Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“I was going to ask Rook to marry me this evening,” Sara said. “That was to be the real announcement. After the other announcement.”

He tilted his head and watched her.

“But I lost courage. What a foolish idea it was.” She touched her teeth again as she had earlier that evening and lowered her gaze.

“What terrible fates got that girl pregnant and sent him off to America? He's too old for this.” She stood and wandered to the mantelpiece as if it had asked her to come and listen to something it had to say.

“I want to go to the sea with him, this second,” she announced. “Oh, I'm so tired of all this aloneness, every room I go in what do I find? Me. Ich, everywhere, ich ich. I was going to ask him to marry me. Maybe not now. The courage has left me now.”

How else could Alice have entered life but with one eye on its exit? Conceived in the back of a car to a little death and infidel thoughts, she was never going to want to loiter in this world.

In that sperm travelling towards that egg (he can see it swimming, heavily laden with bad news) there was nothing but death and disappointment, and it was his doing. Alice was his child; it was always as though her mother didn't so much give birth to her as dispel her, not without love but in recognition of the fact that Alice was uncomfortable with the level of goodness she found inside her mother's small, white, freckle-dusted body. And when dispelled she went straight to her source, her father, that was how it seemed at least.

When she was born everybody noticed how like her father she looked and how eerie that resemblance was, because it was not in the features, which were more like her mother's, but in the parts of the face that don't have a name. Or maybe not even there, but just in the moving interim between one expression and another. The closed eyes and open eyes were her mother's, but the blinking eyes her father's. The smile was her mother's and the scowl, too, but the graduation from one to the other, the little wilderness between states, was her father's through and through.

Every time he wakes up it is this wilderness that greets him, this no-man's-land, filled with his daughter's eyes and smiles on their way to an expression they never quite reach.

No matter what he attempts with the timeline, and no matter how he manoeuvres collapsing memories into stories that might get round to her, all that is left of Alice is three isolated flashes which, when they come, throw all other time out of bounds.

First, he is carrying Alice through the woods. There are gunshots: bang, they ricochet between the trees, lose their heart, and stream onto the path in shreds of last sound. He covers Alice's ears (which, he thinks in wonder, are just like shells they found on the beach the week before she was born), and he takes the time to trace his fingers around their curves. Alice does not cry. Alice is three weeks old and not overly concerned by or interested in this world, not even the deer killing, not even the lattice of branches that bow down to her. Still, though, he covers her ears to spare her any concern that might come.

“When she's three,” he says, “we'll harvest the cherries from the tree, but not 'til then. The laws of kashrut say to wait until the third year, and practise patience.”

Helen hugs Henry to her.

“The third year of the tree, Jake, not of Alice. Not all time begins with Alice. The tree's already ten, twenty years old. You've drunk its wine.”

“You think the birth of a tree is more important than the birth of a child?”

“We didn't do the same when Henry was born.”

“Because Henry was born before we even found the tree—”

“Anyway,” Helen intercepts, “the law of kashrut, what point does it have?”

“It's about patience and—”

“Patience and virtue. Yes, yes. Since when did you care about those?” She smiles up at him.

“It's about observing rituals for their beauty. Why do we celebrate birthdays, or Christmas, or pancake day?”

She kisses Henry's head.

“I suppose. It just all seems so obscure, if you know what I mean.”

“And the Bible isn't?”

She smiles again, reaches over, and touches Alice's nose with the tip of her finger.

“We can abstain from cherries for three years for the sake of beauty, and the sake of Alice,” he reasons.

“And what will we do for the sake of Henry?”

“Kashrut can be for Henry too, a belated kashrut. We can have it for both of them.”

“I suppose we can.”

He touches his daughter's nose in the same place. “She's just as I imagined her.”

Helen puts her hands over Henry's ears against the gunshots.

“It's good that you love her so much,” she says.

It has snowed, and the prison is frozen like a monochrome photograph inside its fences. They make their way towards the entrance where the woman shows something to a guard and their bag is searched, and at that they are allowed along the corridor to the large, hot room. They take a seat at a table with a young man.

The man reaches his hands across the table and smiles. “You need to get that coat off.”

Instinctively he hugs the coat to himself in refusal and shakes his head.

“I'll get us coffee,” the woman says.

“He always has tea when he's here. Strong and sugary.”

The young man smiles again and a sweetness passes over his face, a familiarity in the eyes also, in the small upturn at their corners which seems to convey great curiosity in things.

“She won't leave me alone,” he says to the man when the woman has gone.

The man winks. “Just as well.”

He observes the other people in the room, their hunched shoulders and anxious looks; all women. Not for the first time he wonders what he is doing here, thinking it is business perhaps, but then not able to say what business that would be, what he used to do here when he was younger and more important. He scratches around in the embers of a fire long gone out and, finding himself in that disconsolate clueless state that has become home, finally contents himself with turning the buttons on his coat one way and the other to see how far they will twist.

“I've done a painting,” the man says.

He smiles brightly. “Oh? That's very nice. Painting. You've done a painting. On the banks of a river, very nice, very nice, well done you, that's good — good, good — that's—”

A hand on his arm stops the stutter of thought.

“It's for an exhibition of prisoners' paintings, called Doing Time. I may give it to you and Ellie when the exhibition's finished, if you want it. It's of four animals in a cage — a tiger, a dog, a cat, and a bird. It's a sunny day at the zoo, and the animals are all watching one another. The question is, which will eat which first? Will the tiger eat the dog, will the dog eat the cat, will the cat eat the bird, will the bird fly away? It's called A Matter of Time .”

Out of the window he can see the reach of the manor house, which is eclipsed from view as the woman puts drinks on the table, and then returns to view when she sits. The bird will of course fly away, he decides, then loses the thought. He takes his cup of tea in his hands and stares at that view, disappearing into a thoughtless blankness. He can hear chatter around him and feels an increasing heat in his hands, as if they are on fire, insulating him against the snow that threads down outside.

When the man sinks his gaze to the table, just in that moment he is reminded of a time when Henry had fallen asleep at the kitchen table and he had picked him up and taken him to the bedroom, swaddling him in blankets, tucking them around his son's body, surprised at how small it was. Then he had sat on the edge of the bed for an hour or more watching, with a feeling of immense love and protectiveness, his son asleep.