The Wilderness (16 page)

He grinned at Helen and she returned it, reaching over to touch his knee.

“It was a Hungarian dance—you had to sort of twirl round and round until you were dizzy and fell over. And I remember—I was always allowed to stay up late. There were money spiders—that's what I remember most about it now. Money spiders, everywhere. In our hair, on our arms and legs. Sara always said they were lucky.”

From the corner of his eye he saw Eleanor coming out of the pub towards them. She was carrying a bottle of something and some large glasses.

Helen glanced at her and then away. “My mother said that, too.”

“But maybe not so lucky after all. The war came. No more of it. The grass turned to weeds and the spiders went.”

Helen watched and waited for him to say more, but now Eleanor was here he didn't want to. He felt, as he always felt, that a past was too intimate a thing to share with Eleanor, that her drab misfortune was infectious, and a meanness in his character detested the thought that their two lives might seem bound. She had of course been there, too, in those days. Money spiders had climbed up her arms. She had stayed up late with him. They had sometimes slept top to toe in the same bed. He would sleep facing away from her feet.

Eleanor stood behind them and spread her arms, bottle sloshing and flashing in the sunlight.

“It's the wilderness! It's the bloody wilderness!”

She flapped her arms about, her feet rooted in their
Wellingtons to the peat.
“Christ
,” she said. “I'd do anything to get away from here, and you come here by choice. Left London for
this
.”

Helen laughed. “This,” she said, stretching her own arms. “Look at it, it's heaven today.”

And it was. He took in the scene: enormous blue sky, wild-flowers, sun silvering the water in the dykes, the distant gas flame of the steelworks almost invisible against the light, and the three of them equally dwarfed by mile upon mile of sun-blurred horizon.

He recalled his conversation with Helen in the zoo cafeteria: we'll come to the edge of the wilderness and we'll make it ours. He dug his heel into the earth.

Helen went back to painting, still smiling. Her arms were dusted with colour. It was mid-afternoon and hot. As he watched her, she struck him as a different and more purposeful woman without a baby in her arms. Her body, always mummified by blue blankets and clinging limbs wrapped in terry towelling, reappeared solo in a definite, young shape, and her legs were revealed thin by the jeans which she had rolled up her shins.

Eleanor sat close to Helen, removed a jar of mussels she had stashed inside one of the glasses, and poured three drinks. Gin. Without taking her eyes from the painting Helen took the glass offered her, knocked the drink back, and put the glass down.

“This is the woman clothed with the sun,” she told Eleanor, who had leaned in over her shoulder. “In the Bible the woman clothed with the sun is the People of God. And with her in heaven is a red dragon with seven heads who is waiting to devour
her unborn child. The dragon represents the nonbeliev-ers, the people who think they're not of God.”

He realised then that he had closed his eyes, and that he always closed his eyes when she began talking about the Bible. Now he opened them again to see her smooth her hair apologetically at the bad news.

“The unborn child is Jesus,” she said, “and the seventh head of the dragon is the Rome of the future, the Rome that is going to kill him. The Roman—Pilate, of course.”

Eleanor squinted her face into scepticism.

“Is that supposed to be true?” she asked.

“Yes, Eleanor, all of the Bible is supposed to be true in its own way.”

He rested himself back onto his elbows and witnessed himself in Eleanor, the churlishness and refusal to be bought with words.
In its own way.
This was such a lazy answer, he thought, and yet Helen obviously thought not. To her it explained everything, and so fully and satisfactorily.

“But after the woman gave birth to Jesus,” Helen smiled, “she entrusted him to the kingdom of Heaven, and she escaped to the wilderness.”

As she looked around her at the moors her smile persisted, but it was a not a delicate smile, not incidental as he had always thought, but serious and persuaded. Her peace was a tangible weight.

“During the war we built a bomb shelter in the garden.” She scooped a mussel from the jar and was pensive suddenly. “I used to play in it. When the bombing got bad we—me, my mum, my daddy, my brother—lived in the shelter for a week. I remember it as one of the very best weeks of my life because
we were all together, absolutely
for
one another. We never argued, you see, because we didn't know when a bomb might drop and whether our shelter was any good. Mother prayed.”

She drew her legs up to her body and fixed her slightly excited look on the yellow woman she had painted.

“Bombs missed us. We began to assume that the prayers were making us immune. Then one night a bomb blew the door off our shelter and took off one of Daddy's feet. Mum lost her religion for five years, until her congregation convinced her again, or bullied her, I don't know which. I watched my daddy for weeks, struggling without his foot, going to work and getting on with it. He was a doctor, he had to keep working.”

She turned her head up towards the sun, warm and rich as it eased past midday.

“Unlike my mum, I wasn't in any doubt. I suddenly knew God existed because he'd saved my father. And that man with only one foot was still my daddy. If he'd had no feet, no hands, no legs, he'd still be my daddy. So we can't be our bodies alone. And if we are not our bodies we must be something else.”

“Our brains,” he said.

“More than that, Jake.”

“Why more than that?”

“His soul shone out through his eyes. I
saw
his soul.”

“In your own way.”

She held her gaze on him for several seconds too long, not with anger or irritation, just as though he were a formation of light she was suddenly interested in, or as if she were waiting for him to finish his sentence. He hadn't known about her father's
foot; he wondered what else she didn't tell him. Footless father, secret fiancé. They had married so fast. Perhaps he didn't know her at all.

Eleanor crossed her legs uncomfortably and tapped her bare knees.

“Honestly, I don't have your strength to believe.”

Helen leaned over and put her hand on Eleanor's knee. “You have all the strength in the world. You especially, of all people. It's plain to see.”

She stood and picked up the sign. Then she climbed the ladder and hooked it back in place, wavering, humming. He was afraid she would fall and he thought he should go and help her.

“With this sign, I call the woman clothed with the sun to The Sun Rises,” she grinned as she descended. “I call the People of God to the wilderness.”

“I hope the People of God drink a lot,” Eleanor answered.

“The People of God do everything, they are everyone.”

He stared up at the sign; it looked good in situ, and the woman seemed to be staring straight back at him, precisely at him and nowhere else. He winked at her.

Then later, Eleanor straightened her legs into the quiet strip of sunlight and smoked. Rook was there and Helen was not. They sat on the low wall around the bright rectangle of concrete as the sun set.

“Cannabis,” Eleanor said, passing it on. “I have it for the aches in my back. It's not just for coloured people anymore.”

He straightened his legs along the wall too, sun-filled, dusty, and tired after the day of work. He held the cigarette between his fingers; of course, it was not a
cigarette,
but he was so ignorant about drugs that he had no proper word for it. This had all just been beginning in London when he left, he had started to see it, people smoking in parks here and there, a sort of immature excitement gathering that had not been present before.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

He smoked, loosening instantly, and passed it to Rook, who was folding minute paper birds from cigarette papers—elegant long-necked cranes with wings bent and poised for flight.

Rook refused. “Too old. You shouldn't smoke that, you bad children.”

Fuck off, Rook,
he thought happily. With a hazy concentration he inspected the long tight roll of tobacco. So much more interest in an object you have no word for. He inhaled more before passing it to Eleanor.

His mind was milky and he wasn't sure how he came to be here, where Helen had gone, where Rook had come from. Having worked his way through much of Eleanor's bottle of gin, and having eaten only mussels all day, he was drunk and hungry; he was optimistic, too. He had the sudden feeling that all his decisions had been right, coming here, marrying Helen, that a potential chaos was being fought back, and that Helen was instrumental in this—no, necessary to it. That peace he had seen in her earlier, it was a peace missing in himself.
Somehow it seemed she had a wisdom that could presage and protect them, a wisdom he should not mock.

“We did good work today,” he said. “We made a difference.”

He looked up at the rear wall of The Sun Rises and then across the silken concrete and out over the moors. He loved the way this low, random wall marked man from nature, how there was so little separation. So little, but enough. Under the concrete the few remaining weeds were dying. The peat glowed in the sunset as if on fire.

“There's so much we can do,” Eleanor said. She sat upright for a moment to clear a path for inspiration. “We can start doing food. Why don't we get some tables and those chequered tablecloths?”

Rook flew one of his paper cranes across the garden where it landed and nestled the tip of its wing in the wet concrete. “We can bring back the debating groups.”

“You know, the red-and-white ones, and candles in bottles. Sara can do the cooking.”

“We can have snail races.”

“We can have book clubs, Nescafé, we can have dances—”

“We can start an Assassination Club.” Rook swilled whiskey around his glass. “We can jointly and democratically decide who to kill, and then we can fashion weapons from unlikely objects and go forth and murder. Being humble folk it may be messy at first but practice will improve us.”

“We can begin,” he cut in on Rook, tired of this nonsense, “an action group. A pro-Israel lobby group.”

Rook laughed. “This is Lincolnshire. You might not find many supporters.”

“On the contrary, areas without any strong leanings this way or that are good fertile ground for this sort of thing.”

“Why would you want to?” Eleanor asked, slumping her body weight onto her knees and gazing, as though longingly, at the creamy concrete beneath her. She looked tired.

“Listen, it isn't enough just to give a people a block of land and then deny them their history. They're surrounded by countries who deny there was ever a holocaust. What the hell are they doing there, then, if there wasn't a holocaust? Why didn't they just stay in their nice European apartments? Has it ever occurred to you that they might not
want
to live in Israel any more than you and I do? Maybe they'd like to go back to Vienna or Berlin—the places they were born. And now everybody says the Jews are a—what was the word I heard?—an unscrupulous race. A naturally
unscrupulous
race. Why? Because they won't settle for being trampled? Because now that they've been given a piece of land and have to live with the hatred of their neighbours they would like something more?”

It was the first time he had ever really voiced these views. Anger—albeit an anger that was blunted with smoke and drink—surfaced, ebbed, and surfaced. He was angry, not because he cared about a distant race but because he wanted to defend his mother, and his mother, if she were here now, wouldn't want him to do so. She would shake her head and say,
Asch, Jacob, you would be better not worrying about it, you would be better starting up a wine-tasting club.

“We don't want to become too—political.” Eleanor frowned.

“Take this place,” he argued, “your uncle left it to you, a
building, some land, a business. It's all very well, but do you want it? Is it enough, without any love, or—”

He gave up on the thought. The word
love
had slipped out with the smoke and he wished it might disperse with the smoke.

“No.” Eleanor pursed her lips tightly around the sound. “But I'd be stupid to think it's not enough when it's all I've got.”

He felt slightly ashamed by the question, but then kicked the shame away. By Eleanor's argument nothing would ever improve or progress, it was a terrible, overly humble, defeatist thing to believe.

Rook slung his legs over onto the moors side of the low wall and stood, cracking his knuckles. “For pity's sake don't start up some ridiculous Jewish group, Jake. You'll upset your mother.”

“She might want to come along.”

“She will not want to come along.”

They eyed each other for a few moments and then he stood too and picked the butts off the wall. It was time to go home to Helen, he thought, and get some sleep. It had been a long day.