Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Helen was rapt and childlike. She gawped as children do when they've no idea of social mores, and he in turn stared at her pointedly while Henry blinked at a glint of sunlight that the glass had thrown him, and one of the men glanced up from feeding the birds and waved to them, holding Helen in his sight for a moment longer than necessary. The whole zoo had become a busy junction of scrutiny, a hall of mirrors, even the sun had rid itself of cloud to observe and be observed. It all had the unruddered perspective of a dream. Was this how his wife dreamt? Was it the sort of thing she dreamt about? Was he giving her what she wanted? Would he ever? What was it that she thought while she stood there gawping? What did she see?

He kissed her unexpectedly — kissed the back of her neck, kissed the baby's forehead. He pulled the collar of her dress down a few millimetres and kissed the top bone of her spine; he wanted to tell her, all of a sudden, that he loved her. As he lifted his head he saw birds rising to the top of the aviary and watching everything at once with rapid, cocked vision.

“We should get breakfast,” Helen said, turning to him with a resolute look. “Is there a café here? Coffee and toast. I want a cigarette too, do you have yours?”

“Yes,” he said, surprised. He had only seen her smoke once or twice before.

Two cups of Nescafé, six pieces of toast, orange marmalade in plastic pots, two cigarettes, and a piece of Battenberg cake which they split into two squares each. Helen liked the yellow sponge, he did not. They disputed it — do you save the best 'til last or plunge straight in for what you like. He said the best should always come last; she laughed, shook her head, and breast-fed while she ate and smoked, dropping cake crumbs on Henry's forehead.

“When we go,” she said, tapping her cigarette into the ashtray, “I want to live in an old house in the country. I want us to find our favourite place there, somewhere in the house, and whenever I stand in that place I want you to notice me.” She stirred her coffee without looking away from him. “When you stand there I'll notice you. I'll say, ‘There's Jake, my husband, my Jake.' When we stand there together we'll make sure we look each other in the eye. The first time we find that place we'll make love there. We'll leave a stain. No one will know it's there, just us.”

He smiled and held her gaze. “I thought you didn't want to go.”

“I don't. I'm watching that cherry tree there.” With her cigarette she gestured out of the window behind him. “It's very early in bloom. It made me think — I don't know.” She shrugged and looked beyond him, but not at the tree. “It just made me think, what's the point? What's the point in holding on.”

“We can come back.”

“No, we can't think of it that way. When we go, we go. We find our place in the house and we act as if it was ours all along.”

Having just inhaled a ball of smoke he let it out quickly in anticipation, almost excitement. “That's how I feel, Helen. We go. We stay. We make it home. To Henry it will always be home.”

She rested her cigarette in the ashtray, finished her cake, and took Henry from her breast, smoothing down her blouse.

“And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness,” he said, leaning back, waiting for her response. “It's from Exodus, Helen. From the Bible.”

She raised her brows. “You think I don't know that?” she teased. “I don't like the sound of the edge of the wilderness very much. Couldn't you have remembered a different quote?”

“We'll leave this great sprawling city of Succoth behind, and on the edge of the wilderness we'll find a cherry tree—”

“And it won't be a wilderness anymore.”

“It will be ours.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” She picked up the cigarette, and looking at it distrustfully, took one last drag and put it out.

Instead of taking the Underground they took the bus back through the city so that they could see it one last time. He wanted to look hard at the new world of tower blocks, eructations of concrete, structures escaping the sky.

“Did you see how those monkeys looked at us?” Helen said as they moved along. “Did you see how perceptive they are? They see everything, they see us truly.”

He nodded. “Yes, they're uncanny.” He formed rings around his eyes with his fingers. “Their eyes are like this, can you imagine human eyes being like this? Terrifying.”

“The first monkey has just come back from space alive, did you know that?” Helen said. “And there are some images of the earth taken on that space mission. If nothing else,” she tucked her hair behind her ear, “mankind's existence is utterly justified by this gift it will give to earth, the gift of sight, a sort of consciousness.”

Eventually he rested his head back and let the motion of the bus carry a Buddy Holly tune through his mind, eroding the words and thoughts: thoughts of Helen and how she had excited him just then in the café by the mere fact that they had agreed on something vital. It was such a powerful state, to be in agreement, like two streams meeting to form a river. Thoughts also of how strange it was, getting to know her. They had married so fast and unthinkingly, not so much through passion but through mutual and unspoken logic. What was the point in two people being alone? He desperately did not want to be alone. And now he would have to justify their marriage, both to himself and to her. Today was the beginning of that.

Thoughts of the baby, the baby that meant more to him than he could justify or quantify, and for whom he felt an almost painfully dense love; so dense, so graceless, that he sometimes wondered if it could count as love at all. Thoughts of his mother and dead father. Thoughts about the aviary, which culminated in an effortless knowledge about the permanence, the coercive and perfecting permanence of a building, the permanence of a home, of going home, and of being home.

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.