The Wilderness (26 page)

Eleanor's take on his encounter with Joy was painfully tender. As she saw it, Joy entered the garden as tall and unapolo-getic as a sunflower, wearing a yellow dress and yellow shoes, and he, some dashing quixotic figure exhaling smoke, decided to deflower her. And when the moment came it was unequivocally wonderful, because the sunflower succumbed to his charm, and he to hers, and they were suspended from themselves and from time like dandelion clocks floating on the breeze. When they landed reality hit. He went back to his wife, she went to America. There was no remorse, only happy memories that would begin eventually to feel like dreams. He wondered how accurate this would prove to be, whether remorse would come. And he wondered how many times Eleanor had gone over and over the scenario in her head, poor Eleanor, relaying it with spelling mistakes, promising she would tell nobody what she knew.

Though she intended for her words of love to hit hard, they instead landed on him so lightly. Toy words. So insubstantial compared to his compressed, shrinking, infinitely dense memory of Joy.

Joy didn't write. Nothing came. He decided to cast her memory aside. The more he reflected on it the more he thought of how impassive she had been, and he wondered if he had perhaps taken advantage of her. She was very young. Rook's
granddaughter.
And he Rook's son in all but blood, in all the ways that were supposed to count. There was a sickly feeling of perversion, if not incest then something else which he could no longer put down to mere infidelity. As he read the lovely scenario in Eleanor's letter he was forced to confront its opposite scenario, that he had perhaps forced Joy into sleeping
with him. Of course he hadn't forced her—but had he? How could he know for certain?

Even more distressing was that he did not feel guilty, neither for Helen nor for Joy. He felt new. Visions of his glass house buoyed him until the coach house began to bleach out around him, and when he and Helen took to their Conception Events he focussed on his sudden hunger for another child and on the being that would become Alice. Helen had described her (you think hard enough, she said, and your thoughts will be the case). Pretty, average height, she will have long fingers and small ears and lilac eyes, a little elfin, honey skin, freckles, her father's strong nose. All this was very well, he thought, but not enough. She would have Joy's height and arrogance, she would not be all good and all God, and lilac eyes were fine but Alice's eyes would be indecisive and refuse to settle for lilac alone.

Upstairs the money sat under the bed in surprisingly few neat piles—a thousand pounds did not look much when it was stacked. It had been there for some weeks, and in those weeks he had made investigations into the ownership of the Junk, except that the task was far harder than he had imagined. The house belonged to a woman called Mrs. Crest, but nobody could find her. She had bought it several years before, in 1956, but never lived there, and left it to fall to its current state.

He chased up all the possible leads until they ran dry; he made enquiries, rural communities had strong grapevines— but nobody knew of Mrs. Crest. Some had vague memories which turned out to be mistaken and some knew Mrs. Crest senior before she died, and there was an illegitimate son, or
daughter, or no, that was a different Crest or maybe even a Croft, no, to be honest nobody paid much attention to those decrepit little houses. They were much more interested in the people on the new estate with the car, or the people who were going on holiday to Australia by plane (it was taking them three days, they had to stop all over the world). Nobody went on holiday to Australia by plane, if they went there they stayed for good. Mrs. Crest, probably, had done this. Probably never coming back.

He took his wife and child across the moors and drove them right out to the prison, wanting to show Helen where the new building would be, wanting to show her for once what he did.

“I suppose you could just—well,
have
the house and land,” Helen suggested in the car, in response to his long exposition of the problem.

He smiled. “Steal them?”

“No, use them. And if Mrs. Crest ever came back you could sort it out with her then.”

“And if she didn't?”

“Well then no harm done.”

“Helen, God would not approve.”

“Don't simplify everything. Right and wrong come in shades of grey. You always try to simplify things to on or off. You're, what is it? Binary. You're Binary Man.”

He laughed and wound the car window down to throw his cigarette out.

“If you've tried everything you can to find her, Jake, and she's just disappeared, then—well,” she looked out at the manor house ahead, the stone lions at the gates, and played
with her wedding ring. “Those lions are very striking. Are they to protect the prisoners from the outside or protect the outside from the prisoners? Anyway, about Mrs. Crest, it's just a suggestion.”

“It's a really charming suggestion. I mean, what's property anyway? Why not just take what you want and then just
settle
it afterwards if needs be. No harm has ever come from people taking land from each other.” He shrugged in jest. “It's just land. The Palestinians, they don't mind. And that footpath we got rid of when we built those houses in Bromley, the local community didn't mind that at all, that's why they campaigned for two days in the rain to get it back.
Pedestrians shouldn't be walked all over!”

Helen glanced at him and tucked her hair behind her ear. “It's just a forgotten little piece of land, Jake.”

“And with those words a thousand wars have begun.”

They drove past the
NO ENTRY
signs and parked by the manor house in bays marked
NO PARKING,
where the first foundations were being dug up against the manor. Land for the grounds was being levelled, the topiary uprooted, a small fountain removed, the security fencing marked out by stakes and tape in a wide circle as far as the eye could see. As they walked around Helen became sullen and hugged Henry who, always deferential to her, was sullen, too. She was upset by the idea of imprisonment, she was upset by her inability to conceive straight away, she was tearful with pride at her husband's work, even if she could not condone it, she said the flatness no longer scared her but made her melancholy. She said she was sorry for being such a terrible wimp, and she smacked a kiss on Henry's cheek.

And then a month later a letter arrived from America. In it Joy said that she had got his address from Eleanor and that she hoped he didn't mind her writing, but in the two months since she had left England she could not stop thinking of him. She even recalled a bruise he had had on his leg. She had met a man in California, a rich man who owned vines, and she was wondering whether to marry him—what did he think? If she did she would have to become a Jew, have a proper Jewish wedding (what if, she joked, she became his golem?). Did he think that was too big a step? Should she?

The letter caught him off guard. He had not expected Joy to think of him and his bruises, or at least to think of them only in hate. He put the letter in a satchel and stuck it under the bed with the piles of money, as if under-the-bed had become a mythical place for all expectant things, as if Mrs. Crest herself would turn up there. As he drove out to get fish-and-chips that evening he mulled the letter over in his mind, his heart reeled despite his head knowing better; Joy, he repeated to himself.

He came home and Helen poured him a beer, made herself a cup of tea, got forks, salt, and vinegar for the chips. They ate in front of the fire, and when they had finished eating Helen fed the fire with the newspaper, making the flames spit with fat.
Last woman in Britain hanged. Dog goes into space. Fifty thousand jobs lost. Russia tests nuclear device. Monkey goes into space.
He watched the news burn with pieces of fish batter. Helen leaned forward and took a triangle of paper that had dropped down through the grate, not that day but some day previous, and she asked what it was, the writing on that corner of paper. He told her it was a letter from Eleanor simply because
he couldn't manufacture a lie any faster. Saying what? she asked. Saying that she is in love with me, he replied. Poor Eleanor, he had not meant to make her emotions public, it just came out in the rush of things.

Helen frowned. Why are you burning it? she asked. You should never burn love letters. Love letters are okay? he asked. Yes, they are okay—so long as they are one-way. She patted his leg, put the corner of Eleanor's letter back into the grate as if that place of salvation was where it rightfully belonged, and turned the lounge lights off. Except for the firelight they were in darkness.

Look, she said, pulling up her skirt, taking off her petticoat. As the satin rubbed against her stockings the material flashed, green sparks of static. It was such amusement to her. Look at me flashing!

He smiled and watched the flames, drenched in chip fat, glow a similar green. Then she redressed, turned on the lights, sat looking into the fire. She confided that she'd had a love letter—a love note—from a man in her Bible group and she would keep it forever. D? he asked. She was surprised—yes, D, how did he know? Short for devil, short for disaster? Short for David, she said. He raised his glass of beer. Well then here's to David. Helen raised her cup of tea. And here's to Eleanor, poor Eleanor, and to being loved.

The fatty flames snapped, wafting bad news and smells of vinegar into the room.

Yes, they toasted in unison.

Here's to being loved.

Time speeds up, rushing headlong into conclusions, then it stops. There is something teenagery about it. Something uncomfortable and maladroit as if it has not learnt how to pace itself with space.

“No,” she says, and her words are the first indication that he has been saying something out loud. “No, Jake. It's you, not time. Time is just as it was. It's you, we have to help you re-learn, like I've been telling you.”

She sits at the kitchen table beating eggs. Embarrassing, but he cannot remember her name. So desperately embarrassing because he sleeps with her, he knows her, she is not a stranger.

Since he dragged the police into his disease things have changed; suddenly he is a liability, suddenly nothing he says or does can be trusted, as if it used to be quite an informal kind
of illness and now it becomes official. The timeline is a mass of crossings out and corrections. He feels to be the supremely unconfident author of his own life. Question marks appear against words, then he deletes the question marks, thinking that if he doesn't question the truth there is no question about it. It is only
him,
as the woman says, only him who is confusing things.

He bruises mint into the sugar solution with the back of a spoon and leans his senses into the sphere of the crisp sweet smell. Of course, there is no smell. Every day he wakes and thinks, today I will smell again. Some primitive optimism stirs: today I will smell again! And visions come, as if to correct that optimism—Henry as a warring adolescent in tight jeans and black boots, and that constricting shirt he always wore as if he were trying to commit suicide by his clothes alone; in the vision Henry's childhood is breaking from him like rocks from a cliff face, and the boy's adulthood is the result of some avalanche of which he, the father, is the unhappy cause. And of course this has nothing to do with being able to smell and not being able to smell, except for the sense of guilt, that the lack of smell is the punishment for bad parenting, for somehow allowing his son to lose his childhood. Or taking it away.

“It's early for mint juleps,” she says, watching him make the mint syrup.

“We used to drink mint juleps at four in the morning,” he counters.

She smiles and pinches salt into the egg mixture. “Have you taken your tablets today?”

“Yes,” he nods, and sits, allowing Lucky to rest her head on his knee.

“Let me check.” She goes to the cupboard, to the small box in the cupboard, and opens it. “The pills are still here,” she remarks. “Which means you haven't taken them after all.”

“Oh?”

“I'll get some water.” She tips the pills from their bed of— white stuff, white wool—onto her hand and goes to the sink. This is her system, to section off two pills and then go back to check he has had them, as if she is tracking the behaviour of a badger in the garden, the strange snuffling behaviour of some nighttime creature.

“I don't want them,” he says. “They give me a headache.”

She sits and pushes the glass towards him. “Is that why you didn't take them?”

“I thought I had taken them.”

“Yesterday, Jake, I found pills in the bin.”

He shakes his head. “I didn't put them there.”

“You mustn't lie. Honesty is everything.”

“I'm not lying. I didn't put them there.”

“Well, anyway. Have these.” She taps the table. “It's important, they're keeping you well.”

“I didn't put them there. I just thought—I wasn't sure. I didn't
put
them there.”

Already he cannot think what
they
are, where
there
is, nor what exactly they are talking about. He repeats the line, it comforts, it seems to have meaning even without his understanding it.

She smiles faintly, her scrutiny deep with good intentions.
She is wearing wide-awake and all-seeing makeup around her eyes.

“You just wanted to get rid of them. I understand. They give you a headache, darling, I understand, but you must take them, they're doing you good.”

He rises and pushes his chair away roughly. “I didn't put them there!”

Fuming, lost, he wishes for a beach of stones and solitude, and him in a long coat facing the ocean, him coddled in a coat and miles of windless isolation.

“This is insane behaviour from you, testing me,” he says. “I am not obliged to put up with it, I have a busy day.” He begins clearing plates and cups from the table and piling them in the sink. Stoically, she takes them out.

“These are clean,” she says. “We haven't had breakfast yet.”

He eyes this woman—this stranger, friend, those pearl-pink nails resting assured on wide hips, that firm regard, the silver thing hanging around her neck, the small cough that raises her chest. How dare she presume to be half known to him and half unknown. Darling, she calls him, and the word breaks his heart. Struggling from her gaze he takes a cup and smashes it against the wall, then stares with clenched fists at the mess.