The Wilderness (13 page)

Without fully comprehending the meaning of the words on the page before him he knows that they speak of unrightable wrongs. He bends forward at the kitchen table, turning slowly.

The letters are in a stack, a veritable brick, in plush cream and pastel envelopes. He cannot be sure exactly when they started coming or how long he has been biting his nails over them in this state of overwrought indecision, but there has been an increased urgency to their arrival so that now they arrive two or three times weekly and the handwriting becomes
more hasty and desperate. Whatever Henry might say, it is a man's handwriting, constricted and reticent, and it leans the wrong way which suggests the man is left-handed like himself. This only adds ammunition to the theory of the affair, since Helen liked his own left-handedness. She liked it that his ring finger belonged to his more active and capable hand, as if that might mean that he would be an active and capable husband. She decided that left-handedness denoted sensitivity and that her active and capable husband would still, beneath all that physical brawn, have the soft innards of a clam.

Who is this man? What does he want with Helen? Were they intimate? If so, how? Why?
When?
When faced with the unknown, or with particular troubling outcomes, it is, to use one of Helen's favourite words,
healthy
to be moderately afraid. Well, as he sits here now he is petrified by the letters; he bites his nails, becomes irritated with himself, and drinks the mint julep in anxious instalments as if it is a thought he is chewing on. The fear is not concerned with what the outcome of the letters might be but rather with the notion that, whatever the outcome, he will deal with it wrongly.

If Helen were having an affair will he be obliged to forgive her? After all she is passed away, gone to the other side,
departed.
Here are yet more choices of expression, and he could go on. Pushing up the daisies, kicked the bucket, met her maker. Such a spread of options before him only heightens the fact that, looking up at the utensils that hang along the kitchen wall, he cannot name them all. Masher, knife with teeth—sawing knife? Perhaps no, but then what?—peeler, whisker. He looks out to the garden and the thing that the washing hangs on. Windmill. Wind thing. Wind washing thing.

Helen has
had her innings.
She has
given up the ghost.

If she was not having an affair and was only up to something of the utmost purity (if this shaky left-handed man is the grown-up and grateful orphan she had secretly been supporting all her life, or if he is her priest), then is he, he wonders, supposed to be angry with Helen nevertheless for concealing something from him? Is he supposed to write to the man and tell him the news? Are they supposed to become friends?

The trouble with right and wrong, he thinks, is that one is usually disguised as the other. He finishes his mint julep and thinks of a myth he knows about two travellers who knock on the door of an elderly couple and ask for shelter. The elderly couple welcome them in, scour a dining board with mint, and prepare the travellers a simple meal. The travellers turn out to be gods in disguise and, so impressed by the hospitality of their hosts, give them a temple in exchange for their
ratty-tatty
house.

He can only assume this is a lesson in being good and doing the right thing, but the right thing in one situation is the wrong thing in the next. If the travellers had turned out to be murderers, letting them in would have been the wrong thing. Besides, it seems terribly unfair that one should be judged in secret, that gods should sleuth around searching out their unsuspecting victims. He, perhaps, is being judged second by second by his formless wife—an exacting, unrevealed ghost, and a kind of god herself.

He had always told Helen this myth when she said he was drinking too many mint juleps; he would point out how mint is a symbol of home and humble goodness. And then he
would wonder, if humble domesticity is so prized a virtue, did that elderly couple even want a temple? What is right, what is good? What use is truth? What constitutes a happy ending?

Eleanor picks up a plastic container of red fruit and rattles it.

“Do you like raspberries?”

“I love them.”

“So we'll get some then. Did Helen use to do anything special with raspberries? Jam? Could try to make a tart.”

He digs his hands into his pockets. “I don't think we had them. They weren't her thing.”

“Shame,” Eleanor says. She drops them into the basket.

It is true, Helen did dislike them. He recalls her once tasting one and taking it out of her mouth.
Hairs,
she frowned,
texture, not right.
She had given him the chewed remains of the fruit and smiled; he had eaten it from his palm. But he doesn't in fact remember if
he
likes raspberries.

As they round the small shop he examines the food and realises that this is true for most things, and that his likes and dislikes have become peripheral trivia. A shoulder of beef behind glass. Some—what are they? He reads the label: clementines. He looks back at the beef, remembers a precise time he had it in a sandwich with the hot white sauce, what he was wearing (blue nylon trousers, hair thick around his ears), where he stood (by the piano), who with (Helen, playing Ir ving Berlin, Alice on her lap); the memory of the food is more real than the present, and in this memory he loves it—the
taste and warmth of the meat, the fondness of the moment. But that slab of pink meat behind the glass, a lining of blood around its edge, makes him feel sick now. Vertigo overcomes him. He glances across to Eleanor to tell her but decides against it.

She loads the basket with dirty vegetables and he can't help but think how like her it is to have dirty vegetables. Always digging, her hands always a little sullied, her clothes, too. She unloads the basket at the counter and pays while he stands and watches. When the supermarkets came Helen was glad to be out of these awkward little shops. Into the clean and bright! You could get everything you wanted in one go. Eleanor struggles with bags, holds one out to him.

“Any chance you might help?”

He takes one, and then insists on taking them both. They get into the car, he into the driver's seat. The air feels thick and congested. Caught in it is the thought of himself as a young man, he is tall with dark hair and a leather coat, dark-blue nylon trousers, he is composed, beautiful some say, his skin tans the moment it sees the sun. He attracts stories, he wears them, and they are what make him alive. As he drives away, Eleanor chatting to herself, he wishes he could be more sure about the point of the missing
e.
So strong and sharp is the memory of it, and of the minutiae: the leaf that looked like a ladybird, the key chain, the deep orange of his mother's carpet, leaves elsewhere, a stain in the shape of a leaf, leaf banisters, woods. But what of it? What was its point? So sharp, and he has made a story around it, but now that he thinks about the story it resolves nothing. Nor is the tale necessarily true. He has begun to worry about the truth, and to become protective over it.
That young man is nothing if he has no true stories. Just an empty and ongoing present.

Driving, though, he feels at ease. Today there is something he has to do. In these new restless, workless days there is something he has to do. He must remember a list of words beginning with
d.
The drive home passes in anticipation of it—finding the list, constructing patterns to order the words in the mind, applying some discipline and logic. Then sitting down to the test, a thing he has always enjoyed doing. There is a hope, more than a hope, that he will pass it. Impossible that he will fail.

At home he helps Eleanor unpack the shopping and then takes up a circular route around the house, beginning in the kitchen, coming through to the hall, ascending the staircase (letting his fingers bounce lightly against the leaf shapes wrought into the banisters, relaxing), following the landing to Henry's bedroom (leaving his footprints on the chocolate carpet), ducking through the secret door, crossing his own bedroom (past Joy's letters, which he eyes suspiciously, not sure why they are lying there on the floor), picking step by step down the pine treads of the second staircase into the study (cold draughts caught behind the books), shoving his weight into the jammed door that opens to the living room, coming back to the hall, and standing.

All the while he repeats: discard, devolution, demolish, dish, decrepit, drone, dynasty, diamond, drastic, day, develop, drip. As a method for remembrance, the circular route works. It sets his brain into a loop, and, if he concentrates on the nothingness of the loop, the turgid pointlessness of it, he finds that forgetfulness, having wilder gardens to explore, does not bother with him.

The more he is able to remember, the more the exercise brings him peace. There is a satisfactory quality about gathering the words into his mind, filling him like stones filling his pockets. He has seen a programme, at some point, in which a man gathers dark-grey stones from the shore and his children count the stones into the deep pockets of his coat. They are learning about the relationship between size and weight. If one pocket has small stones and the other large, he leans. At one point the balance is so uneven that he lies on his left side and his children have to grapple underneath him to remove the excess stones from his left pocket until he is standing. They comb the beach for stones that can form pairs. They become obsessed with the task of making him as straight as a plumb line, as if he is suspended from the sky. One shoulder is tilted; they remove a stone and replace it with a pebble. They add a shell and he is almost there; they add a few grains of sand and he squares himself, miraculously balanced, perpendicular to the horizon.

Demolish, drastic, drip. Each word a stone, one in this pocket, one in that. Day and demolish here, drip and develop there. Each word, he imagines, straightens him. He begins to feel their weight sincerely. There are moments when the sheer challenge of his illness feels blessed; he rises to it and the elevation brings new air to breathe, and memories come sharp as shards from nowhere, like this man and the beach. He thinks now, as he often thinks, that perhaps he is not ill at all, or if he is it is very mild, or his case is quirky and reversible; it is, after all, not like him to get old and unwell. He was always going to be assassinated in public like the empress Elisabeth. He was going to haunt his murderer as Elisabeth haunted Lucheni.
There was simply no option concerned with fading away in cautious, anxious increments; it is not
like him
to forget who he is.

He can see Eleanor through the kitchen window, in the garden heaving up weeds; he thought she had gone out, or that she was not here today at all. He can't remember waking up with her this morning and her putting on that pearl-coloured suit jacket and trousers she is wearing now, tight over her broad figure. Her hair is illogical and her shoulders rounded against the effort of gardening.

The letters are still there on the kitchen table, forgotten about. Each time he comes back to them he has to begin the whole logical process again, fumbling with them, feeling unease fold itself up into fear, calculating the outcomes, then, in response to it all, wandering away in a state of pure distraction, his moral vigilance gone.

He makes coffee, pouring the grinds in, releasing the handle, hearing the water shoot through. Then he crushes ice, thinking that by now it must be late enough in the day for his first mint julep, and he assembles the drink with a careful adoring rigour. He sits. It is his greatest pleasure to have a mint julep in the afternoon followed by coffee and to see the evening in slightly intoxicated, his brain responding to the chemicals in his blood and the sense of life being to hand, and something waiting around the corner.

The water trickles through the coffee machine. He fidgets against the need to urinate. Eleanor comes in from the garden and washes her hands, commenting on the smell of the coffee. It occurs to him that there is little or no smell, not of coffee, nor of the delightful sugar, mint, and bourbon of the julep,
nor the generic smell of the house, nor, he discovers, his own skin. There are smells perhaps, but they are ghosts. He puts his mug down on the table and breathes in deeply, closing his eyes.

“The cherries are coming,” Eleanor says with a forced brightness.

He is relieved by her brightness and forces his own, smiling and pushing his breath out through his nose. She runs her hand over his head and down his arm, holding his hand, then she comes behind him and presses her chest against his head, stroking him.

“Have you learned your words?” she asks. “We'll have to go soon.”

He brings his hands to a prayer position. “Dynasty, develop, drip”—he pauses—“demolish, diamond, depend, desecrate, dilapidate.”

Eleanor walks to the tap and pours herself some water, spilling it down her as she drinks.

Poor Eleanor, he thinks; it makes him feel better to think it. He repeats it to himself as he watches her sponge up the water with tissues. Poor Eleanor,
poor Eleanor,
and feels the coffee wake him to a sense of himself as a tall man, a good tall man, a free man who can get up any time he wants and walk away.