The Wilderness Read online

  There is clatter from the—the tea place, the tea shop; the woman has dropped something and its smashed pieces mosaic the floor. He sees the liquid spread, hears some ragged applause and a quiet opera of sounds he cannot place, sees everything as if in slow motion and for the first time. Seeing it miraculously, roundly, sharply, red, blue, white, quiet. He blinks at leisure. The experience is new, he thinks, as if he has just fallen to earth. Everything mint and unreasoned.

  In time he relinquishes hold of his son, and Henry turns the letters in his hands.

  “They're not even opened, Jake.”

  “Let me see.” He takes them from his son and observes the sealed V of paper. “No, no they aren't, you're right.”

  “So how did you read them?”

  “I don't know, but I did read them. I remember it.”

  Henry leans back and looks around.

  “When I get out of here we'll go flying. You know that flight I bought you—we'll do it together next time.”

  “I must have fastened them again,” he says quickly. “Yes, I definitely did that. I used the sticking things.”

  “I'll be out in about five months. Maybe less. We'll go flying.”

  “I used the sticking things—that's right, let me see—”

  Henry draws his finger to his lips to signal silence, then reaches into the pocket of his trousers.

  “Here, Jake, I got you a present.”

  On his son's palm is a glass dome, and inside the dome is winter. Loose white, like snow. Inside, navigating the snow, is a mother and child. They hold yellow hats on their heads against a wind nobody else can feel, and their yellow scarves snake up on the same wind, to confirm its direction. It blows across them, left to right. Their long coats are as white as the snow and the yellow is everything, all the colour in the world, the yellow is what makes the white white. Henry shakes the dome and holds it between thumb and forefinger. Without the scarves and hats the mother and child would be phantoms in the flurry.

  Henry hands it over. “Here,” he says. “My cell mate was given it by his grandma and he threw it away. I took it out of the bin, I thought you might like it. The poet wanted it—because I had it, such a fucking child—he tried to take it.” He gestures, yours, have it. “That's what the fight was for, if you must know.”

  “For this?”

  “Yes,” Henry says. “For that.”

  STORY OF THE MUFFLING SNOW

  “But even if you could find Mrs. Crest and buy that land, how could you build on it anyway?” Helen asked. “It's foolish.”

  She held Henry above her head, both of them grinning and gurgling, then she turned and became serious.

  “I'm sorry, Jake—but it is a little foolish. Isn't it? You can't build on the peat. It's useless, when I just walk on it I sink—”

  He sat on the sofa, his knees wide. “Have you seen the plans for the new M62? It goes right across the Pennines, across miles and miles of peat moor. Do you know the lengths they'll have to go to just to be able to stand on the peat and cut it out? If they can do that, Helen, I can do this.”

  “You said yourself that there's land for sale everywhere all around the moors. Just not on the moors.”

  “Right, not on the moors.”

  He took a mouthful of cherry wine; it was raw in his throat.

  “Why must you always prove yourself?” she asked.

  “I want something good for us.”

  “This is good. Everything we have is good.”

  Some emptiness made itself known to him; a hole, a distinct yearning for something more than this. “I just want it,” he said, spreading his arms. “Glass, coloured silks, a sea of black. Some sense of achievement and—”

  “Control,” she said, hugging the baby. “Power.”

  “No. Satisfaction.”

  “You're spilling your wine.”

  He looked down to find there, on the carpet, a wine stain. “Satisfaction,” he said, correcting his hold on the wine glass. “When did you start walking on the moors anyway?”

  “While you're at work, we go don't we, Henry? We love it. It's magical.”

  She began waltzing the baby slowly around the room. Beyond her the late-evening sun glared through the window, holding her in silhouette. Birds flew up behind her in the garden, startling colours flashing and beating on the air.

  “Sometimes we go and see Eleanor,” she said. “Sometimes we talk to the peat cutters, and they show us what they've found. Little wooden Bronze Age tools and Roman whistles. From time to time, Jake, they find whole trees preserved in the peat, did you know that? Birches and oaks.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I did, yes. When I was a child—” He dismissed the sentence and passed his eye over the stain. That sensation in his gut again, yearning, fear of nothingness. “So—you're happy here?”

  She stopped her waltz and smiled. “Yes. We're happy. And you?”

  We, you, as if Helen and Henry were one, and he a quite separate other.

  “I'm happy enough, yes, but I want this house. I'll show you the drawings. Let me get them.”

  “All you ever want is what you don't have,” she said mildly. “All you ever think about is what is far away.”

  I remember how orange your hair was, he wrote. How long will it take for the dye to fade, or has it already? Will it fade or will it grow out?

  And in answer to Joy's question, in her previous letter, about his bruise, he wrote that he got it falling from the step ladders whilst cleaning the windows. Anyhow it was gone now, that bruise. He wrote that he loved her, he did it, he braved the words again without even knowing if they were true, and in the process of writing they became true. A gunshot, a yellow dress, hair tangled over her shoulders, a woman with a man behind her eyes. Joy; he repeated her name to himself as he sealed the envelope and penned out her Californian address in his tall, stiff letters.

  D, he heard as he crossed the drive to the car. D, see how Henry loves you? He's so happy with you!

  Helen and her Bible group were gathered in a circle of chairs under the almost-bare cherry tree; it was late in the season to be outside. They were wrapped in Helen's blankets and the cold, failing light seemed to dignify their struggle with the large questions. Always the large questions, he thought. Every week they took the Reasonable Book and bartered with it: How do we reconcile anger with God? How do we best protect our children in a dangerous world? Is it right to hang a man or a woman for a sin? An eye for an eye—but doesn't that eventually leave us all blind? What will happen to me when I die? My hands? My soul? Does it say in Revelation? Where? What page, what verse?

  Henry was cocooned in blankets in the man's arms, D's arms—and D was smiling and nodding as the conversation moved around the circle. Today they were discussing Jeru salem. What little he had caught of the conversation revealed their abstract view of it, a city of peace, a city that symbolised man's redemption. What absurdity, he thought. A city is a city, nothing more or less than the people and buildings that make it up. There is no timeless miasma that hangs around it perpetually restoring its spirit; its spirit is only flesh and bricks.

  He said so. “There are probably nuclear weapons in Jeru salem as we speak,” he offered as he opened the car door. A shudder passed through the group. Nuclear weapons was a phrase to shrink from, this was the sixties, nuclear weapons were for earlier cruder times than these.

  “Jake,” Helen warned.

  They eyed him with disdain, D especially. Good, he thought. D was a good-looking man in a closed, harmless way, and Helen looked astonishing beside him—something of D's tame-ness freed her of her own. They looked like they understood each other. She was beautiful with her legs curled and her body lost to the blanket; he only knew her lap was there because the Bible was resting on it, otherwise she was a swirl, a question mark, an open question. Her almond freckled face appeared as a beacon of hope and health in the ill light. Beautiful, he thought, terrifically so. “Helen,” he said, content to leave her this way, with D. Beauti
ful with D. “I'm going to post a letter, I'll be back soon.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course. Be as long as you need.”

  “You'll be all right?”

  “I'll be more than all right.”

  After posting the letter he kept driving. The ridge pulled him in its direction and he assumed he would stop there, that the pull would end and he would linger long enough to recollect his time there with Helen, earlier that week, when they had flown the plane. As an early birthday present she had given him a model glider attached to a bungee cord; once propelled only God knew where the plane would land. They had taken it to the ridge, Helen running and shouting, There it goes! Chase it! How she loved the dream of flight. Every escapist urge in her converged on the wings and engine of an aeroplane. He thought he would stop there at the ridge and fondly recall Helen of a few days ago running along its spine with her heels flicking behind her, but he did not seem to want to stop. He continued beyond the ridge farther than he had been for years, right out to the sea.

  Theirs was a long and frozen coast. Seals littered it. He hated to see them, thinking they must be cold and bored simply lying there with their great gelatinous eyes. There was often snow in the air even when the day was warm elsewhere. As a family the three of them had come here when he was a child, he, Sara, and his father. His father had seemed proud of his English coast (as he thought of it, His English Coast), and afraid of it also, because at the point at which the tide met the sand England was truly jeopardised. It became no-man's-land, then at some point Europe. It became everything of Sara that he neither knew nor understood.

  Regardless of the weather they would lay a tablecloth out on the sand and sit a little way back from the seal rocks. His father ate fish-and-chips with—when he came to think of it now—jealous, nationalistic enthusiasm, and he and Sara followed, Sara always bringing a plate from her bag to put the food on, discarding the newspaper by folding it small enough to go in the pocket of her coat. Once done, she would eat hungrily and squint out across the sea. He never knew which to follow, Sara's strenuous long-range gaze or his father's absorbed one, squirrelling attention to everything near. He tended to settle for the middle distance, finding there two-dozen pairs of seal eyes blinking into their own horizons. He would eat and read the paper over his father's shoulder. Dog goes into space. Israel. Dog, monkey. The three of them would eat in peaceable silence.

  Now pulling the Mini into the car park he followed the path through dune grass and came out onto the wide stretch of sand. The tide was out and the sand was tinged grey by the threat of snow. There were already fragments of it sharp on the wind. Ahead, standing with their arms linked, was a couple. They were distant and beyond the seal rocks, but he knew without doubt or hesitation who they were. The shorter one, in a long coat, barely moving, was Sara. The taller one whose legs seemed impossibly long against the endless horizontal landscape of beach, horizon, and low sky was Rook. Rook's arms were pointing over here, over there. Sara turned her body to follow their direction, and then the two of them walked a few paces forward towards the sea.

  He thought they would, at some point, stop and reenact the family picnics of old, Rook sliding in seamlessly to take the place of the father, a few memories walking in to take the place of the child. Only this time both arms (the long and the short) would point out over the sea and both minds and mouths would dream of what was beyond. Hallo Europe, they would say. Nice to not see you! But their collective mind would see it. There would be a lot of keen talk and laughter, and swapped tales of Austria and Italy which would pass between them like small electric shocks.

  But in any case they didn't stop for any such reenactment. They walked on with linked arms towards the sea. Snow blew in from the north. No use looking out over this sea for warmth and comfort. America was the other way, and California the other side of it. It was not wrong to be in love with Joy; it may seem selfish from an outside perspective, but it was not wrong for him to strike out for something he wanted where it caused no harm, where it could come to nothing. He did not even want it to come to anything, he just wanted something for himself. Sara and Rook had always had each other. Look at them linked like particles. Nothing could break them.

  The sky was thickening with snow and the flakes hurried inland with the waves. Sara and Rook kept walking. And they kept walking. They were ankle-deep in water. He dug his feet into the sand and watched, perplexed, while the seals snoozed on. Then they were knee-deep. Sara pulled her coat tighter; Rook took his off and put it over her shoulders. Then Rook was waist-deep and Sara in up to her chest, then armpits, Rook's coat fanned out across the water. He took a step forward in alarm and waited for them to spread their arms and start swimming.

  All that remained of Sara was her dark head, and of Rook his head and shoulders like a bust the waves had sculpted. With one wave Sara's head was gone. He ran forward and called out but the snow rushed into his mouth and muffled the word. He stopped. Rook was gone, too. Surely their heads would come back up and their bodies would be swimming. Nothing. He ran forward again. The snow muffled the sea. The white sky left the water black and quiet.

  10

  Eleanor turns briefly.

  “Your mother and Rook didn't drown,” she says. “Where did you get that idea from?”

  She goes back to digging the compost. The cherry tree is thick with leaves and the tight red fists of new fruit; birds hover above its branches. His eyes blink at the aggravated bash of the birds' wings.

  “I can think what I like.”

  “But it isn't true.”

  He sits on a fold-up chair Eleanor has put out. He knows it isn't true, but he feels belligerent. Can he not say things that aren't true? If there is no freedom in words and thoughts then where is there freedom?

  And anyway in a sense it is true, in that Sara did finally drown when they scattered her ashes over that very same sea, a vision that comes to him now at a slow swoop: Sara is dead (when did she die?), Mother is dead (how did she die?), Mama is dead. Some part of him knows this should matter more than any other thing, and yet he meets the forgotten news with bareness. Alive, dead; there is a profound difference, but he does not know what it is. It affects him, but only as a news bulletin from a distant land.

  Eleanor crouches and, holding a piece of bread for the birds, waits for them to fly near. They flap to the ground, hop, but they will not come to her hand.

  “Don't you remember that winter,” he says, “and the muffling snow, and we had to clear it away. You must remember that.”

  “The muffling snow.” She chuckles. “I do remember. I remember everything.”

  He folds his arms. “Well then.”

  It is not that he thinks Rook and Sara did really drown that day, nor that he is confused, just that it is a scenario he has run through countless times and whose tragic slant has become addictive to him. Had this terrible thing happened everything he is might be viewed differently perhaps, with more consequence and sympathy, as one might view the mess in a room differently when they discover it was made by a burglar. Somehow it is not enough to just go wrong in life, to just get things wrong. There has to have been a terrible drama that sets the stream of errors in motion. Had Sara and Rook walked into the sea that day, he would be exonerated. Everything, every other thing would be excused.

  “It would have been tragic if they'd died that way,” Eleanor says, watching the birds. “You need to get the idea from your head.”

  “Tragedy is a good thing,” he counters. “Interesting thing.”

  She sits upright for a moment. “How can you say that? Haven't you had enough of it to know better?”

  “I haven't had it at all.”

  “Your wife died! Your wife died of a stroke at the age of fifty-three. She was perfectly healthy and happy, then suddenly she had a stroke and was gone. Believe me, that is tragic.”

  “Death is only tragic when it happens to people under fifty. Death over fifty is just life. It's not sad. Nobody allows the sad
ness, you just have to get on and cope.”

  She extends her arm farther to the birds, hunches her back.

  “You lost a child.”

  “That was my fault, so it isn't tragic. Tragic is when nobody can help it. Comes from the sky. Comes like a downpour.”

  When she tries to speak he turns his head away slowly until she is discouraged enough to stop.

  “Jake, you seem to think so badly of yourself,” she says eventually. “How can you think it was your fault? You seem to think everything you've ever done is wrong. You're a nice man, you've always been such a nice man.”

  He needs the toilet; he can't remember where in the house it is and if he will need to go upstairs, and then if so, which stairs. Two sets. One has to choose carefully. A nice man. Poor Eleanor, she is always so mistaken about everything, so deluded.

  “I know you, Jake, I know everything you've done, and you aren't bad. What horrors are you building in your head? What fantasies? What for?”

  He keeps his head turned from her and stares into the blankness until his eyes are dry.

  “Tell me what you think, Jake.”

  Suddenly he feels too confused to answer. Everything seems disbanded and rolling away too fast to fetch.

  “Won't come,” she says finally of the birds, and, frustrated, throws the bread on the grass.

  He comes to his feet, scattering the birds with his sudden movement, and picks up the bread piece by piece. Then he holds out his hand and stays perfectly still. If he is a nice man he will just die, as Helen was a nice woman and died. The fates clear away the nice first, and then get into the real business with the wicked. I don't want to die, he thinks. I want to go home. I do not want to die before I have got home.