Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“You miss my point,” he says, “if you think it is about screwing people. Architecture is at the heart of life, it's life wrought into something permanent.” He turns his hands as if manoeuvring a great lever. “It's not just how to build but how to be moral and to use your brick, your concrete, your steel honestly, without tricking people, without treating them as if they are children.”

He is not sure how well he even understands what he says, and how much mass has been lost from the argument over the years. Nevertheless it gains stature as he speaks it, warming him to his profession as he has not been for years, unearthing that good faith that drew him to it in the first place. He drinks down another mint julep and considers Joy in her yellow dress gazing out over the ocean from the glass wall of her home, sipping a julep — never gulping, always sipping.

“I was going to build a glass house once.” He cuts steak away from the bone and chews it ponderously, wondering if he has an attentive audience.

He begins telling of the glass house he had always wanted on the moors. A little like that famous one in America, he says, and a flurry of nods and Philip Johnsons echo around the table. But better, he says. Better than that. He tells them how he had intended to dredge the water from the peat; at first the structure would sit out of sorts in its sponge bed. But gradually over decades the peat would begin to dry, it would be smothered and heated by sediment that would crush out its water and slowly, another century later, it would become brittle coal, then the coal would harden until it was a tough, glassy graphite. A polished glass house embedded in polished ground. And at last the land would have adapted itself to the structure. This manmade coercion of the landscape is what is rightly called architecture and the rest is called only art at best — at worst, modelling.

When he has finished speaking he assesses the three or four faces looking at him, sees interest, and so he goes on; he tells them that the building that inspired him the most is the bird place at London Zoo, a great iceberg of glass. While he gestures its size and angles with his arms, some quizzical and troubled stares meet his, the words Cedric Price are muttered; Lewis asks, Is it made of glass? Surely not? Surely the birds would die, isn't it made of some kind of mesh — some kind of —and Fergus interrupts with the assertion that it is a mighty piece of architecture, yes, who could fail to be inspired?

From their enthusiastic nodding he can only assume everything has gone well; he stands. “May I make a parting speech?” he says.

A choral yes passes up and down the table. He meets Eleanor's eye and sees her apprehension. She is sitting up straight, twitchy and almost — very uncharacteristically— birdlike.

“I would like to say only this,” he states. “You do not create a building in keeping with its environment. You create a building that gives the environment something to aspire to. Beauty is not the point. It just happens to slowly become the point. Is this not like life? I am going to spend my retirement seeking beauty. That's all, thank you.”

He does not exactly mean this, or rather, does not know if he means it or not. Seeking beauty? As if it can be found in the cupboard under the sink, or in one's sock drawer. But there is something very marvellous in being blindly profound, and everybody agrees it seems, raising their glasses and toasting him. Now when he looks at Eleanor she is relaxed and heavy once again in that cloak of needy devotion.

He has little idea what he just said; but that, he thinks, is because he is drunk. Nothing more.

Before they leave he decides to go out into the garden, and is confused to find it changed: where once had been a neatly, cleanly filled rectangle of poured concrete, surrounded by a low wall and open view of the moors, there is now a — what is its name? — the glass shed, the glass part, and it is cluttered with tables and large sweating plants. People are eating at the tables and look up at him as he wanders in. Unsure of how to get out again he panics and stares at their hot, flushed faces.

Then he sees on the floor, by his own feet, some footprints embedded in the surface, dried fossils of prints that are making their way out and over the wall that is no longer there. One set is large, the other smaller. He smiles before he has had time to guard himself from the tender swipe of the past, and then Eleanor comes up behind him, not seeming to notice the footprints at all, and guides him back to the others.

In his memories he is often travelling, riding uninhibited down motorways at night, down the brand-new M1 hushing and empty, along an American highway in a brown car with his wife. Flying.

When he is driving in those memories the roads are always like this: black and quiet. The car swishes; everything feels soft, overly soft. His eyes are always closed even when he is at the wheel. There is certainly no danger, only a secured sense of going home, though home is not necessarily the bricks and mortar of the coach house or the fluorescence of a motel or even the flat open landscape of his childhood. It is an eternally imminent concept of home whose proximity brings fantastic comfort until he begins to realise that it will only ever be proximate and will never arrive. Then there comes a longing and nothing to satisfy it, a neural restlessness.

It is the drink perhaps, more than the softness and darkness, that brings the longing now. Here is the urge to touch Eleanor, an urge inflamed by bourbon. An urge to reach across to the driver's seat and find her arm and to feel the movement of her leg pushing down the clutch, just to feel that she is alive. To touch the girl in the pub whose name he has forgotten; to touch Joy. He has not thought of Joy for days, nor her letters about her dear husband. What is the man's name? His brain is too soaked for this. Silas, that's his overblown name. Silas. Now he thinks of Joy, and that picture of her in her yellow dress. Thinks of fucking her, and enjoys the deliberately crude shape of the thought before it passes into reverence — reverence of her distant, almost ghostly being.

It is like a whip slicing through him — the brakes, the bump, the sharp whistling sound from Eleanor's throat, and then they are still, at a forty degree angle to the pavement. Eleanor's hands clutch the steering wheel ineffectually. He assesses himself — he is fine. She is fine too, eyes blank, very still, but fine. He looks back. A shape is lying in the road but he cannot identify it — not human, he thinks with relief, but what?

“Hit a dog,” Eleanor is saying, tearful.

He leaves the car and sees the dog there — it is black, its knees delicately bent and its head tilted up as if trying to escape the body's predicament. It is, he finds himself thinking, just a dog. There is no collar. When he strokes behind its ears his fingers come away with blood. The dog stares without movement but makes a small noise, no more than a song of the breath. It sounds like a tired woman humming a baby to sleep.

Eleanor is kneeling next to him in the road weeping, randomly generating different types of lament. “Oh no, Jake — oh goodness — oh Lord — what have I done? What have I done?”

He can think of nothing else to do; he picks the dog up and it screams. Has he ever heard a dog scream before? Surely dogs do not scream? The sound is similar, he thinks, to the noise his children used to make on their cheap plastic recorder. He lays the creature on his coat in the back of the Land Rover. Eleanor, pulling herself together, asks where they should go, and he suggests the police station, the only place he can think of that will still be open.