Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

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.

There were six or so inmates in the visits room: Are any of these thieves? he had asked. A shrug from Henry. Nobody asks what you're here for, Henry had said. He found this information unbelievable, but let it pass. He could not abide thieves. Murderers, adulterers, heretics, junkies, kidnappers — not ideal, but the world needs its irregularities: it is too perfectly spherical, too perfectly perfect without. God is too easy without the challenge. But thieves disrupted the oiled mechanisms of give and take that he, personally, took as the most human of human traits: the ability to recognise value, fairly trade, to save for what seemed important, to spend on what seemed immediate. To give, also, and to provide.

Each of these six inmates, except Henry, was being visited by a woman. One of the women had a child who played sullenly with his father's fingers, lifting and dropping them. He recalls a black couple whose quiet conversation was casual and sporadic as if they were waiting together for a bus. How loyal women are, he had thought — loyal and patient. His mind was drawn to his daughter, he wanted to talk to Henry about her but had no idea what he would say — could not bear, more likely, Henry's casual regard of her. About Alice, he wanted to say. Let's talk about Alice. Instead he put his hands to his chin and tilted his face upwards.

As he slid the letters across to Henry he looked at the grey walls, the refectory along the wall to his right — no, left, no. Right. He remembers that the woman at the counter looked drowsy as she piled bars of something on a rack. He sipped his tea, usually refusing tea on grounds of its tasting like wet clay, or old wood, but there at the prison it is always strangely delicious — strong, sweet, still hot in the stomach and homely.

Helen was my mother, my mumma, his son had said, cradling his cup in his hands just as Helen used to. Do you remember I used to call her mumma? And she used to call me bubba. And now you sit here and accuse her of having an affair!

He and Henry had disagreed about the letters; he was sure, is still sure, that if they read the letters they would find infidelity in them. Only a secret lover would keep writing to his beloved after her death, not knowing that she was dead. The thought is painful to him, so much so that he sometimes feels pity for this poor man, who must by now be worried, mustn't he? The lack of replies must be eating at him.

Henry was not interested in the theory and put the letters aside, yawned, and rambled about prison life. They saved their fruit rations, he said, and fermented them with marmite and sugar to make wine; he asked if he could be sent some mar-mite, they had stopped selling it at the prison shop.

There was an argument about who knew Helen better. He remembers he had tried to pull the chair towards the table to impose his view, but the chair was rooted to the floor. In the effort he had done something, spilt his tea or knocked the letters to the floor, it is unclear now, but one of the women had looked around at him as if apologetic, and he had felt, again, something like unworthiness or failure in the slow tired blink she gave before she turned back to her husband.

The argument — the argument had been so familiar. He can't with any honesty say they definitely had it this time, more that it is just an argument that is always there for the having, regurgitated so many times it could be scripted. He sometimes wonders if it is the only conversation he and Henry have really had since Helen died. It is an argument over who knows her best, who is more like her, who loved her most. The debate tires and upsets him; how can he even approach these questions? Helen was his wife. Compacted in that word is a whole planet of intimacy, not to mention the fact of choice: that he and Helen chose each other in a way that Helen and Henry never did. Slept together, too. Made Henry. Henry is secondary to Jake-and-Helen, a by-product.

Henry gathered the letters then, from the floor or the table, and patted them tenderly into order. He began to talk about a German poet in his block who had a wife at home with long blond hair and eyes like planets. The poet wrote his wife a hundred poems a day. People write when they're lonely, Henry said, and it would be no good just writing to yourself, what you say has to be said to someone. Days when the poet couldn't get his post sorted in time to go out he went mad. Henry smiled as if at a fond memory. He said that maybe those mysterious letters were just from somebody lonely exploiting Helen's charity.