Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

At almost one a.m., forms filled, the dog alive but sedated on a vet's table, they pull up outside the dark shape of his house and get out of the car.

In contrast to his own lucidity Eleanor looks exhausted and distressed. She makes her way up to bed. He is as lucid as a bright day, and unaffected by the dried burgundy blood that is still on his fingers or the scream that lingers in his ear. Restless, he stays downstairs and helps himself to Helen's Barley Cup. The jar must have been there for months — years; the best before date is July 1993, but what, he wonders absently, is the date now? It is difficult to believe they are so far down the century already; how time leaves you winded and stupid! He drinks from a dirty mug because the sizable mug collection that the family has acquired over the years has formed a sullied congregation at the kitchen sink, or in the kitchen sink, or on the table.

When he gets into bed he cannot sleep, and instead churns words through his head: Silas, Helen, Eleanor, Alice, Fergus. It dawns on him that these words are all names. What, then, is the difference between a word and a name? How similar they seem: Silas, for example. How similar to silence, and how without physical grounding. He repeats it, not as a name anymore but as a tool with which he sharpens the claws of his memory. He simply must not fly apart, he thinks. It was wrong of him to drink so much, and to indulge his thoughts the way he has.

He turns on the light and begins a letter to Joy in his usual pseudo-aristocratic style. Dear Joy, One thinks one is going mad at last, one lies in bed and repeats the word Silas. One thinks, perhaps, that one takes after one's son after all, though one resists the idea.

Eleanor rolls over and groans. “Turn the light out,” she says.

“I'm writing.”

“What?”

“Epistles.”

“Oh Christ.” She nestles her arms down under the blankets. “What's an epistle?”

“A letter, Ellie. A letter.”

He knows that she likes it when he shortens her name; she gives a contented sigh and slips into an easy childlike sleep.

It is good to write to Joy, he can tell her anything. Letter after letter, year after year, she invents herself as someone perpetually unpredictable. She never thinks, says, or does the obvious. When he told her about his diagnosis — writing the word Alzheimer's carefully, copying the unfamiliar spelling from a book — she wrote back and said only that she has prepared a spare room in her house for when he slips into oblivion, and has told Silas that her formative lover might be coming to stay. She has festooned the room with coloured cushions and may paint the walls orange — her favourite colour — as if expecting the arrival of a new baby. She did not say, how terrible. She did not say, you must tell Henry.

Perhaps he is mistaken, but he has felt Henry coming back to him slowly since Helen died, leaning on him, confiding a little more, looking at him with a depth of empathy he had never shown before. Even Henry's requests for money have been reassuring in his ability to provide it. He has never been richer, never had, he supposes, more to give and so few to give it to. He can now see his son, not as an enemy or a stranger but as an edgy child, his edgy frightened child. Their fractious little chats are the most honest encounters they have ever had. Fatherhood must come in cycles, so that you create something helpless that needs you, and you watch it grow until it is so big it needs you again, like a sunflower that grows to six feet and needs staking. Henry needs him, he decides; depends on him.

When Alice was born one of his first thoughts was that one day perhaps he would be able to give her away in marriage. This was a cause for celebration, because it thereby implied, did it not, that until then she would be his to give away? He was standing at the foot of two or so decades of ownership of this exceptional being. She was his, his! He loved her for that (though not that alone); he loved her exultantly.

Eleanor is the voice of unreason if she thinks a father will allow himself to disintegrate into a dribbling, idiotic babyhood in front of his children. And there comes that feeling again that this will not happen to him, it will not go that far. He will not let it go that far.

Though he is cheered by the thought, the letter to Joy does not proceed terribly well; he feels suddenly exhausted and puts his head heavily on the pillow. He thinks of the dog, the needle entering its vein, thinks of oblivion, and hopes the creature is resting soundly.

Gracious with age, improbably tall, dressed in a pin-striped suit that must have been three or four decades old, Rook manifested himself in the living room with a filthy and charming smile. He kissed Sara on either cheek: “My queen,” he called her. “Sara my queen.”

Then he took Helen's hand and gave it the sharp, faithful treatment of his lips — a kiss, a wide crooked smile. At last he turned.

“Jake, my son, my favourite son.”

“Rook.”

They hugged, a lofty and lopsided affair. Rook had brought the sugar in with him, his clothes smelt as the air often did— that heavy burnt smell of sugar beet from the factory seven or eight miles away. After time it would work its way into the clothes, skin, and hair of everybody that lived here, just as the peat would work into the nails, and the flatness into the attitude. It happened to everybody, everybody, that was, but Sara, who seemed impermeable. It therefore struck him when Rook carried the moors into Sara's house that a cocoon had been penetrated. He sat on the sofa, on top of the photographs of the coach house, with his legs spread. Sara brought him cherry wine, leaving the bottle on the coffee table in front of him.

“You've got a boy.” Rook looked around the room. “Where is he?”

“Asleep,” he answered.

“Of course. Babies sleep — I forgot.” Rook wheezed a laugh; same wheeze, he thought. Same laugh. Same amusement at his own behaviour.

“Henry doesn't sleep a lot,” Helen offered, pulling her chair towards the coffee table. She tucked her skirt underneath her as she adjusted her position.

“Henry?” Rook grinned. “What a fine and regal name, like my own. Charles, that is, not Rook. Say it: Charles. It always sounds regal even if you swear first. Fucking Charles.”

Wheezing, tittering, he reached for the bottle of wine and poured into each of the glasses. When Helen leaned forward and covered her own he leaned in farther, lifted her hand towards him, and turned it palm up. He ran a long finger across her palm, a finger livid with the life and anger of old age.

“I'm a soothsayer. Sooth says you drink tonight.” Then he placed her hand carefully on the table and filled her glass. “Henry,” he repeated, nodding appreciatively. “Good name. I'm a royalist. Did Jacob tell you that? To the bitter end. Don't believe in politics, it's all buggery, that's the truth. It gives the illusion of freedom, freedom for the people. Truth is the people don't want to be free, they want to be owned by someone better off than them. They want to be pets, you ask anyone, you ask anyone what their fantasy is — it's being tied up and looked after. Yes, I'm a royalist. I'd let the queen tie me up any day. In fact I have. She's a busy woman, used silk and a slipknot. I let myself out after.”

Rook glanced up towards the kitchen where Sara was cooking, gulped his wine, and made a contented sound in the back of his throat.

“Don't you think the queen's a beautiful woman?” Helen ventured, smoothing away her smile with the hand Rook had touched.