The Wilderness Page 19

  “Helen, God would not approve.”

  “Don't simplify everything. Right and wrong come in shades of grey. You always try to simplify things to on or off. You're, what is it? Binary. You're Binary Man.”

  He laughed and wound the car window down to throw his cigarette out.

  “If you've tried everything you can to find her, Jake, and she's just disappeared, then—well,” she looked out at the manor house ahead, the stone lions at the gates, and played with her wedding ring. “Those lions are very striking. Are they to protect the prisoners from the outside or protect the outside from the prisoners? Anyway, about Mrs. Crest, it's just a suggestion.”

  “It's a really charming suggestion. I mean, what's property anyway? Why not just take what you want and then just settle it afterwards if needs be. No harm has ever come from people taking land from each other.” He shrugged in jest. “It's just land. The Palestinians, they don't mind. And that footpath we got rid of when we built those houses in Bromley, the local community didn't mind that at all, that's why they campaigned for two days in the rain to get it back. Pedestrians shouldn't be walked all over!”

  Helen glanced at him and tucked her hair behind her ear. “It's just a forgotten little piece of land, Jake.”

  “And with those words a thousand wars have begun.”

  They drove past the NO ENTRY signs and parked by the manor house in bays marked NO PARKING, where the first foundations were being dug up against the manor. Land for the grounds was being levelled, the topiary uprooted, a small fountain removed, the security fencing marked out by stakes and tape in a wide circle as far as the eye could see. As they walked around Helen became sullen and hugged Henry who, always deferential to her, was sullen, too. She was upset by the idea of imprisonment, she was upset by her inability to conceive straight away, she was tearful with pride at her husband's work, even if she could not condone it, she said the flatness no longer scared her but made her melancholy. She said she was sorry for being such a terrible wimp, and she smacked a kiss on Henry's cheek.

  And then a month later a letter arrived from America. In it Joy said that she had got his address from Eleanor and that she hoped he didn't mind her writing, but in the two months since she had left England she could not stop thinking of him. She even recalled a bruise he had had on his leg. She had met a man in California, a rich man who owned vines, and she was wondering whether to marry him—what did he think? If she did she would have to become a Jew, have a proper Jewish wedding (what if, she joked, she became his golem?). Did he think that was too big a step? Should she?

  The letter caught him off guard. He had not expected Joy to think of him and his bruises, or at least to think of them only in hate. He put the letter in a satchel and stuck it under the bed with the piles of money, as if under-the-bed had become a mythical place for all expectant things, as if Mrs. Crest herself would turn up there. As he drove out to get fish-and-chips that evening he mulled the letter over in his mind, his heart reeled despite his head knowing better; Joy, he repeated to himself.

  He came home and Helen poured him a beer, made herself a cup of tea, got forks, salt, and vinegar for the chips. They ate in front of the fire, and when they had finished eating Helen fed the fire with the newspaper, making the flames spit with fat. Last woman in Britain hanged. Dog goes into space. Fifty thousand jobs lost. Russia tests nuclear device. Monkey goes into space. He watched the news burn with pieces of fish batter. Helen leaned forward and took a triangle of paper that had dropped down through the grate, not that day but some day previous, and she asked what it was, the writing on that corner of paper. He told her it was a letter from Eleanor simply because he couldn't manufacture a lie any faster. Saying what? she asked. Saying that she is in love with me, he replied. Poor Eleanor, he had not meant to make her emotions public, it just came out in the rush of things.

  Helen frowned. Why are you burning it? she asked. You should never burn love letters. Love letters are okay? he asked. Yes, they are okay—so long as they are one-way. She patted his leg, put the corner of Eleanor's letter back into the grate as if that place of salvation was where it rightfully belonged, and turned the lounge lights off. Except for the firelight they were in darkness.

  Look, she said, pulling up her skirt, taking off her petticoat. As the satin rubbed against her stockings the material flashed, green sparks of static. It was such amusement to her. Look at me flashing!

  He smiled and watched the flames, drenched in chip fat, glow a similar green. Then she redressed, turned on the lights, sat looking into the fire. She confided that she'd had a love letter—a love note—from a man in her Bible group and she would keep it forever. D? he asked. She was surprised—yes, D, how did he know? Short for devil, short for disaster? Short for David, she said. He raised his glass of beer. Well then here's to David. Helen raised her cup of tea. And here's to Eleanor, poor Eleanor, and to being loved.

  The fatty flames snapped, wafting bad news and smells of vinegar into the room.

  Yes, they toasted in unison.

  Here's to being loved.

  9

  Time speeds up, rushing headlong into conclusions, then it stops. There is something teenagery about it. Something uncomfortable and maladroit as if it has not learnt how to pace itself with space.

  “No,” she says, and her words are the first indication that he has been saying something out loud. “No, Jake. It's you, not time. Time is just as it was. It's you, we have to help you re-learn, like I've been telling you.”

  She sits at the kitchen table beating eggs. Embarrassing, but he cannot remember her name. So desperately embarrassing because he sleeps with her, he knows her, she is not a stranger.

  Since he dragged the police into his disease things have changed; suddenly he is a liability, suddenly nothing he says or does can be trusted, as if it used to be quite an informal kind of illness and now it becomes official. The timeline is a mass of crossings out and corrections. He feels to be the supremely unconfident author of his own life. Question marks appear against words, then he deletes the question marks, thinking that if he doesn't question the truth there is no question about it. It is only him, as the woman says, only him who is confusing things.

  He bruises mint into the sugar solution with the back of a spoon and leans his senses into the sphere of the crisp sweet smell. Of course, there is no smell. Every day he wakes and thinks, today I will smell again. Some primitive optimism stirs: today I will smell again! And visions come, as if to correct that optimism—Henry as a warring adolescent in tight jeans and black boots, and that constricting shirt he always wore as if he were trying to commit suicide by his clothes alone; in the vision Henry's childhood is breaking from him like rocks from a cliff face, and the boy's adulthood is the result of some avalanche of which he, the father, is the unhappy cause. And of course this has nothing to do with being able to smell and not being able to smell, except for the sense of guilt, that the lack of smell is the punishment for bad parenting, for somehow allowing his son to lose his childhood. Or taking it away.

  “It's early for mint juleps,” she says, watching him make the mint syrup.

  “We used to drink mint juleps at four in the morning,” he counters.

  She smiles and pinches salt into the egg mixture. “Have you taken your tablets today?”

  “Yes,” he nods, and sits, allowing Lucky to rest her head on his knee.

  “Let me check.” She goes to the cupboard, to the small box in the cupboard, and opens it. “The pills are still here,” she remarks. “Which means you haven't taken them after all.”

  “Oh?”

  “I'll get some water.” She tips the pills from their bed of— white stuff, white wool—onto her hand and goes to the sink. This is her system, to section off two pills and then go back to check he has had them, as if she is tracking the behaviour of a badger in the garden, the strange snuffling behaviour of some nighttime creature.

  “I don't want them,” he says. “They give me a hea
dache.”

  She sits and pushes the glass towards him. “Is that why you didn't take them?”

  “I thought I had taken them.”

  “Yesterday, Jake, I found pills in the bin.”

  He shakes his head. “I didn't put them there.”

  “You mustn't lie. Honesty is everything.”

  “I'm not lying. I didn't put them there.”

  “Well, anyway. Have these.” She taps the table. “It's important, they're keeping you well.”

  “I didn't put them there. I just thought—I wasn't sure. I didn't put them there.”

  Already he cannot think what they are, where there is, nor what exactly they are talking about. He repeats the line, it comforts, it seems to have meaning even without his understanding it.

  She smiles faintly, her scrutiny deep with good intentions. She is wearing wide-awake and all-seeing makeup around her eyes.

  “You just wanted to get rid of them. I understand. They give you a headache, darling, I understand, but you must take them, they're doing you good.”

  He rises and pushes his chair away roughly. “I didn't put them there!”

  Fuming, lost, he wishes for a beach of stones and solitude, and him in a long coat facing the ocean, him coddled in a coat and miles of windless isolation.

  “This is insane behaviour from you, testing me,” he says. “I am not obliged to put up with it, I have a busy day.” He begins clearing plates and cups from the table and piling them in the sink. Stoically, she takes them out.

  “These are clean,” she says. “We haven't had breakfast yet.”

  He eyes this woman—this stranger, friend, those pearl-pink nails resting assured on wide hips, that firm regard, the silver thing hanging around her neck, the small cough that raises her chest. How dare she presume to be half known to him and half unknown. Darling, she calls him, and the word breaks his heart. Struggling from her gaze he takes a cup and smashes it against the wall, then stares with clenched fists at the mess.

  “I didn't put them there,” he says.

  “Your grandfather had a scar here and here,” he tells Henry. “Across both cheeks. At university the Jews would be challenged to fencing matches, and if they lost they ended up with a scar where the other man had made his mark—to show he owned the Jew. To—”

  “Stake out his territory.”

  “If you like. Territory. Yes, territory.” He straightens himself tall in the chair. “Of course the Jews learned to fence. They turned out to be better at it than the others. Success is the Jewish disease”'

  “All success is a disease, Jake.”

  Within moments the pause in the conversation becomes insufferable; the noise of chatter around them and a child babbling encroach on them. He used to love silences. Now they are just floodplains for questions and doubts, in which the seep of continual panic makes itself known.

  Henry has a bruise on his cheek, blue and rude. Neither has mentioned it yet except obliquely but it looks, he thinks, painful and has started to spread beneath his eye. He wonders what happened to the photograph of his grandparents. The fencing scars on his grandfather's cheeks had appeared silver and symmetrical, like tribal scars. Next to him his wife, holding her praise ring with a crooked smile that suggested she might, at any moment, throw the praise ring in the air, twirl around, and catch it. Henry has that look, too, that mischief.

  “What is your surname?” he asks Henry suddenly.

  “Jameson,” Henry says, and interlocks his hands at the end of outstretched arms, peering and serious.

  “Yes, Jameson, that's right. The same as me, of course.”

  He smiles and stirs the tea with his finger. It's hot; he withdraws his finger in surprise. It is gratifying and logical for him and Henry to share names—he can see himself in his son's face, in the dark eyes, black almost, and the long lashes, the straight line of the lips.

  “How did you get it?” he asks, waving a finger in the rough direction of his son's cheek.

  “Just a fight, nothing important.”

  “You shouldn't fight,” he hears himself saying. “You really shouldn't fight.”

  Henry scratches at his stubbled hair and frowns. “Sometimes you have to. Like you just said my grandfather had to— he'd have been cut to pieces otherwise. It clears the air, it establishes order.”

  “Yes but you shouldn't fight.”

  The conversation echoes in his ears as one he and Helen would have had, with the roles played by different actors— now he is Helen, and Henry him. But Helen would have said it with such force, giving anecdotal evidence and quoting from the Bible. The Reasonable Book she called it. The Reasonable Book favours peace amongst men, tolerance, gentility, turning the other cheek. He, on the other hand, says it merely as a lazy platitude because he is unable to think. You shouldn't fight, you shouldn't fight. It sounds right, after all—broadly acceptable, harmless enough, a wisdom given by a parade of faceless ghosts moving through his brain. He rests on his elbows, places his chin on entwined fingers. “How did you get the bruise?”

  Henry laughs. “I told you, it's not important.”

  Rage again, rage from nowhere—just looking at Henry's shorn head heats his blood, and seeing the shallow hills and wells of the skull that used to be covered by dark silk curls, and the lost beauty of the face, and the new beauty of age and fear, and the bruise. My child, he thinks. Straightening his shoulders again, winging them back, he pushes the bag he has brought across to Henry. Provisions, as they used to say. The things one provides.

  “You don't like my hair,” Henry smiles. After a pause he adds, “You were staring at it as if you wanted to put it in a bag and drown it.”

  He shrugs as he so often does now—a large vacant shrug. “I think it's quite difficult.”

  “I'd grow it,” Henry says, “but they like you to keep your hair the way it was when you came in, so they can identify you easily. I'd like to grow it.”

  “They don't want you to reinvent yourself,” he says, remembering this word, how Helen had said it to him on their second or third date while sitting on bomb ruins in Stepney, running her hands through his newly cut, oiled hair. You've reinvented yourself. For me? She is hopeful and happy. Can you reinvent yourself, he asks her, if you didn't invent yourself in the first place?

  “Exactly,” Henry responds. “We're supposed to stay as we are, to prove we're useless, to prove to society we're useless so society can feel useful in comparison.”

  And what did Helen say in return? He trawls his knowledge of her for an answer, feeling that he must end her sentences now that she can no longer end them herself, and that he will lose her if these memories fail him, lose her completely.

  “Henry, I tell you about your grandparents because it's important for you to know who you are and where you come from.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. There was a lot of money—there was very much money given to us when you were a baby, and it was from your grandparents, and their parents, and theirs. And it should have been yours and Alice's but I have failed you. In failing you, you won't ever know about them.” He reaches forward. “None of that will belong to you.”

  Henry gathers in the top of the canvas bag and holds it to himself.

  “It would have made no difference.”

  “It would have helped you—”

  “Be Jewish you mean? I'm not Jewish. I know about it all, my grandparents, Sara—all those weeks and months I spent with Sara cooking, we talked a lot. She always told me I was going to be amazing, some brilliant achiever.” His hand alights on his head briefly and then sails down, slaps a thigh lazily. “I know about it, and you're right, none of it belongs to me. I haven't worked out yet what belongs to me. This place, I suppose.” He looks around almost affectionately. “This place.”

  They sit quietly for a moment.

  “So what happened about the letters?” Henry asks. “Have any more come?”

  “No, no more. I have them, here, do you want to see the
m?” His hand cradles them in his pocket and he goes to put them on the table.

  Henry bars the offer with his palm. “I don't want to see them. They're Helen's. It's like putting her underwear on the table or something.”

  Yes, he thinks. Rather like that. Rather an exposure.

  “I opened them,” he tells his son, “and I know who they're from. A man called D, David.”

  Henry narrows his eyes. “Last time you were here you gave a long speech about how you wouldn't open them—it wasn't morally right, an unopened letter is the property of the sender, etc. etc.”

  He has no recollection of those words or that visit; it is bleached out like the pattern from a tablecloth. No recollection of when he last saw Henry, no traceability for his own words.

  “Well,” he replies eventually. “I did read them, and the sender is a man called D. It's short for devil.” He smiles, feeling genuinely amused for a moment. “And he was your mother's lover, another Bible lover, he used to come to her Bible groups. I've met him in fact.” He adds, dishonestly, “He's extremely ugly.”

  “Her lover?”

  “Yes, and the letters are very animated.”

  Animated, he thinks, but not at all erotic. He leans forward, puts the letters on the table, and spreads his palms on the— what is this, what can it be called?—this table plastic. “They are about Moses and the Mountain of Solitude. And the Ten Commandments. You go up the mountain to pray, and down the mountain to have sex. You see, you have to go down the mountain sometimes. D says there is nothing wrong with what he and Helen did. It's about weeding. It's in the Bible.” He bangs the table softly as he says this. “It's in the Bible.”

  His son looks quizzical and forlorn, and so he reaches forward and takes the small hands, overwhelmed by a need to protect and restore, and be a father, a good open-minded father.

  “Henry, she will have had her reasons for what she did,” he assures.

  They sit like this for some moments and he is surprised that Henry does not recoil, or that he himself does not. Henry appears to know nothing about his disease—surely he would recoil if he did. The timid little child was always afraid of infection by others. He would whip his hands away now if he knew his father's mind was rotting, but because he does not there is a sense of victory, over the disease itself and its captious, jeering nature: something is only a fact, he tells himself, when a lot of people know it. Until then it is an unfledged rumour.