The Wilderness Read online

  “What's the flame?” she asked rather fearfully, pointing to a chimney on the horizon from which a blue flame bellowed.

  “Waste gas. Like an Olympic flame,” he replied, leaning across the hand brake to pat her leg, trying to cheer her up. She liked to watch athletics, she liked the speed, height, and distance people could go for no reason but to go fast, high, or far.

  “Did you see it?” she asked, successfully distracted. “The four-minute mile? I was with my daddy, we went to the cinema to see it, we had—oh what do you call them? Those sweets with the mint inside and chocolate out.”

  Yes he saw it, the sinewy man stretching himself against the clock, and wondered, is this the best men can do?

  “If a man could run as fast as an ant, for his size,” he responded, “he would be as fast as a racehorse.”

  “But that's irrelevant, he's not an ant. He doesn't need to be as fast as an ant.”

  “All the same. You'll be happy here. I feel it.”

  Their tour passed Rook's house, a bewilderingly out-of-place Italian Renaissance-style place painted in faded orange and dusk pinks, muraled walls showing cherubs, and an overgrown walled garden accessed through wrought-iron gates. The absurdity of its opulence, albeit aged and faded opulence, against these humdrum flatlands made it all the more astonishing. Helen held her hands to the car window. “I love Rook,” she said. “I love him for living there.”

  “Rook loves himself for living there,” he commented.

  He had never travelled the moors in a car before. Their blackness was unforgiving through a car window, without the fresh air to take the edge off it, with the flowers too small to see. He understood Helen's fear, and conversely her enchantment at the interruption Rook's house provided. She stared from the window as the scenery passed.

  “Is that a kestrel?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied. “It's a buzzard. I mean it, they're very different.”

  Then, farther along, The Sun Rises appeared. He was genuinely taken aback. He had forgotten about it. If nothing else, life in London offered enough pubs and bars to never have to consider one solitary pub in the middle of some moors two hundred miles distant. And yet he had been here so many times; Sara had cooked her Jewish food here back when she still did such things. They had drunk—he was underage, nobody on earth cared. Sara had decorated the toilets with paintings of mermaids and slogans in German: MAN IST WAS MAN ISST. You are what you eat. It was one of the few German phrases he knew. Rook had sat at the bar with a rope of sunlight falling around his neck, eating mussels, too drunk to speak, eyeing Sara with an unreadable expression. Love, possibly. Lust, or pity, or just drunkenness. Sara had lost all her relatives, her parents included, in the war. She was unsure of herself, wondering how to cook all the potatoes they had—as Jewish latkes or as English mash. Deciding who to be, where her allegiance lay. The Sun Rises had been a small pocket of belonging and energy in a sluggish time. How could he have cast it so easily from his mind? How strange, then, was memory—that a whole interval of one's life could be blotted out like the sun behind the moon, and then emerge again so intact!

  In front of the pub he saw a woman. He knew immediately that it was Eleanor. She wore a turquoise dress patterned with blue flowers that fit her little better than a curtain; she wore a pair of Wellington boots. She seemed, as far as he could see, to be watering the bedding plants at the front of the pub although it had rained the previous night.

  He sounded the horn and waved. For a time she looked up bemused, then waved back, then made gestures of annoyance that he had not stopped. There'll be plenty of time, he thought. He said it aloud to his wife. “There'll be plenty of time to meet Eleanor.”

  “The e is missing,” Helen said, pointing back at the sign that swung above the door. It read, on the background of a faded hilly landscape, THE SUN RIS S. “It needs painting back on, somebody should do that.”

  He smiled, watching Eleanor shrink in the rearview mirror. They struck their way across the moors, past field upon field of beetroot and potatoes, and at last reached the new tarmac corridor of the M1, his foot pressed onto the accelerator, and Helen fast asleep. They got home late, went to bed, got up, he went to work. When he left Helen was reading her Bible at the kitchen table, her head dipped deeply, turning her wedding ring round and round her finger. That afternoon he handed in his notice. A month later they were packing their three cases and trying them out this way and that until they fit in the back of the Mini.

  2

  Driving to work, he falls into the illusion for a moment that he is still in that Mini; the car shrinks to oblige the mistake. He misjudges the position of the gear stick in the thought that it is far closer to his leg, and his head and shoulders are stooped as they always used to be under the Mini's low roof. What frightens him is this—the way objects rush and trip over themselves to support his confusion. He looks around his car and tries to remember what make it is; he cannot. He opens the window to feel what month it is. It isn't a month. There aren't months. There are just happenings, a lack of signposts. Why this e? Why this missing e? He laughs at himself. The brain stores billions of memories and some are obvious, of course—it is obvious that he will remember his honeymoon and his suitcases and his pilgrimage (this is how he thinks of it now), his pilgrimage back home. And Henry. Granted, some of the details are imagined or inflated or borrowed from other times, but the essence, as part of the story of himself, is undeniably right. But the missing e? It is with a struggle that he remembers what he did this morning, or how long ago it was that Helen died, and yet he recalls her saying those words: The e is missing. It needs painting back on, somebody should do that.

  He pulls up at the side of the road, lifts his glasses, and rubs his eyes. He has been doing this journey to and from work every day for thirty-five years. He pores over the map.

  One day he arrived home from work, it was a Tuesday or a Wednesday, or a Monday. Helen was in the kitchen carving through salmon fillets while oblongs of sunlight fell in on her hands.

  “They're old.” She put the knife down and spread her fingers. “Are they really my hands?”

  He stood by her side, picked up the knife, and folded her fingers around the handle. He kissed her neck, a neutral and warm contact but nothing more, and she tucked her hair behind her ear.

  In response to these worries that she was getting old there was nothing more to say; he had said it all. You're beautiful, he had previously ventured (and meant it, she was more beautiful now, in the details, in the stories of the lines, than before). She had shaken her head and simply disagreed. We all get old, he had tried: to no avail. Me faster than most, she had replied. He had shaken his head, she had shaken hers back. Once or twice he had offered, Helen, you're not getting old, and they had ended up smiling ruefully at the whiteness of the lie.

  “It's like being injured,” she said, and rested the knife blade on the salmon. “Suddenly I feel injured by the years, like I've been in a car crash.”

  “What is this, Helen? You have to stop. You're fifty-three, it's not old.”

  “I had a dream that you were leaning over a very beautiful Bible, here at the table. What does this mean, Jake?” She cut through the flesh once and then again. “That you're going to find God?” She laughed. “At last, you're going to find God! And why would you do that?”

  The expression she turned to him was unbearably sweet. Disarmed, he shrugged at it.

  “I doubt I will, I'm not looking for him. The dream means something else, or nothing. It means you want me to find God. It means I need to, it means anything, nothing.”

  She merely shook her head at him.

  “I think it means, Jake, that I am not going to be here for very long. You'll be alone—you see, God finds those who are alone and in need.”

  “And where are you going?” he asked, feeling querulous. He turned to take a plum from the fruit bowl on the kitchen table and Helen stole it from his hand as he was about to bite it. She sliced the plum
in half and scooped out the stone, then passed half back to him.

  “Look at this,” she said with a sudden childlike smile, and laid the salmon and the plum side by side. “One is fruit, one is fish, but the flesh is so similar. This is where I see God, in these—in these consistencies between things.”

  Discarding his half of fruit on the table he took the knife from her and held it close to her face. He had not wanted half a plum, he had wanted a whole one; he had not wanted it cut neatly, de-stoned. Certainly he had not wanted to hear her prophesise her own death, and moreover he had not, at the point where he saw her prophesy play before his mind in a stilted and sickening delivery of images, wanted to talk about the artistry of God in lieu, yet again, of a real topic of conversation.

  “What is this, Helen? Didn't you once used to ask me about my day, and I yours?”

  Her eyes, either side of the blade, blinked rather calmly. “Yes, and you used to say, Do we have to talk about our days, Helen? It's so superficial, talking about days. Can we not just have a coffee and make love instead?”

  The asymmetry of her face, divided as it was by the steel blade, captivated him. He had always thought of her as perfectly ordered, prettily symmetrical, delicate and unsurprising. She was, at this moment at least, not. Not delicate—her fearlessness made her formidable. Not pretty—too formidable to be pretty. No symmetry—one ear, he now observed, was higher than the other, one eye slightly wider, one cheekbone more threaded with fine blood vessels.

  “Can we make love now?” he asked. He wanted to withdraw the knife, knowing the absurdity of it, but he did not want to restore her to the plainness of perfection quite so soon. He felt an urgent love for her; he thought, he had to admit, of Joy.

  “No, not now.” She blinked again and backed away the few inches to the sideboard, and finally he placed the knife down. “Besides,” she said, “you didn't meet me to go shopping today.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I said you didn't meet me to go shopping today.”

  He will never forget the way she brought her hands to her hips so as to challenge him not to lie. He did not lie.

  “I'm sorry, I completely forgot. Are you punishing me?”

  “No, of course not.” She sat at the table and leaned forward on her elbows, her hair crowding behind her ears and her eyebrows arched. “You forgot last week, you put the coffee in the oven instead of the fridge, you sometimes forget my name.”

  “What is this?” he demanded to know. He was angered now by the slipping of the conversation from plums to death to God to this, this, whatever this was. An accusation perhaps, though of what he was unsure.

  “Can you say anything, Jake, except what is this?”

  “If you could start making sense, yes, then I could stop asking you to clarify.”

  She stood and took a bowl from the table. “I'm going to pick some cherries.”

  Then she walked barefooted to the French doors, and slipped outside.

  After her death he stared into the dark and demanded a ghost. He had read bereavement leaflets that warned gently of the appearance of the deceased, at the foot of the bed, out of the corner of the eye, a smoky presence you might put your fingers through. If such a thing came he was not to be alarmed— no, far from it, he was to be comforted. And so he waited.

  Each night he sat in his study and looked through an album of photographs Henry had put together for her memorial. There is one of her on that same day of her death, after she went out into the garden barefooted, and she is up the ladder in the branches of the cherry tree in her pinafore and shoes and socks that made her look like Alice in Wonderland. The more he sat in his study looking at those photographs, the more he became convinced that if she came back to life and he could ask her just one question, it would be this: When did you put your shoes and socks on?

  The question plagued him out of all proportion. Maybe he was wrong about the bare feet. But he was not wrong about the bare feet. He remembered it. He would make himself a mint julep and swill it with the troubled concentration of a detective.

  After closing the album he always sat back in his seat and replayed this scene: Helen barefooted in the kitchen on her last day alive, slicing salmon and plums, making mention of his forgetfulness for the first time as if she had been saving this conversation—as if, before dying, she wanted him to know she knew that it was not just a bit of absentminded aging but dementia, an illness; that her knowledge of this would go some way to protecting him after she was gone.

  This is where I see God, in these—in these consistencies between things, she had said. Did she really say this, or is it just the kind of thing she might have said? Were her feet really bare, or was going barefooted just the kind of thing she would have done? And in perfecting that scene in the kitchen, has he simply perfected his version of it? And isn't it true to say that the more perfect the memory the less accurate it is likely to be? Like a Nativity scene on a Christmas card, rendered so many times it now no longer represents anything of the real birth of Christ.

  Dogged by these uncertainties, willing her ghost to come, he rid the house of milk, knowing Helen's near phobia of it. For months he settled for black coffee and found himself remembering those days, so far back—before Alice's birth— when she did drink it, when she loved it, when her freckled skin itself was like cream dusted with cinnamon, when she would tell him his eyes were washed with milk, and when she loved the cherry blossom that curdled on the branches. But it was not to stay that way, and by the time she died her aversion to it was stronger than any aversion she had to anything; just the smell of it, she would say. Just the smell of it. So, in trying to lure back her ghost, he poured the remains of a bottle of milk down the sink and bought no more. She still didn't come. One day it suddenly dawned on him that he was being absurd and he bought a pint, put it in the fridge. Nothing whatsoever changed. The empty drudgery of the days went on regardless.

  At night, occasionally, he would go through the photograph album once again and then try to feel the ghost or the delusion. He lay with his teeth gritted as his night vision, still sharp, interrogated each pixel of darkness in the bedroom. Each pixel gathered with others in a crouch of wardrobe or flow of jacket or a heft of beam; the handbasin and the chrome arm of the record player caught a splinter of moonlight. In there, between there, from there, he calculated, Helen will appear.

  There is a story his mother once told him about the murderer Luigi Lucheni. In 1898 Lucheni stabbed the Austrian empress in the heart with a shoemaker's file and killed her. When he went to prison he began raving and went mad, and he spent twelve years this way, in euphoric insanity, until he finally killed himself. In this time his only comfort was the regular visitations, manifestations, of the ghost of the beautiful empress. She came wrapped in fur, crouching at his side at dog level; she gave him dog vision. You can call me Elisabeth, she offered generously. She gave him access to the brilliance of sights, smells, and sounds that humans perpetually overlook; she stroked him, he her. In whispers she explained how she had come back to the source of the sin that killed her in order to forgive it, to forgive him, and she told him that this close encounter with one's demise was the only way to heal the pain of being dead. The hole in her heart—a concise puncture that barely blemished the white skin of her breast—had begun to glow a little, and cool breezes passed through it. For the first time, she was happy. And he was happy, at last, he was happy.

  (As an aside to this story, Sara also mentioned that Lucheni indirectly started the First World War by setting a precedent for the assassination of Austrian royals, which is what spawned the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand sixteen years later, which is what flared the conflict between the empire and the Serbian assassins, which is when Russia stepped up to defend their Serbian allies, which is when Austria mobilised its army, and Germany theirs in support, and France theirs in opposition, and Britain theirs in support of France's opposition, and so: a war. Sara dipped a wedge of cold potato in her milky coff
ee and said, Hey presto—a phrase she had just learned—hey presto, Jacob, Elisabeth had a lot to forgive. And she remained impassive, inexpressive, as if the war had no personal dimension for her.)

  He believed, then, that if Lucheni—who had been ugly and craven by all accounts—got Elisabeth, a ghost of Helen would not be unreasonable in the least. One bereavement leaflet seemed to feel so certain of apparitions that it listed them, as a compensatory effort, against the other possible symptoms of grief: physical pain (in the chest, as if one's heart is cleaved), a sense of injustice, a broiling anger, notions of hopelessness, an intermittent or abnormal appetite, sporadic loss of function in the limbs, extreme fear of, or else longing for, one's own death. And in return, one may see or get the distinct feeling that the loved one is there, at the foot of the bed, or in the bed, or at one's shoulder, a smoky presence. One may put their fingers through it and feel the soul of the deceased, like moist remnants of dawn in the morning air.

  Apart from that short-lived banishment of milk, he has never been a superstitious man; he awaited the presence as anyone would await the next step in a process. The chest pain came, the abnormal appetite, some anger promptly controlled. Confusion. In fact, it was more than this—it was clotting of thoughts, disorientation. A presence was the least a man in his position should now expect; it was not his privilege after all, it was his right.

  He bartered with his solitude. The ghost did not have to be an apparition, nor strictly ephemeral, it did not have to bring lasting peace and hope, it could be real and logical, obvious almost, the outcome of a simple sum. It didn't have to creep in the dark, it could be felt in the day if Helen, who was not a night creature, so preferred.

  He was open to possibility. After more than thirty years of marriage to a woman whose beliefs fired her every breath he had at least learned, for the sake of good-natured compromise, to be anything but agnostic, agreeing to believe anything in principle. And the more he lived by this compromise the more he found it served his natural attitudes. He would always favour something over nothing. He would always hedge his religious bets, preserving this something as just that, some thing, not this specific thing nor that particular thing. Helen would draw him into religious debate and he would, he always felt, evade it deftly by saying, “Helen, take it up with somebody else—in principle, I don't disagree with you. Maybe there is a god, in principle you're absolutely right, anything is possible.” He meant it, and the integrity was part of what made the argument deft, that for once he was not trying to quell her constant musing by outwitting her but was doing so by being simple and honest.