The Wilderness Read online

  Out of the bus, he and the dog begin searching the quiet streets. No travel offices to be seen, and his legs are beginning to ache now that they have had a chance to rest. Finally, as he is beginning to fret that he is lost, he finds one of the travel places. The front is all window with pictures of beaches and mountains. He tries the door but it won't open. With his head to the glass he sees that there is nobody inside, and when he looks around him, up and down the street, the story is the same, everything closed. It is quite dark.

  I want to go to Rome, he thinks sulkily. He and the dog scour each street hoping to find something open. He starts to feel hungry and the hunger addles his thoughts. What was it his mother wanted him to do with that money? It always felt like a test: Did she want him to spend it and rid the family once and for all of its European past, or did she want him to spend it on something that would prolong that past?

  And then there is the letter from Eleanor which he realises now he had quite forgotten about—just as he forgets about Eleanor he supposes. And he shouldn't do this; Eleanor is all he has. Did he drop it at his mother's house? It got somewhat lost in all the drama of the money. It had seemed so heavy with portent there in his pocket while he tried to play Debussy, and then it slipped from the picture. And then there are the letters he clutches now from Helen's lover, which he knows (and is happy for the absolute certainty of the knowledge) must not be opened. And Joy's letters, strange, intoxicating Joy, a surge of yellow in his mind. He is hungry and thirsty and can't think anymore.

  The streets become a jail; he is lost. One street just looks like another, and he finds himself climbing a hill steeper than his legs can manage, so that he sits halfway up catching his breath, stroking the poor dog's head and wondering at what point he became an old man.

  Hours must be passing. At the top he buys an ice cream just before the man packs up for the day and drives off. The cathedral is at his feet, the square empty but for a couple treading their way across with a packet of crisps, and darkness is falling fast. There is nothing he can do to get home, or get to Rome, there is nothing he can do for himself or for his dog to make this better. Once he would have been able to solve any problem or navigate through any city, and now he doesn't know which way is home, or how far it might be—only that he is exhausted.

  Another hour of walking around and he finds a bus; he came on a bus, so he must be able to go on a bus. Another half an hour and he is somewhere unfamiliar. A few questions to passersby to find out where he is, a blast of panic in the middle of a narrow street in a narrow town on what feels like the edge of nowhere, or worse still the edge of everywhere, as though another step will scatter him far and wide beyond himself. A slow, aching trail through the small town, past the fish-and-chip shop, blinded by a memory of Helen by the fire: monkey goes into space, Egypt, Israel. Freckles on her eyelids that she could never see. The static crackle of her petticoat as she took it off, little green flashes in the dark that made her gasp—my petticoat's flashing! Maybe he could get some chips, but he has lost the confidence even to do this, wondering what he would say to the person behind the counter. Maybe he will cry. Here. Sit here and cry?

  Another few minutes of moving forward, because moving forward is the instinct, and now there is a police place. He goes inside.

  “I'm lost,” he says. “I need to get home.”

  Some activity and showing driving licences and identity, establishing addresses, raised brows—he must have walked some fifteen miles before he got on the first bus, is he okay? Yes, but hungry, and the dog is thirsty. Both are given water, and then put into a car and driven across a now deeply dark flat landscape. Shame descends. He has done a bad thing. The police are involved.

  Gradually the motion of the car relaxes him, his legs relax, his head is heavy on the back of the seat, his hand a hot weight on the dog's head. So grateful for the police car that is taking him home, so very thankful. Though the dog sleeps soundly next to him on the seat, he is awake for the journey. The police drop them off outside the house, coming to the door to make sure this is where he lives, and to explain to the woman what has happened. She nods at the door in her dressing gown while he shuffles past to sit at the kitchen table; from here he has a view of her back. Wide back, short hair coerced into a band. He fidgets. Already the last few hours are hazy. If she asks, what will he say?

  When the police go she sits heavily opposite him with her head propped on her hand, just looking at him—in anger? In dismay?

  “You wrote me a love letter once,” he says.

  “I did.”

  “I don't know what I did with it.”

  “You burnt it. I found a corner of it in your grate.”

  She stands and wraps her dressing gown around her. “If you want to escape from me save yourself the effort. Any time you ask, I'll go.”

  As she leaves the kitchen he sees bottles floating on the sea. Hundreds of bottles with messages inside. Today, or sometime this week, he went to see the fox-haired woman and talked about cells. In his brain are countless cells—countless, but not infinite. To say infinite would be reckless. Inside each cell a little piece of him is packed, and every time a cell dies a piece of him dies. His past is just an electric impulse. Static flashes on a petticoat. Gradually he is being scattered and lost—hundreds of unread messages floating out across the sea.

  STORY OF THE LOVE LETTERS

  He crouched on the bedroom floor, spread out the paper, and drew plans. A large cube of glass here and another smaller one here, joined by a corridor. The low elevation, the seamless joints of glass, the lights embedded in the ceiling. An Irving Berlin record played through and began rotating silently as he worked. He glanced towards the money under the bed and set his thoughts back to the evening after they had decorated The Sun Rises.

  He replayed it: Rook and Eleanor had gone to stay at Sara's house; Eleanor often did this because she hated to be alone on the moors, and that night she was paranoid and spooked because of all they had smoked, and because of Joy's odd appearance at the door, and the likeness of her to the sign. She couldn't get it from her head that Joy was a ghost. The two women had not taken to each other at all. Joy had expressed— with her lazy feline lack of expression—huge enthusiasm for staying at The Sun Rises alone in all that darkness that was so lacking in London, where she lived, from which she was escaping for a few days. And so it was settled, and it was just him and Joy left there with a storm coming in and the rain beginning to fall.

  After Eleanor and Rook had gone, then, Joy had set foot on the white garden, realised that the concrete was still setting, and drew her foot back. She hopped onto the wall instead and walked around it to meet him. It was windy and getting dark, and in the distance Rook and Eleanor were making their way on bikes along the road. She sat on the low wall and, with long young fingers, folded her ear in half.

  “I've run away from home,” Joy yawned. “I can't decide whether to go back or go to America.”

  He looked up to the heavy sky. “America.”

  “Oh?” She arched a brow. “Have you been?”

  “On my honeymoon. I recommend getting a car and just driving and driving until you reach the sea.”

  “And then?”

  “Driving back again.”

  She inspected the fine layer of concrete on the bottom of her silk shoe but seemed unbothered by it. “You don't have to stay and look after me by the way.”

  He laughed at that, at the idea of looking after this woman. Then the rain had begun to fall, fluttering at first on the wind and then coming sudden and heavy; his thoughts were still muffled from the cigarettes they had smoked, and by contrast the rain was cold and soothing. He had no urge to go indoors.

  “Let's go for a walk,” Joy said, jumping from the wall. “You know the way animals huddle from the rain—well I can't bear that, huddling. The rain has to be faced.”

  She grinned and stalked out of the garden, across the concrete, and he followed, leaving their two sets of prints across i
t. As they walked he told her about the glass house he wanted to build and they linked hands—some solidarity against the rain perhaps, or some instinct to play their parts without unnecessary loss of time. They trudged half a soaked hour to a place from which they could see the Junk, a sunken house like a forgetful old man making his way somewhere, and behind it, in the dusk, the line of birch scrub like thin white limbs. And behind that, the great chimneys of the steelworks and the gas flame aglow in the rain, purple and unextinguishable.

  “Yes, here,” she had said. “Build your house here, so that the house is framed by the factory, d'you see?”

  She cut a rectangle in the air with her long arms. There was a coarseness about her, an enthusiasm that overlooked the mud on her hem and shoes; her dyed red hair was the rebel in a massive flat conformist landscape. He both liked and disliked the crude words she used to describe the house that she envisaged there, he liked and disliked it that she so easily shared his vision—excavate some land, the water table is so high here (look at the rain pooling already underfoot)—build a floating glass house like a lantern, hang silk in its windows so it glows against the black, green silk, purple silk, yellow silk. He liked and disliked her, and where the like and dislike met and cancelled out there was him, himself, some lost person found.

  “Green silk, purple silk, yellow silk,” she said, and turned amber eyes to him. Two molten castoffs from the sun, he thought. Two coins. Planets.

  “You're immortalised,” he said without thinking.

  She wiped rain from the end of her nose and flicked the drops into the torrent around them. “At last!”

  He smiled. “The woman on the new sign of The Sun Rises is you.”

  What was he saying? What nonsense. What a dishonour it was to his wife, from whose imagination the painting had come.

  “Apt then, Jameson.” (It was not the first time she had called him by his surname, as if they were partners in crime.) “Because I fully intend to be an alcoholic when I grow up.”

  “A good ambition.”

  “May as well have ambitions you can achieve. My family is full of not-quite-but-almosts.”

  He stared out across to the Junk, felt rain run down the back of his neck. Joy wrapped an arm around him. “I don't think you're like that, Jameson. You'll make it.”

  “We're huddling,” he said, and moved away.

  With Helen he would never be so abrupt, too protective over her, too concerned with keeping her happy. Joy just smiled, shook the affection from her hands, and laughed one single ha! as if she had caught him out.

  They made their way back to The Sun Rises. Reminded of it by the mud that was caking their legs he began talking about the myth of the golem, how the golem, in Jewish mythology, was a creation of the holiest of holies. The holy man would make himself a golem out of mud to prove that he, like God, was capable of creation. Then he would bring the creature to life with spells; the golem, brainless, without its own agenda or heart, would serve the holy man as a slave serves a master.

  “We are virtually made of mud,” Joy had said, flapping the sodden yellow material of her dress. “Never mind the golem.”

  They ran the rest of the way. Back at the pub they filled Eleanor's bath deep with hot water and got in fully clothed, shoes and all, until the water was brown. What he did not mention to Joy, what he would not want her to know, was that Rook had always joked—in a perfectly serious way—that he was Rook's golem, his dumb unfinished creature. And it had always seemed to be a harmless childhood game, all those play fights, always losing to Rook even when he could have won, always being controlled one way or the other. The thought of it through adult eyes sickened him. Then there he was in a bath with Rook's granddaughter, and it could go any way. Any way he wanted it. Rook had no part in this even though Joy was one of his own, his clan—he had no part in what happened next.

  They had peeled their clothes off and climbed into Eleanor's huge bed dripping, ignoring the untidy lovelessness of the room around them. Outside the bedroom window the new sign banged and swung in the wind. No words were spoken at all, none were needed, and anyhow the creak of the ancient bed did enough to fill the silence. Never, never had he felt so utterly aligned to another human being. Afterwards, as she rose from the bed and bent to her sodden dress, he bent with her.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “And me you, all of a sudden.”

  She had taken the leaf from the silk of her shoe and stuck it on his arm. He thought of how they were positioned, hunched double on the edge of the soaked bed, their heads pressed together.

  “We're huddling.”

  She smiled like a cat, like a cat that has just seen an open door.

  “That won't do, Jameson. That won't do.” She sat upright, stretching out her long spine, her skin taut and chalk white. She stood, pulled on her yellow dress which clung to her skeleton. A gunshot rang out over the moors—deer culling, he thought. Deer killing. And he briefly weighed the words for their difference while Joy cocked her head towards the rain pelting down the windows, then narrowed her eyes.

  “Guess what,” she said. “You've persuaded me. I'm going to go to America.”

  He leaned forward a fraction and touched her hair. “Don't.”

  “I'm going to go to America. Going to leave this rain behind.”

  So that was then, and some short time after that Joy went without a word, and some time after that came the money, and the paint on the sign outside The Sun Rises faded a little in the heat of the summer. Some time in amongst these times Eleanor's love letter came, declaring what she would never declare (or so she said) to anybody else, and saying also that she knew about Joy without him having to say a word—she knew, she just absolutely knew—instinct and jealousy told her so.

  Eleanor's take on his encounter with Joy was painfully tender. As she saw it, Joy entered the garden as tall and unapolo-getic as a sunflower, wearing a yellow dress and yellow shoes, and he, some dashing quixotic figure exhaling smoke, decided to deflower her. And when the moment came it was unequivocally wonderful, because the sunflower succumbed to his charm, and he to hers, and they were suspended from themselves and from time like dandelion clocks floating on the breeze. When they landed reality hit. He went back to his wife, she went to America. There was no remorse, only happy memories that would begin eventually to feel like dreams. He wondered how accurate this would prove to be, whether remorse would come. And he wondered how many times Eleanor had gone over and over the scenario in her head, poor Eleanor, relaying it with spelling mistakes, promising she would tell nobody what she knew.

  Though she intended for her words of love to hit hard, they instead landed on him so lightly. Toy words. So insubstantial compared to his compressed, shrinking, infinitely dense memory of Joy.

  Joy didn't write. Nothing came. He decided to cast her memory aside. The more he reflected on it the more he thought of how impassive she had been, and he wondered if he had perhaps taken advantage of her. She was very young. Rook's granddaughter. And he Rook's son in all but blood, in all the ways that were supposed to count. There was a sickly feeling of perversion, if not incest then something else which he could no longer put down to mere infidelity. As he read the lovely scenario in Eleanor's letter he was forced to confront its opposite scenario, that he had perhaps forced Joy into sleeping with him. Of course he hadn't forced her—but had he? How could he know for certain?

  Even more distressing was that he did not feel guilty, neither for Helen nor for Joy. He felt new. Visions of his glass house buoyed him until the coach house began to bleach out around him, and when he and Helen took to their Conception Events he focussed on his sudden hunger for another child and on the being that would become Alice. Helen had described her (you think hard enough, she said, and your thoughts will be the case). Pretty, average height, she will have long fingers and small ears and lilac eyes, a little elfin, honey skin, freckles, her father's strong nose. All this was very well, he thought, but not enough. She would h
ave Joy's height and arrogance, she would not be all good and all God, and lilac eyes were fine but Alice's eyes would be indecisive and refuse to settle for lilac alone.

  Upstairs the money sat under the bed in surprisingly few neat piles—a thousand pounds did not look much when it was stacked. It had been there for some weeks, and in those weeks he had made investigations into the ownership of the Junk, except that the task was far harder than he had imagined. The house belonged to a woman called Mrs. Crest, but nobody could find her. She had bought it several years before, in 1956, but never lived there, and left it to fall to its current state.

  He chased up all the possible leads until they ran dry; he made enquiries, rural communities had strong grapevines— but nobody knew of Mrs. Crest. Some had vague memories which turned out to be mistaken and some knew Mrs. Crest senior before she died, and there was an illegitimate son, or daughter, or no, that was a different Crest or maybe even a Croft, no, to be honest nobody paid much attention to those decrepit little houses. They were much more interested in the people on the new estate with the car, or the people who were going on holiday to Australia by plane (it was taking them three days, they had to stop all over the world). Nobody went on holiday to Australia by plane, if they went there they stayed for good. Mrs. Crest, probably, had done this. Probably never coming back.

  He took his wife and child across the moors and drove them right out to the prison, wanting to show Helen where the new building would be, wanting to show her for once what he did.

  “I suppose you could just—well, have the house and land,” Helen suggested in the car, in response to his long exposition of the problem.

  He smiled. “Steal them?”

  “No, use them. And if Mrs. Crest ever came back you could sort it out with her then.”

  “And if she didn't?”

  “Well then no harm done.”