The Wilderness (29 page)

He needs the toilet; he can't remember where in the house it is and if he will need to go upstairs, and then if so, which stairs. Two sets. One has to choose carefully. A nice man. Poor Eleanor, she is always so mistaken about everything, so deluded.

“I know you, Jake, I know everything you've done, and you aren't bad. What horrors are you building in your head? What fantasies? What for?”

He keeps his head turned from her and stares into the blankness until his eyes are dry.

“Tell me what you think, Jake.”

Suddenly he feels too confused to answer. Everything seems disbanded and rolling away too fast to fetch.

“Won't come,” she says finally of the birds, and, frustrated, throws the bread on the grass.

He comes to his feet, scattering the birds with his sudden movement, and picks up the bread piece by piece. Then he holds out his hand and stays perfectly still. If he is a nice man he will just die, as Helen was a nice woman and died. The fates clear away the nice first, and then get into the real business with the wicked. I don't want to die, he thinks. I want to go home. I do not want to die before I have got home.

The breeze needles his hair, his brain empties thought by thought, and he feels himself become slowly inanimate. Mindless, motionless, a stopped clock. Even the need to urinate has gone. The birds approach. Hours and days pass without breath or thought. He begins whispering Irving Berlin:
Honey, and I've decided, love divided in two wont do.
A smile takes his face and he can feel it lift him. One by one the birds take the bread from his fingers.

In the actual memory it is November and the sky is so full of snow it seems unable to support itself. The sea is black. The threat of snow muffles the mind. The couple stops walking, Rook takes Sara's hands and kisses each one, and Sara kneels and opens her bag.

He decides he will observe them quietly, and so he eases the distance between them with a few steps. Even if they turn they
will fail to recognise him with the sun setting behind him and leaving him in silhouette. They, in contrast, are washed with a coat of matt evening light that leaves them plain but for the blue tint of distance. Sara takes a flask and cups from her bag—white porcelain cups with gold chipped rims, he knows—and laying the cups on the sand she pours coffee. She stands; they drink.

Crouching, he looks to his right along the beach. A few seals sleep in the high, drier sand, but the colony must be mostly out at sea. The smell of them remains, like a litter of dog pups. When his father died Sara was at this beach, swimming in the frozen water, eating chips and saveloys with Rook, drinking coffee; she reasoned that the brine eased their creaking joints and the cold was good for the soul. His father had been dead for five hours before Sara came home and found him slumped at the kitchen table. Watching her and Rook now he gets the impression that they are rarely apart. They seem washed up on the shore, that a mistake has brought them here to England, that some rectifying will take them back to their homelands, and that he will be left. He suppresses jealousy; there is no use for it.

Rook then takes Sara stiffly in his arms, and she eases herself into them, and he watches the two of them waltz formally around the centrepiece of their coffee cups on the sand. They respond to each other like a muscle responds to the brain. In contrast to everything he sees around him, every relationship and happening, they do not look arbitrary. Each leaf has a pattern, he remembers Sara once saying. And the patterns are repeated, and the patterns of the patterns are repeated. The leaf is a billion numbers that defy chance.

Of course, Sara and Rook had once been all chance, meeting in The Sun Rises, Rook sitting in that dusty rope of sunlight
popping mussels into his mouth, Sara the uneasy alien holding a child in her lap and twisting her thick Jewish hair. But they used the years as a filter through which all chance was forced out. Now they are bound like the wooden couple that waltzes in and out of the cuckoo clock every hour. Is it love? Yes. It is not that it might as well be, but that it can't be otherwise.

His mother and Rook waltz wide across the sand, in and out of the snowflakes. They are both skilled dancers. Sara used to go to waltzes as a child when she lived in Vienna; he feels, as he squints against the incoming snow, that he is looking through the muffled haze of time and beyond himself into the past. He is taken by a heat-giving happiness. If Sara and Rook walked straight into the sea now, if they did! This lone man standing on the beach, small in the bigness of it all, watching with a jealous heart as his mother goes to her death in love, and takes her (and his) past with her, this poor rootless man, no wonder he loses his way, he is an effect without a cause; poor man.

But his mother just dances. She seems happy. He isn't a poor man, he is quite a rich man, an architect, a father, his mother is happy. He'll have to make and answer for his own fate after all. He stands and, giving them one last glance, turns back to the dunes and the car park.

Why are you so anxious?
Helen read.

If his memory serves him, she pressed her thumb into the cushion of skin between his eyes.
Jesus asked his disciples: Why are you so anxious?

She smoothed the creases from his brow with her thumb.
Do not be anxious about anything. It will not add a day to your life.

He told her he had just seen his mother at the beach. That was nice, she replied. Did seeing his mother make him anxious?

If only he could have told her then! Helen, a man is anxious because he has too much time and not enough to think about. A man is anxious because he has lost too much time and has ended up thinking about all he should have thought about when he had the time.

With the dog following him he moves through the house, up one staircase and down another, kicking at objects that get in his way, shouting at a fluttering curtain, at the chimes of the church clock, throwing his weight about only to make certain that he does still have weight. He does, and when he feels it he bears it joyously: this, then, this body is not lost. He is disoriented by the memory of the beach and the seeming nearness of it, so close to his thinking that its waters could be at the top of the stairs and its snows filling Henry's chocolate bedroom.

Eleanor is there and then not. He sees her hunched over and he is moved, wants to put her up straight, hold her, talk to her about the past. Then he sees pink nails, makeup, and gets the giddying sense of the stranger emerging and eclipsing her. And then he thinks he must have made a mistake because she is hardly Eleanor at all except for in outline; if he could grab her and hold her still she might remain as he knows her, but she moves, and the movement confuses him.

Things are getting worse, have got worse, suddenly. Everything is quite wrong and the pills make his head ache to the
point of sickness. He is possessed by a sudden boredom that greys the colours. If only he were a child, he thinks, but the thought ends there.

He is furious at useless implements that he can no longer name, at Eleanor who is not steady, who is solid and then disintegrates to his mind, at the coffee machine that perpetually boils dry for lack of water, at the shifting world—the days into nights and restlessly back again, the plates in the sink in the cupboard in the sink in the pillbox, the headache in his head and out of his head, the nausea, the rage. To say that all the change is in him is unreasonable and infuriating—that he must be questioned, manoeuvred, and ultimately culpable, that all this is his fault but that despite this there is nothing he can do. Everything must now always be his fault. If only D's letters were opened; if only something were Helen's fault, too, and she could share this burden.

The rage comes so hard, so often—starchy, white rage with no give. Always lately there is a feeling that he must escape, and when he can't he feels hopeless. This morning's rage comes because Eleanor tells him he does not need to wash the windows, he did it yesterday, the day before, the windows are clean. Besides, it is raining, washing windows in the rain is pointless. Pointless as the naked woman and her jars, pointless as the man rolling the rock up the hill (though what man, and what hill, and where did he hear of it?). And yet the icy shine of the glass has pleased him, as has the sight of the windows harnessing the light, as, too, has his reflection appearing through his own labour as if, at last, Helen has answered his question.
You did invent yourself, you are always inventing yourself.

In rage at Eleanor's charge of pointlessness he has hurled a bucket of soapy water across the garden; now, guilty and apologetic, he watches her through the gleaming window picking it up and tidying it away, just as she tidies away the fragments of cups and the burnt food and the tins of fish he puts absently in the freezer: the multitude of little arrangements she makes out of his derangements. Eleanor, his external memory, his conscience, his nurse, his cleaner, his cook. She thinks he fails to notice, but he notices. He sees her clearing traces of him from the face of things, and the way her life seems to have become little but an apology and recompense for his actions. Around her all his doings lose substance as if she simply absorbs them. Such broad hips and shoulders on which to rest the weight of his errors.

Sorry, is what he seems to say to her most. Sorry about that. Most of the time he can't even be sure what he is apologising for. Always she ruffles his hair. Never mind, she tells him.

She does not seem to age. Never beautiful, she is still not. Never young, never old, nothing to lose, she has the vigilant indifference of an automatic sprinkler system that floods a room whether or not there is a fire. He does not even remember fully how she came to be living here—what sleight of hand was this that removed Helen and left Eleanor? There is a fog around her. His fog, she will say. Why my fog? he will respond. Why must all the blame be mine? Because (she will attach her hands to her hips) that is the nature of your forgetting. Fog. That is the weather in your head.

He is ashamed of his adolescent moods. The shame is never greater than this, now, as he returns to the garden after his looping, looping like a caged bird up and down the double stairs, to
find Eleanor, poor, watchful, vigilant Eleanor sweating hunch-shouldered against the humidity waiting for him. He can do nothing for her; in truth he is growing afraid of her and of what she is beginning to see in him. He sits on the wall around the raised flower bed with the dog laid across his feet; he checks her name tag: Lucky. Unusual name, he can't imagine why he would have named her this, it doesn't seem like a thing he would do. But then his life doesn't seem like a thing he would do either, not at the moment. He lets his fingers dig the soil.

The air is soupy. A van pulls up at the gates and Eleanor goes to it, he cannot hear what she says to the driver but she walls her body off by hugging her arms across her chest. She is always this way with strangers; they talk—about him? Are they discussing his behaviour? He has done nothing; whatever they think, he has done nothing. He digs in the soil and collects, digs and collects. After a time Eleanor comes away from the gates and relaxes her arms.

“He wanted directions,” she says, and returns to her gardening.

He takes a new pocketful of stones upstairs to the bedroom and rests them with the others at the foot of the French windows. The dog pursues, his canine shadow, the shadow of the part of himself that is still noble, he thinks. Her sheer blackness is brave and her thinness willing. In whatever tight and unlikely spot she lies she makes it home. She settles here by the heap of stones and he sits on the floor next to her, pushing the heap taller until it holds its shape. Perhaps that man did not just want directions. Perhaps they are planning to take him away. He must get more stones. Needs more. Build it up here, build it back here, make it higher, yes, and get some of those
stones that have fallen out of Eleanor's armfuls of weeds around the compost. Get some of those off the grass; get things in order.

That night he makes some advances on Eleanor in the bed, biologies born of habit: she is warm and unfathomable under cover so that he is reminded of a time he cannot place, in which he once discovered her body and was surprised by how he liked it. When was this? Which episode of the past? How long has Eleanor been here? He remembers being relieved by how she opened her arms to him in complete trust and how he entered, dumbfounded by her huge, undutiful breasts (Helen's were egg-like in comparison, and obedient and firm, biology-textbook perfect; Joy had no breasts, only ribs and nipples): here suddenly was a world of breast! A universe of breast! Unshielded and staring at him adoringly. And behind that adoration all he could hear, and all he can hear now, is the deep long moan of failure.
I should not be here, I do not belong here.