Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

He thinks of Helen tucking her hair behind her ear and reading from the Song of Songs. My beloved's eyes are washed with milk —and her feet smashing glass, and her picking at fish and chips in newspaper wrappings while she read the news. Monkey goes into space. Mother's milk gives baby brain damage. Israel attacks Egypt. Dog goes into space. Twenty thousand jobs cut at the steelworks. Monkey goes into space. Brain damage. Her picking at batter with her skinny fingers and then flattening out the newspaper saying, “I'll keep this, this is important,” and him screwing it into a ball and throwing it in the bin. “It smells,” he would say, “and besides, tomorrow there will be more news.”

The plane drops towards the airstrip and he heaves a sigh of relief, recognising in the slow-down of the engine, the lengthening of its chugs, a familiar creeping desire to be getting home.

It was the end of 1960 when his father was buried. He walked through Quail Woods with his mother who divulged no, or little, emotion. Sometimes she sighed or said, “Asch,” as if arguing against something in her head; sometimes she sneezed at the lily scent in her nose, sometimes she squeezed his arm and then, as he turned to console her, dropped it as if playing a game with him.

Some way along the wide track she stopped, knelt, and took a flask of coffee and two china cups from her bag. They were her best cups as usual, their gold rims slightly chipped. She poured two half measures, unwrapped sugar cubes from a napkin which she dropped in neatly, and handed him his drink.

“Thank you,” he said.

“To Henry,” she offered, raising her cup. “For bringing the future when we most need it.”

“To Henry. And to Father.”

“And to us. Is it appropriate for me to be drinking a toast on the day my husband is buried?”

“In healthier cultures death is a celebration, Sara.”

“Ah yes, so it is. Perhaps we should offer the trees a dance.” She proffered her cup towards a tree and gave a bow. “May I have this dance? No? You're feeling under the weather? Well, trees, we are all under the weather! Ha!” She spread her arms and looked up. “All of us under the weather!”

He took his mother's arm and pulled her gently towards him. “Tell me, what do you think of Helen?”

“She is too sincere for you,” she said after a short pause.

“Sincere?”

“You will become bored of her, just as I became bored of your father.”

“But Sara.” He was a little shocked. “You gave him so much of yourself, you gave up so much of yourself.”

“As one has to, Jake, when one is bored. Give, give — you hope in all the giving that they will give back and then you wager, well, if they don't, at least you will both have nothing left to give. At last you will be equal. Your father and I were very equal by the time he died.”

He frowned. “A terrible philosophy—”

“I loved him,” she said, as if sealing the debate. “He was a friend. So there you have it.”

The edges of the woods were visible from this central path, and beyond them ploughed fields. In the car, on the roadside where the trees abruptly ceased, Helen would be waiting for them, leaning back against the new leather as she breast-fed. Today had been the first time Sara and Helen had met; it had been brief and cursory with all focus on the baby. They had each agreed that Henry was beautiful; they had reached a broad consensus about the way a baby's face is so general, made to a recipe of unbearable dearness, and Sara had added something about the way the dearness is at some point lost in a spurt of growth and features. She and Helen had looked at him and laughed as if to suggest that he was the living example of this loss. He had touched his own face self-consciously. In fact he was good-looking and they all knew it, and an appreciative silence followed as they all considered, he was sure, how very similar he and his son already were, how alike in mannerisms, especially the comic way Henry, only weeks old, held his hands thoughtfully to his chin.

All in all he thought the meeting between his wife and mother had gone well. It was a short encounter, yes, but Sara did not like first-time meetings to last long, even intimate ones like these. She liked to look, as if deciding whether she would buy, and she liked to go away and think before she said anything she might not mean. She had looked long at his new wife and baby, bowed, and said quietly, “A privilege to meet you.” He had thought, perhaps, that she meant it.

“Is sincerity not a good thing, Sara?” he asked, throwing out the gritty dregs of the coffee.

“I said she was too sincere. Too much of anything is tiresome, she will push you to acts of goodness that don't suit you very well. You are my child, I want you to be what you are and not what a pretty girl from the suburbs wants you to be.” She shrugged, and in her black mourning dress took measured steps, one two — three four, one two — three four. “I have something for you,” she added.

As she crouched again, digging into her bag, he thought of how she was, or had become, a thousand acts of goodness herself, straitjacketing herself into Englishness, cooking the food his father liked, dispensing with the excess sugar and fat, shearing off her mother tongue, evicting her past, funnelling, tapering. Goodness could be a narrow state; perhaps she was right.

“How is Rook?” he asked as he waited.

“Rook? Oh, Rook is fine, of course.”

“And?”

She glanced up. “And?”

He leaned back against a tree and turned his cup in his hand. “Perhaps you could marry him.”

“We go driving together sometimes,” she said, looking away. “We drive out to the coast to check if Europe is still there. We've checked across the sea so many times, we have never yet seen it, but we assume it must still be there. So we eat saveloys and wave at it. Hallo Europe, we say, nice to not see you. We are altogether senile, at least Rook is. I pretend, huh, to keep him company.”

“So is that a yes, or a no?”

“Jacob.”

“Mama.”

“You know I don't like to be called mama.”

“Nor I Jacob.”

“Well then aren't we both rebellious.”

By now she had abandoned her search in the bag. She slouched forward as elderly women generally do not, certainly as she generally did not, and gazed ahead blankly. Then, as if awakening, she took a shoe box from her bag that could not possibly have taken her all that time to find, and stood.

“Here,” she said, and smoothed her hair; it was still remarkably dark between the grey strands, and glossy.

He put the empty cup in his pocket. When he opened the box he found a Bible. It was old, the leather weakened to the feel of silk under his fingers. They had stopped walking by now, and he knelt on one knee, his mother lingering above him. Then she crouched and put her head close to his; her hair smelt of lilies.

“It belonged to my parents,” she said. “Why don't you have it, now that you're married to a religious woman? It's my gift to you both, maybe a wedding gift since you just ran away and married in secret.”

“Sara—”

“No, I'm not angry, I'm happy you did it that way. Too much song and dance the other way, too much money.”

He nodded, a little underwhelmed by the gift — touched and even excited that it was from his grandparents, but without any wish to own a Bible. The samovar perhaps, the praise ring his grandmother had used, the objects of charm and intrigue that belonged to an estranged world. But a Bible? Was his mother mocking him?

“Helen will like it,” he said eventually, deciding to find in his mother's gesture some attempt at friendship with his wife.