Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Helen's voice came from the kitchen. “Jake! We were in the middle of eating.”

He sniffed at the memories. He dug at the crumbling stone floor with his toe; rain had started drumming on the patches of corrugated-tin roof.

The whole lot could go, the whole house. It reminded him of denial and negation. Sara's religion hidden, Sara's trinkets shut away, Sara's past leaking potent in splintered stories when his father was out. Small charming and murderous stories, that was all he ever got of his mother's legacy. Then they dried up. The war shut them up. Something on his father's side of the battle was won for good, and Sara not only curbed herself but his father, too. He stopped defending his values, he stopped hitting out, stopped ranting. With nothing to fight for (Britain doing noble battle, his side victorious beyond doubt) he lost any recourse he had once had to human interaction, let Rook — with his gift for human interaction— edge further in, became quiet for almost twenty years, and then he died.

Helen appeared in the doorway with her hands on her hips and the picnic blanket draped over her arm. A bird flew up behind her and out of the room, she looked back at it rapt, childlike, then turned to him.

“I agree to all this”—she wafted a hand—“all these glass dreams, if you agree to have another child.”

He laughed. “Wow.”

“Don't wow me. Come on, yes or no.”

“Well, I suppose—”

“Great. Come on then.”

She brushed stone dust from her pleated skirt, scratched her cheek. “Come on.”

As she climbed the stairs she pulled off her knitted top. Shadowing her, he focussed on the ladder of bones that formed her spine so that it was as if he were climbing not the stairs but her — her physiology, her very structure and makeup, ascending the pathway to her brain, a brain so very different to his. She thought in different ways to him. But for this moment at least they were thinking the same: Henry is not here, the rain is thrumming, the atmosphere is right, another child would be sensible, yes, and fun, and good for Henry. Yes.

She reached the top of the stairs and peeked into the bedroom.

“You met Rook's granddaughter didn't you?”

He stopped. “Yes.”

“Eleanor said everybody in the pub talks about her. Was she really that beautiful?”

“Beautiful?” He felt hot and guilty. “Unusual more than beautiful.”

A gunshot. The silken white concrete at his feet. And then Joy's long thighs along the musty old sheets, the way, afterwards, she had risen from Eleanor's boatlike bed and knelt at her shoes. And how, as she peeled the leaf from their saturated yellow silk, she had said in a bruised voice, Going to go to America as soon as I can, leave this rain behind. And licked the leaf for good measure, and stuck it on his arm.

“And now she's gone off to America,” Helen added. “So brave — she's so young — younger than me, isn't she? I'd like to have met her.”

“How do you know she's gone?”

“Rook told me.”

“When did you see him?”

“He popped by yesterday while you were at work. He taught me to play poker. Not for money.” She ventured to the door on the left. “I think he wishes she hadn't gone, sometimes I think he's lonely. Jake, can I tell you a secret?”

He nodded blindly.

“Our trip to America, our honeymoon — it was lovely and everything but I was homesick most of the time. I could never live outside England.” She spread the blanket down on the floor of the bedroom. “Does that disappoint you?”

Shaking his head, he thought, so Joy has gone. He should have been relieved. That night he had arrived home and taken deep breaths in the garden. He had splashed his face with cold water. The gunshot still rang loud in his ears and Joy's dress in his mind; Joy's tendency, that he had discovered like a delightful truth, to tilt her head and fold her ear in half when speaking. He had been given his first glimpse at heaven and it had been yellow and completely impelling. Without meaning to he had woken Helen up, leaving rain-soaked clothes on the bedroom floor, and, seeing the leaf stuck to his arm (a birch leaf, silver birch), he swallowed his guilt and peeled it off, half expecting to see a wound under it or some evidence of wrong-doing, but saw only his almost young skin. Even the mere edge of spring had brought a tan to it.

He blinked and brought his attention back to the room, to Helen looking around, her arms folded to guard off the cold. She looked strange here in her bra, misplaced. This had been his parents' bedroom, once. Not so different in some ways, still bare and drab, only then it had been mitigated by the multiple blankets and cushions Sara depended on for the illusion of luxury. A section of the room had been annexed as a bathroom, incredibly small and now shabby and fungal in corners, the porcelain of the washbasin cracked.

Helen squeezed into the bathroom and closed the door. He heard her use the toilet, which no longer flushed; she was desperate, she said. By the time she had come back he'd smoothed the picnic blanket as large as it would go and without undressing, they made love. As he ran his hands over her back he found himself thinking of where she had come from. He had been to her house once — a mock-Tudor house in a neat and hushed cul-de-sac, nicely groomed parents and a back garden with a loop of lawn around a silver birch. Her parents said that as a girl she had used to peel off the bark and glue it to the wallpaper in her bedroom, and she bolstered this story with her own memories — the white chalk of the bark on her fingertips, and the fishy smell of glue.

For his part, here in this room, he could smell foxes, milk, a mix of stench and scent. He gripped the hem of Helen's skirt. He was making love, he thought, in his parents' bedroom. Five nights ago he had been with another woman and did not regret it. So now he was one of those men he disapproved of. He clutched the back of his wife's thighs and littered her neck with messy, roaming kisses.

Afterwards they tipped the components of the picnic into the knapsack and left. The rain had stopped and the moors were steaming slightly where the sun had begun warming the soil. The sight of it filled him with renewed ambition. The day after his adventure with Joy he had gone to work and been told that he would be the lead architect on the design for the new prison. Lying in bed while Helen slept that night, he thought of it intensely. He knew how it would be — not the terrible Victorian design of herding prisoners into cramped wings, like animals, and leaving them solitary. His would have four wings, T-shaped as he had read about in a recent journal, each wing reaching out from the central hub of the prison like a free limb. And each wing would be its own community, more like a public school than a prison. In the day the men could move amongst each other, at night they would be separated.

Helen said it sounded horrible. T-shaped wings? Sounded dark and dingy. Why did he want to work on such a horrible project? He told her: a prison dictated its own design like almost no other building: the size of the rooms and windows was set to a maximum, the width of the walls, the breadth of the staircases, the number of doors and windows, the regimented oval of land around which those men would run— these were all given. There was nothing less satisfying than a building which permitted its architect total freedom — much better was a building that exerted limits and challenges. To Helen it sounded far from pleasing. But it was not supposed to be pleasing; it was supposed to reform and moralise. Not punish, but moralise. This was the modern way.

Helen had sighed when he told her this, pulled her nightdress back into order under the covers, and assured him that he should not cast aspersions. A person's morality is a two-way journey, whether they appear good or bad depends only on which leg of the journey you catch them on, she said.