The Wilderness Read online

  “I loved him,” she said, as if sealing the debate. “He was a friend. So there you have it.”

  The edges of the woods were visible from this central path, and beyond them ploughed fields. In the car, on the roadside where the trees abruptly ceased, Helen would be waiting for them, leaning back against the new leather as she breast-fed. Today had been the first time Sara and Helen had met; it had been brief and cursory with all focus on the baby. They had each agreed that Henry was beautiful; they had reached a broad consensus about the way a baby's face is so general, made to a recipe of unbearable dearness, and Sara had added something about the way the dearness is at some point lost in a spurt of growth and features. She and Helen had looked at him and laughed as if to suggest that he was the living example of this loss. He had touched his own face self-consciously. In fact he was good-looking and they all knew it, and an appreciative silence followed as they all considered, he was sure, how very similar he and his son already were, how alike in mannerisms, especially the comic way Henry, only weeks old, held his hands thoughtfully to his chin.

  All in all he thought the meeting between his wife and mother had gone well. It was a short encounter, yes, but Sara did not like first-time meetings to last long, even intimate ones like these. She liked to look, as if deciding whether she would buy, and she liked to go away and think before she said anything she might not mean. She had looked long at his new wife and baby, bowed, and said quietly, “A privilege to meet you.” He had thought, perhaps, that she meant it.

  “Is sincerity not a good thing, Sara?” he asked, throwing out the gritty dregs of the coffee.

  “I said she was too sincere. Too much of anything is tiresome, she will push you to acts of goodness that don't suit you very well. You are my child, I want you to be what you are and not what a pretty girl from the suburbs wants you to be.” She shrugged, and in her black mourning dress took measured steps, one two—three four, one two—three four. “I have something for you,” she added.

  As she crouched again, digging into her bag, he thought of how she was, or had become, a thousand acts of goodness herself, straitjacketing herself into Englishness, cooking the food his father liked, dispensing with the excess sugar and fat, shearing off her mother tongue, evicting her past, funnelling, tapering. Goodness could be a narrow state; perhaps she was right.

  “How is Rook?” he asked as he waited.

  “Rook? Oh, Rook is fine, of course.”

  “And?”

  She glanced up. “And?”

  He leaned back against a tree and turned his cup in his hand. “Perhaps you could marry him.”

  “We go driving together sometimes,” she said, looking away. “We drive out to the coast to check if Europe is still there. We've checked across the sea so many times, we have never yet seen it, but we assume it must still be there. So we eat saveloys and wave at it. Hallo Europe, we say, nice to not see you. We are altogether senile, at least Rook is. I pretend, huh, to keep him company.”

  “So is that a yes, or a no?”

  “Jacob.”

  “Mama.”

  “You know I don't like to be called mama.”

  “Nor I Jacob.”

  “Well then aren't we both rebellious.”

  By now she had abandoned her search in the bag. She slouched forward as elderly women generally do not, certainly as she generally did not, and gazed ahead blankly. Then, as if awakening, she took a shoe box from her bag that could not possibly have taken her all that time to find, and stood.

  “Here,” she said, and smoothed her hair; it was still remarkably dark between the grey strands, and glossy.

  He put the empty cup in his pocket. When he opened the box he found a Bible. It was old, the leather weakened to the feel of silk under his fingers. They had stopped walking by now, and he knelt on one knee, his mother lingering above him. Then she crouched and put her head close to his; her hair smelt of lilies.

  “It belonged to my parents,” she said. “Why don't you have it, now that you're married to a religious woman? It's my gift to you both, maybe a wedding gift since you just ran away and married in secret.”

  “Sara—”

  “No, I'm not angry, I'm happy you did it that way. Too much song and dance the other way, too much money.”

  He nodded, a little underwhelmed by the gift—touched and even excited that it was from his grandparents, but without any wish to own a Bible. The samovar perhaps, the praise ring his grandmother had used, the objects of charm and intrigue that belonged to an estranged world. But a Bible? Was his mother mocking him?

  “Helen will like it,” he said eventually, deciding to find in his mother's gesture some attempt at friendship with his wife.

  “I doubt it, the cover is human skin,” she said. “She may be too sincere for human-skin Bibles. But you don't have to tell her.”

  He coughed. Involuntarily his fingers danced across the leather, not wishing to rest anywhere. He eyed his mother then, assessing her, trying to show that he was not thrown by her games.

  “My parents kept the Bible out of rebellion,” she said, conceding to explanation. “My father bought it for his bookshop—Bibles sold very well in those days, people were very afraid the world would end if they didn't pray hard enough. Then he discovered how it was bound and he kept it, as a rebellion against all this madness, this Catholic madness and hysteria. He thought it—how can I say it—belittled the Catholics, to have their precious holy Bible bound with a precious holy human. Jews do not believe they are the only creatures that matter. Catholics not only believe it, they know it as a fact. He wanted to mock them. He had a dry humour.”

  “I see,” he said, recollecting the photograph of his grandparents that lived on the dresser in Sara's living room. The picture showed a large, elegant, and nervous-looking middle-aged man, standing next to a thin, broad-grinning woman. He remembered how Sara polished the image with a flourish, saying, Here, my father, as if all history gathered up its skirts and knelt at the foot of this man.

  “I'll keep it for myself,” he said.

  “It's very valuable.”

  “I'll keep it. I won't give it away to Helen. You say I'll give myself away to her but here it is—here is me not giving anything.”

  Here is me being your child, he thought to say. He put the box under his arm and began walking. The road was close; he could see the back end of the Mini parked up in the lay-by.

  Sara laughed lightly. “It is hardly that simple. The most important things are given without even knowing. We have a very strong tendency to give exactly what we can't afford, Jake, that's why I warn you. I sound morbid, but what sort of mother would I be if I didn't tell you the one thing I know.”

  Just before they reached the car he put his hand on Sara's shoulder.

  “Do you know,” he said to his mother, “I think Helen and I will move back.”

  He said it before he thought it, in fact he said it hours before he thought it, so that he was in the free fall of inebriated, unplanned speech. “Helen would grow to like it here, she's already introduced herself at the church, perhaps I can do good things.”

  He waited for her response, but none came. She watched him with what he could only summarise as politeness.

  “What is there here after all,” he went on, “except moors and more moors? Peat and more peat. We need buildings, community buildings, facilities, places to swim, new schools. I see they're planning to extend the prison, that's a big project, to think how to contain people and at the same time how to reeducate them—”

  “And punish them, I hope.”

  “Punishment isn't the point of prisons.”

  “If you say.”

  He was always surprised by Sara's staunch view of things. He always fell into the misconception that a member of an ill-treated race will naturally be for freedom, naturally against bindings in human skin, naturally sickened by all that demeaned and failed to enlighten.

  “Everything is falling into apathy here,”
he said. “And London has enough architects. It won't miss me. I feel like a child there, no, an orphan, a boy playing with building blocks. I'm a father now. I'm coming home.”

  Sara stopped at the entrance to the woods and put her hand on the trunk of a tree. It was all pines here, pines and larches and that sharp clean smell of a place without history. He liked the flat sterility of it, and the idea that his home was something quite banal, quite blank, whose history was yet to be made, or never to be made. A place that was not sodden with sentiment. A place that was just coming alive with industry and gathering a population and looking ahead to a future it had no precedent for.

  “Are you contemplating another dance?” he asked his mother, who stood at the tree in silence.

  “My husband,” she rasped, sinking slightly. She was sobbing completely without sound. “Shit,” she said. “Shit.”

  He went to embrace her, comforted by her sudden sadness. She straightened and pushed him gently away. She wiped her red eyes dry. “I am happy, Jake, that you're moving home,” she said then. “It will make a nice place for a child.”

  From here he could see Helen sitting in the backseat of the car, the door open, tucking her breast into the black sweater while the baby slept on her lap. A nipple vanishing into mourning clothes and her legs bent stiffly against the front seat. Hurriedly he shrugged himself out of his coat and wrapped the Bible in it so his wife wouldn't see, and he wedged it in the back on the floor. They took their places in the car and he turned to his wife and the baby, leaned to them, made a noise like a pigeon, a low coo. The car smelt of milk and of dirty laundry shoved into bags. Together the four of them drove in near silence to Sara's home, with only the occasional comment from Helen—The baby's watching you drive Jake, Look at that kestrel (he contested, It's a buzzard, not a kestrel, they're very different), What's growing in that field, Is that the sea, over there? She looked afraid, he thought.

  Mama, he kept wanting to say, with nothing to follow it. Mama. He called her mama because it annoyed her—not because he wanted to annoy her but because he had, he found, a marvellously perverse capacity for accidentally doing the very things she hated. And she had the marvellously perverse capacity to appear to love him more when he did something she hated.

  He observed the mammoth clouds and steel sky, the open stretch of moors and the patches of mutilation where the peat was being extracted. The corners of his mouth kicked into brief smile. Mama, he wanted to say as he turned to her in the passenger seat and saw a streak of yellow along the black of her hair. Mother, the lily has stained your hair. But he said nothing; leave it there, leave her to be ridiculous.

  Eventually he had to fold his hands tight around the steering wheel so as to avoid reaching across and dusting it off. He could only conclude that not all relationships were simple.

  Sara put the key in the lock and edged her way indoors. During coffee and then supper he weighed up whether he could broach the subject of the future. It was on his mind to ask her if she would go back to Austria; it would be an insensitive and hurried question but he felt he must ask; suddenly he felt he must know the layout of their futures. On the verge of his asking, as they were picking at a plate of biscuits, Sara eyed him and gave a low, short chuckle.

  “I've forgotten the language,” she said. “My own language. To think, I couldn't go back if I wanted to.”

  “You haven't forgotten the language,” he said quickly. He had heard her that morning talking to herself in German while she put on her black dress and grey shoes, slotting the lily into her hair even despite his insistence that this was not custom, to wear flowers in the hair at funerals.

  “I have. Every word of it.”

  “But Sara—”

  “Another biscuit?”

  They all shook their heads.

  He watched her closely for the rest of the evening. Of course she would not go back; her friends were dead, how could she bear the guilt of not being dead herself? She lived in a distinctly British house in, save for a few Austrian ornaments and pieces of crockery, a distinctly British way. Built between the wars, the house itself was the consciousness of Britain, the glass at its entrance stained with the bright painted colours of a galleon sailing into victory after the First World War, and every man, woman, or child within those walls a sailor by extension, and a victor.

  Of course she would not go back, and he did not want her to, but that evening he began to carry with him a frustration, that of a story unfinished. As a child there had always been myths and tales about home, and he had assumed that one day this word home would stop referring to something merely imaginable and begin to be real, and Sara would go back and reclaim herself, and he would reclaim the lost half of himself, and the story would complete. Now of course, that place called home had been deftly swapped for somewhere else: this. There wasn't another half of himself. He deposited lilies into vases and let them crowd the dining table. He must accept it.

  The evening wore on quietly. They listened to the radio and Helen disappeared upstairs for an hour or so with the baby. He thought of the Bible and wondered what Sara had meant by the gift. Its beauty and relevance had grown in his mind; knowing that it was bound in human skin, knowing it was not, therefore, what it first seemed to be, and knowing that its cover contradicted its contents (for nowhere in the Bible could it say, And their skins shall be stretched for leather). He noted in himself, not for the first time, a liking for the perverse. He thought tenderly of how he might attach a building of clean prefabricated concrete to that excellent gothic manor that currently housed the prison and how out of keeping that would be, what a clash of ideals. How iconoclastic—a word he had learned well at university. He thought of his father's grave and which parts of his father's person would survive longest in this acidic Lincolnshire soil. Would he still fart for a few days in that coffin, still excrete fluids? How long would it take his polished leather shoes to decompose?

  “What's that?” Helen asked as they readied themselves for bed that night. She struggled to pull her sweater over her head; he assisted.

  “It's a present from Sara.” He threw the sweater over the shoe box.

  “For you?”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “I'll show you another time, it's personal.”

  “Personal?” Helen queried, bending over a whimpering Henry in his pram. “I'm your wife. What could be more personal than that?”

  He stripped down to his underpants and climbed into the single bed. The spare room was not big enough for a double bed; there was a larger spare room but, against everything Sara stood for as a person, it was full from floor to ceiling with a lifetime of his father's junk. It would always be that way, he supposed. Sara would not suddenly defend her values against the man now, not after all this time.

  “Come to bed,” he replied. “I need you here, it's been a long day.”

  She came. They made love quietly so that Sara wouldn't hear. Afterwards, while she slept, he thought intensely of hiding the Bible from her as if it had become the very cornerstone of his independence. Perhaps it was the morose headiness of the day that left him so obsessed with the idea. In his grave, his father clung vehemently to his patent shoes and his pocket watch. Downstairs Sara clung similarly to her chipped coffee cups. Everybody needs a thing that is their own, he decided. Momentarily he was afraid of giving, feeling himself, as a man, to be a one-way river running into the sea of his wife, impregnating her so she could grow but not ever growing himself. To already be thinking these things, after less than a year of marriage! These were morbid nighttime thoughts; in the morning he would be more cheerful.

  At some point in the night he awoke to Henry's crying, then he slept. When he woke up again he discovered that the baby was sleeping belly down on Helen's chest. With all three of them in bed he couldn't sleep for fear that he would crush them both, and so he lay sweating in a pole-like stance all night thinking of the future. Against that thought he considere
d the monstrous tower block he was building in London. They had run out of money and stuffed its joints with newspaper; newspaper was a useless building material. There had been controversy about it and he had fought to prevent these ridiculous desperate measures, but had not succeeded. One day the whole block would fall down. He did not want to be there to see it.

  In the morning he told Helen, “We will move, leave London, we will get our things and come back.”

  The day after that, before returning to London, he drove Helen and the baby out across the peat moors.

  “I want to show you where I was brought up, maybe it will give you an insight,” he told his wife.

  “I don't need an insight into you, Jake, you're an open book.”

  He laughed and tapped the wheel. “Only someone who needed an insight into me could think that.”

  They drove along the straight, empty lanes that formed a grid across the peat, Helen looking out of the window, astonished still at this landscape that was not London, nor like any countryside she had seen. She was full of questions which she asked with a sceptical note. What are those? Dykes? What's a dyke? This used to be an island? Will we sink, Jake, if we stay here long enough will it be an island again?

  That morning, as they were packing the car, he had declared that they should come here to live. He told her. Had he asked she would have said no. No, passionately, definitely. And he knew he would not have been able to handle or manipulate those words, nor change her opinion. It was better, then, to cut off the possibility of objection and deal instead with the flurry of questions that would come. They had been coming all day, and all day he cured them with answers. Yes, there will be plenty of work, of course we can visit London, your parents, our friends. No darling, we won't sink, we'll take root. Yes, we'll be happy, you'll be happy. I wouldn't do anything to make you unhappy.

  She was afraid of moving to this odd, backward, and (she hesitated over the word, then almost whispered it) uncivilised place. She said she could see too far. The great hourglass cooling towers were monstrous to her and the steelworks, though way in the distance, hummed like something at breaking point.