The Wilderness Page 21

  The breeze needles his hair, his brain empties thought by thought, and he feels himself become slowly inanimate. Mindless, motionless, a stopped clock. Even the need to urinate has gone. The birds approach. Hours and days pass without breath or thought. He begins whispering Irving Berlin: Honey, and I've decided, love divided in two wont do. A smile takes his face and he can feel it lift him. One by one the birds take the bread from his fingers.

  In the actual memory it is November and the sky is so full of snow it seems unable to support itself. The sea is black. The threat of snow muffles the mind. The couple stops walking, Rook takes Sara's hands and kisses each one, and Sara kneels and opens her bag.

  He decides he will observe them quietly, and so he eases the distance between them with a few steps. Even if they turn they will fail to recognise him with the sun setting behind him and leaving him in silhouette. They, in contrast, are washed with a coat of matt evening light that leaves them plain but for the blue tint of distance. Sara takes a flask and cups from her bag—white porcelain cups with gold chipped rims, he knows—and laying the cups on the sand she pours coffee. She stands; they drink.

  Crouching, he looks to his right along the beach. A few seals sleep in the high, drier sand, but the colony must be mostly out at sea. The smell of them remains, like a litter of dog pups. When his father died Sara was at this beach, swimming in the frozen water, eating chips and saveloys with Rook, drinking coffee; she reasoned that the brine eased their creaking joints and the cold was good for the soul. His father had been dead for five hours before Sara came home and found him slumped at the kitchen table. Watching her and Rook now he gets the impression that they are rarely apart. They seem washed up on the shore, that a mistake has brought them here to England, that some rectifying will take them back to their homelands, and that he will be left. He suppresses jealousy; there is no use for it.

  Rook then takes Sara stiffly in his arms, and she eases herself into them, and he watches the two of them waltz formally around the centrepiece of their coffee cups on the sand. They respond to each other like a muscle responds to the brain. In contrast to everything he sees around him, every relationship and happening, they do not look arbitrary. Each leaf has a pattern, he remembers Sara once saying. And the patterns are repeated, and the patterns of the patterns are repeated. The leaf is a billion numbers that defy chance.

  Of course, Sara and Rook had once been all chance, meeting in The Sun Rises, Rook sitting in that dusty rope of sunlight popping mussels into his mouth, Sara the uneasy alien holding a child in her lap and twisting her thick Jewish hair. But they used the years as a filter through which all chance was forced out. Now they are bound like the wooden couple that waltzes in and out of the cuckoo clock every hour. Is it love? Yes. It is not that it might as well be, but that it can't be otherwise.

  His mother and Rook waltz wide across the sand, in and out of the snowflakes. They are both skilled dancers. Sara used to go to waltzes as a child when she lived in Vienna; he feels, as he squints against the incoming snow, that he is looking through the muffled haze of time and beyond himself into the past. He is taken by a heat-giving happiness. If Sara and Rook walked straight into the sea now, if they did! This lone man standing on the beach, small in the bigness of it all, watching with a jealous heart as his mother goes to her death in love, and takes her (and his) past with her, this poor rootless man, no wonder he loses his way, he is an effect without a cause; poor man.

  But his mother just dances. She seems happy. He isn't a poor man, he is quite a rich man, an architect, a father, his mother is happy. He'll have to make and answer for his own fate after all. He stands and, giving them one last glance, turns back to the dunes and the car park.

  Why are you so anxious? Helen read.

  If his memory serves him, she pressed her thumb into the cushion of skin between his eyes. Jesus asked his disciples: Why are you so anxious?

  She smoothed the creases from his brow with her thumb. Do not be anxious about anything. It will not add a day to your life.

  He told her he had just seen his mother at the beach. That was nice, she replied. Did seeing his mother make him anxious?

  If only he could have told her then! Helen, a man is anxious because he has too much time and not enough to think about. A man is anxious because he has lost too much time and has ended up thinking about all he should have thought about when he had the time.

  With the dog following him he moves through the house, up one staircase and down another, kicking at objects that get in his way, shouting at a fluttering curtain, at the chimes of the church clock, throwing his weight about only to make certain that he does still have weight. He does, and when he feels it he bears it joyously: this, then, this body is not lost. He is disoriented by the memory of the beach and the seeming nearness of it, so close to his thinking that its waters could be at the top of the stairs and its snows filling Henry's chocolate bedroom.

  Eleanor is there and then not. He sees her hunched over and he is moved, wants to put her up straight, hold her, talk to her about the past. Then he sees pink nails, makeup, and gets the giddying sense of the stranger emerging and eclipsing her. And then he thinks he must have made a mistake because she is hardly Eleanor at all except for in outline; if he could grab her and hold her still she might remain as he knows her, but she moves, and the movement confuses him.

  Things are getting worse, have got worse, suddenly. Everything is quite wrong and the pills make his head ache to the point of sickness. He is possessed by a sudden boredom that greys the colours. If only he were a child, he thinks, but the thought ends there.

  He is furious at useless implements that he can no longer name, at Eleanor who is not steady, who is solid and then disintegrates to his mind, at the coffee machine that perpetually boils dry for lack of water, at the shifting world—the days into nights and restlessly back again, the plates in the sink in the cupboard in the sink in the pillbox, the headache in his head and out of his head, the nausea, the rage. To say that all the change is in him is unreasonable and infuriating—that he must be questioned, manoeuvred, and ultimately culpable, that all this is his fault but that despite this there is nothing he can do. Everything must now always be his fault. If only D's letters were opened; if only something were Helen's fault, too, and she could share this burden.

  The rage comes so hard, so often—starchy, white rage with no give. Always lately there is a feeling that he must escape, and when he can't he feels hopeless. This morning's rage comes because Eleanor tells him he does not need to wash the windows, he did it yesterday, the day before, the windows are clean. Besides, it is raining, washing windows in the rain is pointless. Pointless as the naked woman and her jars, pointless as the man rolling the rock up the hill (though what man, and what hill, and where did he hear of it?). And yet the icy shine of the glass has pleased him, as has the sight of the windows harnessing the light, as, too, has his reflection appearing through his own labour as if, at last, Helen has answered his question. You did invent yourself, you are always inventing yourself.

  In rage at Eleanor's charge of pointlessness he has hurled a bucket of soapy water across the garden; now, guilty and apologetic, he watches her through the gleaming window picking it up and tidying it away, just as she tidies away the fragments of cups and the burnt food and the tins of fish he puts absently in the freezer: the multitude of little arrangements she makes out of his derangements. Eleanor, his external memory, his conscience, his nurse, his cleaner, his cook. She thinks he fails to notice, but he notices. He sees her clearing traces of him from the face of things, and the way her life seems to have become little but an apology and recompense for his actions. Around her all his doings lose substance as if she simply absorbs them. Such broad hips and shoulders on which to rest the weight of his errors.

  Sorry, is what he seems to say to her most. Sorry about that. Most of the time he can't even be sure what he is apologising for. Always she ruffles his hair. Never mind, she tells him.
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  She does not seem to age. Never beautiful, she is still not. Never young, never old, nothing to lose, she has the vigilant indifference of an automatic sprinkler system that floods a room whether or not there is a fire. He does not even remember fully how she came to be living here—what sleight of hand was this that removed Helen and left Eleanor? There is a fog around her. His fog, she will say. Why my fog? he will respond. Why must all the blame be mine? Because (she will attach her hands to her hips) that is the nature of your forgetting. Fog. That is the weather in your head.

  He is ashamed of his adolescent moods. The shame is never greater than this, now, as he returns to the garden after his looping, looping like a caged bird up and down the double stairs, to find Eleanor, poor, watchful, vigilant Eleanor sweating hunch-shouldered against the humidity waiting for him. He can do nothing for her; in truth he is growing afraid of her and of what she is beginning to see in him. He sits on the wall around the raised flower bed with the dog laid across his feet; he checks her name tag: Lucky. Unusual name, he can't imagine why he would have named her this, it doesn't seem like a thing he would do. But then his life doesn't seem like a thing he would do either, not at the moment. He lets his fingers dig the soil.

  The air is soupy. A van pulls up at the gates and Eleanor goes to it, he cannot hear what she says to the driver but she walls her body off by hugging her arms across her chest. She is always this way with strangers; they talk—about him? Are they discussing his behaviour? He has done nothing; whatever they think, he has done nothing. He digs in the soil and collects, digs and collects. After a time Eleanor comes away from the gates and relaxes her arms.

  “He wanted directions,” she says, and returns to her gardening.

  He takes a new pocketful of stones upstairs to the bedroom and rests them with the others at the foot of the French windows. The dog pursues, his canine shadow, the shadow of the part of himself that is still noble, he thinks. Her sheer blackness is brave and her thinness willing. In whatever tight and unlikely spot she lies she makes it home. She settles here by the heap of stones and he sits on the floor next to her, pushing the heap taller until it holds its shape. Perhaps that man did not just want directions. Perhaps they are planning to take him away. He must get more stones. Needs more. Build it up here, build it back here, make it higher, yes, and get some of those stones that have fallen out of Eleanor's armfuls of weeds around the compost. Get some of those off the grass; get things in order.

  That night he makes some advances on Eleanor in the bed, biologies born of habit: she is warm and unfathomable under cover so that he is reminded of a time he cannot place, in which he once discovered her body and was surprised by how he liked it. When was this? Which episode of the past? How long has Eleanor been here? He remembers being relieved by how she opened her arms to him in complete trust and how he entered, dumbfounded by her huge, undutiful breasts (Helen's were egg-like in comparison, and obedient and firm, biology-textbook perfect; Joy had no breasts, only ribs and nipples): here suddenly was a world of breast! A universe of breast! Unshielded and staring at him adoringly. And behind that adoration all he could hear, and all he can hear now, is the deep long moan of failure. I should not be here, I do not belong here.

  Finally the two of them settle for just holding each other. He is without energy, she is always afraid of doing something to make him unhappy or agitated. They just hold each other with locked limbs.

  “Will we be getting something for my headaches?” he asks.

  She wraps her arms tighter around his neck. “Tomorrow we're going to the clinic again, we'll ask about the headaches.”

  He separates himself from her and settles on his back. If they are going to the clinic tomorrow he ought to see to his timeline, in case the woman there asks. He tries to remember what that woman looks like and gets a picture of a teacher he had at school, Mrs. Webster, her image flashing in front of his eyes after half a century of absence. What musty corner of the brain keeps these images? What nudges them out?

  As they lie there he can feel Eleanor's lack of sleep, like Helen's in the last few months. Helen had always been able to sleep so easily, and then suddenly, as if she knew that her time was short, she would lie there and breathe in loud circles to alleviate what she had begun to call the imps in her chest. Pain, no, not pain. Worry? Was she beginning to get old? Look at her hands—were they an old woman's hands?

  There used to be a painting on the wall opposite, he suddenly recollects. Now that he goes to define it, he cannot, except that it was dark, and perhaps of a woman slumped along a dirty mattress. Very often Helen and this woman would look at each other as if they were one and the same person, but born into different rooms at different times in different light conditions. And very often she would sigh, and say, There is not very much that separates one human from another.

  And towards the end of her life she said this more and more frequently. Instead of sleeping soundly when the light was switched off she began to turn from one side to the other, and then, as she was falling asleep, gnash her teeth a handful of times, and make disoriented comments about a “poor woman,” a “fine line,” and a “ruined bed.” Perhaps she even muttered the word D. Yes, and he would not have known to listen for it. Yes, the more thought he gives it now, the more certain he is that she must have mentioned that name.

  He gets up and dresses.

  “Where are you going?” Eleanor asks.

  “To make coffee.”

  “Come back soon.”

  He sees her white fleshy arms and disk of face in the darkness, nods and goes downstairs. He turns on the coffee machine. On the timeline he makes a mark, November 1961, Rook and Sara at the sea. At 1967 he blackens the mark he has put next to the Six-Day War, and he wants to write there: Alice dies. Yet—yet he cannot. It doesn't seem that it can possibly be true. Now more than ever it seems to be the most absurd outcome, something he has made the case through his very fear of it. He doesn't want to approach the memory. Maybe it is not true. And if it is true, maybe the disease will make him forget it before he can be sure of it. Like cycling off a cliff on fire. If he bides his time—if he winds slowly towards the edge, he will lose consciousness before the ground disappears.

  He makes another mark: 1980, painting goes missing from bedroom wall. Nothing in him can vouch for this claim; in all honesty he can remember nothing at all of the last twenty or so years of his life. The gap on the timeline is ominous and looks better with this careful little detail, inevitably Mrs. Webster will be pleased. Then he puts on his coat and pushes D's letters into a pocket, summons the dog and leaves the house, thinking he will go and visit Henry. The prison seems suddenly safe and homely, everybody tucked in their T-shaped wings and forced into communities. There are not these loose times, and Henry is probably waiting for him.

  He cuts across the main road and past the church, and, gripping D's letters, delves into the heavy darkness of the lane opposite. Beneath the letters is something else, smooth and hard; he cannot identify it. At first, when he takes it out and holds it on his palm, he is puzzled. A snow thing? Crystal snowball thing. He shakes it. Slowly he remembers where it came from, that Henry gave it to him for his birthday some years ago, and as he remembers that day (snowy, and they were walking in the woods) warm nausea breaches his stomach.

  The crystal snowball tells the story they all know, he, Henry, and Alice, the story of their beginnings: it is the end of the 1800s, a shoemaker and his daughter venture out into the Austrian woods in the snow to find mushrooms, and discover in their path a child wearing a lace hat and yellow shoes with a bullet hole in her head, the mother with a yellow hat, yellow shoes, yellow foam in her mouth, and a revolver by her side. She has shot her daughter and then herself, for what reason nobody knows. Gory photographs and speculation make the papers every day for a week.

  A man called Arnold is sitting in his chair, feet on a stack of books, a Siamese cat in his lap, a coffee in a chipped gold-rimmed cup in one hand and the corner
of the newspaper in the other: he is trembling as he reads. It is Vienna, Strauss is dead and the century is closing. He touches his silver fencing scars. How could a mother kill her own child? Closing the shop he rushes home through the snow to his wife, finding her twirling a praise ring with a twinkle in her eye. He takes her to bed. Must replace a life for a life, he thinks. Life is fragile, even when times are good, life is fragile enough to leave a child in yellow shoes dead in a wood. They call their lovemaking Conception Events. She, Minna, thinks of love and life, her belly full of fried fish. He, Arnold, thinks of the dead child. Somewhere in the clash of these opposite thoughts Sara is conceived.

  Twenty-eight years later Sara fights back the death in her, thinks not of the bullet hole but of the yellow, and her son, Jacob, is conceived. Thirty years after that Jacob takes the hand of a slight freckled woman in the bombed relics of Stepney and invites her home. The woman looks at the church of St. George opposite and nods her consent. She is thinking of Jesus, he of bombs, London bombed and bombed, London rebuilt. In the midst of their uncertain hopes Henry is conceived. Two years later she is thinking of the cherry tree, of fate. He knows little but yellow, a yellow dress, the sun glinting off the glass of his extraordinary would-be house. In the midst of yellow autumn Alice is conceived. Out of the story a family grows: here they are, one, two, three, four.

  The story has not ended then. By virtue of their existence Alice and Henry are fighting for its happy ending. He and the dog wind on at random, he now realises, along the dark street; he has no idea where the prison is. The lip of the moors opens out just ahead in an expanse of no-building, nothing. There is a choice, to go out into this wilderness or to go back home. Ambition and fear rub up in his bones; he looks back and sees a figure running towards him, a woman; large, cumbersome, running, and a breathless voice that calls, Jake?