Free Our Picnics in the Sun by Morag Joss

Howard said that wasn’t the point, although I didn’t really grasp why not. Perhaps I wasn’t listening properly. By then, things were already quite badly awry.
    Five o’clock came and went and still there was no word from Adam. I’d been maintaining an attitude of mild rebuke for his casualness about the arrangements; in my head I could hear the sharp remarks he deserved but which I must not say, for I could not have borne to see on his face a look that asked why he had bothered to come if, once he was here, all I did was complain. So I rehearsed the mock scolding I would give him that would conceal my real worry, and dialed his number. Calls to his mobile were terribly expensive but this felt like an emergency. I was close to losing hold of my good mood. He didn’t answer. Of course—he must be still on the plane. That meant he would be hours yet. He hadn’t let me know a train time so he must be hiring a car and would just turn up. I had to be patient. I wandered upstairs where there was still an air of ill-ease that wouldn’t shift.
    I made my way to his room and checked again that the bedside lamp was working. I wiped a finger along the window ledge and straightened the curtains. Since the only thing to do next would be to return to the kitchen, I stayed at the window and did nothing. Adam’s room was one of the two bow-windowed ones at the front, with a view looking down to the road; I stood and watched one or two cars go by. Even in summer very little traffic passed this way, another factor we’d overlooked when we tried to sell the weaving and pottery, and later in desperation also garden produce and afternoon teas, from the “gallery” that was only an old farm shed.
    I turned away from the window. I’d kept the room clean and aired since Adam’s last visit not long after Howard’s stroke, although it had been unchanged for much longer than that. He’d depersonalized it completely when he was fourteen, just before he went to lodge with Mrs. Dobbs and go to school in Exeter. As a boy he didn’t have much in the way of possessions; we didn’t give him big expensive toys or gadgets and he didn’t keep treasured collections or make things. But he’d taken such as he had—posters, books, dart board, a few broken homemade toys—and piled them in the yard for burning.Without a sigh, over the course of a single day he’d tried to expunge all evidence of his life here as if his presence had never been more than a temporary arrangement—and worse, as if he never intended to return. After he’d gone I brought it all inside again and fixed the room up as if he’d never left. Howard thought I’d gone mad. I hung the dartboard back inside its circle of pockmarks on the wall and remounted the posters of places Adam had never been to—Paris, Madrid, Moscow—telling myself he’d regret it one day and be grateful that I saved it all. Well, even if not exactly grateful, he hadn’t minded, or at any rate not enough to chuck the stuff out all over again.
    Fourteen years on, the room hadn’t changed except that now the wardrobe held the new clothes I gave him as birthday presents and that he kept here because they were really only suitable for the country. (I liked the idea of him stepping into clothes that were here, ready for him when he arrived.) Although he seldom slept in it, the room was still his and would remain so. Even if he only ever came back for a few days at a time, his room would be always waiting.
    I smoothed the bedspread and adjusted the angle of the towels over the back of the chair. I gave a pointless quarter-turn to the pottery dish on the chest of drawers. It was one of Howard’s pieces, neither bowl nor plate. I lifted it and considered it in my hands: its thickness, the partial, globular brown glaze that adhered like an obstinate gravy stain. Howard had only ever made stoneware, heavy and cold to the touch, like concrete, and he never deviated from a palette of dun-colored glazes,