The Wilderness Page 25

  Eventually he broke the silence. “Put it on,” he said. “I want to see it on.”

  12

  There she is, there. In the garden. He has seen her before. He creeps to the window to watch her, filled with spy-like curiosity. There. Maybe she is Alice, but the light keeps blanching her features and makes it hard to tell. She moves through the light like a dolphin—so like Alice, but he cannot be sure, and is careful to rush to no outlandish conclusions. Be rational, Jacob, he thinks, and observe; do, at all costs, avoid being mad.

  The child circles the sleeping dog, occasionally stooping to touch the creature's coat with her palm and to stare closely at the blackness of it. Then rising again to her trip-skip across the grass. The dog is untroubled, does not even wake or open her eyes for a solitary tolerant glance at her visitor; she just sleeps on with a peace that suggests she and the child have looped this loop many times. Between them is a thousand years of private solicitude. It makes sense now, if the child is Alice, because of course the dog would know Alice, there will have been years for these bonds to form.

  He crouches at the French windows, toppling the pile of stones, and lets his eyes follow the child. Her knees, too big for her it seems; her fingers splayed. Occasionally she lifts her fingers a few inches from her eyes and peers through them in experimentation for how the world looks as background. Just mere background for her fingers. Foreground, background.

  He takes a stone in his hand and clutches it. One summer, the summer of 1966, they are all at the beach, the four of them: Helen, Alice, Henry, and himself. The children insist on wearing their swimming costumes, but he and Helen give up the pretence of warmth and pull on their jackets. Alice pads silently across the rocks and crouches to peer into the eyes of a—thing—wet bear, legless thing. Seal, yes. Seal. Always peering, Helen says, as if she can see what we cant.

  He approaches her. Be careful, Alice, he says. Don't disturb her. (He has decided the thing, seal, is female by the slightly languorous side-tilt of her body, draped rather than ditched by the tide or sudden lethargy.) The seal's pitch, tar, wet-ink eyes are wide open. Blat, Alice observes. Black, he nods. Very black. Alice is beguiled by the eyes and puts her face within a finger's width of the seal's. The animal smell is overwhelming, even to him from this distance, and yet Alice seems not to notice it. He can see his child's reflection in the animal's eyes, like a flower growing in outer space. Blat, she repeats, blat. He takes her hand and leads her away.

  The four of them sit where the stones begin to thin out and give way to sand, and he decides to explain something about existence, respect for other animals and objects, the growing sensation that an individual is an extremely small thing of small pursuits, that the world is sometimes background, sometimes foreground, depending on how big one feels, but inevitably—how to explain this to a child?—inevitably one is small whether they feel it or not. To learn to be small—perhaps this is important.

  He drapes his arms over his knees, tries to think how to put it. They are fairly new thoughts, questing, humbling thoughts he has been having in the last two years since Alice was born. Alice provokes in him instincts that Henry did not. Religious? No, not that. Not even tinglings of awe and wonder. But something to do with equality, the equalising effect she has on him. Whereas he feels responsible for Henry, he suspects that he and Alice are responsible for each other—that, with her changeful eyes, she sees him truly; he sees her truly.

  She staggers up to him now like a needy drunk and he straightens his legs and lifts her onto his lap. He is about to begin. That seal, she is just one of millions and millions of animals, four of which are us my darling— He is about to explain, when Henry turns with a sudden Jake?, the tone that always precedes a question, and asks why the horizon is so straight.

  It isn't straight, he replies, if you look properly you'll see it's curved.

  Helen holds her hand out to Henry and says, Yes, Jake, but as you know, Henry's right, it appears straight.

  Again Henry asks why. Because the earth is perfectly balanced, Helen tells him. She details the phenomenon with an example of their household scales, and Henry, who likes to help her cook, grasps it readily: the horizon is straight because the earth is balanced because it is God's earth and is in perfect harmony.

  In celebration she cuddles Henry and they tickle each other. He watches his wife and son, deciding not to ruin their happiness with fact. Lifting Alice from him he stands. Come on, kids, he says, I'll show you about balance. Equality. Henry asks, What's equality? I'll show you, he answers. He gets them to find stones which they drop in his pockets. Henry's stone is small and almost pedantic in its fine speckles, where Alice's is too big for her to carry, so she stands calm and wordless until he comes to her aid. He drops a stone in each pocket, and tilts in Alice's direction, explains that her stone is bigger and heavier. (Like the kitchen scales, Helen winks to her momentarily confused son.) The children work to balance him. A stone here, another there, a pebble, a few grains of sand. When he is upright they cheer. He smiles out over the boundless coast: equality, he says. He picks Alice up and stands quietly with her, both peering, peering earnestly out over the sea.

  The memory, so arresting, is freshly encased in the child's motions. His gaze has not left her, and has sought out her lilac eyes until they, those fantastic eyes, turn purple with placid recognition. Suddenly the dog rushes awake and runs across the garden, and the child, unworried, continues trickling through the sunlight. A bright, slightly nervy day.

  There is a sound which he recognises but cannot identify, something very familiar that makes him feel an action on his part is required. Pulling himself from the view of the garden he combs his hair with his fingers; perhaps he needs the toilet. He is not sure. Something, certainly, needs to be done.

  A voice calls. “Jake!”

  He confronts both exits from the bedroom and is undecided about which to take and where they lead. At some point he finds himself halfway down the polished wooden stairs as if he is simply shrugged from one moment to another without his consent, and now in the study, now the living room, the woman is there, and a man he has never seen before.

  “Look who I found at the door,” the woman says. “Fergus.”

  The man steps forward and takes his hand.

  “Hello, Jake. Sorry to surprise you like this.”

  “Of course it's fine.”

  He smoothes his hand down his shirt before offering it out. He inspects the man—frazzled features, something very windswept and loose in even his small movements. He is wearing the matching clothes for work that everybody wears, that he remembers wearing himself, and has a bag over his shoulder and something of a schoolboy look about him. Large, excited eyes, hands that look cold. But no matter how he interrogates these pieces of evidence, no recognition comes.

  “Are you well?” he asks the man, gesturing them towards the sofa.

  “Yes, very.” The man casts an open look at him, a searching look that seems to expect to find something of great interest. “But what about you?”

  He gives the man what feels to him to be a charming smile, an emulation of some replete composure; maybe he should have affected this earlier in life. Now it is the ideal tool for digging himself out of utterly vacated silences such as this, when the right thing to say does not present itself. When nothing at all presents itself. The man has a dim rattle in his breath, a straight, narrow nose, broken blood vessels on his cheeks. He is out of shape like a man at the end of a long race.

  “Anyway, I brought some books I thought you might like,” the man declares, whipping open his bag with fingers that behave with the same invisible speed as the wind. “Just a moment, let me find them in here.”

  “And how's your wife?” he says, watching the incredible fingers, wringing his hands in his lap.

  The man holds his gaze in a way he has noticed Henry doing, distrustfully, or surprised. “She's great.”

  “Very good. Then maybe you'd like coffee?”

 
Now the man beams, salvages his arms from the bag, and reaches forward to grasp his shoulder. “You know I would.”

  The woman stands. “So I'll go and make a coffee then. You'll be all right, Jake?”

  Do be good, she means; don't be mad. And she leaves.

  Some time is spent looking around the room.

  “Do you like the house?” he asks eventually.

  The man stands and looks around him keenly.

  “I do, very much. Haven't you lived here for years?”

  “No, no I don't think so. We moved in recently.”

  He gives a smile and the man returns it.

  “We need to decorate. It's a mess,” he offers then, and the man comes back to the sofa and sits. Indeed, it is a mess; the stranger brings a light to the house, so that he can see what he had not noticed before. Objects on the floor, stacks of books and paper on the table, and, what are they, the clothes that go on the end, so many of them it would be impossible now to match them into pairs. Things for the dog. The television activators, piles of shirts and jumpers by the iron.

  “You seem”—the man begins, putting the books heavily on his lap—“you seem well.”

  “I am, I'm very well, there's so much fuss over it all.” He scratches his head. “A lot of fuss over a bit of a car accident. I hit a dog. I haven't been the same since.”

  The man looks at him strangely then away. He opens one of the books and leafs quickly through until he finds a picture.

  “Glass houses, Jake,” he says. “I thought you might want to have a look.”

  He does look, turning the pages over and over, one house after another: long crystalline sheets of glass hanging onto cliff edges or glittering in woods—they strike him as X-rays, with their contents visible, the furniture and people just small functioning parts of the building. Oddly medical and diagnostic, as if to say, this is a house; after thorough examining it seems certain that this is a real house. They seem obliquely frail and vulnerable under this pressure of scrutiny.

  “You see this one,” the man says, “built in the forties, and this one—built about two years ago, and yet can you tell there's fifty years between them? Not at all. Glass and steel are timeless, didn't you always say it yourself?”

  He nods, rubbing the silky pages with his thumb. The colours bleeding on the panes seem to him indescribably meaningless and beautiful; it was once his job, he perceives dimly, to do this sort of thing, but now he would not know where to start, how to get those colours just so; how do the colours get on the glass? The responsibility of it is too immense now to contemplate, it does not seem like the sort of task for a man, or at least not this man. Not this man.

  Leaning over this book, his slippers on, in need of a piss, his pyjamas (he fears) still on under his clothes, his wedding ring tight on a finger that, along with the rest, has swollen with uselessness, he is overwhelmed by these charges of failure. Becoming anxious, he resorts to his winning smile, backing off from the book, eventually nudging it from his thighs and standing. He goes to the television and turns it on, immediately reassured by the sound and its gravity, the pull that allows his thoughts to settle. He sits cross-legged in front of it.

  The man clears his throat and speaks over the sound.

  “The truth is, Jake, things aren't the same without you. You brought a bit of idealism to the office. Nobody is idealistic anymore, have you noticed that?”

  He glances at the man over his shoulder, then languidly back. He sees a mouth moving, hears words cluster together like a series of shapes that promise tessellation, but which do not, no matter how one turns them.

  The man breathes in, pauses, and raises his voice a little to compete with the television.

  “At last we have an interesting project on our hands though—we've been asked to build a visitor centre on the moors. Made primarily of glass, which is why I dug out all these books. And I came to be thinking about all those plans you made way back for your own house—those designs, and how intricate they were. They were really good”'

  He looks back at the man and suddenly sadness claims him, a roaring sadness almost indistinguishable from anger, envy, guilt, regret, and on its heels, an image from nowhere of his mother in some irreparable toothless state and Helen, Helen silhouetted by a tower of glass which veers away to a constantly escaping point in a bare sky.

  The man now stands, comes to his side, and sits. He spreads papers across the floor. “These are copies of your drawings. We found them in your files when you retired. Look at them.”

  The woman has reappeared and is dishing out coffee. Both look at him, and then the woman does something with the television and the noise cuts out. She too comes to the floor; the three of them lean over the papers.

  “It's excellent, you see how there are different parts to the building?” The man traces his finger along a line of cubes. “Each room was a glass box, and you linked each one to the other with a series of corridors, here.” The finger slips along parallel lines. It plots from cube to cube in a right angle. “The idea was that you would excavate the peat, pour in concrete, and then embed the glass deep down into the foundations so that the house seemed to just rise from the ground.”

  The strangeness of seeing this again; he remembers it now that he has it before him. Stretched across yellowing paper the design is elegant, and he enjoys the way the man's long finger scores the lines. In all of his memories, details about the house itself are absent. He smoothes his hand over the drawing and the man continues.

  “At the end here you were going to put a playroom for the children—see this small room? The idea being that, with the house at right angles”—again he traces the shape—“you would be able to see the playroom from the rest of the house. So you could be sure the children were safe.”

  The woman shifts suddenly. “I didn't bring sugar. Do you want sugar?”

  “No, no. Without is fine.” The man nods, smiles, and goes back to the drawing. “And this is an idea we want to adopt for the visitor centre—put a play area here which can be easily seen from everywhere in the building, because the council wants to attract families to the area. Get the idea of conservation going in young minds and have this idea,” he spreads his long nervous hands as if he is weighing something, “that humans can live more see-through lives, and that our buildings don't need to interrupt nature. That's the theme.”

  The man stops and takes a mouthful of coffee.

  “Just one question, Jake.” He swallows loudly and taps the paper. “What's this? This boat?”

  The boat the man indicates is a small fine drawing in the empty area overlooked by the house, what would have been the garden. What is it? He has no recollection of drawing those careful besotted lines. They resemble a rack of ribs, a perfect skeleton.

  The woman taps the paper. “That's the boat we found in the peat when we were children. Do you remember, Jake?”

  He nods; yes, or no, maybe.

  “It lived for years rotting away up against the side of the Junk, and you wanted to get it preserved and have it sailing through the garden.”

  “What happened to it?” the man asks.

  Her face shrugs. “I don't know.”

  The three of them stare at the drawing, in hope that it might answer.

  “That was good of Fergus to come and see you, Jake,” the woman says.

  He pivots to see her at the door, her face flushed. Fergus?

  “Do you remember Fergus being here?”

  He regards her blankly and shakes his head. “Was there a man here?”

  “Yes.”

  Her nod is tired and undecided as she gives herself up to the sofa.

  “When?” he asks.

  “Just now. He left two minutes ago.”

  “He brought the map?”

  “The drawings, yes. These are architectural drawings, Jake, not maps.”

  Frowning, she looks around the room. Done something wrong, he thinks. Won't know what. Definitely done something.

&n
bsp; “Did you clear away the coffee things?” she asks.

  Relieved, he shakes his head. No, he did not clear anything away, he hasn't moved. For some time he has been sitting, staring at this paper, aware, more aware than he can remember being for a long time. He does remember the time they found the boat. And his body knows all those straight-backed hours in the study, and the smell of cooking pushing through from one end of the house to another, and the pleasure of complete absorption in the lines on the page.

  “I haven't moved from this spot,” he says.

  She leaves the room and returns quickly. “The coffee cups aren't in the kitchen. Have you put them away?”

  With some irritation she scrapes the hair from her face, and he thinks she looks like one of those frazzled housewives. Perhaps she should rest; he pats the floor as a gesture for her to join him.

  “When we found the boat,” he says, “me and Ellie, we had no idea what it was at first.” He looks up at the woman and steeples his hands. “We used to dig graves in the peat and lie in them, and we were digging that day, that's why we found it. We used to lie there in those graves with the entire sky above. That sky. Have you ever seen anything so big?”

  The woman kneels down beside him and rests her arms on the spread of her belly. “We used to play golems,” she nods. “One of us would cover ourselves in mud, to become a golem, and pretend the other was the king whose orders had to be obeyed. Like, do a headstand! Run anticlockwise five times with no clothes on! And we had to write the word emet in mud on the golem's forehead.”

  He swallows at the memory. He sees it; he and Eleanor running around into the setting sun, and in the window of the Junk the flames of the menorah flicking up their first light.

  “Emet meant truth,” the woman says, “so if you had emet on your forehead you had to tell the truth. About anything. You used to tell me that Sara had been queen of Austria and that she would have to go back there soon, with you. I used to tell you that my uncle was saving up rations to sell on the black market. And that I sometimes weed myself still even though I was fourteen. Cry for help. And that one day, even though I was four years older than you, we were going to get married.”