The Wilderness (34 page)

Sara shrugged. “It's hard to say, you have to be less literal about these things, Jacob.”

They walked on steadily, sipping their coffee.

“Does he say anything?”

“Asch, no.” She flicked the suggestion away. “If we said anything we would only argue. We sleep, and when I wake up he is gone.”

Their feet creaked across the snow as they walked on, slowing unconsciously.

“Did you used to argue? I don't remember you ever arguing.”

“No, we never did, never, though we had this little war going on, silently of course.”

Not a little war, he thought. A huge war over whose thousands of years of history was the more relevant. A war too big for arguments.

The more he considered it, the more he found his parents' marriage singularly catastrophic. It had passed off wordless bitterness as peace, sacrifice as compromise; he for one had been convinced for years. He had chosen Helen—had he?—as someone with whom he could reenact this quietude. It was a theory, at least, and it made him suddenly grateful for their argument; how he did
not
want to become his parents! He would not give up.

“Where does he go, I wonder,” he said. “Father. When he leaves in the morning, where does he go to?”

From his mother, silence. Snow began to fall again. One flake, two flakes, a laid-back flurry. A gunshot sounded then and Sara jerked her free hand to her heart.

“Dreck!” she said. “Good God.
Dreck!”

She looked rapidly around her to see where the shot had come from. The air was confused with snow and completely quiet as if there had never been sound, as if it had never
known sound at all. He, meanwhile, had spilt his coffee, not at the shock of the gunshot but at the speed and looseness of his mother's reaction—this from a woman usually so succinct and eloquent in her movements.

“Deer culling I expect,” he added, wiping the coffee on the sleeve of his coat.

“It scared me half to death.”

“Nothing scares you, you're never scared.”

“Untruth—untruth,” she muttered, motionless. “I am very scared of being mistaken for a deer in the wood. But thank you all the same.”

He thought suddenly of a leaf, a leaf shape—he did not know why except that, of course, images flash into the mind and out again, brain functions, nerves, strangenesses that are not there to be understood. He poured the remains of the coffee into the snow and put the cup in his pocket. Absently, he reached for his mother's hand but she withdrew from his touch.

“Look up,” she said.

Why, he wondered? Why look up? But he did. Perhaps Sara, too, had been thinking of this leaf? Often he had entertained the idea that they, he and his mother, thought the same things. If their brains were to be sliced in half like cabbages they would reveal the same patterns and layers. So he did not ask why, but just did as she said and expected a reason to follow.

Above was monochrome: perfectly white snow on black branches that jagged across a dark-grey sky, a black bird passing through the scene. It was a photograph of the past, he in it. Snow fell on his face as if the photographic paper itself, old and pulpy, was disintegrating. There were no leaves, of course—it was winter. His brain flickered uncertainly.

He clutched the cup in his pocket thinking that he ought to get back to Helen. It was incredibly cold and the baby would be unsettled by all this waiting. The handle of the cup—the precious cup that had once been Arnold's—snapped off in his fingers.
Shit,
he mumbled under his breath.
Shit.

“I don't know where he goes when he leaves,” Sara said. “I suppose he never really comes.”

They continued looking up towards the sky until the forest ran out, then they turned and walked back with longer, more hurried strides, their faces wet with snow.

Duly, Helen gave up.

“I've thought,” she said a few days later. “I've thought and you're right. Let's give up. It's been seven months trying for Alice—for, I mean, a baby—and I think I was wrong. We're not meant to have another child, God doesn't want it.”

Her look was resilient; she held his gaze. She would give up on the specifics, the look said, but she would not give up on the general, the fundamental. God would not stop coming into it just because he had insulted her and her friends.

“So we'll stop trying,” she said. “If it's to be, it's to be. My dreams are wrong. Forgive me.”

He let her fatalism go. The fanaticism. Once again the thing that most separated them was the thing in her that most impressed him—her ability to believe. No, not ability, her addiction to believing, her conviction, and the great power that
sprang from it. So he agreed, and together they let their Conception Events go.

A month passed and another. The snow melted and small, tense buds appeared on the cherry tree. Another month passed. He was not prone to matching emotions with seasons; spring was not a time to be new and optimistic, it was spring in England because the face of the earth to which England clung was turning finally towards the sun, there was no emotion about it. It was a surprise to him then when he found himself harbouring hope that now that the freeze had gone and the leaves were opening and the birds were returning from Africa, Alice—not just any child, but Alice—would come. Then the hope turned to expectation, then, when summer came, the expectation turned to deep frustration, the frustration to desperation.

Helen seemed calm. She began volunteering at a hospice and came home daily inundated with gifts from dying people who thought their whole lives had been worthwhile if only because they had met her. Henry started crying again like a normal baby, crying and babbling and laughing. Eleanor had found a boyfriend and she stressed how in love she was; trade at The Sun Rises was increasing. Truly, the moors were a fantastic place to be in the summer, vast, warm, and sewn through with flowers. Whenever he went to see Sara she was with Rook, and he was left to observe them dancing continual Strauss waltzes across Sara's orange carpet. Everybody but him, then, was at peace.

He wrote to Joy. He began telling her about The Big Death and the ghost of Elisabeth, elaborating until Elisabeth became
potent to him. Perhaps Helen's dreams were not so unreasonable after all, if Sara could be receiving the ghost of her dead husband in her bed at night, and if he could lend himself so readily to these fairy stories, and if he could devote so much time to writing to a woman who was becoming less real by the day. And if Alice would not exit his plans.

And if the great humanitarian housing project he had crafted was turning out to look rather like any other housing project, with windows too small to make use of the sunlight and a budget shrinking faster than the dried-out peat. If what was so apparently real was failing, and what was so apparently false was thriving, then Helen's dreams did not look so irrational. And besides, without their social prophesies as to which film they should see or place they should visit, their weekends were certainly less interesting, he too often at The Sun Rises witnessing Eleanor's public love affair (doomed, he knew) and reaching back in drunkenness to old times there, times he had failed to repossess.

Then Joy wrote and told him about an argument she had had with her husband.
He hurled a lobster into the swimming pool,
she said.
So I hurled him in after it.
As if she had been told, in exact detail, his anguish over Alice and his conflict with Helen, she indulged in some advice. The French call the orgasm a
petite mort,
a little death. Her take on this was that the little death is necessary to life as well as pleasure—if a woman wants to have a baby a small part of herself has to die to make way. She can't be all life all the time. Joy suggested that Helen had not had an orgasm for a long while, and that they would never conceive without it.

He was taken aback; he had not mentioned his impotency
(this was how he regarded it on all levels) to Joy, nor would he ever. What made her so knowing about him? Sometimes she talked as though she had fifty years of experience under her belt. And she was right, also, about Helen. When they had conceived Henry their relationship was new and pleasure had been everything, but this time they had wiped pleasure completely from their agenda. From this point onwards he would step back into this project; he reverted to his original stance on the dreams, weighing now the extent to which they had, with their fatalism, hoist him into a sexual lassitude and prevented a result. Alice, he suddenly thought, would be
his
child. Where Henry dismissed him Alice would crave him. By the time he reached the end of Joy's letter he was breathless. Knight E5 to F3, she concluded. He shifted her thus, and planned his next move.

Joy's next letter was a parcel. Helen picked it from the porch floor and gave it to him, asking if he knew what it was. He said no truthfully. Opening it in privacy he found it was a miniskirt, blue denim with red stitching and hopeless pockets. Joy had sent it for Helen, confirming that these were becoming fashionable in California. She had never met Helen but thought she would look vital in it, sexy and modern. There was also a pair of silk tights which Joy said were the new thing—where stockings were fiddly and uncomfortable and no good for miniskirts, tights were a second skin. He held them up by the waist and looked at their weird shrivelled form in some dismay, but then pictured them stretched over Joy's legs, over his wife's legs, and he wrapped them into a ball with a wry smile.

After a week—the minimum time needed, he guessed,
without Helen associating the parcel with the gift—he asked Sara to look after the baby and took his wife to The Sun Rises. Helen was in good spirits, maybe she was pleased to see him happy again. They talked to Eleanor and her new partner most of the night and helped her now and again behind the bar.

“Eleanor is in love with you,” Helen whispered gently. “Whatever pretence she makes with that man.”

He whispered back, stroking her neck, “And I'm in love with you.”

When he got home he gave his wife the miniskirt and silk tights. He wondered what she would put in those pockets— poems on folded-up pieces of paper? A photograph of the baby? A photograph of him? A photograph of a man he did not recognise? She looked at the skirt quizzically, almost suspiciously. The hemline was a good few inches above the standard. He expected her to announce, I could never wear this, but she didn't. She just carried on looking, turning it in her hands.

Eventually he broke the silence. “Put it on,” he said. “I want to see it on.”

There she is, there. In the garden. He has seen her before. He creeps to the window to watch her, filled with spy-like curiosity. There. Maybe she is Alice, but the light keeps blanching her features and makes it hard to tell. She moves through the light like a dolphin—so like Alice, but he cannot be sure, and is careful to rush to no outlandish conclusions. Be rational, Jacob, he thinks, and observe; do, at all costs, avoid being mad.

The child circles the sleeping dog, occasionally stooping to touch the creature's coat with her palm and to stare closely at the blackness of it. Then rising again to her trip-skip across the grass. The dog is untroubled, does not even wake or open her eyes for a solitary tolerant glance at her visitor; she just sleeps on with a peace that suggests she and the child have looped this loop many times. Between them is a thousand
years of private solicitude. It makes sense now, if the child is Alice, because of course the dog would know Alice, there will have been years for these bonds to form.

He crouches at the French windows, toppling the pile of stones, and lets his eyes follow the child. Her knees, too big for her it seems; her fingers splayed. Occasionally she lifts her fingers a few inches from her eyes and peers through them in experimentation for how the world looks as background. Just mere background for her fingers. Foreground, background.

He takes a stone in his hand and clutches it. One summer, the summer of 1966, they are all at the beach, the four of them: Helen, Alice, Henry, and himself. The children insist on wearing their swimming costumes, but he and Helen give up the pretence of warmth and pull on their jackets. Alice pads silently across the rocks and crouches to peer into the eyes of a—thing—wet bear, legless thing. Seal, yes. Seal.
Always peering,
Helen says,
as if she can see what we cant.

He approaches her. Be careful, Alice, he says. Don't disturb her. (He has decided the thing, seal, is female by the slightly languorous side-tilt of her body, draped rather than ditched by the tide or sudden lethargy.) The seal's pitch, tar, wet-ink eyes are wide open. Blat, Alice observes. Black, he nods. Very black. Alice is beguiled by the eyes and puts her face within a finger's width of the seal's. The animal smell is overwhelming, even to him from this distance, and yet Alice seems not to notice it. He can see his child's reflection in the animal's eyes, like a flower growing in outer space. Blat, she repeats, blat. He takes her hand and leads her away.

The four of them sit where the stones begin to thin out and give way to sand, and he decides to explain something about existence, respect for other animals and objects, the growing sensation
that an individual is an extremely small thing of small pursuits, that the world is sometimes background, sometimes foreground, depending on how big one feels, but inevitably—how to explain this to a child?—inevitably one is small whether they feel it or not. To learn to be small—perhaps this is important.