in his shadow for that.

  Howard reaches over and pats my hand. I imagine the man our dead son would now be looking across at us, and I wonder what he makes of his parents, one deluded and frail, the other always weak-minded and suggestible, and both possibly worse than foolish. There is little enough to admire, God knows, but yet I do not believe he would hate us. Nor is he vengeful; as we age, more and more he will let us be. As we dismantle what remains of our lives here and depart, as we surely must, he may even, watching us go, wish us peace. A calm has already descended, and suddenly I am so tired—tired in my bones—and I know I will sleep soundly.

  Over the next few days my strength returns. I see off another visit from Nurse Jenny, but leave the telephone unanswered. When I’m up and about again there’s some return to routine, but no question of going down to the library to attend to emails. Howard and I are resigned and reminiscent, and little by little we go all through the house, usually hand in hand. It’s not since the very first time we came to look at Stoneyridge that we’ve stood in rooms together like this, but there’s no need to explain to each other why we do it now, reflecting sometimes aloud (but more often in silence, as if we were listening to hear the walls speak for themselves) on how we managed to stay here so long. The rooms somehow draw attention to their emptiness, and there’s a reproach in it, as if they’re still crying out for something definitive to be enacted within each one that will settle once and for all its proper purpose. We recall how excited we were that first visit, immune to the threat implicit in all the house’s “potential.” I remind Howard we used the expression putting our own mark on the place.

  We didn’t, though. After Adam was born the configuration of the rooms remained unstable, provisional upon the result of one or other new, always inconclusive experiment in our living habits. Amid talk of color energies and light direction we were always changing our minds about which bedrooms to sleep in, which rooms to use as sitting room or dining room; innumerable times we moved ourselves half-in or half-out of this or that one, unsure where to settle. It was not chaotic, exactly—there wasn’t enough energy in our state of flux for that—but at the heart of it was a creeping lack of conviction about how to live. I used to tell myself it was creative, but it was only irresolute.

  And it’s the same now. It’s as if year upon year we moved things all around this house without ever quite moving in, and now the contents of rooms seem to do it by themselves; we stumble across objects in odd corners as if catching them out in little secret escape bids to other places. As rubbish goes, it’s strangely active. Roaming the house, half-trying to put it back to rights, we find doors forever open through which old echoes stray, as if the place has just been vacated by another who leaves behind shuffling currents of air and a bitter wake of sighs.

  From the clutter I unearth the old albums again and we go through the photographs, speaking kindly of the people in them. We took grinning pictures of everybody: the woman who delivered the beehives, the men who installed the septic tank, the London crowd who came on the retreats for the couple of years, but we’ve forgotten their names and spend a silly amount of time trying to bring them to mind.

  When we’re not doing this or that upstairs, which we call “sorting things out,” we rest together. Both of us tire easily. Side by side on Howard’s bed, or at the table or in the sitting room, we hold hands in silence. I don’t tell Howard this, but I’m reminded of couples waiting in stations for a train that only one of them will board.

  One of the biggest tasks I take on, and that requires all my strength, is the removal of the antlers in the hall. Dragging the sideboard away from the wall is hard enough, but once that’s done I climb the stepladder with a chisel in my hand and I gouge out the plaster around the wooden mounts that hold the antlers. The plaster is quite rotten and gives easily; great chunks of it cascade off the wall and land on the tattered carpet. So these mounts have in effect been holding the wall up, and some of them are very loose, anyway; God knows how long we have passed to and fro in the hall in danger of being speared by falling antlers. I keep Howard well out of the way (and am careful of my own head) while I yank them off the crumbling wall. This sets off an aerial bombardment of multi-spiked missiles, falling and tumbling, stabbing the floor as they roll. Some of them break, raising a yellowish dust very like the old fallen plaster and revealing a fili
gree interior of rotted bone. I chuck them all into a pile by the front door. They’re useless for burning so will have to be taken out and dumped.

  Despite all the sorting-out, I am perfectly aware of what time of year this is. We dig out the boxes of Christmas decorations from under the beds in the spare rooms. This time Howard doesn’t try to call it Yule instead of Christmas, and we unwrap all the funny unpainted things he carved for the tree and we smile over them, even though there is no tree and neither of us has anything like enough strength to fell one and bring it in. Even if we had, proper snow is falling now; the pine wood where we might have got one will soon be invisible under it. We watch like children from the windows as the snow comes whirling down. It’s beautiful and exciting. I picture the moor and the poor sheep and how they will look with snow accumulating on their backs. I cannot put off the thought of the sheep much longer.

  The next day I manage to pluck and draw the pheasants Digger brought and I roast them with what vegetables we have left. The decanters in the dining room hold quantities of ancient brandy and port and sherry, and I tip it all in together and bubble it up into a syrupy liquor that tastes surprisingly good. Howard’s not really allowed alcohol but I open a bottle of wine, too. It’s a strange feast but we eat until we’re sated. Adam’s hamper, which arrived some days ago, is untouched. It doesn’t seem right to open it now; it will be useful when he gets here.

  The evening wears on into night. I persuade Howard to go to bed before me because tomorrow will be a big day. When he’s settled I go back out to the hall, following the path of powdery pale footprints we left yesterday as we trod through the fallen plaster and scattered bone dust. The antlers still lie in a heap by the door, casting jagged shadows up the wall. It’s too cold to linger but I sit for a while, listening. There will be no word from Theo now, of course, but I want to pause and offer a nod of thanks in his direction. But for him, this decision would not have been made. He was necessary. For a while longer I sit, thinking of all the things I must say when I pick up the telephone.