Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“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.