Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“When I was a teenager, a few years before I went to London, I used to dream about doing this place up. I remember seeing all the factory workers come here on their bikes and sit at the bar, or out in the weeds at the back, trying to get a bit of fresh air, talking about blast furnaces, torpedoes, rolling mills, crucibles—”

Helen pouted a little. “Those words mean nothing to me,” she said. But she had stopped painting and started listening avidly as she always did when he talked about the past.

“And I always thought how bad it was that after twelve hours sweating in a factory there was nowhere outside for them to sit, I mean properly sit with space and air around them. Just weeds.”

He stubbed his cigarette out. Helen took the butt and tidied it away in her pocket.

“I thought they looked quite pretty.”

“Before the war it used to be grass and we sat out there in the summer — Sara used to play the violin and Rook the harmonica and we would sing—”

“I didn't know Sara played the violin,” Helen said.

“She did. She used to do a lot of things. We would sing — I still remember it— Komm doch, mein Mädel, komm her geschwind .” His singing voice was dry and dusty, and he couldn't remember when he had last thought of this song. “Dreh dich im Tanze mit mir, mein Kind! Hör, wie die Geigen locken zum Reigen, komm doch, mein Mäde! zum Tanz geschwind!”

He grinned at Helen and she returned it, reaching over to touch his knee.

“It was a Hungarian dance — you had to sort of twirl round and round until you were dizzy and fell over. And I remember — I was always allowed to stay up late. There were money spiders — that's what I remember most about it now. Money spiders, everywhere. In our hair, on our arms and legs. Sara always said they were lucky.”

From the corner of his eye he saw Eleanor coming out of the pub towards them. She was carrying a bottle of something and some large glasses.

Helen glanced at her and then away. “My mother said that, too.”

“But maybe not so lucky after all. The war came. No more of it. The grass turned to weeds and the spiders went.”

Helen watched and waited for him to say more, but now Eleanor was here he didn't want to. He felt, as he always felt, that a past was too intimate a thing to share with Eleanor, that her drab misfortune was infectious, and a meanness in his character detested the thought that their two lives might seem bound. She had of course been there, too, in those days. Money spiders had climbed up her arms. She had stayed up late with him. They had sometimes slept top to toe in the same bed. He would sleep facing away from her feet.

Eleanor stood behind them and spread her arms, bottle sloshing and flashing in the sunlight.

“It's the wilderness! It's the bloody wilderness!”

She flapped her arms about, her feet rooted in their Wellingtons to the peat. “Christ ,” she said. “I'd do anything to get away from here, and you come here by choice. Left London for this .”

Helen laughed. “This,” she said, stretching her own arms. “Look at it, it's heaven today.”

And it was. He took in the scene: enormous blue sky, wild-flowers, sun silvering the water in the dykes, the distant gas flame of the steelworks almost invisible against the light, and the three of them equally dwarfed by mile upon mile of sun-blurred horizon.

He recalled his conversation with Helen in the zoo cafeteria: we'll come to the edge of the wilderness and we'll make it ours. He dug his heel into the earth.

Helen went back to painting, still smiling. Her arms were dusted with colour. It was mid-afternoon and hot. As he watched her, she struck him as a different and more purposeful woman without a baby in her arms. Her body, always mummified by blue blankets and clinging limbs wrapped in terry towelling, reappeared solo in a definite, young shape, and her legs were revealed thin by the jeans which she had rolled up her shins.

Eleanor sat close to Helen, removed a jar of mussels she had stashed inside one of the glasses, and poured three drinks. Gin. Without taking her eyes from the painting Helen took the glass offered her, knocked the drink back, and put the glass down.

“This is the woman clothed with the sun,” she told Eleanor, who had leaned in over her shoulder. “In the Bible the woman clothed with the sun is the People of God. And with her in heaven is a red dragon with seven heads who is waiting to devour her unborn child. The dragon represents the nonbeliev-ers, the people who think they're not of God.”

He realised then that he had closed his eyes, and that he always closed his eyes when she began talking about the Bible. Now he opened them again to see her smooth her hair apologetically at the bad news.

“The unborn child is Jesus,” she said, “and the seventh head of the dragon is the Rome of the future, the Rome that is going to kill him. The Roman — Pilate, of course.”

Eleanor squinted her face into scepticism.

“Is that supposed to be true?” she asked.

“Yes, Eleanor, all of the Bible is supposed to be true in its own way.”

He rested himself back onto his elbows and witnessed himself in Eleanor, the churlishness and refusal to be bought with words. In its own way. This was such a lazy answer, he thought, and yet Helen obviously thought not. To her it explained everything, and so fully and satisfactorily.

“But after the woman gave birth to Jesus,” Helen smiled, “she entrusted him to the kingdom of Heaven, and she escaped to the wilderness.”

As she looked around her at the moors her smile persisted, but it was a not a delicate smile, not incidental as he had always thought, but serious and persuaded. Her peace was a tangible weight.

“During the war we built a bomb shelter in the garden.” She scooped a mussel from the jar and was pensive suddenly. “I used to play in it. When the bombing got bad we — me, my mum, my daddy, my brother — lived in the shelter for a week. I remember it as one of the very best weeks of my life because we were all together, absolutely for one another. We never argued, you see, because we didn't know when a bomb might drop and whether our shelter was any good. Mother prayed.”

She drew her legs up to her body and fixed her slightly excited look on the yellow woman she had painted.

“Bombs missed us. We began to assume that the prayers were making us immune. Then one night a bomb blew the door off our shelter and took off one of Daddy's feet. Mum lost her religion for five years, until her congregation convinced her again, or bullied her, I don't know which. I watched my daddy for weeks, struggling without his foot, going to work and getting on with it. He was a doctor, he had to keep working.”

She turned her head up towards the sun, warm and rich as it eased past midday.

“Unlike my mum, I wasn't in any doubt. I suddenly knew God existed because he'd saved my father. And that man with only one foot was still my daddy. If he'd had no feet, no hands, no legs, he'd still be my daddy. So we can't be our bodies alone. And if we are not our bodies we must be something else.”

“Our brains,” he said.

“More than that, Jake.”

“Why more than that?”

“His soul shone out through his eyes. I saw his soul.”

“In your own way.”

She held her gaze on him for several seconds too long, not with anger or irritation, just as though he were a formation of light she was suddenly interested in, or as if she were waiting for him to finish his sentence. He hadn't known about her father's foot; he wondered what else she didn't tell him. Footless father, secret fiancé. They had married so fast. Perhaps he didn't know her at all.