The Wilderness

STORY OF THE CUTOUT SOLDIERS

In the next room Helen was saying goodbye to the members of her Bible group, who slipped out through the French doors of the study and appeared in the garden with their King James's tucked under their arms. Then he heard his wife call out, “D, you've forgotten your notebook,” and some chuckles and the clean, succinct contact of young lips on young cheek.

D, she called the man, and yet to call somebody by their initial seemed too familiar for a Bible group. Then he considered that the only other person Helen might have called by their initial was God himself. D was honoured indeed. What was he? Devil, Dream? Was he drastic and disastrous? He tried idly, over his shoulder, to get a view of him through the window but the man had gone.

When Helen came into the living room this is how he was, his neck craned as he fluttered his hands over the piano keys. Henry sitting stoically in the crook of his arm.

“What's that you're playing? Is it ‘Three Blind Mice' or something?”

“It was meant to be Debussy.”

Helen laughed and then put her hand to her mouth.

“It's difficult one-handed,” he said.

“I know. All my life is one-handed.”

On the left side of his body was the baby; on the right side, in his pocket, a letter from Eleanor. With Helen close by the letter felt the heavier of the two, so much so that it made Henry weightless; he tightened his grip on the child and stretched his little finger to the octave below; he was not anywhere close to being good enough to handle Debussy — such strange chords and fingerings — but he wasn't interested in starting anywhere lower. Better, he concluded, to be very bad at a difficult thing than very mediocre at an easy thing.

“Well, Jake,” Helen said. “What do you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of—” Her expression changed, less curious, more excited. She reached for Henry. “Haven't you been upstairs? Don't you know?”

“If I say, know what, will that give it away, that I don't know?”

“Follow me.”

She beckoned him out of the living room, into the middle room from which the stairs led. They climbed together, he following her. The letter shifted silently in his pocket. Henry babbled at him over Helen's shoulder and pointed in great excitement at the wrought-iron birds and leaves of the banister. He glanced out of the landing window at the road and the church. The church bells were ringing, six o'clock, he thought, though there were never six chimes, always waves of them one after the other breaking on his eardrums. He looked at the back of his wife's shin-length rayon dress as it moved along the landing. He looked at the small stain on the carpet where the roof sloped at the eaves and piles of blankets were stored. Henry pointed wildly at the walls the blankets the stain the doors the webs and laughed in bubbles.

They went into Henry's room, across its chocolate-brown carpet, past translucent mobiles, a light-blue cot, wardrobes along one wall stuffed with unpacked boxes of photographs, Christmas decorations, clothes. To the right was a low inner door — a secret door, Helen had remarked when they first looked round the house. They bent double through it and were then in their bedroom. If they had taken the other stairs that led to the bedroom directly from the study, where they had almost begun, they would have been here a minute ago, but Helen liked the game of the double staircase. She would enjoy it, she had said, when there were two children in the house and they could run around, up and down the two staircases, in loops like birds flying.

“Look, Jake,” Helen said, pointing unnecessarily at the bed. “Look what Sara gave us.”

In the middle of the bed, on their faded pink blanket, were piles of cash — neat structures of ten-pound notes.

“What is this?”

“Some money from your daddy's death. She was going to give it to you another time, when she — passed away, I suppose,” Helen hesitated to give the notion some respectful space. “But she wants you to have it now, she said what use would it be to you in twenty years? It'll be too late then.”

He approached the money and handled it. “She came here today, and gave you this?”

“One thousand pounds. Your daddy was richer than you thought.”

He said nothing. Henry made an aimless grab for the paper and then put his fist in his mouth.

“We should go and thank her. Perhaps we can have her round for dinner?”

“Yes, if she'll come,” he said.

He was not as shocked as he thought he should be. In his mind he was always going to be comfortable; to see his bed awash with money was not as incongruous as it was for Helen, who had chosen him, perhaps, for his lack of comfort. Despite his profession there had always been a whisper of poverty about him. He attracted all that was insalubrious; it was his gift that his wife most cherished — the gift of a house with cobwebs the length of legs, of rising damp, of an edge to her billowing and unchallenged worldview, a mild demon that proved her god.

“It will help us when we have another baby,” she said. She rested Henry amidst the piles of money. Perhaps she was trying to envisage how they would look in luxury. Seeing her small, worried smile he took her in his arms and nodded. He would have been shocked by all this had he believed for a moment this was, as Sara was claiming, his father's money. As it was he had other ideas.

“I'll see my mother tonight,” he told her.

Sara didn't speak, but went to the kitchen to make coffee. He waited, outstaring the orange carpet before feeling the inevitable urge press his bladder. The letter was hot in his pocket; he skim-read it again as he stood at the toilet, unpicking Eleanor's handwriting. By the time he came back downstairs from the bathroom Sara was placing a tray on the coffee table. She plumped up the cushions on the sofa. She was wearing the dress he most liked to see her wear, a long brown wool dress with a dark-yellow belt, and a run of four fake buttons at the neck.

“Sit, sit,” she told him.

Coffee came, and sugared ginger.

He took the plate in the flat of his hand. “Thank you, Sara.”

“Don't mention it. I was about to have coffee and ginger anyway. I always do before bed. It's a strange little habit I've picked up.”

“Yes — I mean for the money.”

“Oh, that.” She sat across the room from him in her chair and pushed her skirt along her thighs as if trying to shoo it away. “Thank your father, not me.”

“Well I can hardly do that.”

“Asch.”

“It's a lot of money, Sara.”

“I suppose you are going to offer it back, and then I will refuse to take it, and we will bicker like this for five minutes, and I will win, and then we will be in the same situation we are now, yes? So let's agree not to do this. Time is short.”

She popped a cube of ginger in her mouth. It was typical of her to diagnose time like this: time is short, time is running out, there's no time, the time has passed. He ignored the comment.

“I wasn't going to argue, Mama, in fact I've already decided what to do with the money, if you approve.”

“Good.”

She smiled and put her plate on the carpet, the ginger neatly consumed, and took her gold-rimmed coffee cup from the tray, ran her finger round the rim until it settled on the chip.

“I want you, Helen, and Henry to be comfortable.”

“Of course.”

He waited for her to ask what it was he had planned, but she only chewed in apparent thought, surveying the fireplace from a distance as if she were deciding whether she liked it. He tried to remain composed — easy at any other time with any other person, but with his mother, never easy. Never easy. Hysteria flickered in his gut and he swallowed. If he were hysterical, would he get a reaction then? An emotion? Or just this: this woman facing her own silence?

“Aren't you going to ask what I plan to do with the money, Sara?”

“Must I ask? Can't you simply say?”

Yes, he realised. He had been stupid, childish. Why did he have to wait for her prompt?

“I'm going to buy the Junk.”

“Oh.” Her expression gave nothing away; it was neither approving nor disapproving, kind nor unkind. “And what will you do with the Junk?”

“Knock it down and build another house.”

“You have a house. Perhaps you could do some little improvements to it. It's, what is the word, ratty-tatty.”

He smiled, then stood. “But if I buy this land I can build the least ratty-tatty house you've ever seen, something completely new and fresh.”

She gave out one unamused laugh, again, not unkind, not kind. “As you wish,” she said.

With his coffee cup cradled in his hand he knelt at her feet.

“If you hate the idea I can do something else with the money. Invest it for Henry's future, say, or take Helen around the world. She's always wanted to fly.”

“She would be afraid to fly when it came to it, and the rest of the world is not so interesting, Jacob, only different people doing the same things in a foreign language. Build your house. Do well, make it comfortable, make sure you succeed.”

He stared up at her face with his hand on her knee. He had a faint sense of humiliation, that she should now be telling him to do the very thing he had already decided to do. It was a constant choice, a battle. Hysteria or composure.

He straightened and sat back on his heels.

“Where did the money come from?”

Sara shrugged and pursed her lips. “The bank paid out far more money than I expected. Lucky, yes?”

“The bank that Father worked in?”

“That's right.”

“That was very generous of them.”

“You say generous, I say fortunate. I always think if you have had bad fortune in your life then you will have an equal amount of good fortune. So here is mine, and I'm giving it to you because I'm too old for fortune. At my age everything is already decided.”

“It isn't Father's money, is it?”

She put the coffee cup on the floor near his knees and rested her large hands on her lap. “Jacob,” was all she said.

“It belongs to your aunt in Austria — what was her name? Schorske? Aunt Schorske. I remember you telling me about her once, she was the only one surviving wasn't she? So now has she died, Sara?”

“As a matter of fact yes.”

“This is decades of family inheritance in one lump sum that's now sitting on my bed.”

Her eyes dipped, her shoulders fell a fraction, her hands sagged in her lap. The change was by parts of degrees but he saw it nevertheless and it startled him.

“When did she die?”

Sara shook her head.

“And you didn't go to the funeral?”

He ought to stop, of course, what with his mother diminishing visibly before him, and Eleanor's letter in his pocket leaving him no moral footing at all, but he could not stop.

“It's a transaction, isn't it. You exchange your past, with all the difficult feelings you can't bring yourself to feel, for some money, and then you give the money away and wipe your hands of it. Simple.”

Rich coming from him, he knew. He relied himself on the very idea that emotions were disposable, just as Sara had taught; emotions were asphalt roads, the more extreme the emotion the straighter the road. The straighter the road the faster one could travel, shuttle, shuttle one's way into a sort of charmed oblivion. He had no rights, no grounds, to be pushing her into a sentimentality he dare not feel. But his voice looped back to him thick and calm and it convinced even himself. Sara stood lightly and went to the window, closed the curtains.

“Everybody wants to know about money, where it came from, where it's going. Money money.”

“Yes,” he said, feeling more together now in his small triumph. “We make too much of it. I'm sorry.”

She could not look at him. “You shouldn't keep it on your bed,” she murmured.

“You're right. I'll put it in the bank.” He paused. “The one Father worked for.”

“Sums like that get stolen, if you tell people you have it, you lose it. In a small place like this.”

Still with her back to him, a brown-and-yellow figure against brown-and-yellow curtains, a gracefully whittled figure blending increasingly with its surroundings, she began humming. He remained on his knees, twisted so that he could see her better. Then from the humming a chant broke almost inaudibly — a signal of her distress, as a chicken will pull at its own claws.

“I'll go, Sara.” He rose to his feet.

The chanting stopped. She turned, smiled, and nodded.

“I'll let you know how I get on with buying the house. Maybe you can help me plan the building—”

She flung her hand up, but flung it slowly in a way nobody but she could. “I know nothing about architecture,” she said. “It's all the same to me. You go ahead.”

He dug his hands in his pockets. “Fine. I'll — go ahead.”

He thought to carry the cups and plates back to the kitchen but decided against this one subservient gesture, not at this stage when he had established some command. He must leave while he could, before he felt so desperately diminished or guilty that he would have to stay and lie awake in the spare room and worry for her well-being.

He hugged and dwarfed her.

“Good night, Jake,” she said, fighting gently free.

“Good night, Sara. And thank you. Helen thanks you, too.”

Sara nodded. “She thanked me herself. Will you be all right to let yourself out?”

“Yes, quite all right.”

Despite this, Sara followed him to the hallway.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “Of course.”

“Is there something you want to say?”

“Not at all.”

But for a moment she had the look of a stray dog, lost between these walls, not shielded by them. He recalled her suddenly as a young woman sitting with him on the dyke bank, their bare feet numb in the water and in her hand a marsh frog. Little invader, she called it, and let its green head ooze from her hands; its whole body, like a great drop of oil, slid into the dyke. It laughed into brown water. He had been able to smell his father's Makassar oil that she had rubbed into the ends of her long dark hair, each strand thick and strong as violin strings. Her stern brows had butterflied at some moment of pleasure in the frog's freedom.

She seemed, standing before him now, to carry an outline around her like that of the cutout soldiers he had played with as a child. Everywhere she went an invader. Little invader, getting littler. He stooped one last time to kiss her. They were never happy, either of them, unless they left the other a little bit less alive.