Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Of course she would not go back, and he did not want her to, but that evening he began to carry with him a frustration, that of a story unfinished. As a child there had always been myths and tales about home, and he had assumed that one day this word home would stop referring to something merely imaginable and begin to be real, and Sara would go back and reclaim herself, and he would reclaim the lost half of himself, and the story would complete. Now of course, that place called home had been deftly swapped for somewhere else: this. There wasn't another half of himself. He deposited lilies into vases and let them crowd the dining table. He must accept it.

The evening wore on quietly. They listened to the radio and Helen disappeared upstairs for an hour or so with the baby. He thought of the Bible and wondered what Sara had meant by the gift. Its beauty and relevance had grown in his mind; knowing that it was bound in human skin, knowing it was not, therefore, what it first seemed to be, and knowing that its cover contradicted its contents (for nowhere in the Bible could it say, And their skins shall be stretched for leather). He noted in himself, not for the first time, a liking for the perverse. He thought tenderly of how he might attach a building of clean prefabricated concrete to that excellent gothic manor that currently housed the prison and how out of keeping that would be, what a clash of ideals. How iconoclastic —a word he had learned well at university. He thought of his father's grave and which parts of his father's person would survive longest in this acidic Lincolnshire soil. Would he still fart for a few days in that coffin, still excrete fluids? How long would it take his polished leather shoes to decompose?

“What's that?” Helen asked as they readied themselves for bed that night. She struggled to pull her sweater over her head; he assisted.

“It's a present from Sara.” He threw the sweater over the shoe box.

“For you?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“What is it?”

“I'll show you another time, it's personal.”

“Personal?” Helen queried, bending over a whimpering Henry in his pram. “I'm your wife. What could be more personal than that?”

He stripped down to his underpants and climbed into the single bed. The spare room was not big enough for a double bed; there was a larger spare room but, against everything Sara stood for as a person, it was full from floor to ceiling with a lifetime of his father's junk. It would always be that way, he supposed. Sara would not suddenly defend her values against the man now, not after all this time.

“Come to bed,” he replied. “I need you here, it's been a long day.”

She came. They made love quietly so that Sara wouldn't hear. Afterwards, while she slept, he thought intensely of hiding the Bible from her as if it had become the very cornerstone of his independence. Perhaps it was the morose headiness of the day that left him so obsessed with the idea. In his grave, his father clung vehemently to his patent shoes and his pocket watch. Downstairs Sara clung similarly to her chipped coffee cups. Everybody needs a thing that is their own, he decided. Momentarily he was afraid of giving, feeling himself, as a man, to be a one-way river running into the sea of his wife, impregnating her so she could grow but not ever growing himself. To already be thinking these things, after less than a year of marriage! These were morbid nighttime thoughts; in the morning he would be more cheerful.

At some point in the night he awoke to Henry's crying, then he slept. When he woke up again he discovered that the baby was sleeping belly down on Helen's chest. With all three of them in bed he couldn't sleep for fear that he would crush them both, and so he lay sweating in a pole-like stance all night thinking of the future. Against that thought he considered the monstrous tower block he was building in London. They had run out of money and stuffed its joints with newspaper; newspaper was a useless building material. There had been controversy about it and he had fought to prevent these ridiculous desperate measures, but had not succeeded. One day the whole block would fall down. He did not want to be there to see it.

In the morning he told Helen, “We will move, leave London, we will get our things and come back.”

The day after that, before returning to London, he drove Helen and the baby out across the peat moors.

“I want to show you where I was brought up, maybe it will give you an insight,” he told his wife.

“I don't need an insight into you, Jake, you're an open book.”

He laughed and tapped the wheel. “Only someone who needed an insight into me could think that.”

They drove along the straight, empty lanes that formed a grid across the peat, Helen looking out of the window, astonished still at this landscape that was not London, nor like any countryside she had seen. She was full of questions which she asked with a sceptical note. What are those? Dykes? What's a dyke? This used to be an island? Will we sink, Jake, if we stay here long enough will it be an island again?

That morning, as they were packing the car, he had declared that they should come here to live. He told her. Had he asked she would have said no. No, passionately, definitely. And he knew he would not have been able to handle or manipulate those words, nor change her opinion. It was better, then, to cut off the possibility of objection and deal instead with the flurry of questions that would come. They had been coming all day, and all day he cured them with answers. Yes, there will be plenty of work, of course we can visit London, your parents, our friends. No darling, we won't sink, we'll take root. Yes, we'll be happy, you'll be happy. I wouldn't do anything to make you unhappy.

She was afraid of moving to this odd, backward, and (she hesitated over the word, then almost whispered it) uncivilised place. She said she could see too far. The great hourglass cooling towers were monstrous to her and the steelworks, though way in the distance, hummed like something at breaking point.

“What's the flame?” she asked rather fearfully, pointing to a chimney on the horizon from which a blue flame bellowed.

“Waste gas. Like an Olympic flame,” he replied, leaning across the hand brake to pat her leg, trying to cheer her up. She liked to watch athletics, she liked the speed, height, and distance people could go for no reason but to go fast, high, or far.

“Did you see it?” she asked, successfully distracted. “The four-minute mile? I was with my daddy, we went to the cinema to see it, we had — oh what do you call them? Those sweets with the mint inside and chocolate out.”

Yes he saw it, the sinewy man stretching himself against the clock, and wondered, is this the best men can do?

“If a man could run as fast as an ant, for his size,” he responded, “he would be as fast as a racehorse.”

“But that's irrelevant, he's not an ant. He doesn't need to be as fast as an ant.”

“All the same. You'll be happy here. I feel it.”

Their tour passed Rook's house, a bewilderingly out-of-place Italian Renaissance-style place painted in faded orange and dusk pinks, muraled walls showing cherubs, and an overgrown walled garden accessed through wrought-iron gates. The absurdity of its opulence, albeit aged and faded opulence, against these humdrum flatlands made it all the more astonishing. Helen held her hands to the car window. “I love Rook,” she said. “I love him for living there.”

“Rook loves himself for living there,” he commented.