The Wilderness Read online

  He sees himself sitting in the chair trying, failing, to make a paper triangle. Rook would ridicule him now for this dysfunction—Rook who was so canny with those fingers that could fold infinite objects into being. And now Sara would chide: Infinite, there you go again, Jake!

  He wishes, more than anything, to not be drawn down by his situation. They say that on balance he is where they would expect him to be, that is, his demise is reassuringly predictable. The simple enormity of it grips him and rids him momentarily of feeling, and when he surfaces again it is to a vista spread before him of arable land and beyond that the black strip of the moors. The path ahead is strewn with felled trees. The woods are gone.

  How dizzying it is, to come here to Quail Woods only to find that it has no wood. How dizzying for something to turn to nothing. What day is it, how long since he saw the fox-haired woman, or Henry? He recalls, from his childhood perhaps, a view of woods from the air and the trees being felled, their trunks stacking up on the ground like matches. But it cannot have been Quail Woods; Quail Woods has been here quite recently; he remembers walking here with Sara on the day his father died, and drinking coffee between these now recumbent trees. It is not a memory, at least not his memory. Maybe, like the man on the shore, it was a programme, or maybe, he thinks, disappointed with himself, he made it up.

  Wondering what he has done with Eleanor, and why he wore a jumper on this increasingly hot evening, he turns around and makes his way back to the lay-by where the Land Rover is parked.

  That night he chaperones Eleanor to the bed and allows her to help him remove their clothes. As they make love he watches her face, the V of creases at her eyes, the pores of skin on her flaccid cheeks, the stubborn mouth. Is this really her? He struggles to relate this woman to the memory of an old friend.

  Under the bed Joy's letters ghost into the darkness, and downstairs the unopened letters to Helen listen to the creak of the bed. My life is a slow-motion mistake, he thinks. Then he buries his face in Eleanor's; her skin has the neutered centuries-old scent of the human-skin Bible, some musty religion packed inside. He goes after that, the musty religion. Astonishing how a pensioner's body can still seek and find a god in this curious old act, and still believe in that god's promises, even when they have been made and broken a thousand times before.

  In the morning he has an idea, or at least recognises an idea that has been distilling. He goes to the telephone book, wracks his memory for a name, and makes a call. Wrong number. And again, not this one. Eventually he has some success. The vet tells him that to the best of his knowledge the dog brought in two months ago is well, recovering from an operation to its leg. No owner could be traced and nobody came forward, so she was taken to a dogs' home. He calls the home. She is still there, is he interested in taking her? Maybe, he will come and have a look.

  When he arrives they show him her enclosure and, to his surprise, he recognises her at once; she is standing, a white bandage round her black leg, as if she has been waiting for him. A swell of possession arises in him. She is flesh and blood, as black as wet tar; when he puts his hand out to her nose she nudges his palm with bold curiosity. They tell him she is called Lucky. He grimaces. All rescue dogs are called Lucky. When they call the name, a hundred lopsided, empty creatures must come running all at once.

  STORY OF THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN

  Helen scrubbed the sign down and painted it. She painted a naked woman whose skin glowed with sunlight, her arms held aloft and the sun a furious ball of yellow in her hands. She had stars above her head, and stood in front of a black landscape, the steelworks in the far distance, with the graphite smoke emitting from the chimneys. The words in black across the woman's legs, with the missing e painted in: THE SUN RISES.

  “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”

  With this declaration she scratched her cheek and stood back to assess her work.

  He observed the painting, it was sweet, a little childish. Not skilful at all but the brushstrokes were so plain they were utterly irreproachable. He could not fault her anything, ever. Could not ever question her goodness. He sat on the grass by her side in the afternoon heat and smoked.

  The Sun Rises was in an odd place, thrown into the middle of the moors without boundaries, except for the arbitrary knee-high wall somebody had put around the back garden. In fact the land that The Sun Rises, and therefore Eleanor, owned had always been in dispute, and perhaps it had no right to any land at all, but gradually it took it anyway, edging the forty or so yards to the road at the front, and spilling out of its low walls at the back. From where he and Helen sat on the small strip of grass at the front, and with the pub's back and front doors open, he could see right through the building to the rear garden.

  Already that morning he had washed down the pub walls inside and out, nailed chairs back together that had been left broken in the cellar for years, glossed the doors and skirting boards, scrubbed the stone floors, secured window latches, fixed the cisterns, put locks on the toilet doors, oiled the bar hatch; Eleanor cleaned the windows and sills, the glasses, the spirit bottles, the pumps, polished the last pieces of brass that remained, and she watered the beds at the front. They fit a till to replace the shoe box stuffed with crumpled cash.

  The day before, they had spent the entire day hoisting the waist-high weeds from the small back garden and flattening the ground. Then at seven that morning, lucky enough to have a hot dry day, two men had come and poured concrete onto the layer of hardcore and sand that covered the soil. By now it was beginning to dry and its whiteness shone against the peat.

  He looked for Eleanor but she must have been indoors. He turned to his wife and pointed out to the steelworks with his cigarette.

  “The Sun Rises is so called because the sun rises over there. And we used to be able to see it, before the smoke from the chimneys botched the sky. So we decided, together, to call this The Sun Rises, as an affirmation. That the sun does still rise.”

  Helen returned his smile. “That's nice,” she said. “Who's we?”

  “Me, Eleanor, Sara, Rook, Eleanor's parents, when they were still alive.”

  “And what happened to them? How did they die?”

  “Her mother died before the war of—pneumonia, or something like that, and her father wasn't around much, he didn't cope with the loss and wouldn't come home for days at a time—then he got conscripted when the war came and was killed in, I don't know, '42, '43. Her uncle—her father's brother—came to look after her but he never wanted to be here. Then he left, too.” He shrugged and inhaled. “Eleanor says that every man in her life is useless and always will be.”

  Helen shielded her eyes from the sun and squinted at her painting. She added some colour to the stars above the woman's head.

  “So she believes she'll never find the man she wants?”

  He shrugged again, not knowing how Eleanor viewed her love life, and not interested, either.

  “She will find him.” Helen put her tongue out in concentration. “She will.”

  He leaned over and kissed her shoulder.

  “The concrete looks good, don't you think?”

  “I think it looks strange. I preferred the grass.”

  The weeds, he wanted to correct. Helen had a habit of lumping different things together under the same word, as though the act of being specific pained her: in this case all things green and growing were grass. But to him they were weeds and it mattered, suddenly greatly, that the garden had choked and shrunk underneath them.

  “When I was a teenager, a few years before I went to London, I used to dream about doing this place up. I remember seeing all the factory workers come here on their bikes and sit at the bar, or out in the weeds at the back, trying to get a bit of fresh air, talking about blast furnaces, torpedoes, rolling mills, crucibles—”

  Helen pouted a little. “Those words mean nothing to me,” she s
aid. But she had stopped painting and started listening avidly as she always did when he talked about the past.

  “And I always thought how bad it was that after twelve hours sweating in a factory there was nowhere outside for them to sit, I mean properly sit with space and air around them. Just weeds.”

  He stubbed his cigarette out. Helen took the butt and tidied it away in her pocket.

  “I thought they looked quite pretty.”

  “Before the war it used to be grass and we sat out there in the summer—Sara used to play the violin and Rook the harmonica and we would sing—”

  “I didn't know Sara played the violin,” Helen said.

  “She did. She used to do a lot of things. We would sing—I still remember it—Komm doch, mein Mädel, komm her geschwind.” His singing voice was dry and dusty, and he couldn't remember when he had last thought of this song. “Dreh dich im Tanze mit mir, mein Kind! Hör, wie die Geigen locken zum Reigen, komm doch, mein Mäde!, zum Tanz geschwind!”

  He grinned at Helen and she returned it, reaching over to touch his knee.

  “It was a Hungarian dance—you had to sort of twirl round and round until you were dizzy and fell over. And I remember—I was always allowed to stay up late. There were money spiders—that's what I remember most about it now. Money spiders, everywhere. In our hair, on our arms and legs. Sara always said they were lucky.”

  From the corner of his eye he saw Eleanor coming out of the pub towards them. She was carrying a bottle of something and some large glasses.

  Helen glanced at her and then away. “My mother said that, too.”

  “But maybe not so lucky after all. The war came. No more of it. The grass turned to weeds and the spiders went.”

  Helen watched and waited for him to say more, but now Eleanor was here he didn't want to. He felt, as he always felt, that a past was too intimate a thing to share with Eleanor, that her drab misfortune was infectious, and a meanness in his character detested the thought that their two lives might seem bound. She had of course been there, too, in those days. Money spiders had climbed up her arms. She had stayed up late with him. They had sometimes slept top to toe in the same bed. He would sleep facing away from her feet.

  Eleanor stood behind them and spread her arms, bottle sloshing and flashing in the sunlight.

  “It's the wilderness! It's the bloody wilderness!”

  She flapped her arms about, her feet rooted in their Wellingtons to the peat. “Christ,” she said. “I'd do anything to get away from here, and you come here by choice. Left London for this.”

  Helen laughed. “This,” she said, stretching her own arms. “Look at it, it's heaven today.”

  And it was. He took in the scene: enormous blue sky, wild-flowers, sun silvering the water in the dykes, the distant gas flame of the steelworks almost invisible against the light, and the three of them equally dwarfed by mile upon mile of sun-blurred horizon.

  He recalled his conversation with Helen in the zoo cafeteria: we'll come to the edge of the wilderness and we'll make it ours. He dug his heel into the earth.

  Helen went back to painting, still smiling. Her arms were dusted with colour. It was mid-afternoon and hot. As he watched her, she struck him as a different and more purposeful woman without a baby in her arms. Her body, always mummified by blue blankets and clinging limbs wrapped in terry towelling, reappeared solo in a definite, young shape, and her legs were revealed thin by the jeans which she had rolled up her shins.

  Eleanor sat close to Helen, removed a jar of mussels she had stashed inside one of the glasses, and poured three drinks. Gin. Without taking her eyes from the painting Helen took the glass offered her, knocked the drink back, and put the glass down.

  “This is the woman clothed with the sun,” she told Eleanor, who had leaned in over her shoulder. “In the Bible the woman clothed with the sun is the People of God. And with her in heaven is a red dragon with seven heads who is waiting to devour her unborn child. The dragon represents the nonbeliev-ers, the people who think they're not of God.”

  He realised then that he had closed his eyes, and that he always closed his eyes when she began talking about the Bible. Now he opened them again to see her smooth her hair apologetically at the bad news.

  “The unborn child is Jesus,” she said, “and the seventh head of the dragon is the Rome of the future, the Rome that is going to kill him. The Roman—Pilate, of course.”

  Eleanor squinted her face into scepticism.

  “Is that supposed to be true?” she asked.

  “Yes, Eleanor, all of the Bible is supposed to be true in its own way.”

  He rested himself back onto his elbows and witnessed himself in Eleanor, the churlishness and refusal to be bought with words. In its own way. This was such a lazy answer, he thought, and yet Helen obviously thought not. To her it explained everything, and so fully and satisfactorily.

  “But after the woman gave birth to Jesus,” Helen smiled, “she entrusted him to the kingdom of Heaven, and she escaped to the wilderness.”

  As she looked around her at the moors her smile persisted, but it was a not a delicate smile, not incidental as he had always thought, but serious and persuaded. Her peace was a tangible weight.

  “During the war we built a bomb shelter in the garden.” She scooped a mussel from the jar and was pensive suddenly. “I used to play in it. When the bombing got bad we—me, my mum, my daddy, my brother—lived in the shelter for a week. I remember it as one of the very best weeks of my life because we were all together, absolutely for one another. We never argued, you see, because we didn't know when a bomb might drop and whether our shelter was any good. Mother prayed.”

  She drew her legs up to her body and fixed her slightly excited look on the yellow woman she had painted.

  “Bombs missed us. We began to assume that the prayers were making us immune. Then one night a bomb blew the door off our shelter and took off one of Daddy's feet. Mum lost her religion for five years, until her congregation convinced her again, or bullied her, I don't know which. I watched my daddy for weeks, struggling without his foot, going to work and getting on with it. He was a doctor, he had to keep working.”

  She turned her head up towards the sun, warm and rich as it eased past midday.

  “Unlike my mum, I wasn't in any doubt. I suddenly knew God existed because he'd saved my father. And that man with only one foot was still my daddy. If he'd had no feet, no hands, no legs, he'd still be my daddy. So we can't be our bodies alone. And if we are not our bodies we must be something else.”

  “Our brains,” he said.

  “More than that, Jake.”

  “Why more than that?”

  “His soul shone out through his eyes. I saw his soul.”

  “In your own way.”

  She held her gaze on him for several seconds too long, not with anger or irritation, just as though he were a formation of light she was suddenly interested in, or as if she were waiting for him to finish his sentence. He hadn't known about her father's foot; he wondered what else she didn't tell him. Footless father, secret fiancé. They had married so fast. Perhaps he didn't know her at all.

  Eleanor crossed her legs uncomfortably and tapped her bare knees.

  “Honestly, I don't have your strength to believe.”

  Helen leaned over and put her hand on Eleanor's knee. “You have all the strength in the world. You especially, of all people. It's plain to see.”

  She stood and picked up the sign. Then she climbed the ladder and hooked it back in place, wavering, humming. He was afraid she would fall and he thought he should go and help her.

  “With this sign, I call the woman clothed with the sun to The Sun Rises,” she grinned as she descended. “I call the People of God to the wilderness.”

  “I hope the People of God drink a lot,” Eleanor answered.

  “The People of God do everything, they are everyone.”

  He stared up at the sign; it looked good in situ, and the woman seemed
to be staring straight back at him, precisely at him and nowhere else. He winked at her.

  Then later, Eleanor straightened her legs into the quiet strip of sunlight and smoked. Rook was there and Helen was not. They sat on the low wall around the bright rectangle of concrete as the sun set.

  “Cannabis,” Eleanor said, passing it on. “I have it for the aches in my back. It's not just for coloured people anymore.”

  He straightened his legs along the wall too, sun-filled, dusty, and tired after the day of work. He held the cigarette between his fingers; of course, it was not a cigarette, but he was so ignorant about drugs that he had no proper word for it. This had all just been beginning in London when he left, he had started to see it, people smoking in parks here and there, a sort of immature excitement gathering that had not been present before.

  “Thanks,” he murmured.

  He smoked, loosening instantly, and passed it to Rook, who was folding minute paper birds from cigarette papers—elegant long-necked cranes with wings bent and poised for flight.

  Rook refused. “Too old. You shouldn't smoke that, you bad children.”

  Fuck off, Rook, he thought happily. With a hazy concentration he inspected the long tight roll of tobacco. So much more interest in an object you have no word for. He inhaled more before passing it to Eleanor.

  His mind was milky and he wasn't sure how he came to be here, where Helen had gone, where Rook had come from. Having worked his way through much of Eleanor's bottle of gin, and having eaten only mussels all day, he was drunk and hungry; he was optimistic, too. He had the sudden feeling that all his decisions had been right, coming here, marrying Helen, that a potential chaos was being fought back, and that Helen was instrumental in this—no, necessary to it. That peace he had seen in her earlier, it was a peace missing in himself. Somehow it seemed she had a wisdom that could presage and protect them, a wisdom he should not mock.