The Wilderness (3 page)

“Are you contemplating another dance?” he asked his mother, who stood at the tree in silence.

“My husband,” she rasped, sinking slightly. She was sobbing completely without sound. “Shit,” she said.
“Shit.”

He went to embrace her, comforted by her sudden sadness. She straightened and pushed him gently away. She wiped her red eyes dry. “I am happy, Jake, that you're moving home,” she said then. “It will make a nice place for a child.”

From here he could see Helen sitting in the backseat of the car, the door open, tucking her breast into the black sweater while the baby slept on her lap. A nipple vanishing into mourning clothes and her legs bent stiffly against the front seat. Hurriedly he shrugged himself out of his coat and wrapped the Bible in it so his wife wouldn't see, and he wedged it in the back on the floor. They took their places in the car and he turned to his wife and the baby, leaned to them, made a noise like a pigeon, a low coo. The car smelt of milk and of dirty laundry shoved into bags. Together the four of
them drove in near silence to Sara's home, with only the occasional comment from Helen—
The baby's watching you drive Jake, Look at that kestrel
(he contested, It's a buzzard, not a kestrel, they're very different),
What's growing in that field, Is that the sea, over there?
She looked afraid, he thought.

Mama, he kept wanting to say, with nothing to follow it. Mama. He called her mama because it annoyed her—not because he
wanted
to annoy her but because he had, he found, a marvellously perverse capacity for accidentally doing the very things she hated. And she had the marvellously perverse capacity to appear to love him more when he did something she hated.

He observed the mammoth clouds and steel sky, the open stretch of moors and the patches of mutilation where the peat was being extracted. The corners of his mouth kicked into brief smile. Mama, he wanted to say as he turned to her in the passenger seat and saw a streak of yellow along the black of her hair. Mother, the lily has stained your hair. But he said nothing; leave it there, leave her to be ridiculous.

Eventually he had to fold his hands tight around the steering wheel so as to avoid reaching across and dusting it off. He could only conclude that not all relationships were simple.

Sara put the key in the lock and edged her way indoors. During coffee and then supper he weighed up whether he could broach the subject of the future. It was on his mind to ask her if she would go back to Austria; it would be an insensitive and
hurried question but he felt he must ask; suddenly he felt he must know the layout of their futures. On the verge of his asking, as they were picking at a plate of biscuits, Sara eyed him and gave a low, short chuckle.

“I've forgotten the language,” she said. “My own language. To think, I couldn't go back if I wanted to.”

“You haven't forgotten the language,” he said quickly. He had heard her that morning talking to herself in German while she put on her black dress and grey shoes, slotting the lily into her hair even despite his insistence that this was not custom, to wear flowers in the hair at funerals.

“I have. Every word of it.”

“But Sara—”

“Another biscuit?”

They all shook their heads.

He watched her closely for the rest of the evening. Of course she would not go back; her friends were dead, how could she bear the guilt of not being dead herself? She lived in a distinctly British house in, save for a few Austrian ornaments and pieces of crockery, a distinctly British way. Built between the wars, the house itself was the consciousness of Britain, the glass at its entrance stained with the bright painted colours of a galleon sailing into victory after the First World War, and every man, woman, or child within those walls a sailor by extension, and a victor.

Of course she would not go back, and he did not want her to, but that evening he began to carry with him a frustration, that of a story unfinished. As a child there had always been myths and tales about
home,
and he had assumed that one day this word
home
would stop referring to something merely
imaginable and begin to be real, and Sara would go back and reclaim herself, and he would reclaim the lost half of himself, and the story would complete. Now of course, that place called home had been deftly swapped for somewhere else: this. There wasn't another half of himself. He deposited lilies into vases and let them crowd the dining table. He must accept it.

The evening wore on quietly. They listened to the radio and Helen disappeared upstairs for an hour or so with the baby. He thought of the Bible and wondered what Sara had meant by the gift. Its beauty and relevance had grown in his mind; knowing that it was bound in human skin, knowing it was not, therefore, what it first seemed to be, and knowing that its cover contradicted its contents (for nowhere in the Bible could it say,
And their skins shall be stretched for leather).
He noted in himself, not for the first time, a liking for the perverse. He thought tenderly of how he might attach a building of clean prefabricated concrete to that excellent gothic manor that currently housed the prison and how out of keeping that would be, what a clash of ideals. How
iconoclastic
—a word he had learned well at university. He thought of his father's grave and which parts of his father's person would survive longest in this acidic Lincolnshire soil. Would he still fart for a few days in that coffin, still excrete fluids? How long would it take his polished leather shoes to decompose?

“What's that?” Helen asked as they readied themselves for bed that night. She struggled to pull her sweater over her head; he assisted.

“It's a present from Sara.” He threw the sweater over the shoe box.

“For you?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“What is it?”

“I'll show you another time, it's personal.”

“Personal?” Helen queried, bending over a whimpering Henry in his pram. “I'm your wife. What could be more personal than that?”

He stripped down to his underpants and climbed into the single bed. The spare room was not big enough for a double bed; there was a larger spare room but, against everything Sara stood for as a person, it was full from floor to ceiling with a lifetime of his father's junk. It would always be that way, he supposed. Sara would not suddenly defend her values against the man now, not after all this time.

“Come to bed,” he replied. “I need you here, it's been a long day.”

She came. They made love quietly so that Sara wouldn't hear. Afterwards, while she slept, he thought intensely of hiding the Bible from her as if it had become the very cornerstone of his independence. Perhaps it was the morose headiness of the day that left him so obsessed with the idea. In his grave, his father clung vehemently to his patent shoes and his pocket watch. Downstairs Sara clung similarly to her chipped coffee cups. Everybody needs a thing that is their own, he decided. Momentarily he was afraid of giving, feeling himself, as a man, to be a one-way river running into the sea of his wife, impregnating her so she could grow but not ever growing himself. To already be thinking these things, after less than a year of marriage! These were morbid nighttime thoughts; in the morning he would be more cheerful.

At some point in the night he awoke to Henry's crying,
then he slept. When he woke up again he discovered that the baby was sleeping belly down on Helen's chest. With all three of them in bed he couldn't sleep for fear that he would crush them both, and so he lay sweating in a pole-like stance all night thinking of the future. Against that thought he considered the monstrous tower block he was building in London. They had run out of money and stuffed its joints with newspaper; newspaper was a useless building material. There had been controversy about it and he had fought to prevent these ridiculous desperate measures, but had not succeeded. One day the whole block would fall down. He did not want to be there to see it.

In the morning he told Helen, “We will move, leave London, we will get our things and come back.”

The day after that, before returning to London, he drove Helen and the baby out across the peat moors.

“I want to show you where I was brought up, maybe it will give you an insight,” he told his wife.

“I don't need an insight into you, Jake, you're an open book.”

He laughed and tapped the wheel. “Only someone who needed an insight into me could think that.”

They drove along the straight, empty lanes that formed a grid across the peat, Helen looking out of the window, astonished still at this landscape that was not London, nor like any countryside she had seen. She was full of questions which she
asked with a sceptical note. What are those? Dykes? What's a dyke? This used to be an island? Will we sink, Jake, if we stay here long enough will it be an island again?

That morning, as they were packing the car, he had declared that they should come here to live. He
told
her. Had he asked she would have said no. No, passionately, definitely. And he knew he would not have been able to handle or manipulate those words, nor change her opinion. It was better, then, to cut off the possibility of objection and deal instead with the flurry of questions that would come. They had been coming all day, and all day he cured them with answers. Yes, there will be plenty of work, of course we can visit London, your parents, our friends. No darling, we won't sink, we'll take root. Yes, we'll be happy, you'll be happy. I wouldn't do anything to make you unhappy.

She was afraid of moving to this odd, backward, and (she hesitated over the word, then almost whispered it)
uncivilised
place. She said she could see too far. The great hourglass cooling towers were monstrous to her and the steelworks, though way in the distance, hummed like something at breaking point.

“What's the flame?” she asked rather fearfully, pointing to a chimney on the horizon from which a blue flame bellowed.

“Waste gas. Like an Olympic flame,” he replied, leaning across the hand brake to pat her leg, trying to cheer her up. She liked to watch athletics, she liked the speed, height, and distance people could go for no reason but to go fast, high, or far.

“Did you see it?” she asked, successfully distracted. “The four-minute mile? I was with my daddy, we went to the cinema
to see it, we had—oh what do you call them? Those sweets with the mint inside and chocolate out.”

Yes he saw it, the sinewy man stretching himself against the clock, and wondered, is this the best men can do?

“If a man could run as fast as an ant, for his size,” he responded, “he would be as fast as a racehorse.”

“But that's irrelevant, he's not an ant. He doesn't need to be as fast as an ant.”

“All the same. You'll be happy here. I feel it.”

Their tour passed Rook's house, a bewilderingly out-of-place Italian Renaissance-style place painted in faded orange and dusk pinks, muraled walls showing cherubs, and an overgrown walled garden accessed through wrought-iron gates. The absurdity of its opulence, albeit aged and faded opulence, against these humdrum flatlands made it all the more astonishing. Helen held her hands to the car window. “I love Rook,” she said. “I love him for living there.”