The Wilderness (19 page)

The letters bring to mind a vision of him and Helen in bed one night talking about jealousy—or no, there is more to the story than that. It begins in the garden of the coach house and it is a Saturday, perhaps five years ago. He hazards a cross on the timeline. Helen is reading in the sun while he is putting the finishing touches on a model plane, sticking the Solarfilm to its bright-red wings and fuselage. Henry arrives unexpectedly. Though he lives nearby, Henry doesn't visit often—instead he and Helen meet for cups of coffee, or Helen goes to
see him in his damp little flat that designates the triumph of his independence, and they appreciate his baking. But he rarely comes here. Seeing him, Helen jumps from her seat to hug him, repeating, Henry, Henry! How nice! While Henry returns, Helen, you look so well, what are you reading?

They bow their heads together over her book like two children, their small hands pawing through the pages, their dark hair touching. The sun coppers the outer strands of their hair like fused wires.

“These are some of the paintings I'll see when I go to Paris,” Helen says.

Henry puts a hand on her shoulder. “Show me.”

The book is about art, a subject they both are interested in. Helen likes the turn-of-the-century paintings and the pictures of downtrodden women in shabby rooms, or a poor man smoking in a bar with nothing but his shadow for company, or paintings of dancing girls and prostitutes, young women with drooping eyes.
Marvellous!
Helen always remarks, tracing her fingers across the colours.
Amazing!

“Paris?” he says, interrupting them. “You're going to Paris?”

“Yes, Jake.” Helen turns the sweet oval of her face to him. “With my Bible group. Surely I told you?”

“No, you didn't.”

“Oh. I was sure I had. In any case, you don't mind.”

He goes back to making the plane. “Of course not,” he says.

That night he writes to Joy at length, and his words are fuelled on by the image of his wife and son conspiratorial over works of art, and how anything, even the racy and demoralised paintings, appears innocent in her grace. He is excluded from her, and this distance makes him love her more, and love
Joy more. A win-win situation, perhaps. In bed that night Helen has difficulty sleeping because of the feary
imps
in her chest, a queasiness, a worry about old age that comes only in the dark. He asks her about Paris and she kisses his forehead and says she is sorry for being remiss about telling him. Fine, it's fine. But he finds himself picking a fight as if he wants her to be doing something wrong to salve his own bad conscience. He quite wishes she would confess to a secret affair; years and years of writing to Joy are eroding even his own astonishing ambivalence. But she will not fight. Are you jealous? she asks, smiling with curiosity, and some of the worry of age falling from her face.

Jealous! He tells her he does not suffer from jealousy.

Her response is the comment that base feelings are perfectly acceptable sometimes—she likens love, honesty, loyalty to flowers, and jealousy, greed, hatred to weeds. To pretend the weeds are not there is more destructive than to admit they are there and tend to them.

He nods and agrees, but insists he does not suffer from jealousy. She says something about Moses and the Mountain of Solitude, but he is not listening. Instead he is considering whether to tell her about Joy, maybe just to see what her response will be. She is saying something about the Ten Commandments. Before he has the chance to confess anything she is asleep, so suddenly, as if she has a disease that abruptly shuts her down.

Now, leaning over his timeline, he thinks he might look up that section about Moses in the Bible, his human-skin Bible, and find out what it was she was trying to tell him. When Helen died he marked in his human-skin Bible all the passages
that she had marked in hers. Maybe those passages held a code, a message she had left for him, a greater reason for these days than eating, sleeping, shitting, breathing. He was mad back then, he spent months poring over the quotes, ordering and juxtaposing them, and he learnt them all until their sense was completely washed out by overuse.

He jerks his head up, thinking he has heard some movement in the house, and finds his heart beating hard. Helen? The other one—the other woman? When he looks for the dog he sees she is still sleeping and is comforted again by her long peaceful breaths. Perhaps in a moment he will make himself a coffee or a mint julep, something to relax him.

Somewhere, here on the timeline, is the felling of Quail Woods when he was a child. He will have to mark it. He had been with Sara, who had brought with her a flask of coffee as usual, and the two of them had been looking up, always up, until, unexpectedly, the branches above them thinned, and when they looked ahead the woods were horizontal rather than vertical. Sara had breathed in sharply and murmured,
Dreck! Fallen like matchsticks!
He remembers the loud drone of a plane overhead. And scattered around were the yellow hard hats of the foresters, but no men. Yellow hats everywhere, this is what he remembers. The event is difficult to plot exactly on the timeline but he guesses he had been about nine or ten, and so he makes a mark near the beginning and stands to make coffee.

The dog will have to fit somewhere on this timeline too— she is certainly an
event
—but where she goes is mysterious, whether it be a day, a month, or a year ago. He off-loads a cross where there is a space, though in fact there are many
spaces—his life is not very well inscribed with events. There are entire decades he doesn't remember at all, and which have slid off the great mountain of his life into the valleys below. And then there are curious, bloated memories like this one of Helen and Henry poring thicker than thieves over an art book in the garden, with the sun catching their hair.

Then the recollection of his mother in that wood with those words:
You will cause nothing but harm. I am telling you and you must listen.

Then the recollection of a gunshot which explodes his muggy ennui and levers open the air to provide a place from which he will never be excluded. His place. His moors. Every happening, every person, every defining instant, every sense has succumbed to this black gravity of the moors and to a flag of yellow like a flame in his brain setting him on fire. His whole life would appear to be an object hurtling towards a miniature window of time: Joy feeding a mint into his mouth, putting on her yellow silk shoes, and wrinkling her nose up to the weather swarming down the rattling old windows.
Going to go to America as soon as I can, leave this rain behind,
she said. Him, sucking the last bit of flavour from the mint, in no doubt that she had the courage to leave and wishing he had it himself. And then his life passes through that window and comes out the other side altered, as if a piece of glass embeds itself in him during the transition and digs in deep.

Now it is coming out. He is who knows how old; it is who knows what year; it has been who knows how long. There are letters to Helen from another man:
Are you jealous?
she asks from some dead place. He sees her hair touching Henry's in the garden and he thinks, yes, jealous of everything that ever
touched you—sunlight, God, and death itself. But I am not jealous of the letters. The letters are my last chance at forgiveness.

The glass is coming out of his soul (if he has one, if he does), and with it the pain and sin, and with it the dream. Out goes the baby and the bathwater and the whole lot. Instinct tells him to hold on even if it is pointless. He makes another mark on the timeline: gunshot. Bang. That first gunshot was 1961. He makes four attempts at writing the number next to the line and the last attempt is good, neat for him, and clear.

Helen stood in the centre of the room and looked about her.

“So this is where you were born,” she said. She seemed pleased, he thought. Her voice was keen.

He nodded, yes.

“It's so—humble.”

“I suppose, yes.”

Humble it was, more so now in its dereliction than ever before. The Junk, they used to optimistically call this house, because it always looked as solitary there on the moors as a boat battling the oceans from China. Looking at it now he was taken aback by how small it was, and how derelict, and it was sinking into the peat so that one half of it was shrugged low like a hunched shoulder. Now more than ever, as it sank, and as it came closer to resembling a pile of useless rubble, it lived up to its name.

They stood in what had been the kitchen, a low room about ten feet by ten feet, separated by an unstable wall from a similar room to its left. That was a supporting wall. It would come down before long, what with the gradual collapse of the foundations into the peat. The peat acted like a sponge, pulling solidity into it. It was certain that the whole thing would collapse.

Before them, against the supporting wall, was a staircase that had not existed when he had lived there as a child. The staircase was open to the kitchen, without any banister. It was being pulled akimbo by the shifting wall—this not helped by the fact that it had been badly built in the first place without proper support underneath. It, too, would come down. He took it all in impassively, and then broke the silence.

“These stairs are new.” He banged the falling plasterboard that flanked them. “We used to get up and downstairs by a ladder on the outside wall.”

Helen raised her brows. She had not lived like this as a child; she was from middle-class suburbia and besides, was ten years younger than him, born the very year the war had started. Things were different when she was born, a decade made a difference.

“We hardly belong to the same generation,” he said.

The statement was a crude summary of a flurry of thoughts about time and childhood. It came out rather nonsensically.

“We belong to different generations? So Henry is both your child and your grandchild,” she joked, spreading a picnic blanket on the kitchen floor, stubbornly seeking pleasure in the face of this squalor.

Sitting cross-legged, they took food from the knapsack— some sandwiches, some Battenberg cake, apples, a flask of tea,
and for him an inch of whiskey at the bottom of a bottle. It was chilly; she pulled the edge of the picnic blanket over her knees, took the Battenberg cake from the bag, and smiled.

“So what do you think, Helen?”

“Of what? Of this? Of knocking this down?”

“Yes.”

She took the cling film from the cake and handed him some.

“We can't ever afford it.”

He glugged back a mouthful of whiskey and felt it warm his throat.

“We can't afford it now, but we will.”

“You're obsessed. You get obsessed with ideas, Jake, and I never feel there's anything I can do to stop them. I don't even know why you ask me.”

“There'll be a steel frame, not timber, not the timber A-frame of the coach house, a discreet steel frame with a flat roof, glass walls, all glass with masonry walls either end.”

“We'll feel like fish.”

“We'll feel like pioneers.”

Helen watched him dissect his cake.

“You're eating the yellow sections first,” she remarked.

“Yes. I don't like them.”

“So in that case you leave them 'til last.”

“No, you save the best 'til last.”

She, too, was eating the yellow sections, because, he deduced, they were her favourite: the same action, opposite motivations. Like all things they did? Like getting married? Having a child? They both ate with strategy, a cube at a time, peeling the marzipan away.

“You don't like marzipan?” he asked.

“It's horrible.”

“Then you'll be left with it and you'll wish you'd eaten it first.”

“I won't wish I'd eaten it first, because if I'd eaten it first I'd feel sick and wouldn't be able to eat the rest.”

He shook his head and smiled. “No, no. It's like a sacrifice. Making an initial sacrifice before the feast—to appease the gods of hunger.”

“Gods,” she laughed, leaning forward and whispering. “You and your little pagan gods.”

He watched her eat, nibbling cake from the white napkin. Then he stood and wandered into the next room, a cramped and dusty space, ramshackle, cables hanging loose.

“Jake,” he heard her call. “Come and eat.”

“In a minute.”

“Come now.”

He stood still, gazing at the floor where an Indian tiger skin had used to be. His father had been such a fool, a colonial throwback to days gone and better forgotten. They hadn't been allowed to set foot on the tiger skin, even though it had taken up a large part of the room. When Sara had gone into labour, and there was not time to get her from the middle of the moors to the nearest hospital thirty miles away, she gave birth here on this floor. Not on the precious tiger skin, in case of blood. No, not on the tiger skin, on an old blanket.

Babies turn their heads when they emerge. He and Sara agreed that the tiger's mouth, mid-roar, must have been the first thing he saw when he was born. Then she would tell him that the first thing she saw when she was born was the silver of
the samovar glinting in a winter morning, and the first thing she heard was the singsong alphabet palindromes of their maid: En, oh, peh, kuh. Kuh, peh, oh, en, chanted for comfort as the birth pains climaxed and Sara's eyes and ears appeared. It was important to know the very first things perceived, she said. They held the secret. They would be the very last things perceived.

Helen's voice came from the kitchen. “Jake! We were in the middle of eating.”

He sniffed at the memories. He dug at the crumbling stone floor with his toe; rain had started drumming on the patches of corrugated-tin roof.

The whole lot could go, the whole house. It reminded him of denial and negation. Sara's religion hidden, Sara's trinkets shut away, Sara's past leaking potent in splintered stories when his father was out. Small charming and murderous stories, that was all he ever got of his mother's legacy. Then they dried up. The war shut them up. Something on his father's side of the battle was won for good, and Sara not only curbed herself but his father, too. He stopped defending his values, he stopped hitting out, stopped ranting. With nothing to fight for (Britain doing noble battle, his side victorious beyond doubt) he lost any recourse he had once had to human interaction, let Rook—with his gift for human interaction— edge further in, became quiet for almost twenty years, and then he died.