Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“I doubt it, the cover is human skin,” she said. “She may be too sincere for human-skin Bibles. But you don't have to tell her.”

He coughed. Involuntarily his fingers danced across the leather, not wishing to rest anywhere. He eyed his mother then, assessing her, trying to show that he was not thrown by her games.

“My parents kept the Bible out of rebellion,” she said, conceding to explanation. “My father bought it for his bookshop — Bibles sold very well in those days, people were very afraid the world would end if they didn't pray hard enough. Then he discovered how it was bound and he kept it, as a rebellion against all this madness, this Catholic madness and hysteria. He thought it — how can I say it — belittled the Catholics, to have their precious holy Bible bound with a precious holy human. Jews do not believe they are the only creatures that matter. Catholics not only believe it, they know it as a fact. He wanted to mock them. He had a dry humour.”

“I see,” he said, recollecting the photograph of his grandparents that lived on the dresser in Sara's living room. The picture showed a large, elegant, and nervous-looking middle-aged man, standing next to a thin, broad-grinning woman. He remembered how Sara polished the image with a flourish, saying, Here, my father, as if all history gathered up its skirts and knelt at the foot of this man.

“I'll keep it for myself,” he said.

“It's very valuable.”

“I'll keep it. I won't give it away to Helen. You say I'll give myself away to her but here it is — here is me not giving anything.”

Here is me being your child, he thought to say. He put the box under his arm and began walking. The road was close; he could see the back end of the Mini parked up in the lay-by.

Sara laughed lightly. “It is hardly that simple. The most important things are given without even knowing. We have a very strong tendency to give exactly what we can't afford, Jake, that's why I warn you. I sound morbid, but what sort of mother would I be if I didn't tell you the one thing I know.”

Just before they reached the car he put his hand on Sara's shoulder.

“Do you know,” he said to his mother, “I think Helen and I will move back.”

He said it before he thought it, in fact he said it hours before he thought it, so that he was in the free fall of inebriated, unplanned speech. “Helen would grow to like it here, she's already introduced herself at the church, perhaps I can do good things.”

He waited for her response, but none came. She watched him with what he could only summarise as politeness.

“What is there here after all,” he went on, “except moors and more moors? Peat and more peat. We need buildings, community buildings, facilities, places to swim, new schools. I see they're planning to extend the prison, that's a big project, to think how to contain people and at the same time how to reeducate them—”

“And punish them, I hope.”

“Punishment isn't the point of prisons.”

“If you say.”

He was always surprised by Sara's staunch view of things. He always fell into the misconception that a member of an ill-treated race will naturally be for freedom, naturally against bindings in human skin, naturally sickened by all that demeaned and failed to enlighten.

“Everything is falling into apathy here,” he said. “And London has enough architects. It won't miss me. I feel like a child there, no, an orphan, a boy playing with building blocks. I'm a father now. I'm coming home.”

Sara stopped at the entrance to the woods and put her hand on the trunk of a tree. It was all pines here, pines and larches and that sharp clean smell of a place without history. He liked the flat sterility of it, and the idea that his home was something quite banal, quite blank, whose history was yet to be made, or never to be made. A place that was not sodden with sentiment. A place that was just coming alive with industry and gathering a population and looking ahead to a future it had no precedent for.

“Are you contemplating another dance?” he asked his mother, who stood at the tree in silence.

“My husband,” she rasped, sinking slightly. She was sobbing completely without sound. “Shit,” she said. “Shit.”

He went to embrace her, comforted by her sudden sadness. She straightened and pushed him gently away. She wiped her red eyes dry. “I am happy, Jake, that you're moving home,” she said then. “It will make a nice place for a child.”

From here he could see Helen sitting in the backseat of the car, the door open, tucking her breast into the black sweater while the baby slept on her lap. A nipple vanishing into mourning clothes and her legs bent stiffly against the front seat. Hurriedly he shrugged himself out of his coat and wrapped the Bible in it so his wife wouldn't see, and he wedged it in the back on the floor. They took their places in the car and he turned to his wife and the baby, leaned to them, made a noise like a pigeon, a low coo. The car smelt of milk and of dirty laundry shoved into bags. Together the four of them drove in near silence to Sara's home, with only the occasional comment from Helen— The baby's watching you drive Jake, Look at that kestrel (he contested, It's a buzzard, not a kestrel, they're very different), What's growing in that field, Is that the sea, over there? She looked afraid, he thought.

Mama, he kept wanting to say, with nothing to follow it. Mama. He called her mama because it annoyed her — not because he wanted to annoy her but because he had, he found, a marvellously perverse capacity for accidentally doing the very things she hated. And she had the marvellously perverse capacity to appear to love him more when he did something she hated.

He observed the mammoth clouds and steel sky, the open stretch of moors and the patches of mutilation where the peat was being extracted. The corners of his mouth kicked into brief smile. Mama, he wanted to say as he turned to her in the passenger seat and saw a streak of yellow along the black of her hair. Mother, the lily has stained your hair. But he said nothing; leave it there, leave her to be ridiculous.

Eventually he had to fold his hands tight around the steering wheel so as to avoid reaching across and dusting it off. He could only conclude that not all relationships were simple.

Sara put the key in the lock and edged her way indoors. During coffee and then supper he weighed up whether he could broach the subject of the future. It was on his mind to ask her if she would go back to Austria; it would be an insensitive and hurried question but he felt he must ask; suddenly he felt he must know the layout of their futures. On the verge of his asking, as they were picking at a plate of biscuits, Sara eyed him and gave a low, short chuckle.

“I've forgotten the language,” she said. “My own language. To think, I couldn't go back if I wanted to.”

“You haven't forgotten the language,” he said quickly. He had heard her that morning talking to herself in German while she put on her black dress and grey shoes, slotting the lily into her hair even despite his insistence that this was not custom, to wear flowers in the hair at funerals.

“I have. Every word of it.”

“But Sara—”

“Another biscuit?”

They all shook their heads.

He watched her closely for the rest of the evening. Of course she would not go back; her friends were dead, how could she bear the guilt of not being dead herself? She lived in a distinctly British house in, save for a few Austrian ornaments and pieces of crockery, a distinctly British way. Built between the wars, the house itself was the consciousness of Britain, the glass at its entrance stained with the bright painted colours of a galleon sailing into victory after the First World War, and every man, woman, or child within those walls a sailor by extension, and a victor.