The Wilderness (36 page)

“That was good of Fergus to come and see you, Jake,” the woman says.

He pivots to see her at the door, her face flushed. Fergus?

“Do you remember Fergus being here?”

He regards her blankly and shakes his head. “Was there a man here?”

“Yes.”

Her nod is tired and undecided as she gives herself up to the sofa.

“When?” he asks.

“Just now. He left two minutes ago.”

“He brought the map?”

“The drawings, yes. These are architectural drawings, Jake, not maps.”

Frowning, she looks around the room. Done something wrong, he thinks. Won't know what. Definitely done something.

“Did you clear away the coffee things?” she asks.

Relieved, he shakes his head. No, he did not clear anything away, he hasn't moved. For some time he has been sitting, staring at this paper, aware, more aware than he can remember being for a long time. He
does
remember the time they found the boat. And his body knows all those straight-backed hours in the study, and the smell of cooking pushing through from one end of the house to another, and the pleasure of complete absorption in the lines on the page.

“I haven't moved from this spot,” he says.

She leaves the room and returns quickly. “The coffee cups aren't in the kitchen. Have you put them away?”

With some irritation she scrapes the hair from her face, and he thinks she looks like one of those frazzled housewives. Perhaps she should rest; he pats the floor as a gesture for her to join him.

“When we found the boat,” he says, “me and Ellie, we had
no idea what it was at first.” He looks up at the woman and steeples his hands. “We used to dig graves in the peat and lie in them, and we were digging that day, that's why we found it. We used to lie there in those graves with the entire sky above. That sky. Have you ever seen anything so big?”

The woman kneels down beside him and rests her arms on the spread of her belly. “We used to play
golems
,” she nods. “One of us would cover ourselves in mud, to become a golem, and pretend the other was the king whose orders had to be obeyed. Like, do a headstand! Run anticlockwise five times with no clothes on! And we had to write the word
emet
in mud on the golem's forehead.”

He swallows at the memory. He sees it; he and Eleanor running around into the setting sun, and in the window of the Junk the flames of the menorah flicking up their first light.

“Emet
meant truth,” the woman says, “so if you had
emet
on your forehead you had to tell the truth. About anything. You used to tell me that Sara had been queen of Austria and that she would have to go back there soon, with you. I used to tell you that my uncle was saving up rations to sell on the black market. And that I sometimes weed myself still even though I was fourteen. Cry for help. And that one day, even though I was four years older than you, we were going to get married.”

She puts a hand on his leg. “And you always said you wouldn't marry me. So I told you I would settle for just living together instead, as if we were married.”

They sit in silence for a moment. He remembers scraping the earth from the boat bone by bone, finding the point of its hull, each strut of wood almost perfectly preserved.

“And then, when the game was over we used to scrub out
the letter
e
on the golem's forehead to make the word
met,
which was Hebrew for death. And we would dig a grave, the golem had to get in it, and we shovelled peat back on top of them and counted how long they could stay dead. We'd leave a foot or a hand uncovered, to give the signal. We used to call it the game of the missing
e.
That's how we found the boat.”

A long silence unravels between them that is saved by her standing and going to the other side of the room.

He absorbs himself in looking at the maps in front of him. Everything takes on a lucid sense: Ellie, the peat, the boat, childhood. Something in him rests. One day he would love to see Ellie again and sit at that piano while she sang and while Sara played the—thing, thing on the shoulder, and Rook the mouth organ.

He looks out of the window to see if the child is still there, and she is. There is suddenly the dense comfort of waiting— that if they wait, he and the child, probably somebody will come and collect them soon. He stands and goes to the window to where, on the other side, she plays quite heedless, and he pushes his hand against the pane and bangs, hoping to ask her who they are waiting for, and when it is likely to come, just roughly, just so that he might plan.

When the woman comes to his shoulder she makes him jump. He turns to see she is holding a tray of drinking things and spoons, wearing a sorry look on her face which does not in the least match his own peaceful mood.

“You put the coffee cups in the writing bureau, Jake. I knew I would find them somewhere.”

He goes back to the floor and the yellowed paper, sits, wonders why she can't share his peace.

“Who are you anyway?” he asks, irritated.

He spreads the paper flat and pushes down its dog-eared corners. The paper was once white, and now it is yellow, he thinks. Once flat, now creased. And there is the truth about life: once this, then that.

“You're gone, Jake. Gone,” the woman announces at length.

He pulls his legs crossed, grips his ankles, and looks up at her.

“Going,” he corrects, and rubs fiercely at his leg, a patch of sore skin where all irritation and outrage now centres.

“To think I've waited for you for thirty years. I haven't even bothered to try to love anyone else. And now I've got you, and you're gone.”

He scowls. It is important: not gone,
going.
If he were simply gone the child would not be wasting her time with him; and besides, it is crucial to be clear about the mechanics of it, the increments, the balancing of the stones—

The train of thought loses its way, breaks up, and scatters. “In any case,” he states, “we have to remain aware of the consolations.”

The woman picks at her nails and delivers up the same tired nod.

“The consolations,” she agrees.

He dips his head in shame. What has he done wrong? He closes his eyes against the waft of air as the woman leaves the room, as if she were never there.

The table was plainly set. A dinner, an announcement, Sara had said, but when they arrived at her house there was not the mood of announcement. The plates set out between the usual weekday cutlery were patternless and the wine glasses like the ones Eleanor used in the pub, too unimaginative for wine. At least there
were
wine glasses. He was feeling brimful with some almost belligerent optimism, and in the mood for celebration. Immediately he opened the cabinet and compared the wines—cherry, no, something white and sweet, no. He took an Italian red and put it in the middle of the table.

Helen wore her miniskirt. With elfish steps across the orange carpet she took Henry to the cot upstairs.

Strange creature that she was. The way she had formed this ambivalent bond with the skirt that caused her to wear it often
around the house (it's so short, she marvelled, and you can see all my legs!) but disallowed her from wearing it in public (it's so short, she cringed, and you can see all my legs). Dear Helen. He had persuaded her that Sara's house was not
public,
it was just a slightly more daring version of private, so she had put it on, getting into a thick blue sweater, humming selfconsciously.

Now she reappeared in the living room, blinked, tucked her hair behind her ear, scratched her cheek, as if trying to make herself as one hundred percent pure
Helen
as possible, sat at the table where Rook was already smoking, passed her hand to his and said, “Hello, forgive my legs.”

“Darling, I love your legs,” Rook insisted.

“They're new.”

“So I see.”

She flowered. They chatted about the passing of summertime and the first falling leaves on the cherry tree, and their second autumn away from London. Rook was a vigilant listener as he turned corners of a napkin into birds which he flew in her direction, and which she gathered into an orderly flock on her side plate.

Dinner was served and they ate in good spirits: lamb shanks, boiled potatoes, vegetables. Plain and righteous food with sprinklings of salt and pepper, a little English mustard. He would not be churlish, he decided; would not comment on the lack of silver and cut glass, or on the unlit menorah, or on Sara's mild, aged presence, as if some substance had slipped from her.

“The announcement,” Sara said, once they were all settled with food and wine, “is that—well, you might as well say it Rook, hmm?”

“The announcement,” Rook took up, “is that I've managed to wrestle that piece of land for you.”

“The Junk? Wrestle from whom?” he asked, setting his knife on the plate.

“Contacts,” Rook winked.

Helen's eyes widened a fraction. “You know Mrs. Crest?”

Rook seemed to think about this far deeper than the question merited. “In a way.”

The table was drenched in yellow from the setting sun, charging up the cutlery, running across their hands. It scattered itself across Sara's dress and cleaned her of any possible sins or secrets; no point turning to her for clarity. Rook winked at him. He stared back and the entirety of his childhood flushed over him in a moment. Its frustrations and unanswered questions, Sara and Rook's collusion, the feeling that he was never getting the truth but should be grateful nevertheless, because the truth is not a right, it is a privilege at best and a burden at worst.

“It's time for our future, then,” he said, and reached for his wife's bare thigh.

“And are you still volunteering at the hospice, dear?” Sara asked Helen.

Dear.
He was surprised to hear this sweet tone in his mother's voice.

“Yes, Sara, yes. It's—wonderful, fulfilling. To be with people in their last few days or weeks, it feels like my calling.”

Sara smiled and sank the prongs of her fork so slowly, so delicately into a potato, like a woman too beached in the middle of old age to have the gusto for eating.

“And also,” Helen went on. He saw her cross her legs under the table. “I've become interested in—well, we have a man in the hospice who is … black.” She straightened. “His daughter comes in to visit him and tells me about the terrible things that happen to blacks in this country. Do you all know? Are you aware?”

She lowered and lifted her gaze in one interrogative gesture, spearing a piece of carrot which she left balanced on the plate. “They can't get work, they can't get houses. If you want to rent or buy a house you simply can't.”

A sympathetic murmur went around the table, even Rook had no acerbic quip to add. They ate on in thought for a few moments.

“I mean, these are the 1960s,” Helen added, cutting her food up as if preparing it for Henry. “Have we learnt nothing?”

“Actually I read in the paper,” he said, topping up the empty glasses, “that the blacks in London are being helped by the Jewish communities. Jewish people rent houses out to blacks and then, when the blacks have the money, they buy them.”

He smiled, and met a theatre of blank faces. Helen sat back from her food and put her hands on her belly.

“That's good,” she said. “In fact though, if nobody minds me broaching the subject—I mean, you could argue that the whole problem with racism sprang from Jewish myths. It
has
been argued. I don't know if I agree, but let's not romanticise.”

He and Rook cocked their heads, Sara went on chewing.

“You know it, Sara, of course. The myth that Ham saw
Noah drunk and naked, and in his shame Noah punished Ham by putting a curse on his son, Canaan. And the curse was for him to be smitten in his skin. Burnt, in other words, burnt and blackened—and from that the blacks were cursed.”

Sara raised her head and sighed. “I think there is no agreement, dear, as to what that myth means.”

“All the same. Oh I know what horrors have happened, and I know it's very right, politically, to favour the Jews—”

“But it's never right to be blindly favourable to anything,” Sara added.

“Yes, precisely.”

“I agree, dear. Keep that vigilance in life and you won't come to harm.”

He stood and took his empty plate to the kitchen. His blood boiled. Not against his wife, no, he rather admired her courage, her relentless defence of fair play and good practice, her wish to work out who the unfortunate were and save them. But Rook, Sara? What world of neutrality had they slipped into? He looked to them for some rich-blooded darkness, red wine, human skin, the tiered glint of candles bashing out a statement of defiance, a lily in the hair, a gunshot to sunder the milky carriage of clouds: a dark counterbalance to his wife's whiteness, to bring his life into symmetry—a stone in this pocket, a stone in that. A perfection. A fucking joke! His history was dying.

“Do you remember that myth, Sara,” he said, striding back to the dinner table with a knife in his hand. “What was it? A deer and lion living in a forest. What was the forest?”