The Wilderness Page 9

  It was plain jealousy, with Rook; he could see that now. All the teenage years of warring with the man had suggested a complex power struggle between them, when in fact its cause was simple. He was jealous of Rook for winning Sara's love. At the same time he genuinely liked and respected the man for that success, and of course like and respect were integral features of the jealousy. Sara should be with Rook; it wasn't just that she loved him, it was that she loved him in a difficult way, with risk and insecurity, the sort of love she had always lacked with her own husband, and the sort that was equally returned. Despite Rook always meaning to him the loss of his mother, he also denoted some kind of deeper discovery of her, and he found himself hoping that Rook had gone off into the darkness of Sara's room, that they were together there now.

  But when he heard the scuff of shoes he knew it was Rook and was hardly surprised. The tall figure appeared as a shadow and remained so. Neither of them spoke. Rook rolled a cigarette with a series of deft flicks, lit it, and handed it up.

  He smoked, crouched on the wall, and handed it back to Rook without a word. The menorah was still burning inside the window. Its message was striking: here we are, here we live.

  Seeing Rook's eyes gleaming judgement in the darkness, he was taken by a thought.

  “You think I've failed,” he said.

  “I do?”

  “In coming back from London.”

  The old man's eyes looked up at him. “On the contrary, you think you've failed.”

  “On the contrary.”

  He looked away from Rook.

  “London was too easy. It's full of pioneers. You can see where pioneers are by the colour they leave everywhere, do you understand me? The lights and the way they fill in all the black spaces. There isn't a black space left in London. Here though—”

  “So you're here to colonise.”

  “The potential here—”

  He extended his arms to the darkness.

  Rook coughed. “What's this big idea that we're in control of our own characters and destinies anyway, Jacob? Much easier to give in to the pull.”

  “Maybe.” He took the cigarette again. The jealousy surfaced on a new, convenient level. “What were you doing with my wife?”

  Rook straightened suddenly as if he'd had a brilliant idea. “Isn't she great”'

  “I think so.”

  “And that she gave up so much for you. Brave girl, to take the plunge. It's a responsibility, my boy. Now of course she's yours to look after. All yours.”

  He rolled the smoke around his mouth and frowned. “Gave up?”

  “Her engagement.”

  “Engagement?”

  He thrust the cigarette back to Rook and shifted his weight, rubbed the smell of sugar from his nose.

  “You do of course know about her engagement, Jake?”

  “To whom?”

  “A good man of the cloth, a believer. Her parents were very keen. Very disappointed when she chose you instead. Still, you are an architect I suppose. That's something.”

  They muttered humourless laughter together; Helen's father had nothing but disdain for architects, England was going to the dogs and it was the buildings that were sending it there; buildings were not what they used to be, progress was peril, the road to hell was clad in cement, and so the rant continued along this same weak vein. He looked along the top of the wall and felt incensed.

  “I've got no idea what you're talking about, Rook, and to be honest I don't even believe you. Why would Helen tell you that when she hasn't told me? It doesn't make sense. You never make sense.”

  Rook shrugged and wandered away from the wall. “Believe me or not.”

  “Why wouldn't she tell me?”

  “Everybody has a secret life,” Rook whispered. He took a red leaf from the hedge he was standing next to and burnt regular holes into it with his cigarette. Then he pushed it up against the shadows on his jacket. “A ladybird, Jake,” he said, coughing, peering down. “See it?”

  “What do you know about him then, this man?”

  Rook flicked the cigarette into the hedge and put his hands into surrender. “Ask your wife, my boy. Ask your wife.”

  “Oh for God's sake, you started this.”

  “You started this,” Rook mocked.

  On an impulse he jumped from the wall and lurched towards Rook, thumping the man's chest. Rook laughed thinly and lashed out, swiping his leg from under him. He pulled Rook down with him and they scrambled ludicrously on the ground, both knowing that they could have stayed standing if they had wanted; that it was part game. He knew also that, unlike their fights when he was a child, he could now probably kill Rook without much trouble. They dug punches in each other; he felt Rook's knuckles pushing into his face, not punching but grinding almost, as if he wanted to wear him down to sugar.

  It would be easy to stand up now, throwing the old man off him, shrugging, swinging a ferocious punch to his head. He could break every subservient cycle of his life, bring the glass house into being with one sterile and excellent act of violence. Pinning Rook to the grass he thought of Helen's giggle earlier, and the way she crossed her arms like a child; he entertained jealousy, suspicion, he doubted his wife and jabbed Rook in the ribs for it. He tried to feel jealous about his wife's man of the cloth, but the emotion kept redirecting itself instead to Rook, to the fact that Rook had got her to confide where he couldn't.

  Then he stood and let Rook give him a savage kick in the shin, accompanied by a wheeze of apparent joy. Rook stood, and they flailed their arms again in the dark. Some punches found their target, most didn't. There was a little blood at the corner of his mouth that tasted pleasant; this was where he always knew that the fine and confusing line between fight and play was crossed, and that play had won. When one of them bled Rook always laughed and he always followed, and Rook would take the blood on his fingers and say, Watch, watch it turn from scarlet to burgundy. And they would do so, utterly detached from the violent fact of the fluid and how it had come to be there.

  Rook did not reach his fingers for the blood this time. He sat on the grass and gave out steam on his laboured breath. He was laughing as usual.

  “Get me up, Jake,” Rook said, and then when he was up the old man sauntered off as steady as a racehorse, went round the side of the house, and was gone.

  In the bathroom he washed the blood away and found a small nick in his gum, nothing to worry about. He got into the single bed next to his wife and tried embracing her, then tried to lie in such a way that he was not even touching her, then tried a casual hand on her stomach. He opted for this last position, feeling a restlessness in her gut and sensing that she was not properly asleep. Henry began rumouring tears, moaning in sleepy bubbles, but soon settled again.

  He felt arrestingly alive. He was awake and twitching with ambivalence. There was the sense, first, that he could fly apart from all he knew, and those splinters of his being would fall into the resolute shape of the glass house and embody a future. Then there was the opposite sense of falling into the peat, becoming it. He must have been drifting into sleep because he did indeed feel the descent of himself and saw Sara's face before him, saw himself bowing to her amongst the trinkets he had found in the cupboard, and telling her, I want to be your son. Won't you have me? Then he came out of the strange sleep and smelt his wife's soapy hair, stretched his legs; his feet hung over the end of the mattress.

  A little while later Helen got out of bed, groaned, went to the bathroom, and was sick. In between retching she sobbed and sniffed. He got up and tapped at the bathroom door, putting his fingers to the small throb in his gum.

  “Are you all right?”

  She made a sound, neither negative nor affirmative, and eventually he left her alone, thinking how he had never succeeded in making her drunk, even at their wedding, even on their honeymoon. While he waited for Helen to come back he leaned over the side of Henry's cot and watched the child sleep. That man, the one she was engaged to? Was it true? He
felt bewildered by it. Flattered and awed that she would have severed all ties with another man without a word, just to be with him. He stroked Henry's forehead, passing his thumb back and forth, back and forth.

  When Helen came back they got into bed and he turned away from her, pulling her arms around his waist. She gripped his hands.

  “The missing e is the death of me,” she groaned. She smelt of mint where she had tried to scrub away the taste of her sins.

  “Did you find it?”

  She squeezed his wrists. “Forgive me, Jake.”

  “Of course,” he returned. “I forgive you.”

  4

  Over his mint julep he consults this Bible, the skin soft under his fingers. It says very clearly that adultery is a sin. They have committed adultery, and blood is in their hands … and have also caused their sons, whom they bare unto me, to pass for them through the fire, to devour them.

  Without fully comprehending the meaning of the words on the page before him he knows that they speak of unrightable wrongs. He bends forward at the kitchen table, turning slowly.

  The letters are in a stack, a veritable brick, in plush cream and pastel envelopes. He cannot be sure exactly when they started coming or how long he has been biting his nails over them in this state of overwrought indecision, but there has been an increased urgency to their arrival so that now they arrive two or three times weekly and the handwriting becomes more hasty and desperate. Whatever Henry might say, it is a man's handwriting, constricted and reticent, and it leans the wrong way which suggests the man is left-handed like himself. This only adds ammunition to the theory of the affair, since Helen liked his own left-handedness. She liked it that his ring finger belonged to his more active and capable hand, as if that might mean that he would be an active and capable husband. She decided that left-handedness denoted sensitivity and that her active and capable husband would still, beneath all that physical brawn, have the soft innards of a clam.

  Who is this man? What does he want with Helen? Were they intimate? If so, how? Why? When? When faced with the unknown, or with particular troubling outcomes, it is, to use one of Helen's favourite words, healthy to be moderately afraid. Well, as he sits here now he is petrified by the letters; he bites his nails, becomes irritated with himself, and drinks the mint julep in anxious instalments as if it is a thought he is chewing on. The fear is not concerned with what the outcome of the letters might be but rather with the notion that, whatever the outcome, he will deal with it wrongly.

  If Helen were having an affair will he be obliged to forgive her? After all she is passed away, gone to the other side, departed. Here are yet more choices of expression, and he could go on. Pushing up the daisies, kicked the bucket, met her maker. Such a spread of options before him only heightens the fact that, looking up at the utensils that hang along the kitchen wall, he cannot name them all. Masher, knife with teeth—sawing knife? Perhaps no, but then what?—peeler, whisker. He looks out to the garden and the thing that the washing hangs on. Windmill. Wind thing. Wind washing thing.

  Helen has had her innings. She has given up the ghost.

  If she was not having an affair and was only up to something of the utmost purity (if this shaky left-handed man is the grown-up and grateful orphan she had secretly been supporting all her life, or if he is her priest), then is he, he wonders, supposed to be angry with Helen nevertheless for concealing something from him? Is he supposed to write to the man and tell him the news? Are they supposed to become friends?

  The trouble with right and wrong, he thinks, is that one is usually disguised as the other. He finishes his mint julep and thinks of a myth he knows about two travellers who knock on the door of an elderly couple and ask for shelter. The elderly couple welcome them in, scour a dining board with mint, and prepare the travellers a simple meal. The travellers turn out to be gods in disguise and, so impressed by the hospitality of their hosts, give them a temple in exchange for their ratty-tatty house.

  He can only assume this is a lesson in being good and doing the right thing, but the right thing in one situation is the wrong thing in the next. If the travellers had turned out to be murderers, letting them in would have been the wrong thing. Besides, it seems terribly unfair that one should be judged in secret, that gods should sleuth around searching out their unsuspecting victims. He, perhaps, is being judged second by second by his formless wife—an exacting, unrevealed ghost, and a kind of god herself.

  He had always told Helen this myth when she said he was drinking too many mint juleps; he would point out how mint is a symbol of home and humble goodness. And then he would wonder, if humble domesticity is so prized a virtue, did that elderly couple even want a temple? What is right, what is good? What use is truth? What constitutes a happy ending?

  Eleanor picks up a plastic container of red fruit and rattles it.

  “Do you like raspberries?”

  “I love them.”

  “So we'll get some then. Did Helen use to do anything special with raspberries? Jam? Could try to make a tart.”

  He digs his hands into his pockets. “I don't think we had them. They weren't her thing.”

  “Shame,” Eleanor says. She drops them into the basket.

  It is true, Helen did dislike them. He recalls her once tasting one and taking it out of her mouth. Hairs, she frowned, texture, not right. She had given him the chewed remains of the fruit and smiled; he had eaten it from his palm. But he doesn't in fact remember if he likes raspberries.

  As they round the small shop he examines the food and realises that this is true for most things, and that his likes and dislikes have become peripheral trivia. A shoulder of beef behind glass. Some—what are they? He reads the label: clementines. He looks back at the beef, remembers a precise time he had it in a sandwich with the hot white sauce, what he was wearing (blue nylon trousers, hair thick around his ears), where he stood (by the piano), who with (Helen, playing Ir ving Berlin, Alice on her lap); the memory of the food is more real than the present, and in this memory he loves it—the taste and warmth of the meat, the fondness of the moment. But that slab of pink meat behind the glass, a lining of blood around its edge, makes him feel sick now. Vertigo overcomes him. He glances across to Eleanor to tell her but decides against it.

  She loads the basket with dirty vegetables and he can't help but think how like her it is to have dirty vegetables. Always digging, her hands always a little sullied, her clothes, too. She unloads the basket at the counter and pays while he stands and watches. When the supermarkets came Helen was glad to be out of these awkward little shops. Into the clean and bright! You could get everything you wanted in one go. Eleanor struggles with bags, holds one out to him.

  “Any chance you might help?”

  He takes one, and then insists on taking them both. They get into the car, he into the driver's seat. The air feels thick and congested. Caught in it is the thought of himself as a young man, he is tall with dark hair and a leather coat, dark-blue nylon trousers, he is composed, beautiful some say, his skin tans the moment it sees the sun. He attracts stories, he wears them, and they are what make him alive. As he drives away, Eleanor chatting to herself, he wishes he could be more sure about the point of the missing e. So strong and sharp is the memory of it, and of the minutiae: the leaf that looked like a ladybird, the key chain, the deep orange of his mother's carpet, leaves elsewhere, a stain in the shape of a leaf, leaf banisters, woods. But what of it? What was its point? So sharp, and he has made a story around it, but now that he thinks about the story it resolves nothing. Nor is the tale necessarily true. He has begun to worry about the truth, and to become protective over it. That young man is nothing if he has no true stories. Just an empty and ongoing present.

  Driving, though, he feels at ease. Today there is something he has to do. In these new restless, workless days there is something he has to do. He must remember a list of words beginning with d. The drive home passes in anticipation of it—finding the list, constructing patterns
to order the words in the mind, applying some discipline and logic. Then sitting down to the test, a thing he has always enjoyed doing. There is a hope, more than a hope, that he will pass it. Impossible that he will fail.

  At home he helps Eleanor unpack the shopping and then takes up a circular route around the house, beginning in the kitchen, coming through to the hall, ascending the staircase (letting his fingers bounce lightly against the leaf shapes wrought into the banisters, relaxing), following the landing to Henry's bedroom (leaving his footprints on the chocolate carpet), ducking through the secret door, crossing his own bedroom (past Joy's letters, which he eyes suspiciously, not sure why they are lying there on the floor), picking step by step down the pine treads of the second staircase into the study (cold draughts caught behind the books), shoving his weight into the jammed door that opens to the living room, coming back to the hall, and standing.

  All the while he repeats: discard, devolution, demolish, dish, decrepit, drone, dynasty, diamond, drastic, day, develop, drip. As a method for remembrance, the circular route works. It sets his brain into a loop, and, if he concentrates on the nothingness of the loop, the turgid pointlessness of it, he finds that forgetfulness, having wilder gardens to explore, does not bother with him.

  The more he is able to remember, the more the exercise brings him peace. There is a satisfactory quality about gathering the words into his mind, filling him like stones filling his pockets. He has seen a programme, at some point, in which a man gathers dark-grey stones from the shore and his children count the stones into the deep pockets of his coat. They are learning about the relationship between size and weight. If one pocket has small stones and the other large, he leans. At one point the balance is so uneven that he lies on his left side and his children have to grapple underneath him to remove the excess stones from his left pocket until he is standing. They comb the beach for stones that can form pairs. They become obsessed with the task of making him as straight as a plumb line, as if he is suspended from the sky. One shoulder is tilted; they remove a stone and replace it with a pebble. They add a shell and he is almost there; they add a few grains of sand and he squares himself, miraculously balanced, perpendicular to the horizon.