Our Picnics in the Sun

by Morag Joss

  In the morning Howard wakes with a headache and a growling stomach. When he tests his mouth with the word hello it feels full of some sour mulch, rather like damp pheasant feathers, he thinks, remembering the sight of them yesterday, piling up in the sink. Deborah’s awake, and they both get up slowly, and then Deborah makes him eat porridge, which makes him feel better. Afterward he sits, feeling full and dreamy, watching the floating currents of stray feathers cross the floor as Deborah moves to and fro, opening and closing doors. All morning she is restless. She puts on boots and coat and goes outside several times, even, he thinks, going as far as the henhouse though there’s no point in doing that now; no hens to come clucking round her legs, no eggs to collect. He goes to the sink to wash up their breakfast things, as best he can with the bag of pheasant feathers in the way, and from the window watches her return and stand stock still in the yard, her head tilting upward as if listening for messages from the sky. More snow has fallen overnight and all the buildings are plumped and rounded in whiteness, transformed from dereliction into a kind of tumbledown picturesque; Deborah turns in slow circles as if studying every cleansed and beautified plane and angle. When she comes back inside she stands and strokes her hand across his shoulder and down his arm, which he takes as a little tactile thank-you for washing up. This close to her, he sees there is a bright, settled look in her eyes.

  Later, when she brings him his jacket, he thinks she just wants him to go out with her to look at the snow, to make a slow circuit of the yard arm in arm or perhaps venture a little way along the track. But she dresses him as if they’re departing on an expedition—hat, scarf, gloves, extra socks, extra sweater, and snow boots—and she brings his walking frame to the door. When she tucks the T-shirt, muslin hat, and identity band into the pockets of her coat, he knows where they are going.

  But he never could have guessed how difficult it is. On her command, he plants the walking frame carefully and deep into the snow in front of him, and brings each foot forward without trying to lift it. This makes progress possible, but once they’re off the track and on to the lower reach of the moor, the snow collects in heavy suds on his boots and clings in frozen dags to his trousers, and he can take steps of no more than a few inches. Deborah’s earlier restlessness has vanished and she coaxes him along patiently. Again it sweeps over him, an absurd (given the circumstances) yet pressing sensation of delight and completeness. He is who he is. Here, now. With her. It is so difficult. But he has all day.

  There is no wind, not even higher up. The sky is opaque and massive with ice, the air bright and muffled and frozen; the only sounds are the faint trickle of a tree branch shifting under its ballast of snow, a brittle, high crow call, and the secretive crump of their boots. His body is warm from the exertion of walking but his cheeks are numb; now and then Deborah stamps her feet and blows into her cupped hands. For a little while a milky sun gleams down on them, and then it fades, trailing ghostly pink streamers of cloud. They walk on. The snow in the shaded distant slopes of the moor is deepening to an icy, absorbent blue. Howard can’t distinguish anymore which parts of him are merely numb from the parts of him that are feeling pain. He tries to tell Deborah about this but she, now cheerfully heartless, pushes him on. There will be no end to it: to the cold, his freezing feet, the pain in his lungs, the breathlessness, all this weightless, stony, silent air, the expanse of white land. They really should not still be moving farther from the house this late on a winter day, but he knows better than to try to stop and turn back. They have not yet reached the place.

  It’s much farther than I remember. Under the contour-softening snow, can I even be sure of finding the slanting stone at all? And it’s so cold. Howard is suffering; his face is mottled and his eyes are rimmed red, he grunts with every step and stoops lower over his frame. Nonetheless we press on. It’s always the last part of anything that’s hardest to do, I tell myself, and the most necessary.

  It’s after three o’clock when we get there, but it’s not difficult in the end to make out the group of boulders amid the gorse; snow lies differently on stone than on thorns, smoothing over the one as if it were misshapen flesh, blunting the others’ spikes into innocuous-seeming bumps. I scrape away the snow from the slanting stone and ease Howard down to rest. I feed him a handful of snow to slake his thirst, then leave him to walk over the ridge. He’ll need several minutes to get his breath back. Now it’s the sound of my own breathing I’m aware of, how shallow and excited it’s become, mingling with the creak of snow underfoot which has also surely risen in pitch, though this could be fanciful.

  When I get to the ridge I turn and search for Howard, a dark shape against the white, and I wave. I want him to know I’m slipping out of sight over the ridge and he is not to worry, but how can a wave convey all that, and is he even able to see me? Large flakes of new snow are beginning to fall. I keep my hand raised and wait, but there is only stillness around the slanting stone. I walk on over the ridge and stop again. The land makes a dip downward into the combe over to my left. I must be almost on the very spot where I fell and hurt my ankle.

  As I’d hoped, there is no movement, no sound from the dip in the land. Very carefully I walk on, slanting away from the combe and continuing down, going lower on this side of the ridge than I have been for years, until I’m standing at the top of the copse of beech trees. It’s only half a mile beyond and farther down to Digger’s farm. I pause, feeling furtive, although there is not the slightest chance I’ll be seen. I walk on a while until I hear, and then I see.

  The calls of the ravens and crows are coming not from the wood but from beyond it, on a gentler slope of the moor not far from our old ring feeder. Through the trees and the falling snow I can make out the black smudges of birds moving low above the land, rising and dropping, flapping and quarreling. I draw nearer thinking I’m prepared for what I’ll find, but I am not.

  “I’ll do it tomorrow first light,” Digger told me on the telephone yesterday evening. “Put ’em out of their misery, wanted doing long ago.”

  Our eight sheep, or what’s left of them, lie among tufts of their own scattered wool. At least they were dead—one clean shot through the head—when the carrion eaters came for their eyes and tongues and split their bellies open. Digger will leave the bodies until the ground thaws enough for him to bury them, he says, and meanwhile the foxes and badgers will leave him less to do. They’ll be along to tidy up—a glut of meat this time of year, they don’t get that often.

  The new snow is landing like fragments of tissue paper on the torn bodies; I step among them, going from one to the next, pulling a lock of wool from the back of each one and folding them into an inside pocket.

  The climb back up and over the ridge takes four times as long as coming down, and the snow is falling faster. When I reach Howard he’s dozing under a dusting of snowflakes and I wake him by shaking him and brushing the snow off his shoulders. I explain about the sheep. His mouth opens and closes, he shakes his head. I go on to explain that it’s all over. Where we will go now I am not sure, but Digger’s entitled to put us out, now we’re not keeping stock anymore. Howard raises his fists. He’s always believed Digger cruel; I know better, but I also know he feels not a scrap of sentimentality for any living creature and he’ll want us out by the end of February to get the place done up for the summer. He’ll get us off his hands the way he sends his livestock for slaughter, with not a backward glance.

  I tell Howard that we’ve come here for one last look, and because we have one last thing to do. I pull out from my jacket his old T-shirt and the baby’s hat and identity band. We have to bring these back here.

  Howard reaches for them and begins to mumble and cry. I wipe his tears away with the T-shirt. If tears dry on your face in this weather your skin will get very sore, I explain. He pushes himself forward with surprising strength and struggles to his feet, then points away back to the ridge in the direction we came from. His legs are shaking.

  “Go … go back
!” he says, shaking his arm. “Now, please, back now. Going back home …” He searches my face for a sign I understand what he wants. Of course I do, and it isn’t revenge that makes me tell him I’m not taking him back down the hill. We’re here for a reason, I say. Come on, get comfortable.

  He moans and sinks, lets his legs collapse under him, and arranges himself back in his place against the rock. I snuggle in close to him and take his hand. I feel the rock press into my back. I reach for another handful of snow and share it with Howard; it’s oddly toothsome and I find myself comparing it with the excitement of eating ice-cream as a child, and search for some way to describe the taste.

  I’m sorry it’s not much of a picnic this time, Howard, I say. This strikes me as funny but either Howard doesn’t think so or he doesn’t hear.

  He’s gone very quiet, and his face is colder. I wipe the snow from his mouth and rouse him again. Though his cheeks are cold he’s not shivering at all; in fact he seems very relaxed. We can’t bury the baby’s things, I explain to him quietly. The ground’s much too hard. So I’m going to find somewhere else they’ll be safe. I get up and roam around, never going out of Howard’s sight. Everywhere’s under snow, but I kick it up in thick clumps under the gorse and find a patch of flat stones that in the spring are probably part of a streambed taking meltwater down the hill. I scrabble with my hands and place the baby’s things as deep as I can in the shingle, and cover them over. It’ll have to do. I return to Howard and he takes my hand and gives me a questioning smile. “Why?” he asks. “Why … them … you buried up here?”

  Why do I want them buried up here? Such a simple question, but I have to think to find the answer. Because he was here. And they are all there is, I say.

  Howard accepts this, or I think he does, because he shuts his eyes and soon his breathing slows. He stirs just to remove his glove, and I do the same, so that when he takes my hand again flesh touches flesh. But I feel him recede from me; I have the idea that my thoughts henceforward will not be shared. Perhaps when he wakes up we’ll talk about where we could, in theory, go after Stoneyridge. There must be places for people like us; I imagine a very small flat with handrails everywhere and windows too high to see out of. But I can’t worry about it now, and perhaps there’s no need to consider alternatives. I’m not cold anymore, and not in the slightest afraid; the stiffness that’s spreading all through my body is insulating and kindly. This absence of fear feels like a gift, or a late reprieve. If we are to get hypothermia and die, if someone months from now is to find our torn clothes half-hidden under a rock, spilling their odd collection of bones, if a stranger is to turn up in the stream the shreds of a soaked little hat and an illegible name bracelet wrapped in an old T-shirt, all washed clean, so be it. The years of failure will be only ours, and the means of bringing those years to a conclusion ours also. And Adam will survive.

  The thought of Adam makes me cry, suddenly, and Howard squeezes my hand tight. Still, my yearning to see Adam must be fought down, as I’ve fought down every day of his life my yearning for his brother, whose name, unknown to everyone but me, was Theo. The snow goes on falling and gathers warmly around us. Howard’s hand relaxes, and then he doesn’t move.

  It’s a little later when I peer through blurry eyes and try to make out the hill against the sky, but huge snowflakes loom at me and I’m drowsy, and unsure of what my eyes are telling me. I half-remember some old fairy tale about a figure appearing—or was it disappearing—in a blizzard, although I don’t need any such story, not now. So it is not from any desire or striving on my part that I begin to sense that someone may be near at hand, and I sit up, suddenly alert, and strain to see in the distance a movement that some instinct tells me will be slow and faint behind the veil of snowflakes. And then, from the comfort of my nest in the snow, I see him. It is the walking figure again, in the last of the light. He is unchanged, colorless. He seems hardly to touch the ground or sky but shimmers, caught in the tug of a gentle tide between the two; he advances and recedes and with each step I long for him to draw me to him, yet he does not; even as he approaches, his remoteness deepens. He is earth and sky, he is the snow’s luminescence, and the twilight air. He is Adam come back to Stoneyridge at last and following our footprints across the snow to find us, or he is Theo, my Theo, conjured from my mind’s own wanderings. It doesn’t matter. Because whether Howard and I are now trapped or freed, out of our long habit of love for each other, inarticulate and disappointed as it may be, is born a love for both our sons that’s infinite and equal.

  I hold fast to Howard’s hand. If I were able now to find the breath, to shout out once would bring Adam running toward us and set in train all the hurry and bustle of rescue and explanations, the return to Stoneyridge. Or the sound might merely pinch the surface of the air, disturbing it for a moment, and then vanish into the winter quiet as if there were no one here at all, not a soul to return an answering cry or even hear the echo of my voice across the moor.

  Professor Louise Newman, a child psychiatrist and Director of the Monash University Centre for Developmental Psychiatry & Psychology, Victoria, Australia, says, “Most children grow out of imaginary friends. But in some cases an imaginary friend can emerge in adulthood, usually in response to trauma, inability to cope with stress and sometimes psychotic illness …

  “Other people believe in angels and guardian angels, and they don’t think there’s anything out of the ordinary about that,” she says.

  —ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) News in Science, May 2006

  In memory of my brother

  GAVIN WALLACE

  the champion and advocate of Scottish literature over three decades, whose dedicated love of words and loyalty to those who make them into books endears him in perpetuity to writers throughout Scotland.

  27 May 1959–4 February 2013

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My sincere thanks to Kate Miciak at Random House, New York, for her dedicated care and wise editorship of this novel, the latest of many she and I have worked on together happily and, for me, always rewardingly. I am relieved that when, on first reading this one, she found herself forgetting to breathe, it was in a good way.

  I also thank my two brilliant agents, Jean Naggar of the Jean Naggar Literary Agency in New York and Maggie Phillips at Ed Victor Ltd in London, for all their guidance, advocacy, and kindly support.

  I dare not list by name, for fear of gushing uncontrollably, the friends, family, and colleagues whose company, advice, good humor, love, and encouragement helped sustain me during the writing of this novel, but I thank them all from my heart.

  OUR PICNICS IN THE SUN

  MORAG JOSS

  A Reader’s Guide

  A CONVERSATION BETWEEN

  FRANK DELANEY AND MORAG JOSS

  Frank Delaney: There are tides in this book always running against each other. Howard is the one whose body has failed but whose love hasn’t. His beloved wife, Deborah, cares less and less for him emotionally as she has to care more and more for him physically. Their son, Adam, is always farthest away when they want him most, nearest when his mother wants him least. That sounds like a novelist’s life statement—is it, in your case? The more one wants the less one gets?

  Morag Joss: Not so much “the more one wants the less one gets” than “whatever one has, one wants something different,” perhaps—the paradox and circularity of that. I like your “tides” metaphor—I do think of the action of my novels rather like that, a story emerging as the characters work with and against forces of various kinds, not all of which they understand or are even conscious of. And they’re not just emotional forces within and between themselves, but also the tides of circumstance, obligation, accident. There are opposing tides in your novels, too, aren’t there? The tides of history and politics and myth in your novels of Ireland, for example.

  FD: I find it fascinating that you choose to write about people of educated values and previously manageable positions in life being reduced
almost to shreds. Why did you go in that direction?

  MJ: There’s a theory (not mine) that writers write about that of which they are most afraid. While I haven’t consciously done that, I think there may be something in it. Perhaps because of a precarious childhood I have never felt very safe or taken such safety as I have for granted, and my response to adverse reversals in the lives of others is always to think that it might be me next. (The trick, of course, is to accept the possibility of such reversals, yet not live cautiously.) My characters are pretty unlucky, now I come to think of it. But the world is unlucky for so many, even (or especially?) for confused, high-minded people, and I think my novels reflect that. By definition, luck, good or bad, is undeserved and usually unexpected, and has nothing to do with justice, which makes it rather frightening, wouldn’t you say?

  FD: Nothing in the novel is what it seems at first glance—everything fails and disappoints. And yet—outside the front door is a glorious landscape. Is there a sense in which you’re saying that Nature is the ultimate, maybe even the only, redemptive force?

  MJ: No, I think I’m saying that Nature is at best an indifferent force, and morally neutral. The landscape is glorious but the moor is heartless; it inspires but also injures. Nature enthralls but it also disgusts (the dead sheep), under beautiful sunny skies there is predation, and birth is quickly followed by death. In other words Nature is bound to fail and disappoint Howard and Deborah, because they want to believe in it as a benign force that they can trust in; they want to harness it, befriend and even worship it. The only redemptive force, which although on its last legs dictates how the novel ends, is the power of love.