The Wilderness Read online

  “Why is it you always get what you want?” she said gently.

  He put the rest of the cake on the floor, stubbed his cigarette out, and began removing his shoes. He got out of his trousers, trying to keep his balance in the dark, kicking the trousers off his feet. The lame peace, the inertia of before, had now left him.

  “Jake? Where are you?”

  “We ought to mark our belonging here, shouldn't we, if there's three of us—if there's going to be four of us. That's an army, that's time to set territories.”

  “Are you going outside?”

  “Yes.” He lit a match and made his way to the door. “Come with me.”

  Out in the drab moonlight Helen removed her shoes. It was easier to see out here. The smells of sugar and steel competed in the air. The white limbs of the birch trees made him think of Joy, he could not help it, he did not want to help it. Long white limbs in the darkness, skeletal and spectral. His memory saw Joy's slender hand cut a square across the black: Here, see it? Framed by the factory. He longed for everything he did not yet have, he longed for himself even, as if he were chasing himself and never quite catching up.

  With summer gone the night held little warmth or consolation. He ran. It was a peculiar feeling, to run nowhere for nothing, naked. But he couldn't have done it clothed, it would have felt too absurd, as if he were mad and being chased by phantoms. He ran and shouted nothing for no one. He gestured to Helen to follow him and then flung his arms up and began stamping his feet into the miry soil. In response to his lunacy Helen laughed and scampered in circles. Freezing, she giggled. Bleeding freezing.

  “Ours!” he said. “This is ours!”

  “Ours!” she repeated.

  He ran to the dyke by the road and bent to splash his face with water; the water was freezing and puckered his skin. Helen came up behind him and doubled in breathless laughter.

  “You look ridiculous like that,” she said, “with your great long body and your big feet and your testicles hanging down—like a savage!”

  He snapped off a few flowers from the bank of the dyke and named them: “Brooklime, Labrador tea—these used to be everywhere.”

  Handing them to her he moved on again across the peat making figures of eight and shouting, “This is ours!”

  When they were cold to the point that no running could warm them, even though they had years more running in them, they retreated to the car, turned on the engine for heat, and then the radio for celebration: Irving Berlin. Honey, and I've decided, love divided in two wont do, they sang together. They climbed into the backseat. They were three times too big for the space, four times, they crowded themselves.

  He held her down and pushed himself inside her, almost savage, as she had said—checking briefly to see that she was with him, that she was receptive, and then closing his eyes to block everything out. His head hit the car window with rousing violence. The birch limbs appeared to his vision in drunken intervals, maybe he had opened his eyes to see them, maybe he had only imagined them along with the flare of yellow, the lilac blink of a child not yet born, a miniskirt draped over the steering wheel, a gunshot, a leaf, a gunshot, some bizarre rememberings of the hammered-silver samovar Sara used to display on the sideboard, appearing to him with erotic clarity as if the memory were extruded through the force of sex itself; a stray thought that he never let in of his grandparents in Dachau. Furious anger cancelled, with shameful ease, by overwhelming pleasure. Helen was shrieking, he clutched her hair and pushed deeper until her shrieks filled the car, filled the moors, made new waves on the sea.

  “Memory,” she said.

  “I have none.”

  She indicated right and they pulled out onto the main road, heading away from the moors.

  “Memory?” he asked.

  “We're driving along a highway in America. We're listening to Buddy Holly. I'm pregnant—but I haven't told you yet. I will tell you, soon.”

  He took a packet of mints from the dashboard and handed her one. The radio played: the Crystals, James Brown, Buddy Holly, and he was grateful for its intrusion into their marriage. He closed his eyes against the memory of his wife's shrieks, and against the slight awkwardness that now tied their tongues as they drove home.

  “In fact I do have a memory,” he said at length, turning the mint around in his mouth. “I'm ten, we have to get upstairs by climbing a ladder on the outside wall, it's late. We've had a dinner party with some neighbours and Sara and my father have had an argument, in public, about her being Jewish. She's saying that what she misses, really misses, is olives. You can't get olives in England. Then my father starts: he says she's putting it on—her religion, he meant—he starts mocking her. He hates Jewish food, you see. She's broken some cardinal kosher rules—mixed meat and milk, eating pork, I don't know, my father thinks it's proof that the whole thing is just a show—”

  He looked outside the car window and saw nothing but night.

  “My father starts mocking her about manna: Are you waiting for manna from heaven, do you think your God's going to save you or do you think, perhaps, that it's me going out to work that will save you? My father takes some money from his pocket and waves it around. This is manna, and it isn't from heaven!

  “Then Sara tells him, very coolly, that manner is in fact the way you are, your disposition—she used that word—and manners, with an s, is also the thing you observe when you are in company, and that it is the first thing any self-respecting Englishman should learn. Then she goes upstairs, leaving my father and the neighbours to themselves. I follow her, in case she's upset, but when I find her in the bedroom she is turning slowly in a kind of dance, twisting the praise ring. She looks so happy. I have this vision that my mother is utterly indestructible. And that she will protect me from anything.”

  He then turned to Helen with a more resolute expression.

  “And then the next day, the Second World War breaks out and after we hear the announcement Sara goes upstairs again. I want to see her do that dance, be that amazing, strong mother. But this time there she is in the bedroom completely nude. Completely. Her body isn't what I expect.”

  He examined Helen's face for a reaction but saw only the quick flick of her eyes towards him and back towards the road.

  “It's, I don't know, womanly. With clothes on she always seems so narrow and contained. But she isn't. She has a small potbelly, and her hair is loose all over her shoulders. So pretty, that's what I think, and young, and—vulnerable.”

  Helen crunched her mint. “Does she see you?”

  “Yes. She tells me to go and fill the bath. When the war started there were no more stories about her childhood and Austria and the rest. She just gradually shed her skin and became—English. Her family died, so she thought she should die. And it was as if, Helen, that moment that I saw her naked and vulnerable was the moment where I grew up, and I didn't want to. I wasn't ready to.”

  Helen put her hand on his knee.

  “I think you were ready to.”

  “And because I wasn't ready, I've spent my whole life missing what I left. And I'll spend the rest of my whole life doing the same.”

  “No, darling. Don't say that. Everybody has a little something missing inside them, it's prudent, it's like keeping a spare room in the house for guests.” She opened the window for fresh air. “And if there is a big thing missing, find what it is and replace it. We can replace it.”

  His wife's words did not comfort him, though; they never did. The memory left him feeling that the urgent growing up of that day had involved transgressing a sacred boundary. The more he tried to rid his mind of the image of his naked mother the more it prevailed and sharpened, so that he could see the birthmark on Sara's hip, her thick pubic hair, that belly, like the most private of all things, laid bare to his scrutiny.

  The white front of the coach house flared in the headlights; they pulled up, stopped the car, gathered the items of clothing that had not made their way back on—socks, Helen's bra, Helen's ne
ck scarf, his leather belt. The car engine ticked as it cooled.

  For the first time he was struck by the loveliness of their house as if he had been loaned Helen's eyes for long enough to see what she saw: the creamy walls, tall black-framed windows, the modest but clear announcement of its drive, the garden an all-consuming selfish green even in the darkness, the cherry tree burning yellow into another autumn.

  “Jake,” Helen said.

  He held back a few steps and watched her approach the back door. “Yes?”

  “Jake, I believe I'm pregnant.”

  He looked at his wife. “Since when?”

  She smiled wryly. “Fifteen minutes ago.”

  Had it been any other person, he would have ridiculed the premature announcement, but Helen—Helen knew, he could tell.

  “That hit the spot?”

  She bit her lip. “In more than one way.”

  “It's Alice?”

  “Yes,” she grinned, “I'm sure of it.”

  “Buddy Holly!” he said, his tones muted. He lifted her and spun her around; her feet knocked a milk bottle at the back door and smashed it across the gravel.

  His delight was genuine, kissing her, letting her go, hoping against hope that she was right in her inkling, brushing the broken glass aside with his foot. But when they switched on the kitchen light they saw that something was not right. A chair had been knocked over. The French doors were shattered.

  “Shit,” he said. He ranged across the kitchen, to the hallway, up the stairs. Ornaments along the way were broken, nothing precious, but why break them? Why not either steal or leave them? He bartered with himself: if the money is still there under the bed it is all right. He paused a moment in Henry's room, seeing that it was apparently untouched. Music came from his and Helen's bedroom, the crackle of a record crawling around the turntable. Love divided in two wont do. If the money is still there, he wagered, all will be well.

  He ducked through the secret door, lowered himself to his knees by the unmade double bed, noted the proximity of his knee to a piece of smashed china that had once been a statue of an angel—a rather fanciful thing, a gift from him to Helen that he trusted she would like precisely because he didn't. Fury filled him when he saw her diary torn up and scattered across the pile of laundry by the wardrobe. Confusion, relief, slight offence filled him when he registered also that the human-skin Bible had been pulled from its shoe box in the wardrobe and thrown, intact, to the floor.

  He screwed his face towards the darkness under the bed. The money, of course, was gone.

  Helen perched on the sofa in her rayon skirt.

  “Ginger, dear,” Sara said.

  “Actually I don't like ginger.”

  “Ah, so.”

  Sara dwindled back to the kitchen and he followed her, reasoning lamely.

  “They'll find who took it. There were fingerprints everywhere.”

  He leaned against the counter and felt pressure on his bladder as the shot of water passed through the coffee. “They'll find who it was.”

  Sara prepared the mugs; not the gold-rimmed cups but some two-a-penny blue-and-white striped mugs that were bereft of saucers or the possibility of saucers.

  “Jacob, dear, they will never find that money. The sooner you lose hope the better.”

  He folded his arms and dug his fingers between his ribs, made a short laugh. It's only money, it's only money. So Helen had taken to assuring him. But, despite their haste to see the police off and get out of the house, get back to their child as if to make up for all they had failed to protect, she had taken the time to rid herself of the miniskirt and leave it in a pile like a curse. On their drive back to Sara's they had lamented at cross-purposes, Helen talking about changing locks and the prospect of rewriting what she had logged in her destroyed diaries, he persisting (so much that he began to irritate even himself) in questioning, why, why did it happen? She interrogating the future, he nursing the past. He suddenly becoming what he did not want to be; a dweller. A dweller on the done and dusted. A dweller in an old honeysuckled house, and condemned to it.

  Helen went to bed; it was already two or three in the morning. He stayed up with Sara, who seemed to have no tiredness, either that or no idea of the time. As she switched on her radio and sank back into the bentwood chair he wondered if it were really possible for a person to age in a week, to give up on even the remote idea of youth. She was vacant. The loss of the money had impacted on her enough to cause the faintest of shudders, and then had seemed to absent her mind. He would not be the one to remind her that it was her family, that money. All the blood and bones of it, the sum of the remains.

  “Where is Rook?” he asked suddenly. “Did he go home?”

  “Yes,” Sara said, and feigned a yawn. “Tomorrow he's going to America.”

  He straightened. “Why's that?”

  “To see his granddaughter—I hear you've met her.” She smoothed her hands across the cushion on her lap. “The poor girl got herself in trouble a few months ago; Rook wanted to go and help sort it out but she wouldn't let him. She went alone, stubborn girl. I like her. I pity her. It's easier in California—of course she had to go over the border still and keep it all quiet.”

  She spoke as if it were all just a matter of course.

  “Sara, do you mean what I think you mean?”

  “Probably.”

  He forced himself not to speak until he had thought precisely what to say. He poured himself a glass of wine, the sweet white stuff, the bottle already half empty.

  “Over the border?”

  “Mexico.”

  He shuddered at the idea of Joy laid out somewhere hot and dark, somewhere with thick spicy air. He turned the vision away.

  “Rook didn't say anything at dinner—”

  “No, of course. He was quiet with thought. He has been worried, naturally.”

  “But it's over? She's all right?”

  “Oh, quite all right. But Rook wants to go and treat her and buy her things and make her happy. That girl's happiness is his meaning for life.”

  Sara looked a little regretful at this. She tucked her large hands between her thighs.

  “How long ago—the pregnancy?”

  “Some months.”

  He drank, wondering what some months meant.

  “But she's getting married—isn't she? Joy? I think Rook mentioned.” He acted out ignorance with a shrug. “So she could have—there was no need for any sorting out.”

  “Ah, but she's certain the husband-to-be is not the—what is that word.”

  “Father?”

  “Culprit.”

  He felt rather sick and dark.

  “Then who?”

  “Apparently she had something with a man here, in England, before she left. That's all she would tell Rook. Or at least,” Sara sighed, “that's all Rook would tell me.”

  He felt to be the embodiment of sin, some bedevilled creature polluting all he touched. Or he felt drunk. He thought of Alice gathering cell by cell upstairs; of Sara naked; of Helen's shriek; of Rook's wink; of a gunshot. Of a Bible so bleakly bound that even criminals would not take it. In his mind a door opened, Alice walked through, it closed again, Alice was gone. She was not pleased with what she saw, so she left. Her life was no more than his hush-hush of a door opening and shutting.

  “I was going to ask Rook to marry me this evening,” Sara said. “That was to be the real announcement. After the other announcement.”

  He tilted his head and watched her.

  “But I lost courage. What a foolish idea it was.” She touched her teeth again as she had earlier that evening and lowered her gaze.

  “What terrible fates got that girl pregnant and sent him off to America? He's too old for this.” She stood and wandered to the mantelpiece as if it had asked her to come and listen to something it had to say.

  “I want to go to the sea with him, this second,” she announced. “Oh, I'm so tired of all this aloneness, every room I go in what do I fin
d? Me. Ich, everywhere, ich ich. I was going to ask him to marry me. Maybe not now. The courage has left me now.”

  13

  How else could Alice have entered life but with one eye on its exit? Conceived in the back of a car to a little death and infidel thoughts, she was never going to want to loiter in this world.

  In that sperm travelling towards that egg (he can see it swimming, heavily laden with bad news) there was nothing but death and disappointment, and it was his doing. Alice was his child; it was always as though her mother didn't so much give birth to her as dispel her, not without love but in recognition of the fact that Alice was uncomfortable with the level of goodness she found inside her mother's small, white, freckle-dusted body. And when dispelled she went straight to her source, her father, that was how it seemed at least.

  When she was born everybody noticed how like her father she looked and how eerie that resemblance was, because it was not in the features, which were more like her mother's, but in the parts of the face that don't have a name. Or maybe not even there, but just in the moving interim between one expression and another. The closed eyes and open eyes were her mother's, but the blinking eyes her father's. The smile was her mother's and the scowl, too, but the graduation from one to the other, the little wilderness between states, was her father's through and through.

  Every time he wakes up it is this wilderness that greets him, this no-man's-land, filled with his daughter's eyes and smiles on their way to an expression they never quite reach.

  No matter what he attempts with the timeline, and no matter how he manoeuvres collapsing memories into stories that might get round to her, all that is left of Alice is three isolated flashes which, when they come, throw all other time out of bounds.

  First, he is carrying Alice through the woods. There are gunshots: bang, they ricochet between the trees, lose their heart, and stream onto the path in shreds of last sound. He covers Alice's ears (which, he thinks in wonder, are just like shells they found on the beach the week before she was born), and he takes the time to trace his fingers around their curves. Alice does not cry. Alice is three weeks old and not overly concerned by or interested in this world, not even the deer killing, not even the lattice of branches that bow down to her. Still, though, he covers her ears to spare her any concern that might come.