The Wilderness Page 26

  She puts a hand on his leg. “And you always said you wouldn't marry me. So I told you I would settle for just living together instead, as if we were married.”

  They sit in silence for a moment. He remembers scraping the earth from the boat bone by bone, finding the point of its hull, each strut of wood almost perfectly preserved.

  “And then, when the game was over we used to scrub out the letter e on the golem's forehead to make the word met, which was Hebrew for death. And we would dig a grave, the golem had to get in it, and we shovelled peat back on top of them and counted how long they could stay dead. We'd leave a foot or a hand uncovered, to give the signal. We used to call it the game of the missing e. That's how we found the boat.”

  A long silence unravels between them that is saved by her standing and going to the other side of the room.

  He absorbs himself in looking at the maps in front of him. Everything takes on a lucid sense: Ellie, the peat, the boat, childhood. Something in him rests. One day he would love to see Ellie again and sit at that piano while she sang and while Sara played the—thing, thing on the shoulder, and Rook the mouth organ.

  He looks out of the window to see if the child is still there, and she is. There is suddenly the dense comfort of waiting— that if they wait, he and the child, probably somebody will come and collect them soon. He stands and goes to the window to where, on the other side, she plays quite heedless, and he pushes his hand against the pane and bangs, hoping to ask her who they are waiting for, and when it is likely to come, just roughly, just so that he might plan.

  When the woman comes to his shoulder she makes him jump. He turns to see she is holding a tray of drinking things and spoons, wearing a sorry look on her face which does not in the least match his own peaceful mood.

  “You put the coffee cups in the writing bureau, Jake. I knew I would find them somewhere.”

  He goes back to the floor and the yellowed paper, sits, wonders why she can't share his peace.

  “Who are you anyway?” he asks, irritated.

  He spreads the paper flat and pushes down its dog-eared corners. The paper was once white, and now it is yellow, he thinks. Once flat, now creased. And there is the truth about life: once this, then that.

  “You're gone, Jake. Gone,” the woman announces at length.

  He pulls his legs crossed, grips his ankles, and looks up at her.

  “Going,” he corrects, and rubs fiercely at his leg, a patch of sore skin where all irritation and outrage now centres.

  “To think I've waited for you for thirty years. I haven't even bothered to try to love anyone else. And now I've got you, and you're gone.”

  He scowls. It is important: not gone, going. If he were simply gone the child would not be wasting her time with him; and besides, it is crucial to be clear about the mechanics of it, the increments, the balancing of the stones—

  The train of thought loses its way, breaks up, and scatters. “In any case,” he states, “we have to remain aware of the consolations.”

  The woman picks at her nails and delivers up the same tired nod.

  “The consolations,” she agrees.

  He dips his head in shame. What has he done wrong? He closes his eyes against the waft of air as the woman leaves the room, as if she were never there.

  STORY OF THE CURSE

  The table was plainly set. A dinner, an announcement, Sara had said, but when they arrived at her house there was not the mood of announcement. The plates set out between the usual weekday cutlery were patternless and the wine glasses like the ones Eleanor used in the pub, too unimaginative for wine. At least there were wine glasses. He was feeling brimful with some almost belligerent optimism, and in the mood for celebration. Immediately he opened the cabinet and compared the wines—cherry, no, something white and sweet, no. He took an Italian red and put it in the middle of the table.

  Helen wore her miniskirt. With elfish steps across the orange carpet she took Henry to the cot upstairs.

  Strange creature that she was. The way she had formed this ambivalent bond with the skirt that caused her to wear it often around the house (it's so short, she marvelled, and you can see all my legs!) but disallowed her from wearing it in public (it's so short, she cringed, and you can see all my legs). Dear Helen. He had persuaded her that Sara's house was not public, it was just a slightly more daring version of private, so she had put it on, getting into a thick blue sweater, humming selfconsciously.

  Now she reappeared in the living room, blinked, tucked her hair behind her ear, scratched her cheek, as if trying to make herself as one hundred percent pure Helen as possible, sat at the table where Rook was already smoking, passed her hand to his and said, “Hello, forgive my legs.”

  “Darling, I love your legs,” Rook insisted.

  “They're new.”

  “So I see.”

  She flowered. They chatted about the passing of summertime and the first falling leaves on the cherry tree, and their second autumn away from London. Rook was a vigilant listener as he turned corners of a napkin into birds which he flew in her direction, and which she gathered into an orderly flock on her side plate.

  Dinner was served and they ate in good spirits: lamb shanks, boiled potatoes, vegetables. Plain and righteous food with sprinklings of salt and pepper, a little English mustard. He would not be churlish, he decided; would not comment on the lack of silver and cut glass, or on the unlit menorah, or on Sara's mild, aged presence, as if some substance had slipped from her.

  “The announcement,” Sara said, once they were all settled with food and wine, “is that—well, you might as well say it Rook, hmm?”

  “The announcement,” Rook took up, “is that I've managed to wrestle that piece of land for you.”

  “The Junk? Wrestle from whom?” he asked, setting his knife on the plate.

  “Contacts,” Rook winked.

  Helen's eyes widened a fraction. “You know Mrs. Crest?”

  Rook seemed to think about this far deeper than the question merited. “In a way.”

  The table was drenched in yellow from the setting sun, charging up the cutlery, running across their hands. It scattered itself across Sara's dress and cleaned her of any possible sins or secrets; no point turning to her for clarity. Rook winked at him. He stared back and the entirety of his childhood flushed over him in a moment. Its frustrations and unanswered questions, Sara and Rook's collusion, the feeling that he was never getting the truth but should be grateful nevertheless, because the truth is not a right, it is a privilege at best and a burden at worst.

  “It's time for our future, then,” he said, and reached for his wife's bare thigh.

  “And are you still volunteering at the hospice, dear?” Sara asked Helen.

  Dear. He was surprised to hear this sweet tone in his mother's voice.

  “Yes, Sara, yes. It's—wonderful, fulfilling. To be with people in their last few days or weeks, it feels like my calling.”

  Sara smiled and sank the prongs of her fork so slowly, so delicately into a potato, like a woman too beached in the middle of old age to have the gusto for eating.

  “And also,” Helen went on. He saw her cross her legs under the table. “I've become interested in—well, we have a man in the hospice who is … black.” She straightened. “His daughter comes in to visit him and tells me about the terrible things that happen to blacks in this country. Do you all know? Are you aware?”

  She lowered and lifted her gaze in one interrogative gesture, spearing a piece of carrot which she left balanced on the plate. “They can't get work, they can't get houses. If you want to rent or buy a house you simply can't.”

  A sympathetic murmur went around the table, even Rook had no acerbic quip to add. They ate on in thought for a few moments.

  “I mean, these are the 1960s,” Helen added, cutting her food up as if preparing it for Henry. “Have we learnt nothing?”

  “Actually I read in the paper,” he said, topping up the empty glasses, “th
at the blacks in London are being helped by the Jewish communities. Jewish people rent houses out to blacks and then, when the blacks have the money, they buy them.”

  He smiled, and met a theatre of blank faces. Helen sat back from her food and put her hands on her belly.

  “That's good,” she said. “In fact though, if nobody minds me broaching the subject—I mean, you could argue that the whole problem with racism sprang from Jewish myths. It has been argued. I don't know if I agree, but let's not romanticise.”

  He and Rook cocked their heads, Sara went on chewing.

  “You know it, Sara, of course. The myth that Ham saw Noah drunk and naked, and in his shame Noah punished Ham by putting a curse on his son, Canaan. And the curse was for him to be smitten in his skin. Burnt, in other words, burnt and blackened—and from that the blacks were cursed.”

  Sara raised her head and sighed. “I think there is no agreement, dear, as to what that myth means.”

  “All the same. Oh I know what horrors have happened, and I know it's very right, politically, to favour the Jews—”

  “But it's never right to be blindly favourable to anything,” Sara added.

  “Yes, precisely.”

  “I agree, dear. Keep that vigilance in life and you won't come to harm.”

  He stood and took his empty plate to the kitchen. His blood boiled. Not against his wife, no, he rather admired her courage, her relentless defence of fair play and good practice, her wish to work out who the unfortunate were and save them. But Rook, Sara? What world of neutrality had they slipped into? He looked to them for some rich-blooded darkness, red wine, human skin, the tiered glint of candles bashing out a statement of defiance, a lily in the hair, a gunshot to sunder the milky carriage of clouds: a dark counterbalance to his wife's whiteness, to bring his life into symmetry—a stone in this pocket, a stone in that. A perfection. A fucking joke! His history was dying.

  “Do you remember that myth, Sara,” he said, striding back to the dinner table with a knife in his hand. “What was it? A deer and lion living in a forest. What was the forest?”

  “Dvei Ilai,” Sara returned.

  He waved the knife in excitement, watching Helen slice a plum and wrangle the halves apart, noticing the juice run down her fingers.

  “Dvei Ilai. A giant lion, a massive lion twenty feet wide. And the Roman Caesar wanted to find him and kill him, so he asked the rabbi to call the lion out of the forest. The rabbi said, no, not a good idea. The lion cannot be killed. But the Caesar was adamant so the rabbi did as he was asked. It was the big mistake of the Catholics to ignore the Jews. The lion came, roaring, and his roar crumbled all the walls of Rome.” He took his seat and poured more wine. “Rome was destroyed.”

  There had been streams of these stories when he was a child, myth upon myth, myth tangling with myth, myth becoming fact, fact becoming fiction. So many dark close nights of it. Jam, syrup, sugar, baked pastry, an intimate smell of religion come true.

  “In a minute I'll go and get the deeds to the Junk, I've got them upstairs.” Rook raised his glass. “Let's have a little toast to Mrs. Crest.”

  He ignored the old man and held his own glass firmly to the table. “What's more,” he said, “the lion's roar was so bone-breaking that all the Romans' teeth fell out.”

  Sara put her hand to her mouth and pressed at her gums.

  “I've made bread pudding,” she said. “Will we all have some?”

  “Memory,” Helen's voice fired from the darkness of the driver's seat.

  He paused to consider. It was her tactic to make him talk— if she simply asked what he was thinking he would shrug, nothing, and mean it. Nothing. But if she asked him for a memory, in this place reminiscent of his whole life, surely something would come. It was a cheap trick, but it worked.

  “House of the exaggerating soldier, just there,” he said.

  They passed the dark outline of a derelict brick house.

  “The soldier and his wife moved to London, I wonder what happened to them.”

  He recalled tables of rich food, the eyes of the soldier and his wife glinting in the poor light, the candles, the wife's blond custardy hair. Actually she had been an attractive woman, at least as he now remembered her; quite the counterpoise to Sara. Fair to Sara's darkness, tall to Sara's smallness. Of comparable beauty though, if it were possible to compare creatures from separate planets.

  “Memory,” he fired.

  She took in a breath. “I'm in London, I'm about fifteen. I'm walking home and I see a man and woman in the ruins of a building, they are making love. They aren't completely naked, only from the waist down.”

  She faced him for a moment, her hands tight on the wheel. She smiled.

  “It was quite … comical—but, suddenly, I felt that place was human. That all the world was loving and human and there to belong in.”

  He scratched briskly at his chin and smirked.

  “So that's the reason.”

  “Reason for what?”

  “For you being so—forward. When we first met, when we were at the ruins in Stepney. When you dipped your hand down my trousers while I was merrily talking about, I don't know, buildings. When you did all that with the church looking on.”

  “Yes,” she replied, “I suppose so.”

  He smiled at the thought.

  “I decided that I couldn't leave London until I had done what that couple had done,” she continued, “or done something similar. Until I had used part of the city for myself, used it like it was my playground.”

  In a way, he understood. He, too, wanted to appropriate a place before leaving, just to affirm that it was indeed him leaving, and not him being expelled.

  “I thought it was just your nature, back then, to do those sorts of things. Thought you were a little bit—ah—loose.”

  She shrugged. “Jake, I don't have a nature.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Then tell me about it. Tell me a few words to describe it.”

  He lit a cigarette and handed it to her, lit one for himself. She didn't decline, perhaps because her powers of negotiation were channelled into driving in the cave-like darkness, or because she was too intent on hearing his answer.

  “Well, you're kind, generous, funny, compassionate—”

  “Ah, see. Now you're describing what a woman is like when she can't think of any other more imaginative way to be. It's not anything as defined as a nature. It's a lack of ideas.”

  “Helen—” He reached across and stroked her face. She drew on her cigarette and flicked his hand away.

  “Let's go to the Junk,” she said.

  “Now?”

  “Now. Guide me there. I can't ever get my bearings in the dark.”

  It was only two miles or so from where they were; as they went the car filled slowly with smoke. Helen sped up; he arched his neck back and stared at the roof of the car an inch or less from his nose, breathed out smoke and let it wash over his face. Things felt good—Helen smoking, Helen speeding, Helen arguing, Helen driving them off to a black patch of peat. The baby back at Sara's, there to collect tomorrow. A night alone. Land to build on.

  They stopped where he indicated. There was the house, slumped, derelict, and behind it the solitary row of wind-bent birch.

  Helen knocked the keys back and forth in the ignition with her finger. “Let's go in.”

  On the floor in the kitchen they sat cross-legged and took food from the knapsack—some sandwiches, some Battenberg cake, oranges, a flask of tea, mint julep for him at the bottom of a bottle. It was pitch-dark and the damp foxy smell occupied all the senses. When his eyes adjusted he could see his wife's white legs, and he could make out the rest of her because she was blacker than the background. She pulled the edge of the picnic blanket over her knees. It was far too cold for the miniskirt she was wearing but she refused the offer of his coat. He tried to insist, because she wore the skirt for him as she did most things for him; all her suffering came via him. He had, he
thought, been corrupting her from the day they met; I do solemnly declare to corrupt you 'til death do us part. But she refused the coat three times, and he swallowed the fourth offer.

  She took the cling film from the Battenberg cake and handed him some with a smile. As he dissected it she lit up a match and put it close to his hands.

  “You're eating the yellow sections first,” she remarked.

  “Yes. I don't like them.”

  “So in that case you leave them 'til last.”

  “No, you save the best 'til last.”

  The match went out and he heard her shuffle and stand.

  “It's fishy, all this business about Mrs. Crest,” she said.

  He nodded, though she couldn't have seen.

  “Perhaps we shouldn't sign the deeds.”

  “We will sign the deeds. I don't care where it's from. Once they're signed it's legal. Helen, it's ours.”

  There was a pause.

  “If we're going to live here, then, right here on this bit of peat, I want to, I don't know, run around all over the moors naked, to stamp my belonging.” She laughed.

  “You could,” he suggested.

  An intense darkness marked where she stood and he reached forward to where he calculated her ankle would be, stroked the bare skin.

  As he touched her he felt an unexpected peace. There was no need to keep searching for something else, no need to live here. He could throw the deeds back in Rook's face and tell him to fuck off. They already had a house. But then Helen crouched and put something in his hand, some clothing. He brought it to his face and smelt it: her top. It had the faint smell of her skin and the pleasant, faintest soap-sweetened sourness from her underarms, and when he looked up he could see her pale torso and the white of her bra.