The Wilderness (33 page)

He makes a breakfast of toast and butter, curious as to why there seems to be no light outside yet. Maybe it's—the late season. The late season is so often dark.

Then, by the living room's unlit fire, he sits and eats, and lets the television flicker in the background. He recalls a letter burning in the grate and a hundred fat-soaked newspapers, salt and vinegar on his fingers.
Monkey goes to space. Israel does a thing. Egypt.
If he waits here, the dog's head balanced on his leg and her black body curled out across the carpet like a contorted shadow of himself, Helen will possibly come.

He draws his knees to his chest and crosses his ankles, a difficult position for a man of his size but he finds balance on his sitting bones and roots himself to the ground. He has no headache. Life seems closer: somehow his mother seems closer. His shoes are on, and a pair of trousers and his coat. This surprises him. He closes his eyes and an image of himself comes, kneeling over the human-skin Bible. Outside Helen wavers on
the ladder in her pinafore as he turns to Psalms and reads.
Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? And thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?
The emotion of it is so pressing, yielding the feeling of something terribly lost and lost over again, that he squeezes his eyes tighter. The memory is clear and godly, so clear that it barely has the quality of a memory at all, but more that of—what is it? The feeling that one has been here before, and that time spirals rather than flows. He has been here before, he thinks. He will be here again.

His mother is close. Is she dead? Alive? Dead. He is certain he remembers her dying, and the recollection is peaceful and fightless, almost as if she did not die at all but just moved rest-fully from one sitting position to another. She told him a story, then or some other time, about milk. About how there were once children who were born and were perfectly healthy until they drank their mother's milk, but in that milk was a disease that damaged their brains, and they kept drinking and kept drinking the very stuff that gave them life, and all the time it was taking their lives. Until they were blank and empty. Until their pale skin was a shore of washed-up milk.

Why would she tell him this story? He wonders if it relates to the woman and child in the woods. Or if it relates to nothing, just another unexplained story that she told as she always did, as if she were forever showing him grains of sand but never showing him the beach.

Then other images play: a flock of coloured birds flying up into a pyramid of glass (surely not a memory, more likely a dream). A brown car passing like silk along an American highway. Quail Woods being cut down, the trees massive to his small child's mind. Alice in a blue dress with a large felt raspberry
that Helen had sewn onto the front and Henry running in the garden after a plastic plane. Sara pouring endless streams of coffee as if to substitute for affection, her large white hands handing him a cup, handing it over, handing it over like birds in flight. Now those brain-damaged children again; how he feels for them, and how sick he feels to think of them at the breast dying piece by piece.

Then his wife comes to him in a form she has so often come to him. It is a fantasy. She is wearing a miniskirt, that miniskirt that he so well remembers with the red stitching on denim and the small pockets that were good for nothing. He had always imagined that it was theirs, not hers. It was something they might take from the cupboard some rainy afternoons, use for the duration of lovemaking, and put away again. An erotic agreement between them.

He is still surprised by how unsophisticated this fantasy is, and how the more elementary it is the more arousing. His fantasy requires that she is naked from the waist up, dressed only in the skirt, her hair plain, and her eyelids tinged yellow, and her head directed to the centre of the living room, resting on the human-skin Bible. The room is empty and featureless, the fire out, a cup of water near to them that they never touch. There is no before or after, no baby, no milk, just that lone unmitigated act.

The wrecking ball buckled the face of a house. Along the Edwardian terrace other houses were being pulled down with hydraulic excavators and cranes; they could not demolish them fast enough. It was a bleak scene—the buildings' masonry twisted and their brickwork crumbled, and the house interiors were black, rotten, and forgotten. The snow around them was dirty and the air dusty. He covered his face.

Hardly old at all, these buildings, but not worth living in as they stood, and too expensive to restore. They were not war-damaged themselves, but they reminded one of war damage, reminiscent of that starless, hungry time of his teens and towns that looked beaten up and sick. No, the sooner the rows were gone the better—their poor condition did nothing for the area except cast an austere shadow, and the ground they
occupied was relatively high and drained, close to the steelworks. It would provide a good housing site for the influx of workers. He was wondering at a clean modern development based on the big ideas of the thirties; when he talked about humanity, comfort, and provision Helen approved. Yes, she said, that's better, that's good.

She had encouraged an excited discussion about the possibilities—a sort of village, as Mr. Rowntree had made for his workers, with everything they needed at hand. But more modern, he had interjected. Yes of course, she conceded, more modern, good roads, and places for cars, they could even have a coffeehouse and a Chinese restaurant. He had been thinking more along the lines of uncluttered horizontal and vertical planes of white poured concrete and roof gardens faced at the sun, and buildings centred around sets of perfect squares so that every house was aware of every other house, to create a—

Close community, Helen had offered.

Quite. Everybody in their own space, but conscious, on a bigger scale, of their shared life.

Helen had been enthusiastic. She still was. He observed the demolition and made site notes, kicked the snow away and dug his heel into the ground to get a feel for the soil. Had the sun been out, this whole small plateau would be drenched with it now. It received thirteen or fourteen hours of sunshine a day in the summer, which meant that with careful planning and decent construction the houses could be warmed through without the need for much heating, and would not suffer damp problems.

He walked back to the Mini and put his notebook of ideas on the passenger seat. Somehow he did not see it happening
the way he planned. Somewhere between the ideals and the reality an ingredient would be lost. Money, probably. He did not have the heart to tell this to Helen, or even the heart to tell himself. He turned the radio on—Buddy Holly. He thought of the money under his bed and, charged with the need to trade it for something extraordinary, tapped his fingers as he drove away.

That weekend he and Helen argued, properly, for the first time.

“The house is so cold,” she said, pulling a blanket around herself.

“It's old, what can I do? You wanted to live here.”

“So is it my fault, that we're cold?” It seemed to be a genuine question, so he answered accordingly.

“In part, yes.”

She gave a crazed smile he had never seen before.

“Is it my fault it's been snowing for two months?”

“Of course not.”

“Is it my fault we haven't got any of those gas heaters— everybody has them, except us. Is that my fault?”

“I wouldn't say so, I'll get some. If you want the house to smell of gas that's fine.”

“Jake, they won't make the house smell of gas. Cheryl has one and it's fine.”

“Who's Cheryl?”

“A friend from church.”

“What is it with you, that everywhere you go you just
make friends?.
You didn't want to leave London because you were happy, and now here you are with all these friends, seemingly
happy
—”

“Is that a criticism?”

He sat at the piano and played a few high ironic notes.

“Anyway,” Helen said, “I'm not happy. I'm cold.”

“Is that my fault?”

“Yes.”

“Good. And good that everything isn't absolutely one hundred percent brilliant with you.” He turned to her and ceased playing. “Because your perfection gets a bit wearing sometimes.”

He saw her body stiffen. “How terrible for you,” she said slowly and quietly. “How you have suffered in my hands, poor man.” He had never seen her appear so pale and blank. She tugged at the blanket until it was tight around her.

“Everything is supposed to be easy,” he said. “What with me making decisions to carve our future, and your dreams to guide us. What a perfect combination we are! But your dreams are failing us. Where's Alice?” He stood from the piano stool. “Where is she? Why can't you just accept that you're not perfect, you don't
know?.
You're going blind into every day just like the rest of us.”

“I don't know where Alice is,” she said. “I don't know.”

“That's right. And here we are running after something that doesn't exist, so why don't we give up?”

“Because it does exist.”

“It doesn't.”

“Jake, it does. Why don't you trust me? When you said we were coming here I trusted you.”

“Yes, but you have reason to trust me because I do everything I can to
make
the future and make it certain, I control it. You just predict it, where's the control in that? At best—if your predictions are right—all we are is victims of them.”

“No—”

“And at worst, like now, gullible victims.”

He went to the fire and fed it with another wedge of ash wood. It was not even that cold, if she only dared to shrug the blanket off, face and challenge it.

“You have to stop playing God,” he said.

She marched to him. “You're the one playing God.
I control the future. I make it certain
.”

“If God exists we are all victims,” he said, his voice raised. “Look at you, huddled there. The meek shall inherit the earth. Well you'll be first in line—you'll have it, it's yours. You'll last a day. You, your Bible bashers, you'll last a week at the most without people like me to take charge.”

He left the living room by one door, angry, but rather calm. Helen left by the other, disappearing into the study and up the second stairs. He heard her feet soft on them.

In the afternoon he, Helen, the baby, and Sara packed into the Mini and drove out along the icy roads, snow shovelled to the verges. Progress was slow and haphazard as the car slipped along the grooves of other tyres and tried to take several courses at once. They went to his father's grave, where they laid flowers and stood in a frozen breeze, a winter landscape
without contrast. Helen, who had never known his father, began crying, and then wandered slowly from grave to grave reading dates and whispering into Henry's ear. She had hardly spoken to him since their fight. She was stiff with Sara, and he was struck by how Sara, in perverse response, warmed to her. She rubbed Helen's arm, commenting on the cold. Difficult for thin women, she said. Difficult to keep the chill away when you've no body fat. He saw Helen smile despite herself, and then retreat again into a defensive gloom.

Then, at Sara's request, they went into the woods. Tucked up and quiet, Helen stayed in the car breast-feeding.

“I like to come here,” his mother said. “The last bit of wood left for miles around—when I first came here it was all wood. Now it's all vegetables. Beetroot instead of trees.” She smiled wryly. “Not so beautiful, hmm.”

“It depends on your idea of beautiful,” he said.

“Mine is trees, not beetroot. I don't suppose I'm alone.”

As they walked she poured coffee from the flask into the first gold-rimmed cup, handing it to him, then into the other. She tucked the flask away in her bag. Even under the trees the snow was thick enough to envelop their feet as they went.

“Your father visits me,” she said suddenly.

“Visits you?”

“Yes, comes to me. At night. He lies in bed beside me.”

“A ghost?”

“Something of the sort.”

“Can you touch him, is he
there?”