The Wilderness (2 page)

The moors spread ahead of them, and behind them Quail Woods is being disassembled tree by tree. One must be careful, he thinks as he turns from the man's back and strains to see the land below, not to become too attached to what is gone, and to appreciate instead what is there. He eyes the small neat grids of houses below and finds, as he always has, that these spillages of humanity are not to be scorned for their invasion on nature but are to be accepted, loved even; he names some of the streets in his head and maps the area with compass points and landmarks, his hands now clasped to his knees.

At the point at which he expects the plane to descend, the pilot suddenly turns its nose upwards to the empty blue sky. “One last dance!” he shouts. The wind rips through the cockpit as they change direction and the prison appears way down below at a tilt, as if sliding off the surface of the earth. Looking down briefly he sees, perhaps, a figure waving. Henry said he would look out for him and wave. He lifts his arm in response, less edgy now and more exhilarated by the air smashing against them and the disorientation as the plane lists and the scenery changes faster than the mind can map it.

They make a large, noisy loop. He feels sick and young, thinking abruptly of Joy in her yellow dress and blinking to find the vision gone. Joy, joy!
Nakhes,
as his mother would once have said when she still allowed herself some Yiddish.
His mother would have loved Joy; would always have thought he made the wrong choice. He sits back and looks up, for the first time, to the sky.

As the plane slows it descends, too sharply. And with the slowing comes fear. He looks at his watch. For a moment he fails to understand what the watch hands are doing, where they are going or what for. He studies them like a child. Twenty to three, twenty to four, something like this. I have been unwell, he means to say to the pilot, as if to imply to himself: I am no longer unwell. It is impossible to accept that you will never be well again, and everything you have will be lost. A man is not programmed to think this way, he will always seek out the next corner and look around it in expectation that something,
something,
will be there.

He has been told not to think about it, and his son buys him a half-hour flight for his birthday so he can block it all from his mind. “What?” he says. “My birthday?” “No,” his son corrects. “Your—problems.” And he kisses him, all his plain, unscented good looks released from their misfortune for that one moment in that one simple exchange. Henry no longer has to stand on tiptoes to reach his cheek. How old is Henry, he wonders, and for that matter how old is he? When is his birthday? What year? He can't remember at all.

He thinks of Helen tucking her hair behind her ear and reading from the Song of Songs.
My beloved's eyes are washed with milk
—and her feet smashing glass, and her picking at fish and chips in newspaper wrappings while she read the news. Monkey goes into space. Mother's milk gives baby brain damage. Israel attacks Egypt. Dog goes into space. Twenty thousand jobs cut at the steelworks. Monkey goes into space. Brain
damage. Her picking at batter with her skinny fingers and then flattening out the newspaper saying, “I'll keep this, this is important,” and him screwing it into a ball and throwing it in the bin. “It smells,” he would say, “and besides, tomorrow there will be more news.”

The plane drops towards the airstrip and he heaves a sigh of relief, recognising in the slow-down of the engine, the lengthening of its chugs, a familiar creeping desire to be getting home.

It was the end of 1960 when his father was buried. He walked through Quail Woods with his mother who divulged no, or little, emotion. Sometimes she sighed or said, “Asch,” as if arguing against something in her head; sometimes she sneezed at the lily scent in her nose, sometimes she squeezed his arm and then, as he turned to console her, dropped it as if playing a game with him.

Some way along the wide track she stopped, knelt, and took a flask of coffee and two china cups from her bag. They were her best cups as usual, their gold rims slightly chipped. She poured two half measures, unwrapped sugar cubes from a napkin which she dropped in neatly, and handed him his drink.

“Thank you,” he said.

“To Henry,” she offered, raising her cup. “For bringing the future when we most need it.”

“To Henry. And to Father.”

“And to us. Is it appropriate for me to be drinking a toast on the day my husband is buried?”

“In healthier cultures death is a celebration, Sara.”

“Ah yes, so it is. Perhaps we should offer the trees a dance.” She proffered her cup towards a tree and gave a bow. “May I have this dance? No? You're feeling under the weather? Well, trees, we are all under the weather! Ha!” She spread her arms and looked up. “All of us under the weather!”

He took his mother's arm and pulled her gently towards him. “Tell me, what do you think of Helen?”

“She is too sincere for you,” she said after a short pause.

“Sincere?”

“You will become bored of her, just as I became bored of your father.”

“But Sara.” He was a little shocked. “You gave him so much of yourself, you gave
up
so much of yourself.”

“As one has to, Jake, when one is bored. Give, give—you hope in all the giving that they will give back and then you wager, well, if they don't, at least you will both have nothing left to give. At last you will be equal. Your father and I were very equal by the time he died.”

He frowned. “A terrible philosophy—”

“I loved him,” she said, as if sealing the debate. “He was a friend. So there you have it.”

The edges of the woods were visible from this central path, and beyond them ploughed fields. In the car, on the roadside where the trees abruptly ceased, Helen would be waiting for
them, leaning back against the new leather as she breast-fed. Today had been the first time Sara and Helen had met; it had been brief and cursory with all focus on the baby. They had each agreed that Henry was beautiful; they had reached a broad consensus about the way a baby's face is so general, made to a recipe of unbearable dearness, and Sara had added something about the way the dearness is at some point lost in a spurt of growth and features. She and Helen had looked at him and laughed as if to suggest that he was the living example of this loss. He had touched his own face self-consciously. In fact he was good-looking and they all knew it, and an appreciative silence followed as they all considered, he was sure, how very similar he and his son already were, how alike in mannerisms, especially the comic way Henry, only weeks old, held his hands thoughtfully to his chin.

All in all he thought the meeting between his wife and mother had gone well. It was a short encounter, yes, but Sara did not like first-time meetings to last long, even intimate ones like these. She liked to look, as if deciding whether she would buy, and she liked to go away and think before she said anything she might not mean. She had looked long at his new wife and baby, bowed, and said quietly, “A privilege to meet you.” He had thought, perhaps, that she meant it.

“Is sincerity not a good thing, Sara?” he asked, throwing out the gritty dregs of the coffee.

“I said she was too sincere. Too much of anything is tiresome, she will push you to acts of goodness that don't suit you very well. You are my child, I want you to be what you are and not what a pretty girl from the suburbs wants you to be.” She shrugged, and in her black mourning dress took measured
steps, one two—three four, one two—three four. “I have something for you,” she added.

As she crouched again, digging into her bag, he thought of how she was, or had become, a thousand acts of goodness herself, straitjacketing herself into Englishness, cooking the food his father liked, dispensing with the excess sugar and fat, shearing off her mother tongue, evicting her past, funnelling, tapering. Goodness could be a narrow state; perhaps she was right.

“How is Rook?” he asked as he waited.

“Rook? Oh, Rook is fine, of course.”

“And?”

She glanced up. “And?”

He leaned back against a tree and turned his cup in his hand. “Perhaps you could marry him.”

“We go driving together sometimes,” she said, looking away. “We drive out to the coast to check if Europe is still there. We've checked across the sea so many times, we have never yet seen it, but we assume it must still be there. So we eat saveloys and wave at it. Hallo Europe, we say, nice to not see you. We are altogether
senile,
at least Rook is. I pretend, huh, to keep him company.”

“So is that a yes, or a no?”

“Jacob.”

“Mama.”

“You know I don't like to be called mama.”

“Nor I Jacob.”

“Well then aren't we both rebellious.”

By now she had abandoned her search in the bag. She slouched forward as elderly women generally do not, certainly
as she generally did not, and gazed ahead blankly. Then, as if awakening, she took a shoe box from her bag that could not possibly have taken her all that time to find, and stood.

“Here,” she said, and smoothed her hair; it was still remarkably dark between the grey strands, and glossy.

He put the empty cup in his pocket. When he opened the box he found a Bible. It was old, the leather weakened to the feel of silk under his fingers. They had stopped walking by now, and he knelt on one knee, his mother lingering above him. Then she crouched and put her head close to his; her hair smelt of lilies.

“It belonged to my parents,” she said. “Why don't you have it, now that you're married to a religious woman? It's my gift to you both, maybe a wedding gift since you just ran away and married in secret.”

“Sara—”

“No, I'm not angry, I'm happy you did it that way. Too much song and dance the other way, too much money.”

He nodded, a little underwhelmed by the gift—touched and even excited that it was from his grandparents, but without any wish to own a Bible. The samovar perhaps, the praise ring his grandmother had used, the objects of charm and intrigue that belonged to an estranged world. But a Bible? Was his mother mocking him?

“Helen will like it,” he said eventually, deciding to find in his mother's gesture some attempt at friendship with his wife.

“I doubt it, the cover is human skin,” she said. “She may be too sincere for human-skin Bibles. But you don't have to tell her.”

He coughed. Involuntarily his fingers danced across the
leather, not wishing to rest anywhere. He eyed his mother then, assessing her, trying to show that he was not thrown by her games.

“My parents kept the Bible out of rebellion,” she said, conceding to explanation. “My father bought it for his bookshop—Bibles sold very well in those days, people were very afraid the world would end if they didn't pray hard enough. Then he discovered how it was bound and he kept it, as a rebellion against all this madness, this Catholic madness and hysteria. He thought it—how can I say it—belittled the Catholics, to have their precious holy Bible bound with a precious holy human. Jews do not believe they are the only creatures that matter. Catholics not only believe it, they know it as a fact. He wanted to mock them. He had a dry humour.”

“I see,” he said, recollecting the photograph of his grandparents that lived on the dresser in Sara's living room. The picture showed a large, elegant, and nervous-looking middle-aged man, standing next to a thin, broad-grinning woman. He remembered how Sara polished the image with a flourish, saying,
Here, my father,
as if all history gathered up its skirts and knelt at the foot of this man.

“I'll keep it for myself,” he said.

“It's very valuable.”

“I'll keep it. I won't give it away to Helen. You say I'll give myself away to her but here it is—here is me not giving anything.”

Here is me being your child, he thought to say. He put the box under his arm and began walking. The road was close; he could see the back end of the Mini parked up in the lay-by.

Sara laughed lightly. “It is hardly that simple. The most important
things are given without even knowing. We have a very strong tendency to give exactly what we can't afford, Jake, that's why I warn you. I sound morbid, but what sort of mother would I be if I didn't tell you the one thing I know.”

Just before they reached the car he put his hand on Sara's shoulder.

“Do you know,” he said to his mother, “I think Helen and I will move back.”

He said it before he thought it, in fact he said it
hours
before he thought it, so that he was in the free fall of inebriated, unplanned speech. “Helen would grow to like it here, she's already introduced herself at the church, perhaps I can do good things.”

He waited for her response, but none came. She watched him with what he could only summarise as politeness.

“What is there here after all,” he went on, “except moors and more moors? Peat and more peat. We need buildings, community buildings, facilities, places to swim, new schools. I see they're planning to extend the prison, that's a big project, to think how to contain people and at the same time how to reeducate them—”

“And punish them, I hope.”

“Punishment isn't the point of prisons.”

“If you say.”

He was always surprised by Sara's staunch view of things. He always fell into the misconception that a member of an ill-treated race will naturally be for freedom, naturally against bindings in human skin, naturally sickened by all that demeaned and failed to enlighten.

“Everything is falling into apathy here,” he said. “And London
has enough architects. It won't miss me. I feel like a child there, no, an orphan, a boy playing with building blocks. I'm a father now. I'm coming home.”

Sara stopped at the entrance to the woods and put her hand on the trunk of a tree. It was all pines here, pines and larches and that sharp clean smell of a place without history. He liked the flat sterility of it, and the idea that his home was something quite banal, quite blank, whose history was yet to be made, or never to be made. A place that was not sodden with sentiment. A place that was just coming alive with industry and gathering a population and looking ahead to a future it had no precedent for.