The Wilderness (15 page)

He drafted a reply. He told her that because America was divided into square grids, every so often there had to be an extra bit of land that wasn't a mile square, to account for the earth's curvature, just as there is an extra day in the year every so often to account for time's curvature (and this day, he added incidentally, is Henry's birthday). He suggested the bit of land she lived on must be one of those extra bits that did not quite fit, which was why she could never make America feel like home.

She wrote back jubilantly. Of course, she would move. The problem would be solved. They had already started looking.

He was equally jubilant at her happiness. He told her that since money was no object she should move to somewhere with a great deal of glass and a view of the ocean. She could stand there on a shag-pile rug and sip martinis.

No, no, she wrote. Not martinis—the rage these days, the thing you drink if you want to be modern, is mint juleps. At the bottom of the page she wrote out the ingredients and a few quick instructions. Mint, ice, sugar, bourbon. The smell, she wrote. The smell—heavenly! Once you've smelt the sugar and mint, you will never, dear Jake, go back to martinis.

These branches and leaves look like chaos, but they are not. There is a pattern. Each leaf has a pattern, and each bit of bark, and each pattern in the leaf has a smaller pattern. And the patterns are repeated, and the patterns of the patterns are repeated.

He walks the wide path looking above him at the tree canopy. The branches lattice in mad arrangements across the sky. The sky is pristine with light, it is true sky-blue, and he is warm under it, hot even. Sara insisted that there were patterns here, and that the madness had methods finer than the eyes could comprehend. Mathematics held it together. Clasps of numbers cohered what the eyes saw as separate. Of course he agreed; he went so far as to say that the logic going through the leaves must proceed infinitely through all things, at which she called him reckless for his choice of expression. She did not believe in words like
infinite;
it was that very optimistic carelessness in Helen that she balked at. One does not see infinity, one cannot put a value to it, nor measure it in stones.

He enjoys looking up. Upwards, being on the vertical plane, is not connected to time. He is troubled by the recollection of
Eleanor talking to the fox-haired woman, nodding, her arms crossed, and that look of sympathy softening the wrinkles around her mouth. Apparently he is struggling with numbers and shapes, but his words are good—his ability to label things is still very good. He cannot accept this; he realises that he has no real wish to label things. If he can no longer call a tree a tree, it is sad, pathetic, but the tree will go on. But if he can no longer calculate or piece together through numbers then the invisible sense, the sense behind the apparently chaotic stray of branches and leaves, is gone. Order will be a dream he once had that has melted like glass, slowly and quite imperceptibly.

He sees himself sitting in the chair trying, failing, to make a paper triangle. Rook would ridicule him now for this dysfunction—Rook who was so canny with those fingers that could fold infinite objects into being. And now Sara would chide:
Infinite, there you go again, Jake!

He wishes, more than anything, to not be drawn down by his situation. They say that on balance he is where they would expect him to be, that is, his demise is reassuringly predictable. The simple enormity of it grips him and rids him momentarily of feeling, and when he surfaces again it is to a vista spread before him of arable land and beyond that the black strip of the moors. The path ahead is strewn with felled trees. The woods are gone.

How dizzying it is, to come here to Quail Woods only to find that it has no wood. How dizzying for something to turn to nothing. What day is it, how long since he saw the fox-haired woman, or Henry? He recalls, from his childhood perhaps, a view of woods from the air and the trees being felled, their trunks stacking up on the ground like matches. But it
cannot have been Quail Woods; Quail Woods has been here quite recently; he remembers walking here with Sara on the day his father died, and drinking coffee between these now recumbent trees. It is not a memory, at least not his memory. Maybe, like the man on the shore, it was a programme, or maybe, he thinks, disappointed with himself, he made it up.

Wondering what he has done with Eleanor, and why he wore a jumper on this increasingly hot evening, he turns around and makes his way back to the lay-by where the Land Rover is parked.

That night he chaperones Eleanor to the bed and allows her to help him remove their clothes. As they make love he watches her face, the V of creases at her eyes, the pores of skin on her flaccid cheeks, the stubborn mouth. Is this really her? He struggles to relate this woman to the memory of an old friend.

Under the bed Joy's letters ghost into the darkness, and downstairs the unopened letters to Helen listen to the creak of the bed. My life is a slow-motion mistake, he thinks. Then he buries his face in Eleanor's; her skin has the neutered centuries-old scent of the human-skin Bible, some musty religion packed inside. He goes after that, the musty religion. Astonishing how a pensioner's body can still seek and find a god in this curious old act, and still believe in that god's promises, even when they have been made and broken a thousand times before.

In the morning he has an idea, or at least recognises an idea that has been distilling. He goes to the telephone book, wracks
his memory for a name, and makes a call. Wrong number. And again, not this one. Eventually he has some success. The vet tells him that to the best of his knowledge the dog brought in two months ago is well, recovering from an operation to its leg. No owner could be traced and nobody came forward, so she was taken to a dogs' home. He calls the home. She is still there, is he interested in taking her? Maybe, he will come and have a look.

When he arrives they show him her enclosure and, to his surprise, he recognises her at once; she is standing, a white bandage round her black leg, as if she has been waiting for him. A swell of possession arises in him. She is flesh and blood, as black as wet tar; when he puts his hand out to her nose she nudges his palm with bold curiosity. They tell him she is called Lucky. He grimaces. All rescue dogs are called Lucky. When they call the name, a hundred lopsided, empty creatures must come running all at once.

STORY OF THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN

Helen scrubbed the sign down and painted it. She painted a naked woman whose skin glowed with sunlight, her arms held aloft and the sun a furious ball of yellow in her hands. She had stars above her head, and stood in front of a black landscape, the steelworks in the far distance, with the graphite smoke emitting from the chimneys. The words in black across the woman's legs, with the missing
e
painted in:
THE SUN RISES.

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”

With this declaration she scratched her cheek and stood back to assess her work.

He observed the painting, it was sweet, a little childish. Not skilful at all but the brushstrokes were so plain they were utterly
irreproachable. He could not fault her anything, ever. Could not ever question her goodness. He sat on the grass by her side in the afternoon heat and smoked.

The Sun Rises was in an odd place, thrown into the middle of the moors without boundaries, except for the arbitrary knee-high wall somebody had put around the back garden. In fact the land that The Sun Rises, and therefore Eleanor, owned had always been in dispute, and perhaps it had no right to any land at all, but gradually it took it anyway, edging the forty or so yards to the road at the front, and spilling out of its low walls at the back. From where he and Helen sat on the small strip of grass at the front, and with the pub's back and front doors open, he could see right through the building to the rear garden.

Already that morning he had washed down the pub walls inside and out, nailed chairs back together that had been left broken in the cellar for years, glossed the doors and skirting boards, scrubbed the stone floors, secured window latches, fixed the cisterns, put locks on the toilet doors, oiled the bar hatch; Eleanor cleaned the windows and sills, the glasses, the spirit bottles, the pumps, polished the last pieces of brass that remained, and she watered the beds at the front. They fit a till to replace the shoe box stuffed with crumpled cash.

The day before, they had spent the entire day hoisting the waist-high weeds from the small back garden and flattening the ground. Then at seven that morning, lucky enough to have a hot dry day, two men had come and poured concrete onto the layer of hardcore and sand that covered the soil. By now it was beginning to dry and its whiteness shone against the peat.

He looked for Eleanor but she must have been indoors. He
turned to his wife and pointed out to the steelworks with his cigarette.

“The Sun Rises is so called because the sun rises over there. And we used to be able to see it, before the smoke from the chimneys botched the sky. So we decided, together, to call this The Sun Rises, as an affirmation. That the sun does still rise.”

Helen returned his smile. “That's nice,” she said. “Who's we?”

“Me, Eleanor, Sara, Rook, Eleanor's parents, when they were still alive.”

“And what happened to them? How did they die?”

“Her mother died before the war of—pneumonia, or something like that, and her father wasn't around much, he didn't cope with the loss and wouldn't come home for days at a time—then he got conscripted when the war came and was killed in, I don't know, '42, '43. Her uncle—her father's brother—came to look after her but he never wanted to be here. Then he left, too.” He shrugged and inhaled. “Eleanor says that every man in her life is useless and always will be.”

Helen shielded her eyes from the sun and squinted at her painting. She added some colour to the stars above the woman's head.

“So she believes she'll never find the man she wants?”

He shrugged again, not knowing how Eleanor viewed her love life, and not interested, either.

“She will find him.” Helen put her tongue out in concentration. “She will.”

He leaned over and kissed her shoulder.

“The concrete looks good, don't you think?”

“I think it looks strange. I preferred the grass.”

The weeds,
he wanted to correct. Helen had a habit of lumping different things together under the same word, as though the act of being specific pained her: in this case all things green and growing were grass. But to him they were weeds and it mattered, suddenly greatly, that the garden had choked and shrunk underneath them.

“When I was a teenager, a few years before I went to London, I used to dream about doing this place up. I remember seeing all the factory workers come here on their bikes and sit at the bar, or out in the weeds at the back, trying to get a bit of fresh air, talking about blast furnaces, torpedoes, rolling mills, crucibles—”

Helen pouted a little. “Those words mean nothing to me,” she said. But she had stopped painting and started listening avidly as she always did when he talked about the past.

“And I always thought how bad it was that after twelve hours sweating in a factory there was nowhere outside for them to sit, I mean properly sit with space and air around them. Just weeds.”

He stubbed his cigarette out. Helen took the butt and tidied it away in her pocket.

“I thought they looked quite pretty.”

“Before the war it used to be grass and we sat out there in the summer—Sara used to play the violin and Rook the harmonica and we would sing—”

“I didn't know Sara played the violin,” Helen said.

“She did. She used to do a lot of things. We would sing—I still remember it—
Komm doch, mein Mädel, komm her geschwind
.” His singing voice was dry and dusty, and he couldn't remember when he had last thought of this song.
“Dreh dich im
Tanze mit mir, mein Kind! Hör, wie die Geigen locken zum Reigen, komm doch, mein Mäde!, zum Tanz geschwind!”