The Wilderness Read online

  He sits amongst them: all architects except for one, a girl. She waves across the table at him and he waves back, though he is certain they've never met before. There are so few women in architecture that he would remember if they had. He always wondered why more women didn't become architects, and he never came up with an answer, except maybe that women forget to think big, and for this reason they are not engineers or aeroplane builders. An inbuilt humility means they never imagine they can create something bigger than their own bodies, whereas with men—well, all he has ever wanted to do is just that. And despite his own standards, he would still maintain for this very reason that one of his ugly and defunct high-rises is better than no high-rise at all.

  “Drink, Jake?” This is Fergus, his peer he supposes. Fergus with his lank and rangy physique and pale Irish complexion. Before he can anticipate it Fergus is leaning across the table and clutching his forearm in a gesture of solidarity. “What can I get you?”

  “A bourbon,” he says. “With ice, and a little sugar if they have it.” He offers a twenty-pound note which Fergus declines. He insists, but Fergus is adamant.

  It becomes clear that this evening is to be his, and this means that it is all organised for him, and he just has to sit here and behave. In his wallet is a packet of mint which he now lays on the table in a vaguely petulant frame of mind. He considers that he could drink until blind—yes, what an idea! Drink mint juleps until eloquent, like he has so many times at this very table.

  Over dinner he is fretful at first, worrying about Eleanor, worrying that she is out of her depth and that these men, who have all known and liked Helen, should be offended by his replacement of her. But this feeling wanes as the bourbon relaxes him and as he learns that if he is indeed being inappropriate there is a perennial pleasure in that. He would like more of it. Prompted by Lewis, one of the younger architects, he indulges in talk of ideals. There is an unspoken creed to being a member of the council corps that says one cannot afford to have architectural ideals. Even theories—even theories without the slightest ambition—are aggravating.

  “The modernist project,” he says, “is not just about lack of ornament—it's about the lack of a need for ornament. Think about decoration in general: every time it occurs, it occurs in order to cover up for a crime. The ugly woman. Mankind putting its clothes on after it ate the apple.” He pauses for a moment. This was once his wife's argument also, the one ideal they both believed in. “Think how many criminals have tattoos.”

  “Adolf Loos,” Fergus says to his surprise. “You're quoting his theory, Jake, am I right?”

  He nods; of course the architect's name had abandoned him but yes, this is his theory.

  “But it's just meaningless rebellion,” Fergus continues. “Look where Loos lived—Vienna, which is a beautiful city. He just got sick of beauty, like being full up on a huge chocolate cake. Doesn't make chocolate cake bad. It certainly doesn't mean we should destroy every chocolate cake we find, am I right or am I wrong?”

  What Fergus is alluding to, he assumes, is the period of architecture for which they are both part responsible, the decade of obliteration in which wrecking balls defied hundreds of years of history and replaced them with concrete. In which tower blocks were built to be lived in by the most unfortunate until the best inventions in demolition techniques ten or twenty years later allowed them to be brought down in front of applauding crowds. In which bright new towns spliced the landscape with right angles in order that people could move from the expanding twilight of cities. In which the manor house now known as Moorthorpe prison had suffered an extension so ugly that even at the time, and even over something as profane as a prison, people had been outraged and petitioned against the violence done to beauty.

  Lined up on the table are three bourbons; he drops mint into them, stirs them with his finger, and knocks one of them back. Fly apart, he thinks. Fly apart.

  “You are wrong,” he tells Fergus. “Architecture rests itself too much on the principle of beauty. A building must be beautiful because it is first worthy, and not worthy because it is first beautiful.”

  Lewis, sitting opposite, leans forward with his elbows either side of his plate. “So you'd honestly screw someone worthy before you screwed someone beautiful?”

  Eleanor laughs. It is the first sound she has made for ten minutes or more, and he supposes that she has laughed out of a need to contribute more than out of appreciation of the joke. He dislikes it when Lewis—not the most masculine of men—assumes the stance of the predator; despite himself, he dislikes the infidel trait that he sees in other men, as if they think they can live by their own rules alone.

  “You miss my point,” he says, “if you think it is about screwing people. Architecture is at the heart of life, it's life wrought into something permanent.” He turns his hands as if manoeuvring a great lever. “It's not just how to build but how to be moral and to use your brick, your concrete, your steel honestly, without tricking people, without treating them as if they are children.”

  He is not sure how well he even understands what he says, and how much mass has been lost from the argument over the years. Nevertheless it gains stature as he speaks it, warming him to his profession as he has not been for years, unearthing that good faith that drew him to it in the first place. He drinks down another mint julep and considers Joy in her yellow dress gazing out over the ocean from the glass wall of her home, sipping a julep—never gulping, always sipping.

  “I was going to build a glass house once.” He cuts steak away from the bone and chews it ponderously, wondering if he has an attentive audience.

  He begins telling of the glass house he had always wanted on the moors. A little like that famous one in America, he says, and a flurry of nods and Philip Johnsons echo around the table. But better, he says. Better than that. He tells them how he had intended to dredge the water from the peat; at first the structure would sit out of sorts in its sponge bed. But gradually over decades the peat would begin to dry, it would be smothered and heated by sediment that would crush out its water and slowly, another century later, it would become brittle coal, then the coal would harden until it was a tough, glassy graphite. A polished glass house embedded in polished ground. And at last the land would have adapted itself to the structure. This manmade coercion of the landscape is what is rightly called architecture and the rest is called only art at best—at worst, modelling.

  When he has finished speaking he assesses the three or four faces looking at him, sees interest, and so he goes on; he tells them that the building that inspired him the most is the bird place at London Zoo, a great iceberg of glass. While he gestures its size and angles with his arms, some quizzical and troubled stares meet his, the words Cedric Price are muttered; Lewis asks, Is it made of glass? Surely not? Surely the birds would die, isn't it made of some kind of mesh—some kind of—and Fergus interrupts with the assertion that it is a mighty piece of architecture, yes, who could fail to be inspired?

  From their enthusiastic nodding he can only assume everything has gone well; he stands. “May I make a parting speech?” he says.

  A choral yes passes up and down the table. He meets Eleanor's eye and sees her apprehension. She is sitting up straight, twitchy and almost—very uncharacteristically— birdlike.

  “I would like to say only this,” he states. “You do not create a building in keeping with its environment. You create a building that gives the environment something to aspire to. Beauty is not the point. It just happens to slowly become the point. Is this not like life? I am going to spend my retirement seeking beauty. That's all, thank you.”

  He does not exactly mean this, or rather, does not know if he means it or not. Seeking beauty? As if it can be found in the cupboard under the sink, or in one's sock drawer. But there is something very marvellous in being blindly profound, and everybody agrees it seems, raising their glasses and toasting him. Now when he looks at Eleanor she is relaxed and heavy once again in that cloak of needy devotio
n.

  He has little idea what he just said; but that, he thinks, is because he is drunk. Nothing more.

  Before they leave he decides to go out into the garden, and is confused to find it changed: where once had been a neatly, cleanly filled rectangle of poured concrete, surrounded by a low wall and open view of the moors, there is now a—what is its name?—the glass shed, the glass part, and it is cluttered with tables and large sweating plants. People are eating at the tables and look up at him as he wanders in. Unsure of how to get out again he panics and stares at their hot, flushed faces.

  Then he sees on the floor, by his own feet, some footprints embedded in the surface, dried fossils of prints that are making their way out and over the wall that is no longer there. One set is large, the other smaller. He smiles before he has had time to guard himself from the tender swipe of the past, and then Eleanor comes up behind him, not seeming to notice the footprints at all, and guides him back to the others.

  In his memories he is often travelling, riding uninhibited down motorways at night, down the brand-new M1 hushing and empty, along an American highway in a brown car with his wife. Flying.

  When he is driving in those memories the roads are always like this: black and quiet. The car swishes; everything feels soft, overly soft. His eyes are always closed even when he is at the wheel. There is certainly no danger, only a secured sense of going home, though home is not necessarily the bricks and mortar of the coach house or the fluorescence of a motel or even the flat open landscape of his childhood. It is an eternally imminent concept of home whose proximity brings fantastic comfort until he begins to realise that it will only ever be proximate and will never arrive. Then there comes a longing and nothing to satisfy it, a neural restlessness.

  It is the drink perhaps, more than the softness and darkness, that brings the longing now. Here is the urge to touch Eleanor, an urge inflamed by bourbon. An urge to reach across to the driver's seat and find her arm and to feel the movement of her leg pushing down the clutch, just to feel that she is alive. To touch the girl in the pub whose name he has forgotten; to touch Joy. He has not thought of Joy for days, nor her letters about her dear husband. What is the man's name? His brain is too soaked for this. Silas, that's his overblown name. Silas. Now he thinks of Joy, and that picture of her in her yellow dress. Thinks of fucking her, and enjoys the deliberately crude shape of the thought before it passes into reverence—reverence of her distant, almost ghostly being.

  It is like a whip slicing through him—the brakes, the bump, the sharp whistling sound from Eleanor's throat, and then they are still, at a forty degree angle to the pavement. Eleanor's hands clutch the steering wheel ineffectually. He assesses himself—he is fine. She is fine too, eyes blank, very still, but fine. He looks back. A shape is lying in the road but he cannot identify it—not human, he thinks with relief, but what?

  “Hit a dog,” Eleanor is saying, tearful.

  He leaves the car and sees the dog there—it is black, its knees delicately bent and its head tilted up as if trying to escape the body's predicament. It is, he finds himself thinking, just a dog. There is no collar. When he strokes behind its ears his fingers come away with blood. The dog stares without movement but makes a small noise, no more than a song of the breath. It sounds like a tired woman humming a baby to sleep.

  Eleanor is kneeling next to him in the road weeping, randomly generating different types of lament. “Oh no, Jake—oh goodness—oh Lord—what have I done? What have I done?”

  He can think of nothing else to do; he picks the dog up and it screams. Has he ever heard a dog scream before? Surely dogs do not scream? The sound is similar, he thinks, to the noise his children used to make on their cheap plastic recorder. He lays the creature on his coat in the back of the Land Rover. Eleanor, pulling herself together, asks where they should go, and he suggests the police station, the only place he can think of that will still be open.

  At almost one a.m., forms filled, the dog alive but sedated on a vet's table, they pull up outside the dark shape of his house and get out of the car.

  In contrast to his own lucidity Eleanor looks exhausted and distressed. She makes her way up to bed. He is as lucid as a bright day, and unaffected by the dried burgundy blood that is still on his fingers or the scream that lingers in his ear. Restless, he stays downstairs and helps himself to Helen's Barley Cup. The jar must have been there for months—years; the best before date is July 1993, but what, he wonders absently, is the date now? It is difficult to believe they are so far down the century already; how time leaves you winded and stupid! He drinks from a dirty mug because the sizable mug collection that the family has acquired over the years has formed a sullied congregation at the kitchen sink, or in the kitchen sink, or on the table.

  When he gets into bed he cannot sleep, and instead churns words through his head: Silas, Helen, Eleanor, Alice, Fergus. It dawns on him that these words are all names. What, then, is the difference between a word and a name? How similar they seem: Silas, for example. How similar to silence, and how without physical grounding. He repeats it, not as a name anymore but as a tool with which he sharpens the claws of his memory. He simply must not fly apart, he thinks. It was wrong of him to drink so much, and to indulge his thoughts the way he has.

  He turns on the light and begins a letter to Joy in his usual pseudo-aristocratic style. Dear Joy, One thinks one is going mad at last, one lies in bed and repeats the word Silas. One thinks, perhaps, that one takes after one's son after all, though one resists the idea.

  Eleanor rolls over and groans. “Turn the light out,” she says.

  “I'm writing.”

  “What?”

  “Epistles.”

  “Oh Christ.” She nestles her arms down under the blankets. “What's an epistle?”

  “A letter, Ellie. A letter.”

  He knows that she likes it when he shortens her name; she gives a contented sigh and slips into an easy childlike sleep.

  It is good to write to Joy, he can tell her anything. Letter after letter, year after year, she invents herself as someone perpetually unpredictable. She never thinks, says, or does the obvious. When he told her about his diagnosis—writing the word Alzheimer's carefully, copying the unfamiliar spelling from a book—she wrote back and said only that she has prepared a spare room in her house for when he slips into oblivion, and has told Silas that her formative lover might be coming to stay. She has festooned the room with coloured cushions and may paint the walls orange—her favourite colour—as if expecting the arrival of a new baby. She did not say, how terrible. She did not say, you must tell Henry.

  Perhaps he is mistaken, but he has felt Henry coming back to him slowly since Helen died, leaning on him, confiding a little more, looking at him with a depth of empathy he had never shown before. Even Henry's requests for money have been reassuring in his ability to provide it. He has never been richer, never had, he supposes, more to give and so few to give it to. He can now see his son, not as an enemy or a stranger but as an edgy child, his edgy frightened child. Their fractious little chats are the most honest encounters they have ever had. Fatherhood must come in cycles, so that you create something helpless that needs you, and you watch it grow until it is so big it needs you again, like a sunflower that grows to six feet and needs staking. Henry needs him, he decides; depends on him.

  When Alice was born one of his first thoughts was that one day perhaps he would be able to give her away in marriage. This was a cause for celebration, because it thereby implied, did it not, that until then she would be his to give away? He was standing at the foot of two or so decades of ownership of this exceptional being. She was his, his! He loved her for that (though not that alone); he loved her exultantly.

  Eleanor is the voice of unreason if she thinks a father will allow himself to disintegrate into a dribbling, idiotic babyhood in front of his children. And there comes that feeling again that this will not happen to him, it will not go that far. He will not let it go that fa
r.

  Though he is cheered by the thought, the letter to Joy does not proceed terribly well; he feels suddenly exhausted and puts his head heavily on the pillow. He thinks of the dog, the needle entering its vein, thinks of oblivion, and hopes the creature is resting soundly.

  STORY OF THE MISSING e

  Gracious with age, improbably tall, dressed in a pin-striped suit that must have been three or four decades old, Rook manifested himself in the living room with a filthy and charming smile. He kissed Sara on either cheek: “My queen,” he called her. “Sara my queen.”

  Then he took Helen's hand and gave it the sharp, faithful treatment of his lips—a kiss, a wide crooked smile. At last he turned.

  “Jake, my son, my favourite son.”

  “Rook.”

  They hugged, a lofty and lopsided affair. Rook had brought the sugar in with him, his clothes smelt as the air often did— that heavy burnt smell of sugar beet from the factory seven or eight miles away. After time it would work its way into the clothes, skin, and hair of everybody that lived here, just as the peat would work into the nails, and the flatness into the attitude. It happened to everybody, everybody, that was, but Sara, who seemed impermeable. It therefore struck him when Rook carried the moors into Sara's house that a cocoon had been penetrated. He sat on the sofa, on top of the photographs of the coach house, with his legs spread. Sara brought him cherry wine, leaving the bottle on the coffee table in front of him.

  “You've got a boy.” Rook looked around the room. “Where is he?”

  “Asleep,” he answered.

  “Of course. Babies sleep—I forgot.” Rook wheezed a laugh; same wheeze, he thought. Same laugh. Same amusement at his own behaviour.