Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

When Helen came into the living room this is how he was, his neck craned as he fluttered his hands over the piano keys. Henry sitting stoically in the crook of his arm.

“What's that you're playing? Is it ‘Three Blind Mice' or something?”

“It was meant to be Debussy.”

Helen laughed and then put her hand to her mouth.

“It's difficult one-handed,” he said.

“I know. All my life is one-handed.”

On the left side of his body was the baby; on the right side, in his pocket, a letter from Eleanor. With Helen close by the letter felt the heavier of the two, so much so that it made Henry weightless; he tightened his grip on the child and stretched his little finger to the octave below; he was not anywhere close to being good enough to handle Debussy — such strange chords and fingerings — but he wasn't interested in starting anywhere lower. Better, he concluded, to be very bad at a difficult thing than very mediocre at an easy thing.

“Well, Jake,” Helen said. “What do you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of—” Her expression changed, less curious, more excited. She reached for Henry. “Haven't you been upstairs? Don't you know?”

“If I say, know what, will that give it away, that I don't know?”

“Follow me.”

She beckoned him out of the living room, into the middle room from which the stairs led. They climbed together, he following her. The letter shifted silently in his pocket. Henry babbled at him over Helen's shoulder and pointed in great excitement at the wrought-iron birds and leaves of the banister. He glanced out of the landing window at the road and the church. The church bells were ringing, six o'clock, he thought, though there were never six chimes, always waves of them one after the other breaking on his eardrums. He looked at the back of his wife's shin-length rayon dress as it moved along the landing. He looked at the small stain on the carpet where the roof sloped at the eaves and piles of blankets were stored. Henry pointed wildly at the walls the blankets the stain the doors the webs and laughed in bubbles.

They went into Henry's room, across its chocolate-brown carpet, past translucent mobiles, a light-blue cot, wardrobes along one wall stuffed with unpacked boxes of photographs, Christmas decorations, clothes. To the right was a low inner door — a secret door, Helen had remarked when they first looked round the house. They bent double through it and were then in their bedroom. If they had taken the other stairs that led to the bedroom directly from the study, where they had almost begun, they would have been here a minute ago, but Helen liked the game of the double staircase. She would enjoy it, she had said, when there were two children in the house and they could run around, up and down the two staircases, in loops like birds flying.

“Look, Jake,” Helen said, pointing unnecessarily at the bed. “Look what Sara gave us.”

In the middle of the bed, on their faded pink blanket, were piles of cash — neat structures of ten-pound notes.

“What is this?”

“Some money from your daddy's death. She was going to give it to you another time, when she — passed away, I suppose,” Helen hesitated to give the notion some respectful space. “But she wants you to have it now, she said what use would it be to you in twenty years? It'll be too late then.”

He approached the money and handled it. “She came here today, and gave you this?”

“One thousand pounds. Your daddy was richer than you thought.”

He said nothing. Henry made an aimless grab for the paper and then put his fist in his mouth.

“We should go and thank her. Perhaps we can have her round for dinner?”

“Yes, if she'll come,” he said.

He was not as shocked as he thought he should be. In his mind he was always going to be comfortable; to see his bed awash with money was not as incongruous as it was for Helen, who had chosen him, perhaps, for his lack of comfort. Despite his profession there had always been a whisper of poverty about him. He attracted all that was insalubrious; it was his gift that his wife most cherished — the gift of a house with cobwebs the length of legs, of rising damp, of an edge to her billowing and unchallenged worldview, a mild demon that proved her god.

“It will help us when we have another baby,” she said. She rested Henry amidst the piles of money. Perhaps she was trying to envisage how they would look in luxury. Seeing her small, worried smile he took her in his arms and nodded. He would have been shocked by all this had he believed for a moment this was, as Sara was claiming, his father's money. As it was he had other ideas.

“I'll see my mother tonight,” he told her.

Sara didn't speak, but went to the kitchen to make coffee. He waited, outstaring the orange carpet before feeling the inevitable urge press his bladder. The letter was hot in his pocket; he skim-read it again as he stood at the toilet, unpicking Eleanor's handwriting. By the time he came back downstairs from the bathroom Sara was placing a tray on the coffee table. She plumped up the cushions on the sofa. She was wearing the dress he most liked to see her wear, a long brown wool dress with a dark-yellow belt, and a run of four fake buttons at the neck.

“Sit, sit,” she told him.

Coffee came, and sugared ginger.

He took the plate in the flat of his hand. “Thank you, Sara.”

“Don't mention it. I was about to have coffee and ginger anyway. I always do before bed. It's a strange little habit I've picked up.”

“Yes — I mean for the money.”

“Oh, that.” She sat across the room from him in her chair and pushed her skirt along her thighs as if trying to shoo it away. “Thank your father, not me.”

“Well I can hardly do that.”

“Asch.”

“It's a lot of money, Sara.”

“I suppose you are going to offer it back, and then I will refuse to take it, and we will bicker like this for five minutes, and I will win, and then we will be in the same situation we are now, yes? So let's agree not to do this. Time is short.”

She popped a cube of ginger in her mouth. It was typical of her to diagnose time like this: time is short, time is running out, there's no time, the time has passed. He ignored the comment.

“I wasn't going to argue, Mama, in fact I've already decided what to do with the money, if you approve.”

“Good.”

She smiled and put her plate on the carpet, the ginger neatly consumed, and took her gold-rimmed coffee cup from the tray, ran her finger round the rim until it settled on the chip.

“I want you, Helen, and Henry to be comfortable.”

“Of course.”

He waited for her to ask what it was he had planned, but she only chewed in apparent thought, surveying the fireplace from a distance as if she were deciding whether she liked it. He tried to remain composed — easy at any other time with any other person, but with his mother, never easy. Never easy. Hysteria flickered in his gut and he swallowed. If he were hysterical, would he get a reaction then? An emotion? Or just this: this woman facing her own silence?

“Aren't you going to ask what I plan to do with the money, Sara?”

“Must I ask? Can't you simply say?”

Yes, he realised. He had been stupid, childish. Why did he have to wait for her prompt?

“I'm going to buy the Junk.”

“Oh.” Her expression gave nothing away; it was neither approving nor disapproving, kind nor unkind. “And what will you do with the Junk?”

“Knock it down and build another house.”

“You have a house. Perhaps you could do some little improvements to it. It's, what is the word, ratty-tatty.”