The Wilderness (39 page)

No matter what he attempts with the timeline, and no matter how he manoeuvres collapsing memories into stories that might get round to her, all that is left of Alice is three isolated flashes which, when they come, throw all other time out of bounds.

First, he is carrying Alice through the woods. There are gunshots: bang, they ricochet between the trees, lose their heart, and stream onto the path in shreds of last sound. He covers Alice's ears (which, he thinks in wonder, are just like shells they found on the beach the week before she was born), and he takes the time to trace his fingers around their curves. Alice does not cry. Alice is three weeks old and not overly concerned by or interested in this world, not even the deer killing, not even the lattice of branches that bow down to her. Still, though, he covers her ears to spare her any concern that might come.

“When she's three,” he says, “we'll harvest the cherries from the tree, but not 'til then. The laws of kashrut say to wait until the third year, and practise patience.”

Helen hugs Henry to her.

“The third year of the tree, Jake, not of Alice. Not all time begins with Alice. The tree's already ten, twenty years old. You've drunk its wine.”

“You think the birth of a tree is more important than the birth of a child?”

“We didn't do the same when Henry was born.”

“Because Henry was born before we even found the tree—”

“Anyway,” Helen intercepts, “the law of kashrut, what point does it have?”

“It's about patience and—”

“Patience and virtue. Yes, yes. Since when did you care about those?” She smiles up at him.

“It's about observing rituals for their beauty. Why do we celebrate birthdays, or Christmas, or pancake day?”

She kisses Henry's head.

“I suppose. It just all seems so obscure, if you know what I mean.”

“And the Bible isn't?”

She smiles again, reaches over, and touches Alice's nose with the tip of her finger.

“We can abstain from cherries for three years for the sake of beauty, and the sake of Alice,” he reasons.

“And what will we do for the sake of Henry?”

“Kashrut can be for Henry too, a belated kashrut. We can have it for both of them.”

“I suppose we can.”

He touches his daughter's nose in the same place. “She's just as I imagined her.”

Helen puts her hands over Henry's ears against the gunshots.

“It's good that you love her so much,” she says.

It has snowed, and the prison is frozen like a monochrome photograph inside its fences. They make their way towards the entrance where the woman shows something to a guard and their bag is searched, and at that they are allowed along the corridor to the large, hot room. They take a seat at a table with a young man.

The man reaches his hands across the table and smiles. “You need to get that coat off.”

Instinctively he hugs the coat to himself in refusal and shakes his head.

“I'll get us coffee,” the woman says.

“He always has tea when he's here. Strong and sugary.”

The young man smiles again and a sweetness passes over his face, a familiarity in the eyes also, in the small upturn at their corners which seems to convey great curiosity in things.

“She won't leave me alone,” he says to the man when the woman has gone.

The man winks. “Just as well.”

He observes the other people in the room, their hunched shoulders and anxious looks; all women. Not for the first time he wonders what he is doing here, thinking it is business perhaps,
but then not able to say what business that would be, what he used to do here when he was younger and more important. He scratches around in the embers of a fire long gone out and, finding himself in that disconsolate clueless state that has become home, finally contents himself with turning the buttons on his coat one way and the other to see how far they will twist.

“I've done a painting,” the man says.

He smiles brightly. “Oh? That's very nice. Painting. You've done a painting. On the banks of a river, very nice, very nice, well done you, that's good—good, good—that's—”

A hand on his arm stops the stutter of thought.

“It's for an exhibition of prisoners' paintings, called Doing Time. I may give it to you and Ellie when the exhibition's finished, if you want it. It's of four animals in a cage—a tiger, a dog, a cat, and a bird. It's a sunny day at the zoo, and the animals are all watching one another. The question is, which will eat which first? Will the tiger eat the dog, will the dog eat the cat, will the cat eat the bird, will the bird fly away? It's called
A Matter of Time
.”

Out of the window he can see the reach of the manor house, which is eclipsed from view as the woman puts drinks on the table, and then returns to view when she sits. The bird will of course fly away, he decides, then loses the thought. He takes his cup of tea in his hands and stares at that view, disappearing into a thoughtless blankness. He can hear chatter around him and feels an increasing heat in his hands, as if they are on fire, insulating him against the snow that threads down outside.

When the man sinks his gaze to the table, just in that moment he is reminded of a time when Henry had fallen asleep at
the kitchen table and he had picked him up and taken him to the bedroom, swaddling him in blankets, tucking them around his son's body, surprised at how small it was. Then he had sat on the edge of the bed for an hour or more watching, with a feeling of immense love and protectiveness, his son asleep.

The most vital thing is to protect one's children. There is no part of the soul or body that is complete without that guardianship, no part that is even alive. He feels the pressure of the sentiment on his cheeks, his shoulders, his eardrums, his bladder. Somewhere in the woods his son is running around shooting an imaginary enemy with an imaginary gun, and soon he will come home needing dinner. The table should be set in preparation; no time here to waste talking to strangers.

When he looks out restlessly through the window the sight of the manor house catches his eye again, dragged through time, exiled in the present moment.

“That's funny,” he says, bewildered, and the man and woman turn to him.

“What's funny?” The woman puts her hand on his thigh.

“That building was there yesterday, and the day before.”

The snow goes on weaving patterns before his eyes.

There is a gunshot. Bang! Henry shouts and his fingers form a gun. Alice wants to try walking but the snow is deeper than her, at least just here. She is now one and a half: how fast the time has gone! She windmills her legs and he clings to her while his wife and Henry follow behind. His wife sings.
Honey, and I've
decided, love divided in two wont do.
Her voice carries out across Quail Woods in clean pleasant lines until it meets the moors.

“Henry, stay with me,” his wife says.

“Want to go to Jake.”

“Stay with me. Jake is looking after Alice.”

He waits for his wife and son to catch up. His wife is out of breath because of the snow and Henry's five-year-old weight on her hip; he kisses her cold cheek and then Henry's. Henry reaches out for him and he leans back; what can he do or say? He does not want to give his daughter over, and as the snow falls on them he holds her closer, pulling the yellow blanket around her. Joy's recent letters are in his pocket and brushing against his leg as he manoeuvres himself through the snow.

“And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness
,” his wife announces. “And they were happy to be encamped in their stone house, and not the glass house. And they found a cherry tree, and its branches were possibilities, possibilities within possibilities. Some possibilities were to become real, and some were to always remain just possible.”

He smiles at her, stoops, and gathers up a snowball which he throws lightly at a tree. With some effort Helen holds Henry at the end of her reach and turns slowly in the snow, until his weight is too much. She sets him down onto his own feet.

“And from them came two children, a boy and a girl, and their eyes were as the eyes of doves by the rivers of water, washed with milk—”

“—and fitly set,” he finishes. “And the snow was milk and the sky was milk and their hearts and brains turned to milk.”

His wife scoops snow from a tree and throws it at him.
They laugh, even Henry laughs. Alice chatters
Jape, Jape,
like a bird, and a gunshot bounces out across the canopy of branches. It splices the possibilities into sometime and never. He thinks of all those things his life will not be, and wonders what he is without them.

(And as the snowballs fly in a three-way him-wife-son tangle they seem to break up and spill across the air until the air, the trees, the whole forest are dripping with white milky liquid in which the only colour, just beyond them, is yellow, yellow dress, yellow foam, a pair of yellow shoes surfacing and submerging as the mother and child try to stay afloat.)

“Want to go to Jake,” Henry grizzles, as Helen hoists him up again to her hip. “Go to Jake.”

“I'm with Alice at the moment, Hen.” His words come out as steam on the freezing air. “Later you can come to me.”

His wife observes the now sleeping child on his shoulder, and she scratches her cheek and tightens her hold of Henry.

“It's good that you love her so much,” she says.

So then Alice is three, and his wife is walking barefooted along the path in her miniskirt, blotched in the green-and-yellow camouflage of the sunlight as it fights through from above. The overhang of trees sieves the light of its heat. Everywhere there are patches of yellow that force through from nowhere and give the effect of a dream. There is so much yellow that it works its way up his legs as he paddles through it and he feels like he is coming alive.

He is at his wife's side carrying Alice on his shoulders so that she can become a tree; she threads her fingers through his hair and chirps,
Jape, Jape.
Henry runs ahead and throws pinecones at targets on trees—a knot in the bark or a red cross painted to mark the tree as fit for felling. Most of the trees are marked.

He comments that woods are going to be cut down, and Helen replies that it is sad to lose the woods, their lovely woods where they like to come walking.

To lighten the mood he reminds his family that it's been three years since Alice was born, which means that their three years of kashrut is done. The day is gorgeous, the height of summer and so he suggests that they go home and get up the ladder and pick cherries. They'll make, let's see, a pie.

Helen crouches and rummages in a bag; she pulls out some cake which she unwraps from its cling film and hands to them.
You're eating the yellow sections first,
she says as they tuck into the cake. Yes, he explains, because he doesn't like them.
So in that case you leave them 'til last.
No, he assures her, you save the best 'til last.

A series of gunshots rupture their debate. There is a war, or there has been a war, or—what?—he doesn't know now, reaching back into the memory is like putting his hand into a box blindfolded, knowing there are objects but not knowing quite what they are. War plays its part, but maybe it is just its steady tick that has never left him. Maybe just the tick of his own maudlin heart.