The Wilderness Page 16

  Alice inclines her head. “The limp?”

  “Yes.”

  “We had a bet. I bet that you would ask about the limp when Seth wasn't listening, and he bet you'd come out and say it in front of him. I think he had this idea of you as a brash, formidable man who would have no qualms about pointing out his faults. Anyhow,” she shrugs lightly, “it looks like I won.”

  The dug-up earth in his hand comforts a slow, drunk feeling that is beginning to occupy him. “I see,” he says. “And did you have a lot of money on it?”

  Again she smiles. “It was a sportsman's thing. We try to keep money out of everything.”

  “Next time you bet on me maybe it would pay you to bring money into it. You know me, after all. He has no idea.”

  He pats her leg and she passes him his coffee. The wind becomes restless and blows their hair. Full of DNA, hair, a single strand can tell a child who their father is. Alice's flickers out long and fine. Just one strand of that hair knows about him, can testify to him. He is in every part of her.

  “I have this dream,” he tells her, or at least tells some invisible vanishing point beyond her. “That there's a woman in a— what do you call it? The place with the food.”

  “Kitchen?”

  “Tins and jars, things that don't go off. Sara has one. We don't.”

  “Pantry? Larder?”

  “Yes, quite. She is naked, Alice, and she has labels which she sticks to the jars. She goes up and down the rows of jars. But when she reaches the end of one—line—row—the labels have already fallen off the first jars. It's endless, Alice. Her job is endless.”

  “Like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill,” Alice says. She pulls a shawl over her thin shoulders. “Just to watch it roll back down again.”

  “I dream it again and again.”

  She leans to him and strokes his temple. “Dreams are good for us, Jake. Even bad ones. Ride them. Do you know how? Focus on the jars, say, or the woman, and say, This isn't real, this isn't real. Let one part of you step out of the dream. Remember you're its master, and not the other way round.”

  He sees his daughter blink her lilac eyes. When they reopen they are blue. With her head caught just there they are blue-green.

  “And the woman gets older,” he says. “She starts young and—” He gestures curves with his hands. “In the end she's old. She looks like a fucking plank of wood.”

  Alice smiles, seeming surprised.

  “Your mother was afraid of growing old. Your mother was not afraid of anything but growing old. She was—” He frowns and seeks his train of thought. “Was she old?”

  Alice is pensive. “ Fifty-three. That's not old.”

  She engages his eyes for a moment with a look that is worried, that is sympathetic, that borders on suspicious. He smiles to distract her and, returning the smile, she retrieves her hair from the wind and sets it in place behind her ear.

  “Alice, I'm afraid I have a disease. I have Alzheimer's.”

  She brings her hand to her mouth; on anybody else the gesture might show gossipy surprise, but on her it seems only to press back any words that haven't had time to be considered.

  Eventually she takes her hand away. “I saw something in your eyes, before. You aren't yourself. I knew something wasn't right. I thought you just seemed lost, because of Helen.”

  “I am lost.”

  The relief, to have told her, is so immense that he is heavy and warm with it.

  “How long have you had it?”

  “Two years,” he says, though he is not at all sure of this. It isn't a lie; it is his best shot at the truth.

  “So what does it mean? Can you manage?”

  “Yes, for now. I have—that other lady. She helps out.”

  “Eleanor?”

  “Is that definitely her name? It doesn't seem right somehow—”

  Alice takes a careful sip from her drink and puts the cup down.

  “I haven't told Henry,” he says. “Just you.”

  “Why not Henry?”

  “Because I have to look after him.”

  She crawls the two or three feet to him and puts her hand on his cheek.

  “Then I'll look after you. Don't worry, I'm here. You see? I'll make sure you're all right.”

  Her look is all Helen's; capable sympathy. Somebody who knows how it works. He clasps her hand and swallows a grief that has welled in his throat.

  “It's my brain, Alice, I feel like all my wires are being unplugged one by one. No, not even in an order, just unplucked. I need to keep it all together. I have to stash all the documents in one place quick before they blow away, do you understand? You could help.”

  “I'll take time off work, come for a fortnight or so and we'll go through everything you need, I'll read up on it and we'll go through everything.”

  “When will you come?”

  “Let me organise it—” She takes her hand from his cheek and sits back on her heels. The poet is wandering towards them in his own world, concentrating, his hands translating some train of thought; he seems to be calculating something. Alice looks across at him and then back, then presses her palms on her thighs.

  “Jake, is it bad timing to say this now? Me and Seth are going to have a baby.”

  For the moment he is shocked. A flock of birds lifts from nowhere and crowd the sky as if they, too, are shocked. They stain the air with prime colour and beat their wings. He sees, behind the birds, the poet receding again, scanning the brickwork of the derelict building. Alice? His child? Having a child? How extraordinary and miraculous that this could happen. He finds a stone in his palm, wonders where it came from, and pushes its reassuring shape into his coat pocket.

  “Everything will be all right,” she nods. “I'm going to look after you.”

  “You are really having a child?”

  “Yes, Jake, really.”

  “Buddy Holly,” he grins, gripping her knee. He is—yes, he recognises this feeling—he is exulted.

  “Eureka,” Alice breathes. She tips her head back in gentle laughter and draws her hands into a prayer.

  Waking confused, he turns to the woman, to Eleanor. Quite dislodged, she seems lying there—plucked from old time and put into new. She doesn't belong; he doesn't belong. Vertigo, he feels like he has vertigo. Is he still at the bus station? Has Alice's bus not come yet?

  No, he is somewhere familiar. The room is half lit through the single curtain drawn across the French windows and he hears birdsong. He sits up and frowns into the pixellated light, gripped now by elation, and now by a morbid disappointment that quickly becomes anger. By the bed is his book he has so struggled to read these last weeks. He fails to remember what it is about, but picking it up it falls open at pages on the restoration of an Edwardian school, and a photograph of a small—what is the word. People with signs refusing to allow the bulldozers in.

  Was all of it a dream? Is the dog real? Did he feed her the lamb, and has he ever fed her lamb, and has he ever even fed her at all? I bet I have killed her, he thinks. In the dream he was fighting for a building and it felt so good to have a cause, a corner. Where is his corner? He searches out the shapes and objects of the bedroom and finds them momentarily unfamiliar. Where is Alice? Where is his corner ? Which is his war, which side is he on?

  As he lifts himself from the bed he realises that the illusions of his sleep have spread to every edge. There was no such time on the grass with Alice, with the poet. He may have been to the bus station or he may not have, it may have been today or five years ago, because time is not considerate enough anymore to make itself clear.

  There is no poet. There is no grandchild coming. No Alice. There is only now. Now! Like a punch in the face. And now again. Now is so endlessly small and inadequate. Now there is the urgency to get up, get out, get away from Eleanor, shoo away the heartbreak of the dream with a coffee, some water— he is so thirsty—maybe a mint julep. Drown it. He is breathless with trapped tears. He has never dreamt so vividly. He
wishes never to do so again.

  STORY OF THE CUTOUT SOLDIERS

  In the next room Helen was saying goodbye to the members of her Bible group, who slipped out through the French doors of the study and appeared in the garden with their King James's tucked under their arms. Then he heard his wife call out, “D, you've forgotten your notebook,” and some chuckles and the clean, succinct contact of young lips on young cheek.

  D, she called the man, and yet to call somebody by their initial seemed too familiar for a Bible group. Then he considered that the only other person Helen might have called by their initial was God himself. D was honoured indeed. What was he? Devil, Dream? Was he drastic and disastrous? He tried idly, over his shoulder, to get a view of him through the window but the man had gone.

  When Helen came into the living room this is how he was, his neck craned as he fluttered his hands over the piano keys. Henry sitting stoically in the crook of his arm.

  “What's that you're playing? Is it ‘Three Blind Mice' or something?”

  “It was meant to be Debussy.”

  Helen laughed and then put her hand to her mouth.

  “It's difficult one-handed,” he said.

  “I know. All my life is one-handed.”

  On the left side of his body was the baby; on the right side, in his pocket, a letter from Eleanor. With Helen close by the letter felt the heavier of the two, so much so that it made Henry weightless; he tightened his grip on the child and stretched his little finger to the octave below; he was not anywhere close to being good enough to handle Debussy—such strange chords and fingerings—but he wasn't interested in starting anywhere lower. Better, he concluded, to be very bad at a difficult thing than very mediocre at an easy thing.

  “Well, Jake,” Helen said. “What do you think?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of—” Her expression changed, less curious, more excited. She reached for Henry. “Haven't you been upstairs? Don't you know?”

  “If I say, know what, will that give it away, that I don't know?”

  “Follow me.”

  She beckoned him out of the living room, into the middle room from which the stairs led. They climbed together, he following her. The letter shifted silently in his pocket. Henry babbled at him over Helen's shoulder and pointed in great excitement at the wrought-iron birds and leaves of the banister. He glanced out of the landing window at the road and the church. The church bells were ringing, six o'clock, he thought, though there were never six chimes, always waves of them one after the other breaking on his eardrums. He looked at the back of his wife's shin-length rayon dress as it moved along the landing. He looked at the small stain on the carpet where the roof sloped at the eaves and piles of blankets were stored. Henry pointed wildly at the walls the blankets the stain the doors the webs and laughed in bubbles.

  They went into Henry's room, across its chocolate-brown carpet, past translucent mobiles, a light-blue cot, wardrobes along one wall stuffed with unpacked boxes of photographs, Christmas decorations, clothes. To the right was a low inner door—a secret door, Helen had remarked when they first looked round the house. They bent double through it and were then in their bedroom. If they had taken the other stairs that led to the bedroom directly from the study, where they had almost begun, they would have been here a minute ago, but Helen liked the game of the double staircase. She would enjoy it, she had said, when there were two children in the house and they could run around, up and down the two staircases, in loops like birds flying.

  “Look, Jake,” Helen said, pointing unnecessarily at the bed. “Look what Sara gave us.”

  In the middle of the bed, on their faded pink blanket, were piles of cash—neat structures of ten-pound notes.

  “What is this?”

  “Some money from your daddy's death. She was going to give it to you another time, when she—passed away, I suppose,” Helen hesitated to give the notion some respectful space. “But she wants you to have it now, she said what use would it be to you in twenty years? It'll be too late then.”

  He approached the money and handled it. “She came here today, and gave you this?”

  “One thousand pounds. Your daddy was richer than you thought.”

  He said nothing. Henry made an aimless grab for the paper and then put his fist in his mouth.

  “We should go and thank her. Perhaps we can have her round for dinner?”

  “Yes, if she'll come,” he said.

  He was not as shocked as he thought he should be. In his mind he was always going to be comfortable; to see his bed awash with money was not as incongruous as it was for Helen, who had chosen him, perhaps, for his lack of comfort. Despite his profession there had always been a whisper of poverty about him. He attracted all that was insalubrious; it was his gift that his wife most cherished—the gift of a house with cobwebs the length of legs, of rising damp, of an edge to her billowing and unchallenged worldview, a mild demon that proved her god.

  “It will help us when we have another baby,” she said. She rested Henry amidst the piles of money. Perhaps she was trying to envisage how they would look in luxury. Seeing her small, worried smile he took her in his arms and nodded. He would have been shocked by all this had he believed for a moment this was, as Sara was claiming, his father's money. As it was he had other ideas.

  “I'll see my mother tonight,” he told her.

  Sara didn't speak, but went to the kitchen to make coffee. He waited, outstaring the orange carpet before feeling the inevitable urge press his bladder. The letter was hot in his pocket; he skim-read it again as he stood at the toilet, unpicking Eleanor's handwriting. By the time he came back downstairs from the bathroom Sara was placing a tray on the coffee table. She plumped up the cushions on the sofa. She was wearing the dress he most liked to see her wear, a long brown wool dress with a dark-yellow belt, and a run of four fake buttons at the neck.

  “Sit, sit,” she told him.

  Coffee came, and sugared ginger.

  He took the plate in the flat of his hand. “Thank you, Sara.”

  “Don't mention it. I was about to have coffee and ginger anyway. I always do before bed. It's a strange little habit I've picked up.”

  “Yes—I mean for the money.”

  “Oh, that.” She sat across the room from him in her chair and pushed her skirt along her thighs as if trying to shoo it away. “Thank your father, not me.”

  “Well I can hardly do that.”

  “Asch.”

  “It's a lot of money, Sara.”

  “I suppose you are going to offer it back, and then I will refuse to take it, and we will bicker like this for five minutes, and I will win, and then we will be in the same situation we are now, yes? So let's agree not to do this. Time is short.”

  She popped a cube of ginger in her mouth. It was typical of her to diagnose time like this: time is short, time is running out, there's no time, the time has passed. He ignored the comment.

  “I wasn't going to argue, Mama, in fact I've already decided what to do with the money, if you approve.”

  “Good.”

  She smiled and put her plate on the carpet, the ginger neatly consumed, and took her gold-rimmed coffee cup from the tray, ran her finger round the rim until it settled on the chip.

  “I want you, Helen, and Henry to be comfortable.”

  “Of course.”

  He waited for her to ask what it was he had planned, but she only chewed in apparent thought, surveying the fireplace from a distance as if she were deciding whether she liked it. He tried to remain composed—easy at any other time with any other person, but with his mother, never easy. Never easy. Hysteria flickered in his gut and he swallowed. If he were hysterical, would he get a reaction then? An emotion? Or just this: this woman facing her own silence?

  “Aren't you going to ask what I plan to do with the money, Sara?”

  “Must I ask? Can't you simply say?”

  Yes, he realised. He had been stupid, childish. Why did he have
to wait for her prompt?

  “I'm going to buy the Junk.”

  “Oh.” Her expression gave nothing away; it was neither approving nor disapproving, kind nor unkind. “And what will you do with the Junk?”

  “Knock it down and build another house.”

  “You have a house. Perhaps you could do some little improvements to it. It's, what is the word, ratty-tatty.”

  He smiled, then stood. “But if I buy this land I can build the least ratty-tatty house you've ever seen, something completely new and fresh.”

  She gave out one unamused laugh, again, not unkind, not kind. “As you wish,” she said.

  With his coffee cup cradled in his hand he knelt at her feet.

  “If you hate the idea I can do something else with the money. Invest it for Henry's future, say, or take Helen around the world. She's always wanted to fly.”

  “She would be afraid to fly when it came to it, and the rest of the world is not so interesting, Jacob, only different people doing the same things in a foreign language. Build your house. Do well, make it comfortable, make sure you succeed.”

  He stared up at her face with his hand on her knee. He had a faint sense of humiliation, that she should now be telling him to do the very thing he had already decided to do. It was a constant choice, a battle. Hysteria or composure.

  He straightened and sat back on his heels.

  “Where did the money come from?”

  Sara shrugged and pursed her lips. “The bank paid out far more money than I expected. Lucky, yes?”

  “The bank that Father worked in?”

  “That's right.”

  “That was very generous of them.”

  “You say generous, I say fortunate. I always think if you have had bad fortune in your life then you will have an equal amount of good fortune. So here is mine, and I'm giving it to you because I'm too old for fortune. At my age everything is already decided.”

  “It isn't Father's money, is it?”

  She put the coffee cup on the floor near his knees and rested her large hands on her lap. “Jacob,” was all she said.