The Wilderness (37 page)

“Dvei Ilai,” Sara returned.

He waved the knife in excitement, watching Helen slice a
plum and wrangle the halves apart, noticing the juice run down her fingers.

“Dvei Ilai. A giant lion, a massive lion twenty feet wide. And the Roman Caesar wanted to find him and kill him, so he asked the rabbi to call the lion out of the forest. The rabbi said, no, not a good idea. The lion cannot be killed. But the Caesar was adamant so the rabbi did as he was asked. It was the big mistake of the Catholics to ignore the Jews. The lion came, roaring, and his roar crumbled all the walls of Rome.” He took his seat and poured more wine. “Rome was destroyed.”

There had been streams of these stories when he was a child, myth upon myth, myth tangling with myth, myth becoming fact, fact becoming fiction. So many dark close nights of it. Jam, syrup, sugar, baked pastry, an intimate smell of religion come true.

“In a minute I'll go and get the deeds to the Junk, I've got them upstairs.” Rook raised his glass. “Let's have a little toast to Mrs. Crest.”

He ignored the old man and held his own glass firmly to the table. “What's more,” he said, “the lion's roar was so bone-breaking that all the Romans' teeth fell out.”

Sara put her hand to her mouth and pressed at her gums.

“I've made bread pudding,” she said. “Will we all have some?”

“Memory,” Helen's voice fired from the darkness of the driver's seat.

He paused to consider. It was her tactic to make him talk—
if she simply asked what he was thinking he would shrug,
nothing,
and mean it. Nothing. But if she asked him for a memory, in this place reminiscent of his whole life, surely something would come. It was a cheap trick, but it worked.

“House of the exaggerating soldier, just there,” he said.

They passed the dark outline of a derelict brick house.

“The soldier and his wife moved to London, I wonder what happened to them.”

He recalled tables of rich food, the eyes of the soldier and his wife glinting in the poor light, the candles, the wife's blond custardy hair. Actually she had been an attractive woman, at least as he now remembered her; quite the counterpoise to Sara. Fair to Sara's darkness, tall to Sara's smallness. Of comparable beauty though, if it were possible to compare creatures from separate planets.

“Memory,” he fired.

She took in a breath. “I'm in London, I'm about fifteen. I'm walking home and I see a man and woman in the ruins of a building, they are making love. They aren't completely naked, only from the waist down.”

She faced him for a moment, her hands tight on the wheel. She smiled.

“It was quite … comical—but, suddenly, I felt that place was human. That all the world was loving and human and there to belong in.”

He scratched briskly at his chin and smirked.

“So that's the reason.”

“Reason for what?”

“For you being so—forward. When we first met, when we were at the ruins in Stepney. When you dipped your hand
down my trousers while I was merrily talking about, I don't know, buildings. When you did all that with the church looking on.”

“Yes,” she replied, “I suppose so.”

He smiled at the thought.

“I decided that I couldn't leave London until I had done what that couple had done,” she continued, “or done something similar. Until I had
used
part of the city for myself, used it like it was my playground.”

In a way, he understood. He, too, wanted to appropriate a place before leaving, just to affirm that it was indeed him
leaving,
and not him being expelled.

“I thought it was just your nature, back then, to do those sorts of things. Thought you were a little bit—ah—
loose
.”

She shrugged. “Jake, I don't have a nature.”

“Of course you do.”

“Then tell me about it. Tell me a few words to describe it.”

He lit a cigarette and handed it to her, lit one for himself. She didn't decline, perhaps because her powers of negotiation were channelled into driving in the cave-like darkness, or because she was too intent on hearing his answer.

“Well, you're kind, generous, funny, compassionate—”

“Ah, see. Now you're describing what a woman is like when she can't think of any other more imaginative way to be. It's not anything as defined as a nature. It's a lack of ideas.”

“Helen—” He reached across and stroked her face. She drew on her cigarette and flicked his hand away.

“Let's go to the Junk,” she said.

“Now?”

“Now. Guide me there. I can't ever get my bearings in the dark.”

It was only two miles or so from where they were; as they went the car filled slowly with smoke. Helen sped up; he arched his neck back and stared at the roof of the car an inch or less from his nose, breathed out smoke and let it wash over his face. Things felt good—Helen smoking, Helen speeding, Helen arguing, Helen driving them off to a black patch of peat. The baby back at Sara's, there to collect tomorrow. A night alone. Land to build on.

They stopped where he indicated. There was the house, slumped, derelict, and behind it the solitary row of wind-bent birch.

Helen knocked the keys back and forth in the ignition with her finger. “Let's go in.”

On the floor in the kitchen they sat cross-legged and took food from the knapsack—some sandwiches, some Battenberg cake, oranges, a flask of tea, mint julep for him at the bottom of a bottle. It was pitch-dark and the damp foxy smell occupied all the senses. When his eyes adjusted he could see his wife's white legs, and he could make out the rest of her because she was blacker than the background. She pulled the edge of the picnic blanket over her knees. It was far too cold for the miniskirt she was wearing but she refused the offer of his coat. He tried to insist, because she wore the skirt for him as she did most things for him; all her suffering came via him. He had, he thought, been corrupting her from the day they met;
I do solemnly declare to corrupt you 'til death do us part.
But she refused the coat three times, and he swallowed the fourth offer.

She took the cling film from the Battenberg cake and
handed him some with a smile. As he dissected it she lit up a match and put it close to his hands.

“You're eating the yellow sections first,” she remarked.

“Yes. I don't like them.”

“So in that case you leave them 'til last.”

“No, you save the best 'til last.”

The match went out and he heard her shuffle and stand.

“It's fishy, all this business about Mrs. Crest,” she said.

He nodded, though she couldn't have seen.

“Perhaps we shouldn't sign the deeds.”

“We
will
sign the deeds. I don't care where it's from. Once they're signed it's legal. Helen, it's ours.”

There was a pause.

“If we're going to live here, then, right here on this bit of peat, I want to, I don't know, run around all over the moors naked, to stamp my belonging.” She laughed.

“You could,” he suggested.

An intense darkness marked where she stood and he reached forward to where he calculated her ankle would be, stroked the bare skin.

As he touched her he felt an unexpected peace. There was no need to keep searching for something else, no need to live here. He could throw the deeds back in Rook's face and tell him to fuck off. They already had a house. But then Helen crouched and put something in his hand, some clothing. He brought it to his face and smelt it: her top. It had the faint smell of her skin and the pleasant, faintest soap-sweetened sourness from her underarms, and when he looked up he could see her pale torso and the white of her bra.

“Why is it you always get what you want?” she said gently.

He put the rest of the cake on the floor, stubbed his cigarette out, and began removing his shoes. He got out of his trousers, trying to keep his balance in the dark, kicking the trousers off his feet. The lame peace, the inertia of before, had now left him.

“Jake? Where are you?”

“We ought to mark our belonging here, shouldn't we, if there's three of us—if there's going to be four of us. That's an army, that's time to set territories.”

“Are you going outside?”

“Yes.” He lit a match and made his way to the door. “Come with me.”

Out in the drab moonlight Helen removed her shoes. It was easier to see out here. The smells of sugar and steel competed in the air. The white limbs of the birch trees made him think of Joy, he could not help it, he did not want to help it. Long white limbs in the darkness, skeletal and spectral. His memory saw Joy's slender hand cut a square across the black:
Here, see it? Framed by the factory.
He longed for everything he did not yet have, he longed for himself even, as if he were chasing himself and never quite catching up.

With summer gone the night held little warmth or consolation. He ran. It was a peculiar feeling, to run nowhere for nothing, naked. But he couldn't have done it clothed, it would have felt too absurd, as if he were mad and being chased by phantoms. He ran and shouted nothing for no one. He gestured to Helen to follow him and then flung his arms up and began stamping his feet into the miry soil. In response to his lunacy Helen laughed and scampered in circles.
Freezing,
she giggled.
Bleeding freezing.

“Ours!” he said. “This is ours!”

“Ours!” she repeated.

He ran to the dyke by the road and bent to splash his face with water; the water was freezing and puckered his skin. Helen came up behind him and doubled in breathless laughter.

“You look ridiculous like that,” she said, “with your great long body and your big feet and your testicles hanging down—like a savage!”

He snapped off a few flowers from the bank of the dyke and named them: “Brooklime, Labrador tea—these used to be everywhere.”

Handing them to her he moved on again across the peat making figures of eight and shouting, “This is ours!”

When they were cold to the point that no running could warm them, even though they had years more running in them, they retreated to the car, turned on the engine for heat, and then the radio for celebration: Irving Berlin.
Honey, and I've decided, love divided in two wont do,
they sang together. They climbed into the backseat. They were three times too big for the space, four times, they crowded themselves.

He held her down and pushed himself inside her, almost savage, as she had said—checking briefly to see that she was with him, that she was receptive, and then closing his eyes to block everything out. His head hit the car window with rousing violence. The birch limbs appeared to his vision in drunken intervals, maybe he had opened his eyes to see them, maybe he had only imagined them along with the flare of yellow, the lilac blink of a child not yet born, a miniskirt draped over the steering wheel, a gunshot, a leaf, a gunshot, some bizarre rememberings of the hammered-silver samovar Sara
used to display on the sideboard, appearing to him with erotic clarity as if the memory were extruded through the force of sex itself; a stray thought that he never let in of his grandparents in Dachau. Furious anger cancelled, with shameful ease, by overwhelming pleasure. Helen was shrieking, he clutched her hair and pushed deeper until her shrieks filled the car, filled the moors, made new waves on the sea.

“Memory,” she said.

“I have none.”

She indicated right and they pulled out onto the main road, heading away from the moors.

“Memory?” he asked.

“We're driving along a highway in America. We're listening to Buddy Holly. I'm pregnant—but I haven't told you yet. I will tell you, soon.”

He took a packet of mints from the dashboard and handed her one. The radio played: the Crystals, James Brown, Buddy Holly, and he was grateful for its intrusion into their marriage. He closed his eyes against the memory of his wife's shrieks, and against the slight awkwardness that now tied their tongues as they drove home.

“In fact I do have a memory,” he said at length, turning the mint around in his mouth. “I'm ten, we have to get upstairs by climbing a ladder on the outside wall, it's late. We've had a dinner party with some neighbours and Sara and my father have had an argument, in public, about her being Jewish.
She's saying that what she misses, really misses, is olives. You can't get olives in England. Then my father starts: he says she's
putting it on
—her religion, he meant—he starts mocking her. He hates Jewish food, you see. She's broken some cardinal kosher rules—mixed meat and milk, eating pork, I don't know, my father thinks it's proof that the whole thing is just a show—”