Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“We are virtually made of mud,” Joy had said, flapping the sodden yellow material of her dress. “Never mind the golem.”

They ran the rest of the way. Back at the pub they filled Eleanor's bath deep with hot water and got in fully clothed, shoes and all, until the water was brown. What he did not mention to Joy, what he would not want her to know, was that Rook had always joked — in a perfectly serious way — that he was Rook's golem, his dumb unfinished creature. And it had always seemed to be a harmless childhood game, all those play fights, always losing to Rook even when he could have won, always being controlled one way or the other. The thought of it through adult eyes sickened him. Then there he was in a bath with Rook's granddaughter, and it could go any way. Any way he wanted it. Rook had no part in this even though Joy was one of his own, his clan — he had no part in what happened next.

They had peeled their clothes off and climbed into Eleanor's huge bed dripping, ignoring the untidy lovelessness of the room around them. Outside the bedroom window the new sign banged and swung in the wind. No words were spoken at all, none were needed, and anyhow the creak of the ancient bed did enough to fill the silence. Never, never had he felt so utterly aligned to another human being. Afterwards, as she rose from the bed and bent to her sodden dress, he bent with her.

“I love you,” he said.

“And me you, all of a sudden.”

She had taken the leaf from the silk of her shoe and stuck it on his arm. He thought of how they were positioned, hunched double on the edge of the soaked bed, their heads pressed together.

“We're huddling.”

She smiled like a cat, like a cat that has just seen an open door.

“That won't do, Jameson. That won't do.” She sat upright, stretching out her long spine, her skin taut and chalk white. She stood, pulled on her yellow dress which clung to her skeleton. A gunshot rang out over the moors — deer culling, he thought. Deer killing. And he briefly weighed the words for their difference while Joy cocked her head towards the rain pelting down the windows, then narrowed her eyes.

“Guess what,” she said. “You've persuaded me. I'm going to go to America.”

He leaned forward a fraction and touched her hair. “Don't.”

“I'm going to go to America. Going to leave this rain behind.”

So that was then, and some short time after that Joy went without a word, and some time after that came the money, and the paint on the sign outside The Sun Rises faded a little in the heat of the summer. Some time in amongst these times Eleanor's love letter came, declaring what she would never declare (or so she said) to anybody else, and saying also that she knew about Joy without him having to say a word — she knew, she just absolutely knew — instinct and jealousy told her so.

Eleanor's take on his encounter with Joy was painfully tender. As she saw it, Joy entered the garden as tall and unapolo-getic as a sunflower, wearing a yellow dress and yellow shoes, and he, some dashing quixotic figure exhaling smoke, decided to deflower her. And when the moment came it was unequivocally wonderful, because the sunflower succumbed to his charm, and he to hers, and they were suspended from themselves and from time like dandelion clocks floating on the breeze. When they landed reality hit. He went back to his wife, she went to America. There was no remorse, only happy memories that would begin eventually to feel like dreams. He wondered how accurate this would prove to be, whether remorse would come. And he wondered how many times Eleanor had gone over and over the scenario in her head, poor Eleanor, relaying it with spelling mistakes, promising she would tell nobody what she knew.

Though she intended for her words of love to hit hard, they instead landed on him so lightly. Toy words. So insubstantial compared to his compressed, shrinking, infinitely dense memory of Joy.

Joy didn't write. Nothing came. He decided to cast her memory aside. The more he reflected on it the more he thought of how impassive she had been, and he wondered if he had perhaps taken advantage of her. She was very young. Rook's granddaughter. And he Rook's son in all but blood, in all the ways that were supposed to count. There was a sickly feeling of perversion, if not incest then something else which he could no longer put down to mere infidelity. As he read the lovely scenario in Eleanor's letter he was forced to confront its opposite scenario, that he had perhaps forced Joy into sleeping with him. Of course he hadn't forced her — but had he? How could he know for certain?

Even more distressing was that he did not feel guilty, neither for Helen nor for Joy. He felt new. Visions of his glass house buoyed him until the coach house began to bleach out around him, and when he and Helen took to their Conception Events he focussed on his sudden hunger for another child and on the being that would become Alice. Helen had described her (you think hard enough, she said, and your thoughts will be the case). Pretty, average height, she will have long fingers and small ears and lilac eyes, a little elfin, honey skin, freckles, her father's strong nose. All this was very well, he thought, but not enough. She would have Joy's height and arrogance, she would not be all good and all God, and lilac eyes were fine but Alice's eyes would be indecisive and refuse to settle for lilac alone.

Upstairs the money sat under the bed in surprisingly few neat piles — a thousand pounds did not look much when it was stacked. It had been there for some weeks, and in those weeks he had made investigations into the ownership of the Junk, except that the task was far harder than he had imagined. The house belonged to a woman called Mrs. Crest, but nobody could find her. She had bought it several years before, in 1956, but never lived there, and left it to fall to its current state.

He chased up all the possible leads until they ran dry; he made enquiries, rural communities had strong grapevines— but nobody knew of Mrs. Crest. Some had vague memories which turned out to be mistaken and some knew Mrs. Crest senior before she died, and there was an illegitimate son, or daughter, or no, that was a different Crest or maybe even a Croft, no, to be honest nobody paid much attention to those decrepit little houses. They were much more interested in the people on the new estate with the car, or the people who were going on holiday to Australia by plane (it was taking them three days, they had to stop all over the world). Nobody went on holiday to Australia by plane, if they went there they stayed for good. Mrs. Crest, probably, had done this. Probably never coming back.

He took his wife and child across the moors and drove them right out to the prison, wanting to show Helen where the new building would be, wanting to show her for once what he did.

“I suppose you could just — well, have the house and land,” Helen suggested in the car, in response to his long exposition of the problem.

He smiled. “Steal them?”

“No, use them. And if Mrs. Crest ever came back you could sort it out with her then.”

“And if she didn't?”

“Well then no harm done.”

“Helen, God would not approve.”

“Don't simplify everything. Right and wrong come in shades of grey. You always try to simplify things to on or off. You're, what is it? Binary. You're Binary Man.”

He laughed and wound the car window down to throw his cigarette out.

“If you've tried everything you can to find her, Jake, and she's just disappeared, then — well,” she looked out at the manor house ahead, the stone lions at the gates, and played with her wedding ring. “Those lions are very striking. Are they to protect the prisoners from the outside or protect the outside from the prisoners? Anyway, about Mrs. Crest, it's just a suggestion.”