The Wilderness (9 page)

There were six or so inmates in the visits room:
Are any of these thieves?
he had asked. A shrug from Henry.
Nobody asks what you're here for,
Henry had said. He found this information unbelievable, but let it pass. He could not abide thieves. Murderers, adulterers, heretics, junkies, kidnappers—not ideal, but the world needs its irregularities: it is too perfectly spherical, too perfectly perfect without. God is too easy without the challenge. But thieves disrupted the oiled mechanisms of give and take that he, personally, took as the most human of human traits: the ability to recognise value, fairly trade, to save for what seemed important, to spend on what seemed immediate. To give, also, and to provide.

Each of these six inmates, except Henry, was being visited by a woman. One of the women had a child who played sullenly with his father's fingers, lifting and dropping them. He
recalls a black couple whose quiet conversation was casual and sporadic as if they were waiting together for a bus. How loyal women are, he had thought—loyal and patient. His mind was drawn to his daughter, he wanted to talk to Henry about her but had no idea what he would say—could not bear, more likely, Henry's casual regard of her.
About Alice,
he wanted to say.
Let's talk about Alice.
Instead he put his hands to his chin and tilted his face upwards.

As he slid the letters across to Henry he looked at the grey walls, the refectory along the wall to his right—no, left, no. Right. He remembers that the woman at the counter looked drowsy as she piled bars of something on a rack. He sipped his tea, usually refusing tea on grounds of its tasting like wet clay, or old wood, but there at the prison it is always strangely delicious—strong, sweet, still hot in the stomach and homely.

Helen was my mother, my mumma,
his son had said, cradling his cup in his hands just as Helen used to.
Do you remember I used to call her mumma? And she used to call me bubba. And now you sit here and accuse her of having an affair!

He and Henry had disagreed about the letters; he was sure, is still sure, that if they read the letters they would find infidelity in them. Only a secret lover would keep writing to his beloved after her death, not knowing that she was dead. The thought is painful to him, so much so that he sometimes feels pity for this poor man, who must by now be worried, mustn't he? The lack of replies must be eating at him.

Henry was not interested in the theory and put the letters aside, yawned, and rambled about prison life. They saved their fruit rations, he said, and fermented them with marmite and
sugar to make wine; he asked if he could be sent some mar-mite, they had stopped selling it at the prison shop.

There was an argument about who knew Helen better. He remembers he had tried to pull the chair towards the table to impose his view, but the chair was rooted to the floor. In the effort he had done something, spilt his tea or knocked the letters to the floor, it is unclear now, but one of the women had looked around at him as if apologetic, and he had felt, again, something like unworthiness or failure in the slow tired blink she gave before she turned back to her husband.

The argument—the argument had been so familiar. He can't with any honesty say they definitely had it this time, more that it is just an argument that is always there for the having, regurgitated so many times it could be scripted. He sometimes wonders if it is the only conversation he and Henry have really had since Helen died. It is an argument over who knows her best, who is more like her, who loved her most. The debate tires and upsets him; how can he even approach these questions? Helen was his
wife.
Compacted in that word is a whole planet of intimacy, not to mention the fact of choice: that he and Helen chose each other in a way that Helen and Henry never did. Slept together, too. Made Henry. Henry is secondary to Jake-and-Helen, a by-product.

Henry gathered the letters then, from the floor or the table, and patted them tenderly into order. He began to talk about a German poet in his block who had a wife at home with long blond hair and eyes like planets. The poet wrote his wife a hundred poems a day. People write when they're lonely, Henry said, and it would be no good just writing to yourself, what you say has to be said
to
someone. Days when the poet couldn't get
his post sorted in time to go out he went mad. Henry smiled as if at a fond memory. He said that maybe those mysterious letters were just from somebody lonely exploiting Helen's charity.

He must have been looking away from Henry during that speech, because he remembers now seeing him suddenly as a stranger: restless, warring, and vulnerable in his—what is the word—jail costume? It occurred to him that, given a choice of who he should be, his son had been launched into a dilemma he had not yet solved. The baby was in him, and the boy, and the man, the old man, the wise, the embittered, the arrogant. His hair had not grown back from whatever it was that had made it come out, either the drugs or the prison razor. There they both sat, more hairless than ever. He had no idea how to relate to his son. They could not pull their chairs closer, and there was no way of bridging the gap. The table and chairs were all of a piece, arranged so as to never be rearranged.

He put the letters in his pocket before he left. Henry whispered something:
There,
he said,
see that man, he's the one who set his girlfriend on fire.

As he listened to Henry whisper he looked at the clock and saw its fast hand trip forward, and it started near the four and, by the time Henry stopped speaking, it was near the eleven. In that time Henry had told him about how the man would eat nothing that had been in contact with meat; he would eat only muesli which his girlfriend brought in plastic boxes. Yes, that was where he had encountered that man, in prison. He is relieved; he remembers sharp words with Eleanor when he came out into the car park where she was waiting, because she wanted him to tell Henry about his illness and he could not.
They quarrelled, but gently. Everything is always gentle now, even violence and quarrelling. He looked at the prison and felt the stab of pride that he had built it and that it was still standing. Eleanor coughed when she started up the engine and punched at buttons to get the radio working. It was raining heavily. The moors were puddling around the dykes.

All of this he remembers and can see as plain as day—he just can't say when it happened. Like a photograph that cannot be placed anywhere specific in the album.

His colleagues are sitting around the long oak table and when he walks in they turn and some of them hold their hands together as if they are going to clap. He eyes the bar, the stone floors, the mirrors behind the glass shelves, the window through which the rope of dusty light always used to sling itself, cutting in angles over Rook's figure on a barstool, and he decides he will not succumb to that last refuge of the old—nostalgia. It sounds like a disease, a weakening of the body. Neuralgia, nostalgia. And besides, he is here to look forward, not back.

Whenever he sees these people together, out of context, he is instantly compelled to think of them as he has always done, as the
council corps;
they have always thought of themselves as a muted collective, low in flair and kudos, striving onwards in mediocrity. He realises, as he places himself and Eleanor amongst them, that he has come to feel this too. He has become a member of a group that doesn't know whether to stick together for safety or fly apart for escape.

He sits amongst them: all architects except for one, a girl. She waves across the table at him and he waves back, though he is certain they've never met before. There are so few women in architecture that he would remember if they had. He always wondered why more women didn't become architects, and he never came up with an answer, except maybe that women forget to think big, and for this reason they are not engineers or aeroplane builders. An inbuilt humility means they never imagine they can create something bigger than their own bodies, whereas with men—well, all he has ever wanted to do is just that. And despite his own standards, he would still maintain for this very reason that one of his ugly and defunct high-rises is better than no high-rise at all.

“Drink, Jake?” This is Fergus, his peer he supposes. Fergus with his lank and rangy physique and pale Irish complexion. Before he can anticipate it Fergus is leaning across the table and clutching his forearm in a gesture of solidarity. “What can I get you?”

“A bourbon,” he says. “With ice, and a little sugar if they have it.” He offers a twenty-pound note which Fergus declines. He insists, but Fergus is adamant.

It becomes clear that this evening is to be his, and this means that it is all organised for him, and he just has to sit here and behave. In his wallet is a packet of mint which he now lays on the table in a vaguely petulant frame of mind. He considers that he could drink until blind—yes, what an idea! Drink mint juleps until eloquent, like he has so many times at this very table.

Over dinner he is fretful at first, worrying about Eleanor, worrying that she is out of her depth and that these men, who
have all known and liked Helen, should be offended by his replacement of her. But this feeling wanes as the bourbon relaxes him and as he learns that if he is indeed being inappropriate there is a perennial pleasure in that. He would like more of it. Prompted by Lewis, one of the younger architects, he indulges in talk of ideals. There is an unspoken creed to being a member of the
council corps
that says one cannot afford to have architectural ideals. Even theories—even theories without the slightest ambition—are aggravating.

“The modernist project,” he says, “is not just about lack of ornament—it's about the lack of a
need
for ornament. Think about decoration in general: every time it occurs, it occurs in order to cover up for a crime. The ugly woman. Mankind putting its clothes on after it ate the apple.” He pauses for a moment. This was once his wife's argument also, the one ideal they both believed in. “Think how many criminals have tattoos.”

“Adolf Loos,” Fergus says to his surprise. “You're quoting his theory, Jake, am I right?”

He nods; of course the architect's name had abandoned him but yes, this is his theory.

“But it's just meaningless rebellion,” Fergus continues. “Look where Loos lived—Vienna, which is a beautiful city. He just got sick of beauty, like being full up on a huge chocolate cake. Doesn't make chocolate cake bad. It certainly doesn't mean we should destroy every chocolate cake we find, am I right or am I wrong?”

What Fergus is alluding to, he assumes, is the period of architecture for which they are both part responsible, the decade of obliteration in which wrecking balls defied hundreds of
years of history and replaced them with concrete. In which tower blocks were built to be lived in by the most unfortunate until the best inventions in demolition techniques ten or twenty years later allowed them to be brought down in front of applauding crowds. In which bright new towns spliced the landscape with right angles in order that people could move from the expanding twilight of cities. In which the manor house now known as Moorthorpe prison had suffered an extension so ugly that even at the time, and even over something as profane as a prison, people had been outraged and petitioned against the violence done to beauty.

Lined up on the table are three bourbons; he drops mint into them, stirs them with his finger, and knocks one of them back. Fly apart, he thinks. Fly apart.

“You are wrong,” he tells Fergus. “Architecture rests itself too much on the principle of beauty. A building must be beautiful because it is first worthy, and not worthy because it is first beautiful.”

Lewis, sitting opposite, leans forward with his elbows either side of his plate. “So you'd honestly screw someone worthy before you screwed someone beautiful?”

Eleanor laughs. It is the first sound she has made for ten minutes or more, and he supposes that she has laughed out of a need to contribute more than out of appreciation of the joke. He dislikes it when Lewis—not the most masculine of men—assumes the stance of the predator; despite himself, he dislikes the infidel trait that he sees in other men, as if they think they can live by their own rules alone.

“You miss my point,” he says, “if you think it is about screwing people. Architecture is at the heart of life, it's life wrought
into something permanent.” He turns his hands as if manoeuvring a great lever. “It's not just how to build but how to be
moral
and to use your brick, your concrete, your steel honestly, without tricking people, without treating them as if they are children.”

He is not sure how well he even understands what he says, and how much mass has been lost from the argument over the years. Nevertheless it gains stature as he speaks it, warming him to his profession as he has not been for years, unearthing that good faith that drew him to it in the first place. He drinks down another mint julep and considers Joy in her yellow dress gazing out over the ocean from the glass wall of her home, sipping a julep—never gulping, always sipping.