Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Joy's next letter was a parcel. Helen picked it from the porch floor and gave it to him, asking if he knew what it was. He said no truthfully. Opening it in privacy he found it was a miniskirt, blue denim with red stitching and hopeless pockets. Joy had sent it for Helen, confirming that these were becoming fashionable in California. She had never met Helen but thought she would look vital in it, sexy and modern. There was also a pair of silk tights which Joy said were the new thing — where stockings were fiddly and uncomfortable and no good for miniskirts, tights were a second skin. He held them up by the waist and looked at their weird shrivelled form in some dismay, but then pictured them stretched over Joy's legs, over his wife's legs, and he wrapped them into a ball with a wry smile.

After a week — the minimum time needed, he guessed, without Helen associating the parcel with the gift — he asked Sara to look after the baby and took his wife to The Sun Rises. Helen was in good spirits, maybe she was pleased to see him happy again. They talked to Eleanor and her new partner most of the night and helped her now and again behind the bar.

“Eleanor is in love with you,” Helen whispered gently. “Whatever pretence she makes with that man.”

He whispered back, stroking her neck, “And I'm in love with you.”

When he got home he gave his wife the miniskirt and silk tights. He wondered what she would put in those pockets— poems on folded-up pieces of paper? A photograph of the baby? A photograph of him? A photograph of a man he did not recognise? She looked at the skirt quizzically, almost suspiciously. The hemline was a good few inches above the standard. He expected her to announce, I could never wear this, but she didn't. She just carried on looking, turning it in her hands.

Eventually he broke the silence. “Put it on,” he said. “I want to see it on.”

There she is, there. In the garden. He has seen her before. He creeps to the window to watch her, filled with spy-like curiosity. There. Maybe she is Alice, but the light keeps blanching her features and makes it hard to tell. She moves through the light like a dolphin — so like Alice, but he cannot be sure, and is careful to rush to no outlandish conclusions. Be rational, Jacob, he thinks, and observe; do, at all costs, avoid being mad.

The child circles the sleeping dog, occasionally stooping to touch the creature's coat with her palm and to stare closely at the blackness of it. Then rising again to her trip-skip across the grass. The dog is untroubled, does not even wake or open her eyes for a solitary tolerant glance at her visitor; she just sleeps on with a peace that suggests she and the child have looped this loop many times. Between them is a thousand years of private solicitude. It makes sense now, if the child is Alice, because of course the dog would know Alice, there will have been years for these bonds to form.

He crouches at the French windows, toppling the pile of stones, and lets his eyes follow the child. Her knees, too big for her it seems; her fingers splayed. Occasionally she lifts her fingers a few inches from her eyes and peers through them in experimentation for how the world looks as background. Just mere background for her fingers. Foreground, background.

He takes a stone in his hand and clutches it. One summer, the summer of 1966, they are all at the beach, the four of them: Helen, Alice, Henry, and himself. The children insist on wearing their swimming costumes, but he and Helen give up the pretence of warmth and pull on their jackets. Alice pads silently across the rocks and crouches to peer into the eyes of a — thing — wet bear, legless thing. Seal, yes. Seal. Always peering, Helen says, as if she can see what we cant.

He approaches her. Be careful, Alice, he says. Don't disturb her. (He has decided the thing, seal, is female by the slightly languorous side-tilt of her body, draped rather than ditched by the tide or sudden lethargy.) The seal's pitch, tar, wet-ink eyes are wide open. Blat, Alice observes. Black, he nods. Very black. Alice is beguiled by the eyes and puts her face within a finger's width of the seal's. The animal smell is overwhelming, even to him from this distance, and yet Alice seems not to notice it. He can see his child's reflection in the animal's eyes, like a flower growing in outer space. Blat, she repeats, blat. He takes her hand and leads her away.

The four of them sit where the stones begin to thin out and give way to sand, and he decides to explain something about existence, respect for other animals and objects, the growing sensation that an individual is an extremely small thing of small pursuits, that the world is sometimes background, sometimes foreground, depending on how big one feels, but inevitably — how to explain this to a child? — inevitably one is small whether they feel it or not. To learn to be small — perhaps this is important.

He drapes his arms over his knees, tries to think how to put it. They are fairly new thoughts, questing, humbling thoughts he has been having in the last two years since Alice was born. Alice provokes in him instincts that Henry did not. Religious? No, not that. Not even tinglings of awe and wonder. But something to do with equality, the equalising effect she has on him. Whereas he feels responsible for Henry, he suspects that he and Alice are responsible for each other — that, with her changeful eyes, she sees him truly; he sees her truly.

She staggers up to him now like a needy drunk and he straightens his legs and lifts her onto his lap. He is about to begin. That seal, she is just one of millions and millions of animals, four of which are us my darling — He is about to explain, when Henry turns with a sudden Jake? the tone that always precedes a question, and asks why the horizon is so straight.

It isn't straight, he replies, if you look properly you'll see it's curved.

Helen holds her hand out to Henry and says, Yes, Jake, but as you know, Henry's right, it appears straight.

Again Henry asks why. Because the earth is perfectly balanced, Helen tells him. She details the phenomenon with an example of their household scales, and Henry, who likes to help her cook, grasps it readily: the horizon is straight because the earth is balanced because it is God's earth and is in perfect harmony.

In celebration she cuddles Henry and they tickle each other. He watches his wife and son, deciding not to ruin their happiness with fact. Lifting Alice from him he stands. Come on, kids, he says, I'll show you about balance. Equality. Henry asks, What's equality? I'll show you, he answers. He gets them to find stones which they drop in his pockets. Henry's stone is small and almost pedantic in its fine speckles, where Alice's is too big for her to carry, so she stands calm and wordless until he comes to her aid. He drops a stone in each pocket, and tilts in Alice's direction, explains that her stone is bigger and heavier. (Like the kitchen scales, Helen winks to her momentarily confused son.) The children work to balance him. A stone here, another there, a pebble, a few grains of sand. When he is upright they cheer. He smiles out over the boundless coast: equality, he says. He picks Alice up and stands quietly with her, both peering, peering earnestly out over the sea.

The memory, so arresting, is freshly encased in the child's motions. His gaze has not left her, and has sought out her lilac eyes until they, those fantastic eyes, turn purple with placid recognition. Suddenly the dog rushes awake and runs across the garden, and the child, unworried, continues trickling through the sunlight. A bright, slightly nervy day.