The Wilderness (22 page)

Alice offers him half of her sandwich and he accepts gladly.

“How do you feel about retirement, Jake?”

“It's fine,” he tells her. He has no idea if it's fine. The poet has put him in a bad mood. After a pause he flattens his hair to his head, hoping it does not look too ridiculous. He finds his fingers are digging, digging away at the grass, soil in his nails. “Every day I feel—things become thinner,” he says. “The world becomes thinner.”

Alice frowns. He watches the butterfly-wing dip of her brows. “Thinner? More”—she gestures an I-don't-know with her slender hands—“more—temporary?”

Silently he blesses her. Like her mother, she is always keen to understand. She does not, ever, belittle with triteness and scorn. The poet throws the cucumber from his sandwich and, without drama, grasps the air with a fist.

“There
is
a thinness to things,” he says. “I think jobs distract
us from it. As soon as that distraction is gone the days look— flimsy. We look at ourselves and feel flimsy. Who are we, what are we meant to be, all this shit. This is the shit we spend our lives running from.”

With this declaration the poet stands and wanders off towards the building, casual even with his limp.

He wants to shout after the poet now and tell him about the CND and the Israel group he ran from the table in The Sun Rises, the group whose name he can't bring to mind. They did things. They were
effective.
When he thinks of those meetings he can remember nothing except for a couple of faces that may or may not have belonged to that table at that time. He remembers how, years later, he organised blood donations for the Israeli soldiers going into the Six-Day War, and he and those people around the oak table all gave theirs. Henry's school announced that Israel would be destroyed, so Henry emptied his money box and gave its contents to the cause. He knows that what they all did was idealisti-cally extreme, for a greater good, and he knows he was respected for it. He knows the poet would respect him for it, and he would call after him now, but the poet seems otherwise absorbed.

“How did he get that?” he asks, watching after the man. He clutches the stone in his palm.

Alice inclines her head. “The limp?”

“Yes.”

“We had a bet. I bet that you would ask about the limp when Seth wasn't listening, and he bet you'd come out and say it in front of him. I think he had this idea of you as a brash, formidable man who would have no qualms about pointing out his faults. Anyhow,” she shrugs lightly, “it looks like I won.”

The dug-up earth in his hand comforts a slow, drunk feeling
that is beginning to occupy him. “I see,” he says. “And did you have a lot of money on it?”

Again she smiles. “It was a sportsman's thing. We try to keep money out of everything.”

“Next time you bet on me maybe it would pay you to bring money into it. You know me, after all. He has no idea.”

He pats her leg and she passes him his coffee. The wind becomes restless and blows their hair. Full of DNA, hair, a single strand can tell a child who their father is. Alice's flickers out long and fine. Just one strand of that hair knows about him, can testify to him. He is in every part of her.

“I have this dream,” he tells her, or at least tells some invisible vanishing point beyond her. “That there's a woman in a— what do you call it? The place with the food.”

“Kitchen?”

“Tins and jars, things that don't go off. Sara has one. We don't.”

“Pantry? Larder?”

“Yes, quite. She is naked, Alice, and she has labels which she sticks to the jars. She goes up and down the rows of jars. But when she reaches the end of one—line—row—the labels have already fallen off the first jars. It's endless, Alice. Her job is endless.”

“Like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill,” Alice says. She pulls a shawl over her thin shoulders. “Just to watch it roll back down again.”

“I dream it again and again.”

She leans to him and strokes his temple. “Dreams are good for us, Jake. Even bad ones. Ride them. Do you know how? Focus on the jars, say, or the woman, and say,
This isn't real, this
isn't real.
Let one part of you step out of the dream. Remember you're its master, and not the other way round.”

He sees his daughter blink her lilac eyes. When they reopen they are blue. With her head caught just there they are blue-green.

“And the woman gets older,” he says. “She starts young and—” He gestures curves with his hands. “In the end she's old. She looks like a fucking plank of wood.”

Alice smiles, seeming surprised.

“Your mother was afraid of growing old. Your mother was not afraid of anything but growing old. She was—” He frowns and seeks his train of thought. “Was she old?”

Alice is pensive. “ Fifty-three. That's not old.”

She engages his eyes for a moment with a look that is worried, that is sympathetic, that borders on suspicious. He smiles to distract her and, returning the smile, she retrieves her hair from the wind and sets it in place behind her ear.

“Alice, I'm afraid I have a disease. I have Alzheimer's.”

She brings her hand to her mouth; on anybody else the gesture might show gossipy surprise, but on her it seems only to press back any words that haven't had time to be considered.

Eventually she takes her hand away. “I saw something in your eyes, before. You aren't yourself. I knew something wasn't right. I thought you just seemed lost, because of Helen.”

“I am lost.”

The relief, to have told her, is so immense that he is heavy and warm with it.

“How long have you had it?”

“Two years,” he says, though he is not at all sure of this. It isn't a lie; it is his best shot at the truth.

“So what does it mean? Can you manage?”

“Yes, for now. I have—that other lady. She helps out.”

“Eleanor?”

“Is that definitely her name? It doesn't seem right somehow—”

Alice takes a careful sip from her drink and puts the cup down.

“I haven't told Henry,” he says. “Just you.”

“Why not Henry?”

“Because I have to look after him.”

She crawls the two or three feet to him and puts her hand on his cheek.

“Then I'll look after
you.
Don't worry, I'm here. You see? I'll make sure you're all right.”

Her look is all Helen's; capable sympathy. Somebody who knows how it works. He clasps her hand and swallows a grief that has welled in his throat.

“It's my brain, Alice, I feel like all my wires are being unplugged one by one. No, not even in an order, just unplucked. I need to keep it all together. I have to stash all the documents in one place quick before they blow away, do you understand? You could help.”

“I'll take time off work, come for a fortnight or so and we'll go through everything you need, I'll read up on it and we'll go through everything.”

“When will you come?”

“Let me organise it—” She takes her hand from his cheek and sits back on her heels. The poet is wandering towards them in his own world, concentrating, his hands translating some train of thought; he seems to be calculating something.
Alice looks across at him and then back, then presses her palms on her thighs.

“Jake, is it bad timing to say this now? Me and Seth are going to have a baby.”

For the moment he is shocked. A flock of birds lifts from nowhere and crowd the sky as if they, too, are shocked. They stain the air with prime colour and beat their wings. He sees, behind the birds, the poet receding again, scanning the brickwork of the derelict building. Alice? His child? Having a child? How extraordinary and miraculous that this could happen. He finds a stone in his palm, wonders where it came from, and pushes its reassuring shape into his coat pocket.

“Everything will be all right,” she nods. “I'm going to look after you.”

“You are really having a child?”

“Yes, Jake, really.”

“Buddy Holly,” he grins, gripping her knee. He is—yes, he recognises this feeling—he is exulted.

“Eureka,” Alice breathes. She tips her head back in gentle laughter and draws her hands into a prayer.

Waking confused, he turns to the woman, to Eleanor. Quite dislodged, she seems lying there—plucked from old time and put into new. She doesn't belong; he doesn't belong. Vertigo, he feels like he has vertigo. Is he still at the bus station? Has Alice's bus not come yet?

No, he is somewhere familiar. The room is half lit through the
single curtain drawn across the French windows and he hears birdsong. He sits up and frowns into the pixellated light, gripped now by elation, and now by a morbid disappointment that quickly becomes anger. By the bed is his book he has so struggled to read these last weeks. He fails to remember what it is about, but picking it up it falls open at pages on the restoration of an Edwardian school, and a photograph of a small—what is the word. People with signs refusing to allow the bulldozers in.

Was all of it a dream? Is the dog real? Did he feed her the lamb, and has he
ever
fed her lamb, and has he ever even fed her at all? I bet I have killed her, he thinks. In the dream he was fighting for a building and it felt so good to have a cause, a corner. Where is his corner? He searches out the shapes and objects of the bedroom and finds them momentarily unfamiliar. Where is Alice? Where is his
corner
? Which is his war, which side is he on?

As he lifts himself from the bed he realises that the illusions of his sleep have spread to every edge. There was no such time on the grass with Alice, with the poet. He may have been to the bus station or he may not have, it may have been today or five years ago, because time is not considerate enough anymore to make itself clear.

There is no poet. There is no grandchild coming. No Alice. There is only now. Now! Like a punch in the face. And now again. Now is so endlessly small and inadequate. Now there is the urgency to get up, get out, get away from Eleanor, shoo away the heartbreak of the dream with a coffee, some water— he is so thirsty—maybe a mint julep. Drown it. He is breathless with trapped tears. He has never dreamt so vividly. He wishes never to do so again.

In the next room Helen was saying goodbye to the members of her Bible group, who slipped out through the French doors of the study and appeared in the garden with their King James's tucked under their arms. Then he heard his wife call out, “D, you've forgotten your notebook,” and some chuckles and the clean, succinct contact of young lips on young cheek.

D, she called the man, and yet to call somebody by their initial seemed too familiar for a Bible group. Then he considered that the only other person Helen might have called by their initial was God himself. D was honoured indeed. What was he? Devil, Dream? Was he drastic and disastrous? He tried idly, over his shoulder, to get a view of him through the window but the man had gone.

When Helen came into the living room this is how he was,
his neck craned as he fluttered his hands over the piano keys. Henry sitting stoically in the crook of his arm.

“What's that you're playing? Is it ‘Three Blind Mice' or something?”

“It was meant to be Debussy.”

Helen laughed and then put her hand to her mouth.

“It's difficult one-handed,” he said.

“I know. All my life is one-handed.”

On the left side of his body was the baby; on the right side, in his pocket, a letter from Eleanor. With Helen close by the letter felt the heavier of the two, so much so that it made Henry weightless; he tightened his grip on the child and stretched his little finger to the octave below; he was not anywhere close to being good enough to handle Debussy—such strange chords and fingerings—but he wasn't interested in starting anywhere lower. Better, he concluded, to be very bad at a difficult thing than very mediocre at an easy thing.

“Well, Jake,” Helen said. “What do you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of—” Her expression changed, less curious, more excited. She reached for Henry. “Haven't you been upstairs? Don't you know?”

“If I say,
know what,
will that give it away, that I don't know?”

“Follow me.”

She beckoned him out of the living room, into the middle room from which the stairs led. They climbed together, he following her. The letter shifted silently in his pocket. Henry babbled at him over Helen's shoulder and pointed in great excitement at the wrought-iron birds and leaves of the banister. He glanced out of the landing window at the road and the church. The church bells were ringing, six o'clock, he thought, though there were never six
chimes, always waves of them one after the other breaking on his eardrums. He looked at the back of his wife's shin-length rayon dress as it moved along the landing. He looked at the small stain on the carpet where the roof sloped at the eaves and piles of blankets were stored. Henry pointed wildly at the walls the blankets the stain the doors the webs and laughed in bubbles.

They went into Henry's room, across its chocolate-brown carpet, past translucent mobiles, a light-blue cot, wardrobes along one wall stuffed with unpacked boxes of photographs, Christmas decorations, clothes. To the right was a low inner door—a secret door, Helen had remarked when they first looked round the house. They bent double through it and were then in their bedroom. If they had taken the other stairs that led to the bedroom directly from the study, where they had almost begun, they would have been here a minute ago, but Helen liked the game of the double staircase. She would enjoy it, she had said, when there were two children in the house and they could run around, up and down the two staircases, in loops like birds flying.