Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“Get me up, Jake,” Rook said, and then when he was up the old man sauntered off as steady as a racehorse, went round the side of the house, and was gone.

In the bathroom he washed the blood away and found a small nick in his gum, nothing to worry about. He got into the single bed next to his wife and tried embracing her, then tried to lie in such a way that he was not even touching her, then tried a casual hand on her stomach. He opted for this last position, feeling a restlessness in her gut and sensing that she was not properly asleep. Henry began rumouring tears, moaning in sleepy bubbles, but soon settled again.

He felt arrestingly alive. He was awake and twitching with ambivalence. There was the sense, first, that he could fly apart from all he knew, and those splinters of his being would fall into the resolute shape of the glass house and embody a future. Then there was the opposite sense of falling into the peat, becoming it. He must have been drifting into sleep because he did indeed feel the descent of himself and saw Sara's face before him, saw himself bowing to her amongst the trinkets he had found in the cupboard, and telling her, I want to be your son. Won't you have me? Then he came out of the strange sleep and smelt his wife's soapy hair, stretched his legs; his feet hung over the end of the mattress.

A little while later Helen got out of bed, groaned, went to the bathroom, and was sick. In between retching she sobbed and sniffed. He got up and tapped at the bathroom door, putting his fingers to the small throb in his gum.

“Are you all right?”

She made a sound, neither negative nor affirmative, and eventually he left her alone, thinking how he had never succeeded in making her drunk, even at their wedding, even on their honeymoon. While he waited for Helen to come back he leaned over the side of Henry's cot and watched the child sleep. That man, the one she was engaged to? Was it true? He felt bewildered by it. Flattered and awed that she would have severed all ties with another man without a word, just to be with him. He stroked Henry's forehead, passing his thumb back and forth, back and forth.

When Helen came back they got into bed and he turned away from her, pulling her arms around his waist. She gripped his hands.

“The missing e is the death of me,” she groaned. She smelt of mint where she had tried to scrub away the taste of her sins.

“Did you find it?”

She squeezed his wrists. “Forgive me, Jake.”

“Of course,” he returned. “I forgive you.”

Over his mint julep he consults this Bible, the skin soft under his fingers. It says very clearly that adultery is a sin. They have committed adultery, and blood is in their hands … and have also caused their sons, whom they bare unto me, to pass for them through the fire, to devour them.

Without fully comprehending the meaning of the words on the page before him he knows that they speak of unrightable wrongs. He bends forward at the kitchen table, turning slowly.

The letters are in a stack, a veritable brick, in plush cream and pastel envelopes. He cannot be sure exactly when they started coming or how long he has been biting his nails over them in this state of overwrought indecision, but there has been an increased urgency to their arrival so that now they arrive two or three times weekly and the handwriting becomes more hasty and desperate. Whatever Henry might say, it is a man's handwriting, constricted and reticent, and it leans the wrong way which suggests the man is left-handed like himself. This only adds ammunition to the theory of the affair, since Helen liked his own left-handedness. She liked it that his ring finger belonged to his more active and capable hand, as if that might mean that he would be an active and capable husband. She decided that left-handedness denoted sensitivity and that her active and capable husband would still, beneath all that physical brawn, have the soft innards of a clam.

Who is this man? What does he want with Helen? Were they intimate? If so, how? Why? When? When faced with the unknown, or with particular troubling outcomes, it is, to use one of Helen's favourite words, healthy to be moderately afraid. Well, as he sits here now he is petrified by the letters; he bites his nails, becomes irritated with himself, and drinks the mint julep in anxious instalments as if it is a thought he is chewing on. The fear is not concerned with what the outcome of the letters might be but rather with the notion that, whatever the outcome, he will deal with it wrongly.

If Helen were having an affair will he be obliged to forgive her? After all she is passed away, gone to the other side, departed. Here are yet more choices of expression, and he could go on. Pushing up the daisies, kicked the bucket, met her maker. Such a spread of options before him only heightens the fact that, looking up at the utensils that hang along the kitchen wall, he cannot name them all. Masher, knife with teeth — sawing knife? Perhaps no, but then what? — peeler, whisker. He looks out to the garden and the thing that the washing hangs on. Windmill. Wind thing. Wind washing thing.

Helen has had her innings. She has given up the ghost.

If she was not having an affair and was only up to something of the utmost purity (if this shaky left-handed man is the grown-up and grateful orphan she had secretly been supporting all her life, or if he is her priest), then is he, he wonders, supposed to be angry with Helen nevertheless for concealing something from him? Is he supposed to write to the man and tell him the news? Are they supposed to become friends?

The trouble with right and wrong, he thinks, is that one is usually disguised as the other. He finishes his mint julep and thinks of a myth he knows about two travellers who knock on the door of an elderly couple and ask for shelter. The elderly couple welcome them in, scour a dining board with mint, and prepare the travellers a simple meal. The travellers turn out to be gods in disguise and, so impressed by the hospitality of their hosts, give them a temple in exchange for their ratty-tatty house.

He can only assume this is a lesson in being good and doing the right thing, but the right thing in one situation is the wrong thing in the next. If the travellers had turned out to be murderers, letting them in would have been the wrong thing. Besides, it seems terribly unfair that one should be judged in secret, that gods should sleuth around searching out their unsuspecting victims. He, perhaps, is being judged second by second by his formless wife — an exacting, unrevealed ghost, and a kind of god herself.

He had always told Helen this myth when she said he was drinking too many mint juleps; he would point out how mint is a symbol of home and humble goodness. And then he would wonder, if humble domesticity is so prized a virtue, did that elderly couple even want a temple? What is right, what is good? What use is truth? What constitutes a happy ending?

Eleanor picks up a plastic container of red fruit and rattles it.

“Do you like raspberries?”

“I love them.”

“So we'll get some then. Did Helen use to do anything special with raspberries? Jam? Could try to make a tart.”

He digs his hands into his pockets. “I don't think we had them. They weren't her thing.”

“Shame,” Eleanor says. She drops them into the basket.

It is true, Helen did dislike them. He recalls her once tasting one and taking it out of her mouth. Hairs, she frowned, texture, not right. She had given him the chewed remains of the fruit and smiled; he had eaten it from his palm. But he doesn't in fact remember if he likes raspberries.