A Place in the Country” and “The Picnic” illustrate the before and after of an affair. About ten years after they have ended their affair, Clem and Nettie, a girl, meet at Clem’s country place, attending a picnic set up by Clem’s wife May, who allowed the relationship. The picnic reuniting the former lovers is a sad reckoning.
May leaves them deliberately. Time has altered each of them, and now Clem and Nettie look at each other and try remembering what happened. “They had been sitting for some minutes in complete silence, Nettie repacking the remains of the lunch into the picnic basket or, since the accident with the wine, fiddling with her dress. But what could two people talk about after ten years (for it must be getting on to that?)
Clem sees that she has become a mature woman. Nettie sees that at fifty, Clem is not attractive to her. Clem’s recollections of Nettie “were like a pile of snapshots never arranged according to date.” Then it was an exciting love affair; now, he looks at it as a “displacement of habits.” She loved him then, but looking back, she thinks it’s all so sad, like the wine stain on her dress that will never come out.
See Shirley Hazzard. “A Place in the Country” (1962) and “The Picnic” (1962). In Cliffs of Fall. Jove Books/Berkeley Publishing, rpt. 1981; Collected Stories *A Place in the Country and The Picnic were originally published in The New Yorker.