Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

He scowls. It is important: not gone, going. If he were simply gone the child would not be wasting her time with him; and besides, it is crucial to be clear about the mechanics of it, the increments, the balancing of the stones—

The train of thought loses its way, breaks up, and scatters. “In any case,” he states, “we have to remain aware of the consolations.”

The woman picks at her nails and delivers up the same tired nod.

“The consolations,” she agrees.

He dips his head in shame. What has he done wrong? He closes his eyes against the waft of air as the woman leaves the room, as if she were never there.

The table was plainly set. A dinner, an announcement, Sara had said, but when they arrived at her house there was not the mood of announcement. The plates set out between the usual weekday cutlery were patternless and the wine glasses like the ones Eleanor used in the pub, too unimaginative for wine. At least there were wine glasses. He was feeling brimful with some almost belligerent optimism, and in the mood for celebration. Immediately he opened the cabinet and compared the wines — cherry, no, something white and sweet, no. He took an Italian red and put it in the middle of the table.

Helen wore her miniskirt. With elfish steps across the orange carpet she took Henry to the cot upstairs.

Strange creature that she was. The way she had formed this ambivalent bond with the skirt that caused her to wear it often around the house (it's so short, she marvelled, and you can see all my legs!) but disallowed her from wearing it in public (it's so short, she cringed, and you can see all my legs). Dear Helen. He had persuaded her that Sara's house was not public, it was just a slightly more daring version of private, so she had put it on, getting into a thick blue sweater, humming selfconsciously.

Now she reappeared in the living room, blinked, tucked her hair behind her ear, scratched her cheek, as if trying to make herself as one hundred percent pure Helen as possible, sat at the table where Rook was already smoking, passed her hand to his and said, “Hello, forgive my legs.”

“Darling, I love your legs,” Rook insisted.

“They're new.”

“So I see.”

She flowered. They chatted about the passing of summertime and the first falling leaves on the cherry tree, and their second autumn away from London. Rook was a vigilant listener as he turned corners of a napkin into birds which he flew in her direction, and which she gathered into an orderly flock on her side plate.

Dinner was served and they ate in good spirits: lamb shanks, boiled potatoes, vegetables. Plain and righteous food with sprinklings of salt and pepper, a little English mustard. He would not be churlish, he decided; would not comment on the lack of silver and cut glass, or on the unlit menorah, or on Sara's mild, aged presence, as if some substance had slipped from her.

“The announcement,” Sara said, once they were all settled with food and wine, “is that — well, you might as well say it Rook, hmm?”

“The announcement,” Rook took up, “is that I've managed to wrestle that piece of land for you.”

“The Junk? Wrestle from whom?” he asked, setting his knife on the plate.

“Contacts,” Rook winked.

Helen's eyes widened a fraction. “You know Mrs. Crest?”

Rook seemed to think about this far deeper than the question merited. “In a way.”

The table was drenched in yellow from the setting sun, charging up the cutlery, running across their hands. It scattered itself across Sara's dress and cleaned her of any possible sins or secrets; no point turning to her for clarity. Rook winked at him. He stared back and the entirety of his childhood flushed over him in a moment. Its frustrations and unanswered questions, Sara and Rook's collusion, the feeling that he was never getting the truth but should be grateful nevertheless, because the truth is not a right, it is a privilege at best and a burden at worst.

“It's time for our future, then,” he said, and reached for his wife's bare thigh.

“And are you still volunteering at the hospice, dear?” Sara asked Helen.

Dear. He was surprised to hear this sweet tone in his mother's voice.

“Yes, Sara, yes. It's — wonderful, fulfilling. To be with people in their last few days or weeks, it feels like my calling.”

Sara smiled and sank the prongs of her fork so slowly, so delicately into a potato, like a woman too beached in the middle of old age to have the gusto for eating.

“And also,” Helen went on. He saw her cross her legs under the table. “I've become interested in — well, we have a man in the hospice who is … black.” She straightened. “His daughter comes in to visit him and tells me about the terrible things that happen to blacks in this country. Do you all know? Are you aware?”

She lowered and lifted her gaze in one interrogative gesture, spearing a piece of carrot which she left balanced on the plate. “They can't get work, they can't get houses. If you want to rent or buy a house you simply can't.”

A sympathetic murmur went around the table, even Rook had no acerbic quip to add. They ate on in thought for a few moments.

“I mean, these are the 1960s,” Helen added, cutting her food up as if preparing it for Henry. “Have we learnt nothing?”

“Actually I read in the paper,” he said, topping up the empty glasses, “that the blacks in London are being helped by the Jewish communities. Jewish people rent houses out to blacks and then, when the blacks have the money, they buy them.”

He smiled, and met a theatre of blank faces. Helen sat back from her food and put her hands on her belly.

“That's good,” she said. “In fact though, if nobody minds me broaching the subject — I mean, you could argue that the whole problem with racism sprang from Jewish myths. It has been argued. I don't know if I agree, but let's not romanticise.”

He and Rook cocked their heads, Sara went on chewing.

“You know it, Sara, of course. The myth that Ham saw Noah drunk and naked, and in his shame Noah punished Ham by putting a curse on his son, Canaan. And the curse was for him to be smitten in his skin. Burnt, in other words, burnt and blackened — and from that the blacks were cursed.”

Sara raised her head and sighed. “I think there is no agreement, dear, as to what that myth means.”

“All the same. Oh I know what horrors have happened, and I know it's very right, politically, to favour the Jews—”

“But it's never right to be blindly favourable to anything,” Sara added.

“Yes, precisely.”

“I agree, dear. Keep that vigilance in life and you won't come to harm.”

He stood and took his empty plate to the kitchen. His blood boiled. Not against his wife, no, he rather admired her courage, her relentless defence of fair play and good practice, her wish to work out who the unfortunate were and save them. But Rook, Sara? What world of neutrality had they slipped into? He looked to them for some rich-blooded darkness, red wine, human skin, the tiered glint of candles bashing out a statement of defiance, a lily in the hair, a gunshot to sunder the milky carriage of clouds: a dark counterbalance to his wife's whiteness, to bring his life into symmetry — a stone in this pocket, a stone in that. A perfection. A fucking joke! His history was dying.

“Do you remember that myth, Sara,” he said, striding back to the dinner table with a knife in his hand. “What was it? A deer and lion living in a forest. What was the forest?”