The Wilderness (38 page)

He looked outside the car window and saw nothing but night.

“My father starts mocking her about manna:
Are you waiting for manna from heaven, do you think your God's going to save you or do you think, perhaps, that it's me going out to work that will save you?
My father takes some money from his pocket and waves it around.
This is manna, and it isn't from heaven!

“Then Sara tells him, very coolly, that manner is in fact the way you are, your disposition—she used that word—and manners, with an
s
, is also the thing you observe when you are in company, and that it is the first thing any self-respecting Englishman should learn. Then she goes upstairs, leaving my father and the neighbours to themselves. I follow her, in case she's upset, but when I find her in the bedroom she is turning slowly in a kind of dance, twisting the praise ring. She looks so happy. I have this vision that my mother is utterly indestructible. And that she will protect me from anything.”

He then turned to Helen with a more resolute expression.

“And then the next day, the Second World War breaks out and after we hear the announcement Sara goes upstairs again. I want to see her do that dance, be that amazing, strong mother. But this time there she is in the bedroom completely nude. Completely. Her body isn't what I expect.”

He examined Helen's face for a reaction but saw only the quick flick of her eyes towards him and back towards the road.

“It's, I don't know, womanly. With clothes on she always seems so narrow and contained. But she isn't. She has a small potbelly, and her hair is loose all over her shoulders. So pretty, that's what I think, and
young,
and—vulnerable.”

Helen crunched her mint. “Does she see you?”

“Yes. She tells me to go and fill the bath. When the war started there were no more stories about her childhood and Austria and the rest. She just gradually shed her skin and became—English. Her family died, so she thought she should die. And it was as if, Helen, that moment that I saw her naked and vulnerable was the moment where I grew up, and I didn't want to. I wasn't ready to.”

Helen put her hand on his knee.

“I think you were ready to.”

“And because I wasn't ready, I've spent my whole life missing what I left. And I'll spend the rest of my whole life doing the same.”

“No, darling. Don't say that. Everybody has a little something missing inside them, it's prudent, it's like keeping a spare room in the house for guests.” She opened the window for fresh air. “And if there is a big thing missing, find what it is and replace it.
We
can replace it.”

His wife's words did not comfort him, though; they never did. The memory left him feeling that the urgent growing up of that day had involved transgressing a sacred boundary. The more he tried to rid his mind of the image of his naked mother the more it prevailed and sharpened, so that he could see the birthmark on Sara's hip, her thick pubic hair,
that belly, like the most private of all things, laid bare to his scrutiny.

The white front of the coach house flared in the headlights; they pulled up, stopped the car, gathered the items of clothing that had not made their way back on—socks, Helen's bra, Helen's neck scarf, his leather belt. The car engine ticked as it cooled.

For the first time he was struck by the loveliness of their house as if he had been loaned Helen's eyes for long enough to see what she saw: the creamy walls, tall black-framed windows, the modest but clear announcement of its drive, the garden an all-consuming selfish green even in the darkness, the cherry tree burning yellow into another autumn.

“Jake,” Helen said.

He held back a few steps and watched her approach the back door. “Yes?”

“Jake, I believe I'm pregnant.”

He looked at his wife. “Since when?”

She smiled wryly. “Fifteen minutes ago.”

Had it been any other person, he would have ridiculed the premature announcement, but Helen—Helen knew, he could tell.

“That hit the spot?”

She bit her lip. “In more than one way.”

“It's Alice?”

“Yes,” she grinned, “I'm sure of it.”

“Buddy Holly!” he said, his tones muted. He lifted her and spun her around; her feet knocked a milk bottle at the back door and smashed it across the gravel.

His delight was genuine, kissing her, letting her go, hoping against hope that she was right in her inkling, brushing the
broken glass aside with his foot. But when they switched on the kitchen light they saw that something was not right. A chair had been knocked over. The French doors were shattered.

“Shit,” he said. He ranged across the kitchen, to the hallway, up the stairs. Ornaments along the way were broken, nothing precious, but why break them? Why not either steal or leave them? He bartered with himself: if the money is still there under the bed it is all right. He paused a moment in Henry's room, seeing that it was apparently untouched. Music came from his and Helen's bedroom, the crackle of a record crawling around the turntable.
Love divided in two wont do.
If the money is still there, he wagered, all will be well.

He ducked through the secret door, lowered himself to his knees by the unmade double bed, noted the proximity of his knee to a piece of smashed china that had once been a statue of an angel—a rather fanciful thing, a gift from him to Helen that he trusted she would like precisely because he didn't. Fury filled him when he saw her diary torn up and scattered across the pile of laundry by the wardrobe. Confusion, relief, slight offence filled him when he registered also that the human-skin Bible had been pulled from its shoe box in the wardrobe and thrown, intact, to the floor.

He screwed his face towards the darkness under the bed. The money, of course, was gone.

Helen perched on the sofa in her rayon skirt.

“Ginger, dear,” Sara said.

“Actually I don't like ginger.”

“Ah, so.”

Sara dwindled back to the kitchen and he followed her, reasoning lamely.

“They'll find who took it. There were fingerprints everywhere.”

He leaned against the counter and felt pressure on his bladder as the shot of water passed through the coffee. “They'll find who it was.”

Sara prepared the mugs; not the gold-rimmed cups but some two-a-penny blue-and-white striped mugs that were bereft of saucers or the possibility of saucers.

“Jacob, dear, they will never find that money. The sooner you lose hope the better.”

He folded his arms and dug his fingers between his ribs, made a short laugh. It's only money, it's only money. So Helen had taken to assuring him. But, despite their haste to see the police off and get out of the house, get back to their child as if to make up for all they had failed to protect, she had taken the time to rid herself of the miniskirt and leave it in a pile like a curse. On their drive back to Sara's they had lamented at cross-purposes, Helen talking about changing locks and the prospect of rewriting what she had logged in her destroyed diaries, he persisting (so much that he began to irritate even himself) in questioning, why,
why did it happen?
She interrogating the future, he nursing the past. He suddenly becoming what he did not want to be; a dweller. A dweller on the done and dusted. A dweller in an old honeysuckled house, and condemned to it.

Helen went to bed; it was already two or three in the morning. He stayed up with Sara, who seemed to have no tiredness, either that or no idea of the time. As she switched on her radio and sank back into the bentwood chair he wondered if it were really possible for a person to age in a week, to give up on even the remote idea of youth. She was vacant. The loss of the money had impacted on her enough to cause the faintest of shudders, and then had seemed to absent her mind. He would not be the one to remind her that it was her family, that money. All the blood and bones of it, the sum of the remains.

“Where is Rook?” he asked suddenly. “Did he go home?”

“Yes,” Sara said, and feigned a yawn. “Tomorrow he's going to America.”

He straightened. “Why's that?”

“To see his granddaughter—I hear you've met her.” She smoothed her hands across the cushion on her lap. “The poor girl got herself in trouble a few months ago; Rook wanted to go and help sort it out but she wouldn't let him. She went alone, stubborn girl. I like her. I pity her. It's easier in California—of course she had to go over the border still and keep it all quiet.”

She spoke as if it were all just a matter of course.

“Sara, do you mean what I think you mean?”

“Probably.”

He forced himself not to speak until he had thought precisely what to say. He poured himself a glass of wine, the sweet white stuff, the bottle already half empty.

“Over the border?”

“Mexico.”

He shuddered at the idea of Joy laid out somewhere hot and dark, somewhere with thick spicy air. He turned the vision away.

“Rook didn't say anything at dinner—”

“No, of course. He was quiet with thought. He has been worried, naturally.”

“But it's over? She's all right?”

“Oh, quite all right. But Rook wants to go and treat her and buy her things and make her happy. That girl's happiness is his meaning for life.”

Sara looked a little regretful at this. She tucked her large hands between her thighs.

“How long ago—the pregnancy?”

“Some months.”

He drank, wondering what
some months
meant.

“But she's getting married—isn't she? Joy? I think Rook mentioned.” He acted out ignorance with a shrug. “So she could have—there was no need for any
sorting out
.”

“Ah, but she's certain the husband-to-be is not the—what is that word.”

“Father?”

“Culprit.”

He felt rather sick and dark.

“Then who?”

“Apparently she had something with a man here, in England, before she left. That's all she would tell Rook. Or at least,” Sara sighed, “that's all Rook would tell me.”

He felt to be the embodiment of sin, some bedevilled creature polluting all he touched. Or he felt drunk. He thought of Alice gathering cell by cell upstairs; of Sara naked; of Helen's
shriek; of Rook's wink; of a gunshot. Of a Bible so bleakly bound that even criminals would not take it. In his mind a door opened, Alice walked through, it closed again, Alice was gone. She was not pleased with what she saw, so she left. Her life was no more than his hush-hush of a door opening and shutting.

“I was going to ask Rook to marry me this evening,” Sara said. “That was to be the real announcement. After the other announcement.”

He tilted his head and watched her.

“But I lost courage. What a foolish idea it was.” She touched her teeth again as she had earlier that evening and lowered her gaze.

“What terrible fates got that girl pregnant and sent him off to America? He's too old for this.” She stood and wandered to the mantelpiece as if it had asked her to come and listen to something it had to say.

“I want to go to the sea with him, this second,” she announced. “Oh, I'm so tired of all this aloneness, every room I go in what do I find? Me. Ich, everywhere, ich ich. I was going to ask him to marry me. Maybe not now. The courage has left me now.”

How else could Alice have entered life but with one eye on its exit? Conceived in the back of a car to a little death and infidel thoughts, she was never going to want to loiter in this world.

In that sperm travelling towards that egg (he can see it swimming, heavily laden with bad news) there was nothing but death and disappointment, and it was
his
doing. Alice was
his
child; it was always as though her mother didn't so much give birth to her as dispel her, not without love but in recognition of the fact that Alice was uncomfortable with the level of goodness she found inside her mother's small, white, freckle-dusted body. And when dispelled she went straight to her source, her father, that was how it seemed at least.

When she was born everybody noticed how like her father she looked and how eerie that resemblance was, because it was
not in the features, which were more like her mother's, but in the parts of the face that don't have a name. Or maybe not even there, but just in the moving interim between one expression and another. The closed eyes and open eyes were her mother's, but the blinking eyes her father's. The smile was her mother's and the scowl, too, but the graduation from one to the other, the little wilderness between states, was her father's through and through.

Every time he wakes up it is this wilderness that greets him, this no-man's-land, filled with his daughter's eyes and smiles on their way to an expression they never quite reach.