The Wilderness (12 page)

Upstairs he could hear Helen and Rook moving about; there was laughter. Once Sara had told him stories about her younger life, about how she was behind the lens in this photograph, and how she was the first of all her friends to have a
camera. She was nineteen. She liked to take photographs of different scenes and then find numbers in them (a door number, a tram number, a date on a calendar or a painting), then she would add these together and the sum would be the number she would have to find somewhere in the apartment or the city: her own treasure hunt. She could not take another photograph before she found it. Patterns were important to her. Limits on chaos.

He knelt and opened the doors to the dresser. In there was the praise ring his grandmother had been holding, and the hammered-silver samovar and tea set that Sara claimed was the first thing she saw when she was born, an intricate silver seder plate, a Star of David key chain, fine cups and saucers. He looked to see if his mother was asleep; she was. When he picked up the key chain he found he was examining it as he would an alien object. Even as an adult he did not feel he had permission.

When he was a child an ancient boat was found buried in the peat near his house; its hull was a perfect black skeleton of long, strong spine and curved ribs, they thought it would probably be seaworthy with a little patching. Looking on he could sense his connection to it, but the sort of connection that comes without privileges, where all you can do is examine, observe, detach. So with these key chains and plates and all this silver; the only way he could be worthy of them was to remove himself from them. Like the boat, familiar and strange in one breath. He looked again at his mother. Her eyelids were heavy and dark and the shadows hard on her face. For a moment he thought she looked like his father.

He closed the dresser doors and stood. In London he had
left disputes about land. Being an architect seemed to be one long dispute about land. As he shut away his grandparents' belongings he thought again of the narrow columns of news he was reading about Israel, and of Sara's seemed indifference. The starved desire of a man for his home. He felt along with those men who wanted to find their patch of turf called home. He stood in the centre of the room, hearing Rook and Helen above hurrying from room to room, more laughter. He drank down another glass of wine.

War is around the corner, he thought. The insight comforted him. Peace was becoming very popular, but the idea of peace made him uneasy. The fool believes in it. The wise man is edgier. In the photograph of his grandparents the gold frame seemed to say it all. The peace and beauty they thought would save them in fact locked them in a moment of time from which they never escaped. The photograph saddened him. He observed and examined it. Where did they belong? And him? Where did he belong? He felt that he had come home, and he was drunk, but that was not the only reason for the sensation. If he could get land he could provide for his family in the proper way; if there were a nuclear war, say (he was not being negative, just pragmatic), they would be safe here with land. If there was not, they would still be safe here with land. If the house was glass they would be safe and happy; they could see what was coming. The image of birds lifting through the air of their handmade home coloured his thoughts and strengthened him—the idea that he could
put colour
here. The past was always black and white, but the future was colour. He was happy to be home, if only he could tie
these strings together; he kissed his mother lightly on the forehead and went outside.

In the garden he pulled himself up onto the wall and stood; from his vantage point he could see the outline of Sara's aggressively clipped hedges and shrubs, and into the next garden, neatly turfed, and out across the fields to the steelworks churlish on the near horizon. Steel and sugar, he thought. Such mixed exports, as if the people here really had no idea who they were.

He heard somebody in the bathroom, and then the lights went out upstairs. He didn't know whether Rook had gone home or had settled on the sofa or had gone to Sara's room. It was too far, he decided, for him to have walked home, and if he had arrived here by car certainly there had been no sound of the car leaving. Rook's manifestations never had a history or a process, he simply issued from nowhere one minute and dispensed himself to nowhere the next.

The clouds of smoke that rose from the factory chimneys were tin coloured, and to their right the orange gas flame seared the night sky. He had always found these sheer, hard colours rebellious and brilliant, strangely clean. It was so unlike the sugar-factory clouds that, dispersed in the toxic lights, came up neon orange and yellow and faded eventually into something sickly. He remembered standing on this wall as a child, watching the flame, brewing the courage to jump, and then one day finally jumping and landing two-footed, with a plump thud. But surely no; he had never lived in this house as a child. That was not a memory at all but a fabrication, perhaps a dream. He was drunk, he realised, on holy cherries.
Still, he held his balance on the wall and tasted the residue of wine on his tongue.

It was plain jealousy, with Rook; he could see that now. All the teenage years of warring with the man had suggested a complex power struggle between them, when in fact its cause was simple. He was jealous of Rook for winning Sara's love. At the same time he genuinely liked and respected the man for that success, and of course like and respect were integral features of the jealousy. Sara should be with Rook; it wasn't just that she loved him, it was that she loved him in a difficult way, with risk and insecurity, the sort of love she had always lacked with her own husband, and the sort that was equally returned. Despite Rook always meaning to him the loss of his mother, he also denoted some kind of deeper discovery of her, and he found himself hoping that Rook had gone off into the darkness of Sara's room, that they were together there now.

But when he heard the scuff of shoes he knew it was Rook and was hardly surprised. The tall figure appeared as a shadow and remained so. Neither of them spoke. Rook rolled a cigarette with a series of deft flicks, lit it, and handed it up.

He smoked, crouched on the wall, and handed it back to Rook without a word. The menorah was still burning inside the window. Its message was striking: here we are, here we live.

Seeing Rook's eyes gleaming judgement in the darkness, he was taken by a thought.

“You think I've failed,” he said.

“I do?”

“In coming back from London.”

The old man's eyes looked up at him. “On the contrary,
you
think you've failed.”

“On the contrary.”

He looked away from Rook.

“London was too easy. It's full of pioneers. You can see where pioneers are by the colour they leave everywhere, do you understand me? The lights and the way they fill in all the black spaces. There isn't a black space left in London. Here though—”

“So you're here to colonise.”

“The potential here—”

He extended his arms to the darkness.

Rook coughed. “What's this big idea that we're in control of our own characters and destinies anyway, Jacob? Much easier to give in to the pull.”

“Maybe.” He took the cigarette again. The jealousy surfaced on a new, convenient level. “What were you doing with my wife?”

Rook straightened suddenly as if he'd had a brilliant idea. “Isn't she
great”'

“I think so.”

“And that she gave up so much for you. Brave girl, to take the plunge. It's a responsibility, my boy. Now of course she's yours to look after. All yours.”

He rolled the smoke around his mouth and frowned. “Gave up?”

“Her engagement.”

“Engagement?”

He thrust the cigarette back to Rook and shifted his weight, rubbed the smell of sugar from his nose.

“You do of course know about her engagement, Jake?”

“To whom?”

“A good man of the cloth, a
believer.
Her parents were very keen. Very disappointed when she chose you instead. Still, you are an architect I suppose. That's something.”

They muttered humourless laughter together; Helen's father had nothing but disdain for architects, England was going to the dogs and it was the buildings that were sending it there; buildings were not what they used to be, progress was peril, the road to hell was clad in cement, and so the rant continued along this same weak vein. He looked along the top of the wall and felt incensed.

“I've got no idea what you're talking about, Rook, and to be honest I don't even believe you. Why would Helen tell
you
that when she hasn't told me? It doesn't make sense. You never make sense.”

Rook shrugged and wandered away from the wall. “Believe me or not.”

“Why wouldn't she tell me?”

“Everybody has a secret life,” Rook whispered. He took a red leaf from the hedge he was standing next to and burnt regular holes into it with his cigarette. Then he pushed it up against the shadows on his jacket. “A ladybird, Jake,” he said, coughing, peering down. “See it?”

“What do you know about him then, this man?”

Rook flicked the cigarette into the hedge and put his hands into surrender. “Ask your wife, my boy. Ask your wife.”

“Oh for God's sake, you started this.”

“You started this,”
Rook mocked.

On an impulse he jumped from the wall and lurched towards Rook, thumping the man's chest. Rook laughed thinly and lashed out, swiping his leg from under him. He pulled
Rook down with him and they scrambled ludicrously on the ground, both knowing that they could have stayed standing if they had wanted; that it was part game. He knew also that, unlike their fights when he was a child, he could now probably kill Rook without much trouble. They dug punches in each other; he felt Rook's knuckles pushing into his face, not punching but grinding almost, as if he wanted to wear him down to sugar.

It would be easy to stand up now, throwing the old man off him, shrugging, swinging a ferocious punch to his head. He could break every subservient cycle of his life, bring the glass house into being with one sterile and excellent act of violence. Pinning Rook to the grass he thought of Helen's giggle earlier, and the way she crossed her arms like a child; he entertained jealousy, suspicion, he doubted his wife and jabbed Rook in the ribs for it. He tried to feel jealous about his wife's
man of the cloth,
but the emotion kept redirecting itself instead to Rook, to the fact that Rook had got her to confide where he couldn't.

Then he stood and let Rook give him a savage kick in the shin, accompanied by a wheeze of apparent joy. Rook stood, and they flailed their arms again in the dark. Some punches found their target, most didn't. There was a little blood at the corner of his mouth that tasted pleasant; this was where he always knew that the fine and confusing line between fight and play was crossed, and that play had won. When one of them bled Rook always laughed and he always followed, and Rook would take the blood on his fingers and say, Watch, watch it turn from scarlet to burgundy. And they would do so, utterly detached from the violent fact of the fluid and how it had come to be there.

Rook did not reach his fingers for the blood this time. He sat on the grass and gave out steam on his laboured breath. He was laughing as usual.

“Get me up, Jake,” Rook said, and then when he was up the old man sauntered off as steady as a racehorse, went round the side of the house, and was gone.

In the bathroom he washed the blood away and found a small nick in his gum, nothing to worry about. He got into the single bed next to his wife and tried embracing her, then tried to lie in such a way that he was not even touching her, then tried a casual hand on her stomach. He opted for this last position, feeling a restlessness in her gut and sensing that she was not properly asleep. Henry began rumouring tears, moaning in sleepy bubbles, but soon settled again.

He felt arrestingly alive. He was awake and twitching with ambivalence. There was the sense, first, that he could fly apart from all he knew, and those splinters of his being would fall into the resolute shape of the glass house and embody a future. Then there was the opposite sense of falling into the peat, becoming it. He must have been drifting into sleep because he did indeed feel the descent of himself and saw Sara's face before him, saw himself bowing to her amongst the trinkets he had found in the cupboard, and telling her, I want to be your son. Won't you have me? Then he came out of the strange sleep and smelt his wife's soapy hair, stretched his legs; his feet hung over the end of the mattress.

A little while later Helen got out of bed, groaned, went to the bathroom, and was sick. In between retching she sobbed and sniffed. He got up and tapped at the bathroom door, putting his fingers to the small throb in his gum.

“Are you all right?”

She made a sound, neither negative nor affirmative, and eventually he left her alone, thinking how he had never succeeded in making her drunk, even at their wedding, even on their honeymoon. While he waited for Helen to come back he leaned over the side of Henry's cot and watched the child sleep. That man, the one she was engaged to? Was it true? He felt bewildered by it. Flattered and awed that she would have severed all ties with another man without a word, just to be with him. He stroked Henry's forehead, passing his thumb back and forth, back and forth.

When Helen came back they got into bed and he turned away from her, pulling her arms around his waist. She gripped his hands.

“The missing
e
is the death of me,” she groaned. She smelt of mint where she had tried to scrub away the taste of her sins.

“Did you find it?”

She squeezed his wrists. “Forgive me, Jake.”

“Of course,” he returned. “I forgive you.”

Over his mint julep he consults this Bible, the skin soft under his fingers. It says very clearly that adultery is a sin.
They have committed adultery, and blood is in their hands … and have also caused their sons, whom they bare unto me, to pass for them through the fire, to devour them.