the valley of the roses

the first time we go to the valley of the roses, ostensibly to picnic at dawn, we realise that you’ve left the picnic basket at home. it was your responsibility, i cry. i would bring the blanket, tucked under my left arm as i tell you this, and you the basket. we’d prepped the food last night, reduced baguettes strewn across my kitchen counter as we tried to figure out what filling both of us would enjoy. not tuna (too metallic, you told me), not ham and cheese (too infantile, are we back in primary school, i laughed), and certainly not jambon et beurre (i didn’t understand how that was better than ham and cheese, you said it’s french and so is clearly upscale). you then sighed, after another ten minutes of arguing, that the only option would be butter and jam at this rate. a primary school meal, that probably would be, i replied, but i like it much more than ham and cheese. why wouldn’t you just say that from the beginning, you giggled, that’s what i really wanted the entire time. pinky-promises to just say what we want from now on get drowned out by our current lack of butter-and-jam baguettes. i’m hungry, i proclaim, look at the time — you said we’d need to have a picnic in the valley for breakfast, it’s scorching the rest of the day and freezing at night — i have things to do, places to be. and i don’t, you exclaim, as if setting me up for the simplest of ripostes. yeah, yeah, ok i said i’m sorry, you reply. should we just cut our losses, breakfast at one of the shitty cafés caked in the stench of overused ashtrays and burnt coffee? the one by my work has nice danishes and — an almost-yelped no!, you cut me off with. we came to picnic in the valley of the roses, the most romantic destination on the planet, the place where love makes its last stand against the evils of the world. can’t you abandon your corporeal cravings for one short morning? well, not really, i say. i skipped on my lunch break to start at half-eleven instead of half-nine, i don’t want to work six hours without eating anything. i don’t think my corporeal cravings (said with the heaviest of air quotation marks) can survive being on the tills for that long. you gaze at me, and say oh-so-offhandedly-it-had-to-be-rehearsed i’ll make lunch of our love, and we can dine on that until all the flowers here bloom and wither a million times over. my first instinct is to ask how long you’ve had that in your back pocket. my second is to kiss you until both our lips are sore. i go with the second, and walk into work that day smelling faintly floral, with a few stray petals in my hair, and a full stomach.

the second time we go there, you remember the picnic basket. i leave the blanket at home, we go later in summer and decide to just lie down on the flowers. you tell me that these ones, tinged with pinks and purples so delicate they verge on translucent, don’t have many thorns, and it’s the price of communing with nature that on occasion you get pricked. i think of making a coy reference to our last visit and being pricked, but decide against it. the swathe of roses seems to cleanse everything unmentionable that happens here, while tinging the more speakable memories we’ve made there with a fragrance bordering on divine. this time, we bring the usual assortment of picnic foods — the promotions and finally paying off the wedding have put a bit more money in our pocket, and we opt for the second cheapest bottle of champagne at the supermarket. upscale finger foods complete the coterie of nibbles, but these are barely touched. you tell me that you were waiting for me to make a joke about pricked on your third flute, and that it would have made a better transition into what we really came here for. maybe what you really came here for, i wink, i’m simply here for the facts about roses and cucumber sandwiches. don’t tell me you actually made those, you burst out laughing. i said i’d do it, so i did it. i actually quite like them, i continue, my dad made them from time to time when i was younger and staying over, he would tell me to drink my apple juice with my pinkie out because it was befitting of the sandwich. you can tell that the talk of my dad has left me on the verge of contemplation, and interject with the stupidest joke of all time, something about there being a cucumber sandwich in your trousers and me needing to fish it out. we leave our mark — or well, you leave yours — in the flowerbeds, and the joke about fertilisation you crack on the way back leaves me doubled over in laughter.

the third time we go there, our hair is slightly more grey, and the carrying of picnic blankets and baskets becomes secondary to carrying the twins. we’ve been fretting about them hitting milestones for a while now, flicking through every book about parenting to make sure we’re doing it right, but there’s something idyllic, even more idyllic than the valley that seems otherworldly in its beauty, seeing you hold them both aloft. the most fraternally identical twins, your mum calls them, and i finally see her point. the sun hits one’s hair like mine, illuminating the blondeness hidden beneath generations of resigned brunettitude, yet tinges the other’s with your auburn highlights, coming from your father, you told me once. that before he went grey he was a self-loathing redhead, and that aging was more of a kindness to him than it was to anybody else in the world. funny, i remember replying, my granddad did the opposite, grey to ginger. what made you convulse in laughter, at the time perhaps slightly too much, was the recollection that i thought that he was just naturally ginger, and not treating his hair with henna. when have you ever met anybody who isn’t blinded-by-the-light white and naturally ginger, you asked. i was ten, i protested, i thought that the world was hollow on the inside because we’d sink if it really had metal inside it. i can comfortably say, you consoled me with, that i had absolutely zero theories about what was inside the earth when i was ten. one of the few fronts of precocity i bested you on, i like to think. the clinking as we make our way to our favourite spot is of baby food jars this time, everything blended and in its right place, with whatever assortment of multivitamins. the spot is right on the beginning of the incline just opposite the entrance, where the sun bathes everything in warmth but doesn’t enflame in the earlier hours of the day. we intentionally set the blanket down a few metres west of where we usually lie down, as if the ground is still tainted with our previous escapades. after the twins are suitably satiated, we go for a wander around the valley. the perimeter should be enough for us to get them down, we think. in fact, they head off to la-la land halfway through, and we venture back to our sanctuary with us acting as the branches they hang on to, sloths without a care in the world. their irregular, yet soothing, snores do little to distract me from your conversation. how did we do it the last time we were here, you wonder, it’s so beautiful that i don’t think any questions of the body could ever strike me. maybe not you, i say as i roll over to see your face in a better view, but for me, whenever you talk philosophically like this in the face of this beauty, i turn to what i remember you called my corporeal cravings. i remember talking about that line to some of my work friends, you know that time i came home swearing i’d never drink again but this time i really mean it, when i had the bit of sick on my bag. it was such an unbelievably stupid thing to say, i could think of nothing else to do but kiss you. or ask you if you’d rehearsed that. you laugh, and hit me jokingly, finally confessing that you wanted to use the make lunch of your love thing in a poem, but could never figure out to put it into. into me, i retort, was the best fit, and this leaves both of us giggling with such vivaciousness, the twins wake up so startled. what spirit has possessed their parents, usually so tired and demure, they seem to mewl.

the fourth time we go there, there’s five of us. the twins are about to start sixth form, and our youngest is turning 13. her birthday is in two days, but i have a work trip i can’t miss, and you said that you feel a cold coming on. we head to the valley once again bright and early, waking the children up hours before they would usually arise (the midsummer lie-ins have become endemic to their way of life). somehow, it swelters even before the sun is highest in the sky. the roses’ blooms have become less vibrant, their recalcitrance almost as a protest against the conditions they’re forced to live in. the valley may be slightly more sparse, but its beauty remains undeniable. i say as such to the kids, but they all seem to roll their eyes. my attempt to regale them with the previous times we came here doesn’t seem to connect. it doesn’t have to, because then you get a glint in your eyes, and i know this reminiscing will bring us together once more. i cry to them, don’t you understand romance, and the youngest replies that she does, but not when it’s between us. i giggle, you fall over laughing. we tell them that we’ll be back in a few minutes, there’s sandwiches, water, and some elderflower cordial in the picnic basket (when did we get so bourgeois?), don’t wander off. in unison, they reply ‘like you’re doing?’, and i know then that we’ve raised them well. you take me by the hand, tell me that you want to show me something. i follow you, trudging my way through the fuchsia thickets, until you tell me to lie down. we’re in a clearing, somehow shaped like a heart with roses circling all around us. i ask you how you found this. you reply that you didn’t. you made it, for me. and then i notice that the bag you’ve had slung around your shoulder, the entire time, has had bunches of roses instead of nondescript picnic essentials. you shower me with them, each one completely bereft of thorns, and tell me that this is the exact spot we came the first time. you looked at the picture we took here, remembered what time it was, and pinpointed it exactly to here. and you say to me, the words bound to ring around my head forever, that ‘this is where our love truly blossomed’. it’s dumb, it’s clichéd, did you also rehearse that is my first instinct. i go with my second, my heartstrings playing the same tune they did all those years ago.