The Wilderness (8 page)

Sara was in the kitchen when they arrived, negotiating the complexities of her coffee machine. They deposited their three cases in the living room, brushed the long journey from their clothes, and took coffee with her. It was, indeed, a matter of
taking
coffee, as some take the papers each morning: with the adoring rigour of a ritual. He kissed his mother and, with barely a word, took the gold-rimmed cups from the cupboard—proud to intuit immediately where they lived—then laid them out on the sideboard.

They exchanged pleasantries about the journey. Helen trod the orange living-room carpet with the baby in her arms, stepping
between their sparse belongings and humming or repeating
sshhh,
even though the baby was silent. Then they sat, he and Helen on the sofa, Sara across the room in her bentwood chair. The china cups, though slightly chipped and tarnished, clinked with a hushed clarity that shored up mislaid moments of his childhood with such concision that he was disoriented briefly.

“So you will be looking for somewhere to buy, once you have started work?” Sara asked.

He glanced at Helen. “Yes.”

“And what about building?”

“We still intend to, in a few years. We'll save, then buy land, a piece of moor land, sit on it for a while, and then build.”

That wonderful interlude of agreement between him and Helen had revealed its drawbacks quickly enough. He had realised soon after how he had in fact just agreed to live in some state of rustic dreaminess rather than the self-conferred modern splendour he had planned: the glass house to end all glass houses, the white sunlight on the panes, skeletal against thick black peat. He had, with one cigarette and the mention of inappropriate sex, consigned his reality to a dream. But he told himself it did not matter. There was time. Time reaching forward, time going backwards—more time than he had ever had in his life.

“So you'll need to stay here for—what? I don't know, a few months maybe?” Sara asked.

“Just for a month or so—until we find somewhere to rent. Then we can look around properly. It will all be quick, Sara.”

“As you wish.”

When Helen brushed her hair behind her ear the gesture
seemed to carry an undercurrent of irritation. “You don't mind us staying, Sara? It's an awful pain, all three of us.”

“If I minded I would not have invited you. It isn't my way. And if I want you to go I'll tell you that in a second.”

Helen reached for her hair again to find it already behind her ear. She smiled with visible effort and sat. She put Henry stomach down on the sofa, between them.

“Look at these.” Sara took something from a drawer in the dresser. They were photographs, square Polaroids which she handed to them. “It's a house about six miles from here, a coach house. The woman who owns it is a friend of mine. She lost her husband a few months ago and she wants to sell. It's a bit— ratty-tatty, but a good house. She wants to find good people to buy it, it's not the kind of a house that appreciates complete strangers.”

The photographs showed a long narrow building with white façade, dating, he estimated, to the early 1800s. Perhaps the monochrome images bequeathed to the house a mystique it did not really deserve, a cloudy wistfulness to its old age. He saw through it; he did not especially like it. The two photographs of its interior showed large rooms and splendid supporting beams, frowzy and disordered decor, bad plasterwork.
Ratty-tatty,
as Sara had said. Woodworm, he thought; joist problems; the lintels are probably shot through with holes; likely it will need reroofing.

“It's absolutely the most perfect and wonderful house I've ever seen,” Helen said, caressing the pictures.

He knew the deal was already done, even before Sara mentioned they could have it for less than two thousand pounds, and even before she went to the kitchen and returned with
two glasses filled with what she informed them was cherry wine, and even before she declared that the wine was made with fruit from the cherry tree in the garden of the house, and even before she produced a final picture—in case they were interested—of the tree itself, its blossom the colour of mallow (the monochrome image could not subdue that creamy pink-ness), its branches as slender, Sara observed, as a tamarisk tree.

Helen put her hand to her mouth in measured delight. “As I envisaged it,” she said.

“And also,” Sara added, “Rook is coming for dinner.” She rested her cup on her palm and seemed to test him for a response.

He raised his brows. “Rook?”

“He visits me from time to time.” Her eye twitched and she held her fingers to the offending nerve. Long fingers, elegant face—the sort of face he would expect to see in tall women, when in fact Sara was far from tall. “Anyhow he's coming at seven, and already it's four. Will you excuse me in that case? I have a lot of cooking to do—make yourselves welcome.”

“Just as I envisaged it,” Helen repeated, rubbing her hand up and down Henry's back.

Then, if Rook is coming, he must have a bath, he thought urgently, and he must have a piss. It was the coffee machine, the compressed shot of hot water and then the trickle of liquid as it passed into the jug. It always made him need to piss. And the business with this cherry tree and the house they seemed suddenly destined to buy. He excused himself. He hadn't seen Rook for more than a decade.

He knows the route to The Sun Rises like the back of his own hand. He knows without any conscious thought when to change gear, when to slow down or speed up, which potholes are deep enough to avoid and which areas flood, specifically which areas, down to a few metres or so. Sometimes the puddles have frog spawn in. He knows to avoid them at certain times of the year and he knows, by light, colours, and instinct, that it is probably that time of year now.

Eleanor has a newspaper on her lap; when he glances across he sees that the headline is something about a plane disaster, there is a photograph of something mangled. He thinks of Helen. Her love of flight always made her morose over crashed planes, because planes belonged to a perfect world of height and freedom that was not supposed to fail. She would have
been upset now by those pictures in Eleanor's paper and he would have tried to cheer her up with some platitude or other. Maybe she would have been upset by Eleanor herself, wondering how
x
could be put in
y
's place as if
y
had never been. He hopes she would have been upset; he is. He glances back at the newspaper.

“What's the story?” he asks.

Eleanor puts down the pocket mirror she has been frowning into, looks at the paper, sighs, and tells him to hang on a minute. “Something about the Rwandan president being killed,” she says. “In a plane explosion.”

“Will there be a war?”

She folds the paper and picks her mirror up again, rubbing her skin with her fingertips. “I don't know. It doesn't say.”

It worries him, war. It seems like one of those things that, now he is unable to follow the news properly, might just creep up on him. He was always so aware; now not so. There was always some control over the workings of the world when he could see what was coming.

Silence settles between them as Eleanor combs her fingers through her hair.
Memory,
Helen used to say as they drove. He would give her a memory. This was his homeland and she wanted to get to know it through the eyes of his childhood. He drives on and his stomach tightens. It strikes him as strange and sad that whenever he maps out his own history it converges on pain. He has known so much more than pain—and yet recently everything pivots on the tragedies and wrong turnings.

He doesn't know if Eleanor has truly sunk into oblivion over the past or whether she is just pretending. Either way, it
obviously isn't important enough to her. But to him it is. While she inspects her hairline he entertains horror. This is the precise route he took that night, from the coach house to The Sun Rises, 1967, the week after the Six-Day War had ended; it was hot. War, you see, and bombed airfields and Egypt's planes blown to nothing by Israel, and Helen angry for an entire week as if they would divorce over this: this war. As if it were his fault.

How full of rage and horror he was when he drove out here and decided to make a play for Eleanor, knowing Eleanor would never refuse. All he could think about was Alice. To salve the blame he had loaded on himself he decided to run to Eleanor's bed, and there she was, of course. Of course she let him in. And then he left.

He cannot decide now how long it was before he and Eleanor spoke again. He was embarrassed. He spent months disgusted with himself, and when he checks now to confirm when that disgust eased he is not sure that it ever did. He is embarrassed, that decades later Eleanor is what remains. Their past seems so dull and grubby, and their present so—inexpli cable. He wonders if he should have brought her along tonight.

They pull up at a junction and wait. In the mirror her eyes become ringed with dark brown and expand in size. She emerges and changes under the nib of the eye pencil as Helen had used to do. In the late sixties Helen had worn her eyes large and black; her once-brown legs had turned ravishing white from the bad northern weather and her knees had seemed to be exposed bone. They are so uncannily different, Helen and Eleanor. Eleanor is plump and her makeup is a mask; he prefers her without it. He wants to tell somebody
there has been a mistake. He searches his pockets for a cigarette, finds the accelerator and pulls off.

Eleanor dabs her cheeks in the failing light. “Are you excited?”

Dear Eleanor, to think that somebody could be
excited
about their own retirement dinner.

“Nervous,” he replies. “It's a bit like going to your own wake.”

She sniffs and puts the mirror on the dashboard. “I don't think I'll ever retire. Don't think I'll ever be able to afford to. I'll be digging my own grave to save money.”

She grins; the smell of her perfume edges into his senses as if through a wall of sponge, just some of the smell permeating and the rest lost. What does she even
do
for a living?

“Everyone retires. I tried not to—but there comes a point when it's necessary for you to be eased out. It's a system.”

He worries suddenly that he has forgotten the car keys, quizzing himself to think where he might have left them, before realising they are in the ignition. Eleanor clears a blemish from the windscreen with the cuff of her blouse. She turns to him.

“I'll look after you,” she says.

“Sara used to call retirement the Sabbath Days,” he says, ignoring her. He does not want to talk about being looked after or to look across and catch her eye as if they are sealing a joint fate. “The Sabbath Days, the days of rest. No gathering manna, no ploughing or reaping or pressing—” He frowns out of the window at the moors and the cooling towers in the distance, ejecting broad plumes of cloud into an otherwise clear evening. With his thumb and forefinger he makes a small circle. “No pressing those things, not plums. The other things.”

“Grapes?” Eleanor ventures.

“Yes. Grapes.” Embarrassed still, he forges on with his point. “No ploughing or reaping. No cooking. She called them the days of rest.”

“No cooking? Then I'll have to cook for you. Oh Jakey, poor you, it'll be beef sandwiches every day and frozen hotpots.”

She puts her hand on his thigh and squeezes.

“There was something about a man not eating muesli,” he begins, on the periphery of a memory he cannot quite place. “Did you tell me about that, the man who wouldn't eat muesli, or was it meat?”

“I don't think so.”

He pauses, interrogating his brain aggressively for the clarity that sometimes comes out of temporary confusion, but this time it doesn't come. After a lifetime of well-founded reliance on things just fixing themselves, he finds it disturbing to accept that they are more likely, now, to stay broken.

But where was he? What had he been thinking just now, before that other thought?

Eleanor squeezes his leg again and stares lightly at him; he has often asked her not to stare down his foolishness like this as if in great alarm, or, worse still, great sympathy. Her voice, saying something calming he suspects, is somewhere in his head but he is now noticing the plants that push through along the dykes, and tries to conjure their names. Brooklime, he recalls. Labrador tea. Funny that he should remember such trivia.

She scrutinises him as if trying to establish from the way he sits or the expression on his face whether he might let himself down terribly this evening.

“You all right driving?”

He nods.

He must have seen Henry recently because he remembers it, and everything remembered happened either very recently or very distantly; something he must get used to now that there is no middle distance as such.

The moors spin past, the peat dark grey and puddled along the dykes from heavy rainfall. When he saw Henry he showed him the letters. They've been coming ever since Helen died, he explained to his son. They just come and come. All addressed to her: look. Helen Jameson. Look.