The Wilderness Read online

  “So you'll need to stay here for—what? I don't know, a few months maybe?” Sara asked.

  “Just for a month or so—until we find somewhere to rent. Then we can look around properly. It will all be quick, Sara.”

  “As you wish.”

  When Helen brushed her hair behind her ear the gesture seemed to carry an undercurrent of irritation. “You don't mind us staying, Sara? It's an awful pain, all three of us.”

  “If I minded I would not have invited you. It isn't my way. And if I want you to go I'll tell you that in a second.”

  Helen reached for her hair again to find it already behind her ear. She smiled with visible effort and sat. She put Henry stomach down on the sofa, between them.

  “Look at these.” Sara took something from a drawer in the dresser. They were photographs, square Polaroids which she handed to them. “It's a house about six miles from here, a coach house. The woman who owns it is a friend of mine. She lost her husband a few months ago and she wants to sell. It's a bit— ratty-tatty, but a good house. She wants to find good people to buy it, it's not the kind of a house that appreciates complete strangers.”

  The photographs showed a long narrow building with white façade, dating, he estimated, to the early 1800s. Perhaps the monochrome images bequeathed to the house a mystique it did not really deserve, a cloudy wistfulness to its old age. He saw through it; he did not especially like it. The two photographs of its interior showed large rooms and splendid supporting beams, frowzy and disordered decor, bad plasterwork. Ratty-tatty, as Sara had said. Woodworm, he thought; joist problems; the lintels are probably shot through with holes; likely it will need reroofing.

  “It's absolutely the most perfect and wonderful house I've ever seen,” Helen said, caressing the pictures.

  He knew the deal was already done, even before Sara mentioned they could have it for less than two thousand pounds, and even before she went to the kitchen and returned with two glasses filled with what she informed them was cherry wine, and even before she declared that the wine was made with fruit from the cherry tree in the garden of the house, and even before she produced a final picture—in case they were interested—of the tree itself, its blossom the colour of mallow (the monochrome image could not subdue that creamy pink-ness), its branches as slender, Sara observed, as a tamarisk tree.

  Helen put her hand to her mouth in measured delight. “As I envisaged it,” she said.

  “And also,” Sara added, “Rook is coming for dinner.” She rested her cup on her palm and seemed to test him for a response.

  He raised his brows. “Rook?”

  “He visits me from time to time.” Her eye twitched and she held her fingers to the offending nerve. Long fingers, elegant face—the sort of face he would expect to see in tall women, when in fact Sara was far from tall. “Anyhow he's coming at seven, and already it's four. Will you excuse me in that case? I have a lot of cooking to do—make yourselves welcome.”

  “Just as I envisaged it,” Helen repeated, rubbing her hand up and down Henry's back.

  Then, if Rook is coming, he must have a bath, he thought urgently, and he must have a piss. It was the coffee machine, the compressed shot of hot water and then the trickle of liquid as it passed into the jug. It always made him need to piss. And the business with this cherry tree and the house they seemed suddenly destined to buy. He excused himself. He hadn't seen Rook for more than a decade.

  3

  He knows the route to The Sun Rises like the back of his own hand. He knows without any conscious thought when to change gear, when to slow down or speed up, which potholes are deep enough to avoid and which areas flood, specifically which areas, down to a few metres or so. Sometimes the puddles have frog spawn in. He knows to avoid them at certain times of the year and he knows, by light, colours, and instinct, that it is probably that time of year now.

  Eleanor has a newspaper on her lap; when he glances across he sees that the headline is something about a plane disaster, there is a photograph of something mangled. He thinks of Helen. Her love of flight always made her morose over crashed planes, because planes belonged to a perfect world of height and freedom that was not supposed to fail. She would have been upset now by those pictures in Eleanor's paper and he would have tried to cheer her up with some platitude or other. Maybe she would have been upset by Eleanor herself, wondering how x could be put in y's place as if y had never been. He hopes she would have been upset; he is. He glances back at the newspaper.

  “What's the story?” he asks.

  Eleanor puts down the pocket mirror she has been frowning into, looks at the paper, sighs, and tells him to hang on a minute. “Something about the Rwandan president being killed,” she says. “In a plane explosion.”

  “Will there be a war?”

  She folds the paper and picks her mirror up again, rubbing her skin with her fingertips. “I don't know. It doesn't say.”

  It worries him, war. It seems like one of those things that, now he is unable to follow the news properly, might just creep up on him. He was always so aware; now not so. There was always some control over the workings of the world when he could see what was coming.

  Silence settles between them as Eleanor combs her fingers through her hair. Memory, Helen used to say as they drove. He would give her a memory. This was his homeland and she wanted to get to know it through the eyes of his childhood. He drives on and his stomach tightens. It strikes him as strange and sad that whenever he maps out his own history it converges on pain. He has known so much more than pain—and yet recently everything pivots on the tragedies and wrong turnings.

  He doesn't know if Eleanor has truly sunk into oblivion over the past or whether she is just pretending. Either way, it obviously isn't important enough to her. But to him it is. While she inspects her hairline he entertains horror. This is the precise route he took that night, from the coach house to The Sun Rises, 1967, the week after the Six-Day War had ended; it was hot. War, you see, and bombed airfields and Egypt's planes blown to nothing by Israel, and Helen angry for an entire week as if they would divorce over this: this war. As if it were his fault.

  How full of rage and horror he was when he drove out here and decided to make a play for Eleanor, knowing Eleanor would never refuse. All he could think about was Alice. To salve the blame he had loaded on himself he decided to run to Eleanor's bed, and there she was, of course. Of course she let him in. And then he left.

  He cannot decide now how long it was before he and Eleanor spoke again. He was embarrassed. He spent months disgusted with himself, and when he checks now to confirm when that disgust eased he is not sure that it ever did. He is embarrassed, that decades later Eleanor is what remains. Their past seems so dull and grubby, and their present so—inexpli cable. He wonders if he should have brought her along tonight.

  They pull up at a junction and wait. In the mirror her eyes become ringed with dark brown and expand in size. She emerges and changes under the nib of the eye pencil as Helen had used to do. In the late sixties Helen had worn her eyes large and black; her once-brown legs had turned ravishing white from the bad northern weather and her knees had seemed to be exposed bone. They are so uncannily different, Helen and Eleanor. Eleanor is plump and her makeup is a mask; he prefers her without it. He wants to tell somebody there has been a mistake. He searches his pockets for a cigarette, finds the accelerator and pulls off.

  Eleanor dabs her cheeks in the failing light. “Are you excited?”

  Dear Eleanor, to think that somebody could be excited about their own retirement dinner.

  “Nervous,” he replies. “It's a bit like going to your own wake.”

  She sniffs and puts the mirror on the dashboard. “I don't think I'll ever retire. Don't think I'll ever be able to afford to. I'll be digging my own grave to save money.”

  She grins; the smell of her perfume edges into his senses as if through a wall of sponge, just some of the smell permeating and the rest lost. What does she even do for a l
iving?

  “Everyone retires. I tried not to—but there comes a point when it's necessary for you to be eased out. It's a system.”

  He worries suddenly that he has forgotten the car keys, quizzing himself to think where he might have left them, before realising they are in the ignition. Eleanor clears a blemish from the windscreen with the cuff of her blouse. She turns to him.

  “I'll look after you,” she says.

  “Sara used to call retirement the Sabbath Days,” he says, ignoring her. He does not want to talk about being looked after or to look across and catch her eye as if they are sealing a joint fate. “The Sabbath Days, the days of rest. No gathering manna, no ploughing or reaping or pressing—” He frowns out of the window at the moors and the cooling towers in the distance, ejecting broad plumes of cloud into an otherwise clear evening. With his thumb and forefinger he makes a small circle. “No pressing those things, not plums. The other things.”

  “Grapes?” Eleanor ventures.

  “Yes. Grapes.” Embarrassed still, he forges on with his point. “No ploughing or reaping. No cooking. She called them the days of rest.”

  “No cooking? Then I'll have to cook for you. Oh Jakey, poor you, it'll be beef sandwiches every day and frozen hotpots.”

  She puts her hand on his thigh and squeezes.

  “There was something about a man not eating muesli,” he begins, on the periphery of a memory he cannot quite place. “Did you tell me about that, the man who wouldn't eat muesli, or was it meat?”

  “I don't think so.”

  He pauses, interrogating his brain aggressively for the clarity that sometimes comes out of temporary confusion, but this time it doesn't come. After a lifetime of well-founded reliance on things just fixing themselves, he finds it disturbing to accept that they are more likely, now, to stay broken.

  But where was he? What had he been thinking just now, before that other thought?

  Eleanor squeezes his leg again and stares lightly at him; he has often asked her not to stare down his foolishness like this as if in great alarm, or, worse still, great sympathy. Her voice, saying something calming he suspects, is somewhere in his head but he is now noticing the plants that push through along the dykes, and tries to conjure their names. Brooklime, he recalls. Labrador tea. Funny that he should remember such trivia.

  She scrutinises him as if trying to establish from the way he sits or the expression on his face whether he might let himself down terribly this evening.

  “You all right driving?”

  He nods.

  He must have seen Henry recently because he remembers it, and everything remembered happened either very recently or very distantly; something he must get used to now that there is no middle distance as such.

  The moors spin past, the peat dark grey and puddled along the dykes from heavy rainfall. When he saw Henry he showed him the letters. They've been coming ever since Helen died, he explained to his son. They just come and come. All addressed to her: look. Helen Jameson. Look.

  There were six or so inmates in the visits room: Are any of these thieves? he had asked. A shrug from Henry. Nobody asks what you're here for, Henry had said. He found this information unbelievable, but let it pass. He could not abide thieves. Murderers, adulterers, heretics, junkies, kidnappers—not ideal, but the world needs its irregularities: it is too perfectly spherical, too perfectly perfect without. God is too easy without the challenge. But thieves disrupted the oiled mechanisms of give and take that he, personally, took as the most human of human traits: the ability to recognise value, fairly trade, to save for what seemed important, to spend on what seemed immediate. To give, also, and to provide.

  Each of these six inmates, except Henry, was being visited by a woman. One of the women had a child who played sullenly with his father's fingers, lifting and dropping them. He recalls a black couple whose quiet conversation was casual and sporadic as if they were waiting together for a bus. How loyal women are, he had thought—loyal and patient. His mind was drawn to his daughter, he wanted to talk to Henry about her but had no idea what he would say—could not bear, more likely, Henry's casual regard of her. About Alice, he wanted to say. Let's talk about Alice. Instead he put his hands to his chin and tilted his face upwards.

  As he slid the letters across to Henry he looked at the grey walls, the refectory along the wall to his right—no, left, no. Right. He remembers that the woman at the counter looked drowsy as she piled bars of something on a rack. He sipped his tea, usually refusing tea on grounds of its tasting like wet clay, or old wood, but there at the prison it is always strangely delicious—strong, sweet, still hot in the stomach and homely.

  Helen was my mother, my mumma, his son had said, cradling his cup in his hands just as Helen used to. Do you remember I used to call her mumma? And she used to call me bubba. And now you sit here and accuse her of having an affair!

  He and Henry had disagreed about the letters; he was sure, is still sure, that if they read the letters they would find infidelity in them. Only a secret lover would keep writing to his beloved after her death, not knowing that she was dead. The thought is painful to him, so much so that he sometimes feels pity for this poor man, who must by now be worried, mustn't he? The lack of replies must be eating at him.

  Henry was not interested in the theory and put the letters aside, yawned, and rambled about prison life. They saved their fruit rations, he said, and fermented them with marmite and sugar to make wine; he asked if he could be sent some mar-mite, they had stopped selling it at the prison shop.

  There was an argument about who knew Helen better. He remembers he had tried to pull the chair towards the table to impose his view, but the chair was rooted to the floor. In the effort he had done something, spilt his tea or knocked the letters to the floor, it is unclear now, but one of the women had looked around at him as if apologetic, and he had felt, again, something like unworthiness or failure in the slow tired blink she gave before she turned back to her husband.

  The argument—the argument had been so familiar. He can't with any honesty say they definitely had it this time, more that it is just an argument that is always there for the having, regurgitated so many times it could be scripted. He sometimes wonders if it is the only conversation he and Henry have really had since Helen died. It is an argument over who knows her best, who is more like her, who loved her most. The debate tires and upsets him; how can he even approach these questions? Helen was his wife. Compacted in that word is a whole planet of intimacy, not to mention the fact of choice: that he and Helen chose each other in a way that Helen and Henry never did. Slept together, too. Made Henry. Henry is secondary to Jake-and-Helen, a by-product.

  Henry gathered the letters then, from the floor or the table, and patted them tenderly into order. He began to talk about a German poet in his block who had a wife at home with long blond hair and eyes like planets. The poet wrote his wife a hundred poems a day. People write when they're lonely, Henry said, and it would be no good just writing to yourself, what you say has to be said to someone. Days when the poet couldn't get his post sorted in time to go out he went mad. Henry smiled as if at a fond memory. He said that maybe those mysterious letters were just from somebody lonely exploiting Helen's charity.

  He must have been looking away from Henry during that speech, because he remembers now seeing him suddenly as a stranger: restless, warring, and vulnerable in his—what is the word—jail costume? It occurred to him that, given a choice of who he should be, his son had been launched into a dilemma he had not yet solved. The baby was in him, and the boy, and the man, the old man, the wise, the embittered, the arrogant. His hair had not grown back from whatever it was that had made it come out, either the drugs or the prison razor. There they both sat, more hairless than ever. He had no idea how to relate to his son. They could not pull their chairs closer, and there was no way of bridging the gap. The table and chairs were all of a piece, arranged so as to never be rearranged.

  He put the letters i
n his pocket before he left. Henry whispered something: There, he said, see that man, he's the one who set his girlfriend on fire.

  As he listened to Henry whisper he looked at the clock and saw its fast hand trip forward, and it started near the four and, by the time Henry stopped speaking, it was near the eleven. In that time Henry had told him about how the man would eat nothing that had been in contact with meat; he would eat only muesli which his girlfriend brought in plastic boxes. Yes, that was where he had encountered that man, in prison. He is relieved; he remembers sharp words with Eleanor when he came out into the car park where she was waiting, because she wanted him to tell Henry about his illness and he could not. They quarrelled, but gently. Everything is always gentle now, even violence and quarrelling. He looked at the prison and felt the stab of pride that he had built it and that it was still standing. Eleanor coughed when she started up the engine and punched at buttons to get the radio working. It was raining heavily. The moors were puddling around the dykes.

  All of this he remembers and can see as plain as day—he just can't say when it happened. Like a photograph that cannot be placed anywhere specific in the album.

  His colleagues are sitting around the long oak table and when he walks in they turn and some of them hold their hands together as if they are going to clap. He eyes the bar, the stone floors, the mirrors behind the glass shelves, the window through which the rope of dusty light always used to sling itself, cutting in angles over Rook's figure on a barstool, and he decides he will not succumb to that last refuge of the old—nostalgia. It sounds like a disease, a weakening of the body. Neuralgia, nostalgia. And besides, he is here to look forward, not back.

  Whenever he sees these people together, out of context, he is instantly compelled to think of them as he has always done, as the council corps; they have always thought of themselves as a muted collective, low in flair and kudos, striving onwards in mediocrity. He realises, as he places himself and Eleanor amongst them, that he has come to feel this too. He has become a member of a group that doesn't know whether to stick together for safety or fly apart for escape.