The Wilderness Page 14

  Now it is coming out. He is who knows how old; it is who knows what year; it has been who knows how long. There are letters to Helen from another man: Are you jealous? she asks from some dead place. He sees her hair touching Henry's in the garden and he thinks, yes, jealous of everything that ever touched you—sunlight, God, and death itself. But I am not jealous of the letters. The letters are my last chance at forgiveness.

  The glass is coming out of his soul (if he has one, if he does), and with it the pain and sin, and with it the dream. Out goes the baby and the bathwater and the whole lot. Instinct tells him to hold on even if it is pointless. He makes another mark on the timeline: gunshot. Bang. That first gunshot was 1961. He makes four attempts at writing the number next to the line and the last attempt is good, neat for him, and clear.

  STORY OF THE FIRST GLIMPSE AT HEAVEN

  Helen stood in the centre of the room and looked about her.

  “So this is where you were born,” she said. She seemed pleased, he thought. Her voice was keen.

  He nodded, yes.

  “It's so—humble.”

  “I suppose, yes.”

  Humble it was, more so now in its dereliction than ever before. The Junk, they used to optimistically call this house, because it always looked as solitary there on the moors as a boat battling the oceans from China. Looking at it now he was taken aback by how small it was, and how derelict, and it was sinking into the peat so that one half of it was shrugged low like a hunched shoulder. Now more than ever, as it sank, and as it came closer to resembling a pile of useless rubble, it lived up to its name.

  They stood in what had been the kitchen, a low room about ten feet by ten feet, separated by an unstable wall from a similar room to its left. That was a supporting wall. It would come down before long, what with the gradual collapse of the foundations into the peat. The peat acted like a sponge, pulling solidity into it. It was certain that the whole thing would collapse.

  Before them, against the supporting wall, was a staircase that had not existed when he had lived there as a child. The staircase was open to the kitchen, without any banister. It was being pulled akimbo by the shifting wall—this not helped by the fact that it had been badly built in the first place without proper support underneath. It, too, would come down. He took it all in impassively, and then broke the silence.

  “These stairs are new.” He banged the falling plasterboard that flanked them. “We used to get up and downstairs by a ladder on the outside wall.”

  Helen raised her brows. She had not lived like this as a child; she was from middle-class suburbia and besides, was ten years younger than him, born the very year the war had started. Things were different when she was born, a decade made a difference.

  “We hardly belong to the same generation,” he said.

  The statement was a crude summary of a flurry of thoughts about time and childhood. It came out rather nonsensically.

  “We belong to different generations? So Henry is both your child and your grandchild,” she joked, spreading a picnic blanket on the kitchen floor, stubbornly seeking pleasure in the face of this squalor.

  Sitting cross-legged, they took food from the knapsack— some sandwiches, some Battenberg cake, apples, a flask of tea, and for him an inch of whiskey at the bottom of a bottle. It was chilly; she pulled the edge of the picnic blanket over her knees, took the Battenberg cake from the bag, and smiled.

  “So what do you think, Helen?”

  “Of what? Of this? Of knocking this down?”

  “Yes.”

  She took the cling film from the cake and handed him some.

  “We can't ever afford it.”

  He glugged back a mouthful of whiskey and felt it warm his throat.

  “We can't afford it now, but we will.”

  “You're obsessed. You get obsessed with ideas, Jake, and I never feel there's anything I can do to stop them. I don't even know why you ask me.”

  “There'll be a steel frame, not timber, not the timber A-frame of the coach house, a discreet steel frame with a flat roof, glass walls, all glass with masonry walls either end.”

  “We'll feel like fish.”

  “We'll feel like pioneers.”

  Helen watched him dissect his cake.

  “You're eating the yellow sections first,” she remarked.

  “Yes. I don't like them.”

  “So in that case you leave them 'til last.”

  “No, you save the best 'til last.”

  She, too, was eating the yellow sections, because, he deduced, they were her favourite: the same action, opposite motivations. Like all things they did? Like getting married? Having a child? They both ate with strategy, a cube at a time, peeling the marzipan away.

  “You don't like marzipan?” he asked.

  “It's horrible.”

  “Then you'll be left with it and you'll wish you'd eaten it first.”

  “I won't wish I'd eaten it first, because if I'd eaten it first I'd feel sick and wouldn't be able to eat the rest.”

  He shook his head and smiled. “No, no. It's like a sacrifice. Making an initial sacrifice before the feast—to appease the gods of hunger.”

  “Gods,” she laughed, leaning forward and whispering. “You and your little pagan gods.”

  He watched her eat, nibbling cake from the white napkin. Then he stood and wandered into the next room, a cramped and dusty space, ramshackle, cables hanging loose.

  “Jake,” he heard her call. “Come and eat.”

  “In a minute.”

  “Come now.”

  He stood still, gazing at the floor where an Indian tiger skin had used to be. His father had been such a fool, a colonial throwback to days gone and better forgotten. They hadn't been allowed to set foot on the tiger skin, even though it had taken up a large part of the room. When Sara had gone into labour, and there was not time to get her from the middle of the moors to the nearest hospital thirty miles away, she gave birth here on this floor. Not on the precious tiger skin, in case of blood. No, not on the tiger skin, on an old blanket.

  Babies turn their heads when they emerge. He and Sara agreed that the tiger's mouth, mid-roar, must have been the first thing he saw when he was born. Then she would tell him that the first thing she saw when she was born was the silver of the samovar glinting in a winter morning, and the first thing she heard was the singsong alphabet palindromes of their maid: En, oh, peh, kuh. Kuh, peh, oh, en, chanted for comfort as the birth pains climaxed and Sara's eyes and ears appeared. It was important to know the very first things perceived, she said. They held the secret. They would be the very last things perceived.

  Helen's voice came from the kitchen. “Jake! We were in the middle of eating.”

  He sniffed at the memories. He dug at the crumbling stone floor with his toe; rain had started drumming on the patches of corrugated-tin roof.

  The whole lot could go, the whole house. It reminded him of denial and negation. Sara's religion hidden, Sara's trinkets shut away, Sara's past leaking potent in splintered stories when his father was out. Small charming and murderous stories, that was all he ever got of his mother's legacy. Then they dried up. The war shut them up. Something on his father's side of the battle was won for good, and Sara not only curbed herself but his father, too. He stopped defending his values, he stopped hitting out, stopped ranting. With nothing to fight for (Britain doing noble battle, his side victorious beyond doubt) he lost any recourse he had once had to human interaction, let Rook—with his gift for human interaction— edge further in, became quiet for almost twenty years, and then he died.

  Helen appeared in the doorway with her hands on her hips and the picnic blanket draped over her arm. A bird flew up behind her and out of the room, she looked back at it rapt, childlike, then turned to him.

  “I agree to all this”—she wafted a hand—“all these glass dreams, if you agree to have another child.”

  He laughed. “Wow.”

  “Don't wow me. Come on, yes or
no.”

  “Well, I suppose—”

  “Great. Come on then.”

  She brushed stone dust from her pleated skirt, scratched her cheek. “Come on.”

  As she climbed the stairs she pulled off her knitted top. Shadowing her, he focussed on the ladder of bones that formed her spine so that it was as if he were climbing not the stairs but her—her physiology, her very structure and makeup, ascending the pathway to her brain, a brain so very different to his. She thought in different ways to him. But for this moment at least they were thinking the same: Henry is not here, the rain is thrumming, the atmosphere is right, another child would be sensible, yes, and fun, and good for Henry. Yes.

  She reached the top of the stairs and peeked into the bedroom.

  “You met Rook's granddaughter didn't you?”

  He stopped. “Yes.”

  “Eleanor said everybody in the pub talks about her. Was she really that beautiful?”

  “Beautiful?” He felt hot and guilty. “Unusual more than beautiful.”

  A gunshot. The silken white concrete at his feet. And then Joy's long thighs along the musty old sheets, the way, afterwards, she had risen from Eleanor's boatlike bed and knelt at her shoes. And how, as she peeled the leaf from their saturated yellow silk, she had said in a bruised voice, Going to go to America as soon as I can, leave this rain behind. And licked the leaf for good measure, and stuck it on his arm.

  “And now she's gone off to America,” Helen added. “So brave—she's so young—younger than me, isn't she? I'd like to have met her.”

  “How do you know she's gone?”

  “Rook told me.”

  “When did you see him?”

  “He popped by yesterday while you were at work. He taught me to play poker. Not for money.” She ventured to the door on the left. “I think he wishes she hadn't gone, sometimes I think he's lonely. Jake, can I tell you a secret?”

  He nodded blindly.

  “Our trip to America, our honeymoon—it was lovely and everything but I was homesick most of the time. I could never live outside England.” She spread the blanket down on the floor of the bedroom. “Does that disappoint you?”

  Shaking his head, he thought, so Joy has gone. He should have been relieved. That night he had arrived home and taken deep breaths in the garden. He had splashed his face with cold water. The gunshot still rang loud in his ears and Joy's dress in his mind; Joy's tendency, that he had discovered like a delightful truth, to tilt her head and fold her ear in half when speaking. He had been given his first glimpse at heaven and it had been yellow and completely impelling. Without meaning to he had woken Helen up, leaving rain-soaked clothes on the bedroom floor, and, seeing the leaf stuck to his arm (a birch leaf, silver birch), he swallowed his guilt and peeled it off, half expecting to see a wound under it or some evidence of wrong-doing, but saw only his almost young skin. Even the mere edge of spring had brought a tan to it.

  He blinked and brought his attention back to the room, to Helen looking around, her arms folded to guard off the cold. She looked strange here in her bra, misplaced. This had been his parents' bedroom, once. Not so different in some ways, still bare and drab, only then it had been mitigated by the multiple blankets and cushions Sara depended on for the illusion of luxury. A section of the room had been annexed as a bathroom, incredibly small and now shabby and fungal in corners, the porcelain of the washbasin cracked.

  Helen squeezed into the bathroom and closed the door. He heard her use the toilet, which no longer flushed; she was desperate, she said. By the time she had come back he'd smoothed the picnic blanket as large as it would go and without undressing, they made love. As he ran his hands over her back he found himself thinking of where she had come from. He had been to her house once—a mock-Tudor house in a neat and hushed cul-de-sac, nicely groomed parents and a back garden with a loop of lawn around a silver birch. Her parents said that as a girl she had used to peel off the bark and glue it to the wallpaper in her bedroom, and she bolstered this story with her own memories—the white chalk of the bark on her fingertips, and the fishy smell of glue.

  For his part, here in this room, he could smell foxes, milk, a mix of stench and scent. He gripped the hem of Helen's skirt. He was making love, he thought, in his parents' bedroom. Five nights ago he had been with another woman and did not regret it. So now he was one of those men he disapproved of. He clutched the back of his wife's thighs and littered her neck with messy, roaming kisses.

  Afterwards they tipped the components of the picnic into the knapsack and left. The rain had stopped and the moors were steaming slightly where the sun had begun warming the soil. The sight of it filled him with renewed ambition. The day after his adventure with Joy he had gone to work and been told that he would be the lead architect on the design for the new prison. Lying in bed while Helen slept that night, he thought of it intensely. He knew how it would be—not the terrible Victorian design of herding prisoners into cramped wings, like animals, and leaving them solitary. His would have four wings, T-shaped as he had read about in a recent journal, each wing reaching out from the central hub of the prison like a free limb. And each wing would be its own community, more like a public school than a prison. In the day the men could move amongst each other, at night they would be separated.

  Helen said it sounded horrible. T-shaped wings? Sounded dark and dingy. Why did he want to work on such a horrible project? He told her: a prison dictated its own design like almost no other building: the size of the rooms and windows was set to a maximum, the width of the walls, the breadth of the staircases, the number of doors and windows, the regimented oval of land around which those men would run— these were all given. There was nothing less satisfying than a building which permitted its architect total freedom—much better was a building that exerted limits and challenges. To Helen it sounded far from pleasing. But it was not supposed to be pleasing; it was supposed to reform and moralise. Not punish, but moralise. This was the modern way.

  Helen had sighed when he told her this, pulled her nightdress back into order under the covers, and assured him that he should not cast aspersions. A person's morality is a two-way journey, whether they appear good or bad depends only on which leg of the journey you catch them on, she said.

  He had contested: he did not care whether the prisoners really were good or bad—this wasn't a question for the likes of him. He only took the agreed assumption and acted to it.

  Perilous, she sniffed, and lifted her arm above her head to sleep.

  “We should call them Conception Events,” Helen said now as she got into the car. “Trying for a new child—Conception Events. What do you think?”

  “It sounds hopeful,” he agreed.

  “I wonder if Henry is okay, he's been with Sara all day. We shouldn't have left him.”

  He wished to ask her, Why the sudden change—you weren't worried about Henry before—is it the house? Is it because we lived like peasants? Do you think Sara wasn't a good mother?

  “Henry will love her,” he said. “She will love Henry. We won't be able to tear them apart.”

  “How will Henry love her?” Helen muttered, turning her face away. “Not the most easy woman to—”

  “Love,” he finished.

  Helen faced him. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I really am sorry. She's your mother. I don't even know her.”

  She settled her gaze on him for a moment and then, probably realising he was not going to speak, resorted again to the window and the view: the landscape she thought would sink beneath sea level if left unguarded.

  He started the engine and drove off, the Mini gathering a bit of speed on the perfectly straight roads. If only he could press his foot down hard on the accelerator and churn along at eighty, ninety! It seemed a way of laying claim to the place. In London he had always felt the city was a living entity that he could, perhaps, rub along with or even, with his buildings, nourish—but he was always superfluous to it, no matter what he did. Now, for example, no
w it would be oiling along, grinding along without him. Whereas here, these moors, that house, had been waiting for him all this time.

  His wife was right in what she said about Sara. It was difficult to love a woman so bound by her own limitations and losses. But he was beginning to understand that Sara did not wish to be loved, she wished only to survive. Love to Sara was what he was to London: perfectly redundant.

  When they got back to the sun-trap house they found Henry propped lavishly against the arm of the sofa, and Sara throwing and turning the praise ring, moving round in her long brown dress in inexpressive circles; all her animation was contained in her wrists, which moved the praise ring, and her mouth, which formed sounds.

  “En, oh, peh, kuh. Kuh, peh, oh, en,” she was singing with a sweet and clear voice.

  I have caught you out, he wanted to blurt. Caught you being yourself! He thought of all those leaflets he had made advertising the new lobby group, stacked up in his study against his mother's wishes, all the petition forms he had drawn up, the reading and research he had done, the sense of purpose it gave him, and how he was right not to stop.

  Sara turned to them. “I am teaching your child the alphabet,” she said. “Say it, Henry, say what you've learnt.”

  The baby looked about him perplexed and managed one fat sound, “Ma,” then a slimmer one, “Mi.”

  Sara, standing in the square of light that came through the window, shook her head at the smiling baby. “No no dear child. Phonemes are next week. This week is the alphabet. But you are a clever child, a clever and wondrous child are you not?”

  “He's five months old.” Helen paced towards Henry and picked him up. He had rarely seen his wife so brittle and agitated. Conversely, he rarely saw his mother so relaxed in another human's company as she had been for that brief moment with Henry, before they interrupted the scene. Sara linked her fingers and half smiled.