Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

He had contested: he did not care whether the prisoners really were good or bad — this wasn't a question for the likes of him. He only took the agreed assumption and acted to it.

Perilous, she sniffed, and lifted her arm above her head to sleep.

“We should call them Conception Events,” Helen said now as she got into the car. “Trying for a new child— Conception Events. What do you think?”

“It sounds hopeful,” he agreed.

“I wonder if Henry is okay, he's been with Sara all day. We shouldn't have left him.”

He wished to ask her, Why the sudden change — you weren't worried about Henry before — is it the house? Is it because we lived like peasants? Do you think Sara wasn't a good mother?

“Henry will love her,” he said. “She will love Henry. We won't be able to tear them apart.”

“How will Henry love her?” Helen muttered, turning her face away. “Not the most easy woman to—”

“Love,” he finished.

Helen faced him. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I really am sorry. She's your mother. I don't even know her.”

She settled her gaze on him for a moment and then, probably realising he was not going to speak, resorted again to the window and the view: the landscape she thought would sink beneath sea level if left unguarded.

He started the engine and drove off, the Mini gathering a bit of speed on the perfectly straight roads. If only he could press his foot down hard on the accelerator and churn along at eighty, ninety! It seemed a way of laying claim to the place. In London he had always felt the city was a living entity that he could, perhaps, rub along with or even, with his buildings, nourish — but he was always superfluous to it, no matter what he did. Now, for example, now it would be oiling along, grinding along without him. Whereas here, these moors, that house, had been waiting for him all this time.

His wife was right in what she said about Sara. It was difficult to love a woman so bound by her own limitations and losses. But he was beginning to understand that Sara did not wish to be loved, she wished only to survive. Love to Sara was what he was to London: perfectly redundant.

When they got back to the sun-trap house they found Henry propped lavishly against the arm of the sofa, and Sara throwing and turning the praise ring, moving round in her long brown dress in inexpressive circles; all her animation was contained in her wrists, which moved the praise ring, and her mouth, which formed sounds.

“En, oh, peh, kuh. Kuh, peh, oh, en,” she was singing with a sweet and clear voice.

I have caught you out, he wanted to blurt. Caught you being yourself! He thought of all those leaflets he had made advertising the new lobby group, stacked up in his study against his mother's wishes, all the petition forms he had drawn up, the reading and research he had done, the sense of purpose it gave him, and how he was right not to stop.

Sara turned to them. “I am teaching your child the alphabet,” she said. “Say it, Henry, say what you've learnt.”

The baby looked about him perplexed and managed one fat sound, “Ma,” then a slimmer one, “Mi.”

Sara, standing in the square of light that came through the window, shook her head at the smiling baby. “No no dear child. Phonemes are next week. This week is the alphabet. But you are a clever child, a clever and wondrous child are you not?”

“He's five months old.” Helen paced towards Henry and picked him up. He had rarely seen his wife so brittle and agitated. Conversely, he rarely saw his mother so relaxed in another human's company as she had been for that brief moment with Henry, before they interrupted the scene. Sara linked her fingers and half smiled.

“Every month is a gift. Every month is a month he won't have back. Your child is a genius. Don't overlook him.”

Helen stroked the downy silk of the baby's hair. He stood in the centre of the room trying to command a presence, mark himself as the axis of this little setup. Sara was watching him keenly as if she knew all too well what he thought. Could she tell where they had been, that they had made love where she had also made love, slept, read, embroidered mythologies? Could she smell their sex, like a rude smell that intrudes in the middle of a perfectly good reverie?

“I mean it,” Sara said when Helen had gone upstairs to change Henry. “He's a special child. Don't overlook him.”

The Conception Events did not pass Henry by; he knew what his parents were doing, as if he understood something of the gravity of it. He did not want to be replaced or added to, but nevertheless he was silenced, as if awestruck, as if something wonderful would come whether they each welcomed it or not.

The nights passed with solemn committed attempts at a child. The prison was his first serious project, and with this, and the new child that must surely be on its way, his life seemed to be moving forward. They listened to Buddy Holly. Buddy will be the first thing this child ever hears, Helen observed. She'll come out screaming, Buddy Holly! It'll mean Joy! I'm alive! And when the record was finished, revolving on the turntable, he noticed he was recalling the gunshot. The leaf. The leaf, the gunshot. The sight and sound of them had begun rushing into almost every silence. Stuck whispering in its grooves the record would send him off to sleep. It is nothing, he told himself. Joy is gone, it all amounts to nothing. Don't think of it.

After a fortnight of the Events, Helen said she had been having some peculiar dreams, that maybe they would come into some money.

“We will?”

She set her head on the pillow and closed her eyes. “Mmm,” she said, drifting, her speech loosening. “I think.” Her knack for plucking sleep from nowhere was astonishing, one moment talkative and the next torpid and heavy-eyed.

“Buddy Holly,” he whispered into her ear. “Eureka.”

“Yes,” she whispered in return.

“And when we do, we'll build a house, do you want that, Helen?”

He stroked her back and arms and let an urge for her abate. She didn't answer. He lay for half an hour and thought of the wet peat that had been caked to his shoes, Joy's white hand carving angles in the darkness. Here would be a good spot. With the factory behind like a frame, d'you see it? With the sun rising behind.

Again he asked. “We'll build a house, Helen. Glass. Something for Henry to be proud of. Do you want that?”

“Sshhh,” she said in her childish sleep-voice. “I'm having a dream, I'm dreaming about Alice. Alice under the cherry tree.”

“Who's Alice?”

“Indeed,” she whispered, smiled, then let sleep take over.

He is late. He scurries from the bed and dresses fitfully. Sometimes there is this urgency to get out. Get out, deconstruct this big sleepy being that dwells in bed, and get up. Eat, get out. What if he could get up at this point before the dream of Joy began so that he did not have to dream it for thirty-five years? What if the moment packed itself into a gunshot and died with the sound? Before he leaves the bedroom he glances at Eleanor, who sleeps on, the cumbersome shadow of himself that he has left behind, as if he must sever himself from her to form a new day.

Today at least there is a reason for this urgency, and as he descends to the kitchen he wonders if his hair is acceptable this morning, if Alice will approve of the way he has gone thin and grey on top and of this funny round-shouldered thing that has happened to him. Well, she will not approve, but she may accept. She may smile, put her fingers through the grey strands, and say, “There is still a little black underneath, Jake.”