Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

The sky was thickening with snow and the flakes hurried inland with the waves. Sara and Rook kept walking. And they kept walking. They were ankle-deep in water. He dug his feet into the sand and watched, perplexed, while the seals snoozed on. Then they were knee-deep. Sara pulled her coat tighter; Rook took his off and put it over her shoulders. Then Rook was waist-deep and Sara in up to her chest, then armpits, Rook's coat fanned out across the water. He took a step forward in alarm and waited for them to spread their arms and start swimming.

All that remained of Sara was her dark head, and of Rook his head and shoulders like a bust the waves had sculpted. With one wave Sara's head was gone. He ran forward and called out but the snow rushed into his mouth and muffled the word. He stopped. Rook was gone, too. Surely their heads would come back up and their bodies would be swimming. Nothing. He ran forward again. The snow muffled the sea. The white sky left the water black and quiet.

Eleanor turns briefly.

“Your mother and Rook didn't drown,” she says. “Where did you get that idea from?”

She goes back to digging the compost. The cherry tree is thick with leaves and the tight red fists of new fruit; birds hover above its branches. His eyes blink at the aggravated bash of the birds' wings.

“I can think what I like.”

“But it isn't true.”

He sits on a fold-up chair Eleanor has put out. He knows it isn't true, but he feels belligerent. Can he not say things that aren't true? If there is no freedom in words and thoughts then where is there freedom?

And anyway in a sense it is true, in that Sara did finally drown when they scattered her ashes over that very same sea, a vision that comes to him now at a slow swoop: Sara is dead (when did she die?), Mother is dead (how did she die?), Mama is dead. Some part of him knows this should matter more than any other thing, and yet he meets the forgotten news with bareness. Alive, dead; there is a profound difference, but he does not know what it is. It affects him, but only as a news bulletin from a distant land.

Eleanor crouches and, holding a piece of bread for the birds, waits for them to fly near. They flap to the ground, hop, but they will not come to her hand.

“Don't you remember that winter,” he says, “and the muffling snow, and we had to clear it away. You must remember that.”

“The muffling snow.” She chuckles. “I do remember. I remember everything.”

He folds his arms. “Well then.”

It is not that he thinks Rook and Sara did really drown that day, nor that he is confused, just that it is a scenario he has run through countless times and whose tragic slant has become addictive to him. Had this terrible thing happened everything he is might be viewed differently perhaps, with more consequence and sympathy, as one might view the mess in a room differently when they discover it was made by a burglar. Somehow it is not enough to just go wrong in life, to just get things wrong. There has to have been a terrible drama that sets the stream of errors in motion. Had Sara and Rook walked into the sea that day, he would be exonerated. Everything, every other thing would be excused.

“It would have been tragic if they'd died that way,” Eleanor says, watching the birds. “You need to get the idea from your head.”

“Tragedy is a good thing,” he counters. “Interesting thing.”

She sits upright for a moment. “How can you say that? Haven't you had enough of it to know better?”

“I haven't had it at all.”

“Your wife died! Your wife died of a stroke at the age of fifty-three. She was perfectly healthy and happy, then suddenly she had a stroke and was gone. Believe me, that is tragic.”

“Death is only tragic when it happens to people under fifty. Death over fifty is just life. It's not sad. Nobody allows the sadness, you just have to get on and cope.”

She extends her arm farther to the birds, hunches her back.

“You lost a child.”

“That was my fault, so it isn't tragic. Tragic is when nobody can help it. Comes from the sky. Comes like a downpour.”

When she tries to speak he turns his head away slowly until she is discouraged enough to stop.

“Jake, you seem to think so badly of yourself,” she says eventually. “How can you think it was your fault? You seem to think everything you've ever done is wrong. You're a nice man, you've always been such a nice man.”

He needs the toilet; he can't remember where in the house it is and if he will need to go upstairs, and then if so, which stairs. Two sets. One has to choose carefully. A nice man. Poor Eleanor, she is always so mistaken about everything, so deluded.

“I know you, Jake, I know everything you've done, and you aren't bad. What horrors are you building in your head? What fantasies? What for?”

He keeps his head turned from her and stares into the blankness until his eyes are dry.

“Tell me what you think, Jake.”

Suddenly he feels too confused to answer. Everything seems disbanded and rolling away too fast to fetch.

“Won't come,” she says finally of the birds, and, frustrated, throws the bread on the grass.

He comes to his feet, scattering the birds with his sudden movement, and picks up the bread piece by piece. Then he holds out his hand and stays perfectly still. If he is a nice man he will just die, as Helen was a nice woman and died. The fates clear away the nice first, and then get into the real business with the wicked. I don't want to die, he thinks. I want to go home. I do not want to die before I have got home.

The breeze needles his hair, his brain empties thought by thought, and he feels himself become slowly inanimate. Mindless, motionless, a stopped clock. Even the need to urinate has gone. The birds approach. Hours and days pass without breath or thought. He begins whispering Irving Berlin: Honey, and I've decided, love divided in two wont do. A smile takes his face and he can feel it lift him. One by one the birds take the bread from his fingers.

In the actual memory it is November and the sky is so full of snow it seems unable to support itself. The sea is black. The threat of snow muffles the mind. The couple stops walking, Rook takes Sara's hands and kisses each one, and Sara kneels and opens her bag.

He decides he will observe them quietly, and so he eases the distance between them with a few steps. Even if they turn they will fail to recognise him with the sun setting behind him and leaving him in silhouette. They, in contrast, are washed with a coat of matt evening light that leaves them plain but for the blue tint of distance. Sara takes a flask and cups from her bag — white porcelain cups with gold chipped rims, he knows — and laying the cups on the sand she pours coffee. She stands; they drink.

Crouching, he looks to his right along the beach. A few seals sleep in the high, drier sand, but the colony must be mostly out at sea. The smell of them remains, like a litter of dog pups. When his father died Sara was at this beach, swimming in the frozen water, eating chips and saveloys with Rook, drinking coffee; she reasoned that the brine eased their creaking joints and the cold was good for the soul. His father had been dead for five hours before Sara came home and found him slumped at the kitchen table. Watching her and Rook now he gets the impression that they are rarely apart. They seem washed up on the shore, that a mistake has brought them here to England, that some rectifying will take them back to their homelands, and that he will be left. He suppresses jealousy; there is no use for it.